The Deserter (5 page)

They weren't heroes, they were cattle to the slaughter, choice cuts of human flesh chucked in a meat grinder. They were thousands and thousands of healthy young men forced to march forward double-quick, straight into the guns of a firing squad, as though condemned to death for committing some awful crime, when they were innocent as newborn babes.

After all, why should brother be killing brother? Why should one day's bloody work leave eight thousand corpses rotting in an orchard where the cherries were ripe, or dead in a field where the corn had been growing tall only yesterday? Why should barefoot boys be slaughtered in a country lane where folks had been driving the buckboard into town only yesterday and clucking at the mule?

Last year after skedaddling from Antietam, Otis had found himself picking blackberries with a fifteen-year-old boy from Georgia who had talked about his pig. Otis had nothing against the boy, nor against his pig either. He had nothing against any of those mothers' sons from Georgia or Louisiana or Arkansas. In his opinion, they had as much right to live as he did.

Glancing to his left, Otis saw that Captain Adams had finished his letter. He was sound asleep under his blanket. At three in the morning, Otis wrenched paper and pencil out of his haversack and began writing a letter of his own.

THE WORD OF GOD

T
he generals were at it again. Otis had at last fallen asleep, but in less than an hour he was jerked awake by the boom of artillery from the hills to the rear. He had seen the guns yesterday as the teams hauled them wallowing along the road, the ten-pound Parrotts and the smoothbore Napoleons. Now the low arc of their shot and shell was invisible in the dark, but he could see the blazing mouths of the guns.

The bombardment lasted only a few minutes. When it was over, Otis sat up slowly, feeling the old dread in his stomach. An artillery barrage usually meant action:
Smash 'em first, then send in the boys
.

He took out his watch, the gold repeater he had won in a game with a bunch of like-minded gentlemen at Chancellorsville—the four of them had politely refrained from engaging in anything so vulgar as a battle. Now he held it up to the light. The moon was setting behind the hills to the west, but the moonlike face of the watch was clear enough. The spidery hands said five o'clock.

Below him the officers were beginning to stir, whispering to one another and moving among the sleeping men. What kind of god-awful decisions were they making now, his dear old friends and Harvard classmates? Otis felt fear rise again in his chest, making his breathing shallow and his limbs flimsy and weak. But mixed with his fear was his usual unhappy feeling of resentment.

The officers of the regiment were like members of a private club, from which he was excluded. Otis hungered to put his arm around Seth Morgan and grin at Charley Mudge and laugh with Tom Robeson and share a joke with Tom Fox—even now, even right now on the edge of some murderous action. If only he were one of them, a genuine brother in arms, they would see how brave he could be, how eagerly in their company he would defy the enemy.

But Otis was at the bottom, not the top. Heroism had no meaning for a humble private, only blind obedience to whatever insane orders came down the line from the lords of creation.

Then to his astonishment he saw Seth Morgan look up at him, straight up at him, across the slumped bodies of a hundred sleeping men. Even in the shadowy light of dawn Seth's face was recognizable, and the direction of his gaze was as plain as if he were only a few feet away. Perhaps he was about to beckon, to call him forward to join them, to become one again in the band of old friends.

But then as Otis watched, his heart beating high, he saw Seth's eyes drop. He was looking down, writing something, tearing off a slip of paper, handing it to a corporal, or maybe it was a sergeant, Otis couldn't see the stripes on the man's sleeve. Now Seth was pointing at him, and the other man was looking up at him and beginning to pick his way among the sleeping men, heading for Otis.

“Well, what have you got there?” murmured Otis. The corporal—he had only two stripes—handed him the folded piece of paper and turned away without a word.

With trembling fingers Otis opened the paper and read it, then looked down the hill to smile at Seth, wanting to talk to him, to tell him that he loved him, that he had always loved him, but Seth had melted away. Otis could no longer make him out among the rest.

Rufus and Lem were sitting up now, wide-awake. The three of them sat silently side by side, dreading they didn't know what.

The order wasn't given until full light of day. Finally Captain Tom Robeson was shaking the men up, talking cheerfully, encouraging them to be ready to go right out and take back the lost entrenchments from the rebs across the swale. It was painful to think that such an order could come from an old comrade who had once brought down the house as a girlish charmer in a masterpiece that was entirely the work of Otis Pike.
For God's sake, Tom, what are you asking us to do
?

Below them there was another hurried conference. It was all colonels this time—Charley Mudge and Colonel Colgrove and Colonel whatsit of the Twenty-seventh Indiana, plus a stranger from somewhere else. This time the confabulation was only a few yards away. Otis saw the four of them turn together and stare across the swale.

The conference was over. Otis watched Charley move quickly along the line to talk to his captains. When he reached Tom Robeson, Otis failed to hear the order but he heard Tom say, “But, Charley, it's madness.”

Distinctly then, Otis heard Charley's reply: “It's murder, but it's an order.” He saw Tom shake his head, turn smartly and repeat the order to his men.

Rufus had heard the word
murder
. Lem had heard it too. Their faces were ashen, but Rufe winked at Otis. The entire regiment was standing now. Looking left and right, his panic rising, Otis saw the pale faces of three hundred men waiting for the command, and then his knees gave way. He wanted to move his bowels and his stomach was in convulsion. Rufe caught him and helped him shamble to his feet.

But now he saw Charley mount to the top of the heaped-up dirt and branches and rocks that were the only bulwark from enemy fire for the men of the Second Massachusetts. “Up, men,” shouted Lieutenant Colonel Charles Redington Mudge. “Over the breastworks. Forward, double-quick.”

And now, good God, they were all up and over, they were stumbling and running after Colonel Mudge and Captains Fox and Robeson, running straight over the swampy open ground of the swale, and so were the boys from Indiana, while the rebs in the trenches uttered their shrill turkey gobble and opened up with a hail of rifle fire.

Seth Morgan vaulted over the breastworks with the rest of them, but as he ran into the storm of rebel bullets he looked back at Otis and shouted to him gaily, “Come on, Otis.” He was beckoning, waving his arm and shouting, “Otis, come on.”

At times like these. Otis forgot that he was not a believer and said a prayer. He had often said the same prayer before, “Dear God, what shall I do now?” And God had always looked down from heaven and given the same kindly answer, “Otis, skedaddle.”

In the middle of the open field, Charley Mudge was down, and so was Tom Fox. Otis saw Tom Robeson reel and fall.

“Come on, Otis,” Seth had said, calling to him, encouraging him, inviting him to join their little circle, to be one of them at last. But Otis had a higher call. Obeying the word of God, he backed away from the breastworks, away from Company E, away from the whole entire regiment as it sacrificed itself in a desperate attempt to take back its lost entrenchments from the thousands of country boys from Virginia and Maryland and North Carolina who were basking in the trenches now, all of them raking the swale with Enfield rifles that were accurate to a thousand yards. Not me, dear friends, not me.

So good-bye, dear classmates, farewell and good-bye. Me, I'm taking off down the Baltimore Pike
.

PART V

THE HONOR OF
THE FAMILY

The bright sunshine gleams from their bayonets; above them wave their standards, tattered by the winds, torn by cannon-ball and rifle-shot,—stained with the blood of dying heroes.… Ask them what is most dear of all earthly things, there will be but one answer,—“The flag! the dear old flag
!”

—C
HARLES
C
ARLETON
C
OFFIN

A STUDY OF
WHISKERS

B
eginning with his wife's embarrassing ancestor, Homer was being drawn into the whole progress of the Civil War.

“You see,” he said grandly, “I have an earthshaking new theory of history.”

“Oh, Homer, what is it this time?”

“First you have to back away and look at the nineteenth century as a whole.”

“Well, all right, I'm backing away. So what?”

“If you look at everything, absolutely everything, you see that there was a general crescendo. Everything got louder and crazier and more and more exaggerated as the decades went by, until at last the war broke out in a general smashup and the boil of the antagonism between North and South burst at last.”

“To mix a metaphor or two.”

Homer swept all the papers off his desk. “I'll show you. Look what happened to women's skirts. Wait a sec—I've got a book here somewhere.”

“There was a crescendo in women's skirts? That's your theory? Oh, I know, you mean the way they got wider and wider.”

“Exactly. At precisely the moment the war began at Fort Sumter, after the feelings on both sides had been firing up for decades, women's skirts reached their hugest circumference. Look at this.” Homer slapped open a book of old photographs. “See? It's Mary Todd Lincoln in full regalia. That skirt of hers must be seven yards around.”

“Hmm, I see what you mean. And everything else was swelling too, in some kind of frenzy. Think of the furniture, all carved within an inch of its life and upholstered and doileyed and antimacassared. Even the mantels had petticoats. How strange.”

“And what about genius? The boiling up of poets and writers? All that stuff we teach, Whitman and Melville, Thoreau and Dickinson. My God, masterpieces were busting out all over.”

“You're right, Homer, it's amazing. I never thought of that.”

“Wait a sec, there's more.” Homer snatched up a paper from his desk. “What about the fashion in facial hair? I've been making a study. Take a look.”

It was a page of caricatures—

Mary laughed. “Oh, Homer, you should write a scholarly paper.”

“Of course. I've already got the title—
Victory and Defeat in the Civil War with Reference to the Growth of Facial Hair
,”

“Great. It would enhance your reputation no end.”

Homer tossed his sketch aside. “How're you doing with that old skeleton in the closet?”

“What? Oh, that. You mean my great-great-grandfather.” Mary bit her lip. “It's funny, but it bothers me. It shouldn't, I suppose, but it does. Oh, Homer, there's a nice woman in the Archives department. She found a book for me, the album for the class of 1860. It was so sad. There was a page for Seth Morgan's picture, with his name at the bottom and his regiment, but the picture itself was missing. They must have removed it.”

“They? Who do you mean by ‘they'?”

“Oh, I don't know. His classmates, probably. Poor old Seth, I'd just like to know what he did that was so bad.”

“My dear, why should you care? After all, your great-great-grandfather was four generations back.”

“I know.” Mary looked stubborn. “But I do care, I really do.”

“Well, there must be records. What was the regiment he belonged to?”

“The Second Massachusetts. It was one of the classier ones, I know that.”

“And what about your family? There must be old trunks in your sister's attic. My God, your family's lived in that house since the dawn of time. Have you tried Gwen's attic?”

“No, but I will. That's the next thing. Gwen and Tom are back from Australia. Why don't we drop in on them with a meal? You know, a casserole or something. Do people still make casseroles? And then we can go up-attic.” Mary frowned. “Because I've just got to find out about Seth Morgan. Honestly, Homer, I really do.”

“For the honor of the family?”

“No, nothing like that. I want to resurrect him, dust him off, take a good look at him.”

“Even though he was a scoundrel?”

“How do we know that for sure? I want to weigh all the evidence in court. That's it, Homer. I just want to give him a hearing.”

UP-ATTIC

M
ary Kelly's sister Gwen was the wife of Thomas Hand. Gwen and Tom lived in the old Morgan house on Barrett's Mill Road in Concord. The place was still a working farm, but lately much reduced to a few acres of orchard behind the house.