Cain at Gettysburg (45 page)

“Trouble started when I took all that talk about Mary Magdalene too serious. I'd come on to Natchez. Ever heard of Under-the-Hill? Down by the river? Silver Street? Well, you're none the poorer for it. More sin packed into one little row than any place since Sodom and Gomorrah. That's where I met her. Susan. My Susan. Susan Wyatt. Susan Cobb. Or whatever she calls herself these days. I went down among the heathen to save souls, and lost the best part of my own. But a man lies to himself, and never more so than he does about a woman. I saw her ‘as the lily among thorns.' And she was beauteous. And I took her unto me.” He laughed, grimly now. “I believed, I truly did, that I could lift her up and save her soul. But
you
know what I was interested in, Quaker. Even if I couldn't say so to myself. And she was willing. Oh, that she was. Always laughing. I told myself my Susan was an innocent led wrong. And I took her unto me as a wife. ‘And I said unto her, Thou shalt abide for me many days; thou shalt not play the harlot, and thou shalt not be for
another
man.…' Hosea 3:3.”

Cobb closed his palms over his eyes, whether from weariness or sorrow come to a surfeit. “My heart was filled with joy, and my loins with lust. Even her own people tried to warn me off, but at a time like that a man's a mule. And I was halfway to Heaven, telling myself, ‘Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun.…'” He unveiled his eyes. “Know that verse, Quaker?”

“Ecclesiastes 9:9.”

“What's 9:18 say?”

“‘Wisdom
is
better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good.'”

“Quaker folk beat that into you? Anyway, it's true enough. About the sinner destroying much good. If there was any good left in me, after I tarried with her. With the woman I loved more than eternal salvation. Know what I meant to her? After giving her my name and pledging my immortal soul? I was a riverboat ticket from Natchez up to Memphis. No more than that. Wasn't a month thereafter, and she'd gone off in the night. With my last two dollars.” His grin spread his ravaged nose. “Even took my Bible. I suppose she figured it might bring enough for a breakfast. And what she
did
leave me with made me into a thing that makes decent folk turn away.” He spit into the ashes. “Like I said. ‘A leper.' Even if it ain't the leprosy in the Bible. And there ain't no healing Savior here among us.”

Blake considered Cobb a while longer, then looked away. There was nothing to say that wouldn't have been a lie.

Cobb slapped his thighs, as if he meant to rise and slip off to sleep. But the little man remained seated until the last coals faded and left them in the dark. As for Blake, sleep had no charms to draw him. Not that night.

At last, Cobb said, “Figure it's true? About us going in again tomorrow?”

Blake nodded at a darkness rimmed by darkness. “What's left of us. Unless the Yankees march off.”

“They won't.”

“No. I expect not.”

“Something's changed. Can't say exactly what. But something's changed.”

“They're fighting for their homes now.”

Cobb's disembodied voice said, “It's more than that. It's like they took a while to figure out they had that much fight in 'em. And now they know.”

“Now they know.”

“Well,” Cobb said with a dead-of-night yawn, “I expect we'll have a chance to cover ourselves in glory again in the morning. You ought to try to get yourself some sleep, Quaker.”

“You can stop that now. Calling me ‘Quaker.'”

“All right. Sergeant Blake.”

“I like ‘Tom' better.”

Cobb cackled. “Why, I wouldn't feel sufficiently respectful, you a sergeant and all. I might get court-martialed.”

A shot, close by, startled both men. Blake rose to his knees, grabbing for his rifle. A voice cried,
“Jesus, oh Jesus, I'm shot … I'm shot and killed…”

“That Corny?” Blake said.

“Sounds like.”

“Somebody help me! Jesus Christ. I'm shot.”

The two of them hurried toward the voice, blundering over men whose sleep had been broken. Others, too, headed for the wounded man. A lantern emerged from an officer's tent.

“Corny? Where are you? We can't see you.”

“Git off me, you big sumbitch.”

“Corny?”

“He's here, Sergeant Blake.” It was Charley Campbell's voice. He had leapt to the side of his friend.

Blake felt along the ground and found a blood-slopped leg. His hand pursued the blood upward into a hot, wet pulse.

“Who shot you, Corny?” Charley asked. “What happened? Where'd they hit you?”

“My belly, my nuts. I don't
know
. Oh, Jesus, don't it hurt? I never hurt like this.…”

The lieutenant scared up to command the company found them with his lantern.

“What happened here, men?” the boy demanded.

“Bring the light here, Lieutenant.”

The lad did as Blake bade him.

Prodded, Corny screamed.

“Shut that damned feller up,” a voice called. “Shoot him, if you have to.”

“Corny, I can't tell where you're hit,” Blake said. “You have to help me.”

“Down there. Oh, my God. Down
there
. It hurts me so.”

Every spot Blake touched had been slimed with blood or still pulsed with it. There was gore all down Corny's legs, where it made no sense.

A hand closed over his forearm, gripping it tightly. It was Cobb.

“Over here,” the fallen preacher said. He tugged the lantern from the lieutenant's hand and held it beyond Corny's feet, leading Blake's eyes.

Young John Bunyan had blown out his own brains, rifle under his chin. The big corpse lay shapeless, with a wrecked jaw shocked open and a hole where an eye had been. The bullet had passed on to strike Corny's groin, and much of the slop along Corny's leg was brains and blood from the twin.

“What a damned fool thing,” Charley Campbell said, “what a damned fool thing.”

Corny sobbed in agony, but the whole men stared down at the twin.

“I figure he just got a head start on the rest of us,” Cobb said.

PART

IV

THE LIMITS OF VALOR

EIGHTEEN

July 3, Morning

Hints of light revealed the waste of battle. Horses loitered among the dead, masterless and shimmering with gore. Just below the rise where Lee and Longstreet stood contending, a stallion nuzzled the grass in search of breakfast. Its mutilated hindquarters quaked, part of a separate creature. The morning twilight revealed a dangling leg. Breaking from the cluster of staff men shadowing their generals, John Fairfax strode out and shot the beast.

As the Army woke, a yawning artilleryman quickstepped from the soldier-infested treeline to undo his britches and squat, soiling the ground ten yards in front of his gun so he and his fellows would not step in the turds when serving their piece. Only as he plucked stalks to clean his fingers did the fellow note that he had distinguished company. Undismayed, he touched a paw to an eyebrow and sauntered back into the woodline.

“Ecce homo,”
a high-toned voice called from a cluster of staff officers.

No man for sacrilege, Lee turned sharply toward the few who laughed. Without resort to words, his bearing chastised them. The officers eased back, allowing the disputing generals another layer of privacy as they watched the landscape emerge from the dark's retreat.

Many of the wounded had been collected, but moans still rose from the fields between the lines, distinct in the morning calm. There were no screams, though. Not this side of the field surgeries. Yesterday's worst sufferers were dead.

In the distance, a bugle sounded: one of the newly written Union calls. Summoned, a crimson sun fought through the clouds, exciting the landscape. The night had been almost chill, but hard heat lurked.

“It can be done,” Lee said. “The men can do it.”

A breeze licked them with the stink of death.

Longstreet met Lee's eyes. Caught by a spear of light, they glowed with a belief almost fanatical: His soldiers were expected to make miracles.

Struggling to keep his voice tolerably subordinate, Longstreet said, “General, I've been a soldier all my life. I've been with soldiers engaged in fights by couples, by squads, companies, regiments, divisions, and armies, and should know as well as anyone what soldiers can do.” He broke the stare and faced toward Meade's lines, willing Lee to follow his gaze. “It's my opinion that no fifteen thousand men ever arrayed for battle can take that position. This wouldn't be an attack, but a useless sacrifice.”

Lee turned away. The old man stood erectly, as rigid as a cadet on post at West Point. But Longstreet sensed the turbulence within. They waged a contest not only of wills and visions, but over who could best restrain his temper: two gentlemen, deciding the fate of thousands of trusting men held at their mercy.

Turning toward the Union lines, the old man raised a fist.

“The enemy is there,” Lee said, “and I am going to strike him.”

Longstreet's gut refused to welcome his breakfast. Lee bewildered him. He could not understand how any man—let alone one of Lee's experience—could fail to see the folly in attacking across that mile of open fields. Longstreet had pushed out his scouts in the night, then ridden out on the enemy's flank himself. There were multiple opportunities to outflank Meade. Even now.

Lee refused to hear him. Upon his arrival at Longstreet's position, he had flared at the lack of preparations for a dawn attack, at the realization that Pickett's men had not yet come up on the line. But Longstreet had had no inkling that an early attack was intended. He had been with Pickett the evening before when a message arrived from Lee telling Pickett to hold in place, that he would be called upon when he was needed. But Lee had not called upon Pickett, or on anyone else thereafter. Then the unsettled old man had wanted McLaws and Law—now commanding Hood's division—to attack alongside Pickett the instant he marched up. That had sparked another bitter argument, with Longstreet pointing out how battered the two divisions were in the wake of yesterday's fight, along with the danger of the Federals striking his flank, if Law and McLaws were to move out of position. Only when he drew Lee out into the open to see the terrain for himself had Lee relented regarding McLaws and Law. But the grand attack, with Pickett at its heart, would still go in.

Longstreet had then pleaded for Hill to attack as well, with the bulk of his corps. He believed that Meade's current position would not yield to fewer than thirty thousand men. Lee insisted that half the number would do.

Finally, at sunrise, Fairfax shot the crippled horse and Longstreet made his final, desperate plea. It failed. He felt half a wish that Fairfax had shot him, instead of the stallion.

Longstreet had never been less confident of success, never so burdened by the thought that thousands of men would be wasted—the flesh-and-blood lives of soldiers who put more trust in Lee than they did in God.

How could Lee fail to see it?

Behind them, the Army of Northern Virginia rose from its uneven rest. Most of the birds had fled the groves, yet a few trilled their daily greetings to the world. The aroma of campfires pierced an array of stenches. Regiments groaned and rustled, awaiting a boiled treat of captured coffee. Orders snapped.

Lee softened his posture. But not his resolve. Taking Longstreet's arm, he told him, “We must pull together, you and I. The men must not believe we are divided. They must have confidence.”

Longstreet nodded.

Light gripped the fields and colors fought clinging shadows. Off to the left, on the high ground where the blasted orchard stood, Porter Alexander shifted a battery. The artilleryman had more energy than anyone else in the army. Longstreet had already decided that the young man would command all the corps' guns that day. No one else was as capable. Certainly not fussy old Pendleton. And the artillery would have the devil's own work to do.

“Let us go forward a little,” Lee said, almost gently. “Toward the road, the better to see. You will have many labors this morning, General.”

They mounted and rode out, trailed by their retinues. Nearer now, Alexander busied himself with another section, laying each gun himself.

Riding beside Longstreet, Lee said, “The artillery will have to prepare the way, of course. To silence the batteries in the center. If the artillery does its work, I do not think it will be so very difficult. Meade has been weakened to the breaking point.”

Longstreet did not reply.

They dismounted on another of the low crests that rippled the fields and examined the Union lines through their field glasses. They had entered the realm of the dead now, ground upon which both sides had bled, only to abandon it. The cluster of horses and officers presented a splendid target, but the Union cannoneers declined to open.