South of Shiloh Page 11

  Mitch thought about it. Was Robert Kirby gay? It was a tired gossip theme. Mitch, who remembered his former boss as a sickly, brittle, socially maladroit prick, didn’t think so. Didn’t matter now. Whatever. But LaSalle didn’t feel right, him showing up now.

  Then it was time to get down to business. Darl removed the gear and rifle from his truck and Mitch stripped off his street clothes and changed into a beat-up Confederate wool uniform and worn brogans. He stowed his clothes in the Ford, set his cell phone on vibrate, slipped it in his pocket and buckled on the gear. Then he hefted the Enfield. Expecting rain, after cleaning the rifle at the farm, he’d tucked it in a black rubber-covered canvas case.

  “How do I look?” Mitch asked as Darl looped a folded gum blanket over his belt in the back.

  Darl gave him thumbs-up. “Anybody sees you from a distance, you’ll blend right in. This is it, huh?” He looked around. “Christ, hope this fog clears out. Can’t see shit. You gonna be able to find your way?”

  “I grew up working in these woods; I know every trail.” Mitch nodded vaguely, getting past small talk now, starting to concentrate. “But it’ll be slow going. Give me close to noon to get in place. Then call to make sure the phones work.” Suddenly, he patted his chest. “Shit, forgot my smokes.”

  Darl handed him his pack of Pall Malls. Mitch stuffed them in the haversack. It was time. Mitch and Darl embraced awkwardly.

  “You going to be all right?” Mitch asked, peering at his cousin’s shadowed face.

  “Sure. Gotta be. Get’r done,” Darl said gamely.

  Mitch nodded, then picked up a branch and wedged it in the fork of a tree just off the trail. “On my way out I’ll ditch the rifle and clothes behind this tree. When things quiet down you’ll collect them, right?”

  “Like we said,” Darl bobbed his head.

  Mitch wished he could see Darl’s eyes but he couldn’t and it was time to go. He shrugged, turned, padded down the muddy trail, and disappeared into the tangle of trees. In a few minutes he was raising a sweat, breathing harder.

  Damn, this was turning into work. He was already sweltering in the wool uniform and his feet started to swell in the cramped shoes. And every step took him closer to killing his first man. Thou Shalt Not… Mitch shook it off. Dwayne and his psycho little brother, Donnie, talked casually about putting people down. Darl had killed more than once. Even Marcy, if you believed the stories.

  He’d asked her about it once, and she’d appraised him and said slowly, “There’s people with violent fantasies and people with violent memories and it ain’t smart to have those two meet up in a violent altercation.”

  Bible Belt–raised, Mitch was lip-service religious. Social. Not a believer. But the visceral Southern Baptist scale of weights and measures—sin, salvation, redemption or hellfire punishment—were hardwired in his DNA and could not entirely be ignored. His vices were vanity and women…

  His forehead started to throb. Damn you, Marcy, putting a hex on me. All I wanted was a piece of ass down at the crossroads to kick things off…

  His sin was ambition.

  He knew his Bible and employed understated snippets on the radio show. The Sunday-school words from St. Luke still burned in his memory.

  And the devil, taking him up into a high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the world in a moment of time.

  And the devil said unto him, All this power will I give thee…if thou therefore wilt worship me, all shall be thine…

  People would tolerate his vices.

  But would they tolerate his sin?

  Still, deeper and thicker than Jesus, or the bluesman’s voodoo, was the local priority of blood kin. There were some who’d say the shot that killed Beeman had been loaded in a feud before either of them had been born and had been hanging fire all Mitch’s life.

  “State-line rules,” Billie Watts had quipped.

  Billie. Bright and flawed and talking loose with his nose full of Darl’s cocaine—Billie saying, “Shit, man, if you dropped Beeman in broad daylight on Waldron in front of the courthouse, chances are fifty-fifty a grand jury with enough old-timers from West Alcorn would return a ‘no’ bill.”

  But it wasn’t really about Beeman. Not really. Beeman was just one of those moving parts Marcy had mentioned.

  Walking easier now, warming to the work, he silently threaded in on the muddy trails. He wasn’t kidding Darl; he did know the trails by heart. And they never changed, because the old man wouldn’t let anybody come in, even to log it off.

  He pictured the long parcel of land along the Tennessee border, which held enough oak and hickory to timber a whole suburb. The Kirbys owned two thousand acres wrapped around a spring-fed lake jumping with bass.

  In his father’s day it was about bootleg whiskey and roadhouse hustles.

  Now it was all about the land. Christ, look what they did with Pickwick over on the Tennessee River.

  Like most of the established families who ruled Corinth, Old Man Kirby was committed to slowing down the clock, to preserving the past. While Corinth gloried in its quaint storefronts and museums, all the fuckin’ jobs went to Tupelo.

  Fact was, if Beeman did get elected sheriff, he would be their paid, loyal temple dog, guarding their moldering Civil War mausoleum. He’d use the sheriff’s office to block Mitch at every turn.

  So Beeman had to go. And then Dwayne would owe him the favor.

  For one piercing moment he pictured Ellie lying asleep in bed. Getting up, driving out to the estate, worried about the cannons tearing up the flower beds…

  Not now. Bust up your concentration.

  Think positive.

  When it all worked out and Mitch had his way with the land, he’d line the bulldozers up, tread to tread. And those machines would belong to the construction company he and Dwayne would put together. They’d have plenty of time, maybe two years for it all to settle down. First they’d have to weather a public outcry. The state of Mississippi would initially stay plans to break ground near or on the battlefield. Citing historical preservation protocols on the books since 1966, the state would have to satisfy its mandate that no archaeological or human remains would be disturbed.

  But, in the end, it was private land. Billy Watts would be on top of that.

  Mitch would detour around the battlefield, in respect to the old man’s memory, and then dig up and build on everything all the way to the waterfront lots on the lake. The construction boom would bring hundreds of well-paying jobs to the county. Memphis commuters would be willing to accept the drive time to live in a tastefully designed development adjacent to a pristine battlefield. Heritage had conducted discreet surveys and had run the numbers.

  Hell. In another generation you could probably plow under the battlefield proper. The Boomers and the iPod-brain X-ers moving in wouldn’t give a shit. Serve ’em right for teaching history-lite in the schools. In the end it was like the man said in the movie. It ain’t personal. It’s strictly business.

  You had to get real.

  The land had been stolen and re-stolen over and over for the last three hundred years. The first white settlers had chased out the Chickasaws, who stole it from another bunch of Indians, and so on, going back to Cain knocking Abel’s brains out. All he was doing was adding a modest footnote to a long ledger of crimes.

  Mitch shifted the cased muzzleloader from his left to his right shoulder and mused.

  Face it, man. What I am is Progress.

  13

  Saturday, 4 a.m.

  PAUL’S EYES JOLTED OPEN WHEN A BUGLE STUTTERED a spitty, off-tune version of reveille. Coughs and groans all around as stiff men stirred in soggy blankets. More grumbling as they sat up and faced the icy predawn air. Paul felt beside him—no Beeman. His fingers probed whiskers of frost on the grass. Sitting up, pawing for his glasses case, he saw a shadow turn from the embers of their campfire. Beeman knelt and handed him a steaming cup.

  “Careful. It’s hot,” Beeman said, and Paul was amazed to see
his words strike faint white commas in the air. He put his glasses on and took the cup in both hands, gratefully pressing his palms to the tin warmth. As he sipped the wonderful coffee, he heard Red Beard, the sergeant, yell, “Roll call in fifteen minutes. Pack your gear and grab something to eat. Drink some water. Formation in fifteen minutes.”

  The warning prompted a scramble in the dark as a bright tendril of lightning illuminated the clearing. Paul blinked. An electric flicker. A hobo-camp scurry of disheveled men with pale, sleepy expressions. On all fours, stooping, they gathered up their bedding and saw to their knapsacks.

  Beeman assembled his knapsack, set it aside, and then instructed Paul as he packed. Fold the overcoat inside to keep it dry. Roll the blanket inside the poncho and strap it on top of the pack. When Paul’s fingers fumbled on the new stiff leather straps, Beeman moved in and cinched them tight. Paul used the last of the coffee to wash down a mouthful of dry hardtack and beef jerky from his haversack. As he chewed, his teeth crunched a residue of grit off his fingers, making him aware how dirty he was from a night in the rain and muddy straw.

  He looked around. Christ, he’d be lost without Beeman. Where the hell were Manning and Dalton? It was impossible to see. Someone held a candle in a tin holder that cast a meager light.

  All so strange and fast. At home, Jenny and Molly would still be asleep. Saturday was a leisurely wake-up, waffle-breakfast kind of day. Rattles of tin and steel brought him back to the sounds of equipment being hoisted, cinched, buckled.

  “Motherfucker,” a man nearby muttered as he dropped his musket.

  “Don’t think they used ‘motherfucker’ in 1862,” another man commented dryly. “I downloaded a nineteenth-century slang dictionary off the Camp Chase Gazette Web site and didn’t find it under M.”

  “Bullshit,” the first man said as he retrieved his rifle, “they say it on Deadwood ten times a minute…”

  Paul grinned, trying to get traction on the day as he struggled to arrange his belt and the crisscross of leather straps. Every surface he touched was slippery, gritty, and cold; steel, wood, rubber-coated canvas, leather, and tin. Shivering without his overcoat, he shouldered his pack and lifted his rifle.

  Beeman made him take off the pack, pointing out, “Your canteen strap is under your pack strap; fix it the other way around.” Paul straightened out the straps, re-shouldered his pack.

  “C Company. Fall in,” Red Beard shouted.

  Paul joined the shadows stumbling on the pitch-black trail, where he was manhandled by rough veteran hands, shoved bodily into his slot as the mob rejiggered itself into two ordered lines. He wound up magically in place, with Beeman on his right, an Ohio man on his left, and more Ohioans to the rear. He was grateful for the darkness that hid his confusion at being so swiftly sorted and mechanically aligned. His grin faded. He swallowed and registered the full weight of the pack and the corseting straps. Paul Edin had been transformed into a “two” toting a ten-pound Model 1861 Springfield .58-caliber rifled musket in the front rank of C Company.

  From the wry compendium of Civil War facts at the back of his mind, he selected Lincoln’s somber phrase: “Facing the arithmetic.”

  Men as numbers. The evolutions of Civil War drill were based on soldiers being designated ones and twos. Paul visualized a tapestry of glowing computer code, ones and twos, flowing in various combinations in the foggy, dripping Tennessee forest. For instance, at the order “right flank,” the two lines would double to the right. Paul would step right and forward and tuck in on Beeman’s right side and be in a file of four men abreast. At the order “front,” he would un-double back and be on Beeman’s left in a two-line company front again.

  A two. He extended two fingers of his left hand at his side to remind himself.

  There was no preview of what waited for them. Red Beard bawled the roll. Satisfied that all his men were present, he gave the order, “In each rank, count twos,” to verify that the same men were ranked left and right and behind from the previous night. Then Red Beard stepped back, and a shadow with a wide-brimmed hat and a sword appeared.

  “Captain Sayles,” someone whispered in the rear rank.

  Then the rippling orders: “Attention company, shoulder arms, in two ranks, right face.” Then, “Forward march.”

  Paul pivoted and plunged his left brogan almost ankle-deep in the sucking mud. Just like that, the hunched shapes lurched off, the front of the file dissolving in the dark. And in the unified motion of that first step, it struck Paul that—this is what they looked like—sounded like—the muted clatter of three shadowy companies of Civil War soldiers, accurate down to every stitch, material, and pattern. All that was missing were the actual minié balls in their cartridge boxes.

  After a few minutes they veered off the muddy trail and started uphill on a drier narrow path. Men muttered and cursed as they slipped on loose rocks and slick shale that made for more treacherous footing.

  “Route step, march,” yelled Red Beard.

  The ranks relaxed from marching cadence, the men now at liberty to step and carry the muskets however they wished. Beeman did a side step and negotiated an exchange of positions with the Ohioan on Paul’s right. Now they walked side by side, file buddies.

  “Most of the march will be in double file,” Beeman said as he took Paul’s musket, loosened the sling, and handed it back. “Sling it over your shoulder. This here part, the uphill, it’s the easy part,” Beeman said. “Take a drink,” he finished.

  Paul took a few swallows of water from his canteen and then walked in silence, shrugging his shoulders to ease the cut of the pack straps and the rifle sling. The upward grade stabbed his shins; he exhaled clouds of crystallized breath. No longer cold, now he was flushed and suffocating in a blue plaster of sweaty wool.

  Over a hundred fifty men struggled up the rocky trail but Paul felt isolated, walled off in darkness. He lurched for footing, ducked the wet slap of overhanging branches. Then, slowly, the surrounding pattern of underbrush floated into focus as dawn fuzzed through the trees. With the coming of the light, Paul felt the claustrophobic isolation loosen its hold. Up and down the line men were beginning to talk.

  “So why’s it the easy part?” Paul panted.

  “’Cause it’s more or less dry. Once we get down the other side of this high ground we hit the swamp,” Beeman said. They slogged past an overweight soldier who sat breathing heavily on a fallen tree trunk, wiping his dripping face with a kerchief. “Got him on my list,” Beeman said, “him and another whale up ahead. Both officers. If those boys hadda carry more’n a fuckin’ sword they’d be bear bait.”

  Half an hour later, they took a break on an intersecting trail with tire treads mashed in the leaves. Two large, circular, plastic water containers had been positioned by men in period civilian clothes. As the battalion fell out and water details collected canteens, Beeman pointed out an approaching soldier. “He’s one of my trail contacts, an EMT from Illinois. Gotta have a quick conference about our whales.”

  As Beeman talked to the blended EMT, Paul saw Tom Dalton, moving fast back down the column; spiked black beard, sergeant-serious in chevrons and striped trousers. “How you holding up?” Dalton asked.

  “Fine,” Paul said. “A lot easier than I thought so far.”

  Dalton nodded. “We probably won’t see you until tonight. They’re pushing Davey and me out front. You get paired up with that secesh cop?”

  Paul grinned. “He had hot java waiting when I woke up.”

  “Fuuaack. Marry him. We’ll convert him later.” Dalton was impressed. “I chewed coffee beans.” The conversation was cut short by shouts of “fall in” up ahead. Dalton bared his teeth, excited, “This is great, huh? Doing a swamp in the fog. Gotta go.” He cuffed Paul on the shoulder and jogged back toward the head of the column. Paul watched him disappear into the blue ranks and wondered if he’d opened his fate card.

  Beeman returned and explained, “We’re sending one of the whales back on the four-wheeler
that brought in the water. He’s got severe dehydration and an elevated pulse won’t slow down.” Then the company fell in, Red Beard called roll, and the march continued.

  An hour later, Paul’s shoes, socks, and trouser legs were soaked as he waded cautiously through murky, knee-deep water. Just before they entered the swamp, Paul and a number of other soldiers had followed Beeman’s example and found sturdy branches to use as walking sticks. Now he carried his rifle on his left shoulder and probed with the stick in his right hand for footing. The muddy bottom sucked at his shoes every step. Ahead, ghostly figures waded, shifting their weight from foot to foot, dissembling into the mist. Dawn had transformed the swamp into a muddy steam room, and Paul missed the cool rain.

  After this, the Civil War would be forever linked in his mind to a memory of mist, of fog, of endless vapor.

  The tall trunks of cypress trees loomed in the filmy air like pillars of ancient ruins, then faded away. Dormant kudzu vine spun in the brush and hung the blurry trees with shaggy Druidic sculptures.

  “Blair Witch Project South,” one of the Ohio soldiers quipped.

  Paul’s fascination with historical accuracy now seemed a quaint, academic memory that melted away with the morning heat. His whole body cooked and ached, bisected by tight leather straps. It had all come down to a practical ordeal of making it from one step to the next. He cast an eye at the kudzu-choked dry ground they were skirting, twenty-five yards to the left. “How come we don’t walk over there where it’s dry?” he asked.

  “Mister No-shoulders,” Beeman said cryptically. “Cottonmouths are aggressive territorial little fuckers, like to curl up along the water’s edge. The organizers figured it’d be safer out aways in the water. Plus, we’re walking in the channel. This moving water’ll come out in the creek.”

  “Great,” Paul muttered, looking more suspiciously at the ripples in the murky brown water.