“Come on, old Bushrod,” he said. “Whyn’t you wake up?”
But it wasn’t any use.
The girl sighed and moved in her sleep. Shyly, Nebo looked at her. Anna’s head was tilted on her shoulder; her narrow, scarred face looked serene and youthful, and from somewhere Nebo remembered her laughing. He held to that for a little while, for as long as he could—somewhere she had laughed, and he had heard it.
Quietly Nebo stirred around. He put a fresh warm brick under Bushrod’s blanket and lay some more wood on the fire. Then, carefully, shyly, he edged closer to the chair where Anna sat. She was sleeping—dreaming, he hoped, of some pretty thing—but he knew the time must come when she would wake. And when she did, perhaps he could ask her the things he’d wanted to ask Bushrod.
Men were talking in camp. The sentry walked by, a black shape on the edge of the firelight. Somewhere among the trees, a horse was moving. Something, the horse probably, scared up an owl. The great bird swooped over the fire in a flash of wings and disappeared into the dark. Nebo sniffed the air—it was beginning to smell like the deep night.
Nebo Gloster was suddenly very tired. He lay down at Anna’s feet, on his side with his legs drawn up. The ground was cold but the fire was good and warm on his back, and it would last a little while. Nebo wondered what he would dream about. Last time, he’d dreamed of a dark and rocky field lit by moving fires, and of a great house where dead men lived. Maybe this time it would be better.
He heard the Homochitto moving, licking at the cypress. He saw the moon on the water. He slept.
There was a quiet space then, when even the most restless took to their blankets, or stared into their fires without speaking. The night pressed down on them, and soon there were only the sentries moving through the firelight. It was always this way in camp: sooner or later the talk must cease, and men must look to themselves or flee into sleep if they were to endure tomorrow.
A deep shadow lay just beyond Nebo’s fire, one of those solid black vacancies that men instinctively avoid, as if to enter there were to risk passage through a door they might not find again. Into this shadow the horseman rode, and stopped, and watched a while.
In the tricky, shifting light of the fire, the sleepers—Anna, Bushrod, and Nebo—seemed figures in a very old painting, caught in a vanished moment of repose. It was easy to believe that they might sleep forever, free of pain and grief and confusion, pardoned from all things and especially from tomorrow. They might never change—only the colors around them, already soft, yielding year by year to the benign erosion of time. It was an illusion, of course, for the constellations above were moving ahead of the sun, and the light of day would dissolve the shadows and awaken the sleepers to movement, to life or to death, as it always did. But for now they slept and dreamed, and their peace, for all its deception, was no less real to them.
A long time the horseman watched before he moved away.
Anna Hereford woke shivering. For a moment she could not understand where she was—she seemed caught in a dingy, cloying fog where the only reality was the cold that seized her. Then it struck her: she was somewhere on the battlefield, surrounded by dead men, and the bearded man was coming, turning over the bodies one by one, looking for her. She did not know what direction the house was, nor how far, nor what it was that woke her—a voice, perhaps, or one of the dead men stirring. In a panic she bolted upright, gripping the chair arms. “Bushrod!” she cried.
Her voice roused Nebo, and he sat up stiffly, rubbing his eyes. He might well have been one of the dead, come reluctantly to life again.
“What is it, Miss Anna? Somethin scare you?”
Anna’s voice was hoarse, as if she had not spoken in days. “Oh, Nebo, the fire has gone down and I am freezin.”
Nebo unfolded himself from the ground like a crane. He looked about him. “Miss Anna, I’ll tell you a thing. Somebody—”
“All right,” said Anna, “but first stir up the fire yonder.”
“Somebody was here,” said Nebo, peering into the dark. “I seen him.”
For a moment Anna, too, watched the dark and listened, shivering with a chill deeper than cold. Finally she shook it off. “It was just a dream,” she said.
“No’m,” said Nebo stubbornly.
“All right, all right. But he is gone now. See to the fire, if you please, sir.”
“He was right here,” muttered Nebo, but he limped to the diminishing woodpile and gathered up limbs and branches and threw them on the coals. A shower of sparks swirled skyward, and in a moment the flames caught and the fire was roaring, sending its light into the deep shadows around and driving them away, flickering on the solemn trunks of trees and the faces of sleeping men and their shabby canopies of blankets and canvas. Nebo leaned over Bushrod then, and peered into his face. “Bush-rod? Hey, old Bushrod!”
“What is it Nebo?” said Anna.
Nebo turned to Anna, his face drawn and lined with weariness. “He is mighty still, awful still. I knowed somebody was here. It was—”
“Hush!” said Anna. She stood up then, flinging away the shawl—and nearly fell on her face. “Damn!” she said, and clung to the chair. “Now listen—go you down to the kitchen house. Roust that gal out and have her boil some water. Bring it up here, and some rags, too. And some coffee. And don’t let her bully you—take a stick to her if you have to.”
“I don’t want to go out there, Miss Anna,” said Nebo, his voice trembling.
Anna looked at the man. After a moment, she let go of the chair and pulled herself erect. “Well, I can’t much blame you,” she said. Then, moving slowly, stiffly, she lifted the chain and the silver cross over her head and held them out. The firelight winked on the cross. “Take this,” she said. “You carry it, and nothin will hurt you.”
Nebo took the cross shyly. “Is it magic?”
“Yes,” said Anna. “Now, go on. There is nothin in the dark to hurt you—any more than there is in the light, anyway.”
“Yes’m,” said Nebo, and limped away. In a moment, she could see him no longer.
Bushrod was, indeed, very still. Anna gathered her skirts and knelt beside him, the ground cold beneath her. Bushrod’s face (it was bruised and shrunken, but for once it was clean of blood) was turned slightly away; it was beaded with sweat and greasy in the firelight. The stump of his arm lay outside the covers on a scrap cut from the gum blanket. The blood soaking the bandage was pinkish; they’d been keeping it wet as the surgeon had said to do.
Anna touched his hair—it was damp, and coarse with grime, and Anna wondered what it would look like if it was clean and fresh-combed. “Bushrod?” she said.
The stump of Bushrod’s arm moved like a blind worm. Anna would not look at it.
“Bushrod? Hey, boy.”
This time he turned his face to her and opened his eyes. “Anna,” he said.
“Oh, my,” she said, and touched his face. “You look awful.”
“I knew who you were,” said Bushrod. “I did not mistake you this time.”
“It would have been all right if you had,” Anna lied.
“No it wouldn’t. Not now.” Bushrod spoke slowly, shaping the words. “Hold out your hand.”
Bushrod put up his clenched right hand, and something dropped in Anna’s, and she turned to the fire and looked. It was a brass button. She could make out a star on it, and the word MISSISSIPPI spelled out around the edge. She closed her hand on it. “Is it magic?” she whispered.
But Bushrod said no more. Only his eyes moved, as if he were watching something in the dark. Then his eyes closed, and he was asleep again.
Anna held the button tightly and turned her face to the sky. She knew that God was there, beyond the interlaced limbs and the clouds and the hidden stars. And if He was there, surely He could see, and hear, and surely He was grieving too.
“It is time You listened to me,” she said aloud, and wakeful men down in the camp turned their heads to the sound of her voice. “I. …I would have loved this boy,�
�� she said. “Can’t that cancel out the other? Don’t it mean anything? Won’t You listen to me?”
She shut her eyes and tried to imagine God listening. She searched for an image of Him, found instead the face of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, looking just as he had on the stairs during the battle.
Didn’t I tell you there wasn’t any shame in it? asked the General.
Oh, why don’t you tell Him that? said Anna.
The General laughed. Him? Why, He already knows it, child. Always has known it. It’s you that don’t.
No! He won’t forgive—
He did that a long time ago, said the General, grinning through his beard. It’s you that won’t.
“What!” Anna said, and her own voice startled her to waking. She looked around, half-expecting General Forrest to be standing at the edge of the firelight, but there was no one.
Anna pressed her hands against her temples. She was so tired of dreams and of waking and of not being able to tell the difference. “Oh, God in heaven—” she began, and as soon as she heard herself say it, she remembered another voice, Bushrod’s out of the afternoon before: Enough, he had said. You will have enough bad dreams as it is.
“Is it enough?” she said to the darkness. “Tell me! Has all this really been enough?”
There was a sound then, silken and powerful. Anna looked up, and there was the great owl hovering over her, the firelight touching his wings, his eyes gleaming red—only an instant and then he was gone, and Anna could hear him beating his broad wings through the dark, pulling the silence behind him, and the dark birds lifted from the trees and followed him, swirling in their myriads toward the sky. And among the rustle of wings were other voices: the boy who’d betrayed her long ago, and her own voice as she lay in the clover crying of pain and shame and ecstasy, and the voice of the bearded man who’d violated her worse than any. …The birds and the voices rose and swirled and filled the night— But not for long, she thought. Not for long now, because there has been enough of everything, just as Bushrod said— And it was all right now. The season was changing, the air was drawing them away. They were going away.
Anna Hereford bent again and took Bushrod’s face in her hands. “Oh, I don’t want you to go,” she said. “But it has to be all right. You go on, boy. Go on, now—Jack will find you.”
She was crying hard now, and the hot tears dripped from her chin and fell on Bushrod’s face. He blinked and smiled at her. “The rain,” he said.
“Yes,” Anna said. She kissed him then—his forehead, the side of his smashed nose—kissed him finally on his cracked, swollen lips. “Go on,” she said. “I will never forget you. I would have loved you. I would have. Go on—quick, now—quick—”
“Some of the boys—” said Bushrod.
“Yes, I know,” said Anna. She kissed him again, then pushed the covers down and moved her hand across Bushrod’s shoulders—they were strangely smooth, unblemished—and across the smooth, narrow breast. And meanwhile the voices rose in one last desperate swell, and with them now was the army band playing “Annie Laurie”—but fainter and fainter—and the rattle of guns in the windowpanes, the cry of wounded men in their bloody rags and the long cry of the soldiers going into battle, a horse walking in the leaves—fading, all fading as they were drawn away into the night.
Anna lay her cheek on Bushrod’s breast. It was warm and hard and fragile, and she could hear the faint drum of his heart.
“Enough,” she said softly. “Enough, enough.” And she felt the words travel out from her, following the voices into the blowing dark. She could almost see them go, fading like the lamps on the Nashville coach until they drew down into little points and disappeared. She listened then, waiting, but all the voices were gone. There was nothing now but the night, and the distant promise of dawn, and peace at last.
“Go with God, then,” Anna said. “This will have to do for goodbye.”
Under her cheek, Bushrod’s heart fluttered like a moth in a jar. Then that, too, was still.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The cold time came, as they had all known it would. A pattering sleet drove down, bearding eaves and fences with ice, covering all the new-mounded graves with their first cold dusting. The ice made fantastic crystal goblets of the trees, and silver lace of the hedges and fence rows. Smoke rose from the chimneys of Franklin and flattened and spread itself through the sleet, crawling over the littered fields, dancing now and then on a vagrant draft. There was a silence, too, as always came under a cold moon, full of sounds that were themselves silence: the creaking of limbs, the query of a snow owl, the distant, solitary barking of a dog.
The Army was gone. In its wake lay a vast ruin of broken things: muskets, gun carriages, ammunition boxes, canteens, clay jugs, spectacles, pocket watches—and men. Especially men. The dead ones filled the ground in backyards and alleys and garden plots, among the woods and low places, among the rocks of the fields. Others who might still be saved overflowed the buildings and houses of the village. All of these suffered, many of them died. Those who were well enough to care awaited news of the Army at Nashville. Win or lose, the Army’s fate would decide their own.
Early on this gray and leaden time, on the very afternoon the Army of Tennessee crossed northward over the Harpeth, Nebo Gloster dug a new grave in McGavock’s wood. The new grave was next to that of Jack Bishop and Virgil C. Johnson, so close that Nebo had to be careful where he was digging.
He worked in his shirt-sleeves despite the cold. He had broken the ground with a pick, and once had to use an axe on some troublesome roots; otherwise the sound of his shovel was as regular as a ginning machine. The pile of earth by the grave grew higher and higher; not once did Nebo stop to rest, to stretch his muscles, to drink from his canteen. Once begun, he worked until he was finished, just as he had before.
At a little distance, Anna Hereford stood motionless, watching. She was all in deep-mourning, in a dress borrowed from her cousin; imposed on the gray background of trees, she seemed a charcoal figure sketched on slate. She held a black umbrella against the slanting needles of the rain, and against the cold a hooded mourning-cloak wrapped about her. The skirts of the cloak moved in the wind; save that, she was completely still. Not even when Nebo finished the grave did she move.
“I am done, Miss Anna,” he said. His voice rang loud in the silent wood. “Do ye want to look?”
Anna shook her head.
The frock coat hung on a limb; Nebo reached it down and pulled himself stiffly into it. For a moment he looked into the grave, then took up the spade and the pick and the axe and limped the little way to where Anna waited.
Anna looked at him. Her face was pale, ashen, but the somber garments had darkened her eyes to the color of cedars. Nebo stood with the tools over his shoulder; his hair, tangled and gray, moved in the wind.
“Then we can bring him now?” Anna said.
“Yes’m. We can bring him now.”
Anna put out her gloved hand. Nebo took it shyly, carefully, as if it were glass, and followed Anna toward the house again.
There were no soldiers in the yard now. The wretched little shebangs and the bayonetted muskets were gone, the ashes of their fires were cold and black. The wounded were gone as well, into the house or down into the barns and woodsheds and buildings of the village or, if they were lucky, into other houses where someone could look after them. In the yard of McGavock’s house, only the dead remained, little drifts of ice gathering in the folds of their clothing, between their fingers, in the hollows of their eyes.
The generals were long since removed from the gallery, but others waited there: dead men who, by virtue of chance or whim or convenience, had been laid out on the broad pine boards. One of these, shrouded in a blanket, lay just outside the door. At his head, a candle lantern gleamed in the gray twilight, and the flame of this candle moved and winked when Anna knelt beside it.
She knelt, and her skirts’ rustling made a sound like birds. Nebo stood behind, his ra
w, cold-reddened hands clasped before him. Anna removed her gloves, and with her right hand turned down the blanket, turned it down to the waist of the man who lay beneath it.
Bushrod Carter’s face was solemn, composed, the face of a sleeper without dreams. He was dressed once again in his gray jacket, brushed and cleaned and buttoned, the empty sleeve pinned up. His right hand lay upon his breast.
“Hey, boy,” Anna whispered. She touched his hair; it had been washed and combed, now it glistened with sleet that had crept in under the blanket. Still, it was soft, and fine as cornsilk.
“He looks. …all right, doesn’t he?” said Anna.
“Yes’m,” said Nebo. “Like a soldier.”
“He was that,” said Anna.
She rose then, her skirts rustling, and looked out across the gallery to the littered, trampled yard. “Well,” she said. “I will tell them it is ready. Nebo, will you come inside?”
“Oh, no, Miss Anna. You go on.”
Anna nodded. “Watch with him, then. It won’t be long.” Then she was gone, and Nebo was left alone on the gallery.
Nebo rubbed his hands, studied them, looked down at the shoes Anna had made him wear in the freezing rain. “Well, well,” he said. He walked to the other end of the gallery, stepping carefully among the dead men; he stood there a moment, rocking on his heels, then walked carefully back again. He blew his reddened nose on the skirt of his frock coat, then looked out toward the oak grove. Nothing was moving there. Finally, Nebo sat down, cross-legged, close beside the body of Bushrod Carter.
The patter of sleet made a sound like something walking in the leaves, and away off a dog barked once. There was no other sound. Nebo listened a moment, his head cocked, then he looked at Bushrod’s face.
“Well, old Bushrod,” he said, “it’s mighty quiet now.”
He put out his hand and smoothed the blanket over Bushrod’s legs. He patted it, and smoothed it again.
“Old Bushrod,” he said.
He touched Bushrod’s hand. It was cold and stiff, but Nebo closed his own around it anyway. He was sitting like that, still holding Bushrod’s hand, when the people came out of the house.
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