A Better Angel Page 15
“Coward,” he says. “Fool. Promise-breaker.” But the voices are speaking very softly. I put my hand down against the top of the stack of wood, looking at the bruises and the burns, and it occurs to me that I have always kept one hand whole and untouched, and that the vast majority of my body is unbruised and untouched by Carl’s ordeal.
I switch the ax to my injured hand. It’s not easy, not, like one might hope, a matter of a single stroke. I don’t know how many it is—three or four, I think, but it feels like I am chopping away in an eternity of effort at something much more durable than flesh and bone. I only look at my wrist for the first stroke; afterward I find my mark without looking at it. I am staring at Carl, at the thing that is in him, asking them both with every stroke, “Is it enough?” And I think I mean is it enough to prove to them I love my son, or that I deserve to have him back, that I mean it when I say I promise to take better care of him, that I promise to be a better father, to unroot whatever fault in me threw him into the company of these angry souls who died to make us all citizens of the world, and that I’ll be better to them, too, and never step out of the shadow of the day they died, if that’s what it means now to be good. “You fuckers!” I shout. “Is it enough?”
Carl’s face changes: he looks proud, then curious, then he seems to be gorging on the blood and anger and pain in the air. His face gets ruddy and full and more and more pleased, and then all of a sudden it is entirely blank, and then he is wearing an opposite face. His grinning mouth contracts to an O of sorrow and distress, and he waves his arms around so it looks like he is falling through the air, like he is falling back into himself. He gives a start in his whole body and his face is changed so fundamentally I feel sure there can’t be anything foreign left in him. I am listening so hard to him cry, trying to hear a trace of the other, that I forget to breathe and forget to cry myself, and I would not be surprised if I forgot to bleed. Then I fall over next to him, my wrist jammed against my side, and I can’t get the words out to tell him what time it is, or to answer when my father comes out with a flashlight to curse me to hell and ask me what I’ve done.
A HERO OF CHICKAMAUGA
There is not much to do, when you are dying, but lie on your side and watch the progress of the battle. I have taken an early hit on the first day at Chickamauga. It’s an inglorious end, one for which my father and my brothers would never settle. They are still loading, shooting, advancing toward a field where Rebels sprout like contrary weeds. “Shoot one for me, Captain!” I shouted to my father as I fell. He did not look away from his aim, but said, not without some tenderness, “I’ll shoot you a brace of ’em, my boy.”
The way I have landed there are long blades of grass tickling my lips. When I nibble on them, they have a green and sour taste. All around me, expiring actors are crying out for their mamas, for God to spare them. “O God O God O God,” says a voice from ahead of me. I wish they would shut up. I always thought if I died for real, I would die quietly, because pending oblivion would surely snatch away my voice. Sometimes the thought of death makes me silent even as I pass through an ordinary living day. The wind shifts and carries a burning whiff of naphthalene to my nose—some reenactor has been storing his uniform in mothballs. “Ain’t I too young to go? Ain’t I too young? Who will look after my Frieda?” The boys cry out for their Friedas, their Birgits, their sweet little Maueschens. We are supposed to be an all-German regiment.
“Hey, dead man,” says a voice just behind me, after the cries of the wounded have quieted to moans. Someone’s fallen there: I can feel a foot resting against my thigh. “You got a view? What’s happening?” He sounds like a little boy.
“Much shooting,” I say. He kicks me square in the ass.
“Farb!” I say accusingly. I want to clutch my ass, but the dead don’t rub their hurts.
“It’s a contraction of the thigh muscles,” he says. “Authentic. It went on. I got documentation. Some boys flailed like puppets as they went. So tell me what’s happening, or I’ll do it again.”
“Son of a bitch!” I say, because I’m not accustomed to being kicked by boys from my own side. “Shit-house adjutant!” He kicks me again, hard, and I tell him what’s happening. The Ninth (that’s us) is making steady progress across the field. The Fifty-fifth Ohio is with them, but where the rest of the brigade has got to, I have no idea. There’s Colonel Kammerling bouncing stoutly across the field on his Appaloosa. He is the sort of brave or foolish colonel who carries his own messages into battle. Goddamn he’s been hit! Just as he pulled up beside the captain some dirty Reb has plucked him off.
That last bit is untrue. The colonel is entirely well. Little Billy Kicking Boots can see this when he sits up with a curse. “Farb!” he says. “Kammerling didn’t die at Chickamauga!” I can already tell he’s the sort of stickler for historical accuracy that can be the bane of improvisation, if not fun. I turn my head to look at him, trying to be ready when he kicks me again, and see that he is not a boy after all, but a boyish-looking girl. She has tried hard to make herself mannish, but her face is pretty and gives her away. I think immediately of Joan of Arc, who was surely cursed with all sorts of medieval defects, smelliness and hairiness and bad teeth. The other dead and wounded are calling for her to lie down, and she does.
“I’ll fix you,” she tells me, but doesn’t kick me again. She has positioned herself so she can see the battle; I am positioned so I can see only her face. A good sport, she calls out soft updates to me. I don’t need them. Chickamauga was dinner-table talk at my house when I was growing up. My father would shape peas and carrots into infantry lines to illustrate the battle. “So here,” he’d say, taking away a piece of carrot and eating it, “you can see how Rosecrans left a gaping hole in his line, and Longstreet was not the sort of fellow to ignore such an opportunity.” And Rebel peas went rolling through the gap. A lifetime of dinners like that puts history in your head. I know Chickamauga backward and forward, and since these reenactors pride themselves on absolute fidelity, I know just what will happen on this first day of battle. I have died repulsing Cleburne’s near-duck attack on the Union left. It was not a spectacular battle, not a Pickett’s Charge or a Thomas’s Stand, though we are in fact going to do Snodgrass Hill tomorrow. That will be the big blowout of the whole weekend.
When the battle is over, a lone bugler rides through the smoke. He pulls up amid the wounded, dying, and the dead to play taps. The dead rise, fat hairy boys who, when they are not fighting to preserve or destroy the Union, are lawyers or mechanics or the owners of pool-cleaning services. They rise, stretch limbs made stiff by death, give each other pats and hugs and ass slaps. “That was damn fine!” My brothers and my father come back to catch me up in the traditional post-battle group hug. We raise our father up on our shoulders and bounce him like a child. I find myself looking back to Joan of Arc, who ignores the men squeezing her shoulder and thumping her back. She is staring hatefully toward the enemy line. The Rebs are sauntering over from their line through the low-hanging smoke and the red sunset light, their hands stuck out before them for shaking.
My great-great-grandfather was a hero of Chickamauga. He gave his life to save a hapless drummer boy. Like him, I am a soldier in the Ninth Ohio, though I am not one of those people who think that antecedents make you a blue-blood reenactor. I have no patience with the Sons of Confederate Veterans or Grand Army of the Republic snobs. At dances the only medal I wear is my Boy Scouts Civil War Hiking Trail medal, which I earned with my own two feet.
Rebel-hating, not medals, was handed down in my family, but I’m not fanatical. The disdain was heavily diluted by the time it reached me. My great-great-grandfather ended every letter he ever wrote with “Jeff Davis drives the goat,” but my father moved from Ohio to Florida. He set up a dermatology practice in Orlando. At family reunions in Ohio, I was the Rebel cousin. “You’re from the South now!” said my cousin Libby, pushing away my hand when I tried to feel her up during a basement make-out session. The fact was, O
rlando was not the South. And the South that my cousin, in the family tradition, was brought up to hate, was not anywhere anymore.
I don’t like to be at these things. I don’t like pretending. I don’t like guns, or the noise they make. I don’t like wool—it itches, and when I get rained on I smell like a dog. My boots fit poorly. But if I did not come out to play like this, I would risk a dishonorable discharge from my own family. It’s their passion, my two older brothers’, and my father’s and my mother’s. Clay, my little brother, hated it. We could complain to each other once, but he is not here at the reenactment celebrating the 135th anniversary of the slaughter at Chickamauga Creek. Death has delivered him from his obligations.
“I told you I’d get you!” says Joan. I blink stupidly at her, rubbing at my neck. I’d assumed, when she said she would get me, that she would do something sneaky, march behind me and spit in the tin drinking cup I’ve got hung on my backpack, or steal my gun and pound a cork down the barrel. But she took her revenge direct. She made a claw of her thumb and forefinger and pinched me so hard I screamed.
I’m glad for the pinch, though it hurt like hell, because I wanted to talk to her. I want to be near her in the way that I do sometimes with certain people. I try not to indulge this instinct, not to make myself a pest to strangers, even when I feel, like I did with Joan, an immediate affinity, a craving that only intimate acquaintance will satisfy. My father, who has delved too deeply into the nineteenth century for his own good, calls that immediate affinity “omniphily,” and has told me before how M. Fourier (one of his heroes) wrote that such affinities should be cherished and exploited, and how when they blossomed between every man and woman on earth, they would prove to be the salvation of humankind. But I remember an affliction named Susan Greer, who bothered me with her devotion through the whole of second grade, who followed me with a jar of paste until I consented to sit with her behind a palm tree and partake of it as a lover’s meal. We were married by that paste. Cross-eyed Susie, whose tongue was a little too big for her mouth, was my unwanted loving companion until she moved away to Tallahassee. I remember her and think that a body ought not to press itself on a body, because it’s not such a long trip from “How do you do” to “Partake thou of my paste.”
All this means I am very careful not to initiate pressingly upon people I like for no good reason. So I was happy when Joan sprang out and pinched me, and I am happier still when she asks me to dinner.
“I’m making coffee and beef stew,” she says. “Want to mess with me?”
“Are you going to pinch me again?”
“Are you going to make me angry again?”
“I hope not.”
“Well, that’s fine, then.” She takes a few steps and I follow after, but we haven’t gone ten feet before she stops. “One more thing, though. I need you to tell me something. You’re not from around here, are you?” She sweeps out her arms, as if indicating this little parcel of Georgia, but something about her expression tells me she is indicating the whole of the depraved, sore-losing South.
“No,” I say.
“I mean, you’re a Yankee, aren’t you?”
I point at the brass infantry horn on my kepi. “Looks that way.”
“No,” she says, reaching toward me, so I think she’s about to pinch again, but she only puts her arm flat against my chest, over my heart. No one has ever put their hand there, just like that, and it feels very pleasant. “I mean, are you a real Yankee?”
“Sure,” I say. And because it seems like I ought to, I say, “Of course. Absolutely. I’m no Reb, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s fine, then,” she says. “That’s fine.” As we are walking we pass near the place where my family has pitched its tents. My oldest brother is polishing our father’s saddle. He looks up and sees me. I put my finger to my lips, but he shouts anyway. “Where are you going?” I don’t answer.
“Who’s that?” asks Joan.
“I have no idea,” I say.
“Have you seen the pictures?” she asks me while we’re waiting for the stew to cook. “Nobody smiles in them.” She has an old stereopticon and a collection of stereographs. She puts pictures in the viewer and I put my eyes to the lenses. The pictures are fuzzy at first, but then the boys jump out at me in startling 3-D. A grimfaced Yankee sitting for a portrait: Maybe it’s for his mama, or his sweetheart. His shoulders are round and small, but his neck is so thick I doubt I could get my two hands around it.
“I was a View-Master junkie when I was little,” I tell her. I would flip through the pictures with such wild abandon that I tore out the advancing lever. Then I would steal Clay’s and break it, too. He was pretty forgiving as a child, reacting to slights with sadness instead of anger.
Joan switches pictures, and shows me a Rebel cavalryman with immensely serious eyes. His saber is held in salute.
“What are they looking at?” she asks me. “What do you suppose?”
“The camera,” I say. But really I think they were looking at the future, suddenly made quite real to them by the prospect of their death. There was something about that in Clay’s diary, of which I became the secret keeper after he died. It was under his mattress, an obvious place, but, then, he was very trusting. I was cleaning up the room on the night he died, because that seemed like something bearable, something I could do. But I didn’t clean. I sat on his bed, on the sheets and old unwashed blanket that absolutely reeked of him, and read. The future is shapeless and unreal, he wrote on the first page, except when I am there, when I am close, and then it has the shape of death, and the reality of death. Why is that comforting?
“I think it was more than that,” she says and switches pictures again. This time the blurry image resolves itself into something gruesome: dead Rebs strewn along the fence on Hagerstown Pike. She shows me dead Rebels with their silent guns in front of the battered Dunker Church. She shows me the bodies of dead Rebels packed in a sunken road. I know all the pictures. My father showed them to us, projected on a big screen in our living room, as if recounting a vacation into the past.
“They lie as they fell,” I say, rubbing my eyes and looking at her. A dreaming look passes from her face and she says, “They got what they fucking deserved.”
Joan is at the dance that night, looking very smart in her dress uniform. My brothers are there, and my parents, my mother in a stylish oval hoopskirt and a purple velvet Zouave jacket and a hat piled high with fresh flowers. She kept the hat in the refrigerator at home and brought it to Chickamauga in a cooler. By day she plays a nurse because in real life she is a nurse. Some overeager ambulance types took me off the field last year and brought me to the hospital tent, where I lay on a stretcher and watched my mother exulting in all the fake blood. She saw me and came over to where I lay. I thought it was to say hello, but when she leaned her bloodstained face over me she only said, “Scream.” I didn’t scream. I just lay and watched, listening to all the enthusiastic shrieking the other boys were doing. It seemed to me that they were not a damned thing like the screams of men who were bleeding from the belly or getting their legs sawed off. I remembered how my father had screamed when he got the news that Clay was dead. He always claimed to have seen it coming, but I know he was screaming because he couldn’t believe that his son was gone. Probably that was a pretty close approximation of the sort of scream you make when someone saws off your leg, a scream not just of pain but of disbelief.
“I hate them,” Joan confesses to me as we are dancing. She tosses her head to indicate the Rebel officers. People are hissing at us, “Farb! Farb!” I don’t care. I think we make a dashing couple. If I am a failure at everything else in life, I am at least a success at a polka, and Joan is no slouch. “Have you ever even thought about how they got away with it? How they got away clean. How they are still getting away with it.”
“What do you mean?” I ask her, not caring what she means, because I am holding her and dancing with her, and the pressure of her against my chest
is a little like when she put her hand there.
“Hundreds of years of abomination, is what I mean. I mean people owning other people and then pretending like they never did.”
“That was a long time ago.”
“That’s what they say! That’s exactly what they say. But it was yesterday.”
I don’t like kissing, Clay wrote. All the sucking gives me an ache in the back of my head. Joan and I pitch our dog-tent together. You need two people to make a whole tent—each private carries half of one rolled up on his back. You button them together and they make a pretty sorry sort of shelter, sure to leak in the rain, and not proof at all against the cold. She has got a wool blanket and some mattress ticking that we stuffed with hay and corn husks provided by the hosts of the battle. We strip down to our red flannel long johns and crawl between the blanket and the hay. We lie there, her belly to my back. She sings in a low voice:
Many are the hearts that are weary tonight,
Wishing for the war to cease,
Many are the hearts looking for the right
To see the dawn of peace,
Dying tonight,
Dying tonight,
Dying on the old campground.
Then she is silent, and I think she must be sleeping, but suddenly she cries out, “Spoon!” and we flip over, so now it’s my belly in her back. I am shivering, and not from the cold. She calls spoon a few more times, until one time I turn and find that she hasn’t. Her face is right before mine, and she kisses me. I get an aching in my head, but I like it.
“What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?” she asks me later.