by John Jakes
Charles stared.
Jim curled his mittened fingers against his palms in a tense way. “So long. Take care.”
The breath plume vanished as he turned and shuffled away, his step slow and deliberate. In December the sole of his right boot had worn through, requiring him to stuff papers or rags into the bottom to keep out the mud and damp. These always came loose, though, and did so again now. Bits of paper were deposited in Jim’s footprints. And red spots, Charles observed. Bright red spots in each print in the new snow.
He heard Jim’s horse leave. He stayed crouched by the dying fire, using the tip of his tongue to clean the gooey residue of parched corn from his sore upper gum. Somethin’s made you crazy. The list was not hard to compile. The war. Loving Gus.
And his final, calamitous, mistake.
Two days later, Charles and five other scouts, all wearing captured Yankee uniforms, rode out once again to observe the Union left, which they reached by passing the Confederate works in front of Hatcher’s Run, near the point where the White Oak and Boydton plank roads intersected. In the half-light before dawn, with new snow falling, the scouts bore southeast in a wide arc, pushing toward the Weldon rail line. Presently the snow stopped and the sky cleared. They spread out in order to cover more ground, each man on his own, out of sight of the rest.
Charles gauged his position and headed Sport left, or northward, again, intending to scout the Union works built down to a point on Hatcher’s Run. He was passing through a deserted stand of trees as the sun rose, bright and surprisingly warm despite the cloud cover. Great shafts of light descended between the thick trunks. In the silence, walking Sport forward with his shotgun resting across his thighs, Charles could almost imagine he had entered some fantastic white cathedral.
Screaming broke the illusion. The screaming of a man in agony. It reached him through thick ground haze directly ahead.
He held Sport back; the bony gelding had heard the outcry, too. Charles listened. No small-arms fire. Odd. He was sure he was near, perhaps even a bit east of, the last Union trenches on the left of the siege line. He had to discover who was doing the screaming—a second man’s voice joined the first—but he must go carefully to avoid blundering into videttes.
He murmured a command. The gray started forward at a rapid walk. After about an eighth of a mile, Charles saw orange smudges in the haze. The source was further obscured by the brilliant, sharply defined shafts of sunlight. He heard piercing screams again and a loud crackling. He smelled smoke.
He edged Sport ahead more slowly, began to discern mounted men against a wash of firelight, some structure burning. But why the screams?
A little nearer, halted and partly hidden by a tree, he was able to count ten men, several in gray, the rest in butternut. He saw a white-topped wagon and six more men, in blue uniforms, standing next to it, menaced by the pistols, shotguns, and squirrel rifles of the others. One of the ten—the larger group had captured the smaller, plainly—turned his horse around in order to speak to someone. Charles saw an open officer’s coat with gold frogging. Then he saw a clerical collar with geneva bands; a Protestant collar.
Something clicked. He knew of this band of local partisans.
Behind them, a partly demolished farmhouse burned brightly. Charles decided he had better make his presence known. But first he had to get out of the Union blouse and roll it up. That took a minute. He was still struggling with a sleeve when, mouth dropping open, he saw the rider in the clerical collar wave a gauntlet. Two of his men dismounted, strutted around the frightened Union soldiers, then yanked one from the group and shoved him forward at gunpoint. “Walk in there, Yank. Jus’ like the other ’uns did.”
The prisoner started screaming before the flames touched him. One of the partisans ran a bayonet into the back of both his legs, so that he fell facedown, engulfed by fire, whirling the smoke. His hair ignited; then the smoke hid him.
Shaken, swearing, Charles spurred Sport out of the trees, waving his shotgun. “Major Main, Hampton’s Cavalry. Hold your fire!”
It was well that he shouted that last, because the partisans turned and leveled their weapons at the first sound of his coming. He reined up among the unwashed, mean-looking civilians, the kind of irregular unit whose depredations had become a scandal in the Confederacy. This bunch was led by the gaunt, graying rascal wearing the parson’s collar, confiscated dress sword, and gray coat with dirty fragging.
“What in the name of hell is going on here?” Charles demanded, although the billowing smoke and the screams and a sickening smell something like that of burned meat told him.
“Colonel Follywell, sir,” said the leader. “And just who are you to ask such a question of us, and so arrogantly?”
“Deacon Follywell,” Charles said, suspicions confirmed. “I’ve heard of you. I told you who I am. Major Main. Scout for General Hampton.”
“Have you the means to prove that?” Follywell shot back.
“I have my word. And this.” Charles lifted his shotgun with his gloved hand. “Who are these prisoners?”
“Party of enemy engineers, according to their commanding officer.” Charles didn’t follow the deacon’s pointing finger. “We came across them desecrating this abandoned property—”
“Taking the lumber, that’s all, you murdering bastard,” one of the prisoners yelled. A partisan on horseback clubbed him with the butt of a squirrel rifle. The Yank fell to his knees, clutching the spokes of a wagon wheel.
“—and so, as is our custom, we are extracting recompense for numerous Yankee atrocities, including those of the Dahlgren raid, while we fulfill, at the same time, the apostle Paul’s promise to the good Christians of the church at Thessaly: ‘The Lord Jesus shall be revealed from heaven with His mighty angels’”—the deacon shook a ministerial finger at Charles—“‘in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God and that obey not the gospel of Our Lord Jesus Christ.’”
Charles’s tightened lips showed his disgust. Deacon Follywell was indifferent. With a hint of threat in his watery brown eyes, he said, “We trust we have satisfactorily explained ourselves. We will therefore, with your kind permission, continue our work.”
Again Charles smelled the vile odor from the blazing house. He would just as soon shoot a Yankee as spit on him, but if the South had to rely on this kind of defender—this kind of tactic—then her cause richly deserved to fail.
Sport raised and gently plopped his right forefoot in the snow. Charles shook his head. “You sure as hell don’t have my permission, Deacon. Not to burn people alive. If Dahlgren was sent to commit atrocities in Richmond, he was killed before he had the opportunity. I’ll take charge of these prisoners.”
He counted on the partisans responding to commands of a regular army officer; Follywell’s colonelcy was undoubtedly self-conferred. He realized his mistake when Deacon Follywell pulled his saber and shoved the point against Charles’s chest.
“You try, Major, and you will be next into the flames.”
Charles grew genuinely frightened then. He couldn’t order or shout this band into obedience. Nor, he suspected, could he ride away from the scene easily, even if his conscience would have allowed it, which it didn’t. Instantly, he saw his only means of saving the Yanks and preventing more murders. He had to form a temporary alliance.
He looked at the remaining prisoners for the first time. His stomach wrenched. The stocky, bearded officer in charge of the party was Billy Hazard.
Billy recognized him; Charles saw it in his friend’s shocked eyes. But Billy was careful to give no sign.
What about the rest of the Yanks? Would they fight? Considering the alternative, he suspected they would. Could they overcome twice their number? Might—if Charles evened the odds slightly. What he contemplated was a departure from the road he had traveled since Sharpsburg, but somehow, in this weary winter, he had come to understand too late where that road led.
Only a moment had passed since the partisan leader spo
ke. Charles lowered his head and returned Follywell’s stare. “Don’t threaten me, you ignorant farmer. I’m a duly commissioned officer of the Confederacy, and I am taking these men to—”
“Pull him out of the saddle.” Folly well waved a couple of his louts. The horseman on Charles’s right reached for him. Charles gave him the shotgun point-blank.
The pellets sieved the man’s face; blood streamed from his eye sockets and all the other holes. Follywell roared and pulled his sword arm back for a killing thrust. He got the other shotgun barrel. The blast lifted him from his saddle with his head tilting forward over his tornaway neck.
“Billy—the bunch of you—run!”
Charles had pared the odds to eight against five. But the eight had weapons, and the prisoners were dazed, slow to react. The wagon horses stamped and whinnied as a partisan turned his roan toward Charles, who was hurriedly dragging his Colt from the holster. Two of the Yanks leaped on another partisan while the one near Charles kneed his mount to steady it, raised his left forearm, and laid the muzzle of his revolver across it, all within seconds.
Shouts, oaths, struggle erupted just as the partisan fired. Charles would have been hit but for the stupidity of another of Follywell’s men, who rode up from the rear and smacked Charles’s head with the barrel of his long squirrel gun.
Knocked sideways, Charles started to slip off the left side of his saddle. He kicked his right boot free of the stirrup. The partisan with the squirrel gun coughed hard; the shot fired by the other man had gone in and out of his right shoulder.
The snowy landscape and towering fire tilted. Falling backward, Charles tried to free his left boot and couldn’t. He felt a sharp twist in his thigh as his shoulder and the back of his head thumped the ground. He shot upward at the first partisan, missing. Sport was stamping and shying, feeling the unnatural drag on the left stirrup.
The rest happened swiftly, yet to Charles each action seemed harrowingly slow. Another partisan, dismounted, stamped on Charles’s outstretched right arm. His hand opened. He lost the revolver.
The partisan flung himself on top of Charles, left hand choking, right hand pressing a pistol muzzle against Charles’s body, up high near his armpit. He braced for the shot, seeing against a backdrop of misty sun shafts the first partisan, still on horseback, still maneuvering so that he, too, could shoot.
With no warning, weight and shadow crashed in from the left, knocking away the partisan kneeling on Charles. The man’s pistol discharged; someone cried out. Only then did Charles understand that Billy had come on the run and dived and bowled the partisan back, taking the bullet himself.
The partisan on horseback fired. The blast was followed by an animal’s bellow. Charles screamed, “Sport!”
Billy, wounded, wrestled the other partisan underneath the belly of the gray gelding. Punching, thrashing, kicking dirt and snow, the men struggled until Billy turned the partisan’s own gun back on him by pressuring his wrist. Billy’s finger slipped over the other man’s, forcing him to fire into his own stomach.
Charles stared at Sport’s left shoulder where the partisan’s bullet had entered. The angle of fire would carry the bullet rearward and down. Not deep, he thought. God, don’t let it be deep—
He retrieved his Colt, rolling to the left again. The mounted partisan tried to shoot him but was slow. Charles clasped his revolver in both hands. Two rounds killed the partisan and sent his horse galloping away through the shafts of sunshine. The dead man hung forward over the animal’s neck.
Breathing hard, Billy scrambled from underneath the gray. The other engineers were locked hand-to-hand with Follywell’s men and were by no means out of danger. Charles lurched to his feet. So did Billy, whose uniform had a moist patch of brilliant red on the upper left front. Beyond his friend, Charles saw more blood; it streamed down Sport’s elbow and forearm to his left knee.
“Go on—while you can.” Billy’s breath plumed out. For a moment he locked his teeth against pain. “That’s—one less I owe you.”
“The slate’s clean.” Reaching out quickly, Charles squeezed his friend’s sleeve. “Take care of yourself.”
He put his boot in the stirrup and, when Sport took his weight, felt the gray’s foreleg almost buckle. He had to escape—the firing would bring nearby Union videttes—but first he had to do a little more to ensure survival of the Yankees. He shot twice; two partisans dropped, one killed, one injured. As a couple of the Union engineers took possession of fallen weapons, the remaining partisans turned their horses, abandoned their dead leader, and thundered away in the vapor rising from the warming ground.
The gelding began to trot. “Can you do it, Sport?” Charles asked in a dry, strained voice. They passed over a patch of clean snow and, looking behind, he saw the trail of bloodstains, splashes at regular intervals. He knew what the end would be and began to curse.
In the melee he had dropped his shotgun and forgotten it, he realized. Didn’t matter. Nothing mattered but this beautiful brave horse that had carried him so far, so faithfully, only to be hit by chance in a meaningless little fray that wouldn’t even merit a footnote in official records. “Jesus,” he said, squeezing his eyelids shut till he could barely see. “Jesus, Jesus.”
Sport seemed to know they had a good distance to travel to safety. He galloped with the strength and exuberance of a colt, hoofs rifling out snow and mud beneath his tail, then rat-tatting along a stretch of plank road and through a covered bridge. They turned west again, into denuded pasture. Charles heard a drumming that grew louder. There was pursuit.
Over his shoulder he saw a pair of Deacon Follywell’s partisans riding down on him. One dropped his rein and fired his carbine. The bullet dug a ditch in front of Sport, who veered with the sureness of an experienced war-horse and left the ditch stained red.
The thin, cool sunshine cast pale shadows of the riders in the field, one ahead, two behind. Charles breathed almost as hard as his horse, wanting the sanctuary of some woods directly ahead yet knowing that every bit of extra exertion pumped more blood from Sport’s wound. The gray’s mane stood out horizontally, fringe petrified by the wind. The eye Charles could see had the wild cast of battle, pain, both.
Another shot from the pursuers. It thunked a tree as horse and rider plunged into the woods. Abruptly, an ice-covered brook loomed. A shot broke a limb three feet behind, dropping it with a crash. Charles applied spurs. Up and over the stream Sport flew, leaving a misty red ribbon in the air behind him.
Branches whipped Charles’s cheeks and laid one open. He could hear the gelding’s labored breathing now, sense his strength faltering. Sport couldn’t jump Hatcher’s Run; they had to gallop through, tossing up fans of water. A moment more, and Charles saw the Confederate works.
He waved his hat, yelled the countersign. He indicated his pursuit, and the boys behind the earthworks began pinking away. The partisans wheeled and retreated. One shook a fist, then both vanished.
Charles reined in, dismounted, wiped his bleeding cheek, and walked Sport past the end of the earthworks, bending to murmur a gratitude so profound he could scarcely find words for it. A lot of men had joshed him about treating a horse as if it were human, but Sport had acted that way these past fifteen minutes, understanding Charles was in peril, giving everything—everything—to save him if he could. He owed as much to the gray as he did to Billy.
Sport stumbled, almost fell. Charles led him into a natural semicircle of bare shrubbery, let the rein drop, and watched as the gray slowly toppled onto his right side and lay there, heaving. Pink lather covered his left side from withers to belly.
A couple of mangy pickets tiptoed up. Without looking around, Charles said, “Find me a blanket.”
“Sir, they ain’t no blankets out here on—”
“Find me a blanket.”
Within five minutes, a piece of sewn-together carpet square was passed over his left shoulder. Charles laid it gently on Sport. The gray kept trying to raise his head, as if he wanted
to see his master. Charles knelt, the wet ground soaking his knees. His hand moved up and down Sport’s neck, up and down.
“Best horse in the world,” he whispered. “Best horse in the world.” Twenty minutes later, Sport died.
On his knees next to the gray, Charles pressed dirty palms tight against his eyes. He wanted to cry, but he was unable, as he had been ever since Sharpsburg. He remained motionless a long time. Faces of gaunt, starving boys peeked from the door of a nearby bombproof. There was no comment, no mockery of the tall man with the bleeding cheek kneeling bareheaded by the horse.
Presently Charles struggled to his feet. He put his hat back on. He felt different inside. Purged. Dead. He walked slowly to the bombproof and said to one of the starving boys, “Now I need a shovel.”
“So I buried him,” Charles told Fitz Lee. “Dug the pit myself, put him in, and covered him. Then I piled up a few stones for a marker. Not a very fitting memorial to the best horse I ever rode.”
Fitz had heard of the loss and invited Charles to his tent for whiskey. The burly, bearded general now looked far older than his years. He gestured to the tin cup on the field desk.
“Why don’t you drink that? You’ll feel better.”
Charles knew he wouldn’t, but he took some to be courteous. It was poor stuff, scalding to the throat.
“So it was Bunk Hazard who saved you?”
A nod. “But for him, I’d be dead right this minute. I hope he’s all right. Looked to me as if he was hit pretty badly.”
Fitz shook his head. “You’ve had one blow after another lately. First your cousin—”
Frozen, Charles repeated, “Cousin?”
“Colonel Main. Pickett’s Division. It happened two or three weeks ago. I assumed you knew.”
“Knew what?”
“That he came across a wounded Yank in the woods and stopped to help him, but the Yankee had a hide-out gun.”
“Is Orry—?”
“Gone. Almost instantly, according to the orderlies who were with him.”
Once, at West Point, Charles had fought bare-knuckled. It was a challenge, a contest—no animosity. After twenty minutes, his opponent, shorter but more experienced and agile, began leaping through his guard time and again to land blows. There had been a point at which every blow hurt exquisitely—and then a sudden crossing into another state in which he could still feel each one but only its weight; he was beyond his own capacity for pain.