Enemy Women (27 page)

A man was coming at him under the umbrella of a wide-brimmed hat the size of a dinner table, and for a shirt he was wearing a woman’s dress bodice frothing with dirty lace and ribbons and he was barefoot. He held a six-shot revolver in one hand, and he was looking for a target. Neumann stood and held his own revolver straight out and fired. The ball hit the man in the right shoulder and he shot backward as if jerked by an invisible rope. The man came to his bare feet again like a cat. Then Neumann found himself among men in blue who were running, running past him and over him, nearly knocking him down. The Union forces were running forward over their own dead and wounded. They were racing toward the Confederates in a wild charge.

Stop! he screamed. Stop and form up!

Hoooooo, they yelled at him. A peculiar sound, as if a million men were blowing across the necks of bottles. A shell exploded nearby and Neumann smelled blood and turpentine but he did not stop to see what had been hit, because the men of the Eighth Iowa had not been prepared for this last Confederate charge and their ammunition was still on the baggage wagons, they had only four more volleys. He caught a loose horse and managed to get on it as it circled and circled in a wild panic. He shoved his foot in the stirrup and swung up even while he was being thrown outward by the centrifugal force of the horse’s spinning.

The Union quartermasters were bringing up the baggage train in a frantic charge and the rest of the men coming up were forced to scramble over them, split up and run around. The big six-ton freight wagons needed a wide crossing to get turned onto the Spanish Fort road, but the road was narrow, three were jammed in the pines, sunk to the hubs
in sand. Several had turned so tightly that they had overset and their teamsters were scrambling to cut the mules loose. The mob of bluecoats were running around and through the jammed wagons. They stopped to load and fire and load and fire again, and Neumann counted three good volleys that fogged the crossing in cordite smoke.

Neumann put his horse in a gallop and the long, feathery bunches of needles on the loblolly pines lashed him in the face. Artillery boomed behind him, the peculiar wowing sound of a Parrott shell. A lieutenant colonel rode directly across his path.

Get those men to form up! They are bunching up!

Sir! shouted Neumann. Permission to help clear these wagons! He knew the men were not bunching up. Smith’s Gorillas were too experienced to pack up. A shell went by overhead as if it were a train on some solitary journey, determined to arrive on time, perhaps in Atlanta, for it tore past on a flat trajectory, removing limbs and treetops as it went. Branches fell on them and the smell of cordite came in clouds from behind them.

Abandon them! yelled the lieutenant colonel. Just abandon the damn things!

Neumann kept on. The horse under him probably had not rested in five days. Its gallop was uneven and stumbling. Men streamed past, keeping a distance from one another, stopping to kneel and reload, and then they went on. Smoke drifted among the pines in thin, trailing veils. The five-foot wheels of the wagons ground through the sand on their iron tires with a crisp sizzle.

Two baggage wagons had locked wheels, and the teamsters were screaming at each other and shoving at the wheels while sweat poured down their faces. Neumann hauled up on his horse and at that time heard the low and ugly sound of a Whitworth mortar, the whoo-der whoo-der noise it made as it carved its way through the dense air, coming straight down on them from overhead. Major Neumann put both arms over his head. His horse squatted in terror.

The mortar struck a commissary wagon and Neumann was sprayed
with flour and blood. He felt as if he were somebody else, that he was living outside his own body and wondered for one millisecond if he were dead, had been beheaded. Two mules were down, one of them missing its forelegs, and the stumps churned in the air and hosed the men alongside with blood. The sides of the wagon were scattered in fragments among the trees and the trace chains were embedded in a pine at the side of the road. A mule hoof was sticking out of a burst barrel of flour.

Cut loose and leave it! Neumann could hear himself screaming, so he couldn’t possibly be dead. In fact he was immensely alive. He jumped off his horse and drew his sword and began to cut what mules were left alive out of their harnesses. When he laid his left hand on his scabbard to draw out the sword with his right, he discovered he was missing the little finger and the ring finger on his left hand, ragged white leaders sticking out of the stumps. He took off his neck cloth and tied the hand in a tight bind, then got his sword out and went back to cutting the mules loose.

Another shell came whooing overhead, a struggling mule kicked one of the teamsters in the face and knocked out all the upper teeth on one side of his mouth, so that when he jumped to his feet again Neumann thought the man had been hit with a shell fragment. The teamster spat blood and teeth onto his blue uniform coat and did not seem to notice it. Together Neumann and the teamsters wrenched and tore at the harness and then the mules were loose and the teamsters jumped on their backs to ride them back down the road out of range. Horses would stand through a bombardment, but mules would bolt, and so they had to be taken back. His coat was covered with flour and his ripped hand spewed blood out of the neck cloth.

Neumann galloped to the next jam and the next. The wagons were turned every which way. Their wagon tongues were thrust into the Alabama sand, the mules kicking at the wagon tongues or their drivers or whatever they could reach. Neumann put his sword on the inside of the harness, ran it between mule and leather and then cut it through in one stroke.

Lieutenant Brawly came up at a gallop and called to Neumann,

The First Indiana’s guns are going into line up ahead! And Carlin’s guns are still on the transports!

What the hell are they doing there? Neumann yelled. He had the almost overwhelming desire to knock the young lieutenant off his horse. Go back and tell him we are clearing the road for him! They are shelling the hell out of us!

Yes sir! Ain’t this something? Brawley grinned. They’ve got Texas and Missouri troops in that fort, ain’t going to be easy to get them pried loose.

Go on, Brawley.

Neumann watched him go and then got on the commandeered horse. The road between Fish River and Spanish Fort was littered with Confederate caps and rifles and shoes, he saw powder horns and the bits of paper that served for wadding. The contents of Union baggage wagons were spewed over the trees on both sides. Somewhere in all that mess lay his fingers.

THEY BIVOUACKED BEHIND
a slight rise of ground, within the sandy pine forest east of Spanish Fort. The quartermasters were still attempting to sort out the stores of the baggage train.

At the surgeon’s tent he bent his head down to his knees while the surgeon held his hand and whacked loose the ends of the leaders and drew the skin over the stumps with dirty thread. He heard men screaming in the tents beyond and before long he was screaming like the rest until the surgeon jerked the last thread tight and tied it off.

Are you going to pass out? the surgeon asked.

No, no, just wrap it up, said Neumann. His voice was hoarse from the screaming and the cordite smoke. Suddenly he felt his mouth fill with water and he fought back the vomit.

Looks like you got hit before.

Don’t remind me.

There may be some metal fragments in here.

Just leave it, said Neumann. I got to get out of here. He walked away from the tents to find Brawley. As he walked he shed flakes of flour and blood over his boots.

He walked through the pines and both hands shook slightly as if they were jig dancing to some private music of their own and he could not stop them. He felt elated and alive in a peculiar and contingent way. He kept thinking of a body he had seen earlier, draped over the walls of Spanish Fort, missing its entire left side, so blood soaked he could not have said whether it were Union or Confederate or a butchered hog or a strung-out bag of rags.

He found the fire near the beach where he and Brawley had unloaded their saddles and bedrolls. He felt the tension thrash through him, felt it beat its way through every muscle in his abdomen and his shoulders and then drain out of him. He ducked his head twice, to pull at the muscles at the back of his neck. He pulled his saddle blanket over his face and listened late into the night as the men of the Eighth Iowa waded into the waters of the bay for oysters, breaking them loose with their bayonets, calling out to one another how good they were.

Neumann went over all that had happened to him since daylight, his horse shot from under him and Smith’s Gorillas, who had put him neatly in his place, baggage wagon jammed up and then the shelling, his hand half torn away. The day came back in a series of detailed images with himself moving through them. He had done his duty, he had not run nor cowered, there was a stronghold within him that would not give way. For this he felt a profound relief, a sense of gratitude. He watched the coals of the fire for a while and then finally fell asleep.

On April 8, very early in the morning, Neumann rode up to the First Indiana Heavy Artillery, where its line of cannon was being brought up to the east of Spanish Fort. Twenty-two Parrott rifled guns were being brought into line with their caissons and limber chests, drawn by teams of heavy bay horses. The mouths of the cannon looked backward from the caissons and as the teams drew up their equipage
they swung in a circle so that the cannons faced the fort. Then a crewmember pulled the pin to release the team from the caisson. As soon as they heard the pin clatter loose the horses charged forward of their own accord without waiting for the driver’s signal and galloped away in the jangling music of their harnesses, out of range of Confederate fire.

Neumann found the nearest battery captain standing beside his gun and crew.

Where may I find Colonel Hayes? he said. I have orders to report to him. Neumann stepped down from his horse with his bandaged hand close to his chest.

Up ahead, said the captain. Welcome to the First. But stay and watch, sir. Watch me take out the head-log on that embrasure yonder.

All the cannon were in line now and the battery captains called out their orders.
Load!
they shouted.
Rammer! Ready! Gun number one fire!
And almost simultaneously the shouts
Fire! Fire! Fire!
went all down the line.

All twenty-two guns cut loose. Neumann and the captain stood in the obscuring smoke, their hands over their ears. And the tubes of the cannons shouted for joy in a flattening roar and the earth jumped beneath their feet. Neumann’s horse tore the reins from his right hand and galloped back to the artillery horses and stood trembling.

Spanish Fort burnt under the cloudless sky, and the men who served the guns fed them on gunpowder and iron. Standing columns of smoke poured upward. Sprays of debris rose in the air, he saw timbers turning end over end and with them pieces of stone and human bodies and barrels and wagon spokes. Lord God, he said. The detonations shook the ground beneath his feet and fewer and fewer of the Confederate pieces replied.

Neumann found Colonel Hayes at his headquarters in a Sibley tent, standing with a sheaf of papers in his hand, watching the bombardment, and his face had a deep lustrous glow as the cannons spoke again and again.

Sir, said Neumann. Major Neumann reporting, sir. Here are my orders.

Very well, Major, very well. Organize some kind of an escort to get the rest of our ammunition up here as fast as possible. Is it unloaded? Ha ha! The colonel laughed. There, there, that was Captain Shaw’s piece, he could take out a bird on the wing.

By nighttime Spanish Fort’s defenses were knocked in, the head-logs over the Confederate batteries blown out and most of their guns silenced. The gun bays were spilled outward in avalanches of red brick, and inside the shattered interior the remaining Confederate troops hunkered behind any cover they could find. Across the bay Neumann could see the lights of Mobile, and there was a dim glow to the north of the city where the Confederate troops were burning the stores of cotton. A thin moon came up over the glowing rubble, and the Gulf of Mexico shifted its planes like gelatin under the glittering fields of stars.

Neumann lay beside his campfire and his nerves seemed to sing along the lines of his body, from the noise of the guns and the artillery duels between the two forces that had gone on for nearly a week. They sang a pleasing music. His hand was throbbing in the exact rhythm of his heartbeat. He wadded his saddle blanket under his head and reflected that if he lived he could get to like it. Especially when his side was winning. Brawley tore apart a paper package on the other side of the fire. It was a package of red peppers labeled hot devil monkey.

Where do they get these names? asked Brawley.

Damned if I know, said Neumann. He looked at his hand. The stumps were still leaking blood through the bandages and it hurt very much.

Are you still going to be able to play piano? Brawley dropped a pepper into their kettle with a great show of caution.

No, said Neumann. I couldn’t have before, either. He thought, if he had not given Adair the signet ring it would have been blown off and lost in the flour somewhere. This had some good meaning. The smoke lay low on the ground and in the distance Neumann heard some men singing,
Hail Columbia, happy land, If I don’t burn you I’ll be damned.

Overhead a fireball shot up from one of the Confederate Coehorn mortars, a fireball made of wadded raw cotton and turpentine. It arched sparkling through the nighttime air. It lit up the Federal entrenchments, and then the shallow crack of Enfield rifles came from the burning defenses of Spanish Fort. The Confederate sharpshooters were determined to keep them awake all night.

From another campfire in the distance, Neumann heard a long singsong cry,
Oh Major, the corporal’s eeeetin’ again!

Neumann laughed. He might as well eat while he could. He heard the noise of the batteries starting up again, this time against Fort Alexandria and after that it would be the city. The men smashing into the dramshops.