The Black Flower Read online

  In the first spring of the current war, the company known as the Cumberland Rifles was formed at Frye’s, and Sam Hook was called down from his office and informed he’d been elected the company’s chaplain. He told them he would prefer to be a general; they replied to the effect that there were no openings for generals in a company of infantry. Sam declined participation then, saying he was a Union man anyway and they could all go to hell. There followed much argument and rhetoric, during which Byron Sullivan, Captain-elect, delivered his third (and some said his best) blood-curdling war speech of the afternoon. Also, Mister Frye opened the bar. In an hour or so, Sam Hook was converted to secession, willing to compromise with the rank of Captain.

  Three long years later, Sam Hook was Chaplain for the whole of Adams’ Brigade, and had been since they were over in Cleburne’s. It was, according to Sam Hook, a position of such oppressive responsibility that God Himself would expect no less than a general to discharge it. He had once petitioned President Jefferson Davis on that subject, but the President’s secretary replied, in a curt note, that no one in any authority knew of any chaplains who were generals. There the matter rested.

  Sam Hook had been with the boys in all their fights—cursing, exhorting, driving them on, seeming to be everywhere at once. He even led the old Cumberland Rifles in the Chickamauga battle when Captain Sullivan was down with the shingles—led them in charge after charge with a walking cane and a dragoon pistol borrowed of a staff officer. In every action, he would have the boys understand that God, who would take no side but who was not adverse to going in with the infantry, was walking with them—no easy task amid the smoke and noise and the ample evidence of mortality. The same God stood beside him at church call every Sunday, fair weather or foul, when Sam Hook—no matter how bad his hangover—flung his profane, eloquent sermons over deeply flawed men who walked always along the chilly margins of death.

  Now here was Sam Hook in the autumn afternoon, watching with his comrades across the open plain. He wore a Mexican War forage cap, and for a uniform the old Knight’s-Templar frock coat with crosses on the collars that he’d worn in lodge in Cumberland. At his feet, The Marvelous Dog curled up in a wiry ball and began to snore.

  “Well, Sammy,” persisted Jack Bishop, “these fellows don’t want to hear about tactics from me—but I judge we are goin in by and by and I want a learned opinion. What do you think, a man of the cloth, a warrior monk and so forth?”

  Sam Hook’s eyes narrowed in thought, he thumbed his cap to the back of his head. “Bill,” he said to the First Sergeant, “what do you see yonder?”

  The First Sergeant spat again. “It is a damn long ways over there, Chaplain,” he said.

  “It is that, now,” agreed Tom Jenkins. “A long ways to walk, and no place to run.”

  “Hmmm,” said Sam Hook.

  “Oh, you boys are killin me with your tactics,” said Bushrod in exasperation. He watched them, their little group, as if he were hovering somewhere above—among the blackbirds, perhaps, that were streaming toward their roost in the river trees. Bushrod wished he were a blackbird, free to fly wherever he chose. He would go South, all the way to the big water, perhaps even to the far and fabled islands where there were no men.

  “So, what do you think, Sammy?” asked Bishop.

  “I say fuck it,” said Sam Hook. “Let’s go. I’d as lief try it now as have to try it tomorrow.”

  “That ain’t what I asked,” said Jack Bishop.

  “Hmmm,” said Sam Hook. “No—no, I guess it ain’t.” He knelt and scratched the tattered ear of Old Hundred and the dog groaned in his sleep. Sam Hook looked at Bishop, at Bushrod, at Tom Jenkins and the First Sergeant, at Virgil C. where he sat upon the ground. “Ain’t it curious,” he said. “How we do, I mean. Always wantin to know how a thing will turn out, when it will turn out just the same anyway.” He smiled and looked off toward the Federal works. Something glinted over there—a rifle barrel, perhaps, or a bayonet, or a belt plate. There was movement, too—a restless undulation like a swarm of dark bees. They were shifting troops. Sam Hook turned his eyes away. “I have loved you boys,” he said.

  Bishop nodded. “Well, I reckon that is a good answer,” he said.

  “Yes, I reckon it is,” said Bushrod.

  Virgil C. Johnson yawned and scratched himself. “Say,” he said, “has any of you all seen my coat?”

  In that other, forgotten life before the Shiloh battle, Virgil C. Johnson was a fiddler. His people had traveled from upper Missouri in the forties seeking a warmer climate where the land grew something besides rocks and abolitionists; Virgil C. was born on the way, in the shanty of a flatboat riding the high spring flood of the Mississippi. In Virgil C.’s recollection, the first sound he ever heard was his Uncle Ham’s fiddle sawing out “The House Carpenter.”

  “Now, how the nation could you know that if you was only just borned?” Jack Bishop asked when Virgil C. first made that revelation. The three boys were sitting on a rise near the Yellow Leaf Church, listening to old Relbue Carter’s dogs run a coon in the Leaf River bottoms. Bushrod and Jack were fifteen, Virgil C. two years their junior. The full Wolf Moon of January spread over the familiar valley below in glittering illusion, and the clapboard church, empty and silent, gleamed like marble. The black squares of its windows stared out on the burying ground where dark cones of cedars huddled among the graves.

  Virgil C. was smoking kinnikinnick in a dingy corncob pipe. He exhaled a rank cloud of smoke and said, “Well, Jack, I reckon I know that song when I hear it.”

  “But how could you know it then,” said Bushrod, “when you was just born?”

  “Well, because that’s what the song was,” said Virgil C.

  “Virgil C., you are a damned lie,” said Bishop. “Your mama told you about it.”

  “She didn’t,” Virgil C. said. “You a damn lie your ownself.”

  “She did!” said Bishop.

  “She didn’t!” said Virgil C.

  “Look!” said Bushrod, pointing.

  The shadow of an owl, skimming low, flicked across the valley. They watched it strike. There was a rustle in the broomsage, a shrill piercing scream, then silence. Then the owl, beating hard against the dead weight of the rabbit, rose again in the silver night and glided with its prize toward the dark line of the trees.

  “Great God,” Bushrod began, “did you see—” But Virgil C. caught his arm.

  “Hush,” he said. “Look yonder, by the church.”

  The way he said it made Bushrod shiver. He did not want to look at the church. It was too silent, too empty, too bony white in the cold moon, and if you looked too long and too hard the dark clumps of cedars in the burying ground would start to move. You couldn’t actually see them move, but if you looked away and then looked back, they would have shifted. Some of them would be closer, you would swear to it. Bushrod knew in his heart that it was only a trick of the shadows, but still—

  Bushrod hated the night. He was afraid of it, especially when the moonlight lay like a shroud over the land and nothing looked like it was supposed to. He thought what a damn fool thing it was to run coons anyhow. Some boys drew pleasure from it—he knew Jack and Virgil C. loved the high solitude away from lamps and houses. But Bushrod believed Man to be a creature of the day, who ought to have sense enough to hunt his hole when the sun went down.

  “I don’t see nothin,” Jack said. “Don’t spook us that way, Virgil C.”

  “Hush,” Virgil C. said again. “I can see him. In the big shadow hard by the church house.”

  The three boys peered across the moonlit valley. The church flung out a long shadow, black as pitch, over the west yard. In that dark pool was a darker shape, still and quiet, like a piece of the vast night itself.

  “It’s a man a-horseback,” whispered Virgil C.

  “You fulla shit,” said Jack, but he, too, was whispering now.

  This time Bushrod felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck. He felt a cold deeper tha
n the January night. He believed he could see it too: a man on a big horse, watching from the shadow of the church. It moved just a little, as a horse will when it’s restless, and the cedars did a little dance. They had not heard the horseman come, like they should have in the cold clear air.

  “It’s just your uncle tryin to scare us,” whispered Jack hopefully.

  “No, it ain’t Uncle Relbue,” Bushrod said. “He’s up on Tallyrand tonight, remember?” Tallyrand was a gelding white as milk; you could not hide him in a shadow. “Who do you think it is, Virgil C.?”

  But Virgil C. didn’t answer. Instead, he stood up, and without a word began to walk down the slope into the valley.

  “Virgil C. Johnson, you get back here!” hissed Jack Bishop, but the other boy went on. They could hear his feet whisper in the broomsage. They watched him cross the broad slope, his long-legged shadow flung out beside him. Bushrod thought he heard the muffled clump-clump of an impatient hoof. Virgil C. crossed the valley. He was the only thing moving in all that pale silence. His shadow slanted as he began to climb the far slope toward the church and the huddling cedars and the pool of shadow; he did not slow or falter as the distance closed. Then, just as the dogs set up a mad chorus in the river bottom, the shadow swallowed him up.

  Bushrod and Jack waited in breathless silence, but the only sound was the beating of their own hearts and the distant ghostly yelping of the dogs. Jack stood it as long as he could; before Bushrod could stop him, he stood up and cupped his hands and sent his voice across the valley: “Vir-gil Ceeeee!” Bushrod thought it the loudest sound he’d ever heard, but it brought no answer save the ringing echo in the hills. When these died away, Jack Bishop said, “Well, we got to go over there.”

  “The hell you say,” said Bushrod. “What you want to do that for?”

  “It ain’t a matter of wantin to,” said Jack. “He’d do the same if it was us, you know dern well he would.”

  Bushrod looked out across the valley. “Well, I suppose,” he said. “Let’s get it over with, then. Damn Virgil C. to hell anyhow.”

  The boys unfolded their long legs and started together down the slope. Gravity and fear took over at once, and before they knew it they were running. The cold burned their lungs as they plunged down into the valley, the dry, brittle earth slipping away easily beneath them. As they raced down the hill and up the far slope, Bushrod fanned desperately at the cold ashes of his courage. The Yellow Leaf Church was getting closer and closer, looming before them in icy solitude. Bushrod could not see the shadow now but knew it was there all right, lying in wait with all its secrets, and if something didn’t happen pretty soon he was going to faint dead out. Then, at the last moment, a flame sprang up in Bushrod’s heart; it leapt and flared as they tilted around the headstones; it was roaring when they rounded the corner of the church, and suddenly at its center was the shape of one Bushrod didn’t recognize, but whom he knew somehow to be himself. For the first time he relinquished everything and withdrew to a place he’d never been before, and from that secret chamber watched the Other outrun Jack Bishop in the dark—

  And there, squatting against the weatherboards of the church, hands dangling between his knees, the corncob pipe clamped in his jaw, was Virgil C. Johnson himself. He was alone. “Howdy, boys,” he said.

  Jack and Bushrod stood speechless, drawing deep, raling draughts of the bitter air. It seemed infinitely colder here. Bushrod looked up: over the roofline he could see a glittering sprinkle of stars. Then Jack Bishop spoke, his voice coming in angry gasps: “Damn you. … Virgil C. Johnson. … damn you. …”

  “Hush your mouth,” said Virgil C. He pointed at Jack Bishop with the stem of his pipe. “You don’t know everything. He was here all right. I know he was.”

  “Who was here, dammit?” said Jack Bishop. “Who was?”

  But Virgil C. didn’t answer, and Bushrod looked down at his hands and tasted ashes, cold and dead, in his mouth.

  Tom Jenkins and the Chaplain and Old Hundred were gone, Virgil C. had risen to his feet at last, and the First Sergeant was making ready to continue down the line. That gentleman’s patience, never substantial at any time, had spun out to the breaking place, and he regarded Virgil C. with malice. Virgil C., meanwhile, was struggling to get his arms through the sleeves of his jacket. He smiled earnestly at the First Sergeant. Old Bill took a step toward Virgil C., the muscles of his jaw quivering. Bushrod and Jack tensed, ready to step in should old Bill forget that he was in the Confederate army now where privates were not manhandled at will by their officers. Bill remembered this, though it would seem to be just in time. With hand outstretched he stopped, paused, and everything in him seemed to relax at once. Old Bill cradled his musket in the crook of his arm. Carefully, almost tenderly, he buttoned the single surviving button on Virgil C.’s jacket and smoothed the wrinkles down the front. He lay his hand in a grandfatherly way on Virgil C.’s shoulder. “Virgil C. Johnson,” said the First Sergeant softly, “surely there is a God, and as surely He will make a soldier even of you in this hour of our death.” Virgil C. smiled and nodded. The First Sergeant scowled once at Bushrod and Jack and passed on down the line. When he was out of earshot, Virgil C. spoke. “What do you reckon he meant by that?” he asked.

  Behind the line, the brigade band were shouldering their instruments. A courier rode by, swollen with mysterious import, his horse’s hooves throwing up little clods of dirt. In front of the regiment, a cabal of officers broke up, each hurrying importantly away, his hand on the hilt of his sword. Bushrod knew from long experience these were bad signs, that something was fixing to happen soon. Overhead, the chittering blackbirds still passed in their uncounted thousands.

  Bushrod wondered if, somewhere down in the company, Uncle Ham Johnson was making one of his apocalyptic appeals to Deity. The old man was nearly seventy, brown and hard and wrinkled as last year’s pecans, with a long white beard he kept tucked under the strap of his cartridge box. But he was still with them, one of the oldest men in the army. He was given to praying long, impromptu, tedious prayers whenever he was excited, and he always went into battle singing hardshell Baptist hymns at the top of his voice. It was spooky in a fight to hear him down there, bellowing about the Blood of the Lamb or some such thing—Virgil C. always said he only did it to alert the Almighty that Uncle Ham Johnson, the greatest fiddler in the Army of Tennessee, might be on his way to glory, just in case the Powers and Principalities wanted to get up something particular for him. Bushrod did not doubt that this was so. He smiled at the thought, and bent to tuck the stiff, mud-crusted cuffs of his trousers into his socks.

  Along the line, lieutenants in their swords and frock coats were fussing like hens. “Fall in,” they admonished cheerfully. “Look sharp, boys, and fall in!”

  When Uncle Ham and Virgil C. enlisted, they naturally brought their fiddles with them. In the early days, when it was all a lark and soldiering seemed like a big barbecue under the stars, the Johnson boys made things lively around the fire of a night.

  Virgil C. was a first-rate fiddler, for he’d been playing from a time when he was still too short to reach the plow handles. Still, he was humble about his gift and always waited to be asked to play. Then, once petitioned, he would always tell how, when anybody in Cumberland held a dance or a wedding or a funeral, they would hire him not to play, and having told it he would move slowly into the circle of firelight, and tuck his fiddle under his chin, and look at the bow as if he’d never seen one in his life—all the boys watching meanwhile with the firelight shining on their faces. Then Virgil C. Johnson would touch the bow to the strings and wring from his instrument a single experimental note so heartbreakingly pure that, for however long he chose to sustain it, the boys could believe that what they were living was not a dream, but was connected to all they had ever known, and all they had lost. Then Virgil C. would dip, and launch into “The House Carpenter,” the tune he always started with, and for a little while the dark woods would reel and the very stars see
med to dance.

  But the old gay times, like the fiddles themselves, were fragile. They were more delicate even than Bushrod’s watch.

  On the night of the Shiloh battle, the company and the regiment were spread out all over the woods, and Virgil C. was missing. Bushrod and Jack joined the throngs of men who prowled the field, searching for lost companions in the dark. Wordlessly, in growing terror and disbelief, they toured the nightmare landscape of their first engagement. The woods were lit by fires smoky and fitful in the drenching rain. The Departed were everywhere, in heaps and piles and windrows. They were tucked into thickets where they had crawled to die alone, they were even in the branches of the shattered trees. There were so many, and their faces so awful to look into, that the boys soon lost all hope of ever finding Virgil C. They wandered aimlessly through the wreckage of the battlefield. Now and then a hand would claw at their trouser legs. Voices rose from the shadows, disembodied like voices in dreams. Some demanded relief, others begged; they asked for water or for a surgeon, they asked for mothers and sisters, these voices. Some begged to be shot. From all these the boys shrank in guilty horror.

  Bushrod and Jack still wore the little narrow-billed caps of the early war, so the rain drove in their faces and blinded them. They stumbled and swore. They dodged the shells sent over by the Federal gunboats moored in the Tennessee—big shells that crashed to earth with random malice. They were fired upon more than once by pickets, whether their own or the Strangers’ it was impossible to say. In time they lost all sense of direction. There were no landmarks, only the tangled underbrush and the fires and the rain. They had no idea where their regiment was.

  At last Bishop stopped. He snatched off his useless cap and flung it down. “I am done with this,” he said. “I vote we try to find the rear, if there is any such thing, then go to the rear of that and lay low ’til daylight. I believe south is over that way, though it may not be. Shit, who knows—”