The Storm Before Atlanta (4 page)

FOUR

J
EREMY WAS FINALLY ON HIS WAY TO THE WAR
, rattling along in a boxcar, with his new messmates around him. He didn’t actually know where he was going, except that they were headed west. The flat fields of Ohio rolled past outside the open door.

Most of the soldiers in the car had been in the 107th since it was mustered in at Elmira, New York, a year ago. There’d been over a thousand of them then, and now there weren’t five hundred. They didn’t think much of Jeremy as a soldier—he was pretty sure his new messmates had only accepted him because Nicholas made them. The soldier who’d threatened to put Jeremy’s head through his drum back in Washington, Lars, was in the mess too.

“ ’Member that first night we slept out in the fields outside of D.C.?” said Lars. “We thought we were soldiers then!”

Nicholas laughed at the memory. “Yeah, roughing it, weren’t we? Up till then it was always barracks. We had barracks in Elmira.”

“Then they marched us right off to Antietam, and
then
we found out what soldiering was,” said Dave.

If it’d been anyone else Jeremy would’ve suspected them of saying this just to make Jeremy feel like he wasn’t a real soldier. But Dave was the sort of open-faced, honest character who usually said what he meant. Back home in the Northwoods, people like Dave tended to get beaten up and chucked in the creek a lot.

“Antietam wasn’t so bad as the camp fever in Maryland,” said Lars.

“At Antietam the river ran red with blood,” said Dave.

“But it wasn’t our blood,” said Lars.

“Not mostly,” said Dave. “But it was still blood.”

Dave and Nicholas exchanged a look, and then Dave looked out the door. The men had all fallen silent, and Jeremy felt the presence of dead men in the car as his messmates called them to mind.

“Youse ’member that man who came into the camp in Maryland after those two runaway slaves?” said Seth suddenly. Seth was small and wiry, with a curtain of black hair that fell over his face—the sort of person who is often much tougher than they look. And he needed to be, Jeremy thought, looking at Seth’s bandaged wound and wincing inwardly.

“Yup,” said Dave. “Old Red-in-the-Face.”

“Yup,” said Nicholas with a laugh.

“That was some fun,” said Lars. Lars was huge and golden and acted as if he owned the whole world, or
expected to shortly. He had so much self-confidence that it was easy for your own confidence to get crowded out when you were around him.

“I don’t,” said Jeremy, getting tired of them talking about stuff he didn’t know. “I wasn’t there.”

“Tell the Little Drummer Boy about it, Seth,” said Lars.

“Well, it was Maryland, see,” said Seth, glancing at Jeremy but clearly telling the story to the whole group. Everyone was eager to relive it. “Maryland’s complicated.”

“Why?” said Jeremy, even though he was a regular newspaper reader and knew why. At least they were including him in the conversation.

“ ’Cause they didn’t secede, see, but they almost did. Abe Lincoln don’t want nothing done that might upset them. That’s why he never freed the slaves in Maryland yet.”

“He didn’t?”

“Don’t you know anything?” said Jack, who was the youngest of the men if you didn’t count Jeremy—and nobody did count Jeremy, he was quickly learning.

Jeremy decided he’d overdone the not-knowing-things act and said, “The Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in states in rebellion against the United States. Which don’t include Maryland.”

“Go to the head of the class, Jeremy,” said Nicholas.

Nicholas’s natural position seemed to be leaning against the wall of the boxcar, surveying the men around him through half-closed eyes and quietly running the
show. Lars thought he ruled the world, Jeremy thought, but if there was a leader in his new mess, it was Nicholas.

Seth frowned at Jeremy. “Right. So there come these two runaway slaves into our camp. And naturally we told them they was contraband of war and could stay there till we figured out what to do with them.”

“Young kids,” said Dave. “Maybe thirteen, fourteen? Boy and a girl.”

“Rosie and Rufus,” Nicholas said.

“Rosie and Rufus,” Seth echoed, and all the men smiled at the memory of Rosie and Rufus, except for Jack, who as far as Jeremy could tell only smiled about unpleasant things. “So Rosie and Rufus moved right on into camp, and they were doing the laundry for a quarter, half a dollar and whatnot—”

“Done it right smart, too,” said Lars.

“And then after a few days come this man who claimed to own ’em.”

“Wouldn’t have mattered if it hadn’t been Maryland,” said Dave morosely.

“Right, but it was Maryland, so—”

“He was a big, red-faced man,” Dave supplied. “And he got redder and redder.”

“Yup. He got redder and redder the more he stormed—they was his property, right, they was worth eighteen hunnerd dollars—”

“Total, not each.”

“Right, total. We had no right, the Fugitive Slave Act protected his rights, blah blah blah—”

“Some of the boys was ready to chuck him in the river,” said Nicholas.

“Right. And the captain, he said, ‘I don’t see I have any choice but to let you have ’em, mister, but you’re going to have to get the permission of my soldiers to take ’em away.’ ”

The men laughed at the memory. Get their permission to take Rosie and Rufus, indeed!

“Well, he could see the soldiers—and there was still more’n nine hunnerd of us in the 107th New York then, even after the camp fever at Maryland Heights—wasn’t going to let him take his slaves away. So he says to us—”

“It was the
last
thing he thought of—”

“Right, it was the last thing he thought of, not an argument he ever meant to bring up at all, but he says to us—”

“Like he thought it would help!”

“He says to us, ‘But they’re my own son and daughter! Would you deprive a man of his own flesh and blood?’ ”

The men nodded. Seth pursed his lips grimly.

“That’s when I knew I was agin slavery,” said Seth. “I never was sure before but what there might not be two sides to the story—”

“There’s two sides to every story—”

“Until that man spoke.”

“There are not two sides to this story!” The last man in Jeremy’s mess spoke for the first time. As far as Jeremy
knew his name was No-Joke. He had only been with the 107th since December—before that, he had been with the 145th New York. He was sallow and hollow-cheeked and serious, and they called him No-Joke because he never laughed.

“There’s only one side to slavery,” No-Joke said. “And that’s that it’s wrong.”

“There’s two sides to every story,” Dave insisted. He looked at Nicholas for help.

Nicholas laughed. “If you’d ever been a schoolteacher you’d know there are at least nine sides to every story.”

“Did youse let him take his son and daughter back?” Jeremy asked, to get Seth back to the story.

“His slaves, you mean?” said Seth. “No, we din’t. We wanted to tar and feather him, but we didn’t have no tar and no feathers, so we had to make do with what was to hand.”

The men chuckled.

“Yup, we still had Bossy then, and she supplied us with a bit of—”

“—cow manure—”

“—and we covered him up good—”

“—and then took him to the creek for a bath—”

“—and saw him politely on his way—”

“—’cause we wanted to be hospitable-like—”

The men were laughing hard now, even Jack, everybody but No-Joke, and Jeremy laughed too, although he wasn’t sure how he felt about treating the man that way.
After all, if he only wanted his son and daughter back—but he didn’t, Jeremy realized. He never called them his son and daughter, he called them his slaves.

Pa and Jeremy hadn’t always gotten along too awfully well. Pa was a rough customer and no mistake. But at least he knew he was Jeremy’s pa and not his owner. It was all pretty hard to get your head around.

“What happened to Rufus and Rosie?” he asked.

“Sent ’em on to Washington,” said Nicholas.

Dave frowned. “We should’ve looked them up when we was there just now.”

“Forgot all about it,” said Nicholas.

“We’ve had so many contraband,” said Lars. “Who can remember them all? Remember Nathan? Fella that could walk on his hands?”

And they all went on reminiscing about runaway slaves they had known, as the miles clicked past. Their voices and the rattling of the rails lulled Jeremy into a near-doze, and he watched his new messmates through half-closed eyes and listened.

He tried not to be bothered by the way they all looked down on him. After all, they were real soldiers, and his messmates—his pardners.

When he died like the Drummer Boy of Shiloh, they would kneel around him weeping. Looking at his new pardners, Jeremy found this hard to imagine.

The boxcars rattled on day and night. They passed through Indiana, and Alabama, and finally into Tennessee, where they stopped. The 107th was put to guarding a railroad, which was no work at all because the railroad never tried to get away.

“Thought they was sendin’ us down here for Chickamauga,” said Jack. “Not to guard no train tracks.”

Jeremy and his messmates were at work building their winter quarters. They’d cut down two great trees bigger around than Lars was, and were working now on cutting off the branches. Jeremy was good at this kind of work. He’d been doing it before he was six years old. So he worked hard and hoped his messmates would notice.

“I’d rather guard train tracks, thanks,” said Dave, climbing up on the tree trunk to work at a branch. “Don’t mind missing the fun down to Chickamauga.”

“
I
mind!” said No-Joke. “The Rebs won at Chickamauga! They drove us out of Georgia.”

“Reckon they’d’ve done that even if the 107th had been there,” said Dave.

“No, they wouldn’t have!” said Jeremy, shocked that any of his messmates could think this. “The 107th would’ve driven them clear back to Atlanta!”

“All by ourselves?” Nicholas laughed. “Reckon we’ll have our chance come spring. There’ll be another push. We ain’t leavin’ Georgia lie.”

“Jeremy’ll have his chance to be a hero, like the
drummer boy of Chickamauga.” Lars said this mockingly, so it couldn’t be anything good.

Still, Jeremy couldn’t help asking, “What drummer boy?”

Nicholas frowned. “No need to bring that up.”

“Yes, there is,” Jeremy contradicted. He turned to Seth, who was the official storyteller of the mess. “How did the drummer boy of Chickamauga die?”

“He didn’t.” Seth leaned his ax against the tree and sat down on a branch. “He’s a little fellow about your age—”

“I heard he’s just got captured by the Secesh,” Dave said.

“Yeah, he has, but not in the story, all right? He joined up with the Twenty-second Michigan, right, followed them till they took him. And they made a little pet of him and got him his own musket cut down to size, and he rode into battle on a caisson.”

Jeremy listened, spellbound. That was what
he
wanted to do.

“Only the battle at Chickamauga didn’t go so good, right? So then they’re retreating. And this Confederate officer comes ridin’ up on a big ol’ horse, points a gun at this drummer boy, and tells him to surrender.”