by
Brian D. Hampton
James stood in the yard behind his home staring at his modest vineyard. The neat rows of vines, well manicured and tied off against the fence rails, reminded him of other places, other times, things he at once both wished he could forget, but struggled to remember precisely. Doing either had become more and more difficult over the years. He was in his eighties now, and the memories of the horror seemed always to occupy him, but the accurate recollection of the more technical things, what happened, when, and why, was gone from his mind. It was an interesting inconsistency, maybe even a hypocrisy. He would write about technical things because he was almost forced to do so. He'd mention the times and dates and words that were day by day losing all meaning, but the things that mattered, like the scene of a young man struggling fiercely to keep his bowels from spilling out of his belly and how we should never, could never forget that man - no, child - and why he was forced into this useless, panicked action, would never be set to paper. Those memories would die with him, in only a few days.
His friends and acquaintances and the random reporter that even at this late date still came by to hear this old, nearly deaf man talk about his experiences, speculated about why he kept the vineyard. James didn't drink wine. He liked the occasional nip of brandy - peach brandy - and an even less occasional taste of whiskey. He'd enjoyed the spirits more in his younger days, back when his currently decrepit body and what the alcohol might do to it wasn't a consideration. But, wine never really interested him. Also, the vineyard was very small and could not produce enough juice to be worth making into wine to sell. Still, he grew the grapes, made the wine, and gave it away. There was always someone willing to take what you were willing to give; they just weren't necessarily inclined to use it in the manner intended. That was one lesson he'd learned well.
"That doesn't seem to make any sense," a stranger would say to him, grinning contemptuously. That was a comment that meant more than it said, and James understood the grin better than they thought he did since he'd used it to good effect throughout his life. Nothing James did or had ever done seemed to make sense to most people, and, he knew, he was more of a source of constant amusement than he was of genuine, serious interest. There'd been a day when he tried to explain these things, when he tried to make people see just what the method to his madness was. He'd given that up eventually. It was useless, led to more misunderstanding, more questions. Most people seemed insistent on remaining blissfully ignorant of the reality, of what events really meant. He was simply too old to care any more what people thought. His only answer to such a comment was, "It's the grapes. They mean something to me, and that's all that matters." That was usually enough, and whoever it was that was talking to him would go back to grilling him about his war experiences.
The irony was that if those people who always had more questions but never seemed willing to listen to the answers had simply calmed themselves, stopped looking for controversy, and listened to him talk about the vineyard, they'd learn more about the war than he could ever tell them by drawing lines on a map and reciting the reasons why he had interpreted orders the way he had. That's all anyone ever wanted to know. Why did you wait until that time to do this? Why did you move there instead of over here? Where did you come by your opinion that you had the discretion to interpret your instructions in that manner? Useless questions, no, stupid. He could even attempt to answer those questions directly, but the questioner would never see, would never understand. They'd answered the questions in their own minds before he had a chance to offer comment, his use being only a foil for their stupid and meaningless articles. Lining up a regiment for battle didn't mean anything. A young man - no, boy; he had to make himself remember that that was just a boy - spilling his life away on an already blood soaked piece of dirt was what meant something. If the reporters or visitors had just asked him about that, about what those vines and grapes and the soil they sprang from meant, he would have given them an answer that made sense. They could have written something important then.
James shivered. He felt an aching chill despite the muggy Georgia heat. He'd started thinking about that boy again, about his eyes and the fear they held, about how he was torn open and dying, the flies already beginning to gather for their meal. There was death all around him on the day he came across the boy. Bodies and pieces of bodies were strewn about the countryside in a grotesque display of human tragedy. James remembered being able to smell the death, that sickly sweet odor of flesh beginning to decompose in the summer heat, and how it combined with the rancid smell of even those who were still living. There'd been the scent of gunpowder, so thick it made a man with the strongest lungs choke so hard he almost threw up, and the fragrance of hot lead as balls and projectiles flew out of the guns at an alarming rate that made the earth tremble beneath his horse's feet. Across from him, men threw themselves at one another, tore each other's limbs away, blew holes in their skulls, cursed their names. Hell itself could not have been any worse. But, in all of this, that one boy, a child whose eyes held what James was sure was a deep wisdom despite the youth, captured his mind and held it. He'd wanted to say something, to answer the unasked question of "Why? Why did you send me out here to die like this?" But, he couldn't. At that point, he didn't know himself.
He began to get angry now, a deep anger. Why didn't the reporters ever ask about the boy! He didn't know. He'd even tried to tell the story, but no one ever listened. He'd give an interview in which he'd be asked a question about why he did this or that, and he'd give answers, but then demand to tell the story of this youthful soldier who'd died so horribly. Then he'd read the story based on the interview in the paper or the magazine, and it would represent the conversation as his being unwilling to address the "real" question the reporter had asked while he insisted on telling some fanciful story about a single dead soldier, apparently in order to avoid further questioning. Comments like that made him furious, and he wanted to respond, but eventually he decided it was best if he let it go. The boy's memory was not served by yet another argument based on foolish pride. He would remember the boy; his wife would remember after he was gone. Someone would remember, and that was the important thing.
Brushing away the thoughts with what took more effort than normal, James walked out to his vineyard and opened the gate leading to the deep purple cabernets. He liked these the best. There was something that seemed very simple about them, yet they were the most complex fruit he grew. The deception was what he liked, in fact. They all looked the same, took very little effort to grow, seemed to ripen at the same time of the season no matter what kind of attention they were given and how it might vary from year to year. But, each individual fruit could taste as different from its neighbor as the grape vines themselves differed from the peach trees. It was the wine maker's art to blend all these varied tastes together into something approaching consistency, and while he would never be held up to the standard of the French and their chateaux, he didn't do poorly. It was the caring that counted. He cared about these little fruits and the product they made, and he worked diligently to transform them into a substance worthy of their highly regarded name, and even more importantly, to their meaningfulness.
He picked a fruit off the vine and considered it for a few moments. It was nearly there, almost ripe enough to begin harvesting. A few more days and he and his wife would come out here and pick all the fruits, put them into baskets, and begin their yearly process. As he turned the grape around and around between his fingers, squeezed it slightly to test the rigidity, he thought about where it had come from and why it was here. He popped the morsel into his mouth and bit down, feeling the flavor burst over his tongue and the insides of his cheeks. It was a tart grape, a cabernet franc, and it made his lips contort and his brow furrow, but he didn't mind. The flavor was wonderful, nearly perfect. This would be a good season. This made him happy, helped him to momentarily forget his previous anger, for its taste meant so much more than the mere electrical impulses it sent from his tongue to his brain. There, deep in his mind, this flavor stirred images of his past that blended with the present, and it all made sense somehow.
Making sense out of it was something a bit more than difficult. Why had that boy been there? Why had James given the command that caused the boy's death? Why did the boy follow it? He knew the standard answers, honor and loyalty, but that was a poor explanation in James' estimation. He had sat there perched high atop his faithful horse Hero and watched the boy as his life ran away from him. He watched the boy take his last breath, expel it, and then have his eyes turn back into his head and his lips turn upward in an expression that seemed almost comforting, as though the pain were finally gone, and the boy was happy again, having been taken to some better place. He liked to believe that, and it was part of the reason that less than a year later he officially joined the church after having spent the better part of his life with little time for such things. But, part of him could not forget what had been taken from the world itself with the boy's passing, and the church didn't help him there.
James normally never stayed to watch them die. It wasn't callousness, rather the understanding that to do so would be to allow himself to get too close, to be unable to make the difficult decisions and order what had to be done. If he allowed himself to feel even the slightest bit of regret, he'd lose his effectiveness, and in the end, he'd actually end up allowing more of them to die, to be torn apart as this boy had been. He had to stay where he was, to do what he could to keep that from happening. He had to stay a breath away from the reality. For him, the battlefield had to remain a map with lines drawn upon it. To make it anything more meaningful at that time of his life would have been akin to mass murder. What if he was gone and the higher generals no longer had his cautious voice of reasoning to tell them when it was all wrong? Even if that advice had not been heeded here, could he just give up? What if, God forbid, someone like Jubal or John had his place? How many would be slaughtered because he had no longer been able to do his job?
But at that place, at that time, James could not turn away. He could not spur his horse and move off to some other place, nor could he even avert his eyes and not witness the last moments. The boy's eyes had captured him completely, and they held him there, even seemed to hold Hero there as well. In his more fanciful moments, James did occasionally wonder if the horse would have moved along even if he had asked him to. When the boy was gone and the flies started to land, James could have left then, and it wouldn't have been so bad. But then, he didn't want to. Even though he was back in control of himself, he found it impossible to leave. As he began to realize the full depth of what he had just witnessed, he determined he had to know more: the boy's name, where he was from, if he had a family. The way this battle was going, the body would be left behind, and it might be months before anyone knew what had happened to him. James would need to write a letter, to let the family know that the boy had died with his face to the enemy and that he had not been lost in vain. These were words he didn't know if he believed, but they would comfort those the boy had left behind.
James had knelt beside him, soaking the knees of his pants in the boy's precious blood, and had rummaged through his pockets. There in the lining of the boy's coat, accessed through a large hole in one of the inside pockets, he had found a thick, handmade, leather notebook, about the size of a writing tablet. It was filled with folded, unsent letters home and a couple from his mother that he had received in recent weeks. He read these and was struck by the level of proficiency with which the writer had composed the sentences. He was educated, and so was his mother, rare breeds in those days. Then, he had found pictures, one of the boy himself he was likely preparing to send home, and another of a house, apparently the boy's house with the boy's family standing out in front of it. James did not concentrate on these faces. They could have been any one of a million people from the South just from looking at them. What caught James' attention was another, less focused part of the picture, a piece of the background almost, but not quite out of view.
It was a vineyard. He was certain of that fact for it had been mentioned in one of the letters from home. Like so many, the family was hoping the war would be over soon so that the boy could return. He was loved and missed; he was needed to attend to the wine-making that season. With the father gone, having apparently died years before, the boy was the only one who really understood the art of the blending, and the batch they had made the previous year had been sorrowful indeed. Not that there was any great demand for luxuries such as wines in those days. The war had taken away everyone's ability to purchase such items in any great quantities, except of course for those who were still able to afford the fancy parties and the whiskies and the fine clothes smuggled in through the blockade, the people that had started this war in the first place, the mother reminded the boy. But, it was the only source of income the family really had, and without it, they might, at best, have to turn to some other crop that would only be gathered up by the army's commissaries, roving bands of what in normal times would have been considered nothing but thieves who would leave them compensated at only a fraction of what it would take them to live. "Please come home soon, dear son," the letter had ended, "We need you."
"We need you." "We need you." WE need you." James had read the line over and over again and had only stopped reading when the faithful Moxley had come to him, showing a wound that he seemed not to notice, and reporting of the day's losses. James had felt the anger well up inside him at that point, anger at the old man, at the blue coats on the other side of the sickening field, at the fat cats in Richmond, and at anyone and everything that had ever had a hand in starting this bloody, damned war. He even damned himself for nodding his head, for affirming the order. He could have stopped it. He could have at least saved this one boy, at least for now. Maybe his luck wouldn't have run out on another field, or maybe he could have found his way home. Desertion, that's what he was thinking of. How could he think that? How could accept it? "Let them all desert," he thought in his mind. "There will be no one left to fire the guns, and then this killing will finally end."
James had risen from beside the boy and stretched out his gigantic form, had felt his face run hot with the fury. Sweat streamed from his face. He held the letters tightly in his hands, wrinkling them within his grip, and the boy's blood dripped from his clothes. The staff officer asked him, "General are you hurt?" and he screamed at Moxley, ignoring the question, sending him off to prepare the guns for more battle, for the counter-attack that was sure to follow. He would lead this defense. He would be right up there with it, and he would bring Hellfire and damnation down upon anyone who stood in his way. "Goddamn them!" he shouted aloud, referring as much to the Yankees as he was to his own people. "Goddamn them all!"
It was anti-climatic. The attack had not come. He had not released his anger. He had not died in the great battle as he had almost hoped to do, releasing him from more horrors such as this, allowing him not to know. The war had ended eventually, nearly two years later and not before countless more boys like this one lay dying in what were until then unknown places. Many were buried and forgotten like this boy would have been if not for James' seeing him. James had never been the same after that. All the dire predictions of his ineffectualness had come true. He recognized it when it came, and he had tried to resign, even knowing what that would mean. Still, if he could do nothing where he was, maybe he could do something outside the channels of official army life. But, his resignation had not been accepted, and he had remained where he was, back in command, back in the business of killing.
He had never forgotten the boy, even in the days soon after the war when he was defending himself against outlandish charges of disloyalty and seemed to fall into a life of petty bickering about meaningless issues. He wrote the mother, using all the words he had promised himself he would use, despite the fact he didn't believe them. But, she had never replied, and he never knew if she even received the letter. Still, he had done his duty as best as he could. There was only one more thing left for him.
When he finally made his way back to his beloved Georgia, the first thing he had done was to plant these vines and make them grow. His late wife Louisa had helped him in those early days, and she had been consumed by the passion for the tasks as much as James ever was. She understood the story of the boy, if not as well as James did, then close enough for the differences not to matter. He put all his energies into fostering the young plants' growth, and in time he built for himself quite a reputation as a wine-maker, even if people did think it was senseless. When Louisa had died and his second wife Helen had come into his life, she had taken on the duties as well, and it was almost as if his beloved had never left him, as if God Himself knew what James was doing and saw fit to send someone to help him continue. He did not need the money, would not drink the wine, but he would build and keep this monument to that one boy.
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©1998 Brian D. Hampton May not be reproduced without permission. All rights reserved. |
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