Cain at Gettysburg (7 page)

“Find us any Yankees?” Goree asked.

“No,” Scheibert said, dusting off his uniform frock coat. “They are not showing themselves, the Unionists.” Dueling scars shone white on his browned cheek. “But I must say to you something about the people here. You must not judge Germans by their unfortunate example. They have fallen from the race and do not even speak properly.”

Ross, the Austrian officer, took matters more lightly than the Prussian. “Anyway, they haven't a great deal to say. Except that they're rather frightened of your ‘Louisiana Tigers.'”

The two European officers made an odd pair, evidently hating each other to the point of declaring war—or perhaps fighting a duel—yet doing everything but the most private things together. Longstreet figured that neither wanted to let the other out of his sight.

“Gentlemen,” Fairfax announced, “our menu this evening offers a dish affectionately known in this army as
poulet militaire
. Or chicken stew. Of which there may be a portion or so remaining, if you'd care to go see Jupiter.…”

Ross pinched one end of his perfect mustache. If the Prussian paraded dueling scars, Ross suggested that he had left a few slashes on Viennese hearts. “Oh, we've eaten, thank you. These Pennsylvanians may speak poorly”—he glanced at his Prussian colleague—“but they do cook well enough.” He rubbed his hands together, as if recalling a delectable romance. “We had quite a peasant feast, actually,
ein echten Bauernschmaus
.” His seductive smile widened. “No surprise that these Yankee Dutch girls are so fat, the way they tuck in. A fellow would rather fear one as a lover.”

Longstreet reached down to scratch his leg again. There were nights when the unwitting minstrel show that Scheibert and Ross performed entertained him. This was not such a night. There was too much on his mind, too many things remained unknown.

Why hadn't they encountered Yankee cavalry? Surely Stuart hadn't drawn off all of them with his antics. Brandy Station had been a revelation. The Federals were learning. It took two years to make a cavalryman, according to military lore. Now the boys in blue had had their two years.

Longstreet could not believe they weren't out there, horsemen in the dark, closer than Lee believed.

Determined not to be relegated to a minor role, Fremantle edged closer. Since he wore only civilian clothes, the observers in their traveling-circus uniforms kept their distance. But he wasn't the sort of Englishman to quit the field.

“Lieutenant Goree claims you spent some years in Texas, General. I myself entered the Confederacy through Texas, you know. Rather a swashbuckling place … one finds the people quite forthright.” The Englishman glanced at Goree. “But charming, of course.” He turned back to Longstreet. “How did
you
find it, sir?”

Texas. Ft. Bliss. The post had been well named. He and Louise had never been as happy anywhere else. Later on, Albuquerque had not been bad, even if shadowed by the coming war, but El Paso and Ft. Bliss had given them wondrous years. The summer days scorched, but gorgeous nights redeemed them. And no post he knew had rivaled the place for comradeship, even between the officers and senior enlisted men. Few in number, the wives of all ranks had shared in the post's society, while the old Mexican families, with their public dignity and polished silver buckles, had opened their doors to everyone. He had not expected that, only a decade after a war had raised a foreign flag above them. There had been a storybook goodness to the place, a whispered magic, and it had softened him. He recalled one winter morning when he led out a patrol in the brilliant chill, with the sky overhead as clear as a maiden's conscience. He had raised up his eyes to the mountains ahead, thinking that it was a strange thing to be so happy.

“I liked Texas all right,” he told Fremantle.

They had been so in love, despite a loss, and the world had been sweetly, safely routine, interrupted only by an occasional march into the wilderness to show a band of Comanches or straying Apaches that the U.S. Government took an interest in their behavior.

Then secession had come, with its confusions. His choice of sides had never been in doubt, but nothing was sweet or safe or routine any longer. In the war's first winter, scarlet fever killed three of their children. Louise waited on the far side of a river of sorrow now, and he knew not how to bridge it or where he might ford it. On learning the children were ill, he had rushed to Richmond, only to sit at home with the curtains drawn, neither he nor his wife able to rise from their grief to attend the burial. So the little ones entered the winter-hard earth alone. He understood war and its savagery, but not the death, so senselessly, of his children.

In his bleakest hours, Longstreet saw God as a murderer.

*   *   *

Sergeant Blake watched the Bunyan twins straggle in. Night had preceded them, but the regiment's camp lay just beyond the crest of the mountain their march had climbed and the sky overhead held a last hush-a-bye glow. If you knew a man well enough, you could make him out at a distance in such light.

The Bunyans were strange boys, oxlike and quiet, who kept close to one another. Blake had tolerated it when James, the twin with longer hair, fell out and his brother, John, abandoned the march to stay by him. Another time, with another man, Blake might not have been so kindly. But there was something about the Bunyans that didn't bear interfering with.

It was odd, what knocked a man down. The 26th North Carolina had endured many a tougher march, and the regiment had been rested before this one. The heat was cruel, and the route wound uphill, but the distance was short compared to the efforts they had endured of late. And neither Bunyan had ever quit a march before. Yet, this time James had begun to fail early on, dropping at last by the roadside, to the jeers of passing comrades. Sometimes, a man was just weak and there was no reason.

The twins affected a manly jauntiness as they approached the embers of the cook-fire. They were good boys, ashamed of straggling.

“Lookee,” Cobb cawed, “it's the Bunyan girls come calling!”

“Shut up, Cobb,” Art Peachum said.

Despite the attempted bravado, James still walked with a weakness the dark wouldn't hide.

“Sit on down,” Blake told the twins. “There's ham and beans.”

“Likker, too,” Cobb said. “Maybe Sergeant Blake will join you for a snort after your eats?” He cackled, ever pleased at another's misery. “Oh, I done forgot. Sergeant Blake don't let liquor pass his lips. I wonder why that is?”

“You can just shut up,” Peachum told him a second time.

Blake turned to Jack Ireton, sensed close by. “Corporal Ireton? Call out a detail and gather up canteens. Start with the Bunyans' there. Fill them at the well up top.”

“If it ain't drunk dry,” Ireton said. It was an observation, not a protest. The army had emptied a number of wells down to their muddy bottoms, much to the dismay of the local farmers.

“You all right, James Bunyan?” Blake asked.

“He's all right now,” his brother answered for him. When the two boys came down from the hills and joined up, a wag had nicknamed them “Pilgrim” and “Progress,” but the labels had not stuck, except in memories. Blake, too, had been given a nickname. Besides the inevitable “Quaker.” For a brief time, he had been known behind his back as “Lost Lenore,” until the men agreed among themselves, without much talking, that it went beyond the bounds of fair amusement.

“I didn't ask you,” Blake said to the private. “I asked James.”

“It was just a dizzy spell, weren't nothing,” an unsteady voice reported across the thickening darkness. No one wanted light badly enough to restoke the cooking fire in the heat.

“Going to have to carry us smelling salts for these girls of ours,” Cobb announced.

This time, everyone ignored him.

The Bunyan twins were anything but girlish. Hulking—although not as tall or strong as Blake—they had defied their father to come down from Hawk's Hollow and put on gray coats. Old Charlie Bunyan and his elder boy, Reese, went off to join the Federals. Last time anyone back home had heard of them, they were riding with a bad lot in western Virginia. When newspaper folk wrote high laments about brother against brother, they didn't know how rough things got in the hills. Blake didn't doubt but that the Bunyans would kill their own kind, if the chance came. Kill, then mourn.

A jug of farmhouse whiskey made the rounds. No one passed it to Blake. They knew better. Cobb needled him briefly, but the other men let things be.

There was no fairness to any of it. Blake had become a sergeant not because he was too hard-raised to skedaddle at New Bern, but because he was the strongest man with the biggest fists in the company. And there was no sense to those endowments, since, after his grandparents sent him down from Virginia, most of the work he had done had been in Mr. Curran's store, while each of the men gathered by him had fed themselves and their kin by working fields on which a low-country planter would not have wasted one nigger. They had toiled, while he, at most, shifted sacks of flour. Yet, he could have beaten any man in the company in a fight. It never had come to a test, but they all sensed it, these lean men with muscles of harness leather.

The camp conversation shifted toward home, as men compared the mountain on which they sprawled to the highlands they knew, insisting the resemblance was uncanny. But that was a lie, if one they yearned to believe. In Pennsylvania, even the mountains promised a fertility that would have been the envy of any bottomland farmer in North Carolina.

For his part, Blake had no wish to be back home. Not anymore. The store, which hard work and Mr. Curran's age—and kindliness—had made half Blake's when he was twenty-three, meant nothing now. He had labored toward a dream of respectability. But, thanks to one wretched, accidental meeting, that dream was dead.

Masked by the dark, Blake allowed the hard expression he kept up to twist into bitterness. The truth was that his dream had died before that. The men over whom he had charge had joined because they believed in something, even if they were not certain what it was. No slaveholders, they had come down from the glens as their ancestors had, as if at a war horn's call. Men who sat so near him their smells had names—Tam McMinn, Hugh Gordon, and Pike Gray—had rallied to a cause they could not have explained had they been granted eternity to find words. And he, Thomas Fox Blake, had joined for a woman.

He had been a fool from the start, he saw that now. But Lenore Hutchinson had been favored not only with beauty, she was the daughter of a family of high position, by mountain standards. Calling upon her at her square-built home, he had known desire, but saw respectability. And she had preferred him over his closest rival. He was sure of that. But Lenore never spoke it out loud, for Rafe Granger wore a name still better than hers, even if rumor held that Rafe had already ruined his health as surely as his father had ruined the family fortune. And the Granger boy had time for courting, all the live-long day. Lenore had turned down each of them in turn, enjoying their pain while hinting that, in time, they might ask again. Then the war came. Rafe Granger rode off to join a cousin's cavalry troop in Virginia. Blake enlisted to match his rival's gesture.

Not six months into the war, Lenore had wed a banker down in Raleigh, a man who found his duty closer to home. A year thereafter, Mrs. Curran wrote Blake that Lieutenant Rafael Granger had fallen during a cavalry raid in the Valley. And Mrs. Lenore Bascombe had given birth.

And here he was, on the eastern side of a Pennsylvania mountain, waiting to take the lives of other men.

*   *   *

As the men went hunting sleep in the won't-quit heat, Colonel Burgwyn came by. What light remained in the heavens caught the gleam of boots shined by his nigger. When the colonel made the rounds, a fight was coming.

Blake both admired and resented Burgwyn. He admired the young man's flawlessness, his perfection in all things, and the grace with which he demonstrated his bravery. Although he was a North Carolinian, Burgwyn had graduated, young, from the Virginia Military Institute, where he had studied under Jackson and learned his soldiering. After General Pettigrew, Burgwyn was reckoned one of the smartest young men in the South, as clever of mind as he was princely in his carriage, and the regiment was proud of him. The only time any of the men had seen him shaken had been on the march north, when they made camp on the Blue Ridge on a site that was home to a congregation of rattlesnakes. A soldier had killed a snake over five feet long by the colonel's tent and it clearly troubled Burgwyn just to look at it. But the colonel had steeled himself to take the dead serpent in hand and pretend to admire it.

For all that, Blake could not help feeling that the twenty-one-year-old colonel had known privileges untoward in their extravagance. Blake knew jealousy cheapened a man and he fought it. He even had learned that, to the low-country gentry, the Burgwyn family was of little consequence, as well as suspect for its Northern ties. Yet, when it came down to it, Burgwyn was unmistakably an aristocrat, and Blake wasn't. A Quaker upbringing, Blake recognized, did not suffice to master the heart's spite.

After his customary pleasantries, repeated company by company, the boy-colonel grew serious. “You'll get the formal orders down through your officers, but you might as well hear it now: We're to be prepared for an early march. And we'll march light. You're to leave all knapsacks and blankets for the trains to gather up.” He paused, an actor performing. “There's a battle waiting down in those plains we saw from the mountaintop. We cannot know precisely where or exactly when that battle will come, but we all know it's coming.”

The men murmured in agreement. It was a manner of saluting, of acknowledging the colonel, despite the darkness. Blake was glad that Cobb kept his mouth shut.