by Laird Hunt
That boy didn’t have the voice Bartholomew had when he was at his fiddle of an evening when we were sitting together on a straw bale under the stars but I’d heard worse. Another boy could play the bones took up with him. There was some hands clapping. Two or three got up a kind of jig that they pulled me into the middle of and made me hop and shuffle along.
When I went out later to my first night of picket, that song came with me. There was a Louisville boy on duty with me called me Gallant Ash and hummed some of it. I told him he’d better keep that name to himself but some of the others heard and took it up and then there wasn’t any stopping it. Even our Colonel, when I saw him again the next day, handed it over at me to wear, so I put it on.
Wearing it the following night I shot my first man. Six or seven of them looking to harass and harry, or Lord knows what, came up out of the trees an inch or two before dawn. Half the boys on our portion of the line were nestled in the leaves and slow to rise so it was only a few of us had our muskets at the ready and fired at the blurs come running through the draw. Only one of our firearms functioned and that was mine. I got a look at the man I’d killed when his brothers had run off. He had curly dark hair and a little beard. His mouth was large and his cheekbones high. The ball had hit him just above his left breast. You could see a kind of brown bloom coming up through his light coat. He had a filthy old dressing on his left hand and fingernails could have used a trim.
Our relief came with the sun and told us to head back and report, but I stayed on a minute with the killed man. Like anyone else, I’d seen plenty of the dead, but never one I had made. I had just that morning crafted another light remark about how many rebels I aimed to account for, how many I planned to shoot and skin. We had larked on that subject every day. Some of those had already been in fights had told us that what we were most likely to do when the enemy was all lined up and aiming at us was run. But I had not run. I had fired my weapon.
“Did you see that, Mother,” I whispered.
I saw it, she whispered back.
Now there I sat. I wanted to take up the dead man’s head and cradle it but I did not do that and knew that that kind of a thought was another thing I was going to have to learn to kill. Some of them on relief teased me a little as I sat there my minute but I didn’t pay them any mind. They hadn’t killed anyone that morning. When the sun was up sufficient I saw that the dead man’s open eyes were blue.
One week later, the Colonel, whose horses were off working elsewhere, had one of our lieutenants form up a party to search out a likely forward encampment and told him to take me along. It was a dozen of us then to tromp through the trees and creeks, and after living with a thousand it felt like it was just us and the birds left to populate an empty earth. We saw none of the enemy nor any two-leggers white or dark at all. We scouted a ways and struck a deserted house or three but none fit for a camp. The lieutenant had us split ourselves up then to cover more ground and after walking an hour, me and the boy I was with found what looked like the right place hiding away in the trees.
It was a pretty piece of land with a fine, bright stream to split it. There was a stone bridge could take the weight of our guns across it and a cabin for the Colonel and his officers. There was a barn still had straw in it and a big oak tree we sat under a minute to chew our apples and biscuits and a well we pulled good water up out of. Next to the well was a shed. In it we found a chain and a shackle lying open next to a declivity in the dirt floor. You could see the shackle had been shut hard awhile and probably many a time on something soft.
We might have stood on for a bit to look at this sorry spectacle but at that minute a good-size pig that hadn’t long been wild come snorting by. We shot the pig, got it trussed and hung on a birch pole between us, and made our way back to the meeting point, where after many a rest we presented our pig and made our report. Turned out some of the others had found a choicer spot and that’s where the regiment moved but that didn’t stop a good number of us, including the Colonel, from chewing that night on fresh pork.
I wrote Bartholomew about that day and that meal in my next letter to him. I thought about some of the birds I had seen and put those down and about some of the trees and the fine construction of the bridge and the sound of the creek moving under it and included that in my letter too. The pig we had shot had squealed about as loud in its dying as a pig called Cloverleaf we once had back home and I made the comparison in my letter to Bartholomew and reckoned it was true. I read through it after I thought I had finished it enough and hadn’t quite ruined up every inch of it and I was getting ready to fold it for sending when that shed came back to me. I saw the shackle and the old blood caked on the iron and gave a shudder. That shudder started somewhere down low in my back and came up through my throat and breached my mouth. There wasn’t anyone alive hadn’t seen someone with a shackle someplace on his body, I knew that, but there had been a bite of sorrows in that empty place made me glad to think we had found another spot and weren’t going to return.
Return I did, though. The very next day the Colonel instructed me and my fellow to lead a forage party to the environs to see if we could scare up another nice piece of pork. I walked us straight there like I had the map to it written on my shirtsleeve. There was as much sun out as there had been the day before and an even better breeze. We killed another pig, and the boys I was with all thought we ought to have set our camp there but I didn’t say a word. From a distance the shed, with its door hanging off one of its hinges, looked like it opened up onto a darkness would lead you, if you studied at it too closely, down to a place you would have to work hard to climb your way back up out of.
There was still plenty used my nickname, but I didn’t feel any too gallant over the next coming days. I expect if any of the ladies we saw as we marched had lost her shirt to her excitement I’d have let her air out her luxuries in the breeze. Many was the time I stepped off the line to look for a bush and had to trot to catch back up. I wasn’t the only one had swallowed up some swamp water at the camp we had chosen and was paying the price. None of us had any interest in squatting down in front of the others and looked to put good distance between us, but the still real prospect of one of them stumbling onto me at my business I was at every ten minutes instead of every ten hours and uncovering my secret didn’t help cheer me up. It didn’t cheer me up any much more either when a boy came back from his own trip to the bushes carrying a skull in his hand.
Turned out we were walking through where one of the earliest skirmishes had been and some of the fallen had gone unburied and their bones had been scattered by animals and wind. Soon as we learned this we got bones on the brain and for the next mile, green and brown and mossy white was all we could see.
“There’s one over there,” someone would say.
Another would call out, “There’s a boot down there at the base of that tree still got some foot stuck in it.”
There were bones in the ditches, bones in the fencerows, bones in the cattails, and bones in a kind of circle at the shallow black bottom of a brook. There was some didn’t like all that calling out about bones and thought we ought to stop and do them their justice, regardless of whose they were, blue or gray, but the Colonel had his orders and the regiment was moving and we kept our mouths open and fingers pointing and left our shovels alone.
That feeling of wanting to bury the bones we saw, which had lingered long past the seeing of them, didn’t keep the boy with the skull from pulling it out when we tromped some miles later through a little town, nor from tossing it into the hands of a local belle turned out to watch us pass. A number of us gave out a good laugh when he did this. Not the belle. She neither laughed nor shrieked nor dropped the mossy thing but considered it a minute and then turned and set it carefully on the window ledge next to her. I looked at her over my shoulder a little and wondered at how, after that gift, her lips had made themselves into a strong little smile and at how she had met and held the eye of anyone who looked at or spoke
to her as we all trooped past. There was a child or two in the shadows behind her. The front of the house was fire-blackened and the roof had been part stove in. My stomach gave a tug and I turned away but I didn’t stop thinking about her even when I ran off again to find a quiet spot. Who knew what the skull meant to her and hers. As I squatted there at my business, I tapped a time or two on my own skull to make sure it was still resting there snug on my neck.
My mother had a story she liked to tell about a man heard Death was waiting up around the bend. He changed his direction and walked the other way. You know how that ends. I had known it before I left for war and I knew it down there in the South with its bones and ball-stove roofs, so when the regiment’s numbers commenced again to drop after a call to double-time it up to the sound of the cannon we had begun to hear, I gripped harder at my Springfield and swung my cartridge box around behind me and quit my trips to the bushes and followed fast. I did not even start to imagine what it would be like not to follow. I was only sorry that I would be obliged to engage with my stomach in its poor shape. Not so sorry, though, that I slowed when a pair of corporals jogged down the line telling those who were too sick to drop back. Nor did I, nor any of those around me I am proud to say, slow down when the cannon fire grew so hot it seemed like the injury was already being done to us before we had fairly arrived and that we were already part of the world’s everlasting grief and glory, and we could see the trees crashing down destroyed in the heights and hear the sound, from all quarters, of hurt men letting the air out of their throats.
We started to see gray off at a distance, just little speckles of it but everywhere, and they had us take off our knapsacks and anything else wouldn’t help in the fight. I didn’t have time to be sorry to see Bartholomew’s likeness and all my letters from him go. I just untangled the sack like all those around me were doing and let it drop. We all but ran then. There was a company of ours up ahead having hell’s time and needed our help at holding the flank. I had stood at the picket and fired off my rifle at a man as I’ve already said, but there’s a first time for battles too. Some good number of us fell as we made the last effort, and the air filled itself up with smoke. It seemed like we would never get to where we were going and then we were there.
We had come to a field as long and wide as you like with us on one side and them on the other. It was their boys in their slouch hats and us in ours. If we’d been wearing the same colors, you could have thought it was a mirror. Like the central job of it was we were fixing to fire at ourselves. Like the other half of it, the mirror, was fixing to fire straight back. I got this idea I gripped hard on to that there had to be skirmishers go out first, that we would each send out a wave at each other, that it wasn’t yet time for the rest of us to fight. Our Colonel came riding up behind us about then and put that idea right out of my head. He rode up, then got down off his horse and gave his mustaches a twist and said we hadn’t come all the way over from Ohio to pick petunias, that it was time to bring thunder, to fling doom, to stand shoulder to shoulder and never fear the dark. While he made this speech the grays kept creeping forward and we did too and when we had both quit creeping our throats and eyes had already started fighting and our colors stood not forty yards apart.
There had been a sutler in camp just the day before had tried to sell off a set of iron armor could keep out, he had said, any bullet built by man and see you home to your loved ones but he had been laughed down. I got a picture of that armor in my head though when the gray volleys commenced and the boy next to me caught his ravishing and fell away just as we were lifting our guns. The boy on the other side of me croaked out about sure wishing he had a rock or tree to stand behind, and the old fellow been in plenty of fights next to him laughed and bit open a cartridge, sniffed loud, and said, “You are the tree, son.”
It was nothing but marching and battles, marching and double-timing and battles all the long days after that. Once, they put us on a train to take us farther east but I didn’t think about the world whooshing by, I just thought about the engine smoke in the cattle car they had us in and the boys couldn’t take the rocking and kept getting sick out the open door and a duckling-shaped bruise I had on my rear parts so I couldn’t show anyone made it painful to sit. Another time, after we had fought in a swamp had us picking leeches off our everywheres for days, they carried us where they wanted us in a boat sat so low in the water we expected the whole time anything like a wave would come by and Lee’s work would be done for him because we would all drown.
Each time we fought we took off our knapsacks and made a pile out of them. It got to where we’d feel the ground shake and start to shrug them off. I lost two knapsacks when the rebels took our ground and I quit carrying my photographs and letters in them. After I lost the second one I had Bartholomew get another likeness made. The likeness-maker mistook Bartholomew’s intention, figured him for a boy about to head off for the fight, and had him pose in his tall hat next to a weapon that it came off clear in the likeness Bartholomew wasn’t any too comfortable having to grasp. He wrote in the accompanying note that it was a counterfeit worse than any in the Confederacy, but I liked this picture of my soldier wasn’t any soldier holding his musket like it was a hot rake or a bear’s leg, and after I had looked at it a good long while, I sewed it into the wrappings I wore under my shirt.
I had been shy to send my own picture to him but after all those battles I thought I better get my own likeness taken before I got my ticket to hell or lost an eye or an arm. So I got myself a pass and walked the ten miles up the road to where I could catch a wagon into Washington City. It was my intention to spend the portion of the day I didn’t use in likeness-making to see some of the sights of that great city we were all defending, but the wagon I was riding in got stuck when the driver fell asleep and its mules ran it into some deep mud. It took two hours to fetch it out and by the time we reached the outskirts, which was nothing better than a few deserted houses, a kicked-in stable, and tents and cook fires as far as I could see, I knew it was going to be all I could do to make my way back at something like a reasonable hour. So much for sights and seeing. Luckily there was a likeness-maker said he had other likenesses to deliver to my camp when they were ready who had his wagon set up next to a tonic seller down along the banks of the Potomac. Now, there was a fine piece of wet property. I never saw our capital, and expect now I never will, but I saw its river and felt its cool waters, as I put my feet into it while I was waiting for my turn. There was a preacher down by the water hawking his wares too. There were preachers and men just liked to talk and tap a Bible at every turn of the war, and I listened to them about as much or little as anyone else, but this one, down by the waters of the Potomac, had a style to him that went beyond a handsome way to say Mary, Joseph, and Jeremiah. I considered a minute letting the fellow behind me skip over me so I could listen a little longer, but the hour was advancing and I had my chore to accomplish.
We never used our bayonets for much of anything but cooking and cutting weeds but the likeness-maker had me hold a hoary old blunderbuss had a bayonet hammered onto it permanent for the photograph. He fussed his way under his cloth and looked through his lens and told me I looked just like a real soldier. My ears were still ringing from the previous week’s brawl, and I had seen a fellow from the line cut by balls into five big pieces not three days before.
“I look like a soldier because I’ve been soldiering, you son-of-a-bitch,” I told him.
“Now, now, gentle down, son” is what he said.
He did his work, though. Give credit where credit is due. I do look something like a real soldier in that piece of tin he had delivered the next day. My jaw was set and my cap sat cockeyed and my eyes were as wild as a snakebit colt’s. Bartholomew wrote me when he received it that he had sewn a smart case for it out of some soft lamb leather but that he had not yet dared to look too directly at it for fear that the likeness would shove aside the sweet memory he kept of me.
“Look at it
after they have killed me, then,” I wrote him, for I had a pique on me that he would not look at my picture I’d worked a day at to get made for him.
“If they kill you I will sew it up in its case forever and bury it with my heart in the yard,” he wrote me.
“Well, in the meantime,” I wrote him, “just take a peek at it and see what you think about how straight they’ve taught me to stand.”
It wasn’t just the fighting they wanted us for. At any quiet moments, they had us help with laying breastworks, with building bridges and cutting logs for their corduroy roads. In the big camps, you found yourself sweating under the sun next to every kind of man there was on this earth. I stripped trees with a red Indian out of New York State had green and purple tattoo stripes up and down his legs and arms, and I carried rocks and wrestled oxen and butchered goats and cleaned cannon and loaded wagons with the sad flesh of soon-to-be corpses next to Chinamen couldn’t speak English and Chinamen could speak it better than me and sundry coloreds of all shape, shine, and shade. I think if I had walked straight off the farm and into that work I would have wept at the shock. But the weeks and months had stretched me out into it. You stand in a line in your bright blues with your filthy face and your lice and all the dead you now know and get shot at regular, your thinking takes a change. You get to where you can do things you couldn’t have dreamed up the outline of before.
“Pick up that pile of arms”; “Shoot that line of horses”; “Kill anything that moves. Kill anything that doesn’t” came the orders from my lieutenants and my captains and my Colonel and any other wore the right uniform. You followed them, simple as that, and if you didn’t follow them when the fighting was hot, you died. Maybe you died anyway. There was always that. Death was the underclothing we all wore.