Raintree County

by Ross Lockridge

  Sad words ran in his mind, words of a man named Abraham Lincoln, words from a perishable paper read in a brothel where soldiers hunted for love’s poor counterfeit before the Battle. These words had been woven from the deathcries of ten thousand young men on the hills of Gettysburg and also from the anguish of Johnny Shawnessy hunting for two lost children through days of climax and disaster. These words might vanish like the thin smokes on Lookout Mountain, or they might be graven on the memory of the Republic. Tomorrow he and his comrades would go out to give life or death to these words. On the brooding hills of Tennessee and Georgia, they must affirm and reaffirm

  . . . that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom—and that government

  OF THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE,

  SHALL NOT PERISH,

  FROM

  THE EARTH of Raintree County, covered with corn and wheat, was the image of peace and plenty in the anniversary sunlight. On the platform Mrs. Evelina Brown raised her arms to lead the opening bars of the song.

  —Yes, we’ll rally round the flag, boys, we’ll rally once again,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom,

  We will rally from the hillside, we’ll gather from the plain,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

  The Union forever, hurrah! boys, hurrah!

  Down with the traitor, up with the star,

  While we rally round the flag, boys,

  Rally once again,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

  A chill went up Mr. Shawnessy’s spine; he perceptibly straightened his back and squared his shoulders, hoping that the Perfessor hadn’t observed.

  —We are springing to the call of our brothers gone before,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

  And we’ll fill the vacant ranks with a million freemen more,

  Shouting the battle cry of freedom.

  He was lifted on a wave forward and upward. Memory carried him on the feet of trampling thousands.

  The Union forever! O, beautiful, unanalyzable concept!

  Forward, comrades, let us push forward up the slope. Let us carry the banners of freedom to the summit. O, let us be in the vanguard of history, anonymous and fearless comrades! A hundred hands will bear us to the crest. Young men, my comrades, we shall all behold the far side of the mountain in resplendent weather, white roads of peace and blossoming summer. But first, good heart, comrades, a deep breath, a long shout, and——

  The Union forever, hurrah! boys

  November 25—1863

  —HURRAAAAHHHH!

  THE CRY SMOTE HIM, MADE HIM TREMBLE. THE LINES ON THE RIGHT

  moved out. The blue rush of the ranks poured like a wave advancing. The movement was given on down the line like a rope cracking. It swirled into his regiment, picked him up. He was running.

  —Hurraaaaaaaahhhh! Hurraaaaaaaaaahhhh! Hurraaaaaaaahhhh!

  He was held up by the deep bass roar of the Army. It was one voice shouting. This force held back from early morning, unleashed at last, was a torrent of grim men. Starving, marching, waiting, griping, despairing were trampled down by the thunder of forty thousand feet.

  He went as though the earth moved with him. The blue line reached and topped a little slope that had hid them from view all morning. A hundred yards in front were the Rebel riflepits at the base of the ridge. Smokepuffs flowered along a line loosely entrenched.

  Running, he saw on his left how Jesse Gardner, the thinfaced, querulous boy from the City, stuck out from the straight of the charge, leaning and lunging, ran down to his knees, pitched forward, his gun flung out in front. His canteen bounced on the ground like a pod tossing on water. The wave swept on. At the base of the ridge, the Enemy rose. Some furiously worked their ramrods. Others broke for the rear. Belatedly, a few shells dropped, but far behind.

  Groups of enemy soldiers fell back in a ragged line, firing. Back of that line, a second was trying to fire through the first. He heard the commands of Rebel officers.

  Rocks, bushes, trees faded around. He and others made for a knot of Rebels. One tall Rebel walked forth from the rest. He held his musket clubbed. His eyes glared with a personal hatred. Corporal Johnny Shawnessy flung himself under the swung musket, missed in a lunge with his bayonet, lost balance, fell, rolled over to keep moving. A blast of powder singed the back of his neck. The tall Rebel sat down hard, grabbing his stomach. Flash Perkins reached down a hand and pulled Johnny standing. With clubbed muskets and bayonets, blue and gray soldiers drove at each other in mute violence. Johnny and Flash together rushed a Rebel on one knee ramming a charge. He threw down the rifle. Flash’s bayonet was at his throat. The man squirmed like a snake, screamed for mercy, holding the bare blade in his hands. Flash missed twice with killing lunges. All around, the Enemy threw down their arms.

  More Union soldiers swept in around them, bayonets flashing like cruel desires. Then an officer riding by, said crisply,

  —All right. Go to the rear, you traitorous bastards. Keep your hands up.

  Johnny grabbed Flash around the shoulders and pulled him back from the man on the ground, who lay panting and watching Flash with hypnotized eyes.

  —Goddamn ‘im, he’d a-killed me if he could! Flash growled.

  All the Rebels in sight held up their hands and walked slowly, like men treading on wires. One boy was sobbing. As always, the face of the Enemy and the speech of the Enemy were barbarous and strange. These were outsiders, men of a strange belief, plucked like fish from their own world, forcibly into his.

  Grape and riflefire whined around him. A Union soldier sat down. He tore his shirt open and looked at his chest. There was a black hole in the flesh of his right breast. The soldier sat looking at the hole in his chest and then shyly around at his comrades.

  The blue wave had overrun the riflepits at the base of the hill. It was momentarily confused by its own success. General Jake Jackson rode up the line, hatless as usual. His voice and sword whipped the line forward.

  Johnny heard the deep shout again from along the captured pits.

  —Hurraaaaaaaahhhh! Hurraaaaaahhh! Hurraaaahh!

  A word and a primitive cry—a deep aitch, a growling ar, and a raucous ah—it was savage and almost exultant.

  —Go on, boys! Captain Bazzle said. Keep moving forward! Fire at will!

  The men advanced in groups, firing from cover. Johnny and Flash were to the left of the regimental colors. The ridge here began to rise steeply in humps covered with low bushes and scrub trees. What was left of the retreating first line of the Rebels had become confused with a second, forming in clear view a hundred yards higher. The Rebels fired volleys of grape down the hill. Parts of the enemy line were advancing. A man with a blue bandanna tied around his neck walked right over the top of Johnny’s rifle sight, getting bigger and bigger. Johnny squeezed off.

  —Up, Jack, up! Flash Perkins yelled.

  Johnny got up. The first Union line was forward again, forced on by the advancing second wave which was now firing over Johnny’s head. In places the Unionists were running shoulder to shoulder. Johnny crossed a fence and climbed down into a road that ran diagonally up the ridge. Rebels were entrenched along the road or retreating across it. For a moment he appeared to be the only Union soldier on it. Then the road was choked in both directions with his comrades. A Rebel officer stood up from concealment on the far side of the road.

  —Come on, boys, he said briskly, le’s give ’em what-fer.

  Forty or fifty Rebels poured out into the road. The officer cocked a pistol and aimed it directly at Johnny’s head. Both sides fired a volley at short range. The road was filled with smoke and cursing men. Rebel soldiers ran out of the smoke, yelling. A big bearded man naked to the waist walked forward swinging his musket by the small end. A glancing blow smashed so hard against Johnny’s bayonet that his hands and arms stung to the shoulders, and his musket clattered on the road. He grabbed it by th
e small end and swung wild. The blue roof of the world bloomed with fire. Stars were shooting up in a fountain of brightness and coming down in dissolving trickles of light. Blackness ate at the light in soft waves.

  Johnny felt something rough on his face. He had perhaps been dreaming. Someone was pulling him up. The ground rocked, tipped, turned over, came rightside up. Tom Conway was standing beside him.

  —What happened? Johnny said.

  —You got a nasty crack on the head, Tom said.

  Half a dozen Rebels and Unionists lay around him. In the ditch on the other side, a Union soldier stood over a Rebel, bayonet pressing him down. The Rebel held to the stock of the gun, said nothing, his eyes pleading.

  Dirt and smoke spurted in a high black fountain out of the ground where the two struggled. Johnny flattened. When he raised his head, Tom Conway was lying on his back a yard away. Johnny leaned over him. Tom’s eyes fluttered open. He looked around.

  —What——he started to say, his voice gentle, vaguely worried.

  —It was a shell, Johnny said. Where did it hit you?

  —I don’t know, Tom said. I can’t move.

  There was no mark on the front of his body. Johnny started to turn him over on his side. Tom’s eyes fluttered again, and he fainted. The back of his torn coat was soaked.

  —All right, boys, go on up! an officer shouted. Follow ’em up the hill.

  The Enemy was shelling his own abandoned positions all along the base of the ridge. Every able soldier in the road climbed over the ditch at the far side and went on up. Johnny felt the back of his head, matted with blood. His head throbbed, and he was sick in the stomach. He didn’t know quite where he was and what he was doing.

  After a while, he was alone in dense timber. He didn’t remember how he had come there. Sunlight fell down through broad trunks. He walked among gray stones covered with lichen. He lay down and listened to distant cries, explosions, his own hoarse breath. He didn’t know how long he had been there. He opened his canteen and took a drink. Down the slope, he could see clear to the base of the ridge. Waves of tiny soldiers breasted the small hills. Cannon inched forward. Bits of bright color advanced. A motionless speck of blue or gray marked where a man had fallen.

  Later he was up and walking again. The pale air, streaked with sunlight, had the look of late afternoon under deep trees. After a while he was standing in bushes on the rim of a deep cut.

  In a sunflooded, open space here, amazing things were happening. Half a dozen Confederate guns had been parked below. Some of the artillerists were still methodically working their pieces. Others were trying to get away. Horses whinnied and kicked in the traces. The holders cursed and pulled. Officers shouted commands. Thick smoke and the stench of powder filled the air.

  All around the cut Federal soldiers closed in, firing and yelling.

  One dropped down from a rock near where Johnny was standing and ran toward the nearest gun. The crew had just begun to pull their piece out to a road. The Union soldier fired as he ran, and one of the men fell. A boy sitting on the lead horse raised a pistol and fired back. The Rebel artillerists, seeing that it was one soldier only, closed in on him, one with a rammer, another with a pistol, a third with a sword, like men who knew what they were doing and were sure of the result. The Union soldier broke through them, ran to the gun and onehanded himself clear over the barrel. He turned swinging his musket, teeth bared in the sunlight.

  It was Flash Perkins.

  —Come on, you sons-a-bitches! he yelled. Come on, you——

  Every Rebel in the vicinity accepted the challenge. Johnny ran forward along with several other Unionists.

  It was like a race. A battery officer in immaculate uniform stood ten feet from the gun, backing toward it and calmly loading a pistol with practiced fingers, while he kept darting his eyes around to appraise his chances. An officer with a sword ran at Flash from the other side of the gun. Flash swung his musket. Johnny heard the dull clunk of butt on skull. The officer’s sword was pinned hanging through the cloth in Flash’s coat under the left arm. Bullets sang on the parked gun. Two of the artillerists fell. Flash onehanded over to the other side of the gun.

  The Rebel officer with the pistol threw it down and backed around the cannon away from Flash. He put up his hands.

  —Prisoner.

  A half-dozen Rebels were beginning to fire from farther up the hill on the Unionists clustered around the captured gun. Johnny and Flash crouched behind the prize. Balls spanged on the gunmetal. More and more soldiers in blue came up through the woods, and the Rebels retired all along the line.

  The captured artillerist leaned on the gun and took out a pipe.

  —Pretty sharp scrapping, he said.

  He had a cultivated, amiable voice.

  —Either you Yanks got a light?

  A brigadier general rode by waving his sword, smiling and violently shaking his head.

  —Great work, boys! Fine work! We’ve got ’em whipped now. Make for that crest, and plant your flags on it.

  —Go to the rear, Johnny said to the captured officer. Keep your hands up, and you won’t get hurt.

  A man came by carrying a regimental flag.

  —There’s our flag! Flash said to Johnny. Let’s go up with it.

  He and Flash went up the slope with the flag. Johnny had a terrible headache, and his nose was bleeding. They were only a little way from the top. There was a road up there, and a disorganized mob of Rebel wagons and troops retreated down it.

  On the crest of the ridge the regiment raised its flag. Johnny looked down over the ground they had covered. On the wide fanlike sweep of the battle area, he could see troops and guns coming up. Apparently, he and Flash were at the crest of the fighting, first to the summit.

  —Give a cheer, boys, an officer said.

  They cheered. Other cheers broke out along the ridge. Flags were waving farther down the line.

  —We whupped ’em, Jack! Flash said.

  He grabbed Johnny’s shoulders and shook him. He capered and jumped. Soldiers were hitting each other on the backs and shaking hands. Some were crying.

  —Godamighty! Flash said. Raintree County captured a cannon!

  They followed the Rebels for a while, but both sides were disorganized, the one by defeat, the other by victory. Around sundown, the Unionists stopped on the far side of the ridge, trying to reform units. The men lay down and rested. But there was a new outbreak of cheering as a General rode down the lines waving to the men.

  —It’s Grant!

  —RRRRRRRRAAAAAAA!

  —Good old Ulyss!

  General Grant smiled. He stopped at the place where Flash and Johnny were standing, pointed toward a road, said something to his staff.

  —How about it, Ulyss! Flash said. We took ’em for yuh, didn’t we!

  The men stood around.

  —Three cheers for General Grant.

  They cheered.

  —Good fight, men, the little General said. Reform your units, and pursue the Enemy. Don’t give ’em any rest.

  Out of his blackstubbled beard stuck the stump of a dead cigar. He looked quite unmoved by the victory. As he rode on down the lines, the men continued to cheer.

  —Where are the other boys? Flash said.

  —Jesse and Tom Conway got hit, Johnny said.

  He lay down by the campfire. He had tied a wet bandage around his head. He was too sick and tired to eat. His head whirred, sang, pounded with the violence of the charge.

  Twenty million hands, generations of strong hands, had pushed him up that slope. He had reached the crest of Missionary Ridge on a wave of history. Here at this vital place, the thin, tough line of the South had suffered an hour of weakness and confusion, and several thousand stronglegged young men had broken through to the top of a mountain. Perhaps at last far down the roads receding south, where the wreck of the Rebel Army retreated, a man with good eyesight could see the white shape of Victory.

  Corporal Johnny Shawnessy ceas
ed to know anything about that. He was still appalled at the fury of that long charge up Missionary Ridge. He desperately yearned for home, for the soft arms of a woman who loved him and to whom he was a precious, irreplaceable person. Hadn’t he done enough for the Cause, now that he was a veteran of both defeat and victory?

  What he could never get used to was the fact that War was the supreme image of Chance, brutal god of the battle casualty. With a blind sowing of gold seed in the swamp of life, life had begun. With a blind sowing of lead seed in the confusion of battle, life ended.

  He began to feel a little better after he had eaten something, and he sat and talked and joked with the others, who were beginning to relive the Battle. Every man had taken Missionary Ridge in a different way. The victory had been twenty thousand separate fights. The Battle of Missionary Ridge was only now beginning to be created in the shared images of the twenty thousand men who had gone from base to summit in the forever lost afternoon of the physical fighting.

  Later on, that night, Johnny saw a longlegged figure striding through the lines, looking everywhere among the resting soldiers. It was the Perfessor. His face was haggard and anxious.

  —Hi, Professor, Johnny said.

  The Perfessor stopped and peered at Johnny’s bandaged head in the dusk.

  —My God, John, is that you?

  His voice was peculiarly high. He sat down on the ground beside Johnny and took a long time to light a cigar, cupping his hands around it.

  —I see you got through all right, he said.

  —I’m all right except for a bang on the head.

  The Perfessor made his cigar glow and took his hands away from his face. He was darting his eyes about in his usual manner.

  —It’s a great victory, he said. Thousands of prisoners taken. Bragg won’t be able to stop this side of Atlanta. Hello, Perkins. Surprised you had any fight left in you, after the other night.

  —How are the dames? Flash said.

  —You know terrible girls, Orville, the Perfessor said. You boys’ll have to pardon me. I have to file some dispatches. How many men lost in your regiment?