The Convict and Other Stories

  “Don’t go seeing Federals where they ain’t none,” the sergeant said. “You pop one cap and that bunch back there is scared enough to throw their damn Minié balls all over this road.”

  “Look at them wheel tracks. They wasn’t cut that deep by no wagon.”

  The sergeant looked at the heavy, curled ruts in the clay with his watery eye and unconsciously moved the cartridge box on his belt from its position on his side to the center of his stomach.

  “You’re durn near blind, ain’t you?” Wesley said.

  “The only blind I got is what come out of my canteen last night. You just watch the edge of that woods up yonder and don’t blow your toes off in the meantime.”

  “What are we supposed to do if we get hit out here? There ain’t a hole big enough for a whistle pig to hide in.”

  “That’s what it’s all about, son.”

  “How come the lieutenant don’t get on point except when we’re in the woods?” he said angrily, and instantly felt stupid for his question, but the fear had already started to grow and quicken around his heart as they neared the church, and the white lines of the building against the green fields beyond made the skin in his face pinch tight against the bone.

  “You didn’t see him when we pulled off Kennesaw. He might look like he was born with a mammy’s pink finger up his ass, but he walked a horse trailing its guts down the hill with two wounded on its back while their whole line let off on him. I seen his tunic jump twice when a Minié cut through it, and his face never even turned.” The sergeant was talking too fast now, and the knuckles in his hand were white around the hammer and trigger guard of his carbine. He sucked in his cheeks to gather the moisture in his mouth and spit a thin stream of tobacco juice in front of him. “You don’t worry about him on point. He’s only got one trouble. He don’t quit, and that’s going to get us all in a hard place in the next few days.”

  Wesley stared hard at the church building, and then his heart clicked inside him.

  “Something moved in the window,” he said, his breath tight in his throat.

  “Keep walking.”

  “I seen it. I knowed there was Federals in there.”

  “Keep that goddamn rifle where it is.” The sergeant’s voice was low and his gray face was pointed straight ahead. “They’re probably skirmishers, and they’ll let us pass to get to the column. When we hit the timber, we’ll move right around and behind them.”

  “They’re going to cut us up right here on the road.”

  “You shut, you hear?”

  The boy could feel the blood draining out of his face, and sweat dripped from his hair and ran down his neck into his collar. His heart was clicking rapidly now, like a bad watch, and his breathing swelled inside his chest as though there were no oxygen in the humid air. He wished he had taken some shells from his cartridge box and stuck them inside his belt, because the half second’s difference in loading could keep the Yankees on the floor of the church until he had a chance to make for the woods. He wanted to wipe the sweat from his eyes, but his hands felt wooden and locked onto the rifle, and he knew that if he moved in any irregular fashion, a gray storm of Minié balls would leave him and the sergeant ripped apart on the road like piles of rags.

  “A hundred more feet, son, and then we’ll be coming up their ass,” the sergeant said. The strands of chewing tobacco were like dry burns on his lips.

  Wesley looked at the dark green of the pines and the mist burning away in the sunlight. Then in the time that his eyes could throb with the knowledge that it was too late, that they were caught forever in a rainwashed piece of farmland between two thick woods, a window in the church filled with a man and the long barrel of his rifle thrown hurriedly against the jamb.

  Wesley whirled the Springfield toward the window and fired before the stock touched his shoulder. The man’s face flattened in an oval pie of disbelief, the back of his head roared upward into the sash, and his rifle balanced once on the window’s edge, then toppled out on the ground. Wesley knocked the swollen cartridge out of the breech with the flat of his hand and pushed another flush into the chamber. Every window in the church exploded with puffs of dirty smoke, the sergeant’s carbine went off close to his ear, and he swung his sight on an officer who was cocking and firing his revolver through a dark opening between the front doors. The ball tore the door’s edge away in a shower of white splinters, he saw the officer’s hands go to his face as though he had been scalded, and then he and the sergeant were running down the clay road toward the hackberry trees and the cannon that the lieutenant was already turning into position. Wesley pulled his haversack strap and canteen string off his shoulder and tried to get another cartridge out of his box without spilling the rest. He heard a Minié whine away behind him, then two more that thropped with a hollow rush of air close to his head.

  “Don’t go in a straight line! They’ll hit you sure!” the sergeant yelled.

  The men ramming the powder bag down the mouth of the cannon seemed miniature in the distance, their motions stiff and muted in the shimmering heat. The lieutenant was jacking the elevation screw on the carriage, and then Wesley saw one of the convicts carry a heavy bucket to the front of the cannon and loop the bail over the barrel.

  “Goddamn, they’re loading with grape.”

  “Shut up. Just go down when I do.”

  “They can’t reach the church house with grape. They’re going to tear us in half.”

  “Watch the lieutenant’s arm.”

  The convict finished loading the handfuls of iron balls out of the bucket, a private shot the ramming rod once down the barrel, and the lieutenant raised his hand high above his head and kept it there several seconds.

  “Bury your pecker,” the sergeant said.

  They fell forward on their elbows in the middle of the road, and Wesley clenched his fists and wrapped his arms around his head just as the cannon thundered in a roar of black smoke and pitched upward on its carriage. He felt the ground shake under his loins, and the wide pattern of grapeshot sucked by overhead in a diminishing scream. It was quiet for less than a second, then he heard the iron balls rain on the church house like dozens of hammers clattering into wood. He turned and saw the walls covered with small, black holes, powdered bricks from the chimney scattered across the roof, and a wisp of smoke rising from one eave.

  “Some of them balls must have still been glowing,” Wesley said.

  “Get it moving, son. We ain’t home yet.”

  They started running again, but this time Wesley knew that they had an aura of magic around them, and the two or three Yankees who were still firing couldn’t place a Minié closer than a few feet from them. The breech and barrel of his Springfield were coated with clay, he had lost his haversack, canteen, bayonet, and half of his cartridges on the road, but the trees were only fifty yards away, and the private was already reaming out the cannon barrel with water so they could stuff in the next powder bag. The rest of the men had formed a bent line through the trees, their butternut-brown uniforms almost indistinguishable from the trunks in the deep shade of the woods, and each time a rifle recoiled among the leaves, he heard the lead shot flatten out an instant later against the side of the church house.

  Then he saw the sergeant jerk forward and his carbine fly into the air. The muscles in his face collapsed, his mouth hung open, and his legs, still running, folded under him as though all the bone had been removed. Then he simply sat down. The Minié had almost been spent when it embedded in the base of his scalp, and the lead protruded in a gray lump from the proud flesh.

  “Drop him and run for the cannon,” he heard the lieutenant yell above the rifle fire. Then a moment later, after the cannon roared again and covered him with its heat, “Can’t you hear me, Private? He’s dead.”

  . . .

  The battle lasted through the morning until the Federals were burned out of the church house and forced to run across the open fields to the opposite woods. But later Wesley could remember lit
tle of it in any sequence. There had been the terrible thirst and the white sun boiling out of a cloudless sky, the green horseflies humming over the sergeant’s body, the acrid smoke that floated in the trees and burned the inside of his lungs, the wounded who were carried deeper into the woods and left their thick, scarlet drops on the dead leaves. The only detail that remained etched in time, like a clock suddenly ticking upon the twelfth hour, was the church roof bursting into pockets of flame. He stopped firing and watched the shingles curl and snap in the heat while great holes caved open in the roof and showers of sparks shot into the sky. The flames leaped out the windows and raced up the building’s sides, and then the Federals were in the middle of an unplowed field, their weapons abandoned, some of them limping and holding on to each other in a foolish dance toward the woods. They crumpled silently like stick figures in the distance, and Wesley loaded again and felt the same awful surge of blood and victory in his head as every man firing next to him.

  They buried the sergeant and three enlisted men in the woods, pulled the cannon from its carriage and drove a cold chisel into the priming hole, and made a litter of tree limbs and blankets on the stripped gun mount for the two wounded who couldn’t walk. One man had been shot through both jaws and had a filthy gray shirt tied around his mouth to hold his chin and teeth in place. The old cook had been hit in the stomach while pouring water down the cannon barrel, and the dressing he held to the swollen, black hole above his navel was already sticking to his fingers. They moved across the fields past the scorched brick foundation of the church house, past the bodies of the Federals, which had started to swell in the heat, and Wesley had to look away when he saw the magpies picking like chickens after corn at the crusted wounds. The two convicts began to walk on the edge of the fields when they saw the first dead, slowing gradually while the column moved ahead of them. The lieutenant turned his horse in a half circle and slipped the leather loop off the hammer of his pistol.

  “I want you men in front of the mules.”

  “They got ammunition, Lieutenant. That officer yonder probably has a Colt’s.”

  “You’ll move back on the road or be shot.”

  Their dirty, cotton prison jumpers stuck to their chests. They squinted up at the lieutenant in the sun, their sallow faces filmed with sweat, then walked onto the road ahead of him.

  In the few moments that the column was stopped, Wesley had watched the other men rather than the convicts, and he had sensed, in the way he would the hidden brightening of color in a man’s eyes, a bitter wish inside all of them that the convicts would push it to the edge. It wasn’t any one thing that he could look at clearly in the center of his mind, but instead something that was collectively wrong and displaced for that moment on a yellow clay road between two steaming fields: the immobility of the man in front of him, the thick lump of tobacco frozen in his cheek, the silence along the column and the fact that no one unstrung his canteen, or maybe the smell of their bodies and the sweat running down their necks now that they had stopped. Yes, that was it, he thought. They had stopped. They were in the open where they could be hit again if more Federals had moved up through the woods, and this time they were without their cannon and carrying wounded, but not one man had shown a flick or quiver in his face at the possibility that a skirmish line was already being formed behind that violent green border of trees.

  They moved down the road, and the man on the carriage litter with the shirt tied around his mouth began to chew on his tongue and froth blood and saliva. There were no Federals in the woods, only three dead Negro children. They lay in a row among the leaves, as though they had gone to sleep, and the pine trunks around them were scoured in white strips from a rain of grapeshot.

  “What the hell was they doing there? Why wasn’t they home with their people?” the man behind Wesley said.

  But he had already quickened his step past the lieutenant, who was trying to saw up the bridle on his horse and keep him from spooking sideways into the tree limbs.

  That night, after the moon had risen with a rain ring around it in the green twilight, the mist started to gather in the woods, and the first drops of rain clicked flatly on the high spread of branches overhead. They shaved willow poles from a creek bed, slanted them into the ground, and stretched their slickers over the notched ends and weighted the bottoms with rocks to make dry lean-tos. The cook, whose intestine was bulging against the dressing that he still held to his stomach, and the man who had been shot through both jaws were placed under the cannon carriage with a canvas tarpaulin across the four wheels. The cook’s face already had the iridescent shine of the dead, and he had urinated several times in his trousers. The other man had tried to pull his teeth loose with his fingers, and pieces of bone had dried in the crust of blood along his cheek.

  Wesley used his bowie, which his father had given him when he was twelve, to hack the pine saplings away from the base of a limestone boulder and make a shelter that would be as dry and comfortable as anything the Cherokees had made in South Carolina. The knife was forged from a heavy wood rasp, hammered and sharpened and honed to a blue edge, and it sliced through the saplings with one easy downward movement of the arm. He pitched handfuls of dry pine needles inside the shelter, took off his shirt and spread it evenly over the needles, and put the barrel of his Springfield on the edge of the cloth. He sat in the opening and ate the two biscuits and soda crackers that he had saved in his pocket, and looked through the wavering tree trunks at the bright fire close by the cannon carriage. The light rain had started to drip off the overhead leaves and hiss in the burning pine gum.

  Beyond the fire the lieutenant was seated over a small folding table inside the open flap of his tent. The light from a candle that he had melted to the table flickered on his pale, handsome face while he wrote in a steady motion with an ink quill across a piece of paper. Wesley watched him as he would someone who moved about in a strange world that he would never fully understand, one that existed above all the common struggles that most men knew. He wondered if the lieutenant had also sensed that electric moment back on the clay road or if he had caught it and dismissed it with the same indifference he had shown toward the hot-eyed stares of the convicts after he had drawn his revolver on them. And he wondered if those endless pages that he filled with a flowing calligraphy every night they were allowed fires contained some plan or explanation about the miles they marched each day, the trenches they dug and then abandoned, the whole mystery of an army’s movement that stopped and started on a whimsical command.

  But even if Wesley had read those letters written to a wife in Alabama, he would not have understood the language in them, as it belonged to a vision of the world that had the same bright, clear shape as a medieval romance: “We have lost many of our bravest young soldiers, whom God in His great Mercy will surely reward for their sacrifice in our Cause. Sherman has burned Atlanta and released his troops upon an unprotected and innocent population in vengeance for the battles that they could not win honorably. But I do not think that Lee will ever surrender to such men and open our land to occupation by the Federals. Should he do so, there are many contingents of our Army already forming in Texas to continue the war from Mexico. Regardless, we are proud to have fought for the South, and our honor has never been stained by inhumanity or reprisal towards those who have been so cruel in their invasion of our country. I only pray that you will remain well and in strong spirit until we are home again—”

  Wesley saw the lieutenant place the quill by the paper’s edge, pinch his eyelids with his fingers, and motion a private to the opening of the tent. The private nodded, the shadow and firelight wavering on his back, then walked toward Wesley’s lean-to. He had an empty tin plate and wooden spoon in his hand, and he was irritated at being given an order before he could fill his plate with the gruel that was cooking on the fire. His coat was spotted with dark drops of rain.

  “He wants to see you,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “He don’
t exactly give me written notes.”

  Wesley propped the barrel of the Springfield on a small rock inside the lean-to and put on his shirt and cap. As he walked toward the lieutenant’s tent, the wind blew through the high limbs overhead and shook a cold spray of rain across the clearing. The fire had burned into ash and red coals, with the sweet smell of pine rosin steaming off into the rain, and the other men were shoving in pinecones and twigs to build the flame again under the blackened pot of gruel.

  He had never spoken directly to the lieutenant before, and he stood in front of the open tent flap with the candlelight touching both of their faces while the heat thunder rolled somewhere beyond the woods.

  “Combs said you wanted to see me, sir.”

  The lieutenant pinched his eyelids again, and for the first time Wesley noticed how long and thin his fingers were.

  “Yes. Pull the flap and sit down.”

  There was a sawed-off pine stump on the far side of the table, and after Wesley had closed the flap and tied the thongs to the tent pole, he felt the sudden enclosure of warmth and light against the rain that ticked on top of the canvas.

  “Do you know what those men are thinking about out there tonight, Buford?”

  He was surprised that the lieutenant knew his name, and even more so at the question, but he kept his expression flat and looked somewhere between the candle’s flame and the lieutenant’s face.

  “No sir.”

  “You have no idea?”

  “I go my own way, Lieutenant.”

  “They want to quit. Each one of them tonight sees himself as one of the men dying under the gun carriage. They’re not ready to talk among themselves yet about desertion, but they will be in a few more days.”

  Wesley’s eyes looked for a moment at the lieutenant’s, then back at the candle flame again.

  “You know all that, don’t you? You saw it on the road this afternoon.”