The Best American Mystery Stories 2004

Jeffrey Robert Bowman Stonewalls

From The Chattahoochee Review

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 Cromwell: 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.

I dreamt, but dreams such as these are the slippery slopes to madness and I found myself unhinged from the moorings of my mind in a cornfield where the bodies of the dead lay all about in various states of decay. I alone was of one flesh and soon I began to recognize the faces of the corpses and found in each one people I had known — family, friends, acquaintances, even the women I’d had back in the districts of Richmond, all were there with death and I raised myself up from the bloody stalks and ran through the field but it only stretched wider in all directions and the bodies grew thicker like some awful harvest of offal. But on the horizon, I could make out the pale shape of a rider and I strained for my life to collapse at the horse’s feet and with trembling hands grasped the hem of the rider’s cloak. I turned my face to his and saw with surprise no decay there, nothing but the refined features of Jackson but Caesar there too and what I took to be Alexander the Great and a whole host of other men shimmering there underneath with a great vitality. The horseman spoke and his voice was an organ that sang out over the dead fields, “Poet, you know nothing about the workings of the heart.” Before the words were complete, I thought them strange but then he drew aside his heavy gray cloak and I saw nothing inside the emptiness but a heart most hideous, a thing of sutured iron and quaking with a great turn of pistons. I longed to rip the revolting organ out of him with my hands but when I reached to do so he was already gone and I saw with a horror fathomless the arm I raised to wrest was nothing but a rotted thing of maggoted flesh and I collapsed on legs rotted through and my face was in blood and mud and I screamed the shriek which waked me to a world changed anew.

I raised my face off the ground and found the battle had moved away, at least from where I was directly, and I could hear off in the distance the harsh roar of rifle fire coming back through the woods in long discordant waves. There hung heavy over the camp a pall of gun smoke and through its fog I could make out the ground slithering around me and I thought I might still be in dreams but then saw the undulations were nothing but the wounded in their aimless wanderings for aid and succor. I remembered myself and found the pain gone in my wound and my neck and uniform front stained wet from a bottle drained to its very dregs. It sat between my legs, placed by whom or how I know not. I took a sniff from the neck and the overwhelming smell of laudanum threatened to return me back to the land from which I had just returned. I must have swooned with horror at the prospect for the pain brought my head back some clarity. With tenderness I removed a gauntlet and probed the wound for some sign of mortal death. I found nothing but a shallow groove high on the side of my head, near the part, and though the blood was all on me I could not help but think, “Life,” and I rose like the dead one day will do and stood on feet none too steady and swayed.

The faintness dissipated and I noticed most of the moving forms about me had stilled their motions and now I appeared to be the only one standing among the wrecked tents and scattered provisions of a camp abruptly abandoned. The smoke continued to drift backwards from the battle lines and I began to smell burning resin and leaves from the dry bracken caught fire. Common enough occurrence on these battlefields but today it lent the gun smoke a denser opacity and as I walked towards the woods often I tripped blindly over the dead forms of enemies and allies. Finally, I gained the trees and felt a sense of relief come to my light head. But even here in the confines of the forest I grew muddled and lost in my bearings. I found myself walking in ever widening circles. At one point, there was a man ahead of me looking equally lost and I took him by the arm to ask where General Jackson’s corps was but when he turned to look at me I saw he was without a nose and blood flowed freely from the rude orifice lead-gouged. I let him pass and set out again into the forest where the sounds of war echoed and rebounded among the trees.

I know not how many hours passed in my labyrinth hut when I came to again out of the haze of opiates I found myself in a thinned area of the forest and the moon was a pale pearl streaming its light down cleanly from above the tree line. Somewhere deeper in the woods the flames of the fire gleamed like a jewel hut the smoke here had cleared by some trick of the wind. I was halfway through the scattered grass tussocks when I heard the voice of a man cursing, harsh and strained, hut in a steady monotone. I looked about hut there was no one, save the dead and the wounded not expired. The cursing continued and I realized this was not the ranting of the wounded against the heavy hand of existence hut a vital man struggling under some heavy load. I walked further and in the fading light. I made out the origin of the words. Beneath a tall oak, near blended in from the darkness about, a man held a dead horse by the foreleg and lugged with jerks and pulls backwards on the balls of his feet against the weight. As I came closer. I saw there was a man underneath near crushed by the beast. The person pulling had an odd medley of colors to his uniform and for the life of me I could not tell whether he was my ally or my enemy hut despite the vulgarities thought he had to be at least a brother officer bereaved by the death of the man on horseback. Instinctively I came up behind him and lent a hand and together we heaved and the horse finally shifted in a great slough of dead skin, the horseman beneath freed.

“Whew!” said the other man. “Thankee kindly. I was about worn out from tugging on that thing.” I looked at him and could make out little of his features, save he was of my height and weight and seemed in good health. He wore a great heard stretched down near to the middle of his chest though it was neatly barbered and smelled even pomaded, which was slathered in full evidence upon his hair. His blouse was grimy from powder stains hut his coat looked newly bought. A gold watch chain gleamed dully from the pocket. He looked at me with an aspect not unfriendly and from his accent I could only conclude he was Southern and of good standing. He suddenly smiled and said, “Looks like you been wounded, friend,” and he gestured with a hand towards the side of my head.

“It’s nothing,” I said, “I’m fine.” I touched the wound and my hands came back black and clotted. My fingers felt thick and strange from the opiates but I still spoke my plan lucidly, “Well, shall we go about bringing him to the surgeons?”

The man looked confused. “Who?” he asked.

“The man, the officer,” I pointed at the nearly crushed horseman, who now was beginning to mutter and move with odd, spasmodic jerks. The other man followed my finger and an expression of surprise flittered across his features. “Well, I’ll be... I thought ye was a dead ’un...” he said underneath his breath and he looked about for a moment and stooped down and brought up in his hands the shattered butt-end of a Springfield rifle. He walked over to the stirring horseman and before I had a chance to shout a protest dispatched him out of this world with two swift violent chops of the club. The head made the same sound a melon did splitting open under the blade of one of the kitchen hands back home. He threw away the rifle butt and commenced to root through the pockets of the dead man. He palmed up gold coins and threw away all else into a pile behind him. My mouth was open. I closed it. I pulled my revolver from its holster, thumbed back the hammer, and leveled it at the kneeling form. The hands froze in mid-rummage at the clean click of the pistol coming back to cock.

“What in the name of God do ye think you’re doing?” he asked, not daring to raise his head so it looked as though he were addressing the dead. I laid the front sight right middle below his beard.

“Halting you in the name of justice,” I replied. “You’ll hang for murder,” I assured him. “Now stand up and turn around.”

Still on his knees, the man barked a hoarse laugh, “You’ll have to shoot me.” He laughed. “Murder. What all do you think is going on around you, ye dumb son of a bitch.” He stood and turned and walked away. “Go on and shoot me, I ain’t got the time to waste on you fine-minded gentlemen.”

“Very well,” I murmured and squeezed on the curve of the trigger. The snap of a misfire came and quickly I cocked hack and pulled again. Misfire. His high yokel laugh taunted out of the darkness. I pulled my saber and rushed after his receding form. He whirled and I saw in his arms a bayoneted rifle and I drew up like a horse tethered.

“Easy now, my pretty,” he said as we began to circle each other delicately. “Don’t be messing where ye going to get hurt. I’ll kill ye dead I will,” he said. It was a scene backlit by the forest fire and our shadows danced dark in the dirt in a ghoulish duel. My opponent continued to circle but with one hand fumbled in his pockets. I prepared myself to come in a rush and thrust hut out of his grimy fingers came a percussion cap, which he stuck in beneath the pulled hack hammer as he pointed the rifle at me.

“Loaded and cocked, now,” he grinned, lupine. “Stick it in the dirt, son.” The muzzle drooped to show me the direction.

“How come you know it’s loaded?” I asked him. “Perhaps it isn’t.”

“Try it, son.” He still grinned. “Shoot you or run you through, don’t make no difference atall. Now.” He jerked the muzzle downwards.

I turned the sword blade down and stuck it in the ground.

“Good,” he said. “Now walk on in front of me. Get on hack to where ye come from.” I stepped forward and stumbled past him, each second an eternity waiting for the roar of the rifle which would announce a bullet ripping through my hack and out my stomach to kill me slow and steady. It did not come but I didn’t want to turn and see what he was doing. The woods loomed ahead dark and mysterious and still full of the rippling waves of gunfire and a trace of fear went through me when I thought that death awaited no matter which way I now turned. Certainly the wounded here knew these salient facts. One grasped the cuff of my trouser leg as I passed and said in a plaintive voice, “It don’t look had do it?” I never paused in my stride. I heard the man with the rifle begin to walk behind me and a few minutes later the wounded man asked him the same query. I turned and looked. The man knelt and cradled the wounded man’s head. With a canteen, he gave him a drink and wiped some of the grime away from his face. “It don’t look had do it?” the wounded man repeated.

“Hey. How you?” said my opponent, and he raised up one leg. From out of his hoot, he pulled a bowie knife and he stuck the knife into the man and he died. He was searching through the man’s moneybag when he heard my approach and stood, knife at the ready. I held up my hands when he slashed the air in front of him as duelists do.

“Easy, boy, don’t get no ideas,” he told me.

“Why?” I asked him. “All I want to know is why?”

The eyes went blank for a second but then he let loose the high yokel laugh. There were gaps in between his teeth, some all but rotted away. “Goddamn,” he snorted, “I tell you, you officers ain’t got the brains God gave a turkey.” He knell back to his counting and finding no gold coins he threw away the purse in disgust. He turned on the balls of his feet and pulled another man, dead this one, to him with a grunt. He began the search anew.

“But why?” I asked again.

“Lord God,” the man said, sighing. “To get rich, you fool! You know how much gold is out here just going to perdition and gone cause no one bothers to collect it? Least ten dollars worth, mayhap as much as fifteen.”

“No, but why are you killing them?” I asked. He had moved on to yet another one, Yankee this time, groaning with the crimson slaverous froth about the mouth that comes from being lung shot. He stabbed him and held it until the quaking ceased. He looked at me with eyes baleful and red rimmed from the smoke spread everywhere on the clearing floor.

“How long you figger this feller had?” he asked. “Ten? Twelve hours? Or how about them sonsofbitches over there with they arms done shot off? Four? Lessen the sawbones gets to them and leaves them crippled for they whole lives ahead. I’m just helping them get out of this here vale of tears and into the vale of glory. It’s Christian duty, pure and simple.”

I looked about me and saw the men with faces contorted from hurt and their low moans seemed to be felt more than heard and the world looked a sad and blasted place indeed, metal churned and blood soaked and there seemed no flaw to his reasoning even in my addled state. But yet, I persisted.

“Some would call it murder,” I said. “Courts, for instance.”

The man shrugged and went back to his labors like a prophet unbowed despite the years of perpetual misunderstanding. “Let them,” he said and then an explosion shook the ground from a battery firing blind into the dark and drowned out the rest of his words. When I could hear over my ringing ears, he was saying in an indifferent tone, “... them sonsofbitches will sit up there on high and run they mouths and tell you that what they doing is so high and mighty and if ye listened to they words you’d think God was on everybody’s side in this here war. All we’re doing is fighting for niggers and that means money and that means nigger money.” He shook his head. “The world’s come to a sorry pass when white men are killing white men over niggers.” He looked at me standing in front of him as he tried to roll a big Dutchman over. “Goddamn, you could give me a hand at least,” he said. I apologized and bent and helped him drag the man by the heels to where we could see his pockets in the light of the fire. I almost fainted from the exertion and sat down beside the dead.

The man continued to talk as he hefted a gold watch in his hand feeling the weight. “All a man can do,” he said, “is find pleasure in what he knows is good for him. They stole me from home, give me a rifle and said, go fight. I said. All right. Said, I’ll fight all you sons of bitches tooth and nail and get rich in the meantime.”

He continued to gather corpses, me his earnest helper all the while. Before long, there was a stack of dead almost knee high and the purses of them had been slit open and their contents gathered in a pile which grew as we threw in a watch or gold coins and the precious metal gleamed with a weird luminescence from the silver moon light and the burnished orange glow of the fire. Before long, we both gave pause and I collapsed from weakness and he sat down beside me grinning his odd grin out of the sweat-beaded fur of his beard. He took out a pipe and put in a small white ball, lit a match and breathed in a lungful. He offered me the pipe. “Get ye some,” he said kindly. I took the pipe to calm myself and breathed in and the colors of the laudanum came back to me and I felt near drunk.

“Yes indeed,” said the man, “I took to ship a good bit in my younger days and the monkeys over there in Cathay got me good and drunk with that there tobaccer. I got me a New Orleans Jew doctor over in Heth’s division who sells it to me for a half take on the gold. Times been where he run out and I had to go on over and be with the boys in blue and get the supply on up again. Them boys will swap ye anything long as ye got tobaccer. Especially them Irishmen, you never seen the likes of it. I stay around there and turn myself a nice profit and then conic on back over. Yes sir, I drifted from one side in this war clear on over to the other one and it didn’t make the slightest bit of difference in the world far as I was concerned.”

I smoked the pipe again and watched the whorls and swirls of smoke come up out of my mouth and drift upwards into the black ether of the night now pinpricked by a few cold stars. I felt like taking the man’s knife and cutting through my clothes to open my skin and chest until my heart was laid bare and could beat freely out into the void. “It makes a great deal of difference to me,” I revealed.

The man took the pipe from me and held the match to the pipe bowl again and inhaled. “Well, more’s the fool,” he said in a puff of smoke. “Given time and provided death don’t find ye, ye’ll learn there’s no difference betwixt the sides and the highest pleasure them ones, gray or blue,” he pointed, “have are one and the same.” I followed the finger to a group of horsemen emerging out of the forest fire as they drifted towards us in long elongations of movement, like demons from a flame.

“Cavalry?” I asked vaguely. There was a boundless lassitude to my limbs. It seemed like I were talking to the heavens above.

“No, dammit,” said the pipe smoker. “Generals. They’re kith and kin no matter which side they fight. I swain all they want is death. That’s the only reason for them. It’s the only way they get filled up, on blood, on death.”

“Fulfillment?” I muttered. “No... No...”

But then suddenly the pounding of hooves on the ground was a loud and steady drumming and I heard the man beside me curse and scuttle away on all fours like a rat out into the darkness and then Jackson’s face and those of his staff peered down on me from atop their horses and I realized from my cloud who I was facing and I fell off and found myself on top of a pile of dead bodies with their purses lain carelessly strewn about.

The General spoke. “How odd,” he said.

“Looks like we done caught ourselves a grave robber. General,” said a colonel with a handlebar mustache. His fine hand tweaked the end of one whisker.

“Now, this is a first,” said the General. He looked genuinely perplexed. “I must say we can’t have any of that going on in this army. Does horrid things for discipline. I saw the effects myself down in Mexico. Have him shot tomorrow,” he ordered, and then in an afterthought, “In front of the men. Where there’s lice, there’s filth. Be so kind to tie his hands and bring him along. Major.”

I grunted some sort of protest. My head needed to clear.

“Wail,” Jackson said. He raised a gloved hand. “Speak, my good man.”

I wanted to beg for mercy, redress, a board of inquiry. I wanted to scream: For you! It is for you I fight! Two full long years! Stonewall! South! South!

Instead, I came out with. “I am an officer in the Confederate States Army.”

“Ah,” Jackson said. “A noose then. Someone make a note of it. Come along, gentlemen.”

We rode back through the trees, myself bound and gagged and bouncing in the saddle behind the Major who looked as young as I was. There was nothing but the sound of horses blowing hard and the nervous sweat of their riders was a musk blended with the smell of honeysuckle newly bloomed in the month of May. The moon ran behind a cloud and even these men lost their way and we rode up and down the same path twice trying to find the single trail back into our lines. Finally, Jackson gave a whispered order and we rode back in a group in a generally Southern direction. The moon returned in a burst of silver light and right when it did one of the pickets spotted our movement, yelled a warning and loosed a single shot which hit the man riding in front of me. He stiffened, slumped and fell off the horse as other pickets joined in and a sporadic fusillade passed through our party. I twisted my bonds and managed to get a hand free and I heard the Colonel with the mustaches yell out. “Cease your fire! You’re firing into your own men!”

I turned and looked and saw Jackson was hit high in the arm but alive and looking directly into my eyes with his blue ones as I tore the gag out of my mouth and yelled, “Who said that? That’s a damn lie! Pour it into them, boys!”

I leapt from the horse and rolled as volleys crashed out from all sides. Horses screamed and men toppled from their saddles to the forest floor. I looked and saw pickets and officers half dressed and in disarray hurrying from out of the camps. I lay down on my back. “Oh, Jesus, I think we just shot the General,” I heard someone say. “He ain’t moving,” said another. Soon enough, solicitous hands reached for me. The nervous face of an orderly peered at my wound in the moonlight.

“How is he?” I asked. “How is the General?”

“Hush, son, shh...” he said and he stroked my hair. “The General’s fine... Stretcher bearer?” he said.

I watched as the General was taken down from his horse and laid on the ground beside me. There were two bullets in him and his face looked wan but the eyes still burned incisively. “Across the river...” he was saying to no one in particular.

“Is there your fulfillment, General?” I whispered to him.

He nodded from across the way and then was carried from me on a litter of blankets. I saw tears in the eyes of some of the pickets. Others looked on with morbid shock. I knew none of them would ever come to know the mark I had made on time, nor the knowledge I had received. I was carried away from them and left them there in their shame and anger, to fight and die or perhaps live, to decay or marry and breed.

It was not much more than a month later that Gettysburg came but I was not there, for midway through the march north I left and didn’t stop till I came upon my first Yankees, a troop of home guard cavalry clopping sedately down the Hagerstown Turnpike. Beneath their bemused stares, I got down on my knees in the muddy country road and kissed the flag I’d come to hate and forswore allegiance to a country to which I no longer belonged. This did not make a difference to them. They threw me into Elmira prison anyway, two days after Lee got beat in the blossoming fields and orchards of Pennsylvania.

I didn’t stay long. They needed volunteers to guard the West where the savages had begun to run amok and I wrote my name down for Indian fighting the day I got there. They took a whole bunch of us out West to the Dakotas and Wyoming. Most of us are former Confederates, now in blue but with new enemies to face. Hard-bitten, we hate the Sioux and Cheyenne with the same vituperative loathing we reserve for the fighting back East. It impedes the bread and bullets and our rosters are never full from the battles outside Atlanta, Petersburg. Not to boast, but despite these short supplies, we’re good at what we do and we free up more land for the settlers and their metal plows every day. The newspapers in the East have taken to calling us “Galvanized Yankees” and report our deeds as one would the works of a sinner reformed.

I don’t know about the Yankee part but I do know I’m galvanized. I have never commanded finer troops with such alacrity and dispatch, a beautiful synchrony of mind and body, like a well-calibrated machine.

It is autumn now in the West and every night we watch the harvest moon rise full and blood red over the Dakota foothills. The savages call this a good omen, a good season to set out for hunting before the winter cold. We agree and when we attack their villages in the frigid early morning hours, we find there is nothing but women and children in the camps, a few old men whose feeble resistance we brush aside. Then we commence the slaughter with a carnal efficiency while a few of the boys use the shots and screams as a distraction to kill the penned ponies and add to the general carnage and rape going on about. Afterwards we burn the shelters and warm by their flames as the sun crests over the hills and we watch light come to a land where the horizons stretch on endless, as do the possibilities. The other day I read in a newspaper that Sherman and Sheridan were doing much of the same to the South, my hometown in particular being mentioned as “nothing but a cinder.” I felt as much for it and its inhabitants as I did for the sack of Troy, which is to say nothing.

Fulfillment. Jackson found it in his time. Few men do. I too am blessed by a cruel and righteous God for my heart is an organ of iron.