None shall look back, p.25
None Shall Look Back, page 25
A few minutes later the call came again. Years ago Mrs. Dunbar had called, “Batter bread’s in the oven.” Now she simply shrieked the word “Bread!” as she passed from back porch to kitchen.
Henry, subconsciously on the alert, heard her. He got up, this time without stretching, drew on his pants. As he started for the ladder he passed the cot where Bud lay swathed in quilts like a cocoon. Bud’s big toe was protruding from the quilts. Henry leaned over, swiftly gave it a vicious jerk. “Ain’t you going to help me milk?” he called plaintively from the head of the ladder.
Bud gave no answer save a groan, but the question lingered in the air, brought him finally upright in bed. “Hey?” he muttered, then seeing Henry’s pallet empty he got up, dressed, and after a dash at the washbasin on the back porch went out to the cow-pen. His mind, too, was busy with arithmetical calculation. It was ten miles to Porter’s Ford where the boys intended to spend the day fishing, and there was only one horse. Be just like Henry to make him walk if he didn’t help milk.
In the cow-pen Henry squatted on his haunches. His head was nudged into Old Bell’s ample flank. His lean, dirty hands moving rhythmically brought the milk down in an even white flow into the bucket. Bud, rubbing his eyes and yawning, looked at the cow next to Bell. A little, hardly grown heifer with a bag that he mentally likened to a dried apple. It occurred to him that a person looking at the little old dried-up thing couldn’t tell whether she’d been milked or not. He looked away. “Want me to let down the bars?” he asked with false geniality.
Henry turned his head so that one irate eye had Bud in its field of vision. He met deceit with sarcasm. “That’s right,” he ejaculated. “Let the bars down. Git ’em all stompeded before I’m through milking. . . .” He broke off, realizing that he did not have an audience.
Bud, unruly for once, had already started to the corner of the lot where movable bars served as a rude gate. His hand was on the top bar. He had slid it back and was about to lay it on the ground when he stopped and stood erect, his hand cupped to his ear in a gesture which Henry considered ludicrously imitative of a grown person.
Henry picked his bucket up, squatted down beside the cow he had hoped to get out of milking. “What’s the matter?” he enquired as he dug his head into her flank. “Hear the sap running?”
Bud did not answer. The bar had fallen from his hand. He stepped around it and going out into the road, disappeared behind some bushes. The next minute he was coming back around the clump of sumac, on the dead run. “Soldiers!” he gasped. “Millions of ’em!”
Henry upset his milk bucket, rising, but he reached the fence at the same time Bud did. They hung there, staring as the noise emerged from the mist.
A big man rode first on a gray horse. He looked queer to be at the head of such a parade. Black hair curled stiffly to his coat collar from under a black slouch hat. A linen duster, such as Henry’s father wore to protect his Sunday clothes on long rides, was buttoned under his chin. The boys’ eyes passed swiftly over him. It was the man riding next who roused their astonishment, a great hawk with swinging beard who balanced ponderously in his saddle and beyond him a burly, fair man who rode with his legs dangling out of the stirrups.
Behind these leaders rode four or five hundred men. The boys’ eyes slid over the long line, trying to pick out a face. They would have whispered to each other if they could have found breath. They would have said: these men are not soldiers. Both Henry and Bud had seen bodies of armed men. A regiment had come marching down the road through the dust a week ago, had broken ranks at the gate to spill over into the yard and to drink the cistern dry. One of them had gibed at little Laura Belle, staring from the doorway: “Yes, ma’am, I’m a Yankee and I eat little children. Gal babies mostly, fried.” Somebody had yelled to him then, “Come on here, you fool,” and he had scurried off over the yard, turning to make the immemorial gesture of greasing the head, pinning the ears back, swallowing whole. . . . And there had been the impressive figure on the Widow Glenn’s front gallery just a few days ago. Stout legs in fine blue cloth were stretched out beneath the newspaper he was reading, and when he laid the paper down to stare off into the woods gold braid had showed, gold straps on his shoulders and splendid twisted snakes on his sleeves. “The head Yankee general,” their cousin Roswell had whispered before he pattered off down the road.
But these men, moving secretly through the woods, were not soldiers. They were hunters, hunters who had chased the same quarry so long that they had come, all of them, to look alike. Their horses, bay, roan, chesnut were all plastered dun color with mud, all kept the same gait. The men, boys of nineteen or burly majors, had the rigid slouch of the seasoned horseman. In their drawn, impassive faces only the eyes managed to be alert.
A pair of those eyes, flat and black in a yellow face, seemed to be fixed on Henry now. Something squirmed coldly in the pit of his stomach. He put his hand down, softly felt the cool, hard rail that was between him and the cavalcade. But the eyes had moved on, were fixed on a point to the left of his shoulder. Henry staring into them saw a spark of light grow in the flat pupil. The man leaned over, said something to a comrade, who immediately turned a sharp face, muttered. But it was as if they had spoken to the horses, not each other. All along the line gaunt heads came up, tails flirted. They were suddenly moving down the road in a swinging trot.
The last one had come up, a skeleton roan with silver mane. As the boys watched, his lean, burred tail rose, stretched out horizontally long enough to let three or four balls of manure drop down into the road. Then he, too, vanished into the cloud of dust.
The boys looked at each other, sighed, slipped down from the fence. Bud was turning back toward the milking place but Henry had run around through the down pasture bars and was in the road and after a second Bud cautiously followed him.
In the road the globes of manure lay, a greenish, disconnected snake that trailed through the dust. Henry put out his toe, poked one of the globes slyly. It was warm.
“Them old horses,” he said mechanically, “been on grass too long.”
He raised his face. There was a look on it with which Bud was familiar. That look had carried them into Bell’s Cave, past the buzzard droppings, past the dark branch, a mile farther than anybody else had ever gone. “Come on,” he said curtly.
They were off, pounding down the road almost as hard as the horses that had gone before them, raising, Henry thought proudly, almost as much dust. At the crest of the hill he veered, made for a wooded knob that swelled up suddenly at the side of the road. Bud scrambled up behind him. They dropped to the ground and lay panting, their eyes fixed on the road.
The cavalcade was still in sight. They had had to slow up for the hill and were moving slowly down the slope toward the ford. Henry and Bud could see beyond the black line of the creek the old sawmill, sedate in its hollow, the maple boughs making a scarlet lacework against its crumbling walls. The horsemen must be making for that. They would rest there, stable their horses. . . .
Henry was on his knees suddenly, his thin hand scrunching Bud’s arm. “Hey,” he breathed. “Look!”
The gray walls of the old mill were obscured by a cloud of black, hurrying figures. They rose up from behind, rushed out from inside, were suddenly everywhere, a monster swarm of bees that clouded the slope and hummed angrily.
The boys stared, then their eyes went to the road. The horsemen were behaving oddly, leaping off their horses to vanish into the woods on either side. Some of them as they leapt threw their bridles to others and these men, holding eight or ten bridles at a time hurriedly began shepherding the horses back up the road.
Shots began to ring out. The boys could see the cavalrymen moving up and down the slope or crouching behind trees to fire steadily. One of them was coming around the side of the knob. He wore a ragged straw hat and a canteen was slung over his shoulder. The upper part of his face was severe, expressionless, but his lips grinned away from yellow, parted teeth. He dropped to his knees behind the white trunk of a sycamore, rested the butt of his rifle on the ground while he drew out the ramrod. He had the cartridge paper in his mouth, was biting the end off when he heard Bud chattering in the grass like a doomed rabbit. His eyes looked amazedly into theirs for a second, then the lips drew away on each side of the greasy paper and one hand left the rifle, came up, thumb pointing imperiously over the shoulder.
The next moment he flung the gun from him and plunged forward. The hand that had been pointing dug into the ground, clutched and dug again. His body twisted around. The boys saw the dark, spreading bullet hole, and then he was on his feet, coming toward them. Blood trilled from his mouth and sprayed out on to his dusty front. He cried “Ulll!” and pitched forward on his face.
Henry sank his wiry fingers into Bud’s shoulder, hauled him to his feet. They were over the side of the knob, pelting down through the dead leaves and brambles. It seemed a long time before their bare feet struck the cool dust of the road.
10
GENERAL BRECKINRIDGE stirred the sugar in the tin cup, tilted his head so that the last drops of coffee could run down his throat. His eyes were on the retreating back of the negro servant but he spoke to the young aide who had just come up to the fire. “That’s a valuable man of yours, Rowan. Want to sell him?”
George Rowan smiled. “No, sir,” he said respectfully and took advantage of the brief interchange to let his eyes rest on the General, taking in every detail of his appearance.
Breckinridge sat on a fallen log, leaning a little backwards so that he could stretch out his legs to the flames. His breeches were soaked to the knee with dew—he had been riding about through the undergrowth since early dawn—but above the waist he presented his usual, trim soldierly appearance, dark butternut blouse buttoned to the chin, his long moustaches sprightly, and the eyes in the swarthy face as bright and glancing as a squirrel’s in a thicket. He turned back to General Deshler who stood on the other side of the fire, resumed his animated discussion of yesterday’s fight.
“They were on the run then. Right after we drove Negley off. In my opinion that would have been the time to attack the right.”
Deshler nodded. “At Lee and Gordon’s Mills,” he said thoughtfully. “You and Cleburne could have flanked them out of there in no time.”
Breckinridge’s remarkable eyes flashed assent. “The two handsomest, most soldierly-looking men in the army.” George, watching the two, mentally added the words to the letter that reposed at that moment in his pocket. Since one of his letters had been published in the Tobacco-Leaf he wrote home often, now to this member of the family, now to that. The letters, which would be carefully preserved, contained in molded phrases his impressions of the great whom he had seen since he had become Deshler’s aide. “Vignettes” he had come to call them: “Longstreet . . . has a broad face that at first glance seems dull, with elephant eyes. They say it takes three rounds of cannon to get him steamed up. . . . D. H. Hill, not so impressive as his great brother-in-law,* but soldier all through. . . . Cleburne, pugnosed, fiery yet kindly eyes, true Irish, one of the best tacticians in the army. . . .” He smiled, thinking of a phrase he had written in last night’s letter about “one who threatens to become great also. They all say Zack makes the best coffee of any nigger in camp. I am afraid he is growing too big for his breeches. He says tell you all he is taking good care of me but we lives like jack rabbits out in the bushes. . . .”
General Breckinridge got to his feet and straightening his shoulders walked over to where an. orderly was holding his horse. General Deshler still sat beside the fire. He had been gay enough a few minutes ago, laughing and joking with the young officers as was his custom, but his attitude now was that of a man engaged in deep thought. George, awed by his stern expression, suddenly recalled that this was his chief’s first engagement as a general officer. He got up, walked off a little way through the trees.
As he went his mind was busy with more phrases that he would put in his next letter. “ ‘This morning,’ yesterday morning it would be by the time he got a chance to write a letter, ‘your humble servant was sitting around the fire in the company of four generals’ . . .” Yes, Cleburne had been there too when Hill rode up. Hill’s face was lined with fatigue, his scrubby beard hung in stiffened wisps. His deep-set eyes lightened when he caught sight of Breckinridge and Cleburne by the fire. He called out almost angrily that he had ridden half the night, that there had been no couriers at the bridge to which he had been directed. Did either of them know where in the name of the Almighty the commanding general had moved his headquarters to? Captain Wheless had come up just then with the message. General Hill thought the order was for him and he put out his hand, but the courier said: “These orders are for General Breckinridge and General Cleburne.” Breckinridge had read his order, then handed it to Hill. Hill read it, pulling savagely at his beard. “They can’t go in now,” he said, “there’s been no proper reconnaissance made.” He raised his head, glared at the other two. “Those lines will have to be adjusted. Cheatham’s whole division is at right angles to my line now.”
Breckinridge nodded. “My wagon trains aren’t up yet,” he said in his deep voice. “Some of my men haven’t eaten in forty-eight hours.”
George wished he could remember what else Hill had said before he swung up into his saddle, but the words of the great, he reflected, were surprisingly like those of ordinary mortals in the moment of utterance. Anyhow, the battle which had seemed imminent would be delayed for another half-hour or so. Unless the enemy made another surprise attack. They could not be far off. You could hear them felling trees for fortifications all night.
He had advanced to a place where the sound of axes was as sharp, as insistent as the chatter of squirrels. He stood very still and looked through the aisles of the trees. They said that an Indian tribe had waged its last desperate battle here and had given the river its name. Well, these woods, sombre even in autumn, looked as if they would always harbor an enemy. It was only strange that he remained so long hidden.
He stooped, picked up a stick and threw it at a squirrel. His mind left the impending conflict, went back to yesterday afternoon when he had seen his cousin, Rives Allard, for the first time in two years. He had been standing at the counter of a country store there by the bridge when somebody had called out, “Hey! Orderly out here looking for Lieutenant Rowan.” He had gone out expecting a message from a member of Deshler’s staff and there was Rives on a little bony yellow mare. He was on his way to Reed’s bridge, he said, but had heard somebody say “Tenth Texas” and stopped. He had not even known that George was with the Tenth Texas until the week before when somebody at home had written him the news.
“Well, it’s a damned good regiment,” George said.
He had thought as they stood there grinning at each other that it was strange how things fell out. He and Rives and Ned Allard had all set out from the same camp and here he and Ned were under Deshler, and Rives with Forrest. He had enquired tactfully if Rives had had a promotion and Rives had replied, still grinning, that it looked as if he would stay an orderly for the duration of the war. George knew what that meant. Those fellows, the men down on the lists as “orderlies,” were old Forrest’s hand-picked scouts. One of their best tricks was deserting to the Federal lines with fake information. Rives, he had heard, had done that at Murfreesboro and would have paid with his neck if Forrest hadn’t captured the town that same night.
Well, they were a dangerous lot, bold as the devil. They said old Forrest himself carried a sabre big enough for any two men and ground against all military regulations to a razor edge. A man in the Tenth had seen him whirl it in both hands and slice off a Yankee’s head as if he’d been a gobbler on a block. Captain Bill Forrest, his brother, was no better than a guerrilla. They called his men “The Forty Thieves.” The younger brother, Jeffrey, was said to have something of the manner of a gentleman. God knows where he had got it. Old Forrest himself had been a nigger trader before the war. . . . Well, Rives Allard had always been a queer cuss. It was only natural that he should land in a queer branch of the service. For it was a queer way of fighting. Some men’s families thought they had been killed in action when they had met ignominious deaths. He had heard dark stories. They had bungled the hanging of the boy spy, David Dodds, so that he had been choked to death. Two men in line had fainted at the sight, and the Yankee officer in charge of the execution had wept. A man’s country had the right to demand his life but had she the right to demand more—to demand that he be dishonored in death? He didn’t know that he would have the stomach for it and yet—he suddenly saw himself as he must appear to his comrades—he was accounted a brave man.
He raised his head. “I am willing to give my life for my country,” he said proudly. The words spoken in the quiet woods rang a little theatrically on his ear yet evoked a sudden, immediate sense of beauty. He recalled fox-hunting nights when still fresh at dawn he had ridden home through wet woods, recalled other softer nights. That peculiar, excited feeling that came when he was on the verge of making a conquest that most people would have said even he couldn’t make. Love itself never had a moment to match that feeling. The last night riding home from Brackets with Lucy Churchill. . . . It was the first time a woman had ever refused him. And yet though he was in love with Lucy at the moment he had not suffered. It was as if he knew that he was soon to be caught up into greater affairs. . . .
Off to the right a bugle fluted silverly. Ta-Ta-Ta-Ta! There was the sound of trampling feet. He realized that he had been away five or ten minutes. As he ran back to the camp fire he was thinking that after the war was over and he had leisure he might collect his impressions into a book. “In Tent and Saddle” might do for a title or perhaps “Bugle and Bayonet” would be better. He might even look up the Indian legend, put in something about “the bloody river.”
