Ray

IV

WE have come up in a meadow, all five hundred horses. We are in the Maryland hills and three hundred yards in front of us are the Federals, about fifty of them in skirmish line. What they can’t see are the five Napoleon howitzers behind us.

Jeb Stuart is as weary as the rest of us, but he calls for sabers out. Our uniforms are rotting off us. It’s so hot and this gray cloth is so hot. There is a creek behind us. I dismount and we send the orderlies back to the creek. It is delightful to see them bring water back to the horses and me. The water is thunderously refreshing, though you can’t drink too much if we have to fight. I would prefer not to fight them, but I can see they’ve rolled in a cannon and mean business.

Thing is, all the blue boys are going to die. And we have to do something quickly or they’ll tell General McClellan where we are.

Stuart says to me, “Hold two hundred horses with you, Captain. Let us start the cannons and I will go forward.”

Then we kissed each other, as men who are about to die.

Our horses covered the howitzers.

They let off theirs. It hits in the trees. These are fresh boys. They don’t even really know how to shoot. Yet all of them must die.

I say, “General Stuart, I can kill them all from here. I suggest we don’t charge.”

He made the order to hold the sabers up.

“What do you mean?”

“Observe us, General.”

We had captured an ammunition wagon and it had the twenty-pound shells in it. You could hit a chicken in the middle of the head from this range.

“Do it rapidly, Captain.”

I make the order. The cavalry feints to its left. The Federals are confused. Pellham fires the howitzers.

Ooooof Oooof Oooooof Oooooof Oooooooof.

Then again. Five of them are left, and all wounded. One older man is standing up, living but bewildered, with all his friends dead around him.

“Hello, friend,” I say.

“Are you Jeb Stuart?”

“No. I am his captain,” I say.

“It was too quick for us, Captain,” the man says.

Then the banjo player came up and we drank their coffee and ate the steaks on the fires. We threw earth over the dead. Stuart went out in the forest and wept.

Then all of us slept. Too many dead.

Let us hie to Virginia, let us flee.

I fell asleep with the banjo music in my head and I dreamed of two whores sucking me.