South of Shiloh (20 page)

“Thanks.”

“Need something else?”

“Remind Mike I’m coming out in the morning.” Then he said good-night and hung up the phone.

Rane spent the next hour over the bathroom sink with peroxide, soap, cold water, and a 3M scrub, working the bloodstains from the shirt and coat. Satisfied he’d purged the worst of it, he held up the jacket and checked the tag. A size 42. Like he’d figured, they were about the same size. Tentatively, he tried on the jacket and buttoned it. He raised his arms and felt the wet wool press his throat, chest, and shoulder. Good, he could move freely. After he hung the coat on the shower rail, he scrubbed the residual red smears from his hands and the sink.

As he watched it swirl down the drain, he told himself the blood didn’t bother him; just a piece of the jigsaw puzzle of the story.

He stripped off the damp sweatshirt, pulled on a dry t-shirt, and went back in the living room, hefted the heavy cased rifle and set it aside. He’d already decided the bulky muzzleloader was not making the trip. Then he laid out the leather gear, discarded the bayonet, opened the cartridge box, and took out the cluster of brown-paper cartridges snugged in two tin holders. They weren’t making the trip either.

He kept the waist belt with the smaller leather pouch that contained brass percussion caps. The flat, round burlap-covered canteen was partially full. He carried it to the kitchen sink and raised the flask as a thirsty catch ached in his throat. He took a drink of the stale, rusty water, swallowed it, and dumped the rest down the drain.

Next he held up the haversack Borck had referred to and set it aside on his light table.

Then he tried on the dirty sky-blue wool trousers, pulled on the suspenders, slipped his feet into the muddy black-leather square-toed shoes, and laced them up. He squatted, walked around, and listened to the gritty hobnails clatter on his oak floor. The shoes were slightly loose, but thick socks would solve that.

He searched through the duffel, found soiled flannel underwear and two pairs of heavy gray wool socks. He tossed the underwear back in the bag, kept the socks, and retrieved the flannel shirt from the bathroom. Plucking burrs from the socks, he took them along with the shirt to the basement, ran cold water and detergent in the washer, and tossed in the clothing.

Back upstairs he brought his camera bag from his closet and removed a D200 Nikon camera body, a 17–55 mm lens and the 80–200 for backup, two digital gig cards, and a light meter. Emptying the haversack, he found a glasses case that contained tiny tortoiseshell frames smeared with mud, small cotton food bags, a fork, knife, and spoon, and the rumpled blue army cap that completed the uniform. Last, he lifted out a brown leather-bound journal, which he opened to a tablet of lined paper.

His eyes scanned the cursive penmanship on the first page; it was right-leaning, like the signature on the card, written in the same black pencil.

Dearest Molly and Jenny,

We are encamped on boggy ground near Kirby Creek, Mississippi. It’s raining and a little bit cold. The tops of the trees disappear in this white mist and sitting here I can almost imagine faces haunting the twisted branches.

For me History has always come down to a single human face by which all American faces are measured. If you want to know what History looks like, then look at the last photograph taken of Abraham Lincoln toward the end of the war. It’s all there in his eyes, as if he had to take a sip from every dead soldier on both sides. Sorry, don’t mean to sound corny.

What’s happening here is the officers tell us the Rebs have occupied an entrenched position beyond the woods on the far side of a swamp. In the morning we will form company and deploy for the flank assault through the swamp to take them in the rear.

Get this. They gave me this identity card. I’m inhabiting the persona of a real soldier who fought in the battle. Won’t know how he came out till I open the thing.

I figure 140 years ago he would have been thinking of his wife and daughter right now. And if he had a daughter named Molly she would probably be sitting in an uncomfortable desk in a chilly one-room schoolhouse, and after school she’d have to walk a long way home to a farm. No Walkman, no TV, no dance lessons; probably you’d have to do smelly chores in a barn. Yuck, right?

I’m sure once you got used to it, you’d do just fine. Just as I hope I will measure up on this march that’s coming, which is billed as pretty rough.

I’ve tried hard never to give you or Mom any reason to be displeased with me. But I don’t feel I’ve ever done anything to make you really proud. Maybe this is my…

The writing stopped in mid-sentence. The empty lines at the bottom of the page were smudged with ferrous red dirt, a splotched watermark, and a partial thumbprint. Rane rocked back, closed the journal, and visualized the red-tinged water sluicing down the bathroom drain. Paul’s blood was on his hands and it did bother him, as did the compulsion to wear the man’s clothing and taste the water from his canteen.

Inhabiting the persona…

Rane left the journal, walked into the kitchen, and sat down at the table. The handwritten entry echoed, “…don’t mean to sound corny…”

He studied the glued edges of the manila card he’d taken from the blue sack coat. What were the chances of reopening a fate sealed in blood?

Never believed in corny shit like second chances.

But he had promises to keep.

He pushed the card back and forth across the table until it came to rest next to his key ring, touching the quarter with a hole blasted through it.

Cross my heart.

And hope to die.

24

RANE GRABBED A FAST OIL CHANGE AND TUNE-UP
at Jiffy Lube, inserted a quarter to gauge his tire tread, and hoped they’d do. By nine a.m. he was driving down a country road east of Hudson, Wisconsin, on his way to Mike’s place on Mail Lake. Where he grew up. Back then the asphalt road he was driving had been gravel.

Rane passed through cookie-cutter white-trimmed faux Cape Cod condos that now lined the paved road. “Too many rats in the cage,” Uncle Mike would say.

He glanced up at an ambiguous gray sky that could rain or clear off. A faint stir of northwest wind nudged the pines crowns. Almost warm, close to fifty-five degrees.

He remembered fields and woods; an abrupt transition for a boy nannied and tutored in the Summit Hill district of St. Paul. Marcus and Julia Rane had been flying to a performance in Milwaukee when their small plane hit shear winds and went down.

Uncle Mike had been Rane’s guide through the abrupt switch from studying piano at the MacPhail Center for the Performing Arts to splitting oak rounds with a heavy steel maul. Mike introduced him to fishing, hunting, and the white-chip fury of a bucking chainsaw.

He turned at the red fire number sign. A stand of pines screened the access road curling down to the split-level cedar house built into the bluff overlooking the lake.

Rane parked the Jeep, got out, and went inside to a living room that was a picture gallery dedicated to his cousins Janet and Mark and their kids. Like always, he wondered if the blank spot on the wall begged the question of Molly’s picture. A gaunt, rheumy-eyed golden retriever sidled up to him and nuzzled his hand. The dog and Mike were aging apace.

“So where’s he at, Danny? Out in back?”

His father’s ebony grand piano still occupied a corner of the living room with the top folded down. Wiped free of dust, the portrait of his parents perched on the waxed surface. He had his father’s urbane smile when he wanted, his long fingers, and his mother’s springy dark hair and gray-green eyes.

He looked away from the photograph and paused at the doorway to Mike’s paneled den, where two picture frames hung over the desk. One glittered with the seven rows of ribbons and medals and badges Mike had earned in Vietnam. The other displayed pictures of the seven cars and trucks he’d totaled when he mustered out of the army—before he went straight and married Karen. The discipline of the keyboard and the lure of the den had been a tug of war.

Uncle Mike had won in the end.

“I’m round in front,” Rane heard his uncle yell.

Rane went back out the front door and found Mike standing in the driveway, leaning on the Jeep with a pair of Nikon binoculars hanging around his neck. “Karen’s at work.” He grinned. “We can fart, swear, smoke…and maybe shoot. So what’s up, Johnny?”

Rane said, “Road trip.”

“What the hell for? You writing another book?” Mike raised his eyebrows, which emphasized the gray cast to his right eye. A durable husk of a man, who set off airport metal detectors, he’d been mostly used up in service to his country. Mike had given up on people and now preferred the company of reliable things; mainly old rifles, which he’d built and repaired and endlessly tinkered with in his popular gun shop in Hudson before he retired.

“I’m thinking about doing a story about the North-South Skirmish Association,” Rane ad-libbed. “Don’t they have a chapter in Wisconsin?”

Mike scratched his cheek. “I did some shooting with those guys years back. Gotta wear Civil War uniforms. Shoot at hanging flowerpots, offhand at a hundred yards mostly. Team competition kind of thing. I don’t think they’re active local anymore.”

Rane nodded, regurgitating the information he’d stripped off the Internet last night. “I read the whole Civil War reenactor scene started with the North-South Skirmish back in the fifties. Thought I’d take a look at them, maybe get back into a little shooting. See if there’s an angle…”

Mike pondered. “Don’t see many Sharps with the Skirmish. It was one of the first cartridge rifles. Most of those guys are into muzzleloaders. Maybe exclusively. I’d have to check but you may be wasting your time with the Sharps.”

Rane shrugged. “Guess I’ll find out. You gonna help me or give me a lecture? Where’s the rifle?”

“
Aw
right, I guess. You bought the damn thing after all.”

“Mike, it was a present.”

“Now you’re taking it back,” he grumbled. “Indian giver.” Then he inclined his head toward the large Morton building next to the house, where he had his shop. “C’mon, I got it right over there.”

They walked over to the big tin shed, where a rifle with a leather sling leaned against the doorjamb. Mike picked it up and weighed it in his palm. The Sharps was wickedly slim and balanced to the eye; a lever-action breechloader with an upright rectangular steel bulge to the breech and distinctive curl to the hammer. Mike cocked the lever open, dropping the block, and opened the chamber. He raised an eyebrow. “This was
the
most deadly piece of iron ever seen on a Civil War battlefield. This rifle could tell some stories about the men it killed.”

Rane nodded. “An 1859 single-trigger Sharps military rifle; original lock and hammer and barrel and wood. And what a rusty piece of shit it was when I spotted it in that antique junk shop outside of Lincoln, Nebraska,” Rane said.

“You always had the good eyes, Johnny,” Mike said.

“Yeah, well, you’re the one fixed it up,” Rane said. Then he waited patiently, seeing that Mike, the methodical gunsmith and former competitive shooter, was lapsing into lecture mode. Mike removed a flat plastic box from his jacket pocket, opened it, revealing white cloth tubes tucked in an orderly row with sharp lead points. He selected one.

“Fires a .52-caliber bullet in a linen cartridge. The round is within one-half thousandth of the diameter of the barrel. There’s a wad behind the round to further cut down on gas leakage. Cast and loaded these myself.”

He flipped up the rear ramp sight. “Sights are true from a hundred to eight hundred yards. I left the tick marks you put on that time.” He indicated three thin hash marks, drawn in luminous white paint on the side of the flip-up sight. He inserted one of the cartridges in the open breech. Then he wracked the lever shut. The mechanism sealed the breech and sliced off the end of the linen cartridge.

“You still doing your rosary every day? Dry-firing that old Remington?” Mike asked as he handed over the rifle.

Rane slung the rifle over his shoulder. “Yeah…”

“Well, let’s see if it worked. C’mon, we gotta take a little hike.”

Mike led him up a path over the wooded slope into a long, overgrown field that butted up against a ridge. The side of the far hill had been dug away with a Bobcat and a frame of six-by-sixes sunk into the ground. A series of earth berms were thrown across the ground at two-hundred-yard intervals.

As they walked, Rane casually bounced an assumption off Mike’s expertise. “You catch that story about the Minnesota reenactor who got killed in Mississippi?”

“Uh-huh. Saw it on TV.”

“You think it was an accident, like they say?”

“Probably some dumb shit brought a loaded rifle. Never took the time to clean it from shooting live. Those are play guns; the Springfields and Enfields the reenactor crowd uses,” Mike said. “Italian manufacture, strictly for the reenactor market to shoot blanks. Precision in the rifling isn’t important. Use the same cheap cutter over and over to groove the barrels. Accuracy is not an issue.”

Rane thought out loud, “So it couldn’t have been an aimed shot?”

“Not unless the shooter swapped out the Italian barrel and put in a custom barrel and sights, like Badger makes in Bristol, Wisconsin. Down there he could get one from Whitacre or Dixie Gun Works I suppose. That’s what the boys in the Skirmish competitions do, put decent barrels in those rifles.”

Rane let the topic die as they stopped at a sturdy plywood table and a bench, next to a railroad tie half buried in the weeds. Squinting, Rane saw several tiny metal circles dangling from the frame on chains. At two hundred yards, the suspended targets were smaller than baby aspirins.

Mike removed the lid on a box built into the side of the bench, removed sandbags, and stacked them on the table. Then he took a small canister from his pocket and opened it. Percussion caps.

“Prime it,” Mike said.

Rane plucked up one of the small winged caps, pulled the hammer to half-cock, fitted the cap on the cone beneath the hammer, and crimped down the wings to hold it tight.

Mike plunked the box of cartridges down on the bench and appraised his nephew. “The ultimate accuracy challenge, Johnny. Cast lead and black powder. That powder is extremely sensitive to temperature, humidity, and barometrics. Low-velocity round traveling eight hundred feet a second is way more susceptible to wind than smokeless powder firing a metal jacket…” He raised the binoculars hanging around his neck and squinted with his left eye. “The targets are fresh cast so I can mark the fall of the rounds. Range two hundred yards.” Then he added, “She shoots a little low when it’s damp.”

“I’ll take the one on the left,” Rane said, easing down on the bench and adjusting the rifle on the pile of sandbags. He flipped up the rear sight, set the crossbar at 200, and squinted a couple times getting used to the front blade. Then he pulled the hammer to full-cock.

Mike laughed.

“What?” Rane said.

Mike nodded at Rane’s right hand, the way he instinctively placed his middle finger on the trigger, laid his index finger along the side of the breech, under the hammer. “Point-shooter. Just like the first time you picked up a .22 when you were twelve.”

Rane settled in, getting the feel of the wooden stock against his shoulder as he studied the tiny disc through the notched crossbar. A tickle of breeze kissed his left cheek, maybe three miles an hour. Hold a schoosh to the left.

His finger teased the trigger. The presence that had been hibernating in his blood roused.

Easy. It’s been a while. It’ll take some practice time to snap in. After some sighting rounds he’d stand and fire offhand.

An exercise in composition.

His heartbeat throbbed in the pad of his finger. When it faded, he squeezed the trigger.