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AURA LEE PART TWO 11/25/2009 1:35:51 PM
AURA LEE PRT TWO
The corporal, Barton “Mitch” Mitchell, was awake and had marched too far, too long, and had experienced and seen too much; he was tired and sick and wanted nothing more than to lay down and die. Twice during the past week, and once in the last fifteen minutes, he had seriously thought of suicide. Not surprisingly, this was often contemplated with depressing frequency by the rank and file on both sides.
"Mitch!" a skinny private called out.
The corporal turned his face into the fading sun, squinting against the slanted rays, letting his eyes reflect the shadows from a clump of low trees and wooden posts. He sat on the ground, sprawling with his legs wide apart, half leaning, half reclining against a thick tree by the meandering fence. His Springfield lay across his lap, but he wasn't sure if he'd loaded it—and he didn't care.
"Wha' you want?" he mumbled.
"You gonna sit here all day?" the private groused.
"Yeah. All night, too. Whadda you care?" His voice, coated with Maryland dust, was little more than a distorted whisper.
They knew this detachment of the 27th Indiana of the Army of the Potomac had marched from north of Washington into Frederick, and no one below the rank of colonel had a notion where they were going—or why. They wondered if even George McClellan knew, or if he did, had he shared his plan with anyone?
Twenty-four year old Cpl. Mitchell thought about this predicament for six seconds before he realized he didn’t give a good goddamn.
I don’t care where we been, I don’t care where we goin’, I jus’ wanna take this war and shove it up ol’ Abe Lincoln’s ass, an’ I don’t care if I shoot any more Rebs, an’ I don’t care of they shoot me or blow my head off with some f***in' cannon-shot. . .
All he had to do was stand up and prop the stock of his gun between his bare feet, cock the weapon and put a percussion cap in place. Just bite off the twisted paper end on the powder sack, spit it off to one side, pour the black grit into the barrel, select a Mini ball from his ammo pouch, and drop it hollow end first down the bore. Ram it in tight with the rod five times. Put the muzzle of the gun in his mouth and with his big toe reach in and lean downward on the trigger. Bang! Chances are he wouldn't even hear the gun go off. For certain, he would surely feel nothing. The Mini ball would rip through the roof of his mouth, shatter every fiber of his encephalon, and exit by disintegrating the top of his skull, leaving his head resembling a watermelon dropped from a high railroad trestle onto bedrock. It would be over in a millisecond. The war would be over. The killing and the mayhem would be over. He'd be done with it at last. A scant millisecond, then nothing.
The skinny private, a teenaged-beanpole named Eccles Heffner from Springport, just south of Muncie, stepped between the corporal and the sun and looked down with a genuine sense of compassion. “You sick in your belly? You got hookworm?”
“Yeah.”
“You eat somethin’ bad?”
The corporal shook his head. “Jus’ sick.”
“You got crud. Thass what you got.”
“Yeah.”
“Shiverin’ fits?”
“Yeah.”
“Pssshhitt. We all got that.”
“Yeah.”
Mitchell leaned his head back against the tree and looked at the sky. It was the same sky the people back in Bluffton, Indiana would see, if they looked up. He remembered as a boy stretching out in the field just past the woods near his parents’ farm and looking at the sky, watching the clouds and the birds, and wondering why only birds could fly. It didn’t matter now; he was certain he would never again see that field nor those woods nor those birds. Even the memory of his family was a faded black and brown photograph inside his head.
He looked around at the field where he now found himself. Undoubtedly, someone’s farm, but he saw no house; the only evidence of crops was interminable rows of brown and broken corn stalks, dwarfed sentries guarding what was once private land and might never be again. A flat field, a few trees, a long and sturdy fence beside a dusty, narrow road that went somewhere, but he had no idea where. The fact he was among several hundred men in a division comprised of several thousand meant nothing to him. For all intent, he was alone. It was, he was sure, what the beginning of death was like.
Something within arm’s reach caught his eye. A dark brown paper, a package less than a foot long, rolled into a cylinder and half hidden by curly, skewered grass. He leaned to his left and pushed the grass away; he picked up the parcel and examined it.
“Whacha got there, Mitch?” Heffner asked.
“Dunno.”
“Looks like a present. You havin’ a birthday? Ha!”
The corporal held the parcel in both hands and noted the string wrapped around it, holding it together. The string was knotted with a slip-bow, and he carefully pulled the long end, letting it fall away as the paper separated and came apart.
“Some kinda letter,” he muttered.
“Say what?”
The paper had been wrapped tightly around what he now saw were three cigars. He removed them with his right hand and let the paper fall to his lap.
“Man,” Heffner responded, dancing lightly in front of his friend, “we got smokes! Real smokes! Them look like Reb cigars!”
Mitchell nodded. “Sure do,” he said, although he did not know how Rebel cigars would look compared to Yankee ones. He pushed his rifle aside and clamored to his feet, and the paper drifted down into the grass. “You got any matches?”
Heffner quickly rummaged in his pockets. “Shoot. Ain’t even got a flint!” He spun about and moved away toward the road. “Gonna git me some matches! We gonna have some smokes!” And he was gone.
The corporal brought the cigars to his face, under his nose, and sniffed each one, rolling them tenderly between his dirty thumb and forefinger. They were soft and moist and fresh, and the aroma brought back sudden memories of his father and grandfather on the front porch on Saturday nights. His grandfather didn’t smoke, but his father did. His grandfather chewed. And spit—with deadly accuracy. The rich aroma of cigar smoke and moist chewing tobacco were his strongest recollection of growing up in Indiana another lifetime ago. He looked past the cigars and stared down at the paper in which they had been wrapped.
Visible through casual blades of grass he saw the heading: Headquarters, Army of Northern Virginia, Special Orders, No. 191. September 9, 1862.
He heard more than felt the sudden rumble in his stomach as he bent over and picked up the paper. Quickly he read the page, and as he did his hand had begun to tremble. The letter was addressed to Major-General Daniel Harvey Hill.
“Jaysus.”
He glanced at the bottom of the page. It had been signed: R. H. Chilton, Assist. Adj.-Gen. By command of Gen. R. E. Lee.
“Jaysus.”
The document contained other names, most of which were familiar to Mitchell. Names like Stuart, Hill, Longstreet—and Jackson. The corporal didn’t realize it but he’d even spoken one aloud: “Stonewall Jackson! Jaysus! Jeeper’s socks!”
He had dropped the cigars, now completely forgotten, as he read the hand-written orders. He held the paper in one hand and picked up his rifle with the other. Looking quickly about for Heffner and not seeing him, Mitchell moved through the milling soldiers until he found his first sergeant, John Bloss.
“Shit, man, where you git this from, Mitch?”
“Found it in the grass, over yonder by that there tree.”
“You show this anybody else?”
“Nope, Sarge; you only one.”
“You come with me, boy.”
The moment they showed the orders to their captain, Stanley Waterworth, they were dismissed with “No conversation with anyone about this with anyone, not a soul, you understand? It may just be a hoax. Prob’ly is.”
Capt. Waterworth went immediately to his lieutenant colonel who had not a moment’s apodictic concern as to the document’s authenticity. It traveled next to the division headquarters adjutant, Col. Samuel Pittman.
“My God!” Pittman exclaimed. “I know Chilton! We were classmates, close friends a lifetime ago. I would swear on my father’s eternal soul this is his handwriting!”
Pittman mounted his horse with the document still clutched in his hand and rode the short distance to General George McClellan’s headquarters. McClellan collapsed into the chair behind his ornate campaign desk and spread the paper flat with both hands, holding the edges down with his thumbs. He stared at it a full ten minutes. Then he looked up and addressed his assembled staff.
“Here is a paper,” he said to Gen. John Gibbon, his voice taut with emotion, “with which if I cannot whip Bobby Lee, I will be willing to go home.”
It was on September 13 that McClellan dictated this telegram to President Lincoln: "I think Lee has made a gross mistake, and that he will be severely punished for it. I now have the plans of the Rebels, and will catch them in their own trap."
