Short Fiction · The Valley Was Still (1/2)

The Valley Was Still

Wind touched the pines on the ridge, and stirred the thicket forest on the hills opposite; but the grassy valley between, with its red and white houses at the bottom, was as still as a painted backdrop in a theater. Not even a grasshopper sang in it.

Two cavalrymen sat their mounts at the edge of the pines. The one in the torn butternut blouse hawked and spat, and the sound was strangely loud at the brink of that silence.

“I’d reckoned the Yanks was down in that there little town,” he said. “Channow, it’s called. Joe, you look like a Yank yourself in them clothes.”

His mate, who wore half-weathered blue, did not appear complimented. The garments had been stripped from an outraged sergeant of Pennsylvania Lancers, taken prisoner at the Seven Days. They fitted their new wearer’s lean body nicely, except across the shoulders. His boots were likewise trophies of war⁠—from the Second Manassas, where the Union Army had learned that lightning can strike twice in the same place; and his saddlecloth, with its U.S. stamp, had also been unwillingly furnished by the Federal army. But the gray horse had come from his father’s Virginia farm, and had lived through a year of fierce fighting and fiercer toil. The rider’s name was Joseph Paradine, and he had recently declined, with thanks, the offer of General J. E. B. Stuart to recommend him for a commission.

He preferred to serve as a common trooper. He was a chivalric idealist, and a peerless scout.

“You’d better steal some Yankee blues yourself, Dauger,” he advised. “Those homespun pants would drop off of you if you stood up in your stirrups.⁠ ⁠… Yes, the enemy’s expected to take up a position in Channow Valley. But if he had done so, we’d have run into his videttes by now, and that town would be as noisy as a county fair.”

He rode from among the pines and into the open on the lower slope.

“You’re plumb exposin’ yourself, Joe,” warned Dauger anxiously.

“And I’m going to expose myself more,” returned Paradine, his eyes on the valley. “We’ve been told to find the Yankees, establish their whereabouts. Then our people will tackle them.” He spoke with the confidence of triumph that in the summer of 1862 possessed Confederates who had driven the Union’s bravest and best all through Virginia. “I’m going all the way down.”

“There’ll be Yanks hidin’,” suggested Dauger pessimistically. “They’ll plug you plumb full of lead.”

“If they do,” called Paradine, “ride back and tell the boys, because then you’ll know the Yankees actually are in Channow.” He put his horse to the slope, feeling actually happy at the thought that he might suffer for the sake of his cause. It is worthy of repetition that he was a chivalric idealist.

Dauger, quite as brave but more practical, bode where he was. Paradine, riding downhill, passed out of reach of any more warnings.

Paradine’s eyes were kept on the village as he descended deep into silence as into water. He had never known such silence, not even at the frequent prayings of his very devout regiment. It made him nervous, a different nervousness from the tingling elation brought by battle thunders, and it fairly daunted his seasoned and intelligent horse. The beast tossed its head, sniffed, danced precariously, and had to be urged to the slope’s foot and the trail that ran there.

From the bottom of the slope, the village was a scant two miles away. Its chimneys did not smoke, nor did its trees stir in the windless air. Nor was there sign or motion upon its streets and among its houses of red brick and white wood⁠—no enemy soldiers, or anything else.

Was this a trap? But Paradine smiled at the thought of a whole Yankee brigade or more, lying low to capture one lone Southerner.

More likely they thought him a friend, wearing blue as he did; but why silence in that case, either?

He determined to make noise. If there were hostile forces in and among the houses of Channow, he would draw their attention, perhaps their musket fire. Spurring the gray so that it whickered and plunged, he forced it to canter at an angle toward the nearest houses. At the same time he drew his saber, whetted to a razor-edge contrary to regulations, and waved it over his head. He gave the rebel yell, high and fierce.

“Yee-hee!”

Paradine’s voice was a strong one, and it could ring from end to end of a brigade in line; but, even as he yelled, that yell perished⁠—dropped from his lips, as though cut away.

He could not have been heard ten yards. Had his throat dried up? Then, suddenly, he knew. There was no echo here, for all the ridge lay behind, and the hills in front to the north. Even the galloping hoofs of the gray sounded muffled, as if in cotton. Strange⁠ ⁠… there was no response to his defiance.

That was more surprising still. If there were no enemy troops, what about the people of the town? Paradine felt his brown neck-hair, which needed cutting badly, rise and stiffen. Something sinister lay yonder, and warned him away. But he had ridden into this valley to gather intelligence for his officers. He could not turn back, and respect himself thereafter, as a gentleman and a soldier. Has it been noted that Paradine was a chivalric idealist?

But his horse, whatever its blood and character, lacked such selfless devotion to the cause of State’s Rights. It faltered in its gallop, tried first to turn back, and then to throw Paradine. He cursed it feelingly, fought it with bit, knee and spur, and finally pulled up and dismounted. He drew the reins forward over the tossing gray head, thrust his left arm through the loop, and with his left hand drew the big cap-and-ball revolver from his holster. Thus ready, with shot or saber, he proceeded on foot, and the gray followed him protestingly.

“Come on,” he scolded, very loudly⁠—he was sick of the silence. “I don’t know what I’m getting into here. If I have to retreat, it won’t be on foot.”

Half a mile more, at a brisk walk. A quarter-mile beyond that, more slowly; for still there was no sound or movement from the village. Then the trail joined a wagon track, and Paradine came to the foot of the single street of Channow.

He looked along it, and came to an abrupt halt.

The street, with its shaded yards on either side, was littered with slack blue lumps, each the size of a human body.

The Yankee army, or its advance guard, was there⁠—but fallen and stony still.

“Dead!” muttered Paradine, under his breath.

But who could have killed them? Not his comrades, who had not known where the enemy was. Plague, then? But the most withering plague takes hours, at least, and these had plainly fallen all in the same instant.

Paradine studied the scene. Here had been a proper entry of a strange settlement⁠—first a patrol, watchful and suspicious; then a larger advance party, in two single files, each file hugging one side of the street with eyes and weapons commanding the other side; and, finally, the main body⁠—men, horses and guns, with a baggage train⁠—all as it should be; but now prone and still, like tin soldiers strewn on a floor after a game.

The house at the foot of the street had a hitching-post, cast from iron to represent a Negro boy with a ring in one lifted hand. To that ring Paradine tethered the now almost unmanageable gray. He heard a throbbing roll, as of drums, which he identified as the blood beating in his ears. The saber-hilt was slippery with the sweat of his palm.

He knew that he was afraid, and did not relish the knowledge. Stubbornly he turned his boot-toes forward, and approached the fallen ranks of the enemy. The drums in his ears beat a cadence for his lone march.

He reached and stood over the nearest of the bodies. A blue-bloused infantryman this, melted over on his face, his hands slack upon the musket lying crosswise beneath him. The peaked forage cap had fallen from rumpled, bright hair. The cheek, what Paradine could see of it, was as downy as a peach. Only a kid, young to die; but was he dead?

There was no sign of a wound. Too, a certain waxy finality was lacking in that slumped posture. Paradine extended the point of his saber and gingerly prodded a sun-reddened wrist.

No response. Paradine increased the pressure. A red drop appeared under the point, and grew. Paradine scowled. The boy could bleed. He must be alive, after all.

“Wake up, Yankee,” said Joseph Paradine, and stirred the blue flank with his foot. The flesh yielded, but did not stir otherwise. He turned the body over. A vacant pink face stared up out of eyes that were fixed, but bright. Not death⁠—and not sleep.

Paradine had seen men in a swoon who looked like that. Yet even swooners breathed, and there was not a hair’s line of motion under the dimmed brass buttons.

“Funny,” thought Paradine, not meaning that he was amused. He walked on, because there was nothing left to do. Just beyond that first fallen lad lay the rest of the patrol, still in the diamond-shaped formation they mast have held when awake and erect. One man lay at the right side of the street, another opposite him at the left. The corporal was in the center and, to his rear, another private.

The corporal was, or had been, an excitable man. His hands clutched his musket firmly, his lips drew back from gritted teeth, his eyes were narrow instead of staring. A bit of awareness seemed to remain upon the set, stubbly face. Paradine forbore to prod him with the saber, but stooped and twitched up an eyelid. It snapped back into its squint. The corporal, too, lived but did not move.

“Wake up,” Paradine urged him, as he had urged the boy. “You aren’t dead.” He straightened up, and stared at the more distant and numerous blue bodies in their fallen ranks. “None of you are dead!” he protested at the top of his lungs, unable to beat down his hysteria. “Wake up, Yankees!”

He was pleading with them to rise, even though he would be doomed if they did.

“Yee-hee!” he yelled. “You’re all my prisoners! Up on your feet!”

“Yo’re wastin’ yore breath, son.”

Paradine whirled like a top to face this sudden quiet rebuke.

A man stood in the front yard of a shabby house opposite, leaning on a picket fence. Paradine’s first impression was of noble and vigorous old age, for a mighty cascade of white beard covered the speaker’s chest, and his brow was fringed with thick cottony hair. But next moment Paradine saw that the brow was strangely narrow and sunken, that the mouth in the midst of its hoary ambush hung wryly slack, and that the eyes were bright but empty, like cheap imitation jewels.

The stranger moved slowly along the fence until he came to a gate. He pushed it creakily open, and moved across the dusty road toward Paradine. His body and legs were meager, even for an old man, and he shook and shuffled as though extremely feeble. His clothing was a hodgepodge of filthy tatters.

At any rate, he was no soldier foe. Paradine holstered his revolver, and leaned on his saber. The bearded one came close, making slow circuit of two fallen soldiers that lay in his path. Close at hand, he appeared as tall and gaunt as a flagstaff, and his beard was a fluttering white flag, but not for truce.

“I spoke to ’em,” he said, quietly but definitely, “an’ they dozed off like they was drunk.”

“You mean these troops?”

“Who else, son? They come marchin’ from them hills to the north. The folks scattered outa here like rabbits⁠—all but me. I waited. An’⁠—I put these here Yanks to sleep.”

Hhe reached under his veil of beard, apparently fumbling in the bosom of his ruined shirt. His brown old fork of a hand produced a dingy book, bound in gray paper.

“This does it,” he said.

Paradine looked at the front cover. It bore the woodcut of an owl against a round moon.

The title was in black capitals:

John George Hohman’s
Powwows
or
Long Lost Friend

“Got it a long time back, from a Pennsylvany witch-man.”

Paradine did not understand, and was not sure that he wanted to. He still wondered how so many fighting-men could lie stunned.

“I thought ye was a Yank, an’ I’d missed ye somehow,” the quiet old voice informed him. “That’s a Yank sojer suit, hain’t it? I was goin’ to read ye some sleep words, but ye give the yell, an’ I knew ye was secesh.”

Paradine made a gesture, as though to brush away a troublesome fly. He must investigate further. Up the street he walked, among the prone soldiers.

It took him half an hour to complete his survey, walking from end to end of that unconscious host. He saw infantry, men and officers sprawling together in slack comradeship; three batteries of Parrott guns, still coupled to their limbers, with horses slumped in their harness and riders and drivers fallen in the dust beneath the wheels; a body of cavalry⁠—it should have been scouting out front, thought Paradine professionally⁠—all down and still, like a whole parkful of equestrian statues overturned; wagons; and finally, last of the procession save for a prudently placed rearguard, a little clutter of men in gold braid. He approached the oldest and stoutest of these, noting the two stars on the shoulder straps⁠—a major general.

Paradine knelt, unbuttoned the frock coat, and felt in the pockets. Here were papers. The first he unfolded was the copy of an order:

General T. F. Kottler,
Commanding ⸻ Division, U.S.A.

General:

You will move immediately, with your entire force, taking up a strong defensive position in the Channow Valley.⁠ ⁠…

This, then, was Kottler’s Division. Paradine estimated the force as five thousand bluecoats, all veterans by the look of them, but nothing that his own comrades would have feared. He studied the wagon-train hungrily. It was packed with food and clothing, badly needed by the Confederacy. He would do well to get back and report his find. He turned, and saw that the old man with the white beard had followed him along the street. “I reckon,” he said to Paradine, in tones of mild reproach, “ye think I’m a-lyin’ about puttin’ these here Yanks to sleep.”

Paradine smiled at him, as he might have smiled at an importunate child. “I didn’t call you a liar,” he temporized, “and the Yankees are certainly in dreamland. But I think there must be some natural explanation for⁠—”

“Happen I kin show ye better’n tell ye,” cut in the dotard. His paper-bound book was open in his scrawny hands. Stooping close to it, he began rapidly to mumble something. His voice suddenly rose, sounded almost young:

“Now, stand there till I tell ye to move!”

Paradine, standing, fought for explanations. What was happening to him could be believed, was even logical. Mesmerism, scholars called it, or a newer name, hypnotism.

As a boy he, Paradine, had amused himself by holding a hen’s beak to the floor and drawing a chalk line therefrom. The hen could never move until he lifted it away from that mock tether. That was what now befell him, he was sure. His muscles were slack, or perhaps tense; he could not say by the feel. In any case, they were immovable. He could not move eye. He could not loosen grip on his saber-hilt. Yes, hypnotism. If only he rationalized it, he could break the spell.

But he remained motionless, as though he were the little iron figure to which his horse was tethered, yonder at the foot of the street.

The old man surveyed him with a flicker of shrewdness in those bright eyes that had seemed foolish.

“I used only half power. Happen ye kin still hear me. So listen:

“My name’s Teague. I live down yon by the crick. I’m a witch-man, an’ my pappy was a witch-man afore me. He was the seventh son of a seventh son⁠—an’ I was his seventh son. I know conjer stuff⁠—black an’ white, forrard an’ back’ard. It’s my livin’.

“Folks in Channow make fun o’ me, like they did o’ my pappy when he was livin’ but they buy my charms. Things to bring love or hate, if they hanker fer ’em. Cures fer sick hogs an’ calves. Sayin’s to drive away fever. All them things. I done it fer Channow folks all my life.”