Waiting for Sunrise

“Moon droppin’ ‘hind the trees,” Eli said, trying to sound calm. The darkness hid the shaking of his hands. “Always get a chill just ‘fore the dawn. Wish I had some ‘bacco for my pipe.” He clutched the little clay pipe firmly, as if he was afraid it would get away. “You got any smoke, Henry?”

His companion did not reply, just sat cloaked in the dark of the foxhole. A light fog had formed and joined them in their dugout. The dampness slid round Eli’s neck and inside his wool blouse. The material was so threadbare that it offered little comfort from the cold. He pulled his kepi down tight on his head, his dirty hair hanging over his ears.

Eli thought back to the heat of the previous afternoon. “I was sweating and huffing like a locomotive as I tore across that field. We was baying like hounds, twern’t we? I tell you what, you get a mess of worked up fellas all chargin’ in the same direction and it’s a sight to sight. Glory, what a sight. If I live to be as old as Moses, I won’t ever forget that. No, sir. Glory what a sight. Wish my pa could have seen that. He’d a shut his stovepipe about him and Grant down in Mexico. Heck, that weren’t no fight compared to this one.”

Eli sat and listened. A stirring in the brush caused him to reach for his rifle. It was hard to discern how far the noise had traveled. For hours after sunset the woods and fields had been filled with moans and swears. It was like putting an ear to hell itself, he thought. But as the night had deepened and the stars crawled across the sky, the voices had stilled, with one exception. Every so often a low groan, a whisper of pain, could be heard from up the rise. For a time, Eli had prayed for the man to be healed from his wounds. Then he had prayed for the man to slip quietly from this earth. Listening to his suffering had turned from heartbreaking to maddening. “Go ahead and die,” he had begged the unknown soldier. Or maybe he was known. Eli had run through every mate he knew trying to match up the voice. But pain distorts a voice into something other than human. “Just hope it ain’t any of our boys, Henry. Better it be a grayback.”

“Yep, it twere a glory of a sight,” Eli whispered trying to drive away the fear that gripped him. “Battle flags a waving, sun splittin’ off the Colonel’s sword. Dang me if I didn’t think we was gonna sweep those goober-eaters back to the sea.”

Eli’s words might have hidden what he was feeling to Henry, but not to himself. As he reviewed the day, his clumsiness and cowardice crowded his thoughts. All morning long, as they had marched toward the battle, he had been nervous as a cat. Then, when they had been ordered to leave the safety of the stonewall and advance up that rise, well, the world had splintered around him. The man in front of him, Froelich, he thought, had fallen and Eli had stumbled over him like a three-legged cow. Dang near ran himself through with his own pig-sticker. Twice more he had fallen in the advance. Men had crashed into one another as if tossed about by waves. The reb Minni balls had swarmed around his head like wasps and stung those on both his left and right. After his last fall, he found he could not regain his footing. His legs seemed too leaden to bend, his body too heavy to raise. He sat among the fallen until the colonel came running by with his right arm hanging by his side. In that instant, Eli saw that the officer’s hand had been snipped off, most likely by a passing shell. With renewed vigor, Eli had lifted himself from the ground and joined in the retreat. He had no recollection of the succeeding moments other than fear. A pack of gray wolves had pursued them and snatched the weak up like field mice. Every direction he turned, the wolves were there. Finally, exhausted in a way he never had been before, he had fallen into the pit next to Henry. They huddled in the hole until the darkness rolled over them.

He lifted his head and looked to the east. The horizon was paling, and he could see hints of the carnage around him, but just hints. He still had no idea where he was or who else might be out there. He thought about singing out. Maybe some of their boys were sitting in a creek bed or trench just down by those trees. He stood up a bit and sucked in a breath but then held it in. If there was anyone out there, anyone who didn’t have a hole blown in him, it could just as soon be a reb. He hadn’t survived that run through Lucifer’s spit to be picked off by some sway-backed sniper.

He reached for his canteen and then remembered it had been empty for hours. His stomach gnawed like an animal within him. He had not eaten since the previous breakfast. His haversack with rations of hardtack, salt pork, and coffee had been lost sometime in the madness. He had held onto his rifle but lost his cartridge box. Strangest of all, he had unwittingly shed both brogans during his dash. His stockings had long since worn away and his bare feet fidgeted in the loose earth. When he had first been given those shoes, they had been revered as treasures. Now he knew he could replace them easily enough from the pile outside the surgeon’s tent. After a battle, there was always traps that could be scrounged.

“Henry, you think we gonna head back to Pennsylvania?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I sure did like it better there. Remember when we et at that Quaker farm? By jingo, that might be the best tasting slice o’ ham I ever did eat. And they filled our pockets with turnips. Ain’t met anyone that nice down here. I’d be alright if we spent the summer up north. Find an apple orchard with a soft piece of grass and sleep till kingdom come. Afore the war I loved nappin’ under a tree”

The soothing image forced down the fear and shame for a moment, so he held it like a sweet in his mouth. “Afore the war” was a demarcation of time, a wall that bifurcated his life. He had been an easy-going, some would say lazy, farmhand before. Now he was – he was a sleepwalking stranger, unable to enjoy any moment out of dread for what the next would hold.

They sat in silence. The first songbirds began their morning ritual from the nearby copse. Eli shook his head at the irony of it. How could such beauty come from a battlefield still stinking with the smell of gunpowder and blood? His mother would have explained it with a Bible verse or two. She explained everything with a Bible verse. When she had caught Eli kissing Emma Hurdth behind the church, Ma had tarred his hide with a passage from Proverbs about the foolish young man and the adulterous woman. Seemed she was stretching that cloth awful tight since Emma was only 15 at the time.

“Sun be poppin’ up any time now, Henry boy. Then we’ll see what’s what. Find our way back to our boys and get some grub. Oh, and the stories we will tell. We was caught in a hornet’s nest of graybacks, everyone one of them shootin’ at us, but we didn’t raise no white. Fought like farm dogs, we did. Saw the elephant and lived to tell about it. Wait till I tell Stammer ‘bout that. Drink us some hot coffee and smoke a pipe as we lay back under the trees.”

As the awning of sunlight extended above them, Eli saw movement at the tree line. He raised his rifle and pointed it, forgetting that it was empty. His heart pounded and his dry mouth felt like sand. Figures separated from the trees but in the dim light he still couldn’t be sure. It was long moments before a pair came close enough for him to spot the shape of their caps and the buttons on their blue blouses. Eli let out a long sigh before standing up.

“Over here,” he croaked. For hours he had waited for this moment but now his voice failed him. The pair of soldiers stopped dead and raised their rifles.

“Who is ye?” one of them barked.

“Eli, Elihu Sutton, Private.”

“Who ye with,” the speaker sighted his weapon as if about to fire.

“2nd Brigade of Birney's Division,” Eli responded with a waver in his voice.

“Who yer commander?”

“General Hays.”

“Not no more,” the speaker said lowering his rifle. “Got hisself dead yesterday. Don’t know who be tops today.” The two shuffled toward the foxhole. “Ye spend the night out here alone?”

“No,” said Eli, still trying to steady himself. “Got my pal Henry with me. Two of us held off a passle of them corncrakers.”

The two newcomers paused as they silently stared into the hole. The sun had just begun to crack the tree line and illuminated the rutted battlefield.

The second soldier, the older of the two, squatted down and peered closer at Henry and then Eli. “Son,” he said quietly, reverently, “your friend there be gone.”

Eli turned and looked at the body next to him. It was not Henry. Truth be told, it would have been impossible to tell who it was with most of his face removed, most likely by a load of grapeshot. What was identifiable was the tattered Confederate uniform the dead man wore.