Chris Adrian - A Better Angel

“Not really,” I say, except there is. It springs easily to mind, as if it had been waiting for someone to ask just this question. Once, during a big, hysterical, pan-family blowout, I held Clay’s arms at his sides while he struggled to get away. I was trying to keep him from running out the door, because when he did that we never knew when we would see him again. But my mother took that opportunity to slap him hard across the face, while I was holding him, and I felt like I’d hit him myself, like I’d punished him for the crime of being miserable.

“Then what’s the best thing you’ve ever done?”

“I don’t know. I probably haven’t done much good. How about you?”

“I know it but I haven’t done it yet. I have something planned. It’s something really fine.”

At the regimental inspection the next morning, I am bleary-eyed and wrinkled. The Ninth Ohio has fallen in, then opened ranks so Colonel Kammerling and his aides, my father among them, can walk down the lines to check us over and see if anyone is guilty of anachronism or harboring unsafe equipment. I pull out my ramrod and drop it down my musket barrel, then undo the flap on my cartridge box. My father pulls the ramrod up an inch or two, then lets it drop. When it makes the requisite bright ringing noise, he nods gruffly. A dirty gun will give a dull thud, or no noise at all. He flips open my cartridge box, checking unnecessarily for penny wrappers or stapled cartridges — these are hazardous. They can put out someone’s eye, or even do them in. But my father rolls all my cartridges because I make such a mess of them when I try to do it for myself.

“Fine cartridges, son,” he says, and moves on to scold a poor farby next to me whose gun is dirty, whose buttons are sewn upside down. “You’re a disgrace!” he tells him, and it sounds for a moment like he is talking to Clay.

Joan is behind me. I can hear the colonel praising her. Her musket barrel has rung so purely it has moved him practically to tears.

“It’s obvious, soldier,” he says, “that you care deeply for that weapon. I think it must be the best-cared-for gun in the whole Army of the Cumberland.”

“I love it, sir,” she says. “I love it like it was my own baby.”

After drill I help my father give an informative talk for the civilian spectators, “What Was in a Typical Haversack?” I am his dodo, or translator. He is in character as great-great-grandpa, and I am there so he does not have to come out of it, to answer questions whose answers are beyond the ken of his nineteenth-century persona.

“You had your eating implements,” he says, pointing at the little table upon which he’d emptied out his sack. “Knife and fork, a real big spoon, a tin plate, and a dipper.”

“Wouldn’t a spork have been more economical?” asks a man. He leans forward from the ring of people surrounding us and points at the big spoon. “Wouldn’t a spork have been better? Why didn’t you use a spork?”

My father gives a me a confused look. “Spork?”

“A combination spoon and fork,” I say, hating that he is pretending not to know what a spork is. “Sir,” I say to the pale, fat man, “they didn’t have sporks back then. Thomas Alva Edison invented the spork in 1878, thirteen years after the war’s end.” My father glares at me. There are few offenses graver, in his book, than giving out misinformation at a haversack talk. But I like to remind myself how lying and pretending are different. He moves on to the food you ate with your implements.

“Hardtack, beans, desiccated vegetables, fatback, and salt pork.” He has me pass around some hardtack. We always have a big hardtack bake-off before we leave for a reenactment.

“They ate this stuff?” asks Sporky.

“Yes, we did,” says my father. “But we did not like it.” He sings a few verses of “Hard Crackers Come Again No More.” A child bites into the hardtack — one always does — and says it tastes like cardboard. My father points out some personal items, letters and a Bible and a jacknife. A lady is concerned that letters from home would get greasy if you put them in with the fatback. The fatback is being passed around, too, and she is holding it at arm’s length like it’s a dead rat. My father admits that greasy letters were a problem.

“How long did the war last?” asks the child who tried the hardtack.

“Four years,” says my father.

“Like high school,” says the fatback lady.

“Very much,” I say. “Brutal and hellish, and when you were in it, it seemed like it would never, ever end.”

“You had your armaments,” my father says. “You could maybe put your bayonet in your haversack, if it was properly sheathed.” People clamor for him to talk about his gun. Nobody ever had to ask him twice to do that.

“This is a U.S. Springfield Model 1861 rifle-musket. Named after the armory where she was manufactured, but I call her Sally.” Sporky raises his hand with another question. “Yes, sir?” my father says.

“Did they hide behind those when they were shooting?” he asks, pointing at the stacks of cannonballs that spring up everywhere on the field, commemorating the fall of this or that general, and the tall obelisks commemorating the brave stand of this or that regiment.

“In fact they did,” I say. “Whoever reached the monuments first enjoyed a distinct advantage.”

My father throws me out of his talk. He gets my mother to be his dodo, which is fine with me. I go looking for Joan and find her in her tent with a one-pound can of powder open between her legs, rolling cartridges. I crawl in and sit down next to her. When I lean over for a kiss, she pushes me away.

“Don’t!” she says. “You’ll mess it up.”

“I thought you had a full box already.”

“I need a special one,” she says, folding up the tail of the cartridge she is working on. She tosses it to me. It has an unfamiliar weight, and it takes me a long stupid moment to realize it’s because she’s put a real minié ball in there.

“What’s this for?” I ask her.

“What do you think?” she says. And then she does kiss me. I sit and smooch with her, her not-blank clutched in my hand, when I should be running to my father or the colonel to report. I’m going to leave now, I tell myself. This is somebody’s life in my hands. But I don’t leave.

I am buddied up with Joan for the big event, the reenactment of Thomas’s Stand on Snodgrass Hill. It seems strange to me, sometimes, how the historians talk. Time after time, they say, Thomas was assaulted by furious Confederate attacks, but somehow he managed to hold on. As if he did all the fighting himself. As if he died again and again and again over the course of the day. As if this was a battle between two giants — handsome, noble Thomas, and drunken, contrary Bragg — and not a thing fought by little men who come to know as they duck and kill how their lives are infinitely precious and cheap.

I have a plan to stay near Joan and steal her cartridge when she tries to use it. “Coming over!” I shout, and then fire past her shoulder at the Rebs climbing the hill between the thin oaks. We are lined up in regiment, just two deep, and I am in a position to see her every move. The live cartridge is wrapped in funny papers, not ordinary newsprint. I will know it when I see it. I am ready to stop her.

Who is guilty? Clay wrote. I am guilty. I am guilty. I look back on my life and it is all shame . I have his journal with me at the battle. I carry it around always. At first I carried it everywhere (it’s small and fits in any pocket) for fear that someone would discover it if I left it alone, and then because I got in the habit of consulting it, like some people consult their Bible. Who is guilty? I read that passage before we went up to the hill.