The Twelfth Tribulation: A Short Story of the American Civil War Read online

  Contents

  Title

  Story

  About the Author

  Also by Glen Craney

  An Excerpt from The Yanks Are Starving

  Copyright

  * * *

  Franklin, Tennessee

  November 30, 1864

  EACH NIGHT DURING THE Army of the Tennessee’s stagger north from burning Georgia, Broody Dugan knelt in prayer to ask the same question: If he were fated to be run into his grave at sixteen with nary the flesh on his bones to interest the maggots, why didn’t the Almighty leave him in County Down? The starving could have been done back home just as tolerably without the passage fare and weeks of seasickness.

  Deposited onto the docks of New Orleans six months ago, he hadn’t recovered his land legs when a Confederate quartermaster offered him a crapper of whiskey and invited him to take a tour of Dixie courtesy of Mister Jefferson Davis, leader of the Holy Cause. He thanked the man for the kindness, convinced he’d been delivered to the end of the rainbow where the poteen flowed as free and perpetual as the Shannon. A week later, he arrived on the last train into Atlanta only to find the panicked city clamped like a cracked pecan between Billy Sherman’s divisions. A scuttered sergeant with one good eye had pulled him off the rail car’s roof, shoved a dead man’s musket into his gut, and unceremoniously mustered him into the Seventh Arkansas Infantry CSA, a haggard collection of fellow bog jumpers who manned a stretch of red-clay earthworks not fit for a herd of feral hogs.

  And that was the warmest of his welcomes.

  The veterans in the regiment declared him the descending bird of misfortune, slagging him without cease and demanding he empty their sharts pots to expiate the curse he had brought from Ireland. How the Devil’s jacks was it his fault that Uncle Joe Johnston was cashiered that very morning and replaced by John Bell Hood from Lee’s army in Virginia? Though a Texan by birth, Hood held Westerners to be inferior soldiers, and these Arkansan scarecrows reciprocated that opinion of the general by calling him Old Wooden Head and complaining he was all punch and no aim.

  Three months and seventy thousand corpses later, Hood decided to abandon Atlanta and take what was left of his army to drink from the Ohio River. The general blustered that he’d let the Yanks chase him awhile. He hadn’t counted on that madman Sherman making fast for the sea instead. The fox had escaped the cage, but the Yankee hounds had scampered off in the other direction to raid the master’s pantry.

  Broody shook his head at the injustice of it all. Hood’s Harbinger, they all called him. When ’ol Brood shows up, the carrion crows start circlin’. He kept on reminding them that he’d had no hand at all in losing Atlanta. You sonsabitches got yourselves into that peat pit long before I got thrown into your midst!

  Now, drafted for a courier because all the other fools who could read had been killed or maimed, he stumbled across yet another stubbed Tennessee field, this time on the coldest day of this entire miserable year. As he legged it north with his soles flapping and his lungs wheezing, he fingered his rosary for deliverance from the bends. The rancid cornmeal seizing at his gut apparently wasn’t penance enough for his committing the morter sin of whatever happened to be the opposite of gluttony.

  Overnight the military situation had gone from desperate to worse. The entire Union Army of the Ohio, commanded by a nervous bloke named Schofield, slithered out of the trap Hood had set for it on the Columbia Turnpike. Those devious Billies took advantage of the waning moon and walked right past the tents of his Seventh Arkansas, not twenty yards away, while he and his fellow shams caught up on a week’s worth of lost sleep. Now Schofield was rumored to be concentrating his multitudes in front of Franklin and throwing up a line of brush defense that would chasten Joshua and his trumpets.

  Hell of a circumstance.

  Christ and His saints must have been sleeping last night, too.

  And Hood—if the gossip from Cheatham’s staff could be trusted—awoke that morning wrathy as a rattlesnake, bent on revenge against his own division commanders.

  Broody stopped to catch his breath. Bending with one hand to his knee, he checked his breast pocket to make sure he hadn’t lost the sealed order he was told to deliver to General Cleburne. As he reached for it, a rare grin cracked the dried mud on his face.

  Patrick Cleburne, starry son of Eire.

  He whispered that hallowed name again, this time thickening his brogue in honor of the old country. He would at last get to meet the Stonewall of the West, the Irish Wellington. Nah, those appellations didn’t do the great Celt warrior justice. Who Patrick Cleburne really was, the other lads insisted—

  A thunderous boom shook the ground under him.

  He dropped to his belly. The earth was now rumbling like Tuireann on his throne. Sounded as if Hotchkiss’s batteries were clearing their pipes up the way. Driving back the Yank pickets, likely. But why so late in the day? Dusk was only a couple hours off.

  He kept his palm pressed over his pocket to prevent the hoarfrost from damping the ink on Hood’s order. He didn’t dare pull it out and peruse it, much as he yearned to know what that lame bag of bile had written to Cleburne. Couldn’t have been pleasantries. Lord in Limerick, what a scene he had witnessed at headquarters, two miles back. Hood resembled the embalmed corpse of Moses with his long beard, sickly sallow complexion, and sunken eyes glassy from the effects of the laudanum he swallowed to ease the pain in his amputated right leg stump and withered left arm. The way the veterans told it, Old Wooden Head couldn’t pass a battlefield without leaving a limb behind as a souvenir. His staff had to rise an hour early each day just to strap him onto his saddle so he wouldn’t fall.

  The cannonade finally eased. Broody risked inching his head up to assess the odds for making it unscathed to the next ridgeline. The sky was plum choked with smoke from the exploding shells mixed in with the low winter clouds. The heavens looked ready bound to descend and smother both armies. He gulped more salt-petered air and took off on the run again.

  The smoke slowly cleared, and a hundred yards yonder appeared the great man himself. General Cleburne stood alone on a hillock that flanked the turnpike into Franklin, peering through his field glasses toward a long line of blue that curved around the distant town. What a magnificent figure he cut, erect as a Dublin statue and clad smartly in a new gray sack coat, white shirt with high collar, and black riding boots. His cheek was still scarred from the wound he had suffered two years ago in Kentucky. That Yankee ball had taken out two of the general’s teeth before exiting his mouth and leaving him with a hissing lisp.

  Broody prayed he wouldn’t be mistaken for an intruder and shot. Finally, he gathered up the courage to shout. “General Cleburne!” He pulled out the folded order and waved it. “From General Hood!”

  Cleburne turned, looking startled. He strode closer with an icy glare as if in a mind to pistol-whip Broody for drawing fire. “Say again, soldier?”

  Broody feared he had committed some breach of regulations. “Cor-re-respondence from headquarters.”

  Cleburne’s eyes narrowed. “Fermaugh.”

  Broody wasn’t certain what the general meant. “Sir?”

  Standing there on that open knoll, they were prime targets for the Yankee snipers, but Cleburne didn’t seem to care. The general circled and studied him. “No, I’ll amend my first conjecture. You have more the scruffy manner of a Down culchie.”

  “Kilkeel, sir.”

  Cleburne nodded. “On the coast. I was stationed in Kilkeel with the Forty-First Welsh. Do the lobsters there still salute before diving into the boil pots?”


  “General, to be honest, I never saw even a minnow. The English wouldn’t let us papists within a line’s cast of the fishing spots.”

  Cleburne’s attempt at a smile failed. “I suppose we’ve both left all that behind.”

  The zings of Yankee shots around them thickened.

  Broody wished the general would cut the gab and take the damn order so he could skedaddle back out of range. He couldn’t help dropping his head into his shoulders like a turtle with each whizz-snap of a Minié ball. “Sir, should I deliver this to your orderly?”

  Cleburne set his jaw. “You’d have to go to Ringgold Gap to find him. Six feet under, thanks to…” He caught himself.

  Broody thought he’d heard the name “Bragg” die on Cleburne’s lips. He looked around, astonished that a general would be reconnoitering the advance field with no staff. He offered Cleburne the folded paper again, this time with more insistence.

  Cleburne sighed and accepted the dispatch. His ruddy face drained as he read what Hood had written. He slowly refolded the paper and inserted it into his pocket. He glanced down the ridge and nodded a signal to General Govan, one of his brigadiers, who resumed forming his regiments into columns a quarter-mile to their rear. He turned back toward Franklin and raised his field glasses again to scan the Union defenses nearly two miles off. "Very formidable," he whispered to himself.

  Still waiting to be dismissed, Broody watched the general and tried to fathom the secret trait that had catapulted him from a private to a division commander, the only man on both sides who had risen so far.

  Cleburne seemed to shift his gaze beyond the Yankee earthworks, toward the purple hills rising behind the town. “I neglected to ask your name.”

  “Dugan, sir.”

  “Do you play checkers, Dugan?”

  “Aye, sir, but not much good at it.”

  Cleburne drew his sword and carved a checkerboard in the dirt. Seeing what the general intended, Broody found a couple of log stumps and dragged them over for perches. While Cleburne pulled a handful of carved chips from his pocket and arranged them, Broody stole a worried glance over his shoulder toward where General Govan was directing more regiments into the columns. He squinted in an effort to see if the Seventh Arkansas was forming up, but he couldn’t locate his unit.

  “Something itching at you, Private?” the general asked.

  “Sir, I’m thinking General Hood expects me to return with your response.”

  Cleburne studied the checkers as if calculating several moves in advance. “I doubt General Hood wishes to hear anything more from me.” He pointed at the dirt. “I’ll let you make the first leap.”

  Broody edged a chip forward. To his relief, the Yank snipers had ceased their potshots for the moment, apparently deeming it dishonorable to kill a fella during a checkers match. After a couple of plays, he was about to jump one of the general’s chips when he heard Cleburne say under his breath:

  “Hood’s Harbinger.”

  Broody catapulted to his feet. “Sir, that ain’t my name, with all due respect.”

  Cleburne smiled. “I myself have been called worse.”

  Broody paced back and forth. “Sir, how’d you find out about that slander? Now that it’s out in the air, I’d like to ask for an inquiry—”

  “You know what Napoleon said he required in a general?”

  Broody stopped in his tracks. “No, sir.”

  “Above all qualities, he had to be lucky.”

  Broody was baffled. Checkers. Napoleon. What did any of this have to do with him? The old-timers said that Cleburne was a complicated man, prone to moods and queer musings. But this beat all.

  Cleburne edged another chip across the dirt. “I hear you bring bad luck wherever you go. Have you brought me bad luck this day, Dugan?”

  “Sir, you got no cause to accuse me like that. I ain’t done nothing but what I’ve been told since I got thrown into this army.”

  Cleburne nodded as he jumped another of Broody’s chips. “When I arrived in Arkansas from County Cork, I took a job as a drugstore apprentice.”

  Broody was having a parcel of difficulty understanding what that revelation had to do with the price of a pint, let alone picturing the general standing behind a counter in a vest and handing out apothecaries to ladies complaining about toothaches.

  “One day a farmer drove a wagon into town filled with the largest green fruit I’d ever seen,” Cleburne explained. “Monstrosities twice the size of cannonballs. I asked a fellow worker what they were, and he told me the cooks out West there used them to make stew. Well, I was eager to learn how Americans got along, so I followed his instructions and spent my first day’s pay on the finest watermelon in the bunch. Then, I lit a fire in the stove, cut up the watermelon, and dropped the pieces into the steaming pot. An hour later, I brought out my pride-and-joy watermelon stew for everyone in the store to taste.”

  “Nah.”

  Cleburne winked at him. “I was the laughingstock of Helena for a month.”

  Broody sat back down, not feeling so bad now about his own plight. “Damn, General, that was bitter medicine to swaller. But you’ve recovered nicely from your step in the cow pod.”

  Cleburne snorted. “Not by some accounts. Seems these days I’m the laughingstock in Richmond.”

  Broody figured he knew what that meant. Everyone in the army had heard the rumors, even though the officers tried to keep the matter hushed. Word was that Cleburne had devised a plan to save the Confederacy and had sent it in writing to Jeff Davis: Offer freedom to any slave who agreed to take up arms and fight for the South.

  Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Broody thought. That must have scattered the flies over the mince pies in those Virginny parlors. He didn’t care much about the darkies, one way or another. And from what he’d heard, General Cleburne felt the same way. All the general wanted was to win this war and be left alone to return to his drugstore and law practice. But most of these CSA fellas with them would sooner walk into the fires of Hades than give an African a gun. Aye, those cotton oligarchs were likely cursing Cleburne’s name in the grand hall of every plantation porch from Montgomery to Columbia. Once Irish scum, always Irish scum. He tried to offer some solace to the general. “Them high-saddled London sasanaches used to abuse us the same way.”

  Cleburne’s eyes filmed. He nodded slightly and turned aside.

  After a vexed silence, Broody asked the question that had been nagging him ever since Peachtree Creek. “General, why are we fightin’ this war?”

  “For the rights of our states to—”

  “Nah, I mean us, sir. Not them. You and me.” Broody made a motion with his head to indicate he meant the patricians back at headquarters. “Best as I can see, they’ve used us for cannon fodder, just like the English do. Hell, half o'Dublin were kilt at Fredericksburg. And half o’Galway shot ’em.”

  Cleburne traced the tip of his sword aimlessly in the dirt. “Maybe fighting what we Gaels were born to do. And here’s where the hardest fighting—” He lurched sideways on the log.

  Broody caught him before he keeled over. “Sir, you feelin’ poorly?”

  Cleburne blinked hard and recovered his balance. “A little pekid, is all.”

  “Ain’t you ate today?” Seeing the general wave off the question, Broody reached into his pocket and pulled out a strip of jerky.

  Cleburne stared at the offering. “I couldn’t take your ration.”

  “I got plenty,” Broody said, lying.

  Cleburne examined the jerky. “Deer?”

  Broody shook his head. “Wish we was carvin’ that high on the bone. Some of the lads snared a dog this morning.”

  Cleburne’s eyes widened.

  “Not much tougher than the hardtack. And by all aspects, the mongrel appeared to be a Yankee infiltrator sent over to raid our wagons.” Broody cut off a sliver with his knife and chewed it to demonstrate it was edible. “I’d be honored if one day I could tell my kinfolk I shared a repast with you, eve
n if tain’t the King’s table.”

  Cleburne debated the offer. Then, with a shuddering look of sadness, he tore off a chaw from the jerky and reluctantly slid it onto his tongue.

  While the general gnawed pensively, Broody turned and saw more hurried activity to their rear, regiments coming up and merging into place in a line of columns that extended across the vale below for nearly a mile. Hell of a time to be drilling, cold as it was. He gandered back at Cleburne, expecting a reaction to the tumult, but the general just kept chewing and staring at the checker chips.

  When Cleburne got the canine chaw down, he spat some gristle and asked, “You got a lass?”

  Broody nodded. “Left her in Kilkeel.”

  “Plan to marry her?”

  Broody grinned. “Aye, gonna bring her over when this fightin’ is done.… You, General? Have a missus?”

  Cleburne pulled out a pocket watch on a chain and snapped it open. Inside, the lid held the photograph of a woman.

  Broody whistled. “She’s right bonnie.”

  Cleburne coughed emotion from his throat. “Miss Susan Tarleton of Mobile, Alabama. She accepted my proposal of engagement last March.” His faced shadowed. “I haven’t seen her since.”

  Broody lifted the canteen hanging from his shoulder strap in a toast. “Sláinte! I’m sure it’ll be the grandest wedding this side of the Mason-Dixon.”

  Cleburne became silent again. He stared at the photograph of his fiancée, whose melancholic eyes mirrored his.

  Broody tried to lift the general from his doldrums. “She’s your Emer.”

  “Emer?”

  “I’m not rightly sure I should be telling you this,” Broody said. “But some of the lads have a nickname for you.”

  “Do I want to know it?”

  “Cuchulainn.” Broody thrust out his chest in national pride. “They say you’re the return of the great Ulster warrior from the time of the giants. Now I have to admit, I’d never heard of the buck until Ferdy McGowan regaled me with Cuchulain’s exploits to pass the time in the trenches back in Atlanta.”