by Greg Hunt
“And what about when you get back home?” Bill asked.
“We heard they ain’t doing nothing back home to the ones who decide to walk away. Hell, you boys oughter come on along. Our side’s licked already, so what’s the use?”
“I guess we’ll see it through,” Bill said, “but we don’t fault you boys none for hightailing. It might end up the smartest thing.” Hardisty and his bunch were all still armed with their muskets, and Mel figured Bill was talking so calmly to keep a fight from starting up. But he still stayed ready in case of trouble.
“I can’t see why you want to climb up that durn mountain, though,” Oscar joined in. “Why not head back down this logging trace till you get to the post road?”
“We heered the blue bellies was back that way,” one of the five men said.
“Naw,” Bill said, recognizing the deceit and playing along. “Ain’t nothin’ back that way but whitetails and jackrabbits. But if you fellers would rather climb up through the rocks and brambles, it’s no nevermind to me.”
Every head turned toward the steep hillside beside the road. Mel was glad he hadn’t set his mind to climbing up it. Not unless it was his only chance of escape.
His companions went on their way as soon as they could. Once they were out of earshot of the runaways, Bill began to laugh. “Oscar, you got a mean streak,” he said. “You know what those men will run into if they head back down that road.”
“Yeah, and I feel guilty as the devil about it,” Oscar drawled. “Maybe you oughta double back and let them know that they are bound to run into the whole enemy army before they’re gone a mile.”
“Maybe I will, then,” Bill said, still grinning like a fool. “Let me think on it.”
About the time that the sun had dipped into the tops of the trees to the west, they heard a rattle of musket and rifle fire up ahead. It was only a few shots, and seemed far off. But Mel knew that these winding valleys could do strange things with sound.
“I thought the blue bellies was s’posed to be back of us, not up ahead. What do you think?” Bill asked nobody in particular. Neither of the other two had any immediate opinion. “Maybe a skirmish is all,” Bill said, answering his own question. “Maybe they came on some runaways from the other side and lit into them. Or maybe they met up with an enemy patrol.”
They were still walking, but the uncertainty of what lay ahead slowed their pace.
“Yeah, maybe,” Oscar said without conviction.
Or maybe the two armies found each other again, Mel thought. Maybe those were the first shots of another big fight unfolding. In that case, these troops ahead, Bill’s and Oscar’s fellows, would be in desperate straits for sure, from one army ahead of them, and maybe another catching up behind.
Looking around him, Mel started to wonder how two armies would fight in rugged country like this. He’d seen how they did it in the woods and in the wide-open spaces back at his place, but how could two armies square off and have at each other in such narrow confines as this?
However they did it, he suspected that it would be a bloody, close-up tangle, and he had no hankering to be around to witness it. But where could he go? What could he do to stay out of it? Probably nothing.
A new ripple of gunfire began to crackle and pop up ahead, not steady and sustained yet like the gunfire Mel had witnessed in the battles at his farm, but growing toward it. The big guns had not started blasting yet. Some cannons had gone by while he hid at the edge of the river to let the army go by, but they probably wouldn’t be much use in this mess. From what he had seen, they took a while to set up and load, and they were most useful at long range.
This fight was more likely to be face-to-face, man-to-man, and the devil take the loser.
“We need to get on up there and give our boys a hand,” Oscar said. He was making a sad attempt to quicken his pace, and obviously paying the price in more pain.
“Peers they’ll be needing us soon enough,” Bill agreed.
“What help can you two be?” Mel asked, his voice containing more sarcasm than he had intended. “You don’t even have anything to fight with no more.”
“It’s our fight,” Oscar said, hobbling forward resolutely. “Mine, yours, and Bill’s.”
“And they’ll soon be muskets enough to go around,” Bill pointed out. “All Oscar will have to do is reach down and pick one up.”
Mel wanted to announce then and there that he wasn’t going with them. But something stopped him, something that didn’t make a whole lot of sense. He barely knew these men, but he liked them, admired their loyalty and bravery, and he didn’t want them to think bad of him. He didn’t want them to lump him in with the likes of the cowards they had met back down the road.
So they pushed on, the three of them, hearts pounding in their throats, skittish as jackrabbits, to the unknown place not too far ahead where hundreds of men were facing off, killing and dying for reasons that not one in a hundred could probably explain.
The gunfire intensified, clearly much closer, no more than a few hundred yards now, he guessed.
Without warning they heard the sound of feet running toward them on the road, and moments later men began to appear around a bend at the foot of a hill. Mel and the others were barely able to get out of the way of the stampede. These were wild-eyed men, desperate and determined, focusing all their energy on escape now that they had learned a core truth about themselves.
Bill recognized one of the fleeing men and called out to him. “Joe! Joe Turner! What’s going on up there? Is it lost? Are we whipped so soon?”
The man looked back at the sound of his name, but didn’t stop running, and the look on his face told the story. He might do many brave things during the rest of his life, but the good in all of them would never erase the memory of this day. And then he ran square into a tree, a twelve-foot pine that grew up at the edge of the road. It knocked him silly but he didn’t fall down. Blood began to flow from a deep gash in his forehead but he staggered on. Now you’ll have a scar to help you remember today, Mel thought, and he wondered if he’d ever have the grit to tell anyone the truth of how he got it.
They continued forward as others fled the other way, sometimes alone, and other times in small bunches. Bill pointed out that there were always some who broke and ran, even during the battles they were winning. He retrieved muskets for himself and Oscar that others had cast off and checked their loads.
As for Mel, he didn’t need any more guns. He carried a rifle and wore a holstered pistol at his waist. There were more handguns in his pack that the others didn’t know about.
They were close. Not far up ahead, above the cracking din of gunfire, Mel began to hear the shouts and desperate screams and angry roars of men in battle. Bullets were whispering through the air around them, snipping leaves and thunking into tree trunks. He determined that he would advance no further. If he did, he would make himself a part of this.
Bill uttered a soft “uuh” sound as if someone had startled him. Mel turned in time to see the blossom of bright red blood on his shirt. Bill looked down at it too, then back up at Mel and Oscar, puzzled, as if he needed one of them to explain this mystery to him. Mel tried to catch him as he fell, but Bill’s body had become dead weight and he crumpled awkwardly to the ground.
Oscar let out a wail, cast his makeshift crutch away, and fell on his knees beside his friend. “Bill! Oh Lordy, Bill. What have they done to you now?” He pulled his friend toward him and put his hand over the bloody patch on Bill’s shirt, then lifted his hand and stared at the crimson blood incredulously.
Mel dropped to the ground by Oscar, mostly for safety. He didn’t even bother to check Bill for signs of life. A bullet that dead-center in a man’s chest could only have one result.
“He’s dead now,” Mel told Oscar urgently. “And we need to git.” Oscar looked up at him as if he had spoken in some pagan tongue. Two men ran full tilt past them down the road, then half a dozen more followed. Only one that Mel saw still had
a musket in his hands. A bullet sang by above their heads and slapped into a tree.
“There’s no use going no further. You can’t fight, and you can’t run away with that leg of yours. But we can’t stay here, either.” When Mel took hold of Oscar’s arm and pulled, Oscar shrugged away from him.
“We could wade out to that little island over there and hunker down in the brush,” Mel said. “We might be okay there till this fight’s passed us by.”
Oscar seemed to be regaining some threads of coherence, and appeared to understand what Mel said. He looked up at Mel, then out to the narrow brush-covered island in the river, then back at Mel.
“We’ll take Bill with us,” Oscar said. “I have to take him home so we can bury him proper.”
“We can’t do that, there’s no time,” Mel insisted. “This fight is getting hotter, and it’ll be right on top of us in a minute.”
The flow of men hurrying back down the road was growing thicker, but there was a little different tone to the rampaging retreat. Occasional orders were shouted, and most of the men Mel saw now still had their muskets with them. These were the best, the ones who still had some fight left in them, even if they were losing badly.
“We’ll come back for him,” Mel said, knowing they never would. “After this is over.” He manhandled Oscar to his feet and half steered, half dragged him to the riverbank.
The island was about thirty yards out, a long narrow knob of sand, rocks and soil, grown over with willows and brush too stubborn to be washed away in the spring floods. The current seemed manageable here and not too deep for wading. Mel lifted his rifle and pack high up with one hand, grabbed the back of Oscar’s shirt with the other, and waded in. The noise, gunfire, and chaos crept relentlessly toward them. The road was jammed with men, so full that they spilled over into the river, some willingly and others by accident. Mel saw that he and Oscar were not the only ones seeking refuge on the island, but at this point they had no other choice.
The water grew deeper and the current more forceful than he expected. The stones under their feet were slippery with moss. Time and again Oscar’s footing failed him and he went down, but each time Mel hauled him snorting and gagging back to the top.
“Ella ain’t never gonna forgive me for leaving her brother laying dead like that,” Oscar grieved. “He was the one supposed to be looking out for me. Not t’other way around.”
The water was above their waists now, shoving at them insistently, determined to drag them under.
“Seems to me,” Mel said, panting with the strain of his labors, “you should have stayed down there in Arkansas and lived your lives in peace.”
“Maybe so. But all the neighbor men was joinin’ up, so we did too.”
The water was up to their armpits now and Mel was all but dragging Oscar forward. Back on the road, the pathetic force that must have constituted the rear guard was putting up a faltering defense, turning and firing, then trying to reload as they hurriedly withdrew again. Their numbers were dwindling fast.
Mel caught his first glimpse of the other side, recognizing them by the sight of their blue uniforms through the brush and trees. They advanced in no particular hurry, moving from tree to tree or rock to rock, taking a shot when they had one and then ducking down to reload.
Mel realized that he and Oscar had to get out of the water in a hurry and find some cover. Out here in midstream they were easy targets.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw a man not far upstream step into a hole and go under. He surged to the surface seconds later, gasping in a desperate appeal for help, and sank under again. But the current had him, sweeping and tumbling him along and never letting go. The next time he came up he was a few feet upstream from Mel and Oscar. He groped out desperately for salvation, but all he succeeded in doing was snatching Oscar out of Mel’s grasp. In one startling instant Mel watched the two men roll under the surface and stay there. He thought he saw their bodies tumble into a rapid on downstream, but it was hard to tell.
Mel struggled on, the going much easier now without his burden, until he reached the island and threw himself on a gravel bar. A bullet chewed up a patch of gravel near him, and he crawled forward into a jumble of dead trees deposited there by one flood or another. Secure for the moment in the tangle of dead roots, branches, and fractured timber, he lay still and tried to think things through. The fight had moved on south along the logging road and on to God only knew where. He didn’t really care where they decided to fight, as long as it wasn’t right on top of him. Again.
Mel had seen other refugees head toward the island earlier. Although he couldn’t see any of them at the moment, he felt certain that some were still close by. Their mere presence there made the place unsafe for him to stay for long.
He had lost the rifle someplace, but didn’t recall where. Probably in the river. He still had the holster around his waist and the guns and the pack, but everything was soaked and the stock of gunpowder would be ruined. He, Bill, and Oscar had finished the last of his food earlier in the day.
It was dusk now, and Mel welcomed the arrival of night. The fighting had pushed farther south, back in the direction he and his now-dead companions had come from earlier. The shooting was more random than it had been earlier—desperate spates of gunfire, followed by tense periods when only the gurgling of the river and the chorus of the nighttime frogs and insects could be heard.
Mel pictured the scene somewhere up the valley where the retreating Arkansans must be fighting for their survival right now, not in any organized way, but in small desperate packs, and even one by one, with no real hope of making it out of this place alive.
What amazed him most was the ruthlessness and hatred with which these men had at each other. Were the causes they fought for so important as that? Or was it something else, something so deep down in them that they really didn’t understand it themselves?
Sometimes the wild creatures in the forest fought to the death for no reason that any outsider could understand. And sometimes, apparently, so did men.
Exhausted, Mel dozed off on the sand and gravel bed where he lay, satisfied that he was at least partially hidden by the tangle of wood and brush around him. It wasn’t a restful sleep because the fading gunfire roused him from time to time, as did snippets of disturbing dreams. Rochelle drifted in and out of the dreams, always at risk, always searching for him. Bill and Oscar were there too, pestering him in a good-humored but persistent way, insisting that he get their corpses back on home. “Ella’s already got the graves dug,” Bill insisted. “She’s gonna be mad as a yellow-jacket if you don’t get us back there to go in ’em.”
When it was as dark as it was likely to get, Mel snaked out from under the driftwood pile and stood up. His knees and hips were stiff, but otherwise he felt pretty good. It was quiet all around except for the eternal rippling of the river. Even the distant gunfire had stopped. He could see very little around him, but the river gave him his bearings.
Shouldering his wet pack of guns and necessities, he waded back into the water, feeling his way along a step at a time. He used the press of the river current against his legs to keep them moving in the right direction, and eventually began to make out the dim outline of the opposite bank. Even in the pitch dark, it was a much easier crossing than before, when he was forced to drag a crippled man along behind him in the midst of a running battle.
Staggering up out of the water, he came almost immediately upon two dead bodies at the edge of the logging road. One of their muskets lay close by, but the stock was broken and he didn’t bother retrieving it. His most pressing need at the moment was dry powder and he found a sufficient stock of it in the leather boxes each of the dead men wore on their belts.
Mel settled on the ground beside the bodies and begin taking apart the pistol still strapped to his waist. It was a tricky operation in the dark, disassembling, cleaning, and loading a gun he was not familiar with, but it was important to have at least one of the weapons he carried
ready to fire again. This was no place to be walking around unarmed.
He regretted the loss of the rifle he had been carrying. By his reckoning, it was one of the best he had ever seen in use in any of these battles, better than anything he had ever owned or could reasonably aspire to own. But he would remember the spot, and one day he could come back and spend whatever time he needed to find it.
When he thought about it, he realized that this whole valley would probably be littered with relics and remnants of the running fight that was fought here. At his farm, both armies had done their best to get the dead underground where they belonged, and to gather up the weapons and gear the dead had left behind. But here they seemed to have moved on already. How likely was it that either bunch would ever send anyone back to tidy up this remote and easily forgotten battlefield?
There were things of value all about here, especially the firearms, which could be sold to pay for the lumber and other material and tools needed to rebuild his farm.
But that would have to be done later, assuming of course that the story of his life had a “later” connected to it.
He considered cleaning and charging the other handguns in his pack, but decided against it. It would be a difficult and time-consuming effort, and when he was finished, he would still have to put them back in the wet pack. So what was the use?
The faint spackling of light he spotted through the trees and brush to the north had an eerie quality to it. His first thought was of the Indian legends and folktales about this ghost or that, perpetually searching for one thing or another that had been meaningful to them in life. As he remembered the tales, most of them carried lights, even the headless ones.
If such things were possible, there certainly could be a lot of ghosts wandering these parts tonight. As a cold chill spread over his skin at the mere thought of it, he fought down a rush of mindless animal panic. There was no place to go, no place safe to hide, so if ghosts were afoot tonight, he would just have to deal with them, or perish in whatever gruesome way they deemed fit for him.