LII.

When he had sobered up, Linus Poteat intended to skedaddle the first chance given, but none was forthcoming. It wasn't cowardice, he told himself. This war stuff just wasn't his jam. He could find his way.  Way where?  Where the hell am I?  His eyes were red and sunken.  His normally cheerful smile was downturned, a thread of drool hung down into the grass.  Stumbling, blinking, he rose and found his shoe and turned it upside down thinking something might fall out. He could not be sure what to find, but did so habitually on account of some dim and mystifying experience from beyond the verge. For drunkards like Linus Poteat have their waking rituals where clues may be found as to their comings and goings from nights previous.  He need not have looked far.  Down through the brush to the big river was the smoking hulk of a Yankee ironclad.  My God!  I remember that!  We blew her up!   

As he stood watching the spinning whisps of smoke rising from the river, he was approached by a rebel patrol.  He was rounded up and marched north. He recognized Skid Johnson and Stew Harlow who were both from the Nickajack and were in his conscription class.  Skid Johnson was from the Warrior Mountains. He said his family grew little more than a vegetable patch and hunted for the rest of their food like so many redskins. He was a red-headed freckled kid, and he said he was rounded up like a fugitive slave by the Home Guard.  They clasped him in chains and carted him into Moulton with a few other forlorn souls and told them all they could hang or they could join. Stew Harlow was of the prominent clan of Rats who inhabited the coves and inlets around Rodgersville.  He simply couldn't run fast enough, or he couldn't row fast enough, or he was too drunk to escape the clutches of the Home Guard.  He couldn't be too sure himself.  It could have been all three.  

And so they were marched into the town of Grand Gulf, or what was left of it anyway.  It used to be a thriving little cotton landing about twenty miles south of Vicksburg as the crow flies.  Now it was a burnt out gathering of gutted frames and scorched chimneys. The Yankees had put the town to the torch the year before. Now the Confederate Army was building gun batteries along the bluffs. The boys were hauled before an officer, who disgustedly sent them to dig earthworks. This they did for weeks, and in their penal state, they were watched constantly.  There was simply no way to skedaddle.  Worse yet, alcohol was difficult to come by.  It was around, but not near enough to numb the anguish of monotonous labor.  A sutler's wagon would ride down from Vicksburg three times a week, and he would peddle the most awful rotgut that would blind Linus for hours.  So he started picking through the wreckage of town looking for anything from which he could fashion a still, a unusual aptitude but none too far removed from the workings of a steamboat boiler. In this endeavor he was unsuccessful.

In late April there was a most tremendous cannonade that echoed down the river where the Yankee ironclads were trying to make the run past Vicksburg, that Gibraltar of the South. The rumbling of this distant fire continued ominously for hours.  If the Yankees were not destroyed by Vicksburg batteries, then it meant the next boats to come churning around the upriver bend would be their dreaded ironclads.  And in time they did come.  Seven of them, their armored wheel boxes slapping the water and their stacks belching round nimbi of grey smoke. As soon as they rounded the bend, they coughed thick black shot into the bluffs of Grand Gulf.  The rebel batteries responded in kind. A most furious cannonade ensued.  The guns along the bluffs barked and jerked, and the men would swarm across the gun with their plungers and shot and powder bags. Linus Poteat had never heard such a racket!  And then the Yankee shots came roaring in like freight trains. They fell into the earthworks digging up huge clogs of dirt, or sometimes burst overhead sending shrapnel everywhere that sounded like sleet.  This was a terrifying experience sober.  No wonder why so many officers drank too.

Things got worse as the big Yankee ironclads, which resembled old flat boats or even great metallic moccasins, churned their way closer and closer until they were just under the bluffs.  Linus found himself kicked by a sergeant whom he couldn't hear.  It was then he realized he was crouched with his knees under his chin and that he had urinated himself. 

Get up you bastard and bring water to the gunners with that bucket, the sergeant barked!

Linus watched as Stew Harlow seemed to skitter like a crab bearing a box of ammunition, his head always peering up then ducking with each shell that passed over.  Linus worked up just the bare modicum of courage to crawl after his hat and then crouch-run to a cistern.  

Jesus Christ!  This is madness, he thought to himself!  

The air rocked with successive shockwaves.  Every time the big pop bottle guns fired, they blew a wave of heat and rent air that rattled his clothes. He found a pale and filled it with water, then dashed from cover to cover until he had reached one of the guns.  So frantic had been his scramble that he arrived with almost no water at all.  

Shit!

So he ran back again and returned and found he had lost all the water again. The Yankee ironclads had swung to within a hundred yards of the bluffs, so close you could hear their officers barking orders. Linus saw a Confederate colonel who was brazenly standing atop an earthwork with his binoculars.  In the next moment, his head had simply vanished, knocked to bits by a cannon ball.  This was bad business, Linus thought. It was the most horrible thing he had ever seen when he realized what must have happened to the man's head that had splashed into a pink mist.  Linus Poteat had never been so frightened in all his life. All he could think of was running as far away as possible from this hellish juncture of madness, but there was nowhere to go!  

He heard Skid Johnson call his name through the cacophony of exploding guns. He beckoned him over from one of the rifle pits. So Linus crawled on all fours to where Skid Johnson was and slid down face first into the rifle pit.  He saw Stew Harlow huddled in a corner.  He looked frightened. There was someone else too, but he wasn't moving. No one had the courage to check on him, and assumed correctly he was dead.  

Boys, we gotta get out of this place, Linus said. This is bad business! Real bad business!

Skid and Stew agreed. He'd never had the chance to desert, and it didn't seem any more possible now. Getting blasted to bits, however, made him carve his own chance now out of a primal desire to live, and he intended to take it for better or worse.  So they all bound out from the rifle pits and in the din and chaos of the bombardment, they dashed from cover to cover to the magazines, which were set a good way back.  There they made a pretense of gathering munitions for the gun batteries before leaping into a wooded defile and skedaddling into the forest.  They had no rifles, no food and no camping kit.  They had no idea what to do next but run as far away as they could from that place of hell, and this did into evening to avoid the army patrols.

They wandered through wild ridged country to a river called the Big Black where to their amazement and divine gratitude they came across an abandoned still. It was a lean-to shack built against a gnarled old cedar, and within it they found a trove of moonshine. It was too good to be true, but it was.  There was no better way to settle the nerves than a drip of that fine Mississippi dew, and this they did while they ate tinned bully beef they had rummaged from a crate. It may have been a good time to plan about what to do next. They were all a long way from home.  Instead, they decanted moonshine down their gullets for the next few days and tried to forget the dreadful experience they endured.  

It would not be long, however, before the war itself would chase them down, for General Grant had crossed the Mississippi and had landed on the rebel shore with over 15,000 Yankees and were marching towards the Big Black River.