Ashes (6 page)

"Good night."

Ellen paused at the edge of the highway and
waited for the next car. She could step out before the driver even
saw her. Margaret had promised it wouldn't hurt. But maybe dead
people always said that.

A car came over the hill, its engine roaring
like a great beast, the headlights prowling for prey. Ellen ducked
into the ditch and waited. Five seconds away, maybe. One jump, a
big bump, and then she could be with Margaret.

Her lungs grew hard and cold, she couldn’t
breathe, and the car was maybe three seconds away. She told herself
it was only another game, just hopscotch. She tensed. Two
seconds.

Margaret whispered in her ear. “I lied. It
really does hurt.”

One second, and the car whizzed past, its
exhaust lingering like a sigh.

“
See you tomorrow?” Margaret
said, sitting on the stone fence, pale under the scant
moon.

“
I guess so.”

“
You get this way,” Margaret
said. “When you’re dead, you want to play games all the
time.”

“
I guess I’ll find out
someday.”

Ellen crossed the highway and tried to drift
through the trees the way Margaret could. But it was no use. She
was too solid, too real, she belonged too much to the world with
its hard wood and hard people and hard rules. If only she were
someone's invisible playmate.

But she wasn't. She forgot games, laughter,
the red sweater that Margaret had been buried in. Her thoughts were
of nothing but Mom and home.

Ellen moved onward through the night, only
half-dead, not nearly dead enough.

###

THE ENDLESS BIVOUAC

The day that James Wilkie killed his first
man dawned hell-hot and humid, and didn't get any better as the
hours dragged on.

He'd just gotten over a touch of the bilous
fever, and sweat clung to his collar and soaked through the brim of
his cap. Wilkie had seen what happened to men who took the fever,
and a few days in the sentry box was better than some extra bed
rest. In the makeshift field hospital, bed rest often turned out to
be permanent.

Wilkie was a private in the Third Regiment
Georgia Volunteers. Back home, all his friends had talked about was
glory, honor, and the freedom to keep working the coloreds. Wilkie
was from a family too poor to have slaves. But he'd joined up just
the same, even though he was only fifteen. By the fourth year of
the war, recruiters were enlisting men and boys alike with no
questions asked.

Wilkie wasn't sure how he would react to
battle. He'd heard tales of the blue-bellies who would cut you down
and then stir in your guts while looking you dead in the eyes. They
were devils, rapists, the worst kind of trash. So he had been
relieved when he was assigned as a guard at the prison camp near
Andersonville. Except he didn't see how this duty could be worse
than that of the front lines.

Sometimes he felt that both sides were
prisoners here. Rations were often short and the Confederate camp
up the hill wasn't a whole lot better than the pieces of torn
blankets and old coats that the prisoners rigged up for shebangs.
Dysentery didn't respect stockade walls or uniform color. The heat
stifled everybody the same whether they were twenty feet up in a
lookout or huddled by the swamp relieving themselves.

At least Wilkie could leave the endlessly
sick and dying at the end of his watch. The Yankees were trapped
inside with it, the groans of the starving, the septic stench of
gangrenous flesh, the thick odor of human waste, the constant
stirring of bottle-flies, the shouts and fights, the songs that the
prisoners sang in the evenings that always seemed to find a minor
key. They didn't look so high-and-mighty down there, unwashed and
scruffy, thin as locust posts. Not like devils at all, though the
prison was closer to hell than any place Wilkie had ever heard
described in a sermon.

But all Wilkie could do was his duty. Ten
hours in the box, trying to breathe, fanning his cap to keep the
fever down. He kept the musket in the shade so he could
occasionally press the cool metal barrel to his forehead. It wasn't
even his musket; the guards had to trade off at the end of the day
since supplies were short.

He was drowsing, so close to full sleep that
he could see the dream image of the little garden back home, Susan
sitting in the big oak tree, him with flowers in his hand. He was
just about to say something kind to her, to lure her down from the
tree and into his arms, when he heard the shouts. At first he
thought it was part of his dream, just some raiders hooting drunk
in town, but the shouts grew louder, a strident chorus. Wilkie's
eyes snapped open and he looked down on the compound.

The prisoner was running straight for him.
Even from thirty yards away, Wilkie could see the wide, haunted
eyes, the mouth torn open in a silent scream. Other prisoners were
shouting at him, telling the crazed Yankee to stop. One man gave
chase, but the prisoner was driven by some strange energy that
belied his knobby bones and stringy muscles.

The prisoner was making for the dead
line.

Captain Wirtz’s orders were clear: shoot any
sorry Yankee dog that crossed the line. The single-rail fence ran
about fifteen feet from the stockade walls. Not that any of the
prisoners could scale the timbers before one of the boys put him
down. But Wirtz said rules were rules and a civilized camp was in
the best interest of both sides.

Wilkie lifted his musket and stood on legs
still trembling from sleep. "Hold it there, Yankee," he said, but
his throat was so dry that the words barely reached his own ears.
Still the prisoner ran, his ragged tunic flapping.

"Stop or I'll shoot," Wilkie shouted, louder
this time. The prisoner reached the dead line, vaulted the fence,
and made for the wall. The man who had given chase stopped and
backed away from the dead line. Wilkie felt a hundred eyes on him,
and the shouts died away. Only then did Wilkie realize that half
the Yankees had been urging the prisoner on, the other half yelling
at him to stop.

As Wilkie raised the musket and sighted along
the barrel, he took a deep gulp of August air. He closed his eyes
and opened them again. If he paused long enough, maybe one of the
other sentries would pull the trigger first. But duty was duty, and
the prisoner was halfway to the wall.

It was no worse than shooting a rabbit or
wild turkey, at least as far as aiming went. As the powder
exploded, Wilkie thought he heard some other shots. The stricken
man fell to one knee, jerking like a toppled stack of kindling,
then reached a hand toward the wall. An additional shot rang out
and the man's skull shattered.

Wilkie was sweating from more than just the
fever. Prisoners crowded near the dead line like a harvest of gray
scarecrows. One of the guards let out a whoop of triumph. A
lieutenant ran from the officer's quarters and hurried up the
ladder to Wilkie's sentry box.

"What happened here, private?" The officer
was a bearded man of about forty. He stood with his arms folded,
tapping one of his knee-high leather boots. Union boots, taken from
the last round of new prisoners.

Wilkie could barely speak. "He crossed the
dead line, sir."

Wilkie's eyes crawled from the officer's face
to the corpse on the ground below. Flies had already settled on the
wounds, their wings bright blue in the sun. Eggs would soon be
laid, and maggots would be born in the man's rotting meat. Some of
the larvae would crawl through the shallow grave dirt and make
their way back here to continue the endless cycle.

"Good man," said the lieutenant, though his
expression was of sorrowful weariness. "The war's over for one poor
fool, at least."

Some of the prisoners below were mumbling.
The lieutenant leaned over the sentry box. "Any man crossing the
dead line will be shot," he said in a commanding voice.

The rumbles of discontent continued, but no
Yankees approached the fence. Wilkie stared at the corpse until his
vision blurred. He felt the officer's hand on his shoulder.

"Reload, private, then come with me." The
lieutenant ignored Wilkie's tears.

Wilkie knelt in the sentry box and rubbed at
his eyes. He opened them and let the heat dry them. Even staring at
the clouds, he could still see the corpse, as if the vision had
been burned into his retinas. Wilkie tried to tell himself that it
wasn't his shot that killed the prisoner, but he knew he had aimed
true for the chest. Then he grew angry at himself and rapped the
gun with his knuckles, letting the pain distract him from such
thoughts.

He climbed down the ladder, the musket
cradled across one forearm. Guards opened the front gate, and a
second private joined Wilkie and the lieutenant. They walked the
no-man's-land between the wall and the dead line, eyes straight
ahead, not acknowledging the watching Union soldiers.

"If I had a gun," said some brave anonymous
soul.

"You'll get yours, Reb," said another. The
lilting opening notes of "Amazing Grace" issued from the lips of a
third.

When the detail reached the corpse, Wilkie
and the other private rolled it over, so that the dead man was
staring sightlessly at the sky. The lieutenant stood some distance
away, talking to a Union officer.

"He just up and ran," Wilkie said to the
private. "I had to shoot him."

"Hell, you're lucky you found a good reason.
I seen 'em killed for less." The private spat a stream of tobacco
juice to the ground. "Chamberlain, over in Second, tossed some
bread scraps over the wall just down the foot of the dead line,
then sat waiting for some Yankee to reach for it."

The private folded the dead man's arms over
his chest and grabbed the shoulders of the bloodstained tunic.
Wilkie balanced his musket over his arm again and grabbed the man's
ankles. Pale, wrinkled toes poked from the boots.

"Boots ain't worth stealing," said the
private. "Lately the dead have been just about worthless."

Wilkie said nothing, surprised by the dead
man's lightness as they lifted him. He must be hollow, Wilkie
thought.

"Except I hear the prisoners are selling
rights on the corpses,” said the other soldier. "First out on
burial detail get the best trading, you know."

Wilkie nodded, grunted, hoping to hurry the
private along. The lieutenant finished with the Union officer and
joined them.

"Tibbets," said the lieutenant.
"Eighty-Second New York."

Tibbets. Wilkie tried the name on his tongue,
pushed it against his teeth. Tibbets, a man with family somewhere,
a man who may have enlisted under the same sense of duty that had
brought Wilkie to their shared destination. A man. A name.

A corpse.

Flies buzzed about them. They reached the
front gate and laid the corpse out in the line of the twenty other
fresh dead just inside the wall. Tibbets would rest there until the
morning, feeding flies in the company of his cold comrades. Wilkie
and the other Confederates left the compound as the Union soldiers
dispersed. A single death was not the subject of much rumination,
not when thousands had already made their final exit through those
gates.

Wilkie had grave detail the next morning. He
had slept fitfully, his dreams haunted by Tibbets's rigid face. He
waited by the wagon while Union soldiers tossed the corpses as
casually as if stacking cordwood. Another fifty had died during the
night, and the air was ripe with disease. When the first wagon was
full, it began its trip to the dead-house, where the corpses were
counted.

The Union volunteers marched in the wagon's
wake, Wilkie bringing up the rear. When they reached the
dead-house, the corpses were unloaded and brought inside for
identification. This gave the prisoners a little free time. Some
sat against trees, smoking, but a few slipped into the bushes
surrounding the dead-house. They were the hucksters, ones who
smuggled goods inside and profited from the hardship and
deprivation of their fellow soldiers.

Guards were scattered around the grounds, and
escape was rare. The Confederates turned a half-blind eye to the
trading. An unwritten rule was that a huckster had to share a
portion of his trade goods, slipping some eggs, tobacco, or the
occasional greenback to the captors. It was a system that worked
well, the kind of thing befitting a civilized camp. Except for
those on the inside who had no money or barter.

Wilkie went into the shade of the woods and
rested his musket against an oak. To the left of him was the mass
cemetery, a long shallow ditch waiting for the day's dead. The thin
layer of loose clay over the bodies did little to quell the stench
of decay. Five thousand were already buried here, according to the
corpse counters.

Wilkie lit his corncob pipe. The tobacco was
stale, but at least it burned the smell of death from his
nostrils.

He heard a rustle in a nearby laurel thicket.
"Is that you, Yankee?" he said, to warn the prisoner not to attempt
escape.

The bushes shimmied and the waxen leaves
parted. A man in a shabby Union uniform stepped out. Wilkie first
saw the toes protruding from the boots, then his gaze traveled
slowly past the bloodied rips in the tunic to the man's face. The
top of his skull was peeled away, but Wilkie knew that face, those
eyes.

Tibbets.

Wilkie grabbed for his musket, accidentally
knocking it to the ground. As he fell to his knees and scrabbled
for it among the leaves, the boots approached, crackling in the
dead loam and forest detritus. Wilkie gripped the musket and
brought it to bear. What good was a musket ball against a dead
man?

Tibbets stopped several feet away. His hands
were spread wide, palms up. The dark eyes were solemn, the lips
pressed tight. He was waiting.