by Ralph Peters
Blake found Ireton, guts strewn and dead. Flies feasted. Blake couldn’t watch. He went down the slope after John Bunyan. Cobb buttoned his trousers and followed.
They could have hopped down the hill from corpse to corpse, but that wasn’t enough to shock Blake. What made him shudder was the speed with which the bodies had been stripped of anything valuable. He understood taking shoes, although he wasn’t keen on trying on a dead man’s footwear himself. But here trousers had been stripped off and shirts torn from men who were not even dead, but only wounded and quivering. His Quaker kin did not have a realistic view of mankind.
Ahead of them, John Bunyan pulled up, yanked back by invisible reins. The boy stared around himself, scrutinizing the aftermath of slaughter, then the earth itself. He turned to Blake and Cobb.
“He ain’t here.”
“Calm down now,” Blake told him. “You sure this is the spot?”
“He was right here. I know it. Right here.”
“Maybe wild pigs et James,” Cobb said.
The twin lunged for him, but Blake was quicker, inserting himself between them. “That’s just Cobb.”
John Bunyan seethed. Knuckles bloodless on his rifle.
“Damn you, stop and think,” Blake told him. “Nobody carried him off. You just stop and think.”
The new idea sank in. “He’s only wounded.”
The possibility was difficult for Blake himself to accept, given the other twin’s multiple wounds and the way the boy had gone down like a drained hog. But he could see no other explanation.
“That’s right,” Blake told John Bunyan. “Nobody was about to lug James off. Now put on your thinking cap. Where would a wounded man take himself off to from here? If he could?”
A few trees and a dozen bodies over, a voice cried out one raw word of discovery: “Ezra!”
John Bunyan took on a trying-to-think look, but the boy’s mind had slowed to a crawl. There was too much freight in that wagon’s bed today. He shook his head. Heavily, reluctantly.
“That creek down there,” Blake told him. “Water.”
The twin took off at a run. Blake and Cobb walked after him.
“Just getting that boy’s hopes up,” Cobb said. “God’s a mean sumbitch.”
The formulation slapped Blake. He could never have said such words, not even now. But he had felt them. Often.
“You seen him, Quaker. That big lummox had more holes in him than a nigger’s longjohns. Even if he’s still alive, it won’t be for long.”
“Maybe it’ll be for long enough.”
Cobb cawed a laugh as they parted to pass beyond a mound of bodies. “You think they’re going to have them some frilly, store-bought good-bye, Quaker? Out of one of them illustrated weeklies?” He spit, but there was no wet. “James Bunyan’s just dying twice over now. What good’s it going to do that brother of his?”
They walked down the hill past their own strewn dead, ignoring the torments of the Yankee wounded, loyal only to their battered clan.
“Folks need to say good-bye,” Blake said. “It comforts them.”
“Naw,” Cobb responded. “They don’t, and it doesn’t. Folks just do what they think they’re supposed to do, no matter how it pains them.” He cackled. “Don’t it never strike you, Quaker, how the Yankees cry their eyes out over some whipped nigger they dreamed up, then go to church and worship the sumbitch who does all this? Don’t that seem like pissing in the whiskey jug to you?” They worked through the trampled thorns by the water and Cobb said, “Look at that.”
James Bunyan had dragged his butchered carcass down the hill into the pink and brown water. Reunited, his brother sat with him in midstream, cradling his torso on his lap, disfigured head to his bosom.
“You’re going to be just fine, James, just fine, just fine…” The unsavaged twin rocked his brother back and forth. Even from the bank, Blake could see that James had suffered not only the three wounds he had witnessed, but others as well. The portion of his uniform that lay in the water had turned charcoal and maroon, but the big chunk of meat John held against him was sheathed in blood in various stages of drying. It looked as though pranksters had drained buckets of blood from other wounded men, then poured them over James.
“Ma’s going to tend you,” John Bunyan said, almost singing. “They’re going to send you on home, and Ma’s going to see to you. She’ll have you back behind them mules come autumn, if not sooner … just you wait … and Rachel, she’s going to cry her eyes out from pure happy to see you coming up the hollow … they’ll all be shouting for you, James, shouting and dancing, just to see you come on home … you’re going to make me all jealous…”
“That boy’s dead,” Cobb said. His voice was quieter than usual.
“Well, we’re not going to tell John that. You understand me, Billie? Let him have his grief his own way. He’ll figure things out. Then we’ll see about the burying.”
Cobb didn’t answer directly. “Ought to look round for a new hat. Never will find mine again, not worth the bother. You think wearing a dead man’s hat would be bad luck, Quaker?”
“If God’s the way you say, it doesn’t matter. Come on, let’s get started.”
They splashed into the stream, its waters drawn from a slaughterhouse. Blake knelt down on the streambed stones, close enough to confirm that Cobb was right.
James Bunyan was dead.
The still-living twin looked up, expression as earnest as any Blake could remember. More earnest, even, than his mother’s looks had been when she clutched the last thing she possessed in her soon-to-end life, which had been him. He had not been allowed to see her after the cholera came over her and her Quaker parents moved her to the barn so she would not infect the house with her puking and shitting. Blake was glad now that he had been deprived of the sight of her dying. That was one wise thing his grandparents had done, no matter their reasons. Better to remember her faded beauty and beaten-down voice, rather than filth and delirium.
God wasn’t what Cobb called him. Describing God took bigger, harder words.
“We got to get James on back to the surgeons,” John Bunyan said. “We got to hurry on now.”
“Sure enough,” Blake told him, “that’s what we’re going to do. Where’s your rifle?”
“Yonder.” He pointed at the bank.
Blake turned to Cobb and held out his own weapon. “Here. Take this. And fetch his.”
“Nope,” Cobb said.
“Damn you, you’ll do—”
“Nope. You’re the sergeant. I figure that makes me the body-toter.”
Blake looked at little Cobb, then at the big, death-heavy body in the stream.
Cobb understood and said, “I’m tougher than you. You’re stronger, all right. But I’ll last. And you’re the sergeant. Wouldn’t want old Knock to think we was ignoring military courtesies, would we?”
So they went, John Bunyan stepping backward, slipping amid the round wet rocks and then on the bank-slime, lugging his brother’s body under the armpits. Cobb followed, holding the corpse beneath the knees.
“You get tired, you tell me,” Blake ordered.
“I won’t get tired, Sergeant Blake,” John Bunyan said. Then he spoke, in soothing murmurs, to his brother again.
Snake-strike close, a voice called, “Sergeant Blake? Sergeant Blake?”
Blake turned. Amid the ruined brambles, Lieutenant Devereaux struggled to lift his torso. Blooms of blood had spread over thigh and forearm.
“Help me.”
Blake’s first instinct was to stop playing along with John Bunyan and tell him and Cobb to pick up the lieutenant. But there was something going on beyond the brush that changed his mind.
“You put your brother down for a minute,” he told John Bunyan. “Put him down gently now. And wait for me.” To the lieutenant, he said, “We’ll get you on out of here, sir. Just hold on a little longer.”
He laid down two of the three rifles he lugged, keeping his own. And he march
ed out into the field where the slaughter had begun just hours before.
Scavengers were robbing the dead and wounded. Three of them. Shameless and unconcerned in the afternoon light.
Their pockets bulged.
He came close enough to draw the interest of one of the looters, who paused. The other two kept on mining pockets. A wounded man struggled faintly to resist.
“You,” Blake said. To all of them. He raised his rifle in their general direction, holding it just shy of his shoulder. In their greed, the three men had laid their own weapons aside.
All three of them rose now. Sizing him up.
“You need to stop what you’re doing. Right now.” He cocked his rifle. “And empty out your pockets.”
Bearded and ragged, the men straightened in defiance. One hitched up his trousers.
“You ain’t no sergeant of ours,” the rear man said. “So git along.”
Blake turned his rifle toward the speaker. “I pull this trigger, it won’t matter all that much whose sergeant I am.”
Instead of cowering, two of the men edged closer. The third kept still.
“Now, I ain’t got my letters all that good,” one of the men told Blake, “but I’ve got my numbers. And one shot from you still leaves two of us. That means at least two of us four are like to stay right here with these poor folk.” He smiled, snaggletoothed. “How you like that figuring, Sergeant Whoever-the-Hell?”
Blake saw Cobb before the men did. Cobb had worked around behind them. With a bobcat leap, he left the concealing greenery and slammed his rifle butt into the side of the rear man’s head. Shutting his iron-hard foot over the fallen man’s throat, he locked his weapon against his shoulder before the other two scavengers had time to turn.
“Why don’t y’all tell Sergeant Blake there about them numbers again?”
If the men had been little impressed with Blake, they took Cobb a great deal more seriously. Kind meets kind, Blake thought.
“We were just minding our own business.”
Cobb let go one of his mocking laughs. “Mighty fine business, too.”
Other men with more honorable concerns emerged from the creekbed, bearing their wounded blood relatives or blanket-mates. In the opposite direction, a band of litter bearers appeared, returning to their duties from a field hospital. Plenty of company now.
“Empty your pockets and go,” Blake told the robbers.
One of the men snickered. “You wouldn’t shoot a fellow soldier, Sergeant.”
Cobb spoke up. “He might, or might not. But me, I set myself a goal of killing five men today, and I’m only certain of four. So you git. And take this turd of yours with you.” He removed his bare foot from the soldier’s throat and the man moaned. Just for good measure, Cobb punched his heel into the man’s ribs.
Blake hailed two sets of stretcher bearers. They weren’t the regiment’s Moravian musicians performing their alternate duty, but they responded. He led them into the brambles.
The first two bearers took up Lieutenant Devereaux, who groaned as they lifted him onto the bloody stretcher and carried him off. But when the other bearers moved to shift James Bunyan, one, a red-haired boy, said, “This here fella’s dead.”
John Bunyan sprang up and broke the bearer’s nose, knocking him several feet backward.
“Stop it, damn you!” Blake ordered. His throat felt torn.
John Bunyan looked at him. Trying to remember who this man was and why his voice carried authority.
“James ain’t dead,” he proclaimed.
The two men stood frozen as the unmolested stretcher bearer tended to his comrade. They waited long enough for flies to find them. Then they stood there a bit longer.
At last, John Bunyan tightened his eyes on Blake’s. “You tell me. I don’t trust that Cobb. Or them folks. You tell me if James is…”
Blake knelt down. He took theatrical pains over the body, checking for a pulse in the ruined neck and at an unblemished wrist. He dropped his ear against the boy’s blood-encrusted chest to search for a heartbeat. Then he brought his face close to the horror that remained of James Bunyan’s jaw, testing for breath.
He was careful to stand up and slip into a ready stance before he spoke.
“He’s dead. I’m sorry.”
John Bunyan didn’t wail or cry. Nor did he lash out this time. He just nodded. Looking away from Blake, away even from the big carcass that had been his twin brother.
“I guess I knowed,” he said mildly. Then he added, “Ma’ll take it well enough. She’s the strong one. But this is going to ruin Pa, just ruin him. It don’t matter about him riding with those bushwhackers. James was still the apple of his eye.”
From mild, the twin eased to docile. He looked again at Blake, then at Cobb, and back to Blake. “Can we take him on, though? I don’t want to leave him here like this. I want to be able to tell Pa I buried him proper.”
Blake held out his rifle to Cobb. “My turn to carry.”
* * *
Colonel Burgwyn was dead and Lieutenant Colonel Lane was set to die. They heard the news as soon as they reached the much-diminished crowd of sprawled and sitting men behind the tavern ridge. Blake asked for Major Jones. He didn’t want to seem defiant on such a day and hoped to get permission to take James Bunyan off a little ways and bury him. But Knock Jones had gone to pay his last respects to Colonel Burgwyn.
Blake remembered the colonel soft-voiced in the night, not two full days before, as Burgwyn had tried to make a bookkeeper of him. The boy had risen to a man’s place well enough. And he had paid the cost. With many another.
Two other survivors from the company joined the burial party without being asked. After a testy exchange with some artillerymen drawn back into the reserve, a gunner lieutenant ordered his men to loan Blake and his companions a pick and two shovels.
“Just bring ’em back,” the lieutenant said.
Blake nodded.
As his death thickened, James grew heavier. They carried his body back through a swale, then angled away from the road to escape the screams from a field hospital.
“Only thing meaner than a red-haired woman’s a surgeon with a saw,” Cobb said.
“Now that’s a plain fact,” Corny Wright, one of the helpful pair of volunteers, confirmed.
“Just hope somebody’ll have the decency to bury me apart, when my time comes,” the other man, Charley Campbell, said. “I just can’t take to the idea of being thrown in a pit with folks I don’t know.”
“And shallow enough for dogs to have a chew,” Cobb put in, offering them his lopsided cave of a smile.
“We ain’t going to bury James shallow,” John Bunyan said. Blake caught the sudden fear, the dread, in the boy’s voice.
Before Blake could speak, Cobb told the twin, “No, we ain’t. No Yankee hound’s going to feast on one of our’n.”
“Digging’s a calming thing, anyhow,” Corny said. Cornelius Wright was a blacksmith, famed back home for making up in skill what he lacked in muscle. Charley Campbell, who had sworn off liquor young to please his mother, had doled out whiskey in his uncle’s tavern. Charley had been renowned for never touching a drop to his lips.
Blake understood what the two men were about. They had lost their campfire-mates that afternoon. They needed to belong again, to enter a new family within their greater clan. So Corny and Charley had leapt to make themselves useful. It was fine by Blake, who knew neither man was trouble. But he needed to make sure no lines were being crossed.
“I didn’t see Sergeant Dunlap back there where we’re putting down,” he said.
Corny grunted. “Yankee peckerwood shot him between the eyes.”
Weary men, they slowed almost to baby steps as they took the body up another hillock. On top, Blake said, “We’ll stop here.”
Charley sighed. “Be easier to dig, we was to put him in bottomland.”
But Blake wanted to do this one thing right and proper. For John Bunyan. Who would be needed in the coming da
ys. For John, his ma, the sister, and the worthless other brother who’d gone off with his pa to ride with Yankee bushwhackers. And he wanted to do it because it put some rightness to the day.
“This a good enough place?” he asked the surviving twin.
John Bunyan said, “Over there’s better. By them trees. So he’ll have shade.”
Blake expected a crack from Cobb about dead men not having a particular need for shade, but it didn’t come. Maybe Cobb was just too worn out to keep up his meanness. But the filthy little man with the ruined nose had been all right that day. Not least with the scavengers down by the creek.
Nor did any man complain of the additional labor of digging where there would be roots to hack through. They were too weary to protest against much of anything. They were willing—even Cobb was—to let Blake decide things.
Conscious of the need to return to what remained of the regiment, Blake paced out a length of earth where the falling sun threw shade, but the roots might not be so bad.
“Look here, John,” he said to the twin, who stood, still bewildered, over his brother’s body, “this strikes me as a fine spot. He’ll have the morning sun to warm him after the night, and shade all afternoon to keep him cool. Think this would be agreeable to your kin?”
Gone inward again, the twin nodded, but said nothing.
Aching to belong, Charley and Corny did more than their share of the work, going at it hard until Charley’s muscles shook visibly. John Bunyan replaced Charley in the hole. Except for Cobb, they were young men all, but looked of middle age.
“You get out of there, too, Corny,” Blake told him, taking off his coat. “You’ve done your part.”
Jumping into the rough-made hole, Blake thought how odd it was that he’d never contemplated the prospect of being laid in a mass grave himself. He’d thought about dying and had not been much troubled by the possibility, but the thought of lying forever crushed against or under another man’s rot queased him.
Tired, he thought. We’re all tired. Deadly in need of water.
“You, Charley Campbell,” he said. “If you’re rested enough, you gather up those canteens and go on over and see if that farmhouse can spare a little water without asking Yankee dollars for it.”