Hell or Richmond (62 page)

And he had done it, was doing it, dragging his men along by force of will, men who had been promised one day of rest at last, maybe even a quick hussy’s wash, only to be rousted early and marched back to the ground above the river, looking at that railroad bridge and just knowing it was meant to carry trouble, just looking at it a time, exhausted already, then stripping down and digging entrenchments as ordered, to keep off Yankees still not visible, and they had dug like rabid corpses, if rabid corpses could dig, because the one damned thing they had learned that was of any use was that digging hard meant living, and even rabid corpses wanted to live, he expected.

The Yankees had come, all right. In the afternoon. Poking around, like kids fussing at a snake hole with long sticks, but they hadn’t gotten up to much, no doubt worn hard themselves, and even their cannon seemed lazy when they fired. The heat and the waiting were a trial in themselves, though, and then a narrow squall swept down upon them, bringing not only rain that stank of bad soil, but an eruption of battle sounds just up the river, where another bridge had been defended by a mud fort too small to be anything but a temptation to an enemy. He imagined he heard cheers, maybe didn’t, but in his mind they were not the sound of his people, his blood, no, they were hideous in their joy, even if unreal, the product of an exhausted delirium, and then the cannon directly across the river got in a temper and plowed shells into the general area of his men’s entrenchment, and two of his boys, cousins from the backcountry, from dead clay country all chiggers and cottonmouths, maybe a rattler or two, those black-toothed, toothless, happy-to-stink-like-dogshit sonsofbitches just started pounding each other with their never-once-washed fists, and they could fight, those two, probably nary a thing to do but fight back in those weed-starving wastes that spawned them, unless a man fucked whatever four-legged half-female thing he could corner in the never-completed, falling-down barn he was doomed to inherit, taking his furtive pleasure with beasts until he found himself a gal distasteful as his own flesh, a gal from identical, poorer-than-poor-white fields, for no town slut nor even a tinker’s wife would accept his seed for money, not even a gold piece, and those two damned roughs, fine Yankee killers, give them that, tumbled out of the ditch they had dug, slamming into one another’s meat and splashing blood to the sky, with those Yankee shells bursting reliably on every side, well-fused shells, not like the monkeyed-up rounds his forlorn excuse for a stillborn, goddamned, I’ll-fight-for-it-damn-you nation sent to its own ramrod-buggered artillerymen, no, fine shells these were, just pounding God’s own earth, or somebody’s, since God, if he existed—which Oates would not believe—was unlike to be bothered with such a forlorn place and men grown unrecognizable as a species, and Oates leapt out after them, bigger than either man or boy, call them as you will, bigger than both of them put together, putting on his black-bearded devil face, and he collared one, hurled him back in the trench, then heaved the other after him, catching him in flight with an artful kick. They had been fighting over the color of a dress each said he would buy for a woman they had created from nothing but untutored, cow-fuck thoughts.

And for whatever monstrous reason, nature itself had turned on him, not with the rain, which was no better or worse than everything else in this no-God, godforsaken life, but with a trick of memory, the violent cousinship of those two conjuring a dreadful matter, the worst memory of Oates’ life, his grave shame, his greatest shame, the one memory still more painful than that of leaving his younger brother behind, dying on that slope in Pennsylvania, and he wrestled it down, tightening his fists as if he could strangle the past, going at the memory the way a man goes at a bear that means to kill him.

John!

Battling the memory of his shame, immense and beyond all remedy, he had said, roughly, loudly, to all present: “Only good day I’ve had this here month was when the Yankees up and left Spotsylvania. Wasn’t that a time?”

“Surely, Cunnel,” a crust-faced, pustule-badged sergeant said. “That there was a time.” He glanced toward the railroad bridge. “Wouldn’t mind another such.”

When the Yankees, after a last fool’s assault, or attempt at one—for they soon quit—had drawn off in the night, leaving behind not only their dead to be plundered, but treasures they merely declined to carry off, too lazy to husband what was theirs, how could such men ever beat his boys, how had they tricked them to drive them here, so much closer to Richmond? But none of that, choose the sweet memory bubbling like molasses in a pot, the picturesque orgy of his men unleashed, for a precious half hour, from the trench that had confined them for ten days—or was it more?—and they had begun by stripping haversacks from rotting Yankee bodies to their front, their stink no worse, or hardly worse, than the living men who robbed them, and motive skeletons gnawed rancid bacon, its scent grown indistinguishable from the putrid meat of man that had shielded it from the sun but not the maggots, what a feast they had! And in the abandoned lines themselves, full knapsacks waited, and barrels of crackers not half-devoured, and, in one leather bag, a fancy set of woman’s underwear, which no man could explain, but a gleeful soldier pulled on the frillies, prancing for all to see, until Oates told him, Stop that nonsense, boy, gather up some eats, then take up all the cartridges you can find, that’s good Yankee powder. And men who had gorged on rotten food with alacrity and joy shit themselves half-dead, then ate the rest of the provisions they had looted, such was the way of things.

The Yankees never did come over that bridge all the just-gone evening, but only fired their cannon wastefully, spitefully, not so much as marking one of his men, barely sprinkling them with dirt, for they had learned to dig and dig, indeed, and Oates judged they could have held that position and that bridge and done a plenty of killing, but in the first dark the unaccountable order had come down to withdraw from the fortress they had made of the hillside, to just quit that fine ground, and they had followed another regiment back to a railroad embankment, every man on the verge of fall-flat sleep at every step, only to be told: You come too far, go on back, maybe a third of the way, staff man there to guide you, sure enough, how did you miss him? And with midnight coming on, his still damp, filthy, rain-can’t-wash-this-off, weary-beyond-all-saying men had been told to dig new entrenchments, because, first light, the Yankees were expected to cross the river they had just abandoned, and day must not find the Army of Northern Virginia unprepared. Oates half expected a mutiny, but the men were too tired for that, emotions duller than their work-numbed limbs. He asked about rations and was told, “Tomorrow.”

So his men dug, and chopped, and built in the darkness, men reduced to wires where fine muscles once had been, swinging axes fearsomely in the black Virginia night, while, to the north, the Yankees kept on pounding the emptied entrenchments, as if they meant to sink Virginia like a goddamned ship.

He bit the inside meat of his cheeks until he tasted blood. Forcing himself to stay awake with his men. He might have murdered a child for a cup of coffee.

And the memory attacked in the darkness, in Hell’s own darkness, brimstone black. The shame of Cain, redoubled because of the terrible innocence exploited, violated, savaged, fell upon him again, and he wished to flee, but there was no place to hide, not from this guilt. That gut-cutting, heart-stabbing remembrance was the only thing that might, one day, drive him to violate the oath he had taken for his mother’s sake never to touch a drop of liquor of any kind. The memory was that bad, though he could not even recall what he had done on that hot and dreadful day—thought now that it had to do with the hogs, or maybe a gate left unlatched—but the doing of it had set his father off like nothing before. He had been nine, ten, John younger by a speck of years, and his father had not slapped him nor wielded his belt, not this time. The big man had gone at him with his fists, knocking him down, demanding that he get back up, and knocking him down again, drawing blood and setting teeth a-wobble. Unsatisfied, his father took up a plank and slammed it across his broadening boy’s shoulders, twice, and when he would not, or could not, rise again, kicked him and cursed him mightily. For the first and last time in his uncertain life he begged his father to stop, broken to crying out, uselessly, for his mother, who loved him but would not interfere in this male domain, not even had he been beaten unto death. He cried and pleaded, hurt beyond shame, but his father just brought that board down on him a third time.

“It weren’t me!” he cried at last. “It was John, it was him that done it!”

And his father, heaving breath like a rutting bull, had growled, just once, and said, “Get up, you pisser,” yanking him to his feet, which he could barely keep.

Through a not-yet-closed, blood-filmed eye, he had seen John standing maybe ten feet off, just standing there like the damnedest fool in creation.

His fathered beckoned his younger son to approach. John did as commanded. And his father asked, “That true, boy? You the one done it?”

John had looked not at his father then, nor at the board raised half-high, but at Oates. And his brother’s expression had been not of anger seething, nor even of disappointment, but a nearly blank, ravishingly gentle look that might have been last seen on the face of Jesus Christ himself up on the cross, a look that just said,
Well, the world is just this way, and I can’t help it no more than you can, neither.

And John said, “Yes, sir. I done it.”

TWENTY-TWO

May 24, nine thirty a.m.
Ellington House, on the North Anna River

A piratical-looking darkey claimed that Lee had sat on the porch of the once proud house the day before. The notion pleased Hancock. Lee had quit the river line, instead of fighting. That wasn’t the Lee of old. The match truly might be moving to a close.

The first men over had ravaged the house, which had been a goodly place. The owner had fled in haste and, squandering not a moment, soldiers had torn up floorboards, hurled china and pictures about, smashed a rosewood piano, and tossed books from a library into the hallway and beyond. Riding up, Hancock had encountered two delighted stragglers, one cuddling a ham, the other fumbling as he balanced an ambitious stack of books. Once, Hancock would have had such looters arrested, to say nothing of those who had wrecked the house for the raw joy of destruction. But things were different now. This was war to the death. The South needed to be punished until it broke. And the civilians were worse than Lee’s soldiers in their appetite for hatred, their enthusiasm for prolonging the war.

Still, the waste, the waste. All of it. This house. The lives. A country put to the rack, tortured for a dozen and more political heresies. Behind his bold exterior, another Hancock kept minute accounts. Even now, as he justified it, waste troubled him. He deplored the loss of even little things, of a shirt or a collar stud. The Army, he thought, really should have made him a quartermaster.

“Here,” he said to Colonel Morgan. “Send this to George Meade. It’ll keep Grant off his back for an hour or two.”

The chief of staff took the message and carried it out to the knot of couriers gathered in the shade. The day was already stinking hot, and humid from the past evening’s burst of rain. Hancock had indulged in a cup of iced water, then a second and third, after his headquarters cavalry broke into the plantation’s icehouse. He had reveled in the treat like a child given candy. Simple things were enormous pleasures now.

He had even run out of clean shirts, his cherished indulgence.

Morgan came back in. “Goddamn it, there’s no discipline anymore. I had to chase off two sonsofbitches breaking windows for the Hell of it. And they wanted to know who
I
was.”

Hancock snorted. “I’m not far shy of breaking windows myself.”

The colonel looked at him.

“I know, I know,” Hancock said. “Everything’s going fine. Birney’s across, Gibbon’s crossing, Barlow’s on the way.” He smiled. “Thought he was going to chase me with that great butcher’s knife of his, when I detached Miles.”

Morgan cocked an eyebrow:
And?

“It’s not the damned leg, Charlie,” Hancock told him. “That’s all right today.” He shook his head, wishing for still more iced water. “Sometimes I think a man can only take so much of this. Before the killing starts to seem pure murder.” He laughed. “Bugger a monkey, you know I used to think there was glory in it?” He laughed again, the bitterness level rising. “‘Hancock the Superb’! That’s me, you know. Proud as a pissing peacock.” He lifted a heavy arm and gestured southward. “Now I just want to beat them all to death, crush skulls with a rock.”

Morgan appeared bewildered by the outburst, a display hardly characteristic of their relationship.

Hancock’s smile faded from bitter to sour. “I know I’m contradicting myself. Man is a contradictory beast, Charlie. Delighted to kill, and repulsed by it. Proud, but ashamed.” He cocked an eyebrow and ran a hand over his roughly shaven chin. “How are we supposed to master our enemies, when we can’t even master ourselves? Or at least be honest about what beasts we are?” He gestured at the wreckage of the parlor, the toppled piano. “You know, this doesn’t even make me angry? Year ago, I would have been in a fury. But I just can’t be self-righteous anymore. Why should we give a shit-pot damn about property, when men are dying by the tens of thousands? What are
they
worth? Weigh a man against a Chesterfield sofa, and war tips the scales in favor of the furniture. Whole damned war was cried up over property—in the case of our gray-backed brethren, a few million coons. So why should we spare a parlor? If we’re going to take revenge, why not on property? And spare the lives of those poor bastards out there? Christ, if I were in their shoes, I’d be smashing things up myself.” He snorted. “Wife would take a stick to me, though, if she saw a mess like this. She’d know the price of everything in this house.”