Cain at Gettysburg (31 page)

The captain shook his head. “No, sir. Not down there.”

“And you're certain you reached
those
hills?”

Johnston looked unjustly accused of fibbing. “I don't know where else we could've been.”

The old man turned to Longstreet. “Surely you see it, General? Our plan is made for us. Your corps will assault their left.” Lee traced a line on the map again. “Directly up this road.”

“We could go deeper. Get in behind them.”

“No. Right up this road,” Lee said sternly.

“I only have two divisions present, sir. Pickett won't be in until late in the day. And Hood's still missing Law's brigade. Law's marching in from New Guilford.” He looked at Hood, the only like-minded man present. But Hood could not help him.

“It will be enough,” Lee said. “We must strike those people swiftly. Before General Meade corrects his error. General Hill will cooperate with you.” Lee's demeanor altered: His decision had been made, the time for discussion was at an end. “You'll roll up his flank. If practicable, General Hill will then strike the center. And since General Ewell seems unwilling to visit me, I shall visit him. Perhaps he can demonstrate on General Meade's right, confuse him and keep him from bolstering his left.” Lee stood. “Ready your troops, sir,” he told Longstreet. “We shall finish this business today.”

Behind Lee's back, Longstreet raised his eyes to Heaven. But all he saw was the varmint of an Englishman, Fremantle, up in the high branches of a tree. Whether the ass had climbed up there the better to see the Yankees or to eavesdrop was open to question.

Before his orderly could bring up one of his horses, Lee's departure was delayed. Laff McLaws, Longstreet's other division commander on the field, rode into the headquarters. He guided his horse right up to the fallen tree. A man of prosperous physique, Laff didn't care to walk more than he had to.

Longstreet felt sick at heart. The whole situation baffled him. He couldn't believe those hills were undefended. From what he knew of Meade, the man would not be such a fool. For that matter, he wasn't certain that he believed half of Johnston's report.

He did not want to attack. He feared it. And James Longstreet did not fear many things.

His dread bloomed into anger: Why was Lee doing this? At what cost to his corps? None of the possible explanations soothed him. The old man's back was up, and that was that.

Thick as a well-fed bear, McLaws dismounted. Puffing.

“Ah, General McLaws,” Lee said. “Please join our discussion. You're something of the subject of it.”

McLaws saluted, big beard pulling at his chubby face.

The generals gathered around the map again. Speaking to McLaws, Lee said, “You and General Hood will take your divisions into the attack on our right and the enemy's left. Meade has made a grave error, and we will not forgive it.” He took up his stick again, then traced a specific attack route. “I wish you to place your division across this road, and I wish you to get there, if possible, without being seen by the enemy. Can you do it?”

McLaws looked at Longstreet, bewildered that his corps commander had been cut from the chain of command.

Longstreet nodded, but fumed. The situation was intolerable. He himself was the man who should give orders to McLaws.

“Well, I know of nothing to prevent me,” McLaws told Lee. “Of course, I'd like to have a look at the ground myself, take out a scout.”

“No, sir,” Longstreet interjected, voice edged like a weapon. “I do not wish you to leave your division.” He knew even as he spoke he was being unfair. But he was smoldering. Leaning over the map, he contradicted Lee. “
I
wish your division placed
so
.”

“No,” General Lee said. His voice was cold, not loud. “I wish it placed just perpendicular to that.”

Befuddled by the contest of wills into which he'd blundered, McLaws turned to Longstreet again. His plump face shaped a plea. “I need to have a look at the ground, then. I could go right now, be back right quick…”

“You will remain with your division,” Longstreet snapped. The man had already been tardy once today, he reasoned. But anger, not reason, had spoken.

“Now lookee there,” Hood cried, stealing their attention. He pointed across the fields. “More goddamned Yankees.”

TWELVE

July 2, Morning into Afternoon

“Jesus weren't no fool,” Cobb declared.

Blake looked up from the corpse whose belt he was tugging off. He and his men had been ordered to retrieve items useful to the army and stack them by the roadside. Before laying the bodies in the trenches others were digging.

Meeting Blake's stare, Cobb grinned, black as perdition. The little man had been distant throughout the morning, but seemed more himself now. Among the dead.

“Reckon he wasn't,” Charley Campbell agreed, just to pass the time. “Likely right smart.”

But Cobb wasn't finished. “Matthew 8:22. ‘Let the dead bury their dead.' Show you why he might've been minded that way.” He tromped on a blue-clad corpse's belly. The Yankee farted monstrously.

“God awmighty, don't
do
that,” Corny yelled. “The stink's high enough.”

“Prettiest gal you know, she'd let go the same perfume,” Cobb said. “Let her lie dead in the sun, she'd stink right up. Lace dress, ribbons, and all.” He tapped the Yankee with his toes, playful, threatening. “That there's just the incense leaving the temple of the flesh.”

“Well, let that temple be,” Corny told him.

Cobb returned to Blake's unbroken stare. “Don't it strike you funny, Sergeant Blake? I mean, it's downright unfair. How one dead man just looks like he's having a sleep under a shade tree, while the next feller's all bloat and stink and rot and maggots, after a single night. The good Lord does play favorites. Don't he?”

“Dead is dead,” Blake said. He bent again to his labor, yanking the belt and cartridge box free. The corpse had stiffened. Empty hands clawed the air.

“Sure now … you don't believe that,” Cobb said, winking as if they shared a mighty secret. “Some of these boys must be up there on clouds of cotton, singing out to harps and heavenly trumpets, with niggers washing their feet and serving them beefsteaks. Ain't that how it is, how it's supposed to be?”

Blake considered the profile of the next corpse up the slope. The side of the Yankee's skull had burst outward, leaving an eyeless gash. If Blake had any faith left, it was dying. As surely as the bodies on that hillside were quit of life.

It was so strange: Other men found God in war's commotion. Sunday meetings weren't enough for them. They sang hymns in the middle of the week, in camp or on the march, and scoured their Bibles by firelight for comfort. Men hid in different ways, it seemed to Blake.

He wondered about Cobb now. Since the burying of James Bunyan the evening before, curiosity had begun to nibble at him. There had to be more to the man in that foul carcass, its stench worse than a number of the dead. Blake didn't believe that God had made Cobb what he was. There had to be flesh and blood in his ruination, some earthly tale.

A detail of soldiers came along for another load of corpses. One man had found a wheelbarrow, but most lugged soiled litters. They did not have to bear their burdens far. The low ground behind the creek, with its softer earth, sufficed for the ditches filling with gray-clad bodies. Yankees were left to themselves and the raccoons.

Up on the ridge, where McLaws' men—Barksdale's brigade—had come up and were having a rest, the 26th North Carolina's band began to play. “Camptown Races” fought the rattle of skirmishing in the distance, then the musicians blared out “Bonnie Blue Flag.”

“Ain't that a comfort?” Cobb snickered. “Takes a feller's mind right off of everything.”

Ever the good-tempered barkeep, Charley Campbell said, “I don't mind it.”

“Queer, though,” Corny put in. He raised his snout, as if catching a higher scent. “Thought sure they'd be fighting proper by now. All that marching going on. But it don't sound like much of anything to me.”

“Takes time for all those generals to figure out how to kill them the most men,” Cobb explained, “Yankees and our'n alike. Glory runs neck and neck with the casualty lists, if you ain't noticed. They'll want to outdo whoever went at it yesterday.” He looked around at the human wreckage, the pants shit through in death and the dried blood-gravy. “Show what fine, brave gentlemen they are.”

“We won yesterday,” Corny said. His voice was sullen. He'd clearly had enough of Cobb and his teasing.

“Now, that's a plain fact,” Cobb agreed. “We just whupped the piss and pride right out of the Yankees, and that's a God-honest fact no man can dispute.” He grinned. “Why don't you ask that dead boy you're fiddling with how he feels about it?”

“That's enough now,” Blake said. His tone made it clear that Cobb had reached a limit.

Yet, Blake could not but feel the rightness in what Cobb said. He had waited for the customary elation victory had delivered in the past, but the joy had been unwilling to appear. The one brief rise in spirits Blake had known had come that morning, when a Moravian from the band mentioned seeing Hugh Gordon the afternoon before, bloody down one side but alive, walking back up the road over which they had marched. Blake would have liked to search the field hospitals for him, but orders had come down to tend to their dead. So the regiment's survivors gleaned the fields, leaving back ashen officers and Colonel Burgwyn's nigger. The darkey wept inconsolably.

Blake tossed his harvest of belts and leather boxes atop a fresh pile the others had begun. Just up the slope, a dead man in blue still wore a good pair of shoes. It seemed a wonder they had not already been taken. The brogues looked about Blake's size, and he was tempted. His left sole was worn beyond fixing, and the right had a hole down front. But he could not make himself do it, could not take from the dead. He asked himself if he was just embarrassed at the prospect of being seen, and smiled grimly. Cobb would never let him forget it, if he took those shoes. That much was certain.

But there was more to it. The thought of slipping on a dead man's shoes chilled him unreasonably.

Blake moved along.

The dead came in all God's varieties, favored and shunned. Cobb had that much right. A few had bloated already: the carefree who went into battle with full bellies. Others remained lean, as in life, but their limbs skewed like the branches of stunted trees. Some intact faces were boyish, angelic. Others had glimpsed an eternity of torment. Then there were men with no faces at all, their features shot away or already gnawed by dark-time animals.

“I hate this,” John Bunyan said. Loudly. It was the first time he had spoken since breakfast, and his remarks back then had been limited to his needs. Thinking about his dead twin brother. And God knew what else. The boy worked steadily, but his spirit was truant.

“None of us likes it,” Blake told him.

Back on the ridge, the band played “Rock of Ages.” Then they livened things up again with a polka.

*   *   *

Longstreet sat on the fallen tree, eating hot biscuits with farm butter and waiting for Lee's return. General Hood squatted beside him in the Indian fashion, discussing the day's prospects.

“General Lee's a little nervous this morning,” Longstreet said, careful of his language but unable to fully resist the need to complain. “He wishes me to attack.” Longstreet shook his head with stiff-necked slowness. “I do not wish to do so without Pickett. I never like to go into battle with one boot off.”

Hood spit, then said, “Well, get me Law, at least. If we're to go in with only two divisions, I'm going to need those Alabama boys.”

Longstreet nodded. “When do you expect Brother Law?”

Hood drew out his watch and found it had stopped. “Damn it.”

“Quarter after ten,” Longstreet told him.

The Kentuckian shook his watch hard, then set to winding it. “Damn timepiece is mulish as a Mexican. Couple of hours. By one, surely. Maybe before. Law's a hard marcher.” Hood thought about it. “His boys'll be tired, but game.”

“I believe that General Lee will listen to reason,” Longstreet said. “Regarding Law, at least. But the truth is I don't wish to make this attack.” He bit into a last biscuit and talked through the chewing. “If we're to attack … if we have to do it … I'd prefer to hit them with everything at once. Get it over. Finish it. I don't like piecemeal fights.”

Hood refused to share Longstreet's despondency. “Once we get at 'em, I reckon we'll do well enough. Hit them hard on the flank, they'll fold. Always do.”

Relieving Longstreet of the need to reply, the foreign observers decided the time had come to ambush the two generals.

“But this is splendid!” Fremantle declared. “What a marvelous thing it is to see both armies in full battle array! One does expect a good show.”

“There'll be a show, all right,” Longstreet said.

Oblivious as ever, the Englishman plunged onward. “Oh, no doubt, no doubt. Really, General, it's everything one hears, and more besides. Even the weather … the sunrise this morning put me in mind of Austerlitz. The ‘sun of Austerlitz,' you know. I mean, I thought it rather a good sign, didn't you?” He glanced from general to general, sparkling with delight at himself and the adventure of the day. “I say, what do you think of these rumors about Vicksburg? They say this fellow Grant's been crushed to bits, that he turned tail.”

Longstreet snorted. “Sam Grant might be crushed. But he wouldn't turn tail.”

“They say he's nothing but a common drunkard.”

Longstreet thought of his last glimpse of his friend in that hotel lobby. With Grant's face earnest as a saint's as he insisted Longstreet accept the gold piece he clearly could not afford to give up.