The Convict and Other Stories

ar mounted on a huge four-wheel carriage. The gun crews turned the cannon into position, unhitched the mules, and whipped them into the woods, while three men loaded an iron ball into the mortar. Their officers galloped their horses up and down the line, forming their men into ranks for the advance across the meadow. Then their ambulance wagons moved up on the rear, and Wesley pulled back the hammer on his Springfield and wrapped his fingers tightly in the trigger guard.

We won’t have no chance, he thought. They got enough artillery to blow us all over this track. That mortar can take twenty yards out of our line in a lick. We should have set up in the woods. There ain’t no sense in trying to hold against artillery when you ain’t got none to back you up.

He heard the lieutenant’s horse behind him and turned in the dirt on his elbow. The lieutenant had the reins knotted around his fist and held a carbine propped against his thigh with the other hand. The clean features of his face were covered with the sun’s last red light.

“They’re coming right up the middle, gentlemen,” he said. “They have reserves all the way back through those woods, and they’re going to try to crack us before dark. If we can hold until then, Hood will be on their flank by morning.”

Wesley slid backward on his elbows down the railway embankment and walked in a bent position to the lieutenant’s horse. His head felt suddenly cold in the breeze.

“Lieutenant, half of them is going to run when they start throwing it in on us.” His voice was empty and dry in his throat.

“They’re behind us, too, Corporal. It’s either here or a prison camp at Johnson’s Island.”

“Sir, them men ain’t going to care when it starts to come in, and I ain’t going to be able to hold them.”

“We’ll each do what we should. You had better get back into the line.”

The lieutenant turned his horse away from Wesley and broke into a canter toward the ammunition wagon, his face as sculptured and cool and impossible to read as marble.

The first cannon lurched backward on its wheels in an explosion of smoke and dirt. Wesley pressed his face flat into the hard cinders with his arms over his head as the shell screamed through the air and burst in front of the railway embankment thirty yards down from him. Then the other two cannon roared almost in unison, and his heart pounded against the earth while he waited for that sudden ripping sound, like tin tearing apart, that meant it was coming in on his position. But they had elevated too high, and both shells exploded in the trees somewhere behind the hospital train.

The crew on the cannon were swabbing out the barrel with water when the mortar went off. The carriage seemed to crush into the earth from the recoil, and he heard the huge iron ball begin to arch out of its trajectory and slip downward through the air like a peal of thunder. The heat and the vacuum from the explosion made his head ring and his skin burn, as though someone had opened a furnace door next to him. He looked up, his eyes filled with sweat and dirt, and saw a deep crater where there had been twenty feet of embankment and track. The wounded and the dead were half buried in the dirt and splintered ties, and one soldier sat on the edge of the hole with both palms pressed against his ears.

“Here they come!” someone behind him yelled.

The Federals began advancing in broken lines across the fields, their bayonets fixed, while their artillery fired over them. Their line seemed to waver in the smoke that drifted ahead of them in the wind, and then it would re-form again in a brilliant wash of twilight. One of the hospital cars was hit, and the dry, wooden frame burned into a collapsed, blackened pile on the wheels within minutes. Then an odd, long round from a cannon burst next to the ammunition wagon by the edge of the woods, and blew it, the mules, and the driver into one flame that scorched the tops of the pines. Wesley rolled onto his back and slipped his bayonet into the groove on the end of his Springfield.

“That pigsticker won’t do you no good now, boy,” the Texas soldier said, his head just below the level of the track. “Wait another minute, and give them a rose petal between the eyes.”

He didn’t hear the soldier or even the canister crossing through the air and thumping into the wooden sides of the train. The lieutenant was still mounted, the carbine held at a right angle to his body, the bit sawed back against the horse’s teeth, and there was a rip in the dirty cloth of his sleeve and a wide area of blood that ran to the elbow. The horse’s eyes were wide with fright, and he twisted his head against the bridle and tried to turn in a circle.

“Get down, Lieutenant! Get off him!” Wesley yelled.

The weight of the Springfield rested across his stomach, and he had to raise his head on the incline to speak.

“Lieutenant, they’re going to cut you out of the saddle.”

The two convicts, who had been crouched behind the wheels of the locomotive, broke for the trees with their shoulders bent low. The lieutenant aimed his carbine across his forearm and fired, and one of the tall convict’s legs jerked violently under him, and he went down on his buttocks in the grass. The other convict kept running for the timber.

“You better stop worrying about that crazy man up there and start shooting,” the Texas soldier said.

Wesley turned on his stomach again and slid his rifle over the edge of the grade. The first line of the Federal advance was much closer now, and there were hundreds more in the swirling smoke behind them. The line seemed to bend and break apart momentarily with each hard volley, then other Federals filled their ranks and stepped over the dead. Wesley balanced his rifle on the track, cupped his left hand over the stock, and sighted on a white flash of undershirt below a man’s throat. The shot dropped and hit the man full in the chest, knocking him backward in the field with his arms stretched out by his sides. He pulled back from the track to reload and looked into the dead face of the Texas soldier. There was a small hole in the crown of his skull, and his wooden teeth had fallen in the dirt.

Wesley slammed the breech shut and squeezed off the trigger into the Federal line without aiming. The hammer snapped dryly, and he had to pry loose the bad cartridge with his knife. Far down the line he saw men rising to their feet with their rifles in front of them while Yankees leaped across the tracks.

His fingers were thick and shaking when he put another cartridge in the breech, then he heard the lieutenant shout behind him: “This is it, gentlemen. Hurrah for Jefferson Davis. Let’s put them in hell tonight.”

The lieutenant cut his spurs into the horse’s flanks and thundered over the embankment with his carbine raised in the air. His flop hat flew back off his head, and his hand on the reins was scarlet and shining with blood.

They followed him into the field, screaming out of some memory from Chickamauga or New Hope Church or Chancellorsville, their faded brown-and-gray uniforms almost lost in the haze of smoke and vanishing light. Wesley felt them fall on each side of him, then he saw the lieutenant sit straight in the saddle, as though he had remembered a forgotten thought, and the carbine drop loosely from his hand onto the ground. The horse shook his head against the collapsed reins and bolted out of the smoke toward the railway grade. The lieutenant fell backward off his rump and remained motionless in the field with one boot twisted under his thigh.

Wesley fired straight into a man’s face three feet in front of him and pushed his bayonet into the breastbone of a sergeant who was already hit and falling. Then he heard the distant cough of a cannon in the pines, a peeling rip across the sky, and the blunt edges of the shell breaking out of its trajectory. Whistling Dick, he thought. Why are they throwing it in with their own people here?

The shell burst in front of him, and in that second’s roar of light and earth he thought he felt a finger reach up and anoint him casually on the brow.

LOWER ME DOWN WITH A GOLDEN CHAIN

The American priest and two nuns who ran the orphanage in the Guatemalan village of San Luis said they had never actually seen the rebels. Sometimes at night they thought they could hear a firefight in the mountains, a distant popping like strings of firecrackers, and two labor contractors had been shot to death in their truck by the rebels on a nearby coffee plantation. But the most direct contact that Father Larry and the nuns had with the war was the occasional visit to the village by the army—steel-helmeted Indians in camouflage fatigues—and the overhead flights of American-made helicopters that caused the children to scream in terror because their villages had been strafed from the air.