Cain at Gettysburg (23 page)

“You know what I would like now?” Bettelman asked him.

“To be home with your wife?”

“That's asking too much. I'd settle for a glass of Baden wine. And a nice onion tart.”

“You're mad.”

It was Bettelman's turn to laugh. “We're all mad today. You, me, everybody. You saw it. What was the sense in all that? Trenk, Heisler, Schumann…”

“You should have stayed home and fixed watches.”

“
Einverstanden!
Agreed! But I was a fool. Like you. Now here we are. Don't
you
feel like a fool this lovely afternoon?”

At the moment, Schwertlein felt nothing but shame and madness. Plus the determination not to be made a prisoner.

A door opened and a white-haired man leaned out. Except for the woman concerned about her property, he was the first civilian Schwertlein had seen in the course of the retreat. All of the houses, except those requisitioned as hospitals, were shut up tight now.

“That way…” The man pointed. “Keep going. Down there. Left at that white house. The path leads into the fields.”

He disappeared again. A lock turned.

Schwertlein and Bettelman did as the old man bade them. And the fellow had been the best of Good Samaritans. In minutes, they emerged into a meadow ripe with manure. Hard to the left stood a big red barn. Beyond it, the landscape rose sharply.

On high ground studded with cannon, orderly ranks of blue-uniformed infantry awaited the day's survivors. Other regiments, unbloodied, hurried up a road that traced the ridge. Guided by the shouts of confident officers and with battle flags flying, columns wheeled into pastures to extend the Union lines.

“It looks as if we haven't had enough,” Bettelman said.

NINE

July 1, Late Afternoon and Evening

Blake tried to talk himself into elation, but it just wouldn't take. He liked to fight, and he liked to win. But this day was a bitter depletion.

Part of it was just the lack of water, he figured. As he strode back from the chaos of the town beside his comrades, he felt that slow-me-down hint of dizziness that came from neglected thirst on a hot workday. Maybe, once he got his fill of water, his spirits would lift.

“Soon as we get back in them woods,” Billie Cobb said, “I'm going to take me a shit.”

Blake pictured Cobb squatting among the corpses, the wounded. Cobb wouldn't care, either. His was a sensible approach to life for a soldier, but Cobb's actions were not the deeds that made it into the history books featuring heroes. Blake remembered, back at school in Waterford, reading about George Washington, who clearly had not had to move his bowels a single time in his life.

Then Blake thought about the knights in armor in a picture book his mother had given him and which he had hidden from her Quaker folks. What the devil had those fellows in iron suits done, when the need came upon them?

For the first time in hours, Blake smiled. But there was no happiness in it. Just contrariness.

At the behest of some officer well to the rear, the remnants of the 26th North Carolina had been ordered into Gettysburg on the tail of Pender's men. Knock Jones, the major who had been only third in command that morning, was now the senior officer in the regiment. A mustached plug of a man, Jones had formed up his weary men in column, then led them into town, where the ruckus sounded like dogs loosed on a prayer meeting. The order to enter the town had been a fool's doings, since the streets were already crammed with men in gray and the only visible Yankees were prisoners shuffling rearward. Old Knock, who was twenty-two or so, didn't quite know what to do or to whom he was meant to report. Eventually, he just turned the men around, marched them back to the edge of town, and waited.

With the afternoon's heat and smoke congealed on everyone left alive, a rider worked his way along the pike to tell them that General Pettigrew had ordered his division to fall back to the other side of the creek, to the groves and fields they had occupied in the morning. Questioned sharply, the courier said that, yes, what he had said was correct: General Pettigrew had the division now. General Heth had been wounded in the head.

“Glad he wasn't hit where it might've done him a hurt,” Cobb observed.

Then Major Jones led them back the way they had come, through fields upon which the density of dead and wounded increased sharply as they climbed back up the ridge their charge had won.

Surrounded by battle's leavings, Blake felt bone weariness and a closing of mental shutters. And thirst. Thirst, as if his insides were shriveling.

They didn't march, but trudged back to the scene of their triumph like a pack of country folk coming home late from a cockfight a county over. Knock Jones halted them just where their attack had lost its drive. When the major first tried to speak, his voice would not emerge. His throat was dry, too.

“Y'all listen now,” Jones managed to tell them. “I know you got kin or friends down in those woods. Go find 'em, but don't dawdle. Take the wounded on back, but there'll be no burying of the dead right now. That'll come. You just get our wounded and take them on back. Then the regiment's going to muster where we lay down this morning, when we were waiting to go. And I don't want any man disgracing this proud regiment by wandering off. You do what's right, hear? Now fall out and get to doing.”

Blake figured Jones himself was anxious to find out if Colonel Burgwyn had been killed or only wounded. The two had been close, David and Jonathan.

Lugging their rifles and slumping to the last man, the survivors of the 26th descended into the grove where the day's butchery had been done. It didn't take long for men to start calling out names or dropping abruptly to their knees. Some men shared what little water remained to them—if any—with Rebel and Yankee wounded alike, but most ignored the cries and pleas of their enemies. It wasn't viciousness. It was necessity. The way a man saved family before he did strangers.

Cobb stepped away to have himself a squat between two dead Yankees.

“I don't care what the major says,” John Bunyan declared. “I'm going to bury James.” They were the first words the twin had spoken since they had left the ridge.

“Just hush,” Blake told him. “We're going to take James with us, like he's only wounded. And we'll bury him back yonder, where it's clean.”

The twin went down the hillside in long strides, an inner compass guiding him to the spot where his brother had fallen.

Blake found Ireton, guts strewn and dead. Flies feasted. Blake couldn't watch. He went down the slope after John Bunyan. Cobb buttoned his trousers and followed.

They could have hopped down the hill from corpse to corpse, but that wasn't enough to shock Blake. What made him shudder was the speed with which the bodies had been stripped of anything valuable. He understood taking shoes, although he wasn't keen on trying on a dead man's footwear himself. But here trousers had been stripped off and shirts torn from men who were not even dead, but only wounded and quivering. His Quaker kin did not have a realistic view of mankind.

Ahead of them, John Bunyan pulled up, yanked back by invisible reins. The boy stared around himself, scrutinizing the aftermath of slaughter, then the earth itself. He turned to Blake and Cobb.

“He ain't here.”

“Calm down now,” Blake told him. “You sure this is the spot?”

“He was right here. I
know
it. Right here.”

“Maybe wild pigs et James,” Cobb said.

The twin lunged for him, but Blake was quicker, inserting himself between them. “That's just Cobb.”

John Bunyan seethed. Knuckles bloodless on his rifle.

“Damn you, stop and think,” Blake told him. “Nobody carried him off. You just stop and think.”

The new idea sank in. “He's only wounded.”

The possibility was difficult for Blake himself to accept, given the other twin's multiple wounds and the way the boy had gone down like a drained hog. But he could see no other explanation.

“That's right,” Blake told John Bunyan. “Nobody was about to lug James off. Now put on your thinking cap. Where would a wounded man take himself off to from here? If he could?”

A few trees and a dozen bodies over, a voice cried out one raw word of discovery: “Ezra!”

John Bunyan took on a trying-to-think look, but the boy's mind had slowed to a crawl. There was too much freight in that wagon's bed today. He shook his head. Heavily, reluctantly.

“That creek down there,” Blake told him. “Water.”

The twin took off at a run. Blake and Cobb walked after him.

“Just getting that boy's hopes up,” Cobb said. “God's a mean sumbitch.”

The formulation slapped Blake. He could never have said such words, not even now. But he had felt them. Often.

“You seen him, Quaker. That big lummox had more holes in him than a nigger's longjohns. Even if he's still alive, it won't be for long.”

“Maybe it'll be for long enough.”

Cobb cawed a laugh as they parted to pass beyond a mound of bodies. “You think they're going to have them some frilly, store-bought good-bye, Quaker? Out of one of them illustrated weeklies?” He spit, but there was no wet. “James Bunyan's just dying twice over now. What good's it going to do that brother of his?”

They walked down the hill past their own strewn dead, ignoring the torments of the Yankee wounded, loyal only to their battered clan.

“Folks need to say good-bye,” Blake said. “It comforts them.”

“Naw,” Cobb responded. “They don't, and it doesn't. Folks just do what they think they're supposed to do, no matter how it pains them.” He cackled. “Don't it never strike you, Quaker, how the Yankees cry their eyes out over some whipped nigger they dreamed up, then go to church and worship the sumbitch who does all this? Don't that seem like pissing in the whiskey jug to you?” They worked through the trampled thorns by the water and Cobb said, “Look at that.”

James Bunyan had dragged his butchered carcass down the hill into the pink and brown water. Reunited, his brother sat with him in midstream, cradling his torso on his lap, disfigured head to his bosom.

“You're going to be just fine, James, just fine, just fine…” The unsavaged twin rocked his brother back and forth. Even from the bank, Blake could see that James had suffered not only the three wounds he had witnessed, but others as well. The portion of his uniform that lay in the water had turned charcoal and maroon, but the big chunk of meat John held against him was sheathed in blood in various stages of drying. It looked as though pranksters had drained buckets of blood from other wounded men, then poured them over James.

“Ma's going to tend you,” John Bunyan said, almost singing. “They're going to send you on home, and Ma's going to see to you. She'll have you back behind them mules come autumn, if not sooner … just you wait … and Rachel, she's going to cry her eyes out from pure happy to see you coming up the hollow … they'll all be shouting for you, James, shouting and dancing, just to see you come on home … you're going to make me all jealous…”

“That boy's dead,” Cobb said. His voice was quieter than usual.

“Well, we're not going to tell John that. You understand me, Billie? Let him have his grief his own way. He'll figure things out. Then we'll see about the burying.”

Cobb didn't answer directly. “Ought to look round for a new hat. Never will find mine again, not worth the bother. You think wearing a dead man's hat would be bad luck, Quaker?”

“If God's the way you say, it doesn't matter. Come on, let's get started.”

They splashed into the stream, its waters drawn from a slaughterhouse. Blake knelt down on the streambed stones, close enough to confirm that Cobb was right.

James Bunyan was dead.

The still-living twin looked up, expression as earnest as any Blake could remember. More earnest, even, than his mother's looks had been when she clutched the last thing she possessed in her soon-to-end life, which had been him. He had not been allowed to see her after the cholera came over her and her Quaker parents moved her to the barn so she would not infect the house with her puking and shitting. Blake was glad now that he had been deprived of the sight of her dying. That was one wise thing his grandparents had done, no matter their reasons. Better to remember her faded beauty and beaten-down voice, rather than filth and delirium.

God wasn't what Cobb called him. Describing God took bigger, harder words.

“We got to get James on back to the surgeons,” John Bunyan said. “We got to hurry on now.”

“Sure enough,” Blake told him, “that's what we're going to do. Where's your rifle?”

“Yonder.” He pointed at the bank.

Blake turned to Cobb and held out his own weapon. “Here. Take this. And fetch his.”

“Nope,” Cobb said.

“Damn you, you'll do—”

“Nope. You're the sergeant. I figure that makes me the body-toter.”

Blake looked at little Cobb, then at the big, death-heavy body in the stream.

Cobb understood and said, “I'm tougher than you. You're stronger, all right. But I'll last. And you're the sergeant. Wouldn't want old Knock to think we was ignoring military courtesies, would we?”

So they went, John Bunyan stepping backward, slipping amid the round wet rocks and then on the bank-slime, lugging his brother's body under the armpits. Cobb followed, holding the corpse beneath the knees.

“You get tired, you tell me,” Blake ordered.

“I won't get tired, Sergeant Blake,” John Bunyan said. Then he spoke, in soothing murmurs, to his brother again.

Snake-strike close, a voice called, “Sergeant Blake?
Sergeant Blake?
”

Blake turned. Amid the ruined brambles, Lieutenant Devereaux struggled to lift his torso. Blooms of blood had spread over thigh and forearm.