Chapter 2
His ears rang, a constant dissonance that vibrated through his entire body. Ben didn’t want to open his eyes. The world was too painful, and he didn’t want to be in it anymore. How could he be, after what’d happened? Nevertheless, his eyes slid open and showed him a pale blue sky.
He had the vague notion that it might’ve been beautiful once. Perhaps it still was, to someone, but Ben didn’t want to see it. He didn’t want anything other than for his pain to go away.
It billowed through his body like a sheet on the laundry line on a windy day, rising within him with even the tiniest movement. Any time it subsided, it came right back again as he tried to take in his surroundings. Blood. Corn. Dirt that was too dark, soaked with more blood.
The empty eyes of the man he’d killed.
He lay next to Ben, the skin of his throat shredded, and the front of his uniform covered in the aftermath. His mouth was open in surprise. The eyes that had looked at Ben with such fiendish glee when the man was about to kill him were lifeless and sightless. A fly crawled over one of them.
Alarmed, Ben tried to scoot away from the dead body. He cried out as his guts tangled inside him. Why hadn’t he died already? Why hadn’t the world let go of him?
The sounds of battle had retreated into the distance. The cannons were a distant rumble, no more ominous than a receding thunderstorm. The guns were closer, but not nearly as frequent. The steady scatter of bullets had turned into an occasional rapport.
There were screams, too, and this time, they weren’t coming from Ben.
He craned his head around. It still hurt, but not as badly as the rest of his body. Ben discovered that he and the Union soldier who’d tried to kill him weren’t the only ones on the farm road. Several other bodies littered the narrow track.
A short distance away, a man dressed in Union blue writhed and cried out. He tried to scoot backwards, toward where Ben was lying, but half of his leg was missing. It’d been roughly bandaged in thick fabric that oozed blood as he tried to move, leaving a trail behind him.
At first, Ben thought he was terrified because of his wound. It took him a moment to realize what the man was actually afraid of.
A small group in Confederate gray approached, visible as they came around a bend in the road. They walked casually with their rifles over their shoulders, looking around and taking in the scenery. They weren’t soldiers who were actively fighting. They were cleaning up and taking inventory.
The group paused and bent over a still figure that lay across their path. The man in front, who had a broad chest and flaming red hair, pointed back the way they’d come. One of the other men grabbed the still figure by the feet and dragged him away.
The red-headed man gestured in disgust as they approached the screaming Union soldier with the missing leg. “Fitz, could you please put a stop to that racket?”
Fitz, a slim young soldier, stepped forward. He whipped his revolver out of its holster and fired it once, square between the Union man’s eyes.
Ben understood exactly why he was still hearing smatterings of gunfire. Those who weren’t well enough to be captured and shipped off to a prison camp were being taken care of in other ways.
As they approached, Ben felt that his time was finally coming. He was too far gone, and the redheaded man—a captain, he guessed—would have him put out of his misery. Ben watched their booted feet approach and waited for Fitz to aim his gun at his forehead.
You can do so much more, Ben.
No I can’t, Sister Matthews. I tried, but I can’t. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
“Well, well, well.” The captain looked from Ben to the Union soldier who’d tried to kill him and back again. “You’re just a young pup, aren’t you? But it looks like you managed to take one down.”
He nudged the fallen Union soldier with the toe of his boot. “Aimes, drag this ugly thing away, would you please?”
The Union soldier was grabbed by the ankles and dragged away. His empty eyes continued to stare at Ben for several yards until his head bounced on a rock and flopped the other direction.
“You’re a brave young man,” the captain said. He lifted Ben’s hand from where it rested on his abdomen and whistled. “Bayonet, eh?”
“Ah! Please!” Ben begged. The blood had begun to crust between his clothes and his hand, and separating the two was as painful as if the captain had stabbed him once again. “Make it fast!”
“Oh, sure,” the captain said casually. “As fast as we can, right to the medical tent to see if they can patch you up.”
“I’m not…I’m not going to die?” Ben gasped as tears leaked from the corners of his eyes. Wouldn’t dying be far easier? Wouldn’t that be better than wasting away in the medical tents amongst the stink of rotting flesh?
“Well, that’s up to the docs.” The captain chuckled. “You might not be running messages anymore, but I wouldn’t worry about it. We’re doing just fine, and we’ll have this war won before you know it.”
The captain gestured at two of the men who remained with him. “Fetch a stretcher. You,” he said, pointing to another, “stay here with him while I check out the rest of what we’ve got. The damn Yanks got awful close to our command this time.”
“Yessir.” A scrawny boy in a uniform two sizes too big squatted down next to Ben. He leaned forward and peered into Ben’s eyes. “I’m Elliot. Where you from?”
Ben rolled his head to the side. He was so tired. How far had he traveled?
He thought about home, or at least the only home he’d ever known.
The bloody corn around him was replaced with the high rocky ridges he knew so well.
The pale blue sky overhead was endless, and nestled among the pines was a small, run-down church with another building attached to it.
The wooden siding was as familiar to him as his own hands, as indeed he’d painted and repaired it with his own hands many times.
“Hey.” Elliot poked his shoulder. “I asked where you’re from.”
“Tired,” Ben grunted.
“The captain says men like you gotta keep talkin’. He’s got an idea that he doesn’t want too many of our men dyin’. Makes us look bad or somethin’, although I don’t think it’ll matter once the war is over and we’ve won. So anyway, where are you from?” Elliot asked again.
“Arizona,” Ben murmured, hoping it would get the kid to shut up. Elliot reminded Ben of someone he’d known before, back there in those alpine hills, but his brain refused to come up with any names. All of his blood had leached out onto the cornfield and left him in a fog.
“Arizona Territory, huh? Never been there. So you’re a courier, I guess?” Elliot tapped the pouch on Ben’s belt.
His mission came rushing back to him, turning his mind away from his pain for one blissful moment. “The trap. The Yanks. Did they get us?”
Elliot’s narrow face hovered over Ben’s, a flap of his dark hair hanging over his brow. “Huh? Oh, you mean when the reinforcements came? Naw, they couldn’t beat us! One of our scouts saw them comin’ from miles away.”
Ben felt his body sinking down into the earth. He hadn’t delivered his message, but neither had the troops died because of his failure. “Good,” he breathed.
“Those Yanks think they know everythin’, but they don’t know the land like we do. They’re not really fighters, either. We won this battle, and the captain says we’ll win the next.”
“Mmm.” Ben wasn’t sure anymore what the battle had been about or even why they were fighting a war. The men lined up in their grays or blues and killed each other, and what did it mean?
“Killed myself a bunch of Yanks,” Elliot went on, dragging Ben back from the darkness that hovered in the corners of his vision. “When I first signed up, I thought I might feel bad about it. I’ve heard men talk like that, sayin’ they were killin’ their brothers and such.”
The ground vibrated beneath Ben. It startled him for a moment, making him take a gasping inward breath that pierced his guts all over again. How long could this keep hurting before his body just gave up and died?
“But none of them are my brothers, and it actually felt pretty good. I was accomplishin’ somethin’, doing my part for the war. Now, if you run into anyone who knows me back in Nebraska, you can’t tell ‘em I was talkin’ like that. Got a reputation to keep, you know?”
Ben wondered if he still had his right leg. He couldn’t feel it. He thought about the man who’d been finished off and dragged away. How long ago was that? How long had he been lying in the field?
“How about you? You kill any Yanks?” Elliot pressed.
“No.” Talking was so hard. His tongue was too heavy, and even his teeth seemed too thick.
Wait. He was wrong. Ben relived the violent detonation of his revolver. He hadn’t meant to kill anybody, but he’d never had anyone try to kill him. “Just one.”
“Well, they’ll get you fixed up and back out in the field. Then you call kill as many of ‘em as you want. Take revenge and all that. They deserve it for what they did to you. What did they do to you?” Elliot moved the bloody fabric of Ben’s shirt, trying to get a look at the wound.
“Agh!” Ben cried out in agony.
“Damn. All right. We’ll just let the docs see it. And maybe there’ll be some pretty nurses for you to look at when you get better.” Elliot grinned, and then his head whipped to the right. “Here they come.”
Elliot scooted out of the way as a piece of canvas suspended between two boards was laid next to Ben, right where the dead Union soldier had been a short time ago. The cloth was stained with blood and smeared with dirt. The men grabbed his shoulders and ankles and lifted.
Ben screamed. This time, he knew it came from his own throat. They were ripping him in half as they laid him on the stretcher and lifted it into the air, the tired fabric sagging under the weight of his body. His insides were spilling out onto the ground, fertilizing the soil for next year’s corn.
“They need to get this one some of the good medicine,” one of the men murmured as Ben caught his breath and built it up for another scream.
Elliot was unbothered by the noise as he walked along beside the stretcher.
“The captain says we have the best docs in the Confederate army. The food in the medical tents is shit, though. You’d think they’d at least give you something decent if you’re wounded, but I think it’s a test. If you can survive the food, you might live. ”
As Ben writhed and screamed his way to the medical tents, he wasn’t sure he wanted to live at all.