The Storm Before Atlanta (2 page)

Jeremy felt that the drummer boy had gotten ahead of him somehow, had taken the heroic death that should have been Jeremy’s. He was more determined than ever to get himself into the war.

He walked on along the canal path with the song playing over and over in his head.

The other newsboys were gathered at the loading dock behind the
Courier
office. Jeremy arrived just as Mr. Dougall
came out with the string-tied bundles of papers. The boys moved aside to let Jeremy through. Jeremy could read a sight better than most of them, and he would tell them if there were any good stories with lots of death and glory.

He scanned the page. The war had been quiet lately—the South had actually invaded the North over the summer and had to be fought at Gettysburg. Then there had been riots in New York because people didn’t want to be in the army—something Jeremy found very strange. Now it was quiet, except for some sort of dustup down around Fort Sumter that didn’t look very exciting. Maybe the war was petering out. And Jeremy had missed it.

“Nothing much,” he told the waiting newsboys.

Mr. Dougall gave him a sour look. “Folks’ll buy these here papers if you sell ’em hard enough.”

“I’ll take fifty,” said Jeremy. If there’d been a good battle or something, he’d have bought a hundred.

He dug in his pocket for the money, which was mostly in pennies and dragged his trousers down.

“Thought you was goin’ into the army,” said Mr. Dougall as he counted out the papers with his thumb. “Forty, forty-five, fifty.” He handed Jeremy the stack of papers.

Jeremy breathed in the smell of ink, which he loved—it meant war news, and money to buy food. Mr. Dougall would have liked Jeremy to go into the army nearly as much as Jeremy would, probably, because by reading the news Jeremy kept the other boys from buying more papers
than they could sell, losing money, and going hungry. So Mr. Dougall lost money instead. Jeremy looked at Mr. Dougall’s pronounced paunch—he wasn’t going hungry, anyway.

“You ought to do what my wife’s sister’s boy did,” said Mr. Dougall. “Followed the army till they took him. Ten years old! Wouldn’t take no for an answer. He didn’t wait to get took on at no recruitment meeting, he went and found the war his own self. Tagged along with a regiment on the march till finally somewheres in Virginia they cottoned on that he wasn’t going away, and so they enlisted him.”

“Are you going to sell us papers, or are you going to talk all night?” said Frank, who was in one of the regiments that Jeremy’s regiment fought with.

“Just for that, Mister Smart Mouth, you’re last,” said Mr. Dougall.

Jeremy hurried away to get downtown to where people were coming out of work before the other boys did. But he thought about what Mr. Dougall had said. What Jeremy needed to do was head south until he found the war.

The Yankees hadn’t come to Georgia yet, but talk had. For years Dulcie had crawled up under the porch every evening to listen to Mas’r read the newspaper to Missus and then explain what it meant. Then Dulcie would run down to the cabins in the slave quarters to report, and the
grown-ups would talk long into the night about what it meant, carefully comparing the stories in the newspapers as Dulcie overheard them with what Mas’r and Missus actually told their slaves, which was usually quite different.

Dulcie had a powerful memory, and if she heard something once she could say it back. She could even repeat back the whole sermon on those Sundays when Reverend Davis, the white circuit rider, preached to the slaves, telling them to mind their masters and mistresses so they could get into heaven. Once, when she’d heard Miss Lottie trying to get her geography lesson straight, she’d unwisely repeated the whole thing out herself. Miss Lottie had read it aloud when she’d first started memorizing it, and hearing it once was all Dulcie needed. When she heard Miss Lottie stumbling, Dulcie blurted right out:

“ ‘What can we say of Massachusetts? That it produces whale oil, textiles, and shoes. What of its people? That they are deluded by a sad fanaticism, a perversion of religion that causes them to attack Southern institutions.’ ”

Then, as Miss Lottie stared with outrage standing out in high pink spots on her cheeks, Dulcie added, “What does
perversion
mean, miss?”

Dulcie had been whipped with the cowhide for sassin’ Miss Lottie, and after that she’d kept her talent to herself around the white folks, and Miss Lottie had eventually gone off to boarding school “on account of the war,” and so Dulcie’s opportunity to learn about geography was over.

“On account of the war” meant that Mas’r and Missus
had talked to their neighbors and become convinced that girls (meaning white girls, of course) were safer kept in Southern boarding schools until the invasion was over and the Yankees had been sent back where they came from.

“We’ll tell the servants that it’s to finish off her education,” Mas’r said.

“The servants have no business asking,” said Missus.

“But they’ll wonder, and they’ll talk,” said Mas’r. “It’s what servants do.”

(Mas’r and Missus were much too genteel to use an ugly word like
slaves
.)

“Seems like they know the war news before we do half the time,” said Missus. “Goodness knows how they find out.”

And Dulcie, under the porch with spiderwebs tickling her nose, smiled.

TWO

T
HE LAST TIME
J
EREMY HAD BEEN IN THE RAILWAY
station, the clerk had been a man. But now there was a woman behind the brass grille. She kept picking at her dress as if she was catching fleas.

“I want to buy a ticket to the war, ma’am,” said Jeremy.

She looked up at him, but went on catching fleas with both hands. “A little boy like you should be home with his mother.”

“I’m not a little boy. And I don’t have a mother.”

“Then you should be home with your father.”

“I’m going to the war.”

“You can’t go to the war, just like that. You need a passport to get into the Southern states.”

She unfolded a map of the United States, crisscrossed with railroad lines. Jeremy leaned over to look at it. She spread her hands over the states that had seceded from the United States. “That’s all war, down there. But even if you have a passport—”

“That’s where I want to go,” said Jeremy.

“Don’t interrupt, boy—your train could be sidelined for days waiting for trains of troops and supplies to pass on the tracks. Or for tracks to be rebuilt.” She started catching invisible fleas again. “They blow ’em up, you know.”

“What about Gettysburg?” said Jeremy. “I don’t need a passport for Pennsylvania, do I?”

“No, you don’t,” she admitted.

So Jeremy bought a ticket to Gettysburg. And an hour later he was chugging out of Syracuse, ready to find his place in the war. It wasn’t his first time on a train, it was his second, so he tried not to stare out the window too much or look around him like he was some hayfoot-strawfoot country boy from the Northwoods. A boy came through the car selling newspapers. Yesterday Jeremy would have envied him. You could make good money selling on the trains, if you were allowed to. But now that he was practically a soldier, he was above envying a mere newsboy.

“Chickamauga!” the newsboy cried. “Secesh win at Chickamauga!”

“Paper!” said Jeremy. He paid the boy a penny.

Where
was
Chickamauga? Right on the Tennessee-Georgia border. More war that Jeremy was missing! And the South had won; that was because Jeremy hadn’t been there. He ought to be taking a train to Georgia. He thought of the map the clerk had showed him. Georgia was deep in Confederate territory.

The train went on all day, and into the night.

Then, an hour before dawn, just about the time Jeremy would have been heading out to buy his morning papers, the conductor came through the car calling “Hanover Junction!”

Jeremy sat bolt upright. Hanover Junction was where you got the spur line for Gettysburg.

The train groaned to a stop, and Jeremy got off. He shivered in the cold September morning, but his heart pounded with excitement. He’d been able to see nothing of the land the train had rattled through in the night. They’d passed south of Harrisburg, and he knew the Secesh had gotten as far north as Carlisle—so he might be in territory where there’d been fighting already. And he’d soon be in the thick of it; he’d be in Gettysburg!

The train to Gettysburg seemed too slow. It creaked along, and there weren’t enough people on it—a few women, surrounded by sleeping children, an old man, but no soldiers. It was dawn when the train arrived in Gettysburg at last.

The smell hit Jeremy as soon as he stepped onto the platform. It was like that ox hide that Old Silas had never gotten around to nailing up properly, so it had rotted instead of curing.

The other people on the train got off. Jeremy followed a woman with a collection of children up the platform.

“Will we find Papa here?” asked one of the smallest children. An older girl hushed him, and their mother didn’t answer.

The station was a two-story building with a small tower on top. There was a clerk at a ticket window, and a man pushing a baggage cart. But no soldiers. There was a wide, dark stain on the wooden floor, and Jeremy stepped around it instinctively.

He walked through the station and out onto the street. The smell was stronger out here, and the street was crisscrossed with wide lines of white powder. A horse came clip-clopping along, pulling a wagon. Jeremy waved to the driver, who pulled up beside him.

“You look lost, young man.” The driver was a woman, with stray locks of gray hair escaping from her bonnet.

Jeremy tipped his hat politely. “Yes, ma’am. I’m looking for the soldiers, ma’am.”

“Everyone is, who comes to Gettysburg these days.” The woman nodded over her shoulder. “They’re back that way. Back out of town.”

“What’s all this white stuff on the streets?”

“Chloride of lime. Disinfectant.”

“Oh. Thank you, ma’am.” Jeremy lifted his hat again, then walked the way the woman had pointed, careful to stay at the very edge of the street. He had walked barefoot all his life, even in the coldest New York winters, and his feet were as tough as hooves. But he didn’t know what chloride of lime was, and he didn’t want to step on it.

He saw charred black stains on the buildings, and cannonballs lying here and there. Some of the trees had
lost all their branches and stood like stark gray monuments to themselves. The war had been through here, all right.

At the edge of town Jeremy met an old man with a shovel.

“Looking for somebody?” He was hardly taller than Jeremy, bent over as if from years of digging. A wide-brimmed hat covered his head right down to the eyes, and from under it he grinned with a mouthful of maybe six teeth like broken yellow sticks.

“I’m looking for the soldiers.”

“Which ones? I’m the man to ask. Been digging for weeks.”

He nodded at the field beside the road, which was broken up into brown clods. Jeremy had thought it had just been plowed, but of course it was too late in the year for that. Now Jeremy saw that the field was planted with long lines of narrow boards, ripped from barrels and packing boxes. Near one of them Jeremy thought he saw the toe of a boot sticking up. He didn’t see any bloodstained flags, like in “The Drummer Boy of Shiloh,” but he assumed they were there underground, along with the Bibles laid beside each unbeating heart.

“Them that’s got names, it’s written on the boards,” the man said, still grinning. “I can find any of ’em that’s got names for you. Won’t take a minute—they’re none of ’em dug in too deep.”

Then Jeremy knew what the smell in Gettysburg was.
He was almost sick, but managed to stop himself from giving the strange grinning man that satisfaction. “I’m looking for the soldiers that are still alive!”

“Ah, them. They’ve all left. Gone to fight the war.”

“I’m looking for the war.”

“Well, if it’s the war you want you’d best go to Washington. That’s my advice. It all comes through there, one time or another.”

And seeing that Jeremy wasn’t interested in his gruesome field, he shouldered his shovel and walked away.