Long, Last, Happy Read online

  We rode in. They were ready with the repeating rifles, and we were blown apart. I myself took a bullet through the throat. It didn’t take me off my mount, but I rode about a hundred yards out under a big shade tree and readied myself to die. I offered my prayers.

  “Christ, I am dead. Comfort me in the valley of the shadow. Take me through it with honor. Don’t let me make the banshee noises I’ve heard so many times in the field. You and I know I am worth more than that.”

  I heard the repeating rifles behind me and the shrieks, but my head was a calm green church. I was prepared to accept the big shadow. But I didn’t seem to be dying. I felt my neck. I thrust my forefinger in the hole. It was to the right of my windpipe and there was blood on the rear of my neck. The thing had passed clean through the muscle of my right neck. In truth, it didn’t even hurt.

  I had been thinking: Death does not especially hurt. Then I was merely asleep on the neck of my horse, a red-haired genius for me and a steady one. I’d named him Mount Auburn. We took him from a big farm outside Gettysburg. He wanted me as I wanted him. He was mine. He was the Confederacy.

  As I slept on him, he was curious but stable as a rock. The great beast felt my need to lie against his neck and suffered me. He lay the neck out there for my comfort and stood his front heels.

  A very old cavalryman in blue woke me up. He was touching me with a flagstaff. He didn’t even have a weapon out.

  “Eh, boy, you’re a pretty dead one, ain’t you? Got your hoss’s head all bloody. Did you think Jeb was gonna surprise us forever?”

  We were alone.

  He was amazed when I stood up in the saddle. I could see beyond him through the hanging limbs. A few men in blue were picking things up. It was very quiet. Without a thought, I already had my pistol on his thin chest. I could not see him for a moment for the snout of my pistol.

  He went to quivering, of course, the old fool. I saw he had a bardlike face.

  What I began was half sport and half earnest.

  “Say wise things to me or die, patriot,” I said.

  “But but but but but but,” he said.

  “Shhh!” I said. “Let nobody else hear. Only me. Tell the most exquisite truths you know.”

  He paled and squirmed.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  A stream of water came out the cuff of his pants.

  I don’t laugh. I’ve seen pretty much all of it. Nothing a body does disgusts me. After you’ve seen them burst in the field in two days of sun, you are not surprised by much that the mortal torso can do.

  “I’ve soiled myself, you gray motherfucker,” said the old guy.

  “Get on with it. No profanity necessary,” I said.

  “I believe in Jehovah, the Lord; in Jesus Christ, his son; and in the Holy Ghost. I believe in the Trinity of God’s bride, the church. To be honest. To be square with your neighbor. To be American and free,” he said.

  “I asked for the truths, not beliefs,” I said.

  “But I don’t understand what you mean,” said the shivering home guard. “Give me an example.”

  “You’re thrice as old as I. You should give me the examples. For instance: Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night.”

  “I’m better because I know I’m better,” he said.

  I said, “I’ve read Darwin and floundered in him. You give me aid, old man. Find your way out of this forest. Earn your life back for your trouble.”

  “Don’t shoot me. They’ll hear the shot down there and come blow you over. All the boys got Winchester repeaters,” he said.

  By this time he’d dropped the regiment flag into a steaming pile of turd from his horse. I noticed that his mount was scared too. The layman does not know how the currents of the rider affect that dumb beast he bestrides. I’ve seen a thoroughbred horse refuse to move at all under a man well known as an idiot with a plume. It happened in the early days in the streets of Richmond with Wailing Ott, a colonel too quick if I’ve ever seen one. His horse just wouldn’t move when Ott’s boys paraded out to Manassas. He screamed and there were guffaws. He even cut the beast with his saber. The horse sat right down on the ground like a deaf beggar of a darky. Later, in fact during the battle of Manassas, Colonel Ott, loaded with pistols, sabers and even a Prussian dagger, used a rotten outhouse and fell through the aperture (or split it by his outlandish weight in iron) and drowned head down in night soil. I saw his horse roaming. It took to me. I loved it and its name (I christened it afresh) was Black Answer, because a mare had just died under me and here this other beast ran into my arms. It ran for me. I had to rein Black Answer to keep him behind General Stuart himself. (Though Jeb was just another colonel then.) I am saying that a good animal knows his man. I was riding Black Answer on a bluff over the York when a puff went out of a little boat we were harassing with Pelham’s cannon from the shore. I said to Black Answer, “Look at McClellan’s little sailors playing war down there, boy.” The horse gave a sporty little snort in appreciation. He knew what I was saying.

  It wasn’t a full fifteen minutes before a cannonball took him right out from under me. I was standing on the ground and really not even stunned, my boots solid in the dust. But over to my right Black Answer was rolling up in the vines, broken in two. That moment is what raised my anger about the war. I recalled it as I held the pistol on the old makeshift soldier. I pulled back the hammer. I recalled the eyes of the horse were still bright when I went to comfort it. I picked up the great head of Black Answer and it came away from the body very easily. What a deliberate and pure expression Black Answer retained, even in death.

  What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is, in comparison. We are all overbrained and overemotioned. No wonder my professor at the University of Virginia pointed out to us the horses of that great fantast Jonathan Swift and his Gulliver book. Compared with horses, we are all a dizzy and smelly farce. An old man cannot tell you the truth. An old man, even inspired by death, simply foams and is addled like a crab.

  “Tell me,” I said, “do you hate me because I hold niggers in bondage? Because I do not hold niggers in bondage. I can’t afford it. You know what I’m fighting for? I asked you a question.”

  “What’re you fighting for?”

  “For the North to keep off.”

  “But you’re here in Pennsylvania, boy. You attacked us. This time we were ready. I’m sorry it made you mad. I’m grievous sorry about your neck, son.”

  “You never told me any truths. Not one. Look at that head. Look at all those gray hairs spilling out of your cap. Say something wise. I’m about to kill you,” I said.

  “I have daughters and sons who look up to me,” he said.

  “Say I am one of your sons. Why do I look up to you?” I said.

  “Because I’ve tried to know the world and have tried to pass it on to the others.” He jumped off the horse right into the droppings. He looked as if he were venturing to run. “We’re not simple animals. There’s a god in every one of us, if we find him,” he said.

  “Don’t try to run. I’d kill you before I even thought,” I said.

  His horse ran away. It didn’t like him.

  On the ground, below my big horse Mount Auburn, the old man was a little earthling in an overbig uniform. He kept chattering.

  “I want a single important truth from you,” I said.

  “My mouth can’t do it,” he said. “But there’s something here!” He struck his chest at the heart place. Then he started running back to the depot, slapping hanging limbs out of his way. I turned Mount Auburn and rode after. We hit the clearing and Mount Auburn was in an easy prance. The old man was about ten yards ahead, too breathless to warn the troops.

  In an idle way I watched their progress too. Captain Swain had been killed during our ambush. I saw the blue boys had put his body up on a pole with a rope around
his neck, a target in dirty gray. His body was turning around as they tried out the repeaters on him. But ahead of me the old man bounced like a snow-tail in front of Mount Auburn. We were in a harrowed field. The next time I looked up, a stand of repeaters was under my left hand three strides ahead. I was into their camp. Mount Auburn stopped for me as I picked up a handful of the rifles by the muzzles.

  The old man finally let out something.

  “It’s a secesh!” he shouted.

  Only a couple looked back. I noticed a crock of whiskey on a stool where the brave ones were reloading to shoot at Captain Swain again. I jumped off Mount Auburn and went in the back door of the staff house. I kicked the old man through the half-open door and pulled Mount Auburn into the room with me, got his big sweaty withers inside. When I looked around I saw their captain standing up and trying to get out his horse pistol. He was about my age, maybe twenty-five, and he had spectacles. My piece was already cocked and I shot him square in the chest. He backed up and died in another little off-room behind his desk. A woman ran out of the room. She threw open the front door and bullets smacked into the space all around her. She shut the door. A couple of bullets broke wood.

  “Lay down,” I said.

  She had a little derringer double-shot pistol hanging in her hand. The old man was lying flat on the floor behind the desk with me.

  The woman was a painted type, lips like blood. “Get down,” I told her. She was ugly, just lips, tan hair, and a huge bottom under a petticoat. I wondered what she was going to try with the little pistol. She lay down flat on the floor. I asked her to throw me the pistol. She wouldn’t. Then she wormed it across to us behind the big desk. She looked me over, her face grimy from the floor. She had no underwear and her petticoat was hiked up around her middle. The old man and I were looking at her organ.

  “Wha? War again?” she said. “I thought we already won.”

  The woman and the old man laid themselves out like a carpet. I knew the blue boys thought they had me down and were about ready to come in. I was in that position at Chancellorsville. There should be about six fools, I thought. I made it to the open window. Then I moved into the window. With the repeater, I killed four, and the other two limped off. Some histrionic plumehead was raising his saber up and down on the top of a pyramid of cross ties. I shot him just for fun. Then I brought up another repeater and sprayed the yard.

  This brought on a silence. Nothing was moving. Nobody was shooting. I knew what they were about to do. I had five minutes to live, until they brought the cannon up. It would be a canister or the straight big ball. Then the firing started again. The bullets were nicking the wall in back of me. I saw Mount Auburn behind the desk. He was just standing there, my friend, my legs. Christ, how could I have forgotten him? “Roll down, Auburn!” I shouted. He lay down quick. He lay down behind the thick oak desk alongside the slut and the old man.

  Then what do you think? With nothing to do but have patience until they got the cannon up, somebody’s hero came in the back door with a flambeau and a pistol, his eyes closed, shooting everywhere. Mount Auburn whinnied. The moron had shot Auburn. This man I overmurdered. I hit him four times in the face, and his torch flew out the back door with one of the bullets.

  I was looking at the hole in Auburn when the roof of the house disappeared. It was a canister blast. The sound was deafening. Auburn was hurting but he was keeping it in. His breaths were deeper, the huge bold eyes waiting on me. I had done a lead-out once before on a corporal who was shot in the buttocks. He screamed the whole time, but he lives now, with a trifling scar on his arse, now the war is over. You put your stiletto very hard to one side of the hole until you feel metal—the bullet—and then you twist. The bullet comes out of the hole by this coiling motion and may even jump up in your hand.

  So it was with the lead in Auburn’s flank. It hopped right out. The thing to do then is get a sanitary piece of paper and stuff it into the wound. I took a leaf from the middle of the pile of stationery on the captain’s table, spun it, and rammed it down.

  Auburn never made a complaint. It was I who was mad. I mean, angry beyond myself.

  When I went out the front door with the two repeaters, firing and levering, through a dream of revenge—fire from my right hand and fire from my left—the cannoneers did not expect it. I knocked down five of them. Then I knelt and started shooting to kill. I let the maimed go by. But I saw the little team of blue screeching and trying to shoot me, and I killed four of them. Then they all ran off.

  There was nothing to shoot at.

  I turned around and walked back toward the shack I’d been in. The roof was blown off. The roof was in the backyard lying on the toilet. A Yank with a broken leg had squirmed out from under it.

  “Don’t kill me,” he said.

  “Lay still and leave me alone,” I said. “I won’t kill you.”

  Mount Auburn had got out of the house and was standing with no expression in the bare dirt. I saw the paper sticking out of his wound. He made an alarmed sound. I turned. The Yank with a broken leg had found that slut’s double-barreled derringer. I suppose she threw it up in the air about the time the roof was blown over.

  He shot at me with both barrels. One shot hit my boot and the other hit me right in the chin, but did nothing. It had been mis-loaded or maybe it wasn’t ever a good pistol to begin with. The bullet hit me and just fell off.

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “Come here, Auburn,” I called to the big horse. “Hurt him.”

  I went back in the house while Mount Auburn ran back and forth over the Yank. I cast aside some of the rafters and paper in search of the old man and the slut. They were unscathed. They were under the big desk in a carnal act. I was out of ammunition or I would have slaughtered them too. I went out to the yard and called Mount Auburn off the Yank, who was hollering and running on one leg.

  By the time the old man and the slut got through, I had reloaded. They came out the back slot that used to be the door.

  “Tell me something. Tell me something wise!” I screamed.

  He was a much braver man than I’d seen when I’d seen him in the shade of the tree.

  “Tell me something. Tell me something wise!” I screamed.

  “There is no wisdom, Johnny Reb,” the old man said. “There’s only tomorrow if you’re lucky. Don’t kill us. Let us have tomorrow.”

  I spared them. They wandered out through the corpses into the plowed rows. I couldn’t see them very far because of the dirty moon. I was petting Mount Auburn when Jeb and fifteen others of the cavalry rode up. Jeb has the great beard to hide his weak chin and his basic ugliness. He’s shy. I’m standing here and we’ve got this whole depot to plunder and burn. So he starts being chums with me. Damned if I don’t think he was jealous.

  “You stayed and won it, Howard, all on your own?” he says.

  “Yes, sir. I did.”

  “There’s lots of dead Christians on the ground,” he said. “You’ve got blood all over your shirt. You’re a stout fellow, aren’t you?”

  “You remember what you said to me when you came back and I was holding Black Answer’s head in my hands when he’d been shot out from under me?”

  “I recall the time but not what I said,” said Jeb Stuart.

  “You said, ‘Use your weeping on people, not on animals,’” I said.

  “I think I’d hold by that,” said Stuart.

  “You shit! What are we doing killing people in Pennsylvania?” I screamed.

  “Showing them that we can, Captain Howard!”

  They arrested me and I was taken back (by the nightways) to a detention room in North Carolina. But that was easy to break out of.

  I rode my horse, another steed that knew me, named Vermont Nose.

  I made it across the Mason-Dixon.

  Then I went down with Grant when he had them at Cold Harbor and in the Wilderness. My uniform was blue.

  I did not care if it was violet.

  I knew how Stuart moved. We
were equal Virginia boys. All I needed was twenty cavalry.

  I saw him on the road, still dashing around and stroking his beard.

  “Stuarrrrrrrrt!” I yelled.

  He trotted over on his big gray horse.

  “Don’t I know this voice?” he said.

  “It’s Howard,” I said.

  “But I sent you away. What uniform are you wearing?”

  “Of your enemy,” I said.

  They had furnished me with a shotgun. But I preferred the old Colt. I shot him right in the brow, so that not another thought would pass about me or about himself or about the South, before death. I knew I was killing a man with wife and children.

  I never looked at what the body did on its big horse.

  Then Booth shot Lincoln, issuing in the graft of the Grant administration.

  • • •

  I am dying from emphysema in a Miami hotel, from a twenty-five-year routine of cigars and whiskey. I can’t raise my arm without gasping.

  I know I am not going to make it through 1901. I am the old guy in a blue uniform. I want a woman to lie down for me. I am still functional. I believe we must eradicate all the old soldiers and all their assemblies. My lusts surpass my frame. I don’t dare show my pale ribs on the beach. I hire a woman who breast-feeds me and lets me moil over her body. I’ve got twenty thousand left in the till from the Feds.

  The only friends of the human sort I have are the ghosts that I killed. They speak when I am really drunk.

  “Welcome,” they say. Then I enter a large gray hall, and Stuart comes up.

  “Awwww!” he groans. “Treason.”

  “That’s right,” I say.

  In 1900 they had a convention of Confederate veterans at the hotel, this lonely tall thing on the barbarous waves. I was well into my third stewed mango, wearing my grays merely to be decorous. I heard a group of old coots of about my age hissing at a nearby table. It became clear that I was the object of distaste.

  I stood up.

  “What is it?” I asked them.

  I was answered by a bearded high-mannered coot struck half dead by Parkinson’s disease. He was nodding like a reed in wind. He rose in his colonel’s cape. Beside him his cane clattered to the floor.