Raintree County (100 page)

During this time, Johnny Shawnessy had become a veteran soldier. He had learned to fight and to endure. And as the skills of his trade were few and simple, what he mainly had to do all the time was to endure.

To Corporal Johnny Shawnessy and the other fighting soldiers, North and South, the War had long ago become a contest in endurance. Newfangled weapons were all right, the cavalry was all right, the engineers were all right—all these things were necessary and important. But Johnny and his comrades knew that Victory—that theoretically possible but practically invisible goal—was achieved by a brutally simple thing—a soldier with a long musket loading at the muzzle and firing a lead ball. This irreducible unit of warfare had to be powered with legs able to march forty miles a day. It had to be equipped with an intangible something called ‘morale' that made it able to stand and fire in the face of an entrenched enemy. There was a great deal more, but it was all subsidiary to the use and advance of this ancient weapon of attack, occupation, and defense, the combat infantryman. If the infantryman was properly used in adequate numbers and if he had enough endurance, a series of pins might be moved on a map until the Enemy position was untenable and further war unthinkable. This goal was the object of something called ‘Strategy.' Corporal Johnny Shawnessy and his comrades made Strategy possible.

Except for the long musket and a slight difference in sartorial styles, the Civil War infantryman wasn't far distinguishable from a Roman legionary, and his battles were fought and won according to the same plan. His power to inflict a wound was increased over the short sword. But he was the same instrument of strategy. He was hurled in compact masses on the enemy's front or flank in an effort to break through, roll up, encircle, capture, confuse. Through the primitive forest and mountain country between Chattanooga and Atlanta, the young men with muskets comprising Sherman's Army had flanked and fought all summer to drive the Southern armies from one entrenched position after another. There had been no easy, glamorous, or brilliant way to achieve the thing called ‘Victory.' There had been only this strong, bearded, tough, devoted, and probably doomed young man—the Union infantryman.

In the incredibly primitive, unhappy life of a Civil War infantryman,
something had happened to young Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County. To begin with, he had changed in appearance. He hadn't shaved for over a year, though he sometimes clipped his beard, which was much lighter in color and redder than his hair. His uniform was a grotesque remnant of the bright new thing that had been issued to him after enlistment. He had lived a life more brute than a beast's. He had fought for weeks on end through rainrotten forests, up mountains, down endless dirt roads—marching, countermarching, bivouacking, fighting. He had slept in mud, filth, dirt, lice. He had gone days and sometimes weeks without change of uniform or a bath.

Once he had gone a month without looking into a mirror. When he did so, he saw a strange person, a bearded automaton with a lean, sundarkened face, whitewrinkled around two dull, tired eyes. He knew then how greatly he had changed. He had buried all softer emotions in favor of the combat soldier's two main preoccupations—duty and survival.

For skillfully and without heroism, he had done his duty. And inflexibly, he had willed to survive.

For what?

So that one day he could cease to be a fearing, hating, expertly dangerous human being. So that one day he might forcibly lay hands on this hard husk and tear it off and restore to sunlight that young poet of life, a generously emotional, happy, affirmative creature, Johnny Shawnessy of Raintree County. So that one day he might sleep on a soft bed, eat good food, wear civilian clothes, walk freely where he pleased, work at some innocent task that didn't have homicide as its ultimate objective. So that one day—one impossibly remote, breath-taking day—he might put his arms around the supple waist of a young woman who loved him and whom he loved and kiss her upturned face and feel her bare arms on his shoulders.

He didn't allow himself to think too much of that day. For the present, it was best to leave the husk on, hide within it, endure. Endure, endure, and endure.

He suspected, however, that either the husk had become a part of him, or that the creature beneath it had changed. For after all, he had remained a human being even in the Army, this organized denial
of a man's humanity. He had acquired certain ideally simple and touchingly human attributes, which he shared with his comrades.

He had acquired the simple loyalties of the soldier. He was fiercely loyal to his comrades, to his regiment, to his brigade, to his General. He had learned to hate—if not the Rebels—at least their Cause. He felt murderous when he thought of the speculators, bounty jumpers, and Copperhead politicians on the home front. The Union of the States had become a mystically beautiful concept for him and synonymous with Freedom.

War had discovered in him a simple human being who clung yearningly and without criticism to the most ancient beliefs of the Republic. They made it possible for him to endure. They justified his agony. This agony was so great and terrible that only by infusing it with an ideal quality crudely religious in its fervors could it be endured. Only an intensely sentimental soldier in an intensely sentimental Republic could have fought and endured the Civil War.

Meanwhile, Corporal Johnny Shawnessy had become superficially like his comrades in some of his other habits. He had begun to smoke. He was rarely profane, but the immense profanity of the soldier seemed to him strangely unprofane. It expressed the soldier's enormous disgust with the inhumanity of his life. What the soldier endured was fit to be described only by verbal excretions. The Civil War soldier cursed fighting, eating, marching. He cursed awake, and he cursed asleep. He was cursing the great insanity of War with the bitter curse of experience.

The soldier's pleasures found their ultimate simplicity in the embrace of the campfollower. Johnny had ample opportunity to study this oldest impedimentum of the foot-soldier. It was possible to have wars without battles but not without whores. They followed the soldier almost into the Enemy's guns. Perhaps it was they who made the War possible for him. They gave him the last of his great illusions. Though Johnny himself couldn't have touched a woman who didn't adore him, he understood that the soldier desperately wanted life in the midst of death. He would have some semblance of love—even its bought counterfeit. He would have it—and its unfailing scarlet aftermath. He would drink, smoke, whore. But somehow he would remain the soldier. Somehow he would achieve
by this means more than by any other the purity of the soldier. By this pathetic gesture he affirmed the greatness of his sacrifice. All this was part of the uncleanness of battle.

By the time Corporal Johnny Shawnessy had arrived in the railroad yards of Atlanta, Georgia, he was well schooled in the uncleanness of battle, but there was still something to learn.

A photographer across the yards was focusing his instrument. The wagontrain had stopped just after the last wagon had rolled over the tracks.

—Don't move, boys, the photographer yelled. Just a minute.

The Perfessor went on sketching, while the photographer ducked under the hood behind his boxbodied apparatus.

—What are you drawing, Professor? Johnny said.

—I'm sketching a picture of the photographer taking a picture. Thus I get the best of him.

—But don't forget that he has a picture of you sketching a picture of him.

—Yes, the Perfessor said, but don't forget that I have a picture of him taking a picture of me sketching a picture of him.

The photographer was carrying the plate to his Whatisit for development, the supply wagons were moving again, and time, which had been chemically arrested, began to flow again on the doomed walls of Atlanta.

—What time do you expect the train? the Perfessor asked.

—Any time now.

—It'll have to come soon. Sherman's obviously going to wreck the joint before he moves.

Johnny walked across the tracks to the station. The wagons rolled and rattled through the town on a stream of cusswords, whipcracks, jingled harness, squeaks, bawdy songs. He read the words on the large white building to his left.

ATLANTA HOTEL

and on other buildings around him: BILLIARD-SALOON, HARDWARE, HAGAN & CO., GROCERIES, CONFECTIONERIES, PHOENIX, CONNOR & HARDACE.

Tomorrow would not find these legends written on the treacherous stuff of time. They looked down on Johnny with a tragic fixity, like
fragments of words dug from the ruins of an antique city. These sweaty soldiers in workworn uniforms, these cursing comrades in a passing afternoon, these blasphemous wagoners were mythical men. They were the destroyers of Atlanta and the legended walls of Atlanta.

Of course time had destroyed all forums of all republics, but the process had been slow—sometimes a work of centuries. History moved faster now in the white light of the Nineteenth Century, and a sentimental republic with hundreds of thousands of defenders could flower and fade in a few years.

Looking about him at the yard, he thought of days in Atlanta before the War, of the trains clanging to the station, the ladies in wide dresses stepping down, the jocund buggies waiting to receive them, the Negroes lounging outside the big depot. So they had driven forth, these sentimental ladies, into the lazy, lightfilled streets, homeward in summer through a stately name. They had ridden through Atlanta, and they never dreamed, these softspoken, tender ladies, that in a few years a horde of hardlegged boys in blue uniforms would march joking, cursing, singing through Atlanta and tear her ancient fabric.

Here at last, after incredible persistence on the one hand and incredible resistance on the other, the palladium of the South had been surrendered. And if one were obliged to say, just here or here is the tough heart of the South, beating lifeblood to its defenders, it would be this depot, whose great ventricles had pulled and pumped the chugging engines, receiving and replenishing and rendering forth again.

Now the South was stricken in this heart. Her Enemy had had too many engines on too many tracks, too many factories in too many cities, too many determined generals juggling sheets of supplies and railroad timetables, too many corps of engineers, too many whirring, remorseless machines, too many legions of stronghearted boys. An Army sixty thousand strong, trained for endurance, fierce and jocular, veterans of a dozen battles, was poised for the kill. And over these swarming legions presided a symbol of this Army, William Tecumseh Sherman, a Westerner, a man who had seen Destiny, disguised as a locomotive, moving across the plains, Sherman, the madman who had said in the War's beginning that 200,000 men must
swarm down from the West in an overwhelming tide of envelopment and devastation before the South could be conquered.

Of all the Northern generals, Sherman had been the first to pay the South the bloody compliment of understanding that she was a total nation and must be totally conquered.

Soldiers were beginning to pile up the wooden sleepers for bonfires. They sang, quipped, called loudly to one another at their work. Johnny went on down through the yards. An engine drawing four cars was coming in from the north. Soot belched grayly from the funnelstack. Soldiers cleared the tracks and stood back waving their arms at the engineer.

—Better hurry, Captain. Ain't gonna be no station left around here in a little while.

Johnny walked on beside the depot and turned in at the open end. He stood on a platform inside, waiting for the train. There was one passenger car and a string of freights. Troops were clinging to the sides and riding on top. They waved their hands. The train came steadily on toward the righthand halfcircle of the three-mouthed depot. Now the tracks were swarming with soldiers as far back as he could see. The train coasted into the depot. Soldiers jumped down; men poured from the open sides of the freightcars. Supplies were lifted out. Civilians and officers came from the lone passenger car.

—Hurry up and unload those cars, a major of engineers shouted. Get that train out of here. We're going to blow this station up.

Under the wide, slow circle of the roof, the engine bell was clanging; the troops were unpacking their gear and moving toward the exits; in the brown sunstreaked spaces of the depot the voices of hundreds of men made a busy murmur.

One seldom stopped to think that great interiors could be destroyed. Hollow containers of change, themselves never changing, they were less mutable than sky and trees. It didn't matter how long ago this roof had been lifted—it had the timelessness of a center of arrival and departure that itself never departs or arrives, but remains a constant in equations of mutability.

On a far platform a spare figure in black civilian garb was standing. Johnny instantly recognized the liquidbrown eyes, the grave composure, the trim, pointed beard.

—Well, John, Cash Carney said after the conventional greetings, looks like I got here just before the deluge. I'm glad you got my letter.

As they left the station, a group of officers standing at the entrance nodded to Cash.

—Goodday, Colonel, Cash said. Going to have some fun, I see.

—Yes. Thanks for sending that load of stuff through so promptly, Mr. Carney.

They moved out into the light.

—Colonel Poe, of Sherman's staff, Chief Engineer, Cash said. I do a lot of business with him. I'm down here now to handle a supply problem for the Army. It's a shame to see them rip all this stuff up. Nice depot. Not much of a town though. Just came down in time to see them blow the hell out of it. So this is what you boys were fighting for all summer? Well, it's a war of railroads. Once Sherman wrecks the Rebel system of supply, this war is going to be over. Do you have any idea where Uncle Billy is going to take you scamps?

—He hasn't told us, Johnny said. The order of November 9 promised a long and difficult march, involving a change of base. The Army is being stripped for movement.