Killer Angels, The - Michael Shaara [32]
Longstreet waited for an answer, but no answer came. He lay for a long while awake, but there was gathering cloud and he saw no more falling stars.
Just before dawn the rain began: fine misty rain blowing cold and clean in soft mountain air. Buford's pickets saw the dawn come high in the sky, a gray blush, a bleak rose. A boy from Illinois climbed a tree. There was mist across Marsh Creek, ever whiter in the growing light. The boy from Illinois stared and felt his heart beating and saw movement. A blur in the mist, an unfurled flag. Then the dark figures, row on row: skirmishers. Long, long rows, like walking trees, coming up toward him out of the mist. He had a long paralyzed moment, which he would remember until the end of his life. Then he raised the rifle and laid it across the limb of the tree and aimed generally toward the breast of a tall figure in the front of the line, waited, let the cold rain fall, misting his vision, cleared his eyes, waited, prayed, and pressed the trigger.
WEDNESDAY, JULY 1, 1863 The First Day
... of the coming of the Lord
1. LEE.
He came out of the tent into a fine cold rain. The troops were already up and moving out on the misty road beyond the trees. Some of them saw the white head and came to the fence to stare at him. The ground rocked. Lee floated, clutched the tent. Got up too quickly. Must move slowly, with care. Bryan came out of the mist, bearing steaming coffee in a metal cup. Lee took it in pained hands, drank, felt the heat soak down through him like hot liquid sunshine.
The dizziness passed. There was fog flat and low in the treetops, like a soft roof. The rain was clean on his face. He walked slowly to the rail where the horses were tethered: gentle Traveler, skittish Lucy Long. Stuart had not come back in the night. If Stuart had come they would have wakened him. He said good morning to the beautiful gray horse, the great soft eyes, said a silent prayer. He thought: tonight we'll all be together.
Troops were gathering along the rail fence, looking in at him. He heard a man cry a raucous greeting. Another man shushed him in anger. Lee turned, bowed slightly, waved a stiff arm. There was a cluster of sloppy salutes, broad wet grins under dripping hats. A bareheaded boy stood in reverent silence, black hat clutched to his breast. An officer moved down the fence, hustling the men away.
Lee took a deep breath, testing his chest: a windblown vacancy, a breathless pain. He had a sense of enormous unnatural fragility, like hollow glass. He sat silently on a rail, letting the velvet nose nuzzle him. Not much pain this morning. Praise God. He had fallen from his horse on his hands and the hands still hurt him but the pain in the chest was not bad at all. But it was not the pain that troubled him; it was a sick gray emptiness he knew too well, that sense of a hole clear through him like the blasted vacancy in the air behind a shell burst, an enormous emptiness. The thing about the heart was that you could not coax it or force it, as you could any other disease. Will power meant nothing. The great cold message had come in the spring, and Lee carried it inside him every moment of every day and all through the nights-that endless, breathless, inconsolable alarm: there is not much time, beware, prepare.
"Sir?"
Lee looked up. Young Walter Taylor. Lee came slowly awake, back to the misty world. Taylor stood in the rain with inky papers-a cool boy of twenty-four, already a major.
"Good morning, sir. Trust you slept well?"
The clear black eyes were concerned. Lee nodded. Taylor was a slim and cocky boy. Behind Lee's back he called him "The Great Tycoon." He did not know that Lee knew it. He had a delicate face, sensitive nostrils. He said cheerily,
"Nothing from General Stuart, sir."
Lee nodded.
"Not a thing, sir. We can't