Trajectories of War

Abstract

Trajectories Of War Rawdon Tomlinson Two Soldiers Jeremiah Bennett Killed near Atlanta, 1864 We worked at McFall's Variety in Bells, Texas, swept and oiled floors, sold candy, and shot rats that gnawed burlap bags of peanuts. June '61, his Company elected him Lieutenant, while I checked stock. Everyone said, "Enlist or get drafted." When he was furloughed at Christmas, we hung stars and pine boughs, watching the girls gaze at enchanted isles. Now his head floats smiling, last words hooking, "I guess you'll be coming with us." Scared, I said, yes. No one is awake. Randall Pinnel Killed at Franklin, Tennessee, 1864 We nicknamed him Bullet. He loved his Mississippi rifle better than his kith and kin. Talking to you, listening, he would tilt his head like a cougar's [End Page 498] finding range—the line—and lunge straight into the lie you told yourself. He pretended to have friends, as though he'd read an instruction pamphlet— bursting laughter that didn't fit, swamping you with praise or sentiment, but everything was trajectory. In the great night battle at Franklin, he ended up on the bottom of the line piled deep as cordwood, tangled with arms, legs, heads. A brother. Lucian Pinckney Montgomery Telling It —Milliken's Bend, Louisiana, June 7, 1863 The way it was can't be told, how we ran them down, rows of tents between levees, grabbing their coffee, hardtack, bacon—berserkers hog-calling, scattering them on top against sky like crows mad from owls; I can't tell how our yelling was stoppered up there in morning sun, when we saw the black castle-gunboat anchored tranquilly on the glass river, like silence pressing before the cyclone—how the little puffs from the behemoth's casemates held still, then blasted apart, canister shuddering like a windmill, someone drubbing a washboard with knuckles, Lieutenant Dickerman's arm somersaulting smack into Eubank's face, breaking his jaw, and we crawdadded back down, one boy holding a frying pan to his head; [End Page 499] and I can't tell how we left Dad Holloway up there screaming, yellow butterflies flitting everywhere, the solid shot steam-whistling over us as I built a fire from driftwood and boiled the first real coffee we'd had in a year— a meal itself, tasting like winter wheat blowing in cool clean wind, vista of dogwood; their greasy haversacks were strewn with likenesses and letters, the bodies scattered like piles of laundry— Tobe Gardenshire, Volney Graham, Issac Hull. Making Cartridges —Camp Brogden, Texas, March 1862 Pouring one-hundred ten grains of powder into the paper cylinder, I wish for fingers delicate as Sister's, to tie the buck and ball— the way the girls at the Richmond arsenal pass the end of the twine around the bullet, then over, under, through the loop, a double-hitch, for a .69 caliber— fingers running fluidly over a miniature trussed-up head and torso, a dressmaker's dummy, fit for a wedding gown, some boy loads into a twelve-gauge shotgun. Rawdon Tomlinson has a book of poetry in production at the LSU Press.