South of Shiloh

by Chuck Logan

  Rane had emptied his haversack and was checking out his camera and lens. He looked up.

  “You got film in that thing?” Beeman asked.

  “Digital.”

  “Right. Where’s your rifle?”

  “In the Jeep.”

  “We have some time. You want to clean it up?”

  Rane flipped his hand in an “irrelevant” gesture. “What for? It’s just going to get wet.”

  “Jesus,” Beeman shook his head, “okay, fill your canteen and let’s square away your pack, blanket, and poncho. You’ll need the overcoat tonight.”

  They carried all the gear to the Jeep and as they loaded it, Beeman perused the big pack of water bottles in the back. “One thing for sure: we ain’t gonna run out of water.”

  Tennessee Highway 22 cut a shiny black ribbon through curtains of rain. The fog hugged the budding thickets and it was a good day to stay indoors. Rane said, “This isn’t working out the way you thought.”

  “Nope. I was planning on slinging that M16 under my greatcoat,” Beeman said. “Now I’m going in naked. Fucker could be out there with a scoped deer gun.”

  Rane said, “My uncle Mike was in Vietnam. He used to say the map is not the terrain.”

  “Ain’t that the truth. No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” Beeman said. Then he turned, with a less-than-copacetic smile. “About the ring?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Last Sunday when all this started to look like a grudge bout between me and Mitchell Lee my wife gave me a choice: I go to Tupelo with her and the kids or else. I told her I had to see this through.”

  A couple miles went by in silence. Then Beeman ruminated, “They had rain, just like us. The roads were just tracks through the woods and soon they were churned to slop. Forty thousand men marched from Corinth. Albert Sidney Johnson figured he’d surprise Grant at Pittsburg Landing. Most of them were rookies; it took them three days strung out in the mud. We’ll do it in half an hour.”

  Rane sat behind the wheel, staring straight ahead through the slap of the windshield wipers, intent on the road.

  “One thing I regret is I didn’t get to talk to Paul more.” Beeman sighed. “Feel kind of bad, actually; I threw him this verbal elbow to back him off. Figured he was going to start right in with the Slavery Lecture…”

  “Sure, I can see that,” Rane said, not taking his eyes off the road. “If I had to make it come out right I’d put that way down on my list.”

  “Wasn’t that simple,” Beeman frowned.

  “Right, have it your way. How about the reason your Rebs were marching in the mud is you guys fired on the American flag.” Rane looked out at the rain-swept woods. “They should have stayed home. All Shiloh accomplished was create Grant and Sherman as a team.”

  “Jesus,” Beeman breathed. “I liked it better when you didn’t talk.”

  “That them, your cops?” Rane nodded to a police cruiser parked beside the road ahead.

  “That’s them.”

  One cop actually. A Hardin County deputy, who was a little pissed off, called in to work his day off. After introductions, they sat in the Tennessee cruiser; Beeman in front, Rane in the back. As Beeman handed over his pistol, the cop said, “Not my idea, Beeman. You ask me, this whole thing is a damn snipe hunt. Bunch of gossip outta Mississippi.”

  “Hope you’re right, I really do,” Beeman said.

  “Okay. Here’s the setup. We printed up fifty of these pictures Alcorn forwarded.” He held up the picture of Mitchell Lee that Rane had memorized. “They’ve gone out, with a description of his truck, to our guys, the park rangers, and key folks participating in the event.

  “You put your radio on our frequency,” the cop said. “SWAT is in a tan Chevy van, they want to keep you in line of sight at all times. Try and work with them. Four of our people are wearing plain clothes, mixed in with the spectators, they’ll shadow you. Then there’ll be uniformed officers and park rangers on normal patrol. Anything pops, you go to ground and let us handle it.”

  “Lousy assignment,” Beeman said.

  “You got it. Crummy weather and muskets and cannons going off. Civilians wandering all over the place. All we can do is keep our eyes open and react. Smart move would be to call it off but since the Kirby Creek incident was ruled an accident, the Park Service bent to pressure and let it go on as scheduled.”

  Then they got out of the Tennessee car, returned to the Jeep, and followed the deputy.

  They entered the park and drove slowly through patches of woods and open fields studded with dark granite markers and black rows of cannons. Event monitors wearing orange aprons waved them toward a parking area roped off with yellow tape. They pulled in next to the Tennessee cop, who parked alongside a light brown van. Three men and a woman in jeans and parkas huddled in the light rain, talking to the van’s driver. One of the plainclothes cops carried a long bag on a strap over his shoulder. The canvas bag, designed to carry a folding chair, probably contained a short automatic weapon.

  Rane stood back while Beeman met with the cops and discussed radio procedure. His eyes automatically scanned the surrounding area, which was a security nightmare. If a muzzleloader were to discharge at this instant in the nearest tree line, the telltale smoke would be lost in the fog.

  Then his eyes drifted to a tiered monument directly across the road, where three robed, blackened figures hung their heads in a stylized pantomime of grief. This, Rane understood, was the Confederate Memorial. Beyond the statues, people gathered by a bivouac of white pup tents. A double line of men in gray had formed. They lifted their muskets. An audience of spectators applauded when they fired a volley in the air.

  As the echo rolled along the trees, Rane opened the Jeep’s passenger door, reached in the glove compartment, took out the crumpled fate card, and slipped it in his trouser pocket.

  Beeman left the group by the van and returned to the Jeep. “C’mon, time to suit up,” he said. They opened the rear hatch and pulled out their gear. “Second time I done this in a week,” Beeman muttered as he helped Rane sling the cartridge box over his left shoulder, then cinched the belt with the cap box over it. Then Rane shouldered the pack and slung the haversack containing his camera over his right shoulder along with the canteen. Finally, he pulled the rusty rifle from the canvas sleeve. Beeman yanked the shapeless gray forage cap down over Rane’s eyes, grabbed his own rifle, and handed Rane a folded Shiloh brochure. The park map on the back was marked with dotted arrows in ballpoint.

  Beeman traced the map with his finger. “We’ll skirt the Sunken Road, cross this big field, then the Hamburg-Purdy Road, walk between a Confederate burial trench and the Shiloh Church and wind up here.” He indicated a faint blue curling line marked “Shiloh Branch.”

  They set off, Rane carrying his rusty rifle squirrel-hunter fashion over his shoulder. As they breasted the monument, he paused to study the three mournful statues. Head downcast, the Grecian-robed woman in the middle relinquished a victor’s laurel crown to the hooded, deathlike specter on her right. Another hooded figure hovered on her left.

  “Our Lost Cause Madonna,” Beeman said without irony. “Victory Defeated by Death and Night.”

  They walked past the monument toward a broad field, falling in step, shoulder to shoulder. Beeman’s eyes softened as he gazed across the battlefield, and he said, “When I was a kid my dad would bring me here to go fishing and he’d have me drag my fingers in the dirt. Back then it wasn’t hard to find what we called Civil War lead, minié balls. We’d tie ’em to our fishing line as sinkers.”

  Their hobnails crunched on pavement, then muted as they walked onto the wet grass. The van slowly paced them on the road. The four undercover cops split in twos and strolled wide to either side, mingling with sightseers, who trailed across the fields in bright red, yellow, and blue rain jackets. Here and there kids dashed ahead of their parents. From the corner of his eye, Rane caught a man pointing Beeman out to his wife. The couple followed them at a dis
tance.

  Rane shivered in the drizzle and looked into the trees. Shiloh brooded back at him in gray and black.

  Like dripping acid on a Civil War wet plate.

  So this is what it feels like being out in the open, unprepared. This time someone else could be gauging the distance, measuring the angles, and picking the time.

  Instinctively, he brought the Sharps off his shoulder and carried it slanted across his chest. Should have loaded it back at the parking lot. No time, too many people watching. He was calculating the time and motion of digging into the cartridge box and opening the baby wipes when Beeman asked, “What’re you thinking, John?”

  “If he’s out there, watching,” Rane answered.

  Beeman asked, “How would you do it? You been to that school?”

  Rane’s eyes scoured the trees. “Just common sense. If he’s not dumb, he’ll wait for the show to begin; when stuff starts going off, use the racket and smoke for cover to get away.”

  Beeman nodded. “That’ll be in about an hour when they have a demonstration on Hurlbut Field. Problem is, what if he ain’t concerned with getting away…”

  “Then it gets more difficult,” Rane said.

  “Exactly,” Beeman said with a stiff smile, reaching out and tugging Rane’s sleeve. “So stay tight on my elbow. No disrespect to Paul, but this Mitchell Lee has a habit of missing me and hitting Minnesota.”

  Brushing elbows in a gesture of gallows humor, they continued across the damp open field. Then they crossed a road and threaded through tree lines and monuments and thickets until they passed a small Methodist church with a smaller, restored log cabin located to the left. They stopped on a thickly wooded slope overlooking a brush-choked gully.

  “You know what happened here, the first day?” Beeman asked.

  “Some,” Rane said. “This is where Sherman had his camp on the Union right. The Rebels marched out of the woods across the valley…”

  “Yep. Right down there,” Beeman said, pointing to the tangle below. “When the Rebs attacked, most of Cleburne’s Brigade got mired up in the marsh farther down the ravine. Two regiments, the Sixth Mississippi and the Twenty-third Tennessee, skirted the swamp, crossed the creek and come up through here. Sherman’s troops rallied after the first shock, hunkered down on this ridge and put up a fight. The Tennessee boys broke and ran. The Sixth Mississippi reformed and hit them again.”

  Hearing the husky undertone come into Beeman’s voice, Rane might be tempted, in different circumstances, to reach for his camera. “Well,” Beeman said, “the Sixth Mississippi got wiped out on this slope, three hundred out of four hundred twenty-five men killed and wounded. My great-great-granddad, Matthew Beeman, was one of the lucky ones who walked away…”

  Rane was thinking of the fixed stare on the face of the young man in the picture on Beeman’s fireplace, when his cell phone jingled in his trouser pocket. The electronic chimes struck a jarring counterpoint to the vision of Beeman against the black trees, paying homage to his ancestor.

  Rane took out the phone and felt a twinge when he saw the number of the incoming call pop on the display. Uncle Mike? He let it ring, twice, three times, four, and go to voice mail. When he looked up, Beeman was watching him delete the call.

  “What is it, John? You okay?” Beeman asked.

  “Sure,” Rane waved vaguely and said, “So, the Sixth Mississippi got stuck in that briar patch?”

  “Yeah, and other brigades got mixed in and it turned into this real clusterfuck.”

  They walked along the ridge and Beeman pointed back toward the church. Tongue-in-cheek, he said, “We almost lost Sherman over there. Now that woulda been a shame…especially for the folks in Georgia.”

  Then Beeman’s cell phone rang. Rane concentrated on the raindrops that trickled down the pumpkin-colored steel barrel of the Sharps rifle as Beeman hunched to the phone, face intent. Rane thinking…maybe it’s Marcy Leets…

  Then no. Because he saw Beeman’s expression soften.

  The undercover cops were fifty yards away on either side. The van was barely in sight, screened by trees. Rane stared down at the gully full of brambles, where the Sixth Mississippi perished.

  “Yes, ma’am,” he heard Beeman say. Then Beeman’s eyes narrowed with that slow, “no shit” amusement. He advanced, holding the phone to his ear, and his polite, controlled voice sounded like reverberating thunder: “Just a moment, Mrs. Edin.”

  Beeman lowered the phone, stepped up to Rane, and said in a firm voice, “Okay, John; you just relax. You get any ideas I’ll have them in on you real quick.” He nodded toward the nearby undercover cops. Then he lifted the Sharps from Rane’s hands and slung it on his shoulder.

  John Rane expelled a lungful of air and fingered the fate card in his pocket. The long-range gamble was coming apart. Iraq. Jenny. Now this. Shit comes in threes.

  Turning back to the phone, Beeman said, “Mrs. Edin, I got to move around a little, see if I can get better reception. Just bear with me…”

  54

  AS SHE WAITED FOR DEPUTY BEEMAN TO RELOCATE, Jenny stared across the lake. There was a small bay to the right, and at the end of it she saw a mound of debris she thought might be a beaver dam. For one moment, the wind held its breath and the surface of the lake popped tight as a silver platter filled with pumice-colored clouds.

  Beeman said, “Can you hear me better now?”

  “I can hear you fine,” Jenny said.

  “Okay, you can relax, I got the rifle. I’ll get the ammunition next.”

  “His uncle stressed the fact that what he did in the war was a long time ago. He doesn’t even know the whole story…” She turned and looked up the yard at Mike and Karen standing on the deck. Mike had one hand over his wife’s shoulder. She turned back toward the lake and said, “His uncle feels kind of bad, like a squealer.”

  “You did the right thing, Mrs. Edin. Tell his uncle not to worry. I’ll take it from here.”

  “Where will you take it from here, Deputy Beeman?”

  “Well,” Beeman said slowly. “He came down here to take a picture. I’m going to hold him to that.”

  Jenny blinked at his answer. Wincing slightly, she asked, “But about the gun and bullets?”

  “Mrs. Edin, Jenny, there’s hundreds of men walking around with rifles and black powder. Bound to be a few live rounds here and there.”

  Jenny frowned. “But…is he…in trouble?”

  “I don’t have a lot of law to work with in a case like this and I’m currently out of my jurisdiction, in Tennessee. I could try and read him the riot act. But John, well, my impression is he don’t scare easy.”

  “This is serious, Beeman. God knows what he’s trying to prove but, goddamn it, it sounds like he went down there to shoot somebody, and he knows how to do it,” Jenny said, her voice rising.

  “Yes ma’am, and I’ll talk to him real hard about that,” Beeman said in a reasonable voice.

  Jenny’s voice trembled. “I don’t know what’s going on. And I have other things to attend to. But one thing I know is that I certainly don’t approve, and my husband would not have approved, of some…crazy, macho, vigilante bullshit…”

  “Yes ma’am. And I respect that. Don’t you worry, you got enough to deal with,” Beeman assured her. “We’ll get this straightened out and send John home directly.”

  After thanking Jenny for the heads-up and tendering a polite expression of sympathy, Beeman ended the call. Jenny turned and raised her hands in a befuddled gesture.

  Mike called out, “What’d he say?”

  “He said he’d send Rane home. He sounded…relieved.”

  55

  MITCH WAS HAVING A BAD MOMENT. HE’D BOLTED awake, the lamp was off, and it was pitch-black. Panting, he realized he’d been trying to hold his breath in his sleep to avoid the smell from the chamber pot. Huddled against the damp stone wall, hugging the blanket around him, he shivered and pawed to fend off the buzz and tickle of the flies.

  Could
live with it in the light. Not in the dark.

  Like this since he fell down and cut his face. Demerol vibrations. The pills eased the pain of his aching cheek but brought bad dreams. Flashes of his earliest memory in that country shack; clinging to his decomposing mother out of fear of the dark.

  Gonna stop taking the damn pills.

  Then the overhead light switched on.

  “Sorry Mitch, came unplugged.” Blinking, Mitch saw LaSalle come down the passage and step through the choke point. “Assume the position. We’re going up front. Somebody wants to talk to you.”

  Finally. Darkest before the dawn. Ellie was facing up to the mess she’d made.

  Mitch sat straight-legged and put out his hands. LaSalle put on the cuffs. Then he removed the lock from the shackle.

  “Outside,” LaSalle said.

  Ellender Kirby wore running shoes and a damp gray sweat suit with a small Ole Miss logo on the left breast and dark sweat stains on the chest and under the arms. Strain raccooned her eyes and drew her freckled cheeks tight. Her shoes were scummy with mud and bits of leaves, like she’d been running the trails in the woods. Mitch recognized the expression on her face. Something was bugging her and she had to go run it off.

  Well I guess. Standing in the doorway of the shack, he watched rain billow across the lake. Gray fuckin’ day.

  She took a deep, preparatory breath, then pulled a cell phone—his cell phone, looked like—from her sweatshirt kangaroo pouch, turned it on, and stabbed the buttons.

  “Here,” she said with a mortified look on her face. She leaned over and placed the phone on the shed steps and backed away. He bent forward, picked it up, and put it to his ear just as…

  Marcy!

  “That you, Sport?” Marcy said in that low, screw-your-brains-out, bored voice.