Crescent City (46 page)

Nervous laughter. The body is afraid to go ahead, but the spirit, fearing cowardice, is afraid that the body might really turn about and flee, to the spirit’s everlasting shame.

Polaris stamped, curving her head as far back as she could, as if to communicate with Gabriel. She had the haughty, delicate nose of an aristocrat, but her intelligent eyes were soft and mild. She knows me well, thought Gabriel. We have been together a long time.

Someone was talking loudly. “Hell, this is no place for horses! How we gonna fight in here? Can’t move faster than one mile an hour, if that much.”

Nevertheless, they moved forward. They slid down the muddy banks of hidden brooks, climbed back up, and kept on going, going, until at last they heard the first spatter and crack of gunfire up ahead.

“Leave the horses. Get down. It’s impossible.”

Soldier’s heart again. Gabriel dismounted from Polaris and stroked her muzzle. Would he ever find her again?

A corps of sharpshooters to the right went ducking under bramble bushes. Field artillery, with a great noise of dragging, crushed the underbrush.

Oh, my God! A whole blue division, so close, using grape and canister, came to life, erupting out of the woods and the murk. And a storm of lead exploded. My God! Whole sheets of it, like rain slanting in the wind.

“Forward, forward!” Who is that screaming, whose throat is that, torn raw with the screaming rebel yell as the men plunge, plunge, so close now to the men in blue and the bright silver of bayonets? My voice?

He fired. Covered by the trunk of an ancient oak, blindly he keeps firing at an enemy that is hidden in a mass of pungent, stinging smoke. The noise is shattering, a hammer on the eardrums and in the head. Bugles blare, summoning courage, giving signals that no one understands or can heed because no one can see or know where he is himself or where the enemy is.

“Fire! Fire! Load and reload.” Bullets snap through the leafage, sending a shower of papery scraps to the ground. Someone screams not three feet away; it is a terrible high animal scream. There is no time to look. Still firing, Gabriel kneels, bent low, for nothing that stands upright in this hell can live.

Oh, God, it is the worst hell in a thousand days of hellish war that he has yet lived through!

A man collides with another, crawling on hands and knees, going toward the rear, the wrong way.

“Where you going? Where the devil do you think you’re going?”

“I’m hurt, sir. Back to the rear, I’m hurt.”

“Hurt where? Show blood or turn around, go back, God damn you, go back!”

“They’re shooting at our own side, for Christ’s sake!”

“Can’t help it. They can’t see. Get down! Down!”

And still, hour after hour, the thundering, the whistle before the crash, the roar and smash go on .… Will the night never fall?

It falls. The blackest night that Gabriel has ever seen smothers the woods. Shots dwindle, and in the darkness both sides, exhausted, fall to the ground wherever they happen to be.

All is still. They have taken the wounded to the rear. The ground is littered with the dead or silent. Silent and free, thinks Gabriel. They don’t have to dread the return of the morning.

Once a whippoorwill calls. Its pure, liquid voice is heard for a few seconds, then stops. Even the birds cower, he thinks, they in their nests—those that have not been blasted away—and we on the ground.

He takes a deep breath. He is too tired to investigate anything; anyway, it is too dark; it is his function to stay here with his men or with what is left of them, and wait. He sleeps with his head between his knees.

Then, the second day, a day of rising wind. While bullets rain and rattle, the wind flows and little fires, flaring out of sparks in the underbrush, are carried from twig to twig, from skeletal stripped branch to the next leaf-stripped branch. Flames, like living creatures,
slither over the ground. Probing and searching, they mount the tree trunks, murmuring as they creep. In seconds a scrub pine turns into a torch, one vertical billow of flame. Far behind the forward lines the log breastworks, so laboriously built, catch fire, too. Cinders whirl in this wind; the whole forest, all pitch and resin, roars with fire. The very air burns a man’s lungs.

Now the flames come like racing surf, wave after surging wave. The helpless wounded scream in horror as the waves come near and nearer; some scream in anguish as the waves roll over them; they scream and die, while others shoot themselves in time, if they are strong enough to do so. Men in blue and men in gray alike rush out to save their own, some even saving the enemy’s men.

Gabriel drags a man to safety, thinking, If Lorenzo were here, he could help, and for the first time, he misses him; but Lorenzo went months ago to the other side and is in New York or Washington by now. Incredibly, in all this chaos, Gabriel has a flash of amusement: Rosa had been so sure of his loyalty!
Why, why shouldn’t he be faithful, he adores you?

After some yards he lays the man down near a shallow ravine; with luck the fire just may not jump that ravine. He is too exhausted at any rate to go another step. There is a terrible pain in his foot.

He looks for a pile of leaves to he on and stumbles again, this time over a body. The uniform is blue. He searches the face: young, younger than I, I am a million years old.

The eyes open, staring back at Gabriel, eyes too clouded even to recognize the enemy.

“I’m awfully cold. My sister Margaret, no, not Margaret, the other one, she says, you see, if I had a blanket, I was sick all over this one.”

Gabriel leans closer, although even this slight motion
stabs his foot. The boy babbles, makes a strangling noise, heaves a slimy vomit out of his guts, and having done so, falls back into silence.

Half a night later Gabriel knows that the boy is dead. The stars are thick in a sliver of sky between the treetops, and in their bluish light he can see the dead face. It is extraordinarily dignified, he thinks. He lies on his elbow looking at it, wishing he had a blanket or some decent cover for it. Then it occurs to him that something ought to be said to or about this dignified face, which seems to be expecting that recognition be given. So he says the Kaddish. It is a prayer in praise of God, a Jewish prayer, but it is the only one he knows, and surely suitable.

The pain is a cutting knife in his foot. He must have been shot. How queer that he cannot recall when! His head feels foggy. He lies without moving. From every direction the wounded are calling: Water! Help me! Mother! Christ! But no one comes. It is too dark, too far away.

Dawn comes. A fly has settled on the dead boy’s cheek, and Gabriel shoos it away. The eyes are open and he reaches over to close them. It is a struggle to reach; the pain is growing worse. He wants to find a pocket with an address, and he thinks of the letter he will write to the parents about how their son died, but suddenly his leg gives way and he falls back on the ground.

Now he tries to get his boot off, but he lacks the strength to do it. He wonders whether he will lose his foot or his leg. It feels wet under the boot.

It is so quiet. The battle must have moved elsewhere. He wonders who is winning, or has won, but he doesn’t really care. It doesn’t concern him. High above the little space between the leaves, where the stars were just a while ago, the sky has turned to the most
intense and marvelous blue. So it must be full morning.

She will not want a cripple, he thinks. Does not want me anyway. Wants that—other. He has—what? A gallantry that I have not, have never had?

Back and forth, ebb and flow; that’s my life. Loving without wanting to. Fighting without wanting to. Yet I fight. Yet I love.

History is battles. How many fought, how many wounded, how many died. Someday they will write about this. Numbers and words don’t matter, though. They will write, but it will mean nothing. If I live through this war and they ask me what it was like, I won’t be able to tell them.

And now he hears that a low whispering has begun among the vastness of the trees. Swirling and spreading, it sounds like the moan of the sea. After a while he understands that this is the moaning of the wounded.

He lies quite still. He is spent, even the pain in his foot is spent, he is slipping away and out.

When he opens his eyes, he sees that the scrap of blue over his head is now iron gray. It must be evening again. Somebody is doing something to his foot; his boot is off.

“He may lose the foot,” someone says.

“Maybe not.”

“Be careful with that candle. Drop one of them and every man on the ground here goes up in flames.”

These men wear blue! The Federal uniform, he thinks indifferently. He must be a prisoner.

He is picked up, carried out to a road, and put in a wagon. There must be hundreds of them stretching all the way down the road. He recognizes ammunition wagons, mustered into ambulance service. They have no springs. Now, as they begin to rumble down the
corduroy road, each jolt sends a shaft of blood-red pain down his spine. He wants to ask where they are going, but it is too much effort, and besides, they will probably not answer. But he can tell by the fading light that they are moving eastward, toward Fredericksburg, he supposes.

“Lucky we got a place,” a voice says. “There must be seven thousand men in this load alone. The rest of them will he there two days till they get more wagons.”

How many hours to Fredericksburg?

A man dies and the wagon halts for the removal of the body. At the side of the road lies a huge black bloated crescent, curved like a beached whale. A whale here in this place! He’s seen one only once before, one summer long ago at Pass Christian. He remembers it well, that summer. All that blue and silver water, all the way to Cat Island! He thinks of crabbing, fishing, and the cool porch in the evening behind the trumpet vine, and music coming from somewhere down the beach.

He looks out over the side of the wagon at the whale. But it is not a whale; it has four stiffened legs, which project into the road, almost touching the wagon wheels. It is a horse. Enormous, iridescent flies cluster on its back, buzzing at its ears. And suddenly the legs flail; with a wild lunge the animal flips over to its other side, making a terrible sound of despair in the brutal heat.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Gabriel cries, “kill it! Shoot it!”

“Shoot who?” The Yankee sergeant, cradling his gun by the side of the wagon, hears him and laughs. He has big, rotten teeth. “Not allowed to shoot prisoners, you know that.”

Gabriel’s tongue is thick. He points.

The sergeant looks. “Oh, the horse, you mean?”

Gabriel nods. “Your rifle,” he manages to say.

“You know how many men died these last few days? And you’re worried about a horse?”

But the horse, Gabriel thinks, more clearly now, as they move on, the horse doesn’t even know why—the horse must ponder why. Polaris, surely she wonders where I am. Polaris needs somebody to take care of her so that she will not die in a ditch like this one.

In Fredericksburg they put him down in some sort of public building, a warehouse or mill. There are holes in the roof and puddles where the rain comes in. There’s food, some hardtack and water, but never enough water. How long he lies there, he doesn’t know.

“You won’t need to lose this foot,” someone says at last, a tired man with pouches under the eyes. As on our side, they don’t have enough doctors. Wouldn’t it be strange if David were to walk in here now? Wouldn’t it be sunlight in the dark?

“No, you won’t lose it. I’ve cleaned it out. Keep it clean, if you can.”

More days, and then back onto the wagons, going north. Of course, where else but north? And they come to a stop near a river. There is a dock at which a steamer waits for the long line of wagons. Like a floating cavern, it takes him away from shells, smoke, bloody faces, and dawn attacks, away into a buried silence, a peace that is not peace. Yes, he feels relief as they move down the river, but more than that, a weighty guilt at this removal to the territory of the enemy, at being relieved of the struggle while others must go on fighting as long as they—

“You fainted,” someone says, “but you’re all right now.”

He is lying down on solid ground. Something soft
whisks over his nose, a little clump of pine needles. He lets the sweet forest smell He on his lips. They have put him under a tree.

“Where are we?” he asks.

The man steps back, and Gabriel sees him at full length; fat chest, bearded face, and medical insignia. For a moment, because of the touch of a German accent, he has thought of David. Why not? Stranger things have happened. But this is not David’s acquiline face. This man is ruddy-round, and his beard is grizzled. Northern armies have so many Germans. Irish, too. Funny. But southern ones have Cajuns and Scotch-Irish in North Carolina. Funny, all of it. He drowses again.

His feet are in the sun, now, but his head and shoulders are still in the shade. Lucky. The things you’re grateful for! A piece of shade. It is so bright out that even the grass looks white. There are rows and rows of stretchers in the white sun. The rows run as far as the flagpole. On the flagpole the Stars and Stripes flatten out when the wind pulls, and fall back again, drooping down the pole.

Someone comes to look at his foot, which has begun to bleed again. He bites his lip. Isn’t going to make a sound, ño, God damn it, not here.

“There, that’s better. Can you get up and limp?” This is a different voice, not the German’s.

He steadies himself. “How far?”

“Not far. Just a couple of steps to the train.” The man is making an attempt at kindness. “Only as far as the train.”

“I thought—his is Washington?”

“Oh, yes, but you’re not staying here. Did you think you were staying here?” This is spoken with flat amusement, tired amusement. “You’re off to Elmira to be locked up, you and this whole bunch.”

The train lies glistening on its bed of cinders like a snake on a sunlit rock. The engine is the snake’s head. Impatient, hissing noises come from its throat.

All along the path to the train stands a double line of soldiers with rifles and bayonets. Hell, do they think we’re going to run away? Even the ones among us who haven’t a scratch can’t run away; where the hell could we go? Silently, shuffling, the wounded and the whole climb up onto the train.