Up Jumps the Devil (28 page)

Daughterry's mouth went dry. In three years, they'd rarely laid eyes on living troops in the field. Feeling his own mortality a bit more keenly than he cared for, he called the Devil's attention to the advancing rebels.

“Let's toss everything on board and get out of the way,” he suggested, trying to sound like an experienced human. “We can sort out the dishes later.”

Down the road, a whistle, a yell, and the sound of galloping hooves. Union troops rose up out of nowhere, and pointed muskets at the rebels.

A cloud of blue-gray smoke appeared in silence about the soldiers. A moment later, the thunder of gunfire reached Daughterry's ears.

A wave of minié balls tore through the air.

Ziiiiiiiiiiiip! Ziiip-zip! Ziiiiip!

One bullet smashed through the rolling laboratory.

Fern caught a minié ball and fell dead as a doornail.

The rebels came on, unlimbering their own weapons.

“Goddamn,” muttered Daughterry, looking over at poor, dead Fern. Millie had spooked and vanished into a shallow valley beyond a snake-rail fence. If they were going to get out of harm's way, they'd have to do it on foot.

Daughterry looked around and found himself alone.

He spied the Devil flying down the road, legs and arms a blur, toward a little town whose steeples poked above the treetops a mile or two away.

Daughterry followed at a trot, keeping low, one hand securing his top hat, the other waving a white handkerchief. He aimed to the left of the Union troops, who, having greeted the enemy, seemed to be backing away.

The town was called Gettysburg, he thought, if he remembered their maps correctly.

USUALLY, THE DEVIL
thought a lot about how he looked, and what kind of impression he was making. He thought about Heaven and Earth, and what it meant to be a beast or what it meant to be a man. He thought about what he was going to say next and how it would be received. He wondered what people were saying
about
him.

These things, along with every other kind of thought, had been shoved into a closet of some kind. The Devil's life had been pared down to a single hot purpose: not to be hit by any of the bullets that were slicing through the air.

He ran around the Union troops, flew across a road, through some woods and past some houses, until he came to a garden concealed in a rectangle of picket fence posts. Part of the garden was a field of sunflowers.

The Devil dove in among the sunflowers, buried his face between his knees, and said “Oh, no!” over and over and over.

IT TOOK SOME DOING
, but Daughterry found him there, shaking and bug-eyed. The photographer, a wise mortal, had fought down his urge to run mindlessly, and concentrated on following the Devil's trail, one step at a time. He had followed raw, churned earth to the edge of the garden, and parted the sunflower stems.

“There you are!” cried Daughterry, at which the Devil promptly jumped up and out of the sunflowers, and vanished underground through a nearby cellar door.

Daughterry followed him patiently, driven by a sense of culpability. The fact that he couldn't have known that the Blue and the Gray would come smashing together just then, right on top of them, didn't really change anything. And while there were those who would have said, had they known, that a chance to kill the Devil with a simple minié ball or cannon shell was a blessing, Daughterry had been with the Devil long enough to know that divine justice probably wasn't that simple.

He wasn't evil, it seemed to Daughterry, although he sometimes did evil things.

He wasn't good, the Lord knew, although he sometimes did good things.

If anything, the Devil seemed to think that the world should do what came naturally, that everything natural was just fine, and that questions of Good and Evil were silly. He did what he did to help a better future come faster. Daughterry respected that, whether the Devil's reasons were selfish or not.

He sat down at the bottom of the cellar stairs and whispered “Hey.”

Nothing. Maybe some mice tiptoeing around, leaving little turds behind.

Then, just as faintly, a small voice.

“We're going to die,” said the voice.

“Maybe,” said Daughterry. “Maybe not.”

Whimpering.

Far away, dull thuds, heard on the air and felt through the earth. Cannon.

“I didn't know it was going to be like this,” whispered the Devil. “Whoever invented the part of the brain that makes you afraid, they should be shot. It's useless, but I swear it's going to fucking kill me.”

“You've had feelings before. You know how strong feelings can be.”

The Devil's brow furrowed. Pocahontas had complained about that very thing: the intensity of feeling that came with being human.

It was the only kind of thought that could distract him from his terror. It didn't distract him for long.

“How come
you're
not afraid?” he asked Daughterry.

“I am! I pissed my pants!” (He had indeed.)

Thud. Thud!
Like an approaching giant, the artillery walked closer.

“I didn't,” said the Devil.

“Brave fellow!”

“Really?”

“Well, no.”

The cannonade gave the earth a good shaking just then, so that streams of dirt rained down from the ceiling, and the Devil curled up (Daughterry's eyes had adjusted; that
was
the Devil over there, wasn't it, wrapped around a sharpening stone? It was either the Devil or an old coat) and made noises like a sick kitten.

Daughterry wondered when the owners of the house would appear. Sooner or later, wanting shelter, they'd throw open the garden door and come sliding pell-mell down the stairs.

The battle seemed to be drifting into town. The cellar shook again.

The owner and his family never came.

THE SHAKING GOT
worse and worse.

Above, glass broke.

Pop! Crack!
Musket fire.

The Devil sat partway up (it
was
him, wound about the grindstone), and said, “There is nothing, nothing at all, keeping one of those cannon shells from punching through upstairs and exploding down here, right in our faces.”

“That's true,” said Daughterry.

The Devil did not handle this thought well at all.

Daughterry was a good man and a good friend, and never described to anyone, even his diary, that he had seen the Devil suck his thumb.

THE POUNDING AND SHAKING
and popping and yelling drifted out of town, it seemed, receding like a flood, and there came a time when Daughterry felt that he should talk to the Devil about one or two things.

“Hey,” he stage-whispered across the cellar.

The Devil said, “Yes?”

“I hate to bring it up.”

“Bring what up?”

“The wagon. Our wagon.”

“What about it?”

“They took it.”

Silence.

The ground shook.

“Someone took our wagon,” said the Devil. “The wagon with the laboratory and the glass plates and our food and clothes.”

The Devil seemed to have raised himself to a crouch. His eyes glowed.

“The wagon,” he continued, “with my immortality aboard, wedged under the tool rack?”

Daughterry nodded. “The Federals have it,” he said.

“Get it back.”

“Now, see here—”

The Devil pounced, and would have bitten off one of Daughterry's little fingers, except that Daughterry objected, and shoved the Devil away.

The Devil seemed surprised. Then he seemed to remember that he was mortal. He seemed defeated. His shoulders slumped, and he slouched off to the farthest corner.

“Get it back,” he croaked. “Please.”

Daughterry replied that he would try, and they did their best to sleep.

THE NEXT MORNING
, Daughterry crept upstairs.

Before long, he crept back down.

“Bad news,” he announced to the dark cellar.

“You didn't get the wagon,” said the Devil. He was feeling braver than before. He could hardly feel less brave, after all.

“The Federals seem to be using the wagon for a traveling pharmacy.”

“Then one can reason with these Federals. Pay them something, if necessary—”

“The wagon,” Daughterry explained, “is in a place where I am not welcome. You don't cross Union lines if you're not a Union soldier.”

The Devil nodded. He looked very serious.

“I am willing to face down my fear,” he said, “and go up there and talk to whoever needs talking to, if all it needs is a Federal uniform.”

He closed his eyes, and drew both hands down through the air, as if putting on a rain poncho. Then he stood still. He looked puzzled.

“Were you,” asked Daughterry, “by some chance, trying to ‘magic' a uniform out of thin air?”

“No,” lied the Devil.

The floor shook.

Dust rained down.

“They've started again,” observed Daughterry.

The Devil's eyes widened. He shook visibly. His hands twitched.

Then his eyes narrowed. He still shook a little, but his hands, rolled into fists, were steady.

“I could just be somebody from the town,” he said.

“What?”

Cannon fire, close by. The Devil twitched.

“Who's to say I'm not just plain John Scratch from Gettysburg?” he said, making his way up the cellar stairs. “A plain old fellow from plain old town can ask questions about a medicine wagon, can't he?

Maybe even poke around under the tool rack—”

“No!”

“Yes!”

“But—!”

But the Devil was gone.

THE DEVIL EMERGED
to find the garden just as he'd left it, with some of the sunflowers a bit sat upon. In the street beyond the gate, he found a barricade thrown up by retreating Federals. Furniture, firewood, oxcarts, and wagon wheels, it had been shot up and blown apart. Here and there, houses themselves bore wounds.

One second, the street was deserted. The next second, a train of horses and wagons and mounted swivel guns came charging along. It was a Confederate train, guarded by Confederate soldiers in homespun clothes, long-haired and dusty from top to bottom.

Several officers rode alongside this train, and one of them rode up to the Devil, drew his sword, and poked him in the throat.

“What're you about?” demanded the officer, a mountain of hair in an ancient leather coat and straw hat.

“I am John Scratch,” said the Devil, “a local photographer. I am going up the lines to see about—”

“You ain't in uniform,” the officer observed. “Hazard!” he bellowed. “Scatlock!”

Two Confederate guards left the train and galloped over.

“A man out of uniform,” said the officer, “out and about and having a look at General Lee's supply trains, seems an awful lot like a spy to me.”

“Here, now!” exclaimed the Devil, but the officer spurred his horse and rode off, calling back over his shoulder that the spy was to be held behind Confederate lines until sundown, when he should be hanged without ceremony.

Hazard jumped down off his horse and approached the Devil with a set of heavy chains. The Devil squared off to hit him and wrestle him to the ground, but the other soldier, Scatlock, kicked his horse forward and knocked him off balance.

That wouldn't have happened, thought the Devil, on any other three days.

He caught his balance just in time for Hazard to swing the armload of chains at him.

HE WOKE UP
secured to a young maple tree, alone in the middle of some woods.

One whole side of his head felt lumpy and smashed.

He remembered that he was to be hanged, and laughed. Then he remembered that he was not invulnerable, and stopped laughing.

The ground shook. Great cracklings, like popcorn, tore the air from horizon to horizon.

He thought, at first, that he had been left alone and unobserved in whatever portion of the universe this was, but then he glimpsed a couple of ragtag Confederates leaning against a tree in the middle distance. They looked his way and spat.

The shadows on the ground lengthened quickly.

This couldn't really be happening.

After thousands—millions?—of years, he was going to be hung like a horse thief by a squad of rednecks. He, who had conquered Sumeria. He, who had helped raise the pyramids, and walked in the surf at Troy.

“I walked the surf at Troy!”
he screamed in frustration.