by Lance Weller
“What, goddamn it?”
“Sing me that song, Abel.”
Abel looked around. Beside him, the boy settled down and crossed his arms behind his head, staring up at the busy sky. “Jesus, Ned. I ain’t doing that.”
Ned looked at him. “Please, Abel? I just know I ain’t goin’ to get no sleep tonight otherwise.”
“No, goddamnit. I ain’t doin’ it.”
“Well, Jesus,” said Ned good-naturedly. “First you lie to me about women and fuckin’ and now you won’t even sing me to goddamned sleep.”
Abel stared at the boy. After a moment, he closed his mouth. Squinting hard at him, Abel asked, “You did that just to get my goat, didn’t you?”
“Goddamned right I did.”
“Well, stop it. Don’t sound right. Words like that comin’ out your mouth.”
“Will you sing me that song?”
“No, I won’t. I told you that.”
“Well, shit. I guess then I’ll goddamned stop it when I’m goddamned good and shittin’ ready.”
Abel took a deep breath and blew. He looked around to see how many were nearby and if they were listening, then, after swearing under his breath, Abel began to sing softly a little hush-a-bye song he remembered from his youth. Beside him, Ned grinned and shut his eyes. Abel sang softly, his voice deep and soothing, and after a while he too closed his eyes and settled in beside the boy, still singing.
The stars traced their courses and the orange glow gradually faded and was gone. At some point in their sleep Abel put an arm around Ned’s shoulders and Ned leaned into him and they slept that way, together, until daybreak, when the army roused itself and moved on.
May 5, 1864
They spent the morning digging in the loamy, rainwet earth. All around them rose the soft, seductive scents of spring—the spice of old leaves, the perfume of wildflowers, the richness of turned soil. They could smell the sun and imagine long, hot days to come so that the farmers among them pined for home and the lovers for their sweethearts. Steuart’s Brigade, of Ewell’s Corps, formed a line with two other brigades of the division that threaded north-to-south along the western edge of an old and overgrown cornfield of fifty acres or so, known locally as Saunders’. Whosoever it was that had once owned the land, that had cleared the trash trees and tangles from it and broke the soil, tilled it, sown and reaped and loved it, that had built home and hope upon it, was long gone now. Long gone and leaving behind only stubby, half-wild corn plantings shooting greenly from the yellow, calf-high grass like weird gothic spikes. The old field stretched several hundred yards north and south of the old Orange Turnpike, which slanted eastward through its center and was, in its turn, cut by a deep gully trickling that morning with stale rainwater. A barren yellow patch amidst the darkness and the green. The Wilderness rose around Saunders’ Field like a vegetable wall so that walking from the dark of the wood was like passing from night to day in the space of a step, from sleep to dream.
There was a scarcity of shovels in the division, so men were compelled to break the earth with bayonet points and cutlery and the big, swordlike blades of dragoons that some men carried. A long chain of crumbling mounds rose slowly with the sun. Bristling with roots and twigs and old, dry grass, the earthen mounds were striated light and dark and light again so that those of a geologic bent could see plainly the years of industry that had operated in the Wilderness. Branches and small downed trees were drug atop the earthworks, and by noon the men were hunkered down like gnomes or goblins behind their hasty battlements.
They waited. They watched down the road, where occasionally they glimpsed the soldiers of the Army of the Potomac, now Grant’s, in their dark uniforms crossing the median, and they listened to them in the brush across the field at much the same work as they themselves had done.
A blue sky day and hot. By midmorning fluttery waves of heat shimmered off the planks and rose from the yellow field itself where David Abernathy, crouched down in the dirt behind the fieldworks close by the road, watched as Union soldiers formed up in lines back in the woods beyond the other side of the field. He blinked and slipped the spectacles from his face. The surrounding Wilderness became a soft, fantasy wood of dark shadows and delight, and he sniffed mournfully and replaced the eyeglasses.
Abel lay stretched out on his back beside him, and when David nudged him, he blinked, grunted, and wet his lips as though coming back from some far-off place he did not want to leave. The corners of his eyes were wet, and Abel quickly wiped his face with his wrist backs, one and then the other. Rubbing his palm briskly up and down his face to chase the sleep from him, he blinked and frowned. “What is it?” he asked, his voice rough and tired.
David gripped his rifle and lifted his chin. “Looks like they’re getting ready over there,” he said quietly.
Abel rolled onto his belly and tugged his hat brim down over his eyes to shade them. Squinting, he watched for a long time the far side of the field, where they were gathering themselves behind screens of dense brush—small, dark figures intercut with Zouave uniforms, brightly red, you could just make them out standing double-ranked and bristling with flags and bayonets that sparked in the sun like tiny embers thrown from a fire. You could tell the sound of officers’ horses breaking up the underbrush, their hooves making that lovely, hollow, clopping sound that can only come from horses walking upon the earth, and you could hear the officers’ voices shouting orders and encouragement, readying the working men for the job at hand. Abel’s lips moved with silent counting as he picked out flags from the brush. When he looked back at David he opened his mouth as though to speak, then shut it again and looked back across the field to count a second time. “I heard somewhere Grant went and reorganized the whole works,” Abel finally said. “Hard to say what-all’s over there. How many, I mean. Counted twelve flags ’fore I gave it up.” He frowned and wiped his mouth. “There’s a whole mess of men over there, anyway.”
David pinched his temples with thumb and middle finger, then pressed hard against the lids of his eyes to try and drive the green jangle from his skull. It did not work—it seldom worked—and he let out a sigh. “I did see a Fifth Corps flag back in there not too long ago,” he offered.
Abel nodded. “Could be them Maine men, then,” he said. “Maybe them good Green Mountain boys or them New Yorkers, maybe. Sickles’ old bunch.” He looked hard at David. “You goin’ to make it?”
David tucked his tongue thoughtfully into his cheek and seemed to ponder the question a moment before answering. “I suppose so,” he finally said, gripping his rifle again. He looked at Abel. “I sometimes forget that you come from up that way,” he said.
“New York?” asked Abel, waving a hand through the sunstruck air dismissively. “It’s just a place, like any other. Don’t mean anything more’n what a person wants it to, and the only claim it’s got on me is I’ve got people buried up there.” He shrugged. “Aunt,” he said. “My mama and daddy’re up there. Some others.”
David sniffed and curled his lip. “Goddamn Yankee,” he said.
“Fuck you,” said Abel good-naturedly. “And watch your mouth.” He lifted his chin and asked “How’re Lee’s Miserables?”
David grinned wide. “Like the book says,” he said, finishing the joke. “Faintin’.”
They chuckled softly together. A stray bullet whizzed overhead, clipping through the greenery to send leaves spiraling through the blue air and sounding for all the world on this fine spring day like a fat bee or horsefly off about its business. A heartbeat later came the sound of the shot and then its attendant echo. Abel reached out to finger the cuff of David’s gaudy shirt, whistling as he did so, and David pushed his hand back, then nodded across the field. “What do you think about it? Really?” he asked.
“What? The shirt? I already told you, you look like a goddamned—”
“No,” said David quickly. “About what they’re doing across the way. You think they’re coming?”
Abel snorted. �
��Hell yes, I think they’re coming. I imagine we’ll all have a fine time of it here pretty quick.”
David stared at him, and Abel met his eye, then, after a moment, said, “It’s like I told Ned. I figure they got us by the short hairs, and once they figure that out, it’ll get pretty bad.” He pursed his lips and considered the backs of his knuckles a moment before glancing off across the field, where the blue ranks murmured and swelled behind screens of green. Abel rolled over onto his back. “You just hang back this morning,” he told David. He stared a moment at David’s gaudy shirt, then shook his head. “You hang onto that charm of yours and keep your head down,” he said. “You’ll be all right.” Then Abel tilted his hat back over his face, and a few moments later he was sleeping again.
More noise as skirmishers from both sides found each other in the tall grass. Stray shots hissed over the grass tops, peppering the far side of the earthworks and thunking into the trees. He watched for Ned or some sign of him rising from and firing over the grass with the other skirmishers but saw no one he knew. Finally, David rolled over onto his back and reached down the front of his varicolored shirt for the little crucifix he’d found that morning on the dead cavalryman.
In the early hours of the day, they’d not known how far the Army of the Potomac had come into the Wilderness nor by what roads, so the Army of Northern Virginia moved slowly east down their two roads, separated by over a mile of dank forest. Ewell moved his corps along the old turnpike with pickets well advanced. As they neared the field where they now crouched, the men fanned out into the shadowy green tangle on either side of the road that ran in a white line that disappeared into the gloom beyond the dull yellow grass. Dust rose and went blowing over the field, and the men were pale with it. Over the treetops, they saw other, larger clouds marking the Union progression through the Wilderness as though Ewell’s corps was the stem of a T the Yankees were crossing. As he stepped from the road, David wondered would they feel a tremor in the earth as so many countless pounds of flesh and machines trod and rolled across it. He wondered would they hear them coming like a thunderstorm troubling the next valley and moving swiftly toward them.
Birdsong was everywhere that morning, and shafts of pale sunlight tilted through the branches so the light lay bright upon the leaves and the moss steamed softly from the forest floor. And the sun that morning made the dew to shine like tiny beads strung upon the precise, wiredrawn designs of spiderwebs. And the air that morning was redolent of sun and warmth and good, growing things—the thick, fecund odor of the forest where things grew, fell, rotted out, and grew again. A vegetable reek, thought David, an ancient, womanish scent, and under it, the faint acrid stink of kicked-over camp-fires and the endless clouds of kicked-up dust.
The body of the cavalryman lay just off the road. The men were filing into the deep brush, paying the deadman no mind. When Ned saw him, he whistled softly and nudged David. “Ain’t that just about the saddest thing?” he asked, his round pink face bright with sweat.
The rider lay on his back in a bright green spray of grass that should have been lovely. He’d not been dead more than a day yet the beetles had already begun their gleaning. You couldn’t tell if he’d been handsome for he was tightening with bloat. He was hatless and beardless and had been shot through the throat; darkened blood wrapped his neck and ran in a trail from him like a scarf knit by someone missing him. His left boot was tangled up in his stirrup, and his horse lay dead beside him, its long snout laying across the rider’s thigh. The ground around them was brown and the leaves crackled with life.
David squatted beside the body and rifled through the saddlebags. He sniffed and wiped his nose with the back of his hand, fighting hard against a vomitous swelling at the back of his throat. “I don’t reckon this one’ll get a proper burial,” he told Ned, who stood nearby, shuffling his weight from foot to foot. “Figure, if we can find his name somebody might get word to his people.”
But there had been little time for that. Men were filing to either side of the road and bending to digging. Ned shuffled his feet in the dust. David crouched beside the body. Officers called to them, and before standing to move away, David noticed something clutched in the dead rider’s palm. A small white cross carved of a single piece of bone or something like bone. Ned went off—a blink, and he was vanished in the dark brush. Frowning, David pried the cross from the rider’s stiff hand. He stood looking at it a long time. The cross was light and porous, still cool with the rider’s death. David looked at him. You could hardly call it a face any longer. Touching two fingers to the brim of his hat, he slipped the cross into his pocket and moved off into the brush beside the pale road.
Now, as he lay on his back in the early afternoon sun, David examined the little cross fitted to his palm by a thong wrapped about his fingers. There was an old bloodstain on the transom, and he ran a thumb across it, feeling how smooth it was near the stain. As though some other man, farmer or soldier or miner or clerk or railroad man, some sailor or teamster or drifter or husband, brother or son, had worked his thumbpad back and forth and back again upon the cross at prayers. Or more simply hoping against death in the dark places of the world.
David sighed. He worried the cross with his thumb, and when the sky did not crack open for the good Lord’s almighty hand to reach down and lift him bodily from this place, he sniffed and closed his eyes. He rubbed his forehead against the old, green pain that flared and cavitated behind his eyes.
There was more rifle fire now—scattered popping sounds like flames working into damp wood. The noise was still individual enough to echo between the trees before diminishing slowly under the sky. David took off his hat and dragged a sleeve across his face. His heart shuddered with each percussion, but this was only the beginning of things, and he knew that after a time it would return to its normal rhythm so paid it little mind.
He ducked as a stray bullet sent a spray of dirt over him, then lowered the cross down the front of his shirt. As he grasped his hat to snug it back onto his head, Gully Coleman leaned over and tapped David’s shoulder. “Hey there,” he said, his thin lips tilting up one side of his face and his rail-thin body all angles as he hunkered behind the works. “Let me see your hat a minute, bud.”
David frowned and silently passed the hat to him. Gully took the hat in hands that seemed in all ways outsized for the rest of him. He had a small head and a large face, and men who did not know his character remarked on his resemblance to the Union president, but this was mainly for his height and beard, for Gully lacked Lincoln’s deep, sad eyes and laughing mouth. Gully took the hat, winked at David, and hoisted it up over the earthen ramparts on the point of his bayonet. Before David could protest, Gully was waving the hat back and forth through the sunstruck air.
His challenge was quickly answered by a spattering of bullets. They came slapping hard against the piled dirt and went clipping through the branches overhead. Leaves spiraled with the sun bright on their smooth backs, and men up and down the line hooted, shouted, called, and laughed. Gully lowered his bayonet, plucked David’s shredded hat from it, and passed it back. “See, Virdge,” he said to the man crouching beside him. “I told you them boys had their eyes on our section. They all’s eager on account we’re near the road. They know it’s a good spot.” Gully winked broadly and grinned at David.
David took the hat back. The crown was blown out, and there were too many holes in it to count. He reached inside and poked one thin finger through a hole, wiggled it about, then looked at Gully.
“Why in hell would you do that?” he asked softly.
Gully nodded to Virgil, then toward the Yankee sharpshooters bobbing darkly in the yellow grass near the far tree line. “Old Virdge didn’t allow them Yanks was even in the field, let alone watchin’ us, and I said they was.” He shrugged. “I figured puttin’ up a hat would be the most … What do you say?—The most expeditious way to prove me out.” Gully hooked his thumbs into the tattered lapels of his rotting jacket and pulled in h
is chin. Behind him, Virgil nodded vigorously, then looked away with laughter.
David gaped. He lifted his hand, the hat still hanging from his finger, and pointed at Gully, the hat shaking like a dead bird. “God damn it,” he said. “God damn it to hell. Whyn’t you use your own goddamned hat?”
Gully opened his mouth in mock astonishment. He removed his soiled bowler and held it against his chest. “Why, on account of this is MY hat,” he said earnestly, then jammed the bowler back down onto his head and grinned. “Anyway, I reckoned seeing as how you’re already dressed for the ball in your new finery and whatnot”—he nodded to David’s new shirt—“I just figured you might appreciate your hat being as God-awful-ugly as your shirt.”
There were some thirty men crouching behind the works up and down the line from them who had been watching this exchange, and to David’s ears they all began laughing at once—except for Abel, who still dozed on his back beside him. David scowled and spat and, for spite, slapped hard at the top of Abel’s head with the wrecked hat, but Abel slept on. Disgusted, David put the hat on, then rolled onto his stomach to watch for the Yankees they all knew must come soon.
Gully pursed his lips, leaned and spat, then nodded toward David. “Kindly looks like a pope’s cap now,” he observed.
“Or some kind of piney-apple,” offered Virgil. When David turned to glare at them, Virgil shrugged and held his palms up. “I seen ’em at a stand in Charleston oncet,” he said. “It don’t look bad. On you.”
There was more laughing, and David joined them in spite of himself, but it didn’t last. From the north end of the field, blowing south, came a soft, freshening wind, and from the woods there came a rider.
An officer dressed in his blue finery came a few rods out into the grass. His carriage on horseback was erect and very proper, and neither was his horse skittish as they halted. He wore a sash of yellow and yellow gloves, and his black boots shone as though he’d prepared himself carefully for this moment. Men murmured this was Grant himself come to inspect their defenses, and though most had seen newspapers and knew better, the rumor went up and down the line. It was not Grant, yet still no man fired. “Goddamn,” said Virgil softly. “Goddamn, but that’s a splendid man.”