South of Shiloh Read online

  “I thought the Whitworth was the big sniper gun for our side,” Dwayne pondered.

  Darl shook his head. “Whitworth fires a distinctive six-sided bolt.”

  “Plus,” Mitch added, “in addition to being rare as hell, they kick like a mule. They used to be able to identify a Whitworth shooter by his black eye from the scope clocking back and busting him in the face. Enfield shoots as good as a Whitworth out to five hundred yards.”

  Mitch looked downrange at the rectangle of plywood, turned back to Dwayne. “Tomorrow they’ll be more’n four hundred cheap-ass repros of this rifle on the field pointed at the Yankees. All of ’em capable of firing the same kind of round. The cops are gonna go nuts trying to secure four hundred rifles.”

  Then they talked Dwayne through how’d they get in and out, Darl working the blue side to spot Beeman, talking Mitch in on him with the stolen cell that he’d ditch later.

  “You put a contract on Kenny Beeman for laming Donny—well, tomorrow you’re gonna watch it come due,” Mitch said.

  “Like an accident. No money changing hands. Keep it in the family. You do me a favor and I reciprocate. And you want that done when?” Dwayne asked.

  “Right after the old man dies,” Mitch said.

  “What if she quits running the roads after her daddy passes?”

  “She won’t, she’ll run more,” Mitch said. “And then you and me will sit down, have a beer, and look over a plat map of the Kirby Estate.”

  “Okay, Cousin, we got a deal,” Dwayne said. “You deliver on your part and I’ll give it to Jimmy Beal. Too bad we ain’t got Donny. He always liked to drive fast.” Dwayne paused, and for the first time Mitch observed the young cat-killer gleam in his eyes. “Thing with Donny, he had a vicious damn streak I never could break. Fuckin’ kid. Just as well he ain’t here to run her down. Wouldn’t put it past him to drag his dick in some roadkill pussy.”

  11

  Friday, 4 p.m.

  MCNAIRY COUNTY, TENNESSEE

  THEY’D TURNED HARD RIGHT AT MADISON AND entered a long, dark tunnel of rainy freeways that coursed down the length of Illinois. At dawn, they rolled down the windows to the shock of soft spring air. Whooping, they crossed the Mississippi near Cairo and entered THE SOUTH.

  “‘I do not know what lies before me,’” Manning dramatically intoned, mimicking Martin Sheen playing Robert E. Lee in the movie Gettysburg, “‘it could be the ENTIRE FEDERAL ARMY…’”

  Then, briefly, they discussed some pages Manning had downloaded about Mississippi cypress swamps. “Okay, we got poisonous water moccasins and copperheads native to the swamp we have to march through. Plus there’s bears and Florida panthers, whatever they are.”

  “And Rebs,” added Dalton.

  They rode I-57 down a corner of Missouri that skirted the river, and then merged with I-55. After Arkansas streaked by in the rain, the open road plunged into a maze of interchanges and bridges when they turned east, crossed the big river again, and sped into storm-blurred Memphis. Intent on navigation, Paul studied the road map.

  “Get this,” he said, “Minnesota and Mississippi are front to back in the atlas.”

  They found the exit sign for Mississippi State 72, veered south and east, left Tennessee, and emerged into a foggy rural landscape. Mississippi. Warm and wet and green.

  An hour later they arrived at the Corinth city limits and turned off the highway to search for the historic downtown. Dalton pushed the 4Runner between old brick warehouses and hit the brakes. Wow—check it out, right there—a Rebel battle flag rippling in the rain, lashed to the wheel of a cannon chained on a lowboy behind a pickup.

  “That’s a Napoleon, Paul,” Dalton said. “A twelve-pounder gun Howitzer, model 1857. Smoothbore bronze tube. Range two thousand yards…”

  “Not exactly your shotgun in the old gun rack,” Manning quipped.

  They stopped briefly to see the famous railroad crossing the Battle of Shiloh had been fought to defend, and to eat a rushed takeout lunch. Then the rain moderated and, squinting in the drizzle, they headed north out of Corinth. Following their event map, they drove into the Tennessee border country, where, finally, they found the Union encampment.

  They parked next to vehicles with license plates from Illinois and Ohio in a field where men wandered in various stages of uniform dress. In the distance, a wall of dense hardwood forest was freckled with green buds.

  “Christ,” Paul said, grinning, “it looks like a cross between Woodstock and a powwow for middle-aged white guys.”

  Quickly, they changed into their uniforms.

  “Lose the corps badge,” Manning told Paul, “we’ll be playing an Ohio regiment. Western war.”

  Paul removed the silver First Minnesota cloverleaf Second Corps badge from his coat, then took off his glasses and tucked them into the glove compartment. Gingerly, he fitted the tiny nineteenth-century wire frames to his face; his peripheral vision fell away as he squinted experimentally through the narrow lenses. The road leading into the parking area was obscure in drizzle, already a memory. So this was it. The moment he’d been waiting for. Good-bye, twenty-first century.

  And he couldn’t help wondering: Had I lived a hundred forty years ago, would I have been a different man?

  After buckling on their leathers, they hoisted full packs, shouldered their rifles, and slogged toward a broad tent pitched at the edge of the trees. Several banquet tables set up on a plank floor were manned by vendors in period dress, who displayed clothing and accoutrements: Daley, Fall Creek, and the local sutler, C & D Jarnagin.

  Paul sat at a picnic table and filled out a liability waiver, grinning when he read BLACK POWDER IS DANGEROUS in bold print, and then they lined up at the table marked with a registration sign, where Paul signed in on an old-fashioned ledger. The man behind the desk checked Paul’s registration, thumbed through a file, and then handed him a folded three-by-four-inch manila card sealed along the bottom edge. The front of the card was addressed with antique black script.

  Paul read aloud: “Pvt. Amos T. Mauldon, Co. C, 7th Ohio Vols.” He paused, then asked, “What’s this?”

  “Fate card,” the registrar drawled. “They’ll let you know when to open it. On the inside it tells you what happened to the soldier you’re portraying in the actual battle.”

  Paul stared at the suddenly portentous card; then he turned to Manning. “You mean…?”

  “Neat, huh,” Manning grinned. “You could be walking worm-food. But you gotta march five miles through snake-infested swamps to find out.”

  Paul balanced the card in his open palm, struck by the notion of carrying a man’s life in the hollow of his hand. Manning tugged on his sleeve. “C’mon, we gotta find our company,” Manning said.

  Paul inserted the card into his jacket’s inner pocket and they were directed to a muddy trail. Trudging in search of C Company, they hadn’t traveled far down the trail when the drizzle stopped and the moisture in the air plumped to billowing mist.

  Paul struggled for footing, fighting his bayonet hilt that tangled with the tin cup dangling on the strap of his haversack; his cartridge box caught on the stock of his ten-pound rifle and the mire threatened to slop over the uppers of his leather shoes.

  “It’ll get easier, don’t worry.” Davey Manning slapped him on the back. “You’re doing just fine.”

  The slick black trees and brush closed in, walling off the parking area and, up ahead, Paul smelled fitful wood smoke mingled with a fruity drift of pipe tobacco. Then the trail widened and he saw forty or so men in blue uniforms lounging and squatting to either side, taking shelter under the trees.

  He stopped and his heart speeded up.

  So here it began; his first step through the looking glass into a Matthew Brady tintype. He found himself among Union soldiers hunkered down, sipping coffee from big tin cups. With startled fascination he stared at the gaunt, whiskered men mangy with the rain, strapped in leather, and everywhere the hard glint of period-accurate metal. Here an
d there an overweight guy, but mostly they were lean and weathered. Damn, he marveled. Damn. Like that time in the Superior National Forest, when he had his first look at a wolf in the wild.

  He blinked and noted a tall, triangular white-canvas Sibley tent erected next to the smoldering cook fire. A wet gleam of interlocked silver bayonets crowned a row of precisely stacked rifles.

  They spied a hand-lettered sign marked C CO jammed in the mud, and headed for it. A red-bearded soldier wearing a diamond and chevrons on his sleeve waved to them from under a gum blanket strung between two trees. The sergeant maneuvered a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek, spit a stream of brown juice, and greeted them. “Fresh fish. Where ya from?”

  “First Minnesota,” Dalton said. They gave their names and the sergeant checked a roster.

  “Thought we’d be late,” Dalton said.

  “All you missed was the rain,” the sergeant said. “Besides, we’re on Reb time. Everything is bass-ackwards. Kirby Creek happened a week after Shiloh and here we are more’n a week before. They’re dedicating a memorial on the actual date, so they scheduled the battle early. You sticking around for Shiloh?”

  “Nah, we gotta get back,” Dalton said. “So, you seen the other side?”

  “There’s a Tennessee Regiment and, ah, some snappy guys from the Stonewall Brigade. A regiment from Alabama. Saw the Fifty-first Tennessee yesterday. Their drill looked…okay. There’s a pretty sharp Tennessee cavalry unit—this is Bedford Forrest country, you know. And lesse, there’s an artillery battery.” He jerked his thumb off toward the right. “Over thataway, there’s about a hundred fifty galvanized locals, wearing blue. So we’ll have maybe three hundred infantry if all our guys show up, half a dozen cavalry, and two cannons. A hundred sixty-six of us Yankees signed up, so far a hundred thirty-some have registered on site. The Rebs’ll have over four hundred infantry, maybe twenty horses, and a four cannons. You seen the field yet?”

  Dalton shook his head and, as the sergeant talked, Paul’s hand floated to his breast and fingered the stiff shape of the card under the damp wool. He was tempted to take a peek.

  “It’s pretty cool,” the sergeant said. “When we cross into Mississippi and hit the swamp, we’ll be on private land that’s been in the same family since the actual war. They keep it absolutely untouched. There’s this restored house on a hill overlooking the field that still has all the original minié ball scars in the walls.” The sergeant smiled and looked directly at Paul. “This is as close to 1862 as you can get without a time machine.”

  Paul dropped his hand from his chest and let it fall to his side.

  Then Dalton asked, “What’s the support situation like?”

  “They’re modeling on Rich Mountain last year; same caliber of troops and support.” The sergeant shrugged. “They’ll have water points in the woods, Tennessee highway patrol troopers are mounted in blue to provide our side with cavalry. Officers all have cell phones. Anything happens, they call 911. There’s EMTs in the ranks, an ambulance on standby at a command post, and four-wheelers positioned in the woods. Plus a couple local cops blended through the ranks on both sides. They’ll have police radios and first-aid kits.”

  Then the sergeant looked back to his roster. “Okay. I have Edin here in Company C.” He squinted at his paperwork, then looked up at Dalton and Manning. “Got a note that says you two been in contact with Colonel Burns, the battalion commander?”

  Dalton nodded. “Burns and I have been on e-mail. He suggested we bring spare uniforms with chevrons and stripes just in case. We left them in the car.”

  “Probably have to put them on. We got some no-show NCOs. We can use some more veteran sergeants who know their Hardees. You guys best go talk to Burns’s adjutant, Lieutenant Eichleay; he might stick you up front with Company A.”

  “Ah,” Dalton said, “this is Edin’s first event. I wanted to keep an eye on him.”

  The sergeant made a face. “He sure picked a doozy. Okay. When we form up for inspection I’ll put him between two veterans. You two go find the adjutant, I’ll settle Edin in.”

  Dalton and Manning assured Paul they’d be back to check on him, then they walked toward the group of men around the campfire. The sergeant got to his feet, directed Paul off the trail, and pointed to an open patch of muddy grass among the trees.

  “Okay, Edin, drop your pack here. I’ll get you squared away when we muster.” Then the sergeant turned and walked back to his shelter half on the trail.

  Paul looked around for a place to sit and spotted a mostly dry rubberized gum blanket spread out at the base of a tree. A soldier napped, knees drawn up, leaning back against the trunk with his wide-brimmed slouch hat tipped forward over his face. A long brown-and-black feather protruded from the seam along the crown. Paul first thought to ask him for permission to sit on the blanket, then, deciding not to disturb him, he leaned his rifle against the tree, put his forage cap over the muzzle to keep the bore dry, took off his pack, and sat down on the far edge of the ground cloth.

  As he mopped sweat from his face with a kerchief, he noticed how his fingers trembled. He grinned, unable to shake off a giddy, being-on-stage sensation of floating adrift in this strange costume party; part Outward Bound, part midlife crisis. Carefully, he removed his steamed spectacles, cleaned them, and put them back on.

  Then he fished a brown leather-bound journal from his haversack, opened it, and stared at the empty lined page of the small notebook. Fumbling with his crude jackknife, he sharpened a brown pencil. A drop of sweat fell off his eyebrow and splashed on the page, swelling the blue ruled lines.

  So here I am; it’s 1862 and I’m a Union private on the eve of my first battle. Self-consciously, he worked the fate card from the pocket of his sack coat and studied the spidery penned name. Amos Mauldon. Was this his first battle?

  Paul toyed briefly with the glued edge of the card. Then he placed it on the notebook, bore down with his pencil, and signed his name in clear, legible script below Mauldon’s.

  There.

  He tucked the card away and found himself inspecting his hands. Telephone hands, keyboard hands. Pink. Private Mauldon’s hands would be filthy, toughened, and calloused from farm work, then hardened further by countless hours of drill with a heavy rifle and by digging entrenchments. Would he be a cautious man? Would he have a sense of humor?

  Paul took a sharp breath and peered into the fog-shrouded trees. Without rancor he recalled the conversation with Jenny. The inevitable moment when he’d have to tell Molly he wasn’t her biological father. I wonder. Would Mauldon be raising another man’s daughter?

  He shook off the personal twinge and in a sudden rush of imagination found himself trying to visualize what they’d called “seeing the elephant,” being in battle for the first time. As opposed, say, to watching it acted out in segments on a TV screen between Cialis commercials?

  Stephen Crane had allotted a lot of space to his untried youth’s apprehension in The Red Badge of Courage. Paul could summon up bits of narrative from memory: The youth perceived his time had come. He was about to be measured. For a moment he felt in the face of the great trial like a babe, and the flesh over his heart seemed very thin.

  No military tradition in Paul’s family; no war stories after holiday dinners. His mother and father had both been bureaucrats; two “Minnesota Normals” burrowed lifelong in the State Highway Department. They’d stressed education and job security.

  Suddenly, he recalled a tense office meeting with a prospective client. Years ago. The guy was judged ineligible for insurance because he had some run-ins with the law and had been hospitalized twice for drug dependency. The man, a Ranger veteran, had served with distinction in Somalia.

  Wincing, he cast his eyes around the dank clearing. During the day he insured people and property against loss or harm. At night, his imagination embraced violent panoramas where men marched shoulder-to-shoulder into massed rifle and cannon fire. He bridged the contradiction between his bloodthirsty re
ading habits and his quiet work and personal life with an ironic sense of humor.

  But now that he was here, with mud on his brogans, he couldn’t help wondering…would Private Mauldon have read Lincoln’s First Inaugural? Would he have been stirred by the line about the mystic chords of memory reaching back to every patriot grave? Would he have abolitionist tendencies or would he be a racist who would desert at the first mention of the Emancipation Proclamation? Was he in uniform to preserve the Union or because he’d collected a twenty-five-dollar bounty to enlist? Then Paul smiled and put the brakes on. Slow down, man. For starters, could Mauldon even read?

  Get real. It’s cold and wet. The woods are full of hostile Rebels. Mauldon would be concerned with staying warm, dry, fed…and alive. If the bullets spared him, he’d have all the other subparagraphs on his fate card to ponder: dysentery, cholera, malaria, and the plain old running shits they called the “Tennessee two-step.” His main impression of Abraham Lincoln would be the certain knowledge that, he, Amos Mauldon, would be sleeping in the mud tonight and Lincoln would not.

  Paul leaned back and looked up through the dripping branches that tangled skyward, black and barren of leaves, like crooked fingers.

  Mauldon may have fought at Shiloh and survived, so his immediate world would have been gloomy enough. Would he suspect, this early in the war, that Lincoln would design modern America on the foundation of a million corpses?

  Paul twirled the pencil in his fingers and dropped his eyes back to the empty journal page. So, what would Private Mauldon write to his wife and daughter? Slowly, carefully, Paul began to put pencil to paper. He’d barely filled the first page when he looked up and saw that the napping soldier had sat up and tilted his wide-brimmed black hat back from his face.

  “Howdy,” the man said, his voice coming soft and slow as if half the breath stayed vibrating in his throat and sinuses. “Where you from?”

  Paul cocked his head and grinned. Sonofagun. The guy was a Southerner wearing a blue uniform. “Minnesota,” he said, intrigued.