God's Fool (34 page)

Authors: Mark Slouka

Tags: #American, #Fiction, #Contemporary, #Historical, #Biographical

We looked about us. Shattered foundations, splintered wagons, fortifications like the backbones of huge fish laid across the land. A bearded young man had been caught pushing himself across a field with his heels; another slept facedown on a comrade, one leg out like a sleeping
child, the skin of the calf exposed against the dirt. On plate after glass plate—for this is what they were—we could see ditches and ravines and furrows, clotted and sown with the dead. Some had apparently died recently; others, their bellies and thighs straining against their uniforms, had begun to grow.

We had left their like behind a week back down the road. And yet there was something here that built in me like a wave. The dead gestured and exclaimed, pleaded and cursed. Some seemed surprised, or simply disbelieving. More than a few still clutched their rifles. Entire companies, bent in ways that men don’t bend, appeared to have been flung into the muddy stubble or half-grown wheat from a great height. I remember I picked up a broken pane leaning against the wall: a brown-haired man lay along a picket fence, his neck arched back, his cap still pinned beneath his head. Just above him, a partial crack in the glass ran through a shattered wagon. His arms, frozen at the elbows, pointed straight up from his sides, the fingers straining, as if eager to convince someone of something, or ask a question. Looking at it I couldn’t escape the sense that he had seen the sky above his head crack before he died.

They were flawed photographic plates. A sudden change in the humidity on a particular day had made the collodion too tacky, or not enough; a spear of light entering the horse-drawn darkroom had erased half a cornfield; a mosquito or a gnat, settling in the silver nitrate, had marred the picture of the men along the picket fence like a piece of buckshot.

It even made sense, in a way. Glass was scarce; damaged photographic plates, worthless. But my God, what it must have taken—building those transparent roofs and walls with the dead, setting them in place … Here and there, the landscape of barns and bridges in the glass was nearly identical to the one beyond it, must have seemed, to those looking through it, a kind of nightmare imposed on the actual land. And that’s when Eng noticed it: the images faded as they rose up the walls; to the south, where the sun beat strongest, the panes were already nearly
blank—the dead, and the world they had died in, were vanishing like ghosts. I looked at the open mouths, the tumbled hair. Even now I can see them going: brothers and lovers, fathers and sons, kind men and cruel, high in their bier in the hot Virginia sun, their agony for one brief moment laid out to the sky like a reproach to God, then gone.

XIII.

He’s asleep, the old fool, his face pressed into my neck like a huge bristly child, wheeling and garumphing and chewing his gums … That I should have spent every moment of my life tethered to this man is unbelievable to me. But I have. Time is a narrowing of paths, a pruning away of branches. Nothing like a thing finished and done for ending the debate. Or beginning one, I suppose
.

The fire, burning on two logs, is growing down. The ice is silent. I wonder why it is that a fire with two logs will dwindle and die while a fire with three will burn. Is there a third log for everything in this world? A secret threshold that brings it to life, or quietly lets it die?

If it should be now, I’m not unwilling. But I worry about him. He twitches his paws in his sleep, then shifts with the cold. I draw the blanket up around our shoulders
.

I can still see them there, waiting in the woods by the open fields, watching the milkweed drifting in the air like a lost squall. Some scribble quick notes against the stocks of their rifles or their brothers’ backs or the stones of the old mossed walls that run through those woods like a stitch through a quilt, marking borders long forgotten—“To Miss Masie,” “To My Father,” “In Case of My Death”—then pin them to their shirts. Most just sit with their backs against the trees, their caps hanging lightly on their bayonets, waiting
.

No one speaks. A bee buzzes on a turtlehead blooming in the damp, climbs up the tongue. A hot blade of sun lights the moss on a boulder, cuts the toes off a boot. Here and there men lie sprawled on the previous season’s leaves, staring up through the layered branches. Further off, where an old road has shot light through the roof of leaves, a photographer in a black vest and a wide-brimmed hat goes about his business, hurrying back and forth from a small, square wagon
.

Suddenly a canteen falls over with a clank; a cut leaf twirls slowly to the ground. Like sleepers waking, they raise their heads. A private’s hat flies from a branch. They leap to their feet. The floor of the forest, an overgrown orchard, is stippled with apples, small and hard and green. Within seconds the air is alive with joyful, savage shouting. I can see them, sprinting for the breastworks of pasture walls and broken trees, one hand holding their caps to their heads, the other cradling their bulging shirts, lumpy with ammunition. And for a short space of time, they seem to forget where they are. The wavering heat, the ridge, the order—soon to come—to advance across the open fields (an order Longstreet himself will have to give with a nod, unable to bring himself to speak): All these fade away one last time like distance on a summer afternoon, and they play. As children will play. As though death were a story to scare them to bed, and scarce worth believing
.

And I can see him there, my little boy grown tall and lean, his wrists protruding a full three inches from his sleeves. I can feel his thrill at a solid hit, the sting of a little green ball in his side. And I see him take a small bite with his teeth. Then another. His stomach feels tight and hard as a fist. He drops down behind the wall and finishes the four in his pocket, spitting out the bits that won’t chew, then reaches for two more lying by his legs. A young man drops down beside him, soaked in sweat, laughing. “I pasted Wiley,” he says, grinning, his chest rising and falling, gulping air. “If he was a squirrel he’d be in a pot by now.”

Somewhere, once again, Longstreet nods. Pickett scribbles his note to his wife, then gives the order. It’s a little after three. The Union guns have fallen silent. The men stop, rise. Ranks form. The mile of open field is still with heat, the air almost white. The world pauses, holds. The order comes. The men step into the light
.

• • •

All but one, pants around his ankles, shitting himself raw in the cornfield. All but one, retching little bits of apple like a demon, holding to the stalks that barely reach his head—unable to stand, much less walk—as the air explodes with the sound of eleven cannon and seventeen hundred rifles going off at one time and who, soiled and shamed, believing in his fifteen-year-old heart that he’ll be shot for a coward and a deserter, wipes himself as best he can, and then, not knowing what else to do, weeping with rage and frustration, crawls through the corn and into the woods and starts walking; walking until Gideon, saddling his mare one hot July morning, looks up the road and freezes, then slowly lays down the reins and begins to run in a way not fitting for a man of his age
.

All but one, given back to me like a tidbit, like a bone, after all I’d lived and lost—“Here, take him, if you want him so badly, he’s yours …” And by God, I did
.