Doc noticed that the sergeant was almost vibrating with rage. The two privates on either side looked like they had something stuck in their throats.
Shumaker, warming to his story, added, “So the Yankee says, ‘I kin beat that all holler. Hand me that rifle.’ So I does. And I start the count, and he’s right fast, dropping the butt, playing like he’s reaching for a ca’tridge. Then he whips out the ramrod and drops it clear down the barrel where it goes tink.”
Doc understood. It was regulation that guns were unloaded inside the Corinth works and around the tents.
“So he finishes the drill,” Shumaker continued. “And but for dropping the ramrod down the barrel, he’da beat me.”
“Then what happened, you damn idiot?” the sergeant demanded, his face blacker than a midsummer thunderstorm.
Shumaker shrugged nervously. “That Yank, he done tossed me the rifle and declares, ‘See y’all in Richmond, Reb!’ And he takes off running like lickety-split!”
Doc took a breath, seeing it all in his mind.
“I whipped my rifle t’ my shoulder, took aim, and hollered, ‘Stop, Yank! Or I’ll shoot!’ And over his shoulder, he shouts back, ‘Give ’er hell, Reb! Ye ain’t loaded!’ So I takes out after, but he’s passed the rest of the camps, and he’s rabbit-gone inter the trees. And we search and cain’t none of us find hide ner hair of him.”
Doc nodded to himself. Glanced at the sergeant. “And what, exactly, does the colonel want me to determine here?”
“Well, Doc, my orders from the colonel, and I quote, were ‘Before I decide if I’m gonna shoot him, or have him diggin’ latrines for the next twenty years, take this moron to the regimental surgeon and see if he’s got so much as a single brain in his head!’”
Doc smiled, fighting a chuckle. “Well, Sergeant, tell the colonel, with my compliments, that given Private Shumaker’s apparent mental capacity, the Army of Mississippi might be best served if the private were given the opportunity to enlist in the Federal Army.”
19
March 13, 1862
The wagon stopped short as it hit the half-rotted log. The horses strained in their traces as they leaned into their collars. Muscles bunched in their hindquarters, the trace chains taught.
“Gee!” Sarah yelled, using her long-handled whip to touch the black’s offside flank. The horses leaned right, hooves shredding the leaf mat and twigs underfoot.
“Haw!” she cried and touched the brown’s onside flank. This time the team staggered left, pulling the wagon’s right front wheel over the decaying log where it lay almost buried in the leaf mat.
The wagon lurched up, dropped down, and rocked Sarah back and forth on the seat as she called, “Git up, there!” The horses gained enough momentum to bounce the back wheels over the log with a bump.
Sarah turned, keeping an eye on the corpses piled in the wagon bed as they bounced and flopped, but none shifted enough to be in danger of falling out—limp weight in their torn uniforms. Lifeless. Ruined. Decomposing, and leaking.
But for the stench, she could almost believe the bloated corpses were anything but dead men.
Men didn’t look like that. Or shouldn’t. Not blackened, swollen, and gurgling, eyes dried out and sunken into skulls. Men had lips that covered their teeth, not these gaping rictus grins that exposed blood-blackened and filth-stained teeth.
And the stench. It never let a person forget. Even through the layers of cloth she’d wound around her mouth and nose, even though she tried to parse her breathing to little sniffs, it was enough to leave her on the perpetual verge of throwing up.
She turned her attention back to guiding her wagon through the tangle of gun-shattered forest, and back to the path where it wound through the thick confusion of oak, maple, and hickory timber. Through trial and error, a circuitous path had been hacked out of the thick woods, signs of ax work visible where saplings and vines had been cut. Piles of branches and deadfall had been dragged off to the side. But wagons could reach most of the battlefield now.
“By God, Miss Hancock,” one of the privates behind her called, “that was a fine bit of driving!”
She looked back where the four Yankee privates stood among the trees, and waved. Then they were bending to lift the remains of a Confederate private. They’d carry his body to the dead pile and sling it on top. When all the Rebs in the area had been picked up, they’d be buried in a single trench close to where they’d fallen.
The Union dead got individual graves.
The horses knew the way now, following the trace as it wound around the tree trunks in Morgan’s Wood like a drunken snake. Here and there she could see bullet scars in the bark. One old oak had taken a direct hit and been blown into splinters. Dark patches on the fall-pale leaves marked bloody spots were men had died.
This was ground that Hébert’s Divison had fought over for most of a day before Davis’s Federals had finally driven them from the dense tangle of forest. It was literally crawling with soldiers now, their job to search the brush and forest litter for bodies, weapons, and abandoned equipment.
She broke out onto the Leetown Road where Captain Stengel waited with his clerk. He was dressed in his blue overcoat, gloves on his hands, and a black felt hat pulled low over
