Oh, Lordy, they gonna shoot you for sleeping on guard duty, she said to herself.
But even as she heard the words inside her, she knew they were a deception. She stepped into what should have been the periphery of his vision and saw the paleness in his cheeks and the dark area, like a child's bib, under his chin. A barber's razor with a pearl handle lay in a circle of blood at his feet.
At the end of the ward the screens had been moved aside from the colonel's bed. The sheet he had slept under trailed on the floor like a handkerchief half-pulled from a man's pocket. She ran toward the kitchen to find the night nurse, the Confederate amputees propping themselves up at the sound of feet. The brass lamp still burned on the colonel's nightstand. She glanced at the saucer where he had kept the three.36 caliber pistol balls that had been removed from his body, hoping that perhaps in some way what she had always known about him and denied, namely, that first and last and foremost he thought of no one except himself and his own possessions, was not true.
The saucer was bare, his overturned slop jar running on the floor.
Chapter Ten
LIEUTENANT Robert Perry had always slept without dreaming, or at least without dreaming of events or places or people he remembered in daylight. The world was a fine place, filled with bird-song and the smell of horses and wood smoke at dawn and fish spawning in swamps where the sunlight glowed like a green lantern inside the cypress. In fact, in the quietness of the dawn and the faint pinkness spreading across the cane fields and the cabins of the slaves and the horses blowing in the pasture, Robert sometimes believed he was witness to the quiet hush of God's breath upon the world.
Now sleep came to him fitfully and took him to places to which he did not want to return. The geographical designations-Manassas Junction, Winchester, Front Royal, Cross Keys-were names that never appeared in the dreams. His nocturnal recollection of these places came to him only in images and sounds: a night picket cocking back the hammer on a rifle, a man calling for water, another caught inside a burning woods, a stretcher bearer sitting on the lip of a crater in the middle of a railroad track, holding his ears, screaming, kicking his feet.
When Robert would finally fall into a deep slumber before dawn, he would awake suddenly to the whistling sound of a shell arcing out of its trajectory, then discover the world outside his tent was silent, except perhaps for a cook rattling pans in the back of a wagon. He would lie with his arm across his eyes, his palm resting on the coolness of his revolver, breathing slowly, reciting his morning prayers, waiting for his mind to empty of dreams he told himself had no application in the waking day.
The previous evening he had received a letter from Abigail Dowling, one that perplexed him and also saddened his heart, because even though he had already learned of Jim Stubbefield's death, he had not accepted it, each morning waking with the notion Jim was still alive, in the Western campaign with the 18th Louisiana, the youthful confidence on his face undisturbed by either war or mortality. In Robert's haversack was a carte de visite, taken by a photographer at Camp Pratt, showing Willie, Robert and Jim together for the last time, Jim standing while they sat, a hand on each of their shoulders, a gentle scarecrow posed between two smiling friends.
God fashions the pranksters to keep the rest of us honest, Jim. Wasn't right of you to die on us, old pal, he thought, almost resentfully.
But the other portions of Abigail's letter disturbed him as well, although with certainty he could not say why. He sat on a Quaker gun, in front of a cook fire, in the cool, smoky dawn above the Shenandoah Valley, and unfolded her letter and read it again.
Dear Robert,
I saw your father and he said you know of Jim's death at Shiloh. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am at the loss of your friend. Also I need to confide some thoughts of my own to you about the war and what I perceive as a great evil that has fallen upon the land. Please forgive me in advance if my words are hurtful in any way.
I helped prepare the body of a young Union soldier who had been guarding Confederate amputees in the hospital where I have been working in New Orleans. His throat had been cut by men in the employ of Colonel Ira Jamison. Colonel Jamison was offered a parole, but evidently for reasons of political gain he refused it and had a boy of seventeen murdered in order to establish himself as an escaped prisoner of war. I believe this man to be the most despicable human being I have ever met.
I witnessed the hanging of a gambler whose only crime was to possess a piece of a ripped U
nion flag. The execution was ordered by none other than General Butler himself, supposedly with the approval of President Lincoln. I would like to believe the deaths of the gambler and the young soldier were simply part of war's tragedy. But I would be entertaining a deception. Colonel Jamison and General Butler are emblematic of the arrogance of power. Their cruelty speaks for itself. The young sentry, the gambler, and Jim Stubbefield are their victims. I think there will be others.
Please write and tell me of your health and situation. Day and night you are in my thoughts and my prayers.
Affectionately,
Your friend,
Abigail
The Quaker gun he sat on was a huge log lopped free of branches that had been dragged into the earthworks and positioned to look like a cannon. Robert looked into the cook fire, then across an open field at timbered hills, where, if he listened carefully, he would hear axes chopping into wood, trees crashing among themselves, blue-clad men wheeling light artillery through the underbrush. The wind blew inside the earthworks and the pages of Abigail's letter fluttered in his hands.
"You think we're going across?" he asked a lieutenant sitting next to him.
The man was named Alcibiades LeBlanc. He was heavily bearded and was smoking a long-stem pipe, one leg crossed on his knee. When he removed the pipe from his mouth his cheeks were hollow and his mouth made a puckered button.
"Perhaps," he said.
Robert stood and looked across the field again. There were two round green hills next to each other in the distance, a stream that fed between them and woods on each side of a dammed pond at the bottom of the stream. A Union officer rode out of the trees and cantered his horse up and down the edge of the field. Robert thought he saw sunlight glint on brass or steel inside the trees.
"What troubles you? Not the Yanks, huh?" Alcibiades asked.
Robert handed him Abigail's letter to read. The earthworks were stark, constructed from huge baskets that had been braided together out of sticks and packed solidly with dirt and mud and rocks. Logs supported by field stones were laid out horizontally against the walls of the rifle pits so sharpshooters could stand on them and fire across the field. Alcibiades finished reading the letter and refolded it and handed it back to Robert.
"She wants to marry you," he said.
"It's that simple?" Robert said.
Across the field a shell exploded in a black puff of torn cotton high above the mounted officer's head. But the officer was unperturbed and wheeled his horse about and cantered it along the rim of the woods, where men in blue were forming a skirmish line behind the tree trunks.