The Convict and Other Stories

Wesley stared hard at the church building, and then his heart clicked inside him.

“Something moved in the window,” he said, his breath tight in his throat.

“Keep walking.”

“I seen it. I knowed there was Federals in there.”

“Keep that goddamn rifle where it is.” The sergeant’s voice was low and his gray face was pointed straight ahead. “They’re probably skirmishers, and they’ll let us pass to get to the column. When we hit the timber, we’ll move right around and behind them.”

“They’re going to cut us up right here on the road.”

“You shut, you hear?”

The boy could feel the blood draining out of his face, and sweat dripped from his hair and ran down his neck into his collar. His heart was clicking rapidly now, like a bad watch, and his breathing swelled inside his chest as though there were no oxygen in the humid air. He wished he had taken some shells from his cartridge box and stuck them inside his belt, because the half second’s difference in loading could keep the Yankees on the floor of the church until he had a chance to make for the woods. He wanted to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but his hands felt wooden and locked onto the rifle, and he knew that if he moved in any irregular fashion, a gray storm of Minié balls would leave him and the sergeant ripped apart on the road like piles of rags.

“A hundred more feet, son, and then we’ll be coming up their ass,” the sergeant said. The strands of chewing tobacco were like dry burns on his lips.

Wesley looked at the dark green of the pines and the mist burning away in the sunlight. Then in the time that his eyes could throb with the knowledge that it was too late, that they were caught forever in a rainwashed piece of farmland between two thick woods, a window in the church filled with a man and the long barrel of his rifle thrown hurriedly against the jamb.

Wesley whirled the Springfield toward the window and fired before the stock touched his shoulder. The man’s face flattened in an oval pie of disbelief, the back of his head roared upward into the sash, and his rifle balanced once on the window’s edge, then toppled out on the ground. Wesley knocked the swollen cartridge out of the breech with the flat of his hand and pushed another flush into the chamber. Every window in the church exploded with puffs of dirty smoke, the sergeant’s carbine went off close to his ear, and he swung his sight on an officer who was cocking and firing his revolver through a dark opening between the front doors. The ball tore the door’s edge away in a shower of white splinters, he saw the officer’s hands go to his face as though he had been scalded, and then he and the sergeant were running down the clay road toward the hackberry trees and the cannon that the lieutenant was already turning into position. Wesley pulled his haversack strap and canteen string off his shoulder and tried to get another cartridge out of his box without spilling the rest. He heard a Minié whine away behind him, then two more that thropped with a hollow rush of air close to his head.

“Don’t go in a straight line! They’ll hit you sure!” the sergeant yelled.

The men ramming the powder bag down the mouth of the cannon seemed miniature in the distance, their motions stiff and muted in the shimmering heat. The lieutenant was jacking the elevation screw on the carriage, and then Wesley saw one of the convicts carry a heavy bucket to the front of the cannon and loop the bail over the barrel.

“Goddamn, they’re loading with grape.”

“Shut up. Just go down when I do.”

“They can’t reach the church house with grape. They’re going to tear us in half.”

“Watch the lieutenant’s arm.”

The convict finished loading the handfuls of iron balls out of the bucket, a private shot the ramming rod once down the barrel, and the lieutenant raised his hand high above his head and kept it there several seconds.

“Bury your pecker,” the sergeant said.

They fell forward on their elbows in the middle of the road, and Wesley clenched his fists and wrapped his arms around his head just as the cannon thundered in a roar of black smoke and pitched upward on its carriage. He felt the ground shake under his loins, and the wide pattern of grapeshot sucked by overhead in a diminishing scream. It was quiet for less than a second, then he heard the iron balls rain on the church house like dozens of hammers clattering into wood. He turned and saw the walls covered with small, black holes, powdered bricks from the chimney scattered across the roof, and a wisp of smoke rising from one eave.

“Some of them balls must have still been glowing,” Wesley said.

“Get it moving, son. We ain’t home yet.”

They started running again, but this time Wesley knew that they had an aura of magic around them, and the two or three Yankees who were still firing couldn’t place a Minié closer than a few feet from them. The breech and barrel of his Springfield were coated with clay, he had lost his haversack, canteen, bayonet, and half of his cartridges on the road, but the trees were only fifty yards away, and the private was already reaming out the cannon barrel with water so they could stuff in the next powder bag. The rest of the men had formed a bent line through the trees, their butternut-brown uniforms almost indistinguishable from the trunks in the deep shade of the woods, and each time a rifle recoiled among the leaves, he heard the lead shot flatten out an instant later against the side of the church house.

Then he saw the sergeant jerk forward and his carbine fly into the air. The muscles in his face collapsed, his mouth hung open, and his legs, still running, folded under him as though all the bone had been removed. Then he simply sat down. The Minié had almost been spent when it embedded in the base of his scalp, and the lead protruded in a gray lump from the proud flesh.

“Drop him and run for the cannon,” he heard the lieutenant yell above the rifle fire. Then a moment later, after the cannon roared again and covered him with its heat, “Can’t you hear me, Private? He’s dead.”

. . .

The battle lasted through the morning until the Federals were burned out of the church house and forced to run across the open fields to the opposite woods. But later Wesley could remember lit

tle of it in any sequence. There had been the terrible thirst and the white sun boiling out of a cloudless sky, the green horseflies humming over the sergeant’s body, the acrid smoke that floated in the trees and burned the inside of his lungs, the wounded who were carried deeper into the woods and left their thick, scarlet drops on the dead leaves. The only detail that remained etched in time, like a clock suddenly ticking upon the twelfth hour, was the church roof bursting into pockets of flame. He stopped firing and watched the shingles curl and snap in the heat while great holes caved open in the roof and showers of sparks shot into the sky. The flames leaped out the windows and raced up the building’s sides, and then the Federals were in the middle of an unplowed field, their weapons abandoned, some of them limping and holding on to each other in a foolish dance toward the woods. They crumpled silently like stick figures in the distance, and Wesley loaded again and felt the same awful surge of blood and victory in his head as every man firing next to him.

They buried the sergeant and three enlisted men in the woods, pulled the cannon from its carriage and drove a cold chisel into the priming hole, and made a litter of tree limbs and blankets on the stripped gun mount for the two wounded who couldn’t walk. One man had been shot through both jaws and had a filthy gray shirt tied around his mouth to hold his chin and teeth in place. The old cook had been hit in the stomach while pouring water down the cannon barrel, and the dressing he held to the swollen, black hole above his navel was already sticking to his fingers. They moved across the fields past the scorched brick foundation of the church house, past the bodies of the Federals, which had started to swell in the heat, and Wesley had to look away when he saw the magpies picking like chickens after corn at the crusted wounds. The two convicts began to walk on the edge of the fields when they saw the first dead, slowing gradually while the column moved ahead of them. The lieutenant turned his horse in a half circle and slipped the leather loop off the hammer of his pistol.

“I want you men in front of the mules.”