Raintree County (103 page)

—Please brown that turkey a little more on the back, Johnny said to Flash.

—Be confident. Be resolute. Trust in an overruling Providence, and success will crown your efforts. I hasten to join you in the defense of your homes and firesides.

G. T. B
EAUREGARD

C
ORINTH
, M
ISSISSIPPI

November 18, 1864

—Boys, let's enjoy ourselves while we may, Johnny said. Beauregard is coming!

—TO THE PEOPLE OF GEORGIA

read the Perfessor,

You have now the best opportunity ever yet presented to destroy the enemy. Put everything at the disposal of our generals; remove all provisions from the path of the invader, and put all obstructions in his path.

Every citizen with his gun, and every negro with his spade and axe, can do the work of a soldier. You can destroy the enemy by retarding his march.

Georgians, be firm! Act promptly, and fear not!

B. H. H
ILL
, Senator.

I most cordially approve the above.

J
AMES
A. S
EDDON
, Secretary of War.

—We done licked everything else, Flash said. It'd be kind of fun to take on this here B. H. Hill and the Secretary of War.

—I'm ashamed of you boys, the Perfessor said. Listen to this:

ATROCITIES BY THE UNION SCUM

——

SHERMAN'S MEN LOOT, RAPE, AND MURDER

Let every Southron in whose patriot breast still palpitates a heart not insusceptible to the claims of outraged womanhood rally to the sacred Cause. We long ago knew that the Yankees were cowards and thieves. It is with regret we learn that they are also rapists, arsonists, defilers of everything sacred to hearth, home, and God. Reports emerging from the devastated areas in the rear of Sherman's Army reveal, alas! beyond any doubt the bestiality of these vulturesque and blood-dripping ruffians from the north. Houses ransacked, old men murdered, women outraged, children slain and thrown down wells, every species of atrocity known to the stained and sanguinary story of human depravity has been surpassed a hundredfold by the work of these gory Goths that now rage unchecked on the fair soil of Georgia.

—Boys, the Perfessor said, you see: you've been found out. The press is ubiquitous, all-seeing, impartial. Your names are branded forever in the sheets of shame.

—Tell you the truth, raping ain't been very good lately, Flash said. I only raped six women yesterday and two today. You raped anybody lately, Perfessor?

—Hardly anything to mention, the Perfessor said. A few old ladies in hedgerows. I've got somewhat out of the habit lately. How about you, John?

—I've been observing a Lent, Johnny said, and have limited myself to two rapes a day. Of course, sometimes the Devil tempts me, and I rape before I think.

The Perfessor was in form. He lay on a sofa delicately gouging its velvet flanks with his pocketknife. He put his booted feet on a bust of John C. Calhoun, which some soldier had crowned with a chamberpot. He had a bottle in his hand from which now and then, sitting up, he tipped a little liquor on the potted pate of the preWar South's greatest statesman.

—Senator Calhoun, seh, he said, addressing the bust, you see now the result of your pernicious subtleties. Give me another leg off that turkey, Private Perkins.

Flash tore a turkey kg loose and handed it to the Perfessor, who shook the leg under the statue's nose.

—Mr. Calhoun, seh, your people are conquered and your land is laid waste, and it's all your own fault. You have awakened the spirit of rapine and conquest, seh, in a race long accustomed to the ways of peace. This goddamyankee, seh, this simple farmboy, this placid mechanic, contained a sleeping demon. You tapped him with a sword, and he sprang up beating his breast, waving his dagger, brandishing his torch. Laughing with white teeth, he strides through the wreck of your fair South, seh. Seh, the gory Goth was a skittish virgin to him. Ages of puritan repression, seh, have made him more terrible than Attila. Tear me a breast from that chicken, Orville.

The Perfessor tossed a halfchewed bone at the bust and accepted half a chicken from Flash.

—Senator and gentlemen, he said, war is a good life. Men are only happy when they are feeding, fluting, or fighting, and war gives them an opportunity to do all three at once. Fellow Goths, man's eternal urge to war was expressed once and for all by the greatest conqueror in History, Genghis Khan. You will remember, Senator and Private Perkins, how one day the great Mongol asked his lieutenants
what they considered the greatest happiness of a man. The greatest happiness of a man, said one, is to ride out on a fast horse when the grass is small and a hawk on the arm. That is good, the Conqueror said, but it is not the best. The greatest happiness of a man is to break his enemies, to drive them before him, to take from them all that is theirs, to hear the weeping of their widows and their orphans, to hold between his knees their swiftest horses, and to press in his arms the most beautiful of their women.

The Perfessor gnashed his white teeth on a chicken bone and shook soundlessly.

There was a wisp of smoke coming from the back of the house.

—Damn house is on fire, Flash said.

—Well, boys, let's get on with our raping, the Perfessor said.

He paused long enough to pick three volumes from a bookcase and followed Flash and the others outside. The back of the house was burning famously. They watched it for a while and then climbed into the wagon, the Perfessor declaiming,

—I warmed both hands before the fire of life,

It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

As they started off, they heard a sound of hooves on the road behind.

—Calvary! Flash said.

He turned around and stood up in the wagon.

—Jinks—it's Rebel!

Johnny hit the road just behind the Perfessor and rolled into a ditch. He trained his rifle on the leader of the oncoming troop of horsemen. There were about twenty. Several shots came from around the house, and one of the Rebels fell from his horse. The others rode swiftly into a little grove.

—Let's get hell out of here, boys, the Perfessor said crisply.

Just then the Rebels came out of the woods, dismounted. They began to advance, firing in a skirmish line.

—I'm goin' to drive the wagon out, Flash said.

He jumped into the seat and began to flail the mules. The wagon shook off down the road. In the shelter of the ditch, Johnny and the Perfessor ran along beside. Bullets sang by. Two or three wine bottles gurgled dark blood on the road.

A large foraging party approached, mounted on motley beasts and led by a captain.

—What's going on? he asked.

—Just a few Rebels, Johnny said.

—The bummers are whippin' 'em for yuh, Captain, Flash said.

Flash parked the wagon and jumped down. He and Johnny joined the newcomers and began to exchange shots with the Rebels, who retired into the grove where they had left their horses.

—Some of you men go around and flank that grove, the Captain said.

Flash and Johnny left the lines and crept through a ditch and up a hill. The field seemed to be swarming with Union soldiers, most of them irregulars, who had concentrated like magic at the sound of the shooting. After a little while, the flankers, including Johnny and Flash, rushed the grove yelling. The Rebels broke out of the timber, riding. There was a wild discharge of rifles at the fleeing butternut uniforms, and one of the horses went down on his knees and skidded forward, flinging over on his twisted neck and lying still. The rider was thrown heavily, rolling free. He started to get up, shaking his head. Johnny and Flash lit out for the place. The Rebel had lost his rifle and had only a sabre. He spat in disgust.

—That's what comes a leadin' militia, he said.

He was a tall, broadshouldered fellow, with thin lips, light silken mustache and beard, blue eyes. He was only shaken up.

—By God, we got a captain! Flash said. A sure-nuff captain.

—I trust I'm in the hands of gentlemen, the Rebel said, looking apprehensively at Flash Perkins and the other bummers who were moving up around him.

—Give me your sword, Captain, Johnny said. And come along with us. We'll take you to the proper place.

The Rebel seemed relieved.

—Hell of a way to git caught, he said. That's what comes a leadin' militia.

They put the Rebel on the wagon seat between them, and drove away. About a mile down, the Perfessor sat in a ditch smoking a cigar.

—Just taking a little rest, he said, to relax my legs. Been riding so much I——Hey, who's that?

—Just a Rebel captain, Flash said. We picked him up after the scrap.

—Charmed to make your acquaintance, Captain, the Perfessor said. I'm Jerusalem Stiles of the New York
Dial.

—James Rutherford, captain in the Georgia Cavalry, the Rebel said. I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, sir.

Introductions were completed all around, and the Perfessor climbed up.

—Now, Johnny said, we have to find the Army. You have any idea where it is, Captain?

—If you mean your Army, sir, I reckon it's all over the place.

The Unionists roared, and the Rebel smiled mournfully.

—How about a drop of something, Captain? the Perfessor said.

—Don't care if I do, the Captain said.

They gave the Confederate a bottle, and he took a long drink.

He sighed.

—Well, he said, this is the goddamnedest war! I fought in six major engagements from Gettysburg to the Wilderness and never lost a horse. Then I gits captured by two foragers and a war correspondent. That's what comes a leadin' militia.

—Say, Flash said, this guy's all right. I hate to turn him over to the Army.

From the crest of a gentle hill, they saw the Army again. It was past noon. The men had turned out for dinner. Muskets were stacked. Fields and yards on each side of the road were littered with soldiers.

Before reaching the main road, Flash drove up a side road that brought them across the Georgia Central Railroad. Coming over a hill and out of the woods, they could see a long stretch of the railroad extending for a mile east. Along this line were a thousand infantrymen, and all on the left side. Shouts of command ran up and down the line. The men bent over, some using levers, many taking the iron rail in their bare hands. The whole line strained and tore a mile of track shrieking from its bed.

—Tell me something, said Captain James Rutherford of the Georgia Cavalry. You Yankees claim this land belongs to the whole nation, don't yuh?

—Sure.

—Then why in hell are yuh tearin' it all up for? There won't be anything left down here for y'all or anyone else, after the War's over.

Along the railroad, men were stacking the wooden ties. The iron rails were laid across the tops of the bonfires. When a rail was redhot in the center, two men would take each an end and running with the rail fold it neatly around the nearest tree.

—That's what they call Sherman's neckties, Flash said to the Captain.

—I can tell one thing, the Captain said. Sherman don't intend to come back this way.

—And he don't intend to let anyone else come back either, Flash said.

They rode all afternoon through scenes of jovial devastation. The Army was happy in its work of wreckage. Back of it, trailing to westward, lay the burned-out trail of the railroad and hundreds of ravaged homes. The Army passed like a plague of giant locusts: they settled on the land for a night; they rose and left the land bare.

Sometimes Johnny could hear the Army singing. The husky thunder of its Northern songs echoed in the woodlands of Georgia, filling the soft aer with unfamiliar rhythms.

Meanwhile, all day long, the wagontrains filled themselves to bursting. Nearing a wellstocked farm, they would stream off the road, around through a gate and past the corncrib. As each wagon passed, men would stuff it with forage. Without stopping, the train would exhaust the contents of the crib and come back to the road.

Everywhere along the Army's path were the Negro people. Each day, with pathetic trust, additional hundreds left their old homes, from which their masters had fled before them, and attached themselves to the Army. Their pitiful wagons were stuffed with junk and pickaninnies. Eastward they went as though to a promised land, although in fact there was nothing that Sherman could do with them when he reached the sea.

On this day especially, the uprooted thousands came out of the earth until they seemed to outnumber the Army. Johnny and the other three men in the wagon were vaguely disturbed by this spectacle of a people marching, unbidden, toward a resurrection.

—I just hope, the Rebel Captain said, that the whole goddam race
keeps right on marchin' up North with y'all, and settles right down with yuh. In another fifty years, we'll have another Civil War with the situation reversed.

But the Army thought nothing of that. They didn't trouble themselves with consequences. Now there were blue days on the breast of the land, they were marching. Each day, each hour they passed through new scenes. It was a beautiful country, and they took their toll of it like drunken lovers. They sang, they were carefree, they feared not death or the devil, they were young men, a strong tide, a swift river, which must somewhere come to the sea.

By evening of that day, the Army had moved about fifteen miles, through a dense maze of incident, accident, excitement. New hundreds of black people had been added to its impedimenta. A broad swath of country lay stripped and blackened in its wake. The Army left its spoor not only in destruction, but in a debris of empty cans, papers, letters, caps, a few bodies. The Army of the West had made one more sevenleagued stride on its way to the sea, gathering to itself uncountable legends.

In the early evening, the Perfessor, Johnny, and Flash began to hunt for the regiment which they had abandoned in the morning. All day long it had been moving in its appointed path beside them, and now it was somewhere in this widebosomed evening dense with crowding wagons, tired soldiers, and the brighteyed, inextinguishably jubilant darkies. The men were calling back and forth to one another.