The Convict and Other Stories

by James Lee Burke

  The pine stump felt hard under Wesley, and he began to perspire inside his shirt.

  “I didn’t pay no mind to the others, sir. I was worried about them setting up on us in the woods again.”

  “No one else was.”

  “That’s them, Lieutenant. It ain’t me. I been hit before.” Then he felt foolish at the mention of the red-brown scar under his eye.

  “Why did you join the army?”

  “They killed my brother at Cold Harbor.”

  “I see.” The lieutenant drew his thumbnail back and forth on the letter in front of him and left a deep indention on the edge. The heat thunder rumbled dully again beyond the woods, and the rain streaked in dark spots down the sides of the tent.

  “Do you believe we have a chance of winning this war?”

  “Maybe we ain’t going to win, but Lee ain’t ever going to give up, either. We whupped them every time with Hood till Johnston made us cut and run. Maybe if Hood was still general we’d—”

  He had seen the attention begin to fade in the lieutenant’s eyes. He pressed his palms damply against his thighs and looked at the shadows from the candle moving on the canvas.

  “Did you know the sergeant well?”

  “We was together through Carolina till we joined up with you at Kennesaw.”

  “Do you think you could do his job if you were promoted to corporal?”

  “Sir?”

  “By noon tomorrow we should be at a field hospital in Alabama where we can leave our wounded. Then we’re supposed to re-form on the Tallapoosa River with several thousand troops who are as lost as we are. Between here and there we’ll probably encounter advance cavalry and skirmishers, and if Sherman’s flank has moved south, we’ll have the choice of fighting that gentleman’s entire army or surrendering to them.” The lieutenant rubbed the corner of his eye with two fingers, and Wesley saw the redness along the rim.

  “Sir, I wouldn’t be no good at ordering people around. There’s others out there that’s been in the army a lot longer than me.”

  “Yes, and most of them would run the first time they were put on the point.”

  “I tell you, Lieutenant, I just wouldn’t be no good at it.”

  “There’s a bayou about four miles ahead of us, and there should be a railroad bridge across it if the Federals haven’t burned it. I want you to take one man with you on point before dawn and wait for us there. If you see any Federals, don’t fire on them. Just get back to us.”

  Already Wesley’s mind was back on the clay road in the early morning with the white church house framed in the mist. For an instant he thought he could smell the fear again in his body.

  “How far out you want us?”

  “Within sound of any firing.”

  “Yes sir.” He brushed the back of his fingers across his mouth. He felt inside that in some way he had been tricked, but he didn’t know how.

  “You’d better go back to your lean-to now.”

  Wesley rose from the pine stump and started to untie the canvas flap from the tent pole.

  “How long we got to keep them two convicts with us, Lieutenant?”

  “Until I can turn them over to a provost. Good night.”

  Wesley walked through the rain toward his shelter. The fire had burned down to a red glow under the blackened logs, and the crumbled white ash was dented with raindrops. Inside the lean-to, he lay back on the pine needles with his cap under his head and pulled his slicker over him. He started to think about tomorrow, then stopped and tried to hold an empty, clear space in the center of his mind. He had learned that from the sergeant: never think about what you had to do tomorrow and never think about it afterward. Later, after he began to sink into the first level of sleep, with the rain falling on the cut saplings overhead, he thought he heard the cook cry out like a man’s murderous face appearing suddenly in a church-house window.

  The air was wet and gray in the trees when he awoke just before dawn. The other men were still sleeping, their muddy boots sticking out the ends of their lean-tos. He shook the water off his slicker, rolled it tightly and tied it with two leather thongs, then unlocked the breech of his Springfield and knocked out the damp cartridge and replaced it with another. He walked to the closest lean-to and pulled hard on the man’s ankle.

  “What the hell’s the matter with you?” The soldier’s unshaved face was thick with sleep in the gloom of his shelter. His damp blanket was twisted around his neck.

  “The lieutenant wants me and you on point today.”

  “Shit on that, Buford. He didn’t tell me nothing about it last night.”

  “You can go argue with him about it. He’s up in his tent right now.”

  “Well, shit.”

  “Get some biscuits off the wagon. We ain’t going to stop till we hit a bayou about four miles up from here.”

  The man stripped the blanket back from his body, pulled his cap on his head, and crawled out of the lean-to with his rifle held up before him.

  “All I can say is somebody around here has got his goddamn ass on upside down,” he said, and walked to the wagon, where he began stuffing handfuls of biscuits into his haversack.

  Wesley watched him, then glanced at the lieutenant’s darkened tent and wondered at how easy it had been to be a corporal after all.

  They moved off into the trees and the mist that floated in pools around the trunks. The woods glistened dimly from the rain, and the wet undergrowth streaked his trousers. There were sharply etched tracks of deer in the soft earth, fresh droppings that still steamed in the pine needles, and the faint and delicate imprint of grouse that had been feeding by a slough. Farther on, after the tip of the early sun had broken the horizon and slanted its light through the treetops, he began to see other signs on the forest floor: the heavy boot marks of stragglers, cartridge papers scattered behind a rotten oak stump, a dead campfire with a half-burned dressing in it, and finally a distinct trail of broken branches where a column must have passed.

  “You reckon they’re ours?” the other soldier said. The bill of his cap was on sideways, and his black hair hung over his ears.

  “Somebody was pinned behind that oak, and he wasn’t shooting at his own people,” Wesley said.

  “Well, I ain’t going to get shot walking into a Yankee camp. Let’s set till them others catch up. We don’t even know where we’re at.”

  “It opens up down yonder. If we see anything there we can pull out. Set here and they might just come right up your ass.”

  There was no breeze in the woods, and as the sun climbed higher they felt the heat gather in the trees with the wet smell of the pine needles. The haversack strap around Wesley’s shoulder left a wide stain across his shirt, and he had to wipe the sweat out of his eyes to see clearly through the dappled light. Then the woods began to thin, the forest floor became more even and easy for walking, and he saw a flash of sunlit green meadow in the distance. There were outcroppings of limestone, covered with lichen, between the trees, and as they approached the meadow the wind came up and bent the branches over their heads.

  They rested against the lee side of a large boulder and ate the biscuits and dried corn from the other soldier’s haversack. Wesley looked out across the meadow at the red-clay bayou and the miniature railway bridge that crossed it and the burnished span of track that arched out of sight into another woods. There was a squat water tower before the bridge, and several cords of pitch wood stacked under it, but there was no picket.

  “Just look at the shit in that field,” the other soldier said.

  The meadow, which had been cultivated in the spring for hay, was rutted with deep wheel tracks and strewn with the equipment of a retreating army: molded boots, wet barrels of salt that had burst at the staves, the splintered spokes of cannon wheels, rotted clothing and blankets, sacks of parched corn that crawled with slugs, halters, crushed canteens, buckets of twisted horseshoes and nails, and the dressings raked out the back of a surgeon’s wagon.

  They
crossed through the meadow and made the railway bridge before noon. The pilings were thick with brush in the slow, red current, and the dorsal fins of garfish turned in lazy circles in the shadow of the bridge. The track was banked high with yellow dirt and cinders, and as he leaned back in the shade against the first stanchion of the bridge, he felt the tremble of the train far down the track. He climbed up the embankment, pushing the stock of his Springfield into the shaling dirt, and then he saw it curving out of the woods with the long stream of smoke blowing back flatly over the tops of the cars.

  Wesley heard the other soldier breathing hard beside him. “That’s our goddamn luck, ain’t it? A hospital train,” he said.

  The engine’s wheels locked to a stop under the water tower, and a Negro fireman climbed up on the roof to pull down the tin spout. The windows in the hospital cars were open, and Wesley could see the wounded lying in the tiers of wooden bunks. Their unshaved faces were ashen in the heat, and within minutes green flies had started to drone around the windows.

  “Can you smell it?” the other soldier said.

  “Be quiet.” Wesley’s eyes focused on the captain who was walking toward them from the last car. He wore a surgeon’s insignia on his coat, and his rolled sleeves were spotted with blood.

  “What’s ahead of us, soldier?” he said, looking past Wesley as he spoke.

  “We ain’t been no further than the bridge, sir. We got some wounded behind us that’s real bad, if you got room for them.”

  “Where’s your commanding officer?” His eyes were still fixed on a distant spot across the bayou.

  “With the column. They ought to be coming through them trees any minute.”

  “I’ll give him until we finish loading wood. There’s Yankees tearing up track all the way down the line behind us. If your officer isn’t here when we leave, you can ride with us up on the spine or sit here and wait for the Federals.” The captain turned and started to walk back toward the last car.

  “Sir, a couple of our wounded ain’t going to make that field hospital if they got to go much further,” Wesley said.

  “What field hospital?”

  “The one the lieutenant says is in Alabama.”

  “You’re in Alabama now, son.”

  “Captain, we got hit hard yesterday, and them men ain’t going to make it.”

  The surgeon sucked in on his lip, his face shaded in the brim of his hat, and spit into the piled yellow dirt of the embankment.

  “All right,” he said. “Get up on that water tower, and if you see anything blue down the line, fire one shot. Then jump for the top of the car.”

  A half hour later, with his body flattened on the hot boards of the tower’s roof, he saw the column move out of the trees and start across the meadow. Only one man was tied prone on the cannon carriage now as it swayed in the ruts, and two other men sat on the back end with their knees pulled up before them. The lieutenant had already whipped his horse ahead of the column at the first sight of the hospital train, and Wesley held his Springfield in one hand and climbed down backward off the tower into the tender. They unstrapped the cook’s litter from the carriage and carried him inside one of the cars. There were spittoons at the bottom of each tier of bunks and slop jars that had spilled over on the floors. When Wesley left him, the cook’s eyes were yellow and wide, the two pupils black as cinders, as though he had jaundice, and his wooden identification tag and leather thong were clenched tightly in his palm.

  A mile past the bayou they began to pick up stragglers, and by midafternoon they had overtaken a company of Mississippi infantry. Each time they crossed a rise, more men emerged out of the woods and formed into the lengthening column. Ahead, Wesley could see an ambulance wagon stopped in the middle of the road, with one mule down in its harness, while the column divided in two and swelled out into the muddy fields past it. The ground became more churned and littered with equipment as they neared the Tallapoosa River, then the officers’ horses caught the smell of water in the wind and began to rear and pitch their heads against the bit. The country was open and rolling now, the clay road as scarlet as blood in the late sun, and he saw the green line of trees along the river and knew that they would be in a safe camp by that evening with artillery and reserves set up behind them.

  Then he saw the hospital train backing down the burnished tracks. Steam rolled out from under the wheels, and the engineer was leaning far out the window to see past the last car. Three soldiers with muskets were up on the spine, and the surgeon stood in the vestibule steps with his hand on the passenger rail and one boot already skipping across the rocks of the embankment. The lieutenant turned his horse out of the column and kicked him in a shower of clay toward the surgeon.

  “You can bet that’s our fried ass tonight,” a soldier in front of Wesley said.

  “That’s General Hood camped on the river, mister,” a Texas soldier next to him said. His face looked like the edge of a hatchet. “The only frying that’s going to get done is that pair of Yankee balls we put in our skillet.”

  The lieutenant trotted his horse along the edge of the column and stopped abreast of Wesley. His horse was frothing green and white saliva from its bit.

  “Pull our men out of the line and get them behind the railway grade, Corporal,” he said.

  “Sir?”

  “The Yankees have already cut the track ahead of us, and we’re probably going to be attacked in the next hour. Send the wounded behind the train and keep the men in position until I get back with an ammunition carrier.”

  “Lieutenant, I can’t—”

  But the lieutenant had already galloped his horse down the road’s edge through the soldiers who were spreading across the railroad embankment and digging shallow holes in the cinders and dirt.

  The sun was red over the trees on the river’s bank, and Wesley saw the two convicts walk toward him in silhouette against the sky. Their striped jumpers were stained with red clay and sweat, and the tall man had a pin-fire revolver stuck in the top of his trousers.

  “We’re caught, ain’t we?” he said.

  “You ask the lieutenant about that.”

  “You’re the corporal, ain’t you?”

  “Just dig a hole with them others. If we get hit with Whistling Dick tonight, you’ll wish you dug plumb down to China.”

  “I tell you what, butch. Before we leave out of here, we’re going to take a little piece of you with us,” the tall convict said.

  “Neither one of you is going to run nowheres, unless into a provost or a Minié, and I might be the one that puts it there.”

  “What you mean provost?”

  Wesley saw the lieutenant cantering his horse in front of an ammunition wagon, and he walked across the railroad embankment and slid down into the shallow trench that the other men were scooping out with barrel staves and tin plates.

  He lay flat against the slope and looked across the trampled meadows at the sun burning into the horizon. The low strips of cloud were aflame with light, and the water oaks along the riverbank threw long shadows across the dead current. In the distance he heard a solitary rifle crack, then the irregular spatter of more rifles firing deep in the opposite woods, and that old, blood-draining fear out of a dream started to tighten again in his stomach. He stared hard at the edge of the trees until the trunks began to recede and grow large again in the fading light. Every man on the line had his rifle cocked and pointed across the embankment, with the point of his bayonet stuck in the dirt beside him.

  “Where the hell they at?” the man next to Wesley said. The stock of his musket was dark with the perspiration from his hands.

  Then Wesley saw the branches of the trees begin to move unnaturally and the dark shapes of men walking in a crouch through the shadows.

  “Oh, goddamn, look at them sons of bitches,” the soldier next to him said.

  The Federals were coming out of the woods as far as Wesley could see. Three cannon drawn by mules crashed out of the underbrush, followed by a mort
ar mounted on a huge four-wheel carriage. The gun crews turned the cannon into position, unhitched the mules, and whipped them into the woods, while three men loaded an iron ball into the mortar. Their officers galloped their horses up and down the line, forming their men into ranks for the advance across the meadow. Then their ambulance wagons moved up on the rear, and Wesley pulled back the hammer on his Springfield and wrapped his fingers tightly in the trigger guard.

  We won’t have no chance, he thought. They got enough artillery to blow us all over this track. That mortar can take twenty yards out of our line in a lick. We should have set up in the woods. There ain’t no sense in trying to hold against artillery when you ain’t got none to back you up.

  He heard the lieutenant’s horse behind him and turned in the dirt on his elbow. The lieutenant had the reins knotted around his fist and held a carbine propped against his thigh with the other hand. The clean features of his face were covered with the sun’s last red light.

  “They’re coming right up the middle, gentlemen,” he said. “They have reserves all the way back through those woods, and they’re going to try to crack us before dark. If we can hold until then, Hood will be on their flank by morning.”

  Wesley slid backward on his elbows down the railway embankment and walked in a bent position to the lieutenant’s horse. His head felt suddenly cold in the breeze.

  “Lieutenant, half of them is going to run when they start throwing it in on us.” His voice was empty and dry in his throat.

  “They’re behind us, too, Corporal. It’s either here or a prison camp at Johnson’s Island.”

  “Sir, them men ain’t going to care when it starts to come in, and I ain’t going to be able to hold them.”

  “We’ll each do what we should. You had better get back into the line.”

  The lieutenant turned his horse away from Wesley and broke into a canter toward the ammunition wagon, his face as sculptured and cool and impossible to read as marble.

  The first cannon lurched backward on its wheels in an explosion of smoke and dirt. Wesley pressed his face flat into the hard cinders with his arms over his head as the shell screamed through the air and burst in front of the railway embankment thirty yards down from him. Then the other two cannon roared almost in unison, and his heart pounded against the earth while he waited for that sudden ripping sound, like tin tearing apart, that meant it was coming in on his position. But they had elevated too high, and both shells exploded in the trees somewhere behind the hospital train.