Melvin Bean said, “I got shot in the arm the first day at Gettysburg after I’d used up all my cartridges. Even if I’d seen the damn yankee who nailed me, I couldn’t’ve done nothin’ about him.” The new men listened and nodded solemnly. Caudell reflected that a wound on the first day had kept Bean out of the third day’s charge and very possibly kept the private from being captured or killed.
Ruffin Biggs fired one more round at the paper target circle, which by now looked as if it were suffering from measles or smallpox. He yelped out a rebel yell, then said, “Next time the drummers play the long roll, them Yankees is gonna wish they was never born. This here rifle shoots like hell-beatin’-tanbark.”
“Is that good?” Joyner asked.
“Cain’t be beat,” Biggs answered positively.
“Clear the parade ground,” Captain Lewis said. “Time for Company E to have their turn. Form column of fours.”
Grumbling, disappointed they couldn’t shoot more, his men obeyed. Somebody sang out, “Enfield, Springfield, throw ‘em in the cornfield!” The chant ran down the column like wildfire. The men from the other companies that had already fired took it up again, too.
“Whole army’s going to be singing that before long,” Caudell predicted.
“Hope you’re right,” Dempsey Eure answered, “on account of that’ll mean the whole army’s got themselves repeaters.”
Once they were back by their own shelters, the Castalia Invincibles regrouped around the men Benny Lang had instructed. “Now for the dull part: cleaning,” Caudell said. The men groaned. They groaned again when he showed them the cleaning rod and the kit in the stock compartment, and then how to open the receiver plate and extract spring, bolt carrier, and bolt. “It’s not as bad as it looks,” he told them. “They go together like—this.” He reassembled the mechanism, closed the cover plate. “Now you do it.”
They tried. The bolt proved reluctant to go back where it was supposed to. “Maybe for you it goes like this,” Melvin Bean said. “For me it just goes straight to the devil.”
“Practice,” Caudell said smugly. Willingness to practice was a virtue teachers needed. His voice got deeper, more serious. “You all’ll keep practicing till I see you can do it. Watch me again.” He went through the process, very slowly. “You take another lick at it.”
A couple of them succeeded in getting it right. Melvin Bean kept failing and swearing. Caudell walked over, took the private’s hands in his, guided them through what had to be done. “There. Do you see now?”
Bean smiled. “Reckon so.”
This time, everything went smoothly. “That’s a good job,” Caudell said, smiling himself. “Anyone else still having trouble?” Nobody said anything. “Good. Just don’t think that because you did it once, you have it by the tail. Keep working at it tonight. We’ll go over it again tomorrow, and the day after that. By then, I want you to be able to take that repeater apart, clean it, and put it back together in your sleep. If you can’t, maybe you should be toting a billet of wood instead.” The soldiers’ expressions sobered. Carrying a billet wasn’t onerous punishment, but there were better ways to pass a morning.
Caudell hesitated before he taught the privates how to clean the magazine spring—why burden them with something they might not need to know? Benny Lang had said it was only occasionally necessary, and there looked to be plenty of banana clips about. But on second thought, Caudell did demonstrate the technique. What passed for the Confederate supply system could turn plenty into famine without warning.
“More questions?” he said at last. “All right, then—dismissed.” Most of the men drifted away, still talking excitedly about the new repeaters they were carrying. The other groups had already broken up, some a good while before. Caudell cared nothing about that. Thoroughness counted here, and he was used to repeating himself any number of times until students caught on to what he was saying. Melvin Bean did not wander off. The private removed the receiver plate, took out the rifle’s works, tried to put them back together. Caudell watched. They proved balky. Bean swore softly, then said, “I just can’t make the pesky thing fit. Do you want to come back to my hut with me and show me what I’m doin’ wrong?”
“I’d be glad to do that,” Caudell said.
They walked down the straight muddy lane between rows of shelters. Bean’s cabin was small but neat; its one window even boasted shutters. No one else lived here, which was unusual, if not quite unique, in the regiment.
Bean opened the door. “Go right on in, First Sergeant.” Caudell did. The private followed, closing and barring the door behind the two of them. “Now show me that trick of puttin’ this fool rifle back together again.”
“You really were having trouble, then?”
“I said as much, didn’t I? Thought I had it when you showed me before, but I lost the knack again.” They sat together on the blanket-covered pine boughs that did duty for a bed. Bean watched intently as Caudell went through everything. “So that’s what y’all were doin’! Here, let me have a go, Nate—I reckon I really have got it now.” Sure enough, the pieces went back together smoothly.
“Do it some more. Show me it wasn’t a fluke,” Caudell said.
Bean did, twice running. Caudell nodded. Bean checked to make sure the repeater’s change lever was in the safe position, ‘then set the weapons aside. “Good. I need to be able to do that.” Mischief sparked in the private’s eyes. “And now, Nate Caudell, I expect you’ll be lookin’ to find out how your own bolt fits.”
“I’d like that a lot.” Bean had not waited for him to reply, but was already opening the seven-button private’s tunic. Caudell reached out and gently touched one of the small but perfectly feminine breasts that unbuttoning revealed. He smiled. “You know, Mollie, if you were one of those bosomy girls, you’d never get by with this.”
“If I was, I could bind ‘em up, I suppose,” she said seriously. “It’d be as uncomfortable as all get out, though, an’ I do enough pretendin’ as it is. Melvin! Took me a goodish while even to get used to answerin’ to it.”
Caudell’s lips followed his fingers. Mollie Bean sighed and pulled the tunic off altogether. A long, puckered scar marred the smooth skin of her left upper arm, outer mark of where a Minié ball had gashed the muscle. An inch or two lower and it would have smashed the bone and cost her the limb.
“Here now.” She reached for him.” Ain’t hardly fair for me to be the only one gettin’ out of my clothes. ‘Sides, it’s chilly in here.”
He held her close and did his best to warm her. He certainly forgot about the cold himself, at least until afterwards. When he sat up again, though, he found he was shivering. He dressed quickly. So did Mollie. Back in Confederate uniform, with her forage cap pushed down so the brim covered her eyebrows, she seemed just another private, too young to shave. The 47th North Carolina claimed more than a few of those. But she had been all woman in his arms.
He studied her as if she were a difficult problem in trigonometry. She was very different from the hard-eyed Richmond whores to whom he’d occasionally resorted when he got leave. He supposed that was because he saw her every day and knew her as a person, not just a convenient receptacle for his lust, to be forgotten as soon as he was out the door. “Ask you something?” he said.
She shrugged. “Go ahead.”
“How come you did—this?”
“You mean, how come I came up to the fightin’?” she said. He nodded. She shrugged again. “I was bored down home. Wasn’t hardly nobody comin’ by the bawdyhouse where I was at, either, what with so many men bein’ away to the war. Guess I figured I’d come up and see it for myself, see what it was like.”