The Warriors (5 page)

Short of breath and dizzy—the sickness seemed to be coming on again—he slowed at a point halfway across the field and turned his head around.

Lord God! The damned lunatic was chasing him! The raised pitchfork shimmered in the red light. Despite his age, the man ran with powerful strides.

Jeremiah bolted for the trees. How could you explain anything to a father who’d seen two sons killed in a war that was ending in failure? How could you make such a man comprehend that you were out here alone because you believed, above all else, in honoring promises and obeying orders? Especially orders from someone who’d saved your life?

Eyes slitted, head back, mouth gulping air, he drove himself. Reached the sanctuary of the sweet-smelling pines and kept going, brambles slashing at his legs, needles on low branches raking his cheeks.

Finally, deep in the woods, he leaned over to catch his breath, near fainting from the aches in his chest and midsection. Somewhere behind he heard the farmer thrashing in the brush.

“Yellabelly! They gonna catch you! They gonna
hang
you! You an’ every other goddamn deserter!”

The thrashing sounds diminished. Presently the woods fell silent except for the shrieking of a jay. He’d eluded the man. But he couldn’t elude the accusation. It enraged him.

He started on, mentally minimizing the failure of his raid on the crib. He probably couldn’t have kept corn kernels in his stomach anyway. He was undoubtedly getting sick all over again. He’d just keep moving.

His fury toward the farmer abated slowly. A man like that wouldn’t understand what he was doing; no one could understand except a dead Confederate officer, and two women Jeremiah had never seen.

As he limped from the woods and angled toward a dirt highway in the deepening darkness, his heartbeat slowed. He climbed the shoulder of the road and turned in the right direction after a backward glance to assure himself the farmer hadn’t taken to horseback after him.

No, he hadn’t. The road stretched silent, winding into the black and scarlet autumn sunset.

He swallowed, concerned about being sick again. Sickness would only delay him further. Was there anyone left in the whole damn world who’d understand what he was doing? What if those women called obeying an order desertion? If they did, his flight and all its perils would count for nothing.

Just like the war itself.

A mile or so down the road Jeremiah began pondering a question he’d asked himself many times, without finding an answer. What really had become of the war he’d gone to fight? That brave, honorable war for the St. Andrew’s cross of the Confederacy and all it represented?

He thought he knew part of the answer. The bravery had been rendered worthless by military routs, and a widespread sense of impending defeat. The honor had been turned into a mockery by behavior he’d witnessed among the men on his own side.

Gradually, the shock of his encounter with the farmer passed. He honestly couldn’t blame or hate the man now that he’d escaped him. The beautiful night soothed the anger and brought understanding.

A high-riding white moon blazed, then darkened as thin clouds sailed past. The color of the countryside changed from moment to moment: silver to sable to silver again. A breeze rustled the branches of a plum orchard to his left, out there past a little brook that ran beside the road. He heard the sound of rabbits hopping in the orchard. Somewhere, late-blooming wild roses fumed their sweetness into the air.

His belly began to growl again. His intestines seemed to be clutched by a strong hand, then released.

The sickness had left him helplessly weak for half a dozen days at Lovejoy’s Station where he’d rested in early September, recovering from a light wound. At Jonesboro a Yank ball had sliced the flesh of his left upper arm. The ball would have killed him if it hadn’t been for Lieutenant Colonel Rose.

Rose had been trying to rally the troops under his command during the Jonesboro action. He’d seen the Union sharpshooter take aim at Jeremiah, who was kneeling and loading with frantic speed. Rose had lunged and knocked Jeremiah over—again demonstrating that he was the kind of man Jeremiah wanted to be himself—

An honorable soldier.

Scarcely eight hours later, Rose lay beneath the lantern of a field hospital, mortally wounded.

That night he revealed a side to his personality Jeremiah had never seen before—deeply hidden bitterness and pessimism. Pain destroyed his pretense when he gave Jeremiah a letter to his loved ones. Rose had written the letter a few days earlier, using the only material available—brown butcher’s paper.

Jeremiah could still vividly recall how Lieutenant Colonel Rose had looked in those moments before his death. The field hospital lantern lit the sweat in his beard like little jewels. He grimaced, summoned strength as best he could, whispered to his orderly, “Take the letter home for me, Jeremiah. My wife and daughter—they’ll need you more than this pitiful army needs you. My God, you know we’re done for. Have you counted—”

A violent, prolonged fit of coughing interrupted him. Jeremiah stayed rigid, not wanting to turn and see why a man on another of the plank tables was shrieking. The rasp of a saw told him why.

“—counted the numbers we’re losing every day? Some will go back where they came from, but some will turn into scavengers.”

Jeremiah had seen it already. Enlisted men disobeyed their officers, slipped out of camp after an engagement and prowled among the Union dead, stripping them of personal effects, prying loose gold teeth, even stealing uniform buttons.

“They’ll be roaming all over Georgia soon. I don’t care what others tell you, war—war ruins some men. It ruins land but worse, it—ruins people. You’ve seen what’s happening. Desertions. Profiteering. Brutality to prisoners. Andersonville—”

Another spasm of coughing. Rose went on, more faintly. “Andersonville! Right here in Georgia—an affront to God and everything that’s decent. It’s no different on the other side. And now there’s Sherman to fret about. I fear for my wife’s safety. Go to her. Don’t let anything stop you—or turn you into what some men in this army have become. You’re better than that. Any man”—he grimaced—“would be proud to call you his son. I would. I’ve never had a son.”

Jeremiah’s eyes filled with tears, but he felt no shame.

“I did you a service,” Rose whispered. “So you must do one for me. As soon as you can—promise?”

The sight of the officer’s pain nearly broke his heart. But he had to answer truthfully. “Sir, I—I couldn’t. That’d mean deserting.”

Rose’s eyes opened wider, resentful. He clenched his teeth, raised himself on one elbow. “Then I—I order you to go. You understand, Corporal Kent? I’m your commanding officer and I’m
ordering you.”

Ordering him? That tangled the whole request so fearfully, he didn’t know how to deal with it. He stood mute while Rose glared.

“You will carry out the order?”

“I—”

“You will.” It was no longer a question. “Promise me.” The harshness became pleading. “Please promise me—”

He whispered: “Promise, sir.”

Rose fell back, his chest heaving as he labored to breathe. Almost before Jeremiah realized it, a surgeon was covering Rose’s face. Then men wrapped his corpse in a bloodied canvas and carried it outside to dump it beside three dozen others. Hardly aware of the throb of his bandaged arm, Jeremiah wept.

The order he’d promised to carry out lingered in his mind. He’d promised. There was no question of
when
he’d leave, only of how. He had to get away without being caught.

It took a while. The combination of his none-too-serious wound and the chronic intestinal ailment of the army put him out of action for six days, forcing him to stay at Lovejoy’s Station while General Hood moved most of the troops further west, to Palmetto—hopefully out of Sherman’s range.

Eventually Jeremiah was ordered on to Palmetto with a dozen other men who’d recovered from injuries. He remained at Palmetto during most of September, waiting for orders. He saw Jefferson Davis from afar when the President slipped in to confer with Hood over problems plaguing the disintegrating command structure.

Jeremiah’s promise to Rose became an obsession. Quite often he was tempted to read the letter he guarded so carefully. But he felt that would be a dishonorable violation of Rose’s confidence. Even though the concept of an honorable war had become almost a joke, he clung steadfastly to the belief that he must continue to behave in an honorable way at all times.

Yet watching desertion-ridden companies at Palmetto shrink to half a dozen men made it hard. So did the loss of all the little amenities he’d taken for granted when he was younger. The way your hands felt clean after scrubbing with harsh yellow soap. There was no longer any soap.

How your mouth tasted better in the morning after using salted water and a toothbrush. He’d lost his toothbrush through a hole in his tunic pocket. The whole Confederacy was short of salt. He had resorted to a twig and his own stale spit.

Food had grown progressively poorer and scarcer. There was usually soup, if you could dignify it with that name. Water thickened with some corn meal. Occasionally he’d get potatoes, which he’d mash up and cook with a precious bit of meat. He’d learned to save the chunk of meat, wrap it in a scrap of cloth and reuse it the next day. He’d cooked one such chunk of pork over and over until it was black and smelled like garbage.

It was no wonder the dysentery felled him again, this time for neatly three weeks.

When he recovered, it was already mid-October. He was glad he hadn’t tried to get away yet. Some of the deserters had been caught, brought back, and sent to prison. But he was growing fretful, impatient.

I am
ordering
you—

Promise
me—

“Promise, sir.”

General Hood had taken the army and disappeared into the northwest, hoping to cut Billy Sherman’s supply lines from Tennessee. Since Jeremiah’s unit was gone, he was ordered out with a contingent of Georgia Militia to find and join Hood. He was still physically weak. Couldn’t keep up—or at least had an excuse for pretending he couldn’t. One dawn, the militiamen left him behind.

He was free.

He rested three days in a glade above Atlanta, then headed southeast to deliver the letter. Technically, he supposed he
was
a deserter. But not in his own mind.

He circled wide around besieged Atlanta and crossed the shell-blackened, trench-scarred fields with caution. With one expert shot he bagged a wild turkey, then gutted and roasted it. He had no salt to add as a preservative, but the meat would still last him a while.

Careful as he was to avoid being stopped or questioned, he was defenseless against one threat: the disease in his system. He lost four more days in another patch of forest, lying on the ground hour after hour, wracked by fever, and bowel trouble. It was from those woods, a week ago, that he’d seen more evidence of how ruthless the conflict had become.

He’d seen a sky blackened by fire-shot smoke. Heard thunderous reverberations from dynamite charges. The South’s transportation center and major rail junction was being systematically destroyed by men who didn’t give a damn about fighting honorably, only about winning their war to free the nigra and crush the rebels. He remembered wondering, hatefully, how many noncombatants had been blown up along with the rolling stock and roundhouses in Atlanta.

Now, a good two miles from where he’d encountered the farmer, he was forced to stop. Out of breath. Light-headed.

The darkness of the countryside oppressed him. The moon was temporarily hidden. Perhaps it was the lonely dark that made him think of his mother, Fan Lamont.

She’d sent him off to this failing war with a curious and contradictory set of admonitions.

She’d hated to see him go. Expressed grave concern about his safety. Warned him to be as careful as he could.

Yet she was proud of his enthusiasm. Didn’t refuse when he begged to enlist. And, at the last moment, urged him to fight well and—most importantly—
honorably.

He suspected that the fervency that had finally overcome her fear had had something to do with his stepfather’s mysterious death in Richmond in 1861. It seemed that Edward Lamont, the actor, had tumbled down a flight of stairs in the building where he and Fan had been living. Jeremiah had been in Lexington at the time, staying with Fan’s father, Virgil Tunworth. The boy had heard the account of Lamont’s death from his grandfather.

When Fan returned to the little town in the Shenandoah Valley after the funeral, Jeremiah began to have a feeling the accidental fall wasn’t the whole story. Based on the somewhat nervous way Fan answered his questions, he had decided there must have been something disgraceful about Edward’s death. Something Fan was desperate to counterbalance by giving reluctant permission for the last of her three sons to risk his life for the cause.

Fight well and honorably.

Jeremiah soon became thankful he had never told the entire truth about the war in the few letters he had sent home. He’d said nothing about the spoiled meat dishonest suppliers sold to the army, nothing about the wretched living conditions, nothing about the men who fled under fire at Chickamauga, and the wholesale desertions later. He hadn’t wanted his mother to know how bad conditions were. She had enough to fret about with her home threatened and the well-being of Jeremiah’s two older brothers constantly in doubt. Everyone in the Confederacy knew the risks taken by General Stuart’s regiments. And Matthew—who was too easygoing to bother with more than one or two letters a year—was somewhere on the Atlantic between Liverpool, the Bermudas, and the Carolina coast, serving as supercargo on a blockade runner.

In Jeremiah’s opinion, that was both honorable and dashing. Typical of Matt, too. Jeremiah had always admired and envied Matt, even though their times together had been few. Fan’s second son had been away at sea since Jeremiah was a small boy.

If it had been possible, he’d gladly have exchanged places with Matt. His brother had a naturally happy disposition. Loved games, particularly baseball, a game he and thousands of other boys and young men had created in parks and fields and dusty lots, adapting it from an old English game Matt called rounders.