For some reason, they could go forward no longer but must wheel the lines around to the left. The long lines began the maneuver, the center marking time—men walking backward on the left, hurrying forward on the right, faces turned toward the brigade colors invisible in the smoke. The surviving bandsmen had ceased playing, but the drummers went on. Before the lines, officers walked backward with their swords horizontal—the line bowed and swayed and straightened again, raked lengthwise by fire from the right but still turning, offering its flank—madness, but no matter. Only this: execute the wheel—no thought, no complaint—and keep your dress. They would have to find another place to breach the yankee line.
Cass held his musket across his body and pushed from behind, cursing and cajoling. He looked for Roger and Ike and found them still alive. He spoke their names in his mind, and the names of others—Gawain, Paul, Bushrod, Craddock, Bloodworth, all still alive—but the first sergeant was gone, and Byron Sullivan, and the line was growing shorter and shorter as the men closed ranks. Colonel Sansing was in front of the regiment, his hat gone, face bloody, sword gleaming in the twilight, and Perry strolling along, dragging his sword point through the grass, looking at the sky. Then the wheel was complete and the officers cried, Forward … Mar—
Cut short, the last order Cass heard at the Battle of Franklin. Nothing could be heard now, every sound absorbed into a single great Sound, perfect and complete, that filled the ears in the same way silence would. They passed at a right angle along the front of the Federal line, but how long and how far Cass never knew. He saw everything now as through a red pane of glass, and sometimes he saw nothing but darkness. Red, black, red, black, and images like a broken strand of beads—a foot, a man’s face, a clump of grass, a hat. No dressing now, and no keeping step, for the right guide was gone and the drummers were gone and the ground was thick with dead, slippery with blood. The earth itself seemed distant, as if it had fallen away under the weight of those who struggled over it and those who lay heaped upon it in filthy piles. Cass felt a sting of pain and looked down. His hands floated uselessly before him, streaked with blood, a nail peeled back, rifle gone. Then a flicker of deep black, and when he looked again, he held a different rifle, no idea where it came from, and no matter.
For an instant, the smoke swirled away to reveal the line still intact but drifting to the left, away from the relentless gnawing at its flank. Then a battery fired from the works and the smoke rolled over them again, and the canister cut and sliced and hummed through the air. Men emerged from the smoke, swam through the fed haze, and disappeared. They collided with one another and trampled the dead and dying; they moved forward, faces grim or slack with terror, some laughing, muskets still at the shoulder—always forward, for there was no place to run.
Then, at the moment when it seemed they could bear no more, something—an order dimly perceived, an exhortation, a collective impulse perhaps—jolted through the cord that bound them, and the broken line, the streaming, tattered remnants of Adams’s Brigade, wheeled right toward the enemy again. Cass sensed their turning and followed. He saw General Adams flailing his horse toward the bright flashes. Through the smoke he glimpsed the flag of the enemy, ragged like his own, and heard the enemy cheering. He saw the head-logs, the fresh-turned earth heaving and boiling. No, it was not the earth; it was men piled upon men in a great writhing mass and bristle of bayonets and ramrods, swords, flailing arms. There a roofline suspended over the smoke, there an officer firing his pistol. He heard Colonel Sansing: Forward, brave rifles! Mississippians! Follow me down, boys! And now, at last, they began to run toward the enemy. The phantom shapes stumbled forward in the smoke, bayonets leveled, and in them was loosed every demon of their hearts, and from them rose a terrible cry born of demons that swelled out of them and became them and consumed them. Cass Wakefield felt himself carried forward by the cry. He felt it rise from his own cracked and aching throat as all things—truth and illusion both—fled away, and in their place the overwhelming joy of death. The Death Angel spread his wings over the dying sun, and men and sun and Angel together fell through the dusk and into the unutterable dark.
Cass made the charge gamely through the red haze of his vision. The line broke up into a streaming mob, and Cass ran full tilt, racing Ike Gatlin on one side and Bushrod Carter on the other. The three of them struck for a place on the works where a knot of men were struggling in a bare-hands fight, a tavern brawl in the middle of all that shooting. Cass felt a ball strike his canteen, another snatch at his haversack. All at once, Ike and Bushrod disappeared in the smoke, and Cass found himself alone and running blind. He did not stop but plunged into the smoke, and in an instant he came to the ditch that lay in front of the works.
He blundered at full speed into a solid wall of his comrades and almost ran one through with his bayonet. The man, blind in his fury, cursed and swung at Cass with his musket butt. Cass dodged, lost his musket, lost his footing, was stuck a hard blow on the shoulder. He went down in the melee, landing on a soft carpet of dead men all shot to rags. Cass believed he must be shot too, and a profound sadness came over him. He spoke Janie’s name. He thought of the boy Lucian, and of the friends he would see no more. Then he shut his eyes and waited for death, which he prayed would arrive before the pain. But neither pain nor death came for him, and after a few slow minutes dragged by, Cass decided he was not struck after all. He was still alive and so must rise and go forward. Yet he could not rise. The illusion was broken and could no longer sustain him. Awareness had taken its place, and with it the return of his will and a fear such as he had never known. Fear and will together pressed him into the earth, and not even shame could make him rise again.
He caught a glimpse of the sky, a deep amber riven with black. He was kicked and trampled and trod upon. An iron heel plate ground into his hand. The air seemed to rain blood. Cass drew his legs up and covered his face with his hands. The fight went on around him, but he couldn’t look, for it was death to rise up. He lost track of how many times the rebels fell back, reformed, attacked again. They had ceased their yelling; the enemy had stopped his cheering. Now a terrible roar swelled up from them all, even above the constant and unbearable fire, as they clubbed and slashed and stabbed and fired in each other’s faces. In all his battles, Cass had never heard such a sound from mortal men—mad and primordial, more unearthly than the yelling ever was, rising wave after wave, louder and louder, as though a great stricken beast were tearing itself to pieces. In counterpoint rose pitiable cries and prayers and pleadings, the screams of the wounded, the coughing and gargling of men drowning in their own blood, the ravings of men gone insane. Cass thought he would go mad himself if it did not stop. He prayed for it to stop, at least pause long enough to let him breathe, to let him get away, but it went on and on. At last he quit thinking at all. Then someone was pulling at him—“Cass! Cass!”
He opened his eyes then. A hand was pulling at his cartridge box strap, and even under the solid weight of sound he heard his name again—“Cass!” A man had fallen across his legs; Cass pushed the body away and turned over. At first, he did not know the face inches from his own, white with terror, smeared with grime and blood, and blood running from the ears. When he saw who it was, the shock blinded him for an instant; when he could see again, he found his rage intact. He grabbed the white scarf and screamed in the boy’s face, “What are you doing here! What! What! I told you to stay, God damn you—I told you!” Lucian put up his hands. He said, “Cass, I come all this way—” but Cass said, “Shut up!” He pulled the boy close, felt the scrawny backbone and thin shoulder blades. “God damn, you won’t listen—we get out of this, I’m gone whip you for certain!” The boy said, “What? What?” Cass cuffed him once, then pulled him close again and spoke in his ear. “I will get you out of this, God damn you, Lucian—I will get you home, Lucian.” He cuffed the boy again. With the end of the scarf, he wiped at the boy’s face to see if the blood was his, but he found no wounds. “Cass! Cass!” said the
boy. “Shut up!” said Cass, and struck the boy again.
Then Roger came crawling like a spider over the rubble of dead, his bared teeth white in his grimy face, long hair tangled and wet with sweat. His ears were running blood, too. He put his face next to Cass’s and shouted, “What is that boy doing here?” and Cass said, “What is happening?” and Roger said, “We must get out of this! We can’t stay here!” and Cass said, “We can’t run either!” Roger shook his head like a dog. He jumped up and thrust his musket between the head-logs and pulled the trigger. A man rose suddenly from the pile of dead as if jerked aloft by a wire. He flung out his arms—wild was his face, and his beard a tangle—cried, “God damn the Papist bastards!” He snatched at Roger, seized him by the throat, pointed—“Look ye, man! See the cross! See the cross of Saint Andrew!” Roger said, “Get away from me! Get away!” Then the man was shot in the head, and Roger pushed the body away and began to reload. A cluster of dark shapes rose from behind the works and jabbed at Roger with their bayonets; Roger dropped his ramrod and parried and thrust against them. Now Cass stood up without thinking. He left the boy, snatched up a rifle, and fired into the men on the parapet. He threw away that musket, found another and fired again, then thrust the bayonet through a coatless man who looked like a schoolteacher. The man’s eyes bulged, and he coughed blood in Cass’s face and disappeared. The wild man rose again from the dead, crying, “See the cross! See—” but Cass fetched him a blow with the butt of his musket, and he went away again. The yankees were gone from the parapet now. Cass took Roger by his jacket sleeve, pulled him down. Lucian reached for Cass’s hand. “Cass! Cass!” The black snout of the gun emerged from its embrasure and fired, and the canister ripped into the men and sent them sprawling end over end like cornhusk dolls, their bones snapping like sticks. Some men mounted the embrasure and disappeared inside; one fell back, a hatchet driven in his forehead. When the gun came into battery again, Cass saw T. J. Beckwith of Cumberland walk right up to it and lay his hand on the muzzle. “T. J.!” Cass screamed. The boy lifted his hand, looked at it in puzzlement, then at the patch of his flesh stuck to the blistering gun tube. Then the gun bellowed smoke and a long yellow streak of flame, and nothing was left of young Beckwith but his legs still erect and trembling and a fine red mist where the rest of him had been.
With that image, time vanished altogether. Cass never could say how long they cowered in the ditch with the dead piled over them and the battle swirling madly above. At last, darkness came, and the fight at the cotton gin guttered out. Cass and Roger and Lucian huddled together. They did not speak, though other voices rose pleading, crying, babbling around them. In a whisper, Cass recited the rosary over and over, in the Latin the Ursulines had taught him. Remembering the Latin kept his mind distracted. Ave Maria, plena gracia—They could not stretch their aching legs, for the yankees fired at any movement. Lucian was hard to keep still. Ora pro nobis pecatoribus—So far as Cass could tell, no one was left on their side of the works but the dead and dying. They could hear the yankees talking on the other side; sometimes they laughed, shrill and hysterical, as men will do when suddenly released from peril. Nunc et in horn mortis nostrae—Now and at the hour of our death. Pray for us, Mary. Full dark had long since come, but the battle went on elsewhere, and the night was lit with flashes. Finally Cass had to risk a look. The smoke had drifted away, and the stars were out. By their light, Cass saw heaps and piles of men. They quivered and heaved and groaned, and now and then the yankees would fire into them. He saw a pale officer standing erect in the ditch, starlight gleaming off his coat buttons, and for an instant Cass wondered how such a thing could be. Then he understood that the man was dead, held up by the press of men around him. All these souls, and the stars and thin sickle moon to light their passage.
Then the firing swelled on the left, and with it the quavering yell, more terrible for the darkness. A night attack—impossible—you couldn’t see to fight in the dark. Yet there it was, and no matter why or how, for if it was hell for the lads over there, it was salvation for the living men in the ditch. As the noise of battle grew, the enemy began to shift his line. Officers shouted orders. Cass heard the clinking of trace chains. He shook Roger and whispered, “Let’s get out of this.” Roger nodded. The boy made to speak, but Cass clapped a hand over his mouth. They pushed and shoved the bodies away. Cass took the boy by the collar of his shirt, and they began to crawl out of the valley of death. They seemed to crawl forever over the soft and yielding dead. When they stood at last, their cramped muscles bent them nearly double, and they walked as though they were dead themselves, all the way back to the brick house where they had set off from that afternoon.
They returned to the cotton gin just before break of day. A good many men had gathered there, and the dead, so ghastly by the light of the torches and fires, were already being pulled from the ditch and laid in rows. Cass bent down to Lucian, putting his mouth against the boy’s ear: “You wait. You don’t have to go any further. You can sit right here and watch us.” The boy must have heard, for he shook his head no and held fast to Cass’s jacket.
They went down among the dead, wading to their knees. The regiments had gotten so mixed up that they had to look closely to find their own; they must look at faces when the men had faces, or trust to find some token to know them by. Many were torn to pieces, gone beyond all recognition; these they laid in a separate row. Lucian had to let go of Cass but stayed close behind. After a time, he must have believed that Cass would not leave him, for he went back to the edge of the ditch. There Ike Gatlin taught him how to arrange the dead, heels together, hands crossed on the breast. The boy went about his work in brave silence, his hands gloved with blood.
Meanwhile, the dawn peered timidly over the ring of hills as if frightened by what it must see. The dawn came so slowly that Cass thought it might not venture at all but draw away again, leaving the world to the darkness it deserved. But the morning grew imperceptibly, and by its first good light, they came to the colonel and Perry. The older man was lying on his face, arms at his sides, one hand still holding a pistol, the other his sword. The back of his frock coat was shredded where at least a half dozen balls had made their exit. They didn’t know they’d found him until they turned the body over, and then it was not the face, blurred in death and hidden behind a mask of yellow mud, but the two stars on his collar and the crescentmoon charm on his watch chain. It took Cass and Roger both to pry the weapons from his hand. Around the colonel was a layer of dead they had to unravel like a tangled pile of accoutrements and haul away before they got to Perry. The lad had been shot once in the forehead. He stared up at them as if surprised to see living men in this place.
They laid father and son apart from the rest, and the men of the, regiment paused in their work and gathered around, silent, dragging their hats off; not many, for most of the boys were lying with their feet together, hands crossed on their breasts. They covered the colonel with a Federal blanket. Cass had closed Perry’s eyes and put a handkerchief over the wound, but no one was inclined to remark that he seemed but sleeping. That would come later, when memory had fooled them; for now, Perry just looked dead, and whatever sentiment he inspired had to make its way through a fog of bone-weariness and despair. Yet the men gathered and looked down in silence, as if these two ruined, savaged corpses stood for all those lost, known and unknown—as if they could, in that brief moment, hear the unspoken thoughts of the living and carry them away to the dead. Then the boys turned away and set to work again, knowing that they had but a little while before they must take up arms once more and wind their long columns north. They owned no illusions about that. The enemy was out there somewhere, and they must pursue him, and tomorrow, no doubt, they would be the ones arranged in the mud, sightless, soon to be hid forever.
But not yet. Now, still quick, they labored on. Some swooned from exhaustion and lay curled among the dead as though in rehearsal, and Lucian had to be careful in his work lest he mistake one kind of sleep
for another. Presently, Cass went over the breastworks to see what he could see. More rebels lay there, scattered among the rubbish, but the enemy dead were all gone. This side of the works was eerie in its own way, like an’ abandoned house where some shameful act lingered in the rooms. Cass stayed only long enough to find a jacket for Lucian, one that was but a little bloody, and a canvas tent fly. When he returned, he covered the colonel and Perry with the tent fly and gave the jacket to the boy, who took it without comment this time, having learned the hard lesson that the dead were no longer jealous of their belongings. Cass found Roger sitting on the edge of the ditch, his head in his hands; Cass sat down beside him, and there they remained until Sam Hook came along and found them sleeping.
The Judas Field Page 19
