Those who could stand stood all around the room, leaning on canes and crutches, leaning on one another, bedraggled and bandaged, with bruises colored like the leaves on the ground outside. Others sat against the walls of the long hall, side by side. I saw men with oozing bandages on their heads, men missing hands, and men missing feet. Rows of beds and stretchers lined the center of the room, and they were crowded too with wretched figures. I saw one soldier on a crutch standing over a bed and telling a nurse the name of the man lying there, just before he pulled a sheet up over the soldier’s head. Not a moment later, the body was hauled from the room by two slaves, and another soldier took its place, clutching his arm where the flesh hung off like ribbons. They didn’t even change the bedding for him.
The nurse who smelled of lavender was suddenly beside me. She shook her head sadly. “The things men do to each other. I swear, it’s enough to break your heart.”
“It’s for a good cause, ma’am,” I told her.
“You believe that?”
“I do,” I said. “These men are fightin’ for freedom and our way of life.”
She sighed. “I’m not sure any cause is worth the suffering we’ve seen in this war, on both sides.”
“They started it!” I objected.
“You’re young,” the woman said. “In time, I pray boys like you will understand what a war does to the bodies and the souls of men, regardless of who started it.”
“I understand just fine,” I said, because I didn’t care to be lectured at by this nurse.
She looked at me real sadly and wished me luck finding my brother.
“You best check on that list there.” She pointed at a wall covered with papers. Each paper was covered with names. “That’s the register. If he’s here, he’ll be on the list.” Then she walked away to tend to the wounded some more. Everyone else was either too busy dyin’ or too busy attending to those that were to pay any mind to me.
I walked over to the list and ran my finger along it. The writing wasn’t real neat, but I could make out the names. Michael Amberson, Charles Anderson, Daniel Anderson, Jonathan Anderson, and on and on, name after name, sorted in alphabetical order. I scanned the Bs, where Julius should be, but his name wasn’t there. It was a relief to see he weren’t in the hospital, but sad too. I was hopeful I’d see him and I could run home and tell Ma and Pa that he was okay. But I figured the battle where he’d gone missing was a while back now, and maybe they didn’t keep records up on the wall that long. Maybe there was an office someplace with the old papers. As much as I didn’t want to stay in that hospital a moment longer, I came all this way to find my brother, and I couldn’t give up so easy.
As I walked to the far end of the great hall — it used to be the ballroom when the place was a hotel — a man on the ground reached out and grabbed my leg.
“You see the elephant yet, boy?” the man snarled up at me. He was a cavalryman, or at least he had been, to judge by his uniform and riding boots, but his face was badly burned, and one of his eyes was sealed shut with the scarring. The other eye, dark and piercing, moved around wildly.
“I … I …” I stammered. “Not yet,” was all I could think to say.
“We need men, you know. Take the fight to ’em. Yanks will have to kill every man, woman, and child before we let ’em take the South!”
“Quiet down, John!” another patient shouted from down the hall. “Some of us are trying to sleep until the war’s over.”
“You best get out there, boy,” the man whispered to me. “War’s a young man’s game, and you’re a young man, no? Get out there and fight the good fight! For honor! For dignity!” He was shouting again. “For the Great State of Alabama!”
“You’re in Mississippi, sir,” I told him as gentle as I could.
“I am?” His burned face wrinkled.
“You are,” I said.
“Well, what do I care about Mississippi?” He coughed and spat on the floor. “Leave me be, boy.” And with that, he shoved me away.
I went on down the great room and turned into a smaller room.
I sure wish I hadn’t.
I saw a table laid out, and on it, a man, and he was screaming, with an injured leg all cut up and yellow and oozing something awful. The room smelled like rotten meat left out in the sun too long, sour and sweet at the same time.
A surgeon stood beside the table while two other soldiers held the man down. One of them gave him a slug of whiskey and a musket ball to bite down on. That’s when the surgeon raised the blade of a saw and took it to the man’s injured leg like he was sawing a plank of wood. I turned away and slammed my eyes closed. The man’s shrieks were like no sound I’d ever heard before, even in my worst nightmares, and though I wasn’t lookin’, my mind painted pictures of the horror that could produce such a sound. I felt hot and dizzy, and I needed to get outside. I needed to get some air.
“Ow, watch out!” the man from Alabama yelled as I ran past. I’d stepped on his foot by accident, and looking back to mumble an apology, I tripped over another man, and he grimaced and his terrible teeth flashed at me, all bloodstained and broken. I caught myself on the wall and accidentally pulled down a sheet of paper from the register with all the names on it.
Mulligan, I saw as it fell, and Masterson and Nathanson. All them dead men. The papers rustled as I trod on them. I ran, leaping over men like Dash leaps over logs in the forest, and I raced for the door and the air and the light just as fast as my two legs would carry me.
I didn’t rightly know where I was when I heard birds chirping and smelled the heavy scent of lavender. I blinked into the sun and saw the giant, droopy face of my dog, Dash, hanging over me. His flat, pink tongue licked straight up my face and over my forehead so my hair stood up with his drool like wheat standing in a field.
“Get up, boy!” he said, with a lady’s voice. “You got to run on home now! Run home!”
My eyes must’ve bugged out of my head, because I ain’t never heard a dog talk before, and if I were to think on it, I’d never figure Dash to talk in a sweet lady’s voice. I’d gone crazy.
“Huh?” I pushed myself up off the grass onto my elbows, and Dash turned his head away. That’s when I saw the lady standing behind him, the nurse who’d made me tie him up before. She was the one doing the talking, which I took as quite a relief. I sat up on the ground, brushing the grass from my shoulders. I felt like a fool for swooning, and for thinking my dog had been talking to me. Next thing the nurse told me, though, made me forget all about feeling foolish.
“General Sherman’s here, son, and his men are burning everything!” the woman said. “They’re headed this way! You have got to run on home!”
That made me hop to my feet, and what I saw was a frightful sight. Nurses were loading up all the men who could be moved onto carts and wagons. The men were piled on top of each other, groaning and weeping. Those who could walk on their own feet were walking in a steady stream out of the hospital. Some were fleeing in full retreat, leaving the hospital defenseless. Others pushed their way onto the waiting carts. I saw the burned man from Alabama hobble out and knock other, sicker men aside in his hurry for a ride to safety. So much for fighting the good fight. So much for honor and dignity.
In the other direction, down the hill and into town, what I saw was like a nightmare. It was afternoon, but the sky was black as midnight with smoke and ash.
Plumes of black smoke and fingers of orange flames rose from all the factories in town. The saloon was burning, as were the storehouses and the homes of all the folks that lived on the main street. Citizens ran to and fro, trying to douse the flames with water, but the blue-uniformed Yanks in the streets stopped them and tossed their buckets to the dirt. Off toward the west, I saw the train station on fire and the tracks all twisted and tied. More Yankees held the line on the edge of town, cutting off any chance of a counterattack from the Confederates. I looked about, but couldn’t see a single gray uniform anywhere. All the Confederate soldiers
had gone and left us on our own.
I saw a river of slaves marching toward the Yankee lines on the edge of town, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, and more, all of them walking away, heading to join the Union. I guess they all figured to steal themselves away while they had the chance. One man’s loss is another man’s gain, I suppose.
Yankee officers on horseback watched the chaos from the other side. And I saw one of ’em point our way, directing a group of soldiers up the hill to the hospital, with their torches blazing.
“Why?” I cried.
“It’s total war,” the nurse explained. “The Union doesn’t just want to beat the armies of the South. They want to beat the fight out of every Confederate citizen. They aim to break us, and I fear they just might.” She shook her head. “You take care and get on home.”
She went to help more patients flee the hospital.
I looked beyond the edge of town, in the direction of home, and there too I saw the plumes of smoke rising, gray ghosts carrying the living up to meet the dead.
“Home!” I said aloud, and I untied Dash and we was running fast down the hill. We stayed off to the side of town so we didn’t run into any of those Yankee soldiers on their rampage.
No one paid me and Dash much mind as we ran, but I saw them clear as day, and what I saw filled me with anger hotter than all the flames that burned my town. I saw officers and regular enlisted men in blue looting and stealing from the homes they burned, women crying as their dresses was tossed in the streets; stores of food stocked up for winter trampled underfoot or stolen away. I saw men not in uniform robbing and stealing like they was doing the Yanks’ job for ’em, and I even saw old Winslow carrying off some silks from the general store. I put it all out of my mind, though, and just ran faster than I’d ever run before.
It still weren’t fast enough.
Just down the road from our property, I saw three Union men in their dark-blue uniforms running away, hollerin’ an’ whoopin’. One of ’em, a mean-lookin’ fella with a thick brown beard and a big scar on his forehead, was carrying a small box under his arm. I recognized it right off as the box where Ma kept the silver candlesticks that her Ma had given her, and her Ma’s Ma before that.
I made a move toward ’em, but they all had pistols and swayed like Winslow under the drink, so I knew it’d be deadly to me and to Dash to face them down. I had to pick my battles, and I knew this was one I couldn’t win. The men didn’t take no notice of me, like all the other adults I’d seen, and they went right on by.
When I got to our house, there weren’t nothing left but a smoking heap of ash and timber. All our things were gone, burned or tossed across the yard in heaps. Even the fence was trampled flat. Ma stood weeping with her hands over her face, and Pa limped from heap to heap, poking through the piles with his crutch to separate what could be useful and what was ruined altogether.
“Oh Andrew,” Ma cried out when she heard Dash barking our approach. She ran to me and embraced me, crying.
“What happened?” I shouted. “What’d they do this for?”
“They say we was all guilty of harboring the rebels,” Pa sighed. “A whole troop of federals came by and gave us just a minute to pack our things and step outside before they went in and took what suited them and burned the rest. They even took old Molly.” He sighed. “General’s orders, they said. Apologies, they said, but her milk belongs to the Union. Everything we own belongs to the Union, they said. They were polite about it, which made it all the worse.”
In that moment, Pa looked to me like an old man for the first time in my life. He looked like he’d been left out in the sun too long, and had wrinkled up and dried.
“What’ll we do?” Ma wept. “Where will we go?”
Dash sniffed around in the ash piles, pawing at the timbers that was left of our house. I wondered what he was looking for. A familiar smell? A piece of the porch to lie down under?
“Ain’t nothing left to find!” I yelled at him, ’cause I had to point my anger someways. “Ain’t nothing left at all!”
Pa just shook his head. “We can go stay with your cousin Thomas,” he said. “He’ll put us up.”
“We never asked for charity in our lives,” Ma said.
“What choice have we got?” said Pa, and I knew it hurt him to say it. He bent down with considerable strain and picked up a burned piece of paper from the ground, a page from his beloved old poem about the war between the Trojans and the Greeks. It weren’t even readable no more. At the sight of that, even Pa broke down weeping.
I felt about as low right then as I had ever felt in all my life. It was all my fault, I just knew it. This was my punishment for letting that girl go and for not telling no one about what Winslow’d done to that deserter and for just being a lousy, no-good coward like I was. Julius had gone missing and Pa was crying and our whole house in ruins, and I should have been here, instead of being passed out under a tree because the sight of blood had scared me so.
“How will Julius find us if he comes back?” Ma asked, worry written across her face like it’d been carved there since ancient times.
“I guess we can leave word with the neighbors — those that stay, anyway,” said Pa, but it sounded like even he thought it wasn’t much of an idea.
Dash came back and sat at my feet, whimpering up at me, hungry and thirsty, just like I was.
“I don’t got nothing for you, you dumb dog,” I scolded, and that’s when I had me an idea. Dash weren’t my dog to begin with. He belonged to Julius! And if Dash could track a stranger through the forest, well, he could certainly track down his rightful master!
I looked up at Ma and Pa, gathering what they could for the journey to Cousin Thomas, and I puffed out my chest and spoke loud and clear. Without my voice cracking once, I made my proclamation. “I’ll go find Julius.”
“What’s that?” Pa looked up. Ma’s mouth hung open like fresh caught fish.
“Me and Dash are the only ones who can do it,” I said. “I’ll go find his old regiment and ask around, and maybe Dash can pick up the scent. We’ve tracked down all kinds of folks before, we can track down our own kin.”
“You can’t go off doing that,” Ma said, but Pa didn’t say nothing for a while. He just looked at me for a long, long time.
“Boy’s right,” Pa said at last.
“No, Paul.” Ma turned to him. “He’s just a child.”
“War makes boys into men before their time,” Pa told her. “Always has been that way. If Julius lives, we need him more than ever. I’m too old to go over the countryside searching for news, and Andrew’s a smart boy. He’ll do all right. Besides, it don’t do no good to have him sitting around with us in despair. Don’t do no good at all.”
I nodded, eager. I felt like, finally, it was my turn to be a hero. I could track down Julius and bring my folks good news in a world that’d turned full of bad.
“I just know he’s alive,” I said. “I know it.”
Pa sighed. “So it is with men: One generation grows on, and another is passing away.” Those were lines from his big Iliad poem. Though the pages had burned, his memory still held on to them. “Let’s see what we can scrounge up for the journey,” he added.
Ma set her jaw to keep from crying, and she went looking through the wreck of our house for provisions.
“You be careful, son.” Pa told me. “You stay away from the boys in blue, and if you hear shootin’, you run the other way, understand me?”
I nodded.
“You know where Cousin Thomas lives?”
I nodded again.
“Well, you make your way there in two weeks’ time, hear me?” Pa said. “No matter what.”
“I will,” I promised, and I scratched Dash behind the ears. His tail wagged because I guess he knew that we was going off on the biggest adventure of our lives, and if we found success, maybe we could just set things right again and make up for all the bad we’d done.
Ma loaded me up with a sat
chel filled with all the food we had left, even though I told her I’d be fine to scrounge as I went.
Pa was sorry he didn’t have his rifle no more, but the Yankees took that from him too, in case he were gonna use it to help the Confederacy.
“I’ll find Julius, and we’ll give them Yanks what for,” I told him, but he just shook his head sadly.
“Two weeks,” he reminded me. “You come on down to Cousin Thomas’s in two weeks.”
They watched me walk off down the road, Dash trotting at my side. I took the long way around town, but it didn’t matter much. It looked like all the Yankee soldiers and all the bummers and runaways who followed them had hightailed it back the way they came. I felt a lot of anger that they’d marched right through town without encountering a fight from our boys. Our soldiers had retreated at the first sight of blue uniforms, and they was only just now starting to trickle back.
“You know where the Fifth Mississippi Infantry is?” I asked one line of men as they made their way past me, but they just shrugged. They didn’t know nothing, and I feared I’d be wandering the countryside aimless for the whole two weeks before I had to turn around. There was no way I’d find my brother’s regiment just by asking folks down here. Even if they knew, they’d most likely think I was a spy.
I had to be near enough to Julius for Dash to catch his scent, which meant I had to do some figurin’ about where he might be.
I walked and thought all the way into evening and hardly noticed when I’d come to a road all filled with folks. Some carried bundles and some hauled trunks. Some were wounded and some looked sick, but they was all fleeing the destruction the Yankees had left in their path. There must have been two hundred people gathered along that lonesome country road as the sun set on the longest day of my life so far.
By the time it was dark, the roadside and the fields beyond were dotted with campsites flickering with little fires. Folks roasted bits of meat or ate corn cakes and sipped at weak tea. They chewed tobacco and spat and coughed. A few in the crowd wore the uniform of this or that unit of the Confederate army. My eyes bulged, and Dash growled. There was deserters on the road, just about as open and free as could be.
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