The Deserter by Jane Langton Page A

Tatum?”
    â€œDaid too, sir.”
    When the miserable morning report was completed, the regimental adjutant called out, “Company captains, I believe two of you are replacements? I hope both of you took down the names of the dead and missing, because you’re supposed to write to their next of kin.”
    Then the first sergeant bent his head over the corporal’s roll, signed his name, and handed it to the company’s new captain, who also signed his name, and then the regimental adjutant gathered up all the morning reports and took them to his soggy tent on the outskirts of Gettysburg, there to be consolidated and sent on to the acting assistant adjutant general of the Second Brigade. From brigade level the expanded report would be passed along to the headquarters of the First Division and from there to the central command of the entire Twelfth Corps. At last the report containing the final official figures for all the regiments of the First Division during the Battle of Gettysburg would make its way to the staff of General Meade himself, to be tallied in his final battle report and packed off to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac in Washington, where it would become part of the vast collection of papers documenting the land campaigns of the entire Union army and the maritime history of the navy.
    General Meade’s final battle report was of no concern to the staff officers of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. But Sergeant Willow, who had been in charge of removing the bodies to the place where they were to be temporarily buried—a pit was being dug for them beside the field hospital for the Twelfth Corps—was dissatisfied.
    He should have piped up during roll call when Otis Pike was reported dead. He should have spoken up then, because he had something to say about the burial detail and the body of Otis Pike. After all, collecting corpses was not the jim-dandiest detail you could ever be on, because of the smell in the first place, and then you had to keep the varmints at bay, not to mention the grief of the thing, so he had only been doing his unfortunate duty, groping around all those swollen bodies into their pockets and so on, looking for personal possessions to be sent home to grieving wives and sweethearts. And then when he got to Otis’s corpse he had been mystified by the small amount of blood on his coat.
    Sergeant Luther Willow was an ardent reader of dime novels. He was familiar with the gallant exploits of the London police in their pursuit of dastardly criminals. And like the admirable police detective Benjamin Bone, Sergeant Willow always examined the pattern of the bloodstains on the bodies of the men he found dead on the battlefield. Of course they were battle casualties, not murder victims, but in making his own personal investigations he felt like a colleague of Detective Bone.
    The rebel shell that had blown away the face of Private Otis Pike had left very little blood on the coat—that was the peculiar thing. You would have thought it would be soaked in blood, if not on the front, then on the back, where he was lying in it. Instead, there was only a little on the lining and some superficial stains on the front, almost like the prints of a hand. It didn’t seem natural.
    In his perplexity Sergeant Willow had removed the coat from the body and set it aside, along with the metal tag and the items from the pockets of both the coat and the trousers. He had written the words “PVT. OTIS PIKE” on a piece of paper and pinned it to Otis’s shirt. Maybe tomorrow, he’d go around to wherever the Tenth Maine had settled down, the regiment of provost guards for the Twelfth Corps, and interest somebody in this little battlefield mystery.
    Unfortunately he didn’t get around to it for a couple of days, and by then it was too late. Tenth Maine, Second Massachusetts and the entire rest of the army were on the move again. Pike’s