Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (59 page)

Lem Davis all but crashed into him, only to veer away, mad-eyed, glancing back as though he recognized no man. At least Lem was alive. Couldn’t see anyone else. Just the pillaged Yankee camps receding underfoot, one after another, prizes hard-won, even if by guile, and around him blue-jacketed troopers slashing blades down upon not armor but thin wool and cotton worn to a see-through, steel biting into flesh and muscle and bone, hard men atop beasts.

Let the dark come quick. Oh, let the dark come quick.…

Surely, I come quickly.
Saith the Lord.

No time to pray.

Behind him, beside him, Yankees cheered, cursed, catcalled. Wasn’t much artillery now, the attack had outrun its guns, but the Yankees had themselves a time blazing away from their saddles with those devil repeaters, making a game of death, maybe even betting on which man could hit what and keeping score.

He reached the Pike and found there was no army left, just a mob forcing wagons into ditches to make way for the terrified and cannoneers whipping men away from their limbers, only to be pulled off and beaten themselves. Yankee horsemen, maybe an entire regiment, dismounted on the high ground and shot into the mass.

Nichols believed his heart was bound to fail him, set to burst, and his lungs felt like a barn-burner got at them. Only his feet, blessed by those splendid shoes, a provenance of the Lord, went along untroubled.

Leaving the Pike, he thrashed through brush and scrub trees, trying to work away from the feast of killing, only to find himself drawn back to higher ground and another plundered Yankee camp, where dead men lay in shameless states of undress, not yet swelled up but a first few stiffened in rictus.

Two soldiers, his own kind, sat before a dead campfire and spooned beans from a pot that had not been emptied.

“Yankees are coming!” Nichols warned them.

“Set a spell,” one soldier encouraged him placidly. “Them’s good beans, and plenty.”

“Yankees—”

“Oh, let him go, Ezra,” the other soldier said. “He ain’t figured out this here war’s over.”

Ezra nodded. “I reckon.” He looked up at Nichols, kindly enough. “You take yourself a paw-full of them beans, boy. There’s to spare, and beans won’t slow you down.”

Nichols ran back into the brush, away from the all-but-encircling shots and shouts, seeking the low ground, the creek or the river, safety.

How had it happened?
When they’d whipped the Yankees so complete? How had it happened? Briars clawed him. Imagining Yankees all around and closing in, he had to fight the urge to drop his rifle.

How had it come to this? How had they sinned?

He emerged from the woods not in a quiet corner, but just east of the bridge over the creek. In the fading light, it offered a scene from Hell. On the southern bank, on the heights, some good men had put their cannon in battery and were firing back at the Yankees, brave as David, fending off a Federal Goliath, doing what they could to punish the blue-belly hordes closing on the bridge below.

The bridge itself was all wickedness. Men swung their rifles at their own kind to clear a path, and soldiers toppled shrieking into the water. Some tried to wade or swim across. Bodies floated downstream. On the narrow span, an ambulance was no more welcome than any other box set up on four wheels.

He
would’ve
stopped to fight, he told himself. But it wouldn’t do no good. Even before he turned away, determined to save at least one Confederate soldier and that one himself, he heard bugles pierce the thunderous racket and saw, in the half-light, Yankee cavalry sweep into view on the heights held by the battery, long blades catching the last rays of the sun.

In moments, that golden light was gone and the battery taken.

Trapped on the bridge, men hollered like women with snake-fright, brave men screaming. Soldiers tossed their rifles in the creek and raised their hands, so many of them that the Yankee horses couldn’t make any headway on the Pike, either side of the creek.

Nichols ran, stumbled, and crashed through brush and brambles, one of a few men nosing down the bank, trying to get out of sight of the swarming Yankees, out of any possible lines of fire, just trying to git.

The autumn dark fell fast, suggesting mercy. Nichols heard his own breathing, the gasps of a hunted animal. He heard other men, too, but could not see them. The world seemed newly vast, his day-scorched eyes reluctant to make sense of darkened spaces. Searching along the bank of the creek, he could not find one ford, though he reckoned there had to be several. Nor had he reached the river, he could tell that much.

He fell in with two of his own sort, South-talking men and notable for their smell, the three of them bumbling into each other and Nichols cry-whispering, “Don’t shoot, I’m of your’n.” And they went along together, which only made sense, as the war grated on in the distance and a wicked Yankee band far off played an Irish jig of a tune, its merriment like pissing on the dead.

That tune, or some other deviltry, worked on his new companions—one of them, anyway—for when they came upon a can’t-get-up Yankee, a shot-through man who must’ve lain there since morning, and he greeted their brush-thrashing footfalls with a plea of, “Water … for Mother’s sake…,” that soured new comrade hefted the stock of his rifle and beat the Yankee’s skull in, no reason to it, just spite, the way Nichols once had seen a boy smash in a turtle’s shell with a rock, just to feel bigger and better than something else, to kill something weaker, like he was saying, “I’m alive, goddamn you, and you’re not.”

Then they found what seemed to be, what had to be, a ford, for it wore an apron of mud and a trail led from it, climbing back up the hill, or so it seemed in that darkness unpricked by campfires or torches, and they waded in, Nichols last, just in case, for he was not much of a swimmer, not much at all, but, Lord, they did want to get away from the Yankees, all three of them did, you could smell it on them like stink, and when the creek proved their judgment wrong and the opposite of the sea parting for Moses, the two dark shapes before him fell waterward at the exact same moment, their splashes small but terrible, and only one emerged again to flail his arms and make wildly for the southern bank, while the other disappeared into that water and never resurfaced, not even to cry out in lamentation like the children of Israel. Perhaps he had been punished by the Lord for the sin of Cain, for pulping that Yankee’s brains—surely the Lord had selected the right man—and there in that creek, that creek that had swallowed a man as surely as the great whale swallowed Jonah, Nichols scared up and turned back.

As he struggled, unnerved and shivering, toward the Yankee bank, the mud stole one of his fine, new shoes, just sucked it off, though he’d laced it on real tight, and the creek wouldn’t let his bared foot find it again.

Returned to dry land—or to the bank mud, anyway—he tried to go on with one foot shod and the other as good as naked, but that was no use at all. In a sorrow immeasurable he kicked off, tore off, the left-behind shoe, a grand shoe of stout leather, a sad-as-a-family-burying, useless shoe, and he picked it up, adoring it with his fingers one last time, then he pitched it into the creek to rejoin its mate.

7:30 p.m.

Cedar Creek

None of it had the dignity of a retreat: It was a rout from start to finish. If, indeed, it was anywhere near finished. Which hardly seemed the case, with the Yanks giving chase.

Gordon had tried to rally them—his own men and the rest—to make a stand first on one bank of the creek, then on the other. Each time, it was no good. The Yankees were everywhere, and that “everywhere” was usually right behind any line he formed.

He’d heard early on in the collapse that Ramseur had been wounded, perhaps fatally. Perhaps Dod’s premonition had been real. More to Heaven and earth than any philosophy could contain, he recalled a line in
Hamlet
to that effect. More likely, though, Dod meeting a bullet had been one of war’s coincidences. War found infinite ways to tease a man, sometimes to death.

Later, in the flame-streaked dark, amid the report of rifles and clang of sabers, John Pegram, tearful, had told him that the ambulance carrying Dod had been taken by Yankees. He wouldn’t even die among his kind.

Never did get to see his infant, Dod did not. But Gordon intended to live.

He was trying to halt the two guns left to a battery, to snatch a few more minutes from the Yankees and allow another shred of the army to flee, when yet another throng of blood-glutton horsemen swept down upon them.

So fast, it all went so fast.

In the grave-dark night, with moonrise hours off, he all but gutted his horse with his spurs, guiding the beast toward what seemed the least-Yankee-bothered corner of the field.

After dashing along for a few dozen yards, his horse shied and reared up.

Gordon stayed in the saddle. And somehow he saw, grasped, understood, that horse and rider had come to the edge of a precipice.

“There’s one of those bastards. Over there,” a Northern voice called.

Gordon didn’t know if the man meant him or some other unfortunate, but he did not intend to become a guest of the Yankees.

He said, aloud, “Fanny, I love you.” And he drove his horse over into the unknown.

11:00 p.m.

Belle Grove

He couldn’t bear the interior any longer. A chaotic mix of headquarters, surgery, and refuge for the dying, the old mansion reeked of the dark side of the war, of the place beyond glory. He went outdoors, sidling down the steps, careful of his spurs, and positioned himself before the fire in the yard. He’d borne enough in the hours past and did not need to witness any more misery. Or listen to any more excuses from staff men who’d found their way back only after the battle. He just wanted to stand there alone and unbothered.

Of course, he couldn’t—and wouldn’t—avoid the couriers reporting the ever-increasing count of cannon and flags taken, of guns and wagons recovered, of prisoners captured. He reveled in those numbers; he’d just had too large a ration of human beings. His usual mood of celebration in the wake of a victory, the urge to be surrounded by good men sharing a bottle, of that he was inexplicably bereaved.

Arms folded across his chest, he lingered before the bonfire, its crackle and flare fueled by empty ammunition crates and the scraps of a wagon splintered by a shell. The fire’s warmth was a fine thing, wonderfully inhuman, and welcome in the stiffening autumn night.

Within the house, a man screamed. Sheridan damned the softhearted fool who’d allowed the surgeons to set themselves up in his headquarters. How on earth was a fellow supposed to think? You had to be hard, harder than the man on the other side.

Had he been damned lucky, though? Was that the truth of the matter? Blessed not to have been present for the debacle in the morning? Would his presence have made a difference, or would he have faltered as the others had? Had he been better placed by fate at Winchester, so he could ride, untainted, to rescue the army after others failed? The newspapermen who’d stayed with the army, the few who hadn’t fled, had already pawed him up, thrilled at the story they had to tell and equally pleased that their absent colleagues had missed it.

They would not merely report his feat, they’d exaggerate it beyond the bounds of the plausible. Not because they admired him, not really, but because they wanted to top each other’s versions.

Just in case, he had treated them to whiskey while he regaled them. Not all of his staff’s papers and maps had been rescued in the morning’s evacuation, but some intelligent orderly saved the liquor. And there, on the field he had reclaimed, he had poured the ginger-colored broth into the scribblers’ cups with his own hand, letting them laud him with praise of his achievement.

Now they were gone, those creatures of ink, in a race to the nearest military telegraph office, with his signed authorization to transmit their stories and grant them priority over routine messages. And his generals, too, had heaped on the congratulations, as if he were Napoleon and Frederick made one, and he had praised his generals in turn, and no more was said about the mistakes of the morning or about flawed dispositions and poor vigilance.

He considered taking a dose of whiskey himself, but preferred not to go inside the house to get it. He could not explain his mood, but felt that any movement from his spot would be for the worse. Flames snapped and the tower of wood fell inward. Sparks leapt into the night like fleeing men, as if the fire had suddenly grown too hot for them. In the distance, far to the south, flurries of shots marked the continuing pursuit.

Cruel, to run men to ground like that. But there was no other way to make an end of things. And the Johnnies had asked for it.

Early was broken this time, broken for good. He had misjudged the man’s resilience, true enough, but this day had a finality none could mistake. Early was finished, and soon enough the Confederacy would be finished, probably after tormenting itself through one last hungry winter.

The fire was mesmerizing, inexplicably pleasing, but the paper assault that followed a battle could be held off no longer. He remained by the fire but reviewed reports, gave authorizations, and signed a dispatch he’d dictated—wouldn’t Grant be pleased? Riders came and went. Forsyth brought him scalding coffee in his bone china mug—Sheridan did not tolerate tin cups—and he cradled it in his hands, taking in the aroma, suddenly aware that he’d wanted just this thing: to be alive on this cold night with a mug of fresh-made coffee. To be
alive
. And victorious.

“Something to eat, sir?” Forsyth asked.

“This’ll do fine. Not hungry.”

But he knew Forsyth well enough to calculate, almost to the minute, when the aide would reappear with a slice of ham or the like between two cuts of bread.

A cavalcade approached. It didn’t take a bonfire’s light to recognize George Custer.

George dismounted theatrically, with acrobatics worthy of a circus show. Grinning like a damned fool all the while.