Through the smoke Willie and
Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air, the staff of an American
flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of their rifle pits,
running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade supported
between them.
The barrage went on for thirty
minutes. When it lifted, the sun looked like a broken egg yoke inside
the smoke, the acrid smell of gunpowder so dense they could hardly
breathe.
Willie and Jim advanced across
the clearing with the others, once again the cry of the fox hunt rising
hoarsely from their throats. They
crossed the sunken road and
stepped over the Federal dead who lay there and entered a woods
where
trees were split in two, as though divided by lightning, the bark
on the southern side of the trunks hanging in white strips.
The ground was littered with
Springfield rifle muskets, boxes of percussion caps, ramrods,
haversacks, canteens, torn cartridge papers, entrenching shovels,
kepis, bloody bandages, bayonets, cloth that had been scissored away
from wounds, boots and shoes, newspaper and magazine pages that men had
used to clean themselves.
Inside the smoke and broken
trees and the fallen leaves that were matted together with blood was
the pervasive buzzing of bottle flies. In the distance, over the heads
of the Confederates who were out in front of him, Willie saw a white
flag being waved by a Union officer in front of a silenced battery.
The firing ended as it had
started, but in inverse fashion, like a string of Chinese firecrackers
that pops with murderous intensity, then simply exhausts itself.
Willie and Jim slumped against
a stone fence that was speckled with lichen and damp and cool-smelling
in the shade. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through green water.
Jim's eyes were bloodshot, his face like that of a coal miner who has
just emerged from a mine shaft, his teeth startling white when he
grinned.
The tall man, with the concave
face, from the 6th Mississippi, walked past them, his body bent
forward. A huge barrel was mounted on his back with leather straps that
were looped around his shoulders. The barrel had been hit in four
places across the middle with either grapeshot or minie balls, and four
jets of water were spraying from the holes, crisscrossing one another
as the man labored with his burden back toward the sunken road.
"How about a drink, pard?" Jim
said.
"What's that you say?" the man
asked. His jaws were slack, unshaved, his peculiar, smoke-blackened,
indented face like that of a simian creature from an earlier time.
"You're leaking. Give us a cup
before it's all gone," Willie said.
"Take the whole shithouse,"
the man said.
He slipped the leather straps
off his back and slung the barrel on a rock, where the staves burst
apart and the water patterned on the leaves, then became only a dark
shadow in the dirt.
Willie and Jim stared at him in disbelief.
"Want to make something of
hit?" he asked.
"No, sir, not us," Willie said.
The man rubbed his hand on his
mouth and looked about him as though he didn't know where he was. A
rivulet of dried blood ran from his ear canal into his whiskers.
"Where's the little fellow,
what's-his-name, Tige?" Willie asked.
"Gone. Him and his drum, both
gone," the man said.
"Gone where?" Willie asked.
"Into their cannon. Right into
their goddamn cannon," the man said.
His eyes were wet, the whites
filled with veins that looked like crimson thread, his teeth like slats
in his mouth.
WHEN Willie and Jim found
their outfit later in the afternoon, it was as though they had
journeyed to a different war. Five hundred men of the 18th Louisiana
were spread along the tree-dotted edge of a ravine, their blue jackets
now turned inside out in order to show the white linings. In front of
them, up a long green incline, was a hardwood forest unscarred by rifle
or cannon fire, and inside the forest were three regiments of Federal
infantry and batteries of wheeled artillery whose jack screws had been
twisted to their maximum extension in order to point the cannon barrels
straight down the slope.
Willie and Jim walked through
the bottom of ravine, the leaves almost ankle-deep, their clothes rent,
their saliva still black when they spat. Their friends stared at them
quizzically, as though they were visitors from a foreign world. Willie
and Jim knelt behind a tree on the northern rim and stared out at the
scene in front of them.
The slope was partially in
shadow now, the air cool with the hint of evening. When the wind blew
down the slope Willie could see wild-flowers inside the grass. The
depressed muzzle of a cannon stared down the slope at him like a
blunt-edged iron instrument poised to enter the throat of a surgical
patient.
Off to the left Rufus Atkins
stood among the trees, with two other officers, his head nodding, his
gloves pulled tautly through his belt, while Colonel Alfred Mouton
moved his index finger on a map that was spread across his wrist and
forearm. Then Corporal Clay Harcher walked past Willie,
interdicting his line of vision.
"Where y'all been? Cap'n
Atkins wrote y'all up as deserters," Hatcher said, stopping, his eyes,
which reminded Willie of a rodent's, squinting in the gloom. He carried
a Springfield rifle with a narrow brass tube mounted on top of the
barrel.
"In the rear, catching up on
our sleep. I see you've taken up the role of sniper. I think you've
found yourself, Clay," Jim said.
Hatcher tried to stare them
down, as he had tried on many other occasions, but the memory of his
humiliation at their hands back at Camp Pratt was always in their eyes,
their contempt and rejection of his authority like a salty cut on his
soul. "What's going on, Hatcher?" Willie asked.
"We're taking that
battery up there," Hatcher said, his chin out.
"They're quit. We
punched through them at the sunken road," Willie said.
"Tell that to them
blue-bellies up in the trees," Hatcher said. "Where are your coats?"
"We lost them," Willie said.
"You might as well. We had to
turn ours inside out. The Orleans Guards started firing on us."
For a moment Hatcher felt like
a brother-in-arms, a noncommissioned officer looking out for his men,
Willie and Jim, but he looked at the black stains around their mouths,
the sweat lines that had dried in the dust on their faces, and he knew
they were different from him, better than him, and he knew also they
had already passed a test inside the crucible that now waited for him
up the slope.
He turned his head and
pretended to spit in order to show his lack of fear, even rubbing his
shoe at a dry place in the leaves, then walked off, the weight of his
scoped rifle balanced horizontally inside his cupped palm, rehearsing a
scowling look of disdain for the next enlisted man who should wander
into his ken.
Willie crunched through the
leaves toward the place where Colonel Mouton and his staff were
talking. Mouton wore a thick beard and a wide hat with a plum-colored
plume in it and a long coat and knee-length calvary boots outside his
pants. His coat was stiff on one side with dried mud splatter, one eye
watery where a shaft of sunlight cut across his face. He stopped in
mid-sentence. "What is it you want, Private?" he asked.
"We were in the Hornet's
Nest, sir. The sunken road, over to the east. They surrendered,"
Willie said.
" We're aware
of
that.
But thank you
for
coming
forward," Mouton said.
"Sir?" Willie said.
"Yes?" Mouton said, distracted
now, his eyes lifting for a second time from the map.
"They're whipped. We went at
them twelve times and whipped them," Willie said.
"You need to go rejoin your
comrades, Private," Mouton said.
Willie turned and walked away
without saluting, glancing up the slope at the artillery pieces that
waited for them inside the shadows and the cooling of the day,
twenty-four-pounders loaded with the same ordnance Willie had seen used
at the sunken road. He stopped behind a tree and leaned over, then slid
down his rifle onto his knees, shutting his eyes, clasping the holy
medal that hung from his neck.
The sun was low on the western
horizon now, the sky freckled with birds. Colonel Mouton rode his horse
out onto the green slope in front of the ravine and waited for his
regiment to move out of the trees and join him in the failing light. A
hawk glided over the glade, its shadow racing behind it, and seemed to
disappear into the redness of the sun.
Mouton spoke first in French,
then in English, repeating the same statements three times in three
different positions so all would hear his words.
"The 16th Louisiana and the
Orleans Guards were supposed to be on our flanks, gentlemen.
Unfortunately they have not arrived. That means we have to kick the
Yankees off that hill by ourselves. You are brave and fine men and it
is my great honor to serve with you. Our cause is just and God will not
desert us. In that spirit I ask you to come with me up that hill and
show the invaders of our homeland what true courage is."
"God bless and love every one
of you."
Then he raised his saber in
the air, turned his horse northward, and began the long walk up the
slope into an enfiladed box where they would be outnumbered three to
one and fired upon from the front and both flanks simultaneously.
As Willie marched up the slope
with Jim, his heart thudding in his
chest, he kept waiting for
the crack of the first rifle shot, the one that would i
gnite the firestorm for
which no
soldier
could
ever
adequately prepare
himself. His own stink rose from his shirt, and there was a creaking
sound inside his head, as though he were deep underwater, beyond all
the physical laws of tolerance, and the pressure was about to rupture
his eardrums.
The standard bearer was in
front of him, the white stars and crossed blue bars on a red field
rippling and popping in the wind, the standard bearer tripping over a
rock, righting himself, his kepi falling to the ground, stepped on by
the man behind him.
But it was not a rifle shot
that began the battle. A cannon lurched and burst with flame against
the darkness of the trees, and suddenly there was sound and light in
the midst of the 18th Louisiana that was like the earth-rending force
inside a hurricane, like a wind that could tear arms and legs out of
sockets, rip heads from torsos, disembowel the viscera, blow the body
lifelessly across the ground, all of it with such a grinding
inevitability that one simply surrendered to it, as he might to a
libidinous and heavy-handed lover.
Colonel Mouton's horse twisted
its head sideways, walleyed, whinnying, then went down, its rib cage
pocked with grapeshot. Mouton separated himself from the saddle and
rose to his feet, shot in the face, and tried to pull a revolver from
his holster. He fell to one knee, his left hand searching in the air
for support, then toppled forward into the grass.
A piece of case shot spun
through the air and embedded four inches into the upper thigh of the
standard bearer. He sagged on the flagstaff, like an elderly man grown
weary of an arduous climb, then pivoted and looked imploringly into
Jim's face.
"They sight on the guidon!
Don't take it!" Willie said.
But Jim shifted his rifle to
his left hand and slipped the staff from the grasp of the wounded man.
With almost superhuman strength he held the colors aloft in the sunset
with one hand, his Enfield gripped in the other, stepping over the
fallen, while minie balls made whirring sounds past his ears.
Willie heard the mortal wound
before he saw it, a plopping sound, a minie fired from the woods that
struck Jim's brow and blew out the back of his head.
He saw the battle flag tilt,
then the cloth fall across his own face,
blinding him. When he
ripped it aside and flung it from his hand, Jim lay on his side in the
grass, an unbriused buttercup an
inch
from his sightless eyes.
Suddenly he could no longer
hear the roar of the guns or the air-bursts over his head. But inside
his own mind he heard himself speak Jim's name.
Jim? Hey, you ole beanpole,
get up. We've got fish to catch, dances to go to. This is all a lark,
not worth our dying for.
The sound of the war came
back, like a locomotive engine blowing apart. The ends of his fingers
were wet with Jim's blood, his shirt splattered with Jim's brain matter.
In fifteen minutes two hundred
and forty members of the 18th Louisiana, just short of half, were
casualties. They retreated back down the slope, dragging their wounded
with them, many of their weapons left on the field.
But Willie did not go with
them. He picked up his Enfield and slipped Jim's bowie knife and
scabbard from his belt, and ran in a crouch toward the sunset and the
trees that bordered Owl Creek. A cannon shell screamed past his head,
its breath like a hot scorch on his neck.