Bull Run Page 5
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SHEM SUGGS
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We rode off after the Northerners and took prisoners by the hundred. Some said we should march upon Washington, but our troops were dead-weary and dog-hungry. Winning had left us nearly whipped ourselves. I looked over the field. Dead horses were scattered about everywhere. Worse than them were the ones that were wounded, charging about without any rider, blood running down out their nostrils. Some who’d been hit in one leg perched on the other three, patient as you please. Some gnawed at their wounds all afrenzy. Others were under the guns they’d been hauling, crushed to death or squealing like pigs. I saw one, alive and looking about, hitched to a team of five others, all dead. I hadn’t much stomach for celebrating. I ate some hardtack and emptied my canteen. Then I found a spade and began burying horses.
* * *
NATHANIEL EPP
* * *
The bands had been left in Centreville that morning. They gave us a grand serenade all day, practicing up for their march into Richmond. Then the troops began streaming back our way. I was baffled. I’d expected to trail them south, taking piles of pictures of soldiers standing on captured flags and such. It was plain that these men had no desire to stop and sit for their portraits. They swept through as if the Devil were reaching for ’em. Those in the bands picked up the panic, threw down their instruments without a care, and jumped onto the backs of the teamsters’ horses. I thought upon the matter a moment, then took a stroll, sat under a tree, and dined on some turkey and wine left behind by the society folks. I’d no cause to flee. The Rebels who were coming would be anxious to have their pictures made.
* * *
DR. WILLIAM RYE
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There were moments when my mind turned away from my work and imagined the rejoicing in Richmond. I saw the men packing the bar of the Spotswood Hotel, heard the crowds singing in the streets. Then my eyes returned to the crowd around me, sprawled on the ground, bloody, groaning, fanning the clouds of flies from their wounds or unconscious and unaware of their presence. We soon ran out of chloroform and whiskey and had to hold the men down while operating. We probed and sawed and stitched without stop and were soon as blood-covered as they were. A small mountain of amputated limbs grew up between our two tables, the feet often still bearing shoes. A few of the hands wore gloves. The sights and the stench were overpowering. A detachment of cavalry passing the scene bent over their pommels and retched, to a man. A victory? Indeed it was, for Death upon his pale horse.
* * *
GIDEON ADAMS
* * *
We plodded past abandoned artillery, ammunition boxes, knapsacks beyond number, past mounds of flour and sugar and pork spilling out of broken barrels, cast out of wagons to make room for men. One private in my company loudly claimed that every army that had launched an attack on the Sabbath had been defeated. “The finger of the Almighty is in it!” he declared. The man beside me seemed in high spirits and clapped me on the shoulder. “Well, Able, we’ll be back in Ohio in a week,” he said. His good cheer repelled me. I’d never become accustomed to my new name. But I determined that moment that I’d continue to use it, that I’d join a three-year regiment, and that I wouldn’t return to Ohio until the Rebels had been beaten. This vow quickened my step, putting the dismal defeat farther behind me. I itched for the next battle to begin.
* * *
TOBY BOYCE
* * *
By the time I got there, the fighting was done with. That griped me. Then I spied a knife, the long sort the soldiers called Arkansas toothpicks. I snatched it up. I had me a souvenir to show off at home and felt better. I kept on, wondering what else I might find. I came on a dead man, half a biscuit in his hand and the other half clamped in his teeth. I turned away. A voice asked for water. I hadn’t any and scurried on. I finally came to Bull Run. Loads of Union men, shot or drowned trying to cross, lay all about. Then a voice said “Boy.” I turned and saw a man who’d no body to speak of below his waist. “Shoot me,” he said. He pointed to his rifle. My stomach emptied. He was a Yank. How I’d longed back home to kill one. Here I finally had my chance. But instead I ran, dodging dead bodies, ran back through the Southern men, past the wagons, past the doctors, and kept on running toward Georgia and Grandpap.
* * *
EDMUND UPWING
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Rain came on during the night. It soaked the men, turned the roads to muck, and added more misery to the retreat. It was past midnight when we reached Washington. All that night and the following day the soldiers trudged across the Long Bridge, sodden, sullen, the very picture of defeat. They dropped asleep on sidewalks and porches. Kindhearted women made vats of soup, set them by the street, and fed the famished lads. Staggering along through the rain, they looked a parade of ghosts. ’Tis a fact. My eyes shall never forget it. Nor my ears. How my passengers railed against the soldiers! And their know-nothing officers, and the profiteers, and the press, and the generals, and the President. I learned later that week that Jeff Davis and Beauregard were pulled to pieces the same way for not pressing on toward Washington. A few days after the battle, Lincoln sent McDowell packing. This raised spirits some, but not everyone’s. I heard that Horace Greeley himself, the most powerful editor in the land—who’d first told Lincoln to let the South secede, then insisted that Richmond be taken—now had sent Lincoln a letter stating that the Rebels couldn’t be beaten! The winds blew fickle about the President, but he had his feet on the ground. I’m proud to say he ignored the letter.
* * *
FLORA WHEELWORTH
* * *
The first wagonload of wounded arrived that afternoon. By night, every bed and settee and most of the floor was occupied by wounded soldiers. The other houses nearby were the same. The three servants and I did all we could, cleaning the men and their ghastly wounds, changing dressings, feeding, giving comfort. I was told that my eldest daughter’s husband had been wounded, and I gave the men the same care that I prayed he was receiving. Several were Yankees. We attended them with no less solicitude. They were all simply men, all in grave need. When they died, as so many did, they seemed changed from men back into infants, their bodies relaxing just like a babe’s settling into its slumber. We saved locks of hair to send to their families, and the shirts the men had worn as well, which we labored to cleanse of blood. If I slept an hour or more straight through at night, I considered myself blessed. The rooms stirred endlessly with voices. One man asked for “Clarissa” without cease. Others moaned constantly for water. An officer called out, “Open the door to the King of Glory” and died the next instant. One Union man, a German I believe, both legs shattered and shot through the neck, clutched a photograph of a woman and would not be parted from it, even in sleep. Perhaps it did have healing powers. He had both legs taken off by a doctor who came to us, and survived the ordeal.
* * *
LILY MALLOY
* * *
We hadn’t known there’d been a battle until a week after it was over. Everyone was greatly cast down by the news of the Union’s defeat. Some feared that the war might not end until Christmas. The following week Father brought home a letter informing us that Patrick had been killed in the course of the battle. It was from his captain. It said he’d fought bravely, had been given a fine burial, and was mourned and missed by all who’d known him. Mother wailed. Father looked almost smug, as if Patrick had been punished, as promised. I felt turned to granite by the news, then dashed outside toward the wheat field. I ran without thinking, for miles it seemed, then fell down, hidden by the long wheat, and cried until my ribs ached. I tried to picture his dying, his body, his face, his grave, but couldn’t. He’d been killed on a Sunday. I tried to recall it. We’d gone to church, then come home and studied our Bibles in silence, as always. It seemed impossible that on a day so quiet there’d been a battle anywhere. I felt a great hatred for the stream called Bull Run. I thought back to walking through the wheat when it had been sh
orter, weeks before. How I yearned to be that girl again, back before Patrick had been killed! I begged for us both to be returned to that time, over and over again, until the sky began to darken. Then I climbed to my knees, then my feet, stood for a while, wobble-legged, and slowly headed back. I’d talked to Patrick in the fields that summer. I’d fancied he heard me, far as he was. He was now ever more distant still. I wondered whether he could hear me now. I spoke to him all the long walk home.
* * *
NOTE
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The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.
The speakers in this book, except for General McDowell, are fictional. The background, however, is factual, from whiskey hidden in watermelons to the details of the battle.
For those who wish to stage this work or perform it as readers’ theater, the following synopsis will make it easier to locate the various parts.
SOUTHERN CHARACTERS PAGE NUMBERS
Colonel Oliver Brattle 1, 41, 65, 86
Shem Suggs 5, 21, 53, 79, 92
Flora Wheelworth 9, 37, 56, 99
Toby Boyce 13, 29, 63, 83, 96
Virgil Peavey 17, 49, 70
Dr. William Rye 25, 68, 94
Judah Jenkins 33, 59, 76
Carlotta King 45, 74, 89
NORTHERN CHARACTERS PAGE NUMBERS
Lily Malloy 3, 27, 101
Gideon Adams 7, 15, 39, 55, 75, 95
James Dacy 11, 31, 64, 84
Nathaniel Epp 19, 47, 93
Dietrich Herz 23, 61, 72, 90
General Irvin McDowell 35, 51, 81
A. B. Tilbury 43, 67, 77
Edmund Upwing 57, 69, 87, 97
Excerpt from Seedfolks
Kim
I stood before our family altar. It was dawn. No one else in the apartment was awake. I stared at my father’s photograph—his thin face stern, lips latched tight, his eyes peering permanently to the right. I was nine years old and still hoped that perhaps his eyes might move. Might notice me.
The candles and the incense sticks, lit the day before to mark his death anniversary, had burned out. The rice and meat offered him were gone. After the evening feast, past midnight, I’d been wakened by my mother’s crying. My oldest sister had joined in. My own tears had then come as well, but for a different reason.
I turned from the altar, tiptoed to the kitchen, and quietly drew a spoon from a drawer. I filled my lunch thermos with water and reached into our jar of dried lima beans. Then I walked outside to the street.
The sidewalk was completely empty. It was Sunday, early in April. An icy wind teetered trash cans and turned my cheeks to marble. In Vietnam we had no weather like that. Here in Cleveland people call it spring. I walked half a block, then crossed the street and reached the vacant lot.
I stood tall and scouted. No one was sleeping on the old couch in the middle. I’d never entered the lot before, or wanted to. I did so now, picking my way between tires and trash bags. I nearly stepped on two rats gnawing and froze. Then I told myself that I must show my bravery. I continued farther and chose a spot far from the sidewalk and hidden from view by a rusty refrigerator. I had to keep my project safe.
I took out my spoon and began to dig. The snow had melted, but the ground was hard. After much work, I finished one hole, then a second, then a third. I thought about how my mother and sisters remembered my father, how they knew his face from every angle and held in their fingers the feel of his hands. I had no such memories to cry over. I’d been born eight months after he’d died. Worse, he had no memories of me. When his spirit hovered over our altar, did it even know who I was?
I dug six holes. All his life in Vietnam my father had been a farmer. Here our apartment house had no yard. But in that vacant lot he would see me. He would watch my beans break ground and spread, and would notice with pleasure their pods growing plump. He would see my patience and my hard work. I would show him that I could raise plants, as he had. I would show him that I was his daughter.
My class had sprouted lima beans in paper cups the year before. I now placed a bean in each of the holes. I covered them up, pressing the soil down firmly with my fingertips. I opened my thermos and watered them all. And I vowed to myself that those beans would thrive.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PAUL FLEISCHMAN was born in Monterey, California, and grew up in Santa Monica in a family of gardeners. He attended the University of California at Berkeley and the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque, and now lives in Aromas, California. He is the author of many books for young readers that draw on his interest in music, history, theater, and multiple viewpoints—including JOYFUL NOISE: Poems for Two Voices, winner of the Newbery Medal, GRAVEN IMAGES, a Newbery Honor Book, and BULL RUN, winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.
You can visit Paul online at: www.paulfleischman.net
Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins authors.
ALSO BY PAUL FLEISCHMAN
Young Adult Novels
Breakout
Seek
Mind’s Eye
Whirligig
Seedfolks
A Fate Totally Worse Than Death
Bull Run
The Borning Room
Saturnalia
Picture Books
Sidewalk Circus
The Animal Hedge
Weslandia
Lost
Time Train
Poetry
Big Talk: Poems for Four Voices
Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices
I Am Phoenix: Poems for Two Voices
Middle Grade Fiction
The Half-A-Moon Inn
Non-Fiction
Cannibal in the Mirror
Dateline: Troy
COPYRIGHT
ISBN 0-590-47408-1
EPub Edition April 2013 ISBN 9780062009609
BULL RUN. Text copyright © 1993 by Paul Fleischman. Illustrations copyright © 1993 by David Frampton. Maps by Robert Romagnoli. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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