Goodman Harvey was there, in among the rest, watching them roll by. He blushed when he saw me and tipped his hat. I’d not seen him since he’d stolen me from New Orleans. My change in feeling toward the R— had done nothing, I found, to lessen the violence I felt toward that canker of a man. I walked toward him through the crowd, meaning to push him head-first off the bluff. Instead I found myself asking him politely about the ships.
“What are they, Mr. Harvey?”
“Pook’th Turtleth, mith,” he said. “Union Navy.”
I said nothing. The R— might cheer each defeat as loudly as each victory, but my heart quaked to watch that slow parade.
God have mercy on the river, I thought.
After that the war became a far-away thing again. I thought of it as I might of a disaster in a foreign place. The island, after all, was a kingdom to itself. What are the United States to me? I thought. The war kept 37 as free and as safe as the chap in my belly kept me.
I knew that time and the babe would change me, and they did. But not the way that I or the R— or even Virgil Ball had reckoned. A different way altogether. We were all of us quite surprised.
One morning in May I found Virgil sunning himself on the Panama’s stoop. I’d come down to the bar for a glass of birch-beer and found him outside the door, clutching his tattered felt cap like a pan-handler’s plate. I saw at once that he was not in his proper mind. His mouth moved as if he was chewing on a piece of fat. He stood without a word and led me up to my room, wincing when the latch shut behind us. It was clear from his look that the old fear was on him.
“I want to tell you where I’ve been,” he said.
“Where?”
He stood carefully in the middle of the room, looking nervously about him and pawing at his cap.
His mouth opened.
“Well?”
“Shiloh,” he said. His voice caught on the — oh.
I could see he expected the name alone to do his work for him. I’d heard of course about the battle there, from the R— and sundry others. I’d heard the fighting had lasted two days. I’d heard a goodly number had been killed.
“What’s Shiloh to me, Virgil Ball?” I said.
His head tipped back, as though his body was tired of carrying it, and the story hissed out of his mouth-corner like a jet of steam.
Shiloh
MORELLE SENT ME OUT TO KILL BEAUREGARD, Virgil says. He sent me and I went.
It was the end of 1861. Beauregard had become a burden to him, now that the war was under-way, just as I had become a burden. No doubt he’d have an equally burdensome citizen put a bullet in me at his convenience. I had no doubt of this, but I went just the same. Partly because of Clementine, partly out of habit—; but also because there was no life for me outside the Trade, no purpose, no safety. I’d forgotten this briefly, and it had caused me pain. I was never to forget again.
For sixteen weeks I stalked Beauregard through the hill-country of Kentucky and Tennessee, sometimes trailing him at a distance, sometimes mixing openly with his men. He was a full general now, snake-oiled and brocaded, and from morning till night he was surrounded by a gang of ragged, scrofulous thugs that proved to be his cadre of underofficers. I had no trouble moving about his camp—: I’d brought tobacco and soap and a bottle of laudanum with me, and found a welcome at every camp-fire I called at. There were so many hangers-on— refugees and peddlers and profiteers and whores — that no-one looked at me too closely. My kind had long since grown as familiar to them as chiggers.
Getting close enough to Beauregard to shoot him, however, was a different cut of meat. The good general, I soon discovered, was an accomplished coward. Even during the most fantastic skirmishes he kept himself out of harm’s way, if not out of sight completely—; a clutch of his most redoubtable aides-de-camp hovered about him at all times, enclosing him like a tent, to camouflage his dislike of cannonfire. I was a middling shot at best, and I didn’t fancy suicide. It would take a full-scale battle, I realized, and not a little luck, for me to catch my general unguarded.
By the end of March the wait had become intolerable. I’d been scoring the days into the soles of my boots—; by my reckoning Clem’s babe had been born not long after I left 37. It would be four months old now, perhaps a little more. I knew neither its sex nor its age nor whether it had survived its birth. The child was the only strand connecting me to Clem, or for that matter to the world. My nights grew steadily more difficult, my days too agonized to bear. With each passing day Beauregard seemed farther away than ever.
A chance was to be offered me, however. On the fifth of April — a wet, cloud-blanched Friday — word came down the line of a new offensive. Beauregard’s army had spent the past two days and nights hauling itself into place alongside General Johnston’s above the town of Corinth, Mississippi—; the plan was to attack at first light. It was rumored that the Union Army, led by that drunken melancholic, Grant, was hatching attack schemes of its own, and had been joined just that night by a large force under General Buell—; Johnston, however, would not be turned aside.
“Old Johnnie said he’d fight them if they was a million!” a corporal I’d gotten friendly with grumbled between spoonfuls of laudanum. “Even Little Napoleon”—as Beauregard was known to the rank-andfile—“couldn’t talk him out of it, the bastard!”
I muttered a heartfelt thanks to Lady Fortune, took a spoonful myself in celebration, and spent the next hour cleaning my revolver.
With the earliest streaks of day-light the order came to move into position. I scrambled forward with the rear line as had become my custom, but the banter and bravado I’d grown accustomed to was scarce. Word had spread that this was to be no ordinary skirmish. The men about me checked their rifles and bayonet-mounts feverishly, barely speaking to one another, discharging powder to test for dampness even though the officers had forbidden it on pain of death. No-one knew how many men were entrenched behind the clap-board church at Shiloh—; the infantry moved fitfully, at times surging forward, at times clumped together like livestock in a pen.
When we came to the forest’s edge, however, a cry went up such as I’d never heard before, bright and terrible and heedless, and the men dashed forward with such fatal eagerness that in the space of a breath I was left to myself. There were sounds of rifle-fire close by, and the screams of Beauregard’s men as they hurtled down the slope—; but the rustling of leaves under-foot, the sound of my breath, and the wind in the crowns of the trees seemed infinitely louder. I could hear the scraping of my trouser-legs against one another, and the squeaking of my boots, which were very slightly damp—; the other sounds — the sounds of the battle before me — were no louder than my thoughts.
I began to make out flashes of gun-powder now, to hear the report of rifles and the queer, repetitive shrieking of the wounded—; but my mind grew less convinced with every step I took. It seemed that I was walking in place, like a soldier on parade, and that the colors and noises were billowing toward me, growing duller and quieter with each passing moment. When at last the forest parted and I came out into the open, the battle was nowhere to be seen. There was only the sky, the grass, and a vision of the child that Clem had borne me, hanging on the horizon like a moon.