by Crowe (epub)
Johnny remembered the instructions the General had given him and followed them once more, making his way through the city to the outskirts of town. The ground was still bare in spots, marking the place where the Honor Guard had camped the previous winter. Johnny kicked around the old campground and found a spot off to the side of the main road where someone had come after the soldiers had marched out and piled the stuff that they had left behind when they broke camp. Emmit’s advice to pack light echoed through Johnny’s mind. Where was Emmit now? Johnny dug through the pile, found a blanket with only a few holes in it, and spread it on the ground. It was a fair night, and Johnny had no trouble falling asleep under the stars. In his time serving the Confederacy, he had slept in much worse spots.
The next morning, Johnny returned to Cort’s office. The old man was already there, shuffling and sorting through papers. To Johnny’s amazement, all of the papers were stacked into neat piles with words like “Requisitions” and “Payroll” written on the top sheet.
“You were right,” Cort said, seating himself behind his desk, which had been cleared of everything except whatever Cort was currently working on. “I am the War Department, or what’s left of it here at the capital. Most of the decisions are being made out of the field now. All this,” Cort gestured at the office, “is just for show, it seems. To keep President Davis happy. Make him feel like he’s still involved in the decision making. Still, there’s work to be done.”
Cort stood and opened the top desk drawer, pulling out what looked like a cigar box. “First off, I need to go through and get these soldiers paid up. Here,” he said, dipping a hand into the box and fishing out eleven silver dollars. “That’s your first month’s pay. Maybe when you get back I’ll have this sorted out and can get you the rest of it.”
Johnny took the coins and stared at them as they lay in the palm of his hand. Eleven whole dollars. The things a fella could do with eleven dollars.
“Better put those away,” said the old man, returning to his work. Johnny’s senses returned and he dropped the coins one-by-one into his britches pocket. “Now, you take that bag over there and deliver those notices. That should keep you busy for a good long while. Just come back here when you’re finished and we’ll see about getting you your next batch.”
For the first time, Johnny noticed the canvas bag sitting beside the door. He slung the strap over his shoulder; it was heavier than he had imagined, filled with envelopes bearing the seal of the Confederate army. “War Department” had been stenciled on the side.
“Where should I start, sir?” asked Johnny.
Cort stopped what he was doing and looked at Johnny over the top of his glasses. “At the top, of course!”
One thing that Johnny learned was that you never know how someone is going to take the news; everyone handled it in his or her own way. He had only been delivering the notices a couple of days, but had already witnessed a range of emotions as varied as the people he visited. There was the older farmer who remained stoic when Johnny handed him not one nor two but three notices, one for each of his sons who had been killed. There was the woman in Lexington who embraced her children and cried while she told them that their father wouldn’t be coming home. There was the woman who lived in a small shack, not unlike his back home on Devil’s Knob, who ran Johnny off her property with a pitchfork, yelling after him that so long as that notice in his hand went undelivered then she believed that her husband was alive and well.
All this got Johnny thinking about the only death he had ever known. He had been so young when Grandpa Crowe died and had been so focused on surviving all alone and carrying out Grandpa’s dream of taming the Knob, that Johnny hadn’t taken the time to think about death and how it should be handled; how he should have handled it. All these years later, while Johnny crisscrossed the South, he came to the realization that he had never grieved for Grandpa at all. Maybe at five years old he was still in shock and hadn’t known how to grieve, but as the years passed, maybe Johnny harbored a little bit of resentment toward Grandpa for up and dying, leaving him all alone on top of that God-forsaken knob.
Johnny was thinking about Grandpa Crowe when he sat down to breakfast at the Sweetwater Inn. He had spent the previous night on the bank of a stream outside of Lawrenceville and gone into town first thing that morning to find a place to get some breakfast. The Sweetwater stood on the edge of town. Johnny followed his nose inside and plopped down at a table for two, placing his bag on the other chair. The bag was lighter now. He had managed to deliver about a quarter of the notices already and was looking forward to getting back to Richmond in a week or so.
The inn was busier than Johnny had expected it to be. A group of old-timers huddled together in the far corner, stealing glances over at Johnny from time to time. Johnny nodded at them and thought it must be the uniform that drew their eyes as the waitress came to take his order.
“Let me see your money,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“Your money. Let me see it.”
Johnny reached into his pocket, pulled out his remaining nine silver dollars. He had spent one already and lost another somewhere along the way, he was still kicking himself for that.
“All right,” the waitress flashed a smile at him. “Sorry ‘bout that. We’ve seen more than our share of soldiers come through here on their way home without any money in their pockets. They don’t tell us that up front, you know… only after they’ve eaten their fill.”
Johnny nodded. She was pretty. Not Anna Lee pretty, but attractive nonetheless. Her body curved in all the right places and Johnny felt his face flush at having noticed. What he didn’t notice was that the tingling had begun again in his left arm.
“So, what’ll you have?”
Johnny placed his order: a couple pieces of bacon, two eggs, and some biscuits and jam. The waitress wrote it all down on a scrap of paper and was headed back to the kitchen when Johnny’s gloved left arm reached out and smacked her on the bottom.
To the old-timers in the corner who saw the scene play out, it wasn’t clear who was more surprised, Johnny or the waitress. She turned around, hands on her hips, her face scarlet with anger. Johnny stared down at his gloved left hand, then looked back up at the waitress just in time to receive a slap across the face. Johnny flew backward out of his chair and toppled the other, overturning the canvas bag and sending envelopes sliding across the floor. The waitress seemed to be struggling to find the right words to scold Johnny with, but either never found them or thought better of saying them. She spun on her heel and stormed into the kitchen.
“I thought you was dead,” Johnny muttered to his arm under his breath. In his head he thought he heard the arm laughing, then fall silent and limp once more. “Ain’t you even goin’ to help me pick up?”
It took him a while to recover all of the envelopes with only one good arm. The waitress had returned while Johnny was still scurrying about and she kicked a few of the notices across the floor out of spite. Johnny tried to stammer an apology, but she would have none of it, sticking her nose up in the air and stomping away. He had returned all of the notices to the sack except for one, which he almost hadn’t seen. It had slid across the floor and settled under the store counter where the cash register sat alongside jars of candy. Johnny crawled over and picked up the envelope. He froze when he saw the name written on the front. Johnny closed his eyes and whispered, “Please, Lord, no”. The name was seared into his mind and no amount of wishing it away could erase what he had read. He opened his eyes, hoping that he had seen it wrong, but the name was still there in what he assumed was Cort’s flowing script.
Emmit Pearson
Johnny hadn’t felt like a big breakfast after all and ended up just pushing the food around the plate with his fork. He paid, apologized once more to the waitress, and exited the Sweetwater, unsure about what to do next. What I need, Johnny thoug
ht, is time to think. He didn’t think he could make a decision about where to go next, not yet anyhow, so he simply put one foot in front of the other and went wherever his legs carried him, which was right back to the stream where he had slept the night before. He didn’t think there would be much sleep for him this night. The sunlight reflecting off of the rolling surface of the water dazed him, making it even harder to focus his mind on the matter at hand, so Johnny walked down the bank a way until he came upon an old willow tree leaning its droopy branches out over the water. He dropped the canvas bag, how much heavier it seemed now, and sat with his back against the upstream side where it was still cool in the shade, even for late July.
Aside from Anna Lee, Emmit had been the first real friend that Johnny had. Sure, there had been other fellas since then that Johnny had come to think of as “friends”. There had been General Stuart for one, but deep down he knew that if it hadn’t been for Emmit that he might not ever have made it this far. It had been Emmit who had taken him in and taught him what it meant to be a soldier, to live and fight for something greater than yourself. Yeah, maybe Emmit had made a mistake here and there, like tossing Johnny’s cartridge box away, but even that act had all been a part of it. Without Emmit and his constant encouragement and advice, Johnny knew that he wouldn’t be the soldier that he was today.
Johnny also remembered what Emmit had said about his wife’s condition. If somethin’ ‘appened to me, the grief might just be too much for my Sally, he had said. A bad heart. How could he be expected to deliver the news of Emmit’s death when doing so might end up killing Sally as well?
As the tears began to flow, this time Johnny didn’t try to fight them, he hung his head and let them come. So this is what it feels like, he thought. To grieve. To mourn. Johnny cried for his dead friend, but at least Emmit had died a soldier. Some might call that a noble death, fighting for what he believed in and those he loved. There was no shame in a death like that. A lot of soldiers had died fighting; wasn’t the canvas bag at his feet proof enough of that? But not everyone died like that, not everyone died fighting. Some deaths were accidents. What nobility was there in that? Anger welled up from within and Johnny rocked back and forth. Grandpa didn’t die fightin’ for anythin’, he thought. He was drunk and it was icy and it was just a stupid accident.
“And left me all alone,” Johnny sobbed. “Maybe ruined me for life. It ain’t fair!”
The last image Johnny had of Grandpa Crowe was his funeral. Grandpa Crowe had insisted on being buried up on Devil’s Knob. Reverend Henderson was there and so was Anna Lee, but no one else had come, not even Grandpa’s old drinking buddy Gus Sewell. Maybe Gus was still feeling bad about being the one who had found Grandpa’s body at the foot of the Knob and couldn’t bear to see him put into the ground. Maybe he was just drunk and forgot about the service. The only one there besides the Reverend and his daughter to see Grandpa into the ground was Johnny.
But that wasn’t right. There had been the grave diggers, too. Johnny remembered how they tried to dig a grave for Grandpa but were only able to scrape a few inches down into the stony ground before hitting solid rock. They tried another spot and met the same result. The men tried three more times before loading Grandpa’s casket back onto the cart led Bart back down the Knob, eventually burying the body in the far corner of the churchyard. Johnny remembered thinking even then that Grandpa must have been turning in his grave at being buried in town and not up on the Knob.
Remembering Grandpa tempered Johnny’s anger. “Not fair,” he repeated, his sobbing slowing. No, it wasn’t fair. What had been gained by the old fool’s death?
Johnny sat under the willow tree and cried. He cried for his friend Emmit. He cried for everyone who had fought and died in this stupid war, whose names were written on the sides of envelopes and stuffed into a canvas sack. For the first time, he cried for Grandpa Crowe. Truth be told, he might even have cried for himself a little. Johnny cried until the tears wouldn’t come, then he knew no more.
Having never done it before, Johnny hadn’t realized how exhausting it was to grieve. Sometime in the late morning he must have cried himself to sleep and slept the better part of the day away. In the west, the orange sun hung low in the sky, painting the clouds with its waning light. He stood and stretched, feeling the aches in his back and shoulder loosen and fade away.
He looked at the canvas sack. Emmit was dead, there was nothing Johnny could do about that. Still, a bigger problem remained. He knew that it was his job to deliver these notices, that the families of the deceased had a right to know that their loved ones were gone, but no one had told him what to do in a case like this. He had just cried himself to sleep, mourning those he had known and lamenting the cruelty of death; after all of that he sure wasn’t up to killing poor Sally as well. What’s a fella to do? he wondered.
Johnny walked to the edge of the stream, stripped down naked, and waded into the water. In the middle of the stream he stopped, pinched his nose, and went under. The coolness washed over him and gave him a moment of clarity. It’s a bigger problem than I can handle right now, worn out as I am, Johnny thought. With a good night’s rest, maybe an answer will present itself in the mornin’. At any rate, it was going to be dark soon, too dark for traveling, so he splashed up onto the bank and let the last of the sun warm and dry his body. He had become so used to his golden arm and silver legs that the sight of them failed to make any impression on him at all, which Johnny would soon regret. Once he was dry, Johnny dressed and slipped back into the shade of the willow tree. Using the canvas bag for a pillow, he drifted off to sleep, turning over the problem in his mind.
“One thing’s for sure,” Johnny said aloud, “as soon as I figure out what to do and I get the rest of these letters delivered, I’m done. I’m turnin’ in this sack and goin’ home.”
That night, the faces and names of those the soldiers he had known drifted in and out of his dreams, then they blurred and passed out of his mind, as if leaving him behind. Or as if he had left them behind.
It was still early morning when Johnny awoke, the gray line of dawn just visible on the horizon and moving closer all the time, which made no sense at all.
Puzzled, Johnny rubbed his eyes and looked down. His legs were running on their own.
No matter how hard he willed it, Johnny could not stop running. Like his arm before, his legs had a mind of their own. He tried yelling words like “stop” and “whoa” but they had no effect. He tried to throw himself off balance, hoping that he might be able to hit the ground and at least get his legs out from under him, but one of the problems with having silver goat legs is that they have a goat’s uncanny knack for staying upright. He tried to turn around, twisting his torso in different directions, but his legs kept dashing forward.
One thing Johnny realized was that the longer he ran, the slower his legs went. When he had first awakened Johnny had been traveling as fast as he ever gone. Johnny cursed himself for forgetting what Mr. Scratch had told him. In his grief and indecision over what to do with the envelope with Emmit’s name written on the side he had slept the day away, not giving his legs the proper workout they needed. With all that energy pent up, his legs had started up on their own as soon as Johnny had fallen asleep and were only now starting to tire out. Now, as the sun crested over the horizon, Johnny was going no faster than a man riding at a gallop.
Which was good, considering he was running out of space to run.
Up ahead, Johnny saw where the green grass gave way to sand and stone, beyond that the ocean lapped against the shore. Johnny had never seen the ocean before and stared in awe at the vastness of it, his legs forgotten. Gulls cried to one another while they congregated along the beach, filling the air with their raucous chatter. There was a saltiness in the air that hung on Johnny’s tongue, which could only come from the sea that stretched on without end, all the way to the rising sun. It was a beauty to beho
ld, and if Johnny didn’t figure out how to stop he was going to do more than just behold it.
Hitting the sand slowed Johnny even further, his pace now more like a brisk walk. His steps became labored, plodding strides, the sand shifting beneath his boots. He slowed even further. Reaching the water, Johnny stopped, his legs tuckered out after their journey. Foam swept up from the water and kissed the toes of his boots, then receded back into the great ocean. What now?, he wondered, standing at the edge of the world. In response, his knees buckles and his legs pitched over, causing Johnny to sway, over-correct, and fall, landing on his backside in the sand.
Embarrassed, Johnny looked first one way and then the other, afraid that someone had seen him, but there was no one to be found.
Johnny didn’t know exactly where he was, but was pretty sure that he was somewhere on the eastern coast of Virginia. At least he hoped he was still in Virginia, but there was no way to be sure. The one thing that he was certain about was that he was further away from home than he had ever been. Sitting in the sand, his legs splayed out in front of him, Johnny realized that if he didn’t get moving, he was going to be wet soon. Being from the Shenandoah Valley, Johnny was unfamiliar with things coastal folk took for granted, like the coming and going of the tides. All he knew was that the water crept further up the sand with each successive wave. It had already washed into the tops of his boots and threatened to creep up his pant legs. It was unsettling, the way the ocean reached for him and tried to pull him into its depths. Johnny looked over his shoulder, back the way he had come. If he was going to get out of here, the direction he had come from would be just as good direction to go as any.
Using his good arm, Johnny grabbed the fabric of his britches and hoisted them up until the legs inside were more or less straight, then propped himself up from sitting to standing. So far, so good. He planted his left boot in the sand and pivoted, lifting his right pant leg with his good right hand and swinging his right foot up and around. Having turned about ninety degrees and now facing north, Johnny released his right leg, it splashing in the water as he let go. Half-way there. Before he could complete his turn, Johnny needed to twist his left pivot foot. He shifted his weight from his left to his right and leaned that direction, reaching across his body and grabbing at his left pant leg. His left boot started to turn when another wave came rolling in, just enough to knock Johnny off balance. He listed to the right, dropped his left pant leg and windmilled his arms, trying to regain control. He almost had it when another wave slapped into him and knocked him sideways into the water.