“I think it was more than that,” she says and switches pictures again. This time the blurry image resolves itself into something gruesome: dead Rebs strewn along the fence on Hagerstown Pike. She shows me dead Rebels with their silent guns in front of the battered Dunker Church. She shows me the bodies of dead Rebels packed in a sunken road. I know all the pictures. My father showed them to us, projected on a big screen in our living room, as if recounting a vacation into the past.
“They lie as they fell,” I say, rubbing my eyes and looking at her. A dreaming look passes from her face and she says, “They got what they fucking deserved.”
Joan is at the dance that night, looking very smart in her dress uniform. My brothers are there, and my parents, my mother in a stylish oval hoopskirt and a purple velvet Zouave jacket and a hat piled high with fresh flowers. She kept the hat in the refrigerator at home and brought it to Chickamauga in a cooler. By day she plays a nurse because in real life she is a nurse. Some overeager ambulance types took me off the field last year and brought me to the hospital tent, where I lay on a stretcher and watched my mother exulting in all the fake blood. She saw me and came over to where I lay. I thought it was to say hello, but when she leaned her bloodstained face over me she only said, “Scream.” I didn’t scream. I just lay and watched, listening to all the enthusiastic shrieking the other boys were doing. It seemed to me that they were not a damned thing like the screams of men who were bleeding from the belly or getting their legs sawed off. I remembered how my father had screamed when he got the news that Clay was dead. He always claimed to have seen it coming, but I know he was screaming because he couldn’t believe that his son was gone. Probably that was a pretty close approximation of the sort of scream you make when someone saws off your leg, a scream not just of pain but of disbelief.
“I hate them,” Joan confesses to me as we are dancing. She tosses her head to indicate the Rebel officers. People are hissing at us, “Farb! Farb!” I don’t care. I think we make a dashing couple. If I am a failure at everything else in life, I am at least a success at a polka, and Joan is no slouch. “Have you ever even thought about how they got away with it? How they got away clean. How they are still getting away with it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask her, not caring what she means, because I am holding her and dancing with her, and the pressure of her against my chest is a little like when she put her hand there.
“Hundreds of years of abomination, is what I mean. I mean people owning other people and then pretending like they never did.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“That’s what they say! That’s exactly what they say. But it was yesterday.”
I don’t like kissing, Clay wrote. All the sucking gives me an ache in the back of my head. Joan and I pitch our dog-tent together. You need two people to make a whole tent — each private carries half of one rolled up on his back. You button them together and they make a pretty sorry sort of shelter, sure to leak in the rain, and not proof at all against the cold. She has got a wool blanket and some mattress ticking that we stuffed with hay and corn husks provided by the hosts of the battle. We strip down to our red flannel long johns and crawl between the blanket and the hay. We lie there, her belly to my back. She sings in a low voice:
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease,
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace,
Dying tonight,
Dying tonight,
Dying on the old campground.
Then she is silent, and I think she must be sleeping, but suddenly she cries out, “Spoon!” and we flip over, so now it’s my belly in her back. I am shivering, and not from the cold. She calls spoon a few more times, until one time I turn and find that she hasn’t. Her face is right before mine, and she kisses me. I get an aching in my head, but I like it.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asks me later.
“I don’t know,” I say.
“There must be one thing.”
“Not really,” I say, except there is. It springs easily to mind, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask just this question. Once, during a big, hysterical, pan-family blowout, I held Clay’s arms at his sides while he struggled to get away. I was trying to keep him from running out the door, because when he did that we never knew when we would see him again. But my mother took that opportunity to slap him hard across the face, while I was holding him, and I felt like I’d hit him myself, like I’d punished him for the crime of being miserable.
“Then what’s the best thing you’ve ever done?”
“I don’t know. I probably haven’t done much good. How about you?”
“I know it but I haven’t done it yet. I have something planned. It’s something really fine.”
At the regimental inspection the next morning, I am bleary-eyed and wrinkled. The Ninth Ohio has fallen in, then opened ranks so Colonel Kammerling and his aides, my father among them, can walk down the lines to check us over and see if anyone is guilty of anachronism or harboring unsafe equipment. I pull out my ramrod and drop it down my musket barrel, then undo the flap on my cartridge box. My father pulls the ramrod up an inch or two, then lets it drop. When it makes the requisite bright ringing noise, he nods gruffly. A dirty gun will give a dull thud, or no noise at all. He flips open my cartridge box, checking unnecessarily for penny wrappers or stapled cartridges — these are hazardous. They can put out someone’s eye, or even do them in. But my father rolls all my cartridges because I make such a mess of them when I try to do it for myself.
“Fine cartridges, son,” he says, and moves on to scold a poor farby next to me whose gun is dirty, whose buttons are sewn upside down. “You’re a disgrace!” he tells him, and it sounds for a moment like he is talking to Clay.
Joan is behind me. I can hear the colonel praising her. Her musket barrel has rung so purely it has moved him practically to tears.
“It’s obvious, soldier,” he says, “that you care deeply for that weapon. I think it must be the best-cared-for gun in the whole Army of the Cumberland.”
“I love it, sir,” she says. “I love it like it was my own baby.”
After drill I help my father give an informative talk for the civilian spectators, “What Was in a Typical Haversack?” I am his dodo, or translator. He is in character as great-great-grandpa, and I am there so he does not have to come out of it, to answer questions whose answers are beyond the ken of his nineteenth-century persona.
“You had your eating implements,” he says, pointing at the little table upon which he’d emptied out his sack. “Knife and fork, a real big spoon, a tin plate, and a dipper.”
“Wouldn’t a spork have been more economical?” asks a man. He leans forward from the ring of people surrounding us and points at the big spoon. “Wouldn’t a spork have been better? Why didn’t you use a spork?”
My father gives a me a confused look. “Spork?”