Walker rose from the maple exhausted, the damp blanket hanging like a yoke about his neck. He laid down in his tent and fell into a fitful sleep. As he thrashed, his nightmares filled with phantasmagorias of the boys who had been slaughtered in the war. They appeared in his visions as he remembered them in the glory days, as gallant young men. They assembled this night to magistrate upon the curses he had laid against their brothers. The apparitions bore witness and cried out from the grave that he was unrighteous and judged the slave masters as the damned; it was they who had lifted the veil of the apocalypse. The gallant boys molted into the shapes of grotesque fiends without eyes and they lurched and pitched about holding their fevered snouts low to the earth. He ran and the ravening caught his scent and hunted him down the labyrinth of the bog’s wooded paths, and he was the boy again, running upon awkward legs of lead, straining to reach sanctuary, to plunge into the warm waters of the great cave and swim under the ledge to the far shore in the faith that the dead could not cross beyond the pool of dark waters.
Walker and Augie entered the colonel’s command post located in a red schoolhouse twelve miles south of Appomattox Court House. As they entered Augie shuddered when he eyed the colonel squatting in his chair. His tunic lay open and the once white undershirt with its mother o’ pearl buttons flowed yellowed and frayed over the soft fat of his belly. The corpulence pushed the fabric in streams around his suspenders and cascaded it over the top of his trousers. Augie thought he looked like a tallow candle that’d been rolled ag’n for its second burn’n. It were only a little past noon but the colonel’s fine whiskey was already flowing into his gullet without being tasted. He was trying to add fuel to the lamp, but it was too late, Augie could see the flame in his eyes was out. Major Barnes was in no better shape. He never drank and his tunic still lay starched and regulation straight on his ramrod frame, but it was a funeral sheath about him. Augie saw his nails were bitten to the nub and a quick search of his eyes showed they flittered like a critter’s does in the corner of a barn watching the pitchfork rise up. He weighed these fools had no more than a slippery handle on reality and he fretted what new madness this parlay would call forth into the world.
“Major Walker, I need to speak with you and Major Barnes about some important matters, a strategy of top secret boldness, ask your sergeant to give us a minute.”
In four years, the colonel had never asked Augie to leave Walker’s side and the stench of men plotting stung his nostrils like the trailing of a scat burn. He hung close to an open window and tried to listen as best he could. “John, I have counseled hard with the general and, well, he agrees, you see, it’s my leg, Doc McKenna thinks it’s gangrene. I keep the boot on to keep it from swelling, but, well, I spoke with the general and he says that I cannot in good conscience lead this fine regiment in this dire condition. The general spoke of you personally with affection. With much regret but with the knowledge that the regiment will be led by a well-bred and steady officer, well, with a touch of sadness and joy, I say congratulations, John, or I should say congratulations, Colonel Walker.”
Walker emerged from the schoolhouse and he and Augie walked to their mounts. Augie said, “Congrats, Colonel.”
“Augie, don’t be harsh. It’s that leg of his.”
“Did he mention the general’s wife’s his sister?”
“We have orders. We are to find a way behind the east flank of them blue bellies. The high command strategy is a bold double stroke, a Cannae, to turn the Union flanks on both ends. We need a great victory to gain leverage in peace negotiations.”
“Colonel, that’s fine think’n. I’m for bold strokes and all. They’s good stuff. You and I been riding these past months and both know there ain’t no flank. Heck, the line run on so we’ll need boats in the Chesapeake to circle ’round.”
“Pick twenty, we ride tonight. We have got to find a way or the war is lost.”
“Major, I mean Colonel, there ain’t no flank.”
“Twenty men, Sergeant, the best we have.”
“Tak’n elephants?”
“Augie, please.”
As the day melted into evening a score of riders saddled up for the night run. Walker trotted to the front, and he felt the eyes of the men upon him, a silent insubordination as if after four long years he was betraying his unspoken oath not to send them to their deaths on a fool’s errand. He motioned silently with his hand and like condemned men they cantered into the woods trailing behind Walker as he led them north.
By midnight, the full moon lay low in the sky. The two sent ahead to scout had found an old logging road heading northeast that was wide enough to carry caissons. In excited whispers, they talked of it running in thick woods near high grounds and about ten miles up it forked with one lane hitting west and the other straight north. They moved up the road and when they reached the fork Walker half-believed they had found a secret blue vein running to the heart of the enemy. He had a waking dream of a second Chancellorsville; of the early days, the great sport it had been to ramble behind the Yankee lines and surprise rear units. He caught himself knowing too well the Yankees had learned hard lessons in the war and that each blue was now as hard as his own boys. He also knew there was more Union cavalry running in the Virginia woods this night than there had been at Manassas. They were legion.
They reached the crossroads and Walker signaled the men to take the lane heading north for a mile or two to see if it was clear of Yankees. He would leave the crucial road heading west for later canvassing in the night. He changed the scouts and sent Billie and Augie ahead. A mile later they returned and reported wagons advancing. Walker’s heart sank knowing that if supply wagons were using the road, the Yankees knew of it and in a day, maybe hours, it would be swarming with mounted patrols and studded with sentry posts. He grimaced at the foolishness of his daydreaming. It was a fool’s errand. There was no road, no trail, not even a hunter’s path within a hundred miles that didn’t lay thick with blues like the frogs that had plagued Egypt. Walker looked at Augie and the silent covenant rang out in the night.
Walker ordered them into the trees and Augie nodded, telling the men to stay quiet and muzzle the horses. The wagons approached and the sound of axles turning slowly wandered toward them from up the road. The moon had risen to the tops of the trees and the square shape of the lead wagon emerged with shadowy clarity, the orbs of the drivers’ heads silhouetted in the moonlight, jostling back and forth as the furrows of the road dictated. The first wagon drew so close Walker could hear the harsh whispers of the drivers.
“Hell you say. We lost and need to hold up or we run into horse rebs. We dead reckoning south; that the Big Dipper.”
“Dipper my ass. You Ohio, what you know about navigate by stars? That local boy said there’s a west road up ahead goes straight to the courthouse.”
“We musta passed it.”
“These wagons need to be at that courthouse by morning or Captain have my ass; west road up ahead I knows it.”
“Ain’t seen the escort in a hour; god knows where they run off.”
“They close; any shoot’n start they be here in shake of a baby’s rattle.”
Walker was tempted to assault and take the wagons south but the Yankees had talked of an escort. He weighed his options and had decided not to risk a running battle this far north when Miles burst from the trees and emptied his pistol at the lead wagon. The follow-on wagons scrambled to turn and Walker called for an assault, the rebels pouring out of the trees with wild yells and pistol fire. The Yankees on the two lead wagons popped from the seats like hedge birds and dashed into the woods. The two rear wagons were far enough back to roundabout and Walker could hear their axles spinning as they jostled upon the ruts back north. A single Yankee lay dead in the road and the three others could be heard breaking brush and yelling absurdities as they ran east through the thick woods.
Walker hissed at Miles, “Damned fool.”
Miles scoffed and said, “It a raid’n party w
e on, ain’t it?”
Augie dropped from his horse and mounted the first wagon and told Billie to mount the second. They tied their horses to the rear of each and began to drive the wagon teams south. Augie ran his wagon hard until he reached the crossroads and reined up. The horses were well trained and the team stopped on a drumbeat in the middle of the fork. They stood like statues sweating in their traces. Augie stood on the toe board with the tugs dangling in his left hand and stared with a fixed gaze down the west road.
Walker reached him and asked Augie what the problem was.
Augie held up the palm of his right hand to signal quiet as he continued to stare west. The moon was conjuring up dark shapes floating in the distance. The shapes swayed back and forth and Augie stared mesmerized by the phantasms until the sound reached him. It vibrated in the crushed stone beneath him and it strummed along the thin trees lining the road. The branches in the road’s canopy echoed the awful rumble like a thousand tuning forks. He processed the sounds and his mind pulsed with the vision of the hundred horsemen charging down the road.
He sat and lashed at the team and Walker yelled, “Augie, we will hold them for a spell, head for the river crossing.” Augie and Billie slashed the reins again and the wagons jolted and bounced down the road.
Walker tried to yell for the troop to form up but the air was shattered by fifty deafening rounds of awesome velocity. Hutch’s head expanded with a sickening thump and he lay back and still on the rump of his steed with his boots still in the stirrups, the contents of his skull running off the dock of his mount. Walker knew the Yankees had the new Spencer carbines. He saw his men start to rein left and he commanded “hold” but Miles burst out with, “the hell with that, boys, I’m gitt’n out o’ here.” Miles spurred his horse and galloped down the road. The fever ran the line and in an instant Walker sat his saddle alone at the crossroads. He felt a wind from the west on his cheeks as if the hundred were squeezing the very atmosphere toward him. For the first time in the war a gasp caught in his throat. He reined his horse and sped south, the carbine bolts shearing the sheets of night sky about him.
Walker cursed bloody oaths, vowing before his death to cut Miles down with his sword the moment he laid eyes upon him. His wrath rose and he spurred to gain speed but the horse’s right foreleg buckled and the steed’s legs splayed. The momentum carried the horse skidding along on its belly over the crushed stone of the road until rider and stallion dropped four feet off the side of the road into a stone culvert. Walker lay in a half foot of stagnant water with his right leg trapped beneath the horse. He expected the horse to buck and fight to gain its hooves but it lay still with a strange calm. He ran his hand along the crest and it steamed hot and slick from ear to withers. He figured the animal must have been hit at the crossroads; shot through the big pumper in its neck and its lifeblood had run out at the gallop. He lay like a condemned man on the blocks of stone in the culvert and listened to the Yankees rumble around the turn in the crossroads. He whispered to himself, “So be it.”
He gazed up the road and saw the moon behind the rows of trees that had not yet gained their leaves. He steeled himself to his fate and drew his pistol, shaking the water from it. The hundred hammered south down the road, the horsemen fracturing in and out of the moon’s leaden light as it flowed out from between the trees. The shadows and hooves clattered above him without recognition, and like some passenger train hurtling through the dilapidated depot of an abandoned town, the horsemen vanished down the road as they had appeared, as swaying phantasms pouring away through a funnel of darkness.
Walker pushed the horse with his arms and slid his leg from beneath the dead beast. The leg emerged, and he gritted his teeth and nearly screamed, the pain in his knee aching out once it was freed from the weight of the horse. He sat there in the water and placed his hands on the animal and thought to say a word, but the horse had no name. It was the ninth shot out from under him since Pegasus and he had stopped naming them two years ago. He sat in the woods the entire next day listening from the trees to the incessant rumbling of wagons and caissons ferrying the Union war machine south. He dared not move until the pain in his leg waned. By the next morning the agony subsided, and he was able to splinter the leg with tree branches and synch the brace tight with leather strips cut from his saddle. He chopped a fallen tree branch smooth with his sword and used it for a walking stick. He found a wooded trail and began his tramping back to camp.
Down the road on the night of the fool’s errand, Miles raced past Augie and Billie and yelled out that Walker was dead. He told them to drop the wagons and mount up and run for it because there were so many coming he’d be damned if Little Phil himself weren’t leading them. Augie and Billie dismounted and ran to their horses tied to the rear of the wagons. They could hear the killing herd coming down the road and Augie mounted and started to rein when he saw Billie fiddling about in the back of the wagon. He yelled, “Billie, jump out that wagon. They loaded for bear. C’mon.”
Billie hoisted a strongbox on to his pommel and climbed into the saddle. He sat his horse and was trying to balance it with his knees when the metal and wood of the wagon near him rang and splintered in a dozen places sending sparks and shards of wood peeling aflame into the night. They spurred their horses and about a mile down the road Augie knew the Yankees were gaining and that it were all but done. He saw a lighter patch of earth up ahead in the moonlight and he guessed it might be a trail running into the wooded heights to the west. He gambled and yelled to Billie to follow and they bolted off the side of the road at a full gallop. When he hit that lighter patch, Augie didn’t know if it was going to be some terrible mistake or deliverance until his mount’s hooves churned on the patch of light and he thanked Providence it were a trail. They bolted into the woods and the trees about them splintered and popped with the sizzle of carbine rounds.
The trail led to smaller trails that split in a half-dozen directions up the hills and they chose one without reason and climbed hard. They could hear the sounds of gathering horsemen in the roadway below and the Yankees’ peppering of the woods with random shots. Augie knew it would have to be one crazy sumbitch Yankee to ride up a blind trail in the dark following rebels and he thought he heard, “All right, you first.” He heard grunted orders and the Yankees began again their rumble down the road, chasing Miles and the rest of the fleeing rebels. He whistled softly and believed for the first time they had shook them.
They climbed for half an hour on a path that crested to the top and dropped from their horses into an old hunter’s clearing. Augie squatted by the trunk of a tree aside the trail and listened for the sounds of horsemen. The only sounds were the muffled reports of rifles a good distance off in the lowlands.
Augie turned and swore at Billie, “Boy, that were about the dumbest thing you ever done, there were a hundred of ’em.”
But he got no answer. “Billie, where you at?”
“By the big rock.”
Augie could see Billie had his back propped against a boulder that was adorned with a great arched top. The feldspar in the granite gave the rock a copper sheen in the moonlight. It had been dragged to its resting place by a glacier a hundred millennia ago and had slowly risen with the heights as the innards of the world warred against itself.
“What is it?”
“My back.”
Augie said, “Let’s see what you got go’n.” He rolled Billie on his side and struck a lucifer against the flat of the rock. It flared bright revealing the tunic was soaked with dark blood. He trussed up Billie’s tunic to try and plug the hole with his handkerchief when he felt a second hole bleeding an inch away, both shots had cut through his liver. Billie sensed the tremor in Augie’s hand.
“Done fish’n?”
“What you do’n grabb’n that box?”
“I hear Walker dead. I’m think’n this here war dead. I figur’d it were a payroll; raise them horses like you always say’n. What color is it?”
“Stripe o
f a swamp moccasin.”
“Figured, felt more thick than slick. Go’n open it.”
“Billie, I don’t give a goddamn about that box.”
“Go on, boy, the curiosity kill’n me.”
Augie dragged the strongbox over and wedged his bayonet behind the clasp. He put the heel of his boot to the box and pulled hard at the latch and it sprang with a loud clang.
“Didn’t say ring no church bell.”
Augie flipped the lid open and struck another lucifer. He cupped it in his hand to shield the breeze and the gold coins shimmered like a drawing in a little boy’s book of pirate tales.
Billie cried out, “Holy grits and shits! It a dang regiment payroll. Briggins’s treasure, Augie, always said we’d find it.”
Augie lay there holding Billie. He tried to staunch the wounds but the blood soaked through the handkerchief and the vile warmth of his best friend streamed in rivulets over his forearm.
After a few minutes Billie said, “Gett’n cold, ain’t long now. Same spot as Coop, he bled out no time t’all.”
“Billie, why’d you . . .”
“Ah, stop nagg’n. Just get my share of the treasure to Bea and teach Willie the secret horse stuff.”
“All right.”
“I want you to promise me someth’n.”
“I promise.”
“How can you promise I ain’t told it yet?”
“Treasure for Bea, teach Willie.”
“Nah, that ain’t the promise, you do that anyhow. This war done and it too damn late to be dying. Take my bayonet and put it thro’ your leg. You know how it’s done. Twist the blade and make it look like a ball shot. Promise me.”
“Billie . . .”
“Swear to it.”
“I swear.”
The next morning Augie began stoking a fire and for the next ten hours he seeded it with dry pinecones and cedar. The cedar was from the fallings of a tree he figured was born two hundred years before the Revolution. As the sun spread out in the west he squatted by the fire and took out Billie’s bayonet. He rolled its long thin rapier over in the palm of his hand before carefully placing the tip between two rocks and sliding the full length of its blade into the blue flames. After three hours, he wrapped his shirt around his hand and used it as a furnace mitt to grab the handle of the bayonet. He drew the blade forth from the shimmering rocks and saw the fire had sewed its nature into the fabric of the iron. He reached for the round rock by his side and began to beat the blade with heavy blows, using a long flat slab of granite as his anvil, not giving one damn if the Yankees heard him. The ancient sound of the blacksmith shop rang in the woods as the steel gave grudgingly to the altering of its first shape. The heavy strikes of the bluestone orb blunted the blade’s edges and mooned its tip. He put the blade back into the stones, and the flames licked out again to embrace without prejudice the fabric of its twisted form.
Angels of North County Page 16
