Of Ashes and Dust

by Marc Graham

  The sun was well past noon and I hoped that the next assault would be delayed long enough to waste the few remaining hours of daylight. Given time to strengthen our lines and resupply the troops and batteries, the next day might bring us the victory we so desperately needed. That hope was stillborn, though, as I scanned a nearby ridge where the unmistakable activity of the gun crews foretold the coming engagement.

  “Sergeant Newton.”

  I called the name out of habit before I remembered his body now lay broken on the adjacent hill. I cursed to myself and spat. There would be time for mourning later, but mistakes like that would only make more of my men dead.

  “Sergeant Johnson,” I corrected myself, and the new first sergeant came promptly to my side, his drooping, blond mustache giving his face a melancholy cast.

  “Sir?”

  “Direct fire on that hill,” I said.

  Johnson looked to where I pointed, but the target disappeared behind a cloud of smoke as the massed guns opened fire. The enemy manned their own guns far more effectively than they did ours, and our lines quickly ruptured. Howitzers lobbed shells onto the heads of the entrenched infantry while the rifled guns began the systematic demolition of the hill beneath our feet.

  “Take out those guns,” I ordered. “Shot load, half-degree elevation.”

  Even as my command was carried out, I caught the flash of one of the distant guns. A three-inch cast iron bolt spun from the rifled bore in a shallow arc. We held a superior elevation to the Union emplacement, though, and few of their rounds managed to reach the top of our hill. This round would be no exception. Even as it approached, I calculated it would fall short of my position.

  I was mostly right.

  Part of my mind rebelled at being able to track the round, even as I watched the bolt smash into the hill several yards from where I stood. The earth furrowed into a massive mole’s trail and my heart sank as the round emerged from its tunnel and continued toward me.

  The bolt smashed into my leg and sent me spinning through the air. The concussion of the shot rumbled through my chest. I felt the beginnings of a rush of pain as I crashed into the earth and slipped beneath the waves of consciousness.

  “Jade?”

  The voice called out as from a great distance, seeming to come from all directions.

  Again, “Jade.” This time more insistently.

  I opened my eyes and shook off the echoes of cannon fire that still filled my head, propped myself up on my elbows and looked around. The field was covered by a thick layer of fog and smoke, and I could barely see the tips of my outstretched fingers. Occasional flashes of light appeared here and there, but these were quickly swallowed up in the cloudy gloom.

  I flinched as a hand gripped my shoulder and I spun my head around as the voice said, “What you doing here, boy?”

  “Izzy?”

  The smiling face appeared in the mist, still streaked with blood and dust, and backlit by a strange blue-violet glow.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  I accepted his offer and he pulled me easily to my feet and clapped his hands to my shoulders.

  “Damn, but it’s good to see you, Jade,” he said.

  “You, too,” I said, still puzzled by his strange appearance.

  The fog seemed to lessen as I stood, and I looked about the field for some sign of what was happening. Through the mist, hundreds upon hundreds of soldiers marched westward toward the lowering sun. The tide of blue and grey swept past me, the men giving me not so much as a glance. Despite wounds to their heads and chests and bellies, heedless of limbs that were twisted and bent at impossible angles, the soldiers pushed on.

  “What is this?” I asked, turning back to Izzy.

  It was then I noticed the ugly circle of blood on his chest. I spun him around and found a larger twin to the stain, centered on a slender gash in the back of his jacket.

  “What you think it is, boy?” he said good-naturedly.

  “I saw you die,” I protested.

  Izzy tapped a finger against my forehead. “Now you starting to see.”

  “But I killed the one who did it to you.”

  “Don’t I know it,” Izzy said with a disgusted snort. “Bad enough I get me killed in some damn fool charge. Now I got this sorry thing to keep me company.”

  He nodded over his shoulder with his chin. There, standing still against the tide of soldiers, was the boy I’d shot. He held his grey forage cap in his hands and looked sheepishly toward Izzy. Up close, I could see that he was even younger than I’d thought, maybe only fifteen or sixteen. More shocking than his youth was the five-inch hole torn clean through his belly by my cannonball.

  “Couldn’t just let me go in peace,” Izzy was saying. “Oh, no, you got to send this one along after me to keep me company till we get wherever it is we going. Got to listen to his sorry ass complaining the whole way. ‘Oh, Mister Izzy, I’m sorry I stabbed you,’ ” he mocked the boy, “ ‘but my feet was so awful cold, and it didn’t look like you was gonna need them boots no more. Then they shot my stomach clean out of me, so’s neither of us gonna get no use out of them.’ ”

  Izzy shook his head at me. “All I can say is, it better be a short trip to the Other Side, or I’ll come back and haunt you like no spook ain’t never done before.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  Izzy shrugged his shoulders and pointed downward with his eyes.

  A bright, silvery thread shimmered and danced at my feet, its length disappearing into the smoke and fog. I bent down and took the strange thing in my hand and was surprised to find that one end of the thread was connected to me. It was then I noticed a faint glow about my hands and arms—indeed, about my entire body. The ruddy, purple glow was dimmer than the one around Izzy and seemed to fade before my eyes. I studied the thread in my hands and started to tug it loose.

  “No!” Izzy shouted.

  I stopped and looked back to Izzy. In spite of his earlier tirade, his deep-brown eyes burned with compassion. Puzzled, I turned my attention back to the thread. Hand over hand, I followed it into the thickening blanket of smoke.

  At its far end, the thread was attached to the center of the chest of a figure that lay sprawled on the ground. The soldier was on his back, arms flung out and his left leg bent at the knee in a horrid angle. Beneath a tattered, grey trouser leg—torn and still smoking from the passage of an artillery round—the meat of his lower leg was exposed and pierced by a sharp, jagged point of bone. Blood oozed from the wound, already soaking the uniform fabric and the ground beneath.

  I traced my eyes along the fallen man’s body. His tunic and face were covered with blood, but showed no other sign of injury. I knelt beside the man and turned his head to get a better look at him. I fell back and skittered away. The thread between us grew tight and glowed brightly as I stared into my own eyes.

  “Steady, Jade,” Izzy said as he knelt beside me. “That there thread is what ties you—the real you, the forever you—to your body. As long as it ain’t broke, you can get back inside yourself whenever you’re ready.”

  “So this is just a dream?” I said.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully. “No, this is about as real as it gets. ’Course, if you remember any of this when you go back, it’ll probably seem like it was all a dream.”

  “But why?” I said. “If I won’t remember this, why are we even sitting here?”

  “Why water run downhill, boy?” Izzy said. “Why the stars shine? The why don’t matter, just that it is. Don’t matter why we having this talk. We are.” He sat beside me, and Belly Wound crouched down next to him. “What does matter,” Izzy went on, “is that you done put yourself in a pickle.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You took a life,” he said.

  “I’ve taken lots of lives. It’s called war.”

  “That’s so, but the taking of this one,” he nodded toward the boy, “weren’t needful.”

  “But he killed yo
u,” I said. “Killed you for your boots. You mean to say that was needful?”

  “I ain’t saying that. He made his own mess and he got to deal with that hisself. Ain’t that right?” he asked his fellow corpse.

  The boy nodded, eyes downcast as he picked at the edge of his wound.

  “A man makes his own fate,” Izzy continued, “and it ain’t no one else’s place to decide that.”

  “But to put down a murderer can’t be wrong,” I protested.

  “Mostly,” Izzy agreed, “when it’s a bad man you putting down. You save a life in the doing, stop a body from killing again, that ain’t a bad thing at all. But this boy? Was you ever gonna kill again?”

  The boy looked up and shook his head. “Oh, no, Mister Izzy. I didn’t even mean to kill you. It’s just that my feet was so awful cold. I thought you was dead already, and when you come to, it just startled me is all.”

  Izzy waved a hand to cut the boy off. “He killed because he was cold and scared. He didn’t have a chance to think about it. Did you have time to think?” he asked me.

  I looked away and nodded.

  “Now I ain’t trying to be hard on you, Jade,” he said, his tone softer. “I appreciate what you done, that you cared enough to avenge me. I’m just saying that you’ve made a hard road for yourself.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Folks do good in their lives and they do bad. Most ways they balance out. You done plenty of good, Jade—helping Zeke and Ketty, helping out that little family back when. But this harm you done—not just to this boy, whether he deserved it or not. He got him a pair of little ones that ain’t never gonna know their pappy now, a wife that got no one to put food on the table. You brung suffering and loss, and you got to account for that.”

  I started to protest, but he cut me off.

  “It ain’t punishment, mind you,” he said. “Got nothing to do with sin or mercy or forgiveness. You throw a ball up in the air, it got to land somewhere. You toss a stone in a pond, it gonna make ripples. Nothing good or bad or right or wrong about it— that’s just how it is.”

  I sat still for a time to let the words sink in.

  “What can I do?” I asked at length.

  “Ain’t nothing you can do, boy,” Izzy said, “except just be. You done throwed them rocks in the pond, and you got to man up and take what comes, whether it’s ripples coming back at you or a hurricane.”

  I fingered the silver thread, strummed at it like a fiddle string.

  “What if I just pluck this and have done with it?” I said.

  “That what you really want?” Izzy asked.

  I thought of all I’d already lost. Thought of Ma and Pa and Becca, of Matt and—soon enough—Izzy himself. Then my thoughts turned toward Gina. I couldn’t know what future I’d created for myself, but I knew that—with Gina by my side— there was nothing I couldn’t face. I dropped the thread and shook my head.

  “Good,” Izzy said as he patted my shoulder. “Quitting may seem like the easy choice sometimes, but you still got to face the lessons of what you done. Hurrying things along only makes it harder.”

  “Mister Izzy?” the boy interrupted with a tug on Izzy’s sleeve.

  Izzy looked at him, nodded and pushed himself to his feet.

  “We got to get moving, Jade,” he said. “Got to start heading west by sunset, and I promised we’d check in on his family before we go.”

  I stood and took Izzy’s hand.

  “Will I see you again?” I asked.

  “Oh, I imagine one day,” he said. “Meantime, you just keep your eyes on the road.” He pointed toward the bright light of the sun. “We all gonna get there eventually, but it’s what we see and do along the way that defines the journey.”

  Izzy led me toward where my body lay. The silver thread grew brighter and the fog began to clear. I could see movement on the field—the movement of the living—as the dead began to fade away.

  A soldier in Union blue twill knelt beside my body and checked for signs of life before rummaging through my uniform. He found Matt’s watch in the pocket where I kept it wrapped in a handkerchief, then turned his attention to Zeke’s talisman that still hung about my neck.

  “Son of a bitch,” I shouted at the thief, to no avail.

  “Son of a bitch,” came another shout, and this one got the soldier’s attention. He started to run, but a rifle butt caught him in the back of the head and he went sprawling along the ground. The newcomer retrieved the watch and brought it back to me. I recognized him as the scout from the night before. He put the watch back in my pocket and started checking my wounds.

  “You go on now, Jade,” Izzy said in farewell. “We’ll see you back home along about supper time.”

  With that, he and the boy headed south toward the Franklin Pike and disappeared among the shimmering trees.

  The scout—Dave, I recalled his name—slung his rifle over his shoulder and slid his arms under me. I let the silver thread reel me in and closed my eyes as I merged with my body.

  In a blinding flash of light, pain shot through my senses. Like a foot fallen asleep, my body was pricked with thousands, millions of needles. Every fiber of my body cried out as fiery darts stabbed into them, securing the two halves of myself together once more.

  My eyes shot open and I sucked in a sharp breath. The stench of battle filled my nostrils and the bitter taste of blood wet my lips.

  “Hold steady, now,” Dave said gently. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  I clenched my teeth as he lifted me and the pain of my shattered leg washed over me.

  “Told you I wouldn’t forget,” he said, and carried me from the field.

  The walls of the tent and the people within them fade like a distant memory, while the strange visitors become more substantial. Where my cot and body had been, a tree now grows, a great walnut an arm’s-breadth across at the base. I know it well from countless dreams. As I move closer I hear the wind rustling through the leaves and the sound of wind chimes.

  I reach the ring of dancers. The nearest pair break their grip to allow me inside their midst before again closing the circle. They seem as real and as solid as I am, but all are draped in robes and veils that hide their figures and faces. I speak to them, but they continue their dance uninterrupted. I turn back to the tree.

  With my hand on the rough bark, I pace around the great trunk, stepping over burled and knotted roots. I stop as I reach the lowest branch, and look up to see a carved JR+AB enclosed in a crude heart. The lines are in a shaky hand, and rough gashes cut through them, almost obliterating the initials.

  “Sorry about that.”

  I turn to see a robed figure approach and remove the veil to uncover a head of thin, brown hair. My surprise lasts only an instant before it’s replaced by a calm acceptance.

  “Maybe I should’ve listened to you,” I say.

  “Horse shit,” he retorts. “You were the best thing ever happened to her. She’d have been lost without you.”

  I bite off my argument and turn to lean against the tree. The bark scratches at my back.

  “What is all this?” I ask, waving at the circle of dancers.

  “Your life,” the figure says. “A last chance to take it all in before you move on.”

  “Move on to what?”

  A shrug. “Whatever you choose. It ain’t like the church sermons. There’s no judge all in white and seated on a throne. You’re the judge, and where you go from here is up to you.”

  “That should make things easy,” I say with an irreverent grin.

  “Not as easy as you think,” he says. “There’s no excuses, no justification. Everything is what it is—or was—and you’re stuck with that. No changing things, no going back to make things right. You get the cold, hard truth, and you make your judgment on that.”

  I’m sobered by the words, knowing that there’s plenty I’d change if I could. But I nod my acceptance.

  “All right,” I say. “What do I do?”
>
  “Just get on with it.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Nashville, Tennessee—April 1865

  The thunder of cannon and the pop of small arms fire wrenched me awake.

  “Double canister, load,” I shouted reflexively, before I understood what was happening.

  The weapons continued to fire amid the shouts of men. As I looked around, I saw no puffs of smoke, no clouds of debris or piles of wounded. Only the sterile white of starched sheets and lime-washed walls, and eleven pairs of wide eyes staring at me.

  I felt my cheeks flush at the realization that my dream— nightmare—had spilled over into the waking world. But the eyes that looked back at me all bore the sympathy of shared experience. And something more.

  For the first time in months, there was hope in those eyes. As the gunplay continued outside the hospital walls, a realization dawned on me. Hope began to brighten my soul. A conflicted hope, to be sure, but hope nonetheless.

  On the one hand, the cannon fire could represent a renewed Confederate siege of the city, one that might finally reclaim Nashville for the South and signal the beginning of the end of the war. There had been little in the papers, though, to support that possibility.

  More likely—and no less welcome to the men in the ward, it appeared—was not impending Confederate victory, but quite its opposite. Cheers erupted outside, which told us this was the case. An orderly burst open the doors of the ward room to confirm our guesses.

  “Lee’s surrendered in Virginia,” he said. “Bless God, it’s over.”

  The young man’s excitement was tempered when he noted the downcast eyes of the men in the room, whose very presence here was owing to their sacrifice in service to the lost Cause.

  “Amen, son,” the senior patient, a lieutenant colonel from Mississippi, finally said. “Gentlemen, let us give thanks.”

  The tone of the invitation was only a few degrees shy of being an order. The colonel—son of a Methodist minister, I’d learned—invoked the blessings of heaven no less forcefully than he might have commanded his troops in the field. If the Almighty were subject to the dictates of military discipline, I thought, the healing of the nation and a just and equitable peace would not be long in coming.