Cain at Gettysburg (49 page)

He paused at Cushing's battery, its guns positioned between a small grove and a sharp jut of the fence that marked the line. The guns here belonged to Hancock, who could be difficult. A master of leading men, Hancock was less skilled at employing artillery, the sort of officer who judged the effect of his batteries by the amount of noise they made.

“Ready, Cushing?”

“Yes, sir.”

“General Hancock been round?”

Cushing smiled. “Of course, sir.”

“Offering advice?”

“Mostly encouragement. ‘Give 'em the devil, boys.' That sort of thing. I appreciate the replacement limbers, sir.”

“Lucky we're not both dead. Your boys gave as good as they got, though.”

Just hours before, a Rebel shell had hit one of Cushing's limbers, with the knock-on chain of explosions destroying three of them. He and Cushing had been talking with a sergeant just yards away. Their escape had been miraculous.

“Who's got Brown's battery now?” Hunt asked.

“Walt Perrin, sir.”

“Know his business?”

“Walt's steady.”

“Good.”

As the morning tightened into noon, Hunt stared across the fields again, imagining it all one more time. Cushing and his fellow Second Corps officers just had to survive the coming bombardment, which would concentrate on their portion of the line. Everything about the ground, its little tricks, the drops and folds a hasty glance overlooked, told Hunt the attackers would funnel down to a point near this nick in the line, that stone wall and clump of trees. Charging men invented goals to aim at. In the absence of better landmarks, the copse would draw them.

He considered sharing his ruminations with Cushing, then decided against it. There was a line that must not be crossed between alerting subordinates and alarming them. Cushing was a sound officer, he'd sort things out for himself.

By way of good-bye, Hunt looked down from the saddle and said, “General Hancock will roar like a bear, but you keep back enough rounds to repel an assault at close quarters. He'll be thinking of his infantry, he'll want you to fire just to keep up their morale.” Hunt swept a hand toward the waiting soldiers. “It's up to you to keep those poor bastards alive, Cushing. Your guns are the best friends they've got.” He gee-upped his horse and rode northward.

Another ranging shot struck behind the men of Hays' division, beyond the right-angle turn in the boundary fence. They were coming. Soon. A great damned lot of them. Only a slumbering fool could fail to see it.

Hunt wondered why the Confederates were waiting.

That ranging shot encouraged him, though. The Confederate gunners were still firing high and long, their usual practice. If they failed to correct their elevation now, they'd put most of their shells behind the ridge, once the smoke made everything a guessing game.

He spotted Hancock atop the ridge, haranguing an officer whose men were hurrying forward. Hunt decided not to pay his respects. Hancock would only demand more guns for his front, where there wasn't space to deploy any more effectively. Hancock was the kind of man who wanted more of everything, field pieces, food, or glory: a magnificent fighting soldier, but ever a bit of a trial.

As he rode up along the next stretch of the line, Hunt saw regiments ranked behind regiments, as if the fields had sprouted thick blue crops. Whatever his artillery failed to finish, these men would conclude. He believed he sensed something different today, an alacrity—a vengefulness, perhaps—as if not a few of the men foresaw everything as he did. After so many heartbreaking reverses, the time had finally come to turn the tables.

Hunt knew soldiers. For virtually all of his life, he had lived among them, often in intimate circumstances that let no man hide weaknesses. From syphilitic drunkards to shining knights from the pages of Walter Scott, he had known them by the thousands, even in childhood. He had not been quite eight when his father took him along on the expedition he led across the Missouri, founding Ft. Leavenworth on the western bluffs. Hunt remembered days of boundless prairies, food that you just got down any way you could, lilting songs raised by dusty throats—music hoarse and wonderful—and the disappointment he felt upon meeting Indians at last: Instead of whooping, attacking, and making a spectacle, they had carried themselves submissively, men broken and ashamed. He recalled the immense, immeasurable strength of his father, a captain in Army blue, who died two years later and was thereafter hopelessly, terribly gone. A man in his prime years himself now, Henry Hunt could not imagine another life with such an eminent purpose. He pitied the man who never had served in uniform.

At last, Hunt came to the cemetery atop the commanding hill, where Osborn had staged the Eleventh Corps' strongest batteries. The prospect was even grander than the view from Little Round Top, a flawless panorama of the Confederate gun line glinting a mile away. Behind them, hidden in those distant trees, how many Rebel soldiers waited to charge? Twenty thousand? Thirty? Hunt would not have liked to cross those fields, no matter the numbers allotted him, but it struck him that even thirty thousand men would be hard-pressed to carry his army's lines.

Say what you wanted about the Eleventh Corps, Osborn had the stomach for a fight. Already protected by the terrain, McGilvery had been able to dig in his guns and throw up a parapet, too. But Osborn's best lines of fire were from the cemetery itself, which hardly lent itself to eager digging: No gunner wished to disturb a grave, fearing bad luck to come. Major Tom Osborn could put shot and shell on nearly every point likely to be crucial, but the Rebels could answer in kind. If Lee's artillerymen were smart, they'd concentrate on Osborn, giving his batteries precedence even over those in the center. But Hunt doubted they'd be smart that way—the pressure would be on them to knock out the guns positioned directly in front of their infantry. Unless Lee had artillerymen with sense as well as backbone, enough of Osborn's cannon would survive to play Hell with the charge. Lee's gunners were brave, even daring, but Hunt regarded their skills as second-rate. Having trained a number of them himself in the pre-war army, he regarded their failings as a personal embarrassment.

An infantryman could afford to think in terms of a few hundred yards, but artillerymen had to grasp the entire battlefield.

And Hunt had arranged the entire line to his purposes: McGilvery would rake Lee's infantry from the Union left, making a grim surprise of it, while Osborn poured in shells from the other flank, achieving a crossfire as close to perfect as Hunt had ever seen outside of a textbook.

Lee would have to be mad to send his divisions across that field. And Hunt was sure he would do it.

The artillery commander dismounted, stretching his forty-three-year-old bones and marveling at the prospect laid out before him.

“Rebs were damned fools not to take this hill two days ago,” Osborn said. “Could've done it, too.”

“But they didn't.”

“Well, they're going to pay for it.”

Hunt nodded, then said, “I expect you'll take some fires from your own flank, from your rear there. It may get hot.”

Osborn chuckled. “I hear it got a little hot for you this morning, sir. First report was that you'd been killed by a lucky shot.”

“Ranging shot. Not lucky enough.”

“Cheroot, sir?”

Hunt declined. He didn't believe it was proper to take a subordinate's cigars or his credit. He would have liked a smoke, though.

Lighting up, Osborn asked, “Who's got that battery out in front of Hays? Devil of a place to be, thrust out like that.”

“Woodruff.”

“Brave man.”

“Following orders. Not my orders, by the way. Speaking of limbers, you might want to move yours back behind the ridge.”

“I'll need the rounds handy,” Osborn said. He, too, had his plan.

“You know my instructions. Preserve ammuniton. Wait before returning fires. Only fire at identified, worthwhile targets.”

Osborn smiled. “‘No more than one round per minute.' Yes, sir. I understand.” He gestured toward the fields beyond the town and below them, at the baking expanse awaiting triumph or tragedy. “They come marching out of those woods, we could fire blindfolded and knock 'em down like pins.” Lowering his eyes, the major shook his head. “Almost hate to see the poor devils try it. Sheer murder. Nothing but.”

“Murder's what we do,” Hunt said. “Make sure your men have water.”

*   *   *

Black murdering buggers they were, the English, and 'twas down to their account that Daniel Francis Gallagher never married. For he had no wish to wear himself the black shame he had seen on his father's face, the shame of a man who knew not how to feed his wife and brats. They were Mayo people, his Gallaghers, and the wind from the sea carved the faces of the women, just as the poteen muddled those of the men. But a life it was, if never grand, until black '47, with the praties gone mush in their beds and the black English shipping off cargoes of grain while starvation whittled Irish bodies boneward. Black bastards they were, the landlords, absent or not, come over to the one true church or not, black buggers and bastards all to ride past the shame of a man who cannot feed his kind, riding horses whose price would buy up a village. Then the black typhus came in that black, black year, and his mother, father, and sister did not starve to death, for the spots on their slack, white skin did the trick for the hunger, the three of them dead, all three, and him left to wonder what doing should come next, for the rest of his people were dead or tramping about the lanes worse than tinkers, or gone to America. All but the house-proud Castlebar Gallaghers, shopkeepers so mean the cholera always spared them, his blood kind to whom he walked in that black year, only to be shut out of doors and kept there for fear of the typhus. He'd learned to steal, but better to hate, for little there was to steal in those black days and hatred filled the belly better than love, oh, didn't it, though?

Born to hate the English he was, to spit in the tracks of the county families who traipsed off to London to avoid famine and plague, their great houses shuttered and looked to by keepers with shotguns at the ready, not even a bed in a barn allowed to a boy of ten, but a great lesson he gave them, for all that, for killing was in him. And the family fool enough not to go when the going was still fair, the Cuthberts of Sligo, had a son, and the son had a pony. And when the boy rode down that narrow lane, between the fields gone bad, he was not known to Daniel Francis Gallagher by name, not yet, but white were his golden curls and his riding suit bright as a flash girl's borrowed petticoats, and Daniel Francis Gallagher, aged ten and proud, brought him down with a rock well hurled, and as the boy lay bleeding on the ground, all the lovely sight of him, the same rock retrieved came smashing down between the stunned blue eyes, again and again it came down, until there were no blue eyes left, only a pulp, and no coins in the young master's pockets, but thick slabs of bread with butter and jam in the saddlebags, and him, Gallagher, no murderer but his blood's avenging angel, rolled the corpse over and sat on its rump to eat, caring not, for life had no more value than that and hunger the master of all. He ate the bread with a trembling hand, shaking not from fear but from the joy of feeling the soft, sweet bread give in to his teeth. They could have hanged him on the spot, for all he cared in the moment, so lovely it was to have a full mouth, if not yet a full belly.

Two tramps were hanged for the murder, and guilty they may have been themselves for doing something shameful to the body, but not for the killing, and when he heard about their taking he was halfway across Sligo going the other way, outraged that another man—men—should have the credit of his bold deed. He always had a good eye for the land and the ways of it, even then, and made his conqueror's way back to the cottage that was little more than a shed for human animals, but no one had taken the bodies away and they were gone black as the year itself, as black as English hearts.

There was nothing left but America, his passage paid by doings of which he tried never to think, shaming even now, and if the hunger left him smaller than he might have been, oh, he was a mean one, a hard boy, steeled by the shame on his father's face before he had luck and died, and the chimney-by tales on cold nights of his ancestors rising, all hanged by the lobsterback beasts in the '98, and more than a few, his father included, suspected of being Whiteboys long thereafter, hobbling Englishmen's cattle for practice while waiting to hobble men. For if all the tales of Oliver Cromwell were true, they were as nothing to the slow-murdering policies of London come to pass, and the hunger, the shriveling hunger, his mother naught but cheekbones and a nose above the skeleton clutched by her rags, his sister thin to vanishing, and his father weeping for shame and helplessness, with not even a glass to stop his thoughts. And then the typhus, which spared him, he was certain, for this day.

This
day on a sun-punished field, with a sergeant's stripes upon his sleeve and the boyos of the 69th Pennsylvania sweating around him, taking up the good time by rattling in brogues so thick that even Colonel O'Kane, sweet man that he was, when he wasn't a right bastard, could not catch but stray words of it, for O'Kane was a Derry man, who knew not the secret languages of the West.

“Get out there again, boys, go on,” Gallagher said, in a voice that could empty a shebeen by the docks, “and farther this time, get on with ye, for there's beautiful rifles and such to be had, just laying there for the taking, with the Johnnies who left 'em awaiting for their comeuppance.”

“Cripes, we were halfway to their batteries last time.”

“Then go the other half, dearies, and give 'em all a kiss from Sergeant Danny. Now go bring in every rifle ye can find. Ye'll be thanking me, come the circus. Now go on.”