She stepped closer, saw sweat and fury on the man’s face, and heard a woman shout, “You ought not be comin’ in here and scaring us folks! General Pem’s done given old Grant a good licking! We heard about it yesterday! It’s in the newspaper this morning!”
Lucy had seen that, the report of a fight out near the Champion farm, close to the railroad. It was the first news she had heard about Grant’s army at all since the gunboats had rolled past the town a month ago. Unlike the old men, the soldiers who came back to the town, stragglers mostly, spoke only of success, that Grant had been driven far away, or would be very soon. But the provosts were efficient, and those idle soldiers either disappeared or were hauled off to someplace the civilians wouldn’t see.
The soldier on the wagon jumped down, and Lucy saw him clearly, thick dust on a rag of a uniform, and she realized he was an officer.
“I’m telling you folks to get prepared. The Yankees is coming this way! They done whipped us at Baker’s Creek, and this morning they whipped us at the Big Black!”
The response continued to be dismissive, even hostile, and Lucy saw frustration, resignation in the man’s face.
“You folks gotta listen! There’s gonna be trouble right here! Hey! Lookee there!”
He stepped up on the wagon again, pointed, and shouted out, “Now, what’s all that then?”
She moved through the crowd, looked down the hill, past the wagon. Another wagon appeared, then two more, one an ambulance. Men on horseback followed, a quick gallop, no order, no formation. One officer moved up through them, raised his sword, tried to halt them, but the horsemen moved past him, determined, oblivious. From down several of the streets, men were gathering, most with muskets, hoarse cries, shouting, curses from officers. She felt a sickening swirl inside her stomach, kept by the side of the street, saw more men on foot, some dropping down, too tired to run, some wandering in breathless fatigue. More horsemen appeared now, moving past her quickly, the stink and grime of a hard ride. One man caught her eye. He pointed back to the east.
“We’s whipped! Old Pem done sold us to the Yankees!”
He was quickly past, and she stood frozen, stared down the hill, a gathering crowd of civilians falling in beside her. The few men were becoming many more, some on foot, no kind of march, still no order at all. Wagons moved through them, froth-soaked mules and horses staggering up the hill, some of the wagons filled with men. She began to feel their fear, could see it in the faces, infectious, saw another wagon, different, filled with civilians, a family, knew them, her neighbors, their wagon in line with a dozen horsemen.
She stepped out and shouted, “Mrs. Cordray! Mr. Cordray!”
The driver saw her, gave a look of acknowledgment, then pulled the wagon to one side, and she saw the same fear, on dusty, wide-eyed faces. The husband stood, seemed protective of his family, focused more on keeping the flood of soldiers away. Lucy saw their two small children huddled low on either side of their mother, and the man shouted down to her, “The army is in full retreat! They’re coming back here! Right now, there are men by the hundreds, by the thousands, moving into those earthworks out east! There’s a lot of talk. Not sure what’s true. But you see it now! Something terrible happened, and the army’s coming back here. We were defeated, some saying badly, a disaster. Many dead. They’re saying Grant is close, that he’s going to attack us, right here! You must go home, Lucy! Now! See to your belongings. Come, you can ride with us!”
He picked up the reins again, anxious, impatient, and she obeyed, helped into the wagon by his wife. She settled in close to the youngest child, heard crying, both children terrified by something they could not understand, absorbing only what they heard from their parents. The wagon lurched ahead, and Lucy gripped the wooden rail, looked at the mother, her friend Isabel, a woman not much older than she was. Lucy saw red eyes, filled with tears and terror.
“What does it mean, Isabel? What has happened? No one has said anything about the Yankees. It’s all just … talk.”
She just shook her head, seemed too terrified to speak, pulled her children in tightly. They jostled with the movement of the wagon, the husband whipping the mule, shouting at men who clogged the street in front of them. The soldiers were mostly stopping now, milling about, men lost, no direction, no energy. Officers rode past, swords in the air, screaming oaths, trying to create order, and she looked at one man, more filth on a gray uniform, an older man, authority in his voice, the man halting his horse in front of a crowd of foot soldiers.
“Line up here! Form a line. We must move out to the works!”
Cordray eased the wagon past the soldiers, a slight gap in the throng of men, and he whipped the mule again, shouted the way clear, panic in his voice, adding to the terror in the young children. Beside her, Isabel grabbed Lucy’s arm and said, “We came from the Big Black! We thought we could get to my sister in Jackson, make sure she was all right. But there was fighting! Lucy, it was awful. Men dying everywhere, explosions. The bridge was on fire! We are only back here by the hand of the Almighty. But so many of our boys are out there. So much talk about Yankees, about how we’re beaten! We must get home, protect ourselves. What must happen now? What can we do?”
Lucy looked back at the older officer, the man’s authority taking effect, the soldiers lining up. More men appeared from every street, their panic pursuing them. More officers were coming up, shouted orders turning the men around, guiding them back to the east, back out toward the earthworks, the great strong defensive position the engineers had labored over. Lucy focused on the faces of the officers, some not showing fear at all, just doing the job, pulling their army together, doing whatever had to be done.
Beside her, the mother rocked one child in her arms.
“Lucy, my dear Lucy. What of the children? What of our homes? What can we do?”
Lucy felt a strange calm, put her hand on her friend’s, a soft squeeze. She put her other hand on the head of the smaller child, calming him, pulling his face into her skirt, quieting the terror.
“We will do what we can. Our soldiers know what they must do. If there is to be a fight here … then we will help them.”
NEAR BOVINA, MISSISSIPPI
MAY 17, 1863
They crossed the Big Black on a makeshift bridge made from the felling of huge trees, the bark skinned away to prevent the men from slipping away into the narrow river. It was the engineer’s genius for improvisation, since McPherson’s corps were completely without pontoon bridges. Upstream, the army’s only pontoons were in use by Sherman’s men, another surge forward from the remaining third of Grant’s army, all of them now pushing toward Vicksburg. The fight along the Big Black had produced enormous spoils for the men who had so completely shoved Pemberton’s forces away, and Bauer couldn’t help watching the commotion, vast lines of rebel prisoners, a makeshift camp already set up to hold them. The officers had passed along the good cheer from above, the enthusiastic congratulations to an army that, once again, had bested the enemy. In “B” company, Captain McDermott had made certain that every man in the ranks knew of the success of the others who had done the job, Willis and the other lieutenants passing along the numbers that the captain had passed to them. They had captured nearly seventeen hundred rebel soldiers and more than a dozen artillery pieces, most grabbed on the east side of the narrow river. There were casualties, too, bodies already set into rows, the blue shirts turning black, mangled corpses spread alongside the desperately unfortunate, those who had died from a single piercing wound. But the rebel dead were many more. They were being shoved into mass graves, and Bauer had seen that before, knew that watching the sickening process was usually a bad idea. At Shiloh, he had volunteered for the burial duty, for reasons he couldn’t fathom now. Then the number of rebel dead had been astonishing, beyond anyone’s worst nightmare, and the troops had mostly volunteered for the duty drawn by a promise of generous supplies of whiskey. Bauer had joined in, at least for a while, had gone about the gruesome business of
digging the wide, shallow trenches, shoveling the rebel corpses in one at a time, until each pit was filled. The covering of dirt was always too thin, and Bauer had seen it himself, that when the first rains came, the men on top were exposed, curled and bony hands, smears of rotting flesh, unrecognizable faces. Around him, men were reacting to that sight now, and Bauer knew immediately that the numbers they were seeing at the Big Black weren’t significant, that whatever had happened here was no great bloodletting. It wasn’t quite so the day before. The regiment had marched along the northern fringes of what had clearly been a brutally contested battlefield, a place labeled by the officers for the nearby waterway, Baker’s Creek. But the most prominent feature Bauer could see was the mass of high ground, a great bulge of mostly bare land that had absorbed the shock of artillery shells and fire, and even then was still pockmarked by the dead on both sides. The hilly ground belonged to a family called Champion, and the farmhouse was occupied now by blue-coated brass. Bauer felt certain he had seen Grant himself, a short, stocky man on horseback, smoking a cigar, in white shirt and rumpled hat, watching as the last division of McPherson’s corps moved past. But any vision of the commanding general was brief, the march steady, strong, an army once more on the move. What caught Bauer’s eye was the ground itself, the smells of a fight, smoke and sulfur and the awful stink of the newly created hospitals. The bodies were there, too, a great many more than what he saw at the Big Black, and when the officers spoke of the fight that rolled over that high ground, their voices were subdued, no boasting, no great hurrahs for their victory, no hearty cheer. But a victory it was, and Bauer had seen hordes of prisoners then, too, a mass of captured wagons and horses, and the most impressive sight always, dozens of big guns. But the business of the army was already sweeping through all of that, the captured rebels marching off somewhere, the artillery pieces now a part of Grant’s own, adding to the power of this army that already seemed powerful enough.
That talk had spread through the entire regiment, and the officers had no good answer. Since coming across the Mississippi River, the 17th Wisconsin had been placed mostly toward the rear of the larger column, trailing behind the rest of McPherson’s corps. To the Wisconsin men, all of those encounters, brief or not, had been nothing more than rumbles, a chorus of thunder from somewhere up there. There was hot talk growing about that, angry growling that for some reason, idiots in high places were keeping these men out of the fight. Bauer tried not to share that, kept the silence of the veterans, the men who knew what all of that rumbling could mean. But the talk came from the new recruits, men who had spent the early spring with shovels in Louisiana mud, building up the lust for carrying the musket, fixing bayonets, the big talk of those who still thought of all this as something glorious. For a week now, that “glory” seemed to be going elsewhere, a gift for some other regiment, some other part of McPherson’s corps. The anger of the new men had surprised Bauer. Around him, the grousing was consistent and ugly, uglier by the hour. With so many fights in such a few short days, Bauer had pondered that, wondered if these Irishmen were being singled out just to be ignored, as though someone at the top believed they wouldn’t do the job. That’s a lot of bull, he thought. These micks are no different from anybody else. If someone up ahead thinks they’re bad soldiers, they got a right to gripe about it. Nothing in any of them seems any different from the 16th … maybe the accents. Course, the best way they can prove they can fight is to … fight. Just … give us the chance. The word stuck with him for a long second. Us. Yep, guess so.
He marched again alongside the skinny redheaded boy, O’Daniel, who kept mostly to himself. Sergeant Finley kept to the boy’s side of the four-wide column, and on Bauer’s other arm, the terminally cranky Irishman he knew only as Kelly. The sergeant had stayed mostly quiet, no need for discipline, at least not for stragglers, not today. Bauer could feel the hot energy for a fight, itchy tempers in the men around him. It had kept him more subdued than usual, the man who didn’t belong there. With no enemy to confront, Bauer had the uneasy feeling inside of him that the first man to inspire anyone’s wrath might suddenly give birth to a massive brawl.
They were past any signs of the fight along the Big Black, moving through the same kind of lands they had seen throughout most of Mississippi. The ground was rolling slightly, with sharp drop-offs to one side or the other, low ground clogged thick with briars and vines. Beyond each ravine were stands of timber or open fields, some of those cultivated. He had learned to tell the difference between corn and cotton, or anything else these farmers had planted. It didn’t much matter now, very little chance that anyone had stayed around to work the land in late spring, not with this mass of blue marching through. Damn shame, he thought. Waste. Good crops nobody’ll eat or pick. Houses falling into ruin. Hell, we ain’t gonna hurt none of ’em if they just let us pass. Sammie doesn’t believe that, but no damn civilian’s taken a shot at me. Not yet anyway.
Above them, the sky was darkening, rain clouds, and Bauer gazed up lazily, was drifting into that special silence, a dreamy kind of rhythm to the march where a man could actually go to sleep. The veterans had long ago learned that, sleeping on the march, steady automatic steps, the soft shuffling of their brogans on dusty roads. Even if there was no real cause for exhaustion, no scrambling midnight marches, the sleepiness came anyway, driven mostly now by boredom. The time seemed to pass more quickly as well, long hours slipping past, until that blessed moment when the bugle would sound, calling them into the next place where there might be food. Bauer had become used to it, too many miles on too many roads, most all of the walking on Southern soil. It was a fine way to pass the time … unless the man in front of you suddenly halted.
He stumbled into the man, knocking both of them to the ground, a clatter of muskets and canteens, one cartridge box spilling out, a bayonet scabbard poking into Bauer’s side. The shouts came quickly, more men tumbling down, jarred into alertness, the sergeant now, a hard yank on the redhead’s shoulder, then pulling Bauer up by the collar, choking him.
“Get up, you damn fools! What ails you, anyway?” Finley moved through others, more men pulling themselves back up, the attention all paid forward. Finley called to another of the sergeants, a short stick of a man, named Heath. “What goes up there?”
Bauer heard it now, a high panicky whoop, saw men in motion, a manic scattering, launching off the road, a scramble to avoid … something. He pushed ahead, others as curious as he was, and Willis was there now, his pistol in his hand, one hand holding the men away, the careful aim, then a single shot straight into the ground. The sharp crack from the pistol backed them up, but more men were gathering from both directions, another lieutenant, pistol drawn, but there was no need. Willis called out, “Get back in line! Just a damn rattlesnake. You boys not seen these things? Hell, you probably step over a dozen every time you go wandering out through these woods. Probably squatted right on top of one more’n once.”
The word passed back through the men, rattlesnake, hushed reverence. Bauer couldn’t help a shiver, hated snakes of any kind, had too many memories of the swamps in Tennessee and worse, the swamps across the Mississippi River, where every log seemed to hide one.
The orders went out, and the men began to form up again, reluctance as they eased past the casualty, Willis still standing over it. Bauer was there now, and Willis was smiling at him.
“Hold up, Private,” he said. “Give me your musket.”
Bauer stepped out beside the slowly moving column, unshouldered the musket, and handed it to Willis, who dipped it down, slipped the muzzle under the snake, and hoisted it airborne. It took effort, a grunting strain from Willis, and Bauer grimaced, shivering again, was amazed to see the size, the snake as thick as his leg, near six feet long. Willis carried it a few feet off the road, lowered the musket, let the carcass slide down into deep grass. Willis tossed the musket upright to Bauer, who caught it, glancing at the barrel, where the snake had actually touched the steel. Willis called out, st
ill had an audience.
“You boys pay attention to that. You kill one of those damn things, you don’t go picking it up by the tail. Dead or not, those damn critters will turn around and bite you, sure as hell. Instinct, reflex. They still got fangs and they’ll kill you dead.” He paused, held a wide smile, and Bauer knew how unusual that was. Sure, he thought. He enjoys this. Scaring hell out of us.
Bauer fell back into line, beside the redheaded boy, heard low nervous talk all around him. Bauer looked to the side, Kelly there again, and Bauer said, “They got snakes in Ireland?”
“How the hell do I know? Ain’t never been there. My folks came over ’fore I was born. You got snakes in Dutchland, or wherever the hell you’re from?”
Bauer laughed.
“Sorry. Figured from the accents and all … most of you was born there.”
“Some. Not me.” Kelly paused, the march now rolling forward, the usual rhythm. “Wonder about that, though. What the army must think. They know we’re mostly Irish … well, not you … but you know.…”
“Yeah. I know.”
“Well, how come we’re kept in the rear and all? I’m thinkin’ it ain’t no accident we ain’t been in a fight.”
Bauer had hoped that would fade away, the distraction of the rattlesnake taking their thoughts another way. But the jolting nervousness of the snake just seemed to ignite more of the fire toward an enemy many of these men had yet to see.
A voice came from behind Kelly.
“You’re right about that. I been hearin’ that they’s gonna ship us back home. Some says we’re not fit for fightin’.”