Gob's Grief (2 page)

Tomo played the call again, and a wave of steady grumbling washed up and down the company street. The men cried, “We ain’t no hay-burners!” and “Put the bugler in the guardhouse!” and then, when Tomo played the call a third time, someone shouted, “Kill that rooster!” This last precipitated a moment of perfect silence. Then the shouter was shouted at in fast ruthless-sounding German that Tomo could not follow, for all that his grandmother had often cursed at him, fast and ruthless, in her native tongue.

Tomo and Aaron Stanz walked back to their tent against a steady flow of men headed towards the sinks. When they arrived, Aaron Stanz kicked awake his tentmate, who sat up and rubbed violently at his face. Aaron Stanz handed Tomo a cup of water, which he drank, not realizing he was supposed to wash with it. Aaron Stanz and Private Frohmann laughed until they cried, while a murderous rage built up in Tomo, and he was about to strike out at someone when Aaron Stanz picked him up and hugged him, and shook him, and hugged him again, and declared him the most precious Fenzmaus there ever was.

Tomo played Company C through its day. It was a happy day, for him and for them. It was happy for them because they had something more than dry drum music to regulate their day, and happy for Tomo because this was precisely the sort of life he had envisioned for himself, a life beyond Homer, beyond his mama’s miserable humbugging world. The situation lacked only Rebs to lick, and he did not doubt that they would come. It lacked his brother, too. Tomo’s anger against him was ebbing, so he was glad and not glad that Gob was not with him.

Tomo tooted reveille while the company stood at parade rest, all of the men in full uniform, though if you looked a few hundred yards away to where the Fifty-Ninth Ohio stood in rank you would see men still in various states of undress, some without coats, some without shoes, a few only in hats and shirts. Not only was the Ninth an all-German regiment, they were the sort of Germans that Tomo had never encountered before, not the crazed, superstitious sort, but the neat, hardworking sort. The regiment was famous throughout the whole army for its efficiency and bravery, pitied only because it could not keep a chaplain. But the Ninth drove away its chaplains on purpose. By and large the men were skeptics, except for a few Bavarian Catholics, who bothered the Protestant chaplains with their devoted Mariolatry.

After the reveille Company C gave Tomo a triple hurrah. The sonorous, Teutonic sound washed over him as he stood on his barrel. He played their breakfast call at six-thirty, their sick call at eight. He stood outside the hospital tent watching the invalids line up—in Company C there were only a few, and they were all genuine sick, not shirkers—and sipped the thick, bitter coffee Aaron Stanz had given him to drink in a soup can. Tomo strode up to a man in line and said, “My papa’s a surgeon.” The man had a green face and stank of ammonia. He said nothing to Tomo, but smiled weakly. Tomo ran back to his barrel and played fatigue call, then went and watched as Aaron Stanz helped to bury dead horses. The company had saved them up for him, a perfunctory punishment for his temporary desertion. His coworkers were two men who had stolen a pie from a sutler. The horses were ripe. Three times the two thieves took time out from the work to retire into the bushes, where they made a noise that was like hurrah! without the h.

“That grave’s too shallow!” Tomo kept saying to the two, but they had no English, and weren’t inclined anyway to listen to a boy. Aaron Stanz was working on his own grave, but when he came over at last to see how their work was coming along he said as much as Tomo had. There followed a brief argument, which ended when they dragged a stinking carcass over and pushed it into the hole. The legs stuck out a good two feet above the ground.

“Oh, that’s spicy!” Tomo said, leaning over the grave and getting a faceful of the rotten miasma. He did not watch as the thieves went to work with saws, but ran back to his barrel to play the drill call. He tagged along the back of the line as Company C drilled in the rising heat of the morning. He fetched water for Private Frohmann, and for a pair of twin corporals named Weghorst to whom Tomo naturally gravitated.

At noon, he was back on his barrel, playing the dinner call. He took a meal to Aaron Stanz and the thieves, who had skipped drill to continue their work, but they would not eat, so Tomo split the food with Johnny the drummer boy, who was by turns sullen and friendly all through the day. Tomo played another drill call after dinner, then watched from a tree with Johnny as the battalion marched and turned on the parade ground.

At quarter to six, he blew the call to inspection and dress parade, then shaded his eyes against the bright boots and brass of the Ninth. They were a shiny bunch, and Tomo felt somewhat slovenly among them. He was glad for the dusk which hid his dirty Claflin britches, his stained shirt and patched coat. As the camp darkened he played the supper call, and later, with beans still on his breath, the assembly of guard.

He spent some time fashioning crosses from twigs and twine, while Aaron Stanz stomped down the last of the horse graves. After Tomo had planted the crosses, he went back to the barrel and played tattoo, summoning the company to the last roll call of the day. The very last name read was his own—or rather the one he had adopted. “Alphonsus Hummel!” shouted the first sergeant, but there was no response. Tomo, sitting on his barrel with his chin on his fist and his eyes closed, had fallen asleep. The whole company had a chuckle at him. Aaron Stanz carried him sleeping to the tent, but woke him later to play taps. That was Tomo’s favorite tune—he always felt something settle, deep and peaceful, inside of him when he blew the last note. He heard the fifers in other companies blowing that last note, and other drummers knocking out the few final beats of the day. Johnny had overcome his distaste for bugle-infantry miscegenation and was tapping similarly next to him. Tomo stood on his barrel and watched the lighted tents go dark one by one, and then he waited in vain for another party to begin. His napping had left him wide awake, but the previous evening’s revelry had been solely a function of Aaron Stanz’s return, and not an every-night occurrence. So, after Johnny left him, Tomo sat next to the remains of the party-fire with a balled-up rag muffling his bugle, and he played the whole day through twice more before he retired.

“This company is cursed,” said Johnny. “They lost three fifers since Shiloh. Death wants ’em. They can’t keep ‘em.”

“I ain’t a fifer,” said Tomo. The boys were watching an artillery drill. Tomo wanted them to hurry up and fire the guns, but they only seemed to be dragging them haphazardly all over the field. He had been in camp a whole week and not yet heard a big gun fired.

“That’s no matter,” said Johnny. “Death’ll gobble a bugler just as quick, if he’s dumb enough to march with Company C. We ain’t marched yet, though. It’s early enough you could live, if you ran off now.”

“You put that curse up your ass,” said Tomo, and then cheered and blew a toot on Betty, because six guns had very quickly been lined up, and, in what seemed like the space of a few breaths, were loaded and fired. There came a second group of explosions as the shells burst near targets at the end of the field. One gun overshot and destroyed the top of a tree in the woods. Tomo blew a soft dirge for the departing magnolia.

“That’s your song, you dead bugler, you rotting blowhard,” said Johnny, but there was little venom in his voice. That first week, he had made himself Tomo’s companion. Tomo did not mind him. He was lonely for Gob, and it was good to have a body around to talk to, for all that Johnny said doom when he was not bragging about how his drum had been blown up by a shell at Shiloh.

When the drill was over, they ran across the field, into the woods to look at the fallen magnolia. For a little while they played in unnaturally low branches, until Johnny ducked behind the tall stump and sat down. He told Tomo to come and sit by him.

“Time to pet my snake,” he said, lifting his hips so he could pull his pants down to his knees. Tomo had seen this thing done before, but it was not something he thought he would like to do himself. Didn’t he pet his snake? Johnny asked him. Didn’t nobody ever show him how?

“It’s only about the best thing ever,” he said, tugging languidly at his member, which was even whiter and more grublike than its proprietor. “Go on,” he said. “Give it a try.” Tomo took down his pants and gave himself a few pulls, just to shut the boy up. “Ain’t that grand?” asked Johnny. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the tree. Tomo pulled up his pants and climbed up to the new top of the magnolia. There was a little fire there, which he patted out with his coat sleeve.

Below him, Johnny kicked his feet and bounced his hips up and down, and turned his head to kiss the tree. “Ah, Mrs. Davis, you are a fucking beauty!” he moaned, and then shouted wordlessly three times, each time louder than the last, the last so loud Tomo thought the guard must come into the woods to see who was being murdered. Johnny uttered an expansive sigh, then put his hands behind his head.

“Where are you, bugler?” he called. Tomo whistled above him. Johnny climbed up and shaded his eyes to look out over the camp, which sprawled as far as they could see.

“I think I see General Thomas,” said Tomo.

Johnny said, “Pretty soon I’ll start to spurt. Then I’ll find a girl and have me some babies.”

In another week, the Ninth marched out. Tomo played on Betty as he walked next to Aaron Stanz. They were going south and east, into Georgia, their movement part of a grand design to maneuver Bragg out of Chattanooga. “Chattanoogey,” Tomo kept saying to himself, and giggling. “I never been to Chattanoogey.”

“You seen one of Reb cities,” said Aaron Stanz, “you seen all.” But Tomo had never seen a Reb city. He imagined Chattanooga, a city full of Negroes and furious widows. He made up a song as he walked and called it “Chattanoogey.”

That first day, his feet were sore and bleeding: his ill-fitting boots had pinched his toes up all funny, and he had walked the nail right off his left big toe. He shook the nail out of his boot and threw it on the cook fire. Aaron Stanz told him to make a wish on it, so Tomo wished that Gob might wander miraculously into camp, having pursued him down from Homer. And then he burned his hand snatching the nail from the fire, because it seemed to him that he had made an ill-advised wish. He didn’t want his brother here. He put the nail back in the fire, wishing that a snake would crawl into the bed he had formerly shared with Gob and bite him on the ass. And then he wished he had another nail, to wish his brother to him after all.

With a tin plate balanced on his knees for a desk, he wrote a letter:

Secessia, August 23, 1863

Brother
,

Well, this is the life, and you are missing out on it. No Mama and no Buck, no humbugging. Every night I eat my fill, and people here give a bugler his due. Is this what you feared, to live a good life? When you are sensible again, you can join me and see, though maybe by then Richmond will already be burned.

                                           
Yours in war,
                                          Jigadier Brindle T. J. Woodhull

p. s. see how rapidly they have promoted me you can be my adjutant

He bought an envelope and stamp from the sutler and put the letter in his coat pocket, where it remained unmailed. From the sutler he also bought an abundance of pies, because it occurred to him that he had not yet spent a dime of the money he’d brought with him—ten whole dollars hoarded over the course of many months from the family’s humbug profits. He went back to Company C with pies stacked in his arms, and was hailed by every man as a righteous pie boy. It was seven men to a pie, but somehow there seemed enough to go around.

After supper, the Weghorst twins threw down four square crate tops to make a dance floor. Tomo and Johnny and a fiddler from the Second Minnesota played while the boys of Company C danced, not in pairs this time, but singly. Everybody had his own dancing style—Aaron Stanz kept his arms straight at his sides, his palms turned up behind him, and moved his head like a chicken while his feet skibbled furiously. The Weghorst twins kept their hands and arms above their heads, and bent from side to side at the waist, towards each other and away again. Raimund Herrman pointed his nose at the black sky, put his hands on his hips, and pedaled furiously. Tomo spun around in a circle while he played, till he got so dizzy he fell over, and thought he would lose his pie, from the dizziness and the heaving, shaking laugh that he laughed.

They marched through the Cumberland Mountains, where Tomo blew echoing notes out into misty valleys and Aaron Stanz collected late-blooming wildflowers for his wife. He pressed them into a Bible he only opened for that purpose. It was almost empty of them now, but had been stuffed full when he went home. Stanz told Tomo how he had spent a whole night laying them out for his wife on the floor of their home, naming them and telling her where he had found each flower. “Dwarf irises,” he said to Tomo, tickling him under the chin with one. He asked if he wouldn’t like one to send home to his mama, and then he blushed and asked Tomo to forgive him. He said he would take Tomo home with him to Cincinnati, when the fighting was all done, where sweet Frieda would bake him molasses cookies the very size and shape of a whole boy.

When they came to the place where Battle Creek empties into the Tennessee, Tomo got his first glimpse of a live Rebel. Pickets faced each other across the river. Tomo went down with Johnny, who called out across the water, “Good evening, you damned Rebels!”

“Go to hell, you damned Yankee,” came the reply.

“I got newspapers,” said Johnny, “and coffee, if you got smoke.”