Meet Me In Gettysburg — I
I've never done an irrational thing in my life. I've never been in trouble, stepped out of line, spoken out of turn, said anything foul or cross to anyone, even when I was angry or had good cause. I am neither quiet, nor loud. Neither tall, nor short. Neither ugly, nor handsome. Neither modest, nor ostenatious. Neither thin, nor fat. Neither rich, nor poor. Neither gifted, nor talentless. I am a dangerous dreamer.
I quit my job as a corporate lawyer in Manhattan without notice and left New York. The firm doesn't matter. None of it really does. The pay doesn't matter. It is not an adequate measure of a man's worth, anyway. His occupation. Nor his pay. Nor is the prestige of his employer, nor his zipcode, nor what car he drives, nor what shoes he wears, nor what woman he sleeps with or doesn't sleep with. I've figured out, along the way, that those things are meaningless. A man can live a very unfulfilled life as I was living it. Floating around from one dinner party to the next. Adorned with accolades and more money than I knew what to do with. Investing it to make more money that I'd never spend.
To the contrary, a man can live a very fulfilled life selling newspapers or hotdogs. I knew this well and I always walked past Carl on W. 64th Avenue on the way to the office envying him. He had a pleasing mien that was much deeper than his smile. Out of a million faces, Carl's face is likely the only I will miss from New York. His might be only the face I remember. I left him a large tip for a final hot dog and it didn't change the breadth of his smile or his feeling of me.
Where am I going, the rational human side of me asks the irrational newborn part that is floating through a cloud. Am I having a breakdown of some sort? Should I consult a psychiatrist? I took a train from Grand Central to Philadelphia. Spent the day touring the city like a tourist. Saw the Liberty Bell. Independence Hall. Chatted with a Ben Franklin or two. One was flying a kite to the amusement of a small pack of captivated children. But the day was clear and no electricity would be conducted to the key that dangled down the string. So pretty was the off-white canvas kite fluttering against the azure cloudless sky.
Yet, his lesson was nonetheless fascinating as he spoke of his inventions and rattled off clever witticisms that perhaps the children understood or they did not. They quickly seperated themselves into two distinct factions — the feral bunch and the well-behaved — the latter of which had patience to continue listening and they stood there in rapt enthusiasm watching him pilot the kite and hoping he would ask them to do so in reward for their equanimity, which he did now and then between posing for photographs. I recalled flying a kite with a beautiful woman who I've never met in this life, but who I know no less, in an eternal field of tall grass speckled with purple wildflowers.
I could have watched him all day. In the sunshine with the breeze. In the bustle of a hot Philadelphia mid-afternoon. Car engines idling, horns blaring, tires humming. I wondered if he ever confused himself for Ben Franklin. If that sort of thing happens to impersonators. But I also wondered, in my fancy, if he might have been Ben Franklin in a former life. And if just the right conditions were created in the universe to bring him back, and as an older and wiser soul, he understood what I understood. That true happiness and fulfillment are greater than the artificiality of fleeting pleasures and material gains. Yet, I came to no conclusion and had dinner in a bar as old as The American Revolution, rented a car, and was on my way. My journey was only beginning though another journey was rapidly coming to an end, which is the way that it goes.
The pretty girl at the car rental office asked me what car I wanted and I said it made no difference to me which seemed to befuddle her. She flirted with me for a moment, asking me where it was that I was heading and, being a reasonable question, I answered her.
"Gettysburg," I replied.
She smiled and likely assumed I was a history buff of some sort. Either a novice or a professional. Maybe in her mind I was a professor. She recalled her father taking her there as a child, which hadn't been so long ago. Then she got sentimental, thought better of it, and quickly handed me the keys. I would never see her again, I realized. I wasn't going back. I forgot her name about as soon as she told me it. She had a beautiful face. We said goodbye and she said have a nice trip in such a way that I knew something had both been born and died in that little bit of time. Life is full of such brief platonic relationships and possibilities short-lived that are struck and burn quick as matches. It is difficult to make most of them count.
It was late by the time I arrived in Gettysburg, rather, it was early. Nearly morning. I parked in a lot just in town near some monuments I couldn't make out. They were gray stone. Dawn broke behind them and slowly everything came to life through an orange mist. I couldn't sleep, though I dozed off for a minute or two, my head fell against the side glass as I nodded off only to be awoken by that familair voice.
Meet me in Gettysburg.
It isn't something I could mistake. It came in a loud whisper. It wasn't something I might confuse for something else. It was crisp and clear and I had heard it for over a year, randomly. There was no predictable pattern for when the voice would return, she simply would, quite sporadically. It was not as though it favored strict silence or the loudest of noises. It seemed to have no favorite. She came when I was never suspecting that she might. During meetings with clients. As I dozed off in the subway. Through the hiss of the shower. And regardless of when, or where, she always said the same thing.
Meet me in Gettysburg.
Rationally, I wondered, when. What time. Where in Gettysburg. Irrationally, I would ask the voice as though she were a woman in the room capable of responding and near to me as a lamp on the table, or as though she were hiding just behind the drapes. But she never answered. She never said where exactly. Or when. Nor did she speak of why. Why she wanted to meet me. But it is odd that I know without knowing. That I felt natural in coming and very unnatural by ignoring her voice for over a year as I had, though it always returned to try to persuade me, often more persistently.
But I was bound to my career in law and to a woman I have since abandoned. A woman who looked the part, who made me the envy of everyone who saw us together, but who never was the one for me. Who I married on Cape Cod two years before, though I spent the wedding day drifting into lingering melancholic trances on a boat, staring off into space, interrupted by whatever it was in me that protested the ceremony. And that voice, which came deliberately again with the lapping of the ocean on the shore, or against the boat.
Juliana was somehwere in New York now, wondering when I was coming home. Wondering if I had been kidnapped, or mugged, or murdered, or if I took off with a prostitute from the Chelsea Hotel for she had a fantastic and dark imagination about such things. She would ultimately find that conclusion to be absurd when she came to it and would roost in the belief that I had been harmed because she believed in herself and me so greatly that she wouldn't be able to fathom me leaving her of my own accord. Whether that was arrogance or confidence, I'm not sure.
I had turned off my cellphone since I left New York, and feared if I turned it on now it would erupt with messages from everyone I knew, disturbing the peace I had swiftly realized without it, and maybe the police who would try to tie my disappearance into some dramatic abduction related to a case I was working, or an affair I was not having. That imaginary prostitute who I had met and been seen with in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. Juliana would chuckle and say that I was not having an affair, swear that I was too boring and loyal, and persist that it was foul play. Her ego made an absurdity of anything else.
Or perhaps if I turned on the phone it wouldn't buzz at all. Maybe no one cared and after one or two curious messages came through, nothing would follow. It hadn't been but eighteen hours, after all. The office would assume I was out sick and waited for my call. Juliana would assume that I got cold feet about the baby she wanted and I was on the boat my father left me, which wasn't uncommon for me to go to it to write the novel I'd never finish secretly about the woman I knew but never met, in this lifetime anyway. The one with the sunstreaked golden hair. The one whose voice haunts me and who I recalled flying kites with in that purple-speckled field.
But the orange vapor was washed away by a bright yellow morning sun that plopped itself down, and very soon after men pulled up in vans and trucks and assembled near the monuments in Civil War uniforms as though they were returning to the scene of the battle some 161 years later to have at it again. They were drinking coffees from cardboard cups and slowly they ditched everything that betrayed their role-play, the cars, the cups, their cellphones, and they conversed and slowly began to assemble into muddled companies that became battalions or however it goes. And these bearded men, for the most part, some bespectacled with wire frames, slowly morphed into soldiers from plumbers and school teachers and barbers that decended, or so their stories go, from the actual men who fought and died here all those years ago.
I sat up in the seat of my car no longer tired, but captivated by the awe-inspiring scene which unfolded before my eyes and which preceded to unfold with both blue and grey uniformed men who met together on the dew-slicked grass like some ghostly fraternity. Like footballers meet in Central Park, or basketball pickup games begin on city courts everywhere.
Juliana was somehwere in New York now, wondering when I was coming home. Wondering if I had been kidnapped, or mugged, or murdered, or if I took off with a prostitute from the Chelsea Hotel for she had a fantastic and dark imagination about such things. She would ultimately find that conclusion to be absurd when she came to it and would roost in the belief that I had been harmed because she believed in herself and me so greatly that she wouldn't be able to fathom me leaving her of my own accord. Whether that was arrogance or confidence, I'm not sure.
I had turned off my cellphone since I left New York, and feared if I turned it on now it would erupt with messages from everyone I knew, disturbing the peace I had swiftly realized without it, and maybe the police who would try to tie my disappearance into some dramatic abduction related to a case I was working, or an affair I was not having. That imaginary prostitute who I had met and been seen with in the lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. Juliana would chuckle and say that I was not having an affair, swear that I was too boring and loyal, and persist that it was foul play. Her ego made an absurdity of anything else.
Or perhaps if I turned on the phone it wouldn't buzz at all. Maybe no one cared and after one or two curious messages came through, nothing would follow. It hadn't been but eighteen hours, after all. The office would assume I was out sick and waited for my call. Juliana would assume that I got cold feet about the baby she wanted and I was on the boat my father left me, which wasn't uncommon for me to go to it to write the novel I'd never finish secretly about the woman I knew but never met, in this lifetime anyway. The one with the sunstreaked golden hair. The one whose voice haunts me and who I recalled flying kites with in that purple-speckled field.
But the orange vapor was washed away by a bright yellow morning sun that plopped itself down, and very soon after men pulled up in vans and trucks and assembled near the monuments in Civil War uniforms as though they were returning to the scene of the battle some 161 years later to have at it again. They were drinking coffees from cardboard cups and slowly they ditched everything that betrayed their role-play, the cars, the cups, their cellphones, and they conversed and slowly began to assemble into muddled companies that became battalions or however it goes. And these bearded men, for the most part, some bespectacled with wire frames, slowly morphed into soldiers from plumbers and school teachers and barbers that decended, or so their stories go, from the actual men who fought and died here all those years ago.
I sat up in the seat of my car no longer tired, but captivated by the awe-inspiring scene which unfolded before my eyes and which preceded to unfold with both blue and grey uniformed men who met together on the dew-slicked grass like some ghostly fraternity. Like footballers meet in Central Park, or basketball pickup games begin on city courts everywhere.
They are actors without lines. Men that will set up camp over the next few days and at some point or other, march to the beat of drums and fifes and point rifles at one another, hoping no steel balls are hurled their way when the rifles fire and crack and that plume of smoke dissipates into the afternoon sky just above the wooly heads of their choreographed counterparts. Then about half of them will fall here and there and lie in the grass thinking of who knows what until it is all over as curious onlookers like me watch, imagining what it must have been like, enthralled, and the inevitability of death which we are all marching towards, even though it was all an act on a stage of grass that had once been soaked in their ancestral blood.
How confusing it must have been for the morning birds who watched. For the worms in the ground who would not have anyone to devour. For the trees and the buildings that still stand and for the stone men on the monuments who might wonder why they are reliving the most terrible moment of their life when all their peace and civility came to a brutal end. Might they leave out the surgeon with the bone saw? The cannonballs that decapitate men and sever limbs from bodies as they scream through the battlefield indifferent to the pain they inflict? Might they leave out the cowards running through the briars? Those who shat themselves to death? Those who fainted or passed out due to dehydration or sunstroke? Those who lied and played dead only to be stabbed later by the proud bayonets of the winning side? Who ate grass and offered the ground nothing but vomit and tears. Might they leave out the brutal fistfighting, men being mangled by fists after their bullets and bayonets remarkably failed? Might they leave out the stench of death? The smell of powder burning flesh? Might they leave out the screams of men as they lay dying, limbless or gutshot? Between gunshots and the demonic whistling of those cannonballs.
I stared off into the field until those men assembled and disappeared and were cocked like a gun against each another. There was a knock on my window. It was a man in a gray wiry beard. He wore a blue uniform and smoked a clove cigarette. He blew clouds of smoke away from me and seemed a bit neurotic. He said he was from the 77th New York.
"Where are you from, partner? You here to take part, or to watch?"
I didn't reply at first. It was as though I was incapable of making a sound. I just looked at him and stared. I felt an overwhelming sense of fear drawing over me. Suffocating me. He smiled at me to excuse me of my sudden obmutescence.
"Well, we need another guy, if you're interested. Had a few duck out."
"I'm from New York. I don't have a uniform," I excused myself.
"We can fix you up if you want to be more than a tourist? I'm Sgt. Jim Higgins." He extended his hand through my open window.
"Henry Bailey."
"Well, Private Bailey. Let's go suit you up. All you got to do is follow some simple rules I'll fill you in on. Can you shoot?" His words came out with the smoke of his breath.
"I have. Before."
"Well, fine! Fine. You don't have to hit anything. So it's even easier than shooting. It's all just powder. I'll show you everything you need to know."
He gave me a wool uniform and I stood there in the lot and held it for while before putting it on. It was an odd feeling in my hands. That wool. I got dressed and followed him. A few more guys joined us and everyone introduced themselves. There was a sense of commraderie that I was unfamiliar with, but that felt natural. It wasn't anything like the office or things I once knew from boyhood or college. It was different. Maybe it is how it felt to be in a bowling league.
We weren't soldiers, for truly none of us were going to die. We knew that. We only sacrificed time and did so as hobbyists. At the end of the day we all would go back to a hotel and have dinner or drive home and kiss our wives and play with our kids. Nothing of the day would remain besides for an itch left from the wool collar that rubbed to harshly against our neck, or sore feet from those damn boots with paper-thin soles for those who opted to go authentic. Maybe an allergy from the grass or a sunburn. Nothing was even comparable.
We made camp with large canvas tents on wood poles and kettles of boiling water. The smell of burning wood mesmerized me and I sat down and lied back against a tree and dozed off. I was exhausted. Someone was talking about bringing horses to have a calvary as I fell asleep. But no one wanted to volunteer their horses, nor to risk injury from being thrown from a scared horse who wasn't trained for battle. The subject was squashed, but someone else said they ought to have them in the camps, saddled and standing around for effect. Then the voice came about the time that a merciful wind whipped through the willows.
Meet me in Gettysburg.
"I am here," I called, startled. Getting up.
"You okay, Bailey?" someone asked.
I didn't answer. I rubbed my face and waived my hand to excuse myself. I was exhausted and sat back down and leaned back agaisnt the tree. Tourists came through the camp and I decided to lay down and sleep, which someone declared was a good idea because soldiers would have been exhausted. I fluffed a rucksack to rest my head upon and tilted the kepi over my eyes to keep out the sun. The smell of sweat from the hat overcame my nostrils and I thought of the pungent odor of dying lilies from a bouquet that sat on the dining room table in the apartment. Flowers I got for Juliana for her birthday a few weeks before.
In the black theater of the hat, on the back of my eyelids, I could see, for a moment, a lady. A woman of a young age who stood near me and invited me to kiss her, whispering under her breath to kiss her though people were around and she smiled, looking up at me with a mixture of urgency and uncertainty. She wore a yellow dress that made her look like a yellow bell flower. Biting her bottom lip. A pale pink ribbon around her neck. A broach against the bare cream flesh of her chest that looked unspoiled and inviting the way her collarbones were pronounced and her breath rose and fell with great animation beneath her bosom.
"We shall always regret what we do not do, not what we do," she declared impetuously in a whisper she delivered to my ear. And I kissed her, impatiently, as she had so compelled me.
"Proper," I said breaking reluctantly from her. "I prefer to leave you proper. I'd never ask an impropriety of you. To encroach ruthlessly upon your virtue." But I kissed her again despite my words. And as I feared, hiding with her in the corner of a room that was indistinct but crowded with others who might have witnessed our exchange, I didn't want to release her. I held her arm firmly and desperately in my grasp.
How confusing it must have been for the morning birds who watched. For the worms in the ground who would not have anyone to devour. For the trees and the buildings that still stand and for the stone men on the monuments who might wonder why they are reliving the most terrible moment of their life when all their peace and civility came to a brutal end. Might they leave out the surgeon with the bone saw? The cannonballs that decapitate men and sever limbs from bodies as they scream through the battlefield indifferent to the pain they inflict? Might they leave out the cowards running through the briars? Those who shat themselves to death? Those who fainted or passed out due to dehydration or sunstroke? Those who lied and played dead only to be stabbed later by the proud bayonets of the winning side? Who ate grass and offered the ground nothing but vomit and tears. Might they leave out the brutal fistfighting, men being mangled by fists after their bullets and bayonets remarkably failed? Might they leave out the stench of death? The smell of powder burning flesh? Might they leave out the screams of men as they lay dying, limbless or gutshot? Between gunshots and the demonic whistling of those cannonballs.
I stared off into the field until those men assembled and disappeared and were cocked like a gun against each another. There was a knock on my window. It was a man in a gray wiry beard. He wore a blue uniform and smoked a clove cigarette. He blew clouds of smoke away from me and seemed a bit neurotic. He said he was from the 77th New York.
"Where are you from, partner? You here to take part, or to watch?"
I didn't reply at first. It was as though I was incapable of making a sound. I just looked at him and stared. I felt an overwhelming sense of fear drawing over me. Suffocating me. He smiled at me to excuse me of my sudden obmutescence.
"Well, we need another guy, if you're interested. Had a few duck out."
"I'm from New York. I don't have a uniform," I excused myself.
"We can fix you up if you want to be more than a tourist? I'm Sgt. Jim Higgins." He extended his hand through my open window.
"Henry Bailey."
"Well, Private Bailey. Let's go suit you up. All you got to do is follow some simple rules I'll fill you in on. Can you shoot?" His words came out with the smoke of his breath.
"I have. Before."
"Well, fine! Fine. You don't have to hit anything. So it's even easier than shooting. It's all just powder. I'll show you everything you need to know."
He gave me a wool uniform and I stood there in the lot and held it for while before putting it on. It was an odd feeling in my hands. That wool. I got dressed and followed him. A few more guys joined us and everyone introduced themselves. There was a sense of commraderie that I was unfamiliar with, but that felt natural. It wasn't anything like the office or things I once knew from boyhood or college. It was different. Maybe it is how it felt to be in a bowling league.
We weren't soldiers, for truly none of us were going to die. We knew that. We only sacrificed time and did so as hobbyists. At the end of the day we all would go back to a hotel and have dinner or drive home and kiss our wives and play with our kids. Nothing of the day would remain besides for an itch left from the wool collar that rubbed to harshly against our neck, or sore feet from those damn boots with paper-thin soles for those who opted to go authentic. Maybe an allergy from the grass or a sunburn. Nothing was even comparable.
We made camp with large canvas tents on wood poles and kettles of boiling water. The smell of burning wood mesmerized me and I sat down and lied back against a tree and dozed off. I was exhausted. Someone was talking about bringing horses to have a calvary as I fell asleep. But no one wanted to volunteer their horses, nor to risk injury from being thrown from a scared horse who wasn't trained for battle. The subject was squashed, but someone else said they ought to have them in the camps, saddled and standing around for effect. Then the voice came about the time that a merciful wind whipped through the willows.
Meet me in Gettysburg.
"I am here," I called, startled. Getting up.
"You okay, Bailey?" someone asked.
I didn't answer. I rubbed my face and waived my hand to excuse myself. I was exhausted and sat back down and leaned back agaisnt the tree. Tourists came through the camp and I decided to lay down and sleep, which someone declared was a good idea because soldiers would have been exhausted. I fluffed a rucksack to rest my head upon and tilted the kepi over my eyes to keep out the sun. The smell of sweat from the hat overcame my nostrils and I thought of the pungent odor of dying lilies from a bouquet that sat on the dining room table in the apartment. Flowers I got for Juliana for her birthday a few weeks before.
In the black theater of the hat, on the back of my eyelids, I could see, for a moment, a lady. A woman of a young age who stood near me and invited me to kiss her, whispering under her breath to kiss her though people were around and she smiled, looking up at me with a mixture of urgency and uncertainty. She wore a yellow dress that made her look like a yellow bell flower. Biting her bottom lip. A pale pink ribbon around her neck. A broach against the bare cream flesh of her chest that looked unspoiled and inviting the way her collarbones were pronounced and her breath rose and fell with great animation beneath her bosom.
"We shall always regret what we do not do, not what we do," she declared impetuously in a whisper she delivered to my ear. And I kissed her, impatiently, as she had so compelled me.
"Proper," I said breaking reluctantly from her. "I prefer to leave you proper. I'd never ask an impropriety of you. To encroach ruthlessly upon your virtue." But I kissed her again despite my words. And as I feared, hiding with her in the corner of a room that was indistinct but crowded with others who might have witnessed our exchange, I didn't want to release her. I held her arm firmly and desperately in my grasp.
I wanted to remain there with her, in the corner of that room, but then she was gone and Sgt. Higgins roused me with the butt of his rifle and a bugle boy blew an excited reverie to muster the actors that had come to win the day.
I hurried to get ready and the men no longer talked as they had before, they were evidently in full character and I, afraid to disrupt them, remained mum. I fell in line and marched. The drummer boy beat his drum and my heart beat with it. My eyes stung from the sweat that ran down my forehead in rivulets and I closed my eyes tightly, but it was of no use. Smoke from the campfire made things worse. I could smell honey and bread and gunpowder and sweat. I closed my eyes and tried to see her. The bell flower girl in yellow, but she wouldn't come back. I tried fiercely to recall her as we marched in line to our predestined fate, but it proved futile and slowly she slipped away from me as though she were a cloud of smoke, or deliberately running.
Sgt. Higgins marched alongside of us barking orders that I couldn't discern, and the tourists who watched began to fade from view as we made our way through a strip of woods where the sun spotted us through giant leaves and we spilled out onto a golden field of tall dead grass that was baked in sun. Cicadas chattered and went silent as though to mock our cadence. Birds broke from the trees. The drummer boy beat his drum angrily as though it were a weapon itself. I wanted it to be over. I regretted joining, but I figured it wouldn't last long. And afterwards, I would be welcomed into a new fraternity of men that might help me make sense of this all. Why was I here? Who was it that spoke to me?
Meet me in Gettysburg.
This time it came through the song of a bird that remained on the branch of an ominous dead tree.
"I am here," I muttered quietly, marching still, drenched in sweat. We stopped and stood there in the field and Sgt. Higgins screamed frantic things I couldn't understand. Then he gave way to someone else who was on a white horse and who carried a sword and waved it emphatically as he tried to rally us. The blade of that sword caught the sunlight and looked to be on fire and the man seemed enormously large in the saddle of the angry horse that snorted and brayed wickedly as he jerked it back and forth down the line of steadfast men, its hooves beating upon the ground which I could feel in my stomach worse than the drum.
I hadn't seen him before and it amazed me how real this had suddenly become. How dreadfully real. I looked around to the outlying hills that rolled gently, that were sprinkled with goldenrod and rye which reminded me of the girl I had seen so briefly in the dream. The girl I had flown a kite with in a field like this, less the threat of death and men.
I hurried to get ready and the men no longer talked as they had before, they were evidently in full character and I, afraid to disrupt them, remained mum. I fell in line and marched. The drummer boy beat his drum and my heart beat with it. My eyes stung from the sweat that ran down my forehead in rivulets and I closed my eyes tightly, but it was of no use. Smoke from the campfire made things worse. I could smell honey and bread and gunpowder and sweat. I closed my eyes and tried to see her. The bell flower girl in yellow, but she wouldn't come back. I tried fiercely to recall her as we marched in line to our predestined fate, but it proved futile and slowly she slipped away from me as though she were a cloud of smoke, or deliberately running.
Sgt. Higgins marched alongside of us barking orders that I couldn't discern, and the tourists who watched began to fade from view as we made our way through a strip of woods where the sun spotted us through giant leaves and we spilled out onto a golden field of tall dead grass that was baked in sun. Cicadas chattered and went silent as though to mock our cadence. Birds broke from the trees. The drummer boy beat his drum angrily as though it were a weapon itself. I wanted it to be over. I regretted joining, but I figured it wouldn't last long. And afterwards, I would be welcomed into a new fraternity of men that might help me make sense of this all. Why was I here? Who was it that spoke to me?
Meet me in Gettysburg.
This time it came through the song of a bird that remained on the branch of an ominous dead tree.
"I am here," I muttered quietly, marching still, drenched in sweat. We stopped and stood there in the field and Sgt. Higgins screamed frantic things I couldn't understand. Then he gave way to someone else who was on a white horse and who carried a sword and waved it emphatically as he tried to rally us. The blade of that sword caught the sunlight and looked to be on fire and the man seemed enormously large in the saddle of the angry horse that snorted and brayed wickedly as he jerked it back and forth down the line of steadfast men, its hooves beating upon the ground which I could feel in my stomach worse than the drum.
I hadn't seen him before and it amazed me how real this had suddenly become. How dreadfully real. I looked around to the outlying hills that rolled gently, that were sprinkled with goldenrod and rye which reminded me of the girl I had seen so briefly in the dream. The girl I had flown a kite with in a field like this, less the threat of death and men.
I closed my eyes and could hear her giggling in the sound of our marching. She had blonde hair and brown eyes and she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. She who must have been the voice who told me to meet her here the way the wind speaks through willows and railcars hum on tracks and birds sing songs that are natural to the world. The way brakes squeal in traffic and beds creak as lovemakers make love. I didn't know her, but I knew her. She was half of me and I was not whole without her. I could never, in this life or any other, be whole without her, and anyone else, despite any beauty or wealth of spirit, would be no more than a poor substitute. I knew that then and the realization gave me a feeling of great happiness and satisfaction, but also one of conflicting disappointment and dreadful gloom.
We marched in a line towards the opposing foe. A jagged line of swollen gray cotton uniforms with heads jutting out of them. They looked much like us other than the color of their uniforms. I was astonished by the amount of men that opposed us in this charade, and equally astonished at the amount of men who had joined our ranks as I looked down the line. There must have been three thousand men on either side of the field, all for a reenactment. But where were the onlookers, I wondered. We were actors with no apparent audience. But then, on a distant hill, I caught a glimpse of color and carriages. Umbrellas to lessen the sun. People on picnic, it appeared, but the distance was such that I could not be certain without binoculars, which I had not.
The drummer boy who had paused to give the man on the horse time to rally the troops began again his drumming that was the beat of our collective heart. Each man simply a segment of some greater beast. A beast that could lose parts and hemorrhage blood but not die. In my chest my heart seemed ready to explode and the heat made miserable my body that sweltered in its thick wool skin it qas desperate to shed.
The other side drew closer and they began to scream. I thought they would stand and volley shots at us, cerimonally like, but it wasn't that way. They ran at us to intimidate and overrun us. Our back line stood and the front knelt. We waited to be given the order to shoot, our sights set upon the man most directly in front of our position. Hold. Hold. Hold.
They stopped before they got to us, about thirty yards out or so, and made formation and similar lines. Bayonets attached. It would be one shot and then they would charge. We might have time for two shots before those bayonets tore into our line. I was confused about the bayonets. Would they be dull? Or rubber? Or retractable like those prop knives you could order in comic books as a kid. I couldn't tell from the distance, but it didn't feel like it was pretend anymore.
I saw cannons and artillery men behind them a few hundred yards. They were shadows of men and their great and devastating phalluses gleamed wickedly in the sunlight ready to defile us. I could see them working on the cannons to light them. Raising and lowering them. Shoving giant rods into them to pack down the powder before the ball was rolled in which another man cradled in his palms.
The drumming stopped. The order was given for us to set, aim, and fire. The guns cracked. My rifle kicked, which I wasn't expecting being that it hadn't a ball in it. The crack of our rifles broke any peace there was left on the field that would otherwise have been for picnics or for animals to graze. Or for little girls and mothers to flower pick. Littles boys to tumble in. Rabbits and woodchucks to nest.
Men dropped across from us, some letting out agonizing cries that sounded painfully real. Then they leveled their rifles and fired back and I could hear the whiz of metal splitting the air past my left ear. The man next to me was hit. Blood spurted from his mouth. The blue wool of his uniform coat had been pierced, and the fateful black flower bloomed there on his chest. His red badge of courage. I stared at him before he fell. His eyes wide-open staring back at me as though I were God. I realized then that this wasn't pretend. This wasn't at all fake or rehearsed. This was reality and somehow I had been swallowed by another time.
There wasn't anything to do besides to fight. To kill or be killed. There wasn't another way out. Shoot until they surrendered or we surrendered. Hope for the bugle to call retreat. The cannonballs screamed through the air and lopped off legs and men at the waist. There was an unmistakable thud when they hit the ground and skimmed across the ground, whistling, and bowling through men who had no chance to avoid them. The sweat from my hair in my kepi streamed into my eyes. The merciless sun, who added more misery to our already miserable predicament, beat down upon our wool uniforms and the heat was enough to make any man collapse. There was not the slightest of breezes to cool us, except when a cannonball shot through and missed, then, briefly then, there was something of a waft.
I loaded and fired. Loaded and fired. As fast and as much like a machine as I could. Men screamed, lying in agony. Shot. Torn apart. Their entrails squirming out of their torsos like snakes from a nest. Not a damn cloud. The merciless sun sizzling our skin. There were vultures already, whose shadows played over us, mocking us. They were the shadows of death. Our artillery fired and finally there was an answer to the confederate attack. The unmistakable sound of bones crushing as those lead balls screamed into rows of men searching for anything to hit could not be confused for anything else. Maybe trees snapping in half beneath a giant's foot. It gave us some false sense of relief that it would be over soon. That there would be no men left to shoot or to kill. That they would surrender, or turn and run. They were outnumbered, but they acted as though they didn't know it, or they didn't care. They were defiant to the death as though they were resigned to it and had accepted their fate already.
Then the purpose of their bayonets, which gleamed in the sunlight like streaks of fire, became known. And what ragged men remained across from us charged, screaming wildly. Sgt. Higgins called on us to affix our bayonets, so hurriedly I did. In three seconds despite my fingers fumbling from shattered nerves. I crouched down to a knee and hoisted my bayonet into the gray wave of men and felt the weight of a man who had run into it and over, forced over by men behind him who had used him as a human shield, inadvertently or not. I heaved him up over me and the blood from his chest where my bayonet had been planted ran down my rifle and over my hands and soaked the cuffs of my uniform coat. His death was quick and he fell ontop of me, his face pressed against mine because of the weight of those who ran atop him. And soon there were several more of us in a bloody pile of dead and dying, half-starved skinny, fat, young, and old. Wiry men. Toothless men. Toothed. Baby-faced. Mean, kind, handsome, ugly. All seemingly with only one purpose and that was to kill so not to be killed.
And there I lied trapped under this dead man who looked me in the eyes, whose breath stunk of death, whose teeth were stained from the crimson stream of life that poured from his mouth onto my face and uniform coat. His long greasy hair reaching to my face and the murmur of something, some last appellation, failing to become adequately elucidated and dying with him there inglorioisly on top of his murderer who he looked at like he was his priest.
There are no murderers in war, of course. Those who murder and are murdered are written and boasted of on memorials. Monumentalized. Praised in effigy. Those who survive because they murdered their way out are heroes and march in parades because the dirty business of it all is justifiable homicide. Kill ot be killed for love of country. I kicked the man off me and grabbed my rifle, enraged by something, my hands soaked in blood. The stench of death and vomit and body odor thick in the air. I was desperate to break free, to go home, though I didn't know where home was. I didn't know who I was. The sun blinded me. The vultures circled overhead. The bugle sounded retreat and the confederates that remained on the battlefield, those not so blinded by the urge to kill, gathered what strength they had left, what weapons they could grab, and headed back towards their line and off into the distance where I could see men on horses waiting.
But as I stood with the rest of the men who began to celebrate the victory, I felt the fire of a shot tear into my chest. I hadn't any idea where it came from, but it's effect was immediate and I collapsed on the field watching the black swirl of those vultures who patiently glided on a breeze not felt upon this stagnant parcel of earth stained with blood and entrails of one general's success and another's failure. That is all it would be remembered for. Not me or the thousands like me. And as I lay there dying, surely as I was, the girl in the yellow bell flower dress came to my mind and we were flying a kite again in some field that apart from the massacre, was much like this one.
Meet me in Gettysburg.
I could see her reading a letter. Sitting in a sunlit room. The letter was bloodstained. I had penned it. I had penned it shortly after what had just occured on a cot in a medical tent where I would succumb to the wound. She was reading my words in my thoughts.
"My Dearest Amy McKenzie —
Apple Grove, New York.
"How now must we part, so suddenly, so unfairly. I haven't many words left to author, less breaths left to breathe, as I've been shot, mortally, I fear. But neither life nor death can take you from me. Love is more than death. It will always be more and there is no lake or river, the breadth or depth of which so great, through which I cannot swim to get to you. If Heaven is that which we desire on earth, if it is unfulfilled dreams and promises, then I rest assured that we shall meet again for I've desired nothing more in life than you.
"I hope you find some matter of comfort in that I personally write you before I am to give up my ghost to that which comes to us all. I love you. Emphatically. Irrationally. Wholly. I've instructed a friend, Private Flannery, to mail the letter as it ends and not to finish it if it is unfinished. I love you. I want these words to comfort and to hold you, and never to disturb you or to leave you sullen.
"It seems my mind is full of fanciful thoughts that have been liberated from conventional thinking, and though it is rather dour at the moment, I am full of wonder and optimism that this shall not end it. That there is a mortal and an immortal side of everything as natural as a room in a house, and as simple as a door through which to pass. There is an immortal cord that binds us. I have known you before, and I will know you again. And that so long as we have a compass of where to meet, my ghost will find your ghost. Or your ghost will find my ghost.
"Is it anything more than those games of hide-and-seek we used to play and laugh about to no end as childish lovers not so long ago. Might we linger here as those do in vacant rooms. Might we not mourn one another, yet set out to find our other half as we are when one of us is lost to this world, yet temporarily. My love, my love, have faith. Meet me in Gettysburg."
We marched in a line towards the opposing foe. A jagged line of swollen gray cotton uniforms with heads jutting out of them. They looked much like us other than the color of their uniforms. I was astonished by the amount of men that opposed us in this charade, and equally astonished at the amount of men who had joined our ranks as I looked down the line. There must have been three thousand men on either side of the field, all for a reenactment. But where were the onlookers, I wondered. We were actors with no apparent audience. But then, on a distant hill, I caught a glimpse of color and carriages. Umbrellas to lessen the sun. People on picnic, it appeared, but the distance was such that I could not be certain without binoculars, which I had not.
The drummer boy who had paused to give the man on the horse time to rally the troops began again his drumming that was the beat of our collective heart. Each man simply a segment of some greater beast. A beast that could lose parts and hemorrhage blood but not die. In my chest my heart seemed ready to explode and the heat made miserable my body that sweltered in its thick wool skin it qas desperate to shed.
The other side drew closer and they began to scream. I thought they would stand and volley shots at us, cerimonally like, but it wasn't that way. They ran at us to intimidate and overrun us. Our back line stood and the front knelt. We waited to be given the order to shoot, our sights set upon the man most directly in front of our position. Hold. Hold. Hold.
They stopped before they got to us, about thirty yards out or so, and made formation and similar lines. Bayonets attached. It would be one shot and then they would charge. We might have time for two shots before those bayonets tore into our line. I was confused about the bayonets. Would they be dull? Or rubber? Or retractable like those prop knives you could order in comic books as a kid. I couldn't tell from the distance, but it didn't feel like it was pretend anymore.
I saw cannons and artillery men behind them a few hundred yards. They were shadows of men and their great and devastating phalluses gleamed wickedly in the sunlight ready to defile us. I could see them working on the cannons to light them. Raising and lowering them. Shoving giant rods into them to pack down the powder before the ball was rolled in which another man cradled in his palms.
The drumming stopped. The order was given for us to set, aim, and fire. The guns cracked. My rifle kicked, which I wasn't expecting being that it hadn't a ball in it. The crack of our rifles broke any peace there was left on the field that would otherwise have been for picnics or for animals to graze. Or for little girls and mothers to flower pick. Littles boys to tumble in. Rabbits and woodchucks to nest.
Men dropped across from us, some letting out agonizing cries that sounded painfully real. Then they leveled their rifles and fired back and I could hear the whiz of metal splitting the air past my left ear. The man next to me was hit. Blood spurted from his mouth. The blue wool of his uniform coat had been pierced, and the fateful black flower bloomed there on his chest. His red badge of courage. I stared at him before he fell. His eyes wide-open staring back at me as though I were God. I realized then that this wasn't pretend. This wasn't at all fake or rehearsed. This was reality and somehow I had been swallowed by another time.
There wasn't anything to do besides to fight. To kill or be killed. There wasn't another way out. Shoot until they surrendered or we surrendered. Hope for the bugle to call retreat. The cannonballs screamed through the air and lopped off legs and men at the waist. There was an unmistakable thud when they hit the ground and skimmed across the ground, whistling, and bowling through men who had no chance to avoid them. The sweat from my hair in my kepi streamed into my eyes. The merciless sun, who added more misery to our already miserable predicament, beat down upon our wool uniforms and the heat was enough to make any man collapse. There was not the slightest of breezes to cool us, except when a cannonball shot through and missed, then, briefly then, there was something of a waft.
I loaded and fired. Loaded and fired. As fast and as much like a machine as I could. Men screamed, lying in agony. Shot. Torn apart. Their entrails squirming out of their torsos like snakes from a nest. Not a damn cloud. The merciless sun sizzling our skin. There were vultures already, whose shadows played over us, mocking us. They were the shadows of death. Our artillery fired and finally there was an answer to the confederate attack. The unmistakable sound of bones crushing as those lead balls screamed into rows of men searching for anything to hit could not be confused for anything else. Maybe trees snapping in half beneath a giant's foot. It gave us some false sense of relief that it would be over soon. That there would be no men left to shoot or to kill. That they would surrender, or turn and run. They were outnumbered, but they acted as though they didn't know it, or they didn't care. They were defiant to the death as though they were resigned to it and had accepted their fate already.
Then the purpose of their bayonets, which gleamed in the sunlight like streaks of fire, became known. And what ragged men remained across from us charged, screaming wildly. Sgt. Higgins called on us to affix our bayonets, so hurriedly I did. In three seconds despite my fingers fumbling from shattered nerves. I crouched down to a knee and hoisted my bayonet into the gray wave of men and felt the weight of a man who had run into it and over, forced over by men behind him who had used him as a human shield, inadvertently or not. I heaved him up over me and the blood from his chest where my bayonet had been planted ran down my rifle and over my hands and soaked the cuffs of my uniform coat. His death was quick and he fell ontop of me, his face pressed against mine because of the weight of those who ran atop him. And soon there were several more of us in a bloody pile of dead and dying, half-starved skinny, fat, young, and old. Wiry men. Toothless men. Toothed. Baby-faced. Mean, kind, handsome, ugly. All seemingly with only one purpose and that was to kill so not to be killed.
And there I lied trapped under this dead man who looked me in the eyes, whose breath stunk of death, whose teeth were stained from the crimson stream of life that poured from his mouth onto my face and uniform coat. His long greasy hair reaching to my face and the murmur of something, some last appellation, failing to become adequately elucidated and dying with him there inglorioisly on top of his murderer who he looked at like he was his priest.
There are no murderers in war, of course. Those who murder and are murdered are written and boasted of on memorials. Monumentalized. Praised in effigy. Those who survive because they murdered their way out are heroes and march in parades because the dirty business of it all is justifiable homicide. Kill ot be killed for love of country. I kicked the man off me and grabbed my rifle, enraged by something, my hands soaked in blood. The stench of death and vomit and body odor thick in the air. I was desperate to break free, to go home, though I didn't know where home was. I didn't know who I was. The sun blinded me. The vultures circled overhead. The bugle sounded retreat and the confederates that remained on the battlefield, those not so blinded by the urge to kill, gathered what strength they had left, what weapons they could grab, and headed back towards their line and off into the distance where I could see men on horses waiting.
But as I stood with the rest of the men who began to celebrate the victory, I felt the fire of a shot tear into my chest. I hadn't any idea where it came from, but it's effect was immediate and I collapsed on the field watching the black swirl of those vultures who patiently glided on a breeze not felt upon this stagnant parcel of earth stained with blood and entrails of one general's success and another's failure. That is all it would be remembered for. Not me or the thousands like me. And as I lay there dying, surely as I was, the girl in the yellow bell flower dress came to my mind and we were flying a kite again in some field that apart from the massacre, was much like this one.
Meet me in Gettysburg.
I could see her reading a letter. Sitting in a sunlit room. The letter was bloodstained. I had penned it. I had penned it shortly after what had just occured on a cot in a medical tent where I would succumb to the wound. She was reading my words in my thoughts.
"My Dearest Amy McKenzie —
Apple Grove, New York.
"How now must we part, so suddenly, so unfairly. I haven't many words left to author, less breaths left to breathe, as I've been shot, mortally, I fear. But neither life nor death can take you from me. Love is more than death. It will always be more and there is no lake or river, the breadth or depth of which so great, through which I cannot swim to get to you. If Heaven is that which we desire on earth, if it is unfulfilled dreams and promises, then I rest assured that we shall meet again for I've desired nothing more in life than you.
"I hope you find some matter of comfort in that I personally write you before I am to give up my ghost to that which comes to us all. I love you. Emphatically. Irrationally. Wholly. I've instructed a friend, Private Flannery, to mail the letter as it ends and not to finish it if it is unfinished. I love you. I want these words to comfort and to hold you, and never to disturb you or to leave you sullen.
"It seems my mind is full of fanciful thoughts that have been liberated from conventional thinking, and though it is rather dour at the moment, I am full of wonder and optimism that this shall not end it. That there is a mortal and an immortal side of everything as natural as a room in a house, and as simple as a door through which to pass. There is an immortal cord that binds us. I have known you before, and I will know you again. And that so long as we have a compass of where to meet, my ghost will find your ghost. Or your ghost will find my ghost.
"Is it anything more than those games of hide-and-seek we used to play and laugh about to no end as childish lovers not so long ago. Might we linger here as those do in vacant rooms. Might we not mourn one another, yet set out to find our other half as we are when one of us is lost to this world, yet temporarily. My love, my love, have faith. Meet me in Gettysburg."
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