Sweetsmoke (47 page)

    His
eye was drawn back to the plowed field as a long line of Confederates rose up
and opened fire into the Bucktails' position, the space around him coming
fantastically alive as bullets cleaved the air, searing perforations that
demolished everything in their path. So many projectiles, so many that it
seemed the air itself was enraged, spewing vengeful hornets riding hurricane
winds. The Confederates knelt to reload, biting off the ends of paper charges,
emptying powder into the far end of their musket barrels, dropping in the ball,
tamping it down as the patient Bucktails waited, and within a minute the
Confederates stood to fire and the Bucktails timed it just so and gave them a
crippling volley. Cassius watched the gray men catch the singing fusillade and
fall. He noted the harsh sun in their faces and the long shadows thrown out
behind them, and knew it was barely past six in the morning with the dead already
piling up.

    The
Bucktails were running low on ammunition and were ordered to fall back. Cassius
looked to say good-bye to McLaren but did not see him. Fresh Blues moved in to
take their place, and Cassius stayed where he was, feeling a false security as
he had so far survived and any venture into the snarling air seemed insane. Out
on the plowed field he saw the Confederates turn their weapons away from him
and angle them to his right. He looked over his shoulder across the clover and
saw, coming through the cornfield, two glorious flags waving over the stalks,
leading an unknown force to the southern rim of the corn.

    The
Bluecoats emerged from the corn rows in parade formation, glorious in their
precise emergence. Then, from the turnpike up near the small white building—and
Cassius had not noticed them before—coming from behind a wooden fence a vicious
fire erupted against the Blue troops—God what smoke!—and the Grays in the
plowed field rose as well, perfectly coordinated, as if one man, reflected a
hundred times, abruptly stood, and they opened fire catching the Blues in a
murderous crossfire. A stunning number of Federals dropped instantaneously in
the perfect rows of their formation, as if a giant scythe glinted across their
ankles. Survivors dove back into standing corn to escape. Artillery canister
from the bald area near the small white building screamed into the cornfield
and split men apart as if the human body were little more than a rag doll with
poor stitching.

    This
was killing on an impossible scale, and Cassius could not wrap his brain around
the images in front of his eyes. He tried to remember that each one of these
men had a life, a family, mother, father, children, fears and hopes and ideas;
each one worked and dreamed and had once been a child, and now screamed in
astonished agony. He lost his sense of reality, as if his intelligence shut
down to preserve him from madness. Unable to comprehend the meaning of such an
immense horror, he began to see falling men as unreal, no different than the
soldiers he carved. These were white men being killed by white men who were the
same but for the color of their uniforms; mindfully, purposely slaughtering one
another by the dozens, by the score, by the hundreds, by the thousands. Cassius
saw how easy it was to devastate a man's body and rob him of his valuable life.
And yet those who survived remained on the battlefield and fought on.

    He
watched because it was impossible not to watch. He stayed in one place until he
moved, and his reasons for moving were no greater than his reasons for staying,
unmotivated by fear or superstition. Heat and humidity tormented him, but it
was worse for the combatants who held smoldering weapons and did their work on
the water in their canteens. Time lagged, and the order in which events
occurred began to slam together until it was a confused nightmare of attack and
retreat on both sides. More Blues came through the cornfield, but in smaller
groups, and not in formation. More Grays reinforced the plowed field and died;
others fired; still others ran. A handful of Gray skirmishers slipped into the
cornfield between two Blue brigades and sat between them picking off men in
both directions, so that when the Blues fired back, they killed their own.

    Still
more Blue troops came through the cornfield from the north to reinforce their
decimated brethren, and the thinned and exhausted Grays fell back to the far
woods. The Blues chased them firing, but they too were losing men and running
short of ammunition, and then they gave up the field and fell back to the corn.
The Grays regrouped and rushed back to their original positions, and all the
dead to date were for nothing. He remembered a moment when Grays from the
plowed field rose to charge his position, but the gunfire around him caught
them climbing a fence and they fell back. He began to doubt that he had
actually seen it, even though it had been clear and purposeful and had set his
heart racing. Confederates set fire to the farmhouse next to the plowed field,
and he knew that was true because the smoke occasionally blew in his direction
and choked him, more intense than the passing smoke of artillery.

    The
cornfield was thinning, acres of stalks flattened by bodies and artillery, and
it was patchy and smoking and smelled of sulfur, but the fighting over it did
not stop, as if this patch of ground was the key to the war. He saw men go mad.
He saw men hurl their weapons at the enemy. He saw men forget to remove the
ramrod from their muzzle and fire so that it flew like a spear. He saw men
weep. He saw men scream, he saw men throw their weapons aside and crawl among
the dead for a fresh weapon. He saw dead men piled atop one another where they
had fallen, and others using those bodies as shields to fire on their enemy. He
saw a man of rank open his mouth to shout an order, only to have a bullet drive
through it and out the back of his head. He saw fresh Gray troops charge the
cornfield—someone saw their flag and said Texans—and drive the Blues back, the
stalks thinning badly now, and he heard artillery from just north of the
cornfield, canister fired at close range, that chewed the Texans apart and only
a handful came back. He heard sudden whoops and yells from somewhere to the
northwest and knew another battle raged there, and he wondered how many men
could be fighting at once. He wondered when they would run out of men, and if
they did, would that stop it or would the wind and the trees take up arms and
carry on?

    It
had to be after nine o'clock in the morning, Cassius guessed, looking at the
sun that was somehow safely up over South Mountain. The cornfield, what was
left of it, belonged to the Blue. The fight was now in the clover field and the
plowed field just south.

    Cassius
got to his feet. He struggled to stand, his leg muscles knotted and strained.
He walked into the cornfield, out into the open where here and there a stalk
still stood, frayed and uncertain. He stepped cautiously around the dead, an
intricate chore as they carpeted the area. Artillery had rent bodies into fetid
fetal lumps sprayed across the earth. In some areas, severed body parts were so
thoroughly shredded by canister they were hard to identify. Blue bodies covered
Gray bodies on top of Blue that rested on green stalks and smashed bits of
white corn. He was barely aware of the sounds of battle surrounding him. He
heard the zip of the occasional bullet and ignored the one that went clean
through his shirt without touching his skin. He cringed at the stench, the
ammonia smell of unbathed men, the odors of sulfur and sour vomit, slick oily
feces and the first breath of decay. Delirious frenzied flies massed and dove
and spewed their cream into open wounds. Flattened cornstalks were splattered
with gore, and blood collected like dew in the curled fallen cups of the
leaves. The charnel smell chafed his nostrils and burrowed into his sinuses and
brain, seeping under his armpits and up his ass, marinating his skin down to
his bones until his teeth tasted of rot from within.

    Gunfire
and artillery stopped at the same moment on both sides. There came over the
field a sudden and shocking shroud of silence, and Cassius looked up with alarm
and wonder. It lasted only a few breaths, but in that time he was more afraid
than he had been all morning.

    When
the gunfire and artillery resumed, he was able to move again. He stepped over
something that shifted like a snake but was in fact greasy uncoiling intestines
roasting in the sun.

    He
grieved, he grieved as he looked at the men piled dead alongside the actively
dying; he grieved that they would so willingly give up so much just to keep him
in subjugation. He looked at them littering this giant field and he knew that
he would never be free. He saw the fate of his people in their twisted faces
and dead open eyes, and he knew that he would be a slave forever.

    He
heard a sound and saw movement, and knelt down to roll a body aside. A Union
soldier looked up at him, shot in multiple places but alive, a survivor in the
cornfield. Cassius knelt to give the man water from the canteen still stretched
across his chest. The man was so parched that he could not find sound to
accompany his mouth forming the words "thank you." Cassius decided
that this one man would not die, not here, and he lifted him onto his
shoulders. The man grunted in pain but did not cry out. Cassius was surprised
to find him frail and weightless. He toted the man back through rows of
cornstalks that no longer stood, through the woods east of the cornfield to the
road just around the bend from the action, where men who had yet to see the
elephant sat waiting. They took the man from him and placed him on a litter,
and Cassius followed, walking, as they ran him down the road.

    As
the battle raged in multiple places over there, he stayed out of the way, in
the shade of an old maple on the east side of Antietam Creek, unable to
understand why he had so much difficulty convincing himself to stand up.

    But he
did stand. He looked around. He was again thinking about crossing to the
Confederate side. He headed back from where he had come, but a soldier bumped
into him, an older man who looked hard into Cassius's eyes.

    "What's
with you, boy, you lost? Where you think you're goin?"

    Over
there, said Cassius, indicating the small, nondescript, white building in the
distance.

    "So
you got a tongue in your head," said the older soldier unpleasantly.

    Cassius
gave him the smallest of nods and turned to move away.

    "That
there building's a church," said the older soldier. "You ain't goin
there."

    Don't
look like a church, said Cassius.

    "German
church, Dunkers. Pacifists. You go there, them Rebs send you right back where
you belong. Say, you think them Pacifists is mad, watchin all this? You think
maybe them Pacifists is fightin mad?" He laughed at his own joke.

    Could
be, said Cassius, without conviction.

    "Gettin
mighty hot over there," said the man. A battle was taking place in the
distance, up and down the turnpike near the Dunker church, a push—pull attack
and counterattack. Cassius watched it dispassionately.

    "You
be a smart boy, wait till it dies down 'fore you give yerself back to them
Rebs."

    Cassius
found the ford point north of the middle bridge and crossed the creek, sludge
and sand filling his shoes. He followed the smoke from the burning farmhouse,
then cut directly south, staying clear of another farmhouse where beehives had
been hit by artillery, which meant another sort of trouble. The battle had
moved and a great concentration of Federal troops was massed in a field and
moving south toward a rise. He continued on below the farmhouse, walking
parallel to the Yankees, and he had this area of the field to himself. Beyond the
Federal troops, over near the turnpike, he saw where the big Confederate guns
had repositioned themselves. He walked a little farther, so that from his
vantage point he could see the far side of the rise that the Federal troops
were approaching. What he saw within sixty feet of the rise caused him to drop
down on one knee.

    Before
him was a farmer's road that had been carved out of a swale, worn lower over
the years by carts. On the north brow of this sunken road, fence rails were piled
and he could see where the rails that had earlier lined the south side of the
road—the land rose up a few feet on that side to meet a cornfield—had been
carried to the north side to fortify the position. Confederate soldiers had
taken cover in this low place, a natural defensive position, hundreds of them
spread prone along the bank, aiming their rifles and using the fence rails as
protection and foundation. Looking down the stretch of sunken road, halfway
toward the turnpike, the road came to a soft arrow point and angled off to the
left, traveling southwest, and while more men defended that position, Cassius
could not see around the corner to know how many more. They expected an attack,
and Cassius saw what they could not see, the Federals coming up the rise on the
far side. The crest of the rise was so close to the lane that Blue and Gray
could not yet see one another, but when the Yanks hit that crest, they would be
very nearly on top of them.