Confederates (66 page)

Then yet again the farmyard was full of yah-hooing Confederates. ‘We's come to stay,' one of them yodelled at the sky. Tarheels.

Usaph got up about then. Everyone ignored him. He could walk, he decided, if he kept his mind to it and locked the knee joints. He walked straight out the farm gate like a man going on a stroll. What was out there set him shuddering. He could see some of the flattened stooks of Miller's cornfield beyond the woods, and the line of the Hagerstown Pike, and the wood beyond the pike as far as the little white church of the Dunkers, and everywhere was this mat of young flesh and meat, sometimes mounded where a Texan had fallen on a New Hampshire boy and a Connecticutter had fallen in his turn on the Texan and a Tarheel had gone down writhing atop the Connecticutter. And the mounds stirred and protested as the still living tried to crawl out from beneath. And everywhere the three Deities of God, Mother and Water were being called on amongst the strewn pieces of youths. And at the call of water Usaph remembered his own profound thirst but had nothing to drink and took again instead to cussing that farmer who'd broken the handle off the pump. Trembling as he went, he took a country lane down towards the pike. He was shuddering away. He believed that America had been changed. That instead of fields of corn the fields of the dead seed of the young men ran away for ever, even to the Gulf of Mexico maybe, which he had never seen. In the fields all around him the wounded that had their legs still, and the fearful as well, staggered about. By the side of the lane a plump Irish girl, laundress or whore, knelt by a dead Yankee keening.

‘Oh it will be remembered,' she sang,

‘How cursed General Meagher fell drunk from his horse as battle began,

But still sent my love to be pierced through.

My lovely boy is dead,

The shroud is on his head.

And he is gone

Who knew the sun. My lovely Sergeant O'Shea.'

It was such a ghosty sound and it gusted quivering Usaph along the lane as if he were the victim of a wind or a season. He drew level with a hobbling Rebel whose face was wounded and he was carrying a live grunting pig. Where he had got it from and what his exact hopes were for it were beyond guessing. Fruit of the battle.

8

Though it was only ten-thirty in the morning, it was yet already the worst day America had seen. Three U.S. corps had come in against Jackson's end of the Army of Northern Virginia. First Hooker's and then Mansfield's and then Sumner's. General Abner Doubleday of Hooker's corps, founder of baseball, saw more good pitching arms shattered and blown off in the fields along the Hagerstown pike than in a lifetime of instructing college boys in Cooperstown, New York. Hooker was shaken. Joe Mansfield, white-whiskered and an old regular and fighter of Indians and Mexicans, was shot in the stomach. Sumner was dazed and trembling.

Tom Jackson spent the morning visiting batteries but saying little, just frowning in his saddle and considering amongst all that noise the reports Sandie and Kyd and others brought in. General David Jones was out concussed by an explosion, one report said. There wasn't a colonel left in the Stonewall Division, said another. Andie Lawton had a wound in the shoulder. General Billy Starke was dead. As for units, there were some 600 men left standing in the whole Stonewall Division. Douglass's Georgian Brigade had lost two-thirds of its boys. Hay's had lost three-quarters. Maybe six out of ten of the Texans had been shot.

Tom Jackson wasn't amazed or trembling. All statistics came from the hand of a hard but fatherly God. He told his staff to watch for stragglers. At ten o'clock near the place where the Smoketown road met the pike he himself found a straggler with a light face wound carrying a pig in his arms and therefore sent him back.

Surgeon Maguire had come to talk to Tom Jackson around 9.45. At that stage Stonewall was standing by an artillery battery near the Dunker church. The noise was beyond all telling. Maguire gave Tom Jackson some peaches he'd picked from a tree in passing on his way across from Shepherdstown. While Hunter talked in his ear, Stonewall split the peaches in long fingers and ate them hungrily, getting the nectar in his whiskers. All through the woods on the left of the church there was this crackling and hissing, and Maguire could see Yankees through the Miller cornfield and the woods beyond.

‘Over there,' yelled Maguire, pointing to the masses of Union soldiers. ‘They look like hordes.'

‘Indeed,' said Tom Jackson evenly, mashing the peach flesh.

Maguire said, ‘I admit I'm disturbed by what I've heard, sir. The Shepherdstown Road is crammed with stragglers. Some of them officers. They all say the business is going bad, sir.'

Tom Jackson didn't like his surgeon being hysterical like this. ‘Stragglers will always tell you the business is going bad, Doctor Maguire.'

‘I'm wondering if the wounded as a group shouldn't be evacuated south from Shepherdstown straight away.'

‘Down the Valley?'

‘That's right.'

‘Maybe,' said Stonewall, still ripping into the peaches, and as if it didn't have anything to do with him.

Hunter Maguire decided to make a speech. ‘Look, General, we have six churches in Shepherdstown – the Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, Catholic and the rest. Already they're all full. There are men laid out on the steps of the altar. I saw an armless boy propped in the pulpit of the Lutheran church.' Maguire could feel the edge of panic that was in his own voice now. He expunged it. He could tell how little Stonewall appreciated edges of panic.

‘You should take over the schoolhouses,' Tom Jackson muttered, looking all the while up the pike and at the cornfield.

‘We have,' Maguire said, more deliberate now and calmer. ‘The Oddfellows' Hall as well. The Freemasons'. Surgeons are working in the Town Council room. We're also using farmhouses, barns, corn cribs …'

‘Corn cribs,' said Stonewall dreamily, as if he was reminded of boyhood.

‘Livery stables too,' said Maguire.

‘Well, Doctor Maguire, you must relieve the pressure as you see fit.' Tom Jackson worked with his tongue at the peach skin lodged between his lower front teeth. ‘I'd dislike it an amount though if you let all this influence your thoughts.' He gestured towards the northeast, towards the cornfield again, towards the sunken laneway over there where Daniel Hill was so short of fire that he was shooting a private's musket himself.
‘They,'
he said,
‘they
have just about done their worst.'

God knows how he believed that. But at about 10.30 that day the Yankee infantry dragged back into the woods, far up the pike, that they'd started from that morning. When that happened, Jackson and young Junkin and Hotchkiss and Sandie rode up the pike themselves a little way. The cannon on both sides of the road were still blazing, and all the fences were hung with scarecrow corpses and, against the embankments, young boys lay with their heads back and their lips parted.

After some quarter of a mile, Tom Jackson's party came to what at first seemed a thick line of dead against the bank at the side of the pike. It proved to be instead a Tarheel brigade sheltering there. Their reason for sheltering was clear enough. There seemed to be a Yankee battery sighted on them – its guns stood in place way over beyond a farmhouse. Tom Jackson had got glimpses of that farmhouse in its stony yard all morning. It was about as far as anyone in his army had got. He could see through his glasses that there were corpses on its roof. It was from beyond that roof that the Yankee battery was firing now. Fragments of shell clattered down on the pike. Sandie and Hotchkiss and young Junkin sat their horses and waited to be killed by such fragments; but they were not touched. Once they had dismounted, they felt less naked.

A colonel rushed up to them as they stood under the embankment bowing their heads a little before the rain of metal. This colonel said his name was Matt Ransome. These boys here were his regiment. The 33rd North Carolina. They'd tried to get to the farmhouse and the battery on the rise beyond it, but they suspected there was still an immense force over there.

That was a question Tom Jackson was interested in. Hotchkiss knew what the General was thinking and couldn't help being a little shocked by it. Tom Jackson, after fighting off three attacks at a price the Confederacy could bare afford, was thinking now of counter-attack. Of rolling up McClellan's right flank in the Stonewall manner. If he tried that, few of these Tarheels of Colonel Ransome's would be complete men by noon.

Up on the embankment stood a big hickory. It seemed to Stonewall that a man ought to be able to see beyond the farm and even beyond the hill and the Yankee battery from the branches of that hickory. A man should be able to see what McClellan had in reserve over there.

He called for a volunteer to climb the hickory. ‘Everyone knows from when they were young,' he said for those that could hear, ‘the hickory's one of the best climbing trees you can find.'

A dozen boys started forward. They all wanted to be able to tell their grandchildren, thought Hotchkiss, that once they climbed a tree for Stonewall. The first who got to him was a lanky boy without any shoes. He said his name was Private William Hood. He had that easy rustic way and the sort of slack rustic grin you'd expect. He was up in the high branches inside half a minute.

‘Can you see any troops beyond?' Jackson called up at him. Jackson himself had climbed the bank and was leaning his hip against one of the long lower branches.

‘Whoo-ee,' said the Tarheel. ‘There be oceans of 'em, General.'

‘Count the flags you see,' Jackson said, not really happy with such an inexact report.

Private Hook started counting. ‘They be 1, 2, 3 …'

Just as well he can count, thought Hotchkiss. Bullets began to travel towards the hickory now, making a sharp rustle as they passed through the foliage. There were some sharpshooters firing at William Hood.
Chunk!
went a ball into the ancient wood of the hickory. Jackson didn't seem to notice.

‘… 7, 8, 9 …'

Hotchkiss saw that a dead boy hanging on the fence beyond the hickory and in a rough line with Jackson jerked as a bullet hit the unfeeling flesh. But Jackson had this Presbyterian belief that God would take him when the time was fit. Until then sharpshooters could just about go on wasting their ammunition.

‘… 19, 20, 21.'

About the time Hood got to 30, a shell exploded above the apex of the tree. It did not stop Hood counting or Jackson listening. When Hood got to 39, the General held his hand up.

‘That will do. Come down, sir.'

Hook got down even quicker than he'd got up. Well, he has his historical anecdote, Hotchkiss thought.

A sort of whimsical light came into Jackson's eye. He turned to talk to Colonel Ransome. ‘Why ever did you try to take a battery that's supported by 39 regiments?' he asked.

The figure filled him with a divine contempt for McClellan. 39 flags! And he let them stand by. That's how (under God) we'll win it. By a whisker. By moving regiments around to whatever stretch of fence or pike or lane they're needed at. While McClellan permitted himself – and the Lord permitted McClellan to permit himself – to leave whole corps, perfectly good ones, standing around in the fitful sunlight of mid-morning.

There was a sunken laneway running near Mumma's burned-out farmhouse. It was beyond Miller's cornfield and ran sort of north-south, leading towards the township of Sharpsburg itself. Dan Hill had charge of its defence, but under Tom Jackson's orders. Jackson rushed some of the units, who'd got intact through the fight at the church and in the cornfield, across to the laneway to help Dan Hill's division. They found that thoroughfare filled to its lips with the dead and the wailing; yet it was held.

At the same time the Yankees moved against the laneway, a Union general called Burnside was meant to cross the Antietam by a stone bridge at the south of the hamlet and take the Rebels from that end. He did not get around to trying it till mid-afternoon, and then again the Confederacy – in the shape of its northern Virginia forces – survived by a hair, namely because Ambrose Hill's boys arrived back from Harpers Ferry at the exact right hour, about 4.30.

Weeks later, Searcy would read accounts of the fight in both Northern and Southern newspapers he managed to obtain. Already the North were into the habit of calling the day Antietam, for they had been engaged so much with that obscure country stream, with crossing it, pivoting on its banks. The South had begun to call the event Sharpsburg, for their line, their argument, their future had been anchored on the little town.

These accounts and any others he would ever read would always sicken Searcy. Why, knowing everything, hadn't McClellan managed to trap the beast, the Secession itself, the Serpent of Slavery between Antietam Creek and the big river that morning and so ended it all? It was a question he would bore people with for some years to come. It was the old question of how such incompetence could go hand in hand with a good cause.

Usaph had already left Sharpsburg. By noon he was on the Shepherdstown road and spent the afternoon and the whimpering night in a stables on the edge of that town.

Some orderlies moved through the stables with pails of water and dippers, and when Usaph had drunk deeply he slept. It was almost like he was devouring wedges of sleep; but like sour plums in a cake there was always a dream at the core of the sleep and it would wake him. Yet the day lurched on into the night, and he huddled in a corner behind an old harrow in the hope of not being bothered by surgeons.

In the morning he crossed the river at a place called Boteler's Ford, the water pulling at his knees and wearying him. There were many others crossing too, soldier-farmers who'd done what they could and now were going home. On the Virginia bank, an elderly provost officer with gentle eyes was trying to halt this drift. As Usaph came out of the river he heard him say to an infantryman: ‘Where's your furlough, son?'