Next thing Usaph knew, after the rising of the mist and the roar of the beast, was that all the skirmishers who had been up the road during the night came running back throught the wet stands of trees to the fences where Wheat’s regiment stood, with Rufe still drumming for them but no one being able to hear him. Lucius ran back with his revolver in his hand. Mad Ash Judd hooted as he came to show this was going to be some picnic. Even from his place in the line, Usaph could see that it was going to develop like every other battle, only in greater quantity. He got an image in his mind of the stone fences of his first fight at Kernstown. The Yankees who had charged the fences that day were plenteous, but even as you fired at them, you knew they came in but finite numbers. Usaph got this sudden spurt of anger, for Kernstown had been no fitting classroom for what was happening this morning. Such lines of blue came out of the woods, to the north and assailed your vision, that you thought it was a sudden disease of the eyeballs.
Coming on in four lines across the fields, they now and then stopped a second and fired. Usaph saw three Confederate skirmishers all climbing the snake fences along the pike at once, crossing the road to get into the woods behind. All three of them were shot in the one second, one of them putting his hand up behind his ear in a fly-swatting way before he slumped there across the railings with the other two. They hung like ragged and drying animal hides.
Rufe kept rattling away at his drums, competing with the great blocks of cannon sound. Half the boys loaded and passed muskets to the other half, who discharged them at the enemy. The only voice you could hear was Wheat’s and even he was cut back to the ordinary and normal things colonels uttered. Stuff like, ‘Steady, steady,’ and ‘Mark your target, boys.’
And then the cannon really got to it. Confederate cannon on Nicodemus Heights started tearing into the Yankees from sideways and Union cannon from up the road started ripping the trees up behind Usaph. Something awful was happening to the Georgians over in Miller’s cornfield, and in the little torn snatches of time between bangs you heard a human shrieking there, and the air above the cornfield, you saw between blinking, flew with bits of farmer Miller’s corn crop and with limbs, naked and clothed, and with haversacks and heads and hands.
This, Usaph believed, was an amazing thing to see. But it did not horrify him, even though he had average feeling for his fellows. There was something in him that stopped him being horrified as the heads and armless trunks of Georgia’s children rose from the corn. The cornfield was a good 200 paces off, and something cool in his belly whispered to him that 200 paces was as good as a county.
He began to cough. Others were coughing too. The morning was coming on overcast and the stained powder smoke did not blow anywhere on a breeze as it did on an average day. It sat low on the pike and got into Usaph’s pipes. He got more wrapped up in the condition of his throat than in the terrible whacking of balls against tree trunks and fence rails. A lump of fence rail about as long as a rule flew up and slashed Wheat’s cheek, but he just felt the place and cursed.
Almost in the same act, he turned, cupped his mouth and yelled to Usaph: ‘Get on back to Grigsby. Tell him that in my calm goddam opinion, Usaph, this line offence jest can’t be held.’ He said the Georgians on the flank were going to hell in numbers, that ammunition was already at least half spent and so on.
He squeezed Usaph’s elbow, as if to say: ‘Don’t think of my oddities, boy, jest do this work proper.’
Usaph turned. He knew Grigsby, commanding the Stonewall Brigade, was posted by a stone fence below the little Dunker church. He headed down the fence by the turnpike. A shell fired from over the Antietam and meant for the piteous Georgians in the cornfield lit some twenty yards to his right, where Captain Hanks was standing, tore the captain open before Usaph’s numb eyes and split the bodies of half a dozen boys round about.
Later Usaph could not quite remember the journey back to the Dunker church, could not even remember speaking the message about what great quantities of Yankees were coming on, and about the way Union cannon were ripping up those Georgians in the cornfields who were Grigsby’s flank, and about Wheat’s estimate of remaining powder and balls. He did remember that even that early the open grounds below the Dunker church were sort of sown with lines of wounded lain down on the trampled grass.
He had just turned back towards Wheat when he saw some of his own friends scuttling towards him, retreating fast as they could towards the church, vaulting fences between fields. The first he saw was Rufe, the young drummer, and Rufe was running hard, carrying his drum under his left arm like a boy carrying the pigskin in a football match, and his drumsticks like a relay baton, in his right hand. Sprinting barefoot and no, not like a footballer or an athlete, more like a farm boy in a novelty race at some fair.
Then Usaph could see Wheat and Gus and Lucius and all the others walking back across the field, coming straight for the Dunker church, and Gus and Ash dodging behind trees to fire off a quick, useless, duty-bound round.
And from across the road a few Georgians were fleeing from that cornfield, their clothes a mess of oily muck; and such a scream arising now from that cornfield that it was like a goddam vent of hell.
Usaph turned back again and got in behind the stone fence by the church. Again a great volley took boys in the back as they were fence-climbing. If you had time and sight enough to look, you could see all the fences of Washington County, Maryland, filling up with lolling corpses.
As Decatur Cate climbed up that stone fence by the Dunker church, finding the big flat stones pretty slippery in spite of his long hands, he got the sting of a ball in his upper leg. It went straight through the meat and, by the time he fell on the far side, not far from where Lucius was now standing, he already knew somehow no bone had been broken. ‘Get up, Cate,’ yelled Lucius. And though Cate could not hear him, lip reading was enough. He rose and faced the immense lines of the blue regiments 300 paces off. Dear Christ, he thought. This is just Cannae all over and there is no chance now, God and history really are going to swallow Decatur Cate. He blinked at the storm of balls hissing and emanating from those regiments. Shells fell and burst behind his back amongst the lines of wounded around the church. And when you bit your cartridge and glanced up, you saw this or that boy look at you all at once in a pleading stunned way and then decide there was no charity left in the world and drop down dead. And only when he’d drop would you see the wound. Oh yes, Cate decided with the workaday despair of the damned, we’re going to die right together here. Sublime Ephie can be some sort of double widow and go uncomforted. And so he just stood there and gave himself up to the darkest forces of history.
While matters were thus going to hell at the church, two or three meadows back, maybe somewhere between a quarter and a half a mile, General Hood’s Texans had fires lit. In spite of all the noise, they were cooking their breakfasts, a meat ration they hadn’t got till about dawn. It was their first meal for three days. When it was just starting to get nice and rare, and whatever juice was in the meat was starting to drip in the fires, Sandie Pendleton rode into their meadow and told General Hood that they were to break their arms-stacks and save the Dunker church.
Hood gave his orders. Adjutants lined the boys up. They were damn angry. They waved their arms and spat a lot. In spite of the noise, they uttered outlandish curses.
When they came over the crest by that church and ran down to the fence where the leftovers of the Stonewall stood, they were screaming with an anger as elemental as that of the cannon. Wounded boys, leaned up against the fence, looked up at them wide-eyed, as if they weren’t reinforcements but some final satanic enemy.
It turned out pretty bloody for the Union boys as well. Confederate cannon in the woods and on Nicodemus Heights and from the Dunker churchyard did them harm. And the Texans, just about out of the control of their general, started to climb the fence and rush the close enemy.
Grigsby told Wheat and anyone else that was by that fence to follow on behind them.
Wheat had Rufe by the elbow. ‘Goddamit, Rufe, you ain’t meant to go running like that. Why, your proper place is by me, son. You got your drum there, boy? I see you have!’ Then Wheat untied the dirty yellow sash from round his waist and tied one end of it round the belt of Rufe’s britches, so that he could lead Rufe along like a pet. ‘Where I go, Rufe, you go. Now you sound the advance on that pigskin drum of yours, Rufe.’
Somehow, connected like that, the colonel and Rufe got over the stone fence and so did the sixty or so Volunteers who were left or who found fence-climbing within their powers.
They dragged on across a field and got to the fence by the pike. Here you had to choose gaps to climb the thing, for it was all hung with doubled corpses. So they rushed over the pike and found they were all at once in farmer Miller’s bloody cornfield.
Walking just about as easy as ever in spite of the puncture in the meat of his leg, Cate went with them. He would have been too stupid with the noise and the event to know why. To him as to Usaph and Gus and maybe even to Wheat, the morning was now too savage to be thought of as a real morning. To all of them it became a morning in a foul dream. The verges of the cornfield were heaped with mounds of poor flesh, and fences with their crops of dead had been shattered by cannon. And timber and grey cloth and blue cloth and human remnants lay in heaps that must be climbed. Ahead the Texans had chased those Yankees clean out of the corn, but as you stepped into the crop you could hear all these hidden groaning and pleas for mothers and water and for the God whose sky was cut off by the cropped tops of the stooks. Usaph trod on a mat of Christian boys, all of them defaced this way and that by cannister and shell pieces. He was too close to them now to get away from the fact that they were there. But after a step or two he did not look, there was no sense in picking a path. He could see Rufe ahead at the end of his leash of silk. And Rufe kept drumming but would turn his head aside to retch and gag.
When he came out of the north end of the corn, the air seemed thicker with balls, yet every one of them seemed meant for someone else and not for Usaph Bumpass. The whole earth of Maryland was sown with the young in blue and butternut, and their seed was dead inside them. And Usaph felt with a despair he could taste on his tongue that there’d never be fatherhood again until boy children, now living in safe towns, grew up.
Poor Ash Judd, with his magic seed still living within him, caught up with the Texans and climbed with them yet another snake fence. He saw woods fair ahead. There were such storms of balls emanating from those woods that Ash could just about see them in the air, just like insects. Carrying his musket across his body, Ash took one of them in his arm. He felt all the tendons around the bone up near his shoulder tearing and writhing but, through tears, understood somehow they did so to save that precious bone itself. You’ll live on whole, he told himself. The Texans were starting to drop all round him, going down yelling and cursing, as noisy as they’d been all along. Ash was intent to inspect the hole in his jacket. So fast he couldn’t tell which came first, a bullet tore his groin and another his upper leg. Still no bones, he told himself. If there hadn’t been such noise he might have yelled across the field. ‘Still no bones!’
Next, one in the face, just beside the corner of the jawbone. Ashabel Judd fell forward, not feeling the impact with the ground. During the fragment of a second in which he toppled down, the phrase Prince of Lies repeated itself in his head. His face ended up nose first into the warm crown of his dropped hat. It was a new Union cavalry hat he’d got at Manassas and it had no holes other than the one or two little sweat holes in the side. These his blood clogged too readily. The further flow of blood from his face filled his hat and painlessly drowned him. In this self-same way a lot of boys would drown that morning in landlocked Washington County.
7
There was a pattern, and Usaph and Gus and Wheat and his drummer got caught up in it. They staggered back through the corn yet again and sheltered behind another fragment of fence, and fired yet, oh yet again, at the oncoming sons of the Union.
Usaph noticed in a quiet second that Wheat stood frowning, side-on to the fence and the enemy, a man conferring with himself. He had a handful of Virginians near him – there was Danny and Cate as well as Usaph and Gus – and even as they took aim they kept looking at him as if he was about to provide a magic deliverance.
Wheat couldn’t tell where the rest of the Stonewall was. Maybe there wasn’t any rest. He stood fingering the wound on his face that the fence splinter had made. Rufe his drummer waited by panting and dull-eyed at the end of Wheat’s sash. His sticks were idle in his hand.
It was then the strangest thing of Usaph’s whole day happened. It didn’t seem at all crazy at the time, in fact it convinced every one of them, Usaph counted in, that Wheat was one of the great men of the time. But those who saw it and lived through the day would remember it later with some horror.
‘Where’s your colonel, son?’ Wheat asked a Texan lieutenant passing by along the fence.
‘There’s no colonel, sir. He got shot in the head jest awhile back.’
Wheat frowned, still fingering the injury to his face. All along the fence the Texans were strung out, firing at their own will, rudderless.
Usaph looked at Wheat. The colonel grinned back at him, as if he was saying: ‘And are you still worried by the small joy I had in Frederick, Reverend Bumpass?’ Still grinning away, Wheat dipped a finger into the wound on his face and began ornamenting his features with his own gore, making long scarlet marks on his dirty skin.
‘Put on the war paint, boys!’ he began to scream. ‘Put on the war paint!’ He began to stride up and down amongst the Virginians, amongst Blalock and Cate and the others and down along the line of Texans who were loading and firing, the loaders cussing the firers and yelling at them to fire faster, and the firers screaming curses about the slowness of the loaders. And as he walked with his painted face he dragged Rufe with him. ‘Put on the war paint!’ he said. And his blood showed up on his powder-blackened face, and so did his broad, fixed grin. ‘Put on the war paint!’
It seemed to appeal to the Texans. They paused in their loading and yelled, and rubbed the torn edges of the cardboard cartridges over their dirty faces making marks, and began whooping with their mouths open. The whoops spread down the fence.
Usaph walked with Wheat, as he was meant to, striding beside the dragged-along Rufe, and keeping pace with Gus. ‘Give ’em the whoop!’ Wheat screamed and the Texans started whooping even more. They were some tribe, those Texicans! Usaph saw Gus streaking his face. Gus? Gus, the great man of music? Usaph had already broken a cartridge and was decorating his own visage with powder. Then he saw Cate engaged in the same work. Cate? Why?
Cate himself didn’t know, but he was laughing to himself and daubing away.
Soon, Usaph knew, they’d all get up over the fence and howl through the cornfield. He could scarce wait for it. For Wheat had turned them all into a vengeance, a force of nature. They would be terrible to face, maybe even Cate, a Union lover – he’d be frightful for the Yankees to face.
‘Sound the charge there, Rufe!’ Wheat yelled at the drummer child.
Rufe did it. Whether they heard him or not, they all raged up over the fence, all painted with blood and powder and all unholy mad. Some Wisconsin boys they sent hurtling back through the corn. Union soldiers they overtook surrendered to them and were shot or sent back towards the church. No one paused to disarm these prisoners.
Beyond the corn, Wheat and his Virginia handful and all those Texicans ran into a New York Irish regiment that advanced in battle order across a bare field. Usaph saw two women there, walking beside their men, looking like laundresses. Sergeants’ wives or women. Right there in the lines. There was this harsh swapping of fire. Then Wheat ran charging at them, and some two hundred Irishmen and both their laundresses surrendered and were pointed towards the rear.
Wheat’s line went through another little wood and surprised a green U.S. regiment waiting in a lane
. The Union boys were dressing their lines there by the edge of a lane, dressing by their right and shuffling busily, when they looked up and saw wild hairy beasts with painted faces roaring out of the trees.
Beyond the lane the ground got rocky, you could see granite poking up out of the earth, and in saner times you might pity the farmer whose field it was. Amongst this rocky earth stood a farmhouse with faded white walls. Those green boys of Lincoln’s scuttled back to this farmhouse, some of them, panicked to the limit, trying to hide amongst the black back walls of a burned-out barn, others forming a line by the farmhouse back door, and others around a pump and a small shed in the farmyard.
By now Daniel Blalock and Lucius were out in front with a few screaming Texans. With those few they lived through a volley and scattered the boys near the farmhouse door and ran into the farm kitchen, almost as if the core of the house had to be taken and occupied.
Usaph and Wheat arrived at the side of the house in time to see the Yankees running off, and a man in a good grey suit, no doubt the farmer, stumbling after them, trying to rally them as if he was an officer. A Union fanner, this one. No Dunker. For Wheat’s mad Indian rush had brought them beyond the Dunker farms.
Usaph stood round in the farmyard with Wheat and Cate and Rufe and Gus, and everyone was panting away. ‘Did you see them, boys,’ Wheat groaned. ‘Did you see their poor childish faces?’ Usaph decided to try the pump, for his tinplate canteen was empty. He found the handle had been removed from the apparatus. He groaned and even wept for a few seconds, leaning against the Made in Pittsburgh metal, railing at the meanness of the farmer.
But before he had time to grieve at length over the loss of the pump handle, a regiment flying a Connecticut flag, tough boys, appeared out of the farmer’s lower meadow. They clustered behind a stone wall and fired. Lucius, at the farm window, was shot in the throat. He went to his knees, hawking, and Danny Blalock held his elbow. While he died not knowing he was dying, he thought, all right, this is war enough. Spring semester, I’m going back to Euripides.