The Convict and Other Stories

“What do you mean prison camp? The lieutenant said there wasn’t no Federals south of Atlanta and we’ll be in Alabama in another day.”

“You ain’t listening to me.” For just a moment the boy caught the raw smell of corn whiskey on the sergeant’s breath. “You ain’t got to get killed in this war. You keep yourself alive a few more days and you’ll be on your way back to your family. Don’t you know that, boy? We got beat.”

“We whupped them every time till Kennesaw. We—”

“You walk at the head tomorrow with me. I don’t want to see you near them convicts. Now get on them hubs till they’re slick as spit.”

The boy leaned his Springfield against the cannon barrel, pulled off his shirt, and crawled under the carriage to unfasten the grease bucket from the baling wire. There was a V-line of sunburn around his neck, and his spine and ribs stood out hard and pale against his skin when he bent over the axle hubs with the grease brush. He heard the sergeant breathing deeply behind him, then the sound of the wood plug being pulled from the canteen and once again the rank odor of corn liquor that had been taken too early from the still.

Later, he spread his rain slicker under a dry overhang on the edge of the clearing and slept with his shirt over his face. As he began the several levels of sleep that he always had to go through before he reached that moment of blue-black unconsciousness just before dawn or the cock of a picket’s rifle, he heard first the distant cough of thunder out of a piney woods and yellow sky where there should have been no thunder, the black smoke rising in a haze above the treetops, and then the scream of Whistling Dick tearing with its blunt, iron edges through the air into the middle of their line. The earth exploded out of the trench, and muskets, cannon wheels, haversacks, and parts of men were left strewn on the yellowed edge of a huge crater. Then he heard the cavalry on the flank break toward the woods, the sabers drawn and glinting in the sun, and he knew the Federals would be engaged long enough for them to withdraw and regroup beyond the range of their artillery.

The last level of his sleep was usually a short-lived one, and it came only after the spatter of pistol and carbine fire assured him that the Confederate cavalry had held the Federals in check momentarily, but this time he was back at his father’s sawmill in South Carolina by the edge of a black swamp, and he and his brother were snaking logs across a sand basin to a loading wagon. He could smell the swamp and its fetid odor of stagnant water, quicksand, dead garfish on the banks, and the mushrooms that burst into bloom off rotting tree trunks. The sunlight turned green through the trees and broke on the water in a tarnished yellow cast, and he could see the giant bullfrogs and alligators frozen like pieces of dark brown stone in the dead current. His brother Cole was stripped to the waist, the sweat running in rivulets down his freckled shoulders and dusty back. His face was hot and bright with his work, the exhausted piece of chewing tobacco stiff against one cheek, and when he doubled the reins around his blond fist and flicked them in a swift crack, the mules strained against the harness and pulled the chained logs over the embankment in a shower of sand. He could talk to the mules in a way that only Negroes could, and he could fall and plane timber better than any man at the mill (his square hands seemed almost shaped for the resilient swing of the ax into the wood). He released the mules and walked into the shallows to pick up the rattlesnake watermelon where it had been left to cool and the dinner bucket of fried rabbit. His face was happy and beaded with sweat when he broke the ripe melon across a rock in a bright red explosion of pulp and seeds and picked the meat out with his thick fingers.

“Daddy don’t want us quitting this early,” Wesley said.

“It’s Saturday afternoon, ain’t it? You and me is going to town, and when we get done drinking beer I’m taking you over to Billy Sue’s. Get on down here, boy, and eat your dinner. I ain’t going to be waiting on you.”

Wesley looked at his brother’s happy green eyes and the smear of melon juice on his mouth, and he knew then that neither of them would ever die.

The false dawn had already touched the eastern horizon beyond the woods and filled the trees with a smoky, green light when the sergeant tapped the toe of his boot into his shoulder. He could smell fatback and biscuits cooking in the gravy over a wet fire, and after the dream had slipped back into a private place inside him, he saw the two convicts hunched

by the fire with their dinner pails, the mules still standing with one foot rested in front of the gun carriage, and the long clay road that wound through the trees and the dim fields toward a small, whitewashed church house, a fragile board building with mist rising off the yard. He raised himself on his slicker and looked at it again, and it bothered him in the same way the convicts had when they first joined the column.

“Fill your pan and eat it later,” the sergeant said. His good eye was watery and red, and his words were deep in his throat.

“Is there something wrong with me eating with everybody else?”

“Just do what I tell you. The lieutenant wants me and you up ahead a half mile. A couple of them Louisiana Frenchies come in last night and said the Yankees got around behind us. They might drop a whole shithouse on our head if they catch us out in the open.”

Wesley walked to the fire and squatted in the smoke while the cook, an old man with his trousers partly buttoned, poured a mixture of hot water, boiled corn, and honey into his pan. The boy sipped at the scalding edge of the pan and looked through the trees at the long stretch of clay road and the white church building.

“Get some meat and biscuit. They won’t be no more hot food today,” the old man said.

“I ain’t hungry.”

“He don’t like to eat near the likes of us,” one of the convicts said.

“Don’t get in front of me today,” Wesley said. He picked up his Springfield, laid it over his shoulder, and walked off with the sergeant into the mist while the two convicts stared blankly after him.

The low clouds on the eastern horizon were pink now with the sun’s first hard light, and the white circle of moon was fading as though it were being gathered into the blueness of the day. Sparrow hawks floated over the wet fields, and somewhere beyond the church he could hear a dog barking, an ugly, relentless sound sustained by its own violation of the quiet air. He opened the breech of his rifle, snapped it shut again, and pulled back the hammer to half cock.

“Don’t go seeing Federals where they ain’t none,” the sergeant said. “You pop one cap and that bunch back there is scared enough to throw their damn Minié balls all over this road.”

“Look at them wheel tracks. They wasn’t cut that deep by no wagon.”

The sergeant looked at the heavy, curled ruts in the clay with his watery eye and unconsciously moved the cartridge box on his belt from its position on his side to the center of his stomach.

“You’re durn near blind, ain’t you?” Wesley said.

“The only blind I got is what come out of my canteen last night. You just watch the edge of that woods up yonder and don’t blow your toes off in the meantime.”

“What are we supposed to do if we get hit out here? There ain’t a hole big enough for a whistle pig to hide in.”

“That’s what it’s all about, son.”

“How come the lieutenant don’t get on point except when we’re in the woods?” he said angrily, and instantly felt stupid for his question, but the fear had already started to grow and quicken around his heart as they neared the church, and the white lines of the building against the green fields beyond made the skin in his face pinch tight against the bone.

“You didn’t see him when we pulled off Kennesaw. He might look like he was born with a mammy’s pink finger up his ass, but he walked a horse trailing its guts down the hill with two wounded on its back while their whole line let off on him. I seen his tunic jump twice when a Minié cut through it, and his face never even turned.” The sergeant was talking too fast now, and the knuckles in his hand were white around the hammer and trigger guard of his carbine. He sucked in his cheeks to gather the moisture in his mouth and spit a thin stream of tobacco juice in front of him. “You don’t worry about him on point. He’s only got one trouble. He don’t quit, and that’s going to get us all in a hard place in the next few days.”