The Convict and Other Stories

“They got ammunition, Lieutenant. That officer yonder probably has a Colt’s.”

“You’ll move back on the road or be shot.”

Their dirty, cotton prison jumpers stuck to their chests. They squinted up at the lieutenant in the sun, their sallow faces filmed with sweat, then walked onto the road ahead of him.

In the few moments that the column was stopped, Wesley had watched the other men rather than the convicts, and he had sensed, in the way he would the hidden brightening of color in a man’s eyes, a bitter wish inside all of them that the convicts would push it to the edge. It wasn’t any one thing that he could look at clearly in the center of his mind, but instead something that was collectively wrong and displaced for that moment on a yellow clay road between two steaming fields: the immobility of the man in front of him, the thick lump of tobacco frozen in his cheek, the silence along the column and the fact that no one unstrung his canteen, or maybe the smell of their bodies and the sweat running down their necks now that they had stopped. Yes, that was it, he thought. They had stopped. They were in the open where they could be hit again if more Federals had moved up through the woods, and this time they were without their cannon and carrying wounded, but not one man had shown a flick or quiver in his face at the possibility that a skirmish line was already being formed behind that violent green border of trees.

They moved down the road, and the man on the carriage litter with the shirt tied around his mouth began to chew on his tongue and froth blood and saliva. There were no Federals in the woods, only three dead Negro children. They lay in a row among the leaves, as though they had gone to sleep, and the pine trunks around them were scoured in white strips from a rain of grapeshot.

“What the hell was they doing there? Why wasn’t they home with their people?” the man behind Wesley said.

But he had already quickened his step past the lieutenant, who was trying to saw up the bridle on his horse and keep him from spooking sideways into the tree limbs.

That night, after the moon had risen with a rain ring around it in the green twilight, the mist started to gather in the woods, and the first drops of rain clicked flatly on the high spread of branches overhead. They shaved willow poles from a creek bed, slanted them into the ground, and stretched their slickers over the notched ends and weighted the bottoms with rocks to make dry lean-tos. The cook, whose intestine was bulging against the dressing that he still held to his stomach, and the man who had been shot through both jaws were placed under the cannon carriage with a canvas tarpaulin across the four wheels. The cook’s face already had the iridescent shine of the dead, and he had urinated several times in his trousers. The other man had tried to pull his teeth loose with his fingers, and pieces of bone had dried in the crust of blood along his cheek.

Wesley used his bowie, which his father had given him when he was twelve, to hack the pine saplings away from the base of a limestone boulder and make a shelter that would be as dry and comfortable as anything the Cherokees had made in South Carolina. The knife was forged from a heavy wood rasp, hammered and sharpened and honed to a blue edge, and it sliced through the saplings with one easy downward movement of the arm. He pitched handfuls of dry pine needles inside the shelter, took off his shirt and spread it evenly over the needles, and put the barrel of his Springfield on the edge of the cloth. He sat in the opening and ate the two biscuits and soda crackers that he had saved in his pocket, and looked through the wavering tree trunks at the bright fire close by the cannon carriage. The light rain had started to drip off the overhead leaves and hiss in the burning pine gum.

Beyond the fire the lieutenant was seated over a small folding table inside the open flap of his tent. The light from a candle that he had melted to the table flickered on his pale, handsome face while he wrote in a steady motion with an ink quill across a piece of paper. Wesley watched him as he would someone who moved about in a strange world that he would never fully understand, one that existed above all the common struggles that most men knew. He wondered if the lieutenant had also sensed that electric moment back on the clay road or if he had caught it and dismissed it with the same indifference he had shown toward the hot-eyed stares of the convicts after he had drawn his revolver on them. And he wondered if those endless pages that he filled with a flowing calligraphy every night they were allowed fires contained some plan or explanation about the miles they marched each day, the trenches they dug and then abandoned, the whole mystery of an army’s movement that stopped and started on a whimsical command.

But even if Wesley had read those letters written to a wife in Alabama, he would not have understood the language in them, as it belonged to a vision of the world that had the same bright, clear shape as a medieval romance: “We have lost many of our bravest young soldiers, whom God in His great Mercy will surely reward for their sacrifice in our Cause. Sherman has burned Atlanta and released his troops upon an unprotected and innocent population in vengeance for the battles that they could not win honorably. But I do not think that Lee will ever surrender to such men and open our land to occupation by the Federals. Should he do so, there are many contingents of our Army already forming in Texas to continue the war from Mexico. Regardless, we are proud to have fought for the South, and our honor has never been stained by inhumanity or reprisal towards those who have been so cruel in their invasion of our country. I only pray that you will remain well and in strong spirit until we are home again—”

Wesley saw the lieutenant place the quill by the paper’s edge, pinch his eyelids with his fingers, and motion a private to the opening of the tent. The private nodded, the shadow and firelight wavering on his back, then walked toward Wesley’s lean-to. He had an empty tin plate and wooden spoon in his hand, and he was irritated at being given an order before he could fill his plate with the gruel that was cooking on the fire. His coat was spotted with dark drops of rain.

“He wants to see you,” he said.

“What for?”

“He don’

t exactly give me written notes.”

Wesley propped the barrel of the Springfield on a small rock inside the lean-to and put on his shirt and cap. As he walked toward the lieutenant’s tent, the wind blew through the high limbs overhead and shook a cold spray of rain across the clearing. The fire had burned into ash and red coals, with the sweet smell of pine rosin steaming off into the rain, and the other men were shoving in pinecones and twigs to build the flame again under the blackened pot of gruel.

He had never spoken directly to the lieutenant before, and he stood in front of the open tent flap with the candlelight touching both of their faces while the heat thunder rolled somewhere beyond the woods.

“Combs said you wanted to see me, sir.”

The lieutenant pinched his eyelids again, and for the first time Wesley noticed how long and thin his fingers were.

“Yes. Pull the flap and sit down.”

There was a sawed-off pine stump on the far side of the table, and after Wesley had closed the flap and tied the thongs to the tent pole, he felt the sudden enclosure of warmth and light against the rain that ticked on top of the canvas.

“Do you know what those men are thinking about out there tonight, Buford?”

He was surprised that the lieutenant knew his name, and even more so at the question, but he kept his expression flat and looked somewhere between the candle’s flame and the lieutenant’s face.

“No sir.”

“You have no idea?”

“I go my own way, Lieutenant.”

“They want to quit. Each one of them tonight sees himself as one of the men dying under the gun carriage. They’re not ready to talk among themselves yet about desertion, but they will be in a few more days.”

Wesley’s eyes looked for a moment at the lieutenant’s, then back at the candle flame again.

“You know all that, don’t you? You saw it on the road this afternoon.”