The sun was low on the western horizon now, the sky freckled with birds. Colonel Mouton rode his horse out onto the green slope in front of the ravine and waited for his regiment to move out of the trees and join him in the failing light. A hawk glided over the glade, its shadow racing behind it, and seemed to disappear into the redness of the sun.
Mouton spoke first in French, then in English, repeating the same statements three times in three different positions so all would hear his words.
"The 16th Louisiana and the Orleans Guards were supposed to be on our flanks, gentlemen. Unfortunately they have not arrived. That means we have to kick the Yankees off that hill by ourselves. You are brave and fine men and it is my great honor to serve with you. Our cause is just and God will not desert us. In that spirit I ask you to come with me up that hill and show the invaders of our homeland what true courage is."
"God bless and love every one of you."
Then he raised his saber in the air, turned his horse northward, and began the long walk up the slope into an enfiladed box where they would be outnumbered three to one and fired upon from the front and both flanks simultaneously.
As Willie marched up the slope with Jim, his heart thudding in his chest, he kept waiting for the crack of the first rifle shot, the one that would ignite the firestorm for which no soldier could ever adequately prepare himself. His own stink rose from his shirt, and there was a creaking sound inside his head, as though he were deep underwater, beyond all the physical laws of tolerance, and the pressure was about to rupture his eardrums.
The standard bearer was in front of him, the white stars and crossed blue bars on a red field rippling and popping in the wind, the standard bearer tripping over a rock, righting himself, his kepi falling to the ground, stepped on by the man behind him.
But it was not a rifle shot that began the battle. A cannon lurched and burst with flame against the darkness of the trees, and suddenly there was sound and light in the midst of the 18th Louisiana that was like the earth-rending force inside a hurricane, like a wind that could tear arms and legs out of sockets, rip heads from torsos, disembowel the viscera, blow the body lifelessly across the ground, all of it with such a grinding inevitability that one simply surrendered to it, as he might to a libidinous and heavy-handed lover.
Colonel Mouton's horse twisted its head sideways, walleyed, whinnying, then went down, its rib cage pocked with grapeshot. Mouton separated himself from the saddle and rose to his feet, shot in the face, and tried to pull a revolver from his holster. He fell to one knee, his left hand searching in the air for support, then toppled forward into the grass.
A piece of case shot spun through the air and embedded four inches into the upper thigh of the standard bearer. He sagged on the flagstaff, like an elderly man grown weary of an arduous climb, then pivoted and looked imploringly into Jim's face.
"They sight on the guidon! Don't take it!" Willie said.
But Jim shifted his rifle to his left hand and slipped the staff from the grasp of the wounded man. With almost superhuman strength he held the colors aloft in the sunset with one hand, his Enfield gripped in the other, stepping over the fallen, while minie balls made whirring sounds past his ears.
Willie heard the mortal wound before he saw it, a plopping sound, a minie fired from the woods that struck Jim's brow and blew out the back of his head.
He saw the battle flag tilt, then the cloth fall across his own face, blinding him. When he ripped it aside and flung it from his hand, Jim lay on his side in the grass, an unbriused buttercup an inch from his sightless eyes.
Suddenly he could no longer hear the roar of the guns or the air-bursts over his head. But inside his own mind he heard himself speak Jim's name.
Jim? Hey, you ole beanpole, get up. We've got fish to catch, dances to go to. This is all a lark, not worth our dying for.
The sound of the war came back, like a locomotive engine blowing apart. The ends of his fingers were wet with Jim's blood, his shirt splattered with Jim's brain matter.
In fifteen minutes two hundred and forty members of the 18th Louisiana, just short of half, were casualties. They retreated back down the slope, dragging their wounded with them, many of their weapons left on the field.
But Willie did not go with them. He picked up his Enfield and slipped Jim's bowie knife and scabbard from his belt, and ran in a crouch toward the sunset and the trees that bordered Owl Creek. A cannon shell screamed past his head, its breath like a hot scorch on his neck.
He splashed across the stream and went deep into the hardwoods, where round boulders protruded from the humus like the tops of toadstools. He paused long enough to thread the scabbard of the bowie knife onto his own belt, then he cut northward, running through the undergrowth and spiderwebs draped between the tree trunks, gaining elevation now, the sun only a burnt cinder between two hills.
He smelled tobacco smoke and saw two blue-clad pickets, puffing on cob pipes, perhaps sharing a joke, their kepis at a jaunty angle, their guns stacked against the trunk of a walnut tree. They turned when they heard his feet running, the smiles still on their faces. He shot one just below the heart, then inverted the Enfield, never breaking stride, and swung the barrel like a rounders bat, breaking the stock across the other man's face.
He pulled a.36 caliber navy revolver from the belt of the man he had shot and kept running, across the pebbled bottom of a creek and a stretch of damp, cinnamon-colored soil that was printed with the tracks of grouse and wild turkeys, past a dried-out oxbow where a grinding mill and waterwheel had rotted and started to cave into the streambed, through box elder and elm trees, right into the back of a huge, black-bearded Union private, who was urinating with his phallus held in both hands.
On the ground by his foot lay a dirty handkerchief spread with vest watches, marriage and Masonic rings, coins, a gold toothpick, cigars, tightly folded and compressed currency, a clay pipe, a condom made from an animal's bladder, even false teeth carved from whalebone.
The Union soldier almost lost his footing, then righted himself, as though on the deck of a ship, and pushed his phallus back inside his fly. His sleeves were rolled, and the hair on the backs of his arms was peppered with grains of dirt. He reached out casually for a Sharp's carbine that was hung by its strap from a branch just behind him.
"Lose your way home, Johnny?" he asked.
Willie cocked the pistol and fired a ball into the middle of his forehead, saw the man disappear momentarily inside the smoke, then heard the man's great deadweight strike the ground.
It was almost dark and lightning flickered inside the clouds that once again had sealed the sky. He wandered for what seemed hours and saw feral hogs snuffing and grunting among the dead, their snouts strung with lights. He heard the heavy, iron-rimmed wheels of caissons and gun carriages and ammunition and hospital wagons rumbling on the old Hamburg-Savannah Road. The wind changed, and he smelled water in a stagnant pond somewhere, and another odor with it that made him clear his mouth and spit.
After all the balls were gone from his revolver, he used the knife at least twice in the woods, clenching his hand on one man's throat while he drove the blade repeatedly into the heart cavity. Another he hit from behind, a whiskered signal corpsman with a terrible odor whom he ran upon and seized around the neck and stabbed and left either wounded or dying at the bottom of a rocky den overlooking the Tennessee River.
The clouds overhead were marbled with lightning that rippled across the entirety of the sky. Below the bluffs he could see dozens of paddle-wheelers on the river, their cabins and pilothouses dark, their decks packed with men. He heard gangplanks being lowered with ropes onto the bank, saw lanterns moving about in the trees and serpentine columns of men wending their way into a staging area where a hydrogen balloon rocked inside the net that moored it to the ground.