by Ed Gorman
All this notwithstanding, the Raiders had not found the war to be one gastronomic and vinial excursion through the ruins of the Old South. They had been involved in some running fights with Confederate cavalry, and had lost one man to a sniper on the Atlanta road the day before they encountered Oscar. This was the owner of the horse he now rode.
As the newest member of the company, Oscar spent his camp time washing Major Collingwood’s Irish linen tablecloth and napkins and polishing his silver. He contemplated leaving to resume his search for the 150th, but did not think his leg was up yet to a long journey on foot, and he did not want to take the gray and risk being shot for a horse thief. He might be shot either way, if he were captured and the major decided to treat him as a deserter. And so he remained, following the path of Lincoln’s army with the others and sneaking out of his bedroll evenings to soothe the burning in his red, chapped hands by smearing them with river mud, until South Georgia Crossing.
A village had existed there when the ferry was still running across the river, but then state engineers had built a covered bridge and when there was no longer money to be made from passage, the population had moved on. Only a boarded-up schoolhouse and a scattering of cabins still stood along with the remains of the dock to mark the spot where a community had thriven. Major Collingwood moved his gear into the schoolhouse for the night while the others sought quarters in those buildings whose roofs had not yet fallen in, or wherever else offered shelter from the rain, which had begun in the morning as a light drizzle and had settled into a steady downpour by late afternoon. As was their custom, they removed what provisions they needed that night and packed the rest in an oilcloth. They then gathered the corners together, tied them, and hauled the waterproof bundle into the upper branches of a sycamore to protect it from bears.
A rifle report awoke Oscar shortly before dawn. The rain had stopped. Leaving his shelter on the sloping bank beneath the bridge, he approached the glowing globe of a lantern and found most of the command, some in stockinged feet with their braces dangling, standing around the sycamore. The oilcloth bundle was gone; a frayed scrap of rope dangled beneath the limb where it had hung.
“There. I knew I hit one of the sons of bitches.” Sergeant Harney, fully dressed and wreathed in smoke and the rotten-egg stench of spent powder, pointed with his Henry at a dark spot on the ground that glittered in the lantern light.
“Here’s another,” sang out Private Wheelock. He was crouched a few yards away, holding a flaming match near the earth.
Major Collingwood joined them, tucking in his shirttail, as they began to follow the trail of bloodstains, led by Harney with his lantern. The trail ended at a shallow ford downriver. The horses were brought, after which they crossed and discovered more blood on the other side. As dawn broke, they found the fugitives, seated beneath a twisted old apple tree around the oilcloth spread out on the ground as at a picnic. One of them was winding a length of dirty rag around the even dirtier bare foot of another, while the rest were too busy gorging themselves on half a roasted chicken and a leg of mutton to hear the riders approaching. Their dirty, emaciated faces showed no surprise when they were surrounded, only exhaustion.
There were four, including an old man of sixty and a boy not much older than twelve. The others were young men, but their unshorn hair, whiskers, and hollow cheeks and eyes made them ancient. One of these was the man with the wounded foot. The group’s clothes were a motley mix of faded homespun and Union castoff. Only the old man retained a morsel of the Confederate uniform: a gray kepi, unspeakably filthy, with a broken peak. The boy and the injured man were barefoot. When questioned, the old man revealed that the three adults were all that remained of the Tallapoosa Volunteers, an Alabama company that had been fighting since Fort Sumter. The boy had been with them only six weeks.
The prisoners were disarmed—it was a pitiful arsenal made up of one good navy Colt, a squirrel rifle of 1812 vintage, a shotgun, and a LaMatte pistol whose action was so loose it would have had to be fired with both hands just to keep it from flying apart—and placed under guard while a conference took place.
“The Articles of War are clear in cases such as this,” said the major. “Enemy soldiers found in friendly dress are to be hanged as spies.”
Wheelock was argumentative. “It’s just old rags. They haven’t enough between them to make up a complete uniform.”
“The Articles say nothing about completeness. In any case, we can’t keep them. They will slow us down, and there is no telling when we’ll come upon a regiment that will be willing to take them into custody.”
Oscar said, “They’re just vagabonds. They were only after food.”
“Food is life,” said the major. “Where do we draw the line before we starve? Gentlemen, let us vote.”
The vote was eight-to-six in favor of execution. The prisoners were driven on foot—the injured man leaning upon the man who had bandaged him—to the covered bridge, which had taken several mortar rounds in some forgotten skirmish, leaving most of one side open with shreds of shattered siding dangling from the timbers. Ropes were produced, and the four were lined up on the open edge with nooses around their necks and the other ends slung up over a stringer. Nobody knew how to tie a proper hangman’s knot, and so a square hitch was used. The man with the wounded foot cursed from the pain, the other young man spat insults and struggled when his hands were bound behind him, but Private Bending struck him alongside the head with the buttstock of his Henry, dazing him until he was securely trussed. The old man was silent. The boy cried, snuffling snot and whimpering, and his knees buckled, but Corporal Loesser hauled him up by the seat of his britches while Harney secured the noose. Oscar stood out of the way with a lump of ice in the pit of his stomach and watched.
When the last of the ropes was tied fast and the men who had tied them had climbed down, Major Collingwood told Harney to get on with it. The sergeant strode the length of the bridge, pausing just long enough to give each man a one-handed shove from behind.
One neck broke, Oscar thought, possibly two; those of the young men. He heard a sharp crack, and in any case neither of them moved beyond the jerks and twitches of healthy muscles unwilling to surrender their motor functions without a fight. The old man was all bones, a husk, and lacked the weight necessary to snap the spine, and his body writhed and twisted and his throat rattled. The boy’s example, however, would stay with Oscar long after he’d forgotten how the old man had died. The young body is built to survive; once it has conquered the many pernicious childhood afflictions, it resists unnatural death in its every grain. So violent were the convulsions that Oscar thought the boy was consciously trying to regain his foothold on the bridge while the fluid cooked in his throat and his tongue slid out and his face went from scarlet to purple to deepest black. Later, an army orderly who was studying to practice medicine would tell Oscar that a body deprived of oxygen begins to expire within three minutes. He did not believe it. In his memory, the boy struggled for the better part of an hour before he swung at last in a balletic half-revolution to the left, his legs drawn up beneath him to form an elongated question-mark four feet above the South Georgia River.
Seeking for someplace to rest other than that congested profile, Oscar’s gaze slid to the boy’s hands. Below the coarse rope that lashed his wrists they were swollen, with red streaks against the white where the thick veins and arteries had hemorrhaged. The fingers were as fat as sausages.
The prisoners’ bowels had released, and the reek sent Oscar to the grassy bank opposite the Raiders’ camp to be sick. But he had eaten nothing and could bring nothing up. He stopped trying and sat down with his forehead resting against his knees. The wet grass soaked through his trousers, chilling him. For the rest of his life, the feel of damp clothes against his skin would bring back the war, and with it the sight of the boy’s hands, like scarecrow’s gloves stained and stuffed with straw.
Primarily known for making the New England countryside come alive in his
novels and short stories, Brendan DuBois has written several dozen critically-acclaimed short stories, and has had his work appear in several year’s best anthologies. One of his stories, “The Dark Snow,” was nominated for the Edgar Award for best short story of 1996. Recent novels include Shattered Shell, the third mystery featuring contemporary magazine writer/sleuth, Lewis Cole, and Resurrection Day, a techno-thriller extrapolating what might have happened if the Cuban Missile Crisis had turned into a full-fledged war. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, where he is working on another novel.
During the Civil War, all kinds of people were pressed into service as spies, including the most unlikely anyone would think of. DuBois has crafted a fine and subtle tale from this premise.
THE INVISIBLE SPY
Brendan DuBois
In a campsite near the farthest point of the Union lines outside of Petersburg, Virginia, Colonel Thomas Cabot of the Union army slowly paced the length of his tent. It was nearing dusk and with each passing minute his impatience grew and grew, like an increasing hunger, like being out on a long march with nothing to eat save an old hunk of hardtack. His adjutant, Captain Jacob Shaw, looked up as he polished his boots. “Colonel, this pacing ain’t going to help much, you know that,” he said.
“I know, Jacob, I know,” he said, pausing as he looked out the open tent flap, seeing the lines of canvas tents, as far as one could see, in a farmer’s hayfield. “But we have been promised this information, and I in turn have promised the general that we will have it before the evening is out.”
The sound of the brush against the leather was almost rhythmic, reminding Cabot of his time as a music teacher, back in Boston. Keeping time, one of the first things he taught.… From a teacher of music to a leader of men, and what strange events over the past few years had conspired to take him out of the cool brick buildings of Boston to this hilly and swampy landscape in Virginia, now crisscrossed with trenches and forts.
“Then there is nothing you can do but wait, sir,” his adjutant said. “Wait and be patient.”
“Wait and be damned,” Cabot muttered, looking out again through the tent flaps. “Just a few miles away are the Rebs, and among those damn Rebs is a spy, working for us, who has promised me information tonight, before we go to battle tomorrow. Think of him over there, trying to slip through those Rebel lines and pickets. I can rightly tell you, Jacob, that he’s not thinking of being patient.”
Shaw made a dismissive sound as he continued the polishing. “That’s a nasty business, spying. Don’t rightly hold with it, sir.”
Cabot kept on staring out at the parade ground, at the soldiers going through their nightly ritual, preparing for their evening meal, while he continued waiting and looking for the visitor that was promised to him tonight.
“Spying is mentioned in the Bible, I’ll remind you, Jacob,” Cabot said softly. “And if it’s in the Good Book, and can help us defeat the Rebels and free men from bondage, then I don’t mind spying, not at all.” Cabot crossed his arms, rocked slightly on his heels. “What I do mind, curse it all, is waiting. Just standing here and waiting.”
* * *
It was dusk, and already it was cold. Corporal Harmon Brewster of the Army of Northern Virginia shivered as he stood at his post, on the Halifax Road outside of Petersburg, just a few miles from the Union lines. Already he could hear the distant thuds of cannon fire, as the damn blue-bellies tossed shells into his regiment and others, still enduring this long siege.
He heard some low talk and laughter, and he looked over to the small rise of land, winch rose up to the west. A small fire burned there as his relief sat and warmed up with a handful of others. Their task tonight was to check whatever traffic was going through on this road, making sure all had the correct passes to let them pass through the regiment’s lines. A boring task, almost as bad as drilling in camp during those long months of winter when nothing much ever happened, but he found he was nervous as he stood there, rifle in his hands. For tonight he and the others were looking for a spy, a spy that had been giving the Federals details on their forces and their lines.
He shivered again, remembering the warning from Lieutenant Morgan, who was one of the figures up there around the campfire. The lieutenant had gathered them together earlier and said, “Be extra watchful tonight, boys. It’s no secret that the Federals are preparing for another assault. Word is that they have spies among our lines, checking the number of regiments and where they’re located. This road comes closest to the Union lines. If a spy is going to try to pass through our lines tonight, this’d be a good place as any for him to try.”
Harmon had wanted to ask a question of the lieutenant but was too shy to say anything aloud, in front of the other men in the company. He was a corporal but most of the men just ignored him, for they knew he was young, probably the youngest in the regiment, and Harmon was sure they were right. When he had enlisted, more than two years ago, he had been only fifteen. But he had gone to the recruiter and raised his right hand in an oath, saying that he was over eighteen. Of course, what he had done—what many other farm-boys in his county had done—was to scrawl the number 18 on a piece of paper and put it in inside his shoe. That way, he hadn’t been lying. He really was “just over eighteen.”
On this day he had a couple of questions, and thankfully, some of the other men had spoken up. Sergeant Mortimer had said, “Lieutenant, just what in hell are we lookin’ for? We can’t expect a fella to approach with a paper signed by that baboon Lincoln, saying he’s working for the Federals.”
Somebody else spoke up. “Or to have a paper from Mr. Pinkerton, either,” and they laughed, knowing how Pinkerton and his crew were working for the Federals, trying desperately to get information about where and how the Virginia regiments would appear.
Lieutenant Morgan—his mustache heavy and flowing to each side—had smiled patiently at their questions and said, “Look, it’s simple enough, boys. Anybody and everybody going through on this road tonight gets searched. I don’t care if it’s the old granny hisself, General Robert E. Lee. We’re gonna search everybody who goes through and look for any suspicious papers. Any maps, long letters, or papers that have words on ’em that don’t make sense. Like a code. Everybody gets searched, understood?”
Sure, they had all understood, and Harmon had gotten the first watch, and as he came down to his post, somebody called out, “Remember now, Harmon, if it’s a whore going through tonight, you can search her petticoats without paying!”
He had flushed at that, and said nothing in reply. Now he was at his post, a small lantern at his feet. While the others were up there, warming themselves around the fire, jawing and smoking, he shivered here, waiting for some damn person to come through. His shoes were frayed and worn, held together by leather straps, and his trousers had worn right through both knees. His shirt was simple cotton but at least he had a wool jacket and a slouch hat, which he had pulled down around his ears.
The task tonight was simple. The road was straight enough at this point that he could hear or see someone approaching from some distance away. When he or somebody else saw someone coming down the road, he would call out a challenge. “Loud enough for them and us to hear,” Lieutenant Morgan had said. That way, Morgan had explained, it would give the men around the campfire time enough to come down and help whoever was on guard duty.
Harmon leaned his rifle against his shoulder, rubbed his hands. He looked up at the campfire. Damn it, he was only supposed to be out here an hour before being relieved, and he had a good feeling he had already been out here long enough. But Lieutenant Morgan was the only one among them who had a watch, and he could be forgetful, especially when some good stories were being told.
Damn, it was cold—and then he looked up.
Somebody was coming down the road.
* * *
Colonel Thomas Cabot looked over at his adjutant, who was making a show of putting on his boots. Shaw was a rich man’s son, from New Hampshire, and he had the bes
t clothing and supplies in the entire regiment. But he wasn’t a dandy—no sir—and Cabot had seen him fight as well as any other man during the long months of this bloody Civil War. But what Cabot didn’t like was the man’s pessimism, his dark way of looking at things, which Shaw had no qualms in displaying.
“You know, Colonel, I know you trust Sergeant Calhoun, and the spy that works with him.”
“I trust him with my life and those of the men in my regiment,” Cabot said simply.
“Yes, but just because it has worked once, does not mean it will work twice,” Shaw observed. “And to tell the general that you will have this information before the evening is out, well…”
Cabot looked out again at the parade ground. “I know. I was no doubt too eager. It may be foolish; yet, if it saves the lives of my men during the assault tomorrow, then I do not mind being made a fool.”
“A fool, yes, sir, but I pray that the sergeant is not leading us into a trap. I would much rather be a live fool than a dead hero.”
