Faded Coat of Blue

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  I did not know where he was going, but I followed. With Molloy coming on behind.

  “Like old times, an’t?” Molloy yelled. Then Trenchard fired again and Molloy’s horse crumpled, hit square in the chest. I remember the shock in the horse’s eyes, seen for a sliver of a second, worse than the fear in a man’s. Molloy went flying over the mane and rolled along the street. The fall would have killed a man given to sobriety.

  I could not stop. Getting Trenchard, bringing him down, was all that was left to me now. I did not think of wife or child, or of God or justice. I thought only of making that man pay.

  Trenchard’s horse began to buck him, trying to shake off his tyranny. Blood hosed the street. I saw the foam on the beast’s mouth, and then the vomit of blood. But the animal kept its footing.

  I smelled an ugly smell, ugly and big, as I followed him down that street. Then Trenchard was on foot, running. He fired backward toward me another time, then dodged to avoid the light of a gaslamp. He dashed toward a row of low barns. The Army remount stables. Had he led me into a snake pit, I would have liked it better.

  Just before me, Trenchard’s horse went down at last, saddle twisting onto its side. It lifted its head to look back, trying to examine its wound. Behind me, I heard Molloy shouting that I should wait for him. But there was no time. And I was out of my element. I did not even know if I could stop my horse to get off.

  The horse helped. It broke its gallop and trotted over to its wounded companion. Then it stopped and lowered its head in sympathy.

  I slid off its back, jamming my bad leg to the ground first, of course. But I had no time for pain, no more than I did for thinking. I took off after Trenchard, watching his back disappear into the door of one of the great barns.

  The stables were vast. There were ten long barns, knocked up shoddy of pine, connected by covered ways and filled with horses by the thousand. I did not know how I would find him in that labyrinth. But I was determined to do it.

  He would be after a horse. But he would be too clever to stop before he had left a confusion of distance and turns behind him. And he would want a saddle, if he could find one. For an officer with such commanding looks and an imperious tone may bully his way through many a guard post on a proper mount. But bareback would want explaining.

  I could hear the turmoil of the place from a hundred feet away. The neighing and kicking. The sheer hatefulness of the brutes. But I did not hesitate. Not that night. I ran into the barn as if leading a bayonet charge, pistol up, fearless in my fury. Had Trenchard thought to hide in the first stall, he could have shot me dead and finished the business.

  But he would be frightened now. I sensed that in him. For he was a man unaccustomed to reacting. He was the one who gave the commands, who pulled the strings, who captained the team. This was a new experience, see.

  Lamps hung wherever the barns divided, but their wicks were turned low. Twas almost the darkness of Mrs. Fowler’s house in there, and worsened by the thrust of great heads out of the stalls and all their nipping and meanness. I tried to hug the line of wooden gates, but the animals would not let me. So I ended by limping down the middle of the way, pistol ready, trying to hear past the noise of the disturbed animals.

  Somewhere behind me, Molloy’s voice called, “Sergeant Jones?”

  I tried to recall the skills you learn as a young soldier on outpost, the hearing in between sounds and the reading of the darkness.

  I worked my way from one barn to another, with the horse fear greater in me than any dread of Trenchard’s pistol. I knew that he might be hiding. Waiting for me anywhere. I tried to count back over the number of times he had fired.

  He might have one round left.

  One would be enough, if he fired first.

  I hated the stink and grossness of the place. It clawed at my senses. The pulsing of blood in me seemed ready to burst my head.

  Was that the sound of a man?

  I paused.

  It did not come again.

  I was deep in the maze of stables. And had not seen a single groom or guard. The holiday it must have been. My misfortune. And that of the horses.

  Well in the distance, Molloy called to me again.

  I turned into another stable row. White heads and brown and black thrust over the ledges of their stall floors, curious, chewing, sensing only the presence of a man, but not his purpose. One of them gave the wall a kick as I went by.

  Trenchard was probably gone, I realized. Escaped. And that would be that. Oh, I could publicize his doings, and shame him. But that was not enough for me. Perhaps it was revenge I wanted, perhaps Trenchard was right. But I still believe it was justice that I sought, behind my veil of anger.

  I went softly, with the strewn hay muffling my footsteps. As it would muffle Trenchard’s, were he still in the barns. Without my cane, my leg wanted to thwart my will. It was a miserable thing, that contrary pain, and it urged me to quit. But I refused. For weakness is the devil’s door into our lives.

  I was too close when I realized that the sounds ahead were different. I did not stop in time to do things properly.

  Turning a corner, I saw him. Saddling a gray. With his pistol flat on the ground by a stable lamp he had taken down.

  “Trenchard,” I shouted. Gun raised. He dropped toward his pistol and I shot him. My Colt took a fine piece out of his shoulder and applied it to the door of a stall. Horses reared and screamed and thumped. The gray nearly trampled him, then came to a halt between us.

  Beneath the horse’s belly, I saw Trenchard strain his left hand toward the pistol. The man was not a coward.

  “Don’t do it,” I told him. I got the pistol up again, hammer cocked. Stepping to the side of the horse, I pointed the long barrel at the swell where his neck joined his chest. There was rage and aching on his face. “For I will kill you and like it.”

  He withdrew his hand.

  I thought I had him then. But I made the mistake of watching the pistol, not the man. With an athlete’s power, he rolled backward and grasped the lamp, hurling it down in the straw with his good arm.

  The glass shattered, and flames spread quicker than the Mutiny.

  The horse danced, with fire licking its hooves. I could not get a clear shot. Trenchard ran bleeding. Fire rose around me at a speed I would not have thought possible. I tried to plunge through the flames, but the horse nearly trampled me and I fell against a pillar. I put one last shot down the line of stalls as Trenchard faded into the darkness, his right arm hanging dead. But I did not aim well.

  Then he was gone. And there was only the fire.

  Chapter 16

  Flames exploded around me. The bales of straw and pine planking might as well have been gunpowder. The roof burned all along the stable, and patches of fire gnawed the walls.

  The horses reared and kicked and let off nickering shrieks. Struggling to break from the prisons of their stalls. Such eyes they had.

  I hate the beasts, as much as it is possible to hate any of God’s creation. But I could not let them burn.

  I jammed the Colt back into my trousers and began opening the stalls. The animals ran wildly down the barn, driving me out of their way, leaping through the flames. But many a horse I could not reach. They burned. Their tails took fire, and their manes, and they smashed themselves against their wooden cells in madness. Even after the smoke hid them, I heard their pleas. Baying they were, and pitiful.

  “Sergeant Jones,” Molloy called as he come up the way. There was a cough to his voice. And a tone of relief, too, at seeing me on my feet. For he was a good comrade, if a liar, cheat, and thief.

  “Open the stalls, man.” My throat clutched up. The air was hot and thin, despite the stewings of smoke.

  We ran down the rows like men possessed by battle. The fire chased us. Confused horses could not find their way out. A rearing, stamping herd of them shied at a surge of flames, blocking our path, and I had to shoot into the air to drive them on. “Where’s Trenchard?” Molloy called
. “Forget him. Free the horses.” By the time we reached the next barn, it, too, was an inferno. I have seen villages burn, and fortresses, but never a fire so swift as the one Trenchard left behind him.

  A black horse charged us, burning. Its teeth opened to make a scream it could not sound. We leapt from its path, and Molloy rose back up with his sleeve on fire. I rolled him on the ground, and no harm done but a singe here and there. We were losing the battle to save the horses, though.

  The fire roared like a cannonade. Braces collapsed and sections of the roof dropped in a blast of sparks. The heat seared the skin, the lungs. My sweat boiled under the wool of my uniform, and my eyes tightened and blurred.

  “For the sweet love o‘ Jaysus,” Molloy hollered. “We’ve got to get out.”

  But I could not let God’s creatures burn alive. They bit me, and knocked me out of their way. They banged their unlatched stall doors back against me. Kicking. Wild. Yet I could not go from them.

  Molloy dragged me from that barn just as the rest of the roof came down. But the fire had outraced us again. The stable that should have been our refuge was ablaze. The smell changed from the spunk of burning wood to the stink of cooking flesh not drained of blood.

  I remember the noise. The groan of burning walls, sad the big snap of the flames. Whinnies and hoofbeats and thumping at wood.

  “Got to… get out,” Molloy said. Choking. The floor burned in front of us, a quick hot scorch of hay. I unhooked another stall and blistered my hand on the metal latch. The horse would not come out, shy of the fire before her.

  “We’ll burn alive,” Molloy gasped. The smoke clouded between the walls of flame, making it hard to judge the best way to go. There were no water barrels, nor buckets of sand. Only hay and harness, cheap wood and horseflesh.

  The horses made me think of souls in Hell. “That way.” I pointed.

  We helped one another, taking turns pulling each other through walls of flames and spanking out the fire that teased over our clothing. Twas comradeship, that. Drunk with smoke we burst into the night. And saw that we had company at last. The flames had called out drunken stable hands and lazing guards, then regulars from town. Citizens had come to do their part. They chased the horses, wild in their shouts, or freed them from the yet unravaged barns. They dragged out bales of hay and axed the walls to put a space between the fire and us, to save the stables still untouched by flames. A brick house stood amidst the great corral, asleep, as if it were not of our world.

  Twas a dreadful scandal in the press. Congress had been unwilling to pay for a pair of steam fire-engines for the city, for they hated the mayor and his boys, and now ten times the cost went up in the blaze. Molloy and I pitched in. We put our shoulders to the job of tearing down pine boards beside a cursing crush of men. Freed horses charged in the background, neighing and clattering. Even with the howl and crackle of the flames going Heavenward, you could hear the stampede of hundreds of the animals loose in the streets. Like a cavalry charge without bugles it was. In the morning, they found them broken-legged on creek banks or fallen bloody down blind alleys. Many had to be shot. I heard that a lone horse, burned to the bone on its rump, stood whinnying to die inside the Treasury Department’s yard.

  Now I have seen worse. And I would never put an animal’s fate above a man’s. But I will always think that night a tragedy. You will say they would have been slaughtered on the battlefield, anyway. But it does not matter. No living thing deserves such suffering, and my hand was in the doing.

  Twas the early morning hours before the fire come under control. Full half the barns burned up, while others were torn down to the ground or damaged. A great mess it was. Molloy and I plodded homeward without talking, the only sounds our footsteps, and the thunk of the axe handle I had borrowed for want of a cane, and the clatter of horses running on distant streets. We were black as miners at the end of the shift, the two of us.

  “Tis better, I think,” Molloy muttered, “to be the lowest of men than a damned cavalry horse.” And then he said no more. But his voice that night was full of what we men are, of loneliness and the mix of bitterness and conviction that pushes us from one day to the next.

  “Trenchard’s gone,” I told him. “I let him get away. I failed, see.”

  And then I thought of Mick Tyrone my friend, and the bullet he had taken to the arm. Where might he be? Surely, it could not have been a dangerous wound, I told myself, with a prayer in the thinking. And Livingston was dead. And Bates. The sickness of human vanity had been a plague upon us all, worse than the black cholera. Anthony Fowler’s corpse hovered over the world.

  A horse raced down the street.

  They were waiting for me at Mrs. Schutzengel’s. Enough of them to storm a redoubt. They had no interest in Molloy, for which I was thankful.

  “Captain Abel Jones?” the officer in charge of the detail asked.

  “That I am.”

  “I have orders to take you into custody. And to remand you to prison.”

  He did not even ask for my pistol. But I gave it to him. For I am a great one for the orderly doing of things. Even when I am astonished.

  “What charge against me, then?”

  He read over his list in the lamplight.

  “Murder,” he said. “The murder of Lieutenant Howard Sneed Livingston. And arson. Destruction of government property. Housebreaking. Assault. Attempted kidnapping. Insubordination. Desertion.” He looked up at me. “There’s more, if you want to hear it.”

  They shut me in the Old Capitol Prison, up behind the house of government, and let me sit. I shared my cell with a liveliness of small creatures, but with no other men. No breakfast, see. Not for the likes of me.

  And not one word more. I did get a pail for my slops, though. And a basin of cold water for washing up.

  There was foolish I had been. For when the great men will not have a thing, the little men cannot force it through, and even revolutions end with the same men behind the desks. But, God forgive me, I was not sorry. I had regrets, but only for the shame that would fall upon my wife and child. Even a man proven innocent, which I might or might not be, carries his charges through life in the eyes of other men.

  And yet I was not sorry for my doings. Oh, there were bits that might have been done better. I would not have seen young Livingston end so, despite the awful thing that he had done. Nor even Bates. And surely not the horses. But I felt as I had in my cell in India, after I refused to kill those old fakirs. I had done that which was right and proper, and I scorned the judgement of men. For a Christian must do more than kneel and pray in this world, or the devil will have it all.

  How is it that we end in cells when all we want is justice?

  Now you will say, “McClellan himself told Jones there was to be no more of his nonsense, and Jones was a soldier. He should have behaved himself.” But what will come of this world if we do not take its weight upon our shoulders now and then? There is nothing easier than the turning of a back. But I would not be such a one as that for all the gold and glory in the world.

  And even in those hard, black hours in prison, with secessionists and worse packed all around, I did not lose my faith in our great country.

  Now there is foolish, you will say, and snicker. After all Jones saw, how could he think the Union that he served retained its worth? He saw corruption, and the hidden hands of power, hypocrisy, and wrenching of the law. Death for no good purpose, that he witnessed. And how the hand of man disfigures love. How could he still believe in our torn land? How could he keep his faith in men alive?

  Well, I will tell you, see.

  Perhaps I have a weakness of the mind—enthusiasms reach into my soul. Perhaps Tyrone had worked upon my thoughts, with all his longings for a better world. But faith is simpler than the learned say. I felt a part of something great and vast, of something mighty and yet undefined. Beyond the sorry scraps of daily life, a nation had got up on its hind legs—a nation we had never seen before. The men who volunteered to s
erve the cause, with all their thousand motives and their fears, became crusaders for a better world—although their thoughts were duller day to day. They did their fighting not for kings and crowns, and not for conquest or the spoils of war. They could not even put such into words, the reasons why they left their farms and shops, the mines or city slums or rough frontiers.

  And yet they knew their purpose in their hearts. Twas greater than the fate of any man. You had to stop to see the picture whole, to feel that bigness of unspoken hopes. Oh, down with slavery, yes. For there is evil. The Fowler boy had seen that right enough. But up, I say, up with possibilities so long denied to little folk like us. Mine was the country of the little man, where each might raise himself, with help from God. And no man was born better than the rest, though he might think his pedigree a prize. A land of justice, decency, and merit—a new Jerusalem come down to earth. Such was the dream of eighteen-sixty-one, despite our squalid failures right and left. So let us all fight for, and not against. We hold the future in our trembling hands.

  They would take my uniform away. And though I hated war, and would have loved to sit at home with my beloved, I could not bear the thought I might fall out of the great march. I wished to do my share. For my new country.

  Twas a dream of a country, see. A sweet, good dream unrivaled in the world.

  In the murk of morning, sitting under a dirty window, I considered my uniform. Singed and seared it was, with one sleeve burned through and the brass buttons dull with soot. My captain’s rank was marred and shabby now. Embarrassed I am to tell you how proud I had become of those insignia.

  They would take it all away. And then we would see what else they would do to me. But a Welshman is a terrible thing when you spin him up, and they would never have my silence to console them. I would not give in. No, I was determined to fight on, as fiercely as Molloy and I did that day above Attock Fort.