Places we never were: I [Speirs/Lipton, AU, PG (mild slash)]
Author's note: Speirs and Lipton are the only BoB characters appearing here. I'd love to try an AU featuring all of Easy Company, but a) this would be a massive undertaking that would take me a very, very long time to get through, and b) the historical circumstances of this chapter make it impossible to keep Easy together as a unit, for obvious reasons. (Nevertheless, there's still part of me that wants to try Bull/Johnny in this universe.)
I apologize for the historical inaccuracies running rampant in this story.
places we never were, part one: at home in the valley
i.
The lieutenant has no eyes. A bullet entered his head from the rear and exited from the bridge of the nose, taking the lieutenant’s forehead, brow, mud-colored eyes and wire spectacles with it. His name was Sloane. He was a West Virginian, like Lipton, and he headed up the 56th Rifle Co., IX corps, of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.
The state where Lipton was born is divided now, like his country, but he suspects that no possible outcome to the war can stitch Virginia back together. It makes him as sad as if his own brother wore the gray and marched under Lee and Jackson.
Such divisions seem to matter very little to the new lieutenant leading the 56th. Chaos in the ranks is such that Sloane’s replacement isn’t even a Virginian; he comes from Illinois, the grapevine says. The grapevine says many things about the new lieutenant, whose name is Speirs.
The two of them, Speirs and Lipton, are side by side in the crater as the sun rises over Petersburg, untangling Union bodies and hauling them up in slings made of some poor farmer’s bedsheets. It’s grim work, and they don’t converse. In any case, Speirs has only ever spoken to Lipton curtly, giving orders.
Lipton knew Sloane quite well. He had a terrible yearning to be popular among the men, and to that end attached himself to Lipton, hoping to soak up enlisted-man camaraderie. Lipton knew about Sloane’s wife and four children and their farm outside Morgantown; he knew about Sloane’s right knee, which went game when a storm was coming in; he knew a great deal about Sloane’s great-great-grandfather, who had distinguished himself heroically at the battle of Bunker Hill.
Sloane was at the head of the charge two days before, as with a clatter of bayonets and a thunder of boots the 56th Rifle Co. tumbled into the three-story crater the Pennsylvanian engineers and miners had opened up in the Rebel fortifications. He was well prepared to distinguish himself until someone blew his skull apart. His body has lain in the crater for over forty-eight hours now. Speirs takes him by the shoulders of his uniform as Lipton takes his ankles, and together they heave him into the stained hammock so the men on the rim can pull him up and out.
Sloane was a tidy little man while he lived. Speirs, in contrast, has a four-day beard; his fingernails are torn and filthy, and the gold braid has disappeared from his uniform. The clouds of flies infesting the bottom of the pit don’t seem to irritate him, though they, and the stench, make Lipton feel almost unlucky to have survived the battle.
Lipton has noticed something about Speirs. If a body they move has a watch on it, or a harmonica, or a pocket knife, it goes into Speirs’ breast pocket, and that breast pocket is heavy now, dragging his coat awkwardly down from the shoulder. He takes indiscriminately from Rebel and Union both. Lipton has seen soldiers steal from each other before, but never the officers. And Speirs doesn’t care if anybody sees-though no man of the company would raise a voice against him if he did. There are stories told about Speirs that Lipton cannot rationally believe, but he is thinking now, surreptitiously glancing toward Speirs’ black unblinking eyes, that there is a kernel of truth in every rumor.
-----
In an awful way, he is grateful for the job he and Speirs must now do, grateful for the rot, the gore, the horror that assaults him on all fronts, because when he shuts it out, steels himself, he can’t feel what he should be feeling: shame. It’s a relief, and he is glad of it, and guilty for that, too.
Speirs straightens his back and says, “First Sergeant,” with that deceptive softness that’s always in his voice; one who had only heard him talk might think him a harmless man. But every time Speirs addresses him, Lipton’s stomach tenses a little.
“Sir.”
“Sun’s coming up. Let’s get some breakfast.”
The mess tent is full of wounded men, and Lipton doesn’t think he could eat anyway, but he follows Speirs to the wall of the crater, climbs the rope ladder, and takes the hand Speirs offers to help him over the rim.
Speirs leads and Lipton follows, and they walk nearly a mile across the lush and overgrown fields that he’s already started to hate, until they’re out of reach of the smoke and the smell. Slave cabins squat empty, doors open and creaking in the wind. The plantation house looks down on them from the top of a gentle hill. Speirs ignores it and heads for the storehouses.
“I’ll search the barn, sir,” Lipton says obediently.
“Not alone, you won’t,” Speirs replies as he kicks down the door of a meat-curing shack. A smell of dried pork and wood smoke comes from within, a good smell, and it brings Lipton to the realization that he is, in fact, so hungry he’s sick. But the aroma is old, and there’s nothing in the shed now.
They move on, toward the henhouse, where a lone bird can be heard clucking. Speirs cocks his pistol, and Lipton follows, seeing nothing particularly ridiculous in hunting chickens with a bayonet.
Inside, squatting on the dung-encrusted floor, is a pale woman, well dressed and perhaps thirty years old, clutching a hen tight to her breast. She looks up at Speirs and his gun with an expression somewhere between panic and complete loss of sanity. Lipton looks at Speirs too, and a sudden, nauseous fear grips him, though he does not know why.
“Meat,” Speirs says to the woman. “You got meat? How about bread? You got any bread here?”
The woman just stares at him. The wildness in her eyes has taken on a defiant tinge.
“You, woman,” says Speirs sharply. “Food. My sergeant’s hungry. What have you got?”
By way of reply, she sucks a breath in through her teeth, and then spits, loudly and copiously, on the toe of Speirs’ right boot.
Speirs steps forward and calmly rests the barrel of the pistol against the woman’s forehead. He says nothing. Lipton keeps his eyes on the chicken and waits for the shot.
The woman looks into Speirs’ eyes, upper lip rising in a sneer; she looks, and after a moment she blinks, and after another moment she starts to shake.
She closes her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says in a low, thick, surrendering voice.
Speirs doesn’t move.
“Root cellar,” the woman says. “Canned things in there. It’s all I have left. You men ain’t the first.” A tear runs down her cheek.
There is food in the root cellar, though not much; mostly peaches and beans. Speirs loads his knapsack until it must weigh fifty pounds, and carries the rest in his arms.
“Sir,” Lipton says. “Shouldn’t we leave some?”
“For her?” Lipton nods. “No,” says Speirs. “This isn’t the last of it. Believe me. She has plenty.”
“YANKEES GO TO HELL!”
Speirs’ arms are full and his pistol is holstered when he sees the woman standing in the doorway with tears streaming from her eyes and a heavy shotgun pointed at his head, but Lipton still has his rifle at his hip, bayonet fixed, and without even thinking he charges her as she’s struggling to fire it.
The sound of the shot echoes off the cellar walls. The woman staggers and falls heavily to her knees as Lipton jerks his bayonet out from between her ribs. Speirs turns his head, very slowly, and looks at the hole, big as a man’s fist, that the blast made in the wall behind him.
There is no sound in the cellar but the gurgle the woman makes as she dies and the dripping of blood onto the floor from the tip of Lipton’s blade. Speirs puts the beans and peaches down. He walks up to the woman and nudges her off her knees with his foot. She hits the ground like a dropped sack of coal.
Speirs looks at Lipton. “Good work, First Sergeant.”
Lipton stands still, his mouth slackly open, his fingers loosely wrapped around the stock of his rifle.
“First Sergeant,” Speirs says.
Lipton begins to shake his head very slowly.
“Lipton,” Speirs says.
“I,” Lipton says. “I killed. I killed a-”
“You killed an enemy hostile who threatened the life of your commanding officer.” Speirs is still looking at him, but he can’t look back.
“A woman,” Lipton says.
“Lipton, she tried to shoot me in the face.” Speirs moves, and Lipton closes his eyes, only to open them again when he feels Speirs’ hand press firmly into the juncture of his neck and his shoulder. “I’ll say it again. Good work, First Sergeant. I’ll see that you get a Medal of Honor for it.”
“No,” Lipton says helplessly. The flat toneless voice of shame inside him says, Look at you. You guard with the left hand and betray with the right.
-----
Away from the plantation, halfway back to the battlefield, and Lipton’s still looking back. Speirs eats peaches straight out of the jar, with his fingers, not noticing or not caring that his hands are caked in days-old blood. “It’s not right,” Lipton says.
“That’ll do, First Sergeant,” Speirs says, facing straight ahead.
“To leave her on the ground like we did. It’s not right. She ought to have a grave.”
“We’re not going back.”
“Sir,” Lipton says, breathing hard. “With all due respect. It’s not right.”
“We are not going back to bury that woman,” Speirs snaps. “It is, in my opinion, an unnecessary risk for us to take on behalf of somebody who tried to kill me. And that’s final.”
Lipton falls silent. He carries his rifle at the ready as he walks, and his hands feel numb around it. Speirs tosses the now-empty jar over his shoulder. They tramp across the fields without speaking for a while, and then Speirs pulls another glass jar out of his knapsack and holds it out to Lipton. “Eat something,” he says.
The peaches are perfect, and they only make it worse.
“Lipton,” Speirs says. He doesn’t answer, and Speirs says “Lipton,” again, more urgently.
“Sir.” He closes his eyes.
“I was watching you on Saturday,” Speirs says. “I saw you when the 56th made the charge.” Lipton knows what is coming, and can only wait, hopeless, no longer even able to dread.
“Every man who followed Lieutenant Sloane into the crater was killed. But that only came to twenty-seven men. The rest of the company went around the perimeter-why?”
He doesn’t have to answer; Speirs doesn’t give him time. “Because you stood on the rim and drove them that way. I saw you do that, Lipton.” He speaks with no particular inflection; no apparent censure or disdain. “You disobeyed a direct order.”
“I will accept my punishment, sir,” Lipton says.
“You disobeyed a direct order, and in doing saved the lives of more than two-thirds of your unit. If you hadn’t broken ranks, they would all have been butchered. Like Sloane. And you too.” And then Speirs turns and looks him in the face for the first time in almost an hour. “I will not punish you for that.”
Lipton stops walking. “Sir?”
There is no change in Speirs’ voice or his face; his eyes are dark and unreadable, and the corners of his mouth betray nothing. “You will never disobey my orders, First Sergeant. And I will never throw away the lives of your men. Do we have an understanding?”
“They’re your men now, sir.”
“I have a title. You have their allegiance.”
Lipton swallows, wincing at the roughness of his throat. He is unable to take pride in the other men’s devotion-not when he bought it with an act of treason.
Speirs looks at him as if he can tell exactly what Lipton is thinking, and says, “You had that allegiance long ago.”
They have returned to the battlefield now, and the sky has gone the color of a man’s skin after three days dead. Lipton makes to climb back down the rope into the crater, but stops and stiffens at the edge. Speirs’ hand is resting just above the small of his back.
Lipton stands still, and when he catches Lipton’s eye, Speirs smiles, and for a moment looks genuinely human.
“No regrets, Carwood,” he says, and moves his hand very slightly against Lipton’s back before taking hold of the rope and beginning to lower himself down.
ii.
The night hangs heavy over the treeless landscape, and Speirs shifts next to him on the floor of the narrow trench and says, “How’s morale?”
“They’re resilient men, sir.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Speirs doesn’t look at Lipton much while he’s talking to him, which is something of a relief, because Lipton finds his gaze slightly unsettling. “Is it a regional trait, resilience?”
“Might be,” Lipton says. “Soil’s not so good back home. You scrape your living out of it.”
Speirs nods, looking pensive, and there’s a silence. “You’re from Illinois, aren’t you, sir?” Lipton says cautiously, and lamely adds, “Like the President.”
“Springfield,” Speirs says. “Tiny little town. You won’t have heard of it.”
“I’m sure it’s a… fine place to come from, sir.” He regards himself with some amazement: look at you, making petty conversation with the man most feared in the whole IX corps. Suddenly Speirs’ face is illuminated by the burst of a shell high above them, too high to really do damage, and Speirs watches it without concern. With his hat off in the fading light he looks younger than he is; Lipton tries to picture him still younger than that, and fails. Could he have ever been a child? Does he have parents? Siblings? A bride and children of his own? It all seems impossible. If only every army could be composed of such men, Lipton thinks. Wars could be won without women’s grief. Perhaps without grief at all.
No, he’s wrong about that and he knows it.
The silence among the troops unnerves him, and he calls out, “Everyone all right?” A mumbling chorus answers him. “Speak up, boys,” he says. “Esco?”
“Yeah, Lip.”
“Ivory?”
“Still livin’.”
“Jeremiah?”
A silence. “Jeremiah?”
“Uh! Yeah, Lip.”
“Sorry, Lip,” he hears Ivory Tarrant say. “He was dreamin’ of Helen McCabee, weren’t you, Jerry?”
“Miss Helen McCabee and her titties of glory,” Esco sniggers, and then yelps as Jeremiah brings his formidable fist to bear on him. Lipton smiles, thinking nobody else will notice, but Speirs’ eyes flicker to his mouth and rest there for a moment.
From the far end of the trench there’s a choked moan. “Something out of joint down there, boys?” Lipton shouts.
“It’s the drummer boy, Sarge,” Corporal Hardy shouts back. “He misses his fellows.”
Speirs looks at Lipton intently. “All right, men,” Lipton says, loud enough for the whole company to hear. “Let’s have a song for Eb’nezer. Oh-John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave…”
Before he’s done with the first line, the rest of the men have joined in-all except Speirs. He’s smiling, but he looks a little sheepish, and Lipton realizes he doesn’t know the words. “Your men are in fine voice tonight, First Sergeant,” Speirs says.
“Never doubt a West Virginian when it comes to singing, sir. Glory, glory, hallelujah, his soul goes marching on.” Lipton comes to the last stanza and keeps going. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; he is trampling down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored-” Now Speirs is singing too, low and almost tuneless. Every soldier in the Republic knows these lyrics. “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword; his truth is marching on.”
The song rises up like a column of smoke into the sky; the melody rises; this melody, Lipton thinks, will never fade. How can “Look away, Dixieland” stand up against “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”? Speirs sings louder, in the wrong key, as they reach the last hallelujah, and Lipton sits close beside him and feels victory coming like a rattling southbound train.
“Well done,” Lipton shouts. “Now, let’s see if we can’t wake up old Bobby Lee. A cheer for Harper’s Ferry!”
“Hurrah!”
“A cheer for West Virginia!”
“Hurrah!”
“A cheer for the Union!” Speirs calls out, and the following cheer is the loudest of all.
iii.
It’s a damn strange way to have a war, Lipton thinks as they go into their tenth day in the trenches. He hasn’t laid eyes on the enemy since the day of the crater, although he can often hear them. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia trade taunts and gibes frequently, and fire somewhat less frequently. There have been precious few men wounded since July, and Lipton is grateful for that.
But there are rats, which are getting more daring, and there are lice on the rats, and there is typhus in the lice to which his men are steadily succumbing. Speirs seems relatively unconcerned about the problem, though Lipton exhausts himself worrying; “I’m an officer, not a doctor,” he says, “I can only protect them from so much.” And then one day Lipton notices him turning his head and muffling a cough.
“How long have you had that, sir?” he asks, cold creeping down his back.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Speirs answers brusquely.
“The cough, sir.”
“It’s nothing. Dust in the air.”
“You should go to the hospital tent. Have them look at you. Sir.”
“Lipton!” Speirs says sharply, and there’s an audible strain, a roughness, in his voice. He looks Lipton in the eye, and then, to Lipton’s surprise, looks away. “Don’t call me sir so often.”
“All right,” Lipton says, and it’s quiet for a moment. Speirs sits next to him, as usual, and Lipton listens to his slow breathing until he hears a breath drawn in and not released for several seconds too long; and then another cough.
“I won’t go up there,” Speirs says.
“Is that an ultimatum?”
“Yes.”
“Would you go if you were wounded?”
“Yes. If it were serious.”
Lipton leans close to Speirs and says in a very low voice, near to a whisper, “I disobeyed orders once, sir, I can do it again. And I won’t ask your forgiveness this time.” Then he stands up and puts his hand on the pistol that hangs from his belt.
Speirs gazes up at him in bemusement and maybe even a little surprise. The blackness of his eyes seems impossible under the penetrating summer sun, but it’s true, those eyes are blacker than anything Lipton can think of, even the blackness of sleep. Could he ever know this man, he wonders. Given a hundred years of battle, could he come to see behind the mask-assuming anything is behind the mask at all. He wonders, as he has so often, what it is that’s sitting on the ground at his feet. He believes in ghosts. If he reached out, right now-and he wouldn’t have to reach far-would there be something alive under his fingers?
They look at each other, striving in silence, and Speirs is the one who blinks.
He stands slowly, almost lazily, and his mouth quirks. It’s not a smile, but it might as well be one. “All right then, Lipton,” he says. “No need to shoot me. I’m going.”
“Best hurry,” Lipton replies, and watches him as he climbs out of the trench and crosses the rearward lines, until he’s no longer visible.
Speirs comes back after some hours. He does not have typhus. Lipton gathers a brood of imagined future grandchildren around him and says, Yes, that’s how your grandpappy won the war.
iv.
Nine days later they are out of the trenches and moving: going east to break a Confederate railroad. He feels as if he’s been released from Purgatory. Every step is glorious. They are at one-third regimental strength; the men are hungry and tired and worn with sickness and exhaustion; they are low on every kind of supply; their legs are stiff and some of them groan as they march, but every one of them is filled up with the same fatalistic joy at the prospect of facing the enemy again. Even Speirs. Lipton can see it. This is Speirs’ first operation as commander of the 56th, and he seems to have grown six inches. Under his beard, battered wide-brimmed hat, and a layer of Virginia dust, he is radiant.
There are still stories. He made six (eight) (thirty) Confederate prisoners dig their own graves, and then put the men in them. He caught a man malingering in the hospital and ordered him not to be fed until he acquired a wound. He has no fear. His voice is the thunder of cannons. Some of them defy logic; some of them are true.
They are together at the head of the company. It has been promised that the V and IX corps will come to the Weldon line virtually unopposed-that the rebels are tied up with Hancock’s men at Deep Bottom-but such grand promises were made as the Pennsylvanian engineers were digging under the enemy lines nineteen days ago, and they all now know better than to trust so easily. They may be about to face brigades of infantry as vengeful as the men who fired down into the crater, whose laughter is what Lipton will never forget. Lipton knows this, and Speirs may be thinking the same thing, though who can ever tell what Speirs is thinking, when he catches Lipton’s eye, and then his coat by the sleeve.
What is about to happen doesn’t matter at all. The sun is rising; he can feel it on his back, and that and the warmth of a man’s hand on his arm are all one sensation.
There is no gentleness in Speirs’ kiss, nor anywhere in the man, to Lipton’s knowledge. Still, in the way his palms spread flat and broad across Lipton’s back, there is a kind of fierce protective urge that could be mistaken for it.
A kiss before dying, Lipton thinks, and Speirs pulls him in tighter and tighter and their buttons snag on each other’s coats. Men charge past without turning their heads, and he feels as if the two of them are not even there, mere ghosts, dense blood-warm flesh to one another, shadow and smoke to everyone else.
Then they break apart, and Speirs nods at him and touches the back of his neck, and they turn and begin again to move.
--end--
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Crossposted to camp_toccoa, aldbournewhores.
I apologize for the historical inaccuracies running rampant in this story.
places we never were, part one: at home in the valley
i.
The lieutenant has no eyes. A bullet entered his head from the rear and exited from the bridge of the nose, taking the lieutenant’s forehead, brow, mud-colored eyes and wire spectacles with it. His name was Sloane. He was a West Virginian, like Lipton, and he headed up the 56th Rifle Co., IX corps, of the U.S. Army of the Potomac.
The state where Lipton was born is divided now, like his country, but he suspects that no possible outcome to the war can stitch Virginia back together. It makes him as sad as if his own brother wore the gray and marched under Lee and Jackson.
Such divisions seem to matter very little to the new lieutenant leading the 56th. Chaos in the ranks is such that Sloane’s replacement isn’t even a Virginian; he comes from Illinois, the grapevine says. The grapevine says many things about the new lieutenant, whose name is Speirs.
The two of them, Speirs and Lipton, are side by side in the crater as the sun rises over Petersburg, untangling Union bodies and hauling them up in slings made of some poor farmer’s bedsheets. It’s grim work, and they don’t converse. In any case, Speirs has only ever spoken to Lipton curtly, giving orders.
Lipton knew Sloane quite well. He had a terrible yearning to be popular among the men, and to that end attached himself to Lipton, hoping to soak up enlisted-man camaraderie. Lipton knew about Sloane’s wife and four children and their farm outside Morgantown; he knew about Sloane’s right knee, which went game when a storm was coming in; he knew a great deal about Sloane’s great-great-grandfather, who had distinguished himself heroically at the battle of Bunker Hill.
Sloane was at the head of the charge two days before, as with a clatter of bayonets and a thunder of boots the 56th Rifle Co. tumbled into the three-story crater the Pennsylvanian engineers and miners had opened up in the Rebel fortifications. He was well prepared to distinguish himself until someone blew his skull apart. His body has lain in the crater for over forty-eight hours now. Speirs takes him by the shoulders of his uniform as Lipton takes his ankles, and together they heave him into the stained hammock so the men on the rim can pull him up and out.
Sloane was a tidy little man while he lived. Speirs, in contrast, has a four-day beard; his fingernails are torn and filthy, and the gold braid has disappeared from his uniform. The clouds of flies infesting the bottom of the pit don’t seem to irritate him, though they, and the stench, make Lipton feel almost unlucky to have survived the battle.
Lipton has noticed something about Speirs. If a body they move has a watch on it, or a harmonica, or a pocket knife, it goes into Speirs’ breast pocket, and that breast pocket is heavy now, dragging his coat awkwardly down from the shoulder. He takes indiscriminately from Rebel and Union both. Lipton has seen soldiers steal from each other before, but never the officers. And Speirs doesn’t care if anybody sees-though no man of the company would raise a voice against him if he did. There are stories told about Speirs that Lipton cannot rationally believe, but he is thinking now, surreptitiously glancing toward Speirs’ black unblinking eyes, that there is a kernel of truth in every rumor.
-----
In an awful way, he is grateful for the job he and Speirs must now do, grateful for the rot, the gore, the horror that assaults him on all fronts, because when he shuts it out, steels himself, he can’t feel what he should be feeling: shame. It’s a relief, and he is glad of it, and guilty for that, too.
Speirs straightens his back and says, “First Sergeant,” with that deceptive softness that’s always in his voice; one who had only heard him talk might think him a harmless man. But every time Speirs addresses him, Lipton’s stomach tenses a little.
“Sir.”
“Sun’s coming up. Let’s get some breakfast.”
The mess tent is full of wounded men, and Lipton doesn’t think he could eat anyway, but he follows Speirs to the wall of the crater, climbs the rope ladder, and takes the hand Speirs offers to help him over the rim.
Speirs leads and Lipton follows, and they walk nearly a mile across the lush and overgrown fields that he’s already started to hate, until they’re out of reach of the smoke and the smell. Slave cabins squat empty, doors open and creaking in the wind. The plantation house looks down on them from the top of a gentle hill. Speirs ignores it and heads for the storehouses.
“I’ll search the barn, sir,” Lipton says obediently.
“Not alone, you won’t,” Speirs replies as he kicks down the door of a meat-curing shack. A smell of dried pork and wood smoke comes from within, a good smell, and it brings Lipton to the realization that he is, in fact, so hungry he’s sick. But the aroma is old, and there’s nothing in the shed now.
They move on, toward the henhouse, where a lone bird can be heard clucking. Speirs cocks his pistol, and Lipton follows, seeing nothing particularly ridiculous in hunting chickens with a bayonet.
Inside, squatting on the dung-encrusted floor, is a pale woman, well dressed and perhaps thirty years old, clutching a hen tight to her breast. She looks up at Speirs and his gun with an expression somewhere between panic and complete loss of sanity. Lipton looks at Speirs too, and a sudden, nauseous fear grips him, though he does not know why.
“Meat,” Speirs says to the woman. “You got meat? How about bread? You got any bread here?”
The woman just stares at him. The wildness in her eyes has taken on a defiant tinge.
“You, woman,” says Speirs sharply. “Food. My sergeant’s hungry. What have you got?”
By way of reply, she sucks a breath in through her teeth, and then spits, loudly and copiously, on the toe of Speirs’ right boot.
Speirs steps forward and calmly rests the barrel of the pistol against the woman’s forehead. He says nothing. Lipton keeps his eyes on the chicken and waits for the shot.
The woman looks into Speirs’ eyes, upper lip rising in a sneer; she looks, and after a moment she blinks, and after another moment she starts to shake.
She closes her eyes. “I don’t want to die,” she says in a low, thick, surrendering voice.
Speirs doesn’t move.
“Root cellar,” the woman says. “Canned things in there. It’s all I have left. You men ain’t the first.” A tear runs down her cheek.
There is food in the root cellar, though not much; mostly peaches and beans. Speirs loads his knapsack until it must weigh fifty pounds, and carries the rest in his arms.
“Sir,” Lipton says. “Shouldn’t we leave some?”
“For her?” Lipton nods. “No,” says Speirs. “This isn’t the last of it. Believe me. She has plenty.”
“YANKEES GO TO HELL!”
Speirs’ arms are full and his pistol is holstered when he sees the woman standing in the doorway with tears streaming from her eyes and a heavy shotgun pointed at his head, but Lipton still has his rifle at his hip, bayonet fixed, and without even thinking he charges her as she’s struggling to fire it.
The sound of the shot echoes off the cellar walls. The woman staggers and falls heavily to her knees as Lipton jerks his bayonet out from between her ribs. Speirs turns his head, very slowly, and looks at the hole, big as a man’s fist, that the blast made in the wall behind him.
There is no sound in the cellar but the gurgle the woman makes as she dies and the dripping of blood onto the floor from the tip of Lipton’s blade. Speirs puts the beans and peaches down. He walks up to the woman and nudges her off her knees with his foot. She hits the ground like a dropped sack of coal.
Speirs looks at Lipton. “Good work, First Sergeant.”
Lipton stands still, his mouth slackly open, his fingers loosely wrapped around the stock of his rifle.
“First Sergeant,” Speirs says.
Lipton begins to shake his head very slowly.
“Lipton,” Speirs says.
“I,” Lipton says. “I killed. I killed a-”
“You killed an enemy hostile who threatened the life of your commanding officer.” Speirs is still looking at him, but he can’t look back.
“A woman,” Lipton says.
“Lipton, she tried to shoot me in the face.” Speirs moves, and Lipton closes his eyes, only to open them again when he feels Speirs’ hand press firmly into the juncture of his neck and his shoulder. “I’ll say it again. Good work, First Sergeant. I’ll see that you get a Medal of Honor for it.”
“No,” Lipton says helplessly. The flat toneless voice of shame inside him says, Look at you. You guard with the left hand and betray with the right.
-----
Away from the plantation, halfway back to the battlefield, and Lipton’s still looking back. Speirs eats peaches straight out of the jar, with his fingers, not noticing or not caring that his hands are caked in days-old blood. “It’s not right,” Lipton says.
“That’ll do, First Sergeant,” Speirs says, facing straight ahead.
“To leave her on the ground like we did. It’s not right. She ought to have a grave.”
“We’re not going back.”
“Sir,” Lipton says, breathing hard. “With all due respect. It’s not right.”
“We are not going back to bury that woman,” Speirs snaps. “It is, in my opinion, an unnecessary risk for us to take on behalf of somebody who tried to kill me. And that’s final.”
Lipton falls silent. He carries his rifle at the ready as he walks, and his hands feel numb around it. Speirs tosses the now-empty jar over his shoulder. They tramp across the fields without speaking for a while, and then Speirs pulls another glass jar out of his knapsack and holds it out to Lipton. “Eat something,” he says.
The peaches are perfect, and they only make it worse.
“Lipton,” Speirs says. He doesn’t answer, and Speirs says “Lipton,” again, more urgently.
“Sir.” He closes his eyes.
“I was watching you on Saturday,” Speirs says. “I saw you when the 56th made the charge.” Lipton knows what is coming, and can only wait, hopeless, no longer even able to dread.
“Every man who followed Lieutenant Sloane into the crater was killed. But that only came to twenty-seven men. The rest of the company went around the perimeter-why?”
He doesn’t have to answer; Speirs doesn’t give him time. “Because you stood on the rim and drove them that way. I saw you do that, Lipton.” He speaks with no particular inflection; no apparent censure or disdain. “You disobeyed a direct order.”
“I will accept my punishment, sir,” Lipton says.
“You disobeyed a direct order, and in doing saved the lives of more than two-thirds of your unit. If you hadn’t broken ranks, they would all have been butchered. Like Sloane. And you too.” And then Speirs turns and looks him in the face for the first time in almost an hour. “I will not punish you for that.”
Lipton stops walking. “Sir?”
There is no change in Speirs’ voice or his face; his eyes are dark and unreadable, and the corners of his mouth betray nothing. “You will never disobey my orders, First Sergeant. And I will never throw away the lives of your men. Do we have an understanding?”
“They’re your men now, sir.”
“I have a title. You have their allegiance.”
Lipton swallows, wincing at the roughness of his throat. He is unable to take pride in the other men’s devotion-not when he bought it with an act of treason.
Speirs looks at him as if he can tell exactly what Lipton is thinking, and says, “You had that allegiance long ago.”
They have returned to the battlefield now, and the sky has gone the color of a man’s skin after three days dead. Lipton makes to climb back down the rope into the crater, but stops and stiffens at the edge. Speirs’ hand is resting just above the small of his back.
Lipton stands still, and when he catches Lipton’s eye, Speirs smiles, and for a moment looks genuinely human.
“No regrets, Carwood,” he says, and moves his hand very slightly against Lipton’s back before taking hold of the rope and beginning to lower himself down.
ii.
The night hangs heavy over the treeless landscape, and Speirs shifts next to him on the floor of the narrow trench and says, “How’s morale?”
“They’re resilient men, sir.”
“So I’ve noticed.” Speirs doesn’t look at Lipton much while he’s talking to him, which is something of a relief, because Lipton finds his gaze slightly unsettling. “Is it a regional trait, resilience?”
“Might be,” Lipton says. “Soil’s not so good back home. You scrape your living out of it.”
Speirs nods, looking pensive, and there’s a silence. “You’re from Illinois, aren’t you, sir?” Lipton says cautiously, and lamely adds, “Like the President.”
“Springfield,” Speirs says. “Tiny little town. You won’t have heard of it.”
“I’m sure it’s a… fine place to come from, sir.” He regards himself with some amazement: look at you, making petty conversation with the man most feared in the whole IX corps. Suddenly Speirs’ face is illuminated by the burst of a shell high above them, too high to really do damage, and Speirs watches it without concern. With his hat off in the fading light he looks younger than he is; Lipton tries to picture him still younger than that, and fails. Could he have ever been a child? Does he have parents? Siblings? A bride and children of his own? It all seems impossible. If only every army could be composed of such men, Lipton thinks. Wars could be won without women’s grief. Perhaps without grief at all.
No, he’s wrong about that and he knows it.
The silence among the troops unnerves him, and he calls out, “Everyone all right?” A mumbling chorus answers him. “Speak up, boys,” he says. “Esco?”
“Yeah, Lip.”
“Ivory?”
“Still livin’.”
“Jeremiah?”
A silence. “Jeremiah?”
“Uh! Yeah, Lip.”
“Sorry, Lip,” he hears Ivory Tarrant say. “He was dreamin’ of Helen McCabee, weren’t you, Jerry?”
“Miss Helen McCabee and her titties of glory,” Esco sniggers, and then yelps as Jeremiah brings his formidable fist to bear on him. Lipton smiles, thinking nobody else will notice, but Speirs’ eyes flicker to his mouth and rest there for a moment.
From the far end of the trench there’s a choked moan. “Something out of joint down there, boys?” Lipton shouts.
“It’s the drummer boy, Sarge,” Corporal Hardy shouts back. “He misses his fellows.”
Speirs looks at Lipton intently. “All right, men,” Lipton says, loud enough for the whole company to hear. “Let’s have a song for Eb’nezer. Oh-John Brown’s body lies a-moulderin’ in the grave…”
Before he’s done with the first line, the rest of the men have joined in-all except Speirs. He’s smiling, but he looks a little sheepish, and Lipton realizes he doesn’t know the words. “Your men are in fine voice tonight, First Sergeant,” Speirs says.
“Never doubt a West Virginian when it comes to singing, sir. Glory, glory, hallelujah, his soul goes marching on.” Lipton comes to the last stanza and keeps going. “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; he is trampling down the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored-” Now Speirs is singing too, low and almost tuneless. Every soldier in the Republic knows these lyrics. “He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword; his truth is marching on.”
The song rises up like a column of smoke into the sky; the melody rises; this melody, Lipton thinks, will never fade. How can “Look away, Dixieland” stand up against “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free”? Speirs sings louder, in the wrong key, as they reach the last hallelujah, and Lipton sits close beside him and feels victory coming like a rattling southbound train.
“Well done,” Lipton shouts. “Now, let’s see if we can’t wake up old Bobby Lee. A cheer for Harper’s Ferry!”
“Hurrah!”
“A cheer for West Virginia!”
“Hurrah!”
“A cheer for the Union!” Speirs calls out, and the following cheer is the loudest of all.
iii.
It’s a damn strange way to have a war, Lipton thinks as they go into their tenth day in the trenches. He hasn’t laid eyes on the enemy since the day of the crater, although he can often hear them. The Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia trade taunts and gibes frequently, and fire somewhat less frequently. There have been precious few men wounded since July, and Lipton is grateful for that.
But there are rats, which are getting more daring, and there are lice on the rats, and there is typhus in the lice to which his men are steadily succumbing. Speirs seems relatively unconcerned about the problem, though Lipton exhausts himself worrying; “I’m an officer, not a doctor,” he says, “I can only protect them from so much.” And then one day Lipton notices him turning his head and muffling a cough.
“How long have you had that, sir?” he asks, cold creeping down his back.
“Don’t know what you’re talking about,” Speirs answers brusquely.
“The cough, sir.”
“It’s nothing. Dust in the air.”
“You should go to the hospital tent. Have them look at you. Sir.”
“Lipton!” Speirs says sharply, and there’s an audible strain, a roughness, in his voice. He looks Lipton in the eye, and then, to Lipton’s surprise, looks away. “Don’t call me sir so often.”
“All right,” Lipton says, and it’s quiet for a moment. Speirs sits next to him, as usual, and Lipton listens to his slow breathing until he hears a breath drawn in and not released for several seconds too long; and then another cough.
“I won’t go up there,” Speirs says.
“Is that an ultimatum?”
“Yes.”
“Would you go if you were wounded?”
“Yes. If it were serious.”
Lipton leans close to Speirs and says in a very low voice, near to a whisper, “I disobeyed orders once, sir, I can do it again. And I won’t ask your forgiveness this time.” Then he stands up and puts his hand on the pistol that hangs from his belt.
Speirs gazes up at him in bemusement and maybe even a little surprise. The blackness of his eyes seems impossible under the penetrating summer sun, but it’s true, those eyes are blacker than anything Lipton can think of, even the blackness of sleep. Could he ever know this man, he wonders. Given a hundred years of battle, could he come to see behind the mask-assuming anything is behind the mask at all. He wonders, as he has so often, what it is that’s sitting on the ground at his feet. He believes in ghosts. If he reached out, right now-and he wouldn’t have to reach far-would there be something alive under his fingers?
They look at each other, striving in silence, and Speirs is the one who blinks.
He stands slowly, almost lazily, and his mouth quirks. It’s not a smile, but it might as well be one. “All right then, Lipton,” he says. “No need to shoot me. I’m going.”
“Best hurry,” Lipton replies, and watches him as he climbs out of the trench and crosses the rearward lines, until he’s no longer visible.
Speirs comes back after some hours. He does not have typhus. Lipton gathers a brood of imagined future grandchildren around him and says, Yes, that’s how your grandpappy won the war.
iv.
Nine days later they are out of the trenches and moving: going east to break a Confederate railroad. He feels as if he’s been released from Purgatory. Every step is glorious. They are at one-third regimental strength; the men are hungry and tired and worn with sickness and exhaustion; they are low on every kind of supply; their legs are stiff and some of them groan as they march, but every one of them is filled up with the same fatalistic joy at the prospect of facing the enemy again. Even Speirs. Lipton can see it. This is Speirs’ first operation as commander of the 56th, and he seems to have grown six inches. Under his beard, battered wide-brimmed hat, and a layer of Virginia dust, he is radiant.
There are still stories. He made six (eight) (thirty) Confederate prisoners dig their own graves, and then put the men in them. He caught a man malingering in the hospital and ordered him not to be fed until he acquired a wound. He has no fear. His voice is the thunder of cannons. Some of them defy logic; some of them are true.
They are together at the head of the company. It has been promised that the V and IX corps will come to the Weldon line virtually unopposed-that the rebels are tied up with Hancock’s men at Deep Bottom-but such grand promises were made as the Pennsylvanian engineers were digging under the enemy lines nineteen days ago, and they all now know better than to trust so easily. They may be about to face brigades of infantry as vengeful as the men who fired down into the crater, whose laughter is what Lipton will never forget. Lipton knows this, and Speirs may be thinking the same thing, though who can ever tell what Speirs is thinking, when he catches Lipton’s eye, and then his coat by the sleeve.
What is about to happen doesn’t matter at all. The sun is rising; he can feel it on his back, and that and the warmth of a man’s hand on his arm are all one sensation.
There is no gentleness in Speirs’ kiss, nor anywhere in the man, to Lipton’s knowledge. Still, in the way his palms spread flat and broad across Lipton’s back, there is a kind of fierce protective urge that could be mistaken for it.
A kiss before dying, Lipton thinks, and Speirs pulls him in tighter and tighter and their buttons snag on each other’s coats. Men charge past without turning their heads, and he feels as if the two of them are not even there, mere ghosts, dense blood-warm flesh to one another, shadow and smoke to everyone else.
Then they break apart, and Speirs nods at him and touches the back of his neck, and they turn and begin again to move.
--end--
My other stories are available on my LJ, friendslocked (except for three written for Berlin by Christmas), so if you liked this and you want to read the others, just ask and I'll add you to the filter.
Crossposted to camp_toccoa, aldbournewhores.