Of Grave Concern by Max McCoy Read Free Book Online

similar number of Rebel vessels, former steamboats that had been converted into some notion of fighting ships by mounting light guns on their decks and lining their hulls with cotton. As ridiculous as the “cot-tonclads” were, some of the Union boats looked even more absurd, like giant turtles spouting smokestacks. Neither side seemed to know what they were doing, and nobody now can agree on exactly what happened, except to say that in the end, all but one cottonclad had been disabled or sunk.
    It was 1862, and Memphis had fallen.
    Ulysses S. Grant moved his command from Corinth to Memphis, stopped publication of the Memphis Avalanche, ordered the arrest of all newspaper correspondents sympathetic to the South, and drove all families of Rebel soldiers and Confederate officials from the city. Jonathan returned to Memphis with LaDue’s Company, and we had a tender reunion. Then, in 1863, Vicksburg fell. With nearly the entire river in Yankee hands, Grant turned his attention to the east, and LaDue’s Company marched with the army toward Knoxville.
    Letters came regularly from Jonathan at first, cheerful notes in which he chatted about his commander, John Grenville LaDue, a rabid abolitionist who had spent some time in Kansas with John Brown before the war. But as the fighting became bloodier as Grant moved his army ever closer toward Richmond during the Overland Campaign, the letters stopped. With every day that passed without word from Jonathan, my heart broke anew.
    The war had elevated slaughter to a science, and the list of battles in which the casualties numbered into the tens of thousands is shockingly long. The deadliest battles were Gettysburg, Chickamauga, Chancellorsville . . . and Spottsylvania Courthouse.
    At Spottsylvania the fighting raged for a fortnight, including twenty-four hours of the worst hand-to-hand fighting of the war, much of it in trenches. When the hurly-burly was done, thirty thousand lay dead or wounded, sacrificed for a battle in which neither side could claim victory. LaDue’s Company was thrown into the worst of it, an abattoir known as the Bloody Angle. Of 105 men in the company, only LaDue and twelve others survived.
    Jonathan was not among them.
    I was a widow two weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday.
    I didn’t even know how Jonathan had died. None of those who were lucky enough to be numbered in what came to be called the LaDue Survival Ranks witnessed his death. His body was so ravaged that it could scarcely be recognized as anything human and could only be identified by the book tucked inside his jacket, Leaves of Grass, in which my name and his were found penciled in the endpapers.
    Jonathan was buried in Spottsylvania County, Virginia. The only thing that was returned to me was the bloodstained book. At first, I felt nothing, and then I believed I was the butt of some cruel joke perpetrated by the universe. Then when the pain hit in full, I wished nothing more than to join Jonathan in death.
    By war’s end in April 1865, there would be more than half a million dead. Grieving parents, wives and daughters, and sisters and girlfriends, turned to Spiritualists and mediums to give hope that some spark of their loved ones had survived the horror to cross over to a better place. There were even séances in the White House, with Mary Todd Lincoln trying to contact her dead son, eleven-year-old Willie, who had been taken by typhoid fever.
    I, too, joined the seekers.
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    For twelve years, on the anniversary of Jonathan’s death—May 13—I had held séances, desperately seeking contact with my true love and transmission of the coded message.
    After the first failures, I blamed myself, thinking that my lack of belief was to blame. I strove to become a more devout Spiritualist, and eventually sought out Paschal B. Randolph, a New Orleans trance medium of mixed blood. He taught me many things—including, to my shame, how to use the sexual act to