News of the World: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

Yes Sir and No Sir and make a salute and present a military bearing. Two of the officers they had elected last year weren’t standing and three had moved to Tennessee. They were confused as to the purpose of sergeants and corporals and so decided to forego them. He himself was a Georgia hill country person and spoke that way and thought that way for all of his life, the habits and intonation would stay with him always. He lifted his hand for Thompson.
    On March 27, 1814, at the battle itself, he was hit on the outside of the right hip, leaving a long sear of fragmented flesh and torn homespun and bright red blood. He and the Georgia boys were with Coffee’s forces south of the bend. They had pulled down the timbers of a cabin for breastworks. He didn’t even know at first he had been shot. He was lying beside two boys from his county firing over the timbers where a large soap kettle had rolled out of the fireplace. Round after round from the Creek and Choctaw across the river struck the kettle and made it ring like a bell so that it was hard to hear Thompson lying out in front and crawling toward them, toward cover.
    Finally Sherman Foster called to him, Jeff, Jeff, that’s Captain Thompson out there!
    The Red Sticks, the Muskogee Creek Indians, across the Tallapoosa were laying in a very accurate fire. They had the range on the cabin and the soap kettle and, he now realized, Thompson. All the Red Sticks had were smoothbores but those great .72 caliber balls could kill you just as dead as a rifled gun. The barrels of their guns on the other side of the river looked as long as wagon tongues. He wrapped the firing mechanism of his flintlock rifle in his kerchief and laid it down in the sand. He pulled the powder horn and powder-measure strap off over his head. Shucked off his cartridge box and crawled out to get his captain. Even though it was late March the Alabama sun blazed and roasted everything in its light. The river itself was like some kind of running metal. The smoke of their firing lay in planes. There was no wind. Now Thompson was silent. Why had he gone out there, past the barricade? Everything was thecolor of a biscuit, the color of yellow sunlight and the sulphur shades of gunpowder smoke.
    He slid between two collapsed timbers and when he reached for Thompson’s outflung arm the sand erupted around him as if tiny explosive charges had been set underground. The firing was continuous. He laid hold of the bloodied arm and its torn shirtsleeve and dragged Thompson back into the shelter of the crisscrossed cabin timbers. He pulled him over a broken mirror and a calendar and some spoons. Thompson’s boot heels caught the calendar and its pages rolled over—March and April and May.
    When he got him back under cover the captain was dying. It was a strange thing to roll a man’s body over on its back and look for signs of life. A thing invisible. He had been hit in the V of his throat. Where’ve you been all the day, Randall my son? O Mother, make my bed soon for I am sick to my heart, and I fain would lie doon. He had heard that song all his life and now he knew what it meant. He tore open Thompson’s military jacket, his shirt; he saw life draining away, draining away.
    You’re hit, Sherman said. Look at you, you’re hit.
    I am? Jefferson Kyle Kidd, sixteen years old last week, lay back in the yellow dirt and looked down his own body, the homespun brown pants and square-toed boots and his lanky long legs, the spreading red stain on the outside of his right hip. The weave of the homespun had been driven into his flesh. I’m all right, he said. It’s all right.
    Later they had to pull his pants off and truss up the bandage around his hip bone and his crotch, which was embarrassing, but it healed well.
    He was elected sergeant because they were told they needed one. Sherman moved up to lieutenant and Hezekiah Pitt was made captain to replace Thompson. So there he was with a rank he knew nothing about.
    After