May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel (30 page)

Ol’ Bobby sends his boys at the
Grand Army
every day for six days straight, and though the Boys in Blue hold the field at the end of each of those days, Little Mac issues the order for what he calls a “tactical repositioning,” but all his soldiers know full well is a retreat. Every day they fight and hold the field. Every night they back up, farther away from Richmond and closer to the Union Navy at Harrison’s Landing. By the seventh day they’re farther from Richmond than they’ve been in a month and there’s not a man in the Irish Brigade that isn’t fed up with all this skee-daddlin’ they’ve been doing, especially since the Rebs haven’t whipped them once this entire campaign.

The fighting starts again on the seventh day at a place called Malvern Hill, and it’s a whole morning of sitting on their arses waiting for the call to join the fight. The Irish Brigade’s boiling mad when they finally get ordered up. They’re supposed to simply hold the line protecting the flank of the entire Corps, but there’s no holding back the fury that’s built up by now. The Sixty-Ninth Regiment presses forward, firing a volley, reloading on the move, and firing again. Ten then twelve then fifteen volleys later, and they’ve pushed the Rebs back on their heels. But their muskets are overheating, burning the flesh of their palms and misfiring, so the Eighty-Eighth Regiment switches places with the Sixty-Ninth and takes the lead for a time. They press forward the same way ’til their muskets are hot as Dante’s seventh circle, and now it’s the Sixty-Ninth’s turn again. Back and forth, back and forth it goes, once, twice, and a third time, and by the time the Sixty-Ninth is ready to take the lead for a fourth go-round, the Rebs’ve already given up all the ground they’d gained that whole afternoon, every inch of it lost back to the Irish Brigade.

Some of the boys in the Sixty-Ninth start shouting that if Little Mac’ll just grow a pair, the Sixty-Ninth will lead the march all the way to Richmond. They’re going in with almost no ammunition at all, but with bayonets flourishing, their lines slip past the Eighty-Eighth’s and back into the fray, with the fighting closer than it’s been all day. They’re maybe ten yards from the wreck that was the Reb lines when Ethan takes aim and fires his last round. He sees the man he’s aiming at as the bullet hits him right in the chest and his legs fold underneath him and crumble like a tent that’s had its lines cut, bouncing onto his knees first, then falling backwards with his legs tucked beneath him. Ethan moves up closer and sees the blood gathering beside the man, forming a small pool, and him lying there, legs folded up like Aislinn in her too-small coffin, and with a look on his face that’s saying,
Now why’d you go and do that?

But then Harry’s out of ammunition just a few feet away, and when a Reb that’s as big as he is knocks the musket from Harry’s hands, Ethan thinks his friend’s a goner ’til Harry hauls off and punches the fella smack in the nose, and they’re down on the ground rolling around and cussing up a storm at each other. Ethan moves over to help Harry
and sees another Reb running up to do the same for his friend, but Ethan gets there first, knocking the big man in the head with the butt of his musket and allowing Harry to get the upper hand. The other Reb’s coming at Ethan then and he steps to one side, making the Reb miss partly but still managing to drive his bayonet into Ethan’s shoulder. And he feels a fire of pain rush through his whole body. Still, he’s got his wits enough about him to swing his own musket forward and drive the bayonet into the Reb’s chest, seeing him start to go down the way the fella he’d shot just before did. There’s no hesitation this time as Ethan drives his bayonet into him again, and he drops face-first to the ground, lifeless.

The bugle call finally can be heard over the noise of battle, and it’s time for the Sixty-Ninth to fall back and let the Eighty-Eighth hold the line. First thing Ethan and Harry do, once they’ve seen each other and know they’re mostly all right, is look around for Finny and Smitty. And as they retreat in as orderly a manner as men who’ve just been through such moments can do, boys all along the line are calling out the names of their closest friends, hoping to hear a response.

Ethan, you with us? comes the familiar voice of Finny, forgetting to call him Sergeant, the way he tries to do when it’s the whole company together like this.

Yea, Fin, he answers. Harry’s here too. What about Smitty?

Dunno.

Harry looks at Ethan and immediately breaks ranks, with Ethan soon following behind. It takes a minute or two for them to find Finny and then a little longer for them to catch up with the Eighty-Eighth. The Rebs’ve fallen back, but there are wounded scattered everywhere, gray and blue alike.

Smitt-yyyyy! Harry calls out, once twice and a third time. Until finally they hear a response.

I got’m over here!

They follow the voice and find their friend beside a Corporal from the Eighty-Eighth who’d played ball against them back at Yorktown. He’s pouring some water into the side of Smitty’s mouth, and then a little over the wounds where he’s been shot in the arm and taken some shrapnel in the belly. After a minute or two, Ethan and Harry and Finny
take turns carrying him back away from the lines, lying to him all the way, telling him they’ll all be back playing ball at the Elysian Fields by the time next spring rolls around.

Three days later it was all over. The months of training and planning and marching and drilling and inching forward toward the ultimate goal of Richmond, and it had amounted to this. The Grand Army was abandoning the Virginia Peninsula altogether now, the wounded first, then the artillery, then the troops who’d won nearly every engagement with the enemy and were still being forced to retreat.

For Ethan it’d been a worse few days than the walk to Newry or aboard the
Lord Sussex
, and almost as bad as the days just after Aislinn’s funeral. Smitty woke up the day after the battle and was sure that the pain he felt in his arm was the real thing, and not just the kind made up somewhere in the mind when it doesn’t want to think about what’d been lost. And Ethan woke the first two mornings after Malvern Hill, unsure if the pain he felt in his shoulder and the arm, numb still, prickling with pins and needles, was really there in the corporeal sense, or if he’d become as mad as Smitty. But each successive morning he doubted his senses a little less, felt his arm a little more, and was left only to consider the two men he’d killed in the battle, or how he’d helped hold down Smitty when the doctor cut off his throwing arm, or how all of it turned out to be for naught.

Perhaps the worst part of it was the fact that Ethan’d be on a boat separate from most of the rest of the Sixty-Ninth. His wound was almost serious enough to warrant a discharge, but not quite, and he was happy for that much at least. He knew it would heal eventually, and he hated the idea of leavin’ Harry and Finny behind to face what was next. Smitty was a different story … the war was over for him. Then just before the call came for Ethan to board the last of the ships set aside for the wounded, he saw Harry walking up to him with a shovel draped over his shoulder.

Where’s Finny? Ethan asked, surprised that they hadn’t both come by to see him off.

Well, now that you decided t’go an’ get stuck, Harry said, that’s all fer the picture-takin’ crew, so we got some ditch-diggin’ to do. Little Mac’s worried the bogeyman Bobby Lee’s still out there waitin’ t’get him.

So how come you’re here? Ethan asked.

Well, there’s shifts t’things, ya know, Harry replied. Not my
shift
just now, the way I figure it. Besides, it ain’t like my Sergeant’s gonna do anything about it.

And Ethan smiled for the first time in a few days.

The ship was loaded with stretchers across the top deck, and as the Lieutenant began to make his way down to call for the last group to be put aboard, the thought finally struck Ethan that this might be the last time he saw Harry. There could be another fight before the boys got back to Washington, if Bobby Lee got impatient enough to kick them out faster than they were already going. And if Malvern Hill had taught him anything, it was that any man’s time could be up whenever some stray bit of shrapnel or a well-aimed minnie ball decided to make it so.

I just … Harry … you gotta … Ethan started to say.

Hey, listen to this, Harry interrupted before Ethan had the chance to get even a little emotional. There’s about a hundred Rebs a half a mile from here, a buncha prisoners we took th’other day. An’ me an’ Finny an’ a half dozen of the lads were walkin’ past yesterday, an’ we heard one of th’Rebs say … now get this Ethan … he says, There’s some o’ them Irish devils … I wisht they was on
our
side.

Ethan smiled at the thought of it, pretending to find as much consolation in the accolade as Harry hoped to offer. But as he walked onto the gunboat that’d take him back to Washington, he couldn’t help but feel how little it’d all amounted to once again, and that they’d been fools after all. As the ship’s steam paddle finally started them downriver, he saw the sad image of what remained of the Grand Army’s Grand Plans, strewn all along the riverfront. Even the caissons and supply wagons looked sad, resting beside countless barrels and crates still loaded with supplies that hadn’t been used. And then, just a little farther down the river, beyond the last of the Union camps, there they were again, the runaways, clinging desperately to their last vestige of freedom, and
soon to be left behind by the army that had seemed like their liberators for that one glorious spring.

When the ship was far enough away from the shore for Ethan not to feel their haunted gaze upon him, he took a place along the portside edge of the top deck and decided he’d have to tell her about the disappointments of the past two weeks. It’d be done with whispers amidst the clamor of the paddlewheel, lest a passing orderly take him for a man gone mad.

By the time the two armies meet along the Antietam Creek in this small farming town in Maryland, it’s easy to see how so many of the men have become hardened by all the loss. The Grand Army’s done nothing but lose, and nobody’s callin it
Grand
anymore. Six months
of buildup brought to a crashing halt just like that, with all the lads who’ve fallen having given their limbs and their lives for what seems like nothing at all. And now Ol’ Bobby Lee’s got his boys on the march north, taking the fight into Maryland for the first time.

Your shoulder’s fine … fine enough to hold a rifle anyway, though you doubt you’ll be knocking any baseballs into the Hudson anytime soon, war or not. But it’s hard to think of anything back home these days, as you’ve learned to just put your head down and march in line … not much of an outlook for a division photographer, but essential for a soldier. And now this is shaping up to be the worst fight since Bull Run, likely a whole lot worse, since there won’t be too many greenhorns on either side running away after the first taste of fire, and these two armies are each half again as large, and many times more pissed off, than the ones who met at Bull Run.

It starts as a mess, of course, as if anything else could be possible. The right flank of the Union Army bumps up against Stonewall Jackson’s Corps making a bloody marsh out of the five-foot-high cornstalks. They’re fighting hand to hand with artillery cutting down broad swaths of corn and broader swaths of men until both sides back off, ending it in a standoff. So then comes your turn, along the center of the lines, where the Rebs have the Sunken Road, a convenient trench at least a foot and a half deep where thousands of wagons over dozens of years have eroded away as perfect a firing position as an army could want. And it’s the Irish Brigade’s task to clear the Rebs out of there, all of you walking forward in formation, and the Rebs lying down prone on the ground, only the tops of their heads exposed.

Father Corby, the Brigade Chaplain, rides out in front before you all set off and offers a general absolution of your sins. You look over at Harry who’s got that
Jesus, now that’s a promisin’ sign
look on his face. Still, you and Harry and Finny all remove your caps and bless yourselves, one last time maybe, before you set off. It’s occurred to all of you fighting men that it makes no sense to march in formation against such a position. Not that you’re afraid to get at the Rebs in the Sunken Road,
but for Christ sakes, do we gotta WALK all the way there?
For what? So the officers can keep track of things? Because that’s how Napoleon used to do it?

But walk forward you do, in perfect formations that’ve become second nature to you by now, absorbing musket fire from the time you’re a hundred or so yards out, not being allowed to fire back ’til you get in closer, closer, closer, ’til there aren’t nearly as many of you left as what started out walking in the first place. There’s a wooden cow fence about halfway there, and the lead lines have to stop to knock it all down while still coming under fire. Finally they march forward again, fewer still than just a minute before, and now the men from the back lines step forward to replace those that’ve fallen in the front. Then it’s your turn, third line back, to step to the front position and replace the two men before you who’ve gone down already.