Cain at Gettysburg

by Ralph Peters

  Don’t think about the wound, he told himself. Concentrate on what you have to do.

  He feared the surviving corporals and gunners were cutting their fuses too long. But he couldn’t tell for certain. And he had to limit his movements just to stay upright.

  Suddenly, unaccountably, the smoke put him in mind of a fog at West Point, a very specific fog, when he had marched off some forgotten infraction and missed the New York City ball at which he had hoped to kiss a girl whose name he had now lost. He had never wanted anything more in his life than to kiss her lips, just once. It had seemed the summit of all human ambitions. But the opportunity slipped away as he paced back and forth in the fog, and now she was just a ghost amid the slaughter.

  He snapped back to his duties, sharply aware of the soldiers cowering behind the wall and stretch of fence—scant protection against explosive shells. His guns had to be ready, when the test came. For their sake.

  How much longer could the duel go on? The roar seemed to have lasted hours. He had husbanded all the ammunition he could and called up extra canister, but his long-range rounds were swiftly running out. How could the Rebels keep up such a fire?

  He tried to raise his glass to his eye, but found himself too weak.

  Turning to call a command to First Sergeant Fueger, he flew, spun, twisted, encompassed by fiery heat and colossal noise.

  His thoughts collapsed. He flailed.

  The pain … was huge … unimaginable …

  He wasn’t dead, wasn’t dead. He curled upon himself, clutching his belly and private parts with a frantic hand. A wet mess had escaped the cloth of his uniform.

  His sight came back, his hearing. Screams. All around him, screams.

  The pain was vast and thick. He didn’t want to cry, wouldn’t cry, didn’t know if he was crying.

  He twisted on the ground, which only worsened the pain. He stilled himself, but that was awful, too. He pawed his exploded belly.

  Fueger knelt over him, looking down. The first sergeant’s face was dark against the smoke, but his shadowed features still betrayed his horror.

  “I’m … all right,” Cushing muttered.

  The first sergeant only stared.

  “… to my feet … get me on my feet…”

  “You can’t, sir, you daren’t. Don’t get up. You can’t.”

  “Help me.” He struggled to lift himself, but his body moved oddly. Things went in improper directions. Meat slithered.

  “Your … your innards…,” Fueger said.

  Cushing tried to nod, didn’t know if he succeeded, didn’t even know what he meant. He felt his guts spilling out. It was an impossible, unimaginable thing.

  “Get me up.”

  A big man, Fueger heaved him to his feet. Cushing held his abdomen together as best he could. He did not dare look down.

  “Hold me up!”

  “Sir … you’re…”

  “Hold me up. That’s an order.” He told himself the pain was easier to bear now that he was standing. It was a lie.

  Was the fire slackening?

  Surely, on his own gun line … were the other batteries out of ammunition? Had they been so wasteful? What would they do when the Rebels came? What was happening?

  “… stopped … firing…”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve been ordered to stop.” He renewed his grip on Cushing. The first sergeant was weeping. “We’ve got to get you to the rear, sir.”

  “No.” He almost added, “There’s no point.”

  A horse. General Gibbon. Staring down.

  “Cushing! Go to the rear. Good God, man. Sergeant, take him to the rear!”

  “No,” the boy cried. “I won’t leave my guns. Not now.”

  Gibbon appeared surprised that the man before him could summon such vehemence. Cushing felt his stare. Inspecting. What did the general see? A dead man? A fool? A boy? All Cushing knew was that he could not leave his guns.

  Gibbon turned his head and rode away.

  The fire began to slacken on the other side of the fields.

  “They’ll be coming now,” Cushing said.

  “Yes, sir. That they will.”

  Cushing remembered what he had to do: “Advance the guns!” he shouted. “Guns to the wall!”

  Nothing happened. No man responded. They stared at him. At his belly, his crotch. Cushing still refused to look at himself.

  He had learned to measure many things. But who could measure pain? It could only be expressed in astronomical degrees.

  On the battery’s flanks, soldiers scrambled to their feet, crowding up to wall and fence, preparing to take their revenge for what they’d endured.

  “Advance the guns!” Cushing called out again.

  “They can’t hear you, sir,” Fueger explained. “Your voice…”

  “Then repeat my orders,” Cushing said. “Stay with me, don’t let me fall. Repeat my orders.”

  “Forward the guns!” Fueger bellowed, his big-man’s voice a roar. “Guns to the wall, let’s go! The lieutenant’s still in charge here.”

  In the vastness of his pain, Cushing found a clear space. He learned that his legs still worked. It amazed him, pleased him, a wonderful gift. Pressing his hand against his leaking guts, he started forward, supported by the first sergeant, almost framed by the larger man. They went slowly. Cushing stood as erectly as he could manage.

  He’d lost his hat. He regretted that.

  “Just keep me on my feet,” he told his first sergeant. “Whatever happens.”

  After the crews had manhandled his guns right up to the wall, settling them where they had splendid fields of fire, Cushing said:

  “Load spherical case.”

  Blood and bowels overwhelmed his hand, oozing through his fingers, as desperate to escape as captive animals. His purpose in life had contracted now, from dreamed-of kisses and plans for a long, fine life to a fierce determination to do his duty.

  TWENTY-ONE

  July 3, Afternoon

  “On your feet!”

  The command echoed down through the regiment’s surviving officers. Blake and his men rose up amid the trees. Here and there a soldier, weakened by wounds or the heat, collapsed after struggling to stand. Thrust into command of the 26th North Carolina, Major Jones had scoured the nearby hospitals, bringing back every one of the regiment’s soldiers who could walk. Most came willingly enough, eager to rejoin their comrades, or ashamed to appear reluctant. Blake figured the 26th’s numbers had been lifted to three hundred men.

  They weren’t all going to impress the Yankees. One man in two wore a bandage tanned by the dust, with some a downright patchwork of bloody rags. Forming their lines, a soldier dressed to the right with his one good eye, while the next man clutched his rifle with one good arm.

  Blake had kept a look out, hoping to find Hugh Gordon still alive. But Hugh did not appear.

  Major Jones walked down the lines, inspecting his army of invalids and survivors. Knock Jones wasn’t a talkative man and said even less than usual. When he realized that one boy with a swaddled head couldn’t see well enough to recognize him from three feet away, Knock sent the lad rearward. But the boy was the only one who was dismissed.

  “Old Knock don’t like this at all. No, sir, he don’t,” Cobb muttered. “He knows what’s a-coming.”

  “What the dickens they waiting on?” Charley Campbell asked in a dried-out voice. “Why don’t they just git it over?”

  The thunder of the guns had dropped off sharply. Hundreds of men checked their weapons, rustling about in dappled light and shade, tapping empty canteens, or calling defiance at Yankees who could not hear them. Blake knew each man was gorging himself on his thoughts, whether of the impending ordeal or of loved ones, regrets or dreams. Lying under the artillery fire had been Hell itself, but standing and waiting in the close air was worse.

  Lives crammed into moments.

  Blake recalled things he’d wanted, but nothing he’d truly loved. Not since his mother’s death. He had
wanted Lenore, prized her, but love had not figured into it, he saw that now. It had been all pride and some body-wanting. Not love as the word was meant. Another girl would have done as well, or better.

  Better.

  He wondered, for the ten-thousandth time, what had driven his father to a drunkard’s fate. Why was the love of his mother insufficient to turn a man’s heart from a bottle? And how had his father been able to care so little for him that he preferred freezing to death to raising a son? What devils had got at him? For all the disgrace his father had brought upon them, for all his wildness, he had still been known as a Bible-reading man, if not a Bible-living one. Had he struggled with sulfurous demons, only to fail? Or had he just been heartless and self-given? Those questions would never be answered, whether Blake survived to ask them again or not. But those were the matters that had shaped his life, that had deformed it.

  Cobb had been right, too right: He, Thomas Fox Blake, had relished the wrongs done to him, real or imagined, instead of embracing all that was right in his life, all he had been granted. Was he his father’s son, merely turned to other vices? It was a hard thing to ponder on such a day.

  The air stank of blown powder, of death-rot and shit, of sweat. Yet, as the smoke rose and faded, a magnificent sky reappeared, burned pure by the sun. It was inhumanly beautiful.

  Glory be to God, Blake thought unwillingly. The words burst upon him. Insistent. Unreasonable. Invincible. Glory be unto Him. Even if all of religion were a fable, he saw now that it was a needed thing. The truth ground into him: Whether God was real or a lie, God gave. Had his father been just like him, unable to bear the gift? Were both of them born to see darkness amid the light?

  Blake thought he understood where he had strayed: He’d thought too much on what men did to God, and that had poisoned him.

  Shells had torn pathways through the branches, leaving pale wounds on the trees. Spared leaves shivered, moved by the breath of angels. Dark and pale, dark and pale, their flesh glistened in the sun as they rode the air. Beyond that green infinity of leaves, the sky remained rendingly blue. No stain of black smoke defiled it now.

  It struck Blake that only an intimate knowledge of horror let a man grasp the power of redemption. Nor was it a matter of eternity, but of the here and now, of overcoming the trials of this life, not some candy-apple immortality of wings, white robes, and somnolence. Redemption belonged to the earth, it was proffered to the hand that held the sword, not the quivering sheep. Terror afflicted Abraham, not Isaac: The dread of the deed had been with the old and knowing, not the innocent. And when the angel of the Lord reached down to stay Abraham’s hand, the sky to which he raised his awful eyes must have been one such as this, pure above the abyss of mortality. The angel had saved Abraham: The spared life of his son was incidental. The killers quickened God’s interest, not the innocent, since the innocent could never know His power. His clemency was not for the pure of heart. Why give, where there was no need?

  Had his father been Abraham? Blake could not see it, not exactly. But the notion hovered, a persistent summer fly.

  Glory be to God! He gave all men this sky. If they had the eyes to see it. The world seemed a place Blake had never truly known.

  “Bayonets!”

  The men of the 26th North Carolina joined metal to metal, clanging, rattling, grunting as they locked their blades in place. More men dropped, some victims of the heat and murderous thirst, others surely feigning. A few of the wounded men had had enough. The miracle was in how many stood to go forward.

  “If they don’t get a move on, I’m like to piss my pants,” Charley Campbell said.

  “You’re like to piss ’em soon enough, either way,” Cobb told him.

  Charley reared up. “Damn you, Cobb. You and me are like to have us a meeting, this is over.”

  Grinning, Cobb sang the word of Charles Wesley, in a tenor startlingly pure: “Soldiers of Christ arise … and put your armor on…”

  No other voice took it up. Cobb dropped the melody, cackling. But even his gutting-knife humor had a hollowness.

  Except for random shots, the artillery on both sides had plain given up. What were they waiting for? If there was a right time to go, it was now. Before the Yankees could gather themselves again.

  Colonel Marshall rode up and leaned from the saddle to confer with Knock Jones. Marshall was another fine-faced boy whose birth had placed him over other men.

  “Got some nerve,” a voice said to Blake’s rear, “sending a no-good Virginian to command a brigade’s all North Carolina men.”

  “He ain’t a no-good, Jimmy Marshall ain’t,” another man responded. “But he is a damned Virginian. Give you that.”

  “He don’t get down off that horse, once’n we get out there, he’s going to be a dead Virginian. They all think they’re going to impress themselves some ladies by getting killed brave and dandy.” The speaker snorted a hate-this-whole-world laugh. “Boys, I know a lady or two I’d like to impress with something else entirely.…”

  “Jesus Christ,” Charley Campbell said, “everybody sounds like Cobb now.”

  Blake sensed a change in the atmosphere and alerted. Well to the right, there was movement, something big and animal, amid the greenery.

  General Pettigrew trotted up to Colonel Marshall and Major Jones. The general wore an immaculate uniform and appeared excited, high-strung. Blake thought he caught the name “Pickett,” spoken in a tone of urgency.

  Knock Jones shook his head at something. The major’s expression was dutiful. And black.

  Cobb leaned close to Blake.

  “Listen here, Quaker,” the little man whispered. He stopped himself, then started afresh: “Tom … you listen to me now. Ain’t no use in playing the fool today, it ain’t going to make no difference.…”

  Caught in radiant sunlight, General Pettigrew rose up from his saddle, lifting his sword. “For the honor of the good old North State,” he called. His voice was high and elegant, forced into strength. “Forward!”

  Colonel Marshall turned in the saddle, scanning his new command a final time. “For the North State! Forward!”

  Jones and the company officers repeated the command.

  In the distance, a band played “Dixie.”

  * * *

  Why didn’t Pickett come on? Why was he dawdling?

  Alexander stood along his gun line, alternately seeking paths through the smoke with his field glasses and turning to see if Pickett’s men had appeared.

  The last note he had scrawled to Pickett had read, “For God’s sake come quick … or I can’t support you.” He had noted the time of the dispatch: one thirty-five.

  Ten minutes had passed. He had fired long past his own deadline. Ammunition chests were draining rapidly. Either encouraged by the fading Union fires, or out of shot and shell, many of his own batteries had stopped firing. Without orders.

  Where was Pickett?

  Instead of the Virginian and his men, Longstreet appeared, a black-miened man on a black horse. At the height of the artillery duel, Alexander had watched him ride calmly through the fields behind the gun line, showing himself to the men waiting in the trees, exposing himself with no regard for his safety, an inspiring figure, daring the Yankees to kill him, almost as if he would have welcomed death.

  Longstreet got down from the saddle. His expression was as fixed as that of a corpse.

  Alexander reported: “Sir, the enemy have withdrawn their guns from the center. Most of them, I think. We gave them Hell.”

  Longstreet said nothing, but only stared. His eyes were dreadful, those of a preacher abandoned to Satan’s mercy.

  “We can get off to a right fine start,” Alexander continued. “But General Pickett must come up, or I won’t be able to support him the way I’d like.” Wincing in anger at his next thought, the artilleryman continued, “I had nine guns held back as a reserve, to go out with him. But they disappeared. During the firing.”

  Longstreet spoke at last: “I didn’
t know you’d kept a reserve.”

  “I wanted to surprise you, sir. To give you a nice surprise. I meant for those guns to roll out ahead of Pickett. Flying artillery.”

  “Well,” Longstreet said, “sounds like they flew, all right.”

  Neither man smiled.

  The corps commander sniffed the air like a coon dog and faced the Yankees. The smoke was easing. The distance to the Union lines looked vast.

  Longstreet squinted and leaned forward with his shoulders, as if a few gained inches might let him see all. “Are those fresh batteries coming up?”

  Alexander hastily raised his field glasses. But Longstreet spoke again before he could find the spectral guns.

  “Go and halt Pickett. Stop him right where he is. And replenish your ammunition.”

  Alexander’s innards froze. Despite the oven heat behind the guns. “Sir … we don’t have more ammunition. Not enough. We near emptied the trains last night. There is no more. And even if we had it, it would take hours to bring it up. Meade could bring up more, faster. Now’s our only chance, we have to strike while the iron’s hot.”

  Longstreet’s features furrowed above his beard.

  “I don’t want to make this attack. I believe it will fail.” The general shook his head with funereal slowness. “I don’t see any way it can succeed.” He turned hurt eyes to Alexander again. “I would not make it even now. But General Lee has ordered it and expects it.”

  Again, Alexander felt an unfair responsibility shoved toward him. Did Longstreet want him to agree? Was that it? He believed he had done great harm to the Union guns, that opportunity beckoned. And when he had sounded out Pickett in midbombardment, the noise of the gunnery had excited the Virginian, who had been ablaze with enthusiasm and like to break his leash.

  Now Longstreet had shocked him. And Pickett would not come up.

  Alexander feared to say a word. For the attack, or against it. Playing for time, he took out his watch and clicked open the cover.

  It was two o’clock.

  Red banners waving, Pickett’s first rank of soldiers emerged from the trees.

  * * *

  As he led his brigade forward, Dick Garnett whistled one of his favorite tunes, “Willie Brewed a Peck of Malt.” His lips didn’t shape a carrying sound—he hadn’t the breath for that—but it helped him stay in the saddle. He’d been sick as an Injun in a smallpox year, but had got down from his ambulance wagon to mount his horse and go forward. He was not about to let his brigade make this attack without him, not with Jackson’s charges after Kernstown still in the wind, but he knew he was too weak to go afoot.