Purgatory: A Novel of the Civil War (26 page)

Drew nods. Without protest, he takes the roll of
cloth between his teeth, hanging his head so I can more easily knot
the gag behind. Now he leans back against the tree, gazing serenely
at me, the expression in his blackened eyes as limpid as a
child’s.

For a good while I’m busy, helping Rufus unload the
cart a very thin civilian has driven into camp in Sarge’s wake.
Here, as promised, are beef and cabbages, even a few turnips and
some onions, some dried corn, a few bags of cornmeal and beans, and
a few jugs of whiskey. Grim-faced, Sarge supervises us. At
nightfall, after ordering a meal brought to him and asking not to
be disturbed, he disappears into his tent with a newly arrived
scout. I jog over to check on Drew, afraid that George might sneak
out into the dark and finish what he tried to start this afternoon,
but my Yank’s fine, sagging in his bonds and napping.

By the fires, the men gather, eager for fresh food, a
welcome change of menu. The talk is all about the Institute’s
charred ruins, Sarge’s cleverness in fetching provisions, the bad
news from Petersburg, the ongoing seige. Rufus roasts chunks of
beef on twig-spits over the fire, fries cabbage, stirs leftover
beans, and bakes skillet cornbread. The whiskey jugs make the
rounds, a rough-edged stuff, not half as smooth as Miss Pearl’s. To
our mutual disappointment, George decides to eat at another
campfire rather than risk Rufus’ culinary revenge. “Damn,” whispers
Rufus. “Now what am I gonna do with these grubs? They’re all tickly
inside my pocket. Guess I’ll keep ’em for later.”

“Your Yank needs fed. Want a distraction?” It’s
Jeremiah at my elbow, licking beef grease from his fingers. The
meal’s done, and, other than our secretive Sunday lunch compliments
of Miss Pearl, it’s the best we’ve had in recent memory.

“’Twould be much appreciated,” I say. “I surely would
like to smuggle him some of this beef.”

“Watch this.” Tossing down his empty plate, Jeremiah
begins scratching vigorously, first at his crotch, then at his
armpits. Unbuttoning his jacket, he pulls up his undershirt and
claws his bare midriff. Cursing, he picks at the black mat of his
belly hair. “Got one!” he shouts. “Beastly grayback! Let’s have a
race! Which of you men has lice as swift and agile as mine? None of
you, I’ll bet!”

It’s a free-for-all. Rebs love a wager. Everyone’s
plucking and waving vermin, eager to join in. Soon white cloths are
laid down on the ground; lice are lined up and let loose to
competitively crawl. Sarge sends word to keep the noise down. I
take in the spectacle for a few minutes, then wink at Rufus. He
meets me behind my tent, slips me an aromatic kerchief still
slightly warm, then returns to the fun.

“Boy? Wake up, boy. I got you a fine meal.” It’s very
dark under the pines, but I can make out the silhouette of Drew’s
broad shoulders against the trunk he’s tied to.

“Ummmm,” Drew says. With one hand, I fumble with the
gag’s knot and tug it out of his mouth. “I’m awake, Reb. Had me a
little sleep, but the aromas woke me right up. The smell of that
beef has my stomach growling awful. You did bring me some,
right?”

“Oh yes! Thanks to Jeremiah, who’s challenged
everyone to a lice race, and Rufus, who’s saved you this.” I open
the kerchief to find seven nice-sized chunks of beef.

“That’s what all that noise is about?” Drew says,
biting into a morsel I hold to his mouth. “Ummmm.” He chews and
chews, groans and swallows, then, like a baby bird, opens his mouth
for more. A few cheers sound behind us.

“You want me to fetch you some cabbage and some beans
now? And one of those hidden fried pies?”

“Yes, please,” says Drew, gulping the last of the
beef. “I’d be most grateful.”

Back at the fire, the lice races continue. Jeremiah
appears to be winning. He looks up at me, face flushed with
laughter. The vermin make their agonizingly slow way across the
course. “Nigh epic, I’d say,” I mutter before winking at Rufus
again, then meeting him around the back of my tent for more
food.

“I’m full. I’m really full,” Drew says, downing the
last of the fried pie. “I can’t believe it. With all I’ve eaten
today, I might make it to Purgatory yet.”

“Sarge is holed up with a scout, so I’m going to
untie you now and get you to the tent. Let me join the boys by the
fire for a while so as to waylay suspicions, then I’ll be in.”

“Can we have that talk tonight?” Drew says, voice
tight.

“You bet, boy,” I say, unknotting one by one the
ropes circling his torso and arms. When my hands brush his erect
nipples, he shivers.

Drew seems stronger, just as he said. He walks to the
latrine-trench and then to my tent without a stagger or a stumble.
I have him nestled in blankets and, thanks to Miss Pearl’s
largesse, his wounds covered with precious isinglass plaster and
fresh bandages, when banjo music begins. By the time I get back to
the fire, a stag dance has started. The boys look awkward, dancing
with one another, shuffling in time to “Gal on a Log.” A few titter
and curtsy like girls, inspiring more laughter. One bewails the
absence of a bonnet. I’m just imagining how sweet it would be to
dance with Drew, and the second song, “Leather Breeches,” has just
begun, when Sarge’s voice, hoarse with annoyance, rings out.
“Quiet, boys! I have a guest here!” Within minutes, the party
breaks up, groups of three or four switching to less roisterous
entertainments.

“Many thanks,” I say, passing Jeremiah on the way to
my tent. He’s hunkered down with a few boys over hands of
cards.

“No trouble at all. I won me enough money to treat
Pearl to another bauble next time I’m in town. That grayback was a
regular Mercury.”

_

CHAPTER FIFTY

_

“I
 
got to tell you this,”
Drew sighs. “And if you can’t forgive me, I’ll understand. You’ve
been wonderful to me. And if, after tonight, you leave me to my
fate, well, I guess I got it coming.”

“God, boy, what could it be?” My nape-hair prickles.
Drew and I are spooning in the dark, both shirtless. He’s curled up
into a tighter ball than usual, as if he were preparing for blows.
There are no sounds in camp but fire-crackle, pine-sough, and an
occasional muttered conversation over cards. When Sarge tells us to
shut up, we shut up.

“You asked me once… Well, I lied to you once, I…about
something real important, but then that pitiable lady slapped me,
and then I met Miss Pearl and heard about Lexington burning, and I
know you’ve risked a lot for me and plan perhaps to take even
greater risks for my sake in the future, considering all you’ve
promised about Purgatory Mountain…”

I prop myself up on one elbow. It’s too dark to see
his face. “What is it, for God’s sake? You’re scaring me.”

“I was just afraid that…if you knew, if the camp
knew, it’d be the end of me for sure. If I’d told you then, Ian, we
never would have become friends, we never would have had this.” He
fumbles for my hand, seizes it, and presses my palm over his
breast. Beneath its hairy curve, his heart is racing.

“I’m just so afraid you’ll hate me, and now that
thought is worse than being beaten to death by your company-mates.
But I got to tell you now.”

“Say it,” I croak. Suddenly my voice is a raven’s
voice, tight and dry. “Tell me.”

“I…was part of it. The Burning. I lied to you. I was
part of it. Part of Sheridan’s cavalry. I helped burn the
Valley.”

I push away from Drew. I stand, bumping my head
against the tent canvas. I sit down heavily, cross my legs, and put
my head in my hands. “Oh no.”

Drew sniffles. “You can tell ’em. Let ’em end me. I
deserve whatever I get. I been choking on this since last fall,
when it all happened, when we were ordered to do it. To burn the
houses, the barns, the mills. It’s been like a chunk of burned wood
wedged down in my throat, down deep in me. And when I met you, and
you were good to me, and now we’re…together like this…well, that
chunk’s just swelled and swelled, and some nights I’d wake in your
arms and I couldn’t barely breathe, and sometimes the smell of the
campfire would take me back there, and then I saw that poor woman
selling bullets for food, and Miss Pearl, the look in her eyes when
she described how Hunter had come through, and I just have to spit
it out now, Ian, I got to.”

Drew commences to cry, small whiffling sobs
half-suppressed, the sounds of a big man ashamed of his own tears
but too broken up to suppress them entirely. Part of me wants to do
as I have done lately, to rest a hand on his shoulder, to ease him.
Part of me, something new, will not permit me to do so.

I rise. I pull on my undershirt, my jacket, my cap,
and my brogans. I push through the tent flaps. Jeremiah and a few
boys are still sitting by the fire, poring over their cards,
passing a flask. I pull up a camp chair and sit by them. Jeremiah
looks up at me, cocking an eyebrow of inquiry and concern. I shake
my head. “Bad dream. Pass me that flask, boys.”

I’m warmly drunk after a while. Jeremiah loses two
hands, then wins three. Every now and then he looks up at me,
forehead furrowed. I watch the logs crumble, the orange embers
smothered by ash. “Consumed with that which it was nourished by,”
that’s the Shakespeare line. One of my favorite sonnets.

“Night, gentlemen,” I say, rising to weave off into
the woods. Here’s the pine I bound Drew to. I sit down on the moss
bed where he sat. I lean back against the trunk. The boughs and the
clouds are too thick to see stars. I cock my cap over my eyes, hug
myself as I’ve seen Drew so often do, and take a little nap.

_

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

_

Drew’s no longer weeping when I reenter our tent in
the very first seep of light before dawn. He’s lying silently on
his back, cuffed hands making a little prayer-tent on his
blanket-covered chest. I fall to my knees beside him. For a while,
we simply gaze at one another.

“Go on,” I say.

“What?”

“Tell me about it. I want to know. I want to know
what it was like. To do that.”

“Oh, no. Please.”

“You said you wanted to choke up that charred wood,
Yank. Here’s your chance. Tell me. You’ll be gagged again soon
enough.”

Outside, birds are peeping in the trees, heralding
dawn. War and winter have both seemed endless; I can’t remember the
last time I heard a bird sing. Somewhere nearby, there’s a scraping
sound, then the sound of water being poured into a pail. It’s
Rufus, no doubt, starting up the fire, getting coffee ready, and
breakfast, to get us through the day’s march to come.

“I did what I was told. We all did. And what we were
told to do, word was, General Grant had told General Sheridan…to
make the Valley so bare a crow flying over would have to carry its
own provisions. There were some girls at Edinburg, they begged us
to spare the mill, said it was the town’s only livelihood, so that
one, we extinguished the flames, but the others…”

“Go on. We don’t have much time till reveille.”

“Oh, Ian. God. There were bonfires everywhere, for we
left not a barn intact. The smoke shut out the sun. There were
women and girls screaming, tearing their hair, watching their
houses flare up and then die down to ash. One woman I saw was
laughing, crazy with grief, and couldn’t stop. We stole wagons
heaped with food; we shot horses, cattle, sheep; we burnt acres and
acres of wheat and corn. I shot dead four different bushwhackers.
Is that enough? Have you heard enough?” Drew’s stifled sobs start
up again.

“Don’t cry. Someone might hear. Finish it.”

Drew coughs, gulps, and wipes his eyes. He lies
there, cuffed hands clasped on his chest like an effigy on a tomb.
He clears his throat and continues.

“We were told we were exacting God’s righteous
revenge on a fallen people, the way the Israelites did in the
Bible, but I knew better. Every time I smell smoke, part of me
wants to vomit. I deserve every beating your Sarge has given me. In
fact, I’m thankful for it. When I bleed, I can focus on that, and
forget those faces, those women, those staring children. It was
after that that I got the shakes and got transferred to the area
around Staunton. It wasn’t until we met, and…you held me at night,
that I could sleep more than a few hours at a time without my
nightmares waking me up.”

Reveille sounds. “Stay here and keep quiet,” I
say.

I join morning muster. I feed Drew a quick breakfast
of hoecake and jerky in the tent, each man avoiding the other’s
eyes. Tents are struck; last items are loaded on the cart. The
Yank’s mouth is gagged, his ankles unshackled, his wrists tethered
to the cart. Jeremiah tips his cap to the distant church spires of
Lexington, and we’re off up the pike. A fairly fast march, for
Sarge wants to make Purgatory by nightfall.

_

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

_

A dead man’s sprawled facedown on the edge of the
pike. There’s a gaping hole in his side—probably left by a Minié
ball—and the ground about him is rust-brown with old blood. His
fingers, curved like claws, are sunk deep in mud. He’s dressed in
Rebel butternut. I roll him over. He’s stiff, eyes wide with
surprise, face contorted in a scowl. Black-haired, scruffy-faced,
about nineteen years old, he looks like a younger version of
myself.

Sarge, frowning, rides up to study him. “The scout
warned me about this. He said there might be a few bands of Yanks
roaming around. We shouldn’t have come up the Valley Pike. We need
to get off onto a back road as soon as possible.”

I eye the corpse’s shoes greedily—even with what I
know now about Drew’s past, looking out for him has become a
habit—but they’re far too small for the big Yank, and George
confiscates them quickly enough, along with the dead soldier’s belt
and forage cap. Someone’s taken the boy’s gun already, but the
bayonet’s lying in the grass; George greedily seizes that as well.
Jeremiah and some of the other boys bury him quickly—a shallow
grave in an adjoining field, two sticks tied together to make a
marker—then our little band hurries up the pike between rolling
hills, past weed-filled, untended gardens, past the ruins of burnt
barns and homes, past the skeleton of a cow. At a crossroads, Sarge
consults a map, then leads us off the pike and toward the shelter
of the western hills again.