When he returned to Carnton, he rode right up to the front door and dismounted his gray horse. He walked around the side of the house to take stock of the grounds—he knew they wouldn’t be able to fit all the wounded and dying in the house—and around the back he saw a little dark-haired girl in a gingham dress playing with a hoop, which she rolled down the mowed walkway until it gained speed and got away from her, finally crashing into the tall, dead grass that surrounded a little cemetery plot. He stopped. She was lovely and clean and happy. That is the most beautiful girl in the world, Cowan thought. The girl drove off all memory of the whores he’d been with in Atlanta, all rouge and stink and sharp tongues. Pure, pure, pure, he thought, looking at the girl. And then he thought, You’re a sick bastard, and walked past her to the back steps. The nigra servant was standing there, watching him. He called up to her.
“I’d like to speak with Mrs. McGavock.”
“I keep telling y’all she indisposed, and y’all don’t listen. Now she asleep.”
Cowan was afraid of nigger women; they always seemed like they knew something you didn’t, and so he didn’t rise to her bait.
“Well, then, will you please tell Mrs. McGavock that General Forrest sends his apologies and that he has regretfully concluded that this house is the only suitable structure for a hospital to serve the upcoming battle and that he trusts she will not be too inconvenienced by the intrusion.”
“Inconvenienced?”
The Negress laughed through her nose. Cowan heard the girl banging on the hoop some distance behind him and thought he could hear the swish of her dress. The Negress just turned, walked back in the house, and left the door open. Cowan followed.
6
LIEUTENANT NATHAN STILES, 104TH OHIO
We were digging just as fast as we could with everything we had—bayonets, cups, picks, shovels. I was the commander of my company now, by virtue of the death of the three previous company commanders in the last three months—not much to commend the job, truth be told. But the outfit practically ran itself. You said dig, they dug. You only had to be in one fight to know what a beautiful thing a trench could be. The first minié ball whizzes by your head, and you’re a digging man evermore. But we couldn’t quite figure out why we were supposed to be digging so hard here. It didn’t seem possible that we would fight. I climbed up on top of the cotton gin around which we were digging a trench line and looked out, and I couldn’t see a thing—just open fields for two miles around and those rolling hills we’d stumbled over the night before. Who would fight here? I looked around and saw all the rest of the brigades and companies digging in just as hard as we were, and it looked mighty cozy on our side of things. My little piece of it was right there at the cotton gin, and between us Ohioans and the Indianans and the Illinoisans, we were wrapping a pretty good trench and battlement system right around it. We were a bulge in the line—the colonel called it a salient, but I didn’t go to West Point and learn such fancy words, so it was just a bulge to me—and we were exposed on three sides instead of one. But it was pretty steep coming up the hill toward us, and out front some of the boys from Indiana were cutting down a big spiky hedge and dragging it into place at the bottom of the hill. No one was going to make it up that hill.
I was ready to sleep. Some of the other officers had already found places to rest, up on porches and even in some houses. Someone had found some whiskey, and more than a few men were taking their fill. I couldn’t help thinking that there were rebs in those houses, even if they were hospitable and their women gracious, so I didn’t trust them or their whiskey. I stayed out at the trench line and tried to boil up a cup of coffee. I saw a general stumble down the middle of town, his eyes on fire and spittle flying out of his mouth and sticking in his beard as he cursed a couple messengers about something I couldn’t understand. Those men had come riding up from some units that were way out in front of us on the pike, down the hill a half mile or so. I squinted my eyes hard, and I could see those men out front frantically digging in just like us, maybe harder, like they’d seen something big and terrible. I heard a couple shots, but I didn’t pay it much mind, which I would regret later. I couldn’t figure why those men were out there, but then, I didn’t always understand the stratagems of war, I just did what I was told. I told my men to keep digging, and burned my tongue on my coffee.
I will always remember an odd scene I witnessed a little while before the shots rang out and everything went to hell. I had walked back from the lines a few hundred yards, wandering in and out of occupied houses. I had decided that I actually could use some of that whiskey, but it was now scarce and I had no luck. I don’t know how many pie-eyed, lolly-tongued men told me they were fresh out before I finally realized I wouldn’t be finding any. I was about to turn back after rooting around in one more cellar, located below one of the larger houses just off the town square, when I heard loud voices out in front. There had been some socializing on the front porch, and now it sounded like there was a fight about to break out. It’s odd to think, now, that at that moment just hours before the battle, I was excited to see a fistfight. But I was.
I walked around the front, and what I saw was astounding: a young Confederate officer. We have taken a prisoner, I thought. But then it was apparent that he was no prisoner. He sat on his horse glaring down, red-faced and fiery as he tossed errant blond locks from his eyes and spit words down to an older civilian man. The soldier was disheveled like we’d come to expect rebs to look, but he didn’t have that broke-down mien that made you think you were seeing a raggedness that was natural. This was a man used to better things, a better class of man. The Confederate and the old man were having a row, and I had a hard time keeping up with the words they flung at each other. I couldn’t understand what he was doing there, but my fellow officers just looked on goggle-eyed. The old man was bareheaded and dressed in a severe black suit. His iron-gray hair blew about in the warm breeze, and he glared back at the young rebel. I wish I could remember everything they said, but all I really remember is this: the old man telling the younger one he was a fool, and the younger shouting back that the older man was a traitor consorting with the enemy.
At that, the lollygaggers on the porch finally got up their liquor courage, and one of the bigger men stepped down as if he would apprehend the man on the horse. But the old man held up his hand, which was big and flaky and rough like a farmer’s.
“Gentlemen, this man is the only son of a widow,” he said, which seemed to mollify our boys, because the men on the porch just sat back down and shook their heads.
I wanted to say, I’m the only son of a widow, too, because it was true and it hadn’t kept me from being shot at yet, but among these men that phrase seemed to mean something. I expect they were Masons or some such. You never really know how men choose to associate themselves, and especially why, until it’s too late to understand or to care.
They let that young rebel go, just like that. I watched him turn his fine chestnut mare around and trot off as if no one would dare stop him, which they didn’t. I felt embarrassed to watch him, and I had a momentary urge to run up and apologize to him for being here, in this place that was so obviously his home. He rode well in the saddle, and that mare kept tossing her head back at him as if to urge him to go faster. They looked like they’d been together a long time. But he kept it slow, and I watched him peer into the windows of the occupied houses as he passed.
After he disappeared out of sight, the men on the porch tried to convince the old man in black to have one more drink with them.
“None of us getting any younger, Mr. Baylor, least of all this whiskey, thank God.”
But he waved them off and bowed his head as if to look intently at his shoes. Then he shoved those big hands in his pockets and walked off, right past the corner of the house where I was standing. He didn’t seem to notice me, and I almost asked him who the hell the rebel was to him, but his face was furrowed and twisted like something was trying to chew his skin right
off, and I let it alone. Just when I thought he had passed, he took notice of me and turned for a moment, straightening the front of that black suit and looking at me curiously with the most unusual gray eyes.
“You’re a smart boy,” he said, and then he walked away.
I knew that I had witnessed something I’d rather not have seen.
I wandered back to my unit, suddenly despondent, and not just because I hadn’t found a drink. The streets had become crowded while I was away. Wagons full of Negroes jostled with each other and with the finer carriages of white refugees who wouldn’t make eye contact and wouldn’t yield to the escaping slaves, though they were both fleeing before the same Confederate army. On every wagon hung a collection of pots and pans of varying sizes and conditions, which made quiet music against the wood as the wagons swayed. Slowly the flood of civilians ran toward the north end of town, where the bridge over the Harpeth River was being repaired and reinforced. With a little luck it would soon groan again under the weight of the refugees and the army’s supply wagons. I could hear the distant shouts of quartermasters trying to keep order at the bridge, and I heard the splashes of people who could wait no longer to cross the water. There was singing. We’ll praise the Lord in heav’n above, roll, Jordan, roll.
When I finally arrived back at the cotton gin, the digging had stopped and my men were standing on their toes at the edge of the entrenchment looking out across the fields that surrounded the town. They stood in various states of stupor and were quiet like they were afraid of being heard or singled out. One new man, Colbert, sat back from the others and was crying into his hat, but the others apparently didn’t notice, they were so mesmerized. (Colbert, I would learn, had just received word of his infant son’s death due to smallpox. He wasn’t just a sniveler. Later he fought well and died quick.) One of our veterans, a short, bandy-legged German named Weiss, stood on top of the cotton gin with his head cocked and his one good eye squinting at something in our front. I joined him, climbing up on bales of cotton until I could get my arm up on the shingle roof and swing my legs over. Soon I stood beside him.
What I saw was the most beautiful thing I have ever seen, and I wished to never see it again. In the distance the entire Confederate Army of Tennessee stood on line. All of them. We’d been fighting out here in the west, in Alabama and Mississippi and Tennessee, always hemmed in by rivers and forests and tight little winding roads, and I had never thought about what thousands of men would look like if they stood out and faced us. But there they were. They shimmered in the distance, the warming air making them look wavy like a dream, something from another world. There were flags of all sorts snapping in the wind—the red and blue cross on their battle flag, the odd, faded blue and white flags of one of the divisions in the center. Sounds of brass bands, one playing “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” I wanted them to stay there always, frozen in their splendor. An odd happiness possessed me then, and I can only explain it by saying that I had fought them so long and they had fought so hard I was proud to finally see them in their entirety. I was proud that such an army, a vibrating mass of butternut gray and sharp metal, screeching that strange wail of theirs, was arrayed against me and my men. I was proud that we were worthy of that. And though I knew that not one of them would hesitate to shoot me in the head as I stood there watching with Weiss, who was muttering curses in a strange tongue, I didn’t take it personal. I wished it could all end right there and that the rebels could see themselves as I saw them at that moment. But such things never happen, and such sights are bound to disappear. And so they began to move.
Weiss put his hands to his head and mumbled to himself. “My God, they will fight us here, and they—they will be slaughtered. Butchered, like animals. Stupid, stupid.”
Weiss cursed some more.
“It is not right, no, so stupid. I cannot fire my gun at sheep, no.”
I told Weiss he must, and to get off the goddamned gin.
“I will not shoot sheep,” he said again.
“Keep digging,” I told him.
7
THE GRIFFIN HOMESTEAD
On Winstead Hill, a couple miles south of Franklin along the pike, two boys crouched in the weeds, watching.
Each had stuffed a ham biscuit in his pocket, not cured, but fresh meat off the pig that the Willises had killed not two weeks before. Ab Willis had water in a canteen made from a bull’s bladder, which he claimed had once been the cherished possession of a slain Indian but which his friend Eli just happened to know had been bought off one of the traders that came through the country every once in a while. Eli had bought himself a little pocketknife from the trader with some of his egg money, and that’s how he knew about the canteen. The old trader and his unusually young wife had kept dozens of the things piled up in the back of their wagon, and Eli had mistaken the canteens for a pile of fantastically large mushrooms. He played along with Ab’s story, though. Ab was a good friend, if a little slow.
Ab had been the one to bring the news of the war that afternoon, pounding on the Griffins’ door while Eli was finishing his midday dinner. Eli had been trying to convince his pa that the steers didn’t need to be moved that afternoon, and he was proposing that fishing wouldn’t be such a bad way to spend some time, when he heard Ab stumble up the steps to the front porch.
Pound pound pound. Ouch.
Ab had found the nail sticking out of the door. Eli was supposed to have removed the nail last winter, but he’d forgotten, and then he figured it didn’t make any sense to take it out anyway. Mr. Griffin came to the door, and Ab, always afraid of the old widower with his baggy eye sockets and heavy, fat boots, could barely squeak out his request to see Eli while sucking on his knuckle.
Eli Griffin’s house was something more than a cabin, but just barely. It stood several miles down the pike toward Columbia, about a mile off the road in quiet woods. It had two floors and a wood stove in the kitchen, where Becky cooked their meals. Everything was gray, washed-wood, horizontal beaded poplar boards on the inside, from floor to ceiling, but there was a small stone fireplace at the opposite end of the room from the kitchen stove, and they all—Eli, Becky, and their father, Joseph—thought it was quite smart and cozy. They each had their own special chairs drawn right up to the hearth. There were three bedrooms upstairs, each with a plain-style rope bed covered with a corn husk mattress. The Griffins didn’t have anything hanging on the walls except for a picture of George Washington that Eli had lifted from a farmhouse abandoned a few years before by their neighbors, and a sketch of their mother that Becky had drawn when she was little. It had been three years since Mrs. Griffin had died, and they still prayed for her safe passage to paradise whenever they sat down to eat at the table. She had never bothered to teach Becky her special recipes—probably because she hadn’t figured on dying of the cough—but Becky had made up a few of her own, and Eli never thought to complain about the food.
When Eli came to the door, Ab told him loudly what he’d seen earlier that morning: thousands and thousands of Confederates marching up the pike with guns and sabers and all sorts of things warlike. It looked like the end of the world, Ab said. Without a word Mr. Griffin hurried out to move the cattle, forgetting that he’d told Eli to do it, and Becky, who had also been listening while she put away the dishes, disappeared upstairs to her bedroom. For the first time in recent memory Eli had been left alone. He didn’t bother to wonder about it.
Guns! Men on horses! Ab handed him a biscuit, and they were off, out the front door and down the path that led to the Griffins’ well, and then past the well. They ran fast and recklessly, howling and leaping around like they had been released from someplace stuffy and dark, where all anyone ever did was pray nothing would happen. Something was happening now, by heaven, it was.
They ran for a long time through the fields that lined the road, occasionally stopping to fondle things the soldiers had left strewn along the way. Eli picked up a bone-handled knife with notches on the hilt and stuck it in his pa
nts. Ab held a jar of some sort of confection high above his head to see what the sun looked like when filtered through the glass, and then he threw it down against the road where it broke with a pop, spreading tendrils of peach jam in every direction. They wrestled over a pack of cards, and Eli won. Ab settled for a dented brass spyglass with a couple big scratches and a crack on the lens. Then they paused to catch their breath.
“Well, where are they? Thought you said there were thousands of ’em.” Eli wondered if it had all been a figment of Ab’s imagination, the litter on the side of the road notwithstanding.
“They gone up the road, probably to town by now. They’s moving fast, faster than you can run, slug. I bet they taken the town by now, and we missed it because you too busy eating and not minding what’s goin’ on.”
“You saying you didn’t eat lunch, fatty?”
“I’m saying I don’t eat lunch all leisure-like.”
They wrestled some more, and then, without saying anything, they started running up the road toward town. Each had only the vaguest idea what they would find up there, which was the main reason they were so eager to see it for themselves. By fits and starts they spent the next couple of hours traveling the five miles to the foot of Breezy and Winstead hills, on the east and west sides of the pike, respectively. To the west they could see a number of people on top of Winstead Hill, men and women, who had gathered to watch whatever was about to happen. A few of the ladies sat in chairs that their husbands had brought in the buggies Eli and Ab found parked on the south side at the bottom of the hill. A couple dozen people milled around up there like they were at a party, and Eli and Ab climbed up to join them.