Valley of the Shadow: A Novel (52 page)

Gordon sent Jones and another officer back to make certain the farm track was clear of soldiers for Payne’s horsemen. When they returned, Billy Payne himself was with them, though on foot.

After whispered greetings, Gordon asked, “Ready?”

“I reckon,” Payne said. “Go in?”

“Have a watch? That works?”

“My pappy’s. Right here in this pocket.”

“Your men? They’re up on the road?”

“On the road, sir.”

“When you get back up there, get under what cover you can and check the time. I need you to hit that water at four thirty, on the minute. So I can get these boys here up on that high ground by five.”

“Going to be some cold soldiers. That there water.”

“They’ll forget it when the shooting starts. Speaking of shooting, this has to go quickly, Billy. As little firing as possible. I need this to pass for a blow-over of nothing, pickets with the jumps. And quiet again.”

“Do what I can, General.”

“Virginia won’t let this army down, I know it.”

“I’d best git.”

“Glad your boys are with us,” Gordon told him. “You go on.”

And they waited. Quailing cold in a fog that clung like syrup. Starting at the occasional neigh of a mount out in the ford, at a Yankee complaint of
“Verdammt noch mal.”

Jones sidled up and asked, “Want me to have your horse brought up, sir? Right behind Payne’s boys? Won’t make any extra fuss.”

It was tempting. Gordon felt no particular desire to feel cold water gush into his riding boots. But he answered, “No. Not until we get across the river.”

The soldiers had to see him beside them, bearing the same cross. Even if hardly a dozen men would spot him in the fog, that dozen would pass along the word that “Gordon was right there with us, right there in that river. I’m telling you, boys, he wasn’t high and mighty up on no horse. Got wet as a private.”

Part of leadership was the naked lie that you were like them. The other part was the lie that you were a god.

At last, he heard muffled hooves descending, Billy Payne’s Virginians. The cavalry colonel paused for a clip off a moment, telling Gordon, “Best git on with it, I expect.” His voice smiled: Payne was a scrapper. “Then see if we can’t set off and bag Sheridan, stuff that little feller in a sack.”

The colonel mounted and, behind him, his men eased up into their saddles. Gordon barely heard the tiny spur clinks, the slap of cloth-bound man-meat on worn leather. Faint snaps told of opening holsters as pistols slithered out.

For one last instant, the world held its equilibrium.

Payne spurred his horse.

4:40 a.m.

McInturff’s Ford

That water. Hard as iron, devil-cold. A greedy river, tugging you on in as you plunged ahead, grabbing your wicked parts. And you still shaking and chattering from your half-dunking hours before, never quite dried out, rags gripping you like they wanted to squeeze out all your juice, maybe your blood. Smack into that water you went, pressed on by hundreds of others, the water cold as a dead-of-winter creek back in dear Georgia and this only October, damn Virginia, damn every place but home.

Trying not to slip and get full wet, the soles of your shoes worn thin as those wet leaves back along the trail, holes inviting the water to bite flesh, begging stones to bruise and the mud to fool your footing. Splashing through that unpardonable cold, that heathen-heart chill, jostled and driven by men back of men, all of them rampaging forward, gasping at the first shock of that water, then breathing fiercely as they strove to cross, and you trying to keep upright, with Sergeant Alderman hush-voiced, but maybe not hushed enough, telling every man to keep on moving, to get on through, just get on through it, and you didn’t need no encouragement, but you did want to thrust the butt of your rifle into whoever was shoving you from behind, even if it was a good man, even a friend. Your soul grew wicked.

Fog burdened the river, clotted cotton.

Shooting was done, though. Over quick. Cavalry had gone in, thrashing the water without their usual
yip-yip-yip
ping, just a flurry of oaths and pistol shots, then it was done, the Yankee sentinels vanquished, but every man facing that river punished nonetheless, simply for being alive in the not-quite-morning, for violating some unknown commandment, descending into the make-a-tired-man-weep embrace of that river, every last soldier afoot envying, hating, despising the cavalry up on their rude nags, those lucky men who might get splashed—perhaps even annoyed—but not wet through like the brave and mortified infantry, the only consolation being that General Evans submitted himself to the same misery as the aggrieved rest of them, a Christian martyr, a Peter, pushing on through that water all raw and heedless, through a gurgling flow that surely was as far from the Jordan as a man could get, unless he reached the Potomac, that hell-water. Who among them then could be a Judas and turn back, when General Evans himself displayed such fortitude, and him bedeviled, as all men knew, by his wound from the Monocacy?

You gripped, slipped, climbed up from the water, mud-sheathed from thigh to wretched shoes, lucky to be among the first regiments across—Dear Jesus, thank you—because that bank was going to churn into a pigsty, its earth hewn by a thousand feet, by thousands. And yet, how silent! As the officers guided you—everyone shivering, body-sorrowed, running now—along a track that followed the river for some hundreds of yards, and that earth dissolving foot-pressed, too, there was no yelling, no bold hollering, just a great, queer rustle, a threshery, as an army of ghosts swarmed through the fog.

As you pant along, you see nothing much, just those closest now, all got into a regular column of fours, as if by the spell of a wisewoman from the swamps, like Widow Kirby, a crone embowered in some back, black shack every nigger avoided, her eyes of strange milk, her flesh indecent, her spells unholy (although unhappy womenfolk sought her out), and maybe that was war, the work of some monstrous sorceress contending with the Lord, for surely war was not
His
work, not this war, so far from sanctity, no matter what men said, and you knew that, you knew it now, in the cold, black morning you had to admit it, maybe the Lord wasn’t on nobody’s side, it was all just men doing unto others this terrible way, and black, black, black—let morning come—with General Gordon suddenly there, beside the misbegotten, wayward course that led uphill now, General Gordon saying, softly, softly, firmly, “Up that hill, boys, up that road! Going to have us a portion of Yankees for breakfast!”

John Gordon, a Joshua.

And not a shot, not a whimper, from the Yankees? Where were they, where were they? Couldn’t find a hog with a lantern in this burying fog, so you just followed the man in front of you, Dan Frawley this time, and your wet woolens gripped you viciously, shrinking you all up, but, by God, you had had the wits to keep your rifle, your cartridges, the things that mattered, dry, and you were glad of that much because you were mean, made mean, chilled to meanness, and after all this let the Yankees look out, for there was a wildness, a contagion, a heart-swell of hatred in the air, in this cold, enshrouded air, and you and your kind made not the sound of a herd, but only the slap-patter of an unnatural rain tapping the earth, a muted deluge of footfalls, where were the Yankees?

So darned cold.

You ran forever, maybe twenty minutes. The ground leveled somewhat and you sensed—didn’t see—that you were no longer among trees, but advancing between fields, high fields, and the regiment puckered, forming up, a smaller thing than it had been in gay springtime, but still willing. Sergeants hissed like cottonmouths with stripes, and the order went down the line to load and you did, keeping the ramrod’s tinkle as quiet as haste allowed, but, still, with thousands and thousands of ramrods in play, surely the Yankees heard them?

“I’d shoot the man dead who thought up this adventure,” Tom Boyet, town-learned, whispered, but every man knew that he would not, that he was just gnawed on by misery, like the rest of them.

Captain Kennedy walked by, another ghost, a ghost among thousands of ghosts, saying, “Shoulder to shoulder men, maintain your order, stay together now.”

And you were off, rifle ready, strutting through distempered fields, through a wanton world ungleaned,
shish-shish-shish
ing along, all those feet beyond yours, wet feet, attached to the lowest extremities of sharp-faced, hard-eyed men, blinded by fog thick as any battle smoke, but ready to kill and yearning.

Trees broke your ranks, a shallow windbreak of trees. Black trunks loomed, branches stabbed. Sodden leaves, dawdling on low limbs like ticks, fixed to your cheek, your hands, until you freed yourself. You and your brethren formed up again, the action instinctive, protective. And you felt the pulse of the great gray beast of which you were one small part, and you knew a hint of light was overdue, the solace of morning, but the world was bandaged by this soggy mist.

Shots. Distant shots. A fuss of them. Off to the left, front and left.
That
would wake the Yankees, get them ready.

Officers and sergeants chided men onward.

The distant riflery faded. And resumed. You imagined you heard voices, Rebel yells.

Then you really did hear them. Close. Perhaps a brigade away. You were running, howling yourself, plunging into the fog, ripping open its belly.

Firefly-brevity rifle flame. Glimpsed once, thrice, a dozen times, the blinking chased by loud cracks. A pathetic volley faded into more yelling than shots and quick metal clashes. Bewildered voices pleaded. You stumbled over a root.

Not a root, but a stand of Yankee rifles. They crashed down. Yankees, up close, weaponless, ape-dumb in their unmentionables. Astonished in the glow of smoldering campfires.

Tents. Men kicked the pegs and slashed ropes as they ran past, trapping grunting occupants and firing merrily into the squirming canvas, damning the doomed to Hell. Yankees appeared with their hands up high, but some got belly-shot anyway—the cold, the anger—and one fellow dropped to his knees, praying to the Lord, his reward a rifle stock swung into his mouth.

You just went on, funneled through scrupulous tent lines, guided by the glow of more fires, some tamped, some blazing for breakfast.

Screaming. Joyous. Lewd with death inflicted.

Those cackling around you ordered Yankees caught barefoot to walk rearward. You joined in, mocking, almost unknown to yourself in your spirit’s cruelty: Let
them
learn what it was like to suffer.

Transformed into sheep, the blue-bellies obeyed, every last living one of them. A few of your own kind broke off to rummage through the tents.

You
ran on, raw of throat but yowling and yiking like a dog at full moon, a mad dog. And you came upon one perfect rank of Yankees, ready and disciplined, waiting to fire. Except that they were facing just the wrong way and you and your war-kin swarmed over them, soon colliding with some of Ramseur’s misdirected men, touchy, snarling, possessive of this earth, though no one knew where they were, not really.

A sergeant lined the broken Yankees back up and set them to marching, weaponless, deep into Dixie.

Let
them
feel hunger, let
them
feel cold.

No end of Yankee camps, but no real fight. Fog thick as frosting on a holiday cake. One cannon boomed, then another, their reports pay-attention close. You couldn’t spot the muzzle-flames.

Ive Summerlin, charging ahead, rifle shifted to his left hand now, a Yankee coffeepot waving in his right. He drank from it as he ran, surely scalding himself and caring no whit, sloshing the precious brown liquid down through his beard and over his uniform, a man in ecstasy.

A volley. Near. A soldier toppled face-first into a campfire and did not move until a comrade dragged him off by the ankles, disbelieving his death until he turned his friend over and read the seared flesh and baked eyes. But the Yankee volley had done more harm to a herd of disarmed blue-bellies.

At last, the gray-flannel light softened to rich pearl.

You shot a man as he turned his rifle on you. Chest-shot, eyes startled, thick brows and beard, falling. His rifle clattered.

Howling, you clamored back into your clan and Dan Frawley said, “Georgie, get yourself a cup. Be quick.”

And soon you were running forward again, slopping glorious, wondrous coffee all over yourself as you glugged it down, rendered as mindless as Ive, scorching your throat, your tongue, and not caring at all, the pain magnificent, quickening.

And then the cup was empty and discarded. You joined a line and added to a volley, aiming loosely at shadows a curse away. Dead and wounded Yankees lay underfoot, while others, unmanned, pleaded not to be shot. Chased by exultant demons, their comrades ran.

Officers sought to guide you, to maintain some hint of order, but the most effective means to keep things going was just to let you and your kind stick to yourselves.

You shot at a mounted officer, a full-bearded man in a dark frock coat who was pointing out positions to his men, struggling to rally them. You hit the horse, not the man, but the beast bucked and threw him.

It sounded like a proper battle now, with packs of Yankees here and there attempting to fight back and cannon firing blindly into the fog, contributing smoke.

“Great Jehovah!” Corporal Holloway called, just as you smelled something glorious in the war-stink. Ignoring a pair of befuddled Yankee cooks, Holloway flaunted a skillet of thick-cut pork—not bacon, but salt pork, maybe even fresh—that had been fried up for some officers’ mess. Or maybe Yankee privates ate like that.

Men burned their fingers—you burned yours—grabbing meat from a pan black as Uncle Joe, stuffing your mouth, burning lips and tongue again, exciting blisters and swallowing unchawed clumps of fire-hot meat, the worst of your wet-cold hatefulness forgot.

In a camp as tidy as a Methodist chapel, a delighted rooster of a man had rounded up a passel of Yankee bandsmen. As you and your burned-belly brethren rushed through the luminous mist, he made the Yanks play “Dixie” on their tooters, drawing Rebel yells from across the field.