Prayers to Broken Stones

by Dan Simmons

  “Oh,” I said. The horses’ hooves made soft sounds in the dirt of the road. The fields we were passing were as empty as my mind.

  “Goddamn lie,” said the Captain. “He’s goin’ be back here. No doubt about it, is there, Johnny?”

  “No, sir.” We came over the brow of a low hill and the old man slowed the wagon. His pegleg had been making a rhythmic sound as it rattled against the wooden slat where it was braced and as we slowed the tempo changed. We had passed out of the thickest part of the forest but dark farmfields opened out to the left and right between stands of trees and low stone walls. “Damn,” he said. “Did you see Forney’s house back there, boy?”

  “I … no, sir. I don’t think so.” I had no idea if we had passed Forney’s house. I had no idea who Forney was. I had no idea what I was doing wandering around the countryside at night with this strange old man. I was amazed to find myself suddenly on the verge of tears.

  Captain Montgomery pulled the team to a stop under some trees set back off the right side of the road. He panted and wheezed, struggling to dismount from the driver’s seat. “Help me down, Boy. It’s time we bivouacked.”

  I ran around to offer my hand but he used my shoulder as a brace and dropped heavily to the ground. A strange, sour scent came from him and I was reminded of an old, urine-soaked mattress in a shed near the tracks behind our school where Billy said hobos slept. It was fully dark now. I could make out the Big Dipper above a field across the road. All around us, crickets and tree toads were tuning up for their nightly symphony.

  “Bring some of them blankets along, Boy.” He had picked up a fallen limb to use as a walking stick as he moved clumsily into the trees. I grabbed some Army blankets from the back of the wagon and followed him.

  We crossed a wheat field, passed a thin line of trees, and climbed through a meadow before stopping under a tree where broad leaves stirred to the night breeze. The Captain directed me to lay the blankets out into rough bedrolls and then he lowered himself until he was lying with his back propped against the tree and his wooden leg resting on his remaining ankle. “You hungry, Boy?”

  I nodded in the dark. The old man rummaged in the canvas bag and handed me several strips of something I thought was meat but which tasted like heavily salted leather. I chewed on the first piece for almost five minutes before it was soft enough to swallow. Just as my lips and tongue were beginning to throb with thirst, Captain Montgomery handed me a wineskin of water and showed me how to squirt it into my open mouth.

  “Good jerky, ain’t it, Boy?” he asked.

  “Delicious,” I answered honestly and worked to bite off another chunk.

  “That Iverson was a useless son-of-a-bitch,” the Captain said around his own jawful of jerky. It was as if he were picking up the sentence he had begun half an hour earlier back at the wagon. “He would’ve been a harmless son-of-a-bitch if those dumb bastards in my own 20th North Carolina hadn’t elected him camp commander back before the war begun. That made Iverson a colonel sort of automatic like, and by the time we’d fought our way up North, the stupid little bastard was in charge of one of Rodes’s whole damn brigades.”

  The old man paused to work at the jerky with his few remaining teeth and I reflected on the fact that the only other person I had ever heard curse anything like the Captain was Mr. Bolton, the old fire chief who used to sit out in front of the firehouse on Third Street and tell stories to the new recruits, apparently oblivious to the uninvited presence of us younger members of the audience. Perhaps, I thought, it has something to do with wearing a uniform.

  “His first name was Alfred,” said the Captain. The old man’s voice was soft, preoccupied, and his southern accent was so thick that the meaning of each word reached me some seconds after the sound of it. It was a bit like lying in bed, already dreaming, and hearing the soft voices of my mother and father coming upstairs through a curtain of sleep. Or like magically understanding a foreign language. I closed my eyes to hear better. “Alfred,” said the Captain, “just like his daddy. His daddy’d been a Senator from Georgia, good friend of the President.” I could feel the old man’s gaze on me. “President Davis. It was Davis, back when he was a senator too, who give young Iverson his first commission. That was back durin’ the trouble with Mexico. Then when the real war come up, Iverson and his daddy got ’em up a regiment. Them days, when a rich goddamn family like the Iversons wanted to play soldiers, they just bought themselves a regiment. Bought the goddamn uniforms and horses and such. Then they got to be officers. Goddamn grown men playin’ at toy soldiers, Boy. Only once’t the real war begun, we was the toy soldiers, Johnny.”

  I opened my eyes. I could not recall ever having seen so many stars. Above the slope of the meadow, constellations came all the way down to the horizon; others were visible between the dark masses of trees. The Milky Way crossed the sky like a bridge. Or like the pale tracks of an army long since passed by.

  “Just goddamned bad luck we got Iverson,” said the Captain, “because the brigade was good ’un and the 20th North Carolina was the best goddamn regiment in Ewell’s corps.” The old man shifted to look at me again. “You wasn’t with us yet at Sharpsburg, was you, Johnny?”

  I shook my head, feeling a chill go up my back as he again called me by some other boy’s name. I wondered where that boy was now.

  “No, of course not,” said Captain Montgomery. “That was in ’62. You was still in school. The regiment was still at Fredericksburg after the campaign. Somebody’d ordered up a dress parade and Nate’s band played ‘Dixie.’ All of the sudden, from acrost the Rappahannock, the Yankee band starts playin’ Dixie back at us. Goddamnest thing, Boy. You could hear that music so clear acrost the water it was like two parts of the same band playin’. So our band—all boys from the 20th—they commence to playin’ ‘Yankee Doodle.’ All of us standin’ there at parade rest in that cold sunlight, feelin’ mighty queer by then, I don’t mind tellin’ you. Then, when our boys is done with ‘Yankee Doodle,’ just like they all rehearsed it together, both bands commence playin’ ‘Home Sweet Home.’ Without even thinkin’ about it, Perry and ol’ Thomas and Jeffrey an’ me and the whole line starts singin’ along. So did Lieutenant Williams—young Mr. Oliver hisself—and before long the whole brigade’s singin’—the damn Yankees too—their voices comin’ acrost the Rappahannock and joinin’ ours like we’d been one big choir that’d gotten busted up by mistake or accident or somethin’. I tell you, Boy, it was sorta like singin’ with ghosts. And sorta like we was ghosts our own selves.”

  I closed my eyes to hear the deep voices singing that sad, sweet song, and I realized suddenly that even grownups—soldiers even—could feel as lonely and homesick as I had felt earlier that evening. Realizing that, I found that all of my own homesickness had fled. I felt that I was where I should be, part of the Captain’s army, part of all armies, camping far from home and uncertain what the next day would bring but content to be with my friends. My comrades. The voices were as real and as sad as the soughing of wind through the mid-summer leaves.

  The Captain cleared his throat and spat. “And then that bastard Iverson kilt us,” he said. I heard the sound of buckles as the old man unstrapped his false leg.

  I opened my eyes as he pulled his blanket over his shoulders and turned his face away. “Get some sleep, Boy,” came his muffled voice. “We step off at first light come mornin’.”

  I pulled my own blanket up to my neck and laid my cheek against the dark soil. I listened for the singing but the voices were gone. I went to sleep to the sound of the wind in the leaves sounding like angry whispers in the night.

  I awoke once before sunrise when there was just enough false light to allow me to see Captain Montgomery’s face a few inches from my own. The old man’s hat had slipped off in the night and the top of his head was a relief map of reddened scalp scarred by liver spots, sores, and a few forlorn wisps of white hair. His brow was furrowed as if in fierce concentration, eyebrows two dark eruptions of ha
ir, eyelids lowered but showing a line of white at the bottom. Soft snores whistled out of his broken gourd of a mouth and a thin line of drool moistened his whiskers. His breath was as dry and dead as a draft of air from a cave unsealed after centuries of being forgotten.

  I stared at the time-scoured flesh of the old face inches from mine, at the swollen and distorted fingers clutching, childlike, at his blanket, and I realized, with a precise and prescient glimpse at the terrible fate of my own longevity, that age was a curse, a disease, and that all of us unlucky to survive our childhoods were doomed to suffer and perish from it. Perhaps, I thought, it is why young men go willingly to die in wars.

  I pulled the blanket across my face.

  When I awoke again, just after sunrise, the old man was standing ten paces from the tree and staring toward Gettysburg. Only a white cupola was visible above the trees, its dome and sides painted in gold from the sun. I disentangled myself from the blankets and rose to my feet, marveling at how stiff and clammy and strange I felt. I had never slept out of doors before. Reverend Hodges had promised us a camp-out but the Troop had been too busy learning close order drill and semaphore. I decided that I might skip the camp-out part of the agenda. Staggering upright on legs still half asleep, I wondered how Captain Montgomery had strapped on his wooden leg without awakening me.

  “Mornin’, Boy,” he called as I returned from the edge of the woods where I had relieved myself. His gaze never left the cupola visible to the southeast.

  We had breakfast while standing there under the tree—more beef jerky and water. I wondered what Billy, the Reverend, and the other Scouts were having down in the tents near the field kitchens. Pancakes, probably. Perhaps with bacon. Certainly with tall glasses of cold milk.

  “I was there with Mr. Oliver when muster was called on the mornin’ of the first,” rasped the old man. “1,470 present for duty. 114 was officers. I wasn’t among ’em. Still had my sergeant stripes then. Wasn’t ’til the second Wilderness that they gave me the bar. Anyway, word had come the night before from A.P. Hill that the Federals was massin’ to the south. Probably figurin’ to cut us off. Our brigade was the first to turn south to Hill’s call.

  “We heard firin’ as we come down the Heidlersburg Pike, so General Rodes took us through the woods ’til we got to Oak Hill.” He turned east, smoothly pivoting on his wooden leg, shielding his eyes from the sun. “Bout there, I reckon, Johnny. Come on.” The old man spun around and I rolled the blankets and scurried to follow him back down the hill toward the southeast. Toward the distant cupola.

  “We come right down the west side of this ridge then, too, didn’t we, Boy? Not so many trees then. Been marchin’ since before sunup. Got here sometime after what should’ve been dinner time. One o’clock, maybe one-thirty. Had hardtack on the hoof. Seems to me that we stopped a while up the hill there so’s Rodes could set out some guns. Perry an’ me was glad to sit. He wanted to start another letter to our Ma, but I told him there wasn’t goin’ to be time. There wasn’t, either, but I wish to hell I’d let him write the damned thing.

  “From where we was, you could see the Yanks comin’ up the road from Gettysburg and we knew there’d be a fight that day. Goddamnit, Boy, you can put them blankets down. We ain’t goin’ to need ’em today.”

  Startled, I dropped the blankets in the weeds. We had reached the lower end of the meadow and only a low, split rail fence separated us from what I guessed to be the road we had come up the night before. The Captain swung his pegleg over the fence and after we crossed we both paused a minute. I felt the growing heat of the day as a thickness in the air and a slight pounding in my temples. Suddenly there came the sound of band music and cheering from the south, dwindled by distance.

  The Captain removed a stained red kerchief from his pocket and mopped at his neck and forehead. “Goddamn idiots,” he said. “Celebratin’ like it’s a county fair. Damned nonsense.”

  “Yessir,” I said automatically, but at that moment I was thrilled with the idea of the Reunion and with the reality of being with a veteran—my veteran—walking on the actual ground he had fought on. I realized that someone seeing us from a distance might have mistaken us for two soldiers. At that moment I would have traded my Boy Scout khaki for butternut brown or Confederate gray and would have joined the Captain in any cause. At that moment I would have marched against the Eskimoes if it meant being part of an army, setting off at sunrise with one’s comrades, preparing for battle, and generally feeling as alive as I felt at that instant.

  The Captain had heard my “yessir” but he must have noticed something else in my eyes because he leaned forward, rested his weight on the fence, and brought his face close to mine. “Goddamnit, Johnny, don’t you fall for such nonsense twice. You think these dumb sons-of-bitches would’ve come back all this way if they was honest enough to admit they was celebratin’ a slaughterhouse?”

  I blinked.

  The old man grabbed my tunic with his swollen fist. “That’s all it is, Boy, don’t you see? A goddamn abattoir that was built here to grind up men and now they’re reminiscin’ about it and tellin’ funny stories about it and weepin’ old man tears about what good times we had when we was fed to it.” With his free hand he stabbed a finger in the direction of the cupola. “Can’t you see it, Boy? The holdin’ pens and the delivery chutes and the killin’ rooms—only not everybody was so lucky as to have their skull busted open on the first pop, some of us got part of us fed to the grinder and got to lay around and watch the others swell up and bloat in the heat. Goddamn slaughterhouse, Boy, where they kill you and gut you down the middle … dump your insides out on the goddamn floor and kick ’em aside to get at the next fool … hack the meat off your bones, grind up the bones for fertilizer, then grind up everythin’ else you got that ain’t prime meat and wrap it in your own guts to sell it to the goddamn public as sausage. Parades. War stories. Reunions. Sausage, Boy.” Panting slightly, he released me, spat, wiped his whiskers and stared a long minute at the sky. “And we was led into that slaughterhouse by a Judas goat named Iverson, Johnny,” he said at last, his voice empty of all emotion. “Never forget that.”

  The hill continued to slope gently downward as we crossed the empty road and entered a field just to the east of an abandoned farmhouse. Fire had gutted the upper stories years ago and the windows on the first floor were boarded up, but irises still grew tall around the foundation and along the overgrown lane leading to sagging outbuildings. “John Forney’s old place,” said Captain Montgomery. “He was still here when I come back in ’98. Told me then that none of his farmhands’d stay around here after night begun to settle. Because of the Pits.”

  “Because of what, sir?” I was blinking in the early heat and glare of a day in which the temperatures certainly would reach the mid-nineties. Grasshoppers hopped mindlessly in the dusty grass.

  The old man did not seem to hear my question. The cupola was no longer visible because we were too close to the trees, but the Captain’s attention was centered on the field which ran downhill less than a quarter of a mile to a thicker line of trees to the southeast. He withdrew the pistol from his coat and my heart pounded as he drew back the hammer until it clicked. “This is a double-action, Boy,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

  We forced our way through a short hedge and began crossing the field at a slow walk. The old man’s wooden leg made soft sounds in the soil. Grass and thistles brushed at our legs. “That son-of-a-bitch Iverson never got this far,” said the Captain. “Ollie Williams said he heard him give the order up the hill there near where Rodes put his guns out. ‘Give ’em hell,’ Iverson says, then goes back up to his tree there to sit in the shade an’ eat his lunch. Had him some wine too. Had wine every meal when the rest of us was drinkin’ water out of the ditch. Nope, Iverson never come down here ’til it was all over and then it was just to say we’d tried to surrender and order a bunch of dead men to stand up and salute the general. Come on, Boy.”

  We moved slowly
across the field. I could make out a stone fence near the treeline now, half-hidden in the dapple of leaf shadow. There seemed to be a jumble of tall grass or vines just this side of the wall.

  “They put Daniels’ brigade on our right.” The Captain’s pistol gestured toward the south, the barrel just missing the brim of my hat. “But they didn’t come down ’til we was shot all to pieces. Then Daniels’ boys run right into the fire of Stone’s 149th Pennsylvania … them damn sharpshooters what were called the Bogus Bucktails for some damn reason I don’t recall now. But we was all alone when we come down this way before Daniels and Ramseur and O’Neil and the rest come along. Iverson sent us off too soon. Ramseur wasn’t ready for another half hour and O’Neal’s brigade turned back even before they got to the Mummasburg Road back there.”

  We were half way across the field by then. A thin screen of trees to our left blocked most of the road from sight. The stone wall was less than three hundred yards ahead. I glanced nervously at the cocked pistol. The Captain seemed to have forgotten he was carrying it.

  “We come down like this at an angle,” he said. “Brigade stretched about halfway acrost the field, sorta slantin’ northeast to southwest. The 5th North Carolina was on our left. The 20th was right about here, couple of hundred of us in the first line, and the 23rd and 12th was off to our right there and sorta trailin’ back, the right flank of the 12th about halfway to that damned railroad cut down there.”

  I looked toward the south but could see no railroad tracks. There was only the hot, wide expanse of field which may have once borne crops but which had now gone back to brambles and sawgrass.

  The Captain stopped, panting slightly, and rested his weight on his good leg. “What we didn’t know, Johnny, was that the Yanks was all set behind that wall there. Thousands of them. Not showin’ a goddamn cap or battle flag or rifle barrel. Just hunkerin’ down there and waitin’. Waitin’ for the animals to come in the door so the slaughter could begin. And Colonel Iverson never even ordered skirmishers out in front of us. I never even seen an advance without skirmishers, and there we was walkin’ across this field while Iverson sat up on Oak Hill eatin’ lunch and havin’ another glass of wine.”