The lieutenant bent under a hackberry branch and turned his horse in a circle, and automatically the column, even the mules, stopped at the same moment. They could see a yellow clay road in the moonlight at the edge of the forest, and in the distance the country opened up on rolling green pasture, rick fences, clumps of oak trees, and unplowed cotton acreage. The lieutenant raised himself in the stirrups, pulled off his flop hat, and pushed his long, wet hair back over his head with his fingers.
“Let’s rest it here, boys, then we’re going to turn off by that church house yonder and get into Alabama,” he said.
“You want to let the mules out of harness, sir?” the sergeant said.
The other men remained motionless and watched the officer fix the hard lump of tobacco in the back of his jaw.
“Leave them as they are,” he said.
“Do we have fires, Lieutenant?” the sergeant said.
“We have to chew it cold tonight, Sergeant.”
The soldiers leaned their rifles against the tree branches and sat in clumsy, flat positions on the ground, their knees drawn up before them, their faces bent down into their own exhaustion, the haversack of molded biscuits and dried corn lying like an obscene weight between their thighs. The sweat and heat in their uniforms steamed in the air, and their unshaved faces and uncut hair gave them the look of neglected dead men or collapsed scarecrows under an angry, whalebone moon.
The boy, Wesley Buford, who was sixteen and one of the few from the South Carolina Home Guard who hadn’t been killed or captured at Kennesaw Mountain, had the same quiet anger toward the officer as the other men, not only for the quivering in the backs of his thighs and the dead piece of biscuit in his mouth, but because the very fact of a man’s birth could guarantee him a horse, a saber, an English sidearm, and an inapproachable distance and command over other men’s lives, even in the last few weeks of a country’s defeat. The sergeant, who was also from South Carolina (a hard, squat timber cutter with a discolored eye like a broken egg yolk and a thumb clipped off at the palm), was the only one who ever spoke directly to the lieutenant, and then it was on
ly to request the next order. The other enlisted men, landless crackers with burned-out faces, sometimes stared hard at the officer’s back, but their eyes never met his and their conversation always stopped whenever he sawed back the bit on his horse to wait for the column to pass him.
Then there were the two convicts, freed from the city prison just before Sherman advanced north of Peachtree Creek, who still wore their striped black-and-white cotton jumpers and the blue trousers they had stripped off two dead Union soldiers. They had received a pardon that had been given collectively in less than one minute by a justice of the peace to seventy-five inmates who raised their hands together in the gloom of a cell block to affirm that they would defend the Confederacy, the Sacred Cause, and Jefferson Davis, and two hours later they had tried to desert. Their teeth were black and rotted to the gums from chewing tobacco, their skin was jaundiced from months spent in a dark cell, and their eyes were rheumy and filled with a mean mixture of hatred toward the officer and the sergeant and disdain for the enlisted men who were fools enough to fight in a war that had already been lost.
The taller of the two finished his biscuits, the dry crumbs dropping from his mouth, and pulled the wood plug from his canteen. His tight, gray cap made a deep line in his wet hair. He flicked his boot against the boy’s foot.
“Hey, give me a twist,” he said.
“I ain’t got none,” the boy, Wesley Buford, said.
“What’s that sticking out your pocket!”
“I ain’t got none for you.”
“Well, goddamn, Merle. Listen to this one.”
Merle, the second convict, snuffed down in his nose and spit between his thighs.
“I was listening to him back there on the cannon,” he said. “‘Push them spokes. Hit them mules.’ I thought maybe I joined the nigger army.”
“Well, sho,” the taller man said. “They give him a Yankee Springfield. That lets him give orders.”
The boy’s eyes watched them both with the caution that now came instinctively to him, with a great deal of accuracy, after two months in the infantry.
“I didn’t give you no orders. You wasn’t laying into the wheel,” he said.
“Yes sir, that’s what we got. A soldier that knows how to do it,” the tall convict said. “What if I reach over there and take that tobacco?”
The boy’s hand moved up the stock of his rifle. His callused thumb touched the heavy hammer on the loading breech.
“You ain’t going to cock that on us,” Merle, the second convict, said. “We got the Indian sign on you, boy. Tomorrow you’re going to tote for us.”
“That’s right,” the other man said. “When them mules shit, you wipe their ass. And when I turn around, you bring me my water can.”
“Come with me, Buford.” It was the sergeant’s voice. He stood in the darkness behind the two convicts, a rain slicker draped over his shoulders. His bad eye looked like a luminous piece of fish scale in the moonlight. The tall convict took a twisted leaf of dried tobacco from his pocket and cut off a thick piece between his thumb and knife blade.
Wesley walked silently with the sergeant through the wet hackberry branches to the main clearing, where the cannon stood at a tilted angle in the mud. The grease bucket and brush for the hubs were suspended from the carriage axle by a strand of baling wire.
“I was going to get it after I ate,” Wesley said.
“I ain’t worried about that gun. We’re probably going to be in a prison camp before it gets fired again,” the sergeant said. “You be careful with them convicts. They’ll cut your throat for your biscuits, and half these men won’t do nothing to stop it.”