The Storm Before Atlanta (18 page)

More shots. When you were the target you heard gunfire more with your stomach than with your ears. Another bullet hit the side of the boat with a hard, splintery thud. Then, finally, the shooting stopped. Jeremy supposed it had
only gone on for a minute or so, but it had seemed like years.

“They can’t even tell who we are at this distance,” said Charlie, out of breath. “Guess they don’t wanna waste no more ammunition on them terms.”

“Yours or ours, y’think?” said Jeremy.

“Reckon they’re ours. Lookit us.” Charlie tugged at the knee of his Union trousers. “We look like Union soldiers.”

“Could’ve been ours. They wouldn’t be able to see our uniforms good, and anyways, we’re all red dust and mud,” said Jeremy. “Besides, I
am
a Union soldier.”

Dulcie got up off the bottom of the boat, dripping.

“It could’ve been anybody shooting,” she said. “Yanks and Secesh! You think that’s all that’s running around in north Georgia these days? Could’ve been lots of folks. Could’ve been the slave patrollers, could’ve been the Home Guard, could’ve been the homegrown Yankees.”

“The what?” said Jeremy.

“Don’t you listen to her,” said Charlie with his easy smile. “She’s just talkin’ through her hat.”

“What’re homegrown Yankees?” said Jeremy.

“Southerners who want the Union to win,” said Dulcie. “There’s scads of ’em in north Georgia.”

“She’s just makin’ stuff up,” said Charlie.

“Don’t say ‘she’ like I ain’t even here, Charlie,” said Dulcie.

“Sorry.” Charlie smiled big at her. “You’re just makin’ stuff up, Dulcie.”

“I am not! I ran into homegrown Yanks when I was takin’ my freedom.” She turned to Jeremy. “They’re all through Georgia, waiting to take up with the Union Army as soon as it comes along. Like us.”

“Are they really Yankees, though?” said Jeremy, confused.

“No, they’re Georgians who didn’t want to quit the Union,” said Dulcie. “They’re for Georgia and the United States of America. Plenty of southerners didn’t ever want to secede.”

“Oh, that may be,” said Charlie. “We didn’t specially want to secede back home in North Carolina. But once it came about that there was going to be a fight, we stand with the South, of course.
All
of us.”

They were talking to each other, Dulcie and Charlie, but they kept looking at Jeremy, as if the conversation was for his benefit. As if it was up to him to decide who was right.

“I thought North Carolina was the first state to secede,” said Jeremy.

“
South
Carolina was,” said Charlie, with an uncharacteristic flicker of irritation, as if he had had his home state mixed up with South Carolina a few more times than he could cheerfully tolerate. “Hey! Who’s bailing?”

Nobody was, and the water was halfway up their calves. Dulcie grabbed the can, which was floating in the stern behind her, and started scooping as fast as she could. The water had reached the bullet holes and was gushing
in. Jeremy snatched the can out of Dulcie’s hands—he could bail faster than that, he thought. Dulcie went on bailing with her cupped hands.

“Stop those holes with something!” Charlie ordered.

Jeremy kept bailing—Dulcie started ripping strips off her old flour-sack petticoat and stuffing them into bullet holes.

The water was only a couple of inches beneath the tops of the gunwales. The boat was almost underwater.

“It’s no good. We’re going down. I’m going to try to make the shore,” said Charlie.

Jeremy looked up and saw low hills covered with cotton.

“We’re almost there anyway,” said Dulcie.

“Almost there except you can’t swim,” said Charlie. “So I reckon we can try to get a little closer.”

And then Jeremy felt the boat simply slip away from under him. The water settled in over the gunwales and the boat was lower, and lower, and no longer underneath them. He grabbed Dulcie’s arm and started swimming toward shore. Charlie had ahold of her other arm. They fought through a thicket of river cane and scrambled up onto the clay bank.

They wrung river water out of their clothes as best they could, and then made their way through a small grove of persimmon and hickory trees.

“Those are some funny little hills,” Jeremy commented
as they passed between two hillocks that looked like they hadn’t been formed with the land but had popped out of the ground as an afterthought.

“Uh-huh. Here, this is what I brought you here to see,” said Charlie, stopping.

“I seen cotton fields before.”

“Keep lookin’,” said Charlie, smiling. “Cause you ain’t seen this before.”

“Oh! It’s like pyramids!” said Jeremy.

“They
are
pyramids,” said Charlie.

“Only flat on top,” said Jeremy.

“They’re mounds,” said Dulcie. “There used to be buildings on top. On the big mound there, there was a temple. And where we’re standing now was a city.”

Jeremy looked at the mounds. They were like the sudden hillocks they’d passed, only much bigger, towering high over their heads, and perfectly flat on top. Trees grew up the slopes of the mounds, but the tops had corn growing on them.

“Let’s go up top,” said Charlie.

The largest mound had a turf ramp built up the side of it. They walked up it. At the top, beside the cornfield, they turned and looked down. They could see the tops of the other pyramids below them, overgrown with trees but still discernibly pyramid-shaped. A long time ago a lot of people had worked hard here, maybe as hard as the soldiers digging into the night and throwing up great fortifications
at Resaca. Jeremy imagined hundreds of people working, digging the heavy Georgia clay and building these mounds, month after month, maybe year after year.

“Who made this?” he asked.

“Indians,” said Charlie.

“Why?”

“As a place for people to live in,” said Charlie.

“As temples for the priests to live in,” said Dulcie at almost the same time.

“They lived inside ’em? How do you get in?”

“I think they lived
on
’em.” Charlie frowned, narrowing his eyes as if looking at an old memory. “There was buildings up on top.”

“There was a big war,” said Dulcie. “A revolution. The people rose up and killed all the priests.”

“The war was against invaders,” said Charlie. “From outside. Spaniards.”

“The
priests
were the invaders,” said Dulcie. “They came up from somewhere—Mexico, I think—and there were Cherokees living here—”

“Creeks lived here,” said Charlie, sounding amused.

“
Cherokees
lived here, and then these priests came in from some other tribe and made ’em build these here mounds. They enslaved ’em and made ’em build mounds.”

Jeremy felt like his friends weren’t really arguing about long-ago Indians but about the right-now South. He could feel the oldness of the place seeping into him now. He imagined he was really looking down at the ancient city, at
a plaza and houses and ancient people moving among them, quarreling and making up and laughing at jokes he wouldn’t have understood.

“Slaves built these mounds. Overseers whipped ’em.” Dulcie frowned and looked down, and Jeremy suddenly felt like he could almost hear the crack of the whips as weary slaves dragged basket after basket of dirt up the ramp.

“They whipped ’em to make ’em build their temples,” said Dulcie.

“
Houses
,” said Charlie. “And then one day they looked out from here and they seen Spaniards coming, and they dug a big ditch.…”

“How’d they have time to dig a big ditch if they could already see the Spaniards?”

“All right, they had already dug the ditch before, and they stuck it around with spiked logs and fought off the Spaniards with flaming arrows and spears—for as long as they could.”

“Then what happened?” said Jeremy, hoping he could get them to stop arguing about it.

“Then they had to give up,” said Charlie. “Cause they couldn’t fight forever.”

“How do you know about it?” said Jeremy. He assumed Charlie’s story was the correct one, because Charlie had been to school and Dulcie hadn’t. But it was strange how he’d felt like he could hear the crack of the whips.

Charlie shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s an old story. I’ve always known it.”

“Me too,” said Dulcie. “I’ve always known the story too.”

Only her story was different.

Jeremy looked at the woods below them. It was hard to imagine a war being fought in this quiet place by the river, blood being spilled over these square pyramids and the neat city squares they seemed to surround. But then, it was hard to imagine a city being here—priests, temples, and what must have been hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. What was once worth fighting a war over had become an old story, and nobody was sure of the details or even why they knew it.

A cloud passed over the sun, and Jeremy shivered. “Let’s go,” he said suddenly.

“There’s something moving down there,” said Charlie.

They all three hit the ground fast, and lay flat among the cornstalks.

“Maybe it’s just slaves in the cotton field,” said Dulcie.

“It wasn’t in the cotton field,” said Charlie. “It was over in the cane by the riverbank there.”

Jeremy had thought he’d heard voices coming from the woods downriver from the cotton fields, but he didn’t want to say so because he knew Charlie was a much more experienced soldier than he was.

“We’re going to go down the mound among the trees over there,” Charlie decided, pointing. “Then stay low under the cotton plants and head that way.” He pointed.

“But I want to visit my old homeplace,” said Dulcie.

“What?”

“My old homeplace. It’s that way.” She pointed the opposite direction from the way Charlie had pointed.

“Why do you want to do that?” said Jeremy.

“She misses her old mas’r and missus,” Charlie supplied. “They’re like family, to a slave.”

“They are not!” Dulcie snapped. “I miss my real family. I want to find out what happened to my parents. And also to the other slaves.”

“But they’ll just grab you and put you back in slavery, won’t they?” said Jeremy.

“How?”

Jeremy shrugged. He didn’t know how slavery worked, but he imagined that there must be ways to force people into it or nobody would
be
in it. Anyway, lying on the ground here, with broken cornstalks digging into his belly, wondering where the enemy was, it seemed like a dumb thing to be arguing about, so he dropped it.

“How far is it to your homeplace?” said Charlie, sounding resigned.

“I don’t know, half an hour or an hour. And it’s on the way back anyway. Sort of.”

They would have to walk back anyway, since their boat had sunk.

“Fine,” said Charlie. “That way, then.” He nodded toward the way Dulcie wanted to go. “And if you hear anything, freeze.”

Moving silently down the side of the mound while remaining hidden was impossible. The sides were steep, never meant to be walked on, and the three of them slipped and slid, cracking twigs and rustling leaves as they went. Jeremy had always prided himself on his ability to move silently in the woods, but now with every step he seemed to make more noise than a regiment. There was no help for it, they were making a lot of noise and couldn’t stop, and so Jeremy tried to move quickly. He grabbed a sapling that came out of the ground in his hand, and he tumbled the last ten feet or so, landing with a thud.

The others made their way down beside him, and, crouched over, they began walking through the cotton rows. Jeremy tried not to brush against the plants so that no movement would be visible in the fields from a distance.

“… smart lot of homegrown Yanks around here last night …,” a voice said somewhere off to their right.

Jeremy froze, like Charlie had told him to, but Charlie gestured for them both to keep moving. After all, the voices weren’t exactly coming from the direction they were going. Then a thought struck Jeremy and he froze again.

Charlie grabbed his sleeve to tug him onward. But Dulcie had stopped moving too.

“How do we know you ain’t gonna hand us over to those Secesh?” she whispered.

“Tarnation, girl, don’t you trust me?”

Dulcie answered this with a level gaze.

Charlie looked hurt, and Jeremy felt bad for him. Charlie wouldn’t do that, would he? Would he?

“We trust you,” he told Charlie.

Dulcie gave him a look that seemed to say that Jeremy could speak for himself, but not for her. Nonetheless, they moved on.

Then Charlie, leading the way, spread out his arms to stop them. The rows of cotton ended abruptly.

“There’s the moat to cross,” he whispered.

“Moat?”

“That the Indians dug around this place to protect it. It’s full of water. We’ll have to swim. Look, I’ll take hold of the girl.…”

“I have a name,” Dulcie said.

Charlie gave her a fed-up look. “Dulcie,” he whispered, “and Jeremy, you just get down on your hands and knees and slide in there right smart and swim across with no noise.”

“I can swim Dulcie across,” said Jeremy, just because he wanted to point out that he could.

“I know you can. Now go.”

Jeremy cast a doubtful look at Dulcie. He felt strongly that she was his responsibility, and he didn’t like leaving her with a Reb, even for a minute. But he had to admit that Charlie was stronger than him and more likely to get her across the ditch silently.

He got down on his hands and knees and stuck his
head out quick to look all around. There was no one in sight. He slipped out of his shoes, crawled to the edge of the moat, and threw his shoes across. They landed with a thump on the other side, and Jeremy could imagine Charlie wincing at the unnecessary noise. He shouldn’t have done it—his shoes were already pretty badly damaged by their dip in the Etowah. Too late now. He slipped into the water without a splash and dog-paddled cautiously, not letting his hands or feet above the surface. Pulling himself out the other side was harder, and he did make some noise with a wave of water sliding off him and splashing into the moat. He rolled over and found his shoes.

Charlie was swimming across with Dulcie clinging to his shoulders. They too managed to make almost no noise until they got to the edge. Then they both splashed climbing out—the dress he’d given Dulcie, Jeremy realized, was a real hindrance when it was wet, heavy and confining to her legs. Well, dresses weren’t made for swimming in. Or doing much of anything in, he thought.