The Convict and Other Stories

“The one the lieutenant says is in Alabama.”

“You’re in Alabama now, son.”

“Captain, we got hit hard yesterday, and them men ain’t going to make it.”

The surgeon sucked in on his lip, his face shaded in the brim of his hat, and spit into the piled yellow dirt of the embankment.

“All right,” he said. “Get up on that water tower, and if you see anything blue down the line, fire one shot. Then jump for the top of the car.”

A half hour later, with his body flattened on the hot boards of the tower’s roof, he saw the column move out of the trees and start across the meadow. Only one man was tied prone on the cannon carriage now as it swayed in the ruts, and two other men sat on the back end with their knees pulled up before them. The lieutenant had already whipped his horse ahead of the column at the first sight of the hospital train, and Wesley held his Springfield in one hand and climbed down backward off the tower into the tender. They unstrapped the cook’s litter from the carriage and carried him inside one of the cars. There were spittoons at the bottom of each tier of bunks and slop jars that had spilled over on the floors. When Wesley left him, the cook’s eyes were yellow and wide, the two pupils black as cinders, as though he had jaundice, and his wooden identification tag and leather thong were clenched tightly in his palm.

A mile past the bayou they began to pick up stragglers, and by midafternoon they had overtaken a company of Mississippi infantry. Each time they crossed a rise, more men emerged out of the woods and formed into the lengthening column. Ahead, Wesley could see an ambulance wagon stopped in the middle of the road, with one mule down in its harness, while the column divided in two and swelled out into the muddy fields past it. The ground became more churned and littered with equipment as they neared the Tallapoosa River, then the officers’ horses caught the smell of water in the wind and began to rear and pitch their heads against the bit. The country was open and rolling now, the clay road as scarlet as blood in the late sun, and he saw the green line of trees along the river and knew that they would be in a safe camp by that evening with artillery and reserves set up behind them.

Then he saw the hospital train backing down the burnished tracks. Steam rolled out from under the wheels, and the engineer was leaning far out the window to see past the last car. Three soldiers with muskets were up on the spine, and the surgeon stood in the vestibule steps with his hand on the passenger rail and one boot already skipping across the rocks of the embankment. The lieutenant turned his horse out of the column and kicked him in a shower of clay toward the surgeon.

“You can bet that’s our fried ass tonight,” a soldier in front of Wesley said.

“That’s General Hood camped on the river, mister,” a Texas soldier next to him said. His face looked like the edge of a hatchet. “The only frying that’s going to get done is that pair of Yankee balls we put in our skillet.”

The lieutenant trotted his horse along the edge of the column and stopped abreast of Wesley. His horse was frothing green and white saliva from its bit.

“Pull our men out of the line and get them behind the railway grade, Corporal,” he said.

“Sir?”

“The Yankees have already cut the track ahead of us, and we’re probably going to be attacked in the next hour. Send the wounded behind the train and keep the men in position until I get back with an ammunition carrier.”

“Lieutenant, I can’t—”

But the lieutenant had already galloped his horse down the road’s edge through the soldiers who were spreading across the railroad embankment and digging shallow holes in the cinders and dirt.

The sun was red over the trees on the river’s bank, and Wesley saw the two convicts walk toward him in silhouette against the sky. Their striped jumpers were stained with red clay and sweat, and the tall man had a pin-fire revolver stuck in the top of his trousers.

“We’re caught, ain’t we?” he said.

“You ask the lieutenant about that.”

“You’re the corporal, ain’t you?”

“Just dig a hole with them others. If we get hit with Whistling Dick tonight, you’ll wish you dug plumb down to China.”

“I tell you what, butch. Before we leave out of here, we’re going to take a little piece of you with us,” the tall convict said.

“Neither one of you is going to run nowheres, unless into a provost or a Minié, and I might be the one that puts it there.”

“What you mean provost?”

Wesley saw the lieutenant cantering his horse in front of an ammunition wagon, and he walked across the railroad embankment and slid down into the shallow trench that the other men were scooping out with barrel staves and tin plates.

He lay flat against the slope and looked across the trampled meadows at the sun burning into the horizon. The low strips of cloud were aflame with light, and the water oaks along the riverbank threw long shadows across the dead current. In the distance he heard a solitary rifle crack, then the irregular spatter of more rifles firing deep in the opposite woods, and that old, blood-draining fear out of a dream started to tighten again in his stomach. He stared hard at the edge of the trees until the trunks began to recede and grow large again in the fading light. Every man on the line had his rifle cocked and pointed across the embankment, with the point of his bayonet stuck in the dirt beside him.

“Where the hell they at?” the man next to Wesley said. The stock of his musket was dark with the perspiration from his hands.

Then Wesley saw the branches of the trees begin to move unnaturally and the dark shapes of men walking in a crouch through the shadows.

“Oh, goddamn, look at them sons of bitches,” the soldier next to him said.

The Federals were coming out of the woods as far as Wesley could see. Three cannon drawn by mules crashed out of the underbrush, followed by a mort