by Tony Abbott
A few minutes later Bobby and Ricky were marching to the crest of the mountain. Ricky hurried ahead of him, on and off the paths, clutching at rocks and setting his feet among the scrubby growth so as not to fall. Heat dropped like a blanket over them.
“Lots died here, but we should really go to the Ridge,” Ricky told him. “Missionary Ridge. That’s the real place. Thousands died. But it’s mostly houses now. Over there. And Orchard Knob, too.”
Following his brother’s gaze, Bobby looked over the basin of the city below to the crest of a long, wavering ridge on the far side. He sensed the battle there had been horrifying. Beyond horrifying.
Ricky had droned every mile from Wartburg to Chattanooga: how the Union general Thomas assaulted the Rebel troops on Missionary Ridge. It was a late afternoon charge up the defended hillside. It was reckless and unexpected, and it broke the Confederate line. The Rebels retreated to the town of Dalton over the border in Georgia, and the Union won Tennessee.
The idea of “late afternoon” was appalling to Bobby, as he gazed over the waves of heat toward the green ridge. There was a time, an actual hour, when a battle began? Even the word “battle” made it seem like a thing with a beginning and an end. It sounded like a unit of time and place. “The battle occurred in the late afternoon of the third day.” But it wasn’t like that, was it? It was all the hours before the fighting began, all the waiting for it, then the lifetime after the last shot was fired.
“Hey,” Ricky said, falling suddenly to his knees in the dirt off the end of the path, his head down. Had he dropped his glasses?
Bobby decided that no battle in that dark war ever ended. He saw the distant ridge as if it were no longer green and hot, but blurry and brown like a wrinkled photograph, and heard the spattering gunfire that started late in the day—after what, hours and hours of troop movements over the land or hours and hours of dead time?—five, six slow shots over there, another closer, a crackling of tree bark, a pause when you thought that was it, then the air erupting in shouts and the flack-flack-flack of rifle shots all along the hillside, until their sound accumulated like the roar of some great engine.
“Get over here—” Ricky was burrowing amid a cluster of half-buried stones, digging at something in the ground. Bobby didn’t want to talk to him. Turning instead, he spied a faraway tangle of trees between Lookout Point and the far ridge. Was that the place Ricky had called Orchard Knob or was it somewhere else? There was something obscene about the name. Knob? What kind of knob?
Closing his eyes, he could not avoid it. He saw old men and young boys hugging tree stumps to gain a moment’s footing, that quick snap of gunfire, the scattering for cover, the stumbling and falling. And the gunfire! The more toylike it sounded—pop, pop, pop—the harder to reconcile the death it caused: those young boys that once fenced with sticks, played catch in side yards, snitched pies cooling on windowsills, or whatever they did, now spun completely around, their insides blown across the air.
Ricky was still rummaging on his knees. Their mother shielded her eyes with her hand, looking over at him. “Ricky? You should be on the path.”
“Mom—” he said, his head still down.
Bobby imagined countless birds sweeping over a ridge now littered with boys whose stiff dead arms hailed no one at all.
“Look at this!” Ricky said finally. “Holy cow, look at this! Look!” His fist held up, he was bent farther to the ground, his face right down there in the dirt and digging at it with the fingers of his other hand. Bobby walked over lazily and watched as Ricky opened his white fist. Sitting in his streaked palm was a small rusty object, a metal slug, grimy, scratched, ridged, and looking old.
“A minié ball. A bullet from the battle. I found one!” Ricky said. He stood up, barely able to contain himself with excitement, rolling the snub thing back and forth in his hand. “I looked for more, but there was only one. And I found it!”
Bobby remembered that frozen quarter. “Let me see,” he said.
Ricky’s face was full and crimson. “This is history right in my hand. What if the soldier it killed rotted away, and this minié ball is all that’s left? And I found it!”
“Can I see it?”
“Nuh-uh.” Ricky stepped back, clamping his hand shut. “You’ll lose it. Just wait till I show Dad. He’ll know what this means!” And he ran up the summit like one of those countless soldiers until, stopping suddenly, he called out, “P-tchew! Ptchew!” Aiming the bullet at his chest, he drew it toward him and clutched it there, then hurled himself, jerking his body backward from the impact, and fell onto the warm grass, crying, “Tell—my—father—!”
Disgusted, Bobby walked down the slope past his mother without speaking. In the car park Ricky was still gushing about his find, letting his mother hold the slug. She wondered aloud if they should tell someone at the information center, but Ricky shook his head and dug the bullet into his pocket. Bobby imagined that his mother remembered the surly guard at the entrance booth and decided it was all right not to say anything.
Just before they gathered themselves to leave the mountain, Grandma had to use the bathroom. The gift shop outside the stone gate was a long low room, nearly empty. He and Ricky scoured the wooden boxes and the various cubbies ranged on long tables. There were pencils with printing on them, yo-yos, harmonicas, jump ropes, marbles, maps, books. There were medals, cups, clothing, and wooden pistols and plastic sabers that reminded Bobby of his fencing set. Ricky’s head swiveled everywhere, then he made a sound and ran for a table stacked with slouch hats that he had told everyone were called kepis. They were made of pressed felt—some blue, most gray—stiffened into shape. Ricky dropped one then another over his head and, removing his glasses, looked in the oval mirror provided in the center of the table, wrinkling his brow this way and that.
Bobby stayed at the tables of cubbies, where he found one piled with small cloth sacks with red words printed on the outside and knotted yellow drawstrings at the top. Bobby felt something hard and small inside a sack. He loosened the drawstring.
“I’m going out here,” said their mother, catching the attention of both boys and pointing to the restrooms in the hallway outside the shop doors.
“Wait. Me, too,” said Ricky. He trotted away from the hats to the men’s room outside the shop.
Bobby turned the little sack upside down over his palm and a snub of lead fell out.
“Are you kidding?” he whispered.
It was a bullet, identical to the one Ricky had found below the slope, only it was shiny and new. The wooden cubby was full of them. They were not real slugs. They were souvenirs. Ricky must have discovered one of these, a fake bullet lost by a tourist—maybe a boy like himself—and had presumed it was a hundred years old, heavy with history, an artifact of the bloody battle.
Glancing behind him, Bobby saw no one watching. He returned the slug to the cloth bag and with his hands low on the table slipped it into his jeans pocket. It was only a dollar. Less. Sixty-five cents. No one would know.
His chest pattered as he moved away from the table.
“Bobby!”
He spun around. His grandmother was at the door. “Bobby. Come. Ve’re leaving now.”
Soon they were outside, heading for the car.
Bobby walked behind the rest of them. He slid the bag from his pocket, opened it, and dropped the slug on the grass near the pavement, and the bag a few feet away.
“Hey, look at this. Ricky. Look at this.” He remembered they were the same words his brother had used on the battlefield. When he saw Ricky turn, he bent down and picked up the shiny bullet.
Ricky came over and looked in his hand. “What?” He put his fingers in his pocket to feel the slug he had found on the hill.
“There was a table of them right there in the store,” Bobby said, rolling the bullet back and forth across his palm. “Didn’t you see them in there? They look pretty real, don’t they. But they’re not. I guess you found one that somebody lost or dropped. Se
e, here’s the bag,” he said, bending down to retrieve it. “It’s just a souvenir.”
Looking at Bobby’s palm as if hypnotized by what he saw there, Ricky pushed his glasses up, but his head was lowered, and they slid down again. He wasn’t getting it. “No…” he said. He pulled out his dirty bullet and compared it with the one in Bobby’s hand.
They were the same.
“Yeah. It’s a souvenir,” said Bobby, looking at the two slugs. “Wash yours off, it’ll be shiny, too. Sixty-five cents. Not worth anything.” He was breathless now.
Then, almost softly, Ricky said, “You little jerk.”
“What?” asked Bobby, trying on a little smile as if he hadn’t understood the meaning of his brother’s words. “What do you mean?”
“You little jerk,” Ricky said again as softly. His face was bunching up, his glasses slipping slowly down the bridge of his nose. Even in the abundant sunshine of the parking lot he looked pale, more so because of the bright reflections from the cars all around him. “You thief!” he said loudly now, his face still looking down at the hand that held his dirty bullet, his glasses nearly off the end of his nose. “You little thief—”
Then his hand fisted around his bullet.
Bobby stepped back. “What? You want to fight? You want to fight, huh, Coke-bottle glasses? Bottle glasses! Yeah?” He reached into his pocket, slid out the stick knife, and wiggled it in front of Ricky. “Shut up! Shut up! Jerk! It’s fake! It’s damn junk. Your stupid Civil War. Blindy—”
He didn’t hear the sound of the twisting gravel behind him, but his mother was suddenly there, wheeling his shoulders around and smacking him sharply across his open face. “Give me that! Give me that!”
Bobby’s cheek stung as if it were scraped with a file. He pulled the knife away from her, as Ricky had pulled the bullet away from him. “Give me that!” she screamed. Bobby threw the stolen bullet and its bag angrily at the ground and ran off into the trees beyond the parking lot.
“Bobby! Bobby!” his mother called, but he didn’t stop.
“I hate you all!” he shouted over his shoulder. He felt like a trapped animal and ran as if his cage door had suddenly swung open. When he got to the trees, he slowed and turned. He saw his mother’s hand bunched around something as she helped Grandma into the car. Her face was tight, spitting mad. Was she crying? Were they both crying? Ricky was staring at the ground nearby, looking lost. Was he crying, too? Bobby’s chest stung from shoulder to shoulder, as if poisoned. It was all stupid little words: “Jerk!” “Shut up!” “Give me that!” “I hate you all.”
But he didn’t hate them all, did he? He hated something else. Being in the car for days. Being in the bewildering South. Being surrounded by death, everywhere death. Being himself. He felt ashamed, but he didn’t know why. Ricky was a jerk. He was a jerk. That girl in the rug with nothing on. But there was something else he couldn’t name.
Looking up the hill, Bobby couldn’t stop it coming, the fall of bodies at him and on him. He felt them falling off the hill directly at him, moving through his stinging chest and out his back, taking his breath away, taking little bits of him when they fell. They came on like the whistle of a coming train, the piercing shrill call. The coming of the train in the night, the train passing, the departure of the train, its slow vanishing into the night, leaving him utterly empty of everything but pain.
I’m sick, he thought to himself, his cheeks hot and dripping. I’m sick and I hate all of this! It was all he could think of, there were no other words, but he knew they weren’t right, they weren’t all of it, but he could find nothing else except to run growling away into the dark trees.
With garbled curses, no more than animal breaths, he gripped his wooden knife and jabbed it hard into the ground, carving a circle of dirt deeply into it. He pried it up and out, a cone of moist clay tipping over onto the ground, a fresh blossom of earth. Looking down the slope over the car park, he saw his mother marching Ricky tenderly back to the store, her arm cradled around his shoulders, his head bent low. She clutched the stolen bullet in her other hand as if it were a bomb, its fuse the dangling yellow drawstring. Bobby’s eyes fixed on the ground between his knees, and he snapped the knife in half and in half again and dropped the pieces into the hole. Then he replaced the clod of dirt and stamped it down flat, stamped it, stamped it, then he stumbled slowly to the car where his grandmother sat not sleeping but wordless, staring away, with her tilted head against the window.
Twenty
Jacob
The sun is going down behind the trees, but the air is still warm like a blanket over your face. That’s okay. It’s still cooler than Atlanta. It’s the water always moving in the creeks and the wind in the trees and not so much pavement that makes it cooler.
A person needs time on his own sometimes. It was just too small and hot in that kitchen, the two of them singing and cooking, Cora and Aunt Irene. So I left them jibber-jabbering at the counter, and see where I am. Fishing was all right today but too short, since Frank had to look for a job, and I want to sit on the bank some more. See, I have his best pole and my box of baits.
The road is getting long shadows across it now the sun is leaving. Some birds singing. Fewer now than before. Is this the road I walked with Uncle Frank and Aunt Olivia that first day after we left Hershel at the station? It should be the same, but it doesn’t look the same now. Maybe that’s because of the sun going down behind the trees and shade coloring the road. Or maybe there was a road I forgot to turn on.
I don’t know why Uncle Frank got so mad at me that way. Everyone is always getting mad at me.
“You shut up and you stop that,” he said. His eyes were small like buttons. “You just stop that!” He yelled it.
No. I do remember. It was because of something I said about Mrs. and her red lips and her yellow car. That I would drive it someday soon and she would let me. Was that all I said? I say too much. Never mind. It’s only Dalton and I’m from Atlanta. Cora says things to me all the time. No one heard me anyway except some tangle of people at the market counter. I didn’t say anything bad, did I?
A little farther to the creek. I think I’ll sing to keep myself company. Frank is funny sometimes. Like when Cora and I brought him home from the tavern. The “market.” That was funny. It wasn’t any market.
The road curves up ahead. That’s not right. It’s nearly been an hour. I should be there already. Maybe more than an hour. Maybe it’s too late to fish the creek now. I didn’t say anything bad, did I? Who heard me if I did?
Gonna be standing on a corner,
Twelfth Street and Vine.
I talked to Weeza only twice because she wasn’t around yesterday when I called. It was early. I just want to be home with her and Poppa now. I don’t want to fish here anymore. I better go on back. Is this the way? It still doesn’t look right. Maybe that turn ahead.
Gonna be standing on a corner—
Something’s making noise in the shadows up there. Someone running now?
Twenty-One
Bobby
“Are ve lost?”
Ricky flicked his eyes up at Grandma and said, “I don’t know.”
“Nuh. Ve are lost.”
“I don’t know,” Ricky said.
They’d left Chattanooga in the early afternoon, Bobby gazing sullenly at signs that said Ringgold (there was another battle there, but they didn’t stop) and Tunnel Hill and Dalton, and after another drive-through at Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park, had reached the outer streets of Atlanta before supper.
Atlanta was a huge city, flat, ugly, and sprawling away from the route they were on.
Ricky sat between their mother and grandmother in the front seat, commanding the maps. Though shadows were already growing over the streets, and they were beyond tired, there was one more site to see before they stopped for the night.
“It’s in the guidebook,” their mother said, hunkering over the wheel. “I read it before. The big house is right o
ut here somewhere, and the memorial for the Union soldiers.”
The tension in the car was electric and silent and heavy. Every breath Bobby took was wrong. He was a criminal now. A thief with a mean streak, an animal, while his brother was sainted.
“I don’t know, Mom,” Ricky said, blinking through the window and removing the blue slouch cap his mother had bought him at the gift store when she returned the stolen bullet. “Why would they even have a Union headquarters in Atlanta? Georgia is a Rebel state. Why would they keep it as a place to see? They hate the Union. They hate Sherman because he set fire to Atlanta. And why would there be anything down such a junky street, anyway? Practically right on the railroad tracks.”
She pressed forward. “Because the guidebook says so. It’s in the Triple-A. The Union cemetery and the headquarters. And it’s this way.”
The car edged along the narrowing road, which buildings pressed even narrower. There were low brick and cinder-block structures and high-windowed warehouses. Tiny sheds and dismal, large-doored depots.
“Well, it doesn’t make sense,” Ricky said. He held the map up to his face and scanned the lines on it. “This map stinks.”
“Ve are lost. Nuh.”
“We are not lost. We’re not lost. I’ll just go down here,” their mother said, barely slowing into a turn, “and if it doesn’t work…”
“Marion,” said her mother, “vatch out, the fence—”
The right headlamp nicked a length of fence that was bent in toward the road. Bobby pulled his face back from the window. There was a squeal and a crack.
