“It was all three of us got out together.”
“Your gallantry exceeds you. I have seen and spoken to those two men. They are greenhorns and barely out of the nursery and I exercise the hyperbolic arts in referring to them as men. They would both be better as bootblacks. It is a shame of our days and all days of war that we set our children to arms. One of them cried as he spoke to me.”
“Like the lieutenant.”
“Pardon me?”
“He cried. In his barrel.”
“He has been demoted and sent to fight on elsewhere. Carousing was not his central transgression.”
“I didn’t do anything special, sir.”
“All right.”
“It was three of us got in and three of us got out.”
“Fine, fine.”
The Colonel lit a cigar. He put it in his mouth and took it back out. The smoke came over to me and set a cloud between us.
“I’d had it in mind after your performance with those squirrels to make you a sharpshooter,” he said.
“I wouldn’t want to be a sharpshooter,” I said.
“No, perhaps not, but I’d had it in mind for having seen you in battle and taken account of your exploits and having seen how you barely even had to aim when you shot those tree rats out of their skins. I’d had it in mind to recommend you, in addition, for a citation. For bravery. For that episode with the cartridge boxes. I know about that too. But you hear the tense I am using. You hear that I am speaking in the past.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There are other stories making the rounds about you.”
I took in a little suck of air. The Colonel’s smoke came in when I did that, caught the wrong part of my throat, and I coughed. I saw the lady crossing through the moonlight behind the house. I saw and felt her both.
“Sir, I have been a good soldier and have fought well for the cause,” I said.
“A good soldier, is it? Is that the phrase your mind makes? Is that what rises out of the mystery living its swamp-lit life between your ears?”
I took another breath. I am coming home to you now, Bartholomew, I thought. Would it be such a bad thing? I should never have left and now I am coming home. The Colonel stood. He was half a head taller than me. He had broad shoulders, and the gilt on his saber handle gleamed in the gray light. I felt small, and tired. I didn’t know what I would wear. I had a sudden, wild wish that the stout lady’s dress hadn’t burned, that I had stuffed it in my pack and carried it back here with me.
“I had a man in here late this morning says you stole rations out of his haversack while he was at his nap.”
It took me a minute to hear what he had just said. When I had heard it, it took me another minute to take my mind away from the moonlight and that rustling sound I had made when I walked in the stout lady’s fine cloth to the coarse blue wool I now had on my legs and the Colonel standing behind his cigar smoke in front of me.
“That man presented three others who were willing to testify that you had taken your fill of their rations too.”
“It is lies,” I said. “I’ll fight any man says otherwise. I will feed him my fists and ask him afterward how he liked his meal.”
The Colonel looked at me. He nodded.
“Maybe so. Maybe it is lies. Probably it is. I’d expect we could rouse just as many or more to refute the charges. Maybe I don’t give a good goddamn. But I imagine you can see that I can’t offer you a special position or a commendation with such propositions swirling, can I?”
“No, sir.”
“I could not hold you to the light of general recognition and visibility under such circumstances. I couldn’t put all eyes in this camp on you. You might find you couldn’t move free any longer, that you had found your way into your own barrel, and then what would you do? Do you, Private, disagree?”
I shook my head. He nodded. He picked up his book again but did not open it. He closed his eyes.
“ ‘Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine.’ ”
He tapped the book, opened his eyes.
“ ‘And fortune hard to divine,’ ” he said again.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
We stood awhile. There was some cannon pop off at a distance and some birdsong closer by.
“You may go now, Gallant Ash,” he said.
He looked at me and raised his eyebrow and when he had let his eyebrow down I went.
I am worn down to the bone,” I wrote my husband the evening after this exchange.
“Come home to me when you are ready,” he wrote me back. “We can try again.”
“I am not ready, not yet,” I wrote.
“I’ll keep on waiting, I will,” he wrote.
Then the Colonel gave orders and we marched across a strip of pretty water, over a low green mountain, and into the start of my hell.
TWO
The battle lasted days. In our minds those days were weeks. In our dreams — taken in short heaps on the hard ground — those weeks were years. My company had been given a battery to help guard and some nights we had our rest under the cannon. The rebels kept us hot and more than once it was blade work under the stars. In the middle of a fight we got the order to drop and our boys fired off that six-inch right over our heads. The rebels had heard the order too and they dropped along with us so the only thing got hurt was an oak tree.
During the day they worked their mortars on us. You would have thought it was snowing dirt and fine flaked metal after a while. They killed a number of my company off for good but never took our cannon while we were at the guard. One time they tried a charge. To this day I will raise my weapon on any rebel I see, but the sight of a line of those fine horsemen coming at you through the smoke was a beautiful thing to behold. There was the part of the South worth keeping in that charge. It wasn’t the part kept chattel slaves to scratch their masters’ backs and make their beds. To work their fields. To build their houses. To whip when they wanted to. It was those horsemen, riding low, pistols at the ready, sabers up. They looked like knights. Like it wasn’t powder black on their faces they were wearing but grim ladies’ scarves on their sleeves.
We made our line and cut them down with our muskets and I saw our cannon take off half a handsome white gelding’s head. They did not stop though and got close enough for swords and hooves and pistol work. You ever try to fight a man on a horse? Man with a weapon in his hand? Man come up from Natchez with the demon horse he was born on and hungry for blood? A boy not five feet away from me got made into jelly by a piebald mare with red eyes. Another got his head cracked right open with a pistol butt. I took a saber point across my arm and might have met my glory but a ball come out of nowhere took my ravisher off to his own. It was reinforcements. Four hundred walking blues to fight the one hundred horsemen. Only the grays had infantry of their own. I got a first lieutenant died five minutes later to tie a shirtsleeve tight around my wound. When it was snug, I loaded my musket and went back for more.
We brawled and we brawled and when there weren’t enough of us left to guard the battery, they sent up more fresh troops and offered us flank work in the trees. We had not one of us slept even a snack wink in two days but they had us double-time it. I expect I was not the only one could not hear from the cannon fire, and we ran to that fight in the woods in a silence I would trade the happy half of the world not to make the acquaintance of again.