The Deserter (4 page)

But in the morning the drawers were cold and clammy next to his skin. He had been awake half the night listening to the rumbling wheels of gun carriages on the Baltimore Pike and the clash of picks and shovels. The regiment's band of Pioneers was hard at work the whole night, wielding axes to fell trees and spades to dig trenches. They shouted at each other as they dragged the branches into line to make breastworks. It sounded like hundreds of them yelling at once and rattling their picks against rocks and crashing heavy boulders down against the trees.

Their noises were bad enough, but there was another noise that was worse, a tinny whine around his ears. Otis guessed there was a swale nearby because the mosquitoes were so thick. He pulled his blanket over his head and slept at last, but it was only a few minutes before he woke up to the sound of rebel caterwauling over there on the hill across the ravine, and a spattering of rifle fire. Sitting up, he was aware of a familiar knot of fear in his chest.

Oh Lord, now they were all getting up again. Tom Robeson was urging them onto their feet. The whole damn regiment was shifting position, in fact it was everybody, the whole goddamn division. Otis did his part of the shifting with his eyes half-closed as the regiment climbed an entirely different hill and spread out in a thick new line.

Unfortunately the new position was on the side facing the enemy. Otis chose his place with care, crouching down behind Corbett, the fattest man in the company. If any stray bullets found Corbett, they'd lose themselves in his spongy flesh and never come out the other side. Otis beckoned Lem and Rufe to huddle beside him. Corbett was so fat, there was plenty of room for three.

But the day passed, and nothing much happened. They relaxed and rummaged in their haversacks for pieces of hardtack, and Rufe shared out his cold beans. Not until late afternoon did the artillery on both sides begin to make a racket. And not until dusk did the enemy start fighting in earnest, but luckily it was no concern of Company E.

“Well, if that don't beat the devil,” said Lem. “They've changed their minds again.”

Sure enough, Tom Robeson was making huge “Come on, boys” gestures and first sergeants were running around giving orders. The entire First Division was supposed to hightail it someplace else, and in a tearing hurry, that was clear.

Where, for Christ's sake?

Otis caught sight of the commander of the division, Alpheus Williams. He knew the general from afar by his big black slouch hat and the long mustachios that drooped on either side of his pudgy face. The general was right there in plain sight, looking anxious.

Otis fell in with Rufe and Lem. As the sun sank lower and lower, they headed south. At first the three of them were somewhere near the front of Company E, but before long they edged to the rear in a clever way they'd worked out in other battles in other places.

You just let the boys behind you turn into the boys in front.

SOMETHING
MAGNIFICENT

T
hings had been quiet enough where they came from, but all day they had heard the raging storm of battle to the south. Obviously, the men of the First Division were being called on to shore up something or other down that way, whether they felt like it or not. Otis was not particularly interested in shoring anything up, but there was no help for it. He trudged along with the others in the gathering dusk, and when everybody jogged to the right, he jogged that way too.

Otis was captivated by the sight of a small stone building along this road. It was obviously a schoolhouse. A man stood in the doorway looking out at them. The schoolmaster, thought Otis. At once he was distracted by the memory of a class in the postulates of Euclid under Professor Eustis, and he wanted to fall out of line and offer his services to the schoolmaster. “
Now, class, this morning we will study the axiom that halves of equals are equal.” How delightful, the cheery faces of the little boys and girls
!

But as they drew away from the schoolhouse Otis looked back and saw a couple of medical stewards with a litter. The school was now a hospital.

“Column left.” They were turning into another road, and the boom of artillery and the crash of rifle fire was louder, and now the marching regiments began encountering the side effects of a bloody battle. A train of white-topped ambulance wagons pulled out of the way to let them go by, and every one of the marching men—all walking upright on two legs—looked in at the litters and winced at the sight of bleeding heads and smashed limbs. Crowds of the walking wounded were on the road too, and so was a band of jolly skulkers, cheering at them, shouting, “Go in and give them Jerrie.”

But nobody up front seemed to know where they were going. Behind them Culp's Hill was in the thick of a battle at last, because you could hear the crashing and thundering from back there, and over the brow of the ridge in this neighborhood something huge was going on because you couldn't hear yourself think for the artillery.

Were they lost? Stepping out of line and staring forward, Otis could make out some kind of excited conference up in front, and now Lockwood's brigade was taking off at a trot toward the fighting on the other side of the ridge.

Would they be next? Otis could feel his heart pounding, but then it settled down because it looked like they weren't about to follow the unlucky Second Brigade. And then Tom Robeson walked along the line and told them to move back into the trees.

Oh, yes, sir, gladly, Your Honor, sir
. By this time Otis was dead tired, so he was grateful to drop to the ground and lean against a tree and close his eyes. When he opened them again it was nearly dark, and the battle noises were dying away. Otis didn't give a damn which side had won the day, as long as Private Otis Mathias Pike had not been called into gallant action in the line of fire.

It was absurd, he knew it was, and philosophically unsupportable, and yet it seemed to Otis a fact that his own death in battle would be more tragic than the deaths of other men, sadder than Lem's or Rufe's, for instance, or even of those noble souls, his classmates Mudge and Robeson, Morgan and Fox. Those high-class people would no doubt be useful members of society if they lived, highly respectable statesmen and pillars of the church. But if his own life were ruthlessly cut short, something more important would be lost.

Dreamily Otis imagined the world going on without him. In the theaters where he had been welcomed in the old carefree days before he had been dragged into this war—in Boston and Baltimore, in Washington and Philadelphia, even in Richmond and Lynchburg, Virginia—would they miss him, the actors, the managers, the musicians, the pretty singers, the buxom dancers?

Would Rosalie miss him, the rose of Philadelphia? Or that adorable sweetheart of Washington, darling Flora, the nymph of the Grove? Unfortunately the lovely Lily LeBeau would not miss him, because they had never met. Bitterly Otis imagined the lighted carriages sweeping up to the doors of the famous theaters after he was gone. He envisioned all the fine ladies and gentlemen descending for yet another brilliant performance, none of them aware of the demise of Otis Pike. His name would be no more to them than the horse droppings on the street. Other men would write the witty pieces they came to see and the comic songs.

But what a waste if the fanciful cleverness of Otis Pike should be smashed by a minié ball or blotted out in a shower of grapeshot. Of course it was too bad about all the others, it was criminal that the lives of so many thousands of boys from North and South should be snuffed out in this savage war, but the truth of the matter was that most of them would be missed only by mothers and wives and sweethearts, whereas his own death would be a loss to the world, even if the world didn't know it yet.

Oh, yes, the idiot birds would go on singing when he was no longer there. The horsecars would jingle along Massachusetts Avenue, the curtains would rise in the Howard Atheneum and Arch Street and McVicker's and Ben Debar's, and no one would remember the quick inventiveness of Otis Pike behind the scenes, his transformation of crude comedies like
Sweethearts and Wives
into witty confections, and
Toodles
, and
The Way to Get Married
and
A Kiss in the Dark
.

All he needed was time—time for his budding gift to flower at last into something truly magnificent.

A LONG NIGHT
FOR OTIS PIKE

T
hey were back. Oh God, they were back.

Sullenly, half-dead with exhaustion, the whole goddamned division had shambled back in the moonlight over the rough ground, only to find out there'd been a god-awful bungle. They never should have left Culp's Hill, because while they were someplace else, the enemy had taken over their works, all the trenches for which sweating men had shoveled dirt and felled trees and dragged boulders into rocky barricades the night before.

Otis could see the disgust on the faces of Charley Mudge and Tom Robeson. He watched in alarm as Seth Morgan and Tom Fox found out what had happened and looked disgusted too. There'd been hell to pay while the First Division was elsewhere, and hell was still smoldering and belching up and down the hill and over there beyond their rocky knoll. From high overhead the full moon shone down on Colonel Silas Colgrove's five regiments as calmly as if two thousand footsore men were gathered there for a Sunday school picnic.
I'll thank you to pass me another of them chicken legs, teacher, and I won't say no to a piece of pie
.

Otis threw down his pack in almost the same place as before except it was a little way up a wooded slope. From there he could look across a patch of open ground toward the same infernal hill, the one that belonged to some poor unlucky farmer named Culp, where the two armies had been slugging it out for the last two days.

Now the bullyboys were chopping down trees again and digging more trenches. Otis could see them levering up stones and piling them against boulders as big as streetcars.

It would be another wretched night. Otis sprawled with his head on his haversack. Lem and Rufe were soon snoring on the ground a little way to his right, nestled together like boys in one bed, but Otis was too scared to doze off, even though he'd slept so badly the night before.

Over there across the swale lay the rebel army. They were out of sight, but he could feel them, he could even imagine he heard them breathing, because it wasn't like a woods inhabited by a few snakes and rabbits or woodchucks, it was tens of thousands of men inhaling and softly exhaling, and every one of them had it in for Otis Pike.

Fearfully he rolled over on his other side. From here he could see the red lights of an ambulance moving through the trees and hear the crack of a whip and a shout, and then a whimpering cry. In what part of the battle had that boy dropped down, half-killed by a rifle shot or a twelve-pound ball? Would Otis himself be screaming in an ambulance tomorrow? Or lying dead right here at Culp's Hill?

In a fit of terror he sat up. Looking around wildly, he saw a friend only a few feet away, writing a letter in a patch of moonlight. Earlier that day Otis had found Captain Adams companionable enough, even though he commanded another company.

Desperately he struck up a conversation. “A letter to your sweetheart, I'll bet.”

He could see the flash of Adams's grin. “I'm just wondering if she's looking at the same stars, way up there in Maine.”

“Well, I guess they've got the same stars pretty much everyplace.” Otis moved uneasily and lifted his head from his knapsack. “What do you think that noise is?”

It was a steady low moaning, coming from somewhere behind them, rising and falling, fading away and then beginning again.

Adams stopped writing and listened, but then, instead of answering, he hunched down again to his letter.

The moon was bright enough to read by. Otis was not surprised to see one of his messmates holding a page up to the light. Beyond the curled shapes of Lem and Rufus, Sergeant Luther Willow was racing through another of his police detective stories. Lucky Sergeant Willow, to be able to distract himself with the adventures of some stouthearted policeman.

Otis crawled over beside him. “What is it this time, Sergeant?”

Willow kept his eyes on the page. “Case of switched identity. The duke, he don't know he's got a twin brother, but then the brother kills him and hides his body and takes over his castle, but then Police Detective Bone, he finds a clue, a bloody coat, and when the duchess sees the coat, she screams, and then Detective Bone …” Willow flipped a page. His voice trailed away.

Otis crawled back to his knapsack, wishing he had a dime novel to read, or better yet a sweetheart to write to. Rosalie and Flora were sweethearts of a sort, but they weren't the kind you wrote a letter to. He had no kin to write to either, not since the blessed day when his uncle had expired. No, there was no family whatever to miss Otis Pike if he never came back from this fight.

Well, great God on high, it had never been his fight in the first place. The whole damn war, it was no business of his. What did these fools think they were fighting for? The Union? What the hell difference did it make if North America was four countries instead of three? And he sure wasn't fighting for the darkies. This white soldier wasn't going to die for any colored man.

The whole thing was insane. Otis had been thrown into the army because he'd stuck a knife into a thief in a saloon. Murder, they called it. Now it was his duty as a soldier to murder as many rebs as he possibly could. He was supposed to stick his bayonet in the belly of some Alabama farm boy or blow the head off some poor Johnny Reb from Mississippi before they did the same to him, and maybe he'd end up in a field hospital in the hands of some butcher with a saw, so he'd spend the rest of his Hfe explaining his cork leg.

“Gettysburg,” he'd say, and the pretty ladies would all say, “Oo,” and call him a hero.

Before long the whole country would be full of heroes with only one arm or leg, or no arms or legs, or half their faces blown away, courtesy of Chancellorsville or Fredericksburg or First or Second Bull Run.