Crossing the Deadline (2 page)

PART ONE

CENTERVILLE, INDIANA

CHAPTER ONE

August 5, 1863

“They should spell that piece of trash the W-E-A-K-L-Y,” Richard Charman says late one afternoon, spying a copy of
Harper's Weekly
folded on the bench beside me. He glares at me with deep-set eyes. His brows, thick and wide-spreading as a robin's nest, give the impression that he looks out on the world from within a cave. Charman is Centerville's highest-paid lawyer for good reason. Arguing against him is fruitless and usually ends in defeat. It doesn't matter whether his clients are right or wrong. They almost always win with him on their side.

I'm sitting beside the front steps of the Mansion House, watching Conestoga wagons pass, when Charman spots my copy of the newspaper. He shakes a finger at me, squinting his eyes together like I've been bad. “That paper doesn't take a
strong enough stand against slavery,” he chides me, as if I personally wrote every line in the newspaper.

“Well, I don't know anything about that,” I tell him. “I read it to know what's going on in the war.”

“What good is the news if you can't trust the source?” he asks.

That's a good point,
I think.

“They should be straightforward and call slavery what it is.'

“Don't listen to him, Stephen,” Jake Vandervite says, patting my shoulder. Everyone calls him Dutch because he emigrated from Europe a few years ago. He owns the Mansion House where Mother works. The hotel is a three-story oasis for travelers coming through town, most of them headed west. “Come inside,” he says. “Got a fresh paper this morning for you.” Travelers bring copies of the paper with them. They leave them in rooms or on tables after breakfast when they've finished reading them. Dutch saves them for me, and sometimes Mom brings them home with her. Ever since Robert left two years ago, I study anything about the war I can get my hands on.

When we reach the bar, Dutch says, “Pay Charman no-never-mind. He's got nothing better to do than stick his nose into everybody else's business.”

Dutch is taller than everyone in Centerville, and stronger, too. He has to be in order to manhandle rowdies when they get too many drinks in their bellies. Once, he carried two men, one on each shoulder, out of the Mansion House's gambling room and dumped them smack on their haunches in the street.

I look up at him and notice light passing through his thinning blond hair like it's delicate lace. “I have something else for you besides the newspaper,” he says.

“How many questions do I get this time?”

“Oh, this one will be hard to get, so I'll give you two extra guesses: an even dozen,” Dutch says.

Besides newspapers, guests sometimes leave other items behind, and Dutch gives them to me if they're interesting. But I have to guess what they are.

I pause several seconds and stare deep into his blue eyes, trying to read his mind. “Is it candy?”

Dutch makes a fist and raises his thumb toward the ceiling. “One,” he announces, starting the count. “It's not candy this time.”

“A whistle that sounds like a train?”

“Nah,” he says as he raises a finger beside his thumb. “You're not ready to guess yet, son. You need more clues. Narrow down the possibilities a bit.”

“Is it man-made?”

“Now that's using your head, son. No, it's not man-made. Three.”

“Is it a plant?”

“Yup, Mother Nature herself made it. Four.”

“Does it grow up north?”

“Nope. You're not even close. That's five tries gone.”

“I think I know. I'm sure of it this time.”

“What?” Dutch interrupts me. “You think you know? You better take your time with more clues. You must guess it in twelve, or I give it to somebody else.”

“Oh, I'll be right,” I say. I scratch my chin, cock my head to one side, and ask, “Is it an orange?”

A slap on the counter rattles nearby glasses and bottles. “You cheated,” he says, wagging his finger at me and grinning. “There's no way you got it with the questions you asked.”

I double over in laughter.

Dutch turns around and looks at the bar mirror hanging on the wall. “No, really, did you see it in the mirror?” he asks. “It's impossible for you to have guessed it with those clues.”

“I saw Mrs. Jensen trade a dozen eggs to one of your guests for an orange this morning,” I confess. “I figured you'd end up with some of them, too.”

Dutch reaches down behind the bar and tosses a perfectly round orange into the air. “You always were a sly one, Stephen.”

I catch the fruit and roll it over in my hands several times. It's bigger than Dutch's fist, and that says a lot. “How did it get all the way to Centerville without spoiling?” I ask.

“By train, would be my guess. This beauty came all the way from a place called Saint Augustine, Florida.” Dutch winks. “You might like to look at this, too.” Dutch stretches his long arms three feet over my head and dangles the latest copy of
Harper's Weekly.
“Gotta jump for it.”

I leap for the paper, and my shirt rises above my belt.

“My goodness, Stephen!” Dutch says, pointing. “How'd you get that bruise?”

I pull down my shirt. “What?” I ask.

“On your side . . . there.” he says, pointing again. “It's bruised something fierce. Your uncle Clem didn't have anything to do with that, did he?”

“Oh, no,” I say, turning away. “I . . . was . . . ah . . . shoeing a horse. He was favoring it and got spooked when I was checking it. That's all.”

“Everyone knows Clem's temper is at the end of a short fuse. You sure he didn't have anything to do with it?”

“He's got a quick temper,” I agree. “But this was from a horse.”

Dutch nods, but he knows I'm telling a lie. “Okay,” he says. “Well, you be more careful with those horses.”

“Will do,” I say. “I'll be more careful next time.”

Dutch hands me the newspaper, and I turn to walk away, but he doesn't let go. “You need to learn to read people as well as you read words,” he says.

CHAPTER TWO

I glance at the newspaper. “New York, Saturday, July 25, 1863” is printed across the top. A sketch of Major-General Ulysses S. Grant occupies the entire front page. “From a new photograph just received from Vicksburg” is written under his likeness.

I turn the plump orange over in my hand several times as I stroll to the southwest corner of the room. With a big window on each wall and two soft chairs tucked below them, it's the perfect spot for reading.

I sit and scratch the skin of the orange with the tip of my thumbnail. Sunlight illuminates the mist of juice as it explodes from the rind. A tangy, sweet smell fills the air.

From my spot in the corner, I can hear a group of older men chat at the hearth. One is a local fellow the kids in town
call Possum Peckham. His real name is George Peckham, but his eyes sit too close beside an extremely long and narrow nose. Unless he looks directly at you, he appears to be crosseyed. Folks in Centerville talk about how he left for the war with a full head of dark hair and returned ten months later crippled and gray.

Spinning yarns at the Mansion House is all Peckham can do since a rebel minié ball found his leg while he was down in Tennessee. He can't take a labor job of any kind. He claims a wad of flesh the size of a biscuit was ripped from the side of his thigh. I've never seen it.

Mom says the old fellow's true job is testing Dutch's ale for quality purposes. Occasionally, he drives a delivery wagon to Richmond, six miles east of Centerville. When pressed, he'll take a longer haul up to Fountain City.

Some of the men around the hearth sit backward in their chairs, chins resting on knuckles. Peckham's war stories hold my attention better than the preacher's sermon on Sundays.

“I tell you what, pards,” Peckham says, “all them youngins who want to see the elephant, that's well and good until they stare it square in the face.”

“The South is using elephants?” a man blurts out.

Peckham laughs. “‘Seeing the elephant' means going into
battle for the first time. When soldiers hear that beast bellow like they've never heard before, then they change their minds. When they see the elephant once, feel it, smell it, nobody cares to wrestle the monster again. Our division had five thousand four hundred men, not a man less when we started. Three hours later, our numbers had dwindled to five hundred. If it hadn't been for the arrival of the Twenty-Third Missouri, every man would have been lost that day.”

“Where was this?” someone asks.

“Tennessee . . . a place called Shiloh,” I call out.

“That's right, Stephen,” Peckham says, looking over at me. “Almost smack on the Mississippi line.”

Peckham stands and removes a cracked, leather-bound book resting on the mantel. “Is your brother, Robert, still serving with Grant?”

“Yes, sir,” I say proudly while showing the general's image spread across the front page of
Harper's Weekly.
“His last letter said his group is attached to the Army of the Tennessee down in Vicksburg, but we haven't heard from him lately.”

He opens the book to reveal a tattered page of a newspaper pressed between the pages. “This here's a drawing of the battle of Shiloh. Gotta give it to 'em. They got the battle drawn mostly right, too.”

I'd seen Peckham share the same drawing many times.

“And you were there? And saw it all?” a tall man asks, staring at the image. Peckham nods in silence and passes the picture to a man with a pipe hanging from his mouth. The man takes the picture, looks at it, shakes his head, and passes it to the man sitting to his left.

I rise from my chair and approach. “Can I give it a look, sir?”

He nods and hands the faded yellow paper to me.

The picture shows two groups of men in a clearing, facing each other in rows. Their lines stretch across the open field. Those clustered near the bottom of the picture have fixed bayonets ready for hand-to-hand combat. Thick smoke billowing from cannons blocks much of the center of the scene. Two men carry a fallen comrade past a dead horse.

Peckham continues. “There was one place where bullets flew so thick, we called it the Hornet's Nest.” He leans forward and taps one man on the arm several times. “Imagine if you take a piece of hickory and whack a hundred wasp hives. Then try to fight off every last one of 'em with that stick.” He pauses for a couple seconds and in a low, serious voice adds, “That's what it sounded like. Angry hornets. We thought it'd never end.” Peckham rubs the upper part of his right thigh.
“That's when Johnny Rebel's minié ball found my leg.”

The man with the pipe says, “Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable.”

“There was a small pond near a peach orchard,” Peckham continues. “Not large at all, maybe as wide as from here to across the road out there. After the battle, when both sides were claiming their dead, the water in the pond looked like a pot of stewed tomatoes.”

“At least it was another Union win,” a man with a red beard says. “That's what counts.”

“I don't know 'bout that,” I correct him. “The Union had thirteen thousand men wounded, dead, or missing, while the Butternuts only lost eleven thousand.”

“You're pretty young to know so much about the war,” the man says.

“That's more than the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War put together in just two days of battle,” I say, looking again at the worn page from the newspaper. “A copy of
Harper's Weekly
'bout a year ago showed the eleven generals who were at Shiloh. Sherman, Buell, and there, square in the center of 'em all, was Ulysses S. Grant. ‘The Heroes of the Battle' the paper called them.”

Peckham nods. “Stephen's right. Grant was there.”

I hand the picture back to Peckham. “Thank you, sir, for letting me take a look at it.”

“Your brother served at Shiloh when Peckham was there?” the man with the pipe asks.

“No,” Peckham and I say at the same time.

“He's with General Grant now at Vicksburg. Last we heard.” As I walk back to my chair, all the talk about soldiers killed in the war reminds me how much I miss my brother. I remember how Robert teased me about girls and how, late at night, Mom yelled for us to “quiet down up there so you'll be worth something to the world in the morning.” That only made us laugh harder.

The paper called the generals “Heroes of the Battle,” and Grant gets his likeness put in papers all the time. But I know what a real hero is, and it's not the generals. Robert's a hero.