Jacob's Ladder (30 page)

Alexander's leg was wet and hot: he had pissed himself. His haversack contained a second pair of trousers, but he could not recall, for the life of him, where he'd set it down.

The colonel's barefoot aide ran up the ridge in a low crouch as black death crows cleared his head by inches.

Alexander shivered. His wet crotch was getting cold.

Hunched over, Walker's aide duckwalked the last few terrible feet to that crest, and Alexander blinked his eyes, expecting him to become, instantly, a fine red mist. But the man was still alive, shifting to his left, seeking a better vantage point.

A shell hit ten feet from where Alexander lay. At first it was just a black something, but it took a bounce and Alexander drew himself up small so the explosion wouldn't kill him, and the dud shell stopped rolling and the colonel pointed at it and was laughing, laughing.

Duncan Gatewood thought of nothing, which was a gift he'd acquired, to think of nothing. A vague comfortable feeling suffused his bones—he was relaxed enough that he might slip into the earth beneath him, and his mind drifted, touching here and there, without comment. In a hollow formed by the roots of a tremendous white oak, Duncan lay with his cheek pressed against one root and his foot braced against another, dreaming about his childhood, the boy he'd been. He remembered Uncle Agamemnon. Years ago he'd happened on old Uncle doing his mumbo jumbo beside the river. Uncle crouched in a crossed circle outlined in white ash, chanting in a language Duncan did not know. The young master slinked away and never went near that place again. That magic spot was Stratford land the Gatewoods didn't own.

The silence, when it came, was shocking. When the Federal guns quit, blue regiments reformed across the plain. Rubbing sleep out of his eyes, Duncan joined Colonel Walker's aide on the ridgetop.

“Will you look at that!”

“Jesus Christ Almighty!”

“There! That's the Bucktails?”

“Those in the black hats. They're the Iron Brigade. They gave us unadulterated hell at Manassas.”

“Your eyes are better than mine,” Colonel Walker said, lifting his glasses.

A rank of infantry, two deep, at a steady step, a thousand yards wide, and a second rank, two deep, behind the first. Officers rode before their troops.

“It's a damn dress parade,” Duncan breathed.

Dead silence from the Confederates on the hills. Dead silence from the advancing Federals. Not a sound, not a bird call, not the whinny of a horse nor the sharp crack of the sharpshooter's rifle—the regiments came on like something in a dream.

“Come on,” Walker's barefoot aide whispered fiercely. “Bring them shoes. Bring them shoes, hyar!”

They swept over the dismantled fences.

Someone was muttering, “Fire, fire. Please God, fire.” Colonel Walker's saddle creaked as he leaned forward to see better.

At exactly eight hundred yards, as per General Jackson's prior orders, the Confederate guns opened up and blew the blue soldiers into rags. Guns in the fore, guns to the left flank, guns to the right; and maybe they weren't the best guns and certainly not all their shells exploded, but there were very many guns, pre-aimed at specific targets on the plain; so Confederate guns ate men.

Some of the Federals ran, most flopped down where they stood, and some of the men who lay flat on that plain were still breathing and some had had life's breath knocked out of them.

Now they knew the Confederate guns' positions, Federal guns made their reply. Guns were rushed onto the field, quickly disconnected from their limbers, swung into place, and aimed. Now they had their targets, now they would take revenge! Federal shells tossed clods of frozen earth into the air and part-buried sweaty Confederate gunners. Federal shells disemboweled an officer's prized gray mare. Federal batteries killed gunners, smashed limbers, and hit an ammunition wagon, which blew up with a tremendous crash.

After the Confederate guns were silenced, the Federal regiments regained their feet, re-formed, and surged forward, this time at the double-quick. The Confederate riflemen had orders not to fire until the Federals were right on top of them: the railroad was their mark.

“They are not cowards,” Colonel Walker remarked.

When the Federals reached the railroad, the woods erupted with musket fire, a long rolling blast. The Federal lines melted as if flesh and bone were no more substantial than theater scrims. Officers were whisked off their horses, color bearers lived scant seconds before they fell. Like great wounded beasts the federal Regiments groaned and reeled from side to side, stung, stung, stung.

One regiment howled and fired and disintegrated into individual soldiers who charged across the tracks and into the swamp at the foot of the hill.

Colonel Walker turned to Duncan. “Does Gregg know?”

“He's in reserve!”

“But there's nobody in front of him. Not a soul. Those Federals will surprise him! Courier!”

The colonel handed a note to Alexander. “Take this to General Gregg. It is no jest this time, soldier. Deliver the message into General Gregg's hands, and hurry!”

“Sir, perhaps I . . .” Duncan began.

“A man on foot will get through that tangle quicker than a horseman. Go! For God's sake, go!”

Alexander Kirkpatrick went bounding down the hill as fast as he could run, leaping shattered timber and toppled trees, the residue of battle. Alexander's heart was in the place his brain usually occupied. No one had remarked on his stained trousers! They had asked for his help! Perhaps he would be a brave Confederate soldier!

Alexander's right foot tripped on an oak staub and his left leg stretched to outrace his stumble, but he landed flat on his chest and his face slid into a blackberry thicket. His eyes went white, his breath sucked like a man shot in the chest, and he pushed his hand toward his face only to recoil from the sight. His hand was filled with thorns, a dozen of them, tips black beneath his flesh. They were so deep! He'd never had thorns so deep! When he lifted his head, more thorns scratched his pate, and in a panic Alexander writhed backward, though thorns clung as if they knew and hated him personally. He sat back on his heels staring at his hands. Tears streamed down Alexander's cheeks. He had not sought riches, or power or dominion over other men. Just a quiet corner in a library where a pale sun streamed onto oak tables in the late afternoon.

Alexander Kirkpatrick leaned sobbing against a hickory tree. For the first time in months, he missed Sallie. Sallie would have known what to do. Sallie always knew what to do. Why wasn't Sallie here?

Whimpering, sucking at his hand, Alexander watched blue-clad soldiers advancing across the plain. Confederate musketry stopped many at the railroad, but some regiments slipped sideways and entered the woods.

Those blue-clad figures would cheerfully kill Alexander. He sucked on his trembling hand. Anonymous men were coming up this hill to destroy a mechanism so intricate it could never be reconstructed. These men, flailing and cursing and fighting—they knew nothing. They fought because they knew nothing. These men, many of them, did not even know how to read! How could they comprehend a man like him?

Sallie had only pretended to understand him. The very day they arrived at her father's hovel, Sallie showed her true self: “Carry the firewood, Alexander! What will the horse do for fodder after this hay is gone?” Such questions! Such drumming, unanswerable questions!

Alexander Kirkpatrick's mind whirled like a top as he picked his way back up the hill he had so hopefully descended.

Maxcy Gregg's North Carolinians believed they were in reserve behind a full regiment of Tennessee troops, and their rifles were stacked. When bullets started whizzing through the underbrush, they ran to reclaim their weapons, but old General Gregg forbade them, cursing. “Those are our men out there, boys! Tennesseans!”

Gregg was wrong. They were Pennsylvanians, Ohioans, and New Yorkers, and although they were green regiments, they knew enough to pour fire on the flank and rear of weaponless Confederates. While exhorting his men to hold their fire, General Gregg was shot off his horse.

“The woods are swarming with Federals.” Colonel Walker lowered his glass. “They have broken our line, and I fear for General Gregg.”

A weaponless soldier crossed the ridgetop and started down the backside. “What regiment?” the colonel bellowed.

“Nineteenth Georgia. Ain't none of us left.”

Other soldiers streamed out of the woods, some wounded, some white-faced and speechless.

A captain begged Colonel Walker to help reorganize his shattered regiment. “Thirty-seventh North Carolina. We could have whipped them, but we had no more bullets.” Tears cut streaks through the powder smudges on his face.

General Early and his aides arrived just as an artillery officer lunged up the hill, his horse spewing blood from its nostrils. “Sir, there is an awful gulf before you, swarming with Federals. They will capture our guns in short order.”

General Early was a dyspeptic man, a man of easy and violent temper. He exploded. “The hell with General Jackson's plans,” he cried. “Colonel Atkinson, you will send your brigade forward. Colonel Walker, your brigade will follow!”

The ridgetop was transformed—officers shouted orders, the quick clattering of Atkinson's drums called his men into line of battle, and they were going forward even as they formed.

Somebody hollered, “Let's drive them hogs out of that thicket.”

Hastily, Catesby Byrd finished his letter: “As I write this, dearest Leona, the brigade is forming for battle. I cannot know whether I will survive. If I post this myself, you will know the outcome. If I cannot, remember always my love for you. Catesby.”

He pressed his missive on an ambulance driver, a one-armed veteran with dozens of similar letters stored in a biscuit tin under his seat.

“I hope you retrieve this yourself, Lieutenant,” the driver said. “But if you have bad luck, I'll see it gets to your people. Yes, Jimmy,” he said, “you too,” as he tucked a gaunt young private's letter in with the rest.

“Looks pretty bad,” the private said. “When will this war be over?”

“When we are all dead,” Catesby said, and was shocked to realize that he meant it.

Inside the column of defeated men drifting to the rear, Alexander Kirkpatrick felt safe and anonymous. Anecdotes of ancient wars flitted through his mind: the defeat of the legions at Smyrna, the Helvetians' final desperate charge against Caesar. There is nothing new under the sun.

When they came out of the woods, they had encountered a reserve brigade, at ease, smoking and talking quietly. Officers ignored the stragglers dribbling past, but the men called out, “Getting too hot for you, boys?”

“Oh looky yonder! Is that a coward I see?”

Whistles, catcalls. A whiskered second lieutenant stepped into the road and cried, “Men, your comrades are still fighting. Nothing lies ahead but disgrace!” Though he brandished his pistol, the stragglers quietly broke around him.

A wounded man crumpled to his knees, and the soldier beside Alexander said, “Come on, friend. We're better than beasts! Take his other arm, will you?”

Their burden was just a boy, couldn't have weighed 130 pounds and touched his feet to the ground in a stumble, keeping his weight off them. “Oh, God,” he said.

“You'll be all right. We get you back to the field hospital, you'll be all right.”

“No. No I won't. I won't see the sun rise tomorrow.” So much blood. The boy had been shot in the neck, and every time he laid his head to the right, he pumped blood over Alexander's shoulder.

The blood was briny and pungent. It smelled like the Manhattan wharves where the clerk Alexander had walked, on Sundays, so many lifetimes ago.

“I'm from Charles Town,” the boy gasped. “My family has the Mercantile, not so far from the courthouse where Brown was tried. My father is Edwin Mackey, my mother is Lizbeth. I have a sister, Clara, and a brother, William. The others died as babies and are in heaven.”

For a few minutes he was silent, and when he spoke again, his blood started pumping. “Did you see our napoleon?”

Alexander's helper was a grizzled, gap-toothed mountaineer. “Which napoleon was that, soldier? There was right many napoleons bangin' away.”

“Pelham's. We waited until the Federals were past us, past us, the only gun out there, and then Major Pelham gave the order to fire, and we mowed 'em down like they was shocks of corn. . . .”

“Be careful how you hold him,” the mountaineer warned Alexander. “Every time he flops toward me, he bleeds worse.”

“I am wearied too,” Alexander replied.

“We're all wearied. We're shot at and shot out and wearied. Can't you ease your brother's way?”

There was just this road, unwounded men passing on the left, wounded men on makeshift crutches moving slowly on the right. Sometimes a man stepped out of the column and lay down. An ammunition wagon hurtled toward them and they parted. The driver lashed his foaming horses through the column of broken soldiers.

“Oh, there wasn't anybody more gallant than us,” the wounded boy chattered. “Didn't we plague those yankees? They were searching for us with their long arm—that's what we call artillery, you know, the long arm—and we'd shift position while they were hitting the place we'd been. And Major Pelham, oh he was jigging like a wooden puppet on a string. I couldn't help laughing, looking at him. It was the grandest fun I ever had.”

“You shot?” the mountaineer asked Alexander.

“I don't know,” he answered truthfully.

“I wish I could see my dear mama's face one more time,” the boy said. “I have a letter for Mama in my pocket. Will you see she gets it?”

“No need for that, son. We'll get you to the field hospital and they'll patch you up and you can give your ma your letter yourself. This war's over for you, son. Don't you know it.”