“Union officer, men,” he said.
“Prove it,” one of the Akron boys said.
“Not sure I can, least not to your satisfaction, but if you lower your weapons I’ll climb down off Rosie here and we can step off the road and talk.”
We all three looked at each other, then I nodded and they nodded and the horseman kicked his leg over nice and neat and slid down off his mount. He walked him over to a hickory stump, hitched him tight, then told us to come on over and take a seat. There was a mossy log or two shone blue beside him in the moonlight. We came over and sat with him and he pulled out a bottle freshly filled with whiskey. He pulled the cork out with his teeth, took a drink, then offered it over to us. At first I shook my head but he insisted.
“You have that look about you,” he said.
“What look?”
“Of men just been fighting some fight.”
His name, he said, was Thomas Lord and he was a junior cavalry officer attached to the Kentucky Volunteers. He had gotten separated from his unit in a skirmish and now couldn’t get his way straight in the dark.
“My horse knows, I just don’t trust him as well as I should,” he said.
“That’s a fine horse,” I said.
“I rode him to war and haven’t stopped riding him and reckon one day, Heaven willing, I’ll ride him home.”
“But you don’t trust him.”
“It’s a defect in my personality. Not the biggest one.”
The horse whinnied when he said this. Lord leaned over and gave him a tender smack on his side. We had broken out the pork and crackers we had taken off the dead outlaws and after he had had a few crunches of what we shared out to him, Lord gave what was left of his part to the horse. The horse ate his portion with his dainty horse lips then shut his eyes. The Akron boys took this for a signal and shut their own and soon were snoring snores that sounded like they had each one shoved a fat frog down his throat. Me and Lord drank awhile and listened to their frogs croak, then Lord asked me what we had gotten ourselves into. I told him. The version where I hadn’t done it all. Killed them all. Or put on a dress.
“I heard about schemes like that,” he said. “There’s other varieties but that’s the general idea. Especially the part about you ending up in rebel grays and dead.”
“That we got taken in the first place was my fault. I let these two cobs of corn get to carrying on.”
We drank in silence a time. Lord’s horse gave out a kind of bark in his sleep and Lord said, “He’s having that dream.”
Like I said, I had been thinking about my own dream, so I gave a look over at Lord. He saw this look and smiled back at me.
“You sit on something long enough you start to be that thing and it starts to be you. I had an uncle in Louisville about never left his soft chair. He would get up and I wasn’t the only one would have sworn that chair would give out a cough and wet wheeze just like the ones my uncle did.”
“You are speaking in originalities,” I said.
“My horse is dreaming about a bullet we both of us took.”
I guessed the whiskey had worked up the swirl of war in him and when that happened you couldn’t know what a man would say. I met a man in the days after Antietam would drink whiskey then pull out a knife and start to working its point into himself. And not an hour before I had worn a dress and shot two men and killed another with a clay jug to the head. A man telling me what his horse was dreaming seemed small next to that. I leaned back against my stump and nodded and told him to go on.
“We were behind lines, not more than a few slippery feet from Memphis and enough fresh rebels to put the fear into any size mountain of our men. We were not to engage at any cost, was our strict order, just reconnoiter and return to tell the tale. And it looked like we might get the errand done. Happy thinking. The kind has paved many a road down to its doom. Our way out of there took us through an ambush of sharpshooters and in the first volley half our boys got shot. It was a night darker and stranger than this one with winds running hither and thither and the moon playing hide-and-seek in the clouds. You thought you had a line on where they were firing from and then you would know — because another of us had been dropped — that you were wrong. A rumor got started it was Pickett and his boys we were brawling with and that set the strange weather to working in our heads and we started doing even worse than we already had. I don’t know how it happened but Rosie and I got ourselves about out of there and up onto a rise. I had one of my boys behind me and raised my hand to signal him to hold a minute when I felt a pinch and saw a musket ball had come to its clattery end in the crook of my fingers.”
Lord held up his hand and pointed to the crook between his third and fourth fingers. Then he traced a line that dribbled down the back of his hand, along his sleeve and went curling into a drop off his forearm.
“As I watched, that bullet slipped out from between my fingers and went falling away. It hit Rosie on his neck before it fell down to the ground. He gave up a shout and reared up like he had been hit for good when he felt it. We both about went over backward onto a pile of rock. In the dream he just had it was him caught the bullet in his right front hoof. And me the one went rearing up.”
“Well, well,” I said.
“That very night when I made my report at camp my commanding officer told me his grandfather had taken a spent bullet better than mine back in 1812. He had taken it directly between the eyebrows with enough fire left in it to penetrate the skin, skid down inside the right side of his face, and lodge behind his ear. When he was a boy, my commanding officer told me, it was a special treat to climb onto his grandfather’s lap and take a feel at the nub of bullet buried under his ear skin.”
“That’s quite a dream,” I said. Though whether or not I said it out loud was a question. The events of the long day and now this strange colloquy had done their work and I had got settled down, alongside the Akron boys and Lord’s horse, into my own froggy snores. Whether Lord joined us awhile I don’t know because when we all three woke the next morning he was gone. For whatever reason we did not speak about that meeting as we set out again, and by and by it came to seem to me as vague as the horse’s dream.
I had this idea we would march more or less back the way we had come and get ourselves home to camp by suppertime but during our overnight, the scatterings of Secesh forces had swollen up. From a rise we could see them spread out like moldy cauliflower across the valley we needed to traverse so we set off through the soldier pines to make our way around. It was cheerful weather for a hike. There were bluebirds in the green trees and breezes blowing quiet, happy things about. Made the night before seem another world entirely, nothing but twists of whiskey and steam. The Akron boys had been clammed up tight all morning but by and by they started into their chirping again. I expect I joined them for a chirp or two and who knows but what we might have started in with some full-out singing if an hour into our hike we hadn’t found ourselves walking through the dead.
It was a shallow grave cut for hundreds hadn’t had much of its top put on. There was dust and swirls of leaves blown atop them so that we were several yards in when we realized what it was we had stumbled upon. I had my foot on a hand when one of the Akron boys said, “I just saw a face.” The other said, “That down there looks like an arm.” I thought at first it was just Union dead but then I saw there was plenty of gray had joined in too. There was dead and the bones of the dead for the next mile after that. “Here we go now, boys,” I said. There was dead sitting against trees, dead with their feet in the air, dead dangling over the boughs of trees. There was dead fallen three deep in creek beds and dead lying separately in a clearing tucked up to their chins in neat blankets of sun. I saw a head on its way to making a skull and thought about the belle and wondered if she was still wearing her own.