“A combination spoon and fork,” I say, hating that he is pretending not to know what a spork is. “Sir,” I say to the pale, fat man, “they didn’t have sporks back then. Thomas Alva Edison invented the spork in 1878, thirteen years after the war’s end.” My father glares at me. There are few offenses graver, in his book, than giving out misinformation at a haversack talk. But I like to remind myself how lying and pretending are different. He moves on to the food you ate with your implements.
“Hardtack, beans, desiccated vegetables, fatback, and salt pork.” He has me pass around some hardtack. We always have a big hardtack bake-off before we leave for a reenactment.
“They ate this stuff?” asks Sporky.
“Yes, we did,” says my father. “But we did not like it.” He sings a few verses of “Hard Crackers Come Again No More.” A child bites into the hardtack — one always does — and says it tastes like cardboard. My father points out some personal items, letters and a Bible and a jacknife. A lady is concerned that letters from home would get greasy if you put them in with the fatback. The fatback is being passed around, too, and she is holding it at arm’s length like it’s a dead rat. My father admits that greasy letters were a problem.
“How long did the war last?” asks the child who tried the hardtack.
“Four years,” says my father.
“Like high school,” says the fatback lady.
“Very much,” I say. “Brutal and hellish, and when you were in it, it seemed like it would never, ever end.”
“You had your armaments,” my father says. “You could maybe put your bayonet in your haversack, if it was properly sheathed.” People clamor for him to talk about his gun. Nobody ever had to ask him twice to do that.
“This is a U.S. Springfield Model 1861 rifle-musket. Named after the armory where she was manufactured, but I call her Sally.” Sporky raises his hand with another question. “Yes, sir?” my father says.
“Did they hide behind those when they were shooting?” he asks, pointing at the stacks of cannonballs that spring up everywhere on the field, commemorating the fall of this or that general, and the tall obelisks commemorating the brave stand of this or that regiment.
“In fact they did,” I say. “Whoever reached the monuments first enjoyed a distinct advantage.”
My father throws me out of his talk. He gets my mother to be his dodo, which is fine with me. I go looking for Joan and find her in her tent with a one-pound can of powder open between her legs, rolling cartridges. I crawl in and sit down next to her. When I lean over for a kiss, she pushes me away.
“Don’t!” she says. “You’ll mess it up.”
“I thought you had a full box already.”
“I need a special one,” she says, folding up the tail of the cartridge she is working on. She tosses it to me. It has an unfamiliar weight, and it takes me a long stupid moment to realize it’s because she’s put a real minié ball in there.
“What’s this for?” I ask her.
“What do you think?” she says. And then she does kiss me. I sit and smooch with her, her not-blank clutched in my hand, when I should be running to my father or the colonel to report. I’m going to leave now, I tell myself. This is somebody’s life in my hands. But I don’t leave.
I am buddied up with Joan for the big event, the reenactment of Thomas’s Stand on Snodgrass Hill. It seems strange to me, sometimes, how the historians talk. Time after time, they say, Thomas was assaulted by furious Confederate attacks, but somehow he managed to hold on. As if he did all the fighting himself. As if he died again and again and again over the course of the day. As if this was a battle between two giants — handsome, noble Thomas, and drunken, contrary Bragg — and not a thing fought by little men who come to know as they duck and kill how their lives are infinitely precious and cheap.
I have a plan to stay near Joan and steal her cartridge when she tries to use it. “Coming over!” I shout, and then fire past her shoulder at the Rebs climbing the hill between the thin oaks. We are lined up in regiment, just two deep, and I am in a position to see her every move. The live cartridge is wrapped in funny papers, not ordinary newsprint. I will know it when I see it. I am ready to stop her.
Who is guilty? Clay wrote. I am guilty. I am guilty. I look back on my life and it is all shame. I have his journal with me at the battle. I carry it around always. At first I carried it everywhere (it’s small and fits in any pocket) for fear that someone would discover it if I left it alone, and then because I got in the habit of consulting it, like some people consult their Bible. Who is guilty? I read that passage before we went up to the hill.
The Rebs keep charging and falling back, ululating as they come. Their peculiar cry makes them sound like reckless, hooting drunks. It was supposed to be formidable, 135 years ago. It unnerved the Union soldiers greatly, and they struggled unsuccessfully to come up with a cry of their own, an answer, a great hurrah to raise their spirits as they rushed forward to die, but contemporary accounts tell that they mostly sounded like they were about to vomit. The Rebel charges must fail. They won’t take the field until Thomas makes an orderly retreat to Chattanooga.
Where does it go? That’s what I want to know. That’s the question I’d like to write in Clay’s book. Where does it disappear to, all the pain of an anguished life, after that life has ended? My parents and my brothers, I think they believed it got sucked into Clay’s coffin, in a sort of reverse Pandora’s box effect. So after he died they were always sighing, as if at the sadness of everything, but really I think they were sighing with relief, because they would no longer be tortured with his torturedness.
Joan turns and smiles at me as she loads the funny-paper cartridge. I point my gun at the ground, put my hand out to touch her shoulder. “Don’t,” I say weakly. All around us people are conducting the ordinary business of battle, cocking, firing, charging, taking their hits and offering up their dying groans. I don’t watch her do it. I take a hit and cover my eyes while she raises her rifle and picks out her Reb. I imagine her searching, looking for a nice, juicy, backward-thinking one. “Don’t,” I say again, but I feel a thrill inside when I hear her fire, and I imagine Clay taking a shot at the world that heaped him. The sky is an obscene belly. It smothers me. I see my brother stab back at the world, not consenting to be ruined and killed by it.
I uncover my eyes. Joan is standing just in front of me, looking very calm, peering through the smoke. She raises her rifle, and I think she’ll shoot again, that she has more bullets, that even if I had taken away her cartridge she still would have shot somebody. But she drops her rifle, takes a hit with a moan more of pleasure than of pain, and falls down with a peaceful look on her face.
“Crybaby,” she says to me.
A CHILD’S BOOK OF SICKNESS AND DEATH
My room, 616, is always waiting for me when I get back, unless it is the dead of winter, rotavirus season, when the floor is crowded with gray-faced toddlers rocketing down the halls on fantails of liquid shit. They are only transiently ill, and not distinguished. You earn something in a lifetime of hospitalizations that the rotavirus babies, the RSV wheezers, the accidental ingestions, the rare tonsillectomy, that these sub-sub-sickees could never touch or have. The least of it is the sign that the nurses have hung on my door, silver glitter on yellow posterboard: Chez Cindy.
My father settles me in before he leaves. He likes to turn down the bed, to tear off the paper strap from across the toilet, and to unpack my clothes and put them in the little dresser. “You only brought halter tops and hot pants,” he tells me.