Hell or Richmond (7 page)

“You ever disobey an order of mine again,” he told the unconscious figure, “you’ll get a damn sight worse.”

Big, black-haired, and black of mien, Oates knew his effect on others. He straightened his spine and glared at the crowd of soldiers, every one of them silent now.

“Any other man got his spite up, save it for the Yankees. Going to be plenty of those sonsofbitches coming this way soon.” He growled like a feral hog, as if he might lunge at any man within range. “Now get these two fools out of here, before something makes me madder than I am.”

Men leapt to do his bidding, and a smile threatened his face. The ease with which he put fear into others was a precious thing. Not that he didn’t know what fear was himself: Still a boy, if a big one, he’d run off far and fast, sure the law was coming to Oates’s Corners to fetch and hang him. He’d taken a hoe to a grown man who deserved it and left him lying dead. Or so he’d thought. He slipped on down to Florida, where he hawked cigars, then signed on aboard a schooner. Quick to dislike the sailor’s life and its disrespectful nature, he made his way bleak-bellied from the French stink of New Orleans up to Shreveport, where he dallied a night too long with a slave dealer’s daughter and nearly killed another man before running hard for Texas. There’d been hungry times and worse before his younger brother, John, tracked him down in Henderson and told him he could come home, that the dead man was alive and the law had more than William C. Oates to fuss about.

Running from the law let a man see its uses, though, and he set himself to clerking for an attorney. After passing the bar, he put up a shingle in Abbeville, near enough to home, but not so close he’d have to live with his mother’s ever-angrier love of the Lord. She was a haunted woman who had the sight, but could not see her own way. He always kept his vow to her never to touch alcohol, but as for religion, the war had thrashed it out of him. He went through the motions for the sake of his men, since many a fine soldier had been caught up in the revival over the winter, desperate to believe in a Providence Oates just could not see. The death of his brother up in Pennsylvania had shot his faith through the heart.

His mother had foreseen John’s death, but said nothing of his own fate. Questioned, she just went back to her Bible and silence. On his dark days, he wondered how much she really saw. Mostly, though, he left it. Some things didn’t bear too much thinking over.

He remembered John as a jolly boy, the two of them kicking their way down a dusty trace, eyes peeled for snakes, walking through heat thick as wadding to sit just beyond the circle of whiskey-suckers down at the crossroads store, men of varied provenance, slight ambition, and the occasional suspect hue, a profane congregation met to swap tales of Pike County and the wide world. Even a boy could tell they all were liars, but listening made you dream. And now he dreamed of John, fixing him in childhood for eternity. Ambushed by visions, Oates saw his brother squatting in the dust like a waiting Indian, but sweet-eyed and soft-mouthed, wearing a smile wise beyond his years as he listened to the corn liquor talk through the mouths of men who had become its slaves, niggers to a jug. It still seemed an impossible thing that such a fine, bright soul could be no more, reduced to a rotten corpse in Pennsylvania.

There were some things that could not but be thought over, things a man just could not leave behind. He did not know what he could have done to save his brother on that rocky hillside, but he knew he should have done whatever it was.

John. Sweet, loyal John. Never really meant to be a soldier.

With the fight crowd dissolving, Oates spotted Billy Strickland, newly made a captain.

“Walk with me, Billy,” Oates said.

They strolled beyond the regimental camp, following a farm lane. The fencing was gone, used for firewood by soldiers who had preceded them. Didn’t matter much, since there was no livestock, or none worth the notice. Even the spring greenery seemed poor, as if nature, too, had tightened up on rations. Virginia had been humbled by the war, its grand houses set to mourning. The landscape still had a gentility Alabama never quite reached, not even Montgomery, but it wasn’t like to last if the war chewed south. And that was about what the Yankees had in mind. He was pretty damned sure that he and his men would not see Pennsylvania again. They’d be lucky enough to set eyes on Alabama. Hard times were coming, hard fighting. What pleasure there had been in war was gone, replaced by a muddle of rage and desperation.

“Should I take away Ball’s stripes, sir?” Strickland asked.

Oates shook his head as they walked, feeling that little click in his hip, bad bone. The pain was bearable, local as an itch. But it was there.

“Leave him be,” Oates said. “He just had his blood up.”

Before their boots, flies rose from an ancient cowpat.

“Think the Yanks are ready to come on?” the captain asked, passing the time.

“Just been waiting for the roads to get good and dry. They’ll want to move fast. That polecat Grant. I had enough of that bastard at Chattanooga.”

Between Lookout Mountain and the river, blue uniforms had appeared out of the mist, too damned many for one regiment to manage. He had been hit in the hip and thigh.

“Wish I could’ve been with you boys at Knoxville,” Oates said. He tracked a bird’s flight, as if he meant to shoot it. “Damned shame.”

“Wasn’t much to be done, sir,” Strickland told him. “Just all bad, beginning to end. Not sure any one man would’ve made much difference.”

Oates almost said, “Unless he’d replaced Longstreet.” But that wasn’t the way to talk in front of subordinates.

Instead of ranting, he smiled, spreading his black beard. It was one of his queer smiles, though. “Man can’t help but feel guilty, that’s the thing. Laying up in a fine house like Colonel Toney’s. Laying there in a poster bed, fearing his men aren’t going to be properly handled.”

“They were glad to see you, when you turned up, sir.” The captain paused, choosing his words carefully. “We didn’t know if we’d ever see you again.”

Oates grunted. “I suppose I looked a sight. Back on the river.”

“Yes, sir. Mad-dog angry, too.”

“God almighty. Look at that horse there. Wouldn’t be worth the killing for the meat.”

“That’s how the cavalry mounts all looked at Knoxville,” Strickland told him.

“Just hard to believe,” Oates said, going back to his musing. “There I am, living in luxury and dandling babies, every need provided for. Like there wasn’t a war at all, not anywhere.” He paused. “I wanted the feeling to last, tell you the truth.”

“But you came back, sir.”

Oates nodded, thoughts shifting again. “I grew up hard, Billy. Don’t know if I ever said.
So
hard. You know what it’s like in the backcountry. Might say it made me what I am, but I’d as lief not go through that ordeal twice. And there I am, lying up in that big, fine house … oh, I wasn’t thinking about the war every single minute. No, sir. Not even thinking about the boys as much as I should have. I was thinking I’d like to have me a house like that.”

He laughed. “Wouldn’t make a plug of difference, I suppose. Even if I struck it rich, or married some high gentleman’s spinster daughter—which I don’t have a mind to do—even with that big house and all, there’s a kind of fence they put up. They ask you along on a hunt, but it’s really your dogs they want. No, there’s always this fence. And they aren’t going to let you jump it, because folks like you and me aren’t welcome behind it.” He slapped at a greenbottle. “Lawyer? Officer? That’s no mind. Not once this war is over. It’ll all go back to being the way it was. Men like you and me, we’ll never be fine. We might be respected in a middling way. Might even wind up in the legislature. But we won’t be fine.”

“Were they rude, sir? The people who took you in?”

Oates laughed. It was a big sound in the meadows.

“High folks are never rude,” he said. “That’s part of the bundle.” He laughed again. “Where you and I would make a fist, they just lift them an eyebrow. I wasn’t speaking against old Toney, now. I’ll be grateful to that man and his family until the day I die. I’d been robbed of every penny I had down in the train yard, lying there wounded and crazy with fever, and thank you for your service to our great Confederacy.” He swung his head like a bothered horse. “Colonel Toney took me into the bosom of his family. Out of kindness, nothing but. Another man might donate a gold piece or two to some sanitary commission, but isn’t like to open his doors to a wounded man who’s not blood kin. No, sir. Old Toney treated me handsome. I was talking on the principle.” He stopped himself. “But I do talk on. And I still haven’t got ’round to what I had to say to you, Billy.”

“Sir?”

Oates kicked a stone. His boot leather was so thin his toes felt the hardness. In the strange way a man had of doing things, just below the level of true thinking, he had hoped the gesture would lengthen out his bad leg, making the thigh right again.

“Best turn around,” Oates said. “Don’t want to get too far from the regiment.” He twisted up a wormwood smile. “Can’t have Major Lowther overtaxing himself in my absence. Can we now? Listen here, Billy. You’re a captain now. It’s a different job. You know it, but I’m going to tell it to you anyways. Your job is to control your company. And dead men don’t control a pile of shit. Inspiring your men is just fine, all that preaching and praising and getting them riled up before they step off. But your main business is to
control
them when we go forward. I don’t ever want to see Company I or any damned company in the Fifteenth Alabama go to pieces the way we did at Gettysburg. And I will shoot the man who lets it happen. Hear?”

They walked a few steps in silence, letting the heat of the words cool on the air. At last, Strickland said, “I remember how thirsty I was. That’s what I always think about. How thirsty I was.”

“You just keep your hellions together, doing what they’re meant to do. This war’s going to get even uglier, mark my words.”

As he spoke, it struck Oates that, above all, he was speaking to himself. Strickland needed to hear this counsel. But William C. Oates was the man who needed to take it to heart: When he got in a fight, he just wanted to
fight,
to go at the enemy with gun, sword, knife, knuckles, teeth, anything at all. He was the one who had to control himself.

They walked back toward the temporary camp. They had been there but one night and the men had not yet had time to render it foul. The air smelled of spring, not mankind.

“Funny thing,” the captain said to his commanding officer, “as much as they complained about the work, the men enjoyed the review the other day. Once they got to it. Never saw them so proud. More spit than polish, but you saw how they stood up proper.”

“Complaining,” Oates said, “is the soldier’s one inalienable right.”

“And General Lee…,” Strickland went on. “I do believe every man present would have died for him right there.”

Oates snorted. “They’re going to get the chance.”

Lee. A fine man, no doubt. But a man. Having knocked down the God above, Oates wasn’t looking for a substitute on earth. He was willing to fight for Robert E. Lee. To die for him, if dying was required. But he wasn’t about to worship any creature that walked on two legs or four.

Lee’s magic had touched him, too, though, on that splendid afternoon: the erect old man in his unsullied uniform, riding his fine dapple gray, with his daughter in a borrowed carriage behind him, spine as straight and face as stiff as her father’s. The men had cheered their throats raw. Oates only hoped that Longstreet hadn’t imagined that any of the cheers were for him.

Lee’s daughter now. Fellow would be afraid to marry her, even if he took an interest. Which seemed unlikely, given what Oates had seen of her: plain and prim, with not one hint of pleasure anywhere near her. With a few startling exceptions, white women had never been sporting enough for his tastes: The ones who weren’t outright slatterns had too little joy about them and a bushel too many worries. Every one of them thought too much. He’d take a brown girl for pleasure any day: They lived in the moment, the way he did himself. Women, good women, had always been powerful fond of him, but he had no interest in subsequent domesticity, with all the do’s and don’ts, the ifs and buts and maybes. When the war finished up, he meant to buy himself the finest piece of tail in Alabama and shut the door. Maybe old Toney would sell him that pleasing missy with whom he had developed an acquaintance. Cheekbones of a Cherokee and the rump of the devil’s dam. Or if Toney didn’t have a mind to sell her, perhaps he’d put her out to him on loan. For services rendered to the glorious Confederacy. The way the old man had given him William for a manservant in the field.

It was a fine thing to have a nigger to clean your boots.

Thinking about all that put him in the mood for a woman’s company, for the rut smell of just one of them, even though nothing would come of it. If the Yankees held off a few days, perhaps one of the local families would ask the brigade’s field officers in for a dinner. He could tolerate that nicely about now.

They were being held in reserve, well south of Ewell’s Corps and Hill’s men. That meant hard, fast marching to get to the battle, when it came. For now, though, there was no danger and the sentries ahead stood slackly. He decided not to upbraid them, but recalled another concern.

“Billy, I hear two Texas boys got smallpox, they put ’em in one of the pesthouses back of town. You make sure nobody goes wandering off where they don’t need to be. Yankees are bad enough.”

Belatedly spying Oates, the pickets straightened. As he stepped close, arms were presented and proper salutes rendered. The men had come a long way back from the despondency he had found them in at Bull’s Gap.

Parting, Oates told Strickland, “You go on now and look in on Morgan and Ball. If Jimmy’s come to, you let him know how goddamned close he came to losing those stripes.” Oates winked at the captain, a man who had been but a boy when the war began.

Strickland saluted and started to turn away.