Alternate Generals (18 page)

What did Meade know for sure before he came to Gettysburg? What did Lee know, or Pickett, or any man who came to stand at the top of a hill somewhere at a distance from the sound of cannon, the smoke of guns, the flash of swords? Easy for Monty to condemn them, in afterthought, when the battle was reduced to little dots and bars of red and blue on a map, troop movements become the sleek, imperious, sweeping black arrows that once were countless young faces, all the lost legions of someone's sons.

He is writing an apology that accepts full blame for every pale, death-startled soldier boy's face if D-Day fails. Hope. Hope against hope, a general's faith in what is sometimes little more than a well-considered gamble. Where was Meade's faith? Where is his? Tomorrow's assault on the beaches of Normandy will succeed because it must, and yet he knows that if he doesn't put down these words now—just on the chance of failure, purely for his own soul's sake—he will face tomorrow as less than the general his boys will need.

The screams of horses tear the pen from his hand, wrench him back to the hillside, back to where a sheet of paper covered with words has become again an upraised wall of earth that bars him from the battle. Meade's hand is still on his arm; he shakes it off in spite of the general's angry remonstrations, turns to the wall, thrusts his fist deep into it, through grass and soil and rock, until the barrier before him crumbles and he sees the lands beyond.

Rifle shots crack. Cavalry steeds dash pell-mell against the guns. Other horses bound in harness haul artillery upslope, flanks foamed, hides striped red with the marks of whip and spurs. He watches them struggle, strive, stumble into one of the field's uncountable, invisible pitfalls of sudden panic, founder in the whirlpool and go down. He has never seen anything so white as their madly rolling eyes.

The concussion of an exploding shell behind him throws him from his feet. He sprawls at full length in the mud, in his bathrobe and pajamas and scuffed leather slippers, his outflung hands falling across the shattered chest of a dead man.

This is his first time in the heart of combat, down on the lines, out where he hasn't got an entourage of warm bodies to trim away and smooth over the jagged edges of recent battle so that he can survey the ground his commands have conquered. It's not his fault, it's timing: He should have seen this sort of service in the Great War, but the war itself went out like a blown candle flame by the time he got his orders to go over. Even now he's not sure how deeply he regrets this lost chance, or whether he's only telling himself he's sorry things turned out as they did because that's how he thinks a soldier
should
feel.

And how should he feel now, face to face with what's left of a man? He has never been in combat but he has seen combat's harvest. How could he avoid the dead? He looks into the corpse's face and meets eyes that have fixed their clouding gaze on heaven, though only a heaven of common sky, untroubled by any presence more divine than birds, clouds, the winds that race across the world.

This was how they lay that day at Normandy. This was the rest you gave them, their service to you rewarded.
He knows that voice, although it belongs to nothing human. It is the same presence he felt stealing into his skull as he stood there in the doorway facing Mamie and the doctors, trying to smile away the first stroke's damage before the second came to claim its share.

Enough
, it whispered then;
Rest
, as if he were a wakeful child too overtired to sleep, too cross and willful to find comfort in his mother's arms.

He shakes his head like a dog just come in out of the rain, tries to shake away the words and the ghosts of the words which that presence in his head keeps whispering. Foolishly, wildly he looks to the dead man for help, but the dead man is only a boy, unused to being asked for anything at all except obedience, compliance, faith in the commands of those whose superior years must make them his betters.

The old man knows he doesn't dare to stay here. The voice is gone, for now, but he knows that if he lingers here, it will be back. Like the single, stubborn housefly that's circling the glassed-in porch, lighting on the old man's hands again and again because he lacks strength enough to drive it decisively away, the voice will return.

So he pushes himself to his feet, his bathrobe gummed with mud that's made of blood and dirt, and he runs. His leather slippers slap over the hard ground, skid in places where the rush and retreat of men and horses and iron-sheathed wheels haven't chewed the grass away. A shot-torn banner flaps across his face like the passing of a ghost, the caress of a shroud. White stars and blue bars on a field of faded red twist and unfurl before his eyes. The stars all fall down, points jabbed into the earth like bayonets, taking root, springing up again in rows of plain white markers at his feet, some crosses, some themselves a different kind of star.

The tip of one slipper catches on the marble base of the only cross that stands out of military true to its neighbors. He falls a second time as he fell before, when the bombshell hit, and all that was there to break his fall was that poor boy's body. But this field has already taken its dead deep into the shadows, hiding them away under sweet green grass as if their shaken, broken bodies had always been things too torn and horrible to bear remembering. Like this—plain markers standing in their precise and proper rows—like this they're numbers, printed blocks of red and blue, black arrows on a map, acceptable.

"Is that so? Acceptable?" A hand reaches down to him and he takes it, using it to help himself regain his feet. The gentleman who has come to his aid wears gray. "No more acceptable to you, sir, if truth be told, than it ever was to me."

He stares at the man who speaks and can't help but feel diminished in the face of such bearing, confidence that isn't cockiness, a self-possessed air of command that still makes place for humility. For the first time since the cracks between worlds opened for him, the old man feels himself to be woefully underdressed. His slippers are in a sorry state, his robe thoroughly stained from all the tumbles he's taken while wearing it. Mamie will be fit to be tied when she sees what he's done, but wherever she is, Mamie isn't here, and that's a pity. He thinks of the fine impression a lady of breeding like his wife would make on a born gentleman like General Lee.

He makes a perfunctory adjustment to the fit of his bathrobe belt and clears his throat to speak, but the words are still trapped at an appalling distance. He stands there tongue-tied and knows he's blushing, but General Lee knows the art of setting a man at ease and pretends not to notice.

"When did you first start thinking about their numbers, sir?" the general asks, and when the old man's face creases in protest he is quick to add: "I don't mean when did you first think of them
as
numbers. That's a trick we all try, when their faces get to be too much for us, and may God have mercy on those of us who do succeed." He raises his eyes and surveys the horizon where seabirds soar and dip and cry into emptiness. "So many of them, so very many . . ." The graves only seem to go on forever. They end, as they must, at a road, a fence, the sea. Somewhere beyond the point that Lee's eyes have found there is a green field where cattle wander, and past that there are clouds drifting across the sky.

"There's many things that become too hard to think of head on," Lee tells him. "Still, I don't believe I ever thought that way when I was young. A war was a history book to me then, battles were chapters—that much I always accepted—but the hour I realized that some day I would have to write them all with men . . ." He shakes his head and takes the old man by the arm. "The morning is very fine. I enjoy the smell of the sea. Walk with me now, and for a while—just for a little while—let's neither one of us face a single thought that doesn't bear thinking."

They are walking together between the rows of graves. Absurdly the old man wishes that all this would flicker itself away and change into the rolling greens of a golf course. The thought of himself in his favorite golf togs, Lee still splendid in the uniform of the Confederacy, makes him laugh. It's the first real sound he's been able to force out of his frozen throat and it breaks over the field like a thousand thunderclaps.

Lee's mouth smiles, though his eyes have lost the knack. "That's a start back, anyway," he says.

The old man stares at him: A start back? Back to where, to what? Not to the battlefield, surely? Not to the dead boy's broken body, and the terrified horses, and the generals rooted among the oaks on the hill, moving blocks of blue against blocks of red?

Not back to the voice he's fled.

"Why not?" asks Lee. "Go back and find it again, the voice, the promises it made to you. It's what you've wanted, what you've sought: Enough. Rest. Surrender. Peace. Peace . . . or was it only silence? You're afraid, General. After all these years, you're finally afraid. What you commanded then, at Normandy, was nothing to the power one word of yours carries now." Lee's eyes turn to the skies above the empty fields where something terrible flashes. A single cloud boils up and spreads its churning crown into a shape that's become an icon of more dread than one poor scythe-bearing skeleton ever was.

The old man can't take his eyes from the mushroom cloud. He thinks that if he gazes at it long enough he'll see it bloom with faces. That is when he knows—though he's told himself over and over again that surrender isn't something he can swallow—that surrender is precisely what he seeks. Let someone else give the word, change the world with yes or no. Let someone else see the faces of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, children in his every memory of all the boys he's sent beyond the brink. And now—! Now, when it's become so easy to command so much—!

He looks into the cloud. He doesn't dream, being a practical man, but he can imagine. He knows that if ever a thought didn't bear the thinking . . .

"Daddy?"

A hand, very small and warm, grabs his clumsily. He looks down and his heart cracks open wide. His son is there—not John, not his second-born, but Doud, the baby boy they baby-named Icky.

Icky's body lies in Fairmont Cemetery in Denver; Icky, not even four years old when scarlet fever touched him and he died.

Icky is here, among the graves.

The old man stoops and takes his son into his arms. The boy laughs and lays his soft cheek against his father's aged face.
When I looked at you in your cradle, I never dreamed I'd see you in your grave.
The old man begins to cry and Icky frowns, confused, tries to brush away each teardrop as it falls.

"Daddy? Dad? It's all right."

The old man's arms are empty. Icky is standing before him, a man grown. His uniform is strictly Army, his boots are caked with mud, he's shifted his helmet so that his father can see the red mark that it's left on his child's brow. His free hand reaches out to pat his father's shoulder. He can't embrace the old man now; his other hand cups the butt of a rifle. "It's all right," he says one last time before he turns away and jogs off to join the line of young men marching up the road to Paris, to Berlin, to Gettysburg.

"
Icky
!" The name breaks itself against the sky, driving back the spreading poison of the cloud. The old man stands with arms outstretched after a dream and hardly knows he's found his voice again.

Others know. General Lee's hand claps him on the back. "Enough," he says. "You've rested long enough. You'll find your peace in time, but not like this. Let them hear you speak again, all of your sons."

The old man's head bows. He looks into his hands, now brimming with the flowers he once laid on Icky's grave. "Speak," he repeats as if he's only talking to the flowers. "With what a word, a single word of mine now has the power to do?" The cloud is gone, but its ghost has come to linger on his face.

"With what a single word of yours can stop." Lee takes the flowers from him, one by one, and scatters them over the grass. They are walking again, this time over a silent battlefield strewn with the dead. A mist is rising. Men scuttle here and there, setting up their boxy cameras that perch like spiders on spindly legs. They do not notice the generals as they pass.

"Look at that," the old man says with sorrow. He points to where one photographer is dragging a young man's corpse from where it's fallen so that it catches a better angle of the light. "As if that poor boy were just another of his studio props, a bolster, a chair."

"A number," says Lee. "A counter. But not to you. Never to you. Now do you know? Now can't you see why this—this peace you think you've gained by your surrender—can't be, can't last?"

"If I don't come back, someone else will do my job for me."

"Yes." Lee takes the last flower from the old man's hands and casts the petals into the wind, but they are tiny toy soldiers by the time they fall to earth. The old man knows that you can buy a box of them for a dollar, then buy another easily when the first lot's all broken or crushed or gone missing. So why then does he bother to kneel in the mud of the battlefield and pick them up carefully, tenderly, one by one?

"Someone else will do my job for me," he tells them as he cleans the dirt from their faces and lays them down in rows. He stands at last. "If I let him."

Lee is gone. The old man has no time to spend on wondering where he's vanished. So much to do! And if he doesn't do it, who will? The thought chills him.

But summer swiftly drives the chill out of his bones. His fingers curl, his hands are fists again before he knows it. He is standing in the sunlight and the bees are swarming so drunkenly over Mamie's flowerbed that they're dive-bombing the glass that screens the porch. His eyes dance nimbly, following their crazy flight, his blood hums with the furious beating of their wings. He feels the life in them and laughs because he feels it in himself as well, at last, at last!

Then a sharp gasp. A crash of something heavy to the floor. The male nurse stands there gawping, empty hands shaking over the wreck of the lunch tray he's let fall.