“Check out the sweet treat at the bar,” Vic said.
“Which?”
“Five stools from the right. The tasty brunette.”
“She’s out of your league, Vic, a little too pretty.” Pushing Vic’s button.
Vic raised an eyebrow but wasn’t mad. Smiling at the challenge. “This from the little league.”
“I’m just saying, she looks like she’s happy alone,” Sean said. “She wouldn’t want to talk to some guy who’s all stressed about his business. Not thinking about having a good time.”
“Hey, I want her, I can get her,” Vic said.
Sean smiled. “You think so, Vic? How about a little bet?”
Jeffrey Robert Bowman
Stonewalls
From The Chattahoochee Review
Of Historical Note: On the evening of May 3, 1863, at the battle of Chancellorsville. Confederate Lieutenant General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was shot and mortally wounded by his own troops while returning from a nighttime reconnaissance of enemy lines.
No, I will tell you despite the lies printed daily in Richmond newspapers, there is nothing divinely inspired to the generals of our Southern Confederacy. A rash, even harsh, judgment some might say, especially considering the recent brilliant victories they have won, and on what authority does this upstart writer sit? I confess I never spent four years on the cold Hudson cliffs of West Point, nor did I bide my time leisurely down in Lexington with Virginia’s Marching Idiots, but I consider myself an adequate arbiter of talent nevertheless. First, I cite the past two years of service as an officer in the Army of Northern Virginia. Second, prior to the war,
I had been forced to brood for three long University years on the writings of long-dead Romans and Greeks, Plutarch and his like, those old ones who had scratched out on papyri scrolls the campaigns of Hannibal and Alexander, and all the immortal Ancients of War emblazoned through time by their fiery laurels won at victories with names like Cannae or Issus or something equally obscure. It was in those voluminous tomes I found the military élan I so desired to emulate in eighteen hundred and sixty-one. With those pages in my traveling trunk. I exited the classroom and enlisted with the highest of classical ideals, to be some latter-day Southern legionnaire led by venerable gray-haired Generals into the immortal glory of battle, an Enfield in exchange for the pilum, a steel bayonet instead of the iron dagger. That, and like every other gentleman I knew, I very much wanted to be the first to shoot dead any invader when his foot fell on the soil of my beloved South.
Well, of wars and killing, of that I found plenty. But of Caesars, we had Lee, or perhaps foppish Stuart, benighted pathfinders stumbling their way into the ornery thickets of death. As the months went on and eighteen sixty-one became eighteen sixty-two and then onwards into eighteen sixty-three, we butchered great bunches of ignorant Yankee farm-boys and mill-workers. We killed them at Manassas (twice), at Fredericksburg, at Seven Pines, we killed them and watched them pile up in droves just about anywhere the war went in the state of Virginia, like the fallen chaff from the scythes of migrant threshers. And in these green rolling hills the tactic was always the same: march to where they weren’t looking, come out of the woods on the attack, shriek like the very devil himself. I don’t know who were the bigger fools, we for attempting it or the Yankees for falling for it. They ran every time, even all the way back to Washington. It was a mere matter of geography and if we had the fire to chase them long enough.
Then, after the shooting had died down and the fields were a blood stained morass of broken men and mules and metal-plowed earth, we would bury our dead and leave the Yankees out to fester and rot and turn as black in the face as a field nigger. I confess at first we found this killing to be great fun and often in camp, bottle in hand, we would joke and laugh and I became a somewhat poet laureate for the wonderful odes I had composed to these cowardly, negligent soldiers, these martinets in blue who broke their lines and skedaddled at the first rattle of musketry, the first whoop of the rebel yell.
But as time wore on, even I stilled my pen for there became evident only one truth and this was that all living things bleed and I believe about then, when we looked about and amongst our thinned ranks and saw less and less of those familiar, we all grew very tired of violence and murder. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to death anymore and the jokes we made were the jokes told quietly at funerals by gravediggers and our laughter came from chests hollow as an empty coffin.
But out of this miasma of unease came our Caesar, our Cromwelclass="underline" Stonewall Jackson. He was a general beyond pretty cap and braid, able to scan the metrics of death. He spoke no speeches, had no gift of tongue for words, but at the very sight of him atop his chestnut horse, ramrod straight in the saddle and blue eyes alight with the holy blaze of battle, we found ourselves restored into the grand tapestry of The Cause and Southern Honor. Once more I could write about hallowed fields stained by the sweet wine of Southern youth and our enemies were again dastardly foes and the past two years were elevated into something higher than mere dysentery and pellagra — we were the Three Hundred Spartans and he, Jackson, our Leonidas, the Confederacy made Thermopylae. In his stern, puritan figure we found an iron heart and will and we feasted on this like it were manna sent down by the heavens above.
Chancellorsville and all that happened there can be explained thus as malnutrition or perhaps a loss of sustenance.
At Chancellorsville we hit them so hard we could have been cavalry.
The way they ran, they could have been too.
We had marched hard all through the day and it was near night before the scouts sent out earlier by Jackson came back from their reconnaissance of Howard’s camp. Major Williams led them, a bland planter’s son from the Carolinas, and he came back by my company tired and bedraggled and with his bits of uniform all the more tattered from brambles and branches. He looked over my dispositions and said, “They ain’t even doing nothing but sitting around and smoking and talking to each other in Dutch. That old boy Jackson’s done it again.” Then from somewhere behind us the attack command was passed up quietly and Williams was gone away forward in front and Jackson was there up ahead saying something to the skirmishers and as I passed I heard him say distinctly, “... Now I want them all dead, especially the brave ones,” and then we were running through the woods, the banners dancing above our heads and the woods snatching at our legs but we ignored the slash of thorns across our faces and I looked and I saw that even some of the boys were laughing with anticipation at the whipping we were about to administer to the Army of the Potomac on this third day of May eighteen hundred and sixty-three. Then we were all yelling and I thought of plantation fields and belles of the ball and darkies and I said to myself, “South,” and said to the men to my right and left, “Home boys home,” and then we sprang out into a small clearing where the Dutchmen of Howard’s froze like deer surprised by hounds on an autumn eve and stared with eyes gone doe-like with fear at the shrieking mass headed directly for them. We were right in the middle of their camp, all slashing steel and flying lead, screaming something fierce. The Yankees, they just about trampled one another in their mad-panicked rush to get away.
They fell like quail from a scattergun. I clearly remember Major Williams ahead of me waxing a plumed hat in his hand and saying over the roar, “They Godamighty, look at them sonsofbitches run,” and then he was down with what looked to be half his head shot away. I waved my sword vaguely and fired my revolver and crumpled some dim forms in the smoke about me and yelled forward in a voice so painfully hoarse I would have killed women and children for a cool, cold glass of lemonade. It was then something came out of the smoke and spun me around and knocked me to the ground and I lay there hurt and bleeding and too scared to cry out my pain lest I rupture irreparably. It was painful, crushing. I managed a scattered thought, a prayer of sorts: “Virginia my lord do not so treat your faithful,” and then a great brown mass seemed to swallow me whole like the South herself was claiming her dead, justly awarded.