The Bloody Ground - Starbuck 04 (32 page)

So was God the answer? Was there nothing he could do for himself? Starbuck, gloomier than ever, suspected that the ambition in his own soul was the flaw that revealed itself to his men. That and the cowardice that he saw in himself. Or perhaps Maitland was right, and some men were born to lead. Starbuck swore softly. Hs had a vision of a perfect battalion, one that operated as smoothly as the newly greased mechanism of the captured Springfield rifles. A machine that worked.

Jackson had said that only God could give a man strength, and only strength could make a battalion wo
rk
together. A battalion was composed of men with different fears and suspicions and ambitions, and the trick of it was to swamp those desires with a greater desire: the desire to work together toward victory. In a day or two, Starbuck feared, the Yellowlegs would face a real Yankee army, the same army that had made the northern horizon vague with smoke these last two days, and how would they fight then? Of the officers Potter alone was loyal, and Potter, God knew, was a weak reed. Starbuck closed his eyes. A part of him yearned for the grace of God to drench him with strength, but whenever he was tempted to yield to his Maker's will another temptation intervened, and this was a more beguiling temptation. It consisted of memories of firelit bodies, not dead and twisted and lice-ridden and scarred and filthy, but bodies on sheets. Sally pushing her hair back from her face. The girl who had died under Blythe's bullets at the tavern. He remembered her crouching by the fire, her red hair falling down her naked back, laughing as she toasted a scrap of bread on which she had melted a scrap of cheese taken from a mousetrap. Heaven, Starbuck liked to think, lay in those moments and he was unwilling to call them hell. His father had always said that being a Christian was not easy, but it had taken these last two years to show
Starbuck
how desperately hard it really was. He did not want to abandon sin, yet he feared that he would fail as a soldier if he did not. He wondered if he should pray. Maybe a prayer by this hurrying river would hurtle its way through the smoky air to the ear of God, who alone could give a man the strength to overcome temptation.

A stone slid on stone to Starbuck's right. He opened his eyes and saw a shadow flicker among the rubble and stunted trees on the riverbank. "Who's there?" he called.

No one answered. He decided it must have been a rat, or else one of the rake-thin cats that lived wild in the ruined armory. The lights of the town showed through trees, but they revealed nothing on this broken riverbank where weeds grew thick among fallen stones. He turned back to the water. Maybe, he thought, he should pray. Maybe he should claw and crawl his way back to God, but where would that journey end? On the Yankee side? On his knees to his father?

A click sounded and he knew it was a gun being cocked. For a second he froze, hardly daring to believe what he suspected, then he threw himself backward just as a gun flamed and banged to his right. The shot screamed over his head and a billow of smoke gusted across the
water. He scrambled into a half-
choked culvert that was brimming with scummy water and he dragged the Adams revolver from his holster. He heard footsteps, but could see no one. A sentry was shouting, demanding to know who had fired and why, then Starbuck saw a shape silhouetted against the tree-shrouded lights of the town and he leveled the revolver. Then a second man sprang up and he changed his aim, but both were running away, bent double, unrecognizable, scuttling toward the rusted tracks of the Baltimore and Ohio rails. He fired once, but over their heads for if he had aimed and missed then the bullet could have struck home among the encamped soldiers. More men were running toward the river, shouting warnings and questions.

Starbuck dragged himself out of the filthy water. A sentry saw him and dropped to one knee with his rifle leveled. "Who are you?" he shouted.

"Major Starbuck. Sw
ynyard's Brigade," Starbuck hol
stered the revolver and brushed stinking water off his pants. "Put the gun down, lad."

An officer arrived demanding to know who had fired and why. Starbuck gestured at the river. "Thought I saw a man swimming. I reckoned it was an escaping Yankee."

The officer stared at the moon-glossed river that foamed over the rocks. "I can't see anyone."

"So I was dreaming," Starbuck said. "Now I'm going to bed."

He walked away. He heard the word "drunk" being used, but he did not care. He knew what he had seen, but he had not known whom he had seen. Two men, his men, he guessed, and somewhere in the battalion they were still loose and waiting for their chance.

Them and a hundred thousand Yankees. Across the river. Marching toward a town no one had ever heard of. Called Sharpsburg.

PART
TWO

the
creek
welled
from a mossy spring in a low pass of the South Mountains, then flowed west and south through a rocky landscape of thin soil and old trees. Little disturbed the stream's flow in its first few miles, for there were no settlements in that part of Pennsylvania, but just east of Waynesborough the creek flowed into farmland and became muddied with the feet of cattle. There were still no bridges, for the stream was shallow enough to be forded even during the winter spate, and so it flowed on across the border into Maryland where, deepened and broadened by other streams, it reached its first bridge at Hagerstown. Fish lay in the bridge's shadow, and in summer children played in the waist-deep water.

Past Hagerstown the creek ran southward, flowing deeper and stronger as more tributaries joined, but still it was little more than a stream. In places it ran shallow over rocks, foaming and swirling through the flickering shadows of the woods before it swung in great serpent loops between lush green fields. Deer drank from the creek, men fished from it, and cattle stood in its summer pools to cool themselves.

The Beaver Creek joined the stream five miles south of Hagerstown and now the creek was almost a river. It could still be forded by horsemen, but the local folk had built handsome stone bridges to keep their feet dry. The creek flowed on, still l
ooping, but hurrying now to its
confluence with the Potomac River, where the creek was swallowed into the massive flow of water running to the eastern sea.

Some four miles north of where the creek joined the Potomac River there was a spot where a shelving bank of shingle edged the water beneath a stand of great elms. It was a pretty place, cool in summer and a favorite spot for children who liked to run into the river down the shingle bank or else swing on a rope hung from an elm bough above the water, but on a couple of Sunday mornings every summer there was no playing at the place, for on those days a procession would walk up the Smoketown Road, skirt the East Woods, then follow a track across the Miller farmland that led to the creek's steep, wooded slope. There might be fifty people in the procession, rarely more, and they walked in a solemn silence that would only be broken when someone started a hymn. Then they would all join in, their voices strong as they wended between cornfields and woods toward the water. The men would be in their suits, all of them ill-cut from a dark, thick cloth, but the discomfort of the formal clothes was a tribute to the day. The women were shawled and bonneted while the children were held firmly by the hand so that no unseemly behavior would mar the occasion. At the head of the procession strode a preacher in a wide-brimmed black hat.

Once at the river the preacher would wade into the creek and pray to the God of Abraham and of Isaac and of Jacob that He would bless this day, and bless these good people, then one by one those souls who had come to be baptized in the presence of their neighbors would walk into the water and the preacher would fold their hands on their breast, place another hand at their back, and then, with a joyous shout of blessing because a soul was being received into the heavenly host, he would thrust them backward into the creek so that the water flowed over their heads. He would hold them there for a second, then haul them upright as the congregation on the bank called loud praises for God's mercy to miserable sinners. Almost always the newly baptized men and women wept for happiness as they waded out of the creek to join the dark-suited congregation singing for them.

They sang in German. Many of the local settlers had come from Germany and they worshipped in a small, whitewashed church that had no spire, no porch, no pulpit, no decoration of any kind, though in tribute to the hard winters there was a black-bellied iron stove standing between the well-made pews. From the outside the church looked more like a humble house than a shrine, though inside it was surprisingly spacious and would be filled with light on sunny days. The Germans were Baptists, though their English-speaking neighbors good-naturedly described them as Dunkers, because of their custom of baptism by full immersion. On the Sabbath the Germans might worship in one place and the English-speakers in another, but during the week the Poffenbergers and Millers, Kennedys and Hoffmans, Middlekaufs and Pipers were good enough neighbors and hard-working farmers, and all agreed that they shared good land. Limestone might break the rich fields here and there, but a blessed living could be made from these farms so long as a family worked diligently, trusted in God, and had patience. That was why they had come to America, to thrive and live in peace beside a Maryland creek that flowed from a low pass in the South Mountains down to the wide Potomac River.

The creek was called the Antietam and the Dunker church lay just north of a village called Sharpsburg, and hardly a soul in America outside of Washington County, Maryland, had ever heard of either. But then the armies came.

The rebels came first. Dirty, tired, ragged men with bleeding feet, boils on their skin, and lice in their beards. They marched south down the Hagerstown Pike raising a cloud of dust behind their gunwheels and shabby boots. Some had no boots at all, but walked barefoot. More rebels limped in from the east, crossing the creek on the handsome stone bridges. These rebels from the east wore bandages and had red-rimmed eyes and faces stained with black powder. They had fought to delay the Yankees at the passes in the hills and they had lost, and now they came to join Robert Lee's army at Sharpsburg.

It was a tiny army. Seventeen thousand men spread into the pastures and woodlots north of the village and the farmers could only watch as their precious rail fences were dismantled to make firewood or shelters. The army's guns, with their blackened muzzles and dirt-stained wheels, were lined on the high ground above the creek. The guns faced east.

The Yankees came next; sixty thousand blue-coated troops who crossed the Red Hill on the creek's eastern bank and then stopped. Just stopped.

The rebel guns had opened fire, bouncing their solid shot off the farmland and up over the first Northern troops to show on the river's far bank. General McClellan, told that the enemy had formed a fighting line on the creek's far bank, ordered the halt. He knew that thought must be taken, plans made, and fears understood, and so the Northern troops scattered into encampments and the rebel guns, seeing that their enemy was making no attempt to cross the creek, ceased their firing.

The gunsmoke drifted over the creek's valley and was touched pink by the setting sun. General Robert Lee watched the stalled enemy across the river, then turned to walk back toward the Hagerstown Pike where an ambulance waited to carry him to the army's headquarters just west of Sharpsburg. The General's hands were still bandaged and that made riding difficult, and so he walked while one of his aides led Traveller by the reins. Lee seemed curiously diminished out of the saddle. On horseback he looked like a tall man, but on foot he was revealed as only of average height. The ambulance was waiting beside the whitewashed Dunker church, which looked bright against the dark woods behind. The church's pews were being chopped for firewood by a battalion of Georgians who were billeted about the small house of worship.

The General had hardly spoken as he walked back from the gunline, but now he saw Major Delaney sitting slumped beside the pike that ran in front of the church. Lee smiled. "So you're alive, Major?"

"Happily, sir." Delaney struggled to his feet.

"And you have seen what you came to see, yes?"

"Fighting," Delaney said grimly.

"Rather more than I hoped you'd see," Lee said ruefully. "It seems McClellan has greater energy than I credited him with." Lee gestured to the ambulance. "Hardly a conquering general's carriage, Major, but you're welcome to share it back to headquarters. I assume you'll pitch camp with us again?"

"If I may, General."

"Unless you'd rather go home?" Lee suggested charitably. He might need every man he could muster to fight McClellan, but he could hardly imagine this pale, tired lawyer being of any great help.

"Are we to fight?" Delaney asked, climbing into the ambulance and leaving George to lead his two horses behind the slow-moving vehicle.

"Oh, I think so," Lee answered mildly. "I rather think we must." He leaned back against the ambulance's side and looked momentarily weary, then he frowned at his bandaged hands as though frustrated by the limitations they forced on him. "At least," he said ruefully, "it stops me biting my nails." The ambulance swayed and rocked on the dry road. It was a Yankee vehicle, captured at Manassas, and highly sprung to relieve the pain of its wounded occupants, but even the best springs could not smooth out the nits of the Hagerstown Pike as it dropped into Sharpsburg. "You know what Frederick the Great once said?" Lee asked suddenly, his thoughts reverting to the trial that lay ahead. "That the unforgivable crime in war is not making the wrong decision, but making no decision. And I think we have to fight here."