The Carroll Farm Fight

by Greg Hunt

  Mel decided not to try a shot. The big buck was too far away for a sure kill, and he didn’t like the idea of wounding a fine animal like that. The valley had plenty of deer, and others would come closer to the stand.

  “In my day,” Daddy had said, “when my eyes worked a little better . . .”

  “I know, old man,” Mel teased. “You’d have clipped that big fellow’s toenails for him.”

  “You have a smart mouth on you, boy,” Daddy said. “About big enough to put my boot in, I’d say.” But he was smiling. He knew how to take a razzing.

  Daddy shot an elk that morning, a rare kill in these parts, and a treat for the two men. Cooked right, elk meat was delicious, coarse like beef, and not as gamey as venison. The sleek, proud animal was so large that Mel had to fetch the mule to bring it up to the cabin.

  As it turned out, that was Daddy’s last hunt, and his last trip down into the woods that bordered the long beautiful valley that he had named when he and Mother first carved out a home here in this wilderness. The pain from the sickness that was gnawing away at his insides soon began to make all his decisions for him, and he passed on that winter.

  Settled comfortably on the moss, Mel thought it would be easy enough to drop on off to sleep. But the daylight was arriving, enough so that he could make out the dim shapes of the soldiers stirring around on the forest floor around him.

  Soon they would be moving on toward the fight. When that happened, Mel had already decided he’d fade out into the woods until the whole thing was over. He already had a spot in mind, a cane thicket so dense and disorienting that any stranger who wandered into it might spend hours trying to find his way back out again.

  The lieutenant gathered his men around him and gave them some final instructions. “When we move out, keep good intervals, stay quiet, and keep a sharp lookout in all directions, even up. If the sharpshooters aren’t here yet, we can hunker down and pick them off. And if they are already up in the trees, they’ll have their backs to us and they’ll make easy targets.”

  And you for them, Mel thought.

  “If they’re not in position yet,” Turnipseed said, “we’ll set up a U-shaped ambuscade and wait for them to move into it. Don’t fire until I give the word, then fire at will as fast as you can pull the trigger and reload. The colonel said that any man who comes back with one of them sharpshooter rifles they use will earn himself a quart of whiskey, the real Kentucky sippin’ stuff out of his own stock.”

  Mel was surveying the narrow draw they were in, trying to figure out the best place to hunker down out of sight once the soldiers started moving forward.

  “You, farmer!” It took Mel a moment to realize the lieutenant was calling to him.

  “I’ve got a name,” Mel said, irritated. “It’s Carroll.”

  “I’ll try to remember,” Turnipseed said impatiently. “Now, when we move out, I want you on the far right flank. You have a sharp eye and you know these woods, so I need you over the closest to . . .”

  “Hold on now. This ain’t my fight, mister,” Mel said. He was tired of reminding people of that. “You boys are welcome to whale away at each other as long as you want. But when it all starts, it starts without me.”

  “That’s not the way this one shakes out, farmer. We need you with us, and when things start up, you’re in it with us.”

  “What if I say no?”

  “Then it’ll go hard for you.”

  Mel saw several men tense, their hands on their rifles, and he realized that this was another choice he would not be allowed to make for himself. He was damned tired of being put in these straits.

  The lieutenant spaced his men a few paces apart, facing the valley, and they started slowly forward, looking for any signs of the dreaded sharpshooters ahead. Caution and tension hunched their shoulders like old men, and they gripped their weapons tightly, at the ready. Any time a man’s foot snapped a stick or rustled in the damp morning leaves, others glared at him savagely. It is a bad place to be and a god-awful bad plan, Mel thought to himself, and him out here with entirely the wrong kind of gun for the work at hand. He felt nearly bare naked.

  Somewhere farther down the valley, the cannons Mel had seen the other army move in yesterday afternoon began to cut loose. They were safe enough here from all that, but it was poor consolation to Mel because he knew that the iron balls would be landing all over his farm at the top of the hill.

  Turnipseed had ordered two of his men to stay within easy shot of Mel and keep an eye on him during this advance. Their orders were simple. Shoot him if he tried to hide or run, and shoot him if he wouldn’t fight. Mel’s order was even more direct. Arm himself with the rifle of the first fallen man he could get to.

  Mel heard a bullet slap into the chest of the man to his right in the same instant that a rifle report pierced the morning stillness. As the body sagged onto the damp bed of leaves and moss, Mel threw himself forward and rolled behind the rotting trunk of a downed tree. The other man assigned to watch him was too busy protecting his own body from unwelcomed bullet holes to worry about where Mel was or what he was doing. He found a hiding spot behind the upturned root ball of the same tree Mel was using for protection.

  The next few minutes were eerie and unsettling. There was no steady gunfire, just an occasional shot from one place or another up ahead. Once in a while a distant voice called out a location or heralded a hit. Wriggling his body, Mel tried to burrow deeper into the damp leaves and soft, pungent tree rot, hoping that no parts of himself rose high enough above the tree trunk to make a target.

  The man killed near Mel was drilled through dead center of his chest, right where the heart was. Mel figured those men in the trees up ahead were probably the best their army had, and though they didn’t fire often, they probably had a man, or some part of one, dead in their sights every time they pulled the trigger. It was pure craziness to think that a bunch of men tromping around on the ground under them were any match for their marksmanship, and they had the cover of the leaves and branches to hide their location after they took a shot.

  He didn’t raise up to look around, but Mel could tell by the sounds around him that there were other casualties among the scattered, pinned-down soldiers he had led down here. Off someplace a man was crying and praying, half mad and desperate, and someplace else another was pleading to his comrades.

  “They kilt me, boys! Can’t anybody make it over this away and see to me? I’m so sorry, Lena, darling. I’m sorry I come so far after I promised you I wouldn’t, and now caught a bullet and died.”

  Lieutenant Turnipseed seemed to finally find his wits and tried to take command. He called out from wherever he was hiding. “Listen, men! We can’t stay hunkered down like this or they’ll kill us all!”

  “You reckon, Lieutenant?” a muffled voice answered back.

  “We’ve got to charge them, men,” Turnipseed called out. “On my command, platoon, we take the fight to these bastards.”

  Mel looked over at the nearby soldier, who was now burrowed halfway under the fallen tree’s root ball. The man was gazing back at him, his eyes full of fear and uncertainty. Every second or so his gaze strayed over to the dead man near them, then back at Mel.

  Mel shook his head and hissed in a low whisper, “Don’t do it. You’ll end up like that fellow if you do.”

  “Got to,” the man whispered back. “Officer’s orders.”

  “Okay, but I ain’t,” Mel told him. “If you try to make me, I’ll kill you myself.”

  The cannons in the distance were still pounding, and by now the ones on the hilltop at his farm were beginning to answer back. The sharpshooters in the trees ahead were still plinking away, taking their time with each shot. It was the way he and Daddy used to hunt squirrels in these woods, and more often than not, back then and now, it was one shot one kill.

  Mel figured the lieutenant was probably trying to put together the courage to order the charge.

  And then he found it.

  “Al
l right, men, let’s shoot them down out of these trees,” Turnipseed shouted out. “Let’s go!”

  There was a lot of yelling, commotion, and gunfire. Mel assumed the soldiers had started their charge, although he didn’t rise up to have a look. The man behind the root ball rose to his feet and went running off toward the fight. Soon the forest was filled with the sound of gunfire, and a breeze from the west carried the smoke and the smell of the shooting back toward Mel.

  It was as if a thick fog had blown in, and Mel decided that the smoke was the best cover he could hope for. He crawled a few yards to the dead man nearby and gathered up his rifle and paper cartridges. Carrying them and the shotgun would mean extra weight, but he might run into some problem where a second gun was welcome. Then he rose to his feet and hightailed it away from the fighting, back toward the deep woods to the east.

  Down in a little draw beyond the creek that bordered Dogleg Trail was a cane thicket as dense and forbidding as a wild blackberry patch, and he headed for that. Ten feet into it, a man could disappear completely, and he needed someplace to hole up and sort things out.

  Back behind him the shooting was growing sporadic again. Mel figured that wasn’t good news for Turnipseed and his desperate, idiotic charge.

  “Hey, slow down,” a voice called from behind. “I’m winded and I can’t keep up no more.”

  Mel looked back and saw the man from the root ball clumping along behind him through the smoke. He had lost his rifle somewhere, or threw it down, and he was panting like a dog in July.

  “Thought better of it, did you?” Mel asked.

  “I never did like that little gandy rooster of a lieutenant,” the man huffed, drawing closer. “None of us thought he had good sense. I guess this proves it.”

  “I’ll slow a little, mister,” Mel said. “But you’d better keep up if you want to stay with me.”

  “I will, if my heart don’t stop.”

  When they reached the cane thicket, Mel led the way in. They spooked a deer, which went crashing away through the cane and out the other side. They settled on the ground in the tiny space where the animal had been laying.

  Mel’s companion was named Trent Giles, and when he caught his breath, his talkative nature soon began to annoy the hell out of Mel. But Mel was still glad he’d brought Giles into the cane hideaway because he had tobacco.

  “I thought I might be willing enough to fight until I saw a neighbor of mine from back home go down not ten steps from the place he’d hunkered down. Then I saw another boy that I’d shared mess with all the way up from Arkansas lose a chunk of his head from one of those fifty-caliber bullets. It scared me so bad I wet my britches, and then I turned around and skedaddled. The lieutenant oughtn’t to have ordered his men to go out and get themselves slaughtered like that. There was some fine men in that lot. My friends and neighbors.”

  “Well if there’s any such a thing as justice,” Mel said, “he’s caught one himself by now.”

  “No one would miss him except maybe his mama. His daddy’s a big planter down in the Delta and might of bought himself an officer’s commission, but his gout’s so bad he cain’t hardly walk no more. So he bought his boy a commission instead. Talk is the lieutenant raped a reverend’s daughter down in Jonesboro on the way up here, but he convinced the colonel that the lady was willing. And now this turkey shoot. The man can’t soldier for squat,” Giles said, spitting to the side for emphasis. “Always blaming somebody else for his boneheaded mistakes. And he’s big on punishment. The hard kind. I bet if he seen me run off back there and he makes it back hisself, he’ll do his best to have me shot. You too, maybe.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Mel said.

  “Does that have something to do with why we’re up in this cane thicket?”

  “If your boys don’t win that fight over there,” Mel explained, “I figure they’ll be backtracking this way before long. I want to let them get on by.”

  “But if Turnipseed makes it back and reports to the colonel . . . ,” Giles said. “If he tells him about how you and me run off . . .”

  “Don’t go back,” Mel suggested. “I’ll show you a roundabout way to the post road, and you can start on home to Arkansas.”

  “I might have run this one time a while ago,” Giles bristled, “but I ain’t a deserter, nor a coward either. I didn’t want to waste my life this morning for nothing, but I’ve still got plenty of pluck left in me for the real thing. I’m bound to head back up that hill, for my own pride’s sake.”

  “That does change things a bit,” Mel said quietly.

  Off to the west in White Tail Valley the unexpected roar of hundreds of voices rose up to challenge the din of the cannon fire. The air filled with the distant crackle of gunfire.

  “I need to be up there,” Giles said with a new sense of urgency. He started to rise, but Mel stopped him with a hand on his shoulder. “Sit tight for a spell,” he said. “There’ll be fight enough left when you get back. Wait here and let me take a look around.”

  Picking up the rifle and leaving his shotgun, Mel worked his way out of the cane thicket and found a spot where he could lay down and watch the trail. He didn’t have long to wait.

  Less than half the soldiers who had set out on the predawn raid now came straggling back. They weren’t a military unit anymore, but a collection of bloody, bedraggled, discouraged men. Most were wounded in one way or another, and some supported others the best they could as they stumbled up the trail.

  Mel wondered if they had been able to shoot even one enemy sharpshooter down out of those trees. He doubted it.

  Turnipseed was with them, but he had left all his cockiness behind somewhere along the trail. He limped along, favoring a bad right leg, holding a blood-soaked bandage against his side. Like Giles he had lost his weapon, but still clutched the little braided leather quirt that he seemed to consider his badge of authority.

  Once the lieutenant was patched up and had figured out a way to let the responsibility for the failed raid slide off of him, he’d turn back into the same cocky little bastard, Mel knew. But he didn’t have time enough left for that.

  Mel stayed hunkered down until the ragged bunch had plodded past where he lay, then tracked their movement up a little rise. When they were about twenty feet from the crest, he cocked the rifle and drew a bead.

  It was an easy shot at no more than seventy-five yards, right between the shoulder blades, clean and final. The whipped, miserable survivors didn’t even pause to figure out where the shot had come from. They scrambled over the hilltop, leaving yet another corpse behind.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The fighting was reaching the point of desperate savagery by the time Mel and Giles came out of the trees at the head of Dogleg Trail. Giles wished Mel good luck and rushed toward the faltering defenses overlooking White Tail Valley.

  Mel almost turned and headed back into the deep woods. He knew plenty of places where he could hole up until this was over, and with this rifle he had brought back with him, he wouldn’t go hungry.

  But something kept him from leaving, as surely as if a tether to the farm was tied around his ankle. The farm was nearly destroyed and he couldn’t do anything to save the scraps that were left. He still had it in mind to head over to the Adderly place and see how they had fared, but right now a whole attacking army stood in the way of that.

  Maybe it was his simple curiosity that kept him here, he thought. He had never seen anything like this before, and couldn’t imagine that he ever would again. Maybe it was as simple as wanting to stay around and see how the whole ugly thing ended.

  The perch up in the mulberry tree was comfortable and familiar. From there he was able to view a broader picture of how desperate the morning’s fighting had become.

  His barn was a blazing mound of wreckage, burning so fiercely that Mel could feel the heat of it even where he sat two hundred feet away. The cabin, though not on fire, had a gaping hole on the front side big enough to drive a bull through. T
he log walls and timber roof, once so sturdy, tight and familiar, tilted at crazy angles. There would be nothing for it, Mel knew, but to knock the whole thing down and start over. The smokehouse was still standing, but he figured it would only be a matter of time before a ball from the cannons down in the valley found it too.

  The approaches to the barricades at the head of the valley were carpeted with dead men. Some lay as near as thirty or forty feet, showing how close they had come. In the next attack, or one of the ones after that, they would make it to the barricades, assuming they had the men left to do it with. It was still mid morning, so there was plenty of the day left to cost both sides many more lives.

  The defenders behind the barricades were in miserable shape. Now, during a lull in the fighting, they squatted on the ground or leaned against the barricade, trying to gather the strength and resolve for the next round of fighting. They looked like whipped men already, even though they were somehow still holding their ground.

  The dead and wounded lay untended where they had fallen. The ones who could struggled to tend to their own bloody wounds and broken bodies, and those that couldn’t just lay there bleeding, suffering, and dying.

  Down the hill in front of the cabin the reserves were gone. Everybody was in it now, and when a wounded man fell away from the barricade, there would be no one else to step up and take his place.

  Down in the cornfield, Mel could see that they had fought off at least one attack there, too. Countless bodies were scattered around the western half of the field beyond the dirt berm they had put up.

  Now everyone was waiting for, and no doubt dreading, more of the same.

  Mel spotted Giles, now with his comrades behind the barricade. Most of them had gathered up an assortment of cast-off rifles, and were now checking and loading them. Mel recognized a few of the other men who had followed him down the trail before dawn. Their survival down there this morning might not mean much if another attack was launched against their sparse ranks.