The Black Flower Read online

  The conscript’s rifle lay in the grass. Nebo regarded it as he might a venomous snake.

  “Might as well pick it up,” said Bushrod.

  Virgil C. had arisen and was brushing himself off. “Well, I am back from the grave,” he said. “My lands—how many loads did you have in there, Nebo?”

  Nebo Gloster blew his nose on the quilt. “Well,” he said, his voice trembling, “I thought two of powder and one of ball. Was that too many?” He held out the extra ball in his hand.

  “Jesus and Mary,” said Bushrod, and they laughed while the band played “The Bonnie Blue Flag.”

  Nebo Gloster was not the only conscripted soldier in the company. A dozen or so had come in since the draft law was passed two years before—reluctant citizens smoked out of the thickets and back alleys of the Lower South and sent up to bolster the dwindling line regiments. At least that was the expectation of the Confederate Congress, who naturally understood soldiering only in its broad outlines. It was Bushrod’s experience that the conscripts were useless as soldiers. There was, for example, the Portuguese fisherman who had been shanghaied on the levee in New Orleans; he arrived in the company knowing only seventeen words of English, all of them so esoterically vile that only the First Sergeant had heard them before. The Portagee never fired his musket, never even loaded it so far as any of them knew. The night of the Chickamauga battle, he got lost in the woods and was challenged by a nervous picket post and rattled off most of his seventeen words before he was shot to death. He was a good-natured little fellow, though, as Bushrod remembered it.

  Another man enjoyed telling, in picturesque detail, how he had gotten his sister with child, then murdered her in a cunning way and never been caught. Bushrod thought the man insane for telling such a thing; no one found it amusing. This conscript’s brief career was ended in the fighting at Rockfish Gap. He was discovered riddled with balls and nailed to a pine tree with a bayonet. Around his neck hung a crudely pencilled sign that read:

  The Nakedness of thy Sister

  thou shalt not uncover.

  Sam Hook told Bushrod it was a quotation from Leviticus, and whoever came up with it must have known the Book pretty well.

  Nebo Gloster himself, when he was treed by a cavalry detachment in the swamps of Wilkinson County, Mississippi, had no idea there was a war in progress. In fact, the whole notion of war—that is, men shooting at one another on a grand scale with the approval, even the applause, of the government—was news to him. Bushrod, try as he might, could never impress upon Nebo the concept of the Enemy—but then, Nebo also believed the world was flat and could not see it otherwise, no matter how many astronomical sketches Bushrod made in the dirt.

  And yet, of all the conscripted rabble who made their way into the ranks, none held Bushrod’s attention like Simon Rope.

  It was in the days last summer when Sherman’s mean Western army was driving them back on the city of Atlanta—a bad time, one of the worst. They fought every day among tangled breastworks and pine trees and red clay, under a merciless sun that was, by itself, enough to drive them mad. They simply could not make the Strangers quit. Every man seemed possessed by his own hollow-eyed demon, and killing was all they studied: killing in the thickets, in the briars and pine-barrens—killing the gaunt, ragged Strangers who swarmed at them like fiends out of the smoke. Later they would remember it as the Hundred Days: not once, in all that time, did Bushrod’s regiment unfix their bayonets.

  One afternoon on the Kenesaw Line, the regiment was burying the Recently Departed to its front. This was done under a rare flag of truce sent out by the Strangers themselves, who no longer wished to attack over ground where their own dead had lain for days in the blistering June sun. The parlaying officers were in agreement: the Departed must be hurried under the soil, the battlefield tidied up. Thus, at the appointed time, the living of both armies laid down their arms and rose from behind their works and straggled timidly onto the field.

  The Departed awaited them. The Departed were always a problem, but especially so in hot weather. They were patient enough at first, lying in their heaps and tangles on the field, but after awhile they began to call attention to themselves in ways that moved the nightmare of battle into deeper shades. With luck, the survivors of both armies would move on in advance and retreat, leaving the problem of the dead to burial details and to angry civilians who must watch their cotton patches and backyards turned into cemeteries. On the Kenesaw Line, however, the armies weren’t going anywhere for a while, and the problem belonged to the soldiers.

  The men assembled on the open ground and moved circumspectly among the hundreds of dead. Bushrod Carter was aghast at the whole business; he felt uncomfortable standing erect in the open, and found himself curiously afraid of the Departed who lay sprawled around him. He did not enjoy the novelty of seeing his own works from the outside. Worst of all, he was surrounded by Strangers. Federals and Confederates alike had removed their jackets and so were practically indistinguishable, and the thought came to Bushrod that if trouble erupted now he would not know whom to flee. He stayed close to Jack and Virgil C., hoping that nothing would happen.

  While the common soldiers mingled in solemn courtesy, the opposing officers gathered in congenial little groups, chatting amiably, hands clasped behind their frock coats. Bushrod was amazed at their sense of fraternity, and noted with some satisfaction that the Strangers’ officers seemed as superfluous as their own. Finally, after the officers had worn themselves out pointing and discussing and pacing off distances, the work was begun.

  A United States Quartermaster wagon, brimming with spades, trundled out of the Federal lines, and the tools were issued to the men.

  “Just imagine,” said Virgil C. “A whole wagon full of nothin but shovels.”

  “No doubt we will borrow a few of these,” said Bushrod, admiring the shiny new implement in his hand.

  A young man at Bushrod’s elbow laughed. “Hell,” he said, “I never knew a Reh to borry anything he couldn’t eat!”

  Bushrod realized with a start that the man was a Federal soldier. He was about to step away when the man put out his hand. “Bill Provin of Cairo, Illinois,” he said. “What’s yer name?”

  Bushrod’s raising would not suffer him to leave the man’s hand dangling in mid-air. “Bushrod Carter,” he said. “I am from Cumberland, Mississippi.” They shook hands. Bushrod thought it the strangest thing he had ever done.

  Under the blazing sun, the men began to dig. The ground had been baked until the whole earth seemed a solid brick; presently a wagonload of picks was sent for, and the soldiers took turns breaking up the ground. They sweated and cursed and fought the millions of flies that rose in black swarms from the dead; they gagged and vomited in the almost liquid cloud of corruption that hung like a fog over the field. No sooner had they begun when other interested parties arrived: buzzards, wheeling by battalions in the sky. The boldest of these lit and hopped clumsily about among the harvest, pecking and tearing until the soldiers drove them off. They never went far, however, and finally a buzzard detail of sunstruck men was put together to at least keep the birds on the move.

  As the soldiers worked, their common misery began to effect a fraternity of its own. They traded mild insults and gossip, they complained, they sat in the meager shade of the pine trees and rested together. Now and then a fistfight broke out, and men would gather around and shout and wager until officers came and set them to work again. Beyond these personal eruptions, which Bushrod found oddly moving, there was no trouble.

  At the center of it all were the Departed. Officer and man, they all looked alike; faces blackened and puffy and featureless, bodies swollen until the buttons on their stained blue uniforms popped, arms raised (many of them) in the pathetic gestures that bloating imparts to the body. Perversely, the Departed now seemed to resent the attention that was being given them. They showed a common reluctance to being buried in the shallow trenches where the feral hogs would almost certainly be at t
hem after nightfall. Dragged over the ground, they wheezed and belched and sighed in protest; their clothing snagged on the least obstruction; sometimes they simply fell apart and had to be prodded into the trenches with spades. For a while on the Kenesaw Line, the focus of the great war shifted; the living found a common enemy in the dead.

  In the hottest part of the afternoon, Bushrod and Jack and Virgil C. and the young Stranger from Cairo were preparing to fill in a section of trench. For the moment they leaned on their spades, blinking in the glare and passing around the Stranger’s canteen. It was filled with good, sweet spring water from behind the Federal lines.

  Jack Bishop had said very little during the afternoon, and now he stood with his head down, staring blankly at the red earth. He refused the canteen when it was passed to him. Bushrod studied his friend, thinking the sun might be getting to him—several men had already died that way since they’d begun digging, and the soldiers kept watch on one another for the signs. But Bushrod decided that, with Bishop, it would never be anything as simple as that.

  “What’s the matter, Jack?” asked Bushrod finally. “Are you feelin bad?”

  Jack Bishop made no reply. He went on looking at the ground: his eyes (he was not wearing his spectacles—they were only an added torment in the heat) were heavily-lidded, red and swollen from the glare; his face, like all their faces, was drawn and hollow, unshaven, greasy with sweat and powder stain. As Bushrod watched, Bishop moved his hand over the dead men lying in the ditch, as if he were offering some secret benediction. His mouth began to shape words, but no sound came.

  “You ought to try some of this good water, Jack,” said Bushrod. “Are you feelin all right?”

  “Maybe he’s fixin to keel over from the heat,” said Virgil C.

  “Are you fixin to keel over, Jack? Say, are you all right?”

  Bishop looked up, slowly, as if it were an effort to raise his head. His eyes moved until they found Bushrod’s. Uh-oh, thought Bushrod.

  “If you ask me that one more time,” Jack said, “I will kill you and put you in this hole.”

  “Such language for a brother in the lodge,” muttered Virgil C.

  “Sure, Jack,” said Bushrod. “Never mind.”

  “What’s the matter with your pard?” asked the Stranger, thumping the cork back into his canteen.

  “Best not to inquire,” said Virgil C. “Let’s just dig.”

  They turned again, all but Jack, who went on staring at the ground.

  Bushrod tried not to think about what they were doing. He could not bear the sound of the dry dirt falling on the bodies, and he tried to close his mind against it, to think about something else, anything else. But it was no use—no memory, no image, no ghost of himself in other days could live long in the terrible heat, among the stink and the flies. So he began to work faster, and in a few minutes’ time a furnace was roaring in his head and he could not think at all, and in a few minutes more the fatal red haze began to creep up behind his eyes and he could even quit being afraid of whatever it was Jack Bishop was about to do. So he shoveled and shoveled, the veins pounding in his temples, the red haze creeping higher and higher as he flung the hard dirt viciously into the faces of the Departed who were moving, shifting, swatting at the clods that struck them—now they were coming out of the trench, shrieking and groaning in protest, clawing at the edge of the trench, some of them were already out, groping blindly. Bushrod shoveled harder and harder—

  “Say, Bushrod—whoa, now!” The Stranger wrapped his arms around Bushrod, held him fast. Bushrod fought against him, made to strike him with the shovel. “Go slow, boy! You gone burst your bilers here!” said the Stranger.

  Then Virgil C. had him too, and they scuffled in the red dirt, the dust rising around them, while Jack Bishop watched with his dull eyes. Finally a soldier none of them knew brought a sponge bucket full of water and poured it over Bushrod’s head, and Bushrod settled down and let the Stranger hold him while the red haze faded and the dust thinned around them, and at last Bushrod could think again.

  “Whew!” said the Stranger. “Now, that’s better.” He held out his canteen with the sweet water. “Drink. Drink slow.”

  Bushrod drank, gagged, drank again. “Much obliged,” he said.

  “Don’t mention it,” said the Stranger. He put the canteen strap over Bushrod’s head, tucked his arm through it. “Keep it,” he said.

  “Much obliged,” said Bushrod.

  The Stranger grinned. “You boys is all crazier ’n owl shit.”

  “Lord, ain’t they though?” said Virgil C.

  “Damn these flies,” said Bushrod vaguely.

  “Now, now,” said Virgil C. “I’d have no use for a fly that wouldn’t come to a melodious odor like this.”

  The Stranger spoke again: “Whup—look out, boys.” They followed his nod and saw two men approaching, one of them a Confederate officer.

  “Oh, it’s only Cap’n Sullivan,” said Virgil C. “He’s all right.”

  “Evenin, boys,” said their Company Commander. “I been huntin for you. My, Bushrod, you look a little ragged out.”

  “The sun got him, but he’s good to go now,” said Virgil C. Then, nodding at the second man: “Who’s that, Cap’n?”

  The newcomer had the unsavory look of the Piney Woods, sallow and malarial, with the bad teeth peculiar to that region of Mississippi. He was in civilian clothes—a filthy brown sack coat, jeans trousers baggy at the knees, brogans, a shapeless felt hat turned up in the front. His face was a little oval of flesh in the midst of a great tangled beard; in its center was a bladelike nose flanked by tiny, glittering eyes. He wore an expression of indifference, as if he’d done all this before.

  The man’s hands were clasped in front, joined at the wrist by iron shackles.

  “Ah,” said the Captain, as if he had just remembered he was not alone. “This is Mister Simon Rope, just come to us by way of the conscript draft. Say howdy to the boys, Simon.”

  The man turned his head and spat.

  “As you can see,” said the Captain, “Mister Rope is a little testy after his long journey.”

  “Indeed,” said Virgil C., and spat himself. “What about those irons?”

  The Captain shook his head sadly. “Well, I am told by the provost guard that ever time they take the shackles off, Mister Rope tries to run away. They didn’t say why.”

  “Hmmm,” said Virgil C., and tried to spit again, but nothing came this time. “A fresh fish,” he said.

  “He don’t look so fresh to me,” said the Stranger.

  Then Jack Bishop was among them. He put his hand on Bushrod’s shoulder, and Bushrod turned and saw that Bishop’s eyes were quick again, a little too quick perhaps. Oh Jesus and Mary, thought Bushrod, and knew that something was about to happen.

  “Evenin, Cap’n,” said Bishop. “Who’s the scholar there?”

  Patiently the Captain explained again, while Simon Rope gazed contemptuously at the horizon. When the Captain was finished, Bishop nodded gravely. “I see, I see. And he is bad to run away, is he?”

  “That’s what I am told,” said the Captain.

  Jack Bishop rubbed his chin and contemplated the new man. “I can fix that,” he said.

  “Do tell,” said the Captain.

  “Sure,” said Bishop. He stepped forward until his face was inches from Simon Rope’s. “I can fix that right away, if you’ll just loan me your pistol for a minute.”

  “Now, Jack,” said the Captain. Simon Rope’s eyes glittered like chips of coal.

  “Take the irons off, Cap’n,” said Jack. “I’ll give him a good head start. I’ll even dig him his own hole, though he’ll have to share the bugs—”

  Simon Rope held up his manacled hands to the Captain. “Take em off,” he said, his eyes on Bishop. “Then give him your pistol.”

  “I ain’t givin anybody a pistol,” said the Captain. “Now listen—I am goin to take these shackles off, and you must all go back to work. We must ge
t these poor fellows buried, you know, so we can shoot some more—ah, beg your pardon, young man.”

  “Never mind, Cap’n,” said the Stranger. “It is only a hard truth.”

  “Well, it is a sad thing,” said the Captain. “A very sad thing. Anyhow—Mister Rope, you do as these boys say, and don’t be tryin to run off. Understand?”

  “Sure,” said Simon Rope, and held up his hands again.

  While the Captain fished in his several pockets for the key, Bushrod studied Simon Rope. Bushrod, like most of his comrades, had long ago ceased to be afraid of individual men—not out of bravado, but simply because he no longer had any fear to spare. But Bushrod was afraid of Simon Rope. He was more afraid of Simon Rope than all the mysteries he’d encountered in the long war. As Captain Sullivan removed the shackles, an image floated into Bushrod’s mind of a fat, boiled spider he had turned up once in a mess of turnip greens. That was Simon Rope. Bushrod shuddered and turned his eyes away.

  “All right,” said the Captain. “Now, boys, I came to you because I believe nobody can educate Mister Rope like you can. Do I make myself clear, Jack?”

  “Sure,” said Bishop, holding up his hands. “No hard feelins—we are all a little prickly with the heat.”

  “Sure,” said Simon Rope. His eyes were on Bishop’s face. “No hard feelins.”

  “All right, then,” said the Captain, and turned away.

  Bushrod did not see the Captain leave. He had fallen asleep on his feet and was already dreaming.

  He and his father and old Parson were gone up to the Tallahatchie to meet Cousin Remy on the steamboat. Bushrod watched the little one-armed steamer pop out of the morning fog, feeling for the channel in the overflowed river. When the boat neared the landing, the pilot pulled down on the whistle; a jet of steam leapt skyward and the deep, melancholy chime rolled over the flooded woods, the hills, the landing where the mules and horses shifted restlessly at the sound. …

  Then all at once there was another dream on top of that one. In the new dream, Jack Bishop and Simon Rope were standing in the fiery sunlight and everything around them was red and Simon Rope had a big knife of the kind they had all carried when they first went soldiering. He was holding it in Bishop’s face with the point just under Bishop’s nose. …