I cannot remember now of ever seeing more dead men and horses and captured cannon all jumbled together, than that scene of blood and carnage … on the (Wilkinson) … Turnpike; the ground was literally covered with blue coats dead.
—Sam Watkins, First Tennessee Infantry CS

The taste of dust and gunpowder still clung to my tongue though the sun had finally bled itself out on the hill and night thick as a shroud came to swaddle those destined to be buried alive under bloated horses, or stacked in glutted canyons still warm and ringing with the heat of battle. Picket duty and all I could think of was water, water for this tongue, swollen big and lolling like the dead head of some reptilious fish. I’d heard the playful gurgled call of a crick as the terrified, piteous commotion of wounded helping wounded was muffled by a stand of cedar glades to our left, felt my feet stumble numbly over and around dead men still caught in the throws of dying. A petrified moon hid most of its face from this hell of stiffening limbs, mangled arms raised in supplication, mouths still open, formed on curses, cries for help, or sheer surprise at being killed. Now, kneeling by the river, I knew not which – Mcfadden’s Ford? I made to plunge my head beneath its murky cleansing depths, desperate to be rid of the stink of dead flesh, heedless that even a wink of weeping moon might illuminate my form and draw enemy fire from bluffed banks merely yards opposite. When I’d drunk my fill and filled my nostrils with musk leaves and loam muck, I reached to fill the canteen at my side, only to recall it clutched in the hands of some poor sooty devil I’d stumbled across in the scorch of afternoon retreat, his uniform so caked with dirt, I knew not to this moment for which side he fought. At the time it seemed an inconsequence: the eyes out of the blackened face were my kid brother Tom’s, dilated black irises surrounded by bloodshot blue fear pleading for what little water I had left, and that was that. He might well be the one who killed Tom, all I knew, but he sure was thirsty.

The silence that now penetrated consciousness felt like stunned eternity. With held breath, I noted not a single tree-frog’s bulbous voice, slither-whisper of snake belly through grass, an owl’s silent hunt. Only the water at my feet dared to make its subdued music, a pebbled dirge for those whose blood ebbed its ferned shallows. I hunkered against a nearby tree to listen to the silence and contemplate how the 51’st Ohio, Army of the Cumberland, had lured me so far from home. First had come shame so hot and fierce it burned the back of our necks whenever we went to town under baleful stares of neighbors, even friends, my brother Tom, then seventeen, me, halfway to my nineteenth year.

Cowards. Peace-lovin’ cowards. You want scripture? How abouts them that cry ‘peace peace' when there is no peace? The best way to make peace, boy, is to go help whip those disloyal son’s of so-and-so and end this war quick, that’s what.

Tom and I, hats pulled low, slouched behind Amos and Kitty’s oblivious hooves, heard our history rehashed, distorted, passed about as fodder for contempt, resentment:

The kind of people we don’t need here, them ‘Anabaptists,’ so peaceful, they, couldn’t get along with their own kind back in Swissland, always in trouble with the government because they figure they’ve found a religion better than everybody else’s. Don’t believe in fighting, even for justice; ‘non-resistant,’ or some high-flung term, ‘coward’ in honest man’s language.

At first such talk, buzzed in barely audible murmur behind our back, grew to hornet-hum ferocity and threatened to blight nearly seventy years of peaceful crops, relations we’d thought sturdy as straight rows of corn grown to glint-white tassel year after year, grains of wood polished into sturdy-fine furniture meant to last generations in neighbor’s homes, Grady’s barn a field over we helped raise back in ’58, filled rafter high with hay Tom and I helped Al and his sons cut evenings after strained muscles ached from our own long day in the field. But then Charley Grady got killed early on in the war down in Virginia; barn and hay were soon forgotten. Wounded pride rose up next, stood in youthful self-confidence by mother’s loom one morning when hens still slept heads wing-tucked, after Lincoln issued the draft we’d all dreaded, and the anguish of cowardice became greater than Christ’s call to love one’s enemy.

Mother, I’ve decided not to wait for the draft. I’m going to join.

Her hands, deft hard leathered tools of mean labor, never faltered on the wheel, blue threads emerging to become much needed clothes for the kids come winter. Her voice, soft and heeding of still pale light rising to form halos on peaked shocks beyond the barn, shimmery dust trails falling at her feet from open windows, rings clear as dulcimer hammered keys in my ears now as it did then:

People will always find reasons to despise and kill one another in the name of justice, honor, duty, Isaac. You know your heritage well. ‘They that live by the sword will perish with the sword.’ Ask yourself, for whom or what am I willing to die?

Hard-hearted determination could not prevent me from seeking her blessinged approval.

I’ll go for you and pop. So they won’t try to burn down the barn again, or steal more sheep. So they’ll know we aren’t cowards, dissenters, wanting peace as much as they do.

Her last response became a flash of moon on gun barrel, the opposite bank suddenly appearing spiked with bayonets, shadows in butternut uniforms; I awoke from home-dreams to clutch my Springfield, throttled breath of some frightened bird clutched by prey heaved from my nostrils. The night had begun to whisper amongst itself, cautious communion of grass and sky under minute white lights, flickered flight against palpable close blackness. Low voices floating on water touched my ear, harsh hisses, slurred rude English that could only be the enemy. I raised my gun, not knowing if there was one or ten on the bluffs opposite. Sudden laughter, quick and easy rang out, causing me to drop my gun with muted thud. “For a minute there I thought we done spotted a blue-belly in the grass,” came a voice thick with relief, amusement. “I don’t know about you Gabe, but I’ve seen all the bluebellies I can handle for one day!” Two men proceeded to converse in unhushed voices, and I marveled at their indiscretion. They were moving closer to the water, closer to me and what I knew surely to be our picket line. Was this a ploy, some clever gaffe meant to charm, disarm? “Rebs and Yankies chum, exchange cigars after battle,” the headlines might say, though how some smarmy newspaperman would find such a story escaped me at present. If I don’t shoot I put myself and my men in danger; if I shoot I am little better than a murderer.

No.

An avenger of my brother, of Charles Grady, predestined by moonglint, Isaac Detwiler, Conscientious Objector of injustice. Light hair shining sighted through gun barrel trembled again above fierce conscience warring justice;

Don’t kill in my name, Isaac; live in it...

The pained expression on my mother’s face that last day looked back at me from tree, water, sky, but next thing I knew she wore Tom’s crooked smile and it was his voice I heard, boyish, laughing, carefree.

You were always the best shot in Franklin County!

The sudden sharp bark of a Rifle stopped minute white lights of grasses, sky, tore a piece of the night, laid its bloody sacrifice by the riverbank, colorless uniform so still, death might be mistaken for the tired sojourner merely at wearied repose—till dawn’s just sun rose to discover its own shame.

Above white tasseled Franklin county corn, red-brick farmhouse, raptors circle hazed fields at noon, shadows over whistle-chirp birds-in-song. In the kitchen skeins of blue thread lie in still hands. It is time to let the dinner-bell call the boys home, but the fields are empty.

Copyright © 2007 by Charity Gingerich Share

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