I smoked the pipe again and watched the whorls and swirls of smoke come up out of my mouth and drift upwards into the black ether of the night now pinpricked by a few cold stars. I felt like taking the man’s knife and cutting through my clothes to open my skin and chest until my heart was laid bare and could beat freely out into the void. “It makes a great deal of difference to me,” I revealed.
The man took the pipe from me and held the match to the pipe bowl again and inhaled. “Well, more’s the fool,” he said in a puff of smoke. “Given time and provided death don’t find ye, ye’ll learn there’s no difference betwixt the sides and the highest pleasure them ones, gray or blue,” he pointed, “have are one and the same.” I followed the finger to a group of horsemen emerging out of the forest fire as they drifted towards us in long elongations of movement, like demons from a flame.
“Cavalry?” I asked vaguely. There was a boundless lassitude to my limbs. It seemed like I were talking to the heavens above.
“No, dammit,” said the pipe smoker. “Generals. They’re kith and kin no matter which side they fight. I swain all they want is death. That’s the only reason for them. It’s the only way they get filled up, on blood, on death.”
“Fulfillment?” I muttered. “No... No...”
But then suddenly the pounding of hooves on the ground was a loud and steady drumming and I heard the man beside me curse and scuttle away on all fours like a rat out into the darkness and then Jackson’s face and those of his staff peered down on me from atop their horses and I realized from my cloud who I was facing and I fell off and found myself on top of a pile of dead bodies with their purses lain carelessly strewn about.
The General spoke. “How odd,” he said.
“Looks like we done caught ourselves a grave robber. General,” said a colonel with a handlebar mustache. His fine hand tweaked the end of one whisker.
“Now, this is a first,” said the General. He looked genuinely perplexed. “I must say we can’t have any of that going on in this army. Does horrid things for discipline. I saw the effects myself down in Mexico. Have him shot tomorrow,” he ordered, and then in an afterthought, “In front of the men. Where there’s lice, there’s filth. Be so kind to tie his hands and bring him along. Major.”
I grunted some sort of protest. My head needed to clear.
“Wail,” Jackson said. He raised a gloved hand. “Speak, my good man.”
I wanted to beg for mercy, redress, a board of inquiry. I wanted to scream: For you! It is for you I fight! Two full long years! Stonewall! South! South!
Instead, I came out with. “I am an officer in the Confederate States Army.”
“Ah,” Jackson said. “A noose then. Someone make a note of it. Come along, gentlemen.”
We rode back through the trees, myself bound and gagged and bouncing in the saddle behind the Major who looked as young as I was. There was nothing but the sound of horses blowing hard and the nervous sweat of their riders was a musk blended with the smell of honeysuckle newly bloomed in the month of May. The moon ran behind a cloud and even these men lost their way and we rode up and down the same path twice trying to find the single trail back into our lines. Finally, Jackson gave a whispered order and we rode back in a group in a generally Southern direction. The moon returned in a burst of silver light and right when it did one of the pickets spotted our movement, yelled a warning and loosed a single shot which hit the man riding in front of me. He stiffened, slumped and fell off the horse as other pickets joined in and a sporadic fusillade passed through our party. I twisted my bonds and managed to get a hand free and I heard the Colonel with the mustaches yell out. “Cease your fire! You’re firing into your own men!”
I turned and looked and saw Jackson was hit high in the arm but alive and looking directly into my eyes with his blue ones as I tore the gag out of my mouth and yelled, “Who said that? That’s a damn lie! Pour it into them, boys!”
I leapt from the horse and rolled as volleys crashed out from all sides. Horses screamed and men toppled from their saddles to the forest floor. I looked and saw pickets and officers half dressed and in disarray hurrying from out of the camps. I lay down on my back. “Oh, Jesus, I think we just shot the General,” I heard someone say. “He ain’t moving,” said another. Soon enough, solicitous hands reached for me. The nervous face of an orderly peered at my wound in the moonlight.
“How is he?” I asked. “How is the General?”
“Hush, son, shh...” he said and he stroked my hair. “The General’s fine... Stretcher bearer?” he said.
I watched as the General was taken down from his horse and laid on the ground beside me. There were two bullets in him and his face looked wan but the eyes still burned incisively. “Across the river...” he was saying to no one in particular.
“Is there your fulfillment, General?” I whispered to him.
He nodded from across the way and then was carried from me on a litter of blankets. I saw tears in the eyes of some of the pickets. Others looked on with morbid shock. I knew none of them would ever come to know the mark I had made on time, nor the knowledge I had received. I was carried away from them and left them there in their shame and anger, to fight and die or perhaps live, to decay or marry and breed.
It was not much more than a month later that Gettysburg came but I was not there, for midway through the march north I left and didn’t stop till I came upon my first Yankees, a troop of home guard cavalry clopping sedately down the Hagerstown Turnpike. Beneath their bemused stares, I got down on my knees in the muddy country road and kissed the flag I’d come to hate and forswore allegiance to a country to which I no longer belonged. This did not make a difference to them. They threw me into Elmira prison anyway, two days after Lee got beat in the blossoming fields and orchards of Pennsylvania.
I didn’t stay long. They needed volunteers to guard the West where the savages had begun to run amok and I wrote my name down for Indian fighting the day I got there. They took a whole bunch of us out West to the Dakotas and Wyoming. Most of us are former Confederates, now in blue but with new enemies to face. Hard-bitten, we hate the Sioux and Cheyenne with the same vituperative loathing we reserve for the fighting back East. It impedes the bread and bullets and our rosters are never full from the battles outside Atlanta, Petersburg. Not to boast, but despite these short supplies, we’re good at what we do and we free up more land for the settlers and their metal plows every day. The newspapers in the East have taken to calling us “Galvanized Yankees” and report our deeds as one would the works of a sinner reformed.
I don’t know about the Yankee part but I do know I’m galvanized. I have never commanded finer troops with such alacrity and dispatch, a beautiful synchrony of mind and body, like a well-calibrated machine.
It is autumn now in the West and every night we watch the harvest moon rise full and blood red over the Dakota foothills. The savages call this a good omen, a good season to set out for hunting before the winter cold. We agree and when we attack their villages in the frigid early morning hours, we find there is nothing but women and children in the camps, a few old men whose feeble resistance we brush aside. Then we commence the slaughter with a carnal efficiency while a few of the boys use the shots and screams as a distraction to kill the penned ponies and add to the general carnage and rape going on about. Afterwards we burn the shelters and warm by their flames as the sun crests over the hills and we watch light come to a land where the horizons stretch on endless, as do the possibilities. The other day I read in a newspaper that Sherman and Sheridan were doing much of the same to the South, my hometown in particular being mentioned as “nothing but a cinder.” I felt as much for it and its inhabitants as I did for the sack of Troy, which is to say nothing.