The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  “Column left.” They were turning into another road, and the boom of artillery and the crash of rifle fire was louder, and now the marching regiments began encountering the side effects of a bloody battle. A train of white-topped ambulance wagons pulled out of the way to let them go by, and every one of the marching men—all walking upright on two legs—looked in at the litters and winced at the sight of bleeding heads and smashed limbs. Crowds of the walking wounded were on the road too, and so was a band of jolly skulkers, cheering at them, shouting, “Go in and give them Jerrie.”

  But nobody up front seemed to know where they were going. Behind them Culp’s Hill was in the thick of a battle at last, because you could hear the crashing and thundering from back there, and over the brow of the ridge in this neighborhood something huge was going on because you couldn’t hear yourself think for the artillery.

  Were they lost? Stepping out of line and staring forward, Otis could make out some kind of excited conference up in front, and now Lockwood’s brigade was taking off at a trot toward the fighting on the other side of the ridge.

  Would they be next? Otis could feel his heart pounding, but then it settled down because it looked like they weren’t about to follow the unlucky Second Brigade. And then Tom Robeson walked along the line and told them to move back into the trees.

  Oh, yes, sir, gladly, Your Honor, sir. By this time Otis was dead tired, so he was grateful to drop to the ground and lean against a tree and close his eyes. When he opened them again it was nearly dark, and the battle noises were dying away. Otis didn’t give a damn which side had won the day, as long as Private Otis Mathias Pike had not been called into gallant action in the line of fire.

  It was absurd, he knew it was, and philosophically unsupportable, and yet it seemed to Otis a fact that his own death in battle would be more tragic than the deaths of other men, sadder than Lem’s or Rufe’s, for instance, or even of those noble souls, his classmates Mudge and Robeson, Morgan and Fox. Those high-class people would no doubt be useful members of society if they lived, highly respectable statesmen and pillars of the church. But if his own life were ruthlessly cut short, something more important would be lost.

  Dreamily Otis imagined the world going on without him. In the theaters where he had been welcomed in the old carefree days before he had been dragged into this war—in Boston and Baltimore, in Washington and Philadelphia, even in Richmond and Lynchburg, Virginia—would they miss him, the actors, the managers, the musicians, the pretty singers, the buxom dancers?

  Would Rosalie miss him, the rose of Philadelphia? Or that adorable sweetheart of Washington, darling Flora, the nymph of the Grove? Unfortunately the lovely Lily LeBeau would not miss him, because they had never met. Bitterly Otis imagined the lighted carriages sweeping up to the doors of the famous theaters after he was gone. He envisioned all the fine ladies and gentlemen descending for yet another brilliant performance, none of them aware of the demise of Otis Pike. His name would be no more to them than the horse droppings on the street. Other men would write the witty pieces they came to see and the comic songs.

  But what a waste if the fanciful cleverness of Otis Pike should be smashed by a minié ball or blotted out in a shower of grapeshot. Of course it was too bad about all the others, it was criminal that the lives of so many thousands of boys from North and South should be snuffed out in this savage war, but the truth of the matter was that most of them would be missed only by mothers and wives and sweethearts, whereas his own death would be a loss to the world, even if the world didn’t know it yet.

  Oh, yes, the idiot birds would go on singing when he was no longer there. The horsecars would jingle along Massachusetts Avenue, the curtains would rise in the Howard Atheneum and Arch Street and McVicker’s and Ben Debar’s, and no one would remember the quick inventiveness of Otis Pike behind the scenes, his transformation of crude comedies like Sweethearts and Wives into witty confections, and Toodles, and The Way to Get Married and A Kiss in the Dark.

  All he needed was time—time for his budding gift to flower at last into something truly magnificent.

  A LONG NIGHT

  FOR OTIS PIKE

  They were back. Oh God, they were back.

  Sullenly, half-dead with exhaustion, the whole goddamned division had shambled back in the moonlight over the rough ground, only to find out there’d been a god-awful bungle. They never should have left Culp’s Hill, because while they were someplace else, the enemy had taken over their works, all the trenches for which sweating men had shoveled dirt and felled trees and dragged boulders into rocky barricades the night before.

  Otis could see the disgust on the faces of Charley Mudge and Tom Robeson. He watched in alarm as Seth Morgan and Tom Fox found out what had happened and looked disgusted too. There’d been hell to pay while the First Division was elsewhere, and hell was still smoldering and belching up and down the hill and over there beyond their rocky knoll. From high overhead the full moon shone down on Colonel Silas Colgrove’s five regiments as calmly as if two thousand footsore men were gathered there for a Sunday school picnic. I’ll thank you to pass me another of them chicken legs, teacher, and I won’t say no to a piece of pie.

  Otis threw down his pack in almost the same place as before except it was a little way up a wooded slope. From there he could look across a patch of open ground toward the same infernal hill, the one that belonged to some poor unlucky farmer named Culp, where the two armies had been slugging it out for the last two days.

  Now the bullyboys were chopping down trees again and digging more trenches. Otis could see them levering up stones and piling them against boulders as big as streetcars.

  It would be another wretched night. Otis sprawled with his head on his haversack. Lem and Rufe were soon snoring on the ground a little way to his right, nestled together like boys in one bed, but Otis was too scared to doze off, even though he’d slept so badly the night before.

  Over there across the swale lay the rebel army. They were out of sight, but he could feel them, he could even imagine he heard them breathing, because it wasn’t like a woods inhabited by a few snakes and rabbits or woodchucks, it was tens of thousands of men inhaling and softly exhaling, and every one of them had it in for Otis Pike.

  Fearfully he rolled over on his other side. From here he could see the red lights of an ambulance moving through the trees and hear the crack of a whip and a shout, and then a whimpering cry. In what part of the battle had that boy dropped down, half-killed by a rifle shot or a twelve-pound ball? Would Otis himself be screaming in an ambulance tomorrow? Or lying dead right here at Culp’s Hill?

  In a fit of terror he sat up. Looking around wildly, he saw a friend only a few feet away, writing a letter in a patch of moonlight. Earlier that day Otis had found Captain Adams companionable enough, even though he commanded another company.

  Desperately he struck up a conversation. “A letter to your sweetheart, I’ll bet.”

  He could see the flash of Adams’s grin. “I’m just wondering if she’s looking at the same stars, way up there in Maine.”

  “Well, I guess they’ve got the same stars pretty much everyplace.” Otis moved uneasily and lifted his head from his knapsack. “What do you think that noise is?”

  It was a steady low moaning, coming from somewhere behind them, rising and falling, fading away and then beginning again.

  Adams stopped writing and listened, but then, instead of answering, he hunched down again to his letter.

  The moon was bright enough to read by. Otis was not surprised to see one of his messmates holding a page up to the light. Beyond the curled shapes of Lem and Rufus, Sergeant Luther Willow was racing through another of his police detective stories. Lucky Sergeant Willow, to be able to distract himself with the adventures of some stouthearted policeman.

  Otis crawled over beside him. “What is it this time, Sergeant?”

  Willow kept his eyes on the page. “Case of switched identity. The duke, he don’t know he’s got a twin
brother, but then the brother kills him and hides his body and takes over his castle, but then Police Detective Bone, he finds a clue, a bloody coat, and when the duchess sees the coat, she screams, and then Detective Bone …” Willow flipped a page. His voice trailed away.

  Otis crawled back to his knapsack, wishing he had a dime novel to read, or better yet a sweetheart to write to. Rosalie and Flora were sweethearts of a sort, but they weren’t the kind you wrote a letter to. He had no kin to write to either, not since the blessed day when his uncle had expired. No, there was no family whatever to miss Otis Pike if he never came back from this fight.

  Well, great God on high, it had never been his fight in the first place. The whole damn war, it was no business of his. What did these fools think they were fighting for? The Union? What the hell difference did it make if North America was four countries instead of three? And he sure wasn’t fighting for the darkies. This white soldier wasn’t going to die for any colored man.

  The whole thing was insane. Otis had been thrown into the army because he’d stuck a knife into a thief in a saloon. Murder, they called it. Now it was his duty as a soldier to murder as many rebs as he possibly could. He was supposed to stick his bayonet in the belly of some Alabama farm boy or blow the head off some poor Johnny Reb from Mississippi before they did the same to him, and maybe he’d end up in a field hospital in the hands of some butcher with a saw, so he’d spend the rest of his Hfe explaining his cork leg.

  “Gettysburg,” he’d say, and the pretty ladies would all say, “Oo,” and call him a hero.

  Before long the whole country would be full of heroes with only one arm or leg, or no arms or legs, or half their faces blown away, courtesy of Chancellorsville or Fredericksburg or First or Second Bull Run.

  They weren’t heroes, they were cattle to the slaughter, choice cuts of human flesh chucked in a meat grinder. They were thousands and thousands of healthy young men forced to march forward double-quick, straight into the guns of a firing squad, as though condemned to death for committing some awful crime, when they were innocent as newborn babes.

  After all, why should brother be killing brother? Why should one day’s bloody work leave eight thousand corpses rotting in an orchard where the cherries were ripe, or dead in a field where the corn had been growing tall only yesterday? Why should barefoot boys be slaughtered in a country lane where folks had been driving the buckboard into town only yesterday and clucking at the mule?

  Last year after skedaddling from Antietam, Otis had found himself picking blackberries with a fifteen-year-old boy from Georgia who had talked about his pig. Otis had nothing against the boy, nor against his pig either. He had nothing against any of those mothers’ sons from Georgia or Louisiana or Arkansas. In his opinion, they had as much right to live as he did.

  Glancing to his left, Otis saw that Captain Adams had finished his letter. He was sound asleep under his blanket. At three in the morning, Otis wrenched paper and pencil out of his haversack and began writing a letter of his own.

  THE WORD OF GOD

  The generals were at it again. Otis had at last fallen asleep, but in less than an hour he was jerked awake by the boom of artillery from the hills to the rear. He had seen the guns yesterday as the teams hauled them wallowing along the road, the ten-pound Parrotts and the smoothbore Napoleons. Now the low arc of their shot and shell was invisible in the dark, but he could see the blazing mouths of the guns.

  The bombardment lasted only a few minutes. When it was over, Otis sat up slowly, feeling the old dread in his stomach. An artillery barrage usually meant action: Smash ’em first, then send in the boys.

  He took out his watch, the gold repeater he had won in a game with a bunch of like-minded gentlemen at Chancellorsville—the four of them had politely refrained from engaging in anything so vulgar as a battle. Now he held it up to the light. The moon was setting behind the hills to the west, but the moonlike face of the watch was clear enough. The spidery hands said five o’clock.

  Below him the officers were beginning to stir, whispering to one another and moving among the sleeping men. What kind of god-awful decisions were they making now, his dear old friends and Harvard classmates? Otis felt fear rise again in his chest, making his breathing shallow and his limbs flimsy and weak. But mixed with his fear was his usual unhappy feeling of resentment.

  The officers of the regiment were like members of a private club, from which he was excluded. Otis hungered to put his arm around Seth Morgan and grin at Charley Mudge and laugh with Tom Robeson and share a joke with Tom Fox—even now, even right now on the edge of some murderous action. If only he were one of them, a genuine brother in arms, they would see how brave he could be, how eagerly in their company he would defy the enemy.

  But Otis was at the bottom, not the top. Heroism had no meaning for a humble private, only blind obedience to whatever insane orders came down the line from the lords of creation.

  Then to his astonishment he saw Seth Morgan look up at him, straight up at him, across the slumped bodies of a hundred sleeping men. Even in the shadowy light of dawn Seth’s face was recognizable, and the direction of his gaze was as plain as if he were only a few feet away. Perhaps he was about to beckon, to call him forward to join them, to become one again in the band of old friends.

  But then as Otis watched, his heart beating high, he saw Seth’s eyes drop. He was looking down, writing something, tearing off a slip of paper, handing it to a corporal, or maybe it was a sergeant, Otis couldn’t see the stripes on the man’s sleeve. Now Seth was pointing at him, and the other man was looking up at him and beginning to pick his way among the sleeping men, heading for Otis.

  “Well, what have you got there?” murmured Otis. The corporal—he had only two stripes—handed him the folded piece of paper and turned away without a word.

  With trembling fingers Otis opened the paper and read it, then looked down the hill to smile at Seth, wanting to talk to him, to tell him that he loved him, that he had always loved him, but Seth had melted away. Otis could no longer make him out among the rest.

  Rufus and Lem were sitting up now, wide-awake. The three of them sat silently side by side, dreading they didn’t know what.

  The order wasn’t given until full light of day. Finally Captain Tom Robeson was shaking the men up, talking cheerfully, encouraging them to be ready to go right out and take back the lost entrenchments from the rebs across the swale. It was painful to think that such an order could come from an old comrade who had once brought down the house as a girlish charmer in a masterpiece that was entirely the work of Otis Pike. For God’s sake, Tom, what are you asking us to do?

  Below them there was another hurried conference. It was all colonels this time—Charley Mudge and Colonel Colgrove and Colonel whatsit of the Twenty-seventh Indiana, plus a stranger from somewhere else. This time the confabulation was only a few yards away. Otis saw the four of them turn together and stare across the swale.

  The conference was over. Otis watched Charley move quickly along the line to talk to his captains. When he reached Tom Robeson, Otis failed to hear the order but he heard Tom say, “But, Charley, it’s madness.”

  Distinctly then, Otis heard Charley’s reply: “It’s murder, but it’s an order.” He saw Tom shake his head, turn smartly and repeat the order to his men.

  Rufus had heard the word murder. Lem had heard it too. Their faces were ashen, but Rufe winked at Otis. The entire regiment was standing now. Looking left and right, his panic rising, Otis saw the pale faces of three hundred men waiting for the command, and then his knees gave way. He wanted to move his bowels and his stomach was in convulsion. Rufe caught him and helped him shamble to his feet.

  But now he saw Charley mount to the top of the heaped-up dirt and branches and rocks that were the only bulwark from enemy fire for the men of the Second Massachusetts. “Up, men,” shouted Lieutenant Colonel Charles Redington Mudge. “Over the breastworks. Forward, double-quick.”

  And now, good God, t
hey were all up and over, they were stumbling and running after Colonel Mudge and Captains Fox and Robeson, running straight over the swampy open ground of the swale, and so were the boys from Indiana, while the rebs in the trenches uttered their shrill turkey gobble and opened up with a hail of rifle fire.

  Seth Morgan vaulted over the breastworks with the rest of them, but as he ran into the storm of rebel bullets he looked back at Otis and shouted to him gaily, “Come on, Otis.” He was beckoning, waving his arm and shouting, “Otis, come on.”

  At times like these. Otis forgot that he was not a believer and said a prayer. He had often said the same prayer before, “Dear God, what shall I do now?” And God had always looked down from heaven and given the same kindly answer, “Otis, skedaddle.”

  In the middle of the open field, Charley Mudge was down, and so was Tom Fox. Otis saw Tom Robeson reel and fall.

  “Come on, Otis,” Seth had said, calling to him, encouraging him, inviting him to join their little circle, to be one of them at last. But Otis had a higher call. Obeying the word of God, he backed away from the breastworks, away from Company E, away from the whole entire regiment as it sacrificed itself in a desperate attempt to take back its lost entrenchments from the thousands of country boys from Virginia and Maryland and North Carolina who were basking in the trenches now, all of them raking the swale with Enfield rifles that were accurate to a thousand yards. Not me, dear friends, not me.

  So good-bye, dear classmates, farewell and good-bye. Me, I’m taking off down the Baltimore Pike.

  PART V

  THE HONOR OF

  THE FAMILY

  The bright sunshine gleams from their bayonets; above them wave their standards, tattered by the winds, torn by cannon-ball and rifle-shot,—stained with the blood of dying heroes.… Ask them what is most dear of all earthly things, there will be but one answer,—“The flag! the dear old flag!”