Was cold. From the Duck River to the Tennessee, that December of 1864, all the marshes were frozen. Slumped forward in his saddle, Paris Griffin, who had ridden with Forrest's command for three full years now, could see the infantrymen swarming like buzzards over the carcass of a mule, while the wagons General Forrest had put them in, to save their poor feet from being cut to pieces by the flint-hard mud, waited. They weren't after meat, though mule steak could fill a belly mighty handily; what they wanted was the hide which made a fairly tolerable pair of moccasins. There wasn't a hat left among the infantry. Because, while a man's head could stand the sleet filled winds, a man's feet left bloody tracks across the mud turned black ice, unless he wrapped them in something — and a felt hat made a fine warm covering for one foot. For every man who had both feet wrapped in felt, Paris knew you could count a comrade dead. Because Thomas, the Rock of Chickamauga, had commanded the Union forces at Nashville, with Wilson, the one blueclad cavalry leader at least three-quarters as good as Nat Forrest himself, serving under him.

So now the Confederate Horse had slanted down from Murfreesboro to put itself between Hood's retreating army and Thomas' mighty paw. They were getting murdered piecemeal in a hundred brief, hopeless stands to hold off Thomas' army, Wilson's cavalry, long enough for the broken, tattered, bloody remnants of Hood's forces to get back across the Tennessee; and it was beginning to dawn on even the riders who boasted the highest esprit de corps in military history that a nation which had to send its infantry into battle barefooted in December, was on its last, distinctly wobbly legs.

But Paris Griffin wasn't thinking about that. To be precise, he wasn't thinking about anything. He no longer remembered when he had first succeeded in the difficult business of the complete suspension of thought, except that it had been a long time ago, certainly as far back as the summer of 1862, when they were driving Union General Buell crazy by raiding from their base at Murfreesboro over much of the same territory where they were now, two and a half years later; and maybe in those dim days of antiquity when he'd ridden out of Fort Donelson with the then Colonel Nathan Bedford Forrest to go on fighting instead of staying and surrendering with the rest. There was a very simple formula for this easy evasion of the despair that was numbing his fellow troopers all around him; but it was a formula that couldn't be shared. It consisted of flight to regions of the spirit so far off that maybe it reached beyond the spirit itself into what was essentially a kind of death, since life is much more than the drawing of breath, which was all he was doing now.

It was cold, was cold. And the sleet came down in a grey hissing. He, Paris Griffin, listened to that hiss, letting it enter through his ears until all his mind was filled with it — so that there was nothing inside him but grey mist, sleet hiss rising, rising until everything else was crowded out, and he, finding it easier and easier to do this now to fill up his mind — with nothing — with grey — with blindness — not because his eyes couldn't see but because the grey mist rising blanketed out the connection to his brain, while the sleet hiss went on murmuring, blending into softness, into silence, all the multitudinous variant sounds of an army on the march, so that his ears no longer heard them, any more than his eyes now saw the ragged, freezing beggars swarming over that mule.

But what was becoming harder and harder to do was to come back, to leave that sweet Nirvana — of nothing — no pain — no guilt — no sorrow. He had to force himself with greater sternness each time. Because he didn't want to come back; he much preferred that soft velvety purring nothingness; only he knew that in battle a man who was absent in fact, leaving only his mindless bumbling body behind, was a danger to his comrades — and he cared a great deal about his comrades, though about himself he cared not at all.

It was time now. He'd better start fighting his way back out of the sleet hiss wind whistle grey mist before that tiny receding area of control of consciousness he somehow had always maintained up until now, that minuscule image of self that stubbornly refused to be dragged under — blotted out — drowned — would vanish, would be vanquished; and he, happily surrendering to the sensation of floating — of drifting — to the color grey extending itself across the whole spectrum, would sink out of time, out of existence, into the soft dark womb of pre-life where nothing could ever hurt him any more or make him cry —

It was time; but to his swiftly diminishing horror, he found that he couldn't, that the tiny gesticulating image of himself (that always before had clung to some infinitesimal portion of awareness, of identity) was no longer there, nor even the little square of light, of clarity, he'd always managed to preserve on the edge of the velvety nothingness, remained, except as a glimmer already fading.

Was cold. And riding out into that cold he no longer felt, away from the freezing soldiers stripping the smoking hide off the mule, he moved forward half a mile until he came to where the battle lines momentarily and unexpectedly — not that he cared about that, either, or even recognized his danger — were. He kept on riding towards that little salient where Wilson's Cavalry had dismounted and were snickering away with their repeating carbines that never seemed to need reloading; but he, unaware of the ball whistle, bullet whine, bomb crash, rode on, not even knowing that he had drawn his revolver, thus earning for himself the totally undeserved reputation of a martyred hero, until a forty-pound Dahlgren so far away that the Yankee artilleryman who fired it couldn't even see him, opened up and dropped a shell under him that eviscerated his horse. He went down into smoke stink, red hell-fire, shattering thunder. Into bloodwet, gutslime, hoofthrash. Into the deepest womb of darkness. Into night. Into a soft, lovely, very nearly perfect counterfeit of death.

Frank Yerby, Griffin's Way
Copyright © 1962 by Frank Yerby. All rights reserved.

Posted 9 November 1996

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