He groaned again when they set him in the rowboat, and again when other sailors on the Platte Valley took hold of him and laid him on the deck. Somebody gave him more water and half a hardtack. Then people seemed to forget about him for a spell.
He dozed a little, only to wake with a start when someone asked, “Where are you hit, Lieutenant?”
“Why do you-?” Leaming stopped. The man crouching by him wore a surgeon's green sash. He had a professional interest in Leaming's wound. “The minnie caught me below the shoulder blade and dug down. It feels as though it stopped in my, ah, rump.”
“I see.” The surgeon looked up toward Fort Pillow. “Were you by any chance standing on the bluff there, and shot from above?”
“Yes, that's what happened,” Leaming said. “Will you cut out the bullet or leave it where it is?”
“If it's where you say, I doubt it's doing you much harm at present,” the other man replied. “Digging it out would give you another wound, with all the risk of suppuration and septicemia attendant on such things. So I will let that sleeping dog lie for the time being, I think. Are you in much pain?”
“Some.” Leaming didn't want to sound like a weakling. But he didn't want to be a martyr, either, so he added, “Maybe a bit more than some.”
“I shouldn't wonder.” The surgeon took a small brown glass bottle out of the wooden chest he carried with him. Drawing the cork with his teeth, he handed Leaming the bottle, saying, “Here-take a swig of this.”
“What is it?”
“Laudanum, Lieutenant. Best-quality laudanum. I've had excellent results with it in Memphis, and it should help you, too.” The surgeon beamed. “Not all drugs in the pharmacopoeia work as advertised-I've seen that too many times to doubt it. But laudanum, by thunder, will shift pain.”
Leaming needed no more convincing. He raised the bottle to his lips and drank from it. The taste was strong, and not particularly pleasant: cheap brandy with a heavy infusion of poppy seeds. He had to force himself to swallow. It burned all the way down to his stomach. “It seems-strong.” He had to cast about for a polite word.
The physician smiled. “I know it's nasty, but it will turn the trick. This is no humbug. I'll come round again in half an hour. If I have told you a falsehood, call me a liar.” He picked up his case and went over to the next wounded man. “Where are you hit?”
Half an hour. Usually, that didn't seem very long. Half an hour walking with a pretty girl went by in the blink of an eye. Half an hour with a gunshot wound… was a different story. Leaming couldn't even look at his watch to see how the time passed by. That thieving Confederate had lifted it.
He hardly noticed when his head first began to spin. When he did notice, he blinked in bemusement. He hadn't had much brandy, not very much at all. But it wasn't the brandy that left him floating away from himself: it was the opium dissolved in it. “Well, well,” he murmured, and then again: “Well, well.” Laudanum really did banish pain, in the most literal sense of the word. The torment didn't disappear, but it went off to a distant province where it didn't seem to matter nearly so much. If that wasn't a miracle, it would do for one till something better came along.
“How are you, Lieutenant?” the surgeon asked. “Sorry to be a bit longer than I said I would-I had to take a poor devil's leg off. God willing, the wound won't go bad now.”
“I hope it doesn't. How am I?” Leaming felt… untethered, almost as if he were floating above his own body like one of the hydrogen-filled balloons the Federals used in Virginia to peer behind Confederate lines. “I am… much improved, thank you.” Finding words took a distinct effort.
“I'm glad to hear it.” The surgeon smiled. “I'll give you another dose when this one wears off.”
“Another dose.” Echoing the surgeon was easier. And those two wonderful words held more promise than Mack Leaming had ever imagined.
Matt Ward tripped over a chunk of driftwood on the riverbank. He almost dropped his end of the plank that had a wounded Federal on it. The bluebelly groaned. The Confederate trooper at the other end of the plank said, “Watch what you're doing, dammit! What the hell's wrong with you, anyways?”
“Too much rotgut yesterday,” Ward admitted. His stomach was sour, his head pounded, and his eyes felt as sensitive to the light as those of a man long poxed.
“Well, be careful, for God's sake,” the other trooper said. “That's right,” the wounded Federal added.
“Shut up, you son of a bitch,” Ward said furiously. “I'll take it from him — he's on my side. But I don't have to put up with anything from a goddamn Tennessee Tory, you hear me? I'd sooner tie a rock to your leg and chuck you in the Mississippi than haul you to your damn boat, and that's the Lord's truth.”
The wounded man from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry (U.S.) looked to the other Confederate for support. He got none there. “I feel the same way he does,” the trooper said. “Just thank your lucky stars I know how to take orders.”
“I thank my lucky stars I ain't no nigger,” the Federal said. “That's what I thank my stars for. Otherwise, I reckon I'd just be buzzards' meat.”
“I thank my lucky stars I ain't no nigger, too,” the other Confederate trooper said. “But we weren't fussy yesterday. We got rid of plenty of homemade Yankees, too.”
If the wounded enemy soldier had any more clever comments after that, he kept them to himself. That was one of the smarter things he could have done. Nobody was paying a lot of attention to the troopers carrying wounded men. He might have had an accident, and wouldn't that have been too bad?
It certainly would-for him.
A couple of U.S. soldiers brought a wounded Negro to a boat waiting at the river's edge at the same time as Ward and his companion carried up the white man. Like most Confederates, they wanted nothing to do with toting colored soldiers. Blacks were supposed to work for whites, not the other way around.
Both parties of bearers got their men into the boat. “What's it like on your gunboat?” Ward asked one of the sailors.
“Want to see for yourself?” the man answered in a sharp New England accent.
“Can I?” Ward said.
“Why not? There's a truce on,” the Yankee said. “You and your friend know how to handle oars?”
“I do,” Ward said. The other trooper nodded and started filling his pipe.
“Well, then, why don't you row across? They'll let you up on deck to look around, I figure.” The sailor pointed toward the Silver Cloud. “Some Rebs on board already.”
“We'll do it,” Ward said. He'd almost reached the gunboat before he realized he was doing the Federal sailor's work for him. A good thing he didn't try to get my money, or he'd likely have that, too, he thought with a wry grin. But pulling a pair of oars seemed to sweat the whiskey out of him better than carrying casualties had.
Sailors on the Silver Cloud helped get the wounded men in the boat up onto the deck. They gave Ward and the other Confederate hard looks when they started to come aboard, too. “We don't aim to do any fighting,” Matt said. “Fellow back there said we could come and look around.” He pointed to the man on the riverbank.
“Cotton always did run his mouth too much,” a sailor on the gunboat said, but he stood aside and let the Confederates board. Cotton? Ward rubbed at his ear. Did he say that Yankee's name was Cotton?
A couple of C.S. officers came out of the chamber where they steered the gunboat-Ward had no better name for it than that-along with a US. officer with one gold band at the cuff of each sleeve. Ward couldn't have said what kind of rank that gave him, either. He knew U.S. Army emblems-who didn't? — but not their naval equivalents.
Whoever this fellow was, he and the Confederates were having a high old time. That was literally true, for they were drinking together as if they belonged to the same side. They talked and laughed like old friends. The Confederates told how the New Era had sailed away the day before.
“Doesn't surprise me a bit,” the Yankee answered. “Captain Marsha
ll always was a little old lady in a blue uniform.”
The Confederates thought that was the funniest thing they'd ever heard. One of them almost spilled his drink. “Careful, there,” the other one said. “Be a shame to waste it.”
“Reckon you're right,” the first officer in gray said. Had they really been shooting Federals the day before? All the wounded men in blue on the Silver Cloud's deck said they had.
XVII
Corporal Jack Jenkins rode east through the Hatchie bottom country in a perfectly foul temper. The other troopers wouldn't stop ragging on him for letting Bill Bradford slip through his fingers. “Jesus God,” one would-be wit said, “if you didn't want him yourself, you should've given him to the rest of us.” He might have been talking about somebody who'd thrown away a drumstick instead of putting it back on the platter with the rest of the chicken.
“I wanted him, dammit,” Jenkins said. “He fooled me, that's all.” That's all? he thought bitterly. That was plenty. He'd never live it down. If he got to be an old man with a long white beard, his neighbors would still think of him as the damn fool who let Bill Bradford get away.
“He makes it down to Memphis, he'll stir up all kinds of trouble,” another horseman said. “He's a serpent, Bradford is.”
“Maybe somebody else'll catch the stinking, rotten son of a bitch,” Jenkins said. “It ain't like he paid me to let him get away.”
“Ain't enough money in Tennessee for Bradford to pay to get away,” the other trooper said. Several men nearby nodded. Jack Jenkins was one of them. He would have paid plenty for the privilege of blowing Bradford's brains out. But he'd had the chance-had it and fumbled it.
He yawned. He could hardly stay on his horse, he was so tired. He'd ridden all day and all night, then fought a battle, then got stuck with that damned sentry duty. So he hadn't had enough sleep to spit at the past couple of days. He wasn't the only man swaying in the saddle, either-far from it.
At least the Confederates weren't going hell for leather now. They'd done what they set out to do. There were no Federals anywhere dose by to give them a hard time. They could move at their own pace.
“Wonder where old Bedford'll want us to kick the damnyankees' asses next,” somebody said.
“Wherever it is, we'll do it,” Jenkins said. He had confidence in Nathan Bedford Forrest, and he had confidence in the men with whom he rode.
Whether they still had confidence in him… “Got to make sure they don't trip you when you've got your foot back to kick,” one of them said.
“No damn Federal's ever gonna trip me again,” Jenkins said furiously. “Ever, you hear?”
The rest of the troopers looked at one another, but none of them said anything. The two stripes on Jenkins's sleeve didn't hold them back; they weren't men who feared sassing underofficers. The growl in his voice, the glint in his eye, the angry flush that reddened his badly shaved cheeks, the hunch of his broad shoulders… Any soldier who sassed him now would have to back it up, with fists or maybe with a gun, and some things were more trouble than they were worth.
A great blue heron sprang into the air from the edge of the swamp, a fish in its beak. The bird's wingspan was almost as wide as a man was tall. Jenkins followed it with his eyes. “Wish I could fly like that,” he said.
“Who don't?” somebody else said-that seemed safe enough to answer. “I've had dreams where I could flap my arms and go up into the air.”
“Me, I've had dreams where I could flap my feet,” another trooper put in.
“I believe that, Lou-they're big enough,” still another man said.
“You find a Federal with shoes that'd cover those gunboats?”
“Sure did-took a pair off a dead nigger,” Lou said. “Cryin' shame when a damn nigger's got better shoes than a white man-that's all I've got to tell you.”
“It is,” his friend agreed. “Well, they're yours now, by Jesus. That lousy black son of a bitch don't need 'em no more.”
“What I'd like to do is, I'd like to go up in a balloon one of these days,” another Confederate said. “Showmen'll take 'em up at country fairs sometimes. Don't know what they charge for a ride — a quarter-eagle, maybe even a half-eagle. Hell with me if I wouldn't pay five dollars just so as I could say I really flew.”
Jack Jenkins thought about doing that. It wouldn't be bad-if he had a five-dollar goldpiece, he figured he would plunk it down so he could see what going up in the air was like, too. But it wasn't what he'd had in mind when he spoke; it wasn't what he craved. A showman's balloon was tethered to the ground. Even if the line should break, the balloon was at the mercy of every vagrant breeze.
When he talked about flying, when he thought about flying, he meant flying the way you flew in dreams, flying the way the heron flew. He meant going from here to there because you were here and you wanted to get there. Where here and there were wouldn't matter; you could just hop in the air and go.
Nobody in all the world could do that. Jeff Davis couldn't. Neither could Abe Lincoln. Neither could Queen Victoria, and she had more money than both of them put together. So what did that say about a ragged Confederate cavalry corporal's chances? That they weren't what you'd call good, worse luck.
For that matter, almost anybody in the world could go from here to there on the ground, and where here and there were didn't matter. Not me, dammit, Jenkins thought. He was going where he was going because that was where Nathan Bedford Forrest wanted him to go. The privates riding with him were much more likely to pick a fight with him than he was to pick a fight with Bedford Forrest.
Riding to Forrest's will, his backside almost as sore from the saddle as if he were stricken with boils, he came into Brownsville from the west. Had he ridden into it from the east only two days before? That seemed impossible, but it was true. Would he be able to sleep in a bed tonight, or at least under a roof? After all he'd been through, that seemed impossible, too, but at least he could hope.
Pain dulled by laudanum, Mack Leaming lay on the Platte Valley's deck. The world would do whatever it did. For the moment, he couldn't do anything about it. With the brandy and opium coursing through his veins, he couldn't even care about it very much.
Captain Anderson walked along the steamer's deck with the Platte Valley's skipper. The civilian wore a uniform considerably gaudier than a Navy man's would have been. “You will give me receipts for all the men you take aboard, sir?” Forrest's aide said.
“Oh, yes, of course,” the skipper answered. “Got to keep the paperwork straight. We'll both wind up in hot water if things don't come out even. “
Anderson laughed. “Heaven forbid!” he said. “You Yanks have it worse than we do there, I believe, on account of you're richer than we are-and you have more men to spare for dotting every i and crossing every t. We've got to make do without so much in the way of spit and polish. “
“I'm sure you miss it,” said the captain of the Platte Valley. He winked at Charles Anderson-Leaming saw in most distinctly.
“Well, now and again I do, to tell you the truth,” Anderson replied. “I was a merchant up in Cincinnati before the war, and after that I worked for the Nashville and Chattanooga Railroad. I like having things just so when I can. But when there's no time, and not enough men even if there were time… Well, sir, all you can do is your best.”
“I suppose that's so.” The steamboat skipper pointed up toward the bluff atop which Fort Pillow lay-or had lain. “From what my men say, you Rebs did your best there.”
“We shouldn't have had to storm the place, sir,” Captain Anderson said. “I gather Major Booth fell early in the fight, and Major Bradford, I'm afraid, didn't have the sense God gave a goose. He thought he could hold us out with Tennessee Tories and niggers, and forced us to prove him wrong.”
“Well, you did that, by thunder!” The captain of the Platte Valley sounded as respectful-no, as admiring-as if he and the Confederate cavalry officer were on the same side.
Despite the laudanum, dull anger slowly
filled Mack Leaming. This plump, easygoing fellow had no business getting so friendly with the enemy. They were doing everything but drinking brandy together. Captain Anderson took out a cigar case and offered the steamboat captain a stogie. That worthy bit off the end, stuck the cigar in his mouth, and scraped a lucifer on the sole of his shoe. Once he had his cheroot going, he gave Anderson a match. They smoked for a while in companionable silence.
What was happening over on the Silver Cloud? Was Acting Master Ferguson-a real U.S. Navy officer-as friendly toward the Rebs as this fellow? Was he complimenting them in a professional way for the skill and thoroughness they'd shown in slaughtering the Federals inside Fort Pillow? Leaming didn't-couldn't-know, but he wouldn't have been surprised.
Some Federal and Confederate officers were friends because they'd gone to West Point together or served side by side in the Old Army. Leaming could understand that even if he didn't like it. But it wouldn't be true of someone still wet behind the ears like William Ferguson. All the same, though, to Leaming 's way of thinking Union officers too often bent over backwards to extend all the courtesies to their Confederate counterparts.
That dull anger inside him grew sharper and hotter. He was damned if he would ever give any Confederate more than the minimum due him under the laws of war-if he lived to fight again. Had the Rebels given the men inside Fort Pillow even so much? He didn't think so.
Not far away, a colored artilleryman lay groaning. A bloody bandage only partly covered a huge saber cut on his head, and another wrapped his hand. He was in a bad way; Leaming didn't think he would get better. What would Negroes make of the fight at Fort Pillow? Wouldn't they want to swear bloody vengeance against Forrest's men in particular and Confederate troops in general? Leaming had seldom tried to think like a Negro, but so it seemed to him.
In and around Fort Pillow, the Confederates methodically went on wrecking and burning anything Union forces might possibly use. Forrest's men weren't going to try to hold the place against a U.S. attack. That made more sense than Mack Leaming wished it did. The Federals hadn't been able to keep the Rebs from storming the fortress; the Confederates were unlikely to have any better luck unless they brought in enough troops to man Gideon Pillow's outer perimeter. And what was the point of that?
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