ACROSS THE RAPPAHANNOCK
Rob J. was painfully aware that in the midst of a war, with weapons at every hand and on every person, and with wholesale murder unremarkable, there would be many ways and many opportunities available for an experienced killer who was determined to “tak kare” of him.
For four days he tried to be aware of what was behind his back, and for five nights he slept lightly or not at all.
He lay awake wondering how Ordway would attempt it. He decided that in Ordway’s place and temperament, he would wait until both of them were participants in a noisy skirmish, with lots of firing. On the other hand, he had no idea whether Ordway might be a knife fighter. If Rob J. were found stabbed, or with his throat cut, after a long dark night when every jittery picket had speculated that each moon-shadow was a Confederate infiltrator, there would be little surprise or investigation of his death.
This situation was changed on January 19, when Company B of the Second Brigade was sent across the Rappahannock on what was supposed to be a quick intelligence probe and then a swift withdrawal, but didn’t work out that way. Instead, the light company of infantry found Confederate positions in strength where they hadn’t expected Confederates to be, and they were pinned down by enemy fire in an exposed place.
It was a repeat of the situation in which the entire regiment had found itself some weeks earlier, but instead of some seven hundred men with fixed bayonets charging across the river to mend the situation, there was no support from the Army of the Potomac. The 107 men stayed where they were and took the fire all day, returning it as best they could. When darkness fell, they fled back across the river, bringing along four dead bodies and seven wounded men.
The first person they carried into the hospital tent was Lanning Ordway.
Ordway’s crewmen said he’d been hit just before nightfall. He had reached into his jacket pocket for the paper-wrapped hard biscuit and piece of fried pork he had placed there that morning, when two minié balls struck him in swift succession. One of the balls had taken a chunk from his abdomen wall, and a loop of grayish abdomen now protruded. Rob J. started to push it back inside, thinking to close the wound, but he saw several other things quickly, and he recognized that he couldn’t do anything to save Ordway.
The second wound was perforating, and too much damage had been done internally, to the bowel or stomach, or perhaps both. He knew if he opened the belly he’d find the body’s hemorrhaged blood pooled in the abdominal cavity. Ordway’s drained face was white as milk.
“Is there anything you want, Lanny?” he asked gently.
Ordway’s lips worked. His eyes locked with Rob J.’s, and a certain calmness Rob J. had seen before in the dying revealed that he was aware. “Water.”
It was the worst thing to give a man who was gut-shot, but Rob J. knew it didn’t matter. He took two opium pills from his Mee-shome and gave them to Ordway with a long drink. Almost at once Ordway vomited redly.
“Do you want a minister?” Rob J. asked as he worked to make things right. But Ordway made no reply, only kept looking at him.
“Maybe you want to tell me exactly what happened to Makwa-ikwa that day in my woods. Or tell me about anything else, anything at all.”
“You … hell,” Ordway managed.
Rob J. didn’t believe that he ever would go to hell. He didn’t believe Ordway or anyone else would go there, either, but it wasn’t a time for debate. “I thought it might help you to talk just now. If you have anything to get off your mind.”
Ordway closed his eyes and Rob J. knew he had to leave him in peace.
He always hated to lose somebody to death, but he especially hated the loss of this man who’d been prepared to kill him, because locked in Ordway’s brain was information he had yearned after for years, and when the man’s brain died like a turned-off lamp, the information would be gone.
He knew, too, that in spite of everything, something within him had responded to the strange, complicated young man who had been caught in the grinder. What would it have been like to have known an Ordway who had been delivered of his mother without injury, who had had some schooling instead of illiteracy, some care instead of hunger, and a different birthright from his drinking father?
He knew the futility of such speculation, and when he glanced at the still figure he saw that Ordway was beyond any consideration.
For a time he handled the ether cone while Gardner Coppersmith removed a minié ball, not unskillfully, from the meaty part of a boy’s left buttock. Then he returned to Ordway and tied up his jaw and weighted his eyelids with pennies, and they laid him on the ground next to the four others Company B had brought back.