Ella Wood Novellas: Boxed Set Page 8

  That had been five hours ago.

  Another shell shrieked past. Every man among the green recruits looked pale and sick to his stomach. Jack had taken to soldiering with a vengeance. He’d handled guns from a young age. He excelled at the physical nature of drills. And he thrived on the discipline and the camaraderie of his fellow recruits. But at the moment, he was convinced he’d made a terrible mistake.

  “You reckon it’s ever going to end?”

  Jack turned to meet the anxious gaze of Jovie Cutler. Best friends since boyhood, he and Jovie had spent idyllic years growing up on adjoining plantations and had just finished their second year at the College of Charleston when Fort Sumter fell eight weeks before. Afterward, they’d enlisted together. There was no one with whom Jack would rather face the enemy.

  “It’s not exactly what we imagined, it is?” Jack tipped up his canteen with a trembling hand and took a sip of water. It curdled in his stomach, but he took another just the same. The summer heat poured into the fortifications and his wool uniform soaked through with sweat. “What do you suppose we’d be doing if we were at home right now?”

  “I’ll tell you what I’d like to be doing,” Jovie answered. “Swimming in the pond in the back pasture. Or sitting beside the fishing hole with a book on my knee and a bucket of blackberries at my side.”

  Jack smiled grimly. “Right now, I’d gladly take a week in the rice fields with the slaves.”

  Another shell whistled past and landed close enough to throw dirt over the rim of the bulwarks. Jack cowered into the logs bracing the earthen wall and listened to the man on his other side vomit onto his own boots. He wasn’t the first. That morning’s pork and cornbread liberally blanketed the ground—a sour feast for the flies.

  Jack had just about had enough of war.

  Captain Dutart strode up and down behind them, head up, watching the Centreville Road. “That’s where they’ll be coming, boys, straight at the bridge. That devil McDowell wants the railroad junction in Manassas, but they won’t be breaking through here. Not on our watch. No one crosses that creek!”

  Jack’s stomach flipped again. His courage remained untested in battle. Though he was one of the best marksmen in the company, shooting squirrels and tin cans didn’t prepare anyone for killing men. He had no way of predicting his response once battle commenced.

  Beside him, Jovie pulled an image out of his pocket and studied it in the slanting light of early evening. It was a daguerreotype of Jack’s sister Emily taken a few years before. Aware of Jovie’s long affection, Jack had swiped it on his last trip home and made a gift of it.

  “Have you heard from her?” Jack asked.

  “She writes.”

  “You don’t sound very happy about that.”

  Jovie scuffed his boot in the filthy dirt of the trench. “I don’t think she puts quite the same priority on our communications as I do.”

  “She knows you care for her?”

  “I told her, but she’s only got eyes for Thaddeus Black.” His voice dripped with disgust.

  “She’d be a fool to choose him over you.”

  “Thad wouldn’t enlist, and I’ll be gone for a year. He has all the advantage.”

  “Not all. You have a dangerous gift for words.”

  Jovie glanced at him skeptically.

  “Your letters are your advantage,” Jack insisted. “Show Emily your heart. You can make her remember you when she’s looking at him.”

  A glitter came to Jovie’s eyes that was more than reflected sunlight. He nodded once, short and resolute.

  Jack clapped him on the shoulder. “Thad’s a nice enough fellow, but I’m cheering for you.”

  Another shell shrieked past, landing in a vacant field behind the lines. Then a cry went up from the left side of the line and rippled through the ranks. “Yankees ahead! In the trees across the creek.” Jovie slipped the image back in his pocket and both men scrambled into position.

  Captain Dutart raised his voice. “Hold your fire, men! Wait until you have a target in your sights.”

  Every man among them knelt with head and shoulders lifted above the rim of earth, guns trained on the opposite bank. Hearts pounded. Mouths went dry. The tension swelled until it was thick enough to pierce with a bayonet. Jack could feel a tremble run through his spine. This was his moment of truth, the instant he’d both anticipated and dreaded.

  Would he prove a man or a coward?

  “Here they come, men.” Captain Dutart raised his sword. Figures appeared on the far bank, flickering with light and shadow, scrabbling among the trees. On they came until only the creek separated them from the Confederate position. “Fire!”

  Jack picked out a blue-clad soldier, closed one eye, and sighted down the barrel of his rifle. His hands shook. As he exhaled, he squeezed gently on the trigger. The gun punched his shoulder. The Yankee went down. Without taking time to feel, he ducked beneath the shelter of the wall to reload. It was a habitual motion, so well rehearsed he needn’t think through the steps. Instinct kicked in. Squeamishness evaporated. And when he rose to sight a second time, his hands held steady.

  Breathe. Squeeze. Another Yankee dropped. He sensed Jovie beside him repeating the same mechanical motions.

  The staccato of gunfire soon thinned from solid volleys to a constant, irregular popping as men reloaded at different speeds. Gun smoke grew thick, burning Jack’s nose and blurring his vision. The Yankees came in a wave, streaming over the bridge and plunging into the shallow waters surrounding it.

  The exchange of fire was hot and thick, and Jack found himself invigorated by the quick pace of battle. His mind cleared, processing a thousand details in a moment and reading the enemy instinctively. He picked off an officer as well as three men who never made it past the center of the stream. He was tireless. Energized. A machine of repetitious movement. He’d been born for this moment.

  “Drive them back, boys!” Captain Dutart yelled. The roar of guns swelled in response, but it was the last command he would give. A bullet pierced his temple and he slumped to the bottom of the trench.

  Jovie dropped to the officer’s side, but a quick look confirmed the fatality. “He’s gone.”

  “There! Behind that tree!” Jack shouted, pausing to reload. He’d located the man who’d downed the captain. “Pick him off!”

  Jovie drew a bead on the fellow and fired. The Yankee’s head snapped back and he dropped from sight.

  “That’s it!” Jack encouraged, lining up another shot of his own. “Come on, boys! Let’s send them back to Washington!”

  Heavy fire soon drove the Union soldiers back among the trees. They left behind two dozen dead and wounded, three of which gently floated down the stream with the current. The skirmish only lasted ten minutes, but Jack was keyed up and winded. He barely had time to catch his breath before the Yankees advanced again, driving hard for the bridge.

  Jack sprang back into motion. The second attack proved just as short and just as brutal as the first. Even in diminutive time frames, battle was a hard taskmaster. Jack’s shoulder ached from the kick of the rifle, and his heart slammed double-time as the air around him hummed with airborne lead. It was only with the most determined effort that they held the Union to their side of the stream.

  Four times the Yankees came on and four times they fell back. Jack lost all track of time. And the men he killed fell from his mind as quickly as they fell from their ranks. He knew only the rhythm of his own body within the ebb and flow of battle.

  After the final rebuff, Sergeant Wayne hustled along the breastworks. “We’re going across, men! Captain Webb says we’re to take the initiative. Everyone out and over!”

  Jack’s blood ran hot. He whooped, “Let’s go, boys! It’s time to chase some Yankees!”

  He was the first one over the wall, the first one to struggle through the marsh at the creek’s edge, the first one in the water and up the bank on the other side. The sounds of splashing and crackling footsteps followed close on hi
s heels as the entire brigade snaked through underbrush and up the slope, guns at the ready. At the top, they found the enemy.

  “Here they come!” It was Jovie, two steps behind.

  A minie ball whizzed past Jack’s ear. He dropped behind a fallen log, firing rhythmically into the oncoming Yankees. To his left and right, he could see his comrades dig in behind trees, in hollows, behind rocks—wherever they could find cover. They threw back such a hot fire that the Union ranks finally broke for good, fleeing back toward Centreville in disarray.

  A rush of adrenaline like Jack had never known threatened to blow off the top of his head. Far down the line someone yelled, an exultant burst of triumph at this, their first victory. As others lent their voices, the countryside rang with an eerie, high-pitched cacophony. The Confederacy had met the best the Union could throw at them, and they’d come out victorious.

  Jack threw back his head and flung out his own cry of victory.

  ***

  Jubilation ran high in camp that evening. Tents were pitched to the competing blare of half a dozen company bands. The entire Union line had broken, up and down the five mile front. They’d thrown down their guns and run like whipped pups, with no regard for the officers attempting to corral them. Jack’s regiment had been eager to engage, to chase the routed troops all the way back to Washington, but they were ordered to pull back just before the Federal fortifications at Centreville. Once the Yankees departed for good, he and his comrades raided the Warrenton Turnpike instead, collecting souvenirs from the litter flung aside by the retreating enemy.

  It was late before Jack and his messmates settled around the cook fire to eat their rations—beans, salt pork, and hardtack—prepared for them by Jeremiah, the light-skinned Negro man Jack had brought into the army with him. The tension of the last week dissipated like the daytime heat. Jack felt invigorated, invincible, a man who had conquered a mountain.

  “I told you we’d whoop ’em good!” exclaimed Joseph Dawes as he tossed another log on the fire. Dawes was thick-limbed, good-natured, and as farm-fresh as a pat of butter. His enlistment marked the first time he’d been more than ten miles from his birthplace. “No Yankee can measure up one-to-one against a Southern man.”

  “You missed it, Jeremiah.” Jovie’s grin caught the firelight. “The Yankees took off like the devil was on their tail. You should have seen them run!”

  The victory bubbled in Jack’s belly like a glass of champagne. “They must be back in Washington already.” He pulled a deck of cards from his pack. “This calls for a celebration. I’ve already invited Tyler and his mess for a game of poker.”

  “I’m in,” Dawes chirped.

  “That’s it then,” said a fourth man. A cobbler by trade, Francis Reginald was taller, thinner, and ten years older than the other three with whom he shared a tent. His red hair shone like copper in the firelight. “The Union has to let us alone now. I reckon we’ll be home in a month. I’m going to write to my wife. The war’s over.”

  “Tell her you’re a hero, Reggie,” Dawes said. “She doesn’t need to know we were stuck in the center of the line today and nearly missed the whole thing.”

  Sergeant Wayne eased into the light cast by the campfire. He was a middle-aged man, a career soldier who had regaled the young recruits with stories of his campaigns in Mexico and been unanimously elected to his rank in the earliest days of their company’s formation. “Don’t look so glum, Dawes. You’ll get your fill of fighting before this is over.” He cracked open a peanut, tossing the shell in the fire and the meat in his mouth.

  Dawes snorted. “You saw the mess the Yankees left on the road. They dropped everything and ran. They’re finished.”

  “Are they?” Wayne asked.

  Reggie looked up from his letter. “Aren’t they?”

  “Maybe.” Wayne shrugged.

  Jeremiah finished washing the supper dishes and brought a pair of Jack’s boots to the fire to polish.

  “We’ve earned their respect, but we lost a significant opportunity tonight. Had we pursued McDowell, we’d own Washington right now. We could have ended this on our own terms.” He cracked open another peanut. “We had an invitation to the ball, boys, and we threw it away.”

  The fire crackled loudly in the stillness that followed. Four smiles thinned to uncertainty as the lightheartedness of the moment faded.

  “I don’t want to sour your lemonade,” Wayne added. “You boys did well out there. You were cool under pressure and you didn’t run when the fighting got hot. I’m right proud of you. And Preston, you’re to be commended for leading that charge across the creek.”

  Jack felt warm pleasure swell in his chest. It was high praise coming from a man he so admired. “Thank you, sir.”

  “You all have a right to be proud. You were as fine a company as any I’ve served in.”

  Just then, Will Tyler led a group of five men into the firelight, their raucous laughter suggesting they’d already started in on the jugs of liquor they carried. A huge smile returned to Dawes’s face. “This is more like it. Come on, boys! We have a victory to celebrate!”

  But Reggie had paled beneath his freckles. He folded his letter. “I’m pretty tired. I think I’ll call it a day.” He flipped Jeremiah a nickel. “I’ll put my boots outside the tent. The rest of you louts, don’t wake me up with your game.”

  Dawes threw a handful of woodchips in his direction. “Watch who you’re calling names, Red.”

  There was a good-natured exchange of insults and Reggie disappeared behind the flap of the tent.

  “Jovie, you in?” Jack asked, shuffling the deck of cards.

  “Nah. I think I’ll see to Reg. He always cheers up when he starts talking about his kids.”

  Wayne also rose. “And I have to report to Captain Webb. You boys enjoy yourselves tonight. You’ve earned it.”

  Jack welcomed the newcomers and immersed himself fully in the spirit of the game. Tyler was a former dockhand who had joined the ranks of the 11th North Carolina, a jovial sort who tended to lose his humor the more whiskey he consumed, but Jack liked him. And tonight Jack intended to match him drink for drink. It was a party, after all.

  Jovie emerged from the tent partway through the third round. “Come on, Cutler, jump in!” Dawes called.

  Jovie shook his head. “I’m going for a walk. I’ve got too much of the battle still clinging to me.”

  Tyler held up a bottle sloshing with amber liquid. “This’ll help you wash it off.”

  Jovie tipped back a mouthful and handed the bottle back, slapping the man on the shoulder. “Thanks.”

  “Come on back if you need more,” Jack called as his friend faded into the darkness.

  Jovie raised a hand in acknowledgment.

  The game continued for hours. As the whiskey flowed, the party grew in volume. Jack’s head buzzed with the alcohol flowing through his veins, and the more he drank, the worse he played. As night moved toward morning, players began disbanding one by one until only three men remained—Dawes, Tyler, and Jack.

  “I’m out,” Dawes said in disgust, folding his cards and stretching brawny arms behind his back. “Come on, Preston. Keep the money in our tent.”

  “You in or out, Preston?” Tyler pressed.

  Jack focused on his cards, his concentration coming hard. He threw in two more chips, lead disks made from flattened bullets. “I’ll see you and raise you.”

  “Call,” Tyler said, tossing one last chip on the pile.

  Both men laid out their cards faceup. Dawes groaned and Tyler raked in his winnings with a satisfied grin. “It looks like you owe me…four dollars.”

  Jack rummaged through his pockets. “I’ve got two.” He handed them over. “I’ll get you the rest next payday.”

  Tyler’s face darkened. “You’ll pay me now.”

  “I haven’t got any more. You cleaned me out.”

  Tyler glanced at Jeremiah, still sitting quietly beside the glowing coals. “Then I’ll take your Negro.�
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  “For two dollars?” Dawes scoffed.

  “Pretending you own a slave, are you, Dawes?” Tyler taunted. “Getting a taste for it?”

  While Jeremiah had come specifically to serve Jack, he’d become the much-appreciated cook of their four-man mess, and he willingly extended his laundry and housekeeping duties to Jack’s tentmates for a pitifully small fee.

  “You try to take him, I’ll pay the two dollars myself,” Dawes said.

  Jack smirked at Tyler. “Looks like I’m keeping him.”

  Tyler gripped Jack’s shoulder, his fingers tightening around his collarbone. “Someone better pay up.”

  Jovie stepped in and handed Tyler a pair of bills. His feet were bare and his hair mussed from sleep. “It’s three o’clock. Go sleep it off, Will. We’ve got duty in the morning.”

  The man glowered at Jack, but he departed with Jovie’s continued urging, swaying haphazardly between the tents. When he was gone, Dawes bid them goodnight and disappeared behind the flap of their tent.

  Stillness descended around the fire. A few voices murmured nearby, as indistinct as smoke, and somewhere a soldier picked out the solemn chords of “Lorena” on a banjo. It was a peaceful stillness, familiar and welcome after the clamor of battle. “Go to bed, Jeremiah,” Jovie urged. “I’ll see to Jack.”

  With a nod, Jeremiah retired to the tent he shared with three other slaves, and Jovie sank down beside the dying coals.

  “Thanks,” Jack said, sitting beside him.

  Jovie leaned forward stiffly, forearms on his knees, and stared into the fire. His voice came low and earnest. “Jack, your sister came to see me the day we left. She told me to watch out for you. I promised her I would, and I intend to keep my word.” In one deft movement, he leaned over and snatched the bottle from Jack’s hand.

  Jack made a fumbling attempt to recover it. “I’m not finished with that.”

  “Oh yes you are. Look, Jack. Victory or not, I don’t relish saving your sorry drunk self in the middle of the night.”

  Jack winced, the first pangs of shame bringing heat to his cheeks. This wasn’t his usual behavior. Well, it was, but the shame came from knowing he’d chosen his conduct this evening. He’d acted out of desire, not requirement. “I realize I’ve had a rather rough run this spring. I’m sorry. I’ll try to do better.”