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tly as if their wheels had been wrapped with flannel. He lay back against the trunk of the white oak and shut his eyes, more tired than he had ever been, convinced he could sleep through the Apocalypse. He could feel a puff of breeze on his cheek, smell water in a creek, hear his mother making breakfast in the boardinghouse kitchen at dawn's first light.
Then he heard a sound, like a series of doors slamming. He jerked his head up. Jim was standing above him, his lips moving, his consternation showing.
"What?" Willie said.
Jim's lips were moving silently, then audible words came from his mouth in mid-sentence.
"-got us some water. That fellow from the 6th Mis'sippi we were talking to last night, the one who looked like he got hit across the face with a frying pan, he toted a whole barrel up here strapped to his back," Jim said.
He squatted down with a tin cup and handed it to Willie.
"Where's yours?" Willie asked.
"I had plenty. Drink up," Jim said, his eyes sliding off Willie's face.
There was a black smear of gunpowder on the cup's rim where Jim had drunk, but the water level in the cup was down only an inch. Willie drank two swallows, a little more than half the remaining water, and returned the cup to Jim.
"Finish it up, you ole beanpole, and don't be lying to your pal again," Willie said.
Jim sat down against the tree bark.
"You hit any of them today?" he asked.
"I couldn't see through the smoke most of the time, you?" Willie replied.
"Maybe. I saw a fellow behind a rick fence go down. A ball hit him in the face," Jim said. He looked into space, his jaw flexing. "I was glad."
Willie turned and looked at Jim's profile, a gunpowder burn on his right cheek, the bitter cast in his eye.
"They're no different from us, Jim," he said.
"Yes, they are. They're down here. We didn't go up there."
A young lieutenant strolled through the enlisted men sitting on the ground. He wore a goatee that looked like corn silk, and a wide-brimmed cavalry officer's hat, with a gold cord strung around the crown, a bared sword carried casually on his shoulder. Blood had drained from inside his coat onto the leather flap of his pistol holster.
"Our cannoneers are about to start banging doors again, gentlemen. Then we're going to have another run at it," he said.
"We been out there eleven times, suh," a private on the ground said.
"Twelve's a charm. Stuff your fingers in your ears," the lieutenant said, just as over twenty cannons fired in sequence, almost point-blank, into the sunken road and the woods beyond.
Then the cannon crews began to fire at will, the barrels and gun carriages lurching off the ground, the crews turning in a half-crouch from the explosion, their hands clamped over their ears. They swabbed out the barrels, then reloaded with more caseshot, canister, and grape. They snipped the fuses on explosive shells so they detonated as airbursts immediately on the other side of the sunken road. When they ran short of conventional ordnance, they loaded with lengths of chain, chopped-up horseshoes, chunks of angle iron and buckets of railroad spikes.
Through the smoke Willie and Jim could see bits of trees flying in the air, the staff of an American flag lopped in half, blue-clad men climbing out of their rifle pits, running for the rear, sometimes with a wounded comrade supported between them.
The barrage went on for thirty minutes. When it lifted, the sun looked like a broken egg yoke inside the smoke, the acrid smell of gunpowder so dense they could hardly breathe.
Willie and Jim advanced across the clearing with the others, once again the cry of the fox hunt rising hoarsely from their throats. They
crossed the sunken road and stepped over the Federal dead who lay there and entered a woods where trees were split in two, as though divided by lightning, the bark on the southern side of the trunks hanging in white strips.
The ground was littered with Springfield rifle muskets, boxes of percussion caps, ramrods, haversacks, canteens, torn cartridge papers, entrenching shovels, kepis, bloody bandages, bayonets, cloth that had been scissored away from wounds, boots and shoes, newspaper and magazine pages that men had used to clean themselves.
Inside the smoke and broken trees and the fallen leaves that were matted together with blood was the pervasive buzzing of bottle flies. In the distance, over the heads of the Confederates who were out in front of him, Willie saw a white flag being waved by a Union officer in front of a silenced battery.
The firing ended as it had started, but in inverse fashion, like a string of Chinese firecrackers that pops with murderous intensity, then simply exhausts itself.
Willie and Jim slumped against a stone fence that was speckled with lichen and damp and cool-smelling in the shade. Even the sunlight seemed filtered through green water. Jim's eyes were bloodshot, his face like that of a coal miner who has just emerged from a mine shaft, his teeth startling white when he grinned.
