The Amalgamation Polka (21 page)

Though there was nothing to see, no clear target to fire at, men began toppling out of the ranks like broken dolls, falling soundlessly to the earth. A riderless horse came charging out of the smoke, a booted human leg dangling from the stirrup. Major Hays, their company commander, who had not been seen all morning, rushed unexpectedly past brandishing his saber in one hand, a bottle of whiskey in the other, and muttering a stream of unintelligible gibberish. “Looks like Ole Pricklylegs has called it a day,” yelled Fowler before exclaiming “Ow!” and, with a surprised look on his flushed face, falling backward into the dirt. “Phinny!” cried Liberty, kneeling beside his friend. “Are you all right?” Fowler replied, managing a tight smile, “Sure, Liberty, just got the wind knocked out of me. I’ll be up in a second.” Then Liberty noticed the hole in Fowler’s chest. There was froth around the edges, as if his friend had miraculously grown a new mouth outside his ribs. “You’ll be fine,” Liberty said, patting his hand. “I never thought this would happen to me,” Fowler said, voice already reduced to a low rasp. “Kill a johnny for me, Liberty, I’m going to miss you.” “Keep moving!” shouted Sergeant Wickersham, abruptly materializing out of nowhere. “Fowler will be taken care of. Keep moving!” Reluctantly, Liberty retrieved his rifle and, with one last look back at his dying friend, stumbled on ahead to rejoin the line. He could hardly advance a rod without stepping on a body or a part of one. Heads were lying about like an unharvested crop of grotesque pumpkins. In many places the ground was surprisingly soft, soggy with blood. The wounded groaned and writhed about with an aching slowness, like strange marine animals trapped on the ocean floor. The frequent calls for “Mother!” near and far were almost unendurable. A hand reached up, grabbing Liberty by the pant leg. “Help me!” pleaded the man whose features were obscured in blood, his right eye missing. Liberty shook his leg free and moved on. Up ahead he finally spotted a familiar face, that of Private Amor Dibble, a farmer’s son from Lake Placid who had apparently never been around many people in his young secluded life and had hardly spoken a word to anyone since joining the company back in June and who now, observing an evidently spent cannonball rolling lazily across the grass, stuck out his foot to stop it and in an instant his entire right leg was torn from its socket and Dibble thrown screaming to the ground.

“Lord have mercy!” exclaimed Corporal Bell, rushing to Liberty’s side. “Why aren’t you firing, man? You want to end up like him?” gesturing toward what remained of Private Dibble. He tore a paper cartridge open with his teeth and poured the powder down the barrel of his Enfield. “And look at poor Huff there.” He pointed to a body a couple yards away, where one neat bullet hole decorated the man’s left breast. “Guess he shouldn’t have tossed away those cards, might’ve saved his life. Now get yourself together and start taking part in this scuffle. You can see we need every man we’ve got.” He lifted his musket to his shoulder and fired off into the murk, then took off running after the bullet as if eager to see if his blind shot had happened to bring down any quarry.

It was then that Liberty became aware for the first time that morning of what had been a constant accompaniment to his every move, the phenomenon veterans joked about, the nettlesome sound of bumblebees buzzing incessantly about one’s head. He also noticed in every direction small geysers of dirt were spraying into the air as if the bubbling ground itself were being cooked over a slow, mammoth fire. Men on all sides of him were screaming, cursing and, like frantic automatons, loading and firing, loading and firing, the ten-step procedure necessary to shoot the standard musket keeping even the quickest and most skilled down to about two rounds a minute. Liberty had never felt so alone. Though the sun seemed to have hardly budged a degree since first breaking through the overcast, it seemed this battle had already lasted a full day, and he had yet to fire a shot. As the good sergeant predicted, there were discarded ramrods aplenty littering the field. He gathered up several just to be safe. Then, hurrying as quickly as he could, he clumsily loaded his own rifle—at his best he was fortunate to get off one round a minute—and aimed and fired in the same direction as his fellows into an advancing wall of acrid smoke. And again and again and again until he lost all sense of himself and the failing world around him except for the monstrous, demanding rifle, which actually seemed to him to be alive, a vast, imperious host, which for a spell was permitting his pathetic, parasitic self to serve its divine needs. A sliver of pride was starting to edge into awareness—he hadn’t bolted, he was doing his duty—when a sharp blow to his buttocks sent him sprawling onto someone’s sticky body. He twisted around to see Sergeant Wickersham towering over him like an enraged giant.

“Forward, you coward, keep moving forward.”

“I was,” Liberty replied, climbing unsteadily to his feet. “I was shooting.”

“With that?” Wickersham gestured contemptuously toward Liberty’s rifle, out of whose barrel protruded at least three twisted and bent ramrods. “Take this.” He reached down to yank the rifle from Huff’s dead hands. “He don’t need it anymore. And all you’re gonna need in about half a minute is the bayonet. Now, come on, get up there with the boys and drive these johnnies back into the Potomac.”

Advancing now out of the smoke and fog came a whooping horde of demonic rebs who were upon the Federals in an instant. Men slashed at each other with bayonets and knives. Others, weaponless, squared off to beat on their opponents’ skulls with bare fists. Fallen to the ground, pairs grappled furiously, fingers seeking to close windpipes or gouge out eyes. With a sudden, inhuman roar a section of the fence surrounding the cornfield simply blew up into a hail of needle-like splinters, blood and bits of pink flesh. A dazed Captain Dougherty staggered past, clutching at the gaping wound in his shoulder where a limb had once been attached.

“Sir!” cried Liberty. “Your arm!”

The captain glanced wanly at his injury. “I am aware, private, of my unfortunate condition. Let’s see if you can attend properly to yours.” And he went on rearward.

Someone bumped into Liberty, almost knocking him down, and he turned to see Cub O’Toole, a formerly meek professor’s son from Rochester, swinging the butt of his musket hard into the surprised face of a teenaged reb. There was a sickening crunch and the boy went down as if all his leg strings had been simultaneously cut. “Liberty!” cried O’Toole. “Where you been? You’re missing the dance!” But before Liberty could reply, O’Toole’s eyes rolled abruptly upward as he seized his own neck in both hands, blood gushing between his fingers in an obscene torrent.

Then through the sulfurous haze, came a man running directly at Liberty. He was yelling something unintelligible and seemed quite angry, almost as if he’d taken a personal dislike to Liberty’s appearance. His maddened features were smeared black with gunpowder and in his right hand he waved a big gleaming Bowie knife. As he leaped screaming upon Liberty with a strength and weight unimaginable, Liberty managed to grasp the man’s knife hand with both of his and the two tumbled backward onto the slippery ground where they rolled around like dogs in the dirt, grunting, cursing, each grappling for control of the knife. “I’m going to kill you, Yank!” howled the reb, his hot, foul breath in Liberty’s nostrils. He was attempting to force the sharp edge of the blade up against Liberty’s larynx. “No you aren’t!” countered Liberty, drawing on muscles he didn’t know he had to push the knife at least a couple inches back from his pulsing skin.

They were frozen in a stilled moment of maximum tension, and Liberty didn’t know how much longer he could fend off this man’s determined desire to murder him when he heard a loud, commanding voice and looked up into the grim countenance of Arthur McGee. “Turn your head!” he ordered, and when Liberty obeyed he placed the end of his musket barrel against the back of the reb’s head and coolly pulled the trigger. A warm stew of wet organic matter went spraying across Liberty’s squinched face. McGee kicked the heavy body off of Liberty and graciously helped him to his feet. “Hate to see some damn secesh finish a job I aimed to complete.” He flashed Liberty a tight, significant smile and then vanished into the fray.

Heart audibly racing, emotions as diverse and confused as the battle itself, Liberty instinctively understood that in his present, desperate situation the one thing he must not do is think. Thought tended to dice a moment, particularly a crucial one, into too many puzzling and disconnected fragments. He wiped his face on a trembling sleeve, retrieved his weapon and hastened on.

Bodies were piled up along the base of the cornfield fence like rejected sacks of spoiled potatoes. Astraddle the top rail was perched a dead man, hands still locked around the wood, feet twisted about the bottom bar. He appeared to be studying the far horizon with intent interest as if hopeful of assistance from that quarter. Liberty had lifted himself over the fence, careful not to dislodge this silent sentinel, when a major with a blood-soaked bandanna wrapped around his head dashed up and demanded, “What unit, boy?”

“Eighty-ninth New York, sir.”

“Well, where the hell are they?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty. What a way to conduct a war. Move on up there, then. Close up that gap.” And he slapped Liberty across the back with the flat of his sword.

Liberty took half a dozen steps before being accosted by the hideous shrieks of a wounded soldier who looked to be no more than twelve years old. He was missing both legs at the hips. Liberty paused to offer him a sip of water from his canteen, but the boy couldn’t seem to keep the liquid down and his incessant screams prompted the thought that if the very walls of hell were cracked open with a chisel this was the noise the fiery rock itself would emit. He moved on.

In addition to the perpetual storm of nasty minies, shell and canister were repeatedly plowing the teeming field, filling the humid air with cobs, leaves, stalks and a goodly portion of mangled arms and legs.

“Devilish hot work, eh?” cried a Federal Liberty did not recognize, and who insisted on giving him a curiously demented wink. He was loading and firing his weapon without even bothering to take aim. “I’ve been back and forth over this same ground three times already!”

“Well,” replied Liberty, “looks like you’re about to do it again.”

Despite the energetic efforts of a capless colonel to stem the retreat, the Union line suddenly broke in the face of yet another Confederate charge. Men simply dropped their rifles and ran for their lives. Before Liberty could even react he was clobbered in the left temple by a scrawny, toothless johnny whose only weapon was the rock he wielded in his filthy fist. The sky turned black, the stars jiggled in their courses and when full vision was finally restored, Liberty found himself prone amid the multitude of fallen soldiers in varying states of consciousness and, of course, most numerous, the ones possessing no consciousness whatsoever. The battle, apparently, had pressed on without him. His head, throbbing like the inside of a bell upon which the midnight had just been struck, felt huge and red, and before he could even struggle gamely to his feet he was surrounded by a raggedy-looking pack of unwashed johnnies whose rifles, he couldn’t help noting, were all directed straight at him.

“That’s one angry knot you got there, son,” observed a tall man with eyes so arrestingly blue they seemed like clear pieces of summer sky.

Everyone ducked for a moment as a shell went sputtering a bit too low overhead.

“Rufus!” called the tall man.

“Yes, sir.” Rufus was hardly more than a small freckled boy with thatch hair and bare feet and outfitted in what appeared to be a random sampling of soiled rags. The rifle he clutched in such ungainly fashion was twice as tall as he.

“Conduct this prisoner to the rear immediately.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so, that’s why.”

“Sir,” observed one soldier, anxiously scanning the far tree line. “Looks like they might be fixing to attack again.”

“I thought we didn’t take any prisoners,” Rufus persisted.

“We’re taking this one. Now go on, skedaddle.”

“Fucking hell,” the boy muttered, nudging Liberty in the back with his barrel. “Step lively, Yank. Ain’t killed one of you birds yet and my finger’s gettin’ awful itchy.”

“I’m in a poor way,” Liberty complained. “How far do we have to go?”

“Shut your mouth, you stinking bluebelly. Now move your shanks.” The barrel poked Liberty in the ribs.

“Aren’t you a mite young for soldiering?”

“I’m older than I look.”

“And what age is that, exactly?”

“None of your damn business.”

“Quite a mouth on such an innocent tyke.”

“It’s all you Yankees’ fault. Before this war a curse word never passed my lips. Now I swear like a Spanish trooper without even knowing I’m doing it. Seems to rile some folks sometimes.”

“Why don’t you stop?”

“Can’t. Got the habit.” A stray bullet lifted the cap right off Rufus’s head without touching a hair.

“Holy shit!” cried Rufus. “Let’s hoof it, Yank, ’fore you get killed by your own side.”

In a half crouch they dashed through the dense choking smoke, stopped, turned, ran on again. All around them, now visible, now obscured, masses of howling men—from which army who knew?—shifted to and fro in clamorous confusion.

“Do you even know where the rear is in this mess?” yelled Liberty.

“No Yankee’s gonna tell me I’m lost. You just head away from the noise.”

“But the noise is all around us.”

“I told you once to shut your pan.” He raised his rifle threateningly. “Want a taste of the stock?”

Suddenly the air around them began to sing rather persistently and they found modest cover huddling together in a disappointingly shallow depression in the ground.

“This is the goddamndest thing I’ve ever seen,” announced Rufus, “and I’m missing out on all the fun.”

“We seem to be experiencing our fair share.” Liberty could actually hear the bullets hitting the earth around them like one shovelful after another of tossed pebbles.