Out of Their Minds (18 page)

Through the cloud bank of smoke, and above it, the shells were bursting, but the bursts, dimmed by the smoke, were not the quick, bright flashes of light one would have expected them to be, but twinkling spurts of red-orange flame that ran along the ridge like a flashing neon sign. A huge explosion sent a flare of brilliant red flashing through the smoke and a massive volcano of black smoke went surging upward through the gray cloud bank. One of the plunging shells had found a caisson.

I huddled closer against the ground, doing my best to burrow into it, to press myself so flat and make myself so heavy that my weight would dent the ground and thus offer me protection. I remembered, as I huddled there, that I probably was in one of the safest spots on all of Cemetery Ridge, for on that day more than a century ago the Confederate gunners had been aiming high, with the result that the worst of the bombardment fell, not on the ridge itself, but on the reverse slope of the ridge.

I twisted my head around to its original position and looked across the swale and over on Seminary Ridge another cloud of smoke was boiling above the treetops, while near the base of the cloud ran tiny flickerings, marking the mouths of the Confederate cannons. I had said two hundred to the soldier who had spoken to me and now I recalled that it had been a hundred and eighty and that on the ridge behind me were eighty others replying to that hundred eighty—eighty-odd, the books had said. And that it now must be somewhat after one o'clock, for the cannonade had started at shortly after one and had continued for two hours or so.

Over there, somewhere, General Lee sat on Traveller and watched. Over there, somewhere, Longstreet sat glumly on a rough rail fence, pondering his conviction that the charge which he must order would surely fail its purpose. For this kind of charge, he figured, was the Yankee way of making war that the South's best hope had always been a stubborn defense, luring the Union forces into attack and holding hard against them and wearing down their strength.

But, I told myself, my thinking held a flaw. There was no Lee or Longstreet over on that other ridge. The battle that had been fought on this ground had been fought more than a century ago and would not be fought again. And this mock battle which here was being staged would not be a re-enactment of the battle as it had been really fought, but a playing over of the tradition of it, of the way in which later generations had imagined it had been fought.

A chunk of iron plunged into the ground just ahead of me, tearing up the turf. I reached out a cautious hand to touch it, but jerked it back before I touched it, for the iron was hot. And that chunk of iron, I felt very sure, if it had hit me, could have killed me as easily and effectively as if this had been an actual battle.

Over to my right was the small grove of trees where the Confederate charge had reached highwater mark and then had dwindled away, back down the slope again, and back of me and also to the right, but now concealed by cannon smoke, were the great ugly cemetery gates. The country looked, I had no doubt, as it had looked that day more than a century ago and this re-enactment of the battle would adhere to the timetables, so far as they could be known, and the movements of specific regiments and smaller military groups, and all the rest of it, but there would be much that would be lost, the little details that later generations did not know or glossed over in preference to really knowing them—all the things that Civil War round tables, meeting once a month for dinner and discussion, might know for a certainty or might suspect were right, would be here re-enacted, but one would not find here the things that no man could have known without having lived through the actual battle.

The pandemonium went on and on and did not let up—the clangor and the pounding and the hammering, the dust and smoke and flame. I clung tightly to the ground that seemed to keep on heaving underneath me. I could no longer hear and in time it seemed that I had never heard and would never hear again, but there had never been such a thing as hearing, that I had imagined it.

To either side of me and out in front of me, the blue-clad bodies also hugged the ground, crouched behind boulders, snuggling closely against piled-up fence rails, cowering in shallow and hastily dug pits, behind stone walls, keeping their heads down, clutching rifles that pointed up and outward toward the hill where the Confederate cannon spouted. Waiting for that time when the cannon stopped and the long line of marching men, walking like troops upon parade, should come tramping across the swale and up the hill.

How long had it been going on? I wondered. I twisted my wrist up in front of my face and it was eleven thirty and that was wrong, of course, for the cannonade had not started until one o'clock at least, and probably some minutes after that. It was the first time I had thought to look at my watch since I had been pitchforked into this stupid land and there was no way of knowing how time here might compare with time on earth, or if, even, this place had such a thing as time.

I decided that perhaps it had been no more than fifteen or twenty minutes since the cannonade had started—although it seemed much longer, which was only natural. In any case, I was certain I had a long time yet to wait before the guns ceased firing. So I settled down to it, making sure that I presented as small a target as was possible. Having decided that all I could do was to wait it out I began to worry about what I'd do when the cannonade had ended and the Confederate line came tearing up that final slope, with the red battle flags snapping in the wind and the sun glinting off the bayonets and sabers. What would I do, I wondered, if one of them came lunging at me with a bayonet? Run, of course, if there were anywhere to run—and there'd probably be plenty of others running as well, but more than likely there'd be blue-clad officers and men back across the ridge who'd take a very dim view of anyone fleeing headlong from the battle. There was no question of trying to defend myself, even if I could get my hands upon a gun, for those guns were the most awkward-looking things a man had ever seen, and as far as firing one of them, I'd have no idea whatsoever how to go about it. All of them seemed to be muzzle-loaders and I knew less than nothing about that kind of weapon.

The battle fog was growing thicker, blotting out the sun. The swale was filled with drifting smoke and a layer of smoke floated only a short distance above the heads of the men who crouched upon the slope in front of the belching Union batteries. Looking down the hill, it seemed to me that I was looking down a narrow slot that was hedged in by a flapping curtain of very dirty gray.

Far down the slope something was stirring—not a human being, smaller than a human. A small dog, I thought, caught between the lines, although it was too brown and furry and didn't look quite like a dog. A woodchuck, more than likely. And I told him: Chuck, if I were you, I'd pop back into my den and stay there for a while. I don't think I really spoke to him, although even if I had, it would have made no difference, for no one, let alone that screwy woodchuck, ever would have heard me.

He kept on sitting there for a while, then he started moving up the slope toward me, pushing through the pasture grass.

A swirl of smoke dipped down in front of me and blotted out the woodchuck. Behind me the battery still was firing, with the guns going chuff-chuff instead of speaking out, the customary bellow of them muted by the overriding scream and crash of the avalanche of exploding metal pouring through the sky. Bits of metal at times came pattering down, like heavy raindrops falling from the smoke cloud, and occasionally a bigger fragment went tearing along the sod, ripping out and throwing tiny gobs of dirt into the air.

The swirl of smoke cleared away. The woodchuck was much closer now and I saw that it was no woodchuck. How I could have failed to distinguish immediately that pointed thatch of hair, the juglike ears, I will never know. Even at a distance I should have been able to know that the Referee was not a woodchuck or a dog.

But now I could see him clearly and he was looking straight at me, daring me, challenging me, like a defiant bantam rooster, and as I watched him, he lifted one splay-fingered hand and deliberately thumbed his nose at me.

I should have had more sense. I should have let him go. I should have paid no attention to him. But the sight of him, standing there, bandy-legged and cocky, thumbing his nose at me, was more than I could bear.

Without thinking, I surged upward, raging at him. I took one step down the slope before whatever it was that hit me, hit me. I don't remember too much, just a little of it. A red-hot iron that glanced along my skull, a sudden dizziness, a sense of falling down the slope, falling very fast, and that was all there was.

15

It seemed that I had been climbing for a long time, through an abandoned land of darkness, although I kept my eyes squeezed shut and could not truly know that it was dark. But it seemed to me it was, it seemed to me I could feel the darkness through my skin, and I speculated upon how silly I would feel if, opening my eyes, I should open them to the noonday sun. But I did not open them. For some compelling reason about which I had no sense of sureness, it seemed that I must keep them closed—almost as if somewhere just beyond me was a sight which no mortal was allowed to see. But that was pure fantasy. I had no fact to make me think that it was so. Perhaps the most terrible thing about it all was that I had no facts, that I existed in a dark world where there were no facts, and that I crawled through an empty land—not merely an empty land, but one in which, until a short time ago, there had been much solid substance and a great deal of vital life, but that now had been emptied of all its life and matter.

I kept on climbing, crawling up the slope, painfully and slowly, not knowing where I might be going or why I might be going there. And it seemed to me that in doing this I was quite content—not because it was a thing that I wished to do, but because the alternatives to doing it were so horrible as to be beyond my comprehension. I had no recollection of who I was or what I was or how I'd come to be there, or any idea of when I'd started on this climb; it seemed, in fact, that I had been always climbing in the darkness up this endless slope.

But now, as I crawled, new things came to me—the feel of the ground and the grass beneath my hands, the uneasy pain of a small rock that caught and scraped my knee, the slight, cooling pressure of a small wind against one side of my face, and a fluttering sound—the sound of that same wind moving through leaves somewhere above my head. And that was more than there had been before. This world, I thought, this dark place, had come to life again. I quit my crawling and lay flat against the earth and could sense the stored heat of the summer afternoon being given up by it. Then more than the wind moving through the leaves broke the stillness—the stumbling tramp of feet, the sound of distant voices.

So I opened my eyes and it was dark, as I imagined it had been, but not as dark as I had thought it might be. Just beyond me stood a small clump of trees and on the ridge just beyond the trees, in silhouette against the starstrewn sky, stood a drunken cannon, with a wheel caved in and the muzzle of the barrel tilted toward the stars.

Seeing this, I remembered Gettysburg and from where I lay I knew I had not been doing any crawling. I was in the same place, or approximately the same place, I had been that afternoon when I had lurched to my feet as the Referee had thumbed his nose at me. The only crawling I had done had been in the feverish confusion of my mind.

I put a hand up to my head and found that a thick, greasy scab had formed on one side of my skull. When I took my hand away I could feel the stickiness of my fingers. I struggled up onto my knees and stayed kneeling there a moment to take stock of myself. The side of my head, where I had touched it, was sore, but my mind seemed clear—I felt no fuzziness, no wooziness. And I seemed strong enough. A splinter of iron had barely touched me, I reasoned, breaking skin and peeling away some of the hair.

The Referee, I realized, had almost accomplished what he had intended and I was alive by the slightest fraction of an inch. Had the battle been fought, I wondered, for my sole benefit, for my entrapment only? Or was it something that went on at periodic intervals, a regularly scheduled show played out again and yet again, fated to be played out unendingly so long as the people on my earth showed interest and concern in Gettysburg?

I got to my feet and my legs were strong beneath me, although I had a most strange feeling in the middle of me, and as I stood there wondering about it, I realized that the strange feeling was no more than the simple one of hunger. The last time I had eaten had been the day before when Kathy and I had stopped for lunch just short of the Pennsylvania line. My yesterday, of course—I had no way of knowing how time ran here on this shattered hillside. The bombardment, I remembered, had started at least two hours too soon by the watch upon my wrist, although there was no general-historical agreement as to the precise moment it had started. But certainly not before one o'clock. But that was something, I told myself, that probably had little bearing upon the situation here. In this lopsided world, the curtain could go up at any time the stage manager might wish.

I started walking up the hill and after no more than three strides my foot caught against something lying on the ground and I pitched forward across it, putting out my hands to catch myself so that I didn't fall flat upon my face. I got two fists full of gravel when I fell, but that wasn't the worst of it. The worst of it was when I twisted around to find out what I had fallen over. And as I gagged at the thought of it, I saw that there were others of them, a great many others of them scattered here where the two lines of contending men had met and fought it out and now were no more than loglike lumps, lying peacefully in the dark, with the slight wind fluttering tag ends of their clothing, perhaps to remind one they once had been alive.

Men, I thought—but, no, not men. Nothing for one to grieve over except, perhaps, in remembrance of another time when all of this had been for real and not a stupid dumb-show.