This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  Could this be real? Was he really seeing this? His breath twisted whitely about his face in the cold December air.

  How? Why?

  A chill deeper than the winter air leached into his soul as he glanced down at the Confederate dead in their skimpy summer-weight clothing. Beside them, the dead Yankees wore thick coats made of wool. Frost was already settling on the grass.

  The cold. That was it. They’d been wounded, crawled into the haystacks in search of warmth. Then they’d bled out or stiffened. Sparks, maybe from bursting artillery, maybe from rifles fired from the protection of the haystacks, had set the dry grass on fire.

  “Dear God in heaven. The wounded … they burned alive in the haystacks!” Butler heard a keening sound, unaware it was his own horrified cry escaping the strangling knot in his throat.

  Got to get back. Got to get the army away.

  He was shaking, tears streaking his face, as he backed Red from the horrid porcine feast.

  He almost lost his seat as Red shied, spooked at the half-frozen corpses she stepped on.

  Butler laid spurs to her flanks.

  The hogs would turn to the rest of the dead, but not until they’d finished the cooked meat.

  How much can a man stand? he wondered, his thoughts spinning and sick. When does his soul finally break to leave him weeping and weak in defeat?

  31

  December 28, 1862

  “I missed Butler’s visit in October,” Billy groused as he rode through the cold Arkansas night. “But then, not much is working out the way it’s supposed to in the whole damned war.”

  “You’re telling me?” Danny Goodman said through a grunt. He rode half a horse length behind Billy on the right, his wary eyes on the darkened woods to either side of the narrow road. It had to be nigh onto midnight.

  “Butler left Maw and Sarah with the impression that the Confederate army was going to carry the war up north to Missouri. Said that General Hindman’s forces would sweep in through the Yankee back door, turning the state into a staunch Rebel ally.”

  Danny’s gray horse stumbled over a rock, Danny shifting to help the animal recover. “Yeah, well, Billy Hancock, the way that worked out was that two Union armies chased both Cooper’s and Shelby’s cavalry out of southwestern Missouri the way hounds chase coons out of a henhouse.”

  Billy nodded. “One of them Yank armies, Schofield’s, marched right past the farm on their way to Huntsville. They didn’t even pause long enough to try to steal food. Chased them poor Rebs around Benton and Washington Counties like cats after packrats. In the end they finally managed to corner and whip a bunch over by Fort Wayne.”

  Hindman’s Confederates had responded, marching, starved and barefoot, up from Fort Smith to that bloody fight in the snow at Prairie Grove. Through audacious skill, Hindman had managed to extricate his entire army in the middle of the night and withdraw to Fort Smith. But this time the Federals were right behind him, chasing him all the way to the Arkansas River.

  Run, Brother Butler. Run!

  Billy gave the whole thing his devoted consideration as he and Danny Goodman rode through the winter night, the hooves of their horses clopping on the frozen road. Around them, the trees rose like twisted black apparitions, winter-bare branches stark against the half-moon-lit and starry sky. Patches of snow—almost shining in the darkness where they lay back in the timber and along the north slopes—added to the illumination.

  The buffalo coat Billy wore had been Paw’s, and it had come as something of a surprise that it fit him so well. Despite the cold and snow the thing was so warm he rode with it hanging open to keep from sweating.

  Danny’s rather bony gray panted as it climbed the incline to the top of the ridge as they topped out of Cross Hollow with its abandoned military camps.

  Billy had taken them by way of Lightning Oak Trail in order to avoid the main road as they cut west from the ruins of Van Winkle’s mill. Now, after breaking out on Telegraph Wire Road, he could look back, surprised to see that the farms that had once filled the bottom were gone.

  “What happened to all the houses?” Billy asked.

  “Abandoned, and then torn apart by the armies for firewood and coffins.” Danny blew into his hands to warm them. He was huddled in a coat made from an old blanket. “I really appreciate you doing this.”

  Danny had tracked him down in the hills above the Hancock farm the night before, arriving at the trapper’s cabin with a sack of poorly ground cornmeal and a small bottle of whiskey. A blanket had been rolled over the cantle of his saddle.

  Danny interrupted his thoughts, saying, “Sam Darrow never got over it when his boy, Jackson, was killed up to Wilson’s Creek. Formed himself one of them ranger companies. Said he was gonna ride down and visit the Shockup and Altee farms.” He looked around at the brooding woods again. “God, I hope I’m wrong about this.”

  Billy, too, kept his gaze roaming. “Both Shockup and Altee came out as Union when Curtis was here. With a Federal army down to Fort Smith, and Yank troops going back and forth, a man’d have to have the bark on for sure to cause any trouble for Union folks.”

  “According to what I heard, that is Darrow’s whole plan,” Goodman said, his breath fogging in the cold moonlight. “Said he wanted to make a point to the Yankees. Said he wanted to teach ’em a thing or two. That they might march through this country, but they wasn’t never going to hold it. As for me, I want to see what comes of it.” He paused. “Glad you came with me.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because I don’t want to be seen. And there ain’t no one can get us away if’n either Darrow’s bushwhackers or the Federals spot us.”

  “Why do you care?”

  Danny Goodman shrugged, worked his jaw. “If Darrow does this, harasses them farms, it’s gonna change this country. Not ’cause old man Altee or Ben Shockup did the Darrows dirt. It’s ’cause they ain’t got no other sin than that they’s Union.”

  “What of it? I ain’t neither Yank or Secesh.”

  “Your paw and brother are Rebs, old friend. That makes you and yours Rebs. I fought for Ben McCulloch at Wilson’s Creek and Oak Hill. That makes me a Reb.”

  “You quit. You’re hiding from the conscription just like I am.”

  He’d taken Danny along the back ways, reveling in his proficiency at “Injuning around in the dark” and moving quietly. He just wished Danny Goodman had a better horse.

  The way Billy remembered it, if he kept to the Wire Road just this side of Mud Town, in a mile or so he’d hit the lane that led to the Altee farm. It sat back a quarter mile or so from the road. Of course, if they approached that way, they’d be in the wide open where the lane ran along the fields.

  But if they turned off sooner, made their way through the woods …

  “This way.” Billy reined his horse off into the forest. The snow patches and half moon allowed him to pick his way, the faint shadows giving him direction as they wound through the trees, ducking vines.

  The first awareness he had of getting close came from the faint yellow glow that seemed to dance and flicker through the trees. Even as he picked it out, burning wood popped, the sound muted by the forest.

  “Something’s on fire,” Danny whispered.

  “Something big,” Billy agreed, kneeing his horse around a thick black oak and onto what looked like a trail. Must have been something the Altees used for it widened into a path and led them straight to the gap between what had been the chicken coop and the tobacco barn. Both were now collapsed into burning wreckage.

  As they pulled up at the edge of the trees, the scene before them was sobering. The Altee place had been built of logs, steeple-notched, and had had a shake-shingle roof and plank floors. The charred walls still stood, the roof having fallen in to feed the inferno that still shot flames toward the moon-paled night.

  A woman’s choked sob penetrated the fire’s roar. Billy edged Swat around the fires, until he could see. The big mulberry tree in the Altee front yard was ba
thed in flickering yellow light. Two macabre figures hung by the neck from one of the mulberry’s thick branches.

  At the feet of one, a woman lay partially collapsed on the frozen dirt. She was propped up by one hand. Elsie Altee looked like a rag doll thrown down too hard on the ground. Her hair was in wild disarray, clothes scorched. Beside her, both of the girls, Eudora and Nattie, ages nine and five, crouched weeping, their heads down, hands clasped.

  Something popped in the burning house, making the women and girls jump.

  Billy rode closer, staring in disbelief. He’d never seen a man hung. Old man Altee, as Josiah was called, had been stripped bare, his flesh torn and filthy, as if he’d been dragged. Now he swayed with the evening breeze that blew smoke off to the southeast. Five feet down the limb, Nathaniel Altee, Josiah’s son, age twelve, swung slightly out of synch with his father’s corpse. Nathaniel was still dressed, but his gray cotton pants were dark down the legs where his bladder had emptied.

  Both corpses hung with the heads bent awkwardly, eyes bugged out, tongues swollen and protruding from their slack jaws.

  “Dear God … Dear God … Dear God…” Elsie kept blubbering through the sobs. As if catching the horses’ movement, she blinked hard, eyes going wide, and placed a hand to her mouth. Billy had never seen such terror in another human’s eyes.

  “No! No! No!” She began scrambling back, reaching out, grabbing the girls to her. As each of the children caught sight of Billy and Danny, they began to shriek hysterically.

  “Whoa!” Danny cried as he pulled up and stepped out of the saddle. “Easy! Mrs. Altee, we’re friends. We’re not here to hurt you!”

  Seeing no break in her terror, Danny dropped to his knees, arms out. “See? We’re here to help.”

  Billy watched in horrid fascination as Elsie Altee collapsed into a quivering pile, the girls clawing their way free of her suddenly limp arms.

  Billy took another look at the corpses, stirred again by the breeze to sway and slowly twist back and forth. Then he turned his attention back to the incinerated remains of the house. “Sam Darrow did this?”

  At his words, Elsie began to come to, lifting her head. The woman’s eyes were puffy and slitted, her face swollen. “He was our friend! We helped him build his barn! Sent him stew when Esther was sick with the typhoid! He … He…” Her throat worked, expression wild, then she reached up and clawed at her eyes.

  “Here now,” Danny soothed, pulling her hands down. The two girls were wide-eyed as tears rolled down their thin cheeks.

  Then the wind changed, blowing hot smoke their way.

  Billy bent his head, eyes slitted, covering his nose. Something inside the house burned with a sulfurous sting.

  Damn! Hell’s done busted loose on earth.

  Old Man Altee had kin, three brothers and some cousins, down the other side of Mud Town. Elsie came from the McPhee clan over in Conway County. She was one of the patriarch’s daughters. And if Sam Darrow and his rangers had hit Ben Shockup’s place the way he had Altee’s?

  “By God, Danny, you were right. There’s gonna be the devil to pay. This country’s about to bust wide open.”

  But what did that mean for him, Maw, and Sarah?

  Danny looked up. “Billy? What are we going to do?”

  Billy stepped down from his horse. He wasn’t sure how Darrow’s bushwhackers had tied the ropes like they did, but he’d have to figure a way to get them down. Baffled by the intricate knot, he reached for his pocketknife.

  “We got to care for the men, Danny. When I cut the rope, this isn’t going to be pretty. Make sure the women look the other way. Then we’ve got to get Mrs. Altee and the girls down to kin just on the other side of Mud Town. And we got to do it before dawn.”

  “Why before dawn?”

  “’Cause you was right. We don’t want to be seen by neither side, or we get tarred by the same brush. And me, I don’t want my family looking like they’re taking sides.”

  32

  February 6, 1863

  Doc shuffled and stamped as he climbed the rickety steps to the barracks. If anyone but the guards were to see—let alone care—he looked like a bundle of walking rags. He wondered when he’d grown used to lice. Somehow the perpetual burning and itching, the red welts, and constant infestation had just become “the way it is.”

  The wind tore his breath away, sending it cold and white to blow along the shoddy clapboard barracks wall. It had been whitewashed originally, but the thin coat of paint had faded and peeled, allowing the boards to warp. Here and there in the widest of the cracks, bits of cloth, mud chinking, and even whittled strips of bone had been used to partially seal the gaps.

  Were there any good to come from the miserable cold, it was the ice-and-track-stippled, hard-frozen mud. It made footing treacherous, but stemmed the transmission of disease. Of course, when it melted, it would become a cesslike sea of excrement, thawing urine, and clinging filth.

  Doc unlatched the door and hurried in, slamming it closed behind him and securing it against the wind. It should have felt warmer inside. The little tin stove was burning, its pile of sticks already dwindled to less than ten pieces.

  A wood ration would be granted again tomorrow, but the small bundle of waste wood—mostly garnered from Chicago’s trash—was barely enough to keep the stove alive for eight hours. Just enough fuel was provided to cook a meal in the “kitchen area” fireplace. Once the gruel was boiled, they’d stuff a dead man’s frayed and pest-infested garments up into the flue to stop the exodus of what little warm air remained.

  Their barracks—packed with humanity as it was—should have been appreciatively warmer than outside, but to Doc’s numb face, it didn’t feel like it.

  As he passed down the central aisle among the bunks, curious eyes lifted and the coughing started. Anything, even Doc’s passage, was of remarkable interest to the prisoners. The coughing, of course, provided the background symphony in Camp Douglas.

  Near the stove he found a chess game in process. No less than ten men crowded around to watch as Baker and Halloway moved their hand-carved pieces. The board with its squares had been engraved into the floor using a piece of broken glass as a chisel.

  Sylvester Moulton sat hunched beneath one of the windows reading aloud from the tattered remains of a Chicago newspaper. As Doc passed, he hid a smile. Moulton was nearing the paper’s end, reading ads for employment, a piano for sale, and the incredible claims for various patent medicines. His audience sat enrapt.

  Doc took a seat on the lower bunk where James Morton lay propped, his thin body wrapped in a series of blankets. He had arranged them so that the holes in one were covered by intact portions of another.

  “What news?” James asked, his deep-sunk green eyes meeting Doc’s.

  “We’re down to seven,” Doc told him. “Levi Harvath died this morning. I accompanied his body when it was carried to the deadhouse. Then I went to the chief surgeon’s office and made sure the paperwork was filled out. Like so many, it was typhoid.”

  “The paperwork? Do they do anything with that? Or does it just go into a drawer somewhere in the War Department? How many times have we heard that anyone back home was ever informed? Twice? Three times?”

  “The post is unreliable. You know I don’t put much stock in rumors, but I’ve heard on good authority that someone is fighting a war somewhere or other.”

  James fished inside his blankets, extracting a stained and worn envelope. “Mother manages to write.”

  “Wish your sister would. Four letters I’ve sent. If I could get the money, I’d write her every day.”

  The camp provost allowed a prisoner one page. It would be carefully read before being placed in the post, and it cost a relative fortune without any guarantee that it would be delivered behind the lines. To Memphis, in Union control as it was, the letters should have gone through fine.

  So why hasn’t Ann Marie written?

  James broke into a coughing fit. At least it didn’t leave him i
n agony anymore. His convalescence had taken much too long, and truth be told, had James been asked to walk all the way across the compound, he’d have collapsed at the halfway point.

  Seven of us left.

  Of those captured with Doc at Shiloh, only John Mays and Augustus Clyde had been paroled and exchanged. Paperwork had come through that they were surgeon’s assistants, and noncombatants. Doc had stood by the main gate, watched as they were searched, and then led out to begin the march to the railroad station. That had finally happened in September.

  “I think it’s my fault,” Doc said, looking down at his dirt-encrusted hands.

  “That Ann Marie hasn’t written? What did you tell her in that last letter?”

  “No. I mean I think it’s my fault that we haven’t all been paroled.”

  “How?” James asked.

  “When I talked to the provost, he protested that he had no paperwork for the release of any Dr. Philip Hancock. That surely it was a paperwork error, and eventually it would be straightened out.”

  The man had smiled as he’d said it.

  “Can’t blame yourself for a paperwork error.”

  “James, it was after I made that first big fuss. When I bearded Higbee about conditions. That’s when the records for our group of Shiloh prisoners disappeared. The miracle is that Clyde and Mays made it out.”

  When Doc had asked, an arrogant, fresh-faced lieutenant had told him: “I’m sorry, sir. While we have records of your interment here, we have no records of when or where you were originally processed. Therefore, we cannot give you preference for parole and exchange.”

  It’s my fault! These men are dying because of me.

  He’d gone after Higbee. Raised too much hell. Complained to the Sanitary Commission.

  “I know that look,” James told him. “You’re punishing yourself again.”

  “Since that first time I’ve tried to make amends, James. Kept my silence. Hoped that the occasional hint, the dropped suggestion, might get our Shiloh prisoners finally placed onto the list.”

  And then there was James. And his promise to Ann Marie.