Up Jumps the Devil (29 page)

One of the guards wove a stout hemp noose.

The Devil gritted his teeth. He sighed. He who … with Pocahontas …

Far away, the shaking and booming and crackle of musket fire reached a crescendo, and began to fall off some.

“I rode with Nat Turner, you bastards,” he roared, “when he burned down your granny's house and chopped her up with—”

That got their attention. These were Virginia men. They said a word or two about its being close enough to sundown, and came his way with the noose.

Oh, no.

One of them whirled the hanging rope around his head. When he loosed it, damned if it didn't fall right over the Devil's head like a lasso.

The guard tugged hard, and the noose tightened. The Devil struggled against his chains. He would fight, goddammit! If he had to head-butt every single one of these—

A horse and rider interposed. The officer from town.

“Leave off, dog-fuckers!” he snapped, slicing the rope with his sword. “Sentence is rescinded. Command says we might need every man jack tomorrow, including prisoners.”

The guards vanished into the darkening woods.

“We're marching tomorrow,” the officer told the Devil. “And you're marching with us. Somebody'll be by with supper.”

THE CONFEDERATES HAD WON
the first day. They had driven the Federals into the hills. The second day, they tried to push them out of the hills and destroy them, but the Federals pushed them back. So General Lee was going to gather his soldiers together in one humongous mile-long wave, and roll over the Federals like an ocean.

His soldiers would have to run a mile over open fields, with cannonballs falling on them the whole way. Some of General Lee's staff” thought this was a dumb idea.

“It's a long mile,” they argued.

General Lee didn't care. He was mad.

General Pickett's division would lead the charge. It would be called “Pickett's Charge'” even though it wasn't his idea and he would watch most of it through spyglasses.

THE OFFICER WHO
had captured the Devil came to fetch him, and half drag him through the woods. There had been no supper and no breakfast, and he was feeling weak. He was not familiar with feeling weak. He wondered if it was part of the terror, part of his mortality, which he felt in abundance.

The officer chained him to a tree with several other prisoners. Spies? Deserters?

The officer explained to the prisoners that they were being given a rare chance to escape sentence and prove themselves.

“You will take part in the charge this afternoon,” he said. And he talked about what an honor it was, and how they were dog-fuckers who didn't deserve it. He explained that they would not be given muskets, or even knives. They would not be permitted to carry a flag of any kind. The soldiers behind them would have orders to shoot them in the back if they did anything other than march forward and happily fight the enemy with their bare hands. If they survived, they would not be hanged. If they behaved bravely, they would go free.

The prisoners seemed grateful.

Then the officer explained the wave, and they seemed less grateful.

“Might as well be hanged,” one of them was dumb enough to mutter.

“Done,” barked the officer, and had the man hauled off and hanged.

The Devil thought about the wave.

He almost said something about organizing the Boston Tea Party, but the officer looked at him with a fierce yellow eye, and he shut up.

THERE WAS A LOT
of ground shaking before the wave moved.

The two armies stood and fired cannonballs at each other all day … one army strung out in a line of trees, the other atop a gentle slope, crouched behind a stone wall. Between them, a mile of summer haze, with blackbirds and white moths. Overhead, a sky too hot to be blue, with clouds painted on.

Sitting on the grass or waiting in the woods, the men did not move when the cannonballs came. Their officers had told them they were either going to get hit or they weren't, and there wasn't anything they could do about it, so they might as well hold still.

It was like holding still and trying to keep from flinching while someone hit you in the face, but they did it. And they paid the price. A cannonball would come screaming in, and sometimes, if your eye moved just right, you might actually see it, like a crow flying at unholy speed. Some said you could tell by the scream, somehow, if it was going to hit you, or near you. Others said, “You never hear the one that gets you,” and things like that. There were a thousand things said, all to assure yourself that you were safe, that you were going to be fine. And then here it came, and exploded close by, and you saw incredible sights, like one half of a man go spinning like a top thirty feet in the air, and great trees cut off in the middle, twisting and falling. Men blinded by splinters, staggering with hands over their eyes. Arms and legs that ended too suddenly, and blood like red fountains. Men standing mere yards apart were divided by a grotesque contrast: in one place, horror and explosive slaughter, while five steps away others stood waiting quietly, eyes forward, as if inhabiting a separate world.

Like many of the soldiers up and down General Lee's tree line, the Devil had pissed himself without noticing. Most of the southern soldiers had an empty, hollow sort of gaze, but not the Devil. He was looking at something in particular, and he hardly blinked.

Across the deadly mile, atop the gentle slope of the ridge, behind some cannon and a low stone wall, was a white wagon. It bore huge black letters, and if you had the Devil's stillness and focus that afternoon, you could almost read
EGGERT G. DAUGHTERRY, PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTIST
upon the side.

It might have taken a bullet or two. It might have a bite taken out of it. Hard to tell at this distance. The Devil's fingers curled and uncurled on his knees as he remembered things like immortality and the sands of Troy, and felt the smallness of just being a man. The soldiers around him felt this smallness, too, and were alone with it, each in their way, behind the blankness of their eyes.

When the generals rode out into the still July grass and called to them (
“Up, men, and to your posts!”
), they rose from the ground and shook themselves alert and quit leaning on trees, and marched out in rows.

How they did it, the Devil didn't know. Then he did it, too, and he realized that sometimes there is no How. There is only what you do or do not do, and he did it. He was so damn proud of himself! When they called a cheer for Jeff Davis and the Confederacy and the Honor of Old Virginia, he roared as loud as the best of them, and waved his hat, too.

It was a form of insanity. It was wonderful! Being in church was probably like this, he thought. They were like one whole creature. That was how they were able to move, he realized, even while some of them died.

Then the wave started rolling across that long mile. He didn't think he could stop if he tried. What genius!

AS FOR THE SOLDIERS
behind him, he forgot all about them until they were gone. A cannonball dropped in behind the prisoners and took out eight or nine of the row behind them.

There was a moment when the world tore right in two, and the Devil found himself in the air, perhaps on fire, arms pinwheeling. Then he hit the ground and got up fast, just to prove to himself that he could, and the thing was, it didn't make him any more scared than he'd been before, putting one foot before the other.

Spare weapons littered the ground. He grabbed a musket, checked to see that it was charged and loaded, and pushed on.

The grass and ground were uneven beneath his boots. He had never noticed, before, how terribly uneven the earth was.

A minié ball tossed his hair just above the collar. Lifted his hat just a little.

Here and there, he heard the
thud
of bullets hitting targets.

The enemy, leaning over their stone wall, grew nearer.

The prisoner beside the Devil gave a moan. Just a moan, and fell. Two steps later, he was invisible in the grass.

What a strange and unbearable feeling, that you might not experience the next second because you might be dead.

Now. Now. Now. Now …

Each second began to seem impossible. But the soldiers pushed on, drawn, the Devil recognized, by something that eclipsed them all. Even him.

The seconds passed. The mile was behind them, and the enemy was there.

THERE WAS THE ENEMY
, all lined up, all white smoke and fire and bullets whistling.

Ziiiiiiip! Ziiip! Zip-Zip! Ziiiiiiip! Thud! Thud! Thud thud thud thud!

Screams.

Not far away, a cannon fired straight into the Confederate line, and blew men down like wheat.

One great shout from the rebel throats. The Devil's, too, as if the many throats were one throat, and he was over the wall. Right away, he killed a man.

The Federal soldier looked scared. Looked as if he couldn't believe the ratty, trashy-looking rebels had gotten this far, and then the Devil stuck his musket in the soldier's side and pulled the trigger.

The musket bucked. Gun smoke huffed. The Federal went down with his side torn open, and the Devil stepped over him.

He could not shoot again; a musket needed loading between rounds. So he gripped the muzzle and made it a war club, and waded through surging, howling chaos toward the white wagon, now visible, now invisible beyond the struggle, the smoke. He was beginning to believe he might make it when someone speared him in the leg.

It hurt, but he found himself more offended than frightened. He looked down, saw the bayonet flash through his own flesh, then disappear—that
hurt!
—as it was yanked free.

Wild with rage, the Devil spun on his heel, almost lost his balance in blood-soaked grass, but steadied himself and found his attacker. One swing with the musket knocked the Federal down. One punch with the stock should have burst his head like a melon. No. Two punches. Just a broken nose.

Third punch. A demonic shriek of frustration, and finally the soldier's face caved in.

On toward the wagon, hobbling. Losing blood.

Most of the battle fell behind him.

One more soldier. The Devil picked a stone off the ground, a stone the size of a baby, and smashed the Federal's shoulder.

He was ten feet away with nothing in between when a rebel cannonball—you
do
hear the one that gets you, of course. Why wouldn't you?—screamed out of the sky and tore him up like a dog toy.

He spun through the air, and came down on the other side of the wagon.

The Devil smelled himself cooking. Felt broken bones, and flesh hanging in rags.

He croaked like a frog, and darkness swallowed him.

HE DIDN'T WAKE UP
until General Lee's wave had been pushed back.

A Federal soldier knelt over him, blocking the sun. The sun made him appear to glow, and to shoot solar rays.

“Don't try to move,” said the Federal in a kind voice. The Devil cleared his throat, which seemed to be all there.

“Listen,” he said, and promptly coughed up a bucket of blood.

“Don't try to talk.”

“Listen!”
And he did his best to describe the bottle in the white wagon, which had been chewed up and knocked over by the same explosion that had eaten the Devil.

“This wagon?” The soldier gestured.

“Yes.”

The soldier looked puzzled, and the Devil found himself in strange circumstances. He had never begged for anything before, not even from God, not in all of time and history. Suddenly he found himself begging.

He blacked out again.

Then he felt his head lifted, tilted back. Felt something warm and heavy slide down his throat.

It tasted like piss, and he fought the urge to spit it out. Instead, he lay patiently as the bottle emptied.

HIS BODY FILLED
like one of the great observation balloons, capturing hot air.

He felt himself coming together. Swelling and hardening like an erection. Filling again with the thing that made him bigger on the inside than the man he was on the outside. The golden and forever thing.

It happened slowly. Too slowly.

He tried to get up.

“Don't,” said the kind soldier.

The Devil went dizzy, and fell. Frustrated, he collapsed on the grass.

After a while, the soldier summoned stretcher bearers, who scooped him up and bore him off to a hospital tent.

SOME DAYS LATER
, he went marching over this hill and that, until he came upon Daughterry roasting sausages over a small fire. Nearby sat the wagon, more or less repaired. Millie, recovered, stood hitched in the traces, apparently pulling double duty in memory of poor Fern.

The Devil held a kerchief over his face. Gettysburg, after the battle, was an open, stinking grave. When Daughterry half turned and caught sight of him, his face was tied up in a red sheet the size of a tablecloth.