May the Road Rise Up to Meet You: A Novel (39 page)

What about the third?

Antietam … fella over by the tree in fronta the Sunken Road … best shot of my life, maybe twenny yards out.

That was you? Finny asks after a pause, like he remembers the exact man.

Ethan only nods. Got tripped up by a greenhorn next to me, he says. Fired my shot after the rest, an’ … well, you know what it looks like, Fin.

Finny nods at him, tight-lipped, and there is silence for a few moments.

So you
know
, Finny says, gazing back into the fire. Then a few seconds later he asks, You got one fer sure wit’ th’bayonet? I never did.

You’re too good a shot, Fin.

Mmmm … maybe so Perfessor, he agrees, not bragging at all, just accepting a fact they all knew to be true. Finny’s one of the best shots in the whole Brigade. Wish I wasn’t though, he says. Then I wouldn’t be goin’ t’hell when it’s all done.

What’re you talkin’ about Fin? It’s war. Killin’ happens in war, Ethan says.

Yeah. But I figure it’s gotta be a little more
even
, ya know, a little more
fair
, he replies.

What d’ya mean, Fin? There’s nothin’
even
about killin’, Ethan says.

Sure, but I mean—you got three, an’ got stuck at Malvern Hill, then shot twice at Antietam, so there … three. It ain’t even, sure, but that’s about
fair
, Finny says. But
nine
? Just so
I
could stick around with a coupla nicks an’ that’s all? Why would God go an’ do that? That just ain’t fair.

For a moment Ethan thinks of telling Finny about Suah, about what he’d said to him of God keeping him alive for some purpose. But he knows it won’t be much comfort to Finny. He’s not even sure
he
believes it anymore.

I don’t suppose
any
of it’s fair, Fin, he says instead.

Mmmm, Finny replies, and jabs at the fire some more. Ya think God’ll forgive us?

Don’t know, Fin, Ethan replies. Hard to figure how He … I don’t know, Fin.

There doesn’t seem to be anything more for either of them to say, so they sit in silence for a few minutes ’til the sergeants start rousting the boys from their tents. And before any of them make their way to the fire, Finny stands up and pats Ethan on the shoulder.

Don’t go
up
there today, Perfessor, he says, pointing to the Confederate lines they’ll soon assault. He starts to walk away, then turns back to look at him again. I
mean
it, Ethan, he says sternly. You
done
your share. Your share an’
then
some.

Okay, Fin, Ethan lies.

• • •

ETHAN’S ABOUT THE ONLY MEMBER
of the Press Corps on the dangerous side of the river when the field east of town goes hot around eight-thirty that morning. The cannons boom from both lines, belching smoke in white clouds that soon fill the sky. And Ethan makes his way over to the west side of town, where he bribed an artillery sergeant the day before to help get him up close to the fighting. He’s got his camera strapped on his back when the division gets the command to go up the gentler slope west of town, and Ethan struggles to keep pace—limp, step, limp, step, limp, step he goes—using the tripod for a cane, and more aware than ever how poor a soldier he’d make now. Then, before he gets a hundred yards up the slope, the assault comes tumbling unexpectedly back toward him.

It’s the oddest of sensations for Ethan, standing there with his camera and bundle of equipment rather than a rifle and ammunition pouch. He’s pinned down by the weight of all that he carries and a leg that’s not doing him a damn bit of good when he needs it most. The next moments seem like an eternity as shells hit all around, and waves of attackers, almost an entire division, fall to the ground for cover. Ethan flops to the earth as well, his head uncomfortably on the lower side of the downslope, until he swings around the other way. He sees a Union man, a kid really, flop just a few feet from him, and Ethan arranges the equipment bag and camera on the slope above them to offer whatever protection it can from the musket fire flying past. And then it grows mostly quiet around them as the fighting shifts to the center of the line, where the field is far more forbidding, where a three-foot-high stone wall stretches across the peak of the slope, where Harry and Finny and the rest of the Irish Brigade are all waitin’ to go in.

It almost seems impossible to imagine that even the worst of generals would send ordinary men up to assault such a position. But there it is, for all to see. A first brigade climbs the slope toward Marye’s Heights and is quickly repulsed by just a few rounds from the Rebs perched behind the stone wall. It’s the beginning of an afternoon horror that Ethan witnesses all too clearly from his prone position, huddled behind his camera just a few hundred yards away, left to think only about how it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Another brigade goes into the fury,
only to be thrown back before they get as far as the first, then comes a third assault, and a fourth, with results just as predictable, just as disastrous, just the same.

But as the fifth brigade prepares to climb the hill, Ethan can see the familiar green and gold flag unfold and flap defiantly in the breeze. It elicits great pride in him for a moment, but then quickly gives way to dread at the thought of what awaits Harry and Finny and the rest of the lads. The Irish Brigade is still called a brigade, answering to the call of three or four thousand men. But ever since Antietam they’ve barely been twelve hundred on their
best
day. Still, Ethan knows how little that matters. He knows how a battered regiment can hold off the advance of Stonewall Jackson’s brigade, how the Sixty-Ninth and the Eighty-Eighth can assault Rebel lines twice their number and push them back by the sheer force of their will. And for those precious moments before they start up the slope, he feels the surge of adrenaline within him and would join them himself if he had two good legs, or even just the one, and a musket to go along with it.

They go forward, one brilliant mass of tightly formed rows marching in step into the breach. When the fire intensifies, they step on the doublequick, still maintaining their lines, patching holes in them as men fall along the way, ’til they reach the point where the first two assaults failed, and press on, fixing bayonets as they move up the increasingly steep hill. Minutes later they pass the point of the farthest Union advance, and the cannonade from all along the Rebel lines now centers on them. And still they move forward.

In his mind Ethan can see them do it once more, the famous old Irish Brigade
smashin’ inta th’enemy with ferocity unmatched
, punching a hole in the line the way they did at Malvern Hill, or shattering the resistance of the Rebs in the Sunken Road at Antietam. He thinks, he imagines, he hopes, there’ll be fresh troops to exploit the hole once they make it, another brigade following up, thirsting their way forward into the breach, the way water finds its way to the hole in the dam. But by the time the boys come within twenty yards of the stone wall, they’re nothing like a cohesive fighting force anymore. The green flag goes down and is raised again, only to fall seconds later. And what looked like imminent victory in his hopeful eyes just moments before
now dissolves into a nightmare, a battered and bloody mass of men, his comrades, his friends, his brothers, unwilling to give way, iron-willed bastards that they are.

’Til then comes the grim, imminent reality as the Irish Brigade is washed down the hill, the lads stumbling over their own wounded as the remnants of a once-formidable force yield the field, not retreating as much as blown backward, downhill, by the Newtonian might expelled from behind the stone wall—as in
for each action there is an equal and opposite reaction
, and even the iron will of the lads who march behind the green and gold flag can’t change that part of the equation. The Rebs on the other side of the wall stop firing after a while and lift their caps and cheer, not mocking the Irish Brigade but showing their deep admiration. And Ethan turns on his back now, almost breathless, staring up at the sky, wondering if he’ll have any friends left to see come morning.

Jesus, that last one almost
did
it, the wounded kid next to him says. Those were the Irish Boys, weren’t they?

Ethan only nods his head as the water’s trying to rush to his eyes now and can only be kept back by biting hard on his lip and jerking his head to his chest a few times, then burying it in his right arm.

Hey, you okay? the kid asks.

And Ethan mumbles now, Mmm-hmm.

Jesus, they almost did it, didn’t they? the kid says again, none the wiser.

Ethan opens his watery eyes toward the sight of the slaughter once again.

Mmm-hmm, he mumbles, stuffing back the gasps of air his lungs keep trying to press out, pushing them back with all the rest of those memories that have no right to see the light of day.

Almost
, Ethan says.

The generals must’ve got drunk or cried crocodile tears or spent the whole night after the onslaught figuring out how to cover their arses
when the day of reckoning surely comes. Whatever it was, they didn’t call for the retreat, once the shield of darkness mercifully offered the chance, just left whole brigades, divisions even, to freeze there along the slope below the Reb lines.

You huddled alongside the kid named Will from somewhere in Pennsylvania, pulling in two of Will’s dead comrades from nearby to offer some cover from the wind and the snipers up above. And you and Will listened to the moaning of the wounded, the final pleas from those who didn’t make it through the night, and the muffled tears of those who wished they wouldn’t. Sometime just before the morning, you could see enough of the moonlight reflected off the Rappahannock below to imagine you could speak to Aislinn and somehow your desperate words would be carried off to her. But there were no soliloquies about remember whens or even the lamentations for all that had surely been lost, just a simple plea in case she had any pull in the Ever After and could make such a dream so.
Let me see her again
, you whispered, knowing Aislinn’d know who.

Then came this morning, with the sun offering the grace of warmth along with the danger of the Rebs up above having clear sight of the field again. And between you and Will there was nothing but a few bits of hardtack and some almost-frozen salt pork to make it through ’til the sun finally set again and the generals figured it was time to issue the call to retreat. And it’s only then that you go back down the slope to something like safety and the warmth of a fire and something to eat.

When you finally find the camp for what’s left of the Sixty-Ninth you brace yourself before going in, but it does little to fend off the news. Finny is dead … left up there amongst the lads shattered by the canister fire near the stone wall, the lot of them nothing more than some high-water mark of the great Irish Brigade that looked victory closer in the eye than any Union Brigade three times their size. And the thought comes to you that Fin must’ve
known
that morning how he’d have to face the laws of probability at some point, that there were nine dead Rebs who’d have to be accounted for somehow.

What about Harry? you ask O’Leary from your old company.

Went to the flag ceremony, O’Leary answers with disgust.

The what?

Doncha know the new flag for the regiment arrived from New York?
O’Leary says. There’s a celebration with General Hancock himself and all the officers—the ones
left
anyway—over by the ferry docks. Harry’s ready to get himself court-martialed … said something ’bout takin’ a crack at as many officers as he can …

And instinctively you head off before O’Leary even finishes. Along the way you ask whoever you vaguely recognize if they’ve seen Harry or know where the flag celebration is, until you hear the din of a somber fiddle playing in a building not far from the ferry landing. Harry’s outside it, sitting on the ground and leaning up against the wall not two feet from a window. And inside you can see officers with faces down-turned and bobbing slightly side to side along with the music.

Harry, you say.

He looks up at you, and right off you can tell that he’s not all right.

Jesus, Harry, what happened?

D’you hear ’bout Fin?

You only nod your head by way of acknowledgment. Then you see the blood from Harry’s chest and arm, running in a thin streak down his uniform jacket.

Jesus, Harry, you’re hit!

Jus’ a little shrap’el, Perfess … nothin’ like what Fin … or you … or Smitty got … nothin’ like what
they
got …

And he nods his head toward the heights.

It takes the better part of an hour to get Harry to the hospital set up on the other side of the river on the bluff called Stafford Heights. He’s able to walk the whole way, but you do let him rest an arm on you when it comes to climbing the last hill. And it’s a sad sight the two of you must make, pressed against each other for balance, with you limping and him with a practically lifeless arm tucked inside his coat. Inside the building a nurse takes a look at the wounds, and Harry’s words are confirmed—it looks far worse than it is. There’ll be no amputation or even an operation that’ll be worth using what chloroform they have. There will be no discharge, either. And Harry lies down on the floor at the end of a long row of triaged men waiting to be attended to by one of the overworked doctors, a single blanket underneath him and one on top. The nurse washes the wounds a little and tells him that one of them has practically stopped bleeding all on its own, and then she leaves to tend to more serious cases.

I’ll stay here with you Harry, you say. Get some sleep, and I’ll stay right here by the—

And Harry interrupts you with an angry look on his face and shaking his head almost violently back and forth a few times.

Fer chrissakes, Perfessor, go home! You think I wanna see your feckin’ mug here … to be reminded of it all …