Deserter (4 page)

Like mindless machines they hustled onward up the grade, Yankee cannon and rifle fire sweeping through the lines like terrible, death-dealing winds, soaking the ground with blood, littering it with limbs and bodies. Cemetery Ridge, still far ahead, was no longer a distinct geographical feature: Gunsmoke shrouded it so completely that only muzzle flashes were visible through the gray, roiling fog.

Uriah shoved roughly at Jake's shoulder, bringing him out of where he'd been for a brief moment, urging him onward. He sleeved the blood from his face, clearing his eyes, and raised his rifle, aiming at a white flash on the ridge. It wasn't the lack of sound—he hadn't been able to hear the throaty roar of his Sharps for several
minutes over the clamor of the fight—but the absence of recoil against his shoulder that told him he'd squeezed off a nonexistent round. He loaded with spastic fingers as he lumbered forward.

Hundreds—perhaps thousands—of dead and dying men were strewn about the killing field. There were no more Rebel lines—instead the troops were a seething mass stepping on, over, and around their fallen comrades. Even above the acrid stink of gunpowder and sweat and fear, the heavy, metallic odor of fresh blood hung damply, pervasively, enveloping the now formless assault.

Rifle fire was a devastating, incessant storm from the ridge. The shuffling, hollow-eyed Rebs were no more difficult targets than dairy cows standing stupidly in an enclosed lot, awaiting their personal bullet or minnie ball.

Jake shouldered his rifle and pointed it at a cluster of flashes within the wall of smoke ahead of him, ignoring the sight at the end of his barrel, and jerked the pair of triggers back together. He was no longer a marksman, a sharpshooter. He was a poorly tuned mechanical device that sent .54-caliber slugs toward no particular target, with absolutely no noticeable effect.

A wash of warm liquid slapped Jake's face on the right, stinging him with its force. His eyes flicked in that direction, to his partner's position. Uriah stood, swaying, rifle dropping to the ground in front of him. Jake screamed.

Uriah Toole had no head. It was simply gone. His neck, a ragged stump of flesh with tiny tendrils of smoke rising from it, erupted gushets of blood. After an eternity the body fell forward, coming to rest on the twisted remains of another soldier.

Jake Sinclair's mind—all his senses—shut down. He raised his rifle to his shoulder perfunctorily, unthinkingly, not because he needed to fire it but because that's what he'd been doing for what seemed like all his life, and because that's what he was supposed to do now.

A slug slashed a groove along the left side of his head. Another slammed into the breech of his Sharps, shattering the metal and grinding into the polished wood of the stock, splintering it. A round from his flank gouged a channel along his right cheekbone. Something—maybe a fragment of an exploding cannonball—struck the barrel of his rifle, tearing it from his hands, sending it spinning away into the smoke.

Sinclair went down, face and head bleeding into the dry dirt. In a moment a one-legged corpse with a gaping hole in its chest fell on top of him, and a moment later, another corpse followed, this one amazingly intact.

Sinclair drifted in and out of the battle that surged around him. He wasn't at all sure where he was—the crashing, incessant furor of the weapons, the screams and curses, the quick movements of the corpse that covered him when it was struck by rounds or steel fragments—twisted him back and forth between the edges of awareness and darkness. The pain in his head was something that had always been there, torturing him, and would always be there. Beyond that, his senses had deserted him. There was no passage of time, no end to the battle. Images of Uriah Toole, alive, drinking coffee, arguing, laughing, flickered occasionally in his mind, along with vestiges of scenes from his own home, his youth. His dog, a noble old collie long since dead and buried in the family cemetery, fetched a chewed knot of rawhide to him, dropping it at his feet, liquid, intelligent eyes asking that it be thrown again. Jake scurried from the kitchen to the front veranda with the cut-glass tumbler of bourbon and
branch water his pa took at the end of each day, the cook cautioning him to be careful not to spill a drop, her voice rich and warm. The lawn in front of his pillared home stretched, green and lush, to the quiet little hook the river made, the place where Jake fished with his father, hauling catfish the size of small dogs to the shore. The scenario of leaving the relative safety of the trees forward of Seminary Ridge and jogging into the march, his Sharps at port arms, stepped on the panorama of his home, recurring, becoming more vivid and real each time it appeared.

It was a battlefield scavenger that brought Sinclair to full consciousness. The deadweight of the soldier on top of him was dragged away and rude hands slapped at Jake's pockets. He felt a tug at his waist at the haft of his bowie knife, strong enough to send lightning bolts of pain to his head. Jake's right hand closed on the offender with all the strength he could muster, and even through the pain the feeble size of the wrist registered.
A woman?
The flesh was smooth and the bones small and slender.

The boy yelped and fell back from his crouch next to Jake, his voice high and frightened. “I didn't know! I didn't know you was alive!” Jake's eyes, crusted with dried blood, opened, fixed on the boy's face. He was perhaps ten or eleven, his flesh pale, his eyes as wide as those of a panicked horse. Jake released his grip and the boy was gone.

The sounds of the battle were gone, as well, and the texture of the light told Sinclair that dusk had fallen. He turned over from his face-to-the-earth sprawl very slowly, head screaming in pain, and struggled to a half-sitting position.

The broad field was strewn—littered—with dead men lying together, in small masses and individually. Arms, legs, heads dotted the landscape like afterthoughts. The reek of gunpowder was all but overpowered by that of blood and viscera, a queasily metallic stench that hovered like a malignant fog. Sinclair, upper body balanced by his hand on the ground, palm pressing against still blood-damp soil, watched without passion—without much interest—as a soldier aimed, fired, and picked off a scavenger, the shooter's hoarse cursing louder than the report of his rifle.

Jake Sinclair made his decision at that moment, with little thought or consideration.
No more. No goddamn more. I'm done. Finished
. The voice within him was quiet and strong and, he fully realized, irrevocable. His father's face flashed before him, the old man's mouth set in rebuke, his eyes showing his shame at his deserter son.
No more,
Jake told him.
A man can only see and smell and feel just so much and no more. Then something shuts down, turns off like a blown-out lantern, and everything about him changes and he's a different man. I won't bring my cowardice home to you. You'll think I got torn apart on this field like all these other men, that I died for President Davis and the Confederate States of America, and you'll be proud of me for the rest of your life. After the war is won and the South prevails you'll believe that I gave my life for a just and noble cause. But, Pa, I can't do any more than I've done or give any more than I've given. I have nothing left to give. I'm finished.

Even the slightest bodily movement sent stunning blasts of pain to Jake's head. He raised his left hand—still supporting himself in a sitting position against his
right—and touched first the slash across his cheekbone. The flesh above and below the cut seemed numb, but the open line that followed the bone seemed a yard wide, raw and crusted and slightly damp in places along its four-inch length. He probed very gently at the left side of his head, above his ear. The furrow there continued to bleed along its length, but slowly, the blood seeping rather than flowing. He knew he had to do something about both wounds; infection killed almost as many men as did canister shot and rifle rounds.

There was a fuzziness, a lack of definition, to the sounds around him. The moans of the wounded boys were soft, without the stridency of the pain that forced them from the soldiers'mouths. Surgeons in their once gray and now bloodied dusters moved through the battlefield. One, not twenty feet from him, Jake noticed, wore a Union uniform and a sagging apron, dripping blood. Litter bearers followed the surgeons, grim-faced, walking away from dying men in order to carry those who could possibly survive, to the hospital tents. The surgeons, working mechanically, crouched next to men, inspected their wounds, checked pulse or heartbeat, and either shook their heads or nodded before moving on to the next mangled soldier.

Jake struggled to his feet and stood swaying dizzily, feeling his yelp of pain in his throat but unable to actually hear it himself. The Yankee surgeon lowered the corpse he'd been examining and weaved his way over and around bodies to where Sinclair stood. The doctor's mouth moved but Jake heard no words. The doctor's eyes were red and his face an expressionless mask as he leaned close to Jake, inspecting his wounds.
Again, Jake saw the man's mouth move but heard nothing.

“I can't hear,” Jake said.

The surgeon moved directly in front of him, close enough to him so that Jake could smell whiskey on his breath. He formed the words carefully: “Clean your wounds.” When Jake nodded slightly, indicating he understood, the doctor and his litter bearers moved on.

Darkness was rapidly encroaching on what little light of the evening remained. The heat seemed as intense as it had at noon, and no breeze stirred. The line of trees that had been the Confederate starting point of the charge was impossibly far away. A cavalry horse, its chest white with frothy sweat, a single rein dragging, the other torn off at the bit, danced across Jake's line of vision. Jake began to raise an arm and the animal caught the motion and bolted uphill, toward Cemetery Ridge, hooves missing some fallen men and stepping on others.

Step by staggering step, Sinclair moved toward the woods, the slight downhill grade offering some degree of assistance as he shambled around corpses. Once a hand reached up to him. Jake stopped, saw the hand was at the end of a severed arm lodged against a dead soldier's side, and stumbled on.

There was no longer an encampment. Here and there a cook fire burned beyond the trees, but even the rough order of the pre-attack Pickett's Division was absent. Men, many—perhaps most—of them bandaged, wandered about, dazed, mumbling, making no attempt to gather together with what was left of their units. Some carried weapons. Strangely, most did not. Bits of Jake's hearing were coming back. A shouted
phrase pierced the buzz in his head, then a few spoken words.

Lanterns hung from the front of a hospital tent drew Sinclair. A large cluster of men awaited treatment, many carried or at least supported by friends, all with cloths wrapped around their heads or arms or legs. The screams from within the tent were loud enough for Jake to hear. Amputation was the treatment for severe wounds to limbs; to the rear of the tent a growing pile of battered legs and arms sawn off with no anesthetic beyond a few desperate gulps of whiskey grew like a mass of discarded scrap lumber. Jake walked away from the tent and the lanterns and the screams, moving aimlessly, as if in a dream. At a fire several men had torn the top from a small keg of Pennsylvania whiskey and were scooping it out with tin cups. Jake found the bandana he'd stuffed in his pocket, pulled it out, and reached inside the keg with it. He brought it out dripping with whiskey and used it to rasp across his cheek and head, the alcohol burning like a touch from a white-hot branding iron. When he moved back toward the keg with the cloth one of the soldiers shoved him—hard—away. The man's mouth moved and Jake heard angry sounds, but the words didn't yet register. Handkerchief hanging from his hand, he lumbered off toward the woods.

He may have seen Pickett, hollow-eyed, broken, cavalry hat gone, face bloodied, riding among the men. He may have seen General Lee, too, weeping, apologizing to the troops. Or he may have seen neither. Perhaps both were only feverish apparitions, parts of a surreal dream. It didn't matter one way or the other. It didn't matter at all.

He found his way to the woods, stumbled in as far as he could, tripped over a rock, and was knocked unconscious by the pain that screamed through his head as he hit the ground. He slept there for several hours.

The first thing Jake was aware of as he awakened was a low-hanging cloud of dew that hovered a few feet from the ground. It was deliciously cool under the protection of the floating mist. The sharp snap of a twig as it broke assured Jake that his hearing had returned. He looked toward the sound and saw a tall bay horse, saddled and bridled, the reins draped over the crest of the animal's neck. The horse pulled at a clump of grass next to a tree.

Jake took a slow inventory of his body. He'd apparently hit the ground with a good deal of force last night: His right shoulder radiated pain down his arm and his hip was sore, throbbing slightly. He touched his head wounds with tentative fingers. Both were crusted with dried blood, the one on the side of his head weeping blood slightly. All his limbs moved as he tested them. Other than the pounding in his head and the suddenly intense thirst that had come upon him, he'd survived Pickett's Charge and the three-day Battle of Gettysburg.

Survived as what?
he wondered.

Jake had no intention of rejoining the ranks, of returning to the fight for the Confederacy. He realized that he no longer much gave a damn which side won the war. Uriah wouldn't be less dead if the South prevailed, nor would the multitude of others who had died here. Sinclair felt oddly disoriented, as if he'd stumbled into a situation that was far beyond his ability to understand. But his decision to run, to desert, to leave the fighting to those who could still do it, didn't
waver. The logistics were ridiculously simple, Jake knew that. Desertion was as easy as walking away from a job on a ranch or in a store in a town: A man simply moved on without giving notice. The army wouldn't miss him. So many men were killed and so many shredded by canister shot and explosions that a high number of bodies and parts of bodies would never be properly identified. Many of the Rebs carried no identification papers or personal effects, or lost those to scavengers after the battle.
One body isn't much different from another, especially one of those with a face that took a direct hit.
The hideous picture of Uriah Toole standing, swaying before he collapsed, headless, flashed in Jake's mind. He pushed the thought away as best he could.