The Black Flower Read online

  No, you don’t the voice commanded. Listen! So Bushrod set his heart against the vision and listened. What he heard was the murmur of living men, his comrades, and beyond that the sullen utterance of the great army spread around him, that lay under the press of something even greater still. The dark necessity, somebody had called it. That was Hawthorne said the voice. Remember what he said. The black flower. Let the black flower blossom as it may—

  Slowly, for the second time that afternoon, Bushrod Carter began to awaken. It was as if he had not awakened at all until just now. He passed little by little out of the shadow and his breathing settled into the regular, unconscious rhythm of life. All right, he thought. All right, I can stand it. And he remembered at last the truth he’d had to remind himself of time and again over the years: he was a soldier after all. He was an old soldier and he could stand anything, even the certainty that something was about to happen to him that had not happened before.

  He touched the medal on his watch chain. “Protect us in war and tumults,” he said into the gathering dark, “and support us in the day of battle.”

  “You look like you swallowed a eel,” said a living voice beside him. Bushrod opened his eyes and looked into the gaunted, bestubbled face of his friend Jack Bishop, who himself had just risen from sleep and was brushing the grass from the front of his jacket. The pale autumn sky gleamed in Bishop’s spectacles; behind them, the eyes were red and listless. Bishop uncorked his canteen and took a long swallow. “Ah, me,” he said, “I am gettin too old for this business.” He stoppered the tin drum, picked up his rifle, and ran the tip of his finger around the inside of the muzzle.

  He inspected the finger critically, then wiped it on his pants. “What’s the matter with you anyhow?” he asked.

  Bushrod hesitated before replying. In the interlude before a battle, when the imponderables of life and death teetered in delicate balance, a man had to be careful about what he revealed of himself. It was part of the complex, unspoken old-soldier’s code, a rubric a man could learn only by violating it, as every man did who was new at the trade. Bushrod had learned it long ago, as Jack Bishop himself had learned it, and all the boys who had come this far with them. So when Bushrod spoke at last, he said only, “Oh, nothin atall. I reckon I was wishin it was this time tomorrow.”

  Bishop laughed. “Me, too,” he said. Then, as the code allowed, Bishop opened the way for further discussion. “You know,” he said, “I am not the least bit comfortable with the way this affair is shapin up. What you reckon that old peg-leg son of a bitch has in his head to commence this thing so late in the day?”

  The reference was to their commander, General John Bell Hood, who’d lost his leg at Chickamauga. Hood was an old Indian fighter and apparently thought he could fight the Strangers in the same way. Bishop, who studied generals as he might some species of exotic bird, despised the man, and always referred to him as a peg-leg son of a bitch.

  “No tellin,” said Bushrod. “No doubt he knows what’s best.”

  “Shit,” said Jack Bishop, and spat.

  Bushrod had known Jack Bishop for all their twenty-six years, yet sometimes wondered if he knew the man at all. Long ago, Bushrod had accepted the fact that his friend was insane, though it was only after the winter battle at Murfreesboro—called Stones River by some—that Bushrod knew it once and for all.

  The night of a big battle was always bad, but Stones River remained in Bushrod’s memory as one of the worst. In the freezing rain of that awful night, for reasons never adequately clear, Jack Bishop had divested himself of everything but his spectacles and his hat. In the bulk of his uniform and accoutrements, Bishop looked like every other private of the line, but Bishop naked was so scrawny as to invite attention even in that pinched and rawboned army. Naked, Bishop prowled the line at Stones River, scaring the pickets and leaving a trail of incoherent reports still current in the folklore of the army. Finally he materialized out of the frigid dark at a little fire where Colonel Ike Stone and his staff (in defiance of the order forbidding fires) were trying to boil some coffee. Colonel Stone was Bishop’s godfather.

  “Jerusalem!” cried Colonel Stone when the apparition appeared at his fire. The Colonel and five staff officers and a mounted orderly reached for their pistols.

  “Aw, Uncle Ike,” said Jack Bishop. “I am only out for a stroll.”

  “Goddammit,” said Colonel Stone. “Mister Clark, fetch a blanket, will you? Goddammit, he used to be such a good boy.”

  Now almost two years later Colonel Stone was buried and at rest, and Jack Bishop stood twisting his thin, grimy hands around the muzzle of his rifle. He, too, was looking toward the village and the long, empty plain before it.

  “This is all folly,” Bishop went on, “and I for one am inclined to forego the whole thing. See those trees yonder?” He swept his arm toward the river. “They will make this whole end of the line bunch up toward the center, and it’ll be a fine day for hog killin, won’t it Bushrod, old pard?”

  Bushrod knew it would happen just as Bishop said. Somewhere out there they would have to wheel under fire, and the whole line would be caught in enfilade. He had seen it happen before on divers fields, to them and the Strangers both, and it occurred to him, as it often had, that if he, Bushrod Carter, a humble private of the line, could predict such a thing. … “You would think the General could see it, too,” he said, completing the thought. “I mean, him bein a General and all. Maybe he is just tryin to get em to run again.”

  “Hah!” Bishop snorted. “The gallant Hood is mad because they stole a march on him last night and made him look the fool. Now he’s caught em, he ain’t about to let em get away. Don’t tell me!”

  “Nevertheless,” said Bushrod.

  “Well,” Bishop said, “you can ‘nevertheless’ all you want to, but it don’t take Napoleon to see we fixin to get our ass in a fight.”

  “Nevertheless,” said Bushrod stubbornly. He looked back toward the hills whence they had come, as if he might find proof there of a guiding hand, wise and benevolent. But there were only the barren trees, deep in the shadow now, rising gently toward the sky. The sight troubled him.

  “Well, anyway,” Bushrod said, “the whole army must be up. Just look out yonder.” He indicated with his hand the great tattered host spread out upon the plain.

  “Yes, indeedy,” said Bishop. “That’s a real comfort. Say, you got any more of that good tobacco?”

  The two friends filled their pipes from Bushrod’s poke, and Bishop produced a box of Lucifer matches made in Cincinnati, Ohio. They smoked in silence, contemplating the ground before them.

  They were not cowardly, nor weak, nor faint of heart. Any who had been these things had long since given up, or their bones lay bleaching in the woods and shallow graves along the road behind. Bushrod knew that when the order came, he and Jack would step out smartly with the rest and follow the colors into the great Mystery awaiting them in the twilight.

  He knew just as surely they would run like rabbits if they thought it meet.

  For they had come a long way, as memory measures such things, from the sunlit fields of their youth, and they no longer had any illusions about themselves. Valor or cowardice, glory or shame: they heard the generals offer these as paths a man might actually choose—when in fact, at this late hour, they were all of a piece, and nobody but generals and newspaper correspondents gave any weight to them at all.

  In his haversack, Bushrod carried a little clothbound book—a commonplace book, they called it then—where for all his soldiering he had put down things the boys had said, and things he had out of books, and thoughts that came to him in the quiet watches when the mystery of the world possessed him. On the flyleaf, written by candlelight one vanished evening, was the single line:

  Act well your part; there all the honor lies.

  When he’d copied it from a newspaper, Bushrod thought he remembered that it was from Hamlet. When he learned it was Alexander Pope, it made no difference, fo
r Bushrod loved young Hamlet and thought he should have said it even if he didn’t. It was Hamlet anyway, not Pope with his hobby-horse couplets, who spoke over the cloudy reaches of time to the last soldiers of the Army of Tennessee. Hamlet might have stood for them all, Bushrod thought: exiled from peace, muttered at by ghosts, melancholy, driven by his own inner voices toward a moment from which there could be no turning. Hamlet played it out the best way he could, and Bushrod supposed they would also, and in the end that was all that mattered. Bushrod smiled to himself. Act well your parts, my lads, he thought—and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

  Thus it was that Bushrod Carter could look away toward the distant trees and feel no less a man for being afraid.

  Throughout the cluttered sprawl of infantry, men were beginning to rise stiffly to their feet as if some unseen herald had passed among them. Talk was growing thin, and there was little laughter. Some were already absorbed in the arrangement of their clothing, tugging at crotches and galluses, buttoning and unbuttoning and rebuttoning their short gray jackets. After this came the labored drawing-on of accoutrements, accompanied by the clatter of tin cups and boilers and canteens and bayonets and frying pans hung on blanket rolls that had wisely not been left behind, and no little cussing and grunting and tightening like the harnessing of so many mules. There was nothing chivalric or grand about it, any more than the harnessing of mules was chivalric or grand—except that these were men preparing for battle, many of whom would soon be torn, eviscerated, or blown into a fine red mist before the muzzles of the guns. With that as a possibility, even buttoning a fly assumed the dignity of a final act.

  Among the last to stir was Virgil C. Johnson, whose place in the line was at Bushrod’s left shoulder. Virgil C. was encouraged to rise by the prodding foot of First Sergeant William ap William Williams, whom everyone called Bill. The First Sergeant was a Welshman who had served nearly twenty years out west in the Indian-fighting army; he was the only enlisted man Bushrod ever heard of who quit the old Regular Army to join the Confederate one, though plenty of their officers had done so. No one knew why William Williams had joined the rebels, unless it was simply because he was Welsh, and had waited all those twenty years for a hopeless cause to throw in with—so the common wisdom ran, anyway. It was known that if old Bill were captured and recognized he would be shot as a deserter, no questions asked, and buried in an unmarked grave, and the grave marched over by troops until every trace of it had vanished. Officers, on the other hand, were allowed to resign their commissions in the old Regular Army—if they were captured, they were received by their former peers not as deserters but as wayward fraternity brothers fallen temporarily from the fold. The First Sergeant relished this bitter distinction; its chief effect was to stimulate his ardor in battle—God help the Stranger who tried to take him prisoner. And yet, on this November afternoon, even this accomplished warrior could inspire Virgil C. Johnson to rise no further than a sitting position.

  “Goddammit, Virgil C., get up!” snarled the First Sergeant, whose natural Old Army instinct was to draw back his foot and deliver a comprehensive blow to the ribs on Virgil C. Johnson.

  “Oh, the nation, Bill,” said Jack Bishop. “Now see what you’ve done—you’ve gone and woke him up, and he has not had his sugar-tit.” Bishop gave his musket to Bushrod and went about gathering up Virgil C.’s scattered equipment. He shook out the soiled wad of Virgil C.’s jacket and hung it over the man’s sloped shoulders. Meanwhile, Virgil C. scratched himself and peered groggily about. “Where are we now?” he said.

  “You see?” said Bishop, retrieving his musket. “Now he is good to go.”

  “Jesus Christ deliver me,” said the First Sergeant.

  “No doubt Virgil C. will get up in a minute,” said Bushrod hopefully.

  The First Sergeant spat a stream of ambure into the grass and leaned on his musket. He was looking past them toward the distant Federal works. “I expect he will,” said the First Sergeant. Then he seemed to forget them all. He narrowed his eyes and stared across the open plain.

  Two gentlemen approached, ambling along in quiet conversation. They were Tom Jenkins, the company’s Second Lieutenant, and Mister Sam Hook, their Brigade chaplain. At their feet trotted Old Hundred The Marvelous Dog, who belonged to the Chaplain.

  “Hey, fellers,” said Tom Jenkins.

  Bushrod saw the First Sergeant’s jaw tighten. In old Bill’s mind, officers did not greet enlisted men with “Hey, fellers.” It was a breach of decorum that threatened the very fabric of the Republic—or, in this case, the Confederacy. But the First Sergeant said nothing; he only shook his head and went on looking across the plain as if (Bushrod thought) he expected to see a war party of Comanches sortie from the village.

  Tom Jenkins had been with the Cumberland Rifles (the name was one they had given the company in the old, innocent days—in these latter times it was only invoked in moments of irony) since the beginning. At home he owned a cavernous, dingy, chaotic mercantile on the west side of the square—that is, everyone thought he still owned it. None of the old Cumberland men knew that the town had been burned in October by marauding Federal cavalrymen operating out of LaGrange, Tennessee. Now Tom Jenkins stood grinning, rocking on his heels, hands thrust deep in his breeches pockets, in his tattered frock coat and slouch hat. He had left his sword belt somewhere and were it not for the rusty gold bars on his collar facings he might have been crossing the square on his way to the barber shop. “What’s goin on?” said Tom Jenkins.

  “Why, Tom, we’re glad to see you,” said Bishop. “We been discussin tactics, Bushrod and I.”

  “Tactics,” nodded Tom Jenkins. “Well, that’s mighty good. I am glad to hear it. What did you decide?”

  “We decided we gone get our ass whupped,” said Bishop.

  “Now, wait a minute—” began Bushrod.

  “That don’t seem like much of a tactic to me,” said Tom Jenkins. “I thought tactics was where you studied how to whup the other feller’s ass.”

  First Sergeant William ap William Williams grinned in spite of himself. Next to Captain Byron Sullivan, Tom Jenkins had developed into one of the best line officers in the whole regiment. Since he had no use for army politics, he’d risen no higher than the second-lieutenancy of his rifle company—but even the First Sergeant had to admit that Tom Jenkins had a natural talent for soldiering. He was the kind of volunteer officer who drove the Old Army brass to distraction.

  “No, no, no, Tom,” said Jack Bishop. “You are confusin the tactics of this army with somebody else’s. In this army, you run around in the woods all night, then march like hell all day, then about sundown you fix bayonets and charge across two miles of prairie calculatin to run the other fellows out of trenches they’ve spent all day diggin—that’s tactics. Why, Tom, it lays over any tactics I ever saw—just thinkin about it makes me proud to be a soldier of the Sovereign South. Now, you take those trees yonder—”

  “Say, Sammy,” said Bushrod, wanting to change the subject. “Has Old Hundred bit anybody of note lately?”

  The Chaplain gazed with affection on The Marvelous Dog, who at the moment was gnawing on his private parts. Old Hundred was a terrier cur the Chaplain had picked up during the Atlanta campaign. He was hateful and ill-tempered and had no use for anyone, not even the Chaplain. His coat was like a wire brush; he had a grotesque overbite and forever swarmed with fleas and with ticks that, once safely aboard, swelled overnight to the size of pistol-balls. In camp, Old Hundred prowled from fire to fire begging scraps, and was not above stealing saltpork out of the very frying pan. In battle he waxed hysterical, tangling himself in the feet of the soldiers and biting at their ankles and snarling, though no one had ever seen him close with the enemy. In all, he was the most offensive dog Bushrod Carter had ever seen.

  “Well,” said Sam Hook, “in answer to your question, I can’t say that he has. He took a piece out of Squire Chevis over in Company E last night—or this mornin, whenever it was—but th
at ought not to be a surprise to anybody—there’s always been bad blood between them two. He is a noble creature if you allow for his faults—Old Hundred, I mean.”

  “Well, well,” said Bushrod, not knowing what else to say.

  In the old times, Sam Hook was a lawyer in Cumberland. His clientele were exclusive: the poor, the hopeless, the friendless; peckerwoods barefoot and gallused, and clay-eaters whose childrens’ bellies swelled with hookworms; murderers, the insane, women whose husbands used them badly, prostitutes from the Devil’s Elbow up at Wyatt’s Crossing—That Sort Of Thing, as Bushrod’s old-maid aunt always phrased it. It was pro bono as vocation, or rather avocation, since the money that fueled Sam’s interests came from eight hundred acres of river-bottom cotton land—and, it was said, certain shrewd investments he’d made in the steamboat trade as a youth. He had an office over Frye’s Tavern that opened onto a broad gallery, and in good weather, when court was not in session, Sam Hook could usually be found with his heels up on the railing, holding court of his own. His auditors were anyone, of whatever color or age or rank, who could talk about sporting—about guns and horses and dogs and gamecocks—who liked whiskey, and who could laugh. For years, Sam Hook was known as the best wing shot in Cumberland County, and owned the champion rat-killing dog and a pair of the best fighting chickens in that part of Mississippi. In addition to these credentials, he was an ordained Methodist.

  Sam had the little congregation out in the Yellow Leaf community, four miles in the county from Cumberland. Every Sunday morning he saddled his sleek, long-legged racer and rode out there to call down thunder and lightning on the Faithful, many of whom had seen him perform in just that way in the courtroom. Then, after dinner, Sam rode back to Cumberland again, always in time to take his accustomed seat in the legendary card game that had been held every Sunday evening at Frye’s since before the War with Mexico.