Chapter Nineteen

 

 

Nobody had very high expectations of the food offered in the Stor. But Ma Jode surpassed all their hopes and set aside all their worries, though, as Krysty remarked, it was probably just as well that they never got to take a look in the kitchen. The big woman didn't look as if she placed hygiene high on the list of culinary essentials.

 

She served them a fish soup to start with, snapper flavored with red and green peppers. Several of the little eels had been cooked until they were more like dry husks, added to the dish for extra flavor.

 

The main course was pork, stewed long and slow with sharp apples and a spiced gravy, with sweet potatoes and thin-sliced carrots and turnip greens, fresh corn bread on the side with salted butter.

 

There was cider to drink, chilled and dry on the palate, to wash down the good food.

 

Everyone except Jak refused the steaming platter of cherry cobbler, though the teenager easily stuffed down two brimming helpings.

 

Ma Jode appeared from the scented kitchen to offer some coffee sub. "I'm all a muck-sweat," she announced. "Runnin' down cross my tits and soakin' over my belly. Hotter than the ovens of Satan out there."

 

She opened the door and spit out into the darkness. Cicadas were chirping in the velvety night, and there was a faint breeze off the river.

 

"That was real good," Ryan said. "Want to settle up now with us?"

 

"Sure, outlander. Full meal for six of you. It's .38s that we need best. Those outland foreign 9 mill shitters aren't much use round here."

 

"Six rounds," Ryan suggested.

 

"Each?" The woman grinned.

 

"Call it twelve between us."

 

"Call it four rounds each, and you got the best deal this side of Old Miss."

 

Ryan pushed back his chair, hearing it scrape on the boards. "You got a problem, Ma Jode."

 

"How's that?"

 

"Push your luck. You were doin' it out there about mooring the raft. Now you're doing it again."

 

She laughed, slapping him so hard on the shoulder she nearly knocked him off balance. "Think I don't know it, stranger? 'Course I do. Twelve rounds of .38s and you also get a real good breakfast in the morning. And I'll make sure Judas Portillo's here to show you around Shiloh."

 

"Deal," Ryan said.

 

The woman held out her hand, horny and callused, the size of a small ham. "Take 'em now," she said.

 

Ryan shook his head. "After breakfast."

 

"You might just up stakes and sail away in the night. That wouldn't be neighborly." There was an edge to her voice, and Ryan realized that Ma Jode wouldn't be a person to cross. Not unless you had a lot more firepower.

 

"We'll be here. Around eight."

 

She nodded slowly, her small, hooded eyes staring at him. "Be there or be hung out for the gulls."

 

 

 

RYAN AND J.B. AGREED that it would be a good idea to keep a watch for their night at Pittsburg Landing.

 

It wasn't all that likely that any of the locals would risk taking them on, but you didn't get old in Deathlands by placing your stakes in the square marked Likely.

 

Jak, still complaining about the deep bruising behind his belt buckle, took first watch, from eight through to eleven, then came Doc until one in the morning.

 

Mildred and J.B. agreed that they'd share a double watch, from one until four, and Ryan and Krysty would be together until the dawn.

 

The weather was calm, with just a few high clouds blown in tatters across the face of the moon.

 

 

 

THERE WAS NO THREAT during the night.

 

Ryan slept badly, still plagued by the healing of the double wound in his thigh. It prickled as if someone had rubbed chilies into it, and the skin felt hot to the touch. But eventually the gentle lapping of the river against the huge logs lulled him to sleep, and he woke when J.B. touched him on the shoulder.

 

"Time."

 

"No trouble?"

 

"Nothing."

 

"Weather?"

 

"Dry. Light northerly. Nobody moving around the ville that we've seen."

 

Ryan slept fully clothed. He pulled on the combat boots and slid the SIG-Sauer into its holster. Krysty was at his side, doing the same, settling the short-barreled Smith amp; Wesson .38 on her hip.

 

He limped out of the little cabin, taking a deep breath of the fresh, cool air, using the stick to steady himself. The moon was sailing low, and there was already the faint lightening of the sky, heralding the arrival of the false dawn.

 

 

 

HE AND KRYSTY WATCHED Pittsburg Landing coming to early-morning life, the dawning sun reflected off the rolling waters of the wide Tennessee.

 

There was a faint haze hanging above the surface of the water, and clouds of tiny gnats darted and danced, occasionally falling victim to the silvery leap of a large trout.

 

They saw Ma Jode opening up the Stor, pausing to give them a wave, hawking up a ball of phlegm that she spit at a lean mongrel that was slinking by.

 

"All's right with the world," Krysty stated.

 

"Wonder how Dean's getting along," Ryan said, leaned on his stick, experimentally moving the wounded leg. It certainly seemed easier this morning.

 

"Knowing the kid, he's probably taken over the running of the school by now."

 

 

 

THEY WERE JUST FINISHING an excellent breakfast when Judas Portillo made his appearance.

 

The local guide to Shiloh battlefield saw himself as something of a fop and dandy. He was a little below average height, slim, with long hair greased back with a heavily scented pomade. His face was fleshy with the beginnings of a third chin, the lips thick and fleshy, his eyes dark and liquid with unusually heavy lids.

 

His clothes had a faded grandeur to them. He wore a frock coat, not unlike Doc's, but without the macabre patina of great age, and two mother-of-pearl buttons were missing. His pants were tapered, dark blue, with a strip of black satin down the outside of each leg. Portillo's ankle boots looked as if they had been polished early that morning in a room with inadequate light. Parts of them were still smeared with river mud, and other parts gleamed like a mirror. He had an elegant jabot of slightly stained lace at his throat, which he tugged at constantly.

 

As always in Deathlands, when he met a stranger for the first time, Ryan weighed him up for weaponry.

 

There was a small-caliber revolver of indeterminate make with pearl grips on his right hip, and an enormous bowie knife balanced on the left. Ryan also had a shrewd suspicion that there was a derringer, probably in a spring release, tucked away up the right sleeve.

 

His hat was a cream-colored Stetson decorated with turkey feathers. As he arrived at their table, he took it off with a sweeping gesture and bowed to Ryan. "I am Judas Portillo," he said, in a surprisingly broad Southern cracker accent. "Have I the honor of addressing the Ryan Cawdor?"

 

"You're addressing a Ryan Cawdor," the one-eyed man replied with a grim smile.

 

Portillo forced a smile in return, which flickered for a moment across his well-shaved jowls and then disappeared. "You wish to be shown around the battlefield?"

 

"Yeah. How much?"

 

Portillo shrugged his shoulders. "Just a small handful of jack if you're pleased."

 

"I got a very small handful of jack," J.B. said. "Very small."

 

The smile hesitated again. "I am sure that you outlanders won't disappoint me."

 

"I'm sure," said Ryan. "Just so long as you don't disappoint us, Judas."

 

They settled their account with Ma Jode, who insisted on hugging them all and wishing them well in their journeying, assuring them that their raft would be safe and snug at the landing when they returned.

 

 

 

IT WAS SURPRISINGLY CLOSE to the river, an easy walk that took only a short time. Even Ryan, with his healing wound, enjoyed the morning stroll.

 

They had passed through rolling fields of wheat and barley, along narrow, high-walled lanes and lines of trim picket fences that divided meadows where horse-drawn plows went about their placid business.

 

Doc stopped, waving away some persistent flies. "By the Three Kennedys! But this is truly a pastoral idyll. It quite takes me back to my days of yore when I would lend a hand with the harvest."

 

"Good land," Portillo said quietly.

 

"This the scene of the battle?" Krysty asked as they paused on a crest of land, looking toward the northwest. The light mist had burned off, and it promised to be a fine day.

 

"Road passing left to right is the old River Road. Also called the Hamburg Road. Look way over yonder and see the little spire. That's a church stands on the same spot as the meeting house of Shiloh."

 

"The heart of the fight was ahead, wasn't it?" J.B. asked eagerly. "I recall places called the Peach Orchard and the Hornet's Nest."

 

Portillo scowled. "Want me to tell you or not? I'd just as like go sit on the porch and sip moonshine."

 

The Armorer sniffed. "You go right ahead. Tell us like it was."

 

The guide adopted a strange singsong recitation as he began to tell the bloody saga of Shiloh.

 

"April 6 and 7 of 1862 saw the first major battle of the western campaign of the series of fights called either the Civil War or the War between the States, depending on where you come from. During the Battle of Shiloh, the Northerners lost over thirteen thousand men, while we only lost a tad over ten thousand good old boys."

 

"So the Confederacy won?" Krysty asked.

 

Portillo hesitated, his love of the South fighting with his desire for truth. "Well the South failed to push home and beat the Yankees, and that opened up the trouble at Vicksburg. Guess the fact is that Shiloh was like a poisoned arrow straight in the heart of the Stars and Bars. But Grant took the losses hard, and it kind of slowed down the war for a while."

 

Ryan shifted position, trying to take a little weight off the injured thigh. The good news was that it definitely felt a lot better than it had the previous day. He looked across the green, undulating fields, trying to imagine them scattered with lines of weary men in blue and gray.

 

"I got here a plan," Portillo said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a tattered piece of paper that he unfolded and laid carefully on the ground, smoothing it.

 

There were rectangles and arrows in different colors, mainly either blue or red.

 

"Yankees is blue," Portillo said, pointing with a long twig he'd picked up. "South's red."

 

"Not gray?" Doc asked. "Why red?"

 

"Gray faded and got kind of dirty," their guide replied, pulling a sullen face. "So's I had to go to red. Look here. Reading from the north, the Army of Tennessee, as they called themselvesI says the blue-bellieswas commanded by Sherman here, with McLernand, Prentiss, Wallace and Stuart. On the other side we got Hardee in the middle with Number Three Corps of the Confederate Army of the Mississippi. Bragg with Two Corps is here, just behind him. Major-General Leonidas Polk with One Corps is in the third rank, and Brigadier-General Bieckenridge at the rear with the gallant lads of the reserve."

 

Ryan looked at the fields, with their gentle curves. The coppices of young trees, leaves bright green, turning and shifting in the light breeze. And he tried to imagine the battle unfolding in front of him as Judas Portillo droned on the damp, muddy ground, churned by hooves and boots and the wheels of the heavy artillery; the swirling masses of men, their uniforms streaked with dirt, wreathed in huge, blinding clouds of black powder smoke, many of them terrified and utterly, hopelessly confused, praying for the noise and the slaughter to stop so they could go home to their farms and families.

 

Ryan knew enough of military history to be aware that muskets collected after the fighting would often carry multiple charges. A soldier, mind blanked in panic, would ram home minie ball after ball, until the blaster was totally blocked with up to a dozen unfired rounds.

 

Or they might use their ramrod to force down powder, shot and wadding, then let panic win the day, squeeze the trigger and shoot off their ramrod, as well, leaving themselves with a totally useless weapon.

 

"To put it simply, the battle of Shiloh was a battle of six big mistakes. Huge, triple-stupe ones. Some on one side and some on the other."

 

He led them away, his folded map tucked under his arm, taking them across the scene of the great fight, stopping here and there, in the Hornet's Nest and the setting of the old Peach Orchard, unrolling his plan again, using his long willow twig to point out the salient details of the field.

 

"Basically you got Grant and the Army of the Tennessee, settled around the church."

 

"How many men would Grant have had under his command?" Mildred asked.

 

"Forty thousand, blue-bellies. Thicker'n ticks on a hog's belly."

 

"And the Rebs?" J.B. asked.

 

"Rebs? The gallant boys in gray had around the same number."

 

"What were these mistakes? I recall someone mentioning plucking defeat from the jaws of victory," Doc said, beaming at Portillo and showing his fine, strong teeth.

 

"Don't know nothin' about that. First mistake was Johnston's. Knew that Buell was moving north with reinforcements and decided to get in his blow first. But the roads was bad and his maps poor and his whole army a shambles of confusion. Took a day to sort it out, so he delayed the fight until dawn on Sunday, April 6. Should've been three in the morning the day before."

 

The sun was rising steadily in a cloudless sky, and the temperature was rising with it. Ryan's guess put it somewhere in the mid-eighties.

 

"Second and third mistakes both came from the North." Portillo paused, fishing out a filthy kerchief and blowing his nose noisily on it, peering at the contents as though he expected to find traces of gold in it. Then he folded it up and put it away. "Grant was drunk in Savannah and never expected an attack. Mistake two. Following on this was the fact that the blue-bellies never bothered to put out proper patrols around Shiloh. Fact is that most of the men were still asleep when we hit them. Number three."

 

"Wasn't Lew Wallace at Shiloh?" Doc asked. "Man who wrote Ben Hur ?"

 

Portillo pasted on a sneering grin. "Sure was. Gotten himself chilled in leading a breakout a mite later. And he came up with mistake four. Soon as Grant heard firing, he sailed up to the landing here. Brigadier-General Wallace had the Second Division of the Army of Tennessee and he was moving with a long column of men down that narrow road yonder. Away from where the battle had started. Instead of turning the whole column ass-about so the rear became the front, he ordered the men out front to turn and march back through the column. Kind of reversed it, making it march through itself. Total shambles like a dozen drunk men changing their clothes in a small closet."

 

They moved across the battlefield while the man's monotonous singsong voice painted a picture of the way the fight swayed back and forth, with a general movement toward the east of the area.

 

They spent some time in what had been called the Hornet's Nest, where the land was completely sodden with blood and you could walk from one side to the other stepping only on the corpses from both armies.

 

"This more or less like it was?" J.B. asked. "Hasn't it changed over the years?"

 

Portillo shook his head. "It was kept as a kind of monument. National Military Park. Right up to sky-dark. Visitor center got blasted by a stray nuke."

 

"Fifth mistake?" Krysty asked.

 

"Supreme commander of the Confederate boys was General Albert Sidney Johnston. In the big charge he'd had a couple of small wounds and had the heel ripped from his boot by a ball. Bit later he got hit in the bend of the knee by a stray round. That was about half after one. Johnston 'didn't know it was serious and ignored it. That was number five. Hour or so later he nearly fell from the saddle. An aide, Governor Isham Harris of Tennessee, asked if he was wounded. Johnston replied, 'Yes, and I fear seriously.' Bullet severed an artery and his boot filled with his lifeblood. Had a tourniquet in his field pack that would easy have saved him. Died around half after two."

 

Doc swatted away another cluster of the importunate flies. "If my memory is not too ailing, I believe that General Johnston was the most senior officer to die in battle during the entire war."

 

Portillo shook his head. "Wouldn't know that. All I know is what happened here."

 

Ryan heard the saga of Shiloh winding toward its end, saw in his imagination the scattered bodies of three and a half thousand inexperienced young soldiers, thinking about the horrors of the field hospitals of the day with the blunted saws and no anesthetic. Sixteen thousand had been wounded, three thousand taken prisoner or simply missing in action.

 

"Buell's on his way north with reinforcements, but Grant's men are being pushed back toward the Tennessee. Dusk was falling, Beauregard took over on Johnston's shocking death and here came the sixth and biggest mistake."

 

"Defeat from the jaws of victory," Doc muttered with a smug smile.

 

Portillo nodded, licking his thick lips, hooded eyes glaring at the old man. "Right. He held off, and the gutless blue-bellies escaped and everyone went home."

 

They stood in silence in the broiling heat of the late morning, everyone locked into his or her own thoughts.

 

Far above their heads a white-ruffed kestrel was riding a thermal, eyes scanning the verdant fields below it.

 

"That wasn't bad," Ryan said, finally breaking the silence. "Not bad, Judas."

 

"Thank you, sir."

 

J.B. fished in one of his bottomless pockets and pulled out a jingling handful of small jack, counting it with his eyes and then handing most of it over to the guide, who fingered it suspiciously, then nodded and smiled.

 

"It'll do," he said grudgingly. "Yeah, it'll do."