Daughterry wondered when the owners of the house would appear. Sooner or later, wanting shelter, they’d throw open the garden door and come sliding pell-mell down the stairs.
The battle seemed to be drifting into town. The cellar shook again.
The owner and his family never came.
THE SHAKING GOT worse and worse.
Above, glass broke.
Pop! Crack! Musket fire.
The Devil sat partway up (it was him, wound about the grindstone), and said, “There is nothing, nothing at all, keeping one of those cannon shells from punching through upstairs and exploding down here, right in our faces.”
“That’s true,” said Daughterry.
The Devil did not handle this thought well at all.
Daughterry was a good man and a good friend, and never described to anyone, even his diary, that he had seen the Devil suck his thumb.
THE POUNDING AND SHAKING and popping and yelling drifted out of town, it seemed, receding like a flood, and there came a time when Daughterry felt that he should talk to the Devil about one or two things.
“Hey,” he stage-whispered across the cellar.
The Devil said, “Yes?”
“I hate to bring it up.”
“Bring what up?”
“The wagon. Our wagon.”
“What about it?”
“They took it.”
Silence.
The ground shook.
“Someone took our wagon,” said the Devil. “The wagon with the laboratory and the glass plates and our food and clothes.”
The Devil seemed to have raised himself to a crouch. His eyes glowed.
“The wagon,” he continued, “with my immortality aboard, wedged under the tool rack?”
Daughterry nodded. “The Federals have it,” he said.
“Get it back.”
“Now, see here—”
The Devil pounced, and would have bitten off one of Daughterry’s little fingers, except that Daughterry objected, and shoved the Devil away.
The Devil seemed surprised. Then he seemed to remember that he was mortal. He seemed defeated. His shoulders slumped, and he slouched off to the farthest corner.
“Get it back,” he croaked. “Please.”
Daughterry replied that he would try, and they did their best to sleep.
THE NEXT MORNING, Daughterry crept upstairs.
Before long, he crept back down.
“Bad news,” he announced to the dark cellar.
“You didn’t get the wagon,” said the Devil. He was feeling braver than before. He could hardly feel less brave, after all.
“The Federals seem to be using the wagon for a traveling pharmacy.”
“Then one can reason with these Federals. Pay them something, if necessary—”
“The wagon,” Daughterry explained, “is in a place where I am not welcome. You don’t cross Union lines if you’re not a Union soldier.”
The Devil nodded. He looked very serious.
“I am willing to face down my fear,” he said, “and go up there and talk to whoever needs talking to, if all it needs is a Federal uniform.”
He closed his eyes, and drew both hands down through the air, as if putting on a rain poncho. Then he stood still. He looked puzzled.
“Were you,” asked Daughterry, “by some chance, trying to ‘magic’ a uniform out of thin air?”
“No,” lied the Devil.
The floor shook.
Dust rained down.
“They’ve started again,” observed Daughterry.
The Devil’s eyes widened. He shook visibly. His hands twitched.
Then his eyes narrowed. He still shook a little, but his hands, rolled into fists, were steady.
“I could just be somebody from the town,” he said.
“What?”
Cannon fire, close by. The Devil twitched.
“Who’s to say I’m not just plain John Scratch from Gettysburg?” he said, making his way up the cellar stairs. “A plain old fellow from plain old town can ask questions about a medicine wagon, can’t he?
Maybe even poke around under the tool rack—”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“But—!”
But the Devil was gone.
THE DEVIL EMERGED to find the garden just as he’d left it, with some of the sunflowers a bit sat upon. In the street beyond the gate, he found a barricade thrown up by retreating Federals. Furniture, firewood, oxcarts, and wagon wheels, it had been shot up and blown apart. Here and there, houses themselves bore wounds.
One second, the street was deserted. The next second, a train of horses and wagons and mounted swivel guns came charging along. It was a Confederate train, guarded by Confederate soldiers in homespun clothes, long-haired and dusty from top to bottom.
Several officers rode alongside this train, and one of them rode up to the Devil, drew his sword, and poked him in the throat.
“What’re you about?” demanded the officer, a mountain of hair in an ancient leather coat and straw hat.
“I am John Scratch,” said the Devil, “a local photographer. I am going up the lines to see about—”
“You ain’t in uniform,” the officer observed. “Hazard!” he bellowed. “Scatlock!”
Two Confederate guards left the train and galloped over.
“A man out of uniform,” said the officer, “out and about and having a look at General Lee’s supply trains, seems an awful lot like a spy to me.”
“Here, now!” exclaimed the Devil, but the officer spurred his horse and rode off, calling back over his shoulder that the spy was to be held behind Confederate lines until sundown, when he should be hanged without ceremony.
Hazard jumped down off his horse and approached the Devil with a set of heavy chains. The Devil squared off to hit him and wrestle him to the ground, but the other soldier, Scatlock, kicked his horse forward and knocked him off balance.
That wouldn’t have happened, thought the Devil, on any other three days.
He caught his balance just in time for Hazard to swing the armload of chains at him.
HE WOKE UP secured to a young maple tree, alone in the middle of some woods.
One whole side of his head felt lumpy and smashed.
He remembered that he was to be hanged, and laughed. Then he remembered that he was not invulnerable, and stopped laughing.
The ground shook. Great cracklings, like popcorn, tore the air from horizon to horizon.
He thought, at first, that he had been left alone and unobserved in whatever portion of the universe this was, but then he glimpsed a couple of ragtag Confederates leaning against a tree in the middle distance. They looked his way and spat.
The shadows on the ground lengthened quickly.
This couldn’t really be happening.
After thousands—millions?—of years, he was going to be hung like a horse thief by a squad of rednecks. He, who had conquered Sumeria. He, who had helped raise the pyramids, and walked in the surf at Troy.
“I walked the surf at Troy!” he screamed in frustration.
One of the guards wove a stout hemp noose.
The Devil gritted his teeth. He sighed. He who … with Pocahontas …
Far away, the shaking and booming and crackle of musket fire reached a crescendo, and began to fall off some.
“I rode with Nat Turner, you bastards,” he roared, “when he burned down your granny’s house and chopped her up with—”
That got their attention. These were Virginia men. They said a word or two about its being close enough to sundown, and came his way with the noose.
Oh, no.
One of them whirled the hanging rope around his head. When he loosed it, damned if it didn’t fall right over the Devil’s head like a lasso.
The guard tugged hard, and the noose tightened. The Devil struggled against his chains. He would fight, goddammit! If he had to head-butt every single one of these—
A horse and r
ider interposed. The officer from town.
“Leave off, dog-fuckers!” he snapped, slicing the rope with his sword. “Sentence is rescinded. Command says we might need every man jack tomorrow, including prisoners.”
The guards vanished into the darkening woods.
“We’re marching tomorrow,” the officer told the Devil. “And you’re marching with us. Somebody’ll be by with supper.”
THE CONFEDERATES HAD WON the first day. They had driven the Federals into the hills. The second day, they tried to push them out of the hills and destroy them, but the Federals pushed them back. So General Lee was going to gather his soldiers together in one humongous mile-long wave, and roll over the Federals like an ocean.
His soldiers would have to run a mile over open fields, with cannonballs falling on them the whole way. Some of General Lee’s staff” thought this was a dumb idea.
“It’s a long mile,” they argued.
General Lee didn’t care. He was mad.
General Pickett’s division would lead the charge. It would be called “Pickett’s Charge’” even though it wasn’t his idea and he would watch most of it through spyglasses.
THE OFFICER WHO had captured the Devil came to fetch him, and half drag him through the woods. There had been no supper and no breakfast, and he was feeling weak. He was not familiar with feeling weak. He wondered if it was part of the terror, part of his mortality, which he felt in abundance.
The officer chained him to a tree with several other prisoners. Spies? Deserters?
The officer explained to the prisoners that they were being given a rare chance to escape sentence and prove themselves.
“You will take part in the charge this afternoon,” he said. And he talked about what an honor it was, and how they were dog-fuckers who didn’t deserve it. He explained that they would not be given muskets, or even knives. They would not be permitted to carry a flag of any kind. The soldiers behind them would have orders to shoot them in the back if they did anything other than march forward and happily fight the enemy with their bare hands. If they survived, they would not be hanged. If they behaved bravely, they would go free.
The prisoners seemed grateful.
Then the officer explained the wave, and they seemed less grateful.
“Might as well be hanged,” one of them was dumb enough to mutter.
“Done,” barked the officer, and had the man hauled off and hanged.
The Devil thought about the wave.
He almost said something about organizing the Boston Tea Party, but the officer looked at him with a fierce yellow eye, and he shut up.
THERE WAS A LOT of ground shaking before the wave moved.
The two armies stood and fired cannonballs at each other all day … one army strung out in a line of trees, the other atop a gentle slope, crouched behind a stone wall. Between them, a mile of summer haze, with blackbirds and white moths. Overhead, a sky too hot to be blue, with clouds painted on.
Sitting on the grass or waiting in the woods, the men did not move when the cannonballs came. Their officers had told them they were either going to get hit or they weren’t, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it, so they might as well hold still.
It was like holding still and trying to keep from flinching while someone hit you in the face, but they did it. And they paid the price. A cannonball would come screaming in, and sometimes, if your eye moved just right, you might actually see it, like a crow flying at unholy speed. Some said you could tell by the scream, somehow, if it was going to hit you, or near you. Others said, “You never hear the one that gets you,” and things like that. There were a thousand things said, all to assure yourself that you were safe, that you were going to be fine. And then here it came, and exploded close by, and you saw incredible sights, like one half of a man go spinning like a top thirty feet in the air, and great trees cut off in the middle, twisting and falling. Men blinded by splinters, staggering with hands over their eyes. Arms and legs that ended too suddenly, and blood like red fountains. Men standing mere yards apart were divided by a grotesque contrast: in one place, horror and explosive slaughter, while five steps away others stood waiting quietly, eyes forward, as if inhabiting a separate world.
Like many of the soldiers up and down General Lee’s tree line, the Devil had pissed himself without noticing. Most of the southern soldiers had an empty, hollow sort of gaze, but not the Devil. He was looking at something in particular, and he hardly blinked.
Across the deadly mile, atop the gentle slope of the ridge, behind some cannon and a low stone wall, was a white wagon. It bore huge black letters, and if you had the Devil’s stillness and focus that afternoon, you could almost read EGGERT G. DAUGHTERRY, PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST upon the side.
It might have taken a bullet or two. It might have a bite taken out of it. Hard to tell at this distance. The Devil’s fingers curled and uncurled on his knees as he remembered things like immortality and the sands of Troy, and felt the smallness of just being a man. The soldiers around him felt this smallness, too, and were alone with it, each in their way, behind the blankness of their eyes.
When the generals rode out into the still July grass and called to them (“Up, men, and to your posts!”), they rose from the ground and shook themselves alert and quit leaning on trees, and marched out in rows.
How they did it, the Devil didn’t know. Then he did it, too, and he realized that sometimes there is no How. There is only what you do or do not do, and he did it. He was so damn proud of himself! When they called a cheer for Jeff Davis and the Confederacy and the Honor of Old Virginia, he roared as loud as the best of them, and waved his hat, too.
It was a form of insanity. It was wonderful! Being in church was probably like this, he thought. They were like one whole creature. That was how they were able to move, he realized, even while some of them died.
Then the wave started rolling across that long mile. He didn’t think he could stop if he tried. What genius!
AS FOR THE SOLDIERS behind him, he forgot all about them until they were gone. A cannonball dropped in behind the prisoners and took out eight or nine of the row behind them.
There was a moment when the world tore right in two, and the Devil found himself in the air, perhaps on fire, arms pinwheeling. Then he hit the ground and got up fast, just to prove to himself that he could, and the thing was, it didn’t make him any more scared than he’d been before, putting one foot before the other.
Spare weapons littered the ground. He grabbed a musket, checked to see that it was charged and loaded, and pushed on.
The grass and ground were uneven beneath his boots. He had never noticed, before, how terribly uneven the earth was.
A minié ball tossed his hair just above the collar. Lifted his hat just a little.
Here and there, he heard the thud of bullets hitting targets.
The enemy, leaning over their stone wall, grew nearer.
The prisoner beside the Devil gave a moan. Just a moan, and fell. Two steps later, he was invisible in the grass.
What a strange and unbearable feeling, that you might not experience the next second because you might be dead.
Now. Now. Now. Now …
Each second began to seem impossible. But the soldiers pushed on, drawn, the Devil recognized, by something that eclipsed them all. Even him.
The seconds passed. The mile was behind them, and the enemy was there.
THERE WAS THE ENEMY, all lined up, all white smoke and fire and bullets whistling.
Ziiiiiiip! Ziiip! Zip-Zip! Ziiiiiiip! Thud! Thud! Thud thud thud thud!
Screams.
Not far away, a cannon fired straight into the Confederate line, and blew men down like wheat.
One great shout from the rebel throats. The Devil’s, too, as if the many throats were one throat, and he was over the wall. Right away, he killed a man.
The Federal soldier looked scared. Looked as if he couldn’t believe the ratty, trashy-looking rebels had gotten this far
, and then the Devil stuck his musket in the soldier’s side and pulled the trigger.
The musket bucked. Gun smoke huffed. The Federal went down with his side torn open, and the Devil stepped over him.
He could not shoot again; a musket needed loading between rounds. So he gripped the muzzle and made it a war club, and waded through surging, howling chaos toward the white wagon, now visible, now invisible beyond the struggle, the smoke. He was beginning to believe he might make it when someone speared him in the leg.
It hurt, but he found himself more offended than frightened. He looked down, saw the bayonet flash through his own flesh, then disappear—that hurt!—as it was yanked free.
Wild with rage, the Devil spun on his heel, almost lost his balance in blood-soaked grass, but steadied himself and found his attacker. One swing with the musket knocked the Federal down. One punch with the stock should have burst his head like a melon. No. Two punches. Just a broken nose.
Third punch. A demonic shriek of frustration, and finally the soldier’s face caved in.
On toward the wagon, hobbling. Losing blood.
Most of the battle fell behind him.
One more soldier. The Devil picked a stone off the ground, a stone the size of a baby, and smashed the Federal’s shoulder.
He was ten feet away with nothing in between when a rebel cannonball—you do hear the one that gets you, of course. Why wouldn’t you?—screamed out of the sky and tore him up like a dog toy.
He spun through the air, and came down on the other side of the wagon.
The Devil smelled himself cooking. Felt broken bones, and flesh hanging in rags.
He croaked like a frog, and darkness swallowed him.
HE DIDN’T WAKE UP until General Lee’s wave had been pushed back.
A Federal soldier knelt over him, blocking the sun. The sun made him appear to glow, and to shoot solar rays.
“Don’t try to move,” said the Federal in a kind voice. The Devil cleared his throat, which seemed to be all there.
“Listen,” he said, and promptly coughed up a bucket of blood.
“Don’t try to talk.”
Up Jumps the Devil Page 20