14

o ften in the early afternoon when i abide in the farm’s parlor, adrift in the

slipperiness of time, i see the boys from company d. they look just as alive as they did all

those years ago. yes, i think it’s sam who strides through the front hall to the back door. he

doesn’t notice me stretched out on the sofa just inside the parlor. he’s a gray blur, really—and

has passed before i can rise and call out his name. i think my mind is playing tricks; but the

image carries me back to the last time i saw him alive.

we were near chantilly, the last day of august 1862. i sniffed the air, sensing the undercurrent

of coolness, and took note of the brittle yellow light that heralds the end of summer. across the

fields i witnessed a mob of solemn fellows, some cleaning their rifles, others chopping and

hauling wood. a few quietly wrote letters while another group pulled huge cannons into place

by the road for transport. soldiers, wagons, encampments, horses, military bustle, and confusion

spread out on the rocky fields. some boys sat with minds drawn elsewhere.

i lowered myself down on a log and pulled one foot up across my knee to study it. my mud-

crusted ankle emerged from nothing but a shoe top, tongue flapping for lack of laces. the sole

was gone. in its place were wadded rags and straw, bound on with strips of cloth to protect my

raw, oozing feet. i didn’t know any man with proper boots after we had trudged over a thousand

miles up and down the valley of virginia that year.

hunched over a scrap of paper laid out on a bible, otis mccorkle was intently writing to his

wife lizzie and didn’t see me approach. by craning my neck, i could see that he advised her to

sell everything, all their geese, cows, and chickens. she could use the money to purchase food

and necessities for herself and the baby before a new dispatch of our soldiers came to the

southern counties to seize whatever cattle were left. in camp, mccorkle had heard that the men

were on their way, seeking cattle hides for shoe leather. the beasts now were too scrawny for

meat.

zeke had sidled up behind me and mocked my awkward posture when he caught sight of

mccorkle’s letter. he grabbed mccorkle’s arm, startling him so that he dropped pencil and

paper. “how can you write such words? look at my swollen feet; look at tom’s. look at the

wounds,” he demanded. “you’d deprive us and others of shoe leather? we won’t have a chance

in hell against the yanks if we can’t chase them across a cornfield or walk down the road.”

“you read my letter!” mccorkle shouted. “you had no business reading my private letter!”

his eyes shot sparks, and his face looked like a ripe plum.

zeke relaxed the arm he’d pulled back to punch mccorkle, and his voice softened. “you’re

right. i apologize. i had no right,” he said. “but what are you thinking, saying such things?”

mccorkle’s brow wrinkled in defense. “you don’t know anything about it. i’m tormented

every night, worrying about my lizzie and the baby dying—just to benefit this effort.” he

wasn’t at home to protect them from the depredations of either army, so this advice was all he

had to offer. “our horse is already taken, and lizzie has no way to travel to market unless

someone more fortunate offers her a ride in his wagon. how many of those folks are around

these days?”

“none,” we responded in a chorus.

he continued, “you’re damned right. and our generous confederate government gives a

person less than half what their goods are worth. it’s legal theft. she’ll have nothing if she

doesn’t sell everything before they find her.” after a bit, zeke settled down, particularly when

several of us concerned about our own folks at home admitted to sharing mccorkle’s view. if

officers had gotten hold of his letter, however, he would have been tossed in the guardhouse for

a couple of days.

wine-colored bruises and weeping blisters on my feet dashed any hope of walking home a

hundred miles. how i ached to relax on the wide front porch with my ankles propped up on the

railing. i’d listen to mary’s neighborhood tales and eat ma’s home cooking. i pined for a chance

to lie on a down mattress with a pillow under my head, rain beating on a tin roof. if i were to see

a table laden with ma’s vittles, i suspected i’d kill myself with gluttony. and to her horror, i’d

pitch into everything with fingers and fists, not having used tableware for so long.

there was preaching in camp that morning. there would be preaching again that evening.

presbyterian, methodist, and lutheran ministers, it made no difference. they all came from

valley churches to take their weekly turns before us. they repeated propaganda from

government-issued pamphlets designed to make it easy for us to draw a bead on a yankee

soldier. they told us the yankee boys were evil, not sufficiently pious or god-fearing. “they

deserve to die for their sins. you are doing god’s work in doing battle with them,” one had said,

pounding his fists on a wood-crate lectern.

their message reminded me of a letter written on my nineteenth birthday by my aunt ellen,

ma’s favorite and youngest sister who lived on a farm near the bethel road. she exhorted me to

serve my country bravely as a soldier, but to serve as the savior’s warrior as well. enlist under

his banner, she’d said, and respond as cheerfully to his call as i had to my country’s.

she meant well, but i saw no benefits to religion on the battlefield or in the camp hospital.

fellows who attended the preaching twice a day were just as likely to be sliced in half by a

cannon’s grapeshot as those who didn’t. the minié balls didn’t zing by overhead to cut down the

non-religious while going out of their way to avoid the pious. i didn’t know how the new

minister preached, but from the looks of him, i thought i could do as well as him with two days’

bible study and a glass of whiskey.

i sometimes joined that crowd of fellows, their backs bulging out against the canvas walls.

i’ll admit there was some comfort in the repetition of the familiar words within the church tent

where boys sought solace. beards’ face gleamed with more than lantern light when he recited

the lines of the twenty-third psalm: “yea, though i walk through the valley of the shadow of

death, i will fear no evil; for thou art with me.” he swore those words brought him peace late at

night as he lay on the ground. in moments of weakness, i too succumbed to hopes that if spoken

enough times, the incantations might ward off death and injury.

the aroma of stew filled my nostrils. kettles hung from horizontal branches propped up over

small campfires. the men were preparing rations for three days, a sign we’d march and fight for

at least that long. as usual, the direction of our march and the location of battle were a mystery.

these intervals between fighting ground down my spirit. on the other hand, combat fired up

every cell of my being once i broke through the fear. my senses buzzed as bullets bore through

the forests, unleashing a torrent of twigs and leaves. foliage wafted in slow motion, each vein

and stem magnified and trembling. every moment intoxicated me with crystal detail.

nothing in camp could touch it. at that moment, demons in my head groused about the

captain’s orders and made me long to be anywhere else. for distraction, i picked up my

sketchbook, trying to find humor in our soldier’s life by cartooning it. first, i surveyed the camp

area.

i spied the boys of my mess—sam lucas, tayloe, beards, mccorkle, blue, and zeke. a

small fire flickered where they prepared rations for the march. i had become indifferent to the

camp’s discarded paper and garbage that wreathed tents. an immense pigsty proliferated. the

odor of horse manure was no stronger than our own human stink. heaps of clothes, coffee-

colored with diarrhea stains, lay about. i meandered up the field and stepped around an

unidentifiable animal carcass that someone had hacked up. the fellows laughed over one of my

cartoons, forgotten on a log where i’d been sketching. it depicted sam watching as the day’s pot

of stew tumbled into the ashes from his poorly manufactured tripod. the others were rendered

with mouths agape and arms raised in alarm as they saw their hopes for a meal disappear. sam

was often the butt of our jokes because he detested anything related to chores. his five older

sisters back home had coddled him. he still had much to learn and plenty of complaining left in

him.

cartoon sam’s hair poked out in porcupine spikes, his face was darkened by sunburn, and a

wiry beard sprouted below beady eyes. his head teetered above a stick body. the others didn’t

fare so well either. one thing about sam—he could laugh at himself. and that’s what he was

doing when i hailed him.

as i drew close, i could see that his high spirits, contagious like a sneeze, had infected the

men around the fire. they were all laughing as they stamped feet and shifted weight to loosen

joints stiff from a night on damp ground. suddenly, i heard a burst of rifle fire from over my

shoulder, coming from the nearby woods. for a second, no one realized what had happened,

even as sam tumbled backward. someone continued laughing. a union sniper had anointed

sam, not another of us augusta boys, to die that day. to accept the bullet that carved an exit

through his skull. he was gone instantly.

how could it be that in the midst of guffawing right out loud—laughing from your deep gut

with your head thrown back in abandon—as though all that matters is the itch working its way

up from your innards to your brain—how could it be that you would be shot dead that very

second through your open mouth? how could fate have allowed a bullet to penetrate such a pure

expression of mirth, to turn merriment into a river of blood?

not one of us moved. i stared at sam’s body on his back before us, wondering if i was next,

but was too shocked to run. it felt as though i was watching the scene from the height of the thin

clouds scrolling across the sky, too far away to attach a name to the body on the ground. jim

blue was the first to shatter the horrified silence. “he should’ve kept his mouth shut! don’t you

remember how old man kiefer always ordered him to keep his goddamned mouth shut in greek

and latin class? if he’d kept his mouth shut, this never would have happened.” his words were

choked with tears.

“for chris’sake, blue,” tayloe muttered.

the truth of the past few seconds finally broke through my stupor, and i snatched up my rifle

on the run. “i’m going to kill the son-of-a-bitch who did this.” the rest of the boys followed me.

but as the tangle of wild grapevines and fallen branches clutched at our feet, the receding blue

uniform disappeared into thin air. finally, we straggled back to where sam’s body lay.

“that was a goddam union sharpshooter with his telescopic rifle. they’re the only ones

who’ve got no respect for the rules of war,” mccorkle raged. “only a devil would look down a

rifle barrel and draw a bead on an unarmed man relaxing with his mates.”

“sam didn’t have a fighting chance,” beards muttered.

i remained silent. i was fighting to ignore the inky black sorrow that was crawling upward

from my gut and seeping behind my eyes.

“come on. we need to do something with his body,” mccorkle said. “we can’t just stand

here all day.” he moved toward what was left of sam and the other four of us followed his

example. i grabbed one warm, lifeless leg. beards clasped the other. no one wanted to be

anywhere near his bloody head, but finally beards and jim blue each lifted an arm. i couldn’t

wrest my eyes away from sam’s teeth all lined up like small tombstones. i saw each clearly, as

never before. the bullet had passed through sam’s mouth a hair’s width away, without damage

to any of them.

we laid the body down in a secluded spot at the edge of the woods. zeke then squatted to

loosen sam’s boots. “he promised these to me in case he died, and i now need them more than

he does.” he looked off in the distance, avoiding everyone’s gaze. i was repulsed yet fought my

desire to pull off his good pair of woolen pants recently sent from home. i resented zeke’s

acquisition, even if he was entitled to it, thinking how those shoes would have allowed me to

finally walk home on furlough.

sam was buried as decently as circumstances would allow. we jabbed our bayonet blades

into the red clay and worked the weapons back and forth, back and forth. clawing at the wet,

dense earth with our fingernails, we scrabbled out the bayonet- loosened clods and used a

cooking kettle for a scoop. finally, we made a depression deep enough to keep out the elements.

“where is sam’s top hat?” zeke shambled back to the camp to retrieve it. “can’t bury him

without his hat,” he said sadly, placing the ragged item next to the body. not looking at anyone,

i reached for it and clasped the battered thing tight to my side. it was old to start with; probably

had belonged to sam’s grandfather. its jaunty little tower had led us into battle atop sam’s head

more times than i could remember.

“i’m keeping this to remember him by. and maybe his folks might want it,” i said. the

others nodded.

his body shrouded in his soiled blanket, dog- eared knapsack settled on top, sam was

cocooned in his nest of red earth. beards sacrificed a scrap of paper hoarded in his knapsack and

tucked it into the blanket’s folds with sam’s name and company scratched on it in pencil. then

we piled dirt on what remained of sam lucas. we tamped it all down with rifle butts and

mounded branches on top to deter foraging dogs and wild pigs. the whole time, i thought the

walls of my chest would rupture with the pressure of a silent howl. but not one of us dared show

the strength of our sorrow, in case we all broke down.

we couldn’t just leave sam without some kind of farewell ceremony. nothing about it

seemed right. knit in a silent circle around the mound, each man probed his heart for words. i

finally found my voice. “we’ll sorely miss your high jinks and mischief, sam. may your eternal

soul rest in peace.” no one else spoke but stood with shoulders sagging and heads bowed. we

had lost the only one of our group guaranteed to make us laugh. he was also the bravest; he was

the one who had saved a whole trainload of us that first morning at harpers ferry. i stroked the

hat’s frayed silk brim between my thumb and fingers, and later would find room for it in my

backpack. from a hollowness more burnt-out than the big oak seared by lightening up in pa’s

field three summers earlier, “what a friend we have in jesus” emerged from my throat. it

soared as the broken voices of the others joined in the second verse. after we finished singing,

we all wandered off separately to deal with sam’s death.

emptiness took root in my soul that day. everyone was brought mighty low by sam’s loss,

but i felt the most lonesome and apart from the others. i had lost a man as close as a brother. i

couldn’t get out of my head how empty bethel would be without sam. every day would be like

knowing the night sky would never again have stars.

i’d close my eyes but couldn’t sleep. the union sniper’s bullet had struck sam down, but i

couldn’t fully blame the sniper. after all, ours lured union troops into battle and then quickly

dropped behind the lines to kill our own boys—shirkers fleeing duty. i’d finally leave my

blanket and spend hours at the tent flap staring into the dark while i cursed jeff davis, the entire

confederate government, the slave owners—including bobby lee and most of our officers—and

everyone else who’d spouted states’ rights and voted for secession. in truth, all those people cost

me my closest friend. for days, i spoke only when necessary. if my grief was so vast and raw,

how would mr. lucas and the rest of sam’s family deal with theirs? an upright, forked stick

was all we had to mark the spot for his folks. it would be three years later when they came for

him with a wagon and a tin box to unearth what was left and transport it home for burial.

campground sounds and sights melt away, and i realize i’ve wandered near the farmhouse back

door, confounded by shifting place and time. the sofa in the library is my destination, and i seek

it through the blue shadows enfolding the rooms. the deep tranquility of the library is my

touchstone, and i sink with relief into the soft sofa cushions. but not for long. a sense of great

urgency seizes me. where is sam’s top hat? i hadn’t thought of it in many decades until this

afternoon. could it have been tossed out with everything else these strangers have pitched in the

trash? that hat is all i have left of sam. like so many boys lost then, there was little to bring

home and place under a tombstone.