The Seeker (32 page)
The smoke of the musket fire and artillery pieces settled around the soldiers until it was hard for Adam to see what was happening. He wanted to go find Jake, but instead, as the sun crawled across the sky, he divided himself from the reality of men screaming and dying below him and became nothing more than a vehicle for his pencils drawing the scenes of battle.
The Union took the bridge over the Bull Run stream and charged forward on the cusp of victory. People in the carriages cheered them on, and a few reporters moved closer to better see the action as the army advanced up the rise to finish off the Rebels. But they met surprising resistance. Soon news came winding around to where Adam and Bud Keeling were observing the battle that a new Southern brigade under General Jackson had formed a defensive line on Henry Hill. The Union generals had delayed long enough to allow the Confederates to get some artillery pieces in place, and exploding shells began to rain down on the charging troops.
The stolid resistance knocked the wind out of the Union charge, and the men began to fall back. A couple of regiments quit the field entirely while others regrouped for a second assault, but the officers seemed confused as to the battle plan. Without leadership, many of the troops moved about totally bewildered as to what to do next. To give cover, the artillery company was ordered forward, but no supporting company was assigned to protect the artillery’s new exposed position. In short order the gunners were overrun and the Union howitzers silenced. After that, the dying began in earnest.
Up beside Adam, Bud Keeling swore under his breath. “The right hand don’t know what the left is doing down there.” He shoved his notebook in his pocket and glanced over at Adam. “Tide’s turning, Wade. Best pack up your stuff and find your horse. Unless you want to spend some time with the Rebels. Not something I’d recommend. I hear tell they aren’t too hospitable to Yanks like us even when we aren’t shooting at them.”
The retreat began orderly enough as those soldiers still standing began to fall back. But then the Rebels charged down the hill toward them, and the boys in blue threw down their muskets and bayonets and abandoned their wounded to run for their lives. Here and there a captain or other officer called for the men to re-form a line, but their voices were swallowed up in the chaos. Horses reared and fought against their traces as the Confederate shells shrieked overhead and exploded around them. Some of the horses hitched to artillery pieces ran uncontrolled through the fleeing soldiers and added to the carnage of the day.
Other drivers kept their horses under control as they waited to cross the bridge back to the north, but then a shell hit a wagon on the bridge. A horse let out an unearthly scream and fell in its traces. The other three horses scrambled madly to keep pulling in spite of the dead horse, but the shell had also splintered the front wagon wheel. The heavily loaded wagon skewed to the side, totally blocking the bridge and the army’s escape route.
Now all semblance of order disappeared as the retreat became a rout, and men unable to cross the bridge plunged into the Bull Run stream to fight their way to the north side. Soldiers who had escaped the shells and bullets of the battlefield were swept away in the swift current of the stream.
Adam sat on his horse, removed from the action, and watched. He didn’t pull out his sketchpad. There was no need. The scene before him would be etched in his memory for life. The acrid smell of the battle smoke assaulted his nose as it gathered in thick clouds over the battlefield to mercifully obscure his view of the bodies of men who had fought their last battle. Dead horses lay among them, and Adam no longer had the sure feeling that a soldier was safer on horseback than afoot.
He guided his own nervous horse down into the smoke-covered field, picking his way through smoldering shell fragments, splintered tree limbs and bodies. The corpses were already black with flies in the summer heat. Adam wanted to turn his eyes away, but he made himself look at the faces even as he dreaded seeing that of his brother.
A soldier struggled to his feet to plead for help as Adam passed by. He cradled what was left of his hand against his blood-soaked coat. His eyes staring out of a face blackened by gunpowder looked even younger than Jake’s. Adam could have turned away from him and continued his search, but he didn’t know if Jake was out there among the dead and the dying. He knew this boy in front of him needed a doctor to stop his bleeding. So he lifted the young soldier up on his horse and rode away from the battlefield. Only after he got across the stream and found the house the doctors had commandeered for a field hospital did he realize he’d plucked an Alabama Rebel from the field of battle. It didn’t seem to matter.
The Confederates, satisfied with the spoils of victory left on the battlefield, didn’t pursue the Northern army across Bull Run. The wounded Potomac Army limped back to the capital where the state regiments began to count up their losses. There were many.
The biggest to Adam’s mind was their loss of confidence. They’d marched out of Washington sure they’d overwhelm the Rebels and end the war. Now they knew the Rebels weren’t going to cave at the first show of force. Now they knew their leaders had failed to lead them effectively. Now they knew the war was not going to be ended on a picnic-filled day at the battlefield. The worst blow of all was the way many of the city’s citizens openly celebrated the Confederate victory, some even being so bold as to fly Rebel flags on their porches.
Adam made a quick sketch of a Union soldier with one arm wrapped in a sling bandage tearing the Confederate colors off a porch post. It was the kind of conflict-laden illustration Sam Johnson liked best.
That night he finally found the Massachusetts 5th Regiment and Jake encamped not far from the White House where President Lincoln was reputed to be gathering with the Secretary of War and his top generals to figure out what had gone so wrong at Bull Run. Jake didn’t want to talk about the failings of the army. He didn’t seem to want to talk at all as Adam crouched down beside him where he was staring at the remnants of a cooking fire.
Adam’s relief to see his brother uninjured was tempered by the boy’s morose face. He wasn’t the same cocky young soldier who had ridden away from the city, sure he was going to personally chase the Rebels all the way back to Richmond. While he had escaped the battlefield without any flesh-and-blood wounds, he hadn’t escaped unscathed. Somewhere on the inside he was bleeding. At Adam’s suggestion, they walked away from the other men to be alone in the silky black of the night. To the west the sky rumbled as lightning flickered on and off in a kind of warning signal.
As they moved through the camps without speaking, here and there raucous laughter made it evident some of the men had turned to alcohol in an attempt to wipe away the memory of battle. Jake didn’t even turn his head toward the sound, so deep was he in his own gloom. Adam was determined not to speak first for fear he’d say the wrong words that might make whatever was spearing Jake’s soul stab deeper. They stopped at the edge of a stand of trees and looked back at the camps spread across the opening. Here and there a campfire flickered, and the officers’ white tents pulled light out of the night.
Once they stopped moving, the silence between them became almost suffocating. Adam finally broke his resolve to not speak first and asked, “You want to talk about it, Jake?”
Jake kept his eyes forward, and for a long minute Adam didn’t think he was going to acknowledge his words, but then he muttered, “I ran away.”
“The whole army ran away,” Adam said.
“No,” Jake said. “Not everybody.”
The seconds ticked by as Adam waited for him to explain, each one seeming ten times as long as the last. Finally Jake said, “Not Bill Pickworth.”
“Who’s Bill Pickworth?”
“You met him. Black hair, skinny, not too tall, ears sticking out like some kind of monkey. Nobody paid him much mind. He was just there, you know. Never had much to say.”
“Yeah, I remember him now.” Adam thought of how the boy had looked as he sat on the fringes of the campfire before they marched to Bull Run. He couldn’t have been more than sixteen, with wide brown eyes that seemed to be swallowing every sight whole. “What happened to him?”
“He didn’t run. Not even when everybody else did. He stood there and loaded his gun and kept firing the way a soldier is supposed to. He didn’t run.” Jake looked over at Adam. “But I did.”
Lightning flickered across the sky, but it wasn’t enough for Adam to see Jake’s face in the dark. He didn’t really need to. He heard the sorrow in his voice, not as much for Bill as for the loss of who he’d thought he was himself. A soldier ready for battle.
“There are times when it’s the better part of valor to quit the field,” Adam said. “To live to fight another day.”
“Tell that to Bill Pickworth,” Jake said as he stared back down at his feet.
“Can I?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t see him fall, but he’s not here. He must be dead or captured.”
Adam didn’t try to deny the truth of Jake’s words. Instead he let the silence gather around them. It would just make Jake feel worse if he tried to coddle him.
After a minute, Jake went on. “He saw the elephant and didn’t run.”
“The elephant?” Adam frowned into the darkness.
“Yeah, that’s what the old guys had been telling us. That a man can’t measure his courage until he actually looks into the face of danger. Do you stand and turn the elephant back or do you run like a yellow-bellied coward?” Jake kept his eyes on the ground. “And now I know. I saw the elephant and ran like the coward I am.”
“Do you want to go home, Jake?” Adam directed his words out into the night and didn’t look at Jake as he waited for his answer.
It was slow in coming. “I can’t go home. I enlisted for six months.”
“Phoebe would pay someone to take your place.”
“Do they let you do that?” There was a touch of hope in Jake’s voice as his head jerked up to look toward Adam.
“I don’t know. Maybe. Money can buy most anything.”
“Not self-respect.” Jake let out a long sigh.
“No, not that.”
“I don’t want to be a coward. I want to be able to look a man like Bill Pickworth in the eye and stand shoulder to shoulder with him in battle.”
“The war is far from over, Jake. There will be other battles.” “But what if I see the elephant and run again?”
“You won’t.” Adam put his hand on Jake’s shoulder and squeezed it a little.
“How do you know?” Jake sounded like he used to when he was a little boy in some kind of fix he hoped Adam could make right.
“I know you.” He stared straight at Jake’s face. In the darkness all he could see was the shine of his eyes. “You mess up, but you don’t stay messed up.”
Jake let out a huff of breath and moved out from under Adam’s hand as though he wasn’t sure he could accept Adam’s words. The storm had come close enough that the wind had picked up and carried with it the smell of rain, but it looked like it might go around them. Adam hoped so. The men were dispirited enough without thunder crashing down to remind them of the artillery fire they’d escaped but many of their comrades had not.
Jake was quiet a moment before he said, “Were you afraid, Adam?”
“I wasn’t fighting.”
“I know, but I saw where you were. It wasn’t that far removed from the field. You could have been hit by a shell or even the musket fire. A lot of the bullets were going high.”
“I didn’t think about it, Jake. I only thought about what I was seeing. And you. I worried about you.”
“Did you pray for me?” Jake didn’t wait for Adam to answer as he looked up at the clouds rolling across the sky and went on. “I prayed. Like I never prayed before.”
“To live?”
“No, to be able to look a man in the face and shoot him dead if I had to. I didn’t know if I could.” Again Jake’s little-boy voice came out. “I shouldn’t have prayed that, should I? To be able to shoot another man.”
“You’d best ask somebody who knows God better than me for that answer.”
“Or maybe just ask God.”
“Yeah, or maybe that.” Adam pushed away from the tree he’d been leaning against. Talking about God was making him uneasy. As they began walking back to Jake’s camp, he thought of Charlotte and wondered what kind of answers she was finding among the Shakers. They believed some woman was the daughter of God. But at least they believed something.
As if Jake heard his thoughts, he asked, “Do you believe in God, Adam?”
“Well, sure. Everybody believes there’s a God out there somewhere.” Adam tried to wave off Jake’s question as if it didn’t bother him. “Only heathens say there’s no God.”
“But Mother always said it wasn’t enough to believe in a God out there.” Jake looked back up at the sky where fingers of lightning sliced through the darkness. “She said you had to believe in God in your heart. Inside you.” Jake pounded his fist against his chest. “She said it was like love. That you could believe in love, but until you felt it in your heart, it didn’t mean a thing.”
Adam wanted to change the subject and talk about the storm, the war, anything but God. Or love. But he didn’t. Instead he said, “I used to pray. I prayed for Daddy to come home. He didn’t. I prayed when Grandfather said I should. He still beat me.”
“So you stopped praying.”
“I stopped.”
“Completely? You didn’t pray any when the shells were screaming over your head?”
Adam could feel Jake staring at him, but he didn’t look over at his brother. He could have. It would have been too dark for Jake to see how unsure he felt. “I wanted to pray for you, Jake. I wanted the Lord to hold a hand over you and keep you safe. But I was like you and your prayer about shooting somebody. How could I pray just for you when there were so many dying? If the Lord held his hand over you, over me, over every man on the battlefield, then we’d be in a bowl with no way to wage war.”
“But wouldn’t that be good?”
“Perhaps.” Adam looked at Jake then. “But what of the Union? What of freedom?”