This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  When she killed, the act had always been quick, clean, and merciful. Suffering and filth of this magnitude—let alone that it was endured by human beings—had her sick in soul and body. Senses reeling.

  The first units of the fleeing Confederate Army had appeared around noon the day before, announced only by the clanking of metal and the soft clatter of hooves on the cold ground.

  She and Maw—having almost grown used to the distant sound of battle—had walked out, staring in awe at the first columns of weary horsemen, many swaying in the saddle from exhaustion, their horses plodding and stumbling. Some lame.

  The wagons hadn’t been far behind, turning off the Huntsville Road and climbing the lane to the Hancock farmyard. She and Maw had walked out, unsure of the meaning, only to stare in horror at the wounded men groaning, gasping, and crying in the wagon beds.

  “Ma’am,” a bleary-eyed teamster in the first wagon greeted, his hands blood-blackened as they held the ribbons. “We need your help. These wounded can’t go no farther. We’ll have a surgeon here soon to take over. But I gots to get back to the field hospital. We got more to evacuate.”

  “But I…” Maw had gaped, her eyes wide as she stared at the grisly, writhing men in the ambulance.

  Three more were pulling up, the seats crowded with dirty men, their clothing bloodstained. The whites of their eyes were a stark contrast to their blackened faces, but something in their stare was hollow and lost.

  They seemed to fix on Sarah alone—as though she were an apparition from a heavenly realm. The look unnerved her more than the sudden appearance of so many strangers with their cargoes of torn and dying men.

  “Thank you, ma’am.” He turned. “Let’s get these boys out. Move now! Take the worst inside.”

  “But what’s happened?” Maw had pleaded, stepping forward as the men on the wagon boxes climbed down and began pulling litters from where they’d been lashed to the sides.

  “Army of the West is withdrawing,” one of the other men told her. “Orders were for us to start moving the wounded down Huntsville Road. That’s all I know.”

  Sarah stared at the column of men and horses now choking the narrow road. They might have been souls of the damned marching into hell. It was the way they walked, exhausted, desolate, loose-jointed and without hope as they shuffled, head down, shoulders slumped, guns dangling.

  And then perdition unfolded before her as she hurried into the house ahead of the first of the casualties. Unable to think, she stepped aside as the teamsters laid the first poor man on the rug in the main room. To her horror, she realized his arm was missing; a blood-soaked bandage began weeping blood onto Paw’s Persian carpet.

  Just as quickly, another was borne in, and another, each being laid next to his fellow, like cordwood on the floor.

  As each of the bleeding wretches was laid out, he gasped or cried out in pain. Some trembled, others had tears streaking their powder-blackened faces. A few, jaws clamped, bore the pain in stoic agony.

  “But what do we do with them?” Sarah had cried plaintively.

  “Someone will be along,” another of the teamsters told her.

  “When?”

  “That’s up to the officers, ma’am.”

  And then he was out the door with his companion and litter to get another one.

  Sarah had watched the ambulances as they jostled and backed in a clumsy turn around the yard; then they headed down the lane to the mass of troops thronging southward on the road.

  There they sat, shouting impotently that they needed to get back. That more men needed rescuing. As if God himself could part that river of men, horses, and guns. Even as she watched, the walking wounded, some limping, others with blood-soaked arms or head wounds, began to be loaded into the ambulances by their comrades. When the teamster in charge protested, a musket was pointed at his breast by an angry lieutenant, and the loading of wounded soldiers proceeded.

  “Sarah!” Maw called from the porch. “I need water!”

  By the time she was back from the springhouse with her buckets, the ambulances were gone, swallowed by the shuffling and beaten horde as it surged south toward Van Winkle’s mill.

  The impossibility of it numbed her as she stepped between the prostrate men, her buckets sloshing. Twenty-some were in the yard and on the porch, another thirty or so in the house. Most were calling to her, weakly asking for a drink, some for a blanket, others delirious as they called out names, or seemed to be talking to the very air.

  “What do we do?” Sarah almost wept as she stepped around a boy laid before the door. He looked no older than sixteen; black blood soaked a torn section of coat that had been tied around his middle, and he kept whispering, “Cain’t move m’legs.”

  Maw shoved a cup into Sarah’s hand as she took one of the buckets. “Get them a drink first.”

  Panic lurked just under Maw’s hard veneer. “Then … then someone’s going to come for them.” Maw swallowed hard, bending down to scoop a cup of water from the bucket as she murmured, “Someone has to.”

  But they didn’t.

  Through that long afternoon, Sarah trudged back and forth from the springhouse. The worst of the lot kept crying out to her, and it nearly drove her to madness. They insisted that Sarah was their mother, or they called her the names of their sweethearts or sisters. They implored her to stop the pain, or in agony, they called out to God.

  And he just didn’t seem to hear.

  When they died, she and Maw just let them lie on the floor, their eyes wide and empty, mouths ajar, faces sunken and waxy. She wasn’t sure they could carry the bigger ones, had no idea where to put the dead.

  Somehow she held her teetering thoughts together. As if she could shut off the suffering and horror.

  More men kept arriving, some trudging up the road, guns hanging from their shoulders. Others appeared out of the woods, only to look about, peer into the barn or sheds, and then amble slowly down to the main body of men hobbling south on the road.

  Early on she saw five men emerge from behind the house with the old black boar. She recognized the pig’s hide, but it had already been gutted and quartered. As they walked with the animal’s various pieces thrown over their shoulders they were chewing thankfully on strips of raw meat.

  A melee almost developed as others caught sight of the prize, but a corporal who tipped his hat at her ordered the scavengers to pass the booty around. A long-barreled revolver gave authority to his rank. By the time the looters reached the Huntsville Road, all that remained were the boar’s bones scattered along the lane. And by dark, they, too, were gone. No doubt for the marrow they contained.

  Sarah turned her attention to that first man—the one with the missing arm. The blood wasn’t obvious where it had soaked into the dark blue Persian carpet. When she bent down, the man kept staring fixedly at the ceiling. Numb, she wondered when. If he’d made a sound that she’d missed.

  “Sarah? Help me please.” Maw was bent over a blond, bearded fellow.

  “He’s dead,” Sarah heard herself whimper. “They’re all dying. Right on our floor!”

  “Sarah!”

  She caught herself, stood, managed to step around the slowly moving men who groaned and wheezed to where Maw crouched with sparkling and desperate eyes.

  “No one’s coming, Sarah. It’s just you and me. It’s a job to be done, that’s all. Like shucking corn or hoeing weeds. Just pitch in and do it.”

  Sarah swallowed hard. “What do you need?”

  Maw had pulled the blond man’s shirt up, revealing small holes around his navel that leaked dark blood. The man’s throat worked, and he said, “I can’t feel nothing down there.”

  “Might be a blessing, son,” Maw said as she unbuckled his belt. “Sarah, help me here.”

  “Maw! You’re undoing his…” She couldn’t finish.

  Maw’s eyes were blazing. “Help me ease these trousers off!”

  Sarah ground her teeth as she took hold of the man’s pants; the blood-s
aturated fabric was already ripped and torn. Maw’s quick fingers undid the few remaining fly buttons, and he gasped as she pulled the flaps back. Blood squeezed between Sarah’s fingers as Maw nodded, and she eased her side of the pants down.

  Her stomach rose in her throat. The smell of urine and sour bowel was bad enough. Clotted with blood, the man’s penis hung by a shred of skin, a testicle dangled by its cord. A deep puncture above the pubis was partially plugged by a swollen knot of intestines.

  “What do we do?” Sarah heard herself squeak as she labored for breath.

  “How … bad?” the blond man asked.

  Maw, her resolve crumbling, had settled back on her haunches, face gone pale. “Bad, son.”

  “Write my mother. Sally Adams. She’s on Izard Street. In Pine Bluff. Tell her I love her.” He swallowed again. “God … it’s so … cold.”

  Sarah blinked, forced herself to look away from his mangled manhood and the coagulated blood and urine pooling in the grotesque wound.

  “We’ll get you a blanket, son.” Maw stood, swaying on her feet. “Sarah, get the quilt off my bed.”

  Sarah stood, almost staggering as she stumbled back into Maw’s bedroom and tugged the quilt off the bed. She stared in horror at the stains her blood-caked fingers left on the fabric, and then burst into tears.

  17

  March 11, 1862

  Billy picked his way across the dark yard and slipped in the back door. The main room was illuminated by lamplight, what Billy would have considered a flagrant luxury given the cost and scarcity of lamp oil. But when he stopped at the end of the pantry and counted the number of men lying on the floor, heard their soft whimpers and ravings, he forgave the excess.

  He’d never smelled such a stench. The odor of blood, urine, and shit mingled with the unpleasant sourness of unwashed men, all accented by the sulfuric tang of burned gunpowder. That it pervaded the air of Maw’s house made it that much more horrifying.

  The floor seemed to move as the suffering men drew breath, shifted, and squirmed. Some were covered with blankets or coats, others just lay in their rended clothes. A low fire burned in the hearth.

  Sarah perched in one of the ornate chairs at the kitchen table, her head pillowed in her arms, apparently asleep.

  “Who’re you?” a voice whispered from beside the front door.

  Billy took the man’s measure. Maybe a couple of years older, oily black hair, a haggard expression on his thin face. He wore a filthy gray coat, the knees out in his pants as he sat with his back propped against the wall beside the front door.

  “I’m Billy Hancock. I live here. Who are you?”

  “Private Josiah Armand. Third Louisiana, Hébert’s Division.” He gestured wearily. “I stayed to help Mrs. Hancock and Miss Sarah. Got to go in the mawnin’ though. Reckon they’d think I’s a deserter if’n I didn’t show for muster. And ’sides, them damn Yankees is gonna be hot on our butts come sunup.”

  “Where’s Maw?”

  Armand gestured toward the bedroom. “Gone to ketch herseff a nap. Me, I ain’t hardly slept in three days. Just been marchin’, shiverin’, and shootin’. Cain’t figger why I can’t sleep now.” He smiled faintly. “’Cept when I close my eyes, all I see is horrors like hell broke loose on earth.”

  Armand frowned slightly. “Where you been all day?”

  “Up in the woods. Since your army took most of our food, I’ve been hunting, trapping.” He smiled crookedly. “And avoiding being took into the army.”

  Armand nodded absently. “A couple ’o days ago, I’da called you a yellow-bellied coward, Billy Hancock. But after what I seen these last days, you be de smartest boy I know.” Armand’s eyes drooped. “Gonna catch some shut-eye now. You keep watch.”

  Instantly, the man was asleep.

  Billy wrinkled his nose at the smell, and picked his way among the bodies. Most, he discovered, had one of Paw’s thick books under their heads for pillows—some blood-soaked and now ruined. Adding to his unease, the floor that Maw had kept so spotless was tacky with pooled blood, dried urine, and other gore.

  “Sis?” he asked, pulling out a chair next to her. “Wake up.”

  “What?” She blinked, lifting her head. Her long blond hair was awry, clotted where she’d pulled it back with blood-sticky fingers. Red smudges, as though she had rouged her face, showed where she’d rubbed it with those same unwashed fingers. She stared at him through wounded and puffy eyes.

  Billy glanced around. “Why’d Maw let them in?”

  “You think we had a choice? Someone is supposed to come for them. Maybe tomorrow.” She reached up with blood-blackened fingers and rubbed her eyes. “We’ve finally got a line of the dead laid out in the front yard. Nine of them at last count. If Private Armand hadn’t stayed, Maw and I wouldn’t have been able to carry the boys out. We just didn’t want to have to drag them. Not in front of the others. It wouldn’t have been seemly.”

  “How are you doing?”

  “Billy … I’ve seen things. God in heaven help me, the worst is when they cry out and call on you to save them. I tell them that it will be all right. But it won’t.” She knotted her hands, forearms swelling. “It’s lying, Billy. I wonder … will God forgive me? Or am I just as damned as these poor fellows?”

  “God led them into this mess, so I reckon He could care less.”

  He looked out over the crowded floor where one of the men cried out, “Mary? Where have you been?” and then his voice dropped back to a mumble, his eyes blinking as he stared vacantly at the ceiling.

  “Damnation,” Billy whispered. “Who’s Mary?”

  “His wife.” Sarah shook her head. “He’s gut shot. God help me, Billy, but I wish he’d die. Somewhere today I heard that being gut shot … it could take four or five days.”

  She seemed to suddenly come to her senses. “Why are you here? Soldiers could come anytime.”

  Billy shrugged. “Hell, sis, nobody cares. There’s men all over. Half the country is crawling with Van Dorn’s fleeing soldiers. I’ll be gone come dawn.” He narrowed an eye. “Ain’t none of them been out of place, have they? They been treating you with respect?”

  She gave him a disbelieving stare. “Are you insane? I’m surrounded by gut shots, bullet-broke arms and legs, head wounds, and blown-off limbs and you think any of these poor boys would be trying to sport me off to the woods?”

  She dropped her head into her hands. “You amaze me sometimes.”

  He took a deep breath. “Never can tell about a man.”

  She peeked at him from between her stained fingers. “I did get two proposals for marriage today. One of them thought I was Amanda, and that I lived in Arkadelphia, the other insisted that I was Eudora over to Searcy.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “I told them yes, you fool. And then I watched them smile, and we talked about weddings, and relatives … and then I watched them die! God help me, I don’t never want to spend another day like this. My soul can’t take it.”

  “Come morning, let’s you and me head up to the trapper’s cabin. This is army business. Let the army take care of it.”

  Her look pronounced him a fool again. “Do you really want to leave this all to Maw?”

  “No. Hell, I don’t want neither of you to have to put up with this.” He paused. “What is there to eat?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I don’t need much. Maybe a corn mush.”

  Her eyes darkened. “We cooked everything today. Threw the last we had, flour, meal, dried meat, sugar, into the big pot and boiled it. They stripped the cupboards. Blackstrap molasses, the sugar tin, raw flour, our dried fruits. It’s all gone. They came at the smell. From clear down at the road. We fed the wounded first, and then the rest. They hadn’t eaten in three days, most of them. Three days! What kind of army doesn’t feed troops going to a hard fight for three days?”

  He sighed. “Well, it’s a long shot, but I’ll check the hens for an egg when I take feed up the creek to
them tomorrow morning.”

  “There is no chicken feed.”

  “There was a whole sack full of cracked corn when I left. Ain’t no chickens down here to eat it.”

  She turned those somber eyes on his. “They ate it. One handful per man. Washed down by a cup of water from the springhouse. The hay is gone, too. Cavalry took it. What was left of the black boar didn’t even make it down the lane. Don’t know about the brood sow. If she wasn’t well hid, she’s headed south in a couple dozen stomachs.”

  Billy stared into his sister’s wooden eyes. “How did this happen to us?”

  On the floor, one of the men gave off a rattling gasp, trembled, and went stiff. His back arched, face twitching, and then he relaxed, jaw opening slackly, his wide eyes empty and fixed on the ceiling.

  “Thank you, God,” Sarah whispered as she closed her eyes. “I was supposed to write his mother. Some street in Pine Bluff. Can’t remember the rest.” She paused. “Shotgun blast nearly ripped off his cock and blew one of his nuts away.”

  “Sarah!” Billy hissed his shock and anger.

  Her eyes had that flat emptiness, no change in her expression. “The things I’ve seen…” She chuckled hollowly, as if mocking herself. “I’m not the same girl I was, brother. But I’d give anything to be her again someday.”

  18

  March 12, 1862

  Doc made a face as he tried to organize his pharmacy on the flimsy wooden shelves. The shelves weren’t anything to write home about, being only four high in a sort of boxlike contraption. He had placed them on a battered oak kitchen table. A fine and sturdy piece of craftsmanship that he’d “confiscated” from one of the messes in Company A. They in turn had no doubt “appropriated” it from one of the local households in Corinth. Most likely right out of some citizen’s living room when the unwary occupant—trusting in human nature—had stepped out for a moment.