Days Without End

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

TOWARDS TWILIGHT THE buggers come on again. The breeze has swung round to the east and now a million small waves appear on the river. Lace from a million seamstresses. The old heralds of the twilight are a slow blindness across the land and a long high colour the colour of apples seeps into the sky. The mountains that were faint blue in the distance darken and slowly blacken. The lead drops in the glass. Maybe we are not so ready as we were and afterwards hard words are spoken about the defences along where the sinks are and the field hospital. They must of been creeping up just like that red colour in the sky. Though the first thing that hits us is the cavalry again but they must of scoped out a weakness and through the right yards and supply dumps they pour and they are trying to throw the horses at the stronger rear line. Past the line is the damn colonels and the rest. All the same soldiers pour over against the invading horses. We can see all this while stupidly standing on the breastwork. The dimness of the evening makes us stupid. We can feel the approach of slaughter and in aiming to avoid it we put ourselves before it. The first cohorts of the darkness is a enemy too. The very world and its natures is against us. The hundreds of men repel the cavalry best they can and the horses wheel east again and pour away into the smudges of new night. The colonel must guess the next and we are ordered over the breastwork and down into the wild fields and are to meet the coming Rebs if they are coming. There ain’t a heart among us wants to leave the breastwork. Didn’t we dig the damn thing and why leave it now. The bundles and wastes of shadow do not beckon us. Dan FitzGerald looks at me for orders and I say nothing. Are we to go or what? he says. I’d rather not, I say. But maybe we ought, I say. For the honour of Bundorragha, he says, laughing. What did Bundorragha ever do for you, Dan? I says. Not a thing, he says. So, I says. Then we scramble over the ditch, then we all scramble, let’s say a thousand men, and luckily enough the Rebs ain’t sent their army this time but only a scattering of companies. Maybe feeling out the way. Maybe all they could hide along the little hills. So we are ten steps out on the fresh grasses of Virginia and the river goes along in its silent majesty all fringed with its little waves and by chance the company coming straight to meet us is that rabble of Irish we spotted before. Just by chance in that chancy way of war. Lige Magan has our banner raised and comes along in the centre of our companies. We are walking down the grasses at a steady pace and our bayonets are fixed and our guns sloped. We won’t do nothing till the other crowd comes quicker. We see a new canter in their step. Captain Wilson orders us on and we break into a run. No one wants to do it and everyone does it. Now we hear the first crackles of the Rebs firing and in an instant the field is aflame with noise and returning fire. No time to be reloading now and on we rush with bayonets borne forward. A small cry begins in my throat and seems to grow and then this same roar alights in the other throats and now the roar is the roar of a thousand and the captain is roaring the worst. It would scare the Archangel. The roar is bigger than any wind we know and in it is a sort of queer lust and something akin to cruelty. The Rebels before us have expended their guns and they throw down their muskets and unlatch their bayonets and now they come on against us with a bayonet in one hand and a knife in another. We ain’t never heard of this. Now in the further darkness comes rushing a streaming confusion of horses and we pray it is our cavalry. The slashing and hacking of sabres and firing of pistols. Horsemen stoop down to cut away tendons and muscles. All this in the gathering darkness. Was it madness to attack at twilight or genius? The Irish Rebs are shouting too, shouting filthy things in Gaelic. Then we reach each other and it is all wrestling, punching, and stabbing. These boys are big and afterwards we learn they are railway workers and dockers from New Orleans. Big boys and used to murder and mayhem. They don’t run over this darkness to love us. They want our lives and to cut out our hearts and murder us and still us and stop us. I have a big sergeant trying to get his Bowie into me and I am obliged to run his stomach with the bayonet. The noble adversaries fight on for ten minutes and in that time hundreds are tumbled on the ground. Dozens are groaning and calling for assistance. The darkness is nearly complete and the Rebs turn again to withdraw and the cavalry lets them go because you can’t see a damn thing now in the soupy night. Reb and Federal alike lie bleeding in the blackness.

Then there is a curious lull. The wounded are making the noises of ill-butchered cattle. Throats have been slit but not entirely. There are gurgles and limbs held in agony and many have stomach wounds that presage God-awful deaths. Then the moon rises quietly and throws down her long fingers of nearly useless light. We trudge back to the breastworks and we get the details into action and the wounded are carried up into camp on the new ambulances. The dressing station has survived the Reb cavalry and the surgeon is inside with his saws and bandages. There are more bullet wounds than expected and though in all truth I heard no shells throughout our charge many have missing arms and arms hanging and legs. The helpers light the big oil lamps and the sawing begins. There’s no hospital yet further up the country so it’s now or never. Anything that can be bandaged is wrapped tightly. At the end of the surgeon’s table the pile of arms and legs grows. Like the offered wares of some filthy butcher. The fires have been stoked and the irons is pushed against the wounds and the screaming men are held down. We know in our hearts they can’t survive. The old rot will set in and though we may bump them back north they won’t see another Christmas. First the vile black spot and then all hell to pay. We seen it a hundred times. Still the surgeon works on just in case. He’s sweating like Starling Carlton. Too many, too many. Some may be lucky, we pray. Here’s Lige Magan with a knife in his neck. He must of been knocked clear into Monday because his body is loose and sleeping. Maybe they gave the bugger ether. The blood-soaked surgeon wraps Lige’s sloppy wound and then he’s laid aside. Bring on the next, bring on the next. Aye, but Doc, save old Lige. He the best. Clear this fool out, says the surgeon. Can’t blame him. He’ll work another seven hours. God guide his bloody hand. Our comrades. Poor ruined lengths of paltry men.

When his wound heals they try to return poor Lige to the ranks. But turns out he can’t turn his head. That New Orleans Irish Bowie knife was a spanner in his works rightly. Anyhow since he ain’t no spring chicken he gets an honourable discharge in the midst of war and he tells us he will likely go back to Tennessee to tend his pa. Says they can be two old bastards together. His pa still runs three hundred acres so he might be needing fresh hands for that. Lige looks excited saying all this but also in me there is a natural sorrow. John Cole holds Lige in great affection and so do many. Only Starling Carlton looks scowling and says hard things but that’s just the same as him saying good things. Starling won’t be half of what he is without Lige, we know. I guess folk become joined at the hip over time. Can’t have a thought about Starling without Lige being in it like a squirrel in a tree. Big sweaty Starling going to have to find another buddy. That ain’t going to be easy in prospect. What Starling says to me is he’s worried that if Lige can’t turn his head he won’t see robbers creeping up on him. Seems to bother Starling mightily. Also he says Tennessee ain’t a peaceful country now. How can a bluecoat go back to Tennessee? Good question. Only, he won’t be wearing a blue coat. They give him some weary civilian clothing for himself as Lige goes off. Don’t look like no three-hundred-acre farmer in them. Looks like the robber Starling fears. We shake hands with Lige and he goes off and he has to walk to Tennessee more or less. Says he guesses there must be a road across the Blue Ridge. Must be. No one knows. Off he goes anyhow. Write us a letter when you can, says John Cole. Don’t forget now. I’ll keep in touch, says Lige, ain’t going to let you go. This makes John Cole very quiet. John is a tall man and thin and maybe he don’t have much painted on his face. He like to make his decisions and then do a thing. He has my back and he wants the best world for Winona and he don’t neglect his pals. When Lige Magan intimates his seeming love for him, John Cole does show something on his face though. Maybe remembers the old sick days when John Cole couldn’t move a muscle and that Lige danced attendance. Why should a man help another man? No need, the world don’t care about that. World is just a passing parade of cruel moments and long drear stretches where nothing going on but chicory drinking and whisky and cards. No requirement for nothing else tucked in there. We’re strange people, soldiers stuck out in wars. We ain’t saying no laws in Washington. We ain’t walking on yon great lawns. Storms kill us, and battles, and the earth closes over and no one need say a word and I don’t believe we mind. Happy to breathe because we seen terror and horror and then for a while they ain’t in dominion. Bibles weren’t wrote for us nor any books. We ain’t maybe what people do call human since we ain’t partaking of that bread of heaven. But if God was trying to make an excuse for us He might point at that strange love between us. Like when you fumbling about in the darkness and you light a lamp and the light come up and rescue things. Objects in a room and the face of the man who seem a dug-up treasure to you. John Cole. Seems a food. Bread of earth. The lamplight touching his eyes and another light answering.

That Reb army has made an awful mess of us and we are relieved and moved back a ways north. Colonel mighty pleased though that the Rebs was repulsed as he calls it. Guess they were, at a cost. At a spot called Edwards Ferry we crossed over and it were a strange and excellent feeling to reach Union land again. Shoes a terror though and John Cole got a raw underfoot from the mud and gravel living in his boots. I take ten moments to pull them off and wash his feet in the river. We never seen farmers all the trail up through Virginia. They flee away and hide every scrap. Now the farmers ain’t so chary and we get fresh food as we pass such as we ain’t pleased our gobs with for a long time. Pies still warm from the oven. If in heaven this be the cooking I’m game. We go into camp with a main army and there must be twenty thousand men shitting in the same bowl. Like a great strange city rose among the little hills and farms. If Maryland ain’t pretty country God’s a girl. We’re tired in our marrows and Captain Wilson wants to hone us back up. Draws the line when Starling Carlton finds a cherry orchard three hills over and thinks he’ll be best living there. We got to go over with a rope to bring him back. Find him sitting up in a cherry tree. What the hell you doing? says the captain’s orderly Joe Ling. I ain’t talking to you, says Starling, you just a private. So Joe Ling goes back to camp and the captain come out himself and he’s standing under the branches picking cherries almost by accident and chewing them and spitting out the stones. Good cherries, he says. Well got, Sergeant Carlton. Thank you kindly, says Starling, climbing down, I tries to do my best. You want me to tie him? says Private Ling. Tie him up? says the captain, no, I want you to take off your caps and fill them with cherries. So back we wend well laden. Starling Carlton very easy and go-free then, walking along beside me. There’s said to be storms coming over Maryland but just this day the day is one of those given to the earth as a reminder to what it can be. Pleasant and steeped in a kinda heat you can’t take against. And the fields and narrow roads verdant and pleasing and the cherry trees laden with those little red planets and then the promise of the apples and pears later if the storms don’t destroy them. Makes a soldier want to farm and stay in one place the rest of his given days. In plenitude and peacefulness. We’re going along well and Starling is talking about the country round Detroit in the summer and how as a small boy he wanted to be a bishop. Then Starling stops on the dry road and is staring down at the dryness and I think he won’t move again and maybe it is best to fetch the rope after all. I guess Starling Carlton is as mad as two puppies. I guess you’re a good friend to me, he says then, real quiet. Then the captain just a few yards ahead calls back, you coming on now or what? We coming on now, I say.

Every month if the paymaster’s iron cart finds us we send ten dollars to the poet McSweny for Winona Cole. She’s back working blackface for Mr Noone so she got her own fortune if three dollars a week be ever a fortune. Our fortune is twenty-and-some letters from Winona tied in a shoelace. She sends us all her news in her nice handwriting. She hopes for our return but she don’t want us to get shot by a) the Rebels or b) the colonel, for desertion. She says she hope we got victuals and that we get a good wash once a month as she always insisted. Guess a king couldn’t hope for better. Mr McSweny says she’s blossoming. Prettiest girl in Michigan bar none. I’d say, says John Cole. No surprise, ain’t she Handsome John Cole’s daughter? I say. Well. John Cole laughs when I say that. John Cole is of the opinion that we don’t got so many days of life but that one day on the old Bank of Time we draw the last one. He hopes he sees her again before that. That about as pious as John Cole gets.

It was ourselves heaved over to Tennessee then. We wrote a little missive to Lige Magan before we shipped out telling him to look out for us and got back a sad letter itemising the death of his pa. He was took off his farm by the Rebs and hanged for a bluecoat and all his pigs slaughtered. Didn’t even requisition the pigs. Guess they wouldn’t eat Federal pork. Goddamn fools and murderers. His pa had freed his slaves and had put them to sharecropping so they wouldn’t starve. Rebs said this were treason to the Confederacy. That’s right. Lige said he walked the whole way home from Virginia because he couldn’t use the railroad through Big Lick. I never looked back, he said, which was his little joke. Since his neck was fixed hard. Rebs were keeping the railroad to themselves, he says. His farm was in a place called Paris in Henry County but all he found there was bones and sorrow. We was saying all this to Starling Carlton since we reckoned he might like to hear the news but Starling got agitated and didn’t want to hear no more. Stormed out of the tent like he needed a big shit urgent. What the hell’s the matter with him? said John Cole.

Colonel Neale was pleased with us but the high-ups weren’t so pleased with him and he been replaced and Captain Wilson been bumped up to major and we got a new colonel who don’t know us from a hole in the wall. Colonel Neale is now again the major and he has gone back to Fort Laramie and Starling Carlton wanted to go with him but he signed and won’t be released from happy servitude for another month. Colonel said he would be glad to have us again at Laramie so that was very pleasing. John Cole says we could just go pick up Winona when all this was over or our three years was up whichever come sooner and skedaddle over there. Why not? Well, first thing, you and something there don’t agree, I say. Maybe the water. Anyhow what about the dresses? Well, says John Cole, we could go on all the damn way to San Francisco. Find us a theatre there and put riot into the hearts of simple men. Or stay put with Mr Noone, why not? I say. World’s our oyster, says John Cole, looks like. So we making plans like honeymooners. Our service up in four months or thereabouts. No one thinks the war will be over then and some say we will never see the end of it. The Rebs are stronger than they ever were and their cavalry is like a flashing fire of death, they say. They ain’t got proper provisioning, they ain’t hardly got food, their horses are skinny and their eyes are aflame. It’s a mystery. Maybe they all ghosts and don’t need nourishment.

Month’s up and our old pal Starling gets his papers and tucks them into his sack which is just two square feet of gunny cloth. It is a burning hot morning in early fall and his heart suddenly opens as he is going. We have come through a deal of slaughter together and everything we have done adds up to a sum of regard right enough. Starling Carlton is the strangest man I have called friend. The book of Starling Carlton no man can read easily. The letters all cluttered and lots of smudges and blackness. I seen that man kill other men without much regret. Kill or be killed. All the things he says he hates are the things most dear to him and maybe he knows it and maybe he don’t. John Cole gives him a horn-handled Bowie knife as a keepsake and Starling stares at it like it were a bejewelled crown. Thank you, John, he says. Off he goes after his beloved major and maybe that was the measure of the man called Starling Carlton. That in essence he were true.