The Killer Angels (23 page)

He thought of writing Fanny a quick letter. Dreamyly. He wanted to tell her about the black man. He wanted time to think. But the 83rd Pennsylvania was up and forming. Ellis Spear was coming along the line. It came to Chamberlain suddenly that they might move from here to battle. Under his command. He took a deep breath. Bloody lonely feeling.

He moved back to the cluster around the black man. The shirt was off and Nolan was attending him. The light was stronger; the sun was a blood red ball just over the hills. Chamberlain saw a glistening black chest, massive muscles. The black man was in pain.

Nolan said, “He’ll be all right, Colonel. Bullet glanced off a rib. Cut the skin. Looks just like anybody else inside.” Nolan clucked in surprise. “Never treated a Negro before. This one’s a tough one. They all got muscles like this one, Colonel?”

“We’ll have to leave him,” Chamberlain said. “Let him have some rations, try to give him directions. Buster, can you talk to him?”

“A little. Found out who shot him. It was some woman in that town there, Gettysburg.”

“A woman?”

“He came into town looking for directions and a woman came out on a porch and shot at him. He don’t understand. I guess she didn’t want to take a chance on being caught with him. But
shoot
him? Christ. He crawled out here figurin’ on dyin’.”

Chamberlain shook his head slowly.

Kilrain said, “He’s only been in this country a few weeks. He says he’d like to go home. Since now he’s free.”

Bugles were blowing. The men were moving out into formation. Tom came up with the black mare.

“I don’t know what I can do,” Chamberlain said. “Give him some food. Bind him up. Make a good bandage. But I don’t know what else.”

“Which way is home, Colonel?”

“Let’s go, Buster.”

“Do I point him generally east?”

Chamberlain shrugged. He started to move off, and then he turned, and to the black face looking up, to the red eyes, he looked down and bowed slightly, touching his cap. “Goodbye, friend. Good luck. God bless you.”

He rode off feeling foolish and angry, placed himself in front of the regiment.

The division was forming on level ground, down the road—great square blocks of blue. The colors were unfurled, the lines were dressed. A stillness came over the corps. They were expecting a review, possibly Meade himself. But no one came. Chamberlain sat on his horse, alone in the sun before the ranks of the 20th Maine. He heard Tozier behind him: “Dress it up, dress it up,” a muffled complaint,
whispers, the far sound of hoofs pawing the ground. His own horse stood quietly, neck down, nibbling Pennsylvania grass. Chamberlain let the mare feed. The day was very hot. He saw a buzzard floating along in the pale blue above, drifting and floating, and he thought of the smell of dead men and chicken hawks swooping down and the only eagle he’d ever seen, in captivity, back in Brewer, a vast wingspread, a murderous eye.

Colonel Vincent came down the line, trailing aides like blue clouds. Chamberlain saluted. Vincent looked very happy.

“We’ll be moving up soon. No action this morning. I expect we’ll be in reserve.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Reserve is the best duty. That means they’ll use us where we’re needed. ‘Once more into the breach.’ ” He grinned brightly, showing teeth almost womanly white. “How does that go, Professor?”

Chamberlain smiled politely.

“You spell breach with an ‘a,’ am I right? Thought so. I’m a Harvard man myself.” Vincent grinned, looked thoughtfully at the regiment. “Glad you got those extra men. You may need ’em. How they getting along?”

“Fine.”

Vincent nodded, reached out cheerily, patted Chamberlain on the arm. “You’ll be all right, Colonel. Glad to have you with us. I’m having some beef driven up. If there’s time, we’ll have a good feed tonight in this brigade.”

He was interrupted by bugles, and there it was:
Dan, Dan, Dan, Butterfield, Butterfield.
He swung his horse to listen, saw riders approaching, began to move that way. Over his shoulder he said, “Anything you need, Colonel,” and he rode off.

The call came to advance. Chamberlain turned to face the regiment. He ordered right shoulder arms; the rifles went up. He drew his sword, turned. Down the line the order came: advance. He gave the long order to Tozier, guide on the next regiment, the 118th Pennsylvania. He raised his sword. They began to move, the whole corps in mass, at slow march forward through a flat farm, a peach orchard. He
ordered route step. Looking far off down the line, he saw the men moving in a long blue wave, the heart-stopping sight of thousands of men walking silently forward, rifles shouldered and gleaming in the sun, colors bobbing, the officers in front on high-stepping horses. Chamberlain sucked in his breath: marvelous, marvelous. Behind him he could hear men joking, but he could not hear the jokes. Details of men, in front, were removing white rail fences. He rode past a house, slowed to let the men flow round it, saw a fat woman in a bonnet, a gray dress, standing on the porch, her hands in her apron. She extracted one hand, waved slowly, silently. Chamberlain bowed. Some of the men wished her good morning. A sergeant apologized for marching through her farm. The regiment moved on across the open place and through a cornfield and some low bushes. Then there was high ground to the right. The front of the corps swung to face south, rolled forward down a slope through more cornfields. The corn was high and the men tried not to trample it, but that was not possible. It was becoming a long walk, up and down in the heat, but Chamberlain was not tired. They came to a brook, cold water already very dirty from many men moving upstream. Chamberlain sent back word that no one was to fall out to fill a canteen; canteen bearers would be appointed. On the far side of the brook they came upon a broad road and the rear of the army. He saw a long line of dark wagons, a band of provost guards, men gathered in groups around stacked rifles, small fires. To the right there was an artillery park, dozens of guns and caissons and horses. Beyond the road there was a rise of ground, and at that moment, looking upward toward a broad tree on a knoll just above, a tree with huge branches spread wide in the shape of a cup, full and green against a blue sky, Chamberlain heard the first gun, a cannon, a long soft boom of a gun firing a long way off.

A short while later the corps was stopped. They were told to stop where they were and rest. The men sat in a flat field, an orchard to the left, trees and men everywhere, higher ground in front of them. They waited. Nothing happened. There was the sound of an occasional cannon. But even the crows nearby were silent. Some of the men began to lie back, to rest. Chamberlain rode briefly off to find out what would happen, but no one knew. When he returned he found himself a place
under a tree. It was very hot. He had just closed his eyes when a courier arrived with a message from Meade to read to the troops. Chamberlain gathered them around him in the field, in the sunlight, and read the order.

Hour of decision, enemy on soil
. When he came to the part about men who failed to do their duty being punished by instant death, it embarrassed him. The men looked up at him with empty faces. Chamberlain read the order and added nothing, went off by himself to sit down. Damn fool order. Mind of West Point at work.

No time to threaten a man. Not now. Men cannot be threatened into the kind of fight they will have to put up to win. They will have to be led. By
you
, Joshuway, by you. Well. Let’s get on with it.

He looked out across the field. The men were sleeping, writing letters. Some of them had staked their rifles bayonet first into the ground and rigged tent cloth across to shade them from the sun. One man had built a small fire and was popping corn. No one was singing.

Kilrain came and sat with him, took off his cap, wiped a sweating red face.

“John Henry’s still with us.” He indicated the woods to the east. Chamberlain looked, did not see the dark head.

“We ought to offer him a rifle,” Kilrain said.

There was a silence. Chamberlain said, “Don’t know what to do for him. Don’t think there’s anything we can do.”

“Don’t guess he’ll ever get home.”

“Guess not.”

“Suppose he’ll wander to a city. Pittsburgh. Maybe New York. Fella can always get lost in a city.”

A cannon thumped far off. A soldier came in from foraging, held a white chicken aloft, grinning.

Kilrain said, “God damn all gentlemen.”

Chamberlain looked: square head, white hair, a battered face, scarred around the eyes like an old fighter. In battle he moved with a crouch, a fanged white ape, grinning. Chamberlain had come to depend on him. In battle men often seemed to melt away, reappearing afterward with tight mirthless grins. But Kilrain was always there, eyes that saw through smoke, eyes that could read the ground.

Chamberlain said suddenly, “Buster, tell me something. What do you think of Negroes?”

Kilrain brooded.

“There are some who are unpopular,” he concluded.

Chamberlain waited.

“Well, if you mean the race, well, I don’t really know.” He hunched his shoulders. “I have reservations, I will admit. As many a man does. As you well know. This is not a thing to be ashamed of. But the thing is, you cannot judge a race. Any man who judges by the group is a peawit. You take men one at a time, and I’ve seen a few blacks that earned my respect. A few. Not many, but a few.”

Chamberlain said, “To me there was never any difference.”

“None at all?”

“None. Of course, I didn’t know that many. But those I knew … well, you looked in the eye and there was a
man
. There was the divine spark, as my mother used to say. That was all there was to it … all there
is
to it.”

“Um.”

“We used to have visitors from the South before the war. It was always very polite. I never understood them, but we stayed off the question of slavery until near the end, out of courtesy. But toward the end there was no staying away from it, and there was one time I’ll never forget. There was this minister, a Southern Baptist, and this professor from the University of Virginia. The professor was a famous man, but more than that, he was a good man, and he had a brain.”

“Rare combination.”

“True. Well, we sat drinking tea. Ladies were present. I’ll never forget. He held the tea like this.” Chamberlain extended a delicate finger. “I kept trying to be courteous, but this minister was so damned
wrong
and moral and arrogant all at the same time that he began to get under my skin. And finally he said, like this: ‘Look here, my good man, you don’t understand.’ There was this tone of voice as if he was speaking to a stupid dull child and he was being patient but running out of patience. Then he said, ‘You don’t understand. You have to live with the Negro to understand. Let me put it this way. Suppose I kept a fine stallion in one of my fields and suddenly one of your Northern abolitionists
came up and insisted I should free it. Well, sir, I would not be more astonished. I feel exactly that way about my blacks, and I resent your lack of knowledge, sir.’ ”

Kilrain grunted. Chamberlain said, “I remember him sitting there, sipping tea. I tried to point out that a man is not a horse, and he replied, very patiently, that
that
was the thing I did not understand, that a Negro was not a man. Then I left the room.”

Kilrain smiled. Chamberlain said slowly, “I don’t really understand it. Never have. The more I think on it the more it horrifies me. How can they look in the eyes of a man and make a slave of him and then quote the Bible? But then right after that, after I left the room, the other one came to see me, the professor. I could see he was concerned, and I respected him, and he apologized for having offended me in my own home.”

“Oh yes.” Kilrain nodded. “He would definitely do that.”

“But then he pointed out that he could not apologize for his views, because they were honestly held. And I had to see he was right there. Then he talked to me for a while, and he was trying to get through to
me
, just as I had tried with the minister. The difference was that this was a brilliant man. He explained that the minister was a moral man, kind to his children, and that the minister believed every word he said, just as I did, and then he said, ‘My young friend, what if it is you who are wrong?’ I had one of those moments when you feel that if the rest of the world is right, then you yourself have gone mad. Because I was really thinking of killing him, wiping him off the earth, and it was then I realized for the first time that if it was necessary to kill them, then I would kill them, and something at the time said: You cannot be utterly right. And there is still something every now and then which says, ‘Yes, but what if you are wrong?’ ” Chamberlain stopped. A shell burst dimly a long way off, a dull and distant thumping.

They sat for a long while in silence. Then Kilrain said, softly smiling, “Colonel, you’re a lovely man.” He shook his head. “I see at last a great difference between us, and yet I admire ye, lad. You’re an idealist, praise be.”

Kilrain rubbed his nose, brooding. Then he said, “The truth is, Colonel, that there’s no divine spark, bless you. There’s many a man
alive no more value than a dead dog. Believe me, when you’ve seen them hang each other … Equality? Christ in Heaven. What I’m fighting for is the right to prove I’m a better man than many. Where have you seen this divine spark in operation, Colonel? Where have you noted this magnificent equality? The Great White Joker in the Sky dooms us all to stupidity or poverty from birth. No two things on earth are equal or have an equal chance, not a leaf nor a tree. There’s many a man worse than me, and some better, but I don’t think race or country matters a damn. What matters is justice. ’Tis why I’m here. I’ll be treated as I deserve, not as my father deserved. I’m Kilrain, and I God damn all gentlemen. I don’t know who me father was and I don’t give a damn. There’s only one aristocracy, and that’s right here—” he tapped his white skull with a thick finger “—and
you
, Colonel laddie, are a member of it and don’t even know it. You are damned good at everything I’ve seen you do, a lovely soldier, an honest man, and you got a good heart on you too, which is rare in clever men. Strange thing, I’m not a clever man meself, but I know it when I run across it. The strange and marvelous thing about you, Colonel darlin’, is that you believe in mankind, even preachers, whereas when you’ve got my great experience of the world you will have learned that good men are rare, much rarer than you think. Ah—” he raised his hands, smiling “—don’t you worry about ministers. The more you kill, the more you do the world a service.” He chuckled, rubbing his face. His nose was fat and soft, rippling under his fingers.