The Storm Before Atlanta (16 page)

“No.”

“What?” Jeremy threw his ax down as the branch broke free. A warm smell of pine sap rose from the cut. “But I’ve seen the elephant!”

“Maybe you have, but your eyes don’t look different.”

Jeremy went on to the next branch as Dulcie picked up that one and dragged it away. Well, what did a girl know about seeing the elephant, anyway? He was sure when he saw Charlie again Charlie would be able to tell that he had seen the elephant.

He was carrying another packet of green coffee beans for Charlie. The thought crossed his mind, not for the first time, that Charlie might have gone to a place where coffee beans were no longer useful. Jeremy had avoided looking at the Confederate dead as the 107th marched past them across the battlefield and into Resaca. A Union burial detail had already been working on a long trench to lay them in.

When Dulcie came back he took his mind off the subject by telling her about the battle.

“I heard you got lost in the woods.”

“Anyone could’ve got lost in those woods. Besides, I found the battle again in the end.” He thought about the dying soldier whose hand he had briefly held. He decided not to tell Dulcie about that. It didn’t seem like a good war story for a man who had seen the elephant to tell.

“You should’ve seen those Rebs run,” he said instead. “They kept coming out of the woods, and when we fired they turned around and ran like scared rabbits.”

“I hope the war is over soon.”

“Why?” Jeremy felt exasperated. Girls! As far as he was concerned the war had finally begun, and he liked it fine. He was pretty sure he did, anyway. Mostly.

“I want to find my ma and pa.”

“Oh, it’ll be over soon. It can’t last that long.”

“Yes, it can. The Hundred Years’ War between England and France lasted from 1337 to 1453.”

“Whush!” Jeremy couldn’t help smiling. She was a funny girl, really—imagine knowing something like that. “That must’ve been some war. Why’d it last so long?”

“I don’t know. There was a plague and stuff. And the Thirty Years’ War lasted from 1618 to 1648.”

“How do you know all that?”

“From listening to Miss Lottie’s lessons.”

“This war won’t last that long,” Jeremy assured her.

“We thought at first it would only last a week.”

Why that should mean that it couldn’t last a hundred years, Jeremy wasn’t exactly sure, but he felt it. He knew he could never be that lucky.

He looked at Dulcie again. She ought to have a proper dress to wear, he thought, instead of ragged flour sacks. There had been dresses that some of the men used to wear to the Gander Dances they’d held last winter in Tennessee, when they couldn’t find any ladies to invite—but those had all been left behind, along with everything else that wasn’t needed in the war zone, and anyway, they had been dresses for grown-up ladies. A dress wasn’t something you could easily acquire in an army on the march. The Union commissary didn’t supply them.

Jeremy looked for Charlie when the 107th crossed the Coosawattee River. Charlie had said they’d meet at the next river. But he wasn’t there. Jeremy looked for him again each time they came to a stream or a river. He didn’t find him. He told himself that didn’t
have
to mean anything. After all, the Union Army was huge; the Confederate Army probably was too. The road they were taking wasn’t the only road that Union soldiers were taking. In the miles and miles of countryside that the armies were moving through, how could Charlie manage to find Jeremy again? If he even wanted to, because let’s face it, Charlie was older than Jeremy and had seen many more
elephants. He might think himself above being friends with Jeremy.

Charlie’s absence didn’t have to mean that he was—that anything had happened to him, Jeremy told himself. He tried not to think of all those Secesh dead in Resaca. And he kept on carrying the little packet of coffee beans.

One foggy evening, while they were making camp (which was pretty quick work without tents) and the pickets were being set, Jeremy walked along a small stream from which silver mist rose like ghosts in the twilight. He walked until he sensed someone else walking on the other side, invisible through the fog.

It could have been anybody, friend or enemy. But Jeremy said, “Charlie?”

“Evening,” said Charlie. “That you, Jeremy?”

“Course,” said Jeremy.

“Can’t hardly see anything for this fog,” Charlie said. “Why don’t you come on over and visit?”

“Why don’t you come over here?” said Jeremy cautiously.

“You got any other Yanks over there?”

“Only within hollerin’ distance,” said Jeremy.

“Gettin’ awfully suspicious, ain’t we?” But there was a splashing sound, and a moment later Charlie emerged from the fog and climbed up onto the bank beside Jeremy. He was a little dirtier, and a little more ragged, but he held a pair of shoes in his hand.

Jeremy was feeling rather sorry for him. The Rebs mowed down by Union fire as they came out of the woods kept popping back up and falling over again in his dreams. And dozens of Rebs had surrendered when they could have just run away—some had even surrendered with their weapons in their hands. It must be really embarrassing to be a Reb and have to live with that, Jeremy thought sadly.

“Got these from a Yank,” Charlie said, waving the shoes in his hand and then setting them carefully down on the bank.

“Er,” said Jeremy. “He gave them to you?”

“Not exactly,” said Charlie. “But he wasn’t using them anymore.”

“Was he a prisoner?”

Charlie looked at Jeremy like he was crazy. “What are you talking about? He was a stiff ’un.”

“When you found him?”

“Of course!”

“You didn’t …”

“Didn’t what? He looked like he was hit by a cannon shell. You don’t think I’d kill a prisoner, do you?”

“Course not,” said Jeremy, uncomfortable.

“I heard some Yanks’ll do that, but I don’t think you would.”

“No, I wouldn’t!”

“Well, neither would I.”

Jeremy felt ashamed for having doubted this. “I brought you some coffee,” he said.

“Capital! Thanks, Jeremy. You’re a real friend.”

“It’s nothing,” said Jeremy, embarrassed.

“Course it’s something. Here, I brought you some tobacco, like I said.” He proffered a leather pouch.

Jeremy started to say he didn’t use tobacco, but then he saw that he would hurt Charlie’s feelings if he didn’t allow him to give something in return for the coffee. “Thanks. I’m sorry about what happened to youse at Resaca.”

“Sorry?” Charlie laughed. “Heck, we slowed y’all down pretty good, didn’t we? Time y’all get to Atlanta, there ain’t going to be no Yanks left. Er, present company excepted.”

“But the way your men turned and ran …”

“Nobody turned and ran. I heard about your Indiana regiment that just lay down and wouldn’t go forward, though. Not too good for Hooker’s Ironsides.”

“You call us Hooker’s Ironsides?” said Jeremy.

“We do now. Y’all are pretty tough.”

Jeremy couldn’t wait to tell his messmates that the Rebs called them Hooker’s Ironsides. “I heard Grant won a big victory at Spotsylvania, too,” he told Charlie.

“Oh, you did, eh? I heard Lee is half a mile from Washington, and the White House has evacuated.”

“I don’t believe you!”

“It was in the newspaper,” said Charlie.

“Some Reb newspaper?”

“Well, yeah. They’re sort of always sayin’ that Lee is half a mile from Washington.” Charlie seemed to find this
amusing. “I’ll meet you next when you cross the Etowah. I reckon y’all are headed for Kingston. If y’all should camp near the Etowah, I got something I want to show you.”

“What?” said Jeremy.

“Not going to tell you. But I guarantee you ain’t never seen it before.”

Jeremy did not like the sound of this. He reminded himself that Charlie was an enemy. For all he knew this something Charlie wanted to show him was the business end of an Enfield rifle. “Why can’t you just tell me?”

“ ’Cause I wanna make you wonder about it, Yank,” said Charlie. “Gotta run. Take care, buddy. Keep your head down and don’t let nothing hit it.”

“You too,” said Jeremy, as Charlie splashed away across the creek. Somehow he had meant to be kind and sympathetic to Charlie about the Rebs’ humiliating defeat, and Charlie had failed to be humiliated at all.

FIFTEEN

T
HEY WERE MARCHING ON
C
ASSVILLE
, G
EORGIA
,
AND
Jeremy was not afraid. He beat the drum and the men sang “John Brown’s Body” as they marched along. It was a hot day—too hot, really.

“Double time!” came the order, and Jeremy beat his drum double-time and the men marched faster and stopped singing. Grasshoppers hopped up from the side of the road, and insects buzzed.

The night before there had been cannons firing—Union cannons, anyway. Jeremy and his messmates couldn’t tell if the Secesh were firing back. Had the Rebs been driven back, or were they dug in at Cassville waiting to ambush the Twentieth Corps? Back in Syracuse, when Jeremy used to eagerly read newspaper articles about battles, he hadn’t realized that soldiers in a battle don’t know what battle they’re in. After it happened it could be named the Battle of Some Place and you could read that the 107th marched down Such and Such Road and took Some Big
Hill, but when it was happening the soldiers only knew that they were moving forward and hoping not to get shot.

They came to a log cabin beside the road. A little white girl about five years old stood on the porch. She was wearing an upside-down flour sack with holes cut in it for her head and arms. Jeremy smiled and nodded at her. She shrieked and ran into the cabin.

At the next cabin they came to there was a woman in the yard, hard and angular with a glare that could shrivel spinach. She had a baby on her hip.

“Yankee thieves!” she called. She came out into the road and shook her fist at them. “Thunderin’ Yankee thieves! You-uns have took my cow, my pig, my chickens, my potatoes and carrots, and there ain’t no milk for the baby!”

Jeremy looked away from her, and noticed the other soldiers were doing the same. It was called foraging, not thieving, and all soldiers did it, Yankee and Secesh both. It wasn’t Jeremy’s fault. But she kept following them, screaming.

“We-uns worked all spring to put in a crop and there ain’t nothing left of it that you-uns haven’t stole!”

Jeremy beat the drum louder to drown out her voice. Fortunately, she couldn’t keep up because of the heavy baby in her arms, and they soon left her behind, though for a long time Jeremy could hear her in his head.

Before they got to Cassville, Jeremy smelled the smoke.
Then they looked down into the town. A riot seemed to be going on. One or two buildings were on fire. Men were running out of houses carrying frying pans, fruit, ladies’ dresses—anything they could get their hands on.

The 107th halted.

“Right,” said the lieutenant. “We’re going to go down there and put a stop to that by whatever means necessary.”

“They’re our own men, sir,” said a soldier.

“Yes, they are. And they’re looting the Secesh. Looting isn’t foraging. First of all, I need a squad to round up stragglers and send them on to their companies.”

They went down into the town. It had been a nice old town, Jeremy saw. Now it was being destroyed by Federal soldiers, even though the Rebel army had abandoned it. Quickly the men of the Red Star Division stepped in, pointing guns at the looters and rounding them up into little huddles. Some of the Red Star men had been firefighters in New York City, and they moved in to put out the buildings that were on fire. Jeremy followed them. They didn’t waste time looking around for fire engines but found some buckets and started pouring them onto the flames.

“You there,” one of them said to Jeremy. “Go find us some sheets and blankets. Bring ’em back here and soak ’em in buckets of water.”

Jeremy ran to do as he was told. Where was he supposed to get these things from? The houses, he supposed.
But wasn’t that looting? No, it was foraging, because the things were needed to put out the fires. He ran into a house that had had its door smashed open.