“Was you in the battle?”
“What?” said the man, startled, as if he’d just discovered there was a boy beside him.
“I say, was you in the battle? Down in Franklin?”
“Oh—the battle.” the man thought a moment, then said, “Yes, yes, I suppose I was. Someday you can read my memoirs, learn all about it. I was sober as a monument then, all right. Shit.” He spat, and wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his coat. “Used to be chaplain of Adams’ Brigade, but I am between congregations now.”
“What happened?” asked the boy.
The man shook his head sadly. “Whole congregation—gone, skedaddled, taken flight. Never happened before, I’m sure—not to a Methodist.”
“Did they run away?”
“After a fashion,” said the man. He took the pistol by the barrel and hammered it on the ground. “Damn this thing,” he said. “You would think—”
He was interrupted by the flash and bellow of the pistol as it discharged up his sleeve.
“Son of a bitch!” said Winder, and clapped his hands over his ears.
“Goddammit!” said the man. He had dropped the pistol and was flailing at his smoldering coat sleeve; the ball had ripped along inside it, come out at the elbow and plowed a furrow in the dirt. When he had beaten the embers out, the man glared at the boy. “Where’d you learn such language?”
“Why, a soldier—” Winder began, but suddenly the man went into a coughing fit. He grew red in the face, and drew out a handkerchief and coughed into it. When the man took the handkerchief from his face, the boy could see that it was spotted with blood. They looked at it together for a moment, then the man folded the handkerchief and tucked it away.
Old Hundred, wakened by the pistol shot, stood up and stretched and lapped his tongue out in a yawn. He turned around and around in the grass, then settled down with his back to Winder and the Chaplain.
“I think you are drunk,” said Winder.
The man nodded. “Yes, yes, I am pretty much pickled—there is a logic to it, though you might not think so.”
“A what?” said Winder. But the man ignored him, looking off toward the wood. Presently he began to speak—talking, it seemed, to someone he’d brought with him out of the long night watches, though there was no one but the boy.
“Started too late in the day, like I said, but what the hell? Might as well get it over with, told em that before we ever commenced. No matter. Trouble was, I got lost out there in the dark—Christ! but it was dark. Moses his own self couldn’t keep his way out yonder, not on that field. Don’t tell me about dark.”
“What happened then?” asked the boy.
The man shook his head. “Nobody should’ve lived through that—nobody. But ol’ Sam Hook did, oh yes. I found Byron, he said, Well, Sammy, you must look after the boys now, see they all get back to Cumberland. Shit—won’t see Cumberland no more, any of us, but I didn’t tell him that. I said, Hold on, Byron—but of course it never done any good. It never does once they take a notion to fly. I never saved a single one, you know—not a single one. Maybe you don’t believe that, but it’s so. And there was so many—I swear to God you could hear em, there was so many. The sky was black with em, they made a sound like birds, like leaves. Well, never mind. I got lost. I said, I wish I’d never come out soldierin, all the good I did. Directly we come on a pool of dark water that was full of dead men, piles of em—don’t ask me to tell you what it looked like. Well, I’d give my canteen away, so I said, I’ll have a drink of this water. I said to Ol’ Hunnerd, I said, Come take you a drink of this water, but he hung back, all a-tremble, for he knowed what it was. I said, Well, I am not too proud, and I dipped my hand in and was just goin to drink when I smelled it—Christ! ’Twasn’t water atall. Blood. You understand—a big pool of blood, like standin water.”
“My!” said the boy, but the man didn’t seem to hear.
“Well, I had to find water then. I run toward where I thought the river was—praise God, I found it, come out on a gravel bar peaceful as the day of creation. I washed and washed, laved all the blood away ’til my hands were freezin. Then I just sat down, stared at the water where it was movin along, thought I might pray for the boys but I was too tired, don’t you see—nothin would come, no words anyhow, just pictures in my head, so I had to let the pictures stand. I thought, Well, boys, here is the best I can do right now. Pretty soon The Marvelous Dog come along. He said, Come over this way, Sam. You may think I am mad, but that’s what he said. He turned around and went a little ways and looked back and said, Well, come on, you ain’t doin any good here. So I followed him, we went downriver a ways and come to another gravel bar and he showed me: six, seven men, all Yankees, all dead. Christ Almighty. I could see their faces, white in the starlight—some was men, some boys, come down there to die, I guess. They was stiff already and their eyes wouldn’t shut—I tried, but it wasn’t any use, so I left em starin. I said, Now boys, you are not of my congregation, but I will bide with you awhile—and I did. All night I stayed with em, stayed with those dead men, and we talked and prayed together. It was a long time, there by the dark water with those boys—it would have drove a lesser man crazy, I’m not too humble to say that, though of course there was angels there too, and they gave me comfort. I could see em standin just across the river, and I said as much. We talked about it a long time, some of the boys said they could see em too, and some couldn’t, but never mind. All this time the river sighed and mourned where it slipped along—there was some rocks just there, and it was like somebody talkin in the dark. There was night birds, too, down in the woods—owls and somethin else, I don’t know what. Now and then, black things come slidin down the river—I knew what they were. One of em got hung up in the rocks, looked at me and said, Well, what is this place? but I didn’t know what to tell him. Whole time I never saw another soul, except one time when somebody crossed downstream—must’ve been a ford there. He sat his horse in the middle of the river, like a statue—somethin, the stars maybe, winked off his spurs. He went on, and it was a long time—but it was peaceful, you know? Then it come daylight after so long a time, and I said, Well, boys, I must leave you now, and they said, Well, we will see you again by and by—so I said, Well, I guess you will, and I went off into the woods. Found the jug somewhere—a cabin, I think. Jesus. Maybe I’ll be scared tomorrow—that’s always the time for it. Tomorrow and tomorrow. My God.”
The man fell silent. He lit his pipe again, and Winder saw that his hands were shaking. They sat without talking for a while. A breeze came and flattened out the kitchen smoke and sent it curling down around them. Old Hundred groaned in his sleep. A flock of geese sailed over, honking mournfully, headed for some secret place in the river bottoms known only to geese. Winder watched them disappear over the trees, and he thought about how he would have done, down by the river in the night with the dead men—
“Maybe I will tell you a story,” said the man suddenly.
The boy shifted in the grass, ready to listen.
“What’d you say your name was?”
“I am Winder McGavock, my sister’s name is—”
“All right, all right,” said the man. “Winder. What kind of name is that?”
The boy shrugged. He had wondered the same thing himself.
“Well, never mind,” said the man. “I will tell you a story anyhow.”
“All right,” said the boy.
“Then again, maybe I won’t. I got to find the regiment—been lookin for em all day.”
“Please,” said Winder.
“Ought to be some of em left. The angels told me—”
“What’s a angel look like?” asked Winder.
“Look here, you want me to tell you this story or not?” said the man.
“All right,” said Winder.
“Well, that’s better. I will commence now.”
The boy settled himself to listen.
“Once upon a time,” said the man, “when I was little lik
e you, I got a pony on Saint John the Baptist Day. He was called Banquo, I don’t know why—my daddy named him. He was lazy and mean and not afraid of anything—after the manner of his tribe, don’t you know—and the first time I seen him I could tell he had a low opinion of me. Made it plain when I got up on him—throwed me about thirty feet. Daddy laughed. Said there was three ways you could make a animal do your will—you could beat him ’til he had no will of his own, or you could bribe him, or you could be the kind of man he wanted to bend his will to—if you understand what I mean.”
“Which way’d you try?”
“I bribed him.”
“What’s bribed?”
“Hmph. I curried that son bitch, combed him, petted him, give him so much feed corn he got wide as a chesterfield—my legs would stick straight out in the stirrups when I rode him.”
“Did it work?”
“Oh, yes indeed, if my aim was to get throwed, and stepped on, and bit, and kicked. But as a mollifier, it was all a failure.”
“You didn’t beat him, did you?”
“It crossed my mind—but no, I didn’t. I wasn’t made that way, thank God. That left only the one thing: to make myself. …hmmm. …worthy, if that’s the right word. I asked Daddy how to do it—he said I would have to know myself, that I would know when the time came.”
“Did you ever?” asked Winder.
The man lit his pipe again, his hands were steady now. “’Twas the fall of the year, around the first frost. One night Banquo broke out of his pen, next mornin Daddy and Uncle Fred and me tracked him up in the woods—Fred had been west, and could do such things. As it turned out, we didn’t need to track atall—the buzzards showed us where to go. Found Banquo, down on his belly with his innards trailin behind—a little ways off was a wildcat, dead, his brains was kicked out. Banquo done for him, but too late. Well. I sat down by his head, my heart was broke, I was blubberin like a girl. All the life was leaked out of him except what was left in the eyes—that’s always the last to go—and he saw me sittin there bawlin. I thought, Maybe he has waited for me to come so he could die, but the look in his eyes disabused me of that notion—’twas as if he said, I died brave, and all you can do is sit there and wring your hands. Then his eyes was empty, just like that. I will tell you a thing: a man, child, pony, dog—they all die pretty much the same. One minute the eye is quick, next minute it ain’t—I been on many a deathwatch since then, and that’s my experience. So Banquo was gone, thinkin I was a fool. I think about him sometimes, been thinkin about him today, in fact—”
The man began to cough again. He pulled out his handkerchief and held it over his mouth; when he was done he spread the handkerchief out and he and the boy examined it. There was not so much blood this time.
“Did you bury him?” asked the boy.
“No, the buzzards wouldn’t leave us alone, so we piled some brush and burned him and the cat together, up there in the pine woods behind the house. It was fittin, I suppose.”
The man was silent then. Winder toyed with the buckle of the haversack, waiting. At last he said, “What happened then?”
“What do you mean, what happened?”
“Well, I mean what happened in the story?” said Winder a little pettishly, for he was getting tired.
“Ah,” said the man. He dug a pebble out of the grass and threw it at Old Hundred; it made a thunk on the dog’s back, the dog looked over his shoulder with a malevolent glare. “What was it he expected? I never did know, don’t know now. I am still waitin, after all these years. Daddy was right, of course, but he didn’t say it would take so long. Maybe I never will know. I always thought, if I could finally be good enough, or brave enough, or whatever it is I need to be, then I would see the son bitch again, like I see those boys in the woods yonder. I thought maybe today, surely today. …but I reckon I never will see him now. Oh, well—that’s enough.”
The man lay back in the grass and crossed his hands on his breast. The pipe spilled its ashes on his waistcoat and a plume of smoke spiraled up until the man beat it out. He closed his eyes.
“Is that all the story?” asked Winder.
“Ummm,” said the man.
“Well, I am sorry about the pony, anyway.”
The man did not reply.
“Cousin Anna said there has been enough of killin.”
“Did she?” muttered the man. “Good. Splendid.”
After a moment the boy said, “Well, are you sleepin?”
“Yes,” said the man. “I am give out.”
“I have a picture of some soldiers.”
The man coughed, once. “That’s lovely,” he said.
So Winder, too, lay back on the grass. It was cold and damp, and a stone jabbed him in the back, but it felt good anyway to lie there under the moving clouds. The winds aloft were driving them eastward, toward the place where the mountains were. Winder thought he might go and see the mountains some day, but for now he was too sleepy. He could feel it coming: the dense shadow that crept from the place he imagined sleep to live, that lengthened in long fingers until everything was quiet and put away. He often fought it, but he did not fight it now. He, too, was give out, as the man had said.
Even so, he took the tintype out of his pocket and held it up against the opaque sky. The faces of the three soldiers gazed down at him, and it occurred to Winder that he was actually looking backward toward a moment that had passed on some other day—yet it was still here, caught in the little rectangle of tin. The notion moved him, and he wondered if all moments were kept somewhere, to be looked at again whenever you wanted. Probably not. Still, he thought about Banquo the pony. He could easily make a picture of him, nodding along up a green-shadowed road, his halter rope dragging in the dust. The man was there, his hand out, a little corn mounded in the palm—and Winder and Hattie were there, and cousin Anna, and Nebo, and Mister Bushrod Carter sitting in the road with his shoes off. … Maybe that really happened once or, better yet, maybe it was going to. Pretty soon he would wake the man and ask him, and he also wanted to ask if he could hold the pistol for just a minute. And then tomorrow. …
When they found Winder at last, it was nearly dark. Caroline McGavock knelt beside the boy and gave thanks, and she wept a little—not much, but enough. The boy’s fists were closed. In his arms he clutched Bushrod Carters haversack; beside him, in the grass, lay a pistol with ivory grips.
“That’s a nice piece,” said the soldier who’d come with the women. “Reckon where it came from?”
“I can’t imagine,” said Caroline. “I don’t want to imagine.” She rose, stumbled, Anna caught her arm.
“Oh, Anna—what if I’d lost him?”
“You didn’t lose him, cousin,” said Anna. The two women clung to one another for a moment while the evening settled around them. At last, Caroline turned to the soldier. “Will you carry this boy home?” she asked. “I will surely drop him if I try.”
“Yes ma’am,” said the soldier. “I will carry him.”
Anna bent and untangled the haversack from Winder’s arms. “This was Bushrod’s. …Mister Carter’s,” she said softly.
Caroline smiled. “The boy has guarded it like the Grail this livelong day. You must keep it now, until the young gentleman—” She stopped, and would have bitten her tongue off if she could.
“Oh, cousin,” said Anna.
Caroline slipped her arm around the girl’s shoulders. “Well. You must keep it all the same.”
“Yes,” said Anna. “Another memento of the great Confederate war.”
“Let us all go home,” said Caroline.
The soldier slipped the pistol in his waistband and gathered up the sleeping boy. Anna put her arm around her cousin’s waist, and together they turned back toward the house. A fire was burning in the yard, bright flames already challenging the coming night. They took it as their beacon, and as they moved toward it, Winder twisted in the soldier’s arms and cried out. “Whoa, now,” said the soldier, and shifted the boy�
�s weight against his breast. None of them saw the tintype drop in the grass.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
On the moonless, smoky night of the First of December, Bushrod Carter owned more blankets than he had in all his years of soldiering. These included a gum blanket and a wool blanket between him and the cold ground, and for cover two ample McGavock quilts and a brand-new blanket of Federal issue. His head rested on an actual pillow. Moreover, when the temperature began to drop, Nebo Gloster built a fire close beside, not only for warmth but to heat the bricks kept under the blankets by Bushrod’s bare feet. Anna Hereford had seen to all of this—she hoped that somewhere in his wandering mind he was enjoying it.
She hoped, but she did not believe.
Bushrod had changed his mind twice during the trip back to McGavock’s that afternoon; each time he’d run blindly into the woods, and Nebo had to chase him down. Then, after the second try, his strength left him, and by the time they reached the house Nebo was all but carrying him.
At first, Anna considered bringing Bushrod inside, but quickly saw there was little advantage to it. The house was madness and mayhem, growing worse as more and more men were brought off the field. So they sat Bushrod down in a corner of the yard, and Anna set about gathering up a pallet. She found the wool blankets in a pile set aside for the wounded. The gum blanket was draped over a dead soldier who lay curled up on his side by a green boxwood (Anna lifted the blanket from the body, shook it out, folded it, made herself look in the soldier’s face. “I am sorry,” she said). She sent Hattie to the cedar chest in the attic for the quilts. Finally she accosted one of the surgeons—the oldest and soberest she could find—and led him to the place where Bushrod sat upon the ground.
“Here he is,” she said. “What can you do for him?”
“We must strip his blouse,” said the surgeon.
“Oh, my,” said Nebo. “He ain’t gone like that.”
“Do it anyhow,” said the surgeon.
It took the three of them to divest Bushrod of his jacket and waistcoat and shirt. “Help!” Bushrod cried. “I am bein murdered! Who will help a widow’s son!”
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