A gift for my visitors...

Come into my garden, young man, where the breeze blows through the wisteria and scents the air with sweetness.  It's quiet here, and I'll find you a restful spot where there is nothing more bothersome than the flutter of butterfly wings or the soft buzz of a bee gathering his nectar.

 * * *

 The silence was loud, thrumming through my head like a drum roll. I had started this venture thinking that war was a noble undertaking, that there was something heroic in facing the enemy and preserving the sanctity of the Confederacy.

But war, I learned, wasn't noble.  War was shin-high mud, or sweat trickling down your chest, threatening to stain the miniature portrait of Mary Kate I kept beneath my gray tunic and over my heart. It dripped off my brow and into my eyes, mixing with the tears that men don't shed. 

I reckoned that war was silence, an overpowering, palpable quiet, where the softly offered prayers of the Charlottesville man behind me and the sobs of the smooth-skinned lad from Roanoke on my left mixed with the ragged breathing of the Richmond fellow to my right.  A kind of smothering silence, as oppressive as the July heat that made us itch or grow dizzy and faint from hunger.

I have nothing against silence: I'm not some city boy that needs the clatter of hooves on the cobblestones or the singin' of field hands to be comfortable.  I've hunted with my daddy and brothers in woods so quiet you could hear the deer snort a quarter mile away.

This was different.  It wasn't a companionable silence. 

But I waited — we all waited — for the General's arm to slice downward through the air, the signal to attack, the signal to shake the earth with our thundering feet.

The signal came. 

And the pulse of Pickett's men started throbbing on Seminary Ridge, marching east.

* * *

    You are a luscious young man.  Even worn and disheartened and tired as you may be, you are gentle on my eyes.  There is a corner in my garden so beautiful, so lushly verdant and full of life that it will soothe away your anguish, your fears.  It is a gift I wish to share with you, this erasing the sadness from your eyes and replacing the sorrow in your heart with peace.

* * *

The Union guns began almost immediately.  Our boys on the front line crumpled, one by one, like rag dolls no longer wanted, their cries of anguish creating a kind of symphony, the report of those big old Yankee guns the snare drums.

 I thought about Mary Kate to keep from running scared, to stop the panic seizing my head -- how tiny her gloved hand was when she'd waved goodbye to me, how tiny her waist in the pink dress, how soft her lips were against mine. 

I wondered whether I could muscle through the ranks behind me, swimming downstream against the gray tide, back to Seminary Ridge, clear through Maryland, then across the western Virginia mountains and south to the Shenandoah.  To Mary Kate.

Would she still want me if I came to her a deserter?  Without my honor?

Billy Dupree had talked about just that last night.  With his feet full of rot and his boots wore most all the way through, he'd sat there rubbing and wondering if he had enough foot left to get him back to Richmond.  Then he said something that rankled me at first.  Something I didn't much want to hear.

"Johnny," he said, firelight flickering off his face and making it look even more skeletal than it already was, "we're going to lose this here war, ain't we?"

"Naw," I said.  "Course not.  Why would you ask such a thing?"

"Cause I been thinking on it a great deal, I thought about it when Robert was crying in his sleep last night as if he know'd it, too.  We going to lose cause we ain't right."

I put down the knife I'd been paring my nails with and stared at him.  Maybe the boy had been at war too long.  Maybe all the marching and dying had tainted his brain. 

"How can you say we're not on the right side, Billy?  How can you say such a thing?"

"The C.S.A. owns us, Johnny, just like some own the nigras.  The Army tells us when to sleep, when we can eat and if we can eat.  If we run off, they'll shoot us.   We don't do nothing unless we're told to or have permission to.  The only difference I can see is that we're only owned while we're at war.  Someday we'll be free again."

He looked up at me then and I never did see such a sorrowful face on a twenty-year-old. 

"I hate it, Johnny," he said. "I hate it so damned much that if I thought I was going to be owned for the rest of my life, I wouldn't wait for them blue devils to kill me -- I'd end it right now."

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing at all.  But damn that Billy.  I lay awake most of the night thinking about what he'd said. 

And agreeing with it.

* * *

    I can smooth the furrows from your brow, young man, and quiet the torment in your heart.  No more miles to march, no more prisoners to take, no more fallen comrades whose tears you must dry and hands you must hold while the life seeps from them into the round.  Come into my garden. Accept my hospitality. Enjoy all I wish to give.

* * *

We crossed the Emmitsburg Road, regrouped, and headed toward Little Round Top.  We got maybe four-hundred yards or so before the boys in blue started firing their canister. 

And then we were within rifle distance.

General Pickett led us to the left while Pettigrew and his boys went right, then we turned northeast to link back up with Pettigrew. 

I didn't think I could go on much farther: My lungs were burning; my legs were on fire; blood trickled over my forehead where a whizzing bullet had permanently parted my hair.  But the boys behind just kept pushing me on, so all I had to do was keep my footing and not get trampled by my own.

We'd only gotten maybe a few yards up the slope when I heard a familiar yelp.  Eyes right.

Time stood still. 

Even with the shoving and pushing forward, the smoke so thick it clogged up your nostrils and you swallowed it along with the bile that flooded your mouth, I saw. Even knowing in one part of my brain that the war went on around me, the part of my brain that turned eyes right and saw Billy Dupree without a face I could hang a memory on, made the rest of it go away.

Oh, I heard the shelling.  I heard the cries of the wounded and the bodies going down and the guns firing and the sound of bullets ripping through flesh. 

But it was all echo-like, as if it were coming from the other side of Little Round Top maybe, or down in a holler.

It wasn't here.

It wasn't now.

Only Billy was here and now.  Billy whose hands flew up in the air as if he was asking God to give him a hand up, pull him the hell out of there. 

Only Billy, poor faceless Billy, who didn't like being owned and who'd slept next to me last night whimpering his sympathy for the nigras who didn't like being owned, either.

Billy, whose hands dropped to his side when God didn't give him the hand up, whose body sort of folded in on itself and who slid down, covered by more gray jackets and black boots still fighting and clawing their way up that hill as if their lives depended on it.

They did.

I turned around then, turned into the stink that is war, turned into a blue jacket with frightened blue eyes, somebody's son, somebody's sweetheart, who had his own Mary Kate maybe sopping up the sweat beneath that damned blue coat. 

"I don't like being owned, either, brother!" I cried even as my bayonet slid through muscle, hit bone, the blue eyes widening as my own must've been when his knife pierced my chest. 

His blue and my gray wools tangled while we swallowed dirt and smoke and waited for someone to make sense of the whole damned war.

* * *

I'm so glad you've accepted my invitation, my beautiful young man.  Come.  I've a wonderful place for you to rest. There is a timelessness about my garden, where day melds with night and summer with winter, where all of the sharp edges of the world have been smoothed away to softness. There are footpaths for those who wish to wander and benches for those who wish to sit.  There are huge, gnarled trees to blot out the blistering sun and a black wrought iron gate to mark the sanctity of my garden's perimeter. 

The war will touch you no longer. Come, my dear delicious young man.  Come and rest yourself amidst the oaks and spruce. You may loosen your collar and lay yourself down to rest. It is your only obligation.  That and to feed my garden with your flesh. 

Rest well in the company of your comrades, my lovely young man. 

Rest well.