Cain at Gettysburg (3 page)

“Guess the praying's over,” Cobb said as the band leapt through a polka. “They're meaning to cheer us up, I expect. But you and me … we know better. Don't we now? You and me, Quaker, we know what's coming. Old Marse Robert didn't march us all the way up just to let us live off the fat of the land and scare Dutch girls. No, sir, he didn't. They just give us these pretty new uniforms to be buried in.”

Blake looked at the little man. At God's hideous excuse for a man. A nose eaten by sores topped a mouth whose last teeth ran black. Cobb's new gray tunic was already stained by tobacco juice or worse. A leathery creature of unknown age, his only pleasing feature was thick black hair, but that crawled with lice. Now and then, the men tossed him into a creek, which Cobb accepted as part of his fate on earth. He was the only man in the company with whom no other soldier would share a blanket.

“I didn't know you had gypsy blood, Cobb,” Blake remarked.

Finishing up his business, Cobb smiled again. “My ma was a McCaslin, she had the sight. Guess it passed on down to me, after all.” His smile widened, revealing a grim chasm. “Though it don't take no second sight to see as how the colonel's marked for death.” He laughed, a mean sound. “Anyhow, you know the McCaslins and what's said about them. From your shopkeeping days.”

Yes, he knew of the McCaslins. They were the only clan in the hills to whom no one would give credit, not even when they sent the children to town to beg. Other, worse things were said about them, too. But even the bony, sliver-faced McCaslins compared favorably with little Cobb.

“I should charge you for a court-martial. For talking about Colonel Burgwyn that way.”

Cobb cackled in delight. “You won't, though, Quaker. No, sir, you won't. 'Cause we understand each other, you and me, and you know that's right. Goes all the way back to New Bern, when you and me were the only ones didn't turn tail. You know you'll need old Billy Cobb, sooner or later, when things get doing proper.” He laughed yet again. “Always wondered why you didn't run off with the rest yourself. I mean, we all know why you joined up, Quaker. But I never could figure why you stood and fought like a man, when you didn't need to. Now I know, though. Figured that out back at Culpeper Court House. And I expect I'm not the only one.”

Blake didn't want to hear any more. He marched from the glade, toward the busy encampment, passing a boy squatting at the edge of the bushes. The soldier looked up, embarrassed and quivering.

“For pity's sake,” Blake told him, “go farther into the trees.”

“I meant to, Sergeant,” the boy said in a pleading voice. He didn't rise from his squat. Shivering all the while like a sick man. Although he had probably just eaten too many green plums.

“Better hide that pretty white bottom you got there,” Cobb told the lad. “Might some of the boys take a fancy to it.”

Cobb was the most repellent man Blake had ever met.

The morning sun had already turned mean. It looked to be another day of baking heat interrupted by sudden downpours. Blake was glad they weren't marching, that this Sunday, at least, would be a day of rest. The men needed it. As he did himself. They had never marched longer and harder in his recollection. He needed to see about the hole in his right shoe, too. How thoughtlessly he once had arranged good, strong shoes on the bottom shelves of the store. Blake curled a rueful smile. Holes notwithstanding, at least he
had
shoes. Cobb and plenty of other soldiers didn't. The 26th had the fine new uniforms the governor had sent as a gift to his former regiment, and the outfits made them the best-turned-out regiment in the Army of Northern Virginia. Until you looked down at their feet and saw that they were no better off than the rest.

If only Governor Vance had sent them shoes, Blake thought for the hundredth time. The winter-weight uniforms were only a torment in the summer heat. Even with their tunics rolled up and carried, men collapsed by the roadside on each day's march.

Striding past the cook-fires of a sister company, Blake believed he had rid himself of Cobb, who was careful to be insubordinate only when there were no witnesses about. But Cobb was more agitated than usual and had stayed on his heels like a hound.

They passed two bearded men slaughtering a steer amid happy laughter. In the background, the Moravians played “Bonnie Blue Flag.”

“I know, don't I, Quaker? Why you didn't run off? Back then, when you and me kept the Yankees off, and they made you a sergeant and left me sucking a straw?” Eager and bright as a child he was, with his sordid nose and filth. “I've known why ever since that evening at Culpeper Court House.”

Blake stopped. “I should knock you down.”

The words only intensified Cobb's glee. “But you won't. You and me, we both know that. 'Cause you want them to take you for a gentleman, ain't that right? Still hoping to be made up a lieutenant, a fine, high officer. But you won't be. Not after Culpeper Court House. Everybody knows what you're all about now, Quaker. And it ain't just ‘Lost Lenore.' They know. They just don't say. Out of politeness.”

Blake turned. Fists balled.

Cobb cackled again and danced off. He always knew how far he could go, and that was how far he went.

Blake watched the narrow shoulders recede, the soiled black hair clotted below the brim of a worn straw hat. Most of the men already claimed to have lost the governor's new kepis, favoring their worn slouch hats or straw that shielded them from the sun.

Disdainful of the Sabbath, a nearby game of cards spurred cries of victory and disgust. The band struck up “Wait for the Wagon.”

“I'm not a Quaker anymore,” Blake said.

His words were a breath, and only God could hear them.

*   *   *

Blake sat apart with a tin cup of coffee, concealed by a shade tree and trying to let things be. Cobb had unsettled him.

The coffee was fine, though, and that was something. The drink was the last of a “gift” pressed from a Dutch family in Fayetteville. The local men were timid, when they were in evidence at all, but the big Dutch housewives were bold and forthright. The man of the house, with a beard like a bib, had produced the measure of coffee only after his wife turned them down with an earful.

Blake admired the Pennsylvania countryside. All the men did. The great barns and the houses of stone or brick, as strong as fortresses, and the gardens dense with vegetables, the abundant fields of corn, astonished the men with whom he served, who knew only sag-walled cabins and rock-toothed fields that broke the men who chewed them with a plow. As terrible as war might be, for many a man from the hills it was a lark that spared his back, if not his feet. For a time, at least, the Bunyan twins and Hugh Gordon, Pike Gray and Tam McMinn, had entered a world in which they no longer needed to worry about feeding a pack of children or replacing an old mule that had died in harness. The Cause absolved them of all other obligations. All a man needed to do was to stand up and kill or be killed when the time came.

Pennsylvania was a foreign country to those men, so exotic it was unthinkable that it ever could have been governed by the same hand that ruled their knobs, narrow fields, and hollows. But it was not a strange land to Blake. He had not come to their mountain world until his fourteenth year. Before that, he had been housed by his mother's family in Waterford, Virginia, where Quakers and other industrious sorts had drawn their own wealth from hard work and better soil. For Blake, the orderly towns of Pennsylvania, with their redbrick fronts and scrubbed stoops, brought a sense of homecoming he would have preferred to avoid.

The last of the coffee went cold. Blake drank the dregs. Although there were orders to give, Sabbath or not, he was not yet ready to move. He sat on in the shade a while longer.

The damnable thing was that Cobb was mostly right. It was uncanny. Blake, too, had noticed a queerness in Colonel Burgwyn, who had looked almost feverish during the psalms and sermon. Blake would not have put his impression into the words Cobb had spit out, but it chilled him to feel their rightness.

Yes, there would be a fight. Only God knew where. Probably beyond the high ridges to the east. As always, rumors thrived and grew extravagant. They were marching to Harrisburg. No, to Philadelphia. Or all the way to New York City. They would circle back to Baltimore, or descend upon Washington from the north and hang Lincoln from a sour apple tree.

No one knew what General Lee had in mind.

But there was this quiet day for which to be grateful. Blake wished he could find comfort in its Sunday-ness, but he could not. His upbringing had been left too far behind him, to the sorrow of so many. He had still read the Bible for a time after leaving his mother's faith, but that came largely from habit, partly from guilt. Then the Good Book had drowned in the blood of Malvern Hill.

The regiment had gone in late and done little. But the carnage had stunned Blake. The regiment's skirmishes in North Carolina had not amounted to war. Malvern Hill was war. What killed the last prayers left in him wasn't a sense of revulsion at the suffering and death, but how much he loved it.

*   *   *

“Old George, ever cheerful…,” Reynolds kidded. “You sound as if you've been sentenced to hang at daybreak.”

“Haven't I been?” Meade asked. They walked along a farm road beyond the headquarters picket line. A cavalry unit had followed the track some hours before, leaving its visiting cards. The two generals stepped carefully.

“I suppose you'll have the Sixth Pennsylvania for your headquarters guard now?” Reynolds said. His grin was friendly, but devilish.

Embarrassed to be caught out so readily, Meade tried to smile.

“Oh, come on, George,” Reynolds told him. “It wasn't a brilliant deduction. Philadelphia society would never forgive you, if you didn't. And Margaret would pin back your ears. Social standing has its obligations.” He chuckled. “At least your Rittenhouse bucks got rid of those sticks of theirs. ‘Rush's Lancers' indeed. They read too much Walter Scott in Philadelphia.”

“They took young George in,” Meade said, defending himself. “When he left West Point.”

“And they would've been damned fools, if they didn't. He's a fine young man. Just a bit too energetic for the old jail on the Hudson, I suspect. Come on, cheer up.”

Meade stopped to stare out across a field of wheat. Staring at nothing. The world smelled burnt.

“I'll need your help, John,” he said. Unable to look the man who was now his subordinate in the face.

“Don't underestimate yourself.”

The heat pressed down. Sweat bloomed. “I don't. I never have. I'm a proud man, John. You know it. That's part of my dilemma, I suppose. I don't want to fail. The shame of it.”

“Then don't fail.”

Meade turned to his friend. Reynolds was the shorter man, but more pleasing to the eye. The white hairs threaded into his beard graced him, while graying whiskers just made Meade look older.

“You should have had the command, John.”

Reynolds shrugged, smiled. “Well, I don't. Now what the devil was so important that I had to ride over immediately?” He wasn't bothered, though. His good smile held.

“I can't do this by myself,” Meade told him, reversing their direction and strolling back toward the picket line. “I'm keeping you in command of the army's left wing. Doubleday can handle your household duties at First Corps, while you apply the switch to Sickles—he's back, you know—and to our sainted and reverent General Howard.” He grimaced. “The Eleventh Corps's in a bad way, and we both know it. His Germans hate Howard, and he despises them. And, frankly, I'm not sure I blame the Dutchmen.” Meade's expression tightened. “It wasn't just Jackson at Chancellorsville. Or bad luck. Howard hasn't a jot of imagination when it comes to the things of this earth. He can't envision anything he can't see right in front of him—unless it has to do with abolition—and he won't listen to anyone who doesn't rank him. The man can only lead if he's properly led.”

“Well, you stumped me,” Reynolds said. “I thought you'd be more worried about the Third Corps. Sickles is the joker in the deck, George.”

Meade almost smiled, but his mouth was etched with bitterness. “That's why you're keeping him, too. His corps is able, if he's not. Good division commanders. And I can't very well relieve Abe's favorite War Democrat and Mrs. Lincoln's slinking Tammany pet, can I? Sickles is the burden I can't be rid of, and there's folly and damnation in the creature.” Meade grunted at his image of the man. “He'll have his marching orders this afternoon, to close in your direction. You'll move north to Emmitsburg with the First Corps, keeping the Eleventh on your flank.” Slowing, he turned toward his golden companion. “You wouldn't have a spare map of Pennsylvania, would you? To call Hooker negligent would be merciful.”

A cloud of green flies rose from a pile of horse droppings. The soldiers called the flies “Berdan's Sharpshooters.”

“I expected more of Butterfield,” Reynolds reflected. “He hasn't just been Hooker's boon companion. Dan always kept one duty officer sober.”

“He can't even keep up with the orders I pass along. John, I just can't trust the man. He's Hooker's creature. You should've heard him this morning, claiming Hooker told him nothing of his plans. I asked Warren to take his place, and Seth Williams, but nobody wants it.”

“You can't replace him as chief of staff now. With Lee out there.”

“That's what Warren said.”

“And he was right. Anyway, Warren's where he needs to be. He's a splendid engineer.”

“But I can't depend on Butterfield to be loyal to me. And he and Sickles are thick as thieves.” Meade swept off a veil of flies. “I've never hated the army, but I've hated army politics since West Point. Even you and I have had our differences. To my regret, John. But now, with these volunteer officers … the whole business stinks like an Irishman's drawers. I'm not certain whether they've given me command of an army, or of a political convention. But I know I can't trust Butterfield.”