The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (35 page)

But that assault, Lee knew, would be only one attack. Others would come across the creek, and maybe other Yankees would try to curl around his southern flank. So be it. He did not have the men to guard every river crossing, only to hold the high ground around the village and the Dunker church. But at least his army was growing. Two-thirds of Jackson's men had come from Harper's Ferry and the remaining third, once they had finished sending the Federal prisoners south to the camps, would hurry toward him next day. He would start the battle with less than thirty thousand men and he knew that more than twice that number were readying themselves to attack him, but if McClellan was not fought here then he would have to be fought in Virginia. It was better here, Lee decided, where the Yankees would have to climb the hills from the creek into the face of his guns.

But the Yankees encamped to the north would have no hills to climb, for they were already on the high ground. Those men would attack down the line of the pike where two long stands of timber, the West Woods and the East Woods, formed a natural funnel some six or seven hundred yards wide. The funnel was a swathe of farmland that led into the heart of Lee's position. Not that the Yankees could be seen yet from that heart, for, though they were camped in the woods that grew at the northern lip of the funnel, a thirty-acre cornfield stood between them and the rebel line. The corn stretched across the funnel and was near to harvest and so stood as tall as a paraded regiment. The stalks whispered together in the small evening breeze; a screen to hide two enemies from each other, and in the morning, Lee guessed, a place where the attacking Federals would meet his hard-bitten troops.

"So you're not my reserve after all, Nate," Swynyard said when news of the Yankee flanking march arrived. The Yellowlegs were camped at the base of the East Woods and that meant they guarded one lip of the funnel and so could expect to fight the Yankees in the dawn. "I can change you over," Swynyard volunteered.

"They'll fight," Starbuck said of his men. Besides, it was dusk, and to change the position now would mean confusion among men too tired to change bivouacs. "You ain't expecting an attack up the slope now?" he asked, indicating the farmland where the battalion commanders had met and where the farm buildings now blazed from the work of Miles's incendiarists.

"Maybe they'll come both ways," Swynyard said. "If McClellan's got any sense, that's what they'll do. And that'll mean hard work, Nate. But those boys," he waved a hand northward to indicate the Yankees who were camped higher on the turnpike, "are closest, so worry about them first." He dragged his hand with the missing fingers through his tangled beard. "Earn our pay tomorrow, that's for sure. Your boys are all right?"

"They'll fight," Starbuck said, ignoring his doubts about Tumlin and Dennison.

"Tell them I'm holding prayers in half an hour," Swynyard said. "I'll invite you, even though I know you won't come."

"I might," Starbuck said unexpectedly.

Swynyard was tempted to make a joke of Starbuck's answer, then he saw that maybe his prayers for Starbuck's soul were being answered and so he bit back his jest. "I'd like it if you did, Nate," he said instead.

But Starbuck did not come to the Colonel's prayer meeting. Instead he walked to the very right-hand end of his short line where Captain Dennison's A Company was bivouacked. Starbuck was nervous that the gesture he was about to make would be construed as weakness, but the bad blood inside the Special Battalion needed to be lanced and so he looked for Private Case and, finding the big man, jerked his head toward the trees. "I want you," he said.

Case glanced at his companions, shrugged, then ostentatiously picked up his rifle and checked that it was primed. He followed Starbuck into the trees, taking care to keep a half dozen paces behind. Starbuck remembered the shot in the Harper's Ferry night, but that was not why he had summoned Case because Case would never admit to having been one of the two men. Instead, on the eve of battle, Starbuck wanted to make peace.

Starbuck stopped when they were out of earshot of the rest of the battalion. "So what," he asked, "would the Royal Fusiliers be doing different?" Case seemed bemused by the question and did not answer. Starbuck looked into the ugly face and was amazed again by the flat brutality of Case's eyes. "Even in the Royal Fusiliers," Starbuck said, "sergeants don't get away with defying their officers. What the hell did you expect me to do? Let you keep your stripes?" Again Case did not answer. He just turned his head and spat a thin stream of tobacco juice onto a hump of limestone.

"Tomorrow," Starbuck went on, but feeling as though he was wading through a lake of molasses, "we're going to fight, and if A Company fights as feebly as it did the other day, you're all going to die." That got Case's attention. The feral gaze shifted from some distant point among the trees to stare into Starbuck's eyes. "You know how to fight, Case, so make damn sure the rest of the company fights like you. Do that, and you get your stripes back. Understand?"

Case paused, then nodded. He shifted the tobacco from one cheek to another, spat again, but still did not speak. Starbuck was about to launch himself into an earnest peroration about men not being able to serve two masters, about the need for discipline, about the value of experienced men like Case to a battalion like the Yellowlegs, but he managed to check the words before he even began. He had said all he needed to say and Case had heard all he needed to hear and the rest was up to Case himself, but at least, Starbuck thought, he had given the tall man something to look forward to beyond mere revenge.

"When tomorrow's over, Case," he said, "you can go to another regiment if that's what you want, and you can go as a sergeant, but tomorrow you fight with us. You understand me?"

Case paused. "You through?" he finally asked. "I'm through."

Case turned and walked away. Starbuck watched him go, then walked east until he came to the edge of the wood and could stare across the valley. Distant fires flickered in far woods. Somewhere behind him, on the plateau, a gun fired. There was a pause, then a Yankee cannon answered. A battery of rebel artillery, poised on a hill to the turnpike's west, had seen the Northern gunners emplacing a battery and so had opened fire. The two sides dueled as the night fell, and fought on into the darkness so that their gunflashes lit the farmland in sudden bursts of unnatural light that spewed their powdery glare across green fields and cast black shadows among the heavy trees. To the east, on the slope that fell down to the creek, the burning farm buildings churned thick smoke and bright sparks into the night air. The cannon fire died slowly and finally ceased altogether, but then, in the echoing silence, it began to rain. Starbuck, rolled at last in his blanket beneath the trees, heard the drops pattering on the green leaves and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. He had marched to Sharpsburg and he was more frightened than he had ever been in all his life. Because tomorrow he must fight.

"it's
real
coffee
," Lucifer said, shaking Starbuck awake, "from Harper's Ferry."

Starbuck swore, tried not to believe what was happening, then swore again when he realized it was happening. It was not yet dawn. The mist in the trees was mixed with the acrid smoke of half-dead fires. The leaves dripped. The Yankees were coming today.

"You're shivering," Lucifer said. "You got a fever."

"I don't."

"Like a baby. Shivering." Lucifer prodded the nearest embers with a stick, trying to stir life into the fire's remnants. "Yankees didn't have fires," he said, then grinned. "They're hiding from us. Reckon they're more frightened of us than we are of them."

"They're on your side," Starbuck said gracelessly.

"I'm on my side," Lucifer insisted angrily, "and no one damn else is."

"Except me," Starbuck said, trying to mollify the boy. He sipped the coffee. "Did you stay awake all night?"

"I stayed awake," Lucifer said, "till I was sure they was asleep."

Starbuck did not ask who "they" were. "There's nothing to worry about," he said instead. He hoped that was true. He hoped he had defused Case's smoldering anger. He hoped he would survive this day.

"You don't worry 'cos I do," Lucifer said. "Did I hear

Captain Tumlin tell you he saw John Brown hung in Harper's Ferry?"

Starbuck had to think to remember the conversation, then recalled Tumlin talking about watching with his whore from an upper window of Wager's Hotel. "Yes," he said bleakly, trying to imbue the syllable with disapproval for Lucifer having eavesdropped. "So?"

"So," Lucifer said, "Mister Brown wasn't ever hung in Harper's Ferry. He was hung in Charlestown. Everybody knows that."

"I didn't."

"Your Captain Tumlin," Lucifer said sourly, "don't know shit from a sugarcone."

Starbuck sat up and pushed the clammy folds of the blanket away. He was shivering, but he guessed it was just the damp. That and apprehension. He heard twigs snapping in the woods, but there was a strong picket line to the north so the sound had to be his own men stirring. He wondered how long it was till dawn. The mist was thick as gunsmoke. Everything was damp—the wood, the ground, his clothes. His rifle was beaded with dew. The day was chill now, but it promised to be burning hot, a day of rank humidity, a day when the spent powder would choke the rifle barrels like soot clogging a chimney.

"Shit from a sugarcone," Lucifer said again, trying to provoke a response.

Starbuck sighed. "We're a makeshift battalion, Lucifer. We get the dregs." He snapped one of his laces as he tied his boots. He swore, wondering if the small accident was a bad omen. He fiddled out the broken lace and, in the dark, rethreaded what was left and tied a knot. Then he stood up, every bone and muscle aching. Fires were coming to life in the fields and wood, the flames dulled and misted by the fog. Men coughed, spat, grumbled, and pissed. A horse whinnied, then th
ere was a clatter as a man blun
dered into a stand of arms. "What's for breakfast?" he asked Lucifer.

"Hardtack and half an apple."

"Give me half of the half."

He strapped on his belt, then checked that the cartridge pouch was full, the cap box filled, and the revolver loaded. For hundreds of years, he thought, men had woken thus to a day of battle. They had tested their spear points, felt their sword edges, made certain musket flints were tight, then prayed to their gods that they would live. And hundreds of years from now, Starbuck supposed, soldiers would still wake in a gray dark and go through the same motions with whatever unimaginable means of death they carried. He hefted his rifle, checked the percussion cap, then slung it on his shoulder. "To work," he said to Lucifer. "Earn our pay."

"What pay?" Lucifer asked.

"I owe you," Starbuck said.

"So I ain't a slave?"

"You're free as a bird, Lucifer. You want to fly away, then you fly. But I'd miss you. But if you stay today," Starbuck added, knowing full well that Lucifer would stay, "then you keep out of harm's way. This ain't your fight."

"White men only, eh?"

"Fools only, Lucifer. Fools only," Starbuck said, then walked slowly through the dark wood, feeling his way where the feeble light of reviving fires did not show a path. He talked to waking men, stirred the laggards, and organized a work party to fill the battalion's canteens. Biting bullets off cartridges filled the mouth with salty gunpowder so that an hour into a-fight men were parched and water was worth its weight in gold. He sent another party to bring up spare ammunition from the graveyard so that the battalion could have its own reserve supply at the wood's edge. It was there, where the wood bordered the road, that he stopped to listen to an unseen band of men who softly sang a hymn among the dark mist-shrouded trees." 'Jesus, my strength, my hope,'" they sang, " 'On thee I cast my care; With humble confidence look up, And know thou hear'st my prayer.'" The familiar words were strangely comforting, but someone else had also been listening and started to sing another hymn in a voice much louder than those of the men who had gathered for their morning prayers.

"'Hark how the watchmen cry!'" Captain Potter sang in a remarkably good clear tenor voice," 'Attend the trumpet's sound. Stand to your arms, the foe is nigh, The powers of hell surround.'"

Starbuck discovered Potter among the trees. "Let them be," he chided Potter gently for disturbing the prayers.

"I just thought my choice more appropriate than theirs," Potter said. He was in a feverishly excited mood, so much so that for an instant Starbuck wondered if the stone bottle of whiskey had been emptied, but there was no smell of liquor on Potter's breath as, more quietly, he sang the hymn's last quatrain. "'By all hell's host withstood, We all hell's host o'erthrow, And conquering them through Jesus' blood, We on to conquer go.'" He laughed. "Funny, isn't it? The Yankees are probably singing that as well. Both of us clamoring to Jesus. He must be confused."

"How are your pickets?" Starbuck asked.

"Awake. Watching for the host of hell. I came to fetch them a bucket of coffee. I guess proceedings won't begin till light?"

"I guess not."

"And then," Potter said with unholy relish, "we can expect something very nasty. Is it true they outnumber us?"

"So far as we know, yes." Starbuck felt a trembling that seemed to begin in his heart and flicker down his arms and legs. "Maybe by two to one," he added, trying to sound laconic as though he faced battle every day. And what day was it? A Wednesday. There was nothing special about Wednesdays at home. Not like Sundays that were given to God and solemnity, or Mondays that were his mother's washday and when the whole Boston house would be busy with servants and steam. Wednesdays were just Wednesdays, a half marker between Sundays. His father would be saying prayers with the servants. Did anyone in the house wonder where the second son was today?