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The redheaded sergeant hit him in the back with his fist. "Move your ass!" the sergeant said.
Out in the sunlight Willie saw a ca
The sergeant hit him again, then knotted his shirt behind the neck and shoved him forward. Suddenly Willie was in the sunlight, the sweat on his face like ice water, the peach orchard blooming with puffs of smoke. "Where was Jim?"
The initial skirmish line wilted and crumpled in a withering volley from the orchard. A second line of men advanced behind the first, and, from a standing position, aimed and fired into the pink flowers drifting down from the peach trees. Willie heard the Irish sergeant wheezing, gasping for breath behind him. He waited for another fist in the middle of his back.
But when he turned he saw the sergeant standing motionless in the smoke, his mouth puckered like a fish's, a bright hole in his throat leaking down his shirt, his carbine slipping from his hand. "Get down, Willie!" he heard Jim shout behind him. Jim knocked him flat just as a wheeled Yankee ca
Men in butternut and gray fell like cornstalks cut with a scythe. The colonel who had carried the Bo
Then there was silence, and in the silence Willie thought he heard someone beating a broken cadence on a drumhead, like a fool who does not know a Mardi Gras parade has come to an end.
THROUGH the morning and afternoon thousands of men moved in and out of the trees, stepping through the dead who flanged the edge of the woods or lay scattered across the breadth of the clearing. Columns of sunlight tu
He had never been so thirsty in his life. His lips and tongue were black from biting off the ends of cartridge papers, his nostrils clotted with dust and bits of desiccated leaves. He watched a sergeant use his canteen to wash the blood from a wounded man's face and he wanted to tear the canteen from the sergeant's hands and pour every ounce of its contents down his own throat.
Jim's canteen had been split in half by a minie ball early in the morning, and neither of them had eaten or drunk a teaspoon of water since the previous night. They had collapsed behind a thick-trunked white oak, exhausted, light-headed, their ears ringing, waiting for the group of Te
The leaves on the floor of the forest were streaked with the blood of the wounded who had been dragged back to the ambulance wagons in the rear. Some men had talked about a surgeon's tent, back near the Corinth Road, that buzzed with green flies and contained cries that would live in a man's dreams the rest of his life.
Looking to the south, Willie could see horses pulling more ca
He pressed his thumbs under his ears and swallowed and tried to force air through his ear passages, but it was to no avail. The rest of the world was going about its business, and he was viewing it as though he were trapped under a glass bell.
The ca
Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.
"What?" Willie said.
Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.
"-got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.
He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.
"Where's yours?" Willie asked.
"I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.
There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.
"Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.
Jim sat down against the tree bark.
"You hit any of them today?" he asked.
"I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.
"Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."
Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.
"They're no different from us, Jim," he said.
"Yes, they are. They're down here. We didn't go up there."
A young lieutenant strolled through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather flap of his pistol holster.
"Our ca
"We been out there eleven times, suh," a private on the ground said.
"Twelve's a charm. Stuff your fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty ca
Then the ca