Lucian made his way through the smoky wood, following the soldiers. When he emerged from the trees, he saw the lines moving across a broad field. He watched the soldiers’ backs, their jackets, cartridge boxes and haversacks, blanket rolls, slouch hats, their shouldered muskets and gleaming bayonets bouncing in time to their long stride. They were crowded together, shoulders touching, a solid mass of gray and brown that clinked of tin cups, of frying pans and canteens. The soldiers’ legs made a swishing in the tall broomsage. The lines stretched left and right; they were too long to get around, so Lucian pushed through the ranks, darting and running like a rabbit, ignoring the soldiers’ surprised queries and the officers who shouted after him. At length, he quit running and found himself walking in a broad open space between two brigades; he could hear the men tramping ahead and behind, he could hear the band, the drums beating, could hear his own breeches legs swishing in the grass. Then, up ahead, he saw Cass Wakefield pacing back and forth behind their company—That is our company, he thought. Cass carried his rifle in the crook of his arm, and his hat was crammed down over his eyes. Lucian looked for Mister Lewellyn but couldn’t pick him out. The colors were opened out over the regiment, unfurling red and crossed with stars, and this for the last time in all their lives, though Lucian didn’t know it yet. In a moment, he couldn’t tell where Cass was anymore; he was swallowed up in the smoke and the shapes of men walking. Lucian saw only the solid lines moving forward, the smoke closing and rolling around them like a living thing.
When Lucian lost sight of Cass Wakefield, he wanted to run back to the brick house and through the front door and up the stairs and find a bed to hide under, but he didn’t, because Cass Wakefield had given him his name, and Lucian knew kinfolks stuck together. He’d heard people say that, though he’d never had any to stick to before, much less follow across the edge of time to the place where death was.
The Angel of Death was up there, and Lucian wondered what his country would be like. He was sure that this time the Angel would take Cass and Mister Lewellyn, and the knowledge made his insides lock up. His heart was pounding like a steam sawmill engine, but no matter; he was not about to sit back yonder on the porch and wonder, What if Cass is dead? What if he don’t come back across the yard looking for me?
The smoke was thicker now, full of bright flashes and a noise like horseflies made when they came around your head. Lucian had heard that noise at Decatur; he knew what it was, but he went on walking upright, for it wasn’t any use to duck. He wanted something in his hands, so he picked up a willowy branch like the suckers he used to pick for switches. Now he could slap his leg with it, and he did, and it stung his leg just as the switches had done.
For some reason, the lines all at once began to wheel to the left, swinging around like big turnstiles, and Lucian followed. Men were falling now, lots of them, and Lucian suddenly realized they were marching at a right angle to the enemy. The Angel of Death made his choices—here, there—and men fell into the brown twilight under the smoke—some flung up their hands, some staggered and fell, some merely dropped like a bag of clothes—dead ones and hurt ones, so many—they were all tangled accoutrements, reaching hands, crying voices, bearded faces. Lucian was careful not to walk upon the fallen men. He saw bodies opened with the fat, oily insides laid bare to the light. Nobody was supposed to see those things—that was another rule broken—or see blood in fountains, or a white bone where a hand used to be.
Oh, Lucifer! he thought. At the orphanage, when one of their number died—once or twice a month in the wintertime, more than that when the fever came—the children were made to pass before the lost one, as if by looking they would learn some lesson. They would file past the dead child, who always had its hair brushed, who was always calm and pale and propped on pillows—nothing like these men, or like the dead cavalry man back in Alabama whose scarf Lucian was wearing—and every time, old Pelt would take Lucifer by the ear and whisper harsh into it, Look you well, bastard—here’s what it comes to, all your vanity and pride. This was the lesson, the boy supposed, though old Pelt never told it to anyone else. Then the dead one would be shut up in a little casket painted black, and Lucifer would look down from a high window at the casket borne down the steps and away up the lane. At first, he thought they were only going away for punishment. He expected them to come back, chastened, but they never did, and after a while, he figured out they never would. That was death: you went away; you didn’t come back. Now Lucian thought that if he followed Cass—he would find him again, he knew that—maybe he could see where the children went when they died.
The lines were turning back to the right now, back toward the enemy. When the lines straightened out, the men began to move fast. The musket fire from the yankee works was a single steady roar, and the soldiers’ bayonets came down, and they began to run toward the yankee works. They were all packed together, a streaming mob struggling to get forward, and from their throats rose the strange, wavering cry that Lucian had first heard at Decatur. His ears were hurting from the noise, and the cry was like a nail driven into his head. Then came a sound that hurt Lucian even worse, that almost knocked him over, and a long spear of flame jabbed out into the smoke—one of those black cannon guns, Lucian thought—and he saw men fly into the air and come apart, heard their bones crunching. Now Lucian got down on his hands and knees, down under the smoke, and crawled among the fallen men. He saw the man who’d been playing marbles in the yard back in Decatur, the thin man in spectacles—Jack Bishop was his name—only now his glasses were broken and twisted on his face, and he was dark, smeared with blood.
The band had quit playing. Lucian couldn’t hear the drummers either, only the shooting and the yelling—and the heavy thump and roar of the black cannons again, the hum of musket balls and of something bigger, heavier, that ripped men to pieces. Smoke rolled and boiled over everything, even down where he was now, so that he kept bumping into dead men and hurt men, and the living stepped on him and tripped over him. He saw a man crawling along with a ramrod through his skull, another with both hands dangling by threads. He found a boy no older than himself lying on his back, arms outflung, eyes open. Lucian thought the boy was taking a rest. He said, “Get up! We got to follow!” Then he saw a single neat hole, oozing dark blood, in the breast of the checkered shirt, and Lucian knew the boy had gone with the Death Angel. The boy wore a gray jacket like Cass did, and Lucian remembered Cass’s words, how they didn’t mind if you took what you needed. Lucian needed the jacket. He straightened the boy’s arms—It’s all right; I will be careful and fix you right—and loosened the belt buckle—it had a star on it—and pulled the box and haversack and canteen straps over the boy’s head and turned him over—
Lucian cried out and scuttled backward on his knees. The boy’s back was laid open, grass sticking to the sodden, ruined jacket and the white rib cage and the secret things that still pulsed and glistened. “Cass!” cried Lucian. Then something struck him in the face; it was soft and wet, but it knocked him over. He couldn’t see what it was, for he was blinded with blood. He wiped his eyes. A man staggered back from the line; he was trying to hold his secret parts in, but they kept slipping through his fingers. The man cried out at Lucian, then disappeared in the smoke. Another came and fell across the body of the dead boy, then another and another, until Lucian couldn’t see the boy at all. Lucian crawled to the pile of bodies and hid behind it. He could hear the heavy splat of balls striking the bodies, like when you threw a ripe tomato against a brick wall. A man reached for him; Lucian took the hand but found it attached to nothing and dropped it. Blood spurted in a fountain over him, then subsided, leaving him drenched and hot. His throat was seared, aching; he found a man’s canteen, pulled the cork, and took a deep swallow of foul water. He was crying now, and suddenly he could hear nothing but a painful ringing in his ears. I am dead now! he thought. He was dead and in hell just like old Pelt said he would be. This was death, then: a place where sound could not be heard but only fel
t, a place without time, inhabited by demon apparitions wandering in the smoke, by piles and windrows of dead men who squirmed and thrashed; hurt men who pulled at their clothes and cried for water and God and Mother; a region littered of muskets and shreds of cloth, gobbets of meat, brown cartridge paper, tufts of cotton lint, canteens, hats, rags and haversacks, torn earth, and trampled grass slick with blood—and Lucian wondered what he had done that could not be forgiven.
A long while he cowered behind the rampart of dead, sobbing and praying, asking again and again to be forgiven. At last he gave it up, for God didn’t seem to be listening, or else He couldn’t protect them, and the Death Angel had beat Him again. Lucian knew then he would not be delivered, and he struck the ground with his fist in anger and shame, for it was not fair. Then he thought, Cass is in it, too, and he knew he had to find him. He could stand it if only Cass were with him. Cass would know what to do—and Mister Lewellyn, maybe he could pray them out of it. He rose to his feet, heart pounding, so trembly he could hardly move. But he told himself that he couldn’t be killed any more than he already was, so he went forward, staggering in his fear and weakness, following Cass Wakefield deeper into hell.
Just before the regiment stepped off, Cass Wakefield took note of the evening and the long shadows, the sun hovering as if reluctant to depart, a pale crescent moon rising eastward, pulling the night after it. Before them lay an oak grove, already in twilight, ribboned with smoke. Cass wished they didn’t have to pass through the grove, for the line would break up among the trees, and everything would be out of order until they cleared the woods where the falling sun would light their way to dusty death.
The brigade battle line was long, and before it stretched another, and before that another. The fields were crowded with soldiers, and from their myriads rose voices, shouts, a whisper of movement, the thud of horses’ hooves. Firing spattered from the grove as the skirmishers retired. To the west mounted the roar of a battle already begun, to which they themselves must go in a little while. They had come here under fire from the guns across the river, and they were taking fire yet. The shells burst over the woods or plowed great gobbets from the field, and some men were killed. Cass wished the line would move so they could get the thing over with. There was always too much standing around, too much waiting, and the longer you waited, the taller grew the stalks of fear to twine around the heart. Thousands of hearts here in this open ground, all of them beating hard, and Cass thought it a wonder you couldn’t hear them. Maybe that was part of the whisper that rose from the massed ranks pressed shoulder to shoulder, waiting: the weary, the ragged, the holloweyed, the dysenteric and fever-ridden, marched twenty miles since daybreak without rest, without food, only to be set down at last in the midst of a gathering, fatal dark.
The officers clustered in groups, broke up, clustered again. Couriers galloped to and fro, their horses white with foam, and foam at the steel bits, and the hooves scattering clots of mud. Then General Adams drawing his sword, and the call passing down the line: Attention … Brigaaade! Then: Load, prime, and come to shoulder arms! The fumbling for cartridges, ramrods ringing from their sockets, rattling down the bores of a thousand muskets; the click-clack of hammers drawn back, the fumbling for percussion caps—Keep your muzzles up, keep ’em up there, goddammit—and a bang down the line where somebody let his hammer slip. Finally the men straightening, one by one, muskets at the shoulder, eyes straight ahead. Officers striding up and down, their swords at the carry or pointing here, pointing there. Silence in the ranks. Eyes front. Then: Fix … bayonets! A portentous rattling and clattering as the long steel blades were fixed to the muzzles. Right shoulder shift … Arms! and up went the muskets in a rampart of steel that no power of man, it seemed, could resist or look upon without trembling. Finally the colors uncased, the old torn flags breaking out among the forest of bayonets: symbol not of any nation or cause, but of who they were and of all that they had endured; the outward and visible sign of their courage, their honor, and their pride.
The illusion of order and purpose occupied the minds of men who otherwise might yield to reason. Familiar tasks, drilled into them day after day for years, guided muscle and sinew that otherwise might stiffen from the long march, or lock up in fear, or answer to the individual will. Thought, memory, fear, these three: no greater enemies could a soldier have in that moment when he stood before the half-opened curtain of his fate. And war itself, feeding on its own mad necessity, could not exist without subjugation of the will.
Cass Wakefield knew it was all an illusion. He also believed in it, deeply. He abetted the illusion. He was its instrument, prowling up and down the portion of the line allotted him, poking and prodding, encouraging, cursing, suppressing the collective will that, were it allowed to flourish, would have them all running like hares from the task before them. Cass acted his part as best he could, struggling against the will of mortal men and struggling most of all against his own. He was sore afraid, and his ears drummed with the clamor of his soul and the fluttering of the Death Angel. He had to believe the illusion, for only by believing could he ever hope to move at all.
Across the sky to the west, against a tall pillar of cloud, a vee of geese passed southward. If the birds were sensible of the doings of men, seeing far below the long lines preparing for battle, they might well have asked, Why all this? In that moment, Cass could not have answered, but he would come to understand that, in fact, illusion alone could not have driven them, could not have overcome their will. In the end, only truth could do that: the truth of the cord that bound them. The soldiers knew the truth, and the truth sustained them even in the shadow of death. Courage. Honor. Pride. Comrades. It was imperative that they believe in these things, and they did believe. So it was that when the command was given, they stepped off smartly to the drums and to the band playing “Annie Laurie” as if on parade. They were all moving now, passing into the twilit woods and beyond into a country none of them could see, that some of them would never live to look upon.
They had not gone far when the line parted to reveal the body of a soldier kneeling in the broomsage. The back of his head was cracked and leaking, the hair sodden with blood, and Cass knew the face would be gone, and he didn’t want to look but looked anyhow. Sure enough, all the features were erased, and Cass could not name the man. Then he saw the outstretched hands waving blindly, the fingers opening and closing. Wesley Norman had been bitten by a spider once, and the wound had left a crater in his hand, and there it was. Cass wanted to lay the man down, but there was no stopping now. Cass left him there, still kneeling. Good-bye, Wesley.
Cass peered through the crowded ranks ahead. The lead brigades were almost to the woods now, and he saw a company going in after the enemy skirmishers. Foolish, he thought—they would only end up shooting at one another in the gloom. At that moment, in spite of everything, Janie crossed his mind, and he wondered what she was doing in her own twilight so far away, and if she somehow knew what was about to happen. He could see her standing in the yard, her head cocked as if listening, her mouth shaping his name, Cass? Cass? The image sent a bolt of pain and yearning through him, and he fought it down as he had fought down his own will. Then he thought of the boy Lucian, whom he had ordered to wait at the house. Cass wished he had found the lad a jacket, for the night would be cold. He would never see the boy again, most likely. He was glad they had taught him to pray. He thought of God then and shut his eyes for an instant and prayed hard for forgiveness one last time—All my sins and wickedness, no time to name them now, and let it be easy on little Janie, and may she find someone who—but he couldn’t finish that, would not think on that ever. Not ever. He could not suffer the thought of Janie in a universe without him.
The noise of the band intruded. Cass looked that way, astonished. The field music, the drummers, always went into a fight with the infantry, but the band had never followed them so far. Then his astonishment gave way to annoyance at the idea, and Cass was thinking he might send a round
through one of the horns himself—why not?—when a shell exploded brightly just above the musicians and enveloped them in a cloud of smoke, and from the cloud spun a silver cornet and a flutter of sheet music, and the bass drum went rolling, bouncing, over the field, and the men behind parted to make way for it. When the smoke drifted away, the band was scattered, bells of horns blooming over the grass like dented brass flowers, but the survivors played on—in mad discord, but playing still, scrambling to close ranks—and Cass saw the chief musician marching backward, his baton raised, one hand still on his hip—still marching, but something wrong in it, the tall figure jerking like a marionette. Then the chief musician dropped his baton, stopped, swayed a moment, and only then did Cass discern that the man had nothing above his chin but a red welter.
Time was all around, and the soldiers passed through it, but it had no more meaning to them than water does to fishes or grass to the serpent. In the woods, the line faltered as Cass knew it would; men stumbled over vines and brush, the low branches snatched at their bayonets. Gaps opened, widened, closed again, the colors dipped—the smoke was thick and burned the lungs and made Cass’s eyes water—tree limbs showered down, broken by shells, clipped by bullets—but the drums never stopped, nor the urgent shouts and curses of the officers—Dress this line, God damn it—Dress on the colors—Close it up, men—and Cass shoved his musket butt against the backs of his comrades until they were in the fields again.
They stopped briefly to realign, and men died for it and were left behind like piles of discarded clothing. Cass walked over them without looking or heeding, and without sorrow. Some were men he had known for years, his comrades, his pards. No matter now. Sorrow was for those who lived to remember it.
Beyond the field he saw the barren trees that marked the river, and the logs and raw earth of the enemy’s works shrouded with smoke and lit by flashes. Adams’s Brigade followed the lead brigades into this fire. They walked at the common step, measured and steady, the men silent, leaning forward. Closer they came, and closer, and the sound of their passage made a tramping like a terrible great engine—hundreds of men crossing the earth in their long stride, in time to the beating of the drums. Cass readied himself, some part of him thinking Now and Now and Surely now. He wanted to charge, for once they charged, the thing would be decided quickly: live or die, hold or run. Closer to the enemy lines they came, still silent but for the tramping, and men dropped in the grass, spun, flung out their arms and cried out, disappeared—the colors went down and were raised again—Come on, come on—but something wrong, a hesitation. Cass kept his head down, saw nothing but the legs of the man ahead, but he felt a tremor run through the line—disconnected voices spoke of hedges, abatis, some obstruction they could not pass. It was all wrong, but it was always wrong. Then the command rose above the tramping, the fire and smoke, out of voices gone hoarse with shouting: By the center … Left wheel … March!
The Judas Field Page 18
