The artillery suddenly stops completely. There doesn’t even seem to be any gunfire either. We’re not shooting at them and they aren’t shooting at us. That will change soon, but for now it’s actually quiet.
I push myself up to my knees to look around. Still no Cyrus. This whole thing about stopping Dupree seems impossible. But if I have to try, I need to have Cyrus with me. I sure can’t do this myself, and I’m starting to get the feeling that Cyrus can do anything. Except stop talking or show concern for his personal safety. Or mine.
I don’t want to, but if I’m going to find him, I’m going to have to get up and start going forward again. I get to my feet and take three steps before I realize I’ve left my musket. I can’t show up next to Cyrus with only my bugle. I go back and grab it and start walking down the line. I stay low to the ground just in case some Yankee sharpshooter wants to get lucky.
Stretched out all along the ground are the other soldiers—or I guess I should say the real soldiers, since I haven’t even fired a shot yet. They’re older than me, but not by much. Some like Big Jim and Elmer, who I assume are with Cyrus, are barefoot and wear overalls. Only the officers wear uniforms, and most of theirs, like General Jackson’s, are the blue ones they have from their time in the U.S. Army before the South seceded. No one has the gray Confederate uniforms yet. No one thinks the war is going to last long enough for the South to have time to make uniforms.
You’ll have plenty of time, guys. Too much time.
I also notice that each soldier also has a different kind of gun. That’s probably because each man has to arm himself to fight. The North has all the factories that make the guns, and they certainly aren’t going to sell to the South. So some men have old muskets while a few have the new Enfield rifles that fire lead minié balls, which look like modern bullets.
When you read about this stuff in the history books, it just seems like a long boring list of guns. But now I can see that it makes a heck of a lot of difference whether you’ve got the fancy new rifle or if you’re stuck with your granddaddy’s flintlock. It probably means the difference between shooting a Yankee and getting shot by a Yankee.
As I make my way down the line trying to spot Cyrus, I realize that most all the men share one thing—they all seem anxious. Not scared, just concerned. Their faces aren’t as happy as they were when I first appeared on the field. They’ve seen too much suffering already today. They are volunteers. Most of them, I bet, had visions when they enlisted of doing heroic things in battle. But I wonder how many had thought about what really happens in war, that you might really get shot, get killed. I don’t think my father and his reenactors think too much about this part of a Civil War soldier’s life. How can you and still want to reenact it?
More and more wounded Confederates crawl into our line from the direction of Mrs. Henry’s house, which now has Union artillery planted on either side and a sea of Yankees swirling all around. A few Confederates trickle in from the woods behind us, but the numbers on our side don’t seem nearly as great as those preparing to come at us.
“Don’t worry!” I want to tell the guys on the ground as I pass. “I know it looks bad right now, but you’re going to win!”
But some may not. Some are going to die or lose a leg or an eye, and they probably won’t feel like they’ve won anything. And Cyrus still has to get his wound. God, I hope that hasn’t already happened! I need him now in one piece, not laid up with his butt in a sling.
But he’s fine. I spot him crouching on the ground among some other guys. The Union artillery has picked back up and most of the soldiers bury their faces in their arms. But not Cyrus. And not Big Jim and Elmer, whose faces are black from gunpowder but I still recognize them lying on either side of him.
Cyrus has just finished loading his musket and is pulling back the hammer.
“Cyrus,” I call out.
He doesn’t seem to hear me, but sights his musket at something close to the Henry House. I plop down beside him just as he pulls the trigger.
“Durn!” he snaps at me. “You made me miss!”
I doubt this, considering the house is like five football fields away. He turns to look at me. “Oh,” he says, his eyes narrowing at me. “It’s you. I thought you had snuck off.”
He turns his back to me to reload his gun. I don’t need to ask him why he’s mad at me. I know. I ran. While he and Big Jim and Elmer and all the other Confederates stood in line, firing their guns and getting fired on, I ran. In his eyes, I’m a coward. I deserve the same sarcasm I’ve always dished out at reenactments. As I watch Cyrus ram another ball into his musket, shame hits me doubly hard—at my wrongful treament of him in the past, and his rightful treatment of me today.
I just want a chance to explain myself.
“Cyrus, I’m sorry,” I say to his back. “I’m sorry I ran, but I don’t belong here. I’m not supposed to be here.”
He rolls onto his stomach and takes aim with his gun. For the first time today, he has nothing to say to me. But Big Jim does.
“Don’t nobody belong here,” he says. “But here’s where we’re at.”
He fires. For a moment, we’re shrouded in gunpowder smoke. The smell burns my nostrils and tears come to my eyes for the hundredth time today.
“I need you to listen to me.”
Cyrus has pulled out his flask again and takes a drink. He doesn’t offer the bottle to me this time.
“Shoot,” he says.
I take a deep breath and prepare to let it all come out at once.
“It’s not a coincidence we have the same last name. I am your—”
A massive eruption cuts me off. Dirt and rock and blood pepper our bodies, our faces. We look up and as the cloud of smoke lifts, we can see in front of us to our right a few men sprawled in a pit where an artillery shell has just burst. They are, or were, Confederates falling back from Henry House to our line. They had almost made it when the shell hit.
They all look dead, a pile of twisted arms and legs. Suddenly a hand twitches. The hand seizes a leg and tosses the limb aside. Now we can see the man attached to the hand. He lurches upright, blood matted in his blond beard, and starts hobbling toward us. One of his legs looks like it’s been run over. He makes it a few feet and collapses, a sitting duck in the no-man’s-land between us and the Yankees.
A bullet whizzes over my head and I duck down. When I open my eyes again, Cyrus is gone. I glance behind me. Of course he’s nowhere in sight there.
“Cyrus!” I hear Big Jim scream. I look at the big man. His eyes, wide in his blackened face, stare toward the Yankee line.
I follow his gaze.
“Oh, God.”
Cyrus has gone back over the rise shielding us from Yankees. He’s kneeling by the wounded man in clear sight of enemy fire.
Big Jim makes a move to help, but just as quick Elmer grabs him by the legs.
“Get off me!” Big Jim hollers. He struggles against his brother, even smacks Elmer across the face with the back of his hand. But Elmer squeezes tighter. His face is white, clenched.
“I ain’t losing you too,” Elmer groans. “Not for something that pointless.”
It’s the first thing I’ve heard him say today, but it does the trick. Big Jim stops fighting and lies still.
I turn back to Cyrus, who grabs the wounded man’s wrist and pulls his arm around over his neck. Getting his feet beneath him, Cyrus heaves the man to his back and stands. Cyrus’s face turns scarlet as he staggers under the man’s weight.
He starts running toward our line. Suddenly, I hear the splat of a bullet hitting flesh. Cyrus tumbles forward.
“No!”
But just as quickly Cyrus is back on his feet. The bullet apparently hit the other man in the back. Another few feet and the two of them collapse beside me.
“Are you crazy?!” I yell at him.
Cyrus lies on the ground for a moment gasping for air. It takes just a glance at the wounded man he’s carried back to tell that he’s d
ead.
“Are you crazy?!” I yell again.
Cyrus looks blankly at me. “What are you talking about?”
“He’s dead!” I scream.
“I didn’t know that,” he replies, reaching for his gun.
“You could have been killed!”
Cyrus wrinkles his forehead. “Well . . . yeah.”
And suddenly, like some thick fog has lifted from the earth, all is clear and peaceful. The sun shines warmly across the fields, the sky blazes blue. It might actually be a nice afternoon, if you could ignore the thousands of Yankees taking their time to reorganize not half a mile from where we lie in a line of battle. I know from the history books that the Union commander, General McDowell, has simply broken off the fight for an hour or so to get his men in a solid line to charge us again. Big mistake, McDowell!
I turn back to Cyrus, who is clutching his gun to his chest and trying to reload it.
“Why do you do that?” I ask.
“What?”
“Why do you have to be so . . . so . . .” I want to find just the right word that won’t offend him but still show my concern. I rule out stupid, idiotic, nuts, gonzo, and freaky.
“Why do you have to be so gallant?”
Cyrus stops loading and looks at me. “Gallant . . . gallant . . . I like that. More poetic than brave or something like that. Reminds me of Galahad . . . Sir Galahad searching for the Holy Grail and a way to redeem the Round Table. That’d make a good story too. Set today of course . . . with a guy searching for the meaning of life who goes off to battle and . . .”
He goes on, the stress on his face fading away. Big Jim and Elmer, who were hovering over him, shake their heads and roll back to their place in line.
Even though I want to stay angry, I can’t stop myself from smiling.
He finally pauses the story in his mind and I jump in.
“I’m glad you like gallant, but I don’t understand why you’re willing to get yourself killed.”
He rams the ball into his gun, lays his head back, and stares into the sky.
“It’s just in my nature,” he says.
I look at the dead soldier lying a few feet from us. That could have been Cyrus. And I remember: That will be Cyrus.
He’s supposed to get shot. Today. At Bull Run. And he’s supposed to die. That’s my family’s heritage.
Of course, I’ve learned that my heritage isn’t as crappy as I thought. He’s obviously going to get wounded from some act of heroism—and not cowardice as I’ve thought for all my life. That should make me pleased, if nothing else.
Instead it makes me sad. And angry.
Now I know why I got so angry seeing him go over that hill. Whatever Dupree’s plans, that’s one part of history that I don’t want to happen.
I don’t want Cyrus to die. I want him to live.
“I was born in Big Lick, Virginia, on a bend in the Roanoke River that’s about the prettiest place on earth.”
For a second, I wonder if Cyrus is daydreaming. Lying on his back and looking up at the sky, Cyrus seems like he’s talking more to himself than to me. His voice is faraway, like he’s in shock from a wound. I quickly scan his body for blood. I almost ask him to roll over so I can look at his butt, but given my performance so far today, I don’t think he’d react too well.
He turns his head to me. His eyes are clear and look right into mine. He’s not hurt. He just feels like talking. Maybe it’s starting to sink in that he almost got himself killed. I see Big Jim give Elmer a look and the two of them go off to get more ammunition.
But I’m more than happy to listen. Anything to steer the conversation away from me.
“I grew up on a farm with my daddy and brother Joshua. Joshua was about ten years older than me and I sometimes thought of him more like an uncle than my big brother. He was tall and real friendly with bushy blond hair and a toothy smile, unlike my daddy, who was built low and gnarled like a scrub bush.”
Cyrus pauses. He wrinkles his forehead and mutters, “Like a scrub bush . . . that’s pretty good too. Lordy, I’m getting all kinds of inspiration on this here field. Whether I’m going to be able to remember it all to write down is another thing.”
He shrugs. “Anyway, Momma died when I was born, so it was just the three of us working the land. Sometimes I’d hike the ridge that rose up across the river and stand on this high rock outcropping and pretend I was seeing the end of the world. ’Course it wasn’t the end of the world, just more and more of those blue mountains stretching off into forever. And seeing that that was all to the world made me feel just fine living on the banks of the Roanoke River in Big Lick, Virginia.
“But it never seemed to Joshua’s liking. He was always coming up with these get-rich ideas. Like when I was about eleven years old, he marched into the house smacking his fist into his palm. It was a Sunday afternoon and Daddy was smoking his pipe by the fireplace and Joshua says, ‘Daddy, Cyrus, it’s time to seek our fortune.’ This was what he always said before landing one of his tall ones on us.”
If I understand my family tree right, Joshua was actually my great-great-great-grandfather. Or something like that.
Hearing Cyrus talk about Joshua, I can’t help but think ADD has been in the family a long, long time. “Maybe that’s where you got it from,” I murmur, a bit too loud.
“Got what?” Cyrus says.
“Oh . . . uh, telling stories,” I say.
Cyrus stares at me and suddenly this smile bursts on his face. “I’d never thought of that.”
“So what was his fortune?”
Cyrus leans back. “He says in this real grand sort of way, ‘I’ve been surveying our estate and the holdings of our esteemed neighbors and I’ve discovered that what our community needs is a mill.’ Now Daddy takes the pipe from his mouth and says, ‘What’s wrong with the one we’ve got in Tinker?’ Joshua says, ‘Tinker may be just a half-day’s journey for us, but plenty of folks have to travel even further and they’re going right by us to get there.’”
A half-day’s journey? In a wagon down some bumpy dirt road? Just to get flour made? Sounds like reason enough for me to build anything. Thank God for Food Lion.
Cyrus continues. “Seeing that Daddy had started smoking again, Joshua turned his attention to me. As always, his scheming hooked my interest. ‘I still say we need a mill!’ he declared. ‘And I’m going to build it!’ And so he did. He bought an acre of land from Daddy and on that one acre built his mill right on the river. Seemed like right away he was making money hand over fist. First off he would grind anybody’s crop. Tinker wouldn’t deal with the handful of free colored families who live in the county. But Joshua would. ‘Their money’s the same color as a white man’s,’ he’d say.”
Free blacks? In Virginia? And Joshua treated them the same as whites? I look hard at Cyrus to see if he’s joking. I always think of all blacks in the South as slaves and all whites as slave-owners, but it was a lot more complicated than that. Joshua seems like one of the complicated parts.
Cyrus is still gazing at the sky and talking away.
“Well, after about three years, Joshua comes marching into the house again on a Sunday and says, ‘Gentlemen, it’s time to seek our fame and fortune.’ Daddy says, ‘Ain’t you got enough fortune already?’ Joshua says, ‘No such thing as enough.’ He hooked his thumbs into the lapels of his coat. ‘You heard of a place called Harpers Ferry?’ If Daddy had, he didn’t let on. Joshua knew I hadn’t, so he began to tell me how Harpers Ferry is a town way far away from us. Hundreds of miles. To get there you go down the Shenandoah Valley along a road that ain’t made of dirt but is actually paved with stones! And in Harpers Ferry there are hotels with fancy restaurants and stores that sell candy canes and boots and silver watches and knives. And wouldn’t you know it but Harpers Ferry has got not one, but two rivers flowing by, and each one could swallow twenty Roanoke Rivers. And do you know what they make in Harpers Ferry? Guns. Lots of guns. They got whole big factories that make
guns for the U.S. government. And do you know what runs them factories? You got it. Mills. Big huge ones that you could fit ten of Joshua’s inside. And do you know what runs the mills? Men, that’s who. Men who get paid fifty cents a day. Fifty cents! Why, a man would make more there in a week than he would two months in Big Lick. A man could be rich!”
Whoopee! Fifty cents! I guess that was a lot back then . . . I mean, now. But there’s something about Cyrus’s story that sounds familiar. Something about Harpers Ferry that I’m supposed to know but can’t remember. One of my dad’s stories that I ignored.
Cyrus says, “Daddy didn’t understand why getting rich was so important to Joshua. Said all the fortune he ever wanted was right at home. I don’t think Joshua really cared about the money either. He just wanted more to life, so a month later he left. After he was gone, my view of the world suddenly seemed pretty small. I’d always figured everything I ever needed was on that farm, but now I knew there was a whole lot more out there. I just didn’t know if I’d ever get the chance to see it. Or if I had the guts to go see it for myself.”
The words just pop out of my mouth. “I can’t imagine you not having guts for anything.”
I feel my face go red at sounding so gushy. Cyrus looks embarrassed too, but pleased at the same time. It takes him a few seconds to continue with his story.
“What I also didn’t know then was that I’d never see Joshua again. We got a package from him a couple of months after he left. Inside was this book of Shakespeare plays and these knives . . .” Cyrus pats the hilts on his hips. “One for me and one for Daddy, though Daddy sent his with me when I joined up. Joshua wrote about how big and busy Harpers Ferry was. How the streets were all paved and trains come and go just about every hour. He also told us about a woman he met, Miss Jenny Richmond, and that they were getting married and he looked forward to us meeting his bride.
Stonewall Hinkleman and the Battle of Bull Run Page 7