Cain at Gettysburg (24 page)

“Help me.”

Blake's first instinct was to stop playing along with John Bunyan and tell him and Cobb to pick up the lieutenant. But there was something going on beyond the brush that changed his mind.

“You put your brother down for a minute,” he told John Bunyan. “Put him down gently now. And wait for me.” To the lieutenant, he said, “We'll get you on out of here, sir. Just hold on a little longer.”

He laid down two of the three rifles he lugged, keeping his own. And he marched out into the field where the slaughter had begun just hours before.

Scavengers were robbing the dead and wounded. Three of them. Shameless and unconcerned in the afternoon light.

Their pockets bulged.

He came close enough to draw the interest of one of the looters, who paused. The other two kept on mining pockets. A wounded man struggled faintly to resist.

“You,” Blake said. To all of them. He raised his rifle in their general direction, holding it just shy of his shoulder. In their greed, the three men had laid their own weapons aside.

All three of them rose now. Sizing him up.

“You need to stop what you're doing. Right now.” He cocked his rifle. “And empty out your pockets.”

Bearded and ragged, the men straightened in defiance. One hitched up his trousers.

“You ain't no sergeant of ours,” the rear man said. “So git along.”

Blake turned his rifle toward the speaker. “I pull this trigger, it won't matter all that much whose sergeant I am.”

Instead of cowering, two of the men edged closer. The third kept still.

“Now, I ain't got my letters all that good,” one of the men told Blake, “but I've got my numbers. And one shot from you still leaves two of us. That means at least two of us four are like to stay right here with these poor folk.” He smiled, snaggletoothed. “How you like that figuring, Sergeant Whoever-the-Hell?”

Blake saw Cobb before the men did. Cobb had worked around behind them. With a bobcat leap, he left the concealing greenery and slammed his rifle butt into the side of the rear man's head. Shutting his iron-hard foot over the fallen man's throat, he locked his weapon against his shoulder before the other two scavengers had time to turn.

“Why don't y'all tell Sergeant Blake there about them numbers again?”

If the men had been little impressed with Blake, they took Cobb a great deal more seriously. Kind meets kind, Blake thought.

“We were just minding our own business.”

Cobb let go one of his mocking laughs. “Mighty fine business, too.”

Other men with more honorable concerns emerged from the creekbed, bearing their wounded blood relatives or blanket-mates. In the opposite direction, a band of litter bearers appeared, returning to their duties from a field hospital. Plenty of company now.

“Empty your pockets and go,” Blake told the robbers.

One of the men snickered. “You wouldn't shoot a fellow soldier, Sergeant.”

Cobb spoke up. “He might, or might not. But me, I set myself a goal of killing five men today, and I'm only certain of four. So you git. And take this turd of yours with you.” He removed his bare foot from the soldier's throat and the man moaned. Just for good measure, Cobb punched his heel into the man's ribs.

Blake hailed two sets of stretcher bearers. They weren't the regiment's Moravian musicians performing their alternate duty, but they responded. He led them into the brambles.

The first two bearers took up Lieutenant Devereaux, who groaned as they lifted him onto the bloody stretcher and carried him off. But when the other bearers moved to shift James Bunyan, one, a red-haired boy, said, “This here fella's dead.”

John Bunyan sprang up and broke the bearer's nose, knocking him several feet backward.

“Stop it, damn you!” Blake ordered. His throat felt torn.

John Bunyan looked at him. Trying to remember who this man was and why his voice carried authority.

“James ain't dead,” he proclaimed.

The two men stood frozen as the unmolested stretcher bearer tended to his comrade. They waited long enough for flies to find them. Then they stood there a bit longer.

At last, John Bunyan tightened his eyes on Blake's. “
You
tell me. I don't trust that Cobb. Or them folks. You tell me if James is…”

Blake knelt down. He took theatrical pains over the body, checking for a pulse in the ruined neck and at an unblemished wrist. He dropped his ear against the boy's blood-encrusted chest to search for a heartbeat. Then he brought his face close to the horror that remained of James Bunyan's jaw, testing for breath.

He was careful to stand up and slip into a ready stance before he spoke.

“He's dead. I'm sorry.”

John Bunyan didn't wail or cry. Nor did he lash out this time. He just nodded. Looking away from Blake, away even from the big carcass that had been his twin brother.

“I guess I knowed,” he said mildly. Then he added, “Ma'll take it well enough. She's the strong one. But this is going to ruin Pa, just ruin him. It don't matter about him riding with those bushwhackers. James was still the apple of his eye.”

From mild, the twin eased to docile. He looked again at Blake, then at Cobb, and back to Blake. “Can we take him on, though? I don't want to leave him here like this. I want to be able to tell Pa I buried him proper.”

Blake held out his rifle to Cobb. “My turn to carry.”

*   *   *

Colonel Burgwyn was dead and Lieutenant Colonel Lane was set to die. They heard the news as soon as they reached the much-diminished crowd of sprawled and sitting men behind the tavern ridge. Blake asked for Major Jones. He didn't want to seem defiant on such a day and hoped to get permission to take James Bunyan off a little ways and bury him. But Knock Jones had gone to pay his last respects to Colonel Burgwyn.

Blake remembered the colonel soft-voiced in the night, not two full days before, as Burgwyn had tried to make a bookkeeper of him. The boy had risen to a man's place well enough. And he had paid the cost. With many another.

Two other survivors from the company joined the burial party without being asked. After a testy exchange with some artillerymen drawn back into the reserve, a gunner lieutenant ordered his men to loan Blake and his companions a pick and two shovels.

“Just bring 'em back,” the lieutenant said.

Blake nodded.

As his death thickened, James grew heavier. They carried his body back through a swale, then angled away from the road to escape the screams from a field hospital.

“Only thing meaner than a red-haired woman's a surgeon with a saw,” Cobb said.

“Now that's a plain fact,” Corny Wright, one of the helpful pair of volunteers, confirmed.

“Just hope somebody'll have the decency to bury me apart, when my time comes,” the other man, Charley Campbell, said. “I just can't take to the idea of being thrown in a pit with folks I don't know.”

“And shallow enough for dogs to have a chew,” Cobb put in, offering them his lopsided cave of a smile.

“We ain't going to bury James shallow,” John Bunyan said. Blake caught the sudden fear, the dread, in the boy's voice.

Before Blake could speak, Cobb told the twin, “No, we ain't. No Yankee hound's going to feast on one of our'n.”

“Digging's a calming thing, anyhow,” Corny said. Cornelius Wright was a blacksmith, famed back home for making up in skill what he lacked in muscle. Charley Campbell, who had sworn off liquor young to please his mother, had doled out whiskey in his uncle's tavern. Charley had been renowned for never touching a drop to his lips.

Blake understood what the two men were about. They had lost their campfire-mates that afternoon. They needed to belong again, to enter a new family within their greater clan. So Corny and Charley had leapt to make themselves useful. It was fine by Blake, who knew neither man was trouble. But he needed to make sure no lines were being crossed.

“I didn't see Sergeant Dunlap back there where we're putting down,” he said.

Corny grunted. “Yankee peckerwood shot him between the eyes.”

Weary men, they slowed almost to baby steps as they took the body up another hillock. On top, Blake said, “We'll stop here.”

Charley sighed. “Be easier to dig, we was to put him in bottomland.”

But Blake wanted to do this one thing right and proper. For John Bunyan. Who would be needed in the coming days. For John, his ma, the sister, and the worthless other brother who'd gone off with his pa to ride with Yankee bushwhackers. And he wanted to do it because it put some rightness to the day.

“This a good enough place?” he asked the surviving twin.

John Bunyan said, “Over there's better. By them trees. So he'll have shade.”

Blake expected a crack from Cobb about dead men not having a particular need for shade, but it didn't come. Maybe Cobb was just too worn out to keep up his meanness. But the filthy little man with the ruined nose had been all right that day. Not least with the scavengers down by the creek.

Nor did any man complain of the additional labor of digging where there would be roots to hack through. They were too weary to protest against much of anything. They were willing—even Cobb was—to let Blake decide things.

Conscious of the need to return to what remained of the regiment, Blake paced out a length of earth where the falling sun threw shade, but the roots might not be so bad.

“Look here, John,” he said to the twin, who stood, still bewildered, over his brother's body, “this strikes me as a fine spot. He'll have the morning sun to warm him after the night, and shade all afternoon to keep him cool. Think this would be agreeable to your kin?”

Gone inward again, the twin nodded, but said nothing.

Aching to belong, Charley and Corny did more than their share of the work, going at it hard until Charley's muscles shook visibly. John Bunyan replaced Charley in the hole. Except for Cobb, they were young men all, but looked of middle age.

“You get out of there, too, Corny,” Blake told him, taking off his coat. “You've done your part.”

Jumping into the rough-made hole, Blake thought how odd it was that he'd never contemplated the prospect of being laid in a mass grave himself. He'd thought about dying and had not been much troubled by the possibility, but the thought of lying forever crushed against or under another man's rot queased him.

Tired, he thought. We're all tired. Deadly in need of water.

“You, Charley Campbell,” he said. “If you're rested enough, you gather up those canteens and go on over and see if that farmhouse can spare a little water without asking Yankee dollars for it.”

The barkeep did as bidden, promptly, moving as fast as a man tired to failing could make himself go, heading across a half-mile of fields.

They all need to belong, Blake thought, heaving up another shovel load. Even Cobb, in his way. Why don't I feel it? Under all the yes-sir-no-sir, why don't I feel that need?

Pausing to rest his weight on the shovel, Blake asked, “Deep enough?”

Tight beside him, John Bunyan stopped digging. Blake had grasped that, if he didn't put a stop to things, the boy would burrow right on through to China.

The twin peered over the lip of the grave and beyond the cluster of trees. To the west, shadows deepened on the mountain the army had crossed to come to this place. Then the boy looked at his worn shoes and Blake's.

“I reckon.”

“Dog nor man won't get him down that deep,” Corny assured him.

“Anyway,” Cobb added, “dogs'll have easier pickings after today.”

“He'll still be here, you ever want to bring family back,” Blake said.

For a long moment, they listened to the slackened gunnery in the east, beyond the corpse-laden ridges and the town.

Another chill thought pierced Blake.

“The Yankees aren't leaving,” he said.

“How's that?” Corny asked. Every man among them had believed this battle won and done.

“They aren't leaving. Just listen. Listen to how quiet it's gotten.”

“It ain't quiet,” Cobb said. And he was right. Desultory firing continued. With the shovel-blade-on-stones digging done, the shrieks from the field hospital back along the pike carried over, too.

“Not quiet. Just quieter.”

He saw the realization dawn on Cobb. But the little man's ravaged face went blank again.

“If the Yankees were running, we'd be on them,” Blake explained. “There's light left. We'd be after them like hounds on a three-legged fox. And we'd hear it.”

“After we whipped them like that?” John Bunyan asked. His voice was near despair. “We're going to have to fight them again?
Here?
”

Blake shrugged. “Somebody will. Maybe not us.” Through a fine field of oats, Charley Campbell strode toward them. Laden with their canteens. Blake promised himself, swore to himself, that they would be full of cool well water. “All right. We need to bury James and get on back.”

So they laid him gently in his grave in a Pennsylvania field, and they shoveled in the dirt again as the living brother watched. Used to makeshift, backcountry doings, Cobb fashioned a cross by deep-notching a fallen branch and forcing a stick down into it horizontally.

He held it out to John Bunyan. “Put this in the ground there, boy.”

The cross got the twin thinking. “We need to say some words. Some scripture.”

Blake could have done so. He could have spewed out chapter and verse until morning. But he did not want to do it. Not that. He feared the words would come fouled from his mouth. The dead boy deserved a sincere voice at the last.

“My Bible's in my knapsack,” Corny said. “Wherever that happens to be.”

Charley came up with the canteens. Blake heard water sloshing. Charley grinned, let the canteens settle to the ground, and drew a roll of pressed meat and a loaf from under his jacket.