Distant Flame

July 23-September 1, 1864

July 23-September i, 1864 N THERAINLIGHT, CHARLIE'S eyelashes held beads of water. The brief shower was moving east, and he groaned awake on a stone and felt as if his bones were shod in ice. The wound under his arm oozed blood, and his head throbbed. He was in a glen, and water ran near him in a muddy trickle. He sat up, and he knew that the thunder he heard was shelling in Atlanta,some miles away now. He had quit the war, and Branton was to the northeast, perhaps fifty miles through forests and brambles. He stood and fell to his knees like a wax man, prone to melting as the sun rose. He wanted to sip from the muddy stream, but it smelled foul with alkali or death, and so he found a dead limb of his own height and used it to pole himself along a pine-needled forest floor. He tried to untangle the battle of the day before, then he knew that Duncan McGregor was dead and that he had given Charlie a letter for safekeeping. He took out Sarah's letter, hand trembling, and it was a clotted mess, his blood shed, the sheet now brittle and almost illegible. He hoped for a house, but none appeared, then he hoped for a road, but he walked for an hour and crossed none. He reckoned east easily enough, and with each step the shelling in Atlanta grew fainter. He stopped to spit blood in a clearing. He inhaled the terrible aroma of a dead mule, almost stepped upon it, lost and carrion now. Perhaps it had given up the war, too, wounded, and had wandered into these woods I 252 PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS for a quiet death. That was the least God owed a man, the grace of a quiet death in his own bed. Charlie skirted wide and felt his head woozy, and his mouth was so dry that he wondered if he could bear it, and he thought he could, then he was sure he could not. When he awoke again, late afternoon cast huge shadows from the trees, and Charlie got to his knees and coughed, wracked and trembling , a long bead of pink saliva hanging between his lips and the heated soil. He sat back and tried to clear his head. He uttered prayers, pulling himself up, and then he lurched forward unsteadily, robbed of balance and losing blood. There was a brief meadow, and above it, a red-tailed hawk rolled on the open air, seeking small movements in the broom sedge. The heat on his back grew intense as he came across the field, which glinted with flecks of mica and crystalline quartz. Into the shade of pines, he gasped, and blood trickled down his armpit and into his trousers, which were becoming stiff. The stream was a breath-breaking surprise, a small rivulet running strong and clear over tumbled rocks, and Charlie thanked God and fell down to his knees and then his chest, and he drank long and deep, his throat moving with the flow of cool liquid. He was breathing very hard now, and he slept, and when he awoke it was nearly dark, and he was hungry, and a silent owl came gliding through the undercanopy, wings spread to catch the damp air. Clouds blew against the last palette of rose sunset. A mackerel sky, he thought. He remembered God, the Old Testament shock of His revealed presence, and a burden broke from his shoulders, and he tried to pray, and at first it was no good. He shaped words in Elizabethan English, backed away from them. Charlie asked his father for the words, but none came, and so he did not pray but thought of peace and love, considered the balm of silence. He wondered if he would die this night, and he decided that he would not. All night he dreamed of Branton, and he walked through the mansions of the rich, but nobody was home, and each door he opened revealed splendor, oak sideboards with ornate carvings, baroque tea sets in brilliant silver, great giltframed portraits, but there were no people there, not in any house, not in any room. He awoke just at dawn, and it was still very hot, and he drank again and felt as if he must find help or he would die. Soon the battlefield vultures , straying east, might spot his struggle and come...