After that, other boys bring us their hurts, and Sergeant Ames brings us a few flasks of liquor and some cloth that Will tears into strips.
I watch Jeremiah pacing with Henry, wondering if keeping busy will drown out the artillery banging and rifle volleys and horses screaming and lives being taken. Nothing stops my thoughts. The blood and rags just keep me counting the weeks, nine of them back to June, and I will my courses to come and the sick feeling to go.
IT IS AFTERNOON when Captain comes back again.
‘Men, we’ve orders to advance forward in pursuit of the enemy,’ he says, and there is something in the way his voice is dropped that lets me know it ain’t an order he likes.
‘It is madness, trying what we already tried this morning,’ Thomas Stakely shouts from where he stands next to old John Morgan with tear tracks through the soot on his face. ‘Those Rebels that fired on us ain’t gone anywhere. We’ve got enough dead!’
‘Now we can get those bastards who got Jimmy,’ Sully yells back. ‘And Frank too!’
‘Ain’t letting them take you, Jimmy,’ Henry says like he is somewhere else, like those black feelings are the only thing keeping him from losing his head.
There ain’t no more grumbling about the orders after that, even though me and Thomas can’t be the only ones who ain’t keen on going back at that embankment again, but baby or no, I have got a duty to do.
We all start checking our weapons and moving into line of battle as best we can between the trees. Jeremiah is to my left and Will to my right, Sully and Henry behind, plugging the gap where Jimmy should be.
‘The time comes,’ I say to Jeremiah, ‘you don’t give me a thought. You just do what you’ve got to. You don’t have to watch over me.’
Jeremiah stares, and it is the look he gets going into a battle, cold and far away. Then he says, ‘Don’t you for a minute think I can stop from keeping you in my sights and wanting you safe.’
He is schooling me, telling me something of his heart. It is a sweet thing, but that don’t keep me from saying the only truth I’ll let him believe.
‘I don’t need protecting. I can do this job as good as any.’
‘It ain’t about you doing the job. It ain’t never been about that,’ he says.
‘Then why—This whole time I’ve been trying to prove—’
‘I can’t remember a time you didn’t do whatever you lit onto, like it was just natural. I thought all I wanted was to keep you safe, protect you from this—but I wouldn’t change it for anything, you being so stone-headed, coming here, giving us this time.’
‘I lit onto you,’ I say as the Companies before us file out of the trees, ‘and the way opened up before me.’
AS SOON AS those boys march into the clearing, a storm of shells hails down all around them, blasting the tender thoughts out of my head. Those Rebel batteries keep up the fire so steady the Regiment can’t even advance a hundred yards to the trees on the other side of that grassy strip and our line can’t do a thing but move back to where we started.
When Henry don’t get none of his revenge, he is all over, pacing and sitting and then standing. It is plain he’s got too much feeling and nowhere to put it.
Ambrose comes to Henry’s side, taking hold of his shoulder and offering up that flask of his, saying, ‘I’m only trying to help. You can bear up better under it if you dull the pain a bit.’ But Henry don’t look at Ambrose and he don’t take that flask, even when Hiram shouts, ‘Do us all a favor and take the fucking drink, man!’
Finally Will goes to Henry, puts a hand on his arm, and says, ‘You want to write a letter home, or you want one of us to?’
That gets Henry sinking down to the ground, his head in his hands and his shoulders shaking. I ain’t ever been able to keep from crying when a person’s grieving, and I’ve got my own mourning to do for Jimmy. Jeremiah stands there, his face pinched, too proud to cry. Sully moves off a bit, looking away. But Will stays beside Henry until he takes out his papers, and there is one more thing in this world I wouldn’t know how to tell.
THE SUN IS low in the sky when the Rebels come away from the embankment to test our lines. Directly before us, not two hundred paces across the small clearing, shadows start moving in the trees. There ain’t a single boy of ours that ain’t ready with his musket primed, and Sully wipes his cheeks with the backs of his hands, saying, ‘Come on, you goddamn Greybacks!’
It don’t take more than Sergeant saying, ‘Boys, I think they are Rebs! Fire on them!’