Horrible Harvest

The command come from outside. “Cease your gunfire. I instruct you to cease at once.”

Me and the rest of Company K recognized the voice of our captain right off.

Mr. Miller looked out the wall of windows and seen Captain Doc on horseback, flanked in a semi-circle by the rest of Company K, aiming their service rifles at the house. “Who interrupts my dinner party?”

“General Cameron Miller, can you hear me?”

Mr. Miller looked to his dinner guests before answering. “I hear you fine. Your name, son. You have disturbed our merriment, and I am displeased.”

“I am Captain Docherty – Benjamin Docherty. I’ve been sent on orders from Secretary Seddon himself, sir – Who I might add is acting on behalf of the wishes of President Davis – ”

“On with it, Captain.”

“We have – My company, sir – We have been ordered to escort you to positions on our Southern shores – To fortify our defenses against an expected Yankee invasion, sir – ”

“Not interested.”

“Sir?”

“I am not interested in fortifying our Southern shores, captain. You are dismissed.”

“Sir – It has been hard travels, and – Well, normally, I would maintain an orderly manner, as you technically outrank me, but I am tired and – Frankly, I am angered by the treatment with which your Colonel greeted us – Tell me, sir, do you have my men in there?”

Mr. Miller let loose a crazy cackle. “Son, I only receive the company of pretty young girls on this night. Oh. And an old homely woman who plays the fiddle with little aptitude for the instrument.”

“We’s here, Captain,” I yelled.

“Tennyson?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The others.”

“All here, sir.”

“Mr. Tennyson, I am authorizing you to place General Miller under arrest. I have seen enough on this day to convince me that he does not command a brigade. He is but a ringmaster in a traveling circus of thieves and tyrants – ”

“Now, hold on, Captain,” Mr. Miller barked. “I have business to be conducted with Tennyson. He has violated a litany of offenses against this army and the laws of nature. He is to hang at dawn. On my orders. If you interfere, you will swing next to him on the gallows.”

“General, your threats carry no military authority. The rogue nature of your command ends on this night, at this hour, from this plot of land. Is that understood?”

Mr. Miller laughed. “You have forgotten that you have but a company of men to combat my entire brigade. How do you propose to relieve me of my rank?”

“Sir, I have ridden through the entirety of your camp and taken in a firsthand viewing of your brigade. I have never seen such drunk and disorderly conduct on military grounds in my life. I have not even witnessed such behavior in the seediest of saloons. Those who are not inebriated are sick with dysentery or from infection. Even if they had the will, they could not mount a defense of your arrest – I could come back in a week, and they would still not be sober enough or well enough to organize and put up a fight against your removal – And let me be clear, General. I do not believe that even in a state free of booze, fever, and laudanum, these men would care a whit about your command.”

Mr. Miller laughed even louder. “You fool. I have the finest second in the Confederacy. Colonel Stockton will peel your skin from your incompetent hide.”

“Colonel Stockton is being escorted to Chattanooga as we speak to face a military tribunal for his abuse of rank, General. It is the same path you will find yourself on before daybreak.”

Mr. Miller went cold silent. He turnt over this new information in his batshit brain and then said, “You are bluffing, Captain. Colonel Stockton would not allow himself to be detained.”

“He’s ain’t bluffing,” I said. “I helped detain him.”

Douglas turned his gun on me. “Where is he?”

“Like Captain Doc said, he’s on his way to Chattanooga under military escort – ”

“Stop it.”

“What?”

Douglas stepped to me. “I’ll shoot you dead if he ain’t brought back.”

“How in the holy hell am I to stop it?”

“Yell it. Tell your captain to send riders. Call it off. Bring him back.”

I give him a hard look. “Now a good piece of information you should know is that I ain’t in the position to tell captains what to do. It don’t work that way. If it did, Mr. Stockton woulda been fitted for a grave instead of wasting horse sweat riding him to Chattanooga – ”

A loud crashing sound cut me off. Every upright soul in the dining room ducked out of reflex.

“Our enemy has breached the rear of the house,” General Miller cried.

“There is smoke,” Captain Docherty yelled. “From the second floor.”

I stepped to the hallway and turned to the kitchen. A flickering of light danced in the space between the bottom of the door and the floor. I run towards it and kicked open the door. The blaze snapped like a lizards tongue towards me and then quick as lightning whipped backed. A support beam from the ceiling lay in flaming pieces. Thick black smoke crawled out of a large hole in the ceiling, with fat and deadly tentacles reaching for every bit of oxygen in the room.

I run back to the dining hall just as another chunk of ceiling give way to flames. “Fire.”

“Nonsense,” Mr. Miller yelled as he retook his seat. “It is a trick. To get us outside. I am ordering everyone to sit and continue our dinner. This is my brigade. I will decide if there is a fire or not, and I say there is no fire.”

Bailey, face down on the floor, begun a labored laugh that give her great pain, but it give her even more pleasure. She’d spend her last breaths on it, but she didn’t give a hoot. She’d promised to burn the house to the ground, and she was tickled pink she’d delivered on her promise.

“I told you to shoot her again. She is not dead enough. She mocks us. The nigger mocks us. I will not have it.”

“We leave now. All of us,” I said. “Kenneth, the guard’s weapon. He ain’t gonna need it.”

Kenneth give pause as he tried to process what I saying through all the ruckus. When he landed on my meaning, he quick as a cat, wrestled the gun from the dead fella’s grip and stood.

“Aim that thing at your daddy. He is in your custody.”

Kenneth nodded and nervously pointed the gun at his father. “Father – I – That is – Cameron Miller, you are under arrest.”

Mr. Miller slowly turned to his son. “Is this my boy who betrays me? Are you here to take my throne after I am murdered? Is the empire yours now?”

“You have no empire to which I desire to lay claim. It is your bones I want. Bleached by the sun. The days of decay having wasted away your shell. Your hide melted by time. I will sit in comfort over your corpse and watch as the planet whirls around the sun over and over again and steals all you have built and turns it to vapor. That is what your empire means to me. It is a wisp, a fragment of paltriness that is so grotesquely constructed it will perish under the weight of the filth from which it profits. I will rejoice when every last dollar you have captured by cruelty and larceny is freed from the Miller grip and distributed to those tortured by your lash and rod. Your wealth will be theirs. Your power will be theirs. I will transfer it all to them.”

Now I can’t lay claim he said all that exactly like that, but that’s how a body remembers things. Every word perfect. Every sentiment colored in poetry. Every goddamn thing needed to be said, said.

Another crash, this time from the hallway just past the doorframe of the dining room. Smoke marched along the ceiling above our heads.

“Douglas, Charles – Lay down your weapons, and exit with your hands up.”

“Go to hell, brother,” Charles answered.

“You can be sure I’ll get there soon enough, Charles, but it won’t be tonight. You block the only exit. We need to get out that exit. How you think this is gonna end for you?”

“Shoot me – ”

Douglas pointed his weapon at Charles. “Drop your gun, boy. Our time to set things right will come, but being pigheaded stubborn will do nothing but get us all killed.”

Charles hesitated and then dropped his weapon to the floor. He opened the door before raising his hands high in the air and stepping outside.

Douglas lay his firearm down. “Your captain is wrong, Augustus – About this brigade. The General here is their goose who lays golden eggs. They care a good bit about that. Things ain’t gonna go how you think once we escape this fire.”

“Yeah, well, let’s escape the fire first and see how it goes.”

Douglas shrugged and then raised his hands in the air. He was followed with haste by the members of Company K dressed as women and the fiddler, who was offered a blanket by Captain Doc as soon as he had taken in her naked state.

Mr. Miller sat mule-stubborn in his chair at the head of the table. The smoke grew thicker and thicker but stayed along the ceiling. The temperature of the room grew hotter.

“Stand up, father.”

“There is no fire!”

I turned to Tate. “Go. Get out of the house. Leave this camp – The brigade. Run North. Don’t be a fucking idiot. Mr. Miller’s throat will be tended to. I give you a promise on that.”

Tate didn’t respond. He simply stooped down and picked up Bailey. Holding her lifeless body in his arms, he stepped to the door. “The letter – It was upstairs in Master’s room. He’s got no cause against you now. Neither of you.”

“My rank is my cause,” Mr. Miller shouted. “They will swing for their shameful acts of perversion – On my orders. Because I am the noble watch. I am the Holy See of Dixie. They poison God’s grace over the South. They disgrace my name – ”

Kenneth coundn’t take no more. He smacked his father in the back of the head with the butt of his gun. The blow was hard enough to send Mr. Miller into a near black-out.

Just before exiting the burning house, Tate recited from what I would later learn was Macbeth, “Who could refrain, a heart to love, and in that heart, courage, to make love known?” With that, he breached the doorway, and didn’t stop walking until he reached a spot in the woods where he lay Bailey’s body to rest.

The ceiling of the dining hall give a sag, and an eerie creaking sound traveled through the walls. The room felt as if it were about to be swallowed into the mounting heat.

I looped my hand underneath Mr. Miller’s right arm and give Kenneth direction to do the same with the left. As we dragged the self-appointed general past the front doorway, the entire ceiling above the dining room table give way.