The Black Flower Page 12

  The old man’s mouth moved in his beard. His eyes were yellow globes. “Yes, yes, all right!” the Professor said. He forced the man on his back, fumbled at the gritty entrails, tried to stuff them back. They slipped through his fingers like eels.

  “Impossible!” shouted the Professor into the old man’s face, but the old man burned him with his eyes and drew the Professor’s shirtfront into the knot of his hand and his lips moved and the Professor bent down to hear—

  Let darkness and the shadow of death stain it croaked the old man—

  “No!” cried the Professor.

  Let a cloud dwell upon it—

  The Professor grasped the hand that held him, it was cold like a wet stone and strong, he could not move it and the eyes held him even as the light died and the old man said Let the blackness. …let the blackness. …

  The Professor cried out again but there were no words now and the old man loosed his hand and reached up and touched him once on the forehead and died—

  The Professor watched the hand drop away. He rose to his knees, watching, the smoke and the hurricane all around him but no matter for the old man’s eyes were on him and he was at peace. He took the old man’s hand again, folded it in his own, pressed it to his own breast and with it made the sign, and Calvin Jones was gone. Gone forever now, and no one to regret, no one to say goodbye. Gone without a trace, without even a feather drifting earthward through the smoke.

  The party of musicians, led by the Archbishop of Canterbury, at a little after two o’clock on the morning of December first, followed the scouts all the way to the Federal line. The works were abandoned, the enemy was gone. Then began the business of the night.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Simon Rope was having a big time, even though he had lost one of his ears. Something—he never knew what—had come along and sliced it off and now it burned like fire, all because he’d been too eager to get among the spoils. Well, he’d been cut a good deal worse in his time, and he wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Simon Rope had not participated in the great Battle of Franklin. He managed to drop out of the regimental column just before they reached the gap in the hills where the Columbia Pike cut through. Lying by the roadside, feigning exhaustion, he edged into the brush and waited until the army had passed and was arraying itself on the plain beyond. Then he moved, with great stealth and cunning, up through the woods and behind the place where General Hood had established his headquarters. He actually saw Hood and his officers through the trees and thought how easy it would be to shoot the General in the head right then and wondered what it would be like to shoot a general—but he had left his musket behind, and anyway there were too many soldiers around, so General Hood lived to fight another day.

  Simon Rope traveled a long way through the brush until he found a place where no troops were ever likely to be; there he settled down and waited for something to happen.

  In time, from his hiding place, he could see the long lines moving forward to the attack. He was not impressed by the spectacle; he watched it as a racoon or a weasel might, simply noting the fact without drawing any conclusions or feeling any connection to what was going on below.

  He waited a long time. He relieved himself in the bushes and noted with disgust that his leavenings were meager and hard—he would get something to eat by and by, down there where the village was. He sat on a log and whittled with his knife and listened to the sound of the fight. He thought about many things, and among them was Jack Bishop.

  In all the months since the Kenesaw line, Simon Rope had enjoyed thinking about Bishop and how he would die. Simon Rope made pictures in his mind of how he would do it, where he would make every cut, what he would talk about while he was skinning the son of a bitch alive. He had many plans, but all of them required more privacy than army life had provided so far. He had watched, been patient, been ready to take advantage of the least opportunity, all for nothing. Of course, it would have been simple to shoot the man in the middle of a fight, but that wouldn’t answer. For one thing, Simon Rope had avoided every fight the regiment had been in since he’d joined it—a considerable task that took all his energy. For another thing, Simon Rope wanted to take his time with Bishop. He wanted the bastard to know who killed him and to have plenty of time to think about it while it was happening. But now it was too late. Bishop was going into a fight down there from which he was unlikely to return, and Simon Rope had missed his chance.

  But then again, maybe Bishop would only be wounded. Simon Rope was cheered by the thought of Bishop lying down there in the dark, just waiting for Luck and Providence to bring them together again. Unlikely, but it was something to think about.

  So Simon Rope waited, and after dark, when he believed the battle to be dying down, he began the long trek across the plain below. Only he hadn’t been patient enough. He suddenly found himself in the middle of a night action on the Confederate left, and it was here that something came humming out of the dark and sliced off his ear.

  But now the battle was over for good. There was no more shooting, the field was chock full of dead and helpless wounded, and Simon Rope was having a big time. He found supper in an abandoned cabin: a pot of peas in the ashes of a cold fire, which he ate with his hands. There was bacon grease, too, for his ear. Then he went foraging, and after a few hours the watches and rings and the thick wad of greenbacks he’d collected made a gratifying weight in his haversack. It was simply astonishing what these yahoos carried—he’d even found a diamond stickpin on the body of a Confederate officer. That was funny: the officer had no head, but he had a diamond stickpin. Simon Rope thought if he could only find a lantern—but no, that was too dicey. He had learned not to be greedy.

  He was moving to the right, taking his time, avoiding the little knots of living men who made their way onto the field. When he could not avoid them, he simply became one of them—just another poor soldier boy out looking for his pards. Once he even helped pull some bodies out of a rifle-pit; they were mostly Yankees, and it was on one of them that he found the greenbacks.

  As he went along, he kept his eyes peeled for Bishop—and for Bushrod Carter and the Captain and the First Sergeant and the Sergeant-Major and a few others. He had plans for them all. He didn’t realty expect to find them—he had no idea where the regiment had gone in—but he kept hoping anyway.

  A little after two o’clock in the morning, long after moon-set, Simon Rope was working around a house on the edge of town, a handsome little place in a cluster of outbuildings. The Yankees had breastworks here, and the piles of dead in the yard and in the trench beat anything Simon Rope had ever seen. He didn’t want to get too close to the house, so he was working the fringes of the yard when someone spoke to him out of the dark.

  “Oh, please—help me, won’t you?”

  “Sure,” said Simon Rope. He moved toward the voice, taking his time, being careful.

  “Here—over here.”

  He found the soldier lying in a tangle of dead men. In the starlight, Simon Rope judged him to be not much above fourteen years, just a pup. Both his legs were gone at the knees. “What’s the matter?” said Simon Rope.

  The boy looked at him with wide, grateful eyes. “Friend,” he said. “I knowed somebody’d find me, thank God.”

  “Sure, sure,” said Simon Rope, squatting by the boy. “What’s your trouble?”

  “Christ, don’t you see? I am all blowed to pieces! Look at me!”

  “Well, you’re a mess all right,” said Simon Rope.

  The boy struggled to rise; Simon Rope watched him until he fell back, panting. The boy rolled his eyes. “I can’t get up, Lord, I don’t know what. …what to do. Listen, am I gone die, you think? You could take me back to the surgeons, you could—”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said Simon Rope. “What’ll you give me if I do?”

  The expression on the boy’s face made Simon Rope grin. “Give you?” said the boy. “Well, I. …I ain’t got anything to give you. I
got a pocketknife—I got some money, five dollars, I—”

  “Naw,” said Simon Rope. “You’ll jes have to go on and die, I guess.”

  “Don’t tell me that!” cried the boy. He clutched at the front of Simon Rope’s shirt and Simon Rope knocked his hand away and rose to his feet.

  “Shit, boy, you got your goddamn legs blowed off, both of em. You gone die no matter what. Now, lemme see that ’ere haversack.”

  The boy’s haversack lay under his body. Simon Rope bent and pulled it out and cut the strap with his knife. Then he held the knife up so the boy could see it. “You fixin to die all right, and I’m gone help you along in jes a minute. You see this knife? You think about it while I look in here.”

  The boy whimpered, his eyes were glassy and round in the starlight. Simon Rope talked to him while he examined the haversack. “You know, I seen lots of em cross over, and never a one of em could believe it. You ever think you was gone die? Naw, ’course you didn’t. And scared? Oh, they was all scared. I bet you scared, ain’t you? Sure you are. What you reckon it’s like over there? Dark, I bet, and cold. Man, I’d be scared too.” He threw the haversack away in disgust. “Well, you wasn’t lyin—there ain’t nothin in there worth my trouble. Now, then.”

  He squatted on his haunches again, just by the boy’s head. “You get away from me,” whispered the boy.

  “Oh, I’ll go directly,” said Simon Rope. He looked around, waved the knife at the darkness. “You know, it’s funny to think about, ain’t it?—how things go right on when you’re dead. Now, jes think—it’ll be mornin pretty soon, somewhere your mama’s gone be gettin up, prob’ly make some biscuits, fry up some ham, set the table—goddamn, it’d be good to be there, wouldn’t it? Only you ain’t. You lyin out here in the dark with your legs blowed off and your mama don’t even know it. Hell, jes about the time she’s gettin up, they’ll be throwin you in a ditch yonder—won’t nobody even know your name—”

  “No! It’s. …it’s. …”

  “What?” said Simon Rope. “Speak up, boy, you ain’t got but a minute.”

  The boy coughed, spit blood, tried to rise again. “It’s Dan’l. …my name—”

  “Well, Dan’l,” said Simon Rope, “I’d like to stay and hold your hand, but I got to be movin along. ’Fore I do, though, I’m gone kill you with this knife.”

  “You ain’t! Say you—”

  “Sure I am,” said Simon Rope, and wrapped his hand in the boy’s hair and pulled his head back and drew the knife with one quick motion across the throat that seemed too white and slender even for a boy’s. …

  The party of musicians found their comrades, five in all, spread out along the line of the advance. They gathered them together and laid them out in a row, heels together, hands crossed on their breasts. Each held in his hands a page torn out of a part-book; on the page was written the man’s name so the burial detail would know what name to put on the shingle, if there was a shingle. When everything was arranged, the living bent their heads for a moment while the Archbishop prayed quietly, then they shuffled off a little way and sat upon the cold ground. Seven bandsmen, sitting in a circle around a bull’s-eye lantern, in the groaning night.

  “Well, I reckon that does it,” said the cornetist at last. He looked around at the others, who were all staring at the lantern.

  “I reckon it does, too,” said a short, sallow man who once played the piccolo. “I reckon it does, by God.”

  “I reckon we have done our part,” said the cornetist. “Who’s to say we can’t slip off? They’s bound to be a corn crib or somethin we can hold up in. I’m give out.”

  “Me, too,” said the piccolo player.

  The others said nothing. They raised their faces and looked at the cornetist. Then they looked at the Archbishop. “Yes,” said the Archbishop. “We are all tired.”

  The cornetist stood up and stretched himself. “I b’lieve I’ll hunt a hole. Who’s with me?”

  “You know I am, Jim,” said the piccolo player.

  “I know you are, Delmar,” said the cornetist.

  The Archbishop stood up then, his face was lost in the dark outside the lantern light. “You all go on,” he said. “I think I will stay a little while.” Then he turned and moved away. They could hear him walking through the grass.

  The others sat a moment longer, not looking at one another. “Aw, well, shit,” one of them said at last, and rose, and walked off in the direction the Archbishop had gone. One by one the others followed, gathering up the bloody litters, taking the lantern with them. The cornetist and the piccolo player were left in the dark.

  “Well, the damn fools,” said the piccolo player. “C’mon, Jim, lets us go”

  The cornetist rubbed his eyes and looked off into the dark. He sighed. “No, I guess not,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Come along, Delmar,” said the cornetist. “Be a man for once.” The cornetist moved away, following the Archbishop. The other man stood astonished, suddenly alone in the darkness. Then, with a curse, he, too, followed in the way.

  The musicians, together again, moved in the dim circle of the lantern. Their intermittent shadows were flung across the faces of dead men, they stumbled and tripped over the soft, yielding bodies under their feet. They tried not to step on faces, but sometimes they did. Finally, they came to the ditch along the enemy’s works at the cotton gin, and here they stopped.

  Others were there before them, and others were coming up from behind. With torches and lanterns they came, some of them talking quietly, some laughing even—but at the ditch they all stopped, and the talking and the laughter stopped, and they stood quietly and wished they had not come at all.

  They were young men, most of them, but veterans of a long, vicious war; they were strong, dangerous men, cynical about death, even their own, which they had long ago accepted as inevitable. They had seen other battlefields, other helpless dead, and thought that nothing could ever surprise or grieve or frighten them again. Even so, they found nothing in all their bitter days to prepare them for the scene that confronted them now. They stood in silence, listening to their own heartbeats, understanding all at once that, whatever their experience, they had not exhausted the possibilities for horror.

  The empty breastworks, stretching left and right before the shadowy bulk of the gin house, were a tangle of torn earth, displaced headlogs, sharpened stakes; they were strewn with equipment, with broken muskets, gun rammers, hand spikes, jackets, overcoats, hats and caps, bits of anonymous cloth and paper, tin cups, sardine tins—the ground was white with cotton lint and cartridge paper save at the embrasures where the guns had been: there the earth was scorched and blackened by the muzzle blasts. It was pitch dark behind the breastworks, a frightening dark as if some unknown and unimaginable enemy lurked there, and the silent gin house loomed against the stars.

  But there was no enemy. The works belonged only to the dead, and neither the dead nor the victorious living had any use for them now.

  In the starlight, and in the torchlight as far as it carried, the dead possessed the violated earth. They were draped all over the parapet, festooned in the osage orange hedges, blown back from the embrasures in meaty fragments. In the ditch before the works they lay in geologic strata of regiments and brigades, piled six and eight and ten deep: an inextricable mass of gray and brown, a tangle of accoutrements and muskets, a blur of faces and claw-like hands. Some were almost naked, torn to shreds by canister and rifle fire, the clothes ripped from their bodies; others lay whole and peaceful, dreaming among their comrades. Here and there, dead men who’d had no room to fall stood upright in the pile, still holding their rifles, their faces still set toward the memory of a vanished foe.

  Some of the dead were busy. They twitched and jerked from the violence of their passing, they heaved stubbornly as still-living men tried to push up from underneath. The surface layer of wounded writhed and groaned and implored; the whole pile crawled with movement. Steam rose from the fragment
s, from open skulls and blue piles of entrails. The smell hung close to the ground in the damp night.

  There were too many. Too many to believe.

  “Jesus Christ,” whispered the cornetist.

  Yes, thought the Archbishop. Jesus Christ.

  The Archbishop knelt by the clotted ditch. He knelt as low as he could, until his forehead pressed against the earth. He thought he should pray, but the words would not come. Then it occurred to him that perhaps he was not supposed to pray. Yes, he thought—sometimes I am just supposed to listen.

  So the Archbishop listened, and overhead the sky was full of stars that spread in a vast, luminous cloud from horizon to horizon. Meanwhile the earth turned on its ancient axis, half light and half dark, always morning and evening somewhere. The morning spread across the world’s face; it was out there now, making its way toward them, while the night fell westward with the stars. They, too, were moving, these mortals. They moved in a dream of their own making, whether toward the night or morning the Archbishop could not say—he only knew that he was moving with them. He listened, and in a little while the words came that he needed, and he sent them up toward the infinite dark that lay between the stars: Oh God, Father of all memories, forgive us this victory if You can—

  The Archbishop arose and stood unsteadily on the edge of the ditch, an old man dizzy in starlight. The cornetist took his arm. “Here, now—you all right?”

  “Oh, yes,” the Archbishop said. “It’s been a long night, is all.”

  Presently some officers arrived and set them all to work. They found muskets with fixed bayonets and, using the trigger guards of other muskets, bent the bayonets into hooks; with these they began to drag the bodies from the ditch. They worked blindly, without feeling or thought. They built fires of boards and headlogs and broken ammunition boxes; the fires gleamed in their eyes and in the eyes of the dead. The smoke swirled around them.