Dead Silent (Printable)

By Charles Vander Vennet

I walk among the dead underneath the gray, cloudy, summer sky near the town of Gettysburg. Thousands of fallen soldiers lie lifeless upon the blood-soaked ground. My foot kicks a battle drum and frees it from the clutches of a small black boy in a blue army uniform. One of his legs is missing.

     I see friends and enemies among the dead while looking for my brother. I see a group of privates that I had come to know through games of poker around the campfire at night. As my boots drag along the ground, I stoop to look a man in his face to see if he is my brother, but he's not. A bayonet is stuck in the man's stomach, his face frozen in pain. Sickened by the sight of the dead man's face, my stomach turns, and I vomit on his boots.

     I see a man in a gray uniform sit up on the other side of the battlefield. I want to let him live, but my emotions take over. I grab a nearby rifle, take some shot from my breast pocket, load it with the ease only a colonel can, and set my sights. My finger presses against the trigger, warm from the sweltering summer heat. Time seems to slow as I begin to pull the trigger. I am a hair's breadth away from shooting when I decide to let the man live. I can't allow myself to be a part of such meaningless destruction ever again. He looks around the field and scrambles into the forest. Before he darts into the woods, we catch each other's eyes, but I cannot identify the man is because he is so far away, probably two hundred yards. All I know is he is the enemy.

     I lay the rifle on the ground next to a body and think about why I'm fighting in this war. I can't understand why people have slaves. Why can't they be paid housekeepers or field hands? To separate from a nation as great as the United States of America for any reason, especially this one, is quite possibly the most dimwitted thing I can think of. That's why I am fighting in the war. I am outspoken in my views, and my neighbors hate me because of it. Almost all of my neighbors have slaves, and half of them are in agreement with secession. With my head hanging heavily on my chest, I realize there are no noises. There are no birds singing. The world is dead silent.

Strangely, I find myself in the library of my house just outside Washington, DC on the Virginian bank of the Potomac River. I straighten my lapel as my wife enters the room, her belly swollen with pregnancy. She puts her arms around my waist, and my eyes close in bliss. We stand there until someone knocks on the front door. I walk to the door as the sun sets over the Potomac, in a spectrum of violet and rose. At the door, I meet a man who hands me a letter. He leaves on horseback without saying a word. With my letter opener, I tear through the envelope and remove a single piece of paper. It tells me I am being given my own squad in the Union Army to fight the rebels at Manassas Junction in Virginia. After telling my beautiful wife, we celebrate with a glass of wine. I love fighting for my country. I can't dream of a better job in a time of war. The sweet smell of gunpowder and the booming of cannons are beautiful things on an early spring morning. Waking up in a small tent, I always take a minute to listen to the birds before donning my uniform. I love the beautiful music the birds sing; it makes me feel like the day will be perfect. Without their song, my day would be one of anguish. There is nothing more satisfying than fighting for one's beliefs. My wife believes this too and is happy I am fighting for mine. Sipping our wine, my wife and I leave the library and go up to bed.

     Coming out of my dream, I am holding another rifle. The soldier, to whom it belongs, is dead, and it appears there was no time to reload it. I smell the harsh aroma of the powder when I bring it to my face. I throw the rifle violently to the ground. It hits another, and they make a cross. I think, if only God could see this.

     A fog bank begins to cover the battleground. I can see only a few feet in front of me now. It looks like a silver blanket has been draped over this morbid scene to hide it from the rest of the world. I sit between two fallen Union soldiers to take a break and hide from the world outside this silvery nightmare.

     I rest my head in my leather-skinned, blood-soaked hands and wish for all of this to go away as my blonde hair falls between my fingers. There are no other survivors in the area. I am desperately alone in a sea of death and despair. I must have passed out during the battle and been mistaken for dead because I surely would have joined these fallen soldiers in their march to Heaven. I will return to camp after I find my brother. The area around me is filled with total silence. There are no birds singing.

The nightmare of silent death fades away to become a beautiful spring morning. I am sitting in my library, smoking a cigar in celebration. My wife has just given birth to my first son. Close family members surround me. My father, mother, and brother are sitting in green, plush chairs like mine. My father and brother are playing a game of chess in front of a roaring fire. Seeing them play their game, I see my brother got his looks from our father, while I got mine from our mother. My mother is reading Nathaniel Hawthorne's book, The Scarlet Letter. She is completely engulfed in his prose. The midwife walks in with my baby boy in her arms. He is sleeping. I ask to hold him, so she passes him to me after I stub out my cigar. As I cradle him in my arms, he wakes up and begins to cry.

     Suddenly, I hear a twig crack somewhere in front of me, and I am back on the dreary field, shrouded in fog. I am not alone after all, I suppose. The fog is thicker now. I can't even see my hands when I hold them in front of my face. Out of fear, I fumble for anything to ward off danger. My hand lands on a bayonet. With bayonet in hand, I stand and stumble towards the noise. My feet slip in the mud, and I kick soldiers as I approach the place where the noise came from.

     I can't see much around me, though the fog is thinner here. I am at the edge of the battlefield and standing next to a cannon. I can almost hear the echoing boom as I lean against the cold iron sides. Breathing deeply, I strain to hear anything, but I can't. Again, there are no birds singing.

     I am no longer on the bloody battlefield. I am sitting in a plush, green chair in my library. Through the window, the full moon casts its light down upon the Potomac, and the reflection beams up at me like a giant silver dollar. I am holding two envelopes, one of which is open. I have yet to read the other. The opened letter is from the governor.

It is my distinct pleasure to bestow upon you the rank of Colonel in the United States of America's Army. Effective on 30 June in the year of Our Lord, 1863, you will lead the Second Brigade of the First Division of the Second Army Corps at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Your commanding officers will be Major General Winfield S. Hancock and Brigadier General John Gibbon.

Still basking in my recent news, I slide my silver letter opener through the unopened envelope and remove a single page, which is covered in my father's script. In the letter, he insults my values, says he is ashamed to have a son fighting for anything but state's rights, and tells me I am no longer his son. My jaw is clenched tightly, and a sharp pain runs through my stomach. My wife walks into the room and touches me on the shoulder as I slam my fists on my desk.

     I am back to the silvery nightmare surrounded by the silence of death. I realize I despise war, yet here I am, shooting and killing people, forcing my beliefs on them. I realize, in that moment of pure silence that I despise myself. Would this war really bring any serious change to the future? To my little boy back home?

     Something moves in the trees behind me. I hear a branch break and leaves rustle. My breathing is heavy now, and my brain is riddled with thoughts of danger and death. I am afraid. I stand completely still, holding my breath. My hand grips the bayonet so tightly my knuckles turn white. My eyes dart all around, taking in everything around me. The noises stop. There are no birds singing.

     Looking down at my hand, I see that my knuckles are no longer white, and instead of holding a bayonet, I am holding my son's small, pudgy fingers. My other hand supports his back as his sits on a rocking horse I made for him as a present. By the gap-toothed smile on his face, it is apparent that he likes the toy. His happiness spreads to me, and my heart begins to pound with love and joy.

     A fire is ablaze in front of us in my library. As I watch the light dance on his face, my wife walks into the room.

     "It's time for him to be put to bed. He didn't get much sleep last night, and neither did I," she says with her hands on her hips.

     "Let him stay up a little while longer. It is his first birthday after all."

     With some persistence, I convince my wife to let our son stay up later than usual. She made me promise to take care of him in the middle of the night when he becomes cranky and irritable. This I did with pleasure for I do not get to spend as much time with my son as I would like because of my duties at war.

     After our compromise, my wife removes a book from its shelf and sits in one of our chairs. In the light of the fire, it looks as though an angel has descended from Heaven and graces us with its presence. Watching my wife and son, I realize I am the wealthiest man in this great nation.

     My heart stops pounding inside my chest, and I realize I am back in the dead world of war. The happiness and love in my son's eyes free me from my fear. I look around at all the death. There is a Confederate soldier lying at my feet. He is missing a few fingers and his face is mangled and bloody. I can see his stripes on his uniform. He had been a colonel.

     From the trees behind me, I hear a noise, as if a person were lurking in the underbrush. I swallow the large lump in my throat and take a deep breath. I watch the trees and bushes intensely for any sign of movement. The leaves of a bush in front of me rustle, so I leap onto it. It turns out to be the soldier I let live. I drag him by his hair onto the field.

     He is lying face down in the mud, his feet resting in puddles of bloody water. Holding the bayonet in my right hand, I flip the soldier over so I can see him face to face. The fog has thickened, so I can't see him clearly. I hold the bayonet against his throat with enough pressure to break the skin. As a drop of blood forms on the blade, the fog rolls past and I can see the man's face, as if someone washed my eyes like a window. I realize the world is dead silent as I hold the bayonet against my brother's throat. There are no birds singing.

     The bayonet is no longer in my hand. Instead, I am holding a fishing pole while sitting in a rowboat in the middle of a lake from my childhood. Looking at my hands, I see that the wrinkles of time have disappeared and the scars on my knuckles are gone. My pole dips as a fish nibbles on the bait at the end of the line. I feel a tap on my shoulder from behind me.

     "Can you do this for me?" my younger brother asks me. He always needs me to bait his hook. He hates touching the worms.

     I take the hook from his small hand and a worm from the jar in which we keep them. The worm struggles in my hand to avoid his fate. I slide the hook through the worm and hand the pole back to my brother.

     "Thanks. I wouldnít know what to do without you," he says as he casts the line out.

     On hot summer days like this, my brother and I sit in the boat for hours until the sun begins to set and we have to go home for dinner. I cherish these times spent with my brother because, although we live in the same house, I rarely get to see him. He follows my father around like a shadow while I do my own things. Sometimes I think I was adopted because I am nothing like my family, though I know I'm not since I look so much like our mother. Maybe I just have a different father than my brother.

     The boat we sit in reminds me of our differences. From the moment my father took me out on his boat on the Santee River, I have always wanted my own for fishing. On my tenth birthday, my father told me he was going to have a boat built for me. I asked him whether I could build it, but he ignored my idea and told three of the slaves to build a boat, but because the cotton harvest was unusually large that year due to a lengthy wet season, he had to have all the slaves work twice as hard as usual. This increase in labor meant the slaves would be flogged four times as much as usual. This naturally delayed the construction of my boat. As the days passed, I asked my father to let me build my boat, but he insisted that manual labor was not suited for a person in a family of our lineage. Even my brother tried to convince me that our hands were not made for that kind of work. I began to hate my father and his way of life.

     Despite my hatred for my father, I love my boat and, of course, my brother. He means the world to me despite our differences and the similarities he shares with my father. We go fishing once a week during the late spring and summer, and that helps us create a bond like no other. This particular day, six years after the initial construction of my boat, is no different in that aspect.

     We sit in the boat, talking about what we'll do when we finish our schooling and many other things that form in our minds. We talk about romances long past and books written by our favorite authors. We are not as different in these aspects of life as we are in others. We both enjoy the works of William Shakespeare immensely and dream of being our favorite characters from his plays. My brother dreams of being Prospero from The Tempest, while I dream of being Antony from Antony and Cleopatra.

     While talking about these things, I notice a small cluster of bubbles moving towards us.

     "Be quiet. I think an alligator is in the area," I tell my brother as he tells me of a girl in his class whom he plans to marry. Immediately, my brother grows quiet and becomes as petrified as a rock.

     The bubbles move towards us, getting closer by the second. When they are within a few meters of the bow, a set of eyes appears above the surface of the lake. The glassy eyes peer at us with malicious intent. As quickly as they appeared, the eyes vanish.

     "Get as close to the center of the boat as possible. If he attacks, I don't want you to be thrown overboard," I tell him as the bubbles move towards us.

     As my brother lies down in the middle of the boat and I get up to move there too, the creature rams the boat with incredible force. The boat rocks violently on the calm lake. As the boat teeters from side to side, I lose my balance and fall into the creature's domain. In the cool water, I feel the animal brush against my leg. I am frozen with fear.

     "Swim!" my brother shouts from the boat as he slams the oar against the surface of the water. His words bring me back to reality, and I begin to swim to shore.

     Kicking my legs as I swim, the alligator's skin brushes against me, making me frantic. Behind me, I can hear the hysterical screaming of my brother as he tries to get the attention of the animal. Every few seconds, I hear the slap of the oar against the water.

     When there are only a few strokes left until I reach the shore, I hear my brother cry out in triumph. Crawling onto the sandy bank, I look back at the rowboat. My brother is rowing with all of his strength towards me. Looking around, I cannot see any sign of life underwater.

     When my brother is close enough, I run into the shallow water and pull the boat ashore. The damage the alligator has done to my precious boat is clearly visible. The creature was able bite a part of the oar off.

     "How are you feeling?" my brother asks me as we rest in the shallow water of the lake with waves rolling over our feet.

     "Truth be told, I'm glad to be alive. If you hadn't been there to help me, who knows what might have happened? Thank you," I say. Sitting in the water, my brother and I watch the sun begin to set. "That's our cue to go home. Mother will be angry with us if we are out after dark."

     Back on the battlefield, my brother tells me to get it over with, to kill him. He says he doesn't want to live anymore, not after seeing what he's seen in the war. I see my father in his face, and I press the blade harder into his fleshy throat. It would be so easy, I think. It's only skin, and he is the enemy so I would only be doing my job. I can feel the blood pumping through my veins in hatred, but I realize he isn't my father; he's my brother. The intense hatred I feel is for my father, not my brother. With that, I pull the bayonet away from his throat.

My brother rises to his feet and wipes the blood from his neck. He is shaking uncontrollably.

"Calm down. Take a deep breath."

"You took pity on me. Pity saved my life today," my brother says after taking a deep breath.

"No, you're wrong. Love saved you today. You are my brother, and I love you. I had two chances to kill you today. True, I didn't know it was you the first time, but that doesn't matter. The only thing that truly matters is that you are my brother, and nothing can break the bond we have."

With my final words, we walk off the battlefield. As we walk into the forest and out from underneath the silver blanket of death, the world comes to life. The birds are singing now. The world is no longer dead silent.

© 2006 Charles Vander Vennet

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