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Black Swan • Historical fiction
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1
November 30, 1864: Dawn
That day in 1864 was unseasonably mild for late November. There had been a frost already, and the land lay fallow. The cotton, which lay white on the fields in early fall like the crashed remains of an exhausted wave, had been gathered and ginned and baled and shipped off for when it could be transported in safety, which was practically never. Most of it sat stacked near the gins, in warehouses, and in barns around town. But the fields looked healthy, and the houses weren't burned to the ground, and the barns weren't stripped of their joists and planking, and the nearby rail line, the Nashville & Decatur Railroad, still had all the pieces of its track.
Early that morning, long and twisting columns of butternut gray moved slowly up the three pikes that cut their way toward Franklin, Tennessee. They were miles away but closing fast. Bright metal flashed from within each column, like the glistening of a snake's scales. The locals later remembered that the thump of boots and bare feet upon the macadam rattled the windows of their houses. These were the Southern Confederates, come to smash the Northern Union soldiers. They had been ridden hard. They wore raggedy homespun and crumpled felt slouch hats, and they were so skinny that no one-not even the Unionists-blamed them for looting the dead of their food. It did not escape the Southerners' notice that the land they were moving into had been spared the ravages of war, unlike Atlanta and the little towns of northern Alabama where they had lately been. There they had seen ghost towns and torched fields, houses that retained only the barest skeletal relation to their former selves. There they had seen what looked like the ruins of an ancient civilization.
Here they saw houses circled by groves of giant cedars and magnolias so beautiful they thought they would never see a thing so pretty again, and white board churches that inspired silent oaths of faith and devotion from even the lapsed and godless, promises of good works in exchange for survival. The meanest, most dissolute and liquored-up men looked on the land and wanted nothing more than the quiet, pious life they could lead in one of the houses along the side of the road, tending crops and riding to the little wooden churches with their plump wives and their cherub-faced children. Few such men ever lived such lives later on, if they survived, but it could be said that the imminence of death had inspired in even the hardest cases a momentary appreciation of anonymity and quiet.
The Confederate columns kept on, converging as the roads angled in. They seemed unstoppable, inexorable, churning on and on as if to chase down and devour the town itself. There would soon be no escape, but this was not something anyone in Franklin could know at dawn on November 30.
In the town another mass-this one of blue-swarmed and jittered upon the outskirts, scraping at the dirt with their shovels and picks and bayonets, felling trees and Osage orange hedges, building bulwarks and ramparts. These were the Union soldiers, who had snuck by the Confederates the night before when they rightfully should have been beaten down and destroyed. Good-bye, Andersonville, they had whispered to each other as they walked quietly up the pike past the Confederates at Spring Hill, invoking the name of the most feared Confederate prison. How could 21,000 men walk up a road within a few hundred yards of another 25,000 men and not be noticed? Better not to wonder, thought the men laboring at the ditches, their shirts torn off and their muscles glazed in dirt and sweat. Might jinx it.
And so the Northerners, bone-tired, threw up even more defenses across the southern end of town, a crooked smile of trenches that ran across the bend in the river, from one side of town to the other, in the off chance that the rebels would put up a fight. The possibility was absurd, and after getting together a decent defensive position, many of them wandered about the town in search of food and drink. Many of the officers, that is. They found the natives friendly and hospitable. Or perhaps they were just worn down by the occupation and endless requisitions of the small Yankee garrison that had lived among them for two years while fortifying the town. In any case, the newcomers helped themselves to their stores and their whiskey. Don't mind if I do, they said, filling their canteens and propping their boots up on the railing of porches, watching their men dig and saw and hammer.
A little town, Franklin had its share of rambling two-story frame manses surrounding its square, and plenty of ancient oaks and maple trees with branches hiding little boys staring goggle-eyed and dumbstruck at the bluecoats, thousands more than they'd ever seen. Amid the sound of pickaxes and shouts drifting up toward the square, ladies sat on their porches moving backgammon pieces and wondered if they'd actually see a real battle now, the sort of thing they had read about in the Chattanooga Rebel, which published the clever little irreverent letters of one of the local boys off fighting somewhere to the south.
A hawk circling high above the land, floating on the thermals thrown into such disorder by the heat of the day, would have seen the stream of butternut gray gliding ever closer to the mob of blue, the glint of metal and the flash of bright flags, the gashes of newly turned dirt, the orderly streets and the regular gray roofs of Franklin. Whatever coincidence or divine intent had conspired to bring it about, Franklin was surrounded.
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© Transworld Publishers |
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More Information
Publication Date: 01/09/2006 • 544 pages • 198 x 127 mm
• ISBN: 0552773409
Territory: UK C/Wealth ex Can |
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