Tyler Cabe did not like to think of the war, but sometimes it reared up in his head, big and hungry and dark, chewing right through him like a cancer. And often in the dead of night when he was alone and all the little worries and fragments of guilt a man has hidden away in his soul started coming back to him, nipping at the edge of reason and resolve. The war, then, would return as he tried to sleep…or it would jerk him awake at four a.m. with cold sweats and shakes. It would not be a memory, but a physical, palpable thing that he could feel and see, taste and smell as it oozed from his pores like diseased blood, drowning him in horror.
Cabe had been a member of the 2 ^ nd Arkansas Mounted Rifles.
His first engagement was at the battle of Wilson’s Creek where all his wide-eyed naivete had been purged from him in the worst possible way. He often thought that it was here that he truly lost his virginity. And if that was true, it was no sweet lovemaking in the dark, but a brutal violation. A rape of all he had known and believed in up to that point. Twelve miles southwest of Springfield, Missouri, on Wilson’s Creek, General Nathaniel Lyon’s Union forces struck at the Confederate lines at five in the morning. The fighting that ensued was savage and horrible. Cabe saw men-men he’d known and trained with-blown to ground meat all around him. He was splattered with their blood and entrails. A grisly baptismal. He crawled through their remains, ducked under their anatomies that dangled from tree limbs like garland, tasted their hot, salty blood on his lips.
In the billowing smoke and confusion, half out of his mind, all he could hear was the thundering cannonade and the screams of the dying. The 2 ^ nd pulled back from what was known as Bloody Hill, but then through sheer zeal and fortitude, were able to stabilize their positions. The Confederate forces attacked Union positions no less than three times, inflicting and taking horrendous casualties. After the third charge, the Yankee columns fell back to Springfield, but the 2 ^ nd Arkansas and others were just too beaten-up and threadbare to pursue them. The Confederate victory-if you wanted to call it that with some 1200 dead-bolstered Southern sympathy in Missouri, but the cost was staggering.
Cabe came out of that shocked, distraught, burned and bruised and damaged.
That was his first taste, his induction into man’s oldest preoccupation.
After that, the 2 ^ nd was sent to Indian Territory to quell an uprising by the Creeks and Seminoles. By then, Cabe was desensitized by combat and, instead of wanting to run and hide as he had at Wilson’s Creek, he dove into battle viciously. The Indian fighting was often close-in and barbaric and he found that he liked it that way. There was something far too impersonal about putting a ball through a man from a distance or shelling him indiscriminately…when you came at him with pistol and knife, were splashed with his blood and saw his agony, it woke up some primal beast that lusted for more.
And there was always more.
Pea Ridge came next.
The 2 ^ nd Arkansas, mustered into the CS Army of the West and, thrown together under the command of Generals Price and McCulloch, began the bloody affair on the southern tip of the Ozark Mountains. The combined force stood at over 20,000 including 5,000 Indians from the Five Civilized Tribes. With a near-two-to-one superiority in numbers, the Confederates, sensing a sure victory, split their army into two columns and attacked from front and rear. But Curtis, the wily Union general, flanked both Confederate armies and mercilessly pounded them with artillery fire until the Southerners were forced to retreat.
For Cabe and the 2 ^ nd, it was a living hell.
There’d been a blizzard a few days before and the weather was bitterly cold. Everyone was tired and hungry and near-frozen when Confederate General Van Dorn forced them into the fight. They deployed just east of Leetown in Morgan’s Woods. Confederate generals McCulloch and McIntosh were killed just two hours into the fighting and the 2 ^ nd was left leaderless, pounded and harassed by the 36 ^ th and 44 ^ th Illinois relentlessly. The Confederate army was now in full retreat, pursed by the 1 ^ st and 2 ^ nd Union Divisions. Cabe’s company, cut off now, took shelter in an abandoned farmhouse.
Shoes worn to threads, uniforms hanging in ragged strips, Cabe and the others shivered in the cold. Starving, scratched, torn and bleeding, they waited for relief that never came. There was no food to forage and scarcely any blankets or overcoats to keep warm with. Ammunition was long used-up. Many of the men were wounded, some severely. Just a tattered band strung together with bloody bandages and pride that was quickly eroding.
Within an hour, the shelling began.
The walls collapsed, the roof caved-in. The wounded and weak were buried alive in the rubble. Johnny Miller, Cabe’s best friend in the world, was decapitated by shrapnel. The survivors tried in haste to dig the others out-their screams and pathetic whimpers echoing through the frosty air-but it was hopeless. As the Yankees pressed in, shrieking and blood-hungry, Cabe slipped off into the woods with three others-Sammy Morrow, Pete Oland, and little Willy Gibson. They trudged through swamps and crawled through bramble thickets until they were caked with cold mud, their faces scratched to the bone and uniforms cut to ribbons.
Little Willy was out of his mind, alternately giggling and sobbing and Sammy Morrow kept yelling at him, calling him a mama’s boy and telling him it was time to get weaned off that fucking tit already. But Little Willy ignored him, carrying on conversations with men long dead.
“ He’s crazy, Tyler,” Sammy told Cabe. “We can’t make a run with this bastard at our heels. He’ll give us away.”
“ We can’t leave him.”
“ Why the hell not?” Sammy wanted to know.
But Cabe figured if he didn’t know the answer to that one, what was the point of explaining it to him?
Just around sunset, fatigued and shivering, having had no food in well over twenty-four hours, they were ready to lay down and die. Pete Oland, reconnoitering ahead, discovered a tangle of dead Yankees in a little clearing flanked by a dark, denuded thicket. Cabe counted ten men. Ten men in blue rags that had been obscenely mutilated. They had been scalped and dismembered. Faces had been gouged from the skulls beneath. Their bellies had been opened, internals yanked out and strewn in every which direction like bailing wire.
“ Goddamn,” Pete said. “Ye ever seen anything like it?”
“ Injuns,” Sammy told them. “All them Injuns under Pike.”
And maybe he was right, Cabe had thought. The Cherokee and Creek, Chocktaw and Chickasaw. Wouldn’t have been the first time that Indian troops had gotten a little excited in the carnage and reverted to their old ways.
“ I don’t like them Yankee bastards,” Sammy said and kept saying. “But this…Christ in Heaven, there ain’t no reason for this! Ye hear me? Ain’t no reason! Goddamn injuns! Civilized tribes, my ass!”
Cabe told them to get control of themselves. The men were dead and they had died horribly and savagely, but they were dead. There was nothing to be done for them. He had his boys dig through the corpses and viscera, stripping off greatcoats, blankets, knapsacks, and cap boxes. Any food they could find and especially weapons. Whoever had slaughtered these men had left their Enfield rifles. Cabe figured that well-supplied and well-armed, his group could make it back to the retreating Confederate lines.
It was a plan…only it didn’t happen.
As they looted through the dead, disgusted to a man, a platoon of Yankee cavalry came bounding out of the thickets, ringing in the Confederate soldiers like a noose. There was no escape. No quarter. No nothing. Cabe had been through a lot up to that point…but robbing the enemy dead and then being caught at it like a bunch of ghouls…well, that was pretty much the end of the sad, old road.
The bluebellies dismounted.
Although a lot of them looked a little worse for wear with their dirty, ripped uniforms and gaunt faces drawn hard by war and atrocity, they were looking pretty good compared to Cabe and his men.
The Yankee soldiers got real excited when they saw the condition of their fallen comrades. They had to be physically restrained by their sergeants. As it was, they were like a bunch of slavering mad dogs surrounding the Southerners.
Then an officer walked through their ranks.
A tall, wiry lieutenant in a flapping blue frock coat and a Hardy hat, campaign sword at his side catching the dying sunlight. His face was set hard as marble, those blue eyes just as electric as ball lightening. He walked around the litter pile of the dead Yankees. Flipped one over with his shiny black boot. He showed no emotion, but his eyebrows kept arching, the corners of his lips pulled into a skullish frown.
Cabe knew he had to defuse an ugly situation. “Corporal Tyler Cabe, Second Arkansas Mounted Rifles, sir.”
The lieutenant announced he was Jackson Dirker of the 59 ^ th Illinois.
Something about his bearing and steely silence made Cabe’s blood run cold. Here was a man who obviously garnered instant respect from his troops and was no doubt a good soldier…but here also was a man who, despite his reserve and indifferent manner, seemed to have an almost violent, savage aura about him that bubbled just beneath those crystal blue eyes like acid waiting to devour flesh and bone.
“ Sir…we, we came upon these bodies in this condition. Our unit was chopped up at Pea Ridge, we’ve been on the dodge since yesterday. My men haven’t had a decent meal in days,” Cabe explained, his voice shrill and cracking, because, God, he knew how bad it looked. “We were only going to gather some weapons and food off these…these dead…just enough to survive with.”
The Union soldiers were all shaking and filled with a blank, mindless rage. Little Willy started babbling nonsense that no one could understand and a burly sergeant told him in an Irish brogue to shut his peckerwood Johnny Reb mouth and shut it right fucking now. But Little Willy was crazy and lost in some dream world and he kept right on, choosing the worst possible moment to begin bragging about how many Yankees the 2 ^ nd had killed. The sergeant made a pained, choking sound and pulled an Army Colt and shot him in the head. Little Willy’s skull came apart like a shattered glass vase and his brains vomited into the grass and he fell straight over like a dead tree.
Cabe and the others started shouting and yelling and the Yankees quickly overpowered them. Cabe was knocked to the ground with a rifle butt to the temple and Sammy and Pete were roped to ash trees, then stripped to the waist.
Dirker came walking back from his mount with a bullwhip, something about him just as dark and venomous as rattlesnakes coiled in a ditch. “Graverobbers, ghouls,” he said in a weird, whispering voice. “Killing a man is one thing…but to mutilate him, to do…something…like…this…”
The whip began to snap in the air, its braided length curling and unfurling, waking and stretching…and then Dirker began venting himself. The whip lashed against the bare flesh of Pete and Sammy’s backs, laying them both open in bloody gashes. Dirker kept snapping that whip until both men quit screaming and went limp, their backs like bleeding meat. Cabe came to his senses about then and threw two Yankees out of the way, making for Dirker and then that whip licked him across the face with an explosion of biting agony that dropped him to his knees. It lashed out again and ripped into his cheeks, opened his nose in a ragged laceration. Then he was down and near senseless and that whip clawed at his face again and again and again.
The next thing Cabe knew, he was in a field with maybe a hundred other Confederate soldiers. They were force-marched to the Mississippi River where they were loaded onto the rotting hulks of old steamboats. They were packed into the lower decks and the next week or so was spent down there in the filthy, cold blackness, eating and sleeping and living on stone coal that was two-feet deep. The boat took them up the Mississippi via St. Louis to Alton, Illinois where they were loaded into cattle cars for the trip to Chicago. By the time they reached port, there were dozens of staring corpses packed down there with them…men who had succumbed to the cold, starvation, disease.
In Chicago, the Confederate soldiers were marched some two miles to Camp Douglas through icy mud and stagnant water. Their wet uniforms frozen stiff as steerhide. People came out to gawk and stare and jeer the columns of beaten Southerners…though many did seem sympathetic and some looked almost ashamed at it all. Children sometimes threw things. Other times they waved and smiled. At least…until their parents told them better.
Cabe spent six months at Camp Douglas.
Originally erected as a training base for the Union Army, it had been converted into a POW camp after the Confederate surrender at Fort Donelson. There were over 7,000 prisoners and a single surgeon to see to their needs which were many. The camp was a cesspool of standing water, unburied corpses, rotting bones, rampant disease, and vermin. Rats roamed the grounds freely, feeding off the dead and sometimes the living who were simply too weak and sick to move. Men froze death. Men were beaten to death. Men were executed and tortured for the most minor offenses. Famine killed hundreds. Outbreaks of smallpox and dysentery killed hundreds more. The water was polluted with run-off from the latrines to the point that wounds cleansed with the foul stuff quickly became infected with gangrene. In the summer, the camp became a hive of buzzing flies and biting mosquitoes which filled the air in dense clouds. The unburied dead and heaped refuse became breeding grounds for maggots and rats.
The guards were called “The Hospital Rats” and were sadistic beyond reason, often preferring to toss food into the garbage rather than see the prisoners eat it. They beat men mercilessly, made them stand naked in the snow, and often held lotteries as to which prisoner could survive the longest without food or medical care. An average of eighteen prisoners died each day. Death wagons were pulled through the camp on an irregular basis, cadavers stacked upon them like cordwood in tangles of broomstick-thin limbs and hollowed faces. Often those near-death were thrown on as well. The wagons were often left to broil in the sun for days at a time until the heaped corpses literally shuddered and writhed from the action of feasting worms and rats, expanding gases.
Cabe had not been fed very well while in the CSA.
By the time of Pea Ridge, he was down from his trim 170 pounds to a gaunt 140…but by the time he left Camp Douglas as part of a prisoner exchange, he weighed barely over a hundred pounds. A stick figure scrawled hurriedly by a child’s hand, one dressed in rags and sewn-together bits of uniform and filth-caked blankets.
After a short stay in a Confederate hospital, Cabe was mustered back into the 2 ^ nd Arkansas which was merged with Bragg’s Army of Tennessee. Cabe saw action at Murfreesboro, was under General Joe Johnston’s ill-fated attempt to relieve the Union siege of Vicksburg. And, afterwards…Chickamauga, Chattanooga, the Atlanta Campaign. He was badly wounded by shrapnel during the Carolinas Campaign, but survived to stand with his brothers when the Army of Tennessee surrendered in North Carolina in April, 1865.
After the war he drove steers from Texas up to Kansas, worked as a nightherder, a railroad detective, and rode shotgun on a bullion stage into California. He took up bounty hunting not long after.
But for all he had seen, all he had done, the horrors of war and the living nightmares of Camp Douglas, one event still overshadowed all else…his capture in Morgan’s Woods following the Battle of Pea Ridge.
And his first meeting with Jackson Dirker.
The man who would become his own personal bogeyman and haunt his dreams for years and, very often, his waking moments.