by Greg Hunt
There were casualties behind the barricades too, but not so many. Here and there men fell, some never to move again, and others screaming and clawing at ugly gushing wounds. Mel watched without sympathy as the red-faced sergeant who had confronted him earlier fell to the ground. His body flopped like a hooked fish as blood and brains spilled out of a gaping head wound, and then he lay still, ignored and unattended.
At times the thick gray pall of powder smoke grew so thick that Mel wondered how any of them could keep on fighting, but they seemed to manage, firing blindly into the smoke when no clear targets were in view. Then a breeze would sweep across the hill, clearing the air temporarily, and the fighting would surge with renewed energy.
Through it all, the sour little colonel, the one they called Ol’ Persimmon, stayed on his feet behind the trench like a willing target. Mel didn’t like him one bit, but he knew a man with grit when he saw one. The whole scene had lapsed into pure chaos, but the colonel acted like he was still running things. Above the din of the battle he kept shouting orders to his staff, or at least those who were left, pointing this way and that and sending them rushing away to carry out his commands.
Elliott was still with the colonel, but by now he had a bloody rag tied around his upper arm, and he seemed none too steady on his feet. Loss of blood, or even the sight of his own blood spilled for the first time in any great amount, could make a man woozy.
Down in the cornfield things were exactly opposite of what they were on the hilltop behind the cabin. Hundreds of men were holding steady behind their long dirt berm, but not a shot was fired and not a single enemy soldier was in sight in the broad empty space before them.
Mel wondered what those men down there were thinking and feeling right now. Was it relief that their lives were not in danger, or were they envious of the ones up here, who were at least doing what they all came here to do? More of the latter, he suspected. For most of them it all had to do with the glory, he thought. But there didn’t seem to be much glory in what he’d seen so far.
He wasn’t surprised when the attack began to falter and then fail. The front ranks were still a hundred feet from the hilltop, but at that distance they were almost too close to miss, and none could make it any nearer to the barricades. For a short time it was hopelessly confusing out there as the men in back kept moving forward while the ones in front started falling back. Then the whole lot was retreating, some keeping up their fire as they withdrew, and others merely running back to where they started.
The attackers took what wounded they could with them as they moved out of musket range, but many more were left behind. As the next breeze raked away the remnants of smoke from the battlefield, a pathetic scene unveiled. Among the dead were many other men still alive who cried out pitifully for help, or tried to crawl away to safety. But there was little cover to be found, except the mutilated bodies of their comrades.
A few of the riflemen behind the barricades practiced their marksmanship on those sad survivors, which Mel thought was a shameful and unnecessary punishment for men who had so recently shown their own bravery, if not their best judgment, by charging up that hill. The officers finally put a stop to it, labeling it a waste of ball and powder to kill men who were all most likely to die soon anyway.
Soon the defenders began to haul their own dead and wounded up out of the trenches and carry them back from the firing line. There were several dozen of them, but not nearly as many as the other side had lost. The dead were left laying nearby, while the wounded were carried away on canvas stretchers. Mel realized that his smokehouse had been turned into a rough hospital, and before long a chorus of nerve-jangling screams poured out of there. As he watched, Mel saw a disconnected arm fly out the side window, and it was far from the last human limb to be discarded that day.
A large group of men had been waiting idly halfway down the hillside in front of Mel’s cabin during the fight. They must be reserves, Mel decided, positioned midway between the cornfield and the hilltop so they could move in either direction if their help was needed. Pretty smart. Now some of them began to pick up their guns and gear from the ground and walk up the hillside to fill the gaps of men who had been shot behind the barricades.
A man standing near the center of the barricade, smoking a pipe and staring down at his distant enemy, suddenly toppled back like a felled tree. A second later, Mel heard the far-off pop of the rifle shot that killed him. Then one of the men over by the cannons folded and fell. Again a rifle report sounded.
“Sharpshooters!” half a dozen voices bellowed out up and down the line. Every few seconds a rifle shot cracked in the trees on both sides of the body-littered hillside, and many effectively reached their marks until everyone was scrambling to hunker down and hide, or to withdraw far enough back down from the barricade to be out of the sights of the hidden marksmen.
If he ever had to be part of something like this, Mel thought, that would be the job for him. He’d have no stomach for charging out in the open straight into a wall of blazing gunfire. But it might be tolerable to lay back and potshot anonymous strangers who couldn’t see you to fire back—that was, if he ever had to be part of a lunatic business like this.
A few of the men behind the barricades tried to return fire, but they were firing blindly. There was really nothing to shoot back at except the woods themselves, and what use was that? Besides, it was dangerous to pop up and risk a shot, and for a few it proved fatal.
Then here came the whole bunch again for a second try at it. Far down the valley the thick mob of men in blue uniforms started forward once more, swarming up the valley like hornets boiling out of a torched hive. But the sharpshooters had changed the rules of the game. The men behind the barricades couldn’t stand up into position and prepare to fight, and their leaders couldn’t march along behind them, shouting orders and inciting them to stop the attack.
Although it cost some of their lives, a few of the braver artillerymen managed to turn the cannons, and soon were pouring fire into the trees where the sharpshooters were hiding. That seemed to discourage the sharpshooters considerably, and then the defenders in the trenches felt safe enough to rise up from their cover to get ready.
The attack up the long open valley progressed much as before. As soon as they came close enough to become reasonable targets, the men in the front ranks began to run forward, screaming like lunatics as they fired wildly toward the barricades.
Watching from his perch on a broad limb of the mulberry tree twenty-five feet above the ground, Mel could only feel a sort of stunned amazement at the blind, dogged courage of these men. Most of them, especially those out front, must know to a dead certainty that they would never make it. But still they came, running toward a place they would never reach, taking the lead ball God put their name on, then falling and dying as their comrades leaped over their body and ran on toward their own ugly end.
They seemed to be ordinary men, much like Mel himself, and he had to wonder why they had bought into the notion of all this. Why had they come here in such great numbers, and why were they so ready to fight and die to take over a rocky little hilltop farmstead lost out in the middle of these hills?
Why didn’t they march around it and keep on their way?
It might be something he could ask the major if he had a chance. But he hadn’t seen Elliott since the sharpshooters started firing, and that might not be a good thing. Elliott could be the only ally he had in the middle of all this mess.
Mel felt a tug and a sting on his upper arm. He looked down and was surprised to see a red stain blossoming on his shirt sleeve.
“Dammit!” he muttered, more annoyed than alarmed. The finger-size groove started to smart almost immediately, and blood began to gather and flow. The bone wasn’t hit and he still had use of his arm, but blood was steaming down his arm and dripping off his fingers. He knew he had to do something about it, but there wasn’t much he could do up here in the tree.
He climbed down and headed for the cabin
, which was the only place he knew where he could find what he needed. He was surprised to find it empty. They had pushed most of his handmade furnishings back out of the way, leaving only his table sitting in the middle of the room, covered with maps and other papers. Other than being rearranged, everything seemed to be about as he had left it.
He took his mother’s sewing kit from the shelf where it had been kept all his life, sat down on his cot, and quickly sewed the wound closed with heavy thread. Living alone, a man had to be willing to tend to his own inevitable wounds, and he had patched up worse than this. You learned to put the pain aside when something like this had to be done. He splashed some whiskey from daddy’s clay jug on the wound, then wrapped it tight with cheesecloth. Then he poured another couple of splashes of the whiskey down his throat.
Mel was surprised to spot his shotgun by the front door, right where he left it yesterday when all this craziness started. He took it with him when he went out, along with powder and shot. He also grabbed a chunk of bread about the size of a brick, and nearly as hard. On the porch he retrieved his canteen from a nail on the front wall, filled it at the pump, and returned to the mulberry tree.
It was early afternoon now, and judging by the diminishing gunfire, Mel realized that the second attack must also have failed. Back up in his perch in the tree, Mel doused a corner of the brick of bread with water and gnawed at it for a while. The post-battle activities started again below him. This time they rotated some fresh soldiers up from the cornfield where things had been quiet all day, and sent the men who had been in the fight down the hill to eat and rest.
By late afternoon everything seemed to be settling down. Under white flags, several mule-drawn wagons came up the length of White Tail Valley and teams of men gathered up their scattered dead.
That pleased Mel. He didn’t like the idea of all those men laying out there to bloat and stink. Any man who died as well as these men had shouldn’t have to end up a feast for the wolves, coyotes, bears, and buzzards that lived in these parts. Plus, he had turned his hogs loose the day before, and he knew a hog wasn’t too proud to eat a dead man if he had a chance.
The army occupying Mel’s farm chose a spot down the hill and across the road to dig graves for their dead. It was better than burying them in the cornfield, as far as Mel was concerned. He had a hard time with the notion of running his plowshare over graves, or eating corn nourished with the flesh and bones of dead men. It might not hurt him, but there was something downright eerie about the prospect.
What happened next at the edge of the battlefield out beyond the hilltop barricade was completely unexpected. Down in White Tail Valley, after most of the dead men had been stacked up in the wagon beds, some of the men assigned to that grisly work began to stray on up toward the barricade. Though most were unarmed, they ventured up within easy musket shot of the men they had been fighting not long before.
But nobody on this side readied their weapon or even seemed surprised by their approach. Soon men from both sides began to congregate in small groups out on the battlefield. They shared tobacco, swapped small items back and forth, and chatter calmly like neighbors meeting along the road.
Mel’s curiosity grew. On impulse he lodged his shotgun in a niche between two branches and climbed down to the ground. Soon he was across the barricade and walking toward two men nearby. One wore a blue uniform, now torn and filthy, and the other had on an odd little gray cap and coarse, sturdy work clothes much like Mel’s own. Without his asking, the man in the cap handed Mel a small bag of tobacco and a corner of newspaper. Mel tore off a piece of paper and began rolling a smoke.
“We been boiling the same coffee grounds three or four days running,” the gray cap man said, “till it got so it wouldn’t hardly color the water no more. And now we got nothing.”
“Wish I’d known,” the man in blue said. “I got coffee back at camp I’d gladly swap for a little of that smoking tobacco. Our supply was in a freight wagon that got burnt up two days ago in a fight west of here. Back home I’ve got a curing barn full of the stuff, but it don’t do me no good away back up in Mirabel.”
Mel lit his smoke from one of theirs. The smoke from the burning newsprint stung his nose, but the tobacco was like manna. “How far west was that other fight?” he asked the man in the blue uniform.
“Ten, maybe twelve miles. It was at a little farm place about like this one.”
“At the Adderly farm?” Mel asked. The Adderly family were his neighbors, and friends of a sort. It was Rochelle’s family. The distance and direction were about right.
“I don’t know whose place it was,” the man admitted, “but I can tell you that there wasn’t much left of it after we finished fighting you fellows for it.”
“I’m not in the fight,” Mel told him. “This is my farm here. It’s the Carroll place, and I’m Melvin Carroll, in case anybody down the road asks about me. Tell them you saw me here, still alive.”
“Well, best of luck with it, Mr. Carroll,” the man said. “I hope your farm’s in better shape than that other one when this is over.”
“You mean it’s not over yet?” Mel asked. It didn’t make sense. Why would these men come out here, casual as you please, if they only intended to go back to their own sides and start shooting again?
“Over?” the man in blue chuckled. “Not likely. Not since our batteries have caught up to us.” He pointed over his shoulder with a thumb. Down in the valley, maybe a half mile away, crews were positioning a new row of cannons.
CHAPTER FOUR
At dusk, after the fighting was definitely stopped for the day, Mel wandered around his farm to take stock of things. Details of already exhausted soldiers were at work in several places strengthening the defenses they’d built the day before. The colonel and his staff were settled back in the cabin, poking at their maps and doing whatever else they did to make themselves feel important.
He made a wide loop around the smokehouse where the grim hospital of sorts had been set up. The ground outside was cluttered with dozens of moaning, bawling, bloody, wounded men. A few attendants wandered among them, passing out water and food to the ones that were in any shape to accept it. But for the most part the wounded men just lay there, some on blankets and others on the bare, stony ground, suffering without relief, waiting to survive or die, as the Lord saw fit. The pile of legs, arms and other unidentified human gore outside the window was nearly waist high, abuzz with hordes of hungry flies.
As Mel approached, a barn rat scurried away into the shadows, a gruesome prize in its mouth. According to God’s great plan of how things were supposed to work, not much ever really went to waste, even at a time like this.
But Mel couldn’t see himself ever smoking another ham in this building. He’d have to tear it down, unless these soldiers did it for him during the fight.
The stench around the smokehouse was awful as wounds began to fester, stumps of severed limbs began to rot, and men who had no other choice emptied their bellies, bowels and bladders where they lay. Evidence that operations were still going on in the lamp-lit interior of the smokehouse came in the form of a man’s arm, severed at the elbow, tossed out the window. The pile was mostly arms, given the circumstance of the fight.
Mel hoped that someone would take the time to bury all that mess because he dreaded the thought of dealing with it after they pulled out.
The barn looked curious, with most of the outside planks pulled off as high as a man could reach. Much of that lumber was used in the construction of the defenses. The skeleton of the building looked worth saving, but it would take a lot of work. The inside of the barn was stripped bare. Feed, hay, tools and tack—all of it was gone.
There were no animals anywhere—not a chicken, duck, cow, pig or mule—except for the horses and mules the soldiers brought with them. Mel was most concerned over the whereabouts of his mule, Doc. He had turned Doc loose and watched him head for the woods. But that didn’t mean Doc hadn’t wandered back, or maybe just
kept going to get away from the ruckus. There was no predicting what a mule might do.
Doc might be the single most important possession he would have when all this was over and he started putting things back in order. Doc was a strong healthy animal, still fairly young, and had more sense than most mules did. Although Mel used him for transportation and for most of the heavy pulling and lifting around the farm, his single most vital role was pulling a plow.
Without Doc, Mel couldn’t hope to put even part of a corn crop back in in the ground, and without a crop, it would be a hard, hungry winter.
As full darkness settled in, he wandered down the hillside to the camp at the eastern edge of the cornfield, guided by the dim light of dozens of small campfires. The men were more subdued than they were the night before. They stared hollow-eyed and reflective at their metal plates of food, kicked listlessly at their tiny fires, or mumbled empty conversation with their comrades.
For many of them it was probably their first experience with this kind of thing, and Mel figured it wasn’t at all what they expected. They probably thought they would end the day’s fight all full of pride and righteousness. But for most, the aftermath probably had more to do with remembering the gut-scrambling fear they’d felt when the gunfire was at its worst and death was all around. And there was bound to be some shame and disgust mixed in as well.
War was absolutely real to them now. They were wondering if, after tomorrow, they would be laying outside the smokehouse, bleeding and festering and trying to bear the pain, or laid out down the hill alongside the many other corpses ready for burying.
If tomorrow was anything like today, Mel thought, a lot more of them would end up in one place or the other. He didn’t try to talk to any of them, but headed instead to the chow line over by the road.
“Well looka here,” the large sweaty cook said, recognizing Mel. “So you stuck around through all that shooting, didja? Must have been my cooking that kept you close by.”
