God's Fool (33 page)

It was late that afternoon, numb with fatigue, that we came to the church at the crossroads. It stood on a rise near the edge of a vast, open plain: untilled fields and young corn, bits of wood and orchards. I remember it well. Though a retreating mass of black clouds still obscured the horizon, the storm had begun to clear. There was, I recall thinking, something undeniably picturesque and dramatic about the scene: the church with its wide, badly weathered boards under that huge, bruised sky; the clouds, trimmed with white like ecclesiastical robes; the grain of light on the broken stones in the churchyard behind the fence …

We had spent that day, it seemed, walking out of the world of men. We had no idea where we were. No one moved any longer about the houses and barns we passed. Twice in the last few hours, hearing bursts of rifle fire from the woods, we had hidden in the bushes off the road, then, not knowing what else to do, carefully continued on.

It was partly because Eng thought he had seen the cheesecloth-thin curtain move in the little window to the left that we let ourselves in the gate and walked through the churchyard, glancing here and there at the incriptions (I still remember the name A. Emmanuel Lipp) on the tilting headstones. The sweet, loamy smell of earth, raised by the rain, filled the air. A mockingbird, still as though painted there, sat silently on the branch of a small, dripping elm. We walked up the three boot-scuffed steps and knocked on the door. Around us the road, the fields, the woods, bathed in that stormy light, had turned a deep, undeniable blue.

There was no one there. Eng tried the door. A low rumble of thunder rose from the west, subsided momentarily, then rose again.

“What’s that?” I said, but Eng, having frozen for only a second, was already pulling and slamming at the wooden frame as the sound, so different now, rose like a cloud coming up the road that dipped into the woods a quarter-mile to the east, and stepping back, we crashed through the door and slammed it shut an instant before they were upon us,
pounding by not like men on horseback but more like the storm I had imagined them to be at first, a charge of thunder made flesh and bone and hoof, transformed in one instant into a river of men clinging to the manes of horses pushing apart the air like a concussion of sound. They seemed one mass, like a torrent loosed from a burst dam, with here and there a leg, a face, a foaming muzzle visible in the rush, pouring by for three minutes, then five, then ten, until it seemed that that side of the world from which they had come must soon be empty of horses and men.

We never heard the rifle crack, but suddenly out of the mass a man separated and flew twisting through the air. Two horses went down in a tangle of hooves and terrified neighing, forming an island in the torrent that quickly parted around them like water around a deadfall. “Oh my God,” I heard my brother say. The man lay facedown in the churchyard, his head bent under his chest and his feet propped on the bottom rail of the fence like a diver who had mistaken grass and dirt for water.

It never stopped. By the time the river had passed, leaving behind two more, one crumpled in the dirt, the other lying on his back, half hidden under the body of a horse, we could hear the distant boom of cannon. Thin plumes of white smoke rose above the trees. We rushed to the other window. They were already halfway across the untilled field, a sea of men a full quarter-mile or more across. We rushed back. The edge of the woods at the top of the far rise winked and sparked in the low, sharp light like a rock full of mica.

“Quick,” I said, pulling my brother toward the door. “We can still make the woods.”

“Which way? We have no idea where the main force is. Where their sharpshooters are. If they take us prisoner it could be years before we’re home.”

We ran back to the first window. The tide had advanced. We could make out the figures of individual men now against the mass of uniforms, their faces and hands like spots of light in a dark wood. There were thousands and thousands of them, walking steadily, the ranks dipping down into an invisible depression less than a third of the way
across the field, then rising again like a flow, like oil, like anything but men, and more were still coming. They would pass within a hundred yards of us, maybe less.

“My God, we’ve got to get out of here,” I remember my brother saying.

“Where? There’s nowhere to go.”

“If we could get beneath the floor somehow …”

“There’s no time. We can’t get the boards up … There’s no cellar …”

“We have to do something. They’re going to tear this place apart, brother.”

They were so close now we could see their beards, their caps. They walked bent-kneed and slow as though under a great weight, their eyes on the line of woods ahead. Unable to move, we watched them come on, their boots, their clothes, their breathing making a low hissing sound unlike anything else on earth. In the silence we could hear the men on horseback yelling something, their high-strung charges stepping along the edges of that tide as though afraid of getting their feet wet.

When the guns exploded it was as though a child had tossed a handful of pebbles across the surface of a still pond. A single, sustained wave of sound as overwhelming as a blow and the field was pocked and pitted and torn. Men simply disappeared. I saw dark bits of things fly from the center of a space where a shell had hit, and then the corner of the church was suddenly ripped open to the light and we were flying backwards into the boards of the opposite wall and I was saying to myself, with utter certainty, as in a dream,
I can’t die yet. I haven’t found him yet. I won’t allow it
. A steady screaming—hoarse, inhuman, unbearable—rose above the din of battle.

I’m not sure which of us thought of it, or if we ever even thought of it at all—if thinking was even possible at that moment, and even if it was, if our minds would have allowed us to think such a thing—or if we simply knew what to do the way an animal knows when to burrow and when to bite. Perhaps it was me. I’ll accept it if it’s so. All I remember is the two of us crawling through a cave of noise, a cave whose ceiling seemed to be lowering down on us like a lid. I had shat myself, though I
wouldn’t realize it for some time to come. We reachead the door—or the place where the door used to be. Something roared behind us like a fire bursting through an open flue. There was the yard. The road. Down the dirt, jerking from side to side like a tortoise, crawled a man with dark hair who had been cut in half at the waist. For a moment, the world started to recede as though I were backing into a long dark tunnel. At the end of it I could see him moving across a diminishing, plate-sized circle of light.
Not yet! Not yet, you bastard!
The plate grew larger. We wriggled across the porch, slid down the steps. The man who had been shot off his horse was still there, at the end of an invisible string thirty yards away, twenty yards away, ten yards away.
They don’t kill the dead
, I remember thinking, over and over.
They don’t kill the dead
. I never thought to pray. I knew who my enemy was. He had my boy by the arm.

He had managed to turn himself over. A shrieking wind, a swelling chorus of voices, a thousand strong … Five yards away and I could see the wound, gulping and clutching below the wreckage of his ribs and the torn fabric of his coat. His lips were moving slightly, as if remembering how to speak, or memorizing a poem. A young man, barely bearded. I could see his tongue pushing against his broken teeth like something blind trying to find its way to the surface. He bubbled up a gush of blood, trying to get something out of his throat. “Please,” he mouthed. “Please.” I could see the bayonet he’d managed to get into his hand. Another gush and he began to choke, then thrash, and I could see him looking past me, seeing nothing, a man like any other by God but not him, somebody’s son, but not mine—and I snatched the steel a second before my brother’s hand closed on my own and together we bore down and felt the flesh yield to the bone, felt the shudder catch and stop and still.

Something tore apart the air above our heads; a thick rain of stones and bits of iron fell over us. And I did what I had set out to do: I dipped my fingers into his blood, splashed my brother’s face and chest, my throat, my side, then fell into the dirt and lay like the dead—not weeping, not thinking, not anything at all.

•     •     •

I don’t know how long we stayed there. When the space beneath our arms had been dark for a long time, we began to crawl toward the road. From the fields and orchards at our back came a strange, wavering sound, sometimes like a child at play, tunelessly humming to itself (or more like a thousand children, ten thousand!)… sometimes like the lowing of a cow …

I glanced back only once. A half-moon hung motionless in an open sky. As far as I could see, their shadows clearly visible against the pale ground, lay the mounds and heaps of the dead. And yet the scene was not still. The entire valley was moving—slowly, almost imperceptibly—like the minute hand on a watch. We were one of the things making it move.

When we came to the road we kept going. It was only when we had reached the fringe of woods a hundred yards farther on that we dared to stand. I wonder if some sharp-eyed sentry saw us that night, alone among those thousands, suddenly rise to our feet and disappear into the woods as if that particular stretch of dirt just beyond the dip, just past the sycamore, marked a frontier beyond which resurrection became possible, so that those behind us had only to struggle across that invisible line to live, to have their shattered bodies made suddenly whole, to rise and stand and breathe—deep, deep!—like wakened dreamers trying to remember where they’d been, then run a hand through their cooling hair and slowly start for home.

XI.

I think I knew the moment we walked out of Stoneman’s woods that July afternoon and started down that long open road—the same one Gideon had thundered down that frozen night to deliver him into this world—that we had lost him. I could tell by the way the house looked, by the shadows of the trees across the yard. We had been gone almost three months. And somewhere inside of me, some small thing very quietly shut.

Addy collapsed when she saw us walking toward the house without him. I couldn’t speak. It was as though I’d forgotten how. That afternoon in the parlor Sallie told us that Frank and Charles had been impressed into the Confederate Army as laborers. James had run off a week after we had left. There was no meat left in the smokehouse. I didn’t hear her. “We’re moving north,” he’d written, “I don’t know where. I miss you and Mama and Nannie and everybody but most of the men here think a month will decide the war and then I’ll be home with you before you know it. The food is bad and most of us crawl with lice which keeps us up all night. I saw General Pickett yesterday. He was dressed very fine and had long black hair like a woman, but those who know him say he’s a good fighter and have faith in him. I have to go.”

The children gathered around us. I held them all. I wanted to say something. There was nothing I could say.

•     •     •

Three days from home, a toothless old man, seeing us coming down the road, had straightened up from hoeing a small, neat garden and walked slowly over to the fence. It had rained that morning. It looked as though it might rain again. “Where might home be?” he’d said, leaning his hoe on the rail beside him. We told him. “We don’t have many Chinamen about these parts,” he said. Small clouds of mayflies, like tiny white blossoms, had been rising from the hedges all morning. He fanned his hand in front of his face. “What might your … I mean, if you don’t mind my askin’?” We told him. He nodded seriously, looking past us into the fields. A little fly had stuck to the damp bristle of his cheek. “I heard of a two-headed calf once,” he said, “but that was diff’rent.” He picked up his hoe. “You boys hear about the fightin’ up in Pennsylvania? Fifty thousand dead near some town called Gettysburg.” He shook his head. “Hard to get your mind around somethin’ like that.”

We had been less than a hundred miles away.

I slept, I dreamt. I heard his voice. He came back to me as a three-year-old child, face and legs still soft with fat. He was sitting on a wooden floor in the sun, laughing. He was suddenly grown. I walked past a room and saw him standing in front of a window, and it was him—his back, his legs, his hair, exactly as he was—and in the dream I knew he was gone.

I knew it before the lists of the dead at Gettysburg were printed in the Richmond papers, before they were posted on walls and lampposts. Before I saw Gideon Weems walking up the steps and knew why he had come. Before my eyes had read the names of Francis Bartow and William Beall, Judah Benham and Jefferson Blaisdell, John Bratton and Thomas Buford. Before they had read the words—just words, really—Christopher Bunker, Pvt. Before I had stood there on the porch hearing the sound of my own breathing, my own heart beating on, hearing someone saying, “Quick, get her to the sofa,” before I had realized, would never realize, I think,
could
never realize, that I had lost him—the one I couldn’t, wouldn’t lose—my boy, my heart.

XII.

I remember many things. I remember the night, coming home, we found a greenhouse still smelling of new-cut wood and lay down in a corner to sleep. And slept, waking only twice—once to the sound of rain on the panes overhead, another to the flying moon, just past full, briefly whitening the glass.

We woke just before sunrise, surrounded by the dead trapped in the glass. We stood up. In the pane in front of me, ghostly and inverted, I could see a vast field rising up to a blank horizon, a thin fringe of trees, a rail fence smashed as utterly as if it had been made of matchsticks and some impatient boy had just raked his hand down the line. In the foreground lay two dead horses; one, its neck twisted up against the flank of the other, seemed to be neighing at the sky. Beyond them, very nearly covering that stubbled plain, lay the black heaps of the dead, some singly, others in groups of two and three, diminishing with distance to the crest of a hill where the actual sun, rising now through a low gap between the trees, showed enormous and swollen through the gray November sky like a second, burning earth.