Will was silent.
I didn’t tell you before, son Will, but though God has given me his signs, he’s always meant ’em for the both of us, as we have been together since the morning they put you into the penitentiary across from me. That was God’s doing too, as you must know. And I swear to you I feel the mystery of his ways beginning to come clearer. Any day now, I b’lieve we will hear what God has meant for you and me to do in this sad war and what his reason was to take us out of Milledgeville and set us to traveling with the wrong army. There is a mighty purpose that we are meant to fulfill. And if you think I am being too high and mighty—I mean, I know yo’re inclined to the skeptical—need I remind you that God’s messengers in the Bible tended not to be of the upper classes, and Moses hisself had even killed a man. So if God now chooses us poor excuses for soldiers, well that’s his way, maybe he thinks if he can redeem us he can redeem everyone. I mean, even you would agree the human race is something of a disappointment to him, ’cepting, of course, such angels as your Miz Thompson and perhaps that bucktooth whore you cuddled with in Savannah. But for the most part God had so much expectations for us and we have not turned out right. We are his chief blunder. I mean, bats are his blunder, and ticks and horseflies and leeches and moles and cottonmouths—they are all his blunders, but the greatest of those is us. So when I tell you that I feel the moment is almost upon us when his intention for us is revealed, I want you to believe me. In fact, I already have some idea of the kind of thing he is thinking. You want to know what it is? Willie? You want to know finally what we may be called upon to do?
When Will didn’t answer, Arly said, You fall asleep, son?
Arly went up front to the driver’s box, where a kerosene lamp was strung from the center tarpaulin pole. I’ll unhook this fer a moment, he said. Just to check on my patient back there.
And it was as he had thought: in the light of the lamp Will’s eyes were closed and his eyelids and cheeks were white from the flour dust sifting through the air, and with that clear, untroubled boyish look on him, almost a smile on his whitened lips, he had to be having some sweet dream, perhaps of Miz Thompson, and of course, being Will, not of loving her up but maybe standing with her in a church before the preacher. And with me, Arly thought, the best man beside him ready with the ring.
VI
AS VANGUARD FOR GENERAL SLOCUM’S LEFT WING Kil Kilpatrick’s riders, composed of cavalry and mounted infantry, some five thousand of them, crossed the Savannah River and made their way north, torching villages as they went. In most places the resistance was minimal. Kilpatrick accumulated treasures on the march until he had his own personal train of wagons filled with booty—silver services, fine bed linens, glassware, bottles of liquor, hampers of wine, as well as baked goods, cured meats, eggs, jams, dried fruits and roasted nuts, coffee beans, and other delicacies for the palate.
Cantering into the village of Allendale one afternoon, he smelled something delicious and raised his hand to halt the column behind him. An aroma of cooking meat seemed to be coming from a house set back from the street in a park of live oaks. The house was empty, but he found in the outhouse kitchens a half-darkie in a chef’s hat preparing dinner for some slaves. The slaves, sitting at table when he strode in, jumped up in alarm. What is this? Kilpatrick said, peering into a great pot where there simmered a stew with chunks of meat hanging off the bone, greens and turnips, cloves of garlic, and spices of such subtlety as to propose to him the civilized joys he had forfeited by coming to the defense of his country. Le lapin, said the chef, a French Creole who gave his name as Jean-Pierre. Goddamn, Kilpatrick said, slurping some of the stew from a ladle. You all, he said, turning to the frightened slaves, you all are free. You, he said to the chef, raise your right hand. And right then and there he inducted the bewildered Jean-Pierre into the army, conferring upon him the rank of Sergeant of the Mess. With all the rights and privileges thereof, Kilpatrick said. I’ll have a plate of that now, Pierre, and then we’ll be on our way.
The owners having fled, Kilpatrick commandeered a handsome landau from their stable and the bay stallions that went with it.
FROM TOWN TO town it was a new young black woman Kilpatrick took to ride with him each morning and share his bed at night. He liked the best house in town for his billet, and in the house the best bedroom with the softest mattress, and the downiest pillows and warmest blankets, some of which he would take with him upon breaking camp. In his entourage also was a nephew of his, Buster, an obnoxious ten-year-old towhead despised by the staff officers. The boy lorded it over everyone, a fact that Kilpatrick tolerated with amusement. He doted on the boy and gave him reading lessons when he had a spare moment.
At the Little Salkehatchie River crossing at Morris Ford, two miles from the town of Barnwell, Kilpatrick’s column ran into a force of three hundred Reb cavalry. Kilpatrick ordered up a battery of light guns. Under cover of the barrage his mounted infantry waded the boggy river, shooting straight ahead with their repeater rifles. The secesh troops held their works until their flanks were turned, whereupon they vanished into the woods.
When the Union riders reached Barnwell, they found it undefended. Only women and children were in residence, and they were advised by the kinder officers to leave town as fast as they could. The troops were turned loose. Ragingly hungry, they ransacked homes, riding down fences, pillaging what they could find, looting the pantries, sitting themselves down in the kitchens and demanding dinner from black folks, some of whom were delighted to oblige, while others were frightened into obedience. Kilpatrick chose for his headquarters Barnwell’s one hotel. Hands behind his hunched back, he gazed from a window as plumes of smoke began to appear over the town. Watch what happens, Buster, he said to his nephew. Not many boys will ever see a sight like this—it’s better than a July 4th. Sure enough, flames were soon rising over the town as the volcanic hearts of black smoke. Thin tongues of fire shot skyward as the lovely late afternoon turned to dusk. Buster was so enthralled that, while Uncle was enjoying the spectacle, he got up on a chair, took a candle from its sconce, and went about setting fire to the window draperies. One of the officers shouted, and in another minute Kilpatrick’s staff were cursing and stomping out the flames as the General stood there laughing. Not just yet, Busterino, he said, we’ve got some celebrating to do first.
While the town burned around them, Kilpatrick ordered up some musicians and black dancing partners and gave his staff a Jean-Pierre–catered dinner that went on into the night. Buster was sent off to bed but at one point in the early morning he was roused from his sleep by the shrieks of a woman. All he could see by the firelight coming through the window was the rising and falling white backside of his uncle Kil in the next bed. Uncle grunting and the spurs on his boots jingling and the bed creaking and the woman, whoever she was, yelping—all of it together was like a horse and rider at the gallop, and Buster, wide awake now, knew this was the getting-women-naked part of the evening that always happened after he was put to bed. But he had never seen it this up close before.
Then after a while everything stopped and it was as quiet as it had been noisy and Uncle Kil jumped up from the bed and pulled up his trousers by the galluses. Seeing the boy awake he grinned, his teeth ashine in the flickering light. That, Buster, was nothing but your uncle Kil showing you what it means to be a man. And soon as that pecker of yours puts out some hair, he’ll see to it you learn the lesson for yourself.
At dawn Kilpatrick emerged from the hotel to gaze over a gutted village. The streets were razed, only smoking piles of lumber and standing chimney stacks to indicate the Barnwell that was. His troops, though clearly worse for wear, rode at a slow gait past him, their brigade commanders saluting him as he stood half dressed on the hotel porch. Kilpatrick yawned. He called over his adjutant and, using the man’s back as a desk, wrote a quick note to Sherman, who was riding with General Howard’s right wing not a half day’s march to the east. I have renamed Barnwell Burnwell, Kilpatrick wrote, and sent
the note off by courier.
Unlike the majority of Sherman’s troops and officers, Kilpatrick did not have a particular animus for the state of South Carolina. He fought with a hellish impunity wherever he was. He was a reckless tactician and had from the beginning of the war gained a reputation as a dangerous fool, with a death rate in his commands far above that of other generals. Behind his back they called him Kil-Cavalry. Yet there was about this short, somewhat malformed officer the charismatic audacity of a classic warrior. Men followed him almost in spite of themselves, and women found him irresistible. A few inches shorter and he would have been dwarfish in his proportions, with his wide-shouldered torso and his rounded back. When he rode, he gave the illusion of being top-heavy and about to slip out of his saddle. He was something of a dandy even in the field, perhaps to make up for his ungainly shape and his facial features, which were rude and emblematic of his combative nature. His wide-set eyes gave no indication of a thoughtful sensibility, his nose, hooked and fleshy, pointed to the wide mouth of a sensualist, and everything was framed in scraggly red burnsides that disappeared under a broad-brimmed hat worn at a rakish tilt.
He was far from the kind of officer Major Morrison would respect, who rode into his rest camp that afternoon with a summons from General Sherman. Without ceremony Kilpatrick grabbed the note from Morrison’s hand, and in short order he and his personal guard of six horse soldiers were off at a canter.
Ordinarily in this situation Morrison would have expected a call to ride with them. But he was too tired to take umbrage. In fact he felt ill. When he’d dismounted to report, his legs had nearly gone out from under him. In any event he knew what Kilpatrick would be told: Sherman was marching north with the joined wings to Columbia. Kilpatrick would demonstrate south, toward Augusta, in the manner of a vanguard.
Kilpatrick’s forces were arrayed on a road that ran beside the tracks of the Charleston & Augusta line. As far as Morrison could see in either direction, details were at work prying up the rails and laying them in bonfires made from the ties. He thought of this as an inverse industrial process. The rails, when red-hot, were removed from the fire and bowed and twisted. It was a relaxing duty for the cavalry, and the men’s voices came through to him as burble of camaraderie. This put him in uncomfortable mind of his self-knowledge. Morrison had never had comrades. Even at the Point he had never been able to establish himself as one of a band of men. He was always off at the edge of things, tolerated, perhaps, but not included. There was something about him that he’d long ago resigned himself to—an inwardness that had left him lonely throughout his life and, at his worst moments, petulant.
Pillars of smoke rose in a line above the track, smaller and smaller into the distance—almost, he thought, like the puffs of a working locomotive. On the other side of the track was an open field of some two hundred yards, and then a forest of scrub oak and pine. To his back, a rolling farmland with dried-out, yellowed cornhusks lying withered in the winter sun. In either direction, Morrison knew, pickets were posted for any signs of Reb movement.
He had started out in the morning grateful for the sunny sky but as he gazed into it now it seemed to him a shimmering malevolence. He found a field chair before headquarters tent and, still holding his mount’s reins, sat down heavily. He didn’t know what was wrong but he felt awful. He unbuttoned his tunic, which seemed to him too tight. There was some sort of repetitive rasping in his ears, which he slowly realized was the sound of his own breathing. Feverish, he dozed, with the sounds and sights of the camp transmuted into the voices of his parents and the room he had lived in as a child. He awoke and almost instantly closed his eyes again. This happened over and over. He would awake with a start, look around with a high degree of clarity, seeing his horse nibbling the grass, the officers’ black servants going about their tasks, everything quite sanely observed, and in another moment he was back in the fantasia of feverish illusions—people barking at him in a language he couldn’t understand, rearing horses with the horns of unicorns, and that awful buzzing sound of a sawmill that was his own breath. I am fully aware of what is going on, he said to himself, I am ill with a fever. At the same time, he couldn’t seem to shake himself awake.
YOU’LL COME WITH US! These were the words that resounded within Morrison as an order given over and over again. You’ll come with us! Who had said that? He was aware of riding close quarters in a phalanx of horsemen, his feet in the stirrups pressed momentarily into the flanks of other mounts. He couldn’t see clearly—the morning sun was directly in his eyes. Yet he had unsheathed his officer’s sword and held it low along his leg, and with the reins wound twice in his left hand. He was not a natural horseman and rode bent low over the pommel. The road was sodden, and gobs of mud flew onto his face and affixed themselves like leeches. But then, unaccountably, the terrain went dry and the dust from the riders ahead rose as a cloud and he felt his mouth coated with dust, he was breathing through his mouth, spitting and wheezing and tasting the grit of the land. Yet the effect was to darken the sunlight, and he could see up ahead the roofs of a town.
And then they were riding down a street and all at once the purposive charge was in disarray, with horses rearing and men shouting and horses and riders going down around him. Morrison could not ride forward or turn. The hideous Rebel shriek was in his ears. In this roiling entanglement of blue and gray, men were pulling one another from their mounts. His eyes closed, Morrison raised his saber and swung it at what or who he didn’t know. He felt it cleave flesh and bone. Why didn’t these people understand he was not well? Someone had an arm around his neck. Morrison held tightly to the reins and felt himself going down backward. As he tried, fitfully, to wield his saber in a chopping motion over his shoulder, it flew out of his hands. His eyes opened and he was transfixed by the hoofs of his horse flailing the air. Then its head filled his vision, terror in its rolling eyes, a scream issuing from its open jaws. He caught a glimpse of the sun in the moment before he hit the ground. He felt his leg crack, and was gasping in pain at the moment his spine snapped under the weight of his screaming horse and the breath was pounded out of him.
VII
WHEN THEY CAME OVER THE BRIDGE AND INTO THE village, Arly got down from the wagon and pulled Will out by the arms and ducked under him and stood up slowly till he had the boy slung over one shoulder.
The smoke from the burned houses and barns hung ghostly low over the road. Hell, Willie, Arly said, you wouldn’t want to breathe this air, it ain’t nothing but smoke and cinder. Like to burn your throat away.
Arly stepped to the side of the road and let the wagon go on.
Whatever was left of the town was dimmed in a blue haze on this cold dry morning. Women, some with babies in arms, watched in silence as the wagons passed. A dreariness of creaking wheels and the stolidness of a rolling army following its fighting troops was all there was to see. The train was like the back end of a parade, the band long passed. The lowing of the cattle as the army drovers led them across the bridge and through the town was the music now.
Arly turned in a circle until he saw it well enough through the haze. It was at the east end of the town, past some razed houses to where the land rose. It was a low hump of land with the stones poking up any ways but plumb. There’s nothing to burn in a graveyard, is there, Will? he said. You can knock down a few stones is about the worst you can do.
He set off with his burden, oblivious to the stares of the people he passed. He wore the hated uniform, but they were too stunned to do much of anything besides stare. Some didn’t even do that, just glancing up as he passed and going back to their thoughts as they kicked through their rubble.
Will was thin enough in his life, but a set of dead bones was another matter when folded over your back. And he was beginning to put out a smell. Arly didn’t know what he would do about a burial. He had no spade, he was tired and hungrier than he could remember, and he shouldn’t let the army get too far ahead of him. But if he didn’t bury Will, who would?
Arly’s mind was secured with a feeling of sorrowful righteousness. I won’t deny I took you outen that hospital right there in Savannah where a doctor might have kept you from bleeding to death, he said to the dead boy slung over his shoulder. But how likely was it we wouldn’t shortly be back in two cells awaiting only for the coffins to arrive before they shot us for spies or some other damn thing?
A house gutted but for the sagging porch attracted his eye for the divan out in the front yard. Arly kicked open the wrought-iron gate, stumbled forward, and dropped the body on the divan. He propped it into a sitting position and sat down beside it, taking some moments to recover his breath. He found the stub of a cigar in his breast pocket and put a match to it.
I made a calculated wartime decision, Will, he said. But who can know for sure that God wasn’t behind it? We are his instruments, alive or dead, and I expect your risen spirit is listening to me now up by his side there and knows better than I what will be.
As if in answer, the body toppled sideways against Arly and the head settled in his neck. Sighing, Arly put his arm around it. And the two of them sat that way in the quiet of the burned air under the blackened trees, neither the dead man nor the living inclined to move. Arly didn’t doze, exactly, but his eyes did glaze over, and the cigar dropped out of his fingers onto the grass. It was in this somnambulist state that he observed a wagon drawn by one mule pull up and a man in a brown coat and derby, and a nigger to help him, establish themselves right there outside the gate in the business of photography. Out from their wagon they pulled a big wooden tripod and set that up. Then they dragged a camera box out and affixed that to the tripod. And then, while the man in the derby busied himself picking out a lens and screwing it onto the front of the box and aiming the camera and looking at the sky and aiming the camera again and looking at the sky again, the nigger was running back and forth to the wagon and bringing out boxes with stacks of metal plates. Oh yes, they were getting ready to make a photograph, they were. Arly had come awake, but he didn’t move or open his eyes wider than he needed to see what was going on. The wagon had a black tent mounted on the bed and steps leading up the back, and the sideboard had printed on it Josiah Culp, U.S. Photographer. In smaller letters it said Carte de Visites. Stereographs.
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