None shall look back, p.28
None Shall Look Back, page 28
The horse trotted nimbly up out of the hollow. On the crest Rives paused long enough to take his bearings, then he saw the first ascending black wings and knew that it must be to the right. At ten o’clock he found the place he was seeking. A clearing on the edge of the woods. It had been yellow with sedge grass once but it was motley color now, with everywhere over it strange swellings. Blue, black, gray, brown. . . . Ten thousand moles had worked frenziedly to throw up these hillocks. Steam went up from them and black wings. It was strange there were so many negroes. . . .
The smell was driving straight at him. His stomach went tight over the crackers he had eaten. He passed his hand over his face, lifted his eyes with an effort, trying to remember what the man in the ambulance had said: “Field full of sedge grass and a little way down from the Yankee breastworks.” Yes, this was the place. There were the Yankee breastworks still holding the ridge, and the field would have been full of sedge but for those moles. . . .
He got down, tied his horse to a tree and went forward over the field. The first half-dozen were blue, then butternut. More blue. Butternut and blue in a tangle. He bent over methodically, looked for the same fraction of a second into each face. . . . Too many had their tongues out. . . . His thoughts ran on irritably. Wasting time on the blue and yet you had to look. Mustn’t bend too close. That was how he’d missed that one back there under the tree.
He became obsessed with the idea that the body he had not examined was the one he sought. He went back. The man lay face downwards. Jaunty fit to his coat but he had fattened since he left his tailor! The seams were bursting out under each arm. Rives half-bent over, then straightened up quickly. He got a stick, used it for a lever. The black moon of a face came up slowly. Blood and broken leaves masked the eyes but the lower part was smooth, enormously swollen. He made himself look until he saw the yellow beard growing out of the horrible, tight flesh, then turned and made off crazily through the trees.
Over by the fence was a huge mound of fresh turned earth. Living figures moved about it or spilled out over the field. They went in twos. Some carried stretchers.
He walked over. A red-headed giant of a man was just clambering out of the deep trench, naked to the waist and steaming with sweat. He handed his pick to a fellow, growling, “I wouldn’t a cared if he hadn’t sent me last time. Time before too. Don’t matter how hard the ground is, how many there is of ’em. Every time he sends me.”
A man on the other side of the trench laughed. “He seen you put Tom Neely on his back the other night. You got too much muscle for your own good, Ed.”
The red-headed man shook himself until the sweat flew in bright drops. “ ’Tain’t fair anyhow. I got a weak stomach, just like anybody else.” He pulled a plug of tobacco out of his pocket, bit off a chew, then saw Rives. “Bill,” he mumbled, “better git your book.”
A boy was coming around the side of the trench, a little red-backed notebook in his hand. Rives went to meet him, “Lieutenant George Rowan, Aide-de-Camp to General Deshler,” he said, “. . . Tenth Texas Infantry. . . .”
The boy stared, flipped the pages of his notebook. “I put ’em all down ’s best I can,” he said hopelessly. “Here, Mister, you want to look?”
Rives took the book, frowned at the greasy figures. Behind him a voice said interestedly, “Tenth Texas. Why don’t you look over there under that tree? Just brought in a lot of Tenth Texas.”
Rives handed the book back to the boy, went toward the tree. The bodies lay under it as thick as fruit. They were covered, most of them, with dirty canvas or tow sacks. You couldn’t look because more kept coming in all the time on stretchers. The man who had spoken had a white handkerchief tied about the lower part of his face. It swayed with his gabbling breaths. He went stooping around, lifting rags of sacks. Rives kept beside him. “No . . . No . . . No. . . .” and then just the indrawn breath that sent you on down the line. George was next to the last, over against the fence. He had to be turned over.
Gabbler was pleased, straightened up. “You can most generally find ’em if you keep at it.”
Rives stood with his head bent. He was thinking: Ben Bigstaff and George Rowan had had the same expression on their faces when they died.
Over by the trench somebody was calling: “Hey, Ed, less start putting them in.”
Rives raised his head, looked into the glistening bottom of the trench. He said, “My God. . . . You’d think. . . . Not enough graves!”
There was silence; then a spade clinked on a stone. “We can bury him separate if you want,” somebody said mildly.
They took George a hundred yards away and buried him near a big sycamore tree. Rives got his knife out, made a cross on the tree in case anybody came looking for the grave. Then he walked back across the field with the soldiers. One had taken the handkerchief from his face and swung his spade as he went. “There’s that lady and them niggers come back,” he said suddenly. “Got a wagon this time.”
Rives looked up, saw the wagon first and then the woman moving toward it. Tall and in black. She came with an odd, hobbling motion but that was because of the canteens, slung one on each side and one across her back.
The bushes parted to the right and a negro stepped out. He had a ragged straw hat, glistening eyeballs. He said, “Mister Rives! What you doin’ here?”
Rives said, “Antony!” Then he ran on.
The wagon ahead jolted faster. The girl was coming to meet it. Her hands wove in front of her as she came. She cried out shrilly: “Little Ed! Antony! You didn’t need to stay all day.”
She saw him and stopped short, the still moving canteens bobbing back and forth on each side of her. Her eyes fluttered whitely aside for a second, then came back to his face. She cried “Rives,” and was in his arms.
The wagon jolted up. A second negro voice cried, “Hi, Mister Rives!” Her lips met his again, then she drew away. She passed a hand over her face. It left her features composed, severe. She said: “Oh . . . it’s this way,” and ran forward.
He moved beside her. The man lying on the ground had a great bloody bandage wound about his head. The hairs of his moustache were brown against green skin. He stared off through the trees. “Gimme drink!” he said.
She had the canteen up and was bending over. The water bubbled at his lips, spilled down over his chin. “Oh,” she cried desperately, “open your mouth.”
His lids rose once then fell. “Stay here,” he muttered. “Don’t want move.”
She was on her feet, wringing her hands. “I put the bandage on and I think it’s wrong. Maybe no bandage at all. He can’t talk.”
Rives looked away. “Are those our negroes out there with the wagon?”
“Antony,” she whispered, “and little Ed. He always comes with us.”
Rives called out in a great voice, “Come here, you boys. Get this man into that wagon.”
Little Ed leaned forward, cracked his whip, brought the mules up on the run. The three men lying in the wagon on blood-stained straw stared up sullenly over the side. One was babbling: “He kep’ pulling it off. I’d a been all right. But he kep’ pulling it off.”
“Here,” Rives said, “up with him. Quick.”
The brown-moustached man rose on the stretcher, came stolidly to rest on top of the pile. A thin boy kept squirming out from under him. Lucy walked so close to the wagon that her skirt was in danger of being caught by the wheels. Every now and then she reached out and prisoned a clutching hand. Rives grasped a fold of her skirt, held it tight, looked away over the field. “Why does Antony keep walking around out there?”
“Cousin Susan said . . . too far gone, not to fool with them. . . . Just water. I send Ant first; then I come with morphia.” She looked up, her brows puckered. “Do you think I ought to let him give morphia pellets too?”
He said, “If you’ve got ’em,” and then harshly; “How long have you been on this field?”
Her eyes clouded with the effort to remember. “We got here in the night. . . . Dr. Reynolds . . . was most kind. . . . But he said dangerous . . . so we stayed down the road. . . . I thought you were dead. . . .”
He said, not knowing that he was shouting: “It was George Rowan. I buried him over there. Under that sycamore. See, where the fence turns.”
She was not looking. Her eyes were fixed on a brown, heaving mass in front of them. She stopped, fell away from the wagon, crossed quivering hands on her breast. “I can’t stand it,” she cried. “I never could. . . . It is a peculiarity . . . I have tried. . . .”
He had not been aware of the horse’s cries until that moment but his pistol was out before she ceased speaking. He walked over, pressed it to the place behind the ear. There was a rumble of gas from the intestines. The horse’s head ceased its angry weaving to and fro, sank with a plop into dead leaves.
She was walking on. He went beside her, talking garrulously. “They don’t mind. Anything but breaking their legs. It’s when they can’t stand up. Scares ’em. When they can’t stand up.”
She put her hand on his arm. “It’s over this way.”
They crossed a rustic bridge, the wagon rattling on behind. The house, a cabin, with deep galleries front and back, sat on a rise. The ground in front was wooded but to the side and rear a big meadow sloped away. Rives noticed that it was cleft by a dark, cedared ravine.
Her feet took the path up the hill as if they had known it a long time. Wounded men lay thick on either side but they were thicker on the gallery. An army of maimed beggars, in butternut mostly. They lay sprawled on pallets or were set rag-doll-like against the wall. Two leaned over the railing to vomit blood almost in unison.
A fat woman in a dirty Mother Hubbard was lurching forward between the sprawled figures. She fluttered her hands, cried out shrilly: “You cain’t bring ’em in here. Not room to step now.”
Lucy was looking at him. “Take ’em around to the back,” he said.
The wagon jolted on, halted where an enormous network of roots sprang out of baked, white ground. Antony was sliding off his seat, whining: “Cain’t git no further’n this, Mister Rives.”
He made a threatening gesture, then called out. The negroes were at the side of the wagon. Figures rolled up out of the straw on to the stretchers, came to rest against the trunk of the sugar tree. The man with the bandaged head first, then the thin boy. A hairy face with shut eyes. Rives looked above the heads at the black, ridged tree trunk. A big one. It had been tapped for sugar not so long ago. Shining ants ran about in the little cups left from the tapping.
She was on her knees, looking up at him while her hands tore swiftly at something white. “Your mother’s in the house. That first room.”
He said, still booming: “I will go in and see her.”
He mounted the steps. There was, surprisingly, nobody in the hall, but a half-open door on the right revealed rows of cots arranged hospital wise. There was the smell of blood and purulent matter in the room, a gabbling of high voices.
Two women were in the runway between the cots. One had on a black riding habit; her long widow’s veil streamed to the end of her skirt. Steam eddied from the china cup she held in her hand.
Rives stepped up into the room, went down the runway. Bandaged legs. Heads. Closed eyes. One man whose face was a welter of dirt and blood put out a hand, maliciously, it seemed, to stay his progress.
The man threshing about on the bed, moaning, had an enormous arm, swollen darkly red and blistered, where it was not hidden by scraps of filthy bandage. The odor from it was living evil. It crouched above the bed on angry feet, made forays into the room. Rives thought: Nothing like this on the battle field. He stepped back.
His mother was turning around, her nostrils had gone white from being held taut so long. She spoke through clenched teeth. “Rives. . . .” They walked away from the bed. She held his arm, spoke abstractedly yet confidentially: “Poor man. The drug does not seem to have any influence. Your brother, Miles . . . impossible to communicate. . . . Colonel Lawton thought. . . .”
The other woman kept a kind of step with them. “I’ve torn up all the counterpanes. Do you think those curtains. . . .”
Susan Allard said, “Go in the kitchen. Tell them more hot water.”
Out in the hall there was a flurry, a loud, irate voice: “All very well, but you have no authority.”
Two women standing in the doorway stepped aside. A figure was revealed. Bald head, red moustache, officer’s insignia. He clicked a hand to his brow, frowning: “Madam, this is most irregular!”
There was silence; then from one of the cots came a high, almost negro laugh. Rives met the wounded soldier’s gleaming eyes, then looked back at his mother. She was moving to meet the surgeon. You could not see her feet for that long skirt, but she would be on tiptoe; her chin was tilted. She said: “Dreadful . . . not even enough hot water. But we are doing the best we can.”
The surgeon’s lips jerked under his red moustache. He glared around the room. “Captain Mainwaring . . . reports . . . My God, how many have you got in here?”
She said quietly, “I believe we were the first people on the field. This woman let me bring them here . . . I think her name is Parkins. . . .”
His reddish eyebrows arched up. His mouth opened, then closed. He made irritable gestures of dismissal, was turning to leave the room. But she had him by the arm, was propelling him toward a cot. “This one, Doctor . . . I’ve been giving him morphia every three hours. I think maybe too much . . .”
He said: “Oh, morphia.” He held back, then sank on glistening heels. His sharp nose dived forward, came up, hung, like a dog’s on a point. He tapped the distended chest, then rose. He said: “Hear that crackling sound? Emphysema. Got a bullet in his right lung. Doubt if you could operate. . . .”
Antony was in the room, turning his ragged hat around in his hands. “Ole Miss, they’s a whole lot of ’em over in the hollow. Some of ’em’s ’live.”
Rives went through the door. The hall was dark and cool. He passed down it, pursued by a voice, Antony’s voice but heard long ago. . . . “Whole lot of ’em, Ole Miss . . . yonder in the hollow. . . .” No, that was black berries. . . .
He came out onto the back gallery, went down the steps. There were more of them under the tree. A small, worried-looking woman went bending about among them with a basin. The man with the bloody bandage had been laid out flat on his back between two arching tree roots. Lucy was crouched on her knees beside him, waving a palm leaf fan.
Rives went up, laid a hand on her shoulder. She got to her feet in a flurry of skirts, handed him the fan. “If you’ll just hold that . . . I’ve got to get my hair back tighter.” Her hands went up to the heavy coil of hair at the back of her neck. She was looking straight at him, her mouth a little open. There were little beads of perspiration on her upper lip. His hand slipped from the soft flesh of her shoulder, closed on her wrist. He motioned toward the meadow. “Come on, let’s go over there.”
She looked at him a second, then she bent and laid the fan on the ground. They went off, stepping carefully among the rows of wounded, toward the dark, cedared ravine.
The summer morning wore on its way. During the next hour more wounded were brought in. The supply of pallets had given out, and the wounded or dying men were laid on the bare ground or propped, as some of them requested, against the trunks of trees. There was about the place a great murmuring. Flies had gathered in swarms and fed on the clots of blood that spattered the ground or on the faces and hands of the wounded. The man whom Lucy had been tending asked to have his position changed and lay with his eyes fixed on the distant woods. He was fearfully turbaned, like an Eastern potentate. He did not seem to mind the flies that swarmed in the great cap-like mass on his forehead, but when they strayed down onto his cheek, he grimaced and sometimes called out. A negro woman moving among the wounded pitied him and breaking a leafy bough from a tree placed it in his hand. The nerveless fingers fell away but she tied the stalk to his wrist. He was able then by moving his wrist slightly to brush the flies away. A man sitting by unable to move because his leg had been broken called out his pleasure at the arrangement: “Now you can keep ’em off, son.”
The wounded man grinned back, moving his bough with its drooping leaves faster as if to please his friend. All through the morning it swayed back and forth. The September sky was cloudless now and blue. The man with the broken leg glanced wearily at the sun from time to time and calculated the hour. In the middle of the morning he glanced down and saw the green leaves of the bough fallen athwart his friend’s face. He bent near enough to ascertain that the leaves did not stir, then looked up at the sun. He calculated that it must be eleven o’clock.
17
ON the morning after the battle a band of Confederate cavalry came up out of the Chickamauga valley and followed the road which winds along the crest of Mission Ridge. There were five hundred men from Dibrell’s brigade and a strong advance guard of Armstrong’s men. General Forrest himself rode at the head of the column with General Armstrong.
The cavalcade moved slowly. The two generals kept their horses at a walk while they noted the battle litter that covered the woods on both sides of the road. Arms, saddles, blankets, caissons, wagons and their teams, an ambulance with its broken tongue half driven into the trunk of a tree. Forrest’s eyes were bright. “My God, Armstrong, they’ve left enough stuff to equip a brigade.”
