Jim stood up and flung a
pine cone at them.
"Put a stop to that kind of
song!" he yelled.
As the campfires died in the
clearing, Jim and Willie took their blankets out in the trees and drank
the half-pint of whiskey Jim had bought off a Tennessee rifleman.
Jim made a pillow by wrapping
his shoes in his haversack, then lay back in his blankets, gazing up at
the sky.
"A touch of the giant-killer
sure makes a fellow's prospects seem brighter, doesn't it?" he said.
Willie drew his blanket up to
his shoulders and propped his head on his arm.
"Wonder how a little fellow
like Tige ends up here," he said.
"He'll get through it. We'll
all be fine. Those Yankees better be afraid of us, that's all I can
say," Jim said.
"Think so?" Willie said.
Jim drank the last
ounce in the whiskey bottle. "Absolutely," he
replied."Good night, Willie."
"Good night, Jim."
They went to sleep, their
bodies warm with alcohol, with dogwood and redbud trees in bloom at
their heads and feet, the black sky now dotted with stars.
THEY woke the next morning to
sunlight that was like glass needles through the trees and the sounds
of men and horses running, wagons banging over the ruts out on the
Corinth Road, tin pots spilling out of the back of a mobile field
kitchen.
They heard a single rifle shot
in the distance, then a spatter of small-arms fire that was like
strings of Chinese firecrackers exploding. They jumped from their
blankets and ran back to the clearing where they had cooked their food
and stacked their Enfields the previous night. The air was
cinnamon-colored with dust and leaves that had been powdered by running
feet. Their Enfields and haversacks lay abandoned on the ground.
The men from the 6th
Mississippi were already moving northward through the trees, their
bayonets fixed. Tige McGuffy was strapping his drum around his neck,
his hands shaking.
"What happened to the 18th
Lou'sana?" Jim said.
"Them Frenchies you come in
with?" Tige said.
"Yes, where did they
go?" Willie asked, his heart tripping.
"West,
toward Owl Creek. A kunnel on horseback come in before dawn and moved
them out. Where'd y'all go to?" Tige replied.
Willie and Jim looked at
each other.
"I think we're seriously in the shitter," Jim said.
"How far is this Owl Creek?"
Willie said.
Before Tige could answer a
cannon shell arced out of the sky and exploded over the canopy. Pieces
of hot metal whistled through the leaves and lay smoking on the ground.
Tige hitched up his drum, a drumstick in each hand, and ran to join his
comrades.
"Let's go, Jim. They're going
to put us down as deserters for sure," Willie said.
Jim went back into the trees
and retrieved their blankets while Willie repacked their haversacks.
They started through the hardwoods in a westerly direction and ran
right into a platoon of Tennessee infantry, jogging by twos, their
rifle barrels canted at an upward angle, a redheaded, barrel-chested
sergeant, with sweat rings under his arms, wheezing for breath at their
side.
"Where might you two fuckers
think you're going?" he said.
"You sound like you're from
Erin, sir," Willie said.
"Shut your 'ole and fall in
behind me," the sergeant said.
"We're with the 18th
Lou'sana," Jim said.
"You're with me or you'll
shortly join the heavenly choir. Which would you prefer, lad?" the
sergeant said, raising the barrel of his carbine.
Within minutes men in gray and
butternut were streaming from every direction toward a focal point
where other soldiers were furiously digging rifle pits and wheeling
cannon into position. Through the hardwoods Willie thought he saw the
pink bloom of a peach orchard and the movements of blue-clad men inside
it.
The small-arms fire was louder
now, denser, the rifle reports no longer muted by distance, and he
could see puffs of rifle smoke exploding out of the trees. A toppling
minie ball went past his ear with a whirring sound, like a clock spring
winding down, smacking against a sycamore behind his head.
Up ahead, a Confederate
colonel, the Bonnie Blue flag tied to the blade of his sword, stood on
the edge of the trees, his body auraed with sunlight and smoke,
shouting, "Form it up, boys! Form it up! Stay on my back! Stay on my
back! Forward, harch!"
There seemed to be no plan to
what they were doing, Willie thought. A skirmish line had moved out
into the sunlight, into the drifting smoke, then
the
line broke apart and became little more than
a mob running at the peach
orchard, yelling in unison, "Woo, woo, woo," their bayonets pointed
like spears.
Willie could not believe he
was following them. He wasn't supposed to be here, he told himself. His
commanding officer was the chivalric Colonel Alfred Mouton, not some
madman with a South Carolinian flag tied to his sword. Willie fumbled
his bayonet out of its scabbard and paused behind a tree to twist it
into place on the barrel of his Enfield.
The redheaded sergeant hit him
in the back with his fist. "Move your ass!" the sergeant said.
Out in the sunlight Willie saw
a cannonball skip along the ground like a jackrabbit, take off a man's
leg at the thigh, bounce once, and cut another man in half.
The sergeant hit him again,
then knotted his shirt behind the neck and shoved him forward. Suddenly
Willie was in the sunlight, the sweat on his face like ice water, the
peach orchard blooming with puffs of smoke. "Where was Jim?"
The initial skirmish line
wilted and crumpled in a withering volley from the orchard. A second
line of men advanced behind the first, and, from a standing position,
aimed and fired into the pink flowers drifting down from the peach
trees. Willie heard the Irish sergeant wheezing, gasping for breath
behind him. He waited for another fist in the middle of his back.
But when he turned he saw the
sergeant standing motionless in the smoke, his mouth puckered like a
fish's, a bright hole in his throat leaking down his shirt, his carbine
slipping from his hand. "Get down, Willie!" he heard Jim shout behind
him. Jim knocked him flat just as a wheeled Yankee cannon, in the
middle of a sunken road, roared back on its carriage and blew a bucket
of grapeshot into the Confederate line.
Men in butternut and gray fell
like cornstalks cut with a scythe. The colonel who had carried the
Bonnie Blue flag lay dead in the grass, his sword stuck at a silly
angle in the soft earth. Some tried to kneel and reload, but a battery
none of them could see rained exploding shells in their midst, blowing
fountains of dirt and parts of men in the air. Many of those fleeing
over the bodies of their comrades for the protection of the woods were
vectored in a crossfire by sharpshooters rising from the
pits on
the far side ol the sunken road.
Then there was silence, and
in the silence Willie thought he
heard someone beating a broken cadence
on a drumhead, like a fool who does not know a Mardi Gras parade has
come to an end.
THROUGH the morning and
afternoon thousands of men moved in and out of the trees, stepping
through the dead who flanged the edge of the woods or lay scattered
across the breadth of the clearing. Columns of sunlight tunneled
through the smoke inside the woods, and the air smelled of cordite,
horse manure, trees set on fire from fused shells, and humus cratered
out of the forest floor. Willie had lost his haversack, cartridge box,
the scabbard for his bayonet, and his canteen, but he didn't know where
or remember how. He had pulled a cartridge pouch off the belt of a dead
man who had already been stripped of his shirt and shoes. Then he had
found another dead man in a ravine, with his canteen still hung from
his neck, and had pulled the cloth strap loose from the man's head and
uncorked the canteen only to discover it was filled with corn whiskey.
He had never been so thirsty
in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of
cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated
leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a
wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the
sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own
throat.
Jim's canteen had been split
in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had
eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had
collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed,
their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Tennessee infantry, to
which they now belonged through no volition of their own, to re-form
and once again move on the sunken road that the Southerners were now
calling the Hornets' Nest.
The leaves on the floor of the
forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged
back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a
surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green
flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of
his life.
Looking to the
south,
Willie could see horses pulling more cannons
through
the
trees, twenty-four-pounders as high as a man, the spoked wheels
knocking across rocks and logs. He pointed and told Jim to look at the
cannons that were lumbering on their carriages through the hardwoods,
then realized he could not hear.
He pressed his thumbs under
his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages,
but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its
business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass
bell.
The cannons went past him,
silently, through the leaves and scarred tree trunks, lumbering toward
the peach orchard and the sunken road, as silently as if their wheels
had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the
white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been,
convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff
of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making
breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.
Then he heard a sound, like a
series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above
him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.
"What?" Willie said.
Jim's lips were moving
silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.
"got us some water. That
fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one
who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted
a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.
He squatted down with a tin
cup and handed it to Willie.
"Where's yours?" Willie asked.
"I had plenty. Drink up," Jim
said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.
There was a black smear of
gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in
the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more
than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.
"Finish it up, you ole
beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.
Jim sat down against the tree
bark.
"You hit any of them today?"
he asked.
"I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie
replied.
"Maybe. I saw a fellow behind
a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked
into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."
Willie turned and looked at
Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in
his eye.
"They're no different from us,
Jim," he said.
"Yes, they are. They're down
here. We didn't go up there."
A young lieutenant strolled
through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that
looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a
gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on
his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather
flap of his pistol holster.
"Our cannoneers are about to
start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another
run at it," he said.
"We been out there eleven
times, suh," a private on the ground said.
"Twelve's a charm. Stuff your
fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons
fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the
woods beyond.
Then the cannon crews began to
fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground,
the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands
clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded
with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on
explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the
other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional
ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes,
chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.