by Lance Weller
And there comes the sweet, sick stench of burning men and burning horses and standing watch over these and other, worse, things, you must wonder, Was there ever war like this before? Ever in all the world’s long turning? And would there ever be again? And you must know the answer and take no solace from it.
Weeping soldiers take aim at wounded comrades, their friends and mentors and adopted sons. They shoot them dead before the flames can reach them while those hurt beyond the range and sight of their fellows ready what weapons they can and pray for one thing or another while they watch the fires come. One man twists a little jackknife into his own throat, and another wraps weeping lips around a pistol barrel. Men burst apart, their blood flung down upon the living and the other dead like a gentle spring rain …
David Abernathy crouched in the Wilderness and watched the field where the flames gamboled brightly in the grass. Ahead of him, still hunkered behind the earthworks, Virgil Adams fired blindly, tears leaving pale tracks through the dark powder smeared across his cheeks. Deadmen from both armies lay in heaps in the grass, on the works, in the road, and the Union soldiers were falling back stubbornly, stumbling from the dark woods and back across the burning field toward where they’d started their charge.
A hundred men had stepped off into the grass to meet the enemy and had been, in their turn, driven back into the woods where all was green chaos. David soon lost track of his friends. His bottom lip was split from a Yankee rifle butt and he’d not seen Ned since the fighting started. Blood ran down his chin, striping him like a Red Indian. Somewhere out in the field, amidst the roaring, smoke, and flash, they were trying to form up again, and somewhere out there, still in it where it was the worst, was Abel, but David knew not where.
Balls sang past. They drove into the earth and underbrush around him and his hat gained three more holes. Throwing himself forward through the new spring grass, David gained the works and rolled onto his back to load. He slid the rifle down between thighs, grabbed the hot muzzle with his toughened left hand while his right fished around his haversack for a cartridge. He could feel the impact of bullets against the mounded dirt at his back, could hear their sizzling whine as they flew past, leaving momentary trails of clear, blue air through the smoke. As he tore the cartridge open with his teeth, it left a smear of black powder down and away from his lips like a half-painted frown. David dumped powder and ball down the barrel, then tilted the rifle up and banged the butt upon the ground to settle the charge. He’d lost or shot his ramrod during the charge. The right side of his face ached terribly and he wondered how bad tomorrow’s bruises would be and would his teeth remain locked in his gums or would he, at some point, end up dumping molars and eyeteeth down the barrel along with powder and ball.
From out in the field, David heard the Union cannon fire again. He ducked and squeezed shut his eyes as thunder, shock, and smoke rolled over the grass. Somewhere up the line came the crackling shriek of another tree falling. To his left and right, as far as the smoke allowed him to see, men were busy at their weapons—those still with rammers drawing them out and twirling them batonlike through the air, then fitting firing pins and raising to their knees to fire in great long sheets of flame. The dark of the field was pricked brightly as the Yankees returned fire.
David discharged his weapon without thought, like a machine or a laboring man working late in the day, and threw himself onto his back again to reload. He glanced over at Virgil. The man had accidentally fired his ramrod and was staring mournfully at it where it was stuck quivering in the grass some ten yards out. Virgil looked at him, his face square and sad and resigned, and before David could raise his voice to stop him, he’d vaulted the works and was running through the burning grass. David rolled over onto his stomach to watch as Virgil’s running legs stirred airy coils into the smoke. The cannon near the swale fired. There came the sudden bang, the malignant hissing like a hot rain on a cool day. Shrapnel from their canister sent Virgil’s head, the upper portion of his chest, and his entire left arm spinning away while the rest of his body kept to its course—stumbling through the smoke, propelled by momentum with the pale segments of his liberated spine flopping along behind like a bizarre tail.
Swearing and trembling, David ducked back down and was sick. The field was afire on both sides of the road. Black smoke billowed and darkened the sky nightwise and the sun went wholly red. As though the armies fought under some fantastic new star or the old one gone all wrong. There was screaming. Rifles fired and flames crackled in the grass and David could hear ammunition pouches exploding. The moist slap of bullets striking flesh. And again. And again. He finished loading his piece and rolled over to go back to work.
The Union artillerymen were firing obliquely across the smoldering field into the faces of a regiment charging them from the northwest corner of their line, and the shot tore into the backs of their own men still running for the works on that portion of the field. Men threw up their hands in shocked amazement at bright death. Men fell and rose no more. In the deep woods along the road behind him, David could hear a brigade forming for a countercharge. He heard old Spivey bellowing his war cry and laid his rifle barrel atop the works to aim into the smoke blowing about in designs strange and fantastic. Manshaped ghosts flitted through the gloom. Smoke roiled from the grass, from little glowing beds of fire, as though there were oil patches there that had been set ablaze. David fired in the general direction of the cannon, blinked sweat from his eyes, shook his head, and bent once more over his rifle. The roaring sound of the battle was everywhere and unceasing. The very ground was atremble.
A man came toward him through the smoke, running with his rifle raised like a club and a desperate, terrified expression twisting his features monstrously. Gilded eagle buttons twinkled redly on his coat. With nothing like thought, David squeezed his fist around the trigger. He felt the stock kick against his shoulder; a deep bruise there tomorrow like a blue half-moon etched into his shoulder. He did not even hear the sound it made for the sound of musketry was general and unceasing as rain nor did he need to hear it. The man fell, the gilded eagles winked out, and David ducked back down.
As he settled the charge home for the thirty-eighth time that day, the man he’d shot began to scream. He pleaded and sobbed and called for his mother, his father, and his brother and wondered, groaning, why they had forsaken him.
David closed his eyes and counted slowly, and when he opened them again his hands had calmed and he could breathe once more. Lifting the cavalryman’s cross from around his neck, he wrapped the cord around his fingers so the cross itself fit neatly into the hollow of his cramped palm. He fit a firing pin onto the cone and rose up on his knees.
It was not a man at all lying there gutshot and dying in the dirt before the works but a boy of fourteen years or so. He wore a Yankee coat and lay with his legs kicking feebly in his urine-soaked trousers. The ground beneath him was red, and the hands he held over the wound in his stomach were the hands of a child.
David’s breath left him. He doubled over behind the works with his thumb and forefinger pressed hard to his temples, as though to constrict the veins jangling fresh green pain through his skull. Beyond the works, the boy called again for his father, his brother. He called for his dog and he called for his mother. David pursed his lips and spat. With shaking hands he lay down his musket. He stood. The boy saw him, stared at him through the smoke. His lips moved and he lifted up his gorestained little-boy hands.
David Abernathy was aware of his legs and of his lungs. He was aware of a dull, numb tingling in his hands and he was aware of the bloodred slantings of the late-afternoon sun come cutting through the smoke to stand in strange, ruby-colored columns tilted on the trembling earth. He heard flames crackling orange and red in the dry yellow grass, and he even heard the sound that smoke makes upon the air as it travels—like a soft whisper of lace drug through still, cool water by the hand of a mother who loves her boy.
The boy’s mouth moved without so
und, and he vomited bloody sputum down the front of his overlarge uniform.
David churned with a thick, weary nausea, and he wondered if his eyes leaked blood or tears from the pain in his head. Smoke fouled his lungs and dried his mouth and he could feel the fast pulse of blood all through him—temples and arms and legs and the small veins behind his eyes and he could feel blood pulsing in the lobes of his ears.
He took a breath.
The cool, stinging wind of a single bullet passed close to his cheek like the first quick kiss of a shy girl.
David took a breath.
Clambering over the shot-torn works, he ran into the field and down the road toward the boy. He ran with the little cross pressed to his palm, pinching his flesh with a peculiar, satisfying pain. From somewhere came the sound of Abel’s voice, shouting to him, but David paid it no mind. He ran on, suddenly aware of the good, clean feel of his new shirt upon his hot skin—his chest and arms and back where it had soaked up his sweat and now lay cool on him like the damp towels his mother would press upon his forehead in the beforetimes when he lay abed with headaches—and David suddenly knew beyond knowing, beyond memory, how it had been to be a child with a mother who loved him and how it had felt to run through the tall grass, no trace of pain now, toward her where she stood smiling with her arms open. A dark, welcoming shape against the sun. David was filled with a joy that burned the jolting green pain away. He ran joyously forward, legs fast and blurstruck through the charry smoke.
And, finally, these things: A man runs forward through the smoke, into the field and down the road, to the side of a young boy grievously wounded beside a high wall of flame. This man throws his own tattered coat around the boy and lifts him, mindful not to spill the insides out through the hole in the boy’s stomach. Another man shouts to him, and he turns, still holding the boy as protectively as if he were the man’s own child or the phantom-boy of himself, come to remind him of something he’d forgotten. He turns to face the cannon, to see them jerk the lanyard, and he has only time to raise one hand before he and boy all but disappear in a gust of hot metal. On the smoldering grass where they’d stood is little but a wet smear.
And this: A lean rebel with a tired face and a seeping wound upon his neck stumbles forward. He finds the place where his friend had stood and falls to his knees, searches about in the grass a moment, then lifts up a little carved cross as though it were a rare flower. He puts it in his pocket, then covers his face with his hands and weeps as the balls go whizzing past, leaving thin, diaphanous trails, like strange webbing, hanging in the smoke.
And look—you cannot help yourself. Look to see dead men and wounded, shattered men and burnt. Men standing to battle with fixed expressions of grim resolve, as though they’d discovered things within themselves that will be hard to live with later, and men frightened beyond all sense, lying facedown and weeping in the grass. Union soldiers in retreat across the howling field and masses of men from both sides lying huddled in the damp of the gully between the lines, passing bottles back and forth. Pennants and standards and flags all brightly waving and shot-torn, proud amidst the smoke and flames. In the woods beyond the field either side, wind-rippled green and yellow hospital flags sprout, drawing the wounded to them like awful heliotropic blossoms. Surgeons stand to their work with bare forearms, fists white upon the handles of their bone saws.
Smoke billowed up in great black sheets that could be seen for miles about. A horse, cut loose from the artillery limber, came screaming down the road past Abel with its mane all afire and its nostrils huge. As he stood to watch it pass, Abel fell again. The sun darkened as though night had come upon Saunders’ Field, and when it did come, hours later, it came slowly but with infinite mercy.
He woke well after dark. His eyes slowly opened, and he lay a long time staring into the branch-crossed dark, wondering if he had died. Abel breathed and he blinked and pondered the nature of light and dark, and after a time of this he sat up. Setting his back against a flowering dogwood, he placed his sticky hands in his lap and let his head fall back against the trunk. Tree branch, shrub, and vine traced ink-black lines across the surface of the night, and Abel’s chest and legs were sprinkled with pale fallen blossoms.
He was far behind his own army’s lines, and how he got there he did not know. Wan circles of sad yellow light cast from cloth-covered lanterns shone here and there through the shadows. Occasionally rifle fire erupted with loud clatterings like someone off-loading planks somewhere, and faintly came the moist grindings of working bone saws. High, falsetto screams of those beneath the blades. The constant tramping through the darkened Wilderness as lost men stumbled about.
Abel pulled himself unsteadily to his feet and leaned against the dogwood. Pain flared blue as ice through his chest. Setting palms to knees to better get his breath, Abel worked his shirt open and sent his fingers exploring his midsection to see if he’d been killed. When he found the wound, he gathered his lips between his teeth and pushed the tip of his little finger into the wet declivity beside his heart. His nail scraped against his fourth rib before he finally drew his finger out and went carefully feeling along the wound’s length. The ball had gone through his jacket and his shirt and licked along the side of his chest, laying him open without piercing him. His shirt, along with mud and yellow grass from Saunders’ Field, had dried over the wound, making a fist-sized poultice that had stopped the bleeding.
Abel panted, leaning against the tree. He’d begun to sweat, and bile had risen up his throat before subsiding again. His smoke-scorched eyes went grinding dryly in their sockets as he knuckled them with curled forefingers gullied with cuts. He lacked two nails on his left hand and wondered if the thumb on that hand was broken. It surely felt it. When he tried to remember the face of the man he’d clubbed, it would not come to him, though he could still see the look in the man’s eyes as he died.
When Abel finally took a step away from the tree, he fell for the pain of it. Sitting up again, he felt along his right leg and found two bullet holes, hip and thigh, and marveled that neither had struck bone. The hip was another grazing wound, but when he pressed against the back of his thigh just above the knee, Abel could feel the hard alien shape of the ball itself embedded deep in the meat of his leg.
Where he sat, back from the lines, the air was somewhat cool and fresh. Abel gulped at it, then hissed and fought hard to keep from vomiting. When the spell had passed, he opened his eyes and slowly began to grope about the dark for his rifle.
His left hand touched a pants leg, his right settled upon a man’s chest—cold, sticky, and unmoving. Abel sat very still, letting his eyes adjust to the dark. As shapes faded in from the shadows, he realized he’d risen from a row of deadmen laid out like railroad ties along the road. As he sat there, a wagon slowly congealed from the darkness, its sound describing its shape before he saw the dark silhouette or smelled the horses. The wagon came to a stop down the line from Abel, and he watched two Negroes climb slowly from the bed. A white teamster tied the reins off on the brake, looked about, then pulled his hat brim over his eyes, crossed his arms over his belly, and began a fitful dozing on the jockeybox. One of the blacks lit a tiny lantern and hung it from a nail on the side of the wagon before the two of them walked to the first corpse in line and lifted it between them by the knees and arms. As they rolled the first of their stock into the wagon, a whippoorwill called from the dark, and both blacks paused to look fearfully about. As though the bird call heralded the stirring of the dead; their bright ascension or their long, dark fall. The Negroes watched along the line a moment, and if they saw Abel sitting up amidst the corpses they did not show it; they’d seen deadmen by the score twisted by their endings into every conceivable position of pain and outrage and fear, and so continued with their work.
Abel slowly stood and waited for them. He watched them at their work and reckoned them field slaves long used to heavy loads and wearying labor. Neither spoke as they lifted their charges and carried them to the wait
ing cart, but neither was there reverence in their actions. They simply worked. The whippoorwill called again, and from somewhere a man cried out once, then fell silent again. The blacks came down the line steadily—lifting, carrying, rolling. Neither looked the other in the eye. Abel could smell them now—the sweat that gilded their foreheads and arms, their rank fear and quiet revulsion, and another, softer scent that Abel had always associated with the race and which seemed to him to have the essence of wet leaves in October.
In that strange, mad dark there were too many dead to count, and as Abel stood waiting in their midst, he wondered if he was, himself, dead or living. He was afraid to look down for fear he’d see his own bullet-gnawed corpse lying at his feet. Abel sniffed deeply, feeling his sinuses rattle soft and wet, and tasted the bitter creosote residue of powder and smoke on his teeth and tongue. His tongue felt dry and huge. He spat into his palm and touched the spittle with two fingers, realized the breath in his lungs, and pressed a palm against his chest to feel the quick, strong beating of his own heart.
The whippoorwill called again. Abel licked his lips and tried a whistle. A soft, mournful note escaped his lips and hung in the darkness, static and sad before fading. The blacks, wrestling a half-headless body that had shat itself, paused in their work to look fearfully down the line. Abel licked his lips again and stepped back from the dead, back into the shadows of the Wilderness. He looked down at the place where he’d been. His body was not there. And he was in pain and discomfort, so knew himself alive. Releasing his held breath, Abel turned and went off slowly through the trees.
He walked a long time. He passed other men, dazed and lost and, like him, out a-wandering. Abel watched them as they stumbled past—dull eyes and slack faces, the shells of their ears crusted with blood. They seemed to vibrate palely in the dark, some of them, as though they’d been afflicted with a palsy that would never quit them. Others merely lurched along or lay curled in tight fetal balls amidst singed leaves and charred undergrowth.