This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  “Billy?” Her anger was rising. “Why’d you bring Danny here?”

  He gave her his hot gaze—the one that said, “I’m the man, and I’m responsible!” That look always incensed her.

  Aloud, almost apologetically, he said, “Danny’s in trouble. He needed a place to hole up.”

  “That’s not our problem!”

  “Miss Sarah,” Danny said with a smile, eyes averted. “I understand. Just give me a moment, and I’ll be on my way.”

  “No you won’t,” Billy declared adamantly, ground-reining the horse—not that the gray beast looked like it had the energy, or the inclination, to leave with fresh grass on the ground.

  Billy stepped up, jaw set, a finger pointing her way. “We don’t turn away friends in need, and Danny’s my friend. It ain’t Christian, and it ain’t our way. Paw taught us better than that.”

  Danny’s fatigued eyes fixed on the 1860 Army Colt she held. “Miss Sarah, you all want to shoot me, go right ahead. Given the way I feel right now, being dead might be a tolerable improvement.”

  She lowered the pistol.

  “Billy, you promised…” She couldn’t finish, walking around the currants, stepping wide around the horses, and leaning in the door to slip the revolver back into its holster.

  Then she turned, rubbing the backs of her arms as she asked, “Where’d you get the horse?”

  “It’s Danny’s spare. Ride one, switch to the other when the first is tuckered.” He reached up and unbuckled the bridle and bit, the horse barely letting him as it cropped for grass.

  “You on the run, Danny Goodman?”

  He grinned in her direction, his eyes on the ground at her feet. “Been up to Missouri and into Kansas some. Living the life of the partisan ranger.” He tapped at his waist. “I got enough gold sewed into my belt to buy me a nice place when this is all over and done.”

  “You go sit, Danny my boy,” Billy told him. “I’ll see to the horses. Give ’em a chance to roll.” As he started on the blood bay’s cinch, he said, “Sarah, you reckon that haunch of deer meat is done?”

  “’Nuther hour,” she told him, a feeling of futility sucking at her insides as she watched Danny settle himself on her stump before the fire and extend his hands. He was dirty, his eyes baggy, and he stank so powerfully of horse sweat, old burned powder, and long-caked body odor that her stomach surged, causing her to step back, her hand to her mouth.

  “Good to sit so,” Danny said to no one in particular, his eyes on the fire.

  “Well, after you catch your wind, you go down yonder to the creek and wash up,” she told him, unable to stop from making a disgusted face. “Though, God knows, it’ll probably kill the fish and crawdads when you do.”

  He reacted with a slight smile. “Reckon I am a mite ripe.”

  He still hadn’t really looked at her since he’d arrived. Maybe he was afraid Billy’d thrash him? As if Billy needed to worry. To put it mildly, she wasn’t particularly keen on any kind of male attention these days.

  She busied herself making sassafras tea, warming some of the cattail-root bread, and watched as Billy laid Danny’s saddle forward against the cabin wall.

  “This is quite the hideout you got,” Danny called. “Unlash that blanket, Billy. Reckon they’s a bottle in it.”

  Billy did, unrolling the dirt-smudged wool enough to retrieve a brown glass bottle three-fourths filled with liquid. This he handed to Danny, who used his teeth to pull the cork. Then he took a swig before handing it over to Billy, and asked, “How come you all are up here instead of down to the big house?”

  “On account of the fact that we didn’t kill all of Dewley’s men. Reckon the ones still alive are biding their time, checking on the place periodically. I would.” Billy took a drink, made a face, and wiped his lips with his sleeve. “Besides, there’s too many riders these days. Right on the road like the house is? There ain’t no way for just me to defend it. And the way bands of cavalry run up and down the Huntsville Road? Like as not I’d be swept up as a conscript by one side or the other, or shot as an enemy, or a deserter, or just for the fun of it.”

  He handed the bottle back and added, “An’ I got to take care of Sarah. I let her down once. Ain’t gonna happen again.”

  Danny didn’t even so much as look up, didn’t bother to ask how Billy might have let her down.

  It hit Sarah like a thrown rock: He knows. Knows who Dewley was, why the riders would periodically check on the house. He knows what they did to me!

  Every muscle in her body went rigid; her stomach knotted harder than an Irish prizefighter’s fist. First the fear. Then cold anger settled deep in her bones.

  Billy told!

  She could imagine how it had been. Billy, his face grim, saying, “Now you be damned careful of Sarah. Given what they done to her, don’t you so much as smile at her, or wink, or nothing that might make her remember, you understand?”

  Humiliation and shame brought tears to her eyes.

  Struggling for breath, she looked away at the somber trees, their branches now heavy with budding flowers, leaves ready to burst. The faint trickle of water in the little creek, the grinding of horses’ teeth, and the crackle of the fire were the only sounds.

  She closed her eyes, and the sensation of futility left her swaying on her feet. Billy had told. Danny would tell … who knew? And they would tell. And within months, the whole county—what was left of it—would know.

  The story would go from lip to lip: renegade bushwhackers—worse than jayhawkers—had killed Maw Hancock, abducted and violated young Sarah. Then plucky young Billy killed the worst of them, getting her back.

  Billy Hancock, the brave and resolute hero. Men would buy him drinks; women would smile and nod their heads out of respect.

  For Sarah, however, there would only be the shame and ruin. She’d be the woman to be pitied and kept at arm’s length. A forever peripheral person, sullied and fouled through no fault of her own—but eternally tainted nonetheless. When men gazed at her, they would be seeing her as Dewley’s men did: naked and many times used.

  For women she would be the ever-present reminder of “a fate worse than death.” A horrifying living example that even the ironclad walls of chivalry provided no absolute protection. They would want to distance themselves, as though Sarah might be a lodestone that could draw similar disaster to their doorstep. A woman so abandoned by God—perhaps for good reason—as to be living proof that nightmares could become real.

  She already understood that no decent man would want her. What gentleman would want to take her into his sacred marriage bed, knowing that as she disrobed before him, he was seeing what others had already ogled in lust? That as he laid her on the sheets what he might have considered a temple had been used by so many as sewer?

  She felt faint, head swimming.

  How could my own brother do this to me?

  Numb to the soul, she leaned against the rough log wall, barely hearing as Billy said, “Critters had been at Maw, but we dug a grave for what remained. Took what little was left in the house, and hightailed it up here.”

  “Whole county is empty,” Danny noted. “I been gone since last July so it come as a shock to come home. The farms is all abandoned, and half of ’em burned. Fields growed up with weeds. The roads is like trenches. Bridges all burned. But the worst part is the mills, all ruint. Some’s blowed up, others burned to the ground. Ditches washed out. Stores like Trott’s is all abandoned. What’s Benton County come to, Billy?”

  “Just a highway for armies going up or down the Wire Road, and for guerrillas to hide out between bushwhacking each other. We’d a never hung on if’n I weren’t a hunter.”

  “So … what are you thinking? Just hide out up here until the war’s over?”

  “Think it’ll ever be over?”

  Danny laughed, took a swig from the bottle. “Reckon so. The way people is killing each other, sooner or later, won’t be no farms nowhere. No mills to grind flour. No tanyards to make
leather. No powder mills, lead mines, nor textile mills to make clothing. And then, finally, the last Yankee will kill the last Rebel with a rock, and he’ll win. Standing alone in some field.”

  “Him and me,” Billy said, taking the bottle and tilting it to his lips. After he’d swallowed, he added, “That’s when I’ll come down from the hills and start farming again.”

  “Where are you gonna get the seed corn?” Danny took the bottle and gestured with the neck as if to emphasize the point. “Without roads and railroads and steamboats, ain’t none coming from back East.”

  “Might have to go to Mexico!” Billy laughed in a hysterical way Sarah had never heard. “Hey! Sis! Come dig up this hyar venison, and let’s eat us some.”

  Trembling with rage, she pushed off the wall, saying, “Dig it yourself, you son of a bitch.” Then she stalked off into the growing gloom.

  As she did, she heard Billy say, “What the hell’s got into her?”

  Long after dark, she slipped back, shivering, and found the pit dug up, but still radiating heat. The brown-glass whiskey bottle lay on its side, empty. The door hung open a crack, and she slipped in, hardly surprised to find Billy passed out facedown on his blanket, still fully clothed with his boots on.

  Danny lay wrapped in his blanket on the dirt floor, snoring like a bucksaw cutting hardwood.

  She stepped around him, pulled her blanket from the bed, and tugged her gingham dress—the only one she’d saved from the house—down from its peg. Easing back out, she unhooked the holstered Colt from its peg by the door and, careful not to bang the powder flask, looped the pistol belt over her shoulder.

  The blanket she folded; then she grabbed up the still warm remains of the venison haunch. The two men hadn’t left more than a pound or two of meat clinging to the bones, but it would take her a ways. Once the last of the meat was chewed off, she could break the long bones for their marrow.

  The gray horse fought the bridle and bit, but she managed. Then she turned, leading the gelding down the trail. The farm was little more than a mile away down the trapper’s cabin draw. Once she reached it, she’d turn south on the Huntsville Road toward the ruins of Van Winkle’s mill.

  She’d leave the road at one of the creek crossings, walk the horse upstream through the water, then take one of the forest trails to the Wire Road. From there she’d head south to …

  Well, it didn’t matter.

  If she was going to be a pariah, she would be one someplace where tongues wouldn’t wag, and the gossips wouldn’t delight in chewing her up like a slab of fresh meat. Where people wouldn’t look at her through eyes eloquent with revulsion and pity.

  Damn you, Billy. I trusted you!

  46

  May 2, 1864

  “Peut-être. You gonna carry yo’self over to the mess an’ see what commissary dey got?” Sergeant Kershaw asked. “Bin getting used t’ them vittles.”

  Butler lay in his bunk, his wasted body still recuperating. Hard to believe that he’d actually gained weight on the gruel and weevil-ridden flour the prison provided.

  “It ain’t like I used to get at home where Missy makes that roast ham, biscuits, and hominy! Bet you never had hominy with red pepper in it.” Pettigrew folded his arms, elbows sticking out through the ragged holes in his sleeves. He shot a challenging glance at the rest of the men who crowded around the barracks bunks. They were illuminated by slanting light that came through the window with its broken panes.

  “You and that wife of yourn,” Phil Vail said with a shake of his head. He sat on Brewster’s bunk, whittling on a piece of wood with a pocketknife.

  “Oh, stop,” Butler chided them as he sat up on his bunk. “It’s a prison camp.”

  “Cap’n,” Jimmy Peterson reminded, “you was the one said y’all was gonna take us home.” He stood back in the shadows, looking uncertainly at the other men.

  “Told the Yankees,” Butler replied sullenly. “Ordered them to go home, too.”

  “And since when, Cap’n,” Kershaw’s deep Cajun voice asked, “do dem Yankees ever do anythin’ you tells ’em?”

  “Sergeant, Yankees are beyond my ability to fathom.”

  “What ch’all mean? Fathom? What’s dat?”

  “It means to understand.”

  “Butler!” Doc’s sharp voice brought him up, and Butler blinked. His men were grinning where they lounged around, not even making room as Doc walked up, his face concerned.

  “Hello, Philip. We were just discussing the obstinate intransigence of the North and why—”

  “You were raving,” Doc insisted wearily, seating himself across from Butler on Brewster’s bunk. Next to him, Vail gave him a sidelong look before peeling another sliver from his whittling.

  “Not raving. That implies an emotional quality, a rising of the voice that—”

  “All right. Not raving.” Doc studied him from under lowered brows. “The men are back, aren’t they?”

  Butler pursed his lips, staring down at the floor, rocking slowly back and forth as he did so. Rocking helped. It soothed him when he knew Philip was going to lecture him. The men were always present, but Philip didn’t want to hear that. When Butler concentrated, he could converse silently with his soldiers. But it took so much effort. And they didn’t always understand.

  Doc sighed, slapping his torn pants. The man was mostly skin and bones, and while he kept a cheery expression on his face, and a light tone in his voice, Butler had caught glimpses of Doc when he didn’t think Butler was looking. At those times his brother’s face was a mask of worry and pain.

  Doc raised his hands, as if in surrender. “You’ve been doing so much better. What’s caused you to—”

  “Sergeant Kershaw says it’s the food.”

  Doc’s expression pained for the briefest instant, then he pasted the placid mask back on his face. “The last time we tried to talk about this—”

  “You became unreasonably angry,” Butler reminded.

  “I just…” Doc swallowed hard, as if struggling to keep his voice calm. “I want to understand.”

  “The men are my responsibility,” Butler told him reasonably. “My command. I have to take them home.”

  “To each of their homes?”

  The question was confusing, requiring too much effort to sort through. “No, Doc.” He’d come to calling Philip “Doc” like so many of the prisoners did. “Just have to get them home.”

  “Home? That can mean a lot of things. Our home? On White River? I don’t understand.”

  “I’m not sure I do either, but the sergeant will tell me when it’s time.”

  “The one you call Kershaw?”

  “He don’ know me fer frog spit, Cap’n,” Kershaw said. “Bonhomme, he t’ink I’s just a ghost or spirit!”

  “Aren’t you?”

  “’Course not, Cap’n.”

  “Then why don’t you show yourself like the rest of the men? You just talk into my ear like a—”

  “Butler!” Doc barked. “I need you to concentrate. Pay attention.”

  “That’s all I do, Doc. Do you think it’s easy to be a captain? The entire company is counting on me. I have to keep them alive.”

  Doc’s face was pained again. “You say that with such simple faith it wounds me. Don’t you know … know that your men died at Chickamauga? You’ve told me that they were all shot down in the attack against the Union breastworks.”

  Butler said nothing, nodding slightly. When Doc kept looking insistently at him, Butler finally told him, “We’ve gone over this before.”

  “If you know they’re dead, how can you still see them?”

  “You’re going to tell me I’m crazy again.” Butler smiled in weary amusement. “So, all right, I’m crazy. You want to talk crazy? General Hardee put me in charge of the company! Made me, of all people, responsible for all these men. And they call me a lunatic?”

  Kershaw was laughing, the others smiling in amusement. Butler gave them a conspiratorial wink.

 
; Doc grimaced, his thin face working. “I’m trying to get you to admit that your men, the ones you think you see, aren’t real.”

  Pettigrew threw his hands up. “Here we go again. I’ll say fer sure, yer brother’s like a bulldog when he sink his teeth into something.”

  Butler gestured for Philip to desist. “So I’m seeing ghosts. Philip, they’re here. Just as real to me as you are. I can’t make them go away any more than I seem to be able to make you go away. Go ahead, say it. I’m crazy.”

  Philip looked panicked. “I didn’t mean…”

  Frowning, Butler tried to find the words. “It’s a most peculiar thing. I don’t feel crazy, just … well, a little confused by the way people act around me.”

  “It’s what we call the fatigue. It’s in your mind, Butler.”

  “Philip, you don’t see them clustered around all the time.”

  “We’s a cluster!” Johnny Baker crowed, breaking Butler’s concentration.

  Butler’s lips twitched. Baker never took things seriously.

  Doc sighed, blinked his eyes wearily.

  “Doc,” Butler said softly, “you think you’ve got to take care of me. You don’t understand, do you? Me and the men, we’re going to take care of you.”

  Doc gave him a dull stare. “I can hardly wait.”

  “Sarcasm ill suits you, big brother.” Butler scratched where a louse kept biting his side. “Did you have a reason for disrupting the men and me, or just the indefatigable urge to harangue me back to whatever version of sanity currently preoccupies you?”

  Doc coughed hard into his hand, and when he got his breath, said, “I finally got my appointment with Colonel Sweet today. He said he’d have his staff start on the paperwork. Given your improvement from the raving scarecrow I found in the yard, to merely delusional, I think I can take you home.”

  “By damn, boys!” Willy Pettigrew cried. “Ole Doc’s gonna see us outta hyar!”

  “Wait!” Butler called as the men cheered. “Doc, how are you going to do this?”

  “I took what they’ve started to call the yellow dog oath—the oath of allegiance to the United States.” Doc laughed, coughed again. That deep-lung kind of cough. “As if I ever had any loyalty to the Confederacy. Given your, um, condition, you’ll be released into my custody. For some reason, the good colonel doesn’t seem to think you’ll be a threat to the continued survival of the Union.”