Wilderness (17 page)

The Union line reached the gully, went down its far side, nearly disappeared—became but heads planted strangely with the failed crops—then came back up the near side. Some dropped to their knees in the grass to fire and some fell forward into the grass and did not rise again. David breathed. He squeezed shut his eyes and opened them again, but nothing had changed. He was not home, abed, and being woken to breakfast by his mother’s call. He panted and made ready to fire, then looked at Abel. “What is it?” he shouted.

“I was married ’fore the war,” said Abel. “I was a married man.” He paid the gathering violence no mind and held one hand fast to the side of his neck. “Had us a baby girl that died ’fore we even had the chance to name her.”

David looked at him. Bullets sent sprays of dirt over them and went clipping through the branches overhead to send down bright, spiraling showers of leaves that flashed in the sun as they fell. A man four feet from them threw his arms skyward and fell back dead without a sound. Someone gave the command to fire, and he and Abel and all the men around them rose to their knees and fired over the works, then rolled over onto their backs to reload. From somewhere in the field, beyond the curtain of smoke that had dropped between them and the Yankees, came the chilling, familiar rumble of cannon being brought up the Old Stone Road.

“I dropt her,” said Abel, not looking at David, his hands moving expertly upon his weapon. He tore open a cartridge with his teeth, spat the paper, then pinched the shot and powder into the barrel and drew the rammer, twirled it between his fingers, and rattled it down the barrel to push home the charge.

“I never told anybody,” Abel went on, shouting to be heard. “Not even my wife. They all said she died in her sleep, but I know better.” He pursed his lips and frowned as he drew out the ramrod, twirled it through his hands again, then shoved it into the loose soil beside him. The long chain of firing had begun again at the far end of the field, and they crouched silent and waiting. “I’d’ve named her Jane,” said Abel, looking absently back into the dark of the Wilderness behind them. He opened and closed his mouth then said, “Would’ve called her Janey, maybe.” He swallowed, swore, and turned away to fit the firing pin onto his piece.

The blue line came on. Steady now, without shouting. Leaning forward and clutching at their caps as though they struggled into a wind. No cheering. Abel rolled his head around on his shoulders.
Beside him, David’s hands were busy on his rifle. Abel sniffed and tapped his shoulder. “You reload already?”

“Yes, goddamnit.” David was pale, watching them come. He drew out the rammer again.

“Then leave it alone,” said Abel.

David took a deep breath. Exhaled. He set the ramrod aside.

“One other thing,” said Abel.

“What, goddamnit?”

“When you do fire, point it thataway,” said Abel, good-naturedly nodding toward the field.

David looked at him. He shoved the barrel of his rifle up over the works, fired blindly, then began reloading. He looked back at Abel. “You just go straight to hell,” he said, grinning.

“Save you a seat,” nodded Abel. He rolled onto his stomach, came up on his knees, and fired.

There was no use aiming now, for smoke lay thick upon the field and rose slowly over the trees, as though it was night falling. The rushing enemy had become so many dim ghosts solidifying from the vapor momentarily before dissolving again.

And then they began to fire without order or pause and time compressed upon them all. Firing as fast as hands could load, as fast as tired and tiring arms could lift rifles to bruised and bruising shoulders. Old, familiar aches rose from deep within them as their rifles kicked against their bodies. The sour, charry taste of powder and paper dried their mouths and their jaws hurt and their teeth rattled loosely in their gums as they bit cartridges open.

Out in the field, the Union lines bowed and bent, sections splintered off and went rushing into the deep green woods that grew ever darker for the smoke in them. The Wilderness rang with cries and shouts and tremendous crashes of musketry. Out in the field, the yellow grass was shorn by the hot iron flung across it. Little mobs of men reached the Rebel earthworks and fought there with fists and
rifle butts. A few Zouaves, all bedecked in gaudy splashes of red and blue trimmed in yellow and with mud-stained spats, veered toward them and were cut down as though by razorous wind. Their bodies bright in the grass. More came on. Someone gave the command and their section stood from the earthworks, screamed and charged out into the open field. Behind them, back in the Wilderness, smoke hung in tatters from the branches like strange moss …

… and had you been there to see it, to hear and taste and feel it, to smell it, it would have been something. It would have been a thing indeed to have been there, that day. At that hour. It was the end of something—all felt that. And the beginning of something else. They’d not line up quite like that again. The flags and banners would not be uncased for this kind of work more than a dozen more times, and though bands would play, they’d not be heard. The cauldron of Saunders’ Field was all aboil and the dark trees that ringed it shook and clashed as though under a great wind, as though something truly monstrous prowled between the trunks as countless bullets tore branches, as cannon fire broke them apart. Their roots groaned slowly loose of the boggy soil. Smoke rose in dark, billowy columns and the sun went dark. Men fell dead in the field and they fell across the Rebel earthworks and men fell dead in the Old Stone Road where a section of Union artillery stood firing into the trees and the backs of their own men. The very air was scorched and there was a constant roaring as of a furnace stoked high, running hot. Red smears on the grass, red stains in the road.

There: A clean-shaven Union boy with arms too short for the man-sized sleeves of his frock coat is struck on the shoulder by a spent ball, is spun around and skewered on the readied bayonet of the old veteran behind. The boy dies with blood falling from his open, shocked, and terrified mouth. For his part, the veteran shucks the body from the blade, goes on into the wall of smoke, and is gone.

And over there: A thin and ragged Confederate, hirsute and wild-looking, falls to hands and knees behind the works as though he means to pray there, then leans with slow, calm, resigned weariness against a bullet-chewed old
pine. A neat red hole decorates the center of his forehead and it is not long before the hat, his name stitched with great care into the band by his sister back in Galveston, is stolen from his head.

The Union line went down into the gully, came back up out of it shouting into a long gray line of smoke stabbed bright by flame. The Rebel works were ablaze where they were loading and firing and loading again as those Union men, those Billys those bluebellies those northerners those Yankees, fell clawing at their faces and at their arms and legs and stomachs and hips and shoulders, clutching at their soft throats and at their privates and screaming all the while. Covering their eyes with sooty palms, these deadmen stumbled forward, fell, and rose no more forever.

The sound that came up out of the field that day, rose through the swirling smoke then echoed down the shocked countryside round about. The smell that day was of heat and smoke and fear and rage and shit and blood—a red-hot stink rising salty and bitter from the shivering grass, the clashing trees, the sweating flesh.

And then the Rebels rose from behind their works and stepped off into the grass to meet them.

This: A man with his underjaw shot away crawls blindly through the smoke, his red, spastic tongue, suddenly unanchored, become impossibly long, improbably pointed, with bloody slobber running all down the front of him and the tongue still twisting in its socket as he tries to call for his mother.

And this: A Union man loses both eyes to a spray of hot shrapnel and staggers forward. Rebel soldiers part before him, do not touch him or allow him to be touched, as though he has become beloved of God. He fumbles past, over the earthworks, and is gone.

This: A lean, tall rebel in a shabby suitcoat comes staggering out of the smoke with a bowler hat held beggarwise before his belly and filled with his own entrails spilling from a long, gaping wound that cuts him near in two.

And: Great, wide swaths of crisp yellow grass catch fire, the flames jumping and crackling, fanned by soft, spring winds. Black smoke billows from the field as things begin to burn. The sun reddens at its circumference like a
bloodshot eye. Flames spread and wash over the dead where they lie, igniting ammo pouches with red, moist reports.

And there comes the sweet, sick stench of burning men and burning horses and standing watch over these and other, worse, things, you must wonder, Was there ever war like this before? Ever in all the world’s long turning? And would there ever be again? And you must know the answer and take no solace from it.

Weeping soldiers take aim at wounded comrades, their friends and mentors and adopted sons. They shoot them dead before the flames can reach them while those hurt beyond the range and sight of their fellows ready what weapons they can and pray for one thing or another while they watch the fires come. One man twists a little jackknife into his own throat, and another wraps weeping lips around a pistol barrel. Men burst apart, their blood flung down upon the living and the other dead like a gentle spring rain …

David Abernathy crouched in the Wilderness and watched the field where the flames gamboled brightly in the grass. Ahead of him, still hunkered behind the earthworks, Virgil Adams fired blindly, tears leaving pale tracks through the dark powder smeared across his cheeks. Deadmen from both armies lay in heaps in the grass, on the works, in the road, and the Union soldiers were falling back stubbornly, stumbling from the dark woods and back across the burning field toward where they’d started their charge.

A hundred men had stepped off into the grass to meet the enemy and had been, in their turn, driven back into the woods where all was green chaos. David soon lost track of his friends. His bottom lip was split from a Yankee rifle butt and he’d not seen Ned since the fighting started. Blood ran down his chin, striping him like a Red Indian. Somewhere out in the field, amidst the roaring, smoke, and flash, they were trying to form up again, and somewhere out there, still in it where it was the worst, was Abel, but David knew not where.

Balls sang past. They drove into the earth and underbrush around him and his hat gained three more holes. Throwing himself forward
through the new spring grass, David gained the works and rolled onto his back to load. He slid the rifle down between thighs, grabbed the hot muzzle with his toughened left hand while his right fished around his haversack for a cartridge. He could feel the impact of bullets against the mounded dirt at his back, could hear their sizzling whine as they flew past, leaving momentary trails of clear, blue air through the smoke. As he tore the cartridge open with his teeth, it left a smear of black powder down and away from his lips like a half-painted frown. David dumped powder and ball down the barrel, then tilted the rifle up and banged the butt upon the ground to settle the charge. He’d lost or shot his ramrod during the charge. The right side of his face ached terribly and he wondered how bad tomorrow’s bruises would be and would his teeth remain locked in his gums or would he, at some point, end up dumping molars and eyeteeth down the barrel along with powder and ball.

From out in the field, David heard the Union cannon fire again. He ducked and squeezed shut his eyes as thunder, shock, and smoke rolled over the grass. Somewhere up the line came the crackling shriek of another tree falling. To his left and right, as far as the smoke allowed him to see, men were busy at their weapons—those still with rammers drawing them out and twirling them batonlike through the air, then fitting firing pins and raising to their knees to fire in great long sheets of flame. The dark of the field was pricked brightly as the Yankees returned fire.

David discharged his weapon without thought, like a machine or a laboring man working late in the day, and threw himself onto his back again to reload. He glanced over at Virgil. The man had accidentally fired his ramrod and was staring mournfully at it where it was stuck quivering in the grass some ten yards out. Virgil looked at him, his face square and sad and resigned, and before David could raise his voice to stop him, he’d vaulted the works and was running through the burning grass. David rolled over onto his stomach to
watch as Virgil’s running legs stirred airy coils into the smoke. The cannon near the swale fired. There came the sudden bang, the malignant hissing like a hot rain on a cool day. Shrapnel from their canister sent Virgil’s head, the upper portion of his chest, and his entire left arm spinning away while the rest of his body kept to its course—stumbling through the smoke, propelled by momentum with the pale segments of his liberated spine flopping along behind like a bizarre tail.

Swearing and trembling, David ducked back down and was sick. The field was afire on both sides of the road. Black smoke billowed and darkened the sky nightwise and the sun went wholly red. As though the armies fought under some fantastic new star or the old one gone all wrong. There was screaming. Rifles fired and flames crackled in the grass and David could hear ammunition pouches exploding. The moist slap of bullets striking flesh. And again. And again. He finished loading his piece and rolled over to go back to work.

The Union artillerymen were firing obliquely across the smoldering field into the faces of a regiment charging them from the northwest corner of their line, and the shot tore into the backs of their own men still running for the works on that portion of the field. Men threw up their hands in shocked amazement at bright death. Men fell and rose no more. In the deep woods along the road behind him, David could hear a brigade forming for a countercharge. He heard old Spivey bellowing his war cry and laid his rifle barrel atop the works to aim into the smoke blowing about in designs strange and fantastic. Manshaped ghosts flitted through the gloom. Smoke roiled from the grass, from little glowing beds of fire, as though there were oil patches there that had been set ablaze. David fired in the general direction of the cannon, blinked sweat from his eyes, shook his head, and bent once more over his rifle. The roaring sound of the battle was everywhere and unceasing. The very ground was atremble.