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on explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the other
side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional ordnance, they
loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes, chunks of angle iron and
buckets of railroad spikes.
Through the smoke Willie and Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air,
the staff of an American flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of
their rifle pits, running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade
supported between them.
The barrage went on for thirty minutes. When it lifted, the sun looked like a
broken egg yoke inside the smoke, the acrid smell of gunpowder so dense they
could hardly breathe.
Willie and Jim advanced across the clearing with the others, once again the
cry of the fox hunt rising hoarsely from their throats. They
crossed the sunken road and stepped over the Federal dead who lay there and
entered a woods where trees were split in two, as though divided by lightning,
the bark on the southern side of the trunks hanging in white strips.
The ground was littered with Springfield rifle muskets, boxes of percussion
caps, ramrods, haversacks, canteens, torn cartridge papers, entrenching
shovels, kepis, bloody bandages, bayonets, cloth that had been scissored away
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from wounds, boots and shoes, newspaper and magazine pages that men had used
to clean themselves.
Inside the smoke and broken trees and the fallen leaves that were matted
together with blood was the pervasive buzzing of bottle flies. In the
distance, over the heads of the Confederates who were out in front of him,
Willie saw a white flag being waved by a Union officer in front of a silenced
battery.
The firing ended as it had started, but in inverse fashion, like a string of
Chinese firecrackers that pops with murderous intensity, then simply exhausts
itself.
Willie and Jim slumped against a stone fence that was speckled with lichen and
damp and cool-smelling in the shade. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through
green water. Jim's eyes were bloodshot, his face like that of a coal miner who
has just emerged from a mine shaft, his teeth startling white when he grinned.
The tall man, with the concave face, from the 6th Mississippi, walked past
them, his body bent forward. A huge barrel was mounted on his back with
leather straps that were looped around his shoulders. The barrel had been hit
in four places across the middle with either grapeshot or minie balls, and
four jets of water were spraying from the holes, crisscrossing one another as
the man labored with his burden back toward the sunken road.
"How about a drink, pard?" Jim said.
"What's that you say?" the man asked. His jaws were slack, unshaved, his
peculiar, smoke-blackened, indented face like that of a simian creature from
an earlier time.
"You're leaking. Give us a cup before it's all gone," Willie said.
"Take the whole shithouse," the man said.
He slipped the leather straps off his back and slung the barrel on a rock,
where the staves burst apart and the water patterned on the leaves, then
became only a dark shadow in the dirt.
Willie and Jim stared at him in disbelief.
"Want to make something of hit?" he asked.
"No, sir, not us," Willie said.
The man rubbed his hand on his mouth and looked about him as though he didn't
know where he was. A rivulet of dried blood ran from his ear canal into his
whiskers.
"Where's the little fellow, what's-his-name, Tige?" Willie asked.
"Gone. Him and his drum, both gone," the man said.
"Gone where?" Willie asked.
"Into their cannon. Right into their goddamn cannon," the man said.
His eyes were wet, the whites filled with veins that looked like crimson
thread, his teeth like slats in his mouth.
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WHEN Willie and Jim found their outfit later in the afternoon, it was as
though they had journeyed to a different war. Five hundred men of the 18th
Louisiana were spread along the tree-dotted edge of a ravine, their blue
jackets now turned inside out in order to show the white linings. In front of
them, up a long green incline, was a hardwood forest unscarred by rifle or
cannon fire, and inside the forest were three regiments of Federal infantry
and batteries of wheeled artillery whose jack screws had been twisted to their
maximum extension in order to point the cannon barrels straight down the
slope.
Willie and Jim walked through the bottom of ravine, the leaves almost
ankle-deep, their clothes rent, their saliva still black when they spat. Their
friends stared at them quizzically, as though they were visitors from a
foreign world. Willie and Jim knelt behind a tree on the northern rim and
stared out at the scene in front of them.
The slope was partially in shadow now, the air cool with the hint of evening.
When the wind blew down the slope Willie could see wild-flowers inside the
grass. The depressed muzzle of a cannon stared down the slope at him like a
blunt-edged iron instrument poised to enter the throat of a surgical patient.
Off to the left Rufus Atkins stood among the trees, with two other officers,
his head nodding, his gloves pulled tautly through his belt, while Colonel
Alfred Mouton moved his index finger on a map that was spread across his wrist
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