That was probably why Shiloh National Military Park had been established back in December. Farmers had complained too much about their pigs rooting up the remains of dead soldiers.
Now, veterans of both Northern and Southern armies had returned to the battlefield. Yesterday, Ryan had approved a resolution the Confederate veterans had made:
Resolved, that we extend to the Union veterans a hearty and cordial greeting, and desire that this association be perpetuated so long as any of the survivors of the Shiloh battle be permitted to remain.
Today was sunny, not like those wet, miserable days thirty-three years ago. He could smell peach blossoms, yet this time the odor was not accented by malodorous stenches of gunpowder and death but wonderful aromas of brisket and coffee. He passed a campfire, saw a tall man wearing a Confederate artillery shell jacket talking to a silver-haired man in a blue dress uniform.
He kept walking, passing Southern ladies holding parasols and waving paper fans. He tipped his hat, and continued until at last he reached the place.
The park had posted a sign on a tall stump.
A split-rail fence ran through it near the woods. He didn’t remember that from 1862, but most of the battlefield remained as it had been. The names veterans on both sides had given sections had taken root. The Hornet’s Nest. The Sunken Road. The Peach Orchard. And this place. He looked again at the sign: Bloody Pond.
If he closed his eyes, he thought he could hear the moans of dying men pleading for water, begging for mercy, the occasional pop of a musket or the murderous explosion of an artillery shell fired from one of the Union gunboats. Instead, he heard the rippling of water, and the wind rustling through the trees. A frog croaked. A robin chirped. In the distance, he heard music, laughter, and a voice.
“Is your name McCalla?”
Ryan turned, pushing back his hat, watching the bald, pudgy man in an ill-fitting coat—not a military blouse, but a plaid number—walk toward him.
Even after three decades, the name came to him instantly.
“Caleb Cole.”
Caleb Cole set a black leather grip at his feet, and extended a ham-size hand. Briefly they shook.
“I was hoping you’d be here,” Cole said. “Wasn’t sure you were even alive. Spent all yesterday wandering through the Rebel camps, and most of this morning. I’d about given up.” He turned his head, and spit a river of tobacco juice into the leaves.
Another memory flashed through Ryan’s head. “I thought you didn’t chew tobacco.”
Cole wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his plaid coat. He winked mischievously. “My wife and daughters wish I’d never taken it up.”
Wife and daughters. Ryan felt a tinge of regret. He had never married.
After Corinth, the Second had moved to Vicksburg and stayed there, half starved, burying Sergeant Rutherford from fever three weeks before they had surrendered on July 4, 1863. Ryan, Gibb Gideon, and the rest of the regiment had been furloughed back to Texas as paroled prisoners of war. Exchanged in November, they had returned to Camp Bee, and spent the rest of the war around Galveston.
Then Ryan had begun a career in wanderlust. Up the cattle trails to Kansas. Laying track for the railroad. Mining in Colorado. Working a jerkline in Wyoming. Running a faro layout in Montana. He had seen a lot of country. He remembered little of it.
He had no idea what had ever become of Gibb Gideon, or any of the other men with whom he had fought.
“You still in Missouri?” Ryan asked, just to be polite.
“Nah. Got home after the war and …”
“You see much action after Corinth?” Ryan interrupted.
Cole shrugged. “Atlanta campaign. Kennesaw Mountain.” He frowned. “Well, we marched with Sherman through Georgia and the Carolinas.”
“I see.”
“Nothing I was proud of.”
Ryan forced a smile. “War’s over. I’m no unreconstructed Reb. It’s good to see you.”
Cole spit again. “Well, anyway, I got back to Putnam County once we were mustered out, but I just couldn’t find any pleasure in slopping hogs after all I had seen and done. Got a job feeding railroad workers in Nebraska. In other words, I shot a mess of buffalo. Did that all the way to Cheyenne. Then quit, moved south. Shot buffalo for their hides for a spell. Worked on the railroad betwixt Dallas and Fort Worth down in Texas. Took to freighting in New Mexico Territory. Wound up in Bisbee, down in Arizona Territory, with a stage line, and now I own a mercantile in San Diego, California.”
“You’ve done well.”
“And you?”
Ryan laughed. “I have a twenty-dollar horse and a sixty-dollar saddle.”
“That’d make most Texans I know jealous.”
This time Ryan’s laugh was genuine. He gestured toward the pond. “I don’t know, Cole. Somehow, I thought it would be different. Or maybe I thought it would be the same. By jacks, I don’t know what I thought.”
“It’s been thirty years, McCalla. We were kids when we first came here, dreaming of war and glory, seeing nothing but hell and privations.”
Ryan nodded. “All that’s left is wormwood and gall.”
Laughter wafted through the trees. “No,” Cole corrected. “Most of these folks came here remembering the glory, or what we thought was glory. I saw friends die.”
Ryan frowned. “So did I.”
“Yeah, but I don’t remember the horrors. Oh, I did for the longest while. But, gee willikins, it’s been better than thirty years. These days, I remember a Reb I met at this pond. A Reb I saw again in Corinth. I remember humanity. That’s why I came back here. Well, one reason, anyway.”
Pushing his hat back, Ryan tried to think of something to add only quickly to determine there was nothing else to say. “Well, Cole, it’s good to see you.” Again, he pointed at the pond. “Thanks again, for pulling me out of that.”
Cole rubbed his ribs. “Thanks for the plug of tobacco. It saved my life at Corinth.”
Ryan had taken only a handful of steps before Cole called his name. Facing the Missourian, he saw him kneeling, opening the satchel.
“I have something for you, McCalla.”
Ryan’s mouth fell open, and his heart seemed to stop. He knew what it was, and could not stop the tears welling in his eyes as Caleb Cole respectfully brought over the Miremont case.
“Where did you …?” He almost dropped the case.
“When I heard about the reunion …,” Cole began. Tears flowed down his cheeks, too. “I came out here early. Wanted to see … I guess … no, of course not. I knew her, too, McCalla. When we were stationed in Corinth that summer.”
Their eyes locked. They said her name at the same moment. Ryan sank to his knees, and Caleb knelt beside him.
“Grace is dead?” Ryan didn’t bother to wipe away his tears.
“Her daughter’s name is Clarinda. Clarinda Atkinson. Married with a baby daughter of her own now. She’s the spitting image of her mama, though, Clarinda, I mean. Even taller than me. Seems Grace married this English doctor …”
“I remember him.”
“Way too old for her. Created quite the scandal in Corinth, especially when everyone learned she had been living in the doctor’s place after her home was burned, and this church where she’d been staying was torn down by Union troops. They sang her praises in Corinth, though, those who remembered her. Said she helped save many a life during that battle in October. Blue and gray. She had a good life, Ryan. She wouldn’t want any tears. Died five years ago, Clarinda said, of influenza. Her husband had died … oh, I don’t know … when Clarinda was just a baby. She went right on doctoring, Grace did. Went right on doctoring, and Clarinda says her funeral was the biggest ever in Holly Springs, Mississippi. That’s where they moved after the war.”
He pointed to the case. “She kept that all those years. Kept something for me,
too.” Caleb reached inside the bag and pulled out a Bible and two ancient envelopes, yellowed with age.
Wiping his eyes, Ryan opened the case. “When I left Texas,” he said, his voice sounding ancient, “I thought I would die in battle.”
“I thought the same thing. Definitely figured I was a goner when you Rebs came busting through Battery Robinett in Corinth.”
Ryan hefted the violin. He had broken his mother’s heart, never playing any type of instrument, not even singing in the church choir, after he was back in Texas. Once she had asked him if he had gotten the violin she had mailed to that nurse in Mississippi, but he had never answered.
His hands trembled. He hadn’t touched a violin since … his head shook at the memory. Abilene, Kansas, 1871. In his cups, he had bet a Texas drover he could play, and the drover had paid up at the Bull’s Head Saloon. He had played “Lorena.” The drinking had stopped, and Texas cowboys and Kansas tinhorns, former Rebs and ex-Yankees, had shed tears over the haunting melody.
“Play it,” Caleb said. “Grace would want that.”
He started to shake his head, but at the same time found himself pulling out the bow. He plucked a cord, tightened the string, then another. Drew the bow over it again. He looked up, shaking his head, about to lower the Miremont.
“Wormwood and gall,” he whispered.
“No, good memories.” Cole smiled. “Good friends.”
A group of veterans walked up, laughing. Ryan spotted them, some in Union blue, others in gray, most in denim, duck, or broadcloth. Old men, who had forgotten the savagery. Or maybe they had just learned to live with it.
“Hey, Reb,” a bluecoat said, “play us something.”
“Play ‘Dixie’!” a Southerner cried out.
“Better not!” snapped a Yankee, and everyone laughed.
Ryan tested the strings again, twisted a knob, loosened another. He looked at Caleb Cole, and whispered: “She hated this song.”
He played. On the second verse, the Rebs joined in. The Yanks slapped their thighs. One danced a little jig.
I’ll put my knapsack on my back,
My rifle on my shoulder.
I’m goin’ away to Shiloh,
And there I’ll be a soldier.
A lifetime ago he had marched into these fields and woods. He remembered thinking he was going to die. Remembered how that feeling had evaporated sometime during the savage assault. Surrounded by death, by inhumanity, and, yet, humanity; he remembered never feeling so alive.
On a Saturday evening along the banks of Shiloh’s Bloody Pond thirty-three years later, Ryan McCalla knew he was being reborn. Closing his eyes, he could see Grace Dehner smiling down upon him. And Matt Bryson, and Sam Houston Jr., Sergeant Rutherford, Gibb Gideon, his parents, Harry Cravey, Captain Ashbel Smith, Dr. Landon, the men he had killed in battle, the soldiers who had tried to kill him.
The war was over, and he felt so alive.
the end
Author’s Note
Books consulted for this novel are too many to list, but the main sources were as follows: The Eighteenth Missouri by Leslie Anders (Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1968); The Second Texas Infantry: From Shiloh to Vicksburg by Joseph E. Chance (Eakin Press, 1984); Ashbel Smith of Texas: Pioneer, Patriot, Statesman, 1805–1886 by Elizabeth Silverthorne (Texas A&M University Press, 1982); Ralph J. Smith’s Reminiscences of the Civil War and Other Sketches (W. M. Morrison, 1911); Shiloh—In Hell before Night by James Lee McDonough (University of Tennessee Press, 1977); Shiloh: The Battle that Changed the Civil War by Larry J. Daniel (Simon & Schuster, 1997); The Darkest Days of the War: The Battles of Iuka & Corinth by Peter Cozzens (University of North Carolina Press, 1997); “Co. Aytch”: A Side Show of the Big Show by Sam R. Watkins (Collier, 1962); and the anonymous The Lost Account of the Battle of Corinth and the Court-Martial of Gen. Van Dorn, edited by Monroe F. Cockrell (Broadfoot, 1991).
I should also thank Christopher A. Mekow and other rangers at Shiloh National Military Park and the staff of the Corinth Civil War Interpretive Center. Both are absolute musts for any history buff interested in the Civil War battles of Shiloh and Corinth.
Johnny D. Boggs
Santa Fe, New Mexico
About the Author
Johnny D. Boggs has worked cattle, shot rapids in a canoe, hiked across mountains and deserts, traipsed around ghost towns, and spent hours poring over microfilm in library archives—all in the name of finding a good story. He’s also one of the few Western writers to have won four Spur Awards from Western Writers of America (for his novels, Camp Ford, in 2006, Doubtful Cañon, in 2008, and Hard Winter in 2010, and his short story, “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing,” in 2002) and the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (for his novel, Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs, in 2004). A native of South Carolina, Boggs spent almost fifteen years in Texas as a journalist at the Dallas Times Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram before moving to New Mexico in 1998 to concentrate full-time on his novels. Author of dozens of published short stories, he has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Boys’ Life, New Mexico magazine, Persimmon Hill, and True West. His Western novels cover a wide range. The Lonesome Chisholm Trail (Five Star Westerns, 2000) is an authentic cattle-drive story, while Lonely Trumpet (Five Star Westerns, 2002) is an historical novel about the first black graduate of West Point. The Despoilers (Five Star Westerns, 2002) and Ghost Legion (Five Star Westerns, 2005) are set in the Carolina backcountry during the Revolutionary War. The Big Fifty (Five Star Westerns, 2003) chronicles the slaughter of buffalo on the southern plains in the 1870s, while East of the Border (Five Star Westerns, 2004) is a comedy about the theatrical offerings of Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Texas Jack Omohundro, and Camp Ford (Five Star Westerns, 2005) tells about a Civil War baseball game between Union prisoners of war and Confederate guards. “Boggs’ narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past,” Publishers Weekly said, and Booklist called him “among the best Western writers at work today.” Boggs lives with his wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe. His website is www.JohnnyDBoggs.com.
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