The Convict and Other Stories

by James Lee Burke

  I hadn’t heard a grenade in the roar of burp guns, but when I pulled back his jacket, I saw the blood welling through the half-dozen tears in his sweater. His eyes were crossed, and he kept opening his mouth as though he were trying to clear his ears. I laid him down on a stretcher and buckled only the leg strap and made a marine pick up the other end.

  “There ain’t no place to go,” the marine said.

  “Over the top. There’s an ambulance behind the tank.”

  “Oh shit, they’re in the ditch.”

  The flank had gone, and then suddenly they were everywhere. They held their burp guns sideways on their shoulder slings and shot the living and the dead alike. Marines with empty rifles huddled in the bottom of the ditch and held their hands out against the bullets that raked across their bodies. The very brave stood up with bayonets and entrenching tools and were cut down in seconds. For the first and only time in my life I ran from an enemy. I dropped the stretcher and ran toward the right flank, where I heard a BAR man still hammering away. But I didn’t have far to go, because I saw one of the small dark men on the embankment above me, his Mongolian face pinched in the cold, his quilted uniform and tennis shoes caked with snow. He had just pulled back the bolt on his burp gun and reset the sling, and I knew that those brass-cased armor-piercing rounds manufactured in Czechoslovakia had finally found their home.

  Luke the Gook. How do you do? Punch my transfer ticket neatly, sir. Please do not disturb the dog tags. They have a practical value for reasons that you do not understand. Later they must be untaped and inserted between the teeth because the boxes get mixed up in the baggage car, and I do have to get off at San Antone tonight. Oh sorry, I see you must be about your business.

  But he was a bad shot. He depressed the barrel too low on the sling, and his angle of fire cut across my calves like shafts of ice and knocked me headlong on the body of the lieutenant as though a bad comic had kicked my legs out from under me. In the seconds that I waited for the next burst to rip through my back, I could hear the lieutenant’s wristwatch ticking in my face. But when the burp gun roared again, it was aimed at a more worthy target, the BAR man who stood erect in the ditch, the tripod flopping under the barrel, firing until the breech locked empty and he was cut down by a half-dozen Chinese.

  . . .

  I spent the next thirty-two months in three POW camps. I was in the Bean Camp, which had been used by the Japanese for British prisoners during WW II, Pak’s Palace outside of Pyongyang, and Camp Five in No Name Valley just south of the Yalu. I learned how political lunatics could turn men into self-hating loathsome creatures who would live with the guilt of Judas the rest of their lives. I spent six weeks in a filthy hole under a sewer grate, with an encrusted GI helmet for a honey bucket, until I became the eighth man of eleven from our shack to inform on an escape attempt. But sometimes when I lay in the bottom of the hole and looked up through the iron squares at the clouds turning across the sky, I thought of Jace and Willard and Puritans knocking their axes into wood. Then at some moment between vision and the crush of the dirt walls upon me, between drifting light and the weight of witches’ stones upon my chest, I knew that I would plane and bevel wood and build churches. I would build one at my home in Yoakum, in Goliad and Gonzales and San Antonio, anyplace there were pine trees and cottonwoods and water oaks to be felled. Then I saw the sky re-form as a photograph and the ice clouds turn soft and porous as a Communion wafer.

  WHEN IT’S DECORATION DAY

  Through the darkness and the tangle of hackberry trees he could still see the burning glow of Atlanta against the sky, like red heat lightning that trembled and then faded on the edge of the horizon. He hadn’t believed that a city built of stone and mortar and scrolled iron could burn (or that anything so large and fiercely determined to resist defeat and occupation could be vulnerable against an army that brought war on defenseless people and gave Negroes weapons to fire upon white men). But that afternoon, when they had mired the gun carriage in a slough bottom and the lieutenant had forced the two freed convicts to push against the wheels at revolver point, he heard the armory by the railroad depot explode, a roar that split the hard, blue sky apart like an angry rip that peeled away from the earth’s surface, and before he could release the spokes of the wheel in his hand or feel the weight of the cannon crushing back into the mud bottom or even leap backward from his own preoccupation with the pain in his back and the sweat bees that swarmed around his head in the heat, he already felt the first tremors roll through the ground under him like a displaced piece of thunder. He saw the geyser of dirt and powdered brick rise in the air above the city and flatten off in the wind, then there was a second explosion, muffled, a contained thump that rippled the black water in the bottom of the slough, and he guessed that Sherman’s artillery had hit one of the powder dumps they had buried yesterday on Peachtree Creek.

  Now, under the moon, the smoke drifted through the trees and hung in the shallow depressions, and the cannon and its carriage, coated with dried mud, creaked through the soft dirt of the forest floor behind the two mules. The lieutenant had called a rest only once since they whipped the mules out of the slough bottom, and the boy’s sun-faded, butternut-brown uniform was heavy with perspiration, and the weight of his Springfield rifle, which he held with one arm crooked over the inverted barrel, cut into the shoulder bone like a dull headache. His face was drawn in the moonlight, and his long, blond hair stuck out damply from under his gray cap. There was a thin, red-brown scar under his eye, like a burn, where a Minié ball had flicked across his face at Kennesaw Mountain (where, for the first and only time, he had seen Negroes in Yankee uniforms break through the fog, kneel in a ragged line, and shoot at him—a vision so unbelievable to him in the turning mist and the scream of grape and canister that he lowered his rifle and stared again until the Minié ball ticked across his face like a hot finger).

  The lieutenant bent under a hackberry branch and turned his horse in a circle, and automatically the column, even the mules, stopped at the same moment. They could see a yellow clay road in the moonlight at the edge of the forest, and in the distance the country opened up on rolling green pasture, rick fences, clumps of oak trees, and unplowed cotton acreage. The lieutenant raised himself in the stirrups, pulled off his flop hat, and pushed his long, wet hair back over his head with his fingers.

  “Let’s rest it here, boys, then we’re going to turn off by that church house yonder and get into Alabama,” he said.

  “You want to let the mules out of harness, sir?” the sergeant said.

  The other men remained motionless and watched the officer fix the hard lump of tobacco in the back of his jaw.

  “Leave them as they are,” he said.

  “Do we have fires, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.

  “We have to chew it cold tonight, Sergeant.”

  The soldiers leaned their rifles against the tree branches and sat in clumsy, flat positions on the ground, their knees drawn up before them, their faces bent down into their own exhaustion, the haversack of molded biscuits and dried corn lying like an obscene weight between their thighs. The sweat and heat in their uniforms steamed in the air, and their unshaved faces and uncut hair gave them the look of neglected dead men or collapsed scarecrows under an angry, whalebone moon.

  The boy, Wesley Buford, who was sixteen and one of the few from the South Carolina Home Guard who hadn’t been killed or captured at Kennesaw Mountain, had the same quiet anger toward the officer as the other men, not only for the quivering in the backs of his thighs and the dead piece of biscuit in his mouth, but because the very fact of a man’s birth could guarantee him a horse, a saber, an English sidearm, and an inapproachable distance and command over other men’s lives, even in the last few weeks of a country’s defeat. The sergeant, who was also from South Carolina (a hard, squat timber cutter with a discolored eye like a broken egg yolk and a thumb clipped off at the palm), was the only one who ever spoke directly to the lieutenant, and then it was on
ly to request the next order. The other enlisted men, landless crackers with burned-out faces, sometimes stared hard at the officer’s back, but their eyes never met his and their conversation always stopped whenever he sawed back the bit on his horse to wait for the column to pass him.

  Then there were the two convicts, freed from the city prison just before Sherman advanced north of Peachtree Creek, who still wore their striped black-and-white cotton jumpers and the blue trousers they had stripped off two dead Union soldiers. They had received a pardon that had been given collectively in less than one minute by a justice of the peace to seventy-five inmates who raised their hands together in the gloom of a cell block to affirm that they would defend the Confederacy, the Sacred Cause, and Jefferson Davis, and two hours later they had tried to desert. Their teeth were black and rotted to the gums from chewing tobacco, their skin was jaundiced from months spent in a dark cell, and their eyes were rheumy and filled with a mean mixture of hatred toward the officer and the sergeant and disdain for the enlisted men who were fools enough to fight in a war that had already been lost.

  The taller of the two finished his biscuits, the dry crumbs dropping from his mouth, and pulled the wood plug from his canteen. His tight, gray cap made a deep line in his wet hair. He flicked his boot against the boy’s foot.

  “Hey, give me a twist,” he said.

  “I ain’t got none,” the boy, Wesley Buford, said.

  “What’s that sticking out your pocket!”

  “I ain’t got none for you.”

  “Well, goddamn, Merle. Listen to this one.”

  Merle, the second convict, snuffed down in his nose and spit between his thighs.

  “I was listening to him back there on the cannon,” he said. “‘Push them spokes. Hit them mules.’ I thought maybe I joined the nigger army.”

  “Well, sho,” the taller man said. “They give him a Yankee Springfield. That lets him give orders.”

  The boy’s eyes watched them both with the caution that now came instinctively to him, with a great deal of accuracy, after two months in the infantry.

  “I didn’t give you no orders. You wasn’t laying into the wheel,” he said.

  “Yes sir, that’s what we got. A soldier that knows how to do it,” the tall convict said. “What if I reach over there and take that tobacco?”

  The boy’s hand moved up the stock of his rifle. His callused thumb touched the heavy hammer on the loading breech.

  “You ain’t going to cock that on us,” Merle, the second convict, said. “We got the Indian sign on you, boy. Tomorrow you’re going to tote for us.”

  “That’s right,” the other man said. “When them mules shit, you wipe their ass. And when I turn around, you bring me my water can.”

  “Come with me, Buford.” It was the sergeant’s voice. He stood in the darkness behind the two convicts, a rain slicker draped over his shoulders. His bad eye looked like a luminous piece of fish scale in the moonlight. The tall convict took a twisted leaf of dried tobacco from his pocket and cut off a thick piece between his thumb and knife blade.

  Wesley walked silently with the sergeant through the wet hackberry branches to the main clearing, where the cannon stood at a tilted angle in the mud. The grease bucket and brush for the hubs were suspended from the carriage axle by a strand of baling wire.

  “I was going to get it after I ate,” Wesley said.

  “I ain’t worried about that gun. We’re probably going to be in a prison camp before it gets fired again,” the sergeant said. “You be careful with them convicts. They’ll cut your throat for your biscuits, and half these men won’t do nothing to stop it.”

  “What do you mean prison camp? The lieutenant said there wasn’t no Federals south of Atlanta and we’ll be in Alabama in another day.”

  “You ain’t listening to me.” For just a moment the boy caught the raw smell of corn whiskey on the sergeant’s breath. “You ain’t got to get killed in this war. You keep yourself alive a few more days and you’ll be on your way back to your family. Don’t you know that, boy? We got beat.”

  “We whupped them every time till Kennesaw. We—”

  “You walk at the head tomorrow with me. I don’t want to see you near them convicts. Now get on them hubs till they’re slick as spit.”

  The boy leaned his Springfield against the cannon barrel, pulled off his shirt, and crawled under the carriage to unfasten the grease bucket from the baling wire. There was a V-line of sunburn around his neck, and his spine and ribs stood out hard and pale against his skin when he bent over the axle hubs with the grease brush. He heard the sergeant breathing deeply behind him, then the sound of the wood plug being pulled from the canteen and once again the rank odor of corn liquor that had been taken too early from the still.

  Later, he spread his rain slicker under a dry overhang on the edge of the clearing and slept with his shirt over his face. As he began the several levels of sleep that he always had to go through before he reached that moment of blue-black unconsciousness just before dawn or the cock of a picket’s rifle, he heard first the distant cough of thunder out of a piney woods and yellow sky where there should have been no thunder, the black smoke rising in a haze above the treetops, and then the scream of Whistling Dick tearing with its blunt, iron edges through the air into the middle of their line. The earth exploded out of the trench, and muskets, cannon wheels, haversacks, and parts of men were left strewn on the yellowed edge of a huge crater. Then he heard the cavalry on the flank break toward the woods, the sabers drawn and glinting in the sun, and he knew the Federals would be engaged long enough for them to withdraw and regroup beyond the range of their artillery.

  The last level of his sleep was usually a short-lived one, and it came only after the spatter of pistol and carbine fire assured him that the Confederate cavalry had held the Federals in check momentarily, but this time he was back at his father’s sawmill in South Carolina by the edge of a black swamp, and he and his brother were snaking logs across a sand basin to a loading wagon. He could smell the swamp and its fetid odor of stagnant water, quicksand, dead garfish on the banks, and the mushrooms that burst into bloom off rotting tree trunks. The sunlight turned green through the trees and broke on the water in a tarnished yellow cast, and he could see the giant bullfrogs and alligators frozen like pieces of dark brown stone in the dead current. His brother Cole was stripped to the waist, the sweat running in rivulets down his freckled shoulders and dusty back. His face was hot and bright with his work, the exhausted piece of chewing tobacco stiff against one cheek, and when he doubled the reins around his blond fist and flicked them in a swift crack, the mules strained against the harness and pulled the chained logs over the embankment in a shower of sand. He could talk to the mules in a way that only Negroes could, and he could fall and plane timber better than any man at the mill (his square hands seemed almost shaped for the resilient swing of the ax into the wood). He released the mules and walked into the shallows to pick up the rattlesnake watermelon where it had been left to cool and the dinner bucket of fried rabbit. His face was happy and beaded with sweat when he broke the ripe melon across a rock in a bright red explosion of pulp and seeds and picked the meat out with his thick fingers.

  “Daddy don’t want us quitting this early,” Wesley said.

  “It’s Saturday afternoon, ain’t it? You and me is going to town, and when we get done drinking beer I’m taking you over to Billy Sue’s. Get on down here, boy, and eat your dinner. I ain’t going to be waiting on you.”

  Wesley looked at his brother’s happy green eyes and the smear of melon juice on his mouth, and he knew then that neither of them would ever die.

  The false dawn had already touched the eastern horizon beyond the woods and filled the trees with a smoky, green light when the sergeant tapped the toe of his boot into his shoulder. He could smell fatback and biscuits cooking in the gravy over a wet fire, and after the dream had slipped back into a private place inside him, he saw the two convicts hunched
by the fire with their dinner pails, the mules still standing with one foot rested in front of the gun carriage, and the long clay road that wound through the trees and the dim fields toward a small, whitewashed church house, a fragile board building with mist rising off the yard. He raised himself on his slicker and looked at it again, and it bothered him in the same way the convicts had when they first joined the column.

  “Fill your pan and eat it later,” the sergeant said. His good eye was watery and red, and his words were deep in his throat.

  “Is there something wrong with me eating with everybody else?”

  “Just do what I tell you. The lieutenant wants me and you up ahead a half mile. A couple of them Louisiana Frenchies come in last night and said the Yankees got around behind us. They might drop a whole shithouse on our head if they catch us out in the open.”

  Wesley walked to the fire and squatted in the smoke while the cook, an old man with his trousers partly buttoned, poured a mixture of hot water, boiled corn, and honey into his pan. The boy sipped at the scalding edge of the pan and looked through the trees at the long stretch of clay road and the white church building.

  “Get some meat and biscuit. They won’t be no more hot food today,” the old man said.

  “I ain’t hungry.”

  “He don’t like to eat near the likes of us,” one of the convicts said.

  “Don’t get in front of me today,” Wesley said. He picked up his Springfield, laid it over his shoulder, and walked off with the sergeant into the mist while the two convicts stared blankly after him.

  The low clouds on the eastern horizon were pink now with the sun’s first hard light, and the white circle of moon was fading as though it were being gathered into the blueness of the day. Sparrow hawks floated over the wet fields, and somewhere beyond the church he could hear a dog barking, an ugly, relentless sound sustained by its own violation of the quiet air. He opened the breech of his rifle, snapped it shut again, and pulled back the hammer to half cock.