The Black Flower Read online

  Praise for The Black Flower

  A New York Times Notable Book

  Winner of the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters

  Winner of the William Young Boyd Award from the Naval War College Office for Best Military Novel

  “I recommend it highly.” —Shelby Foote, author of the Civil War Trilogy

  “Bold … a deeply moral book … of startling originality. … Bahr succeeds in capturing the pointlessness of war.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “Impressive … [Bahr’s] convincing evocation of the private soldiers’ harrowing lot puts his work squarely—and not undeservedly—in [Stephen] Crane’s tradition.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Writing with eloquence and humanity, Howard Bahr casts a tale of war as powerful as any you’ll ever find.” —Southern Living

  “A poignant, haunting, and important novel.” —Nashville Tennessean

  “I finished it in one long draught, thinking as I read of Crane, Hemingway, Mailer, and Faulkner … but realizing at the end it was altogether original.” —Ernest B. Ferguson, author of Ashes of Glory: Richmond at War

  “A memorable story of war at its most emotional and painful … Bahr’s blend of historical fact with gut-wrenching emotion has produced a riveting novel of the Civil War, a frightening portrait of men and women caught in an awfulness beyond their control.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

  “Bahr makes an impressive debut with a haunting tale of a brief but bloody encounter on the road to Nashville.” —Kirkus Reviews

  THE BLACK FLOWER

  A Novel of the Civil War

  HOWARD BAHR

  For Dada, who taught me to listen.

  For Mama.

  For all of the boys.

  PART ONE

  THE BAND PLAYED

  “ANNIE LAURIE”

  This day baptized into the Family of Christ Bushrod Pegues Carter aged 11 mos. The 2nd issue of Thomas Joseph and Jane Pegues Carter of this Parish— “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”

  —Register of Holy Cross Parish

  Cumberland, Mississippi

  September 6, 1839

  J. Bishop, B.P. Carter, R.K. Cross and J. McMillan, Seniors, suspension of seven days for drinking, blacking their faces, building a fence across a Public Road, and acting riotously otherwise.

  —Faculty Minutes

  The University of Mississippi

  November 16, 1859

  And for bonny Annie Laurie,

  I’d Lay me down and die.

  —Old Song

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bushrod Carter dreamed of snow, of big, round flakes drifting like sycamore leaves from heaven. The snow settled over trees and fences, over artillery and the rumps of horses, over the men moving in column up the narrow road. A snowflake, light and dry as a lace doily, lit on the crown of Bushrod’s hat; when he made to brush it away, he found it was not snow at all but a hoe cake dripping with molasses. All the snowflakes were turning into hoe cakes the minute they hit the ground. The road and the field were covered in them, but nobody else seemed to notice. The boys went on marching as if nothing had happened.

  Bushrod broke ranks, clambered over a rail fence, and knelt in a drift of hoe cakes. He scooped up a handful and breathed deep of the smell of them. He was just about to bite into one when he noticed the wink of a lantern among the distant trees. Reluctantly, he dropped the hoe cake and moved toward the light. Suddenly, he was in the nave of the Church of the Holy Cross, the lantern now a sacristy candle gleaming redly by the altar. All was exactly as he had last seen it, only that had been in springtime and now a winter sun fell in wine-colored ribbons of light through the windows. Bushrod walked slowly up the nave, the broad pine boards of the floor creaking underfoot. He knelt at the altar rail. A priest in humble linen chasuble was consecrating the elements. Bushrod crossed himself and waited. When the priest turned at last, it was General Patrick Cleburne. “I am glad to see you, General,” said Bushrod.

  The Irishman regarded Bushrod with his dark eyes. He turned again, and Bushrod followed him across a broad wooden stage that rang hollow with their passage. There were fires burning, between which the darkness lay whole and impenetrable. The General passed into one of these dark spaces and Bushrod did not follow. Instead he sat down on a balustrade and waited. Presently, his cousin Remy appeared bearing a great ham on a silver platter. It was a beautiful ham glazed with molasses, the marrow in the round bone still bubbling with heat. Bushrod breathed deep of the smell of it.

  “Take, eat,” Remy said, and cut off a golden slab of the ham with a bowie knife and laid it in Bushrod’s upturned hands and he was about to bite into it when he awoke.

  “Well, dammit,” he said aloud, and the sound of his own voice startled him.

  He had gone to sleep standing up, leaning on his musket. Hunger gnawed at him, and he watched regretfully as the dream of hoe cakes and ham and molasses faded away. However, he was glad to see that it wasn’t really snowing—that was something, anyway. Like a fool, he had obeyed orders and left his blanket roll with the brigade trains down below Duck River; now he would have to steal another one from the Strangers who waited up ahead. There had been some bitter snow coming up from the Tennessee crossing, but the winter was young and fickle yet, and this November afternoon was such as old bird hunters love to dream on: cool and dry, the brittle grass and broomsage brown in the fields, shadows blue in the fence corners. The air was hazy with wood-smoke and the dust of a multitude’s passing. There was the smell of sycamore leaves.

  Bushrod rubbed his eyes and tried to remember what day it was. He counted backward toward the afternoon they crossed the long pontoon bridge over the Tennessee. He tried to picture every sunrise in his mind, but they all ran together in a swirl of snow and rain. There were ten, he thought—perhaps eleven—so it was either Tuesday or Wednesday. It didn’t matter in any case, he supposed.

  Then he remembered. Early last evening when they had formed line of battle, somebody remarked that it was too bad because he liked to keep his Tuesdays free. So it must be Wednesday now.

  Last night was worse than any coon hunt. They had stumbled around in the dark, running into trees and tripping over old cotton rows, trying to keep their alignment, trying to catch the Strangers when it was all they could do to keep up with themselves. At last, around midnight, the regiment had gone into a cold bivouac, sleeping on their arms, and way off in the night Bushrod had wakened to the sound of troops passing on the Nashville road. He figured it was the Strangers slipping past them in the dark, and he was right. The stars were still out when the First Sergeant came and prodded them awake. All this livelong day they had hurried north up the same Nashville road in the footsteps of the retreating enemy, and now they were in line of battle again on a broad plain with the hills to their backs and a little village in the curve of a river up ahead. They were in line of battle. …the realization came to Bushrod with a jolt, and the last rags of sleep blew away.

  He wished he had some coffee. He looked hopefully, but nobody was making any fires. That was a bad sign, he thought.

  On this November afternoon, Bushrod Carter was barely twenty-six, but his greasy hair and mustache were already shot with gray. The grime of the long campaign from Atlanta was etched in the lines of his face and in the cracked knuckles of his hands; crammed under his fingernails was a paste of black powder, bacon grease, and the soil of three Confederate states. Though he was a veteran of all the campaigns of the Army of Tennessee since Shiloh, the fortunes of war had left him still a private of the line, carrying a musket in the ranks of the regiment he had joined more than three years before. True, he had been a Corporal once on the march up into Kentucky, but he
had lost his stripes (symbolically, for he hadn’t sewn any on) in the confusion over a pitcher of buttermilk stolen from the officers’ mess. It was just as well with him, for he really possessed no military ambition. In fact, he was sure he no longer possessed ambition of any kind.

  He had never been wounded, never been very sick, never been kicked by any of the multitude of horses that always surrounded them (though he’d been stepped on twice), never broken a limb nor fallen from a wagon nor gotten hold of any whiskey he would call bad. All this singular good fortune he credited to the Saint Michael medal that dangled from his watch chain, a parting gift from Mister Denby Garrison, Rector of the Church of the Holy Cross. On the medal the archangel with drawn sword was in combat with a dragon; around the struggling figures were the words: St. Michael Protect Us in Battle.

  Bushrod wore a brown felt hat, misshapen by many rains, with a brass star pinned to the crown of it. He wore his gray roundabout jacket unbuttoned, but arranged so that the Masonic device sewn to the breast was clearly visible beneath his cartridge box strap. He wore checkered wool trousers stained with mud in gradations from the cuffs, and shoes on the Jefferson pattern purchased with Illinois state bank notes from a man in Florence, Alabama, just before they’d crossed the river. Bushrod was glad to be rid of the wrinkled, blood-speckled bills which, until they were translated into shoes, bore the animus of the Recently Departed Stranger from whose pants pockets he had taken them.

  Bushrod had taken—on loan, as he saw it—other things from the Strangers during his army career, and many of these he was wearing now. He had a Federal bull’s-eye canteen covered in dark blue wool, a Federal cap box on a Federal belt (though the buckle was his own: a brass oval with a star), a Federal tarred haversack with a good linen liner, and a Federal cartridge box still bearing the “U.S.” plate crammed with fifty rounds of .577 ball cartridge taken from a waylaid United States Quartermaster wagon just over the Duck River crossing. Back with the trains was his excellent Federal wool blanket rolled in a waterproof gum blanket, also Federal, neither of which he ever expected to see again.

  His own side—that is, the Confederate States of America, which existed for Bushrod only as a vague and distant, and rarely generous, entity—had provided him a first-rate Enfield rifle with blued barrel and a rich, oily walnut stock into which he had carved his initials. The blueing was nearly all rubbed off now, and the lands and grooves of the rifling so worn that he imagined the ball wobbled on its outbound trip, but he had carried the piece too long to want to give it up. Besides, he was not a sharpshooter; Bushrod preferred to leave his targets to chance. For this rifle the Confederate States had given Bushrod a bayonet (currently affixed), a bayonet frog and scabbard, and a nipple-protector on a brass chain which he’d thrown away long ago. Finally his government had sent him over the years a series of stylish gray roundabout jackets, on the Army of Tennessee pattern, which he thought were flattering to his rangy frame. His current jacket was stained, tattered at the cuffs, and comfortable. For these, and for all things, he was grateful.

  Bushrod also wore a light gray civilian waistcoat; in its pocket, at the other end of the chain from the Saint Michael’s medal, lay a gold watch he’d won for declamation as a senior at the University of Mississippi. The watch was thin and fragile and should not have lasted this long, but it ticked on faithfully, wheels turning, balance swinging, and no doubt the time it measured owned some meaning somewhere.

  Thus accoutred, Bushrod Carter stood in the melancholy sunlight, wishing for coffee and waiting for something to happen.

  When the regiment came into line that afternoon, they were given the command to rest almost at once. They did not stack arms, however, which was always a bad sign. Now most of the boys were sitting or lying in place on the ground so that it did not seem to be a line at all but a vast, untidy mob of lounging vagrants, some talking quietly, some playing cards, a few reading letters or writing them. Many lay with their hats over their eyes, wandering through restless dreams of their own. Bushrod, even tired as he was, did not feel like lying down. He stood with his musket between his feet, idly thumbing the socket ring of his bayonet, and looked at the sky.

  In the southwest, the sun was sinking lower and lower. Across the blue interval of the heavens, a quarter-moon was rising in the southeast. Moon and sun all at once, vaguely disturbing, portentous, maybe a bad sign though it could be a good one. Bushrod didn’t know. He only knew that, in the narrowing interval between that moment and darkness, something was bound to happen.

  Ordinarily, Bushrod tried not to think too much in the time before a battle. Long ago he had learned to close his mind to speculation, fixing his eyes on the crossed straps or blanket roll of the man to his front or, if he was in the front rank (as he was now), the ground at his feet. He never, never, never looked up at the enemy, not since the first charge on the sunken road at Shiloh when the sight of the bristling blue ranks and the waiting guns double-shotted with canister nearly froze his heart. When a fight was joined in earnest, Bushrod did not think at all. The roar of his own blood consumed all thought and drove him deep into the marrow dark, where he huddled in supplication while Another in his shape loaded and fired the musket, swung it at the heads of Strangers, and waded through the shambles. Only afterward—when the mortal spark, having survived once more, crept upward and looked timidly about—did Bushrod dare to think again. He would look at his hands or at some humble element of earth—a rock, a cloud, a blade of grass—and gradually all the scattered atoms of his being would draw together like particles of quicksilver into one Bushrod Carter again. At such times, he could remember almost nothing of what he had done in the battle. The remembering came later, like magic lantern slides, at unexpected times and places, but most often as he was about to drift into sleep. Then he would watch as scene after scene unfolded, with himself at the center of each, and whatever of terror and outrage and violence he’d missed before would return undiminished in fatal clarity and no effort of will would make it stop until it was played out to the end—Bushrod all the while telling himself That could not be me but knowing all the while that it was.

  So Bushrod went to great lengths not to think before a fight, knowing there would be plenty of time for that later. On this afternoon, however, he could not seem to keep from thinking, could no more stop thinking than he could check the movement of the sun and moon. He even began to think about this time tomorrow, something he rarely allowed himself at any time. He pictured himself walking out alone by the little river that curled around the village like a protecting arm. There, among the willows, he would sit in the cold twilight and smoke and write in his book. He imagined a kingfisher darting down the tunnel of barren trees. He saw the dimple and swirl of fish in the shallows. What was about to happen now would be all over with then. I wish it was this time tomorrow, he thought.

  Then he risked a look at the prospect ahead where the Strangers were waiting for him, and immediately wished he hadn’t. A line of trees marked the river, and there were the spires and rooftops of the town, all elements of a world to which he had no access at the moment. Instead, clearly and painfully visible, like new-turned furrows in a field, were the mysterious works of the enemy; these alone, in the prospect ahead, were of his life and of his comrades’ lives. Between Bushrod and those works was a good mile or more of treeless plain which he personally would have to cross to get at the Strangers, and he knew that the gunners over there had long since laid their pieces to sow every yard of it with shell and canister. Over there, too, were the long bayonetted Springfields soon to be levelled at him by men he did not know, with whom he had no personal quarrel, whose lives he could not imagine—but who would, if they could, send him straightway to join the long ranks of the Departed.

  An unwelcome, but not unfamiliar, thought arrived in Bushrod’s mind. If only those boys over there could get to know him for a while—if only they could learn what a charming, what a really extraordinary fellow he was—perhaps they would not be so ke
en to erase all the possibilities he represented. Then he thought how, among all the minions of the enemy, there was really only one who needed to know him—the one whose every living step since birth had been toward the moment when he would raise his musket or pull the lanyard of his gun or aim his pistol and drop death like a stone into the heart of Bushrod Carter. But which one was it? And even if he knew— For a moment, Bushrod stopped breathing. It was like being underwater, the green world only a circle of light too far above. How could they want to kill him? How could they dare? It was not fair that all his dreams (he had none at present, but no doubt some would appear at their appointed time) were at the mercy of a total stranger, a man to whom he had never been introduced but who, in an instant, could be wed to him so intimately and rob him of all that God Himself had promised—

  His breath came back in a long, ragged sob. He looked wildly about, every nerve vibrating against the air. He did not want to think about these things. He did not want to remember what it was like to walk across the open ground in good order under the flags—

  Look at you said a voice in his head, disapproving and cold, speaking from somewhere in the marrow dark. It was a voice Bushrod had heard many times before; he believed it belonged to that other Bushrod Carter with whom he swapped places now and then and who rarely saw things as he did. All a-tremble over things that ain’t happened yet, that might not happen atall. I won’t have this, won’t have it. Now, listen. Listen—

  Bushrod shut his eyes tight, and in the dark behind his eyes arose a vision: the battlefield, the tangled breastworks of the enemy floating closer and closer, what had been life’s endless prospect shrunken to a few yards of brittle grass. And the Departed! The Departed rising from the earth like blackbirds, by the hundreds, by the thousands, groaning and chattering, disappearing forever into the smoke—