Prayers to Broken Stones (33 page)

“Well,
go,
boy!” snapped the Scoutmaster.

“Yessir,” I said and ran toward the tent entrance. I paused. “Sir?”

“What is it?” The Scoutmaster was already tying another ticket on another Scout’s blouse.

“Where am I to go, sir?”

The fat man flicked his fingers as if brushing an insect away. “To find the veteran you are assigned to, of course.”

I squinted at the ticket. “Captain Montgomery?”

“Yes, yes. If that is what it says.”

I took a breath. “Where do I find him, sir?”

The fat man scowled, took four angry steps toward me, and glared at the ticket through his thick glasses. “20th North Carolina … Section 27 … up
there.
” He swept his arm in a gesture that took in the railroad tracks, a distant stream lined with trees, the setting sun, and another tent city on a hill where hundreds of pyramid tents glowed redly in the twilight.

“Pardon me, sir, but what do I do when I find Captain Montgomery?” I asked the Scoutmaster’s retreating back.

The man stopped and glowered at me over his shoulder with a thinly veiled disgust that I had never guessed an adult would show toward someone my age. “You do whatever he
wants,
you young fool,” snapped the man. “Now
go.
”

I turned and ran toward the distant camp of the Confederates.

Lanterns were being lighted as I made my way through long rows of tents. Old men by the hundreds, many in heavy gray uniforms and long whiskers, sat on campstools and cots, benches and wooden stumps, smoking and talking and spitting into the early evening gloom. Twice I lost my way and twice I was given directions in slow, Southern
drawls that might as well have been German for all I understood them.

Finally I found the North Carolina contingent sandwiched in between the Alabama and Missouri camps, just a short walk from the West Virginians. In the years since, I have found myself wondering why they put the Union-loyal West Virginian veterans in the midst of the rebel encampment.

Section 27 was the last row on the east side of the North Carolina camp and Site 3424 was the last tent in the row. The tent was dark.

“Captain Montgomery?” My voice was little more than a whisper. Hearing no answer from the darkened tent, I ducked my head inside to confirm that the veteran was not home. It was not my fault, I reasoned, that the old gentleman was not here when I called. I would find him in the morning, escort him to the breakfast tent, run the necessary errands for him, help him to find the latrine or his old comrades-in-arms, or whatever.
In the morning.
Right now I thought I would run all the way back to the Boy Scout Station, find Billy and Reverend Hodges, and see if anyone had any cookies in their duffel bags.

“I been waitin’ for you, Boy.”

I froze. The voice had come from the darkness in the depths of the tent. It was a voice from the South but sharp as cinders and brittle with age. It was a voice that I imagined the Dead might use to command those still beyond the grave.

“Come in here, Johnny. Step lively!”

I moved into the hot, canvas-scented interior and blinked. For a second my breath would not come.

The old man who lay on the cot was propped on his elbows so that his shoulders looked like sharp wings in the dim light, predatory pinions rising above an otherwise indistinct bundle of gray cloth, gray skin, staring eyes, and faded braid. He was wearing a shapeless hat which had once boasted a brim and crown but which now served only to cast his face into deeper shadow. A beak of a nose jutted into the dim light above wisps of white beard, thin purplish lips, and a few sharp teeth gleaming in a black hole of a mouth. For the first time in my life I realized that a
human mouth was really an opening into a skull. The old man’s eye sockets were darker pits of shadow beneath brows still black, the cheeks hollowed and knife-edged. Huge, liver-spotted hands, misshapen with age and arthritis, glowed with a preternatural whiteness in the gloom and I saw that while one leg ended in the black gleam of a high boot, the other terminated abruptly below the knee. I could see the rolled trouser leg pulled above pale, scarred skin wrapped tautly around the bone of the stump.

“Goddamnit, boy, did you bring the wagon?”

“Pardon me, sir?” My voice was a cicada’s frightened chirp.

“The wagon, goddamnit, Johnny. We need a wagon. You should be knowin’ that, boy.” The old man sat up, swung his leg and his stump over the edge of the cot, and began fumbling in his loose coat.

“I’m sorry, Captain Montgomery … uh … you
are
Captain Montgomery, aren’t you, sir?”

The old man grunted.

“Well, Captain Montgomery, sir, my name’s not Johnny, it’s …”

“Goddamnit,
boy!” bellowed the old man. “Would you quit makin’ noise and go get the goddamned wagon! We need to get up there to the Pits before that bastard Iverson beats us to it.”

I started to reply and then found myself with no wind with which to speak as Captain Montgomery removed a pistol from the folds of his coat. The gun was huge and gray and smelled of oil and I was certain that the crazy old man was going to kill me with it in that instant. I stood there with the wind knocked out of me as certainly as if the old Confederate had struck me in the solar plexus with the barrel of that formidable weapon.

The old man laid the revolver on the cot and reached into the shadows beneath it, pulling out an awkward arrangement of straps, buckles, and mahogany which I recognized as a crude wooden leg. “Come on now, Johnny,” he mumbled, bending over to strap the cruel thing in place, “I’ve waited long enough for you. Go get the
wagon, that’s a good lad. I’ll be ready and waitin’ when you get back.”

“Yessir,” I managed, and turned, and escaped.

I have no rational explanation for my next actions. All I had to do was the natural thing, the thing that every fiber of my frightened body urged me to do—run back to the Boy Scout Station, find Reverend Hodges, inform him that my veteran was a raving madman armed with a pistol, and get a good night’s sleep while the grownups sorted things out. But I was not a totally rational creature at this point. (How many ten-year-old boys are, I wonder?) I was tired, hungry, and already homesick after less than seven hours away from home, disoriented in space and time, and—perhaps most pertinent—not used to disobeying orders. And yet I am sure to this day that I would have run the entire way back to the Boy Scout Station and not thought twice about it if my parting glance of the old man had not been of him painfully strapping on that terrible wooden leg. The thought of him standing in the deepening twilight on that awful pegleg, trustingly awaiting a wagon which would never arrive was more than I could bear.

As fate arranged it, there was a wagon and untended team less than a hundred yards from Captain Montgomery’s tent. The back of the slat-sided thing was half-filled with blankets, but the driver and deliverers were nowhere in sight. The team was a matched set of grays, aged and sway-backed but docile enough as I grabbed their bridles and clumsily turned them around and tugged them back up the hill with me.

I had never ridden a horse or driven a team. Even in 1913, I was used to riding in automobiles. Chestnut Hill still saw buggies and wagons on the street occasionally, but already they were considered quaint. Mr. Everett, our iceman, did not allow boys to ride on his wagon and his horse had the habit of biting any child who came in range.

Gingerly, trying to keep my knuckles away from the grays’ teeth, I led the team up the hill. The thought that I was stealing the wagon never crossed my mind. Captain Montgomery needed a wagon. It was my job to deliver it.

“Good boy, Johnny. Well done.” Outside, in the light, the old man was only slightly less formidable. The long gray coat hung in folds and wrinkles and although there was no sight of the pistol, I was sure that it was tucked somewhere close to hand. A heavy canvas bag hung from a strap over his right shoulder. For the first time I noticed a faded insignia on the front of his hat and three small medals on his coat. The ribbons were so faded that I could not make out their colors. The Captain’s bare neck reminded me of the thick tangle of ropes dangling into the dark maw of the old well behind our house.

“Come on, Boy. We have to move smartly if we’re to beat that son-of-a-bitch Iverson.” The old man heaved himself up to the seat with a wide swing of his wooden leg and seized the reins in fists that looked like clusters of gnarled roots. With no hesitation I ran to the left side of the wagon and jumped to the seat beside him.

Gettysburg was filled with lights and activity that last, late evening in June, but the night seemed especially dark and empty as we passed through town on our way north. The house and hotel lights felt so distant to our purpose—whatever that purpose was—that the lights appeared pale and cold to me, the fading glow of fireflies dying in a jar.

In a few minutes we were beyond the last buildings on the north end of town and turning northwest on what I later learned was Mummasburg Road. Just before we passed behind a dark curtain of trees, I swiveled in my seat and caught a last glimpse of Gettysburg and the Great Reunion Camp beyond it. Where the lights of the city seemed pale and paltry, the flames of the hundreds of campfires and bonfires in the Tent City blazed in the night. I looked at the constellations of fires and realized that there were more old veterans huddling around them that night than there were young men in many nations’ armies. I wondered if this is what Cemetery Ridge and Culp’s Hill had looked like to the arriving Confederate armies fifty years earlier.

Suddenly I had the chilling thought that fifty years ago Death had given a grand party and 140,000 revelers had
arrived in their burial clothes. My father had told me that the soldiers going into battle had often pinned small scraps of paper to their uniforms so that their bodies could be identified after the killing was finished. I glanced to my right as if half-expecting to see a yellowed scrap of paper pinned to the old man’s chest, his name, rank, and home town scrawled on it. Then I realized with a start that I was wearing the tag.

I looked back at the lights and marveled that fifty years after Death’s dark festival, 50,000 of the survivors had returned for a second celebration.

We passed deeper into the forest and I could see no more of the fires of the Reunion Camp. The only light came from the fading glow of the summer sky through limbs above us and the sporadic winking of fireflies along the road.

“You don’t remember Iverson, do you, Boy?”

“No, sir.”

“Here.” He thrust something into my hands. Leaning closer, squinting, I understood that it was an old tintype, cracked at the edges. I was able to make out a pale square of face, shadows which might have been mustaches. Captain Montgomery grabbed it back. “He’s not registered at the goddamn reunion,” he muttered. “Spent the goddamn day lookin’. Never arrived. Didn’t expect him to. Newspaper in Atlanta two years ago said he died. Goddamn lie.”

“Oh,” I said. The horses’ hooves made soft sounds in the dirt of the road. The fields we were passing were as empty as my mind.

“Goddamn lie,” said the Captain. “He’s goin’ be back here. No doubt about it, is there, Johnny?”

“No, sir.” We came over the brow of a low hill and the old man slowed the wagon. His pegleg had been making a rhythmic sound as it rattled against the wooden slat where it was braced and as we slowed the tempo changed. We had passed out of the thickest part of the forest but dark farmfields opened out to the left and right between stands of trees and low stone walls. “Damn,” he said. “Did you see Forney’s house back there, boy?”

“I … no, sir. I don’t think so.” I had no idea if we had passed Forney’s house. I had no idea who Forney was. I
had no idea what I was doing wandering around the countryside at night with this strange old man. I was amazed to find myself suddenly on the verge of tears.

Captain Montgomery pulled the team to a stop under some trees set back off the right side of the road. He panted and wheezed, struggling to dismount from the driver’s seat. “Help me down, Boy. It’s time we bivouacked.”

I ran around to offer my hand but he used my shoulder as a brace and dropped heavily to the ground. A strange, sour scent came from him and I was reminded of an old, urine-soaked mattress in a shed near the tracks behind our school where Billy said hobos slept. It was fully dark now. I could make out the Big Dipper above a field across the road. All around us, crickets and tree toads were tuning up for their nightly symphony.

“Bring some of them blankets along, Boy.” He had picked up a fallen limb to use as a walking stick as he moved clumsily into the trees. I grabbed some Army blankets from the back of the wagon and followed him.

We crossed a wheat field, passed a thin line of trees, and climbed through a meadow before stopping under a tree where broad leaves stirred to the night breeze. The Captain directed me to lay the blankets out into rough bedrolls and then he lowered himself until he was lying with his back propped against the tree and his wooden leg resting on his remaining ankle. “You hungry, Boy?”

I nodded in the dark. The old man rummaged in the canvas bag and handed me several strips of something I thought was meat but which tasted like heavily salted leather. I chewed on the first piece for almost five minutes before it was soft enough to swallow. Just as my lips and tongue were beginning to throb with thirst, Captain Montgomery handed me a wineskin of water and showed me how to squirt it into my open mouth.

“Good jerky, ain’t it, Boy?” he asked.

“Delicious,” I answered honestly and worked to bite off another chunk.

“That Iverson was a useless son-of-a-bitch,” the Captain said around his own jawful of jerky. It was as if he were picking up the sentence he had begun half an hour earlier back at the wagon. “He would’ve been a harmless
son-of-a-bitch if those dumb bastards in my own 20th North Carolina hadn’t elected him camp commander back before the war begun. That made Iverson a colonel sort of automatic like, and by the time we’d fought our way up North, the stupid little bastard was in charge of one of Rodes’s whole damn brigades.”