Kill or Die (26 page)

In April 1862, on the eve of a battle that would pass into American legend, a barefoot Johnny Reb handed a sealed letter to another.

“You'll give it to her, Michael, give it into the hand of my Kate,” Joseph Kerrigan of Ireland's green and fair County Sligo said.

“And why would I, Joseph Kerrigan?” Michael Feeny said. “When you'll be able enough to give it to her yourself.”

Kerrigan, a handsome young man with eyes the color of a Donegal mist, shook his head.

“That I will not,” he said. “Did you not hear it yourself in the night, out there among the pines?”

“Hear what?” Feeny said, his puzzled face freckled all over like a sparrow's egg.

“The banshee, Michael. She screamed my name. Over and over again, coming from her skull mouth, my name . . . my name . . .”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph and Saints Peter and Paul, it cannot be so, Joseph. You heard the wind in the trees, only the wind.”

“You'll give my Katherine the letter,” Kerrigan said. “She's a strong woman, and after she reads it she'll know what to do. And tell her this also, that her husband fell fighting for a noble cause and brought no disgrace to his name.”

“And it's an ancient and honorable name you bear, Joseph Kerrigan, to be sure,” Feeny said. “You say you heard the banshee, and I will not call you a liar, but she screams for someone else, not you. Many men will die this day and the next.”

“And I will number among them,” Kerrigan said.

He shoved the folded letter into Feeny's hands.

“As you see it is sealed, Michael. Captain O'Neil used his own candle and impressed the molten wax with the signet off his finger. And why not, since I have no ring of my own and the captain's bears the crest of Irish kings?”

The two young soldiers marched together, the swaying, shambling, distance-eating tramp of the Confederate infantry.

Their regiment, the 52nd Tennessee, was part of Braxton Bragg's Second Corps of the Army of the Mississippi, and there wasn't a man who shouldered a rifle that day who didn't believe that he could take on the entire Yankee army by himself and send them running all the way across the Potomac.

“I'm charging you with a great duty, Michael,” Kerrigan said. “That letter you bear so carelessly tells Katherine what she and our children must do to go on without me, and, if need be, where she can find help to do it.”

Michael Feeny thrust the letter back toward Kerrigan.

“No need for it,” he said. “Give it to her from your own hand when all this is done.”

“When all this is done, I will be done as well,” Kerrigan said. “Think you, Michael, that the banshee cries for no reason?”

“A man knows not the hour of his death, Joseph. If he could, what man would walk blindly into the path of a galloping carriage or cross a railroad track at the wrong moment?”

Feeny doffed his kepi and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand.

“The banshee is a demon, but God is with us, Joseph. Ah man, you will bear whatever message you have to your Katherine upon your own lips.”

“It will not be, Michael. I have no desire to die on the field of honor, but I am confident that is my fate. But even so, I hope so very powerfully that I am wrong and you are right. Death is no boon companion whose company I seek.”

Feeny grinned, and placed the kepi at a jaunty angle back on his head.

“Remember this one?” he said.

He tilted back his head and sang.

A big, grizzled soldier with corporal's stripes tapped Feeny on the shoulder and grinned.

“And didn't we English stick his honor's head on a pike at Lisburn castle?”

“Aye you did, and be damned to ye,” Feeny said. “You should be marching for the Tyrant, Englishman, and not for the South.”

The big man laughed and said no more.

“Well, that's taken the song from my lips,” Feeny said. “Let us then keep hope before us instead. Make no prediction of your own doom, Joseph. Walk bold and tall into whatever soldiers' hell is ahead for us, and come out alive on the other end. Perhaps both of us will come out together.”

“Aye, perhaps. But I cannot presume upon providence when my conviction is so strong. So I ask you to bear this letter on your body through the fight ahead. I have another copy of the same inside my own jacket, in case you should be taken away in battle along with me. Sometimes those letters are found and sent on to the families after the dead are carried from the field.”

“All this woeful talk falls far shy of prudence, Joseph Kerrigan. My sainted old grandmother told me that the things we speak go to God's ear, and He sometimes causes them to come to pass. So talk of life, not death.”

“Very well. If God is kind to both of us, we will rejoice. But if I should die and you live, then I ask you to go, as first opportunity allows, to Nashville and present it to my beloved and tell her my spirit will watch over her all her days. I don't trust the army to get the letter to her. You, I do trust.”

Feeny was ready to argue further with Kerrigan. He did not, though, instead merely laying his hand briefly on the other's shoulder. “I give you my promise, good Joe. I expect never to be called on to fulfill it, but if fate brings ill to you and I survive, I pledge to you that your wife will receive from my own hand what you've given me. I vow it on the grave of my sainted mother.”

Kerrigan turned to his companion, shifting his rifle sling as he did so.

“Your mother is alive and well, Mike.”

“And so she is, hale and hearty and as fond of the gin as ever. But her grave, or the place it will be, exists somewhere, empty for now, and it is that grave on which I vowed.”

“You are an odd old crow, Mike. An odd crow, or the devil take me.”

“I am odd, and know it. But also trustworthy. You can count on me to carry that letter to Nashville if it falls to me to do it.”

“I know it will not be easy, my friend. The federals took Nashville in February. Travel in these times is no Sunday stroll.”

“Aye. Even so, Joe. Even so.”

Joseph Kerrigan nodded and blinked fast, hard-fought emotion struggling inside him. He managed to choke it back and respond with a simple: “Thank you, Mike.”

“Think nothing of it. There will be nothing for me to do, because we will live through this fight, you and I. Let me hear you say it, Joseph.”

“We will . . . will live through this fight. Both of us.”

“Aye indeed, and come out the other end heroes, with a gold medal on our chests.”

“That's how it will be, Michael, lay to that.” But there was no conviction in Kerrigan's voice.

All Joseph Kerrigan would experience of the famed Battle of Shiloh, which commenced early the next morning, was a series of events that entered his consciousness in a troubling jumble, running together, bleeding one into the other in a welter of confusion it would require much time to untangle.

No such time would be given him.

In the brief period he had left to know anything at all, Joe Kerrigan would be immediately conscious of only a few things, beginning with the feeling of his own heart pounding as if trying to exit his chest when the call came from the orderly sergeant to check armaments and prepare to advance.

Kerrigan would be aware, in a distant, numbed way, of standing and advancing into a rising crackle and blast of rifle fire and artillery beyond the cannon-blasted forest ahead of him. The foe had awakened and was beginning to resist the advancing Bonnie Blue Flag.

Mike Feeny was still at Kerrigan's side, and said, “Joe, I'm going to make another vow to you. One day you and I will return to this very bit of woods and enjoy a picnic here with our wives and children. These are pretty woods, except for what is happening here. It would be an ideal place for children to play, don't you think?”

“It would, Mike, of a truth. But I will make no plans until I know if what the banshee fated for me is truth or deception.”

“Live, my friend. Live. Let death take others, but let us live.”

They advanced, drawing closer to gunfire unseen but loudly heard ahead of them.

Even now Kerrigan could see nothing he could make sense of, though the sound of the fight heightened and the screams of dying men grew louder.

Then he heard a puzzling rustling and rattling in the trees, a repeated tick-tick-tick sound, followed by a shower of leaves and small twigs.

The ticking, like the sound of rain dripping from eaves after a summer thunderstorm, came from soft lead Minié balls striking trees, the clattering and crackling and downfall of greenery from bullets clipping branches and twigs, denuding trees already struggling to fight off the barrenness of the winter past and clothe themselves for spring.

A man walking to Kerrigan's left grunted and fell, blood streaming down the front of his leg, pouring from a fresh wound. A big grizzled Englishman, he collapsed, groaning, and made only one effort to rise. A second Minié ball caught him in the chest and sent him flat to the ground, a red rose blossoming in the middle of his butternut shirt.

“Holy Mother Mary bless us and save us!” Feeny said, horrified, as he watched the corporal fall.

Kerrigan glanced at Feeny as two other men near them dropped, one wounded in the shoulder, the other shot through the chest and dead.

“This is hot work, Michael,” he said. “But such a fire cannot last for long.”

But the hail of gunfire sheeting toward the advancing Confederate line increased.

The thumping of lead hitting trees and men was now so steady as to drown out the sound of twigs and branches being clipped, though they drifted to the ground in an unceasing shower.

A command from somewhere just behind the line then ordered the soldiers to take shelter from the fire.

“They're killing us, boys!” the officer yelled. “Down on your bellies.”

Kerrigan recognized the fine Irish voice of Captain O'Neil, but it was hoarse and broken by shouting, inhuman stress, and fear.

He, Feeny, and several others around them took cover behind the white, skeletal trunk of a fallen oak and there breathed the gasps of terrified men.

But at least they could still breathe, and for that Kerrigan voiced a silent prayer of thanks.

He turned on his back and reloaded his rifle; surprised the hand working powder, ball and ramrod was steady.

“This ain't really safe,” said a deeply southern voice on the far side of Feeny. “This here log humps up on the bottom side so there's a space between it and the ground, see? Get down low enough and you can look right under. A bullet hits that gap and it's going to sail right through and—”

The man said no more.

His words about the protective deficiency of the warped log had been prophetic. He took a bullet through the face, its destructive course angling down from his forehead through sinuses and throat, lodging finally somewhere in his chest.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Feeny wailed. “Will you look at poor Anderson all shot through and through?”

He fingered a black rosary, blessed by a cardinal, and sounded like a man about to burst into tears.

“You were right, Joe . . . we will die here,” he said.

Kerrigan's earlier morbid convictions about death had been all but forgotten after the first shots were fired.

He was scared, no question, but above and beyond that he was angry, filled with a biting fury at the very idea that men he did not know, and against whom he had done no violence, were trying to kill him.

A vision of his beautiful wife, Kate, rose in his mind and he vowed to her image that, dire premonitions be damned, he would fight to live, and return to her side.

Feeny, battling terror, proved that he had sand. And besides, as he was well aware, did not his name mean “brave soldier” in the ancient Gaelic?

He moved upward a little, leveled his rifle across the top of the log, and took aim in the general direction of the federals.

The action inspired Kerrigan to do the same, though neither of them had a precise target sighted.

Kerrigan defied fate and lifted his head above the protective height the log provided, readying to fire.

Then, in a single instant of time . . . there was nothing.

In darkness and without pain, Kerrigan collapsed partially on top of Feeny, the Minié ball that had shattered his skull lodged deep inside his brain.