In a peach orchard, he came across young men gathering up the amputated limbs and filling wooden barrels with them. When he asked them what they were going to do with all that limbage, they said they were medical students and they were going to bury the barrels in the ground until the limbs had decomposed and then ship them to Washington to the medical college to use in their studies. Another team of students was boiling the flesh from the skeletons of the fallen gray soldiers, working diligently with paddles and hooks as the flames licked at the sides of the steaming black iron kettles.
There were two scavengers he followed that first day and studied for especially how they worked. Over the course of time he learned how they were unlike the others in that they were not interested in keepsake or memory or usefulness
but rather had a professional way about them. They arrived with the same tools as those of the surgeon or mechanic. They would wear carbide lamps to move about the field at night and maintained a variety of disguises. They camped a safe ways off and were not greedy for the accoutrements of war, and what they did take of war's implements they were selective about the pieces they stole. The two were searching for jewelry and certain personal items. They wanted anything with an inscription or an address which they might then sell to loved ones back home. They did not go through the pockets or the linings of the dead but slit them with razors they wore in their sleeves to be the quicker about their business. They carried iron shears in their pockets for cutting off fingers to get rings and wielded jawed pliers to remove gold from the mouth.
By that afternoon, the citizenry had begun arriving in flocks and tramping out to tour the battlefield. They were old fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters hunting for their wounded and dead. The fields were strewn with rifles and all manner of outfit, and these likewise were collected up as trophies by the citizens and more than one of the innocent and curious was killed by the accidental discharge of a rifle still loaded and cocked.
Side businesses sprang up. Women were charged twenty dollars to move a husband or a son from the ground into a wooden box and onto a cart, and he took advantage of this opportunity and his arms ached so for helping that day he could not lift them from his sides. When the women tried to pay him, he refused at first, but finally he relented, whatever they wished to give, and accepted the few coins they left for him on the ground for fear of touching his blood-slick and fat-greased hands.
With the money he walked into town to buy water and a clean dressing for his father's head. He saw two women, one older and one younger. They were sitting in the open doorway of a gray stone house. By their doorstep, the syringa bushes were in bloom and white lilies had unfolded on bowed stems. He took their relationship to be that of mother and daughter. They were laughing as if nothing had happened and he could not help but smile at how happy they appeared in spite of their surroundings. He opened their gate and his throat parched, he called out to them for a sip of water.
“Water,” the mother said. “You want water after what you did?”
He slowly shook his head. As hard as he tried he could not think what he had done.
“You can't tell?” she asked, and then answered her question for him. “You scared all the birds away and they won't ever come back.” Both women laughed at this for how funny it was to them.
“A sip of water is five cents and by the glass is fifty cents,” the younger woman called to him.
He held out his hand to show her the coins he possessed and she motioned for him to approach. He went to them along a path of red bricks lined with trampled yellow flowers. She was a blue-eyed strabismal woman with a high color in her vein traced cheeks. She held her legs clasped in her arms, her chin hovering her knees. The older woman had a boiled look to her face, as if she'd been burned, but she wasn't burned. Sweat ran down the sides of her thin face and collected in the bones of her shoulders and chest. They each clutched a square of cloth to their face from which they inhaled deeply and between them sat a stoppered bottle of rose water. He held out the
silver coins again and the younger woman indicated he should drop them in the berry pail at her feet. When he did, the older woman stood and disappeared inside the house.
“Bread?” he inquired.
“A loaf of bread cost two dollars,” the younger woman said, growing impatient with his trade.
This money he also let drop into the hollow of the berry pail and this time when he did he leaned forward and looked down and saw it to be full of coins and greenbacks.
“You stay back there,” she said sharply. “Don't get so near. Bring a loaf of bread,” she called into the house.
The older woman returned with a glass of water and a loaf of bread less than the size of a muffin. She waved him off and when he stepped back to the gate she set them on the bricks in front of him. She then returned to the step and nodded him forward after she sat.
“Drink the water and go,” she said. “And take that with you. You can't eat that here.”
“Would you have some linen to bind a head?” he asked, after draining the water glass.
“Two dollars.”
He paid her this money as well and taking the rolled material he left out the gate. Behind him, they resumed their private laughing, at what he did not understand.
Making his way back through the gathering crowds, he came upon a cemetery where a woman was digging a grave beside a file of dead men. Inside the wrought-iron gates the grass appeared blue and he was drawn to step inside and stand in that grass, and when he stood inside the fields of war beyond the fence appeared white in the bleaching sun.
Possessed by the orderliness of the place, he walked among
the riven stones of the cemetery. War had even been made upon the cemetery and in places the ground looked as if plowed. The tombstones were broken into fragments and graves had been turned up by plunging shells. The monuments had been toppled to provide cover for a time and so they were pocked and scarred by the scrape of bullets. The bodies slumped behind the stones had absorbed the bullets made of pure, hollow, soft lead, arriving to kill at a thousand yards, fracturing and shattering bones, blasting tissue, and causing large gaping wounds that draped like cut mouths in the sun.
He counted there to be thirty-four of the dead that she was burying and when he asked if he could help he learned she was six months pregnant, but she made no mention of a husband or father to the baby she carried.
“How did this happen,” he asked, not quite sure what he meant, even as he was asking the question.
She looked at him oddly, her head cocked to one side as she leaned on her shovel.
“You are not from around here,” she said.
“No ma'am.”
“Why are you here?”
“My mother sent me to fetch home my pap.”
“Did you find him?”
“He is over thar. I was to get water, but I drank it all myself. Then I paid for a bandage and I did not have any more money to buy water for this canteen.”
“You can help if you want to,” she said. “I will give to you water to take, or I'll just give you water and you can go.”
“I have never had money before.”
“Then it will give me pleasure to pay you in water.”
For a time he helped the pregnant woman plant the dead. Their various causes of death were most apparent as the minié ball was a terrible, crippling, smashing invasion of the body, shattering and splitting bones like green twigs and extra vasating blood in a volume of tissue about the path of its ferocious intention. The killing wounds were to the head, neck, chest, and abdomen. When the minié ball struck it flattened and tumbled, fissuring and comminuting bony structures. Shards of bone and broken teeth often flew from its path, wounding one body with the bones and teeth of another.
Most of the killed in the cemetery had received long distance mortal head wounds in the lee of those signifying stones, as if the stones were waiting and would not be denied their purpose in life. Many had been shot in the left hand reaching up to slide the ramrod into their rifles.
He silently dug into the earth, his hip close to hers. Stray hairs floated about her tired face. She would tuck them away and they would come free again and she would stop to rearrange her hairpins. He thought of his mother and for the time he was a child-boy again and he was home and they were working in the kitchen garden, digging, planting, and hoeing, and soon he would share with the world the advent of an infant brother or sister.
When the hole was deep enough, together they would lift in a man and then beside that grave, they'd dig again, filling in that one with what they excavated from the next one. He worked his shovel hard so she might have that much less to do, but she dug steadily and held her own.
As darkness came on that first long day, he stood up from the new grave to grasp the next man and he saw that it was
a boy his own age. His teeth were broken in his mouth and the bone cup for his hip must have been shattered because his leg was extended at an odd angle from his hip. Simultaneously, he felt horror and dignity for how young the boy was. The woman began silently to cry, the back of her hand at her mouth and he knew it was not so much for the young boy as it was for the little straw he was and the weight he added to her already heavy burden. Her chest caved and her shoulders shook and she wept quietly into her hands. He helped her to sit and stood by her side while the anguish passed through her like a steady racking wind.
“I am sorry,” she said, daubing at her wet face and leaving it smudged with graveyard earth.
“He were a drummer boy,” he said, bending to take the broken sticks from the boy's hand.
“Dear God,” she said. “He was so young.”
“Yes ma'am. Just a pony.”
“You take his boots,” she said, tears filling her eyes again.
“Ma'am?”
“I think you will need his boots.”
They buried the drummer boy with the earth of a new grave and when they had completed the mound, he took up the broken drumsticks and slid them into the black dirt.
“That's enough for now,” she said.
Then she led him to a stone house that stood nearby, its walls pocked with bullets. From a cistern she took a jar of milk and made him drink from it until his belly ached and then she filled his canteen with fresh water and made him also take a loaf of bread. She continued to apologize to him for reasons he did not understand. There was nothing he could
determine that was her fault, nothing she could possibly have done wrong. She told him with conviction that people should be born twice: once as they are and once as they are not. He did not understand this either, but the way she said it convinced him it was true.
“Someone believes something that's wrong,” she said, “and that person gets others to believe it too. And then everybody believes in the same mistake.”
He asked her which mistake she was talking about and his question made her voice go cold to him. She told him he could just about take his pick if he wanted and then she warmed again and her voice pitied.
“You be careful,” she said, her hand on his shoulder.
“Yes ma'am,” he said, relieved that she had recovered herself.
“You will take your father home?”
“I promised my mother.”
“A broken promise is worse than a broken bone.”
“Yes ma'am.”
It threatened to rain again as he made his departure, the dry lightning illuminating the faces of the unburied dead at the cemetery gates. He hastened back to his father to cover him with gum blankets he'd secured. His father was sleeping as a soft, insignificant rain began to fall, and was at peace and only woke when he tucked the blankets to his sides. The coal black horse shook out a muscle in its shoulder and blew. For the horse he'd found a feed bag full of oats and its contents he spilled out on the ground.
“Son,” his father said, pleased to see him. “I should say I am feeling a little puny tonight.
His father smiled up at him as he lifted his head so that he might have a sip from the canteen. He tipped the canteen and let the water leak into his father's mouth. He then let his father's head back down to rest on the jacket his mother had sewn.
“The church pews is full of wounded men,” he told his father, “and outside the window is a wagon where they toss the arms and legs. They say they've run out of chloroform and sharp saws there's so many. Near twenty thousand.”
“Oh, it was a big thing,” his father said of the late fought battle. “Biggest thing you ever saw in your life. Some of the boys had to get drunk three times just to get through it.”
“There's rows and rows of âem laying dead,” he said, trying to understand what he'd seen.
“When they advance, they are afraid and they want to be close to each other,” his father told him. “They want to feel the cloth of the next man, but they need to spread out.”
“They need to spread out,” he said, repeating the words to himself.
“It was a terrible event,” his father said. “It was as if whole brigades disappeared in a cloud of smoke.”
“I have a clean bandage.”
“Yes. The bandage should be changed. We will rest tonight and in the morning we will go home with a fresh bandage.”
He touched at the crust of the bandage wrapped about his father's head. It was black and hard.
“Where was the sun today,” his father asked. “Did it not come out from all the clouds?”
“It was sunny all day,” he said, and it had been, hot and rainless.
“Not here,” his father said, and he could only think it was the coal black horse who had walked the sun from east to west and made a shadow that shaded his father from its rays.
He cradled his father's shoulders in his lap and with a pocketknife he began cutting at the old bandage as gently as he could. The horse stopped its feeding as the bandage came away in chips as if it were tree bark and he could not tell what was skull bone or rotted bandage as it came away in his hands. He looked up to see the horse watching them with what seemed like mild curiosity while it ate.