The Storm Before Atlanta (27 page)

Jeremy wondered if this sort of visiting across the lines happened in every war. He’d never read about it in the newspapers or the dime novels, but he suspected it might.
After all, who had more in common with soldiers in the field than the soldiers on the other side of the line?

He tried to remember the things Charlie had talked about when he’d sat and sipped coffee with Jeremy’s messmates. The memory was a little rusty, because Jeremy had been trying not to think about it, but everything he could remember Charlie saying had seemed more like giving information
to
the Union. Nicholas could say Charlie had just been saying what he thought they wanted to hear, but the fact was, Charlie had told them that the Rebs were tired of the war, that they were out of supplies, that they were curious about what kind of terms they would get if they surrendered.

If Charlie was a spy, then which side was he a spy for?

TWENTY-THREE

D
ULCIE WENT INTO THE TENT TO GET SOME FRESH
bandages.

Seth was sitting beside the medicine chest. He froze when she came in. Just for a second. Then he began counting bottles and writing things down on a list. He was taking inventory. He could do that, because he could write. Dulcie couldn’t, but she did remember exactly how many bottles there were of each medicine.

And one thing she knew was that there were often fewer bottles of morphine after Seth had been in the tent than there had been before.

She didn’t worry about this very much. She knew Seth had to take morphine for the pain in his leg. She wondered if he was taking more than he ought to. She knew that if she gave a patient too much chloroform, it could kill him. But was there such a thing as too much morphine? That she didn’t know.

She did know that they didn’t want to run out of morphine. But she also knew that Seth didn’t entirely like her. He’d been kind to her when she was a runaway slave, but now that she was a person with a job he didn’t seem to like her so much. So she didn’t say anything about the morphine.

“Jeremy! Git in here out of the rain!”

Dave was sitting in a shelter woven of loblolly pine branches, the kind of lean-to that Jeremy had sometimes made in the Northwoods when he was far from the farm and it came on to rain or snow unexpectedly.

Jeremy scrunched in beside Dave. He looked at his messmate sideways, not sure what to say. He hadn’t spoken to Dave in a week either. They sat in silence for a moment and watched the rain pound down. Now and then a raindrop made its way through the woven pine branches and hit Jeremy in the face.

“Been keepin’ yourself busy?” said Dave.

“I’ve been writing letters for injured soldiers. Oh—we just got a letter from Lars,” said Jeremy. “I took it to Nicholas.”

Dave sat up straighter, interested. “He still alive, that ol’ cuss? I knew he was too mean to die!”

“He’s getting married to his sweetheart.”

“Hah! I knew it!” Dave punched the air, and Jeremy
ducked out of his way and got his head stuck out in the rain for a second. “He figures on cheatin’ us out of our shivaree, too. Reckon we oughta beat the Johnnies right now so we can go back and surprise him.”

“I got a Confederate two-dollar bill,” said Jeremy. He took it out of his pocket and handed it to Dave, who examined it with interest.

“The soldier who gave it to me said it wasn’t worth nothin’,” he added.

Dave gave him a sharp look. “You still consortin’ with the enemy?”

“Nicholas is!” said Jeremy, indignant. “He’s over there”—he pointed out into the rain—“playin’ cards with a Secesh! He went and slangwhanged me for the same thing, and now he’s doin’ it! He’s an old hypocrite!”

It wasn’t till he got to the end of this speech that Jeremy remembered Dave was Nicholas’s best pardner. Jeremy had probably brought his horse to the wrong market, saying all that, but it made him mad.

“Nicholas is A-1,” said Dave, not looking particularly mad. “But you gotta understand—he reckons there shouldn’t be no kids in this war.” He looked at Jeremy sideways, like he was worried Jeremy might take offense. “He don’t want no kids at all here, not even drummer boys, not even no contraband like Dulcie. Says war’s men’s business.”

“Oh,” said Jeremy.

“There been kids killed in this war, you know,” said Dave. “Makes Nicholas mad.”

“The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” said Jeremy.

Dave frowned. “Wasn’t never no Drummer Boy of Shiloh.”

“Yes, there was! There’s a song about him.”

“I know. Kinda song that would make people wanna join up, right? Some fool’s always writin’ songs like that. But it didn’t happen.”

“How would you know? You weren’t at Shiloh.” Jeremy knew this sounded rude, but it annoyed him that Dave sounded so sure.

“No, but I read all about Shiloh. Read everything I could about the war. I wanted to get in it so bad. I kind of wanted to—” Dave stopped, and laughed.

“Die for your country?” With weeping comrades kneeling all around.

“Yeah! So I joined up with the 107th at Elmira, and they sent us to D.C. and a month later we was at Antietam.” He shook his head. “Antietam was worse than Shiloh. Don’t let nobody tell you different.”

Jeremy didn’t say anything—he could see from Dave’s face that Dave was back at Antietam and Jeremy’s voice wouldn’t reach him there.

“Only thing Antietam was like was hog-killin’ time back at the farm,” said Dave. “And after I seen that, I didn’t want to die for my country no more. I just wanted to—”

He stopped talking, looked at Jeremy, and seemed suddenly back in the present and like he was thinking whatever he’d been going to say wasn’t such a good idea.

“You wanted to desert?” said Jeremy, carefully.

“What? No! I would never desert. I just wanted to be dead.” Dave stared out at the rain. “If people could do things like that to each other, I didn’t want to be a person no more. Only Nicholas, see, he came and talked me out of that.”

“You saw the elephant,” said Jeremy.

“Yeah. Reckon you seen him too now.”

“Yeah.” Somehow it didn’t seem that important anymore.

“Oh, about that song. We was in Tennessee last winter, and I talked to some of the western soldiers that was at Shiloh. Asked ’em about it. There just wasn’t no stories about no drummer boy dyin’ there. It didn’t happen.”

“Oh.” Jeremy held the Drummer Boy of Shiloh in his head for a minute, and then let him go. It wasn’t as hard as you’d think. He’d seen battle, and he knew it wasn’t anything like that song.

The thing was, he’d joined up over a lie, and now he wasn’t so sure how he felt about that.

“You wish you wasn’t in it now?” he asked Dave.

Dave thought about this for so long that Jeremy reckoned he wasn’t going to answer.

“I wish it was over,” Dave said at last. “And some days I don’t care who wins, just so’s it’d be over. But you know, I hated the farm. The men always called me”—he stopped, took a deep breath—“things, and threw me in the creek and like that. Now I know I ain’t so different from anybody
else, Nicholas told me that, and I ain’t never going back home.”

“Oh,” said Jeremy. He remembered he had thought that Dave was the kind of person who got treated like that, but he sort of hated hearing about it and hoped Dave wouldn’t tell him any more.

“Most days, I want us to win,” said Dave. “Cause, you know, if we lost, then what would happen to the slaves, and the contraband? Dulcie and them other kids and stuff?”

With a twinge of shame Jeremy realized that his Drummer Boy of Shiloh dream had been a dream about himself. He had wanted to be important, to have the war be somehow about him. That wasn’t a cause at all. It wasn’t ending slavery and it wasn’t preserving the Union. It was just selfishness.

“How about you, Jeremy? Sorry you joined up?”

“No!” said Jeremy. “Sure is different from how I thought, though.”

Dave smiled, understanding. “Ain’t no Drummer Boys of Shiloh nowhere. Ain’t no dyin’ surrounded by weepin’ comrades, ain’t no glory and no bein’ a hero. Just a lot of rain and mud and trying to stay alive.”

“It’s no good dying gloriously when there’s work to be done,” said Jeremy.

“You got that right,” said Dave. “There oughta be a song about
that
.”

They looked out at a puddle that was forming in front of their lean-to.

“Now I come to think of it, there
was
a kid that died at Shiloh,” said Dave.

“Really?” Jeremy wasn’t sure, now that he’d gotten over the Drummer Boy of Shiloh, that he wanted him back.

“On the other side. Boy twelve or thirteen years old. Read about it in a Reb newspaper right after Antietam.”

“How did you get a Reb paper?”

“From a Reb, of course. Same place you got your shinplaster.” He nodded at Jeremy’s two-dollar bill, which still lay in his lap. “The newspaper was printed on old wallpaper.”

“Wait, you mean you were talking to the enemy as long ago as that?”

“Sure. We always been talking to the enemy.”

“Hah,” said Jeremy.

“It was a sad story. See, the Johnnies, when they made their army, they brought a lot of boys in from military schools to be drill sergeants. Then they sent ’em all back to school, but this one kid, Charlie Jackson, he wouldn’t go. And he was killed at Shiloh.”

Jeremy stared at him. “What did you say his name was?”

“Charlie Jackson.”

“And he was killed at Shiloh? You’re sure?”

“It was in their newspaper.”

Jeremy’s mind was racing. All right, maybe Charlie
Jackson wasn’t that rare a name. But how many military-school boys named Charlie Jackson could there have been fighting at Shiloh? But Jeremy’s Charlie had
not
been killed at Shiloh—he was most demonstrably alive. Or had been the last time Jeremy had seen him.

“Here comes that fellow Ambrose Bierce,” said Dave. “He ’bout scares me mortally to death.”

Jeremy looked up through the rain at the lieutenant approaching them. He saw what Dave meant. The man looked like something in a ghost story. He held himself stiff and white and distant, as if he was a corpse in the business of appearing nightly and demanding revenge on his murderers. You could almost believe the rain was passing right through him. And he had odd, piercing blue eyes that didn’t seem to look at you so much as at something he was imagining. He was, however, pretty much alive, and very wet. Jeremy and Dave saluted, but didn’t bother to stand up because that would have meant leaving their lean-to.

Lieutenant Bierce returned their salute. He peered down at them through the rain. “Hundred and Seventh New York, eh? Your regiment has just caught a spy.”

Jeremy felt as if he’d been hit by a minié ball. “What kind of spy?”

“Quite a young one,” said Lieutenant Bierce. “But not too young to shoot.” The lieutenant smiled a thin, not-very-nice smile. “Why are you worried about a spy?”

“He’s not, he’s just feelin’ ill, sir,” Dave said. Jeremy didn’t hear the lieutenant’s reply, because he was sloshing as fast as he could toward the 107th’s camp. And a moment later he heard Dave splashing along behind him.

It was Charlie. Of course it was Charlie. And if he had been the 107th’s prisoner to start with, he had drawn a much wider audience now. When Jeremy and Dave arrived Charlie was trying hard to smile his usual seeing-the-joke smile, but in spite of himself he was looking a little nervous in the midst of a crowd that included Jeremy’s messmates, some other men from the 107th New York, and many other men Jeremy didn’t recognize.

Jeremy pushed and threaded his way through the crowd until he was part of the ring that was right around Charlie. The rest of his messmates were in the ring. Even Nicholas, who must have come in off the skirmish—to bring in his prisoner? Jeremy wondered.

Charlie’s hands were tied behind his back with a belt. The end of the belt was in Jack’s hand, and Jack was smiling.

Jeremy hated Jack.

Jeremy looked at Charlie and Charlie didn’t look back.

“I told y’all,” Charlie said. “I was coming over here to surrender. Look, I’ll take the oath of allegiance. I said I would.”

“Sure you will. You’ll wear a Union uniform too, won’t
you? Wearing one already,” said Jack. He gave the belt in his hands a yank, and Charlie winced.