Across the Spectrum (30 page)

It is very small, a little trembling brightness in the vast
blur of dark blue-grey that has taken away the mountains. There is no other
brightness but the stars. She shivers and runs, runs straight back up the sand,
back to her fire, back to its warmth where two women sit in silence, one on
each side, gazing into the flames. Their tanned, lined faces are lit ruddy and
deeply shadowed. She sits down between them, a little breathless, her back to
the sea.

“How’s the water?” one of them asks, and she says only,
“Brrr!”

“When was it we went to the beach at Santa Cruz?” the older
woman asks the younger, who answers, “Right after the war. Wasn’t it? I
remember complaining about picnics with no hard-boiled eggs.”

“Spam. Terrible stuff. Salted grease, think of it! She was
just a baby. Three, maybe?”

“More like five?”

Their voices have always been quiet, never final. There is
always a leaving open, a possibility of question.

“I remember we had a fire on the beach, against a driftlog,
like this. We sat so late. Yes, it was then, because I remember thinking, no
war out there, and it was hard to believe, after so long, that it was just the
sea out there again. We were talking. She’d been asleep for ages. Curled up on
the blanket. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, she said, ‘Mama, will it go on
forever?’ Do you remember that? I never knew if she was awake or dreaming.”

“We’d been trying to remember names of constellations. I
remember. She must have been half awake; she was looking at the fire. ‘Will it
go on forever?’ And you said yes. ‘Yes, it will.’ And she settled down again
perfectly satisfied.”

“Did I? Did I really? I’d forgotten . . .”
They laughed quietly, little soft grunting laughs. She looked from one face to
the other: a good deal alike, though one was webbed and cragged and the other
still full, with a soft underlip. The deepest eyes glinted in the firelight.

“Oh,” she said, “oh but it didn’t—it doesn’t—does it?”

They looked at her, four tiny warm fires glinting and
trembling in their eyes. Did they laugh? They were smiling. Outside the circle
of the firelight a man spoke briefly and a woman answered him. “How about
another piece of wood?” one of the men said, and she looked at her fire and
decided it was time for the piece she had been saving, the massive trunk-end of
a large branch, perfectly dry. She laid it with care in the bright center where
it would catch fast and burn hot. Sparks flew up into the air that was now
quite dark. All the stars hung over the fire, over the sea. The path of the
Galaxy whitened the quiet water far out beyond the breakers. Now and then a
flash of light broke across the sand: luminous water, tiny sea-beings,
sea-fireflies. The mist was gone, the dark was clear. The company of the stars
shone brighter than the brief gleams among the breakers.

The fire creaked and crackled, and the damp core of a log
hissed and sang. They all sat or lay near the flames as the night grew cooler,
her people, some talking softly, others stargazing or sleeping. Aby had long
been asleep, curled up on the blanket beside her. She pulled the blanket back
over his bare legs. He wriggled and made a protest in his dream. “There,” she
murmured. “It will. Yes, it will, love.” Up in the dunes one of the horses
snorted. The sound of the sea was low and long and deep, a huge roar up and
down the edge of the land, too large to listen to for long. Sometimes a warmer
breath of wind moved seaward, smelling of soil and summer, and a few sparks
flew out on it for a moment.

She got up at last, stiff. She slowly covered over the
embers with cold sand. When that was done, she climbed the dunes alone in
starlight towards the moon, which had not risen yet.

This story is a favorite of mine for multiple reasons. It’s
about a secondary character in my Far Western Civil War series, Matt Russell,
an older brother of main character Jamie Russell. Matt joins the Confederate
army early on, arousing Jamie’s jealousy. The story was read by a master class
of writers, most of whom loved it. One thought it was awful, because he
couldn’t accept the idea of a Confederate as the protagonist of a story. In his
mind, that was just wrong. The instructors commented that when a writer gets
that strong a reaction, she knows she’s done something right.

∞ ∞ ∞

I was in plenty of fights and shot at plenty of Yankees,
but if I ever killed one before Sharpsburg I never really knew it. You can fire
at the enemy all day long and some will fall, but when you are in a line of
battle it’s hard to know if it was your ball that did the job.

Many a time I stood in line with Jim Callaghan and Bill
Piper and Bill Lessing and every other Bill in the Tom Green Rifles, and we’d
all fire a volley and each of us claim to have dropped a bluecoat. It was a
game we played, bragging after the fight who got the most hits, and I guess we
believed it but we didn’t honestly know, at least Jimmy and Bill and I didn’t.

We got a hint of the truth in the bayonet charges we made at
Gaines’s Mill and again at South Mountain just two days before Sharpsburg,
because then we could see the terrified faces of the Yankee skirmishers as they
fled before our steel. But me and Jimmy and Bill never got a poke at them.

We didn’t discover then what it was to take a man’s life,
face to face, gazes locked and the both of you trying in earnest to kill one
another. I truly believe none of us knew what it was to kill before we got to
the edge of the Cornfield.

It was ripe, that corn, but we never picked it. We’d been
eating nothing but green corn and apples for so long we were sick of the
stuff—it had literally made every soldier in the Texas Brigade sick—and not a
man touched an ear as we passed along the south edge of the field the night of
the 16th September, 1862.

We’d arrived at Sharpsburg the day before and all figured
we’d be in a fight soon enough. The Yankees had taken exception to Marsh
Robert’s decision to visit Maryland, and there’d already been the little
dust-up around about Harper’s Ferry, after which we came north to Boonesboro
and on to Sharpsburg.

Our noble General Hood was called upon to take us across
Antietam Creek and into position on the left of the line, where there were
farms and patches of woods and a plain old house the Dunkers used for a church.
None of the residents were in evidence, all having skedaddled when they heard
we were coming to town.

We got into line and stayed there while the Yankee artillery
flung shells at us all day and night and all the next day. Then the evening of
the 16th we were sent forward to support Law’s Brigade who’d been jumped on by
some Pennsylvania Yankees. That was when we first saw the Cornfield.

It looked like any other cornfield, drying stalks turning
golden in the setting sun, smelling of harvest time. We did not know this
cornfield’s significance to ourselves at the time. Candy, our little white
terrier who went with us everywhere, ran into the field and rustled in amongst
the stalks, hunting mice.

“Hey, look, there’s a little ghost in that corn,” Bill said,
and we all laughed. Looking back I think maybe it was an omen of what was to
come, but of course we didn’t know it then.

Now, even going into a fight as we were doing that evening,
a Confederate soldier can strip a cornstalk of every ear without missing a
step. But we passed it by, because the thought of more corn just about turned
our bowels to water.

We had not had a mouthful of bread or meat in weeks, and
we’d been promised regular rations that night. We were anxious to finish our
work and get on with the truly important business at hand—fixing our first hot
meal in three days.

No grim reaper thoughts among us as we passed along south of
the corn and into the woods to the east. We were laughing and joking as usual
about who would shoot the most Yankees, until musket fire drew our attention to
our business.

Our skirmishers had run right into the Yankees and surprised
them, and fired point blank into their faces. Right away the screams and yells
started.

It was already shadowy under the trees and we fired at the
silhouettes of Yankees darting between tree-trunks. This was closer than I had
been to an enemy line before, and my heart began pumping pretty fast.

The enemy were shadow-shapes, obscured by the smoke of the
first few volleys. They looked like ghosts to me, and I had to shake my head to
clear the little frightened thoughts away. I’m a Texan and no coward, but that
was the closest I had yet been to a man-to-man fight in a battle.

As we pushed the Yankees back we began walking over the
ground where Law’s Brigade had been hit. We stepped over men who lay dead and
dying, moaning and cursing, some thrashing in pain. This was an ugly sight but
not a new one and we pressed on, the sooner to get our work over with.

A little further on we started walking through Yankee dead
as well. The Pennsylvanians all wore the tail of a buck deer in their caps.
Jimmy stumbled into one and gave a yelp loud enough to be heard over the racket
of the rifles. I looked at him and saw he was staring down at the dead Yankee
like he’d never seen a body before.

The Yankee’s face was pale as ice with awful staring eyes
and his mouth hanging open in frozen surprise. His chest was shot three times,
the blood from the wounds staining his blue coat black in the dying light.

That is the kind of sight a soldier doesn’t like to remember,
and I nudged Jimmy away from it, but Bill didn’t seem to mind it. He picked up
the Yankee’s cap and pulled out the bucktail for a trophy, tucking it into the
cord that he used to keep some sort of shape to his own limp hat.

“Move on, there!” came a voice I knew and hated.

It was Sergeant R. B. Fletcher, who had taken a personal
dislike to me during our discussion of the disposition of my horse when I had
first joined Company B, and had generously extended his sentiments to my
friends in the months since. Fletcher was a martinet and a bully. He had no
sense of humor particularly with ourselves.

Now he pushed Jimmy, who was still shaken, and raised a hand
at me but I leaped out of his way and marched on before he could get near me.
Bill got between Jim and Fletcher and the sergeant had to find someone else to
harass.

We strode on and caught up with our line in the darkening
wood. It was harder to see now, with smoke lying thick and the flashes of the
rifles dazzling the eye. We had to walk carefully, sometimes only avoiding
stepping on a wounded man because of his groans. We would stop when we thought
we had a target, fire, load, and move forward again, peering at the ground to
see the dim shapes of the fallen.

I caught sight of a bucktail Yankee and I fired and saw him
jerk and fall. I was nearly sure it was my shot that hit him, surer than I’d
ever been before. The way his head tilted aside as he dropped seemed a sort of
personal gesture, as if he was asking why I’d gone and done that.

My brother Jamie is the philosopher, not myself, and he
would be able to argue all kinds of lofty ideals about such a situation. I
never did have a lofty habit of mind, but as we stumbled over the dead in that
wood east of the Cornfield, I found myself thinking of old Pastor Wells back at
home, saying, “Always remember, Matthew, that God will punish wrong even if no
one else catches you.” Why I was remembering that I had no idea.

I thought of Momma, also, who hadn’t wanted me to join the
army. She couldn’t bear even thinking of the possibility that she might lose a
son.

I remembered how she cried when I said I was going with or
without her and Poppa’s blessing, and I wondered now at how cruel I had been to
say so. I had thought, at the time, that it would all be much easier than it
had turned out to be.

We did not push the Yankees all the way out of the woods.
Things seemed to grind to a stop there under the trees, and we stood with our
backs to a road that ran through the woods and fired round after round until it
was so dark that all we could see of the Yankees was the flash of their rifles.

We were almost out of cartridges and had nothing to aim at
any more, and the officers finally called it off. We marched back through the
woods, where already the evil smell of death was mixing with the choking smoke.
When we stepped out of there the sky was a heavy, starless indigo, and every
man breathed deep of the clear air and heaved a sigh.

The Cornfield looked ghost-gray now in the evening. Candy
scuttled out of it and fell in with us on our way back to where we’d been
stationed that morning, in another stretch of woods west of the turnpike.

General Hood spoke to General Jackson and got us relieved
for the night so we could cook a hot meal. We settled down behind the lines in
the woods by the Dunker church and waited for our supply train to come up with
the rations. It had started to rain, and while the trees protected us some it
was still a dreary night, but we didn’t want to go to sleep and miss our
rations.

Bill put together a fire and a dozen of us sat around it.
Giles roasted slices of apple on the end of a twig, and tried to feed one to
Candy who was having none of it.

Candy was our great friend and loyal companion. He had been
named in honor of a candy maker from Austin, the man who’d given him to Isaac
Stein of our company.

Candy was up to anything and while he did not take active
part in the battles he was never far off. At first he was Isaac’s, then B
Company’s, then the 4th Texas’s mascot and finally all of the Texas Brigade
claimed him. He was a rare little trooper.

That night Candy curled up around Jimmy’s feet by the fire
and heaved a big sigh. I felt about the same way myself.

I sat next to Jimmy and inspected the soles of my boots,
which were just about worn through. There was a hole starting in the ball of
each foot, and I wondered if there was a cobbler in all Maryland who would put
new soles to a pair of Rebel boots for Confederate money.