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

“Leave me alone,” I said. “Come here, Auburn,” I called to the big horse. “Hurt him.”

I went back in the house while Mount Auburn ran back and forth over the Yank. I cast aside some of the rafters and paper in search of the old man and the slut. They were unscathed. They were under the big desk in a carnal act. I was out of ammunition or I would have slaughtered them too. I went out to the yard and called Mount Auburn off the Yank, who was hollering and running on one leg.

By the time the old man and the slut got through, I had reloaded. They came out the back slot that used to be the door.

“Tell me something. Tell me something wise!” I screamed.

He was a much braver man than I’d seen when I’d seen him in the shade of the tree.

“Tell me something . Tell me something wise! ” I screamed.

“There is no wisdom, Johnny Reb,” the old man said. “There’s only tomorrow if you’re lucky. Don’t kill us. Let us have tomorrow.”

I spared them. They wandered out through the corpses into the plowed rows. I couldn’t see them very far because of the dirty moon. I was petting Mount Auburn when Jeb and fifteen others of the cavalry rode up. Jeb has the great beard to hide his weak chin and his basic ugliness. He’s shy. I’m standing here and we’ve got this whole depot to plunder and burn. So he starts being chums with me. Damned if I don’t think he was jealous.

“You stayed and won it, Howard, all on your own?” he says.

“Yes, sir. I did.”

“There’s lots of dead Christians on the ground,” he said. “You’ve got blood all over your shirt. You’re a stout fellow, aren’t you?”

“You remember what you said to me when you came back and I was holding Black Answer’s head in my hands when he’d been shot out from under me?”

“I recall the time but not what I said,” said Jeb Stuart.

“You said, ‘Use your weeping on people, not on animals,’” I said.

“I think I’d hold by that,” said Stuart.

“You shit! What are we doing killing people in Pennsylvania?” I screamed.

“Showing them that we can, Captain Howard!”

They arrested me and I was taken back (by the nightways) to a detention room in North Carolina. But that was easy to break out of.

I rode my horse, another steed that knew me, named Vermont Nose.

I made it across the Mason-Dixon.

Then I went down with Grant when he had them at Cold Harbor and in the Wilderness. My uniform was blue.

I did not care if it was violet.

I knew how Stuart moved. We were equal Virginia boys. All I needed was twenty cavalry.

I saw him on the road, still dashing around and stroking his beard.

“Stuarrrrrrrrt!” I yelled.

He trotted over on his big gray horse.

“Don’t I know this voice?” he said.

“It’s Howard,” I said.

“But I sent you away. What uniform are you wearing?”

“Of your enemy,” I said.

They had furnished me with a shotgun. But I preferred the old Colt. I shot him right in the brow, so that not another thought would pass about me or about himself or about the South, before death. I knew I was killing a man with wife and children.

I never looked at what the body did on its big horse.

Then Booth shot Lincoln, issuing in the graft of the Grant administration.

• • •

I am dying from emphysema in a Miami hotel, from a twenty-five-year routine of cigars and whiskey. I can’t raise my arm without gasping.

I know I am not going to make it through 1901. I am the old guy in a blue uniform. I want a woman to lie down for me. I am still functional. I believe we must eradicate all the old soldiers and all their assemblies. My lusts surpass my frame. I don’t dare show my pale ribs on the beach. I hire a woman who breast-feeds me and lets me moil over her body. I’ve got twenty thousand left in the till from the Feds.

The only friends of the human sort I have are the ghosts that I killed. They speak when I am really drunk.

“Welcome,” they say. Then I enter a large gray hall, and Stuart comes up.

“Awwww!” he groans. “Treason.”

“That’s right,” I say.

In 1900 they had a convention of Confederate veterans at the hotel, this lonely tall thing on the barbarous waves. I was well into my third stewed mango, wearing my grays merely to be decorous. I heard a group of old coots of about my age hissing at a nearby table. It became clear that I was the object of distaste.

I stood up.

“What is it?” I asked them.

I was answered by a bearded high-mannered coot struck half dead by Parkinson’s disease. He was nodding like a reed in wind. He rose in his colonel’s cape. Beside him his cane clattered to the floor.

“I say I saw you in the road, dog. I’m a Virginian, and I saw it by these good eyes. You killed Jeb Stuart. You! Your presence is a mockery to us of the Old Cause.”

“Leave me alone, you old toy,” I said.

I raised my freckled fists. His companions brought him down.

When the convention left, I dressed in my grays again and walked to the beach. Presently Charlie came out of the little corral over the dune, walking Mount Auburn’s grandchild. If President Grant lied to me, I don’t want to know. I have proof positive that it came from a Pennsylvania farm in the region where we foraged and ambushed.

It was an exquisitely shouldered red horse, the good look in its eye.

Charlie let me have the rein and I led the animal down to the hard sand next to the water. It took me some time to mount. My overcoat fell over his withers.

“You need any help, Captain Howard?” Charlie asked.

“I don’t need a goddamned thing except privacy,” I said.

There was nothing on the beach, only the waves, the hard sand, and the spray. The beauty I sat on ran to the verge of his heart-burst. I had never given the horse a name. I suppose I was waiting for him to say what he wanted, to talk.

But Christ is his name, this muscle and heart striding under me.

I WAS WALKING AROUND GON ONE NIGHT, AND THIS C-MAN — I SAW HIM open the window, and there was a girl in back of him, so I thought it was all right — peeled down on me and shot the back heel off my boot. Nearest I came to getting mailed home when I was there. A jeep came by almost instantly with a thirty cal mounted, couple of allies in it. I pointed over to the window. They shot out about a box and a half on the apartment, just about burned out the dark slot up there. As if the dude was hanging around digging the weather after he shot at me. There were shrieks in the night, etc. But then a man opened the bottom door and started running in the street. This ARVN fellow knocked the shit out of his buddy’s head turning the gun to zap the running man. Then I saw something as the dude hit a light: he was fat. I never saw a fat Cong. So I screamed out in Vietnamese. He didn’t shoot. I took out my machine pistol and ran after the man, who was up the street by now, and I was hobbling without a heel on my left boot.

Some kind of warm nerve sparklers were getting all over me. I believe in magic, because, million-to-one odds, it was Ike “Tubby” Wooten, from Redwood, a town just north of Vicksburg. He was leaning on a rail, couldn’t run anymore. He was wearing the uniform of our army with a patch on it I didn’t even know what was. Old Tubby would remember me. I was the joker at our school. I once pissed in a Dixie cup and eased three drops of it on the library radiator. But Tubby was so serious, reading some photo magazine. He peeped up and saw me do it, then looked down quickly. When the smell came over the place, he asked me, Why? What do you want? What profit is there in that? I guess I just giggled. Sometimes around midnight I’d wake up and think of his questions, and it disturbed me that there was no answer. I giggled my whole youth away. Then I joined the army. So I thought it was fitting I’d play a Nelda on him now. A Nelda was invented by a corporal when they massacred a patrol up north on a mountain and he was the only one left. The NVA ran all around him and he had this empty rifle hanging on him. They spared him.