Fire by Night (20 page)

Phoebe was so moved by Ted’s concern that she nearly changed her mind. Then she remembered all the men the sniper had killed and how close he’d come to killing Ted, and she got mad all over again.

“I gotta do this,” she said. “I gotta get him before he kills anybody else. You can help me by keeping him distracted while I’m out in the open, okay?”

“How are we supposed to do that without getting ourselves killed?”

“Give Johnny Reb something to shoot at. Stick a hat on the end of your bayonet and raise it up just high enough for him to see. While he’s busy shooting it off and reloading, I’ll get myself up a tree.”

Ted clung to Phoebe’s sleeve. “Don’t go,” he pleaded. “It’s too risky.”

She pulled Ted’s hat off his head and stuck her finger through the bullet hole. “I can get him, Ted. Keep him busy for me.”

Crouching low, Phoebe made her way down the trench until she was as close to the grove of trees as she could safely get. She drew a deep breath for courage and signaled for someone to tempt the sharpshooter into firing. As soon as she heard the crack of his rifle, she climbed out of the trench and started crawling across the open ground toward the trees. She knew how dangerous this part was. She had to crawl slowly enough so the sniper wouldn’t detect her movements but quickly enough to get to the bushes before he finished reloading.
Keep him busy,
she pleaded silently—then she prayed that there wasn’t more than one gunman watching.

She finally reached the woods and felt safer after crouching behind a bush. Even so, the trees were not in full leaf yet, and she knew that her blue uniform would probably stick out like a preacher in a bawdy house if he spotted it. She waited for Ted and the others to give the sniper another target, listened for the gunshot, then started climbing the nearest tree while he reloaded, her own rifle slung over her shoulder by its strap.

Phoebe never had been much good at climbing trees, and it seemed to take forever for her to get high enough. All the while, branches kept snapping and rustling and making an awful racket. One branch broke right off in her hand with a loud
crack,
but luckily for her, the sniper picked the same moment to shoot at another one of Ted’s targets. The gunman was very quick at reloading and could fire more than the standard three rounds a minute. Phoebe knew she was a good shot, but she hadn’t practiced reloading this rifle often enough to do it as fast as the sniper did. And she’d never reloaded while sitting up in a tree. She’d better not miss the first time.

At last she managed to climb high enough to get a good view. Phoebe spotted her quarry on the roof of a house, half hidden behind the chimney. She lifted her rifle to her shoulder and took aim. Then Phoebe froze.

The Rebel soldier didn’t look sinister at all but perfectly ordinary, someone she might pass on the street on a sunny day. He was young and fair-haired, somebody’s son or brother or sweetheart. She couldn’t pull the trigger.

This had happened to her once before in the woods back home. She had always thought of deer as venison, something she killed for food. But one day as she’d taken aim at a doe, the deer had turned her head and gazed at Phoebe. She’d seen the deer’s beautiful tawny coat and dark eyes. And the expression in those eyes was not one of fear but of surprise. Phoebe had hesitated as they’d looked eye to eye and was unable to pull the trigger. Then the doe had turned and sped away, white tail flashing as it disappeared into the woods. Phoebe couldn’t bring herself to go hunting for a long time after that.

Now she faced a human target—a kid, really, no older than she and Ted. He was looking down at his rifle, reloading it, and he had no idea that she had him in her sights, that his life was about to end. Time seemed to stop.

Then Phoebe realized that the boy was a killer—her enemy. If he spotted her before she took a shot, or if she missed her first shot, he wouldn’t hesitate to shoot her. In fact, if Ted had been an inch taller, he would be lying dead in that trench right now with a bullet through his forehead. Even so, Phoebe looked at the Rebel’s youthful face again and moved her aim from his chest to his leg. She fired.

Phoebe saw his expression for a split second before he lost his grip on his rifle and began to fall, tumbling off the roof to the ground. It wasn’t pain she saw but surprise.

She shouldered her rifle without reloading and slowly climbed down the tree, sliding down the trunk for the last few feet to the ground. She didn’t need to move slowly this time but she couldn’t seem to make her leaden limbs go any faster. She heard cheering from her fellow soldiers and jogged across the open space, ducking low, then jumped down into the trench. Sergeant Anderson and all the others gave her a hero’s welcome. Ted surprised her with a bear hug, slapping her on the back.

“You got him, Ike! You killed your first Rebel!”

“Yeah, I got him.”

“I can’t believe you took a chance like that. You’re about the bravest man I ever met.” He released her and held her at arm’s length, gazing up at her. “Boy, am I glad you didn’t get yourself shot!”

“Yeah, me too.” Someone passed Phoebe a hip flask with liquor in it. She pretended to take a gulp. Then passed it on.

“Wait ’til Little Mac hears what you did,” Ted said.

“Boys, we’ve got ourselves a crack sharpshooter,” Sergeant Anderson said, pumping her hand.

Ted was still staring at her. “Hey, why the long face? Come on, Ike, you should be celebrating. You killed him.”

“Ain’t gonna do a lick of good,” she said, shaking her head. “They’ll just send somebody else up there tomorrow to take his place.”

“Let them try,” the sergeant said. “We’ll send you right back up there to kill that fella, too.”

Phoebe was excused from any more digging for the rest of the day and allowed to return to her tent. But as she lay on the sodden ground, listening to the rain pattering on the canvas roof above her head, two thoughts kept circling around and around in her mind. The first was that something terrible could happen to Ted. It almost had. He’d nearly been killed. And for the first time since she’d enlisted, Phoebe felt heart-wrenching fear at the prospect of going into battle—not for herself, but for him. There was suddenly more at stake in this war than her own life. When had that happened? What did it mean?

The second thought that kept coming back to her was how wonderful it had felt to have Ted’s arms wrapped around her, hugging her close. She could march and dig and shoot a gun as good as any man or better, but when Ted had held her in his arms, she’d wished he had known that she was a woman. She had longed, in that moment, to lay her head on Ted’s chest and weep with sorrow and relief. And to allow him to comfort her.

As she lay on her back in the leaking tent, Phoebe didn’t know what to do with such unfamiliar feelings. Ted didn’t return them. Ted thought she was a man.

The siege of Yorktown and the endless digging dragged on for a month. By May 3, the gun emplacements were finally finished and General McClellan’s huge cannons had been set in their places. Rumors bounced all around Phoebe’s camp that the Union was going to start bombarding Yorktown in two days, on May 5. But late in the afternoon of May 3, the Confederate artillery suddenly began to pour a heavy barrage of shells into the Union camps. There was nothing Phoebe could do but hunker down in one of the trenches beside Ted and wait for it to end. It seemed as though it never would.

As evening fell and the sky darkened, enemy cannon continued to pound their encampment. Phoebe and the others hadn’t dared to move for hours, even to get food or a drink of water or to use the latrine. She could see bursts of flame roaring from their heavy guns every time they fired, and she watched the shells arc through the night sky like fireworks. The thunderous noise was deafening. Whenever a missile fell nearby, it sounded to Phoebe like a steam locomotive falling from the sky, and she felt all the blood run right down to her toes as she waited for the explosion. The bombardment continued long after she’d stopped praying for it to end. Then, like a vicious thunderstorm fading into the distance, the barrage gradually tapered off, dying away into silence.

At daybreak, an unnatural stillness hovered over Yorktown.

“If they’re going to start pounding us again,” Ted said, “I wish they’d start now and get it over with.”

“You know what?” Phoebe said. “It’s a little too quiet over there. I think they’re gone, Ted. I think the Rebels kept us pinned down with all that artillery last night so they could skedaddle.”

As the morning wore on with neither a sound nor a sign of movement from the Rebels in Yorktown, it began to look as though Phoebe was right. Her regiment and several others were ordered into formation and told to advance toward the enemy lines, guns loaded, bayonets fixed and ready. After sitting in the relative safety of a trench for the past month, Phoebe felt like an easy target as she started forward across the open ground. Her hands were slippery as they tried to grip her gun, and her mouth felt as though she’d gulped a cup of flour.

“Any minute now they’re going to start firing at us,” she heard Ted mumble beside her. “And when they do, they’re going to mow us down like wheat.”

“They’re just waiting for us to get close enough,” someone else agreed.

Suddenly there was an explosion in the forward ranks. Phoebe had to resist the urge to throw herself flat on the ground, expecting enemy shells to begin raining down on them any minute. The colonel called a halt.

Eventually word spread that the explosion had come from a buried enemy artillery shell, set to go off when stepped on. Angered at the loss of several lives, General McClellan ordered Rebel prisoners-of-war to be sent out to search for more buried mines. When the way was cleared, the regiment started forward again, finally reaching the Rebel fortifications that they’d faced from a distance for the past month.

“Gone!” Ted said in disgust. “Look at that, they left their meat on the spit and their biscuits half-baked.”

The only sign of the Rebel army was the garbage they’d left behind—piles of animal bones and oyster shells, abandoned campfires, empty bottles and tin cans.

“General McClellan must’ve thought these Rebels were stupid,” Phoebe said. “Did he really expect them to sit still and wait until he had all his guns lined up? These country boys know when to fight and when to skedaddle, and it seems to me that’s exactly what they done. They snuck right on out of here in the middle of the night— while we were all snoring so loud we never even heard them.”

“But Little Mac—”

“Listen, Little Mac don’t know a thing about Rebels.” She could see by Ted’s glum expression that his faith in the general was starting to waver.

“I can’t believe we wasted a whole month digging holes—for nothing,” he said.

Phoebe kicked at the remains of a cold campfire. “I can’t believe we’re standing around here looking at a deserted town when we could be chasing after them.”

By the time General McClellan finally gave the order to pursue the enemy, rain had begun to fall. Phoebe and the others marched north through a steady downpour, catching up to the Rebels later that afternoon outside Williamsburg. The heavens seemed to be on the enemy’s side once again. The rain slashed down in torrents as the commanding officers ordered Phoebe forward into battle for the first time.

It was a savage battle, too. The Rebels fought like cornered badgers, holding the Union forces back so the main body of Confederates could retreat to Richmond. Phoebe fired and reloaded and fired again, slogging forward through the mud, tripping over the bodies of dead and wounded soldiers, blinded by rain and smoke. The first disfigured corpse she saw, barely recognizable as human, put her in a state of dazed shock. The only thing that kept her firing her rifle and moving through the hail of bullets was the fear that if she stopped she would wind up dead, too.

Blood and rain pooled together, and both flowed in Williamsburg’s streets. As the veteran soldiers would say, Phoebe “saw the elephant,” and it was huge and gray and terrifying. The Rebel yell alone was enough to make her blood curdle. As men from her regiment fell wounded alongside her, screaming in pain, she prayed she would go deaf from the din of rifle fire so she wouldn’t have to hear their agony. She wanted the terror of battle to end. She wanted desperately to live. She wanted to go home and never fight again. But the battle raged on and on …violently, endlessly.

Then it was over. Phoebe was too dazed to understand how or when it had happened. The shooting simply died away as the Rebels retreated, and she was surprised to find that she was still alive and unhurt. The bodies of dead and wounded soldiers lay strewn everywhere. She found Ted, mute with shock but unharmed.

He handed her his rifle as if he never wanted to touch it again, and when she looked it over for him, her stomach made a sickening turn. In the heat of battle, Ted had kept on ripping open the paper cartridges, pouring gunpowder down the barrel, ramming bullets into place the way he’d been taught. But he must have forgotten to put a percussion cap on the lock the last few times he’s fired. In the deafening noise of combat, he probably hadn’t realized that his weapon wasn’t firing, because Phoebe found six bullets rammed down the muzzle of his gun. If he had suddenly remembered the cap, all that gunpowder would have blown Ted’s face off.