Bradford considered. He didn't particularly need anything, but if he said no the Rebs might use it as an excuse to torment him later by refusing to pause. He nodded. “All right. You'll have to let me loose.”
The trooper with the pipe untied him. After Bradford dismounted, he stood by the horse for a moment, opening and closing his hands to work more feeling into them. Then he started for the woods. Jack Jenkins and four other Rebs, one a lieutenant, came with him. “Don't want you wandering off, now, the way you did at Fort Pillow,” Jenkins said.
“I wasn't going anywhere,” Bradford said, as he had early that morning. His lips were suddenly stiff with fear. That was the sentry he'd tricked, and the man knew him for who he was. “Please,” he whispered. “I wasn't.”
“Well, you damn well won't.” The Reb gestured with his rifle musket. “Go on.”
Terror making his legs light, his knees almost unstrung, Bradford went. The Rebs urged him deeper into the woods, so that trees hid the path down which they'd been riding. “Let me… do what I need to do,” he said at last, when they'd gone about fifty yards.
A little to his surprise, they did, spreading out to all sides around the oak he chose so he couldn't get away no matter how much he wanted to-and he did, with all his heart and with all his soul and with all his might. At last, after what seemed a very long time, he finished. He did up his trousers and stepped away from the tree.
“Look!” Jenkins said loudly. “Son of a bitch is getting away!” He swung up his rifle musket. So did the other Confederate soldiers.
“No!” Bradford cried. He fell to his knees. “Treat me as a prisoner of war, please! I fought you as a man, and-”
The guns spoke in a stuttering roar. Hot lead slammed into him from three directions at once. He slumped over. The ground came up and hit him one more blow in the face. He tried to get up, but only his left arm seemed to want to do anything his brain told it to, and it wasn't enough, not by itself.
Corporal Jenkins strolled up and stood over him and slowly and deliberately reloaded. “You shit-eating bastard, you got by me once, but I'm damned if you'll do it twice,” he said, and aimed the rifle musket again.
“No,” Bradford moaned through blood in his mouth, through nerves telegraphing torment, though darkness swelling before his eyes.
And the rifle musket boomed once more, and the darkness rose up and swallowed everything. Through the rising flood, he heard a laugh and the words, “Shot trying to escape,” and then it overflowed, and he never heard or saw anything again.
Illinois. The land of liberty. Abe Lincoln's very own state. A free state. A state where owning a nigger was against the law. Ben Robinson knew there were places like that, but he'd never imagined he would come to one. It was an awful lot like getting to heaven, and nearly made getting shot worthwhile.
Nearly.
He lay on an iron-framed military cot in Ward N of the Mound City general hospital. A big sign said it was Ward N. People talked about it a dozen times a day. Now he knew what an N looked like. Benjamin Robinson. He had four of them in his name. It wasn't much of a start for learning his letters, but a start it was.
Colored soldiers from Fort Pillow, a couple of dozen of them, crowded the ward. Charlie Key was here, and Sandy Cole, and Aaron Fentis, too. They'd all survived their wounds, same as Ben had. Dr. Stewart Gordon, the white surgeon who ran the ward, said they were all likely to get better. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and to know what he was doing, too. Only one man had died since the Silver Cloud and the Platte Valley brought them up here, and poor Bob Hall had been in a bad way: a Reb had hacked up his head and his hand with a saber while he lay sick down at Fort Pillow. Another soldier, Tom Adison, had lost an eye and a chunk of his nose to a Mini? ball. He wasn't in good shape; Dr. Gordon looked worried every time he examined him. The rest were going to make it.
Every time Dr. Gordon changed his dressing, Ben stared at his own wound. Every time, he liked what he saw. Oh, yes, he would have liked not getting shot in the first place ever so much better. But the edges of the gouge in his thigh were healing together. The wound wasn't festering. It didn't have pus dripping from it. It didn't stink. It was-he was-getting better.
One morning-Ben thought it was ten days after the fight at Fort Pillow, but he might have been off one either way-the surgeon came into Ward N earlier than usual. “I want you to listen to me, boys,” he said. “Something's up.”
He was younger than a lot of the colored soldiers he was talking to. But he'd treated every last one of them, and was plainly doing the best he could with them. Ben traded glances with Sandy Cole and Charlie Key, but he was inclined to give the surgeon the benefit of the doubt.
“Something's up,” Gordon repeated. “We're going to have men from the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War visit you today: Senator Wade and Congressman Gooch.”
Even a colored artilleryman who'd been a soldier for only a little while knew about the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. When something went wrong with the Union war effort, the members of the committee swooped down like eagles-some said like vultures to pin the blame on whoever deserved it (or whoever they thought deserved it). They could blight an officer's career. They could, and they had, and by all accounts they liked doing it.
“Do Jesus! Us niggers gonna be in trouble for losing the fight?” Robinson asked in more than a little alarm.
But the surgeon shook his head. “No, no, no. So help me, no. As far as they're concerned, you're heroes for fighting as well as you did. No, what they're after is making Bedford Forrest out to be a monster on account of the massacre. They aim to use it to fire up people in the North to fight the Rebs harder.”
“I got you,” Ben said, but he couldn't help adding, “If you was ever a slave, you already got all the reason you need to fight them Confederate bastards hard as you can.”
“There are no slaves up here,” Dr. Gordon reminded him. “A lot of people up here have never set eyes on a colored man, let alone owned one. The men from the committee want to remind them what the war is all about. There's an election coming up, you know. If Honest Abe doesn't go back to the White House, the Democrats will give the damn Rebs whatever they want.”
“Do Jesus!” Ben said again. He'd imagined the Federals beaten. He knew the Confederates fought hard. But he'd never dreamt the United States might just give up the fight.
He felt better when he saw the members of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. Congressman Daniel Gooch was about forty, with a round face, reddish hair and beard, and worried eyes behind small, oval spectacle lenses. Senator Benjamin Wade was at least twenty years older, and quite a bit tougher. He combed his graying, thinning hair straight back. His eyes were narrow and shrewd, his mouth a disapproving slash across his clean-shaven face. He effortlessly dominated the proceedings.
“We are going to get to the bottom of the bad faith and treachery that seem to have become the settled policy of Forrest and his command,” Wade declared in a rasping voice that brooked no argument. “We must convince the authorities of our government of this fact. Even the most skeptical must believe that it is the intention of the Rebel authorities not to recognize the officers and men of our colored regiments as entitled to the treatment accorded by all civilized nations to prisoners of war. And at Fort Pillow the brutality and cruelty of the Rebels were most fearfully exhibited.”
A secretary took down his words as he spoke them. This man means it, Robinson realized. He'd always known the Rebs were in grim earnest. He'd sometimes doubted his own side was. Here, though, here stood a man with as much iron in his spine as even Nathan Bedford Forrest had.
Congressman Gooch started questioning the colored man closest to him, Elias Falls of Company A. Falls spoke of what he'd seen and heard during the fight. He said Bedford Forrest had ordered the firing stopped, and that a Secesh officer had threatened to arrest a soldier for shooting a Negro. The secretary wrote down his words just like Senator Wade's.
When Falls finished testifying-he didn't take long-Ben Wade spoke again: “That will be about enough of that. We are here to show the people of the United States what monsters the Rebels are. We are going to do that. If you men want to testify to anything else, do it before the Confederate Congress. Do you understand me?” After that, no one talked much about officers trying to stop the shooting.
Congressman Gooch asked most of the questions. Senator Wade chimed in now and again. They worked their way through the ward, coming closer and closer to the cot where Ben Robinson lay. At last, the secretary told him, “Raise your right hand.” When he did, the white man said, “Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth,
