Wilkie could barely speak. "He crossed the dead line, sir."
Wilkie's eyes crawled from the officer's face to the corpse on the ground below. Flies had already settled on the wounds, their wings bright blue in the sun. Eggs would soon be laid, and maggots would be born in the man's rotting meat. Some of the larvae would crawl through the shallow grave dirt and make their way back here to continue the endless cycle.
"Good man," said the lieutenant, though his expression was of sorrowful weariness. "The war's over for one poor fool, at least."
Some of the prisoners below were mumbling. The lieutenant leaned over the sentry box. "Any man crossing the dead line will be shot," he said in a commanding voice.
The rumbles of discontent continued, but no Yankees approached the fence. Wilkie stared at the corpse until his vision blurred. He felt the officer's hand on his shoulder.
"Reload, private, then come with me." The lieutenant ignored Wilkie's tears.
Wilkie knelt in the sentry box and rubbed at his eyes. He opened them and let the heat dry them. Even staring at the clouds, he could still see the corpse, as if the vision had been burned into his retinas. Wilkie tried to tell himself that it wasn't his shot that killed the prisoner, but he knew he had aimed true for the chest. Then he grew angry at himself and rapped the gun with his knuckles, letting the pain distract him from such thoughts.
He climbed down the ladder, the musket cradled across one forearm. Guards opened the front gate, and a second private joined Wilkie and the lieutenant. They walked the no-man's-land between the wall and the dead line, eyes straight ahead, not acknowledging the watching Union soldiers.
"If I had a gun," said some brave anonymous soul.
"You'll get yours, Reb," said another. The lilting opening notes of "Amazing Grace" issued from the lips of a third.
When the detail reached the corpse, Wilkie and the other private rolled it over, so that the dead man was staring sightlessly at the sky. The lieutenant stood some distance away, talking to a Union officer.
"He just up and ran," Wilkie said to the private. "I had to shoot him."
"Hell, you're lucky you found a good reason. I seen 'em killed for less." The private spat a stream of tobacco juice to the ground. "Chamberlain, over in Second, tossed some bread scraps over the wall just down the foot of the dead line, then sat waiting for some Yankee to reach for it."
The private folded the dead man's arms over his chest and grabbed the shoulders of the bloodstained tunic. Wilkie balanced his musket over his arm again and grabbed the man's ankles. Pale, wrinkled toes poked from the boots.
"Boots ain't worth stealing," said the private. "Lately the dead have been just about worthless."
Wilkie said nothing, surprised by the dead man's lightness as they lifted him. He must be hollow, Wilkie thought.
"Except I hear the prisoners are selling rights on the corpses,” said the other soldier. "First out on burial detail get the best trading, you know."
Wilkie nodded, grunted, hoping to hurry the private along. The lieutenant finished with the Union officer and joined them.
"Tibbets," said the lieutenant. "Eighty-Second New York."
Tibbets. Wilkie tried the name on his tongue, pushed it against his teeth. Tibbets, a man with family somewhere, a man who may have enlisted under the same sense of duty that had brought Wilkie to their shared destination. A man. A name.
A corpse.
Flies buzzed about them. They reached the front gate and laid the corpse out in the line of the twenty other fresh dead just inside the wall. Tibbets would rest there until the morning, feeding flies in the company of his cold comrades. Wilkie and the other Confederates left the compound as the Union soldiers dispersed. A single death was not the subject of much rumination, not when thousands had already made their final exit through those gates.
Wilkie had grave detail the next morning. He had slept fitfully, his dreams haunted by Tibbets's rigid face. He waited by the wagon while Union soldiers tossed the corpses as casually as if stacking cordwood. Another fifty had died during the night, and the air was ripe with disease. When the first wagon was full, it began its trip to the dead-house, where the corpses were counted.
The Union volunteers marched in the wagon's wake, Wilkie bringing up the rear. When they reached the dead-house, the corpses were unloaded and brought inside for identification. This gave the prisoners a little free time. Some sat against trees, smoking, but a few slipped into the bushes surrounding the dead-house. They were the hucksters, ones who smuggled goods inside and profited from the hardship and deprivation of their fellow soldiers.
Guards were scattered around the grounds, and escape was rare. The Confederates turned a half-blind eye to the trading. An unwritten rule was that a huckster had to share a portion of his trade goods, slipping some eggs, tobacco, or the occasional greenback to the captors. It was a system that worked well, the kind of thing befitting a civilized camp. Except for those on the inside who had no money or barter.
Wilkie went into the shade of the woods and rested his musket against an oak. To the left of him was the mass cemetery, a long shallow ditch waiting for the day's dead. The thin layer of loose clay over the bodies did little to quell the stench of decay. Five thousand were already buried here, according to the corpse counters.
Wilkie lit his corncob pipe. The tobacco was stale, but at least it burned the smell of death from his nostrils.
He heard a rustle in a nearby laurel thicket. "Is that you, Yankee?" he said, to warn the prisoner not to attempt escape.
The bushes shimmied and the waxen leaves parted. A man in a shabby Union uniform stepped out. Wilkie first saw the toes protruding from the boots, then his gaze traveled slowly past the bloodied rips in the tunic to the man's face. The top of his skull was peeled away, but Wilkie knew that face, those eyes.
Tibbets.
Wilkie grabbed for his musket, accidentally knocking it to the ground. As he fell to his knees and scrabbled for it among the leaves, the boots approached, crackling in the dead loam and forest detritus. Wilkie gripped the musket and brought it to bear. What good was a musket ball against a dead man?
Tibbets stopped several feet away. His hands were spread wide, palms up. The dark eyes were solemn, the lips pressed tight. He was waiting.
"I… I didn't mean to kill you," Wilkie sputtered.
Tibbets said nothing.
A single sentence flew out from the chaos of Wilkie's thoughts: You can't talk when you're dead.
But neither could you walk. Neither could you stand there before the man who had shot you and make some silent pleading demand.
Tibbets raised his arms higher, then looked briefly heavenward. Wilkie followed the dead man's gaze. Nothing up there but a rag-barrel's worth of clouds and the screaming orange eye of the sun.
When Wilkie looked again at Tibbets, the corpse's hands were full of goods. Eggs, squash, a small rasher of bacon. And soap. Wilkie hadn't seen soap in six months.
Tibbets held his hands out to Wilkie. The meaning was clear. The goods were a gift to Wilkie. He set down his musket, trembling, and reached out to the corpse.
The eggs were cool to the touch, cooler than the dead fingers. The bacon had oozed some grease in the heat, but hadn't yet spoiled. The squash was shriveled but whole. And the soap…
Wilkie put the soap to his nose. The scent made him think of Susan, her clean hair, the meadow behind her father's cornfield.
Wilkie gazed gratefully into the dead man's eyes. "Why?" he asked.
The pale lips parted, and Tibbets's words came like a lost creek breeze. "You cried."
Tibbets turned and headed back toward the stand of jack pine.