by Pati Nagle
Dad lay unmoving in the darkened room. He hardly looked like he was breathing at all, but the readouts on the array beside him were flickering. The medic leaned over them for a closer look. All Dimitri could look at was Dad.
Why did he look smaller? Was it all the medical stuff around him? Or just the paleness of his skin?
The medic brushed against the bed and Dad’s eyes flickered open. They fixed on Dimitri and a slight frown creased Dad’s forehead.
Oh, no. He doesn’t remember me. He’s got a—a concussion or whatever, and he’ll never be the same.
Dimitri swallowed and tried to smile. “H-hi, Dad.”
His father blinked a couple of times. “I understand you saved my life.”
Not knowing what to say, Dimitri gave a half shrug, half nod. “I guess.”
“You came into the screen cage.”
Here it comes.
Dimitri braced himself and nodded. His father stared flatly at him for an endless minute.
“What took you so long?”
Startled, Dimitri opened his mouth, but before he could say anything he was yanked into his Dad’s arms. It hurt his sore shoulders, but he didn’t mind.
He didn’t mind one bit.
The Cornfield
I was in plenty of fights and shot at plenty of Yankees, but if I ever killed one before Sharpsburg I never really knew it. You can fire at the enemy all day long and some will fall, but when you are in a line of battle it’s hard to know if it was your ball that did the job.
Many a time I stood in line with Jim Callaghan and Bill Piper and Bill Lessing and every other Bill in the Tom Green Rifles, and we’d all fire a volley and each of us claim to have dropped a bluecoat. It was a game we played, bragging after the fight who got the most hits, and I guess we believed it but we didn’t honestly know, at least Jimmy and Bill and I didn’t.
We got a hint of the truth in the bayonet charges we made at Gaines’ Mill and again at South Mountain just two days before Sharpsburg, because then we could see the terrified faces of the Yankee skirmishers as they fled before our steel. But me and Jimmy and Bill never got a poke at them.
We didn’t discover then what it was to take a man’s life, face to face, gazes locked and the both of you trying in earnest to kill one another. I truly believe none of us knew what it was to kill before we got to the edge of the Cornfield.
It was ripe, that corn, but we never picked it. We’d been eating nothing but green corn and apples for so long we were sick of the stuff—it had literally made every soldier in the Texas Brigade sick—and not a man touched an ear as we passed along the south edge of the field the night of the 16th September, 1862.
We’d arrived at Sharpsburg the day before and all figured we’d be in a fight soon enough. The Yankees had taken exception to Marsh Robert’s decision to visit Maryland, and there’d already been the little dust-up around about Harper’s Ferry, after which we came north to Boonesboro and on to Sharpsburg.
Our noble General Hood was called upon to take us across Antietam Creek and into position on the left of the line, where there were farms and patches of woods and a plain old house the Dunkers used for a church. None of the residents were in evidence, all having skedaddled when they heard we were coming to town.
We got into line and stayed there while the Yankee artillery flung shells at us all day and night and all the next day. Then the evening of the 16th we were sent forward to support Law’s Brigade who’d been jumped on by some Pennsylvania Yankees. That was when we first saw the Cornfield.
It looked like any other cornfield, drying stalks turning golden in the setting sun, smelling of harvest time. We did not know this cornfield’s significance to ourselves at the time. Candy, our little white terrier who went with us everywhere, ran into the field and rustled in amongst the stalks, hunting mice.
“Hey, look, there’s a little ghost in that corn,” Bill said, and we all laughed. Looking back I think maybe it was an omen of what was to come, but of course we didn’t know it then.
Now, even going into a fight as we were doing that evening, a Confederate soldier can strip a cornstalk of every ear without missing a step. But we passed it by, because the thought of more corn just about turned our bowels to water.
We had not had a mouthful of bread or meat in weeks, and we’d been promised regular rations that night. We were anxious to finish our work and get on with the truly important business at hand—fixing our first hot meal in three days.
No grim reaper thoughts among us as we passed along south of the corn and into the woods to the east. We were laughing and joking as usual about who would shoot the most Yankees, until musket fire drew our attention to our business.
Our skirmishers had run right into the Yankees and surprised them, and fired point blank into their faces. Right away the screams and yells started.
It was already shadowy under the trees and we fired at the silhouettes of Yankees darting between tree-trunks. This was closer than I had been to an enemy line before, and my heart began pumping pretty fast.
The enemy were shadow-shapes, obscured by the smoke of the first few volleys. They looked like ghosts to me, and I had to shake my head to clear the little frightened thoughts away. I’m a Texan and no coward, but that was the closest I had yet been to a man-to-man fight in a battle.
As we pushed the Yankees back we began walking over the ground where Law’s Brigade had been hit. We stepped over men who lay dead and dying, moaning and cursing, some thrashing in pain. This was an ugly sight but not a new one and we pressed on, the sooner to get our work over with.
A little further on we started walking through Yankee dead as well. The Pennsylvanians all wore the tail of a buck deer in their caps. Jimmy stumbled into one and gave a yelp loud enough to be heard over the racket of the rifles. I looked at him and saw he was staring down at the dead Yankee like he’d never seen a body before.
The Yankee’s face was pale as ice with awful staring eyes and his mouth hanging open in frozen surprise. His chest was shot three times, the blood from the wounds staining his blue coat black in the dying light.
That is the kind of sight a soldier doesn’t like to remember, and I nudged Jimmy away from it, but Bill didn’t seem to mind it. He picked up the Yankee’s cap and pulled out the bucktail for a trophy, tucking it into the cord that he used to keep some sort of shape to his own limp hat.
“Move on, there!” came a voice I knew and hated.
It was Sergeant R. B. Fletcher, who had taken a personal dislike to me during our discussion of the disposition of my horse when I had first joined Company B, and had generously extended his sentiments to my friends in the months since. Fletcher was a martinet and a bully. He had no sense of humor particularly with ourselves.
Now he pushed Jimmy, who was still shaken, and raised a hand at me but I leaped out of his way and marched on before he could get near me. Bill got between Jim and Fletcher and the sergeant had to find someone else to harass.
We strode on and caught up with our line in the darkening wood. It was harder to see now, with smoke lying thick and the flashes of the rifles dazzling the eye. We had to walk carefully, sometimes only avoiding stepping on a wounded man because of his groans. We would stop when we thought we had a target, fire, load, and move forward again, peering at the ground to see the dim shapes of the fallen.
I caught sight of a bucktail Yankee and I fired and saw him jerk and fall. I was nearly sure it was my shot that hit him, surer than I’d ever been before. The way his head tilted aside as he dropped seemed a sort of personal gesture, as if he was asking why I’d gone and done that.
My brother Jamie is the philosopher, not myself, and he would be able to argue all kinds of lofty ideals about such a situation. I never did have a lofty habit of mind, but as we stumbled over the dead in that wood east of the Cornfield, I found myself thinking of old Pastor Wells back at home, saying, “always remember, Matthew, that God will punish wrong even if no one else catches you.” Why I w
as remembering that I had no idea.
I thought of Momma, also, who hadn’t wanted me to join the army. She couldn’t bear even thinking of the possibility that she might lose a son.
I remembered how she cried when I said I was going with or without her and Poppa’s blessing, and I wondered now at how cruel I had been to say so. I had thought, at the time, that it would all be much easier than it had turned out to be.
We did not push the Yankees all the way out of the woods. Things seemed to grind to a stop there under the trees, and we stood with our backs to a road that ran through the woods and fired round after round until it was so dark that all we could see of the Yankees was the flash of their rifles.
We were almost out of cartridges and had nothing to aim at any more, and the officers finally called it off. We marched back through the woods, where already the evil smell of death was mixing with the choking smoke. When we stepped out of there the sky was a heavy, starless indigo, and every man breathed deep of the clear air and heaved a sigh.
The Cornfield looked ghost-gray now in the evening. Candy scuttled out of it and fell in with us on our way back to where we’d been stationed that morning, in another stretch of woods west of the turnpike.
General Hood spoke to General Jackson and got us relieved for the night so we could cook a hot meal. We settled down behind the lines in the woods by the Dunker church and waited for our supply train to come up with the rations. It had started to rain, and while the trees protected us some it was still a dreary night, but we didn’t want to go to sleep and miss our rations.
Bill put together a fire and a dozen of us sat around it. Giles roasted slices of apple on the end of a twig, and tried to feed one to Candy who was having none of it.
Candy was our great friend and loyal companion. He had been named in honor of a candy maker from Austin, the man who’d given him to Isaac Stein of our company.
Candy was up to anything and while he did not take active part in the battles he was never far off. At first he was Isaac’s, then B Company’s, then the 4th Texas’ mascot and finally all of the Texas Brigade claimed him. He was a rare little trooper.
That night Candy curled up around Jimmy’s feet by the fire and heaved a big sigh. I felt about the same way myself.
I sat next to Jimmy and inspected the soles of my boots, which were just about worn through. There was a hole starting in the ball of each foot, and I wondered if there was a cobbler in all Maryland who would put new soles to a pair of Rebel boots for Confederate money.
They were good boots, made by a Mexican bootmaker in San Antonio, and they had lasted me more than a year of hard marching. This was better than most of my comrades had fared, many of whom were barefoot.
Our last issue of clothing and shoes had been back in March, and we were looking pretty rag-tag by now. I had drawn neither shoes nor clothing at that time. The uniform my sister made was still holding up, and the boots had been all right then.
The only thing I could have used was socks, and we weren’t sent any by the quartermaster. I had taken to wearing both my pairs of socks at once, and when we had a little time to rest, I’d wash the outer pair and switch them with the inner pair. I thought about doing that now, but decided against it. With the rain they might not dry in time for our next march, and there would surely be a march tomorrow, for we knew a big fight was coming.
The Yankees had their lines drawn up in sight of ours. Hood’s Division would be called up in relief the minute we were needed.
“Where the hell’s Carter with our rations?” Bill grumbled.
“Him and Wade are having a feast of it all to themselves, likely,” said Giles, holding out his stick to Bill, who took the apple slice from it and yelped as it sizzled his fingers.
“How many Yankees you boys kill today?” Bill said, tossing the apple from hand to hand.
I looked at Jimmy, who hadn’t said a word since we got into camp. “I didn’t keep count,” I said.
“You didn’t? Afraid I’d beat you out, eh?” Bill said.
I didn’t bother to reply. I was watching Jimmy, who sat staring into the fire, looking glum as a wet polecat. His thin face was even more pinched than usual, and I knew it wasn’t just hunger.
“Hey, Jim?” I said softly, “What was it about that dead Yank that bothered you so?”
Jimmy swallowed, and looked at his knees. “When I first saw him I thought he was—he looked just like my Uncle Tim.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Stupid,” Jimmy muttered.
“No.”
There was not much conversation after that. The rain drizzled on and there was no singing, no laughter. Just wet, weary Texans waiting for our rations. Finally the rain stopped and we slept a little, tired and blue as we were.
The supply wagons arrived just before dawn, and we lined up eagerly for our ration. It was only flour, but that was better than anything we’d had for days, so we quick made up loops of dough and twined them on our ramrods to bake over the fire.
By that time it was starting to get light, and the artillery commenced to lobbing shells at the Yankees and theirs lobbed shells back at us. They did not trouble us, however, as we were well behind the front line.
It was foggy and the mist muffled the sounds of fighting, but we could hear the rifles spitting at each other again off to the west. We sat around the fire watching our dough bake with single-minded attention. Candy gave a sharp bark, as if to explain to us as how he’d enjoy sharing our breakfast. He would have had his fill, but just about then a shell burst in the woods about twenty yards from our fire, and more came screaming and roaring overhead.
“God damn you to hell,” Bill shouted, shaking his fist toward the Yankee guns to the north.
We had all jumped to our feet, and another shell burst in the air right over our heads, making me drop my ramrod in the fire. I cussed as I fished it out, the dough flattened and covered with ashes, which I tried to brush off.
Bill squatted back down and thrust his dough in the fire, but it was too late. Sergeant Fletcher came stomping through the woods shouting to us to fall in.
“Go to hell,” Bill shouted.
In a flash Fletcher grabbed the front of his shirt and screamed into his face. “You send them Yankees to hell, boy, what else are you here for! Get into line!”
Fletcher shoved Bill away and for a second Bill looked ripe to murder him, but Fletcher was already going on, rousing the rest of the company into their ranks. Bill contented himself with cussing and we fell in.
I swallowed the half-baked, ash-covered ruin of my breakfast and wiped the ramrod clean on my pants before loading my rifle with the first round of the day. This has a Yankee’s name on it, I thought, and tried to get mad, but the fog and the lump of raw dough in my gut kept me cold.
We advanced out of the woods to find a farmhouse burning east of us, with our artillery on the high ground between it and the Dunker church. We crossed the turnpike and moved north toward the Cornfield, which looked nothing at all like it had the night before.
Half its stalks were broken and battered and a pall of smoke hung over it and the pasture to the south, where Yankees stood with heaps of dead men at their feet, firing at Lawton’s command not thirty yards away. What remained of Lawton’s men retired through our ranks as we came up, then we raised a yell and fired such a blast into the Yankees that they retreated in a hurry back into the Cornfield.
Yankee guns spat case shot at us from out of the corn, but we fired on their gunners until they were forced to retire. We moved up to the edge of the field, stepping over dead and wounded men of both armies, some lying in ranks as though felled by a scythe.
The 1st and 5th Texas went into the corn while the rest of us faced west across the turnpike. Jimmy and Bill and I were right at the edge of the Cornfield, and we rested our rifles on the top rail of the fence along the turnpike, peering across at the west woods where we’d tried to cook breakfast. Some Yankees had gotten into its north edge and we
started firing at each other across the pike, while all hell seemed to be going on around us.
The Cornfield rattled with Yankee canister and shook like it was alive and scared out of its mind. I glanced back and saw Candy dart into it, and I screamed at him to come back but I doubt he heard me, in any case he didn’t return. For some reason this made me mad at last, and I loaded and fired, shrieking curses at the Yankees across the pike, aiming at anything that moved.
Bill gave out a broken cry and went to his knees, his face a mass of blood. Jimmy bent down to him but the next second he stood up again, screaming with rage as he loaded and fired, loaded and fired.
The air was still as glass and thick with smoke. A ball zinged by my ear so close it burned me, and icewater poured through my veins, but I only cussed harder. I could see that some kind of commotion was going on across the turnpike, though the smoke was so heavy the Yankees were only vague shapes.
I spotted a flag and aimed below it. My first shot had no effect and I loaded to fire again. Just as I was taking aim, a roar of fire blazed out from a cannon beyond the fence and a sheet of canister flew at us, splintered the fence rails, and felled our whole rank.
Jimmy went down with the others. I could hear the balls thudding into them. I was hit by only one ball which grazed my thigh, and I had a fleeting thought that Momma’s prayers must have preserved me, because every other man in the front rank was down.
I was alone with the groaning, writhing heaps of my companions beside me. Without thinking I stepped to my right, into the Cornfield.
Voices jabbered in my head, Momma praying and weeping, Sergeant Fletcher scolding and Bill laughing and saying “How many Yankees? How many, boy?” The most sensible voice, if any could be called sensible, was brother Jamie of all people, telling me in a goddamn practical tone that the corn was no more protection than the rails, less in fact, and that I’d better do something.
I found I was breathing very hard. I started to crouch down but there were dead men at my feet and I didn’t want to be close to them.
