The Black Flower Read online

  “Captain?” This was another voice, a woman’s certainly; she had come out of a room off the hall and now stood by the Squire, gripping his arm. Her voice startled the officer, he caught himself and bowed slightly. “Ma’am,” he said, thinking that here was a lady sure enough—slight, like the girl, but not old enough to be her mother—maybe her sister. The woman went on in her pleasant voice: “In the press of circumstance we have forgotten our courtesy. We can offer you coffee, or cider if you like, and perhaps something for your horse?”

  The officer knew he should decline; he had lingered too long already and Old Straight Stewart would have his ass and he had to get away from the girl on the stairs and her watchful eyes which from this distance certainly did appear to be green—

  “Oh, well,” he said, “just a cup of water would do me fine, and if you had just a handful of corn—”

  “Surely,” said the lady. “John, do make this man comfortable while I see to it.”

  When the lady went, the girl came off the stairs and followed her without looking at him again. He was watching her move away when the Squire took his arm.

  “Come,” said McGavock. “Time is pressing.”

  The Squire led him back to the portico where they stood together by the steps. The officer felt like a suitor on his first call. McGavock was looking off toward the south, his hands clasped behind him, as if he were about to ask what the young man’s prospects were, or what he thought of the last cotton crop. Instead, the older man inclined his chin toward the woods and said, “The army will come from there, I suppose.”

  “I expect they will, sir,” said the officer.

  McGavock turned to him, his face suddenly serious, his voice urgent. “Between the railway and the Lewisburg Pike, the enemy’s line bends to the north. You must tell your general that.”

  The officer was sobered by the tone in the other’s voice. He took out a greasy memorandum book and the stub of a pencil and began to write.

  “Say to him also that he must be prepared for the hedges.”

  The officer looked up. “The hedges?”

  “Osage orange,” said the Squire. “They have been growing for thirty years, so thick a field mouse couldn’t get through. They are all along the enemy’s left, nearly to the Carter gin house. Say to General Stewart that he must be prepared for them.”

  “Very good, sir,” said the officer, scribbling. “Anything else you might think of?”

  McGavock looked to the south again. “Yes,” he said, after a moment. “Tell him. …tell him the works are very strong, and I do not see how—” He stopped himself, fell silent.

  The officer closed his book. “I will tell him, sir.”

  McGavock turned on him again. “You must go now” he said. “You must not delay, sir. There is—”

  But at that moment a young negro came out carrying a tin pail full of corn. “Hey, Marse John,” he grinned, and crossed the portico and went out to old Buck, who greeted him like an eager child. The officer felt a pang; he was glad for Buck, but ashamed he’d asked for corn in these hard times. It was all the girl’s doing, she—

  “Here is your water,” said the girl, and offered the cup.

  The officer was astonished. He had expected the lady, or a servant—was she a servant? Ridiculous. Her eyes were very green, and she watched him in a sidelong way that made him uncomfortable. He felt the blood rise in his face.“I am. …my name is. …”

  The girl lifted an eyebrow, waiting. The officer stammered on. “Patrick Tanner. …that is my name—of Limestone County, Alabama. We haven’t, that is I haven’t. …been introduced. Let me ask you, your name—it, um, it wouldn’t be Nancy, would it?”

  “No,” said the girl, “it wouldn’t.”

  “Ah,” said the officer. “No, of course it wouldn’t.” He looked down at his boots. They were caked with mud.

  “Your water?” said the girl.

  “Oh, yes,” he said. He took the cup, searched for a clever thing to say, found one. ‘“A sweeter draught from a fairer hand was never quaffed,’” he said. “Whittier.”

  “I know,” said the girl.

  She was intolerable. He struggled to get past her eyes, decided she wasn’t all that pretty anyhow, searched for another clever thing to say and found nothing.

  “Captain,” said John McGavock, “it is already late in the day.”

  The officer smiled then. “Yes, sir,” he said, still looking at the girl. “It most always is.”

  He drank the water quickly; it was clear and sweet, the first in memory that didn’t taste like the rust in his canteen. When he returned the cup, he looked at the girl’s hands. They were small, of course, and ringless, and they were shaking, and young Patrick Tanner suddenly realized what he had done.

  He turned and fled. It was only a few steps to his horse, but he felt he would never reach the saddle. The sky seemed darker, the woods yonder full of malignant promise—beyond them lay the army that would soon sweep down on this house, on the girl and the gentleman and lady, on the negro boy, the little white hen, the chinaberry trees, the child—wherever he was—whose wooden horse watched him go with its glass eyes. And after that the long and terrible night that he, Patrick Tanner, had brought down on them, and it was no wonder the girl looked at him as she did and no wonder at all that her hands were shaking.

  He gained the stirrup at last and swung himself up, and it was all he could do to look back again at the people gathered on the portico. The lady lifted her hand. “God be with you,” she said, “and with all of you this day.”

  The officer felt he might cry, he did not trust himself to speak. He still held his cap, where he had removed it in the hall; he waved it, gallantly he hoped, and bowed in the saddle, and was about to turn away when the girl stepped off the portico. He watched her cross the little way between them and stop at the horse’s head. She touched the rein, not exactly looking at him, but not looking away either. “It is Anna,” she said.

  “I. …I beg pardon? I—”

  “My name,” she said. “It’s Anna, not Nancy.”

  “Anna,” said the officer. He struggled to make the words come. “Miss Anna, you got to understand—if it was up to me, we’d all quit and go home. I didn’t mean to—”

  The girl nodded. “I know,” she said. “I know you didn’t.”

  “Ah, my God,” said the officer.

  “Go!” broke in John McGavock. “Say to the General we will be ready.”

  Anna dropped the rein. The officer looked at her a last time. “It was sweet water,” he said, and smiled, pulled Buck around and cantered away. He did not look back.

  He was still at the canter as he passed through the woods, Buck’s hooves making a good sound in the dry leaves, the shadows of branches flickering. Beyond, in the fields again, he pulled Buck down to a trot, then a walk, and at last stopped. He sat a moment, then turned the horse’s head back toward the house. He couldn’t see it, but he felt it there, strong and solid in the waning light. Maybe it will be all right, he thought. Maybe we are stronger than any of us think—

  Horse and rider stood absolutely still, like an equestrian statue in the field. Again there was no pain, only the calm place, and the officer thought When I come again, I will make sure to ride over this very field—I will remember that rock yonder, and that hickory with the busted limb, and I will say how glad I am it is that day and not this— He closed his eyes and watched him and Buck ride through the little wood and across the yard toward the house warm in the spring sun, all the windows open and the curtains billowing out in the breeze, white and fair, and the white clouds poised overhead. And there was Anna in the yard, watching him come with her hand shading her eyes—

  Young Patrick Tanner smiled, shaping in his mind the words he would say, trying to get them right, almost had them when a Federal sharpshooter lurking among the rocks of the field shot him once through the body. It was an easy shot: the man had a telescopic sight, the range was less that sixty yards and almo
st no wind. The officer fell backward over his horse’s rump and landed face-down, his arms flung out before him. Buck shied and trotted away a few paces, looked back at the man, waited for him to rise. When he didn’t, the horse walked back, nudged him once. In a little while, he lowered his head and began to crop the brittle grass.

  Time passed, and the people in the great brick house made ready for what was to come. They watched the sun, and they saw the moonrise, and when they had done all they could, they waited.

  Late in the afternoon, Caroline McGavock found herself in the parlor. It was empty, everything moveable or breakable had been carried to the attic—all but the clock. She had told them to leave the clock, for she took comfort in the simple movement of the hands across the cracked and yellowed face. She would point to it a hundred times in the coming night as proof that even suffering could not last forever.

  The room seemed larger now, and colder than she had ever known it, though already there was a fire in the hearth. In the vacancy, she heard the actual tick of the clock for the first time in years. Anna, who had come to close the shutters, was standing at the window, gazing off toward the south, and Caroline came to stand beside her. There was not much to see: only the slope of the yard, the barren woodline and the sky. It all seemed so familiar, so beguiling, as if nothing at all was going to happen, as if there were no great armies poised for battle, no men about to die.

  Caroline McGavock put her arm around her cousin’s slight shoulders, the other inclined her head so that she stood close beside. They breathed the cool smoky air and let the thin sunlight fall on their faces. Outside, in the dying afternoon, long shadows reached toward the house.

  “Well, cousin,” said Caroline McGavock after a while, “did you ever think, when you came to visit, that we’d be in such a fix?”

  “No, cousin,” said Anna, smiling. “But if I had thought it, I reckon I’d have come just the same.”

  “Me, too,” said Caroline. “Though I’d of rather had a frolic and a pig-roast.”

  “Lord—for all these folks?”

  “Two pigs, then.”

  “I suppose you’d have the Yankees too?”

  “Oh, by all means,” said Caroline. “I am told they have some excellent bands.”

  They laughed. “Well, cousin John would never stand for it,” Anna said. “Why, he’d have—”

  Caroline cocked her head. “Wait—listen.”

  Anna listened. “Musketry,” she whispered. “Is that what it is?”

  Caroline nodded.

  “It is begun, then.”

  “Yes,” said Caroline. “It is begun.”

  Anna pressed her hand against the window glass. “All right, then,” she said. “Let em come if they’re comin, and make an end of it. That’s what I—”

  A gun discharged in the Federal line; even at that distance the concussion rattled the window in their faces and the women jumped back, startled, and Anna threw up her hands. Caroline saw that they were shaking, and took them fast in her own. “Anna,” she said.

  “Oh, my God,” said Anna. “It’s nothin—only fear, and there is plenty of that to go around, don’t you think?”

  Caroline McGavock drew her cousin to her in the twilight. Beyond the trees to the south, they could hear the measured cadence of many drums.

  “Well, little one,” said Caroline, “we best close the shutters. They are coming now.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  They were moving forward, their feet whispering in the grass.

  “That jaybird back there better pull in his feathers,” Jack Bishop was saying. “If I hear ‘dress it up’ one more time, I’ll haul his freight.”

  “You mean young Jeff Hicks?” asked Bushrod.

  “The little general himself,” said Jack. “He has gotten forevermore too big for his breeches.”

  “I guess he is only tryin to do right,” said Bushrod. “No doubt he’s nervous.”

  “Say, Jeff!” shouted Virgil C. over his shoulder. “Your Uncle Jack thinks you are too big for your breeches!”

  “By God, Virgil C. Johnson, for bein such a smart-ass I will haul your freight as well,” said Jack.

  “Your granny,” said Virgil C.

  “Quiet, you men!” bellowed the First Lieutenant.

  They laughed.

  It was not so bad, now that they were moving. They were swinging along, scaring up rabbits and quail, ignoring the band and taking their time from the field music.

  The fortunes of war had pared the regimental field music to three drummers. There had been a brace of fifers once, who announced every evolution from reveille to retreat with their absurd tweedling and marched men into battle with warbling tunes that set Bushrod’s teeth on edge. He was grateful when the idiot fifers were reduced to the ranks. But the drummers remained; three gaunt Presbyterians from the hills of North Mississippi, who kept to themselves and rarely spoke and never laughed. They had come down to Cumberland in rusty black clawhammer frock coats and breeches that ended well above their ankles, bearing fat carpet bags and well-thumbed Testaments, and offered themselves to the recruiting officer with the proviso that they would not, under any circumstances, take the life of another man. So they were instructed in the drum by an old drum-major of militia, and ever since they had been the field music for Bushrod’s regiment. They had outlasted the fifers, outlasted a fat bass drummer who deserted, outlasted a succession of pink-cheeked drummer boys whose legs could not match the ground-eating stride of the Western army. They had woven black crepe into the ropes of their drums so that each resembled a catafalque; they wore black crepe rosettes in the lapels of the frock coats they had never relinquished. They drove men into battle soberly, implacably, the funereal drums bouncing on their thighs, drag ropes swinging. Their drums spoke a frightening magic, older than fear, older than death, and Bushrod regarded them with no little awe.

  They had three cadences, these spectral drummers, which they called First Kings, Second Kings, and Revelation. Going into a fight, they went from one cadence to another with no apparent signal until the officers began to shout commands and men began to fall. Then the drummers began a solemn drill beat that Bushrod believed would be the muttering undertone of every nightmare he would ever have.

  The drummers were beating Revelation now as the regiment stepped along, and Bushrod Carter raised his eyes and looked about. What he saw filled him with wonder and dread.

  The long, mottled lines of Confederate infantry were emerging in perfect order onto the plain, bands playing, drums beating, bayonets gleaming in the sun. The great Life of which they were all a part had surged into movement, pressing forward in bristling waves and bearing them along to some purpose they could but dimly perceive. For the first time in all Bushrod’s soldiering, the sight of his army arrayed for battle drove fear, reluctance, even the sacred knowledge of death itself from his mind, and in their place burned a single, incandescent idea: that here, on this field, he was witness to a scene that would never be played again, and whatever the balance of his life, he would measure it from the moment now unfolding around him.

  Jack Bishop felt it, too. “Mankind,” he murmured. “Look at that, would you? If that don’t make the cheese-eaters run, then I’m your granny.”

  “They won’t run,” said Bushrod.

  “I bet I would if it was me,” said Virgil C. “Hell, it’s all I can do to keep from runnin now.”

  “For God’s sake, keep your dress, boys!” shouted the Captain. “Guide center! Don’t let the line bow out!”

  “Guide center, boys!” echoed the lieutenants.

  “Dress it up!” said young Jeff Hicks.

  All the flags of the army were loosed now. They spread and blossomed in the breeze and marked every regiment with a bright splash of color. Bushrod glimpsed, far to the left, the fabled blue flags of Cleburne’s men and the flutter of blue guidons on the bayonets of their company guides. His own regiment’s flag flapped lazily around its tilted staff, and he thought of their
first company flag sewn by the Ladies of Cumberland and lost at Perryville, and of Mister Denby Garrison who had blessed it, saying We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of God we will set up our banners. … Oh Lord God of Hosts, Bushrod thought—make us an army terrible with banners and support us in the day of battle.

  Along the division front, skirmishers trotted out in a thin double line. From a distance they seemed almost casual, like bird hunters. Bushrod knew better. He had been there before and knew that to be on the skirmish line was the lonesomest, nakedest feeling in the world. He was glad he was not out there now. He was glad, too, that he was a private soldier and not one of the field officers on their nervous mounts, nor among the couriers who cantered back and forth before the lines. He welcomed the press of his friends’ shoulders, the reassuring clank and rattle of the ranks, the bristle of bayonets and the dark, compelling music of the drums.

  “Too-ra-loo,” said Jack. “See the artillery over yonder!”

  Sure enough, the Strangers across the way were already trying their guns: first a blossom of white smoke snatched away by the breeze, then a dull report and the curious, hollow whine of the arcing shell, then the pum-pum! of the aerial burst over the heads of the troops—for all the world, Bushrod thought, like a battle picture in Leslie’s Illustrated.

  “Where the hell’s our guns at?” asked Virgil C. He was breathing hard now and soaked with sweat. “I bet they are strung out all the way back to Spring Hill.”

  “Naw, there’s some around here somewheres,” said Bushrod. As if in confirmation, a Confederate gun far to the left ripped off a shot toward the Strangers. “See there?” said Bushrod. A second gun fired, its report echoing across the fields. Bushrod saw the shell erupt in front of the first line of works. Still, Bushrod admitted, it wasn’t much of a show. Like all infantrymen, Bushrod was scornful of anyone who did not belong to that arm of the service—especially the gunners, those curiously un-accoutred specialists perched upright on their limbers like little dolls. But if he had to go into a fight, Bushrod liked to pass through the smoke of his own guns on the slim chance that they had prepared a way for him. There would be no such comfort now.