When they came into coin, they bought food and stole only when desperate, but salt was more expensive. For that they had to sneak into town.
At nightfall, Augie went alone. The day had sustained a lengthy downpour and the roads were sloppy mud. He evaded the horse tracks for firmer ground and stuck to the unlit streets, passing as a phantom in the night.
The general store and tavern shared a building, with the storefront just beyond the shaft of light cast from the tavern door. The bar was full at that hour. The pounding of boots and clinking of glasses should mask his activities. He used an iron skeleton key on the door—a tool provided by his abstruse companion that thus far had fitted every lock. The hollow tap of his boot heels on the floor boards would give him away, so Augie slipped off his muddy brogans and set them just inside the door. His greater concern was that the groan of his empty stomach would give him away.
In the storeroom he felt around for bundles of goods. He stuffed his pockets with hardtack, and unwrapped salted pork, eating some himself before storing the rest in the draw-bag at his waist. Augie was not so removed from civilization that theft was not deplorable to him, but the ache of hunger altered a man more than even fear or love.
He fumbled around for a bag of salt, straining in the dark to read the stencils on the sackcloth till he found it. Hefting the sack, he nearly upset a barrel of molasses, but it rocked slightly on its rim and settled. The raucous tavern noise continued through the shared wall, undisturbed. The sounds of drunkenness, of normality, was now as foreign to Augie as a forgotten dream, but it called to him still and a desire to belong swelled. He nestled up to the front window, out of view below the sill, and listened to people talking.
He learned the town was Fredericksburg in Virginia, which, had it been daylight, he would have known. They had been this way before. Aside from barroom gossip and the general gripes about money and politics, he heard that a few days before Union troops had marched through and turned back a division of Confederates at a place called Marye’s Heights.
The rattling of the shopkeeper’s key in the door lock caught Augie dead. He tensed, but before he could move from his position, the door swung in. It shielded him from the shopkeeper’s view, but also blocked his escape. From behind the door, the shopkeeper exclaimed surprise, having made a discovery—Augie’s muddy boots.
Like a shot, Augie sprang from a crouch, threw back the door, and snatched the boots in his arm as he trampled over the shopkeeper. Only then did he register that the shopkeeper was a lady, sprawled on the floor with her petticoat turned out. He staggered in his stocking feet, attempting to step into his boots. Her scream brought out the tavern patrons and the air split with a pistol shot. The mud was slick and he lost his boots, and dared not go back to get them.
The men from the tavern tended to the frightened shopkeeper.
"Who was it?" they asked.
"Some horrible, hairy creature," was all she could describe.
"Must’ve been a Yank," someone said. They all laughed.
The barn where Mr. Bagby was holed up was down an embankment from the farmhouse, near the slave quarters. Augie returned soaked in mud, eliciting a guffaw from Mr. Bagby.
"Ho! You’re a sight. Didja find vittles?"
Augie dropped the pouch in Mr. Bagby’s lap. "Here," he said gruffly. "Eat up."
Mr. Bagby grabbed hungrily at the food, taking large bites of each. "Lost your boots," he said through a full mouth. Pork juice dripped into his beard. "Tut-tut. You’ll catch your death with wet feet." He smacked his lips. "Where’s the salt?"
Augie ignored him and sat down hard on the straw, unsettling a cow, who mooed her annoyance. He felt like kicking at her. Instead, he peeled off his soiled socks, releasing a foul odor in the musky barn.
Mr. Bagby pointed a lanky finger at his cart. "Brown sack on the left," he said. He was not one to interrupt his meal with unnecessary movement.
Augie climbed to his bare feet and fetched the sack. Inside he found a worn out pair of moccasin leggings. They smelled like dead fish.
"You want these?" He grimaced at the sibilant whistle blowing through the gap in his teeth.
Mr. Bagby shook his head. "Yours now. I can resole ’em for you. Grab those pelts, too."
Augie brought him the materials. Mr. Bagby wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then, with nimble fingers, extracted a needle and thread from a flap in his belt. He sucked on one end of the thread and said: "So, you gonna tell me what burr got in your britches?"
Augie shrugged. He reserved himself to not talking much since the beating. He had become conscious of which words he had difficulty saying—anything with a th sounded as a d—which naturally led to just keeping quiet all the time.
"We’ve been here already," he said after a while. "Still in Virginia."
"Have we?" Mr. Bagby sniffed the air. "What town?"
"Fredericksburg." The f came out fft.
Mr. Bagby grew solemn remembering the dead they had found last winter.
"We’re going in circles," Augie complained.
"We go where they are." Mr. Bagby selected a skunk pelt from the sack and rolled it with the hide turned out. "We have a task."
"You have a task. I’m just out to deliver a letter for my friend."
Not looking up from his work, Mr. Bagby engaged him. "It has been some months and you haven’t gone to do that yet, I notice. And leave me here to do my task. You ought to have that letter committed to memory, as much as you read it." At the mention, Augie blushed. "But you stay," Mr. Bagby said, "you help me."
"You think I’m afraid to go."
"Did I say that? My apologies."
To Augie’s ears, the words were not sincere, and he was prepared to continue his defense when he realized that Mr. Bagby was scraping off the skunk fur with the edge of a knife. Augie snatched Mr. Bagby’s wrist and flipped his hand over. He concealed a wavy-bladed dagger.
"What’s this? You said you had no weapons."
"A pugio, a tool." Mr. Bagby squirmed as Augie took up the knife to examine it, hefting it to see how it felt in his hand. "A blade has many uses," he justified lamely.
"This isn’t government issue. It’s not Confederate, is it?" Augie ran his finger over embossed letters in the iron. "What’s SPQR?"
"It’s mine." Mr. Bagby forcibly confiscated the knife and returned to work on the skunk pelt.
"You had a knife the whole time. Why didn’t you use it against those Union guards?"
Mr. Bagby scraped harder. "They are not our enemy."
Augie threw up his hands. "I don’t get you. You’re all about your task. Well, you’ll get your fill of mementos for your collection in the morning."
Mr. Bagby’s head jerked up. "Why?"
"I overheard talk at the tavern. The armies have clashed nearby. Should be plenty of dead on both sides."
"How long ago?"
"A few days. A week."
Mr. Bagby’s face rippled with anger, and he threw his materials together. "Why didn’t you say something earlier?"
"The dead aren’t going anywhere."
"We have to hurry." He jammed the leggings into Augie’s hands. "These’ll do for now. Get them on." He snuffled deeply, like a person suffering the effects of a severe cold. "How could I not smell them? The rain—it must’ve washed away the scent."
Augie remained rooted while his companion was abuzz. "You’re crazy. It’s the middle of the night."
Mr. Bagby threw open the barn door. "We might already be too late."
An hour later, they came upon a stone wall. In a trench running along the wall, lines of soldiers had been laid with care, their arms positioned at their sides. The stench of death clung like a Virginia summer. The next morning a burial detail would provide a proper resting place.
Mr. Bagby went to discuss with the soldiers on guard to let them have access to the bodies. It was a mystery how exactly Mr. Bagby persuaded them, but he was nearly always successful.
Augie walked along the trench,
taking a moment to feel their spirits. In the moonlight, the blood on their faces appeared black.
The guards would leave them alone for one hour. Mr. Bagby sank waist-deep in the trench with the corpses, tugging at stiff limbs, while Augie pointed out candidates and collected pieces. The crack of split bones and cartilage ruptured the stillness.
While they worked, the pale moonlight faded under a shroud of fog. Augie looked heavenward to see if the storm had returned, and something damp brushed his cheek. He sensed movement just beyond his vision. It was too quick to spot, but he could feel its presence.
"Did you see that?"
Mr. Bagby perked his ears. It took him only a moment to decide. "Quickly! Help me!"
Manic, he tugged at an arm until the sinew tore from the bone, then discarded the limb and scratched at another corpse. He peeled back fingers until they snapped off like chicken bones. He ripped an ear clean off.
"What’s gotten into you?" Augie hollered.
Mr. Bagby wasn’t collecting; he was just separating parts as quickly as he could work.
Then sashes of white whipped past them, all around, snapping the air like rippling banners. They were chittering like birds. The fog obscured their features but their movements were lithe, fleet.
Augie was enraptured. "What are they? Angels?"
Mr. Bagby paused. "They’re not angels."
He dared to glance up and, as if waiting for him, one of them spread its wings, revealing a sepulchral white, crested head with eyes like charcoal. A hole opened up in the haze—an O-mouth crowned with needle teeth.
Augie recoiled. Mr. Bagby’s hands dragged him into the trench. Augie didn’t fight—he trusted Mr. Bagby, even when, with preternatural strength, he rolled messy corpses over the top of them both, hiding them within the pile of the dead.
The stench was overpowering. They couldn’t breathe. All the fluids expelled by a body after death dripped on their faces. On the surface, the creature passed over a few bodies before latching onto a corpse near enough that Augie could see through the spaces. Its teeth stabbed into the exposed wound in the corpse’s chest, and the mouth suckled like a child at the breast. The body convulsed as though its insides were being sucked out.
Other creatures descended on the trench. Each rooted at a soldier’s wounds, making the wet sounds of a dog feeding on a slab of meat.
Augie turned his eyes to Mr. Bagby; shockingly, he appeared to be praying. Augie despised being vulnerable more than he feared death. Moving fast, he shoved off the corpse hiding him, clambered out of the trench over bodies, and grappled for the handcart. He knocked it over, spilling the bags, then tore them open. His hand found cold metal.
Brandishing the dagger, and with a savage cry, he hacked and slashed at the creatures. The blade sliced through mist, finding no purchase, as if he were fighting a cloud.
"This is your darkness?" Augie shouted, hissing the s.
He tried again, his mind unable to fathom why he was not cutting through their pale flesh. They didn’t respond to Augie at all. He might as well not have been there.
"How do you stop them?"
Mr. Bagby’s response was distant. "Get there first. If they arrive, then we’ve lost."
Augie stood helpless in a stream of corpses while the creatures engorged on the dead. Only the incomplete bodies that Mr. Bagby had hacked were spared. Glutted and bulging with purplish veins, the creatures departed into the darkness, leaving only the husks.
Mr. Bagby struggled to crawl out of the trench. Augie didn’t lend a hand.
"When you told me about what you do," he said, "about the fingers, warding off the darkness—I thought you were mad. This is what you protect them from? These demons?"
Mr. Bagby wiped fluids from his brow. "I don’t know what they are, truthfully. I call them wraiths."
"You knew they were coming," Augie accused.
"They’re always coming. It’s just that we’ve been ahead of them. You can’t fight them. They have no form. You can only thwart them. This is what we are tasked to do."
"Don’t start that. You have a task. You! I’ve got a letter. Goddammit! What have you got me doing here?"
At dawn they caught up to the armies near Chancellorsville. The waning moon lingered like a specter. The casualties were staggering—thousands dead, thousands more in agony. Every coat was stained.
They walked through the rolling field, trailing the squeaking cart. The field was fetid with the odor of gunpowder. Mr. Bagby looked over each downed soldier.
From the chatter of the Confederate wounded, the Union had the heaviest casualties, but the South had suffered a terrible loss of their own. General Stonewall Jackson had been wounded by his own men and his left arm amputated.
Upon hearing this news, Mr. Bagby remarked, "Good. Then he doesn’t need us."
Augie squatted at the side of a cavalryman with a mortal head wound but otherwise whole. There was no outward sign that the wraiths had been there, except that the bodies lacked substance, like the carapace discarded by a cicada—hollow. He clipped off a finger and it cracked like a branch on a decayed tree.
"What the hell are you doing?" The thundering voice caused him to drop the finger. A red-faced Rebel barked obscenities at them. Mr. Bagby had not gotten their permission and the soldiers were incensed.
They hurried off the field under threat of a firing squad and started walking without direction.
Mr. Bagby had changed in those hours. His light had dimmed. "This friend of yours’ family," he said. "Where do they live?"
"A town in southern Pennsylvania."
"We’ll head there. You can deliver your letter and be on your way."
"All right. If that’s what you want." Augie knew it wasn’t, but he was done arguing.
"It will take a few weeks," Mr. Bagby said.
"What about the task? What about the soldiers?"
"That’s not your problem," Mr. Bagby said. At the fork, they took the northern road. "What’s the name of this town?"
Augie had read the name a thousand times on the envelope.
"Gettysburg,"
*****
The summer sun had arrived and by the time they got to Gettysburg it had scorched the bald patch on Augie’s head. He felt renewed being back in his home state, and his spirit soared. Mr. Bagby, though, had become detached, with signs of mourning. They hadn’t come to a battlefield since that day in Virginia.
Gettysburg was only a few blocks square. Mr. Bagby elected to wait in a stable at the edge of town. He was more comfortable in the company of beasts, he said. Augie knew the address on Washington Street like it was his own. His idyllic imagination of the town battled with the reality, which unsettled his nerves. But he had come all this way on a task of his own.
Augie had grown up in Western Pennsylvania in a town much like this. He met George Nace in the Pennsylvania Reserves, and they had marched side by side. Back home, Augie had little family. His mother had died years ago, and his father was always on the river. In contrast, family had a presence in George’s life. They wrote to him often, telling of life back home, and he would read these letters out loud. Augie had even fallen in love a little with George’s sweetheart, Betsy Lynn, from the caring words she wrote to George. No one had ever cared for Augie in that way. Secretly he hoped to find belonging with this family, not as a replacement for their son, but, maybe, as a balm for their sorrow. That was why he fled that cornfield at Antietam, but in doing that he felt unworthy of this family. So he was fleeing still. But witnessing the wraiths had made him see the importance of honoring the dead. He owed it to George to give his family his last regards.
The address belonged to a yellow stone-faced Colonial. Augie’s stomach fluttered. From the lane, he spotted a man hobbling the house steps on crutches, the lower portion of his left leg missing. Augie rushed to his aid, but the man shirked off assistance.
"I can do it," he said testily. He was dressed in a black frock coat and top hat, his pant leg folded up at
the knee. "I apologize. It’s things like stairs that get me short-tempered these days." Getting wind of Augie, he quickly covered his nose with a gloved hand.
Augie became self-conscious of the sickly sweet odor he cast. This reaction to his disheveled appearance was common. He regretted coming to the house in this state and nearly fled without asking the gentleman if he knew the Nace family, but then was struck by the man’s familiarity. A trim black beard and checked eyebrows. A sleek angular nose with flared nostrils. The fine clothing had beguiled him, but it was what he knew to be fact that astonished him. His tongue hardly worked in his mouth.
"George?"
"Yes?"
"George Nace?"
The gentleman was curt: "What is it?"
He was supposed to be dead. The man standing before him was impossible. But after Marye’s Heights nothing was impossible.
Augie fumbled his hand inside his coat. "I have a letter," he said, "in the event that you died."
George scowled and took the letter with pinched fingers. "It was a clerical error." He tapped his crutch. "Just a casualty."
The paper was worn thin and fell open from its many readings. Augie had always been careful when he handled the letter, but he was mortified to see now that there were stains and that the words had faded in the sun. Only in his imagination was it still pristine.
George read silently and his brow rimpled. "Where did you get this?" His face flashed with anger. He saw the soiled Union coat Augie wore and he grabbed a handful of the material, shaking him. "My friend August Boorman had this letter to give to my family, but he was lost at Antietam, where they took my leg. When I was discharged, I made the trip out to Monongahela to tell his father. Then, months ago a Union soldier confiscated Augie’s identification card from a vagabond. That was you—you stole Augie’s coat!"
"No..." Augie shook his head but he couldn’t explain.
"I’m calling a police officer." George cocked his head and called out, "Police!"
Augie squirmed in George’s grip and broke free. Two buttons clattered to the ground. He ran, and with only one full leg, George couldn’t go after him. George called out again for the police and Augie heard a woman’s voice—"What is it, George?"—but he rounded a corner, out of sight.
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