Excerpt: The Blue, The Gray and The Gray

The Blue, the Gray and the Gray
By
William Reid

Chapter One

The cannon train split through the rags of mist crawling along the spar tracks in the predawn light. The eastern sky of southern Illinois glowed with a bruised light, dipping the tips of the trees in gold.
The sun would rise into the cold spring sky on April 2nd, 1864, to a sight no one had thought would come. The Confederacy would fire the first shots in a renewed war with the Union. Theodore Dickson could think of no greater insanity.
“Mail call,” a soldier in gray said as he weaved through the gun crews readying their cannons. His name was Lafayette, Dickson recalled, a kid from Louisiana who had joined their regiment a few weeks ago. He spoke with an easy drawl that set him apart from the Tennessee men around him. A worn leather bag the color of cream hung over one shoulder. “We’ll drop them before we hit the tunnel in five miles.”
Soldiers shoved tattered and stained letters to Lafayette as he passed, letters they had written in the short hours since they had found out what they were traveling to do. Lafayette obediently put the letters into his bag.
“Remember your drills!” Their sergeant barked from the front of the car. His rough voice barreled over Lafayette’s. Long moustaches covered his mouth in a curtain of gray, and his thick beard reached down to his chest. The lanterns on the pegs behind him swayed sickeningly with the motion of the train, distorting his features with shifting shadows. “Wait to fire the canisters when we’re at the Federalist’s line, if they have one. If you see any boilers, aim for their legs. Remember, we’re here to capture equipment and material. Keep your fire to the active hostiles.”
Dickson passed his own letter to Lafayette as the soldier came by. “I thought this was supposed to be a surprise attack.”
“Never hurts to be safe,” Lafayette said as he took the letter.
Dickson wondered whether Lafayette had already put his own letter into the bag, or if he no longer had a home to write to. He was one of the thousands displaced by the Awakened States, his land invaded first by the spider web of spars growing across the globe after the asteroid, then by the Awakened themselves. When the spars had intersected to form a bulbous node in the middle of New Orleans, the Awakened had taken the city for their own.
“Ashley will be happy to hear from you,” the man next to Dickson said, interrupting Dickson’s thoughts. “She’ll be worrying her damn fool head off until you’re home anyway, no matter how many letters she gets.”
“Letter from you, Mr. Lincoln?” Lafayette asked the man helpfully.
William Lincoln grimaced. His lips curled into a scowl beneath his black moustache. “William, Lafayette. Call me William.” Dickson saw his hand move toward his breast pocket, then hesitate. He hastily began undoing his shirt buttons instead, and blew disgustedly through his whiskers. “Hells no, I got nobody. Didn’t they tell you I’m the devil’s spawn? Who would I write to?”
Lafayette cleared his throat nervously and walked on. Lincoln snorted and began stripping off his shirt.
“You could have been easier on him,” Dickson said. He took his glasses off and swabbed them with a handkerchief. The last thing he needed if they did engaged the enemy was dirty glasses. “He’s just doing his job.”
“Goddamn Creole bastard should know better than to ask. Sure as hell he knows what it’s like not to have a family to write to.” He tossed his shirt to the ground and cracked his knuckles. The hair on his chest already glistened with sweat. The small wooden crucifix around his neck dangled in the air. “Lucky you discovered a way around that problem.”
“Wasn’t that big a mystery to solve.” Dickson watched the trees whip by outside, felt the cool morning air gust in through the open gun port. He had a picture of Ashley in his pocket, black and white that lost the green in her eyes and the fiery red of her hair but immortalized her beauty. He fought the urge to pull it out and look at it. He would see her again soon. No reason to brood on the darker possibilities in what lay ahead. He nearly reached into his pouch to pull out the pipe filled with his own grown tobacco, the one thing that might have calmed his nerves. But he sat among kegs of black powder, and it would be an even bet whether the sergeant or an explosion would kill him first if he lit it.
“What are you doing?” A clean-shaven kid asked from the other side of the cannon, staring at Lincoln and his naked torso. The kid, a Virginian named Briggs, was the last person in their three-man cannon crew. Dickson doubted Briggs had ever had a reason to touch a razor to his face. His voice cracked at the edges as he spoke, betraying his underlying fear. “It’s freezing.”
“See if you think that once all them guns are going in ten minutes,” Lincoln snapped at him, nodding at the cannons lining each side of the car.
“And for God’s sakes, remember what to do if the man beside you falls,” the sergeant said, giving them all a meaningful look. “The Lord be with us all today. The Lord be with the fighting men of Tennessee!”
A ragged cheer went up from the men around him. Dickson would have expected more enthusiasm. But he remembered that many of their regiment were veterans of Manassas. The battle had been terrifying enough to scare both sides into a cease-fire. After seeing horrors like that, it was no surprise they weren’t more supportive.
Their regiment was a mix of veterans and new recruits, and hardly homogenous. Tennessee had become the great melting pot of the Confederacy. Northern men who hated the Federalists went there. So did refugees from Louisiana and Arkansas displaced by the Awakened States, or men from further East who wanted to be at the corner of every Confederate front. They all poured in to Tennessee.
“This is crazy,” Briggs whispered just loud enough for Dickson to hear, shaking his head. “We shouldn’t be going back to war. We shouldn’t be starting it. The Yankees were just leaving us be. Has Lee lost his mind?”
Lincoln rounded on him. “Listen up, boy. This ain’t Lee’s idea. It’s the fellas in Richmond what dreamed this up, Johnson and Bragg and all their assorted bastards. And crazy or not, it’s happening. So you better keep your wits about you when we start fighting, or so help me God but I will kill you myself, and then blow your Goddamn head off.”