The Walkin' Talkin' Shepherdstown Battlefield Blues
The soldier was tired but his heart was on fire. Racing up through the deep ravine at a double-quick, he’d had the sense that someone else was inside his body, tucked down into his skin. He could feel his movements, his grasping at sapling trees in order to pull himself forward up toward the ridge far ahead of them, but it all seemed otherworldly, beyond the actual understanding that he was capable of.
Behind him, back across the shallow Potomac at their rear their own artillery was bombarding something up there, but it was nothing he had seen. Blast after blast had rendered his ears immune to the shock of each cannon shot. On the way here, up to their thighs in the cool river, the firing had been intense above their own heads to the point that it almost seemed as if they were beneath a second sky of suspended ammunition tied up to the clouds. The whistling of distant charges hurtling back to Earth made him nervous. The lack of vision, of seeing anything but the varied streaks of late summer sunlight cutting down through dark shade and slashing across the other soldier’s backs and their rifles as they heaved themselves up this hill, sweat dripping from their noses, gasping for breath even as they knew, deep down, nothing whatsoever of war.
He thought of the battle a few days ago at Sharpsburg, of the men he’d seen with their mouths ripped open by bullets through their faces. Teeth on display where lips should have been, he’d clenched his fists and stared at the dead, their burnt hairlines and their bloated stomachs. Beside him, the young man he’d met on that day a month ago at the recruiting station in the city, Joseph was his name, he was leaned against a tree, his thin body swallowed in uniform, plunging his ramrod repeatedly down the barrel of his gun as if each thrust might invoke more deadliness into whatever lead he’d already packed in their.
“Boy,” he hissed, losing his volume to his panting “Move the hell up that hill!”
The boy ignored him.
“Come on, son, stay at my side now. We have got to get up there before the action starts!”
Hundreds of other men were scurrying by, the leaves on the forest floor burning with sound, the crackling of fire as the company and the regiment and the army, so to speak, made it’s way away from Maryland at its back, up into Virginia where the enemy, as it happened, was coming. The soldiers parted around the two who were stopped, their legs positioned one up the hill and one down, so as to maintain their mountain balance. The boy stopped what he was doing, the madness of his repetitions, and set his eyes upon the man speaking urgently at him from a few feet away.
But he said nothing. He locked eyes with the familiar soldier and looked into his gaze as if he were a complete stranger and nothing more. The older soldier at once understood that the younger one was on his own.
There will be his story and there will be mine, he told himself as he began his ascent again. A lone cannon bellowed back on the ridge they were headed for. “Stick!” the soldier in front of him yelled out, after the fact, never looking back. A thick cocked branch had smacked the older soldier in the forehead narrowly missing his left eye. He felt the oozing warmth of pain sliding down the side of his face, the blood rushing to the sight behind his skin to try and repair what might have been broken. It stung like a hornet.
“Damn fool!,” he cried out. “You almost took my eye out, you fat dog!”
But the soldier in front just kept going and so did the one with the fresh welt on his cheek. There was a hill to be climbed. And there was work to be done.
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In the Mexican place on the main drag in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, me and Arle order too much food. Burritos, quesadillas, chips and guac. They have all the right stuff and we order most of it/ or I do. But Arle is game.
The folks behind the counter, a young guy and a young woman, they’re spright/ effervescent; they move with intention, swirling and twisting around one another as they sashay in and out of the register, swiping people’s debit cards and Apple pay cards and this and that cards (no one uses cash anymore), handing over slips to sign, heaving brown paper bags of savory smelling spicy things, smiling the same smile over and over again as they each dish out semi-sincere thank you’s like inside jokes/ with a mediocre tired grin I, for one, find both slightly flirty and maddeningly distant. What they are doing is nothing new, but still, it is kind of riveting to witness. They are masters at this American magic trick called Friday night. You come in with x amount of money to your name and you leave with at least $50-$70 less than you walked in with.
For take out.
I think I might’ve paid for extra tomatillo salsa. It came in one of those crinkly weak plastic sauce cups, the kind whose lid is basically designed to come off in the bag on the ride home. There were like 6 different salsas. I am sure I ordered them but I had no real recollection. The whole process of ordering in that place at that time was high pressure. Most of the customers appeared to know exactly what they were ordering way before they even walked into the joint. It was as if they had the menu pre-memorized. I never even looked at my order on the receipt. Come to think of it, I don’t even think I got a receipt. I remember having clammy hands after a while as we stood there, Arle and I, warmly moving this way and that way as other burrito lovers scooted around us to grab a couple of bottles of local natural sugar soda out of the cooler we were blocking or to get a few extra napkins from the dispenser I was playing with out of nervous boredom like it was a giant Hot Wheel and I was 6 again.
Restaurants make me so uncomfortable for some reason. I can’t put my finger on it but it must have something to do with this idea that someone is sort of paying attention me… or more realistically, in my experience, is supposed to be paying attention to me but for unknown reasons recognizes me as a standout face from the International Fuck This Guy Off If He Comes into Your Eatery database and immediately begins to treat me as if I am both invisible and reprehensible. Then again, it could all be in my mind as well. No one can say for certain.
Eventually they get tired of tormenting me and probably feel sorry for Arle and so the young lady brings out our NYC-apartment-Christmas-tree-sized sack of West Virginia Mexican food and hands it over to me. I smile profusely and gush my gratitude.
She catches my eye for an ephemeral instant and in her iris I see the film of her punching me square in the face and the food going everywhere and Arle walking away, ashamed of everything. Just all of it, for chrissakes.
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I decided to write about Shepherdstown this week because I probably won’t ever have another chance to do what I’m doing here. This was the site of a relatively minor Civil War battle that happened on September 19th and 20th, 1862. No one really talks about it much except for maybe a handful of nerds scattered across the vast landscape like old VHS copies of Faces of Death 3. They are out there but they are scattered, man.
Anyway, today, the day this is getting sent out to you, is September 20th, 2024. It’s the 162nd anniversary of the fight. No one is talking about that.
Why would they? you ask.
Well, I mutter, exhaling a lingering sweet cherry smoke apparition from my cottage core corncob. Allow me to show you.
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In the woods/ before the burritos/ Arle and me had made our way up the peaceful ravine with peace all around us. The drive south from Central Pennsylvania had been relatively easy, a connection of country roads, largely, which was a welcome surprise. Maybe we’d picked the ‘wrong’ route on the GPS? I don’t know. But we ended up moving towards Shepherdstown on curving forest lanes and gently rising and falling farm roads, a landscape that looked strikingly similar to what I imagine the world looked like in the 1860’s.
Upon our arrival in the town, where neither of us had ever set foot before, I’d managed to find our way to the local tourism center which consisted of a small white house with a sign out front and a kind woman at a desk inside the front door where everything seemed quiet and relatively unbothered. We talked briefly and then Arle and I made our way into the room of brochures and pamphlets and maps advertising BBQ joints and farms you could visit to get a taste of real farm life and amusement parks that were actually like 100 miles away but whatever. On our way out I bought a sticker that said Shepherdstown and I casually mentioned that we were hoping to go and visit the local Civil War battlefield and did she happen to know where that might be?
A voice from a back office we hadn’t known was even there responded before the other woman had a chance. She began telling me things I already knew about the battle, but I appreciated her willingness to share as well as her spirited interest in our own curiosity about it. When I told them that I had ancestors who had fought with the Union Army there, they both seemed to like that. It was a Friday afternoon though, around 2 on a cold February day, and I’m sure that they’d be closing shop within an hour or so, which might mean that they weren’t so impressed by my family’s tenuous claim to a thread of their town’s history as they were drunk on the fact that as soon as they smiled and nodded us out the front door it was quittin’ time.
I liked them both though. They told us where the battlefield was, down the road that ran along the river. So we moved back to the car and that’s where we went.
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One of the most untalked about legacies of the American Civil War is that it happened where so many of us live. The actual war war, for the most part, occurred in the northeastern part of the country where populations have skyrocketed today. This means that anyone meandering around uber-developed places in the Virginia or DC suburbs is more or less mowing down fifty soldiers’ ghosts every time they run to their crowded Home Depot for the third time on any given Saturday afternoon.
But the greater Civil War, the one where someone might have once walked down your town’s main drag with their faces on fire and their minds ripped apart by the sudden news of the death of a son or a father or even a neighbor who had marched off not so long ago, pride beaming in his eyes, only to perish from a bayonet through his intestines, or more likely from enough diarrhea to drop a bison in its tracks: that war existed, and therefore- by the laws of history- still exists today, everywhere and anywhere that people felt the cold hard grasp of it slipping around their necks. From Maine to Georgia, from Jersey out to Illinois and Wisconsion, it reigned. From Minnesota to Texas, it demanded that our ancestors, our people we have never known and never will, take a knee in obligation to the incessant pain and sorrow that defined it.
For most, thinking about the American Civil War happens exactly zero percent of the time. For a few others, it happens more often, as a hobby or maybe even a profession. And for a select few, it happens all the time, an obsession, I suppose you call it, for better or for worse. None of those fit me though. For me, I mean, I don’t know how to explain it. I sense the war’s presence in places that have no known tie to any of it. It’s no secret power or anything, don’t get me wrong. It’s pure imagination based upon a lifetime of trying to envision another time anywhere I roam. I guess the old war, for me, it just lays out there on the road, an old damaged photo layered into a newer clearer one, until the two seem together somehow despite the passing of time.
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In the weeks before Covid hit, we were innocent and free. This was Valentine’s Day weekend and we had no idea what was coming for us. No one did, of course. In two weeks or so, the entire world would change in so many ways that, at that time, in that moment, we could have never fathomed. With Arle beside me in the front seat of my Honda, her long legs in her tight jeans, her hiking boots topped by her hip outdoorsy socks, I had been overcome all morning by this feeling of overflowing joy. Her agreement to spend two whole days down in some small college town so we (so I) could hurl myself into my 3rd Great Grandfather’s footsteps, was a real show of love in my book. Looking back, I’m sure we were different people then, at least slightly so, before the pandemic dropped into our world. A month from now we’d be immersed in an entirely different way of life, one in which real danger lurked around every corner.
But on this day, on this late winter Friday, as we parked along the Potomac River, even the river itself seemed so much more tranquil and rustic than the waterway it becomes, about 75 miles downstream, when it rolls through Washington DC as a sprawling urban waterway. There: it seems more oceanic than riverlike. But here, like most rivers closer to the source, it is narrower and runs through farmland and bulbous hills peppered with jagged ridges, all of which paint scenes of idyllic tranquility rather than the chaos often depicted out in all that city water.
I stretched when we got out of the car and I watched Arle do a little flex of her own. The way her body moves, the grace she carries herself with, it came over me then as it still comes over me now. I can’t help but feel enamored with my own fortune at times like this/ stood there in some random Civil War place/ my heart soaring with anticipation/ watching her smile her pretty smile at me/ her hands tucking deep in her winter coat pockets now/ her wooly hat pulled down so that her red hair leaks down in cascades onto her shoulders. For a second I stand there, right where we park the Honda, and I look at her and I know we are standing on the precise ground where at least some of the 118th Pennsylvania Volunteer Infantry once moved across as they retreated down from the ravine across this little road.
What would men from 162 years ago have thought about this woman I’m with? Even in the scramble to survive I bet they might have noticed her and been drawn to her. I suspect that any soldier who had come across her that afternoon as they scrambled back through these woods, might have grabbed her hand and pulled her along with them. The 118th were absolute amateurs at Shepherdstown, they were running for their lives from a fierce seasoned Rebel Army. An army that had not only surrounded them and pushed them back down these cliffs, but had also followed them in order to shoot as many Yankee soldiers in the back of the head or right through the spine or the heart as humanly possible. I can’t stop myself; I daydream of my boys saving my lady.
Snapping out of it, I want to tell Arle how much I love her so fucking hard for being the person who loves me the most. But I don’t say it. I want to grab her and kiss her hard on the mouth because I am so ecstatic to be here and to know that she is here because I am here and in her mind that makes it so she actually wants to be here too. It all adds up to both of us being here because it means something to be here together rather than it means that for me but not really for her.
I don’t do it though. I don’t grab her and kiss her and now I regret it, to be honest.
I am too excited to climb this ravine like my great grandfather did. I am blown away like a little boy walking out of the tunnels to see the lush greens and dreamlike diamond of his first baseball stadium. I look at Arle and I watch her pick me even as all of these other soldiers stop in the middle of their impetuous retreat/ their heads popping open left and right/ their screams and their panting/ their ducking down into these old mill ruins that still stand/ the Confederate volleys coming from the ridge/ potshots tearing through the ribs of the fellow running next to you/ the bone sticking out of the arm of a soldier screaming by the riverside, full shock coursing through his system/ the river up ahead/ the redhead standing here in the middle of it all/ calmly/ like a ghost/ like a siren/ like some dream standing up in a nightmare.
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In the summer of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln was in a bind. He needed more soldiers, more men, to feed into his shrinking armies, but they were getting harder to find. Despite the fervent patriotic fever that had defined the very early days of the war a year or so earlier, this newer version of reality had turned off and scared a lot of people. Many, many more men had already died or been seriously wounded than anyone on either side had ever thought possible. People had begun to see the war differently, more realistically, and that meant a lot of them had no desire to march off simply to be killed far from home.
Thus there were shortages, huge gaps at roll call where regiments that were once heaving with willing green volunteers, glanced up and down their ranks and noticed that they were, as a unit, but a skeleton of their former selves. So, Lincoln and his government made a plan to rally the troops via Executive Order. The Rebel Army was entrenched at Richmond and by all accounts was practically seething to attack and take Washington DC any day now. The government used that fact as inspiration for potential recruits.
“With so large an army there, the enemy can threaten us on the Potomac and elsewhere,” Lincoln wrote. "Until we have reestablished the national authority, all these places must be held, and we must keep a respectable force in front of Washington. But this, from the diminished strength of our Army, by sickness and casualties, renders an addition to it necessary in order to close the struggle which has been prosecuted for the last three months with energy and success. Rather than hazard the misapprehension of our military condition and of groundless alarm by a call for troops by proclamation, I have deemed it best to address you in this form. To accomplish the object stated we require without delay 150,000 men, including those recently called for by the Secretary of War. Thus reenforced our gallant Army will be enabled to realize the hopes and expectations of the Government and the people.”
In Pennsylvania, Governor Andrew Curtin, a close friend of the President’s, worked day and night to pull the strings, orate the ears, and grease the wheels that might inspire his constituents to enlist. In Philadelphia, one regiment was sponsored by the well-known Corn Exchange Bank. The 118th Pennsylvania offered up a bounty of $160 (roughly $6000 today) plus top notch gear and command for anyone willing to enlist. Recruitment stations were set up all over Philadelphia and the surrounding area and men did show up to sign on. The ‘Corn Exchange Regiment’, as the 118th came to be known, was recruited, trained, drilled, and sent off to war in the course of a single month.
Amongst their ranks, in Company G, was this guy I’ve been referring to. My guy. My connection to the Civil War. My Great Great Great Grandfather, Charles Frederick Marker from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania. Later from Manayunk, Philly. He went by Fred. His brother Lewis also enlisted alongside him. They were both in their 30’s, on the older side for volunteers. I still don’t know exactly why they went. Fred was a dad and a husband. It’s hard to understand.
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The soldier, a private in his mid 30’s it seems, was crouched down in the high grass at the edge of a field peering at the woods in the distance. The cannons had gone quiet and the great storm of artillery noise had now faded to a jittery jam smeared on the miasma, the remnants of something so preposterously overwrought now reduced to the slightest of ringings deep in the ear. Around him, to his left and his right, as well as in the line in front of him, inexperienced men crouched together in some kind of emotional state few could ever express with words even now.
To say these men were scared would do them a grave injustice because the connotations of the word itself belie the complicated truths at work. There is fear, to be certain, and fear itself might be a word applied to men of a lesser courage. This we can all agree upon. However there are coves, inlets, you see, upon the Coast of Fear, where varying currents begin to redefine the idea of fear and her more scorned cousin, cowardice. Here and there, in these pockets of truth and humanity, men waver and wonder but deserve no scorn whatsoever. It turns out, as we will see, that even the most dazzling courage is often born up out of immense senses of alarm and uncertainty and impending doom.
Being brave is more than charging the enemy alone when all else is lost.
And being afraid is more than simply turning to flee when the heart can take no more.
Here, then, on this ridge of a cliff overlooking some farmer’s field, with the river at their backs and the greatest unknown of their lives before them, the men of the regiment, breathing quietly, wordlessly, with certain men occasionally muttering nonsense in order to calm their own blood in the moments before what each man knows is coming, here then we peer down from the bright blue September sky and we zero in on our soldier as he watches across the field, and we notice that his hands are shaking and with this we at once feel not shame for him or some version of disgust that he might be frightened of the monster he cannot yet see, but rather, we feel a deep abiding empathy for him, if we are following along correctly, as he begins, far from his home, to attempt to reconcile things that are surely impossible to reconcile.
The soldier has his gun pointing upwards at his side. There is a blade of thin green grass dangling from his lips and we see it shift slightly upon a breeze imperceptible. His uniform is a rich textured blue and it is clean, having been at the bottom of a large wooden crate of uniforms not some two weeks prior. A fly lands on the soldier’s right sleeve and he watches it now, his eyes sliding down from the horizon to his own body, his own being, and he sees the insect, still as the sun, pondering its own fate/ its own next move/ to take flight lest it should die a fool/ or to stand its new ground/ proud in the eyes of its fellow flies that now watch it through trillion eyes each struck with envy and fascination from the safety of their Goldenrod perches just behind this undulating mass of men upon this ridge.
We see the soldier shift his eyes back to the distance. We notice a faint flash of light in the far off trees. Oaks and elms hide what must be there but now there are signs that it is emerging, this beast. We hear voices carry from those woods over there and we see how the soldier we have been observing shifts his weight from one knee to the other, allowing his own weight to be carried by some other part of him for a time. Relief is slight when this happens but is true all the same. With this new kneeling comes a clear fresh perspective. With this more comfortable settling comes a flightless moment wrapped in nothingness. Then comes the cold crack of a long off gun and the man besides the man we have been seeing clashes his teeth and shrieks a tiny sound before he falls forward into the man in front of him. Blood pours from is scalp through a slash in his hat. Our soldier looks at him in horror but there is nothing for it. The next shots ring out and then they are all at once and the colonel is screaming now, Hold your fire, let them come closer, boys! men are toppling over and some are shouting that they are hit and they stand up to run for help and they take new bullets, some of them, that rip into their necks or rip into their wrists like quick snakes that were hid beneath stones made of sky. Nothing can be seen of this attack. Nothing can be understood as the strikes of the viper come so violently, so unannounced.
We see the fly on the soldier’s arm not moving at all.
We see a speck of blood land right before the bug then, a mere pinhead of blood from a boy of 17/ a boy from a farm near a creek far from here/ his freckled forehead that was lightly glazed with fine dewey mist this morning at coffee now burst open by a number of balls at once/ a magnificent shot had it been intended by the distant soldiers that have introduced the wounds (it was not)/ his skull spreads bits of itself to random soldiers in his area/ men look down at the hands and they notice tiny broken chips of the boy now stuck to their fingers or pasted, with blood, to the barrels of the still cold guns/ and we see the fly move forward ever so slightly/ from a spot just behind the young man’s blood to a place in the direct center of it where it can slurp it up while it is still warm with the last burst of heat off his now ended life.
There is no sound now. Just the roar of silence.
We see the Rebel Army emerging from the woods, stepping into the field far away.
It is a city unto itself, rising like it was pushed up from Hell.
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On the bed in our hotel room next to an old cemetery loaded with Confederate dead, I sprawl out on the king bed as Arle unpacks the bag of food. Intense flavors of steak and cilantro fill the room and I end up doing what I keep doing on this trip which is: I end up wondering what the men might have thought. The soldiers, I mean. What would young men from where I’m from, around Philly, who had been born long ago and made their way down here to Shepherdstown to fight in their first battle and be routed so handily, suffer so much so fast, what would they have said if they could have stepped out of that river for just a moment upon their chaotic retreat, and stepped into this unthinkable hotel room with it’s excessive air conditioning and it’s big screen TV tuned to Guy Fieri, and Guy Fieri’s hair and his jewels and his tattoos, and the foreign waft of all of this Mexican food, and my wine in a plastic cup, and Arle standing there in her t-shirt and jeans/ her boots kicked off now/ looking relaxed and content just a mile as the crow flies from where the battle exploded all over the place?
What would that be like? And more importantly, does that question even make sense? I mean, how can it? How can I ask- rhetorically- over and over- what men who lived and died long ago, and who never knew me and whom I never knew- how can I ask… or why would I ask… what they might have thought? How they might have felt. It seems almost masochistic in a way, doesn’t it?
Hey there, soldier, how’s that hot chimichanga smell to your gut shot ass?! Huh, boy?
That isn’t how I mean this existential dive into unknowable waters, of course. I intend the opposite: to somehow bridge some unbridgeable gap between them and me. Between then and now. I wonder what they sensed and wanted and longed for and feared when they stood out there on that rise above the river? I wonder about that a lot. But it seems unfair to me, to never offer them anything in return, you know? I just show up time and time again, usually right before the Confederate forces unleash themselves from the dark woods opposite the 118th’s virgin line, and I poke and pry into all of their bits: into each of their memories: so that I am the ultimate invader: the penultimate beggar: licking their friend’s blood off of their wooly sleeves day after day until I might understand, against all time and reason, how they lived. How they died.
It’s ridiculous, I know. It’s a selfish waste of everyone’s time, the living and the dead. But why do I love it so? Why do I want it so, to know them somehow, and for them to know me?
Maybe it is because I feel connected to them through Fred Marker. Maybe it is because I don’t think I could ever do what they did. Maybe it is because, deep down, I am sure I was there with them in a past life.
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Haha.
Psyche.
I don’t think that.
I was just fucking with you for a sec.
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The Union boys, their rifles? At least half of them don’t fire. When the word comes down to stand and deliver the first volley of their combat lives, the men rise in unison, shoulder their loaded .58 calibers, and pull the trigger upon the word but many of the guns don’t shoot. It is insult to injury now, a twist of the tale that makes anybody hearing about it for the first time shake their heads in disbelief. But it is true. With their lives on the line and a veteran Confederate machine of an army closing in on these green troops, a lot of the 118th Pennsylvanians couldn’t even fire their damn weapons.
In the midst of it all came the order from on high to retreat. High command understood the impending precariousness of the Army of the Potomac’s current position, with their backs to a fucking cliff, as the Rebs came on in overwhelming numbers, so the order was issued.
Retreat at once.
Fall back and cross over the river to the safety of the others side. The artillery would cover the retreat, but time was of the essence. All the other regiments up there that afternoon immediately began to go. But not the 118th. Their commander, upon receiving the order to retreat , refused to do so on the grounds that order had been delivered wrong according to the chain of command. And in one feel swoop of what would seem to be absolute idiocy, the Corn Exchange Regiment, with my great grandfather and his brother attached, found itself alone and surrounded by a very pissed-off seasoned hunk of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. This was days after they’d suffered devastating setbacks at the Battle of Antietam. Lee’s army had been withdrawing back into Virginia when these Yanks showed up in their rear, essentially slapping their ass with a country stick.
So when they found themselves where they found themselves they did not hesitate or show mercy.
They attacked the boys from Philly and they mauled them without remorse.
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On the side of the hill leading up the ravine, I push a boot down into a V formed by one side tree and one side ground. There, with the slow moving water of the Potomac glistening in the twilight of this fading day, I breath in the sharp metal air that smells of coming night. Not far from me I watch Arle as she hangs with one arm from a sapling. She leans her fit body out over the steep drop below her and I sense her suspension as a moment of truth. If the tree would give out, she’d be rolling hard down this slope. And at some point, there are places where it simply falls straight down. If she went off that, she’d be done.
This happened to a bunch of the 118th soldiers that afternoon. When they finally began to retreat, orders be damned, they sometimes found themselves unable to locate the ravine they’d used to get up there. Instead, they ran so hard only to come to the sheer drop of the cliff face. I don’t know how far it is to the bottom, but I do know I don’t think it’s possible to jump it and live. Abd if you did live, I would expect that your legs would be shattered. Maybe your backbone too. There’s just now way that you’d be okay. Still, some men did it. They went over the side, trying, I suppose, to make the best of it/ to shimmy out onto the ledge trying to see it differently than it was/ trying to create a bit of an angle going down instead of the nothing at all they were faced with. Who knows how they fared? I doubt it went well.
Others scattered and tumbled back into the ravine with the Rebel soldiers at their back. The tales of men being shot in the back, even as they made it to the river, even as they made it halfway across the river, even as they made it to the opposite bank of the river where safety waited.
One 118th private reportedly came skittering out of the current on the far side of the Potomac and turned to shake his fist at the Confederates in defiance.
“I made it back, you rotten Rebs!” he hollered. Or something like that.
Then…you guessed it.
A southerner’s bullet struck him down dead in his tracks.
Pennsylvanians died everywhere along the retreat that day. They feel to their deaths and they took shots in the back and they swam out in the deeper water by the dam across the ford where they were shot at, time and time again. The bullets that missed them each churned up horrifying splashes in every direction as the men thrashed and splashed and crashed towards the promised land only to have a final shot enter their body, render it lifeless. Bodies, they said, floated on the river, blood flowing from the wounds.
If that wasn’t enough, some of the regiment coming back across the water were also reportedly struck down by friendly artillery fire. Opening up the big guns was an order intended to give the retreating soldiers a blanket of protection to cross under, but as it turned out, some of the Union artillerymen misjudged distances and took out their own men.
When all was said and done, the Corn Exchange Regiment, which had numbered approximately 700 soldiers that morning, lost about 40% of its men to death and injury in less than an hour of battle and retreat combined. They had been in the army for about a month at that point.
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The next morning I wake up in the hotel room a little groggy from the night before. Chips and guac and red wine and Peanut M&M’s have all combined to puff my face and lodge something like a cannonball up in my guts. But overall, I don’t care. As slender threads of morning sunlight find their way through these hotel curtains, I glance over at Arle as she sleeps.
And yeah, I wonder what one of those soldiers would have done to survive that day a mile down the road. What would any of the dead have done, and they’re all dead now, for the chance to wake up to a brand new morning besides a beautiful woman with nothing but daylight and country roads and music and coffee set for the day?
How is it, I often wonder, that some of us are fated to experience such traumatic sad things in this life while the rest of us go more or less unscathed? Where does the universal justice live in these tales of men blown apart from behind? How do we just move on, go get gas, go grab a breakfast sandwich, after hearing about the bodies in that river right there, shot through their heads, once upon a time?
I move through my days in various fashions, the same as you do, I’m sure. I have days when I feel like I am just clicking/ making money/ looking good/ feeling fine/ like I’m living in ‘Blue Sky’ by the Allman Brothers. Other days, I don’t fare so well. I get swallowed up by darker clouds, lost in the shadows of my own ineptitudes and my self-inflicted cruelty. But no matter which way I’m rolling, I sometimes try to allow myself to indulge my same old thing again. I wonder what some of the Civil War soldiers felt back when they were me. Back when they were alive and scared or blue or hungry or hurt or excited or thrilled to be in the company of a lady that they could barely believe would have them. Across my own days, I hold my story up to the fading light so I can maybe see a dash of other people’s mixed in with as I go. It doesn’t offer much in the way of definitive history or psychology, I know that. But to be honest, those things bore me anyway. I want to close my eyes and taste the past. I want to daydream things that lift me up and slam me down. I need to imagine myself in other people’s heads, other people’s skins in order to live right, I think. And I need them to come occupy me for a while, see what I’m like. See what it’s like to be me.
Imagination is the only way.
Shepherdstown forever.
Hey there! I hope you’re doing well. I hope you find yourself easing into autumn with a full tank of gas. Thank you so much for reading Thunder Pie. Hope you dig this piece today. Have an excellent week.
Serge
Thunder Pie is always edited by Arle Bielanko!
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Photos/ Art: Serge B./ Arle B.
Things I Liked This Week.
We watched The Perfect Couple on Netflix. I’m not sure if I’m the target audience for this thing or not, but honestly: I really liked it a lot. Sure, sure, it definitely felt at times like the Netflix version of Max’s wildly popular White Lotus, but that wasn’t a bad thing at all. The entire cast was superb. Definitely check this out if you’re into murder mystery stuff.
Blindboy Boatclub continues to have probably the best podcast on Earth (The Blindboy Podcast) and if you haven’t listened to him by now, it’s a goddamn shame, man. This recent episode called 57 minutes of me talking about a wasp on a plane charming, hilarious, interesting, and mad at the same time. Do yourself a favor. Then thank me later.
This past week I have tried my damnedest to get back to eating a bit better after a long time in the wasteland, so to speak. As such, I have fallen back on my favorite health food by leaning hard into the Mediterranean thing. I forgot how much I really love olives and feta and hummus and raw vegetables and some oven-warmed pita bread and stuffed grape leaves from a freakin’ can. It’s way better for me , even if it feels like a betrayal to the GOAT: pizza every night.
Arle and I are both excited about our new Instagram spot (Corn Moon Vintage) where we are offering up some of the very unique and vintage treasures we find. So please give us a follow and a look at @cornmoonvintage. Thanks!!!
This music video is the best I have ever seen, hands down.
Finally, this song.
“How is it, I often wonder, that some of us are fated to experience such traumatic sad things in this life while the rest of us go more or less unscathed?” This kind of question haunts me. Sad truth is no rhyme or reason. Great writing, the then and now of it.
Is it a bad thing that this got me horny for Mexican food? Thanks as always. Good stuff, my friend. Have a good week.