This Scorched Earth

by William Gear

  “You killed my men! Mutilated them, you son of a bitch!” Dewley shouted across the distance. “You shot my horse! You run, you little pissant!”

  Billy fired another shot from the Remington before turning and saying, “I want you to scream ‘Billy, you stupid fool!’ as loud and angry as you can, then turn and see how fast you can scramble up to the top.”

  “Billy, you stupid fool!” With the patter and snap of bullets wanging off rocks and the distant pop of the guns, her torn feet were forgotten as she scrambled for footing.

  For the last twenty or thirty feet the trail clung to the face of the rock before entering a narrow defile that was little more than a crack in the limestone cap rock. The cleft gave her the willies.

  A bullet spattered her with rock fragments and hot lead.

  Panting, she made the crest, followed moments later by Billy, struggling along on his crutch.

  As soon as he was hidden from sight, he tossed the crutch aside, dropping to his knees as he laid out his blanket, unrolled it, and loaded the first cartridge. Then he turned to the Remington, loading all six.

  “What are we doing here?”

  Billy looked up at her, eyes crystalline and cold. “John Gritts showed me this place afore he went off to war. It’s old, this trail here. And we’re not the first ones to use it.”

  He pointed. “I need you to start collecting them rocks. The head-sized ones. Here, take the crutch in case you need to lever any out of the ground. Pile them up on that point beside the trail.”

  “You sure they’re coming? It’d be suicide.”

  “They think I’m hurt. By now they found the cartridge box and think I lost it. Without ammunition, hurt, and you screaming at me, they’re thinking they got the scare on us. That we’ll break like rabbits.”

  “What if they circle around? Ketch us from behind? They’re bushwhackers, Billy!”

  “If you’re right about Dewley and his mad pride, I killed and cut his men, took a woman out from under him, and just wounded his horse. Reckon he ought t’ be right fit to chew nails about now.”

  As she turned to collect rocks, Billy crawled up behind a currant bush and stared over the edge. “Here they come. Maybe five minutes, sis. When I shoot, you start tossing rocks down onto the trail.”

  She willed herself to forget the agony in her feet; the cold rocks cut and bruised her fingers. Some she could barely lift. She piled them just back from the edge, wondering at the dull acceptance in her numb heart.

  If we lose here, I’m throwing myself off the edge before they can lay hands on me again.

  Billy’s shot surprised her.

  She peeked over, saw Silas, the tracker, fall backward and bowl Dewley over on a particularly steep section just ten feet below the cleft. She picked up a head-sized chunk of limestone, aimed, and slung it out into the cleft. It hit the trail literally at Dewley’s feet, took his legs out from under him, bounced off a boulder and struck O’Shaunessee full in the chest where the man followed close behind. He screamed as he toppled off the ledge.

  Billy’s rifle barked again as a man clambered out of the mass of falling, screaming men. The fellow arched his back, then sagged limply across the stone before tumbling out of sight.

  Sarah reached for another of her rocks, surprised that it lifted so easily. Stepping to the edge, she lofted it and sent it crashing down into the screaming melee.

  Guns were banging, bullets whirring off the cap rock and ripping harmlessly into the midday sky. Billy shot again. Someone screamed, others cursed.

  Sarah returned with another rock, smaller, and picked her target before she tossed it out. Again it bounced off the slope before thudding into the men clinging to the trail below the cleft. She had a glimpse of the man they called Tennessee as he slipped and dropped over the precipice. She caught sight of him as he smacked onto an outcrop farther down the slope, and plunged headfirst onto the rocks.

  Billy shot again, and someone shouted, “Fall back!”

  “Get back here, you bastards!” The voice was Dewley’s.

  Sarah carried her rock to the edge. Men were leaping, jumping, falling, in their mad descent. At the report of Billy’s rifle, a thickset blond man pitched face-first down the trail, knocking two of his companions off their feet to disappear over the drop. Someone was screaming from where he’d fallen onto the rocks.

  At the bottom, seven of the survivors ran full-out to where a man held the horses. Each vaulted into his saddle, looking back as if to see who was following.

  Billy’s Sharps cracked. A second later one of the riders cried out and clapped a hand to his thigh, his horse shying. With an oath, one of the others wheeled his animal, and leaning into the lunge laid spurs to it. The others, after a moment’s hesitation, bellowed their defeat as they charged off in pursuit. The rest of the horses broke free of the handler and followed at a gallop across the track-stippled bottom.

  One by one, three men hobbled down the trail, each fleeing as fast as he could in the wake of the horse handler who was pelting off behind the vanished horses.

  Sarah threw her last rock, watching it land squarely on Dewley’s leg where he was crawling back down the trail. Dewley screamed. Then the rock clattered down the slope, dislodging more stones as it did.

  Sarah stood at the crest, the wind blowing through her hair, fluttering her red wool shirt, waffling her pants.

  Dewley cried out in pain. “Help me! Damn it, boys, come help me! My leg’s busted.”

  Billy stepped up beside Sarah and offered her the big Bowie. “You want Dewley?”

  She looked at the blade and sniffed, a burning at the base of her throat. “I don’t know how.”

  “Just like butchering a pig, sis.” He paused. “Nothing much different to it that I can see.”

  She took the Bowie. “Reckon, little brother, there’s a heap of difference.”

  She didn’t feel the pain in her feet as she started down the trail. But then, who could feel anything when all of her dreams had been murdered?

  43

  November 5, 1863

  Billy tossed the shovel aside and climbed up out of the grave. Head back, he looked up at the leaden sky, the clouds dark, bruised, and torn as they worried their way toward the southeast. A bitter wind alternately gusted and harried its way through the trees, and called forth a rasping howl from among the branches. Streamers of leaves, ripped away by the gale, scattered and whirled, as though fleeing desperately before the approach of some terrifying beast.

  They had chosen the flat out back and next to the old cabin. At the end of the line where they had buried pets, he and Sarah had taken turns digging Fly’s grave first, and after having placed the dog’s few remains and covered them, now dealt with Maw’s.

  The wind moaned through the pines, flipping the brim of Billy’s hat. Sarah stood, arms crossed against the cold, her rag of a dress—the only one left after Dewley’s looting—was pressed against her legs. Wind kept whipping her long blond locks.

  A dull emptiness lay behind his sister’s face—a glittering despair—as though hell had reached out from some dark place and clawed away everything that was she.

  “Reckon that’s deep enough,” Billy said through a tight throat. His heart could have been a cold stone in his breast. He looked over at the tattered blanket that wrapped Maw. Clothing, let alone blankets, being so rare in the country, this was the only one Dewley had left behind. It had lined Fly’s bed. Had served as Maw’s shroud. Now it was her coffin.

  The wind whisked the blanket’s flap from Maw’s face, teasing her loose white hair.

  Her eyes were empty sockets lined with torn tissue, the eyes having been pecked away by the magpies. The flesh on her left cheek was ripped where some critter had worried her. At the sight, a cry died in his throat, a spear of pain lanced his heart.

  He was living a nightmare.

  Sarah, as though aroused from her lethargy, bent. Her fingers shook as she tugged the old red blanket back over the ruins of Maw’s
face.

  “Let’s…” Billy blinked at the tears. “Let’s get her in the ground, Sis.”

  He tried not to think of how they’d found Maw when they’d arrived at dusk last night. How she’d been dragged from the porch where he’d so thoughtlessly left her. How her gut had been torn open and her insides savaged by some hog gone wild. He tried not to remember the mewling sounds that had risen from his throat, or the horror glittering behind Sarah’s half-mad eyes as they’d lifted Maw’s remains back into the blanket.

  Or the smell, God forbid.

  If only I had been here that day …

  Sarah met his gaze, nodded, and together they lifted and carried Maw to the side of the grave. They swung her out and tried to lower her into the depths. Even as they did, the old blanket tore with a rip, and Maw’s scavenged corpse fell to land with a thump in the bottom.

  “No!” Billy cried out, his stomach flipping. “Oh, God, Maw! I’m sorry! So … sorry!”

  “It’s all right, Billy,” Sarah said woodenly.

  Before he could move, she’d crawled down into the narrow grave and set herself to the task of straightening Maw’s flopped body. But he’d never forget the way Maw seemed to stare up at him out of those empty sockets, as if her ghost were glaring in disgust. It was in the set of her half-open mouth, the dried lips pulled back from the brown, peglike teeth.

  “God in hell,” he whispered, falling back, his legs no longer able to hold him. A banshee scream sounded inside his head. Something burst apart in his chest. Dropping his head into his hands, he wept.

  44

  February 7, 1864

  On his twenty-third birthday James Morton looked up from his bunk with glassy eyes. When he coughed his entire body convulsed—the sound of it racking and deep. His flesh had sunk into his bones, leaving his face cadaverous. The eyes appeared slightly bugged and bloodshot. A sort of living skull beneath thin waxy skin.

  “It’s bad, ain’t it, Doc?” Just that short statement brought on another fit of coughing that left blood and bits of tissue on James’s lips.

  Doc exhaled, watching his breath rise in a feathery mist where it was illuminated by the shaft of light slanting through the barracks window. He wondered if life were nothing more tenuous and fleeting. Appearing warm and animated, only to dissipate into nothingness within moments.

  For more than a month now, he and James had watched the shaft of sunlight shift from the solstice maximum in December. Some wit had marked the farthest the sun had shone into the barracks on the solstice noon by scratching a bunk post. Now at midday, it only reached to a spot lower on the floor.

  The slow crawling of light might have encapsulated all of existence.

  Around him men huddled in blankets and old campaign jackets, many coughing, others muttering among themselves. All of them were scratching, pinching at their hair and beards in an attempt to catch a louse and crush it between their finger and thumbnails.

  Outside, the wind off frozen Lake Michigan was agonizingly bitter. In the Camp Douglas barracks—as snug and windproof as a rusted-out colander in a blizzard—the temperature was just ordinary bitter.

  Doc stared helplessly up at the ceiling tresses where thin strips of daylight could be seen between the shrunken planks in the roof. “I don’t suppose a lie would do any good, James. You’ve seen too much of tuberculosis.”

  James nodded and wiped his lips with a bloody rag. “You taught me too much medicine.” He averted his eyes. “I guess that steamboat just gets farther and farther away, don’t it?”

  “I wouldn’t give up. Not yet. Your sister’s husband said that the paperwork should be coming through any day now. Sometimes, getting a sick man out of an environment like this, back into his home, can work wonders.”

  “I think I’m going to become a Catholic.”

  Doc craned his neck, squinting. “Where did that come from?”

  James waved his bloody rag to take in the rest of the barracks and the ragged, half-starved, vermin-infested prisoners. “Them Catholics, they’re the only ones that recognize saints, don’t they?”

  “You Baptists are depressing. What about the Episcopalians?”

  James chuckled, which precipitated another fit of coughing. When he finished, he whispered, “Dear God, each time it feels like I’m ripping the insides of my throat and lungs out.” A tear squeezed past his eye. “But I meant what I said, Doc. All of us in here, we think you’re a saint. We know what you’ve done for us. Your volunteering in the hospital? How many of them green Yankee surgeons have you trained? That man Jenkins hadn’t even held a scalpel before he was sent here. You’re the one what taught him how to amputate a limb. You’re the one as got that General Meigs to order a sewer system put in last summer.”

  “No I didn’t. They wouldn’t even let me talk to him.” That had been Henry Bellows of the Unitarian Church of New York. Bellows had candidly told the whole world that the only way to clean Camp Douglas was to burn it to the ground. Right down to the last stick of wood.

  Doc looked down at his hands, still so thin and grime-encrusted. Word had finally filtered through the guards that because of Doc’s complaining, starting with Higbee, all of his letters to Ann Marie had been confiscated by the provost and burned. It was said that the provost had feared Doc was using some code to expose abuses within the prison that would be used as Confederate propaganda.

  No wonder Ann Marie had thought him uninterested.

  Could men really be that petty?

  James wheezed. “Most of the men in here think you did. That’s the trouble with being a saint.”

  “Why don’t you rest now?”

  “Because I got a funny feeling, Doc.” He coughed, shivered, and sucked for a breath that just didn’t seem to come. Doc could hear the rattling in the man’s lungs from where he sat.

  “What feeling is that?”

  “That I ought to say what I need to say.”

  “Nothing need be said.”

  “My sister…” He looked away, wincing with shame.

  “She thought I’d forgotten her, James.”

  “I should have wrote her on my own. Told her how much you loved her.”

  “It wasn’t your place. We could only send a single page. That was the provost’s order. The goddamned provost … Well, it needn’t matter. Can’t change the past.”

  “She always was flighty.” James closed his eyes, his skin so pale and delicate it looked like it might tear at the faintest touch. “I wish that … Well, I wish you really were my brother.”

  “I am, James. We’ve shared more than brothers.” He thought back to Butler and Billy, wondering where they were. If they’d ever all be home together again.

  James swallowed hard, coughed. “Afterward,” he whispered, “just send Mother a letter. Don’t go … Don’t go telling them in person. You’ve suffered too much already at Ann Marie’s hands.”

  “She didn’t know.” Doc reached out, laid his hand on James’s and tightened it. “You just get a good night’s sleep, and you can tell them yourself when your papers come through.”

  James broke into a fit of coughing, then spit blood into his rag. “Why’d you get into medicine?”

  “Because my dog died when I was a lad. Called him Sandy. Went everywhere with me. Loved to play fetch with a stick. One day he chewed one up. Did that all the time, but this time he swallowed a sliver.”

  Doc glanced off to the side so James wouldn’t see the hurt. “Took him a week to die, and it was agony the whole time. Paw and I cut him open to see what went wrong. And there was that sliver, poking through his stomach wall and into the intestines.”

  “They’ll have a place for you in heaven, Doc. Saint Hancock … got a ring to it.”

  Sure. And where is God in all this horror, sickness, and death?

  “Don’t grieve for me, Doc. You gotta promise.”

  Doc sat with James until he dropped into an uneasy slumber.

  After a time he rose, walked over to the window, and
stared out at the slanting winter sun. Crystals of ice glinted in the air like tiny diamonds. Light gleamed on the snow-covered roofs, cast shadows in the track-dimpled and hard-frozen mud in the yard.

  A group of shivering men, hugging their sleeves to their breasts for warmth, were harassing a scarecrow of a madman. Bending down, teasing him, asking him questions. The lunatic looked pathetic—a considerable achievement when compared to the rest of the vermin-ridden ragamuffins in Camp Douglas.

  “A real saint would go out there and put a stop to that.” He sighed unhappily and walked back to the bed. James was …

  Doc’s heart dropped.

  When had he gotten so good at recognizing death? James should have had days. Weeks. Maybe, if his parole papers had come through, even months before consumption took him.

  Or perhaps it was a complication from the old chest wound from Shiloh. Or maybe James had just finally given up.

  Doc stared woodenly at the empty green eyes, the chestnut hair … the dusting of freckles on the pale bridge of the young man’s nose.

  He should grieve, feel the aching loss. But inside lay only a dark emptiness. Like that of a worn-out boiler abandoned in the desert, which, when rapped with the knuckles, echoed hollowly of rust.

  “Thomas? Corporal Willy? Do you want to give me a hand here? James needs to go to the deadhouse, and here’s another bunk we can free up for whoever’s next in line.”

  The men went suddenly quiet, turning owlish eyes on Doc.

  “You sure, Doc?” Corporal Willy asked. “He was just talking to you not fifteen…”

  At Doc’s look, Corporal Willy looked away. “All right. Come on. All of you. Burial detail. Form up!”

  “What for? It’s colder ’an hell and a bat’s ass out there! Five men died in here in the last week. Didn’t do no burial detail for none of them,” one of the Fresh Fish protested—a newcomer from Chickamauga.

  Brady Duncan leaned down, practically nose to nose with the Fresh Fish, his eyes thin. “Because James is Doc’s friend. Now get your chapped ass off that floor and form up, or they’ll find you under the barracks in the morning, froze solid in the mud with a broke neck. You get my point?”