The Black Flower Page 28

  Nebo rose to his feet and made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “You can look through the glass like we do,” he said.

  “Come on, now,” said Anna. “The both of you.”

  She took Bushrod’s good arm in her own, and the three of them turned away from the grave. Bushrod took a last look and saw that Virgil C. was back; this time he was puzzling over his broken fiddle. Virgil C. looked up. Say, Bushrod, where you goin now?

  “I don’t know, pard,” said Bushrod.

  “Hush,” said Anna. “Hush, now. That’s enough.”

  For a time after they were gone, nothing moved in the silent afternoon. Then, high overhead, a single leaf turned loose its hold and rattled down through the branches. When it broke free of the bottom branch, it spun for an instant, descending. It settled on the fresh-mounded earth of the grave—the first of many to come, autumn after autumn, forever.

  Lieutenant Tom Jenkins was, so far as he knew, the sole remaining officer of the Twenty-first Mississippi. He had been hunting for someone senior all morning; he and the regimental Sergeant-Major had traversed the ground between McGavock’s and the gin three times, gathered forty-four of the boys, accounted for a handful of the missing—but of the regiment’s officers who had gone into the battle, Tom Jenkins seemed to be the only one who came out again. The knowledge weighed on him like a stone. He wanted to believe his survival was an act of Providence; he hoped it was not through any fault of his own.

  In a corner of one of McGavock’s pastures, the forty-four men of the regiment were gathered under the watchful eye of Mister Julian Bomar, the Sergeant-Major. They were sitting or lying on the ground, sleeping, making coffee, playing cards, smoking, talking things over. Tom Jenkins contemplated his remnant of a command. Forty-four men. No doubt more would come straggling in directly, each anxious to tell his story and prove he had not let the others down. But from the look of things, there would not be many of these. Tom Jenkins was an optimistic man, but he had seen the field.

  He felt like he ought to say something to them, though what it might be, he couldn’t imagine. The notion of a rousing speech, even if he could have made one, was ludicrous. That morning he and Mister Bomar had stood in a group of men and listened to the surviving captain of one of the Tennessee regiments read General Hood’s congratulatory order. They had won a great victory, put the enemy to flight, etc., etc. The officer’s voice dripped with irony, and the men hooted. Tom Jenkins had turned gloomily away, embarrassed for General Hood who, after all, was still their commander. Now, alone with his men in the quiet pasture, he tried to imagine what he would say if he were the General. But it was no use—all he could think of were empty platitudes, the kind of vacuous phrases offered at a funeral: My boys, don’t the Army look natural—almost like it was sleepin—

  Still, Tom knew he had to say something. He started toward his men, hoping Providence would deliver some suggestions on the way.

  When the men saw the Lieutenant approaching, they ceased their talk. Some rose to their feet, others punched their sleeping comrades. Jenkins stopped at the edge of the group. The Sergeant-Major unfolded himself from the ground and came to stand beside his officer.

  Tom Jenkins clasped his hands behind his frock coat and looked into each man’s face. Without exception, the eyes that looked back at him were unreadable. Whatever the boys were thinking, they were keeping it to themselves for now.

  The soldiers gathered around in a half-circle, slouching, hands in their pockets or hooked in their suspenders. Some knelt, some sat upon the ground and plucked at the grass, some fell asleep again almost at once. Tom Jenkins could smell them: their sour breath, their farts, the stink of their wool and sweat, the smell of death. That was one of the things he would carry away from the war: how it stank like death—a rich, sweet smell that festered in the nose and clung to everything but most of all to men. Years later he would smell it on men who had been there. He would smell it on himself in the nights when he would slip from his bed, dress quietly, and leave the house—smell it while he walked the streets and alleys of Cumberland until daybreak. Nothing smelled like that, nothing else in the world. And nothing could wash it away.

  The boys closed around. They were filthy, played out, hungry, and dangerous as snakes. Those still awake watched Tom with their empty eyes.

  Behind them stood their stacked arms: eleven pyramids cluttered as always with belts and haversacks and cartridge boxes, and draped with their dingy gray jackets. Hats dangled from the tips of bayonets. The stocks of the Enfields were greasy-brown, the brass tarnished, the blueing worn away—but the bores (Tom Jenkins knew) had been swabbed with rags and canteen water and the nipples picked clean. The bayonets gleamed dully; those that had been used in the fight were wiped clean. Across two of the stacks, rolled up on its staff, lay the remains of the regimental flag. It could hardly be called a flag anymore, the fire from the Federal works had burned and shredded it to rags. But they had not lost it—three men had died to save it during the attack at the gin; the fourth man to seize it, and the one who bore it from the field, was Tom Jenkins himself. No doubt he would be proud of that one day, but he did not feel proud now. He felt strangely ashamed, and very tired.

  There was the flag. Tom could see it clearly where it lay mute and inert among the bayonets, and he could not seem to nudge his mind beyond it. The sight of the flag stopped him—it was as if he’d gotten right up to the very truth he needed and then couldn’t grasp it. Maybe I am too tired for truth, he thought. Especially for truth.

  For the moment, there was no sound in the pasture at all—no wind, no voices, even the crows were silent. Tom went on standing with his hands behind his back; meanwhile, Mister Bomar contemplated the sky, and the men waited. The hands of their watches moved invisibly, crossing an empty place in time that grew broader and deeper with every click of the wheels. Ordinarily men would not have endured such a vacancy for long before the urge to shatter it with a cough or movement grew irresistible. But these men remained silent; most of them had even ceased watching now, their eyes drifting off with their thoughts. So it was with Tom Jenkins as well. He had so completely forgotten his purpose that he was no longer aware there had been anything to forget.

  He considered himself, Tom Jenkins, officer of the Army of Tennessee. Here was old Tom, for once wearing his sword and pistol—old Tom Jenkins, erstwhile merchant, whose coat was stiff with the blood and brains of one Tony Beckwith, Private, erstwhile carpenter and father to twelve children whose names the man could never remember without writing them out. Tony Beckwith had been just to his right in the charge, had walked right up to the snout of a gun where it poked through an embrasure, put his hand on it just as the gunner pulled the lanyard. Widow and orphans. Recalling this, Tom Jenkins looked down at his coat, he brushed at it and a little of Tony Beckwith came off on his hand. Suddenly the Lieutenant had the urge to laugh. All right, he thought. That’s enough, that’s just about enough. Time to go home.

  He looked up at the circle of faces. All right, boys—time to go home. …let us forget the whole thing, go do something else for a while, I set you free. …

  “Sir?” said Mister Bomar. “Lieutenant?”

  “The truth shall make you free,” said the Lieutenant.

  “Was you goin to say somethin to the men?” asked the Sergeant-Major.

  Yes. Tell them they can go home now, tell them it is all over and done with. Tell them I am too tired to—

  “Lieutenant!” said Mister Bomar, and Tom nearly leapt into the air.

  “Right-o, Sar’nt-Major,” he said.

  Then, for no apparent reason, a bell began to toll down in the village of Franklin. Every man of the regiment, awake or asleep, began, with some dim portion of his mind, to count the strokes as they fell across the silence, each stroke rising out of the echo of the last so that it was one long, mournful sound—four, five, six—marking the hour perhaps—seven, eight, nine—like the courthouse bell in Cumberland—ten, eleven. …and on t
he twelfth stroke every mind made a tally, drew a mark, prepared itself for silence again. But not this time. There was a thirteenth stroke, a fourteenth. The bell went on and on, pealing out over the afternoon in its clear, beautiful, melancholy voice. Without knowing why, the men began to grow restless, to stir like a tableau come to life. They moved their hands and feet, pulled up handsful of grass, lit their pipes, tried out their voices on one another. Tom Jenkins shook his head and rubbed his eyes. Providence, he thought. So here is Providence after all. Then, in a voice so loud it startled even himself, Tom Jenkins shouted:

  “Sar’nt-Major Bomar!”

  “Right here, your grace,” said Mister Bomar, grinning.

  The bell had ceased but the echo hung in the air, and out of it rose the familiar fretting of the crows. A little wind stirred up, tilting the broomsage-tops. The voices of the men grew louder, and someone laughed a dry laugh, and Tom looked at the Sergeant-Major, who was chewing a straw and regarding his officer with a curious smile. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, Tom Jenkins believed he was actually communicating with another human being by thought alone:

  What do you think we ought to do?

  Well, Lieutenant, it is still a regiment, ain’t it?

  Yes, but—

  Well, fuck that, Lieutenant. Nobody has told them they are whipped yet. Just let me go amongst em, see what happens.

  You sure?

  As the Resurrection.

  “Sar’nt-Major!” shouted Tom Jenkins, exactly as he had before, aware too late that he must sound ridiculous.

  “Still here,” drawled Mister Bomar.

  “Ah, yes,” said Tom. He pulled himself erect and gestured toward the men. “Look here, Mister Bomar—what is all this? Ain’t these fellers ever done no soldierin? Have em fall in straightway. Good God.”

  “Yes, my liege,” grinned the Sergeant-Major, and saluted. Tom Jenkins returned the salute—it felt good, somehow, to do that.

  Mister Julian Bomar, incumbent High Sheriff of Cumberland County, was not an Old Army man, but, like all Sergeants-Major, he seemed to have Old Army ways. Sewed them on with the chevrons, Tom Jenkins thought—though strictly in metaphor, for no one in that regiment wore chevrons. In any case, Mister Bomar had that way about him as if he’d never done anything else but soldier, and now he glided among the men, rubbing his hands as if he’d waited all his life for this moment.

  “Now then, lads,” he said. “You heard the Lieutenant—think you can just stand around like it was election day? Fall in, goddammit!”

  He cursed and cajoled, threatened and belittled, evoked strange, militant gods who suddenly loomed with disapproving faces out of the clouds. You call yourselves soldiers, he told them. So many old women, he called them. Old women, standing around with your thumbs up your ass—great God!

  He swore to God, to Beelzebub, to the Archangels, the Seraphim and Cherubim. What would their mothers think? Their little sisters? He peopled the broomsage with dead comrades who pointed ghastly fingers in the direction of duty and vengeance—toward an enemy who expected them to cower like dogs. But he—Sergeant-Major Julian Bomar—did not intend to cower, not now, not tomorrow, not in a hundred lifetimes before any goddamned squareheaded sons of bitches. Any you boys want to quit? he asked. Want to go home? Because if you do, that’s all right—take your sugar-tit and go. But don’t ever let me hear you say you went soldierin in the big war—

  He called them by name, spun out their generations, reminded them of their marches and battles, their glorious dead and the hardships they’d borne—all the while prowling up and down, before and behind.

  Where is your coat, Stuart Bloodworth? Here, put your cap on, cover up those greasy locks. For God’s sake, Earl! All them dead blue-bellies and you still got no shoes? Hungry? Shit—you ain’t hungry. I’ll let you know when you are hungry. Here now, boy, don’t put a hand on that musket ’til that officer tells you to—have you just been born? Are your breeches wet? Dammit to hell, close it up there—and wake, June Elliot, wake to the glorious morn—I will let you know when you are tired—

  The boys shuffled about, groping into their jackets, knocking out their pipes, driven by the Sergeant-Major’s voice. They were like thin, ragged, animated scarecrows, hawking and wheezing and complaining. They were all angles, all sharp corners and bristles, lean and wiry like the long-legged horses the cavalry rode. Even the short ones, the squat ones (there were no fat ones) seemed collected for speed, for driving, for long walking down the winter-deep mud, down the fields and barren valleys into the smoke.

  Tom Jenkins watched them, and he listened to what the soldiers said:

  Oh, Julian, how you do take on! Oh, give it a rest—can’t you just let a feller die in peace? Don’t prod me, Ike Fentress, and what have you stepped in anyhow?

  That’s right, said the Sergeant-Major. Ike, go down there by your little brother—great God, his nose is runnin—

  Button me, darlin.

  See if I ever vote straight Democrat again.

  Let me in there, boys—I want to be next to little Teddy ’cause I love him so.

  No, thought Tom Jenkins—it ain’t that they don’t know they are whipped. They do know. They just don’t give a shit.

  The Sergeant-Major was grinning at him then. Tom Jenkins had not noticed before that Mister Bomar’s cheek and neck were blackened with a powder burn. Tiny beads of blood glistened where the powder grains lay just under the skin, where they would always lie, where not even the undertaker’s cosmetic could hide them on the distant morrow.

  “Resurrection Day, Lieutenant,” said Mister Bomar, and his teeth shown white in his dark face. He turned, put out his hand, and grasped the color staff. He lifted it clear of the bayonets and planted the butt on the ground and unrolled the ragged, smoke-stained remnant of the flag, shook it loose so that the red field, the stars, the blue saltier and the painted names of their battles broke into the light. Then he lifted it, shook it so that the tatters snapped in the air above him.

  “Now, goddammit,” he said. “Who wants to be a soldier in the big war?”

  In the winter pasture, fallow and brown, the voices rose hooting and catcalling because they were old soldiers and bedamned if they would cheer anymore. Nobody waved a flag at them anymore, not at these boys, not at the Army of Tennessee.

  So they mocked and jeered, while the Sergeant-Major grinned and shook the flag at them—

  All right, thought Tom Jenkins. Come on, boys. …come on now—

  Then he heard it, what he was waiting for, what he almost hoped he wouldn’t hear, but never doubted. It began quietly on one end of the line, like a wind mourning in the grass, then grew in strength and volume as each voice took it up in turn: the old familiar cry again, waking all the ghosts that lay along the road behind, pushing hard against all that the living knew and felt—against grief and regret, defeat and hardship, truth and reason and sense and whatever it was that made a man insist he was important, that he alone stood at the center of the universe. Tom Jenkins drew his sword and held it up and the bright blade gleamed like the bayonets, and as he listened Tom Jenkins felt despair tip over inside him and vanish away, and he knew that from that moment he wouldn’t much give a shit either and this was what it came down to and it would have to be enough: a Lieutenant, a Sergeant-Major, and forty-four raggedy-ass privates of the line all lifting their voices, raising a little hell, because the day was passing and the sun was moving down and it was the best they knew to do—

  The sound drifted across the afternoon, over ground where men had struggled and died. Anna Hereford heard it, where she stood with Caroline McGavock on the porch of the great brick house. “Listen!” Anna said, and lifted her face, and felt her blood run quick and hot.

  The soldiers in the yard heard it and turned their heads to the sound, and the wounded men in the yard and in the house, and the surgeons who worked over them, and the litter bearers struggling over the fields, and the dazed civilians, and Hattie and Winder peeri
ng from the door—

  Bushrod Carter heard it, where he lay on a blanket in the yard, waiting for Anna to bring the surgeon. At the moment, he did not know that he was waiting; he was deep in a dream about a strange house with many rooms, and all the rooms empty and lit by spears of red sunlight. And the sound reached him from somewhere far outside the house, and he knew right away what the sound was and where it came from and he wanted to be there—

  Bushrod rose on one elbow, face glistening with fever, his shirt and hair soaked with sweat. “Listen, Nebo!” he cried. “Listen to the boys! Mississippi—”

  “Whoa, now,” said Nebo, and made Bushrod lie down again, and bathed his face with the wet rag as Anna had said to do. Nebo heard the men, too, where they were crying off down in the woods, and the sound of it made him tremble.

  In a little while, Bushrod was asleep again. This time he dreamed of snow.

  In the front yard of McGavock’s, Major R.K. Cross was climbing into the saddle of his fractious little gelding. When the sound reached him, he grinned in spite of himself. Well, go it, boys, he thought.

  The horse shifted nervously under the rider’s weight and, as he always did, turned his head to nip ceremonially at the Major’s boot. “Quit it, Patch, damn you,” said the Major, as he always did. The horse gave him a wry look, and turned his head to the front.

  Major Cross adjusted his saber and checked the caps and loads in his revolver. It was so much better up here, on a good horse, where you could see a ways and where you knew pretty soon the ground would be moving fast under you. The Major looked one last time at the brick house—most likely he would never see it again, and that was well, he supposed. He thought of the girl Anna, and wondered how Bushrod would fare with her—old Bushrod, his pard out of the old times. He thought of the strange fellow with the ramrods, and the generals on the porch, and the beautiful Miss Caroline who’d been so kind to him. So much to remember, so much to take with him if he chose. Ah, well—let it go, he thought. There was not much time left and it was all fading anyhow, all passing into the twilight where the Major himself must be before long.