Barry Hannah - Long, Last, Happy - New and Collected Stories

What a bog and labyrinth the human essence is, in comparison. We are all overbrained and overemotioned. No wonder my professor at the University of Virginia pointed out to us the horses of that great fantast Jonathan Swift and his Gulliver book. Compared with horses, we are all a dizzy and smelly farce. An old man cannot tell you the truth. An old man, even inspired by death, simply foams and is addled like a crab.

“Tell me,” I said, “do you hate me because I hold niggers in bondage? Because I do not hold niggers in bondage. I can’t afford it. You know what I’m fighting for? I asked you a question.”

“What’re you fighting for?”

“For the North to keep off.”

“But you’re here in Pennsylvania, boy. You attacked us . This time we were ready. I’m sorry it made you mad. I’m grievous sorry about your neck, son.”

“You never told me any truths. Not one. Look at that head. Look at all those gray hairs spilling out of your cap. Say something wise. I’m about to kill you,” I said.

“I have daughters and sons who look up to me,” he said.

“Say I am one of your sons. Why do I look up to you?” I said.

“Because I’ve tried to know the world and have tried to pass it on to the others.” He jumped off the horse right into the droppings. He looked as if he were venturing to run. “We’re not simple animals. There’s a god in every one of us, if we find him,” he said.

“Don’t try to run. I’d kill you before I even thought,” I said.

His horse ran away. It didn’t like him.

On the ground, below my big horse Mount Auburn, the old man was a little earthling in an overbig uniform. He kept chattering.

“I want a single important truth from you,” I said.

“My mouth can’t do it,” he said. “But there’s something here!” He struck his chest at the heart place. Then he started running back to the depot, slapping hanging limbs out of his way. I turned Mount Auburn and rode after. We hit the clearing and Mount Auburn was in an easy prance. The old man was about ten yards ahead, too breathless to warn the troops.

In an idle way I watched their progress too. Captain Swain had been killed during our ambush. I saw the blue boys had put his body up on a pole with a rope around his neck, a target in dirty gray. His body was turning around as they tried out the repeaters on him. But ahead of me the old man bounced like a snow-tail in front of Mount Auburn. We were in a harrowed field. The next time I looked up, a stand of repeaters was under my left hand three strides ahead. I was into their camp. Mount Auburn stopped for me as I picked up a handful of the rifles by the muzzles.

The old man finally let out something.

“It’s a secesh!” he shouted.

Only a couple looked back. I noticed a crock of whiskey on a stool where the brave ones were reloading to shoot at Captain Swain again. I jumped off Mount Auburn and went in the back door of the staff house. I kicked the old man through the half-open door and pulled Mount Auburn into the room with me, got his big sweaty withers inside. When I looked around I saw their captain standing up and trying to get out his horse pistol. He was about my age, maybe twenty-five, and he had spectacles. My piece was already cocked and I shot him square in the chest. He backed up and died in another little off-room behind his desk. A woman ran out of the room. She threw open the front door and bullets smacked into the space all around her. She shut the door. A couple of bullets broke wood.

“Lay down,” I said.

She had a little derringer double-shot pistol hanging in her hand. The old man was lying flat on the floor behind the desk with me.

The woman was a painted type, lips like blood. “Get down,” I told her. She was ugly, just lips, tan hair, and a huge bottom under a petticoat. I wondered what she was going to try with the little pistol. She lay down flat on the floor. I asked her to throw me the pistol. She wouldn’t. Then she wormed it across to us behind the big desk. She looked me over, her face grimy from the floor. She had no underwear and her petticoat was hiked up around her middle. The old man and I were looking at her organ.

“Wha? War again?” she said. “I thought we already won.”

The woman and the old man laid themselves out like a carpet. I knew the blue boys thought they had me down and were about ready to come in. I was in that position at Chancellorsville. There should be about six fools, I thought. I made it to the open window. Then I moved into the window. With the repeater, I killed four, and the other two limped off. Some histrionic plumehead was raising his saber up and down on the top of a pyramid of cross ties. I shot him just for fun. Then I brought up another repeater and sprayed the yard.

This brought on a silence. Nothing was moving. Nobody was shooting. I knew what they were about to do. I had five minutes to live, until they brought the cannon up. It would be a canister or the straight big ball. Then the firing started again. The bullets were nicking the wall in back of me. I saw Mount Auburn behind the desk. He was just standing there, my friend, my legs. Christ, how could I have forgotten him? “Roll down, Auburn!” I shouted. He lay down quick. He lay down behind the thick oak desk alongside the slut and the old man.

Then what do you think? With nothing to do but have patience until they got the cannon up, somebody’s hero came in the back door with a flambeau and a pistol, his eyes closed, shooting everywhere. Mount Auburn whinnied. The moron had shot Auburn. This man I overmurdered. I hit him four times in the face, and his torch flew out the back door with one of the bullets.

I was looking at the hole in Auburn when the roof of the house disappeared. It was a canister blast. The sound was deafening. Auburn was hurting but he was keeping it in. His breaths were deeper, the huge bold eyes waiting on me. I had done a lead-out once before on a corporal who was shot in the buttocks. He screamed the whole time, but he lives now, with a trifling scar on his arse, now the war is over. You put your stiletto very hard to one side of the hole until you feel metal — the bullet — and then you twist. The bullet comes out of the hole by this coiling motion and may even jump up in your hand.

So it was with the lead in Auburn’s flank. It hopped right out. The thing to do then is get a sanitary piece of paper and stuff it into the wound. I took a leaf from the middle of the pile of stationery on the captain’s table, spun it, and rammed it down.

Auburn never made a complaint. It was I who was mad. I mean, angry beyond myself.

When I went out the front door with the two repeaters, firing and levering, through a dream of revenge — fire from my right hand and fire from my left — the cannoneers did not expect it. I knocked down five of them. Then I knelt and started shooting to kill. I let the maimed go by. But I saw the little team of blue screeching and trying to shoot me, and I killed four of them. Then they all ran off.

There was nothing to shoot at.

I turned around and walked back toward the shack I’d been in. The roof was blown off. The roof was in the backyard lying on the toilet. A Yank with a broken leg had squirmed out from under it.

“Don’t kill me,” he said.

“Lay still and leave me alone,” I said. “I won’t kill you.”

Mount Auburn had got out of the house and was standing with no expression in the bare dirt. I saw the paper sticking out of his wound. He made an alarmed sound. I turned. The Yank with a broken leg had found that slut’s double-barreled derringer. I suppose she threw it up in the air about the time the roof was blown over.

He shot at me with both barrels. One shot hit my boot and the other hit me right in the chin, but did nothing. It had been mis-loaded or maybe it wasn’t ever a good pistol to begin with. The bullet hit me and just fell off.