The Storm Before Atlanta (5 page)

“So did he?”

“Nope. He shot him.”

“So he did die,” said Jeremy. He knew it.
Another
drummer boy had gotten ahead of Jeremy.

“I mean the drummer boy shot the Confederate officer.”

“Oh. Did he kill him?”

“Yup.” Seth picked up his ax, got up, and started working on the tree again.

“Is that the end of the story?” asked Jeremy.

Seth went on working and didn’t answer.

Jeremy went back to work too, chopping small branches off the larger ones. He wasn’t sure what to think. In a way he envied the drummer boy, having his own gun to shoot. But actually shooting somebody—he didn’t know how he felt about that.

He stopped chopping. “Well, the Confederate officer
would
have shot him,” he said.

“I don’t know,” said Seth. “See, when you go into battle, if you’re going to shoot somebody you just shoot ’em. You don’t ask him to surrender or nothin’.”

“Well, the officer was a slave owner anyway and deserved what he got,” said No-Joke.

“No-Joke’s one of them bobolitionists,” said Lars, as if Jeremy hadn’t already figured that out. “He’s fightin’ to free the slaves.”

“
Ab
olitionist,” said No-Joke.

“Ain’t we all fighting to free the slaves?” said Dave.

“Not me, I ain’t fightin’ for no slaves. I’m fightin’ to preserve the Union,” said Lars. “Can’t have no states dropping off like the United States was just a singin’ club you could quit anytime.”

Lars said this with the certainty he said everything
with. Lars had never had a doubt in his life, Jeremy thought. Lars acted like he’d had the whole world figured out since he was two years old.

“I guess that’s why I’m fighting too,” said Dave, resting his ax on the ground as he wiped his forehead. “For the Union. And so is Nicholas.”

Nicholas smiled at Dave answering for him. Nicholas might be the most easygoing man Jeremy had ever met, even if he was a schoolteacher. “I don’t mind fighting to free the slaves, too,” said Nicholas. “Time those thunderin’ Rebs learned to do their own thunderin’ work for a change.”

“They can’t work. Too lazy,” said Lars, who was lying on his back against a log, watching the rest of them work.

“That’s pretty strange coming from
you
,” said No-Joke, hauling aside a branch that he had just cut, so that he could get on to the next one.

“I didn’t sign up to die for no slave,” said Jack. As usual he had a scowl on his round face. Jack was always angry, as far as Jeremy could tell. Born angry. “It ain’t fair to switch it around now and say we’re fighting for slaves. If I could get out of this war now I would.”

“There’s the door,” said Nicholas, nodding at the open field around them.

“How about you, Little Drummer Boy?” said Lars. “What would you be fightin’ for, if you was fightin’?”

Dave laughed, but then said, “Oh, Jeremy’ll be brave enough when he sees the elephant.”

Jeremy didn’t doubt he’d be brave. But he didn’t think
he’d like to shoot a man. Maybe he wasn’t as brave as the drummer boy of Chickamauga.

“What’s the big deal about the elephant, anyways?” said Lars. “I was at Chancellorsville, never saw him. Gettysburg, never saw him.”

“Maybe it’s a she-elephant,” said No-Joke with a slight frown, because of course he meant it quite seriously.

“ ’Member when we came down into that sunken road and saw all them dead men bleedin’ into the ground? That was the elephant,” said Dave.

Seth, who was still working furiously at his tree limb, let out an involuntary grunt of pain.

“Seth’s got his elephant right on him,” said Lars.

“This? No, this ain’t my elephant,” said Seth. “When I first turned round to speak to the man next to me and realized he didn’t have no head, that was the elephant.”

“This” was what was left of Seth’s right leg. He’d lost it at Gettysburg, and the stump was still not healed. He had insisted on staying with the regiment anyway. This happened often, Jeremy had learned—wounded men didn’t go home, because they thought the regiment
was
home.

It was a shame about Seth’s leg. Surely it would be easier to die nobly wounded in battle surrounded by weeping comrades and have it over with. Jeremy tried to think of something encouraging to say to him. He decided to tell him about Uncle Bill back in the Northwoods.

“I’ve got a uncle who’s paralyzed in one leg—” Jeremy began.

Dave winced. Nicholas and Lars grinned in anticipation.

“It don’t slow Uncle Bill down hardly at all. He can still—”

“I know!” Seth snapped. “He can still do a tap dance, and walk a tightrope, and ride over Niagara Falls on the top of a dad-blamed barrel singing ‘Hail Columbia’ with a chorus of dancing girls in pink satin bloomers, all the while doing mental arithmetic out of the eighth-grade book even though he doesn’t have a
head
!”

The other men laughed. Jeremy turned away, stung. He’d been trying to be nice. Seth didn’t have to take it like that.

“Don’t see how you’re gonna go on campaign with us on crutches,” said Nicholas. “You’re gonna have trouble keeping up.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” said Seth, calmer. “I still got my gun. Just save a few Rebs for me, and I’ll muster ’em out when I catch up to youse.”

Jeremy couldn’t help staring at Seth’s leg.

“Still want to go to the wars, Little Drummer Boy?” said Lars mockingly.

Jeremy looked straight back at him. “Yep. I do.”

FIVE

D
ULCIE WAS STANDING BEHIND
M
ISSUS AT THE DRESSING
table, fixing Missus’s long brown hair, when a distant boom made her drop the comb on the floor.

“There go the cannons,” Dulcie said.

“Nonsense. Cannons! It’s thunder, I imagine. Don’t use that comb now it’s been on the floor, girl, get another one.”

“It sounded like a cannon, Missus.”

“How would you know what a cannon sounds like, girl? Have you ever heard one?”

“No, Missus.” Not all winter, anyway. But back in September she and the other slaves had pressed their ears to the ground and she had heard, or rather felt, the faraway shudder of the guns at Chickamauga. It hadn’t been a sound like this. This seemed closer. And something instinctive, the way the sound had rippled down Dulcie’s scalp, made her sure it was cannons. “Maybe it’s the Yankees coming,” said Dulcie.

“You’d better hope it’s not. You know what Yankees do with colored people.”

“Yes, Missus, I’m awfully afraid of Yankees,” said Dulcie obediently. Then some inner stubbornness made her add under her breath, “I don’t think Yankees
really
eat colored people, though.”

“Are you sassin’ me, girl?”

“No, Missus,” said Dulcie hurriedly, as they both eyed the cowhide hanging by the bedroom door. It was the inevitable end of any trouble with Missus.

The farm wasn’t a big one. It was in the hill country, between the mountains and the big plantations of the Etowah Valley. Once, there had been twenty slaves, back when Dulcie was small, but then the war came. First two slaves had gone away when Mas’r and Young Mas’r went away to the war, and then when Mas’r came back to mind the farm the two slaves had stayed with the army.

Everyone said the Yankees would be beat in a week, but that didn’t turn out to be true, and Mas’r didn’t feel much like staying in the army for longer than that. He liked his new uniform, but he wasn’t so keen on sleeping in a tent and having to associate with men lower down the social scale than him. He didn’t have to, because the Confederacy passed a law exempting men who owned twenty slaves or more from military service. Later Mas’r sold some slaves—they were worth a lot when owning them could keep people out of the army. So he didn’t have twenty
anymore, but he paid some money to the government so he could still stay at home. Then some slaves had been sent away to work on fortifications on the coast and around Atlanta. And then, finally, Mas’r himself had been sent away to the defense of Atlanta, even though he had friends in the government and had paid a whole lot of money to different officials to keep him out of the army.

“It’s wicked, that’s what it is,” Missus had said on the porch the night before Mas’r left for Atlanta.

“Well, there’s not as much appreciation of people of the better sort as there used to be,” said Mas’r with a sigh. “But somebody’s got to defend Atlanta.”

“Why can’t the people in Atlanta do it?” said Missus. “Why does it always have to be you? It’s not fair, that’s what it’s not.”

“No,” said Mas’r. “But we must all do our part for our country, my dear.”

That had been three months ago, during the winter. Now it was well into the spring of 1864, and the war was three years old. The Yankees were likely starting another push for Atlanta. That was what Dulcie heard, and she reported it to the two other slaves remaining on the farm, Aunt Betsy and Uncle John.

“The Yanks are up in the mountains now,” Dulcie had said, as the three of them sat on benches in Aunt Betsy’s cabin waiting for the corn cakes baking on the hearth. “They might be here in a few days.”

“
If
no one tries to stop them. Don’t you remember those Secesh soldiers we saw going north?” said Aunt Betsy.

“If the Yanks win they’ll be down here on their way to Atlanta,” said Uncle John. “And we can pick up and go with them.”

“What if the Yanks retreat?” said Dulcie, talking back. “What if the Secesh drive ’em back north again like they did at Chickamauga? Can’t we just go and join ’em now?”

“With all those Home Guards and slave patrollers all over the road? No thank
you
,” said Aunt Betsy.

Dulcie picked up her corn cake, warm and comforting between her hands, and breathed in sweet corn-cake-smelling steam. Georgians were supposed to be growing corn instead of cotton. The problem was, big plantation owners were ignoring the law and growing cotton anyway, stockpiling it for when the war was over. So there wasn’t enough food, not by a long shot. Dulcie had heard Mas’r read in the newspaper about the shortages, the high prices, and the food riots, when white women attacked stores and warehouses to seize food. But none of that had happened to her. The farm grew enough food to feed them all, for now, and the slaves got their share, because Mas’r and Missus had too much self-respect to be known as people who underfed their slaves. They might whip their slaves, of course. Everyone did that. They might lock them in a dark, hot box for days at a time to learn ’em. But underfeed
them? Certainly not. Underfeeding was the one thing that could get a slave owner talked about by people who mattered—other slave owners.

“After all, if we don’t feed properly then how can we prove to the abolitionists that slavery is a benevolent system?” Mas’r had once said to Missus, and Dulcie, under the porch, had filed away two new words in her head,
abolitionists
and
benevolent
.

Dulcie let her teeth sink luxuriously into the first bite of corn cake. Heaven. There was nothing better in the world, as far as she was concerned, than hot corn cakes fresh off the hearth. She wondered if Yankees had them. “I wonder what Yankees eat,” she said aloud.

“Us-all,” said Uncle John, teasing her.

She made a face at him. “Seems like they must have trouble getting food, so far away from their own homeplace.”

“Doesn’t trouble them none,” said Aunt Betsy. “They just take ours.”

They ate in silence for a moment, and Dulcie thought how odd that
ours
was, because nothing belonged to the slaves, not food nor anything else, and yet in a strange way it did seem like if the Yankees came down into Georgia they’d be coming in where they shouldn’t and taking what they shouldn’t all the same, and Dulcie almost understood that word
ours
.

Dulcie was combing Missus’s hair and thinking about this when Missus suddenly said, “What’s that?”

The sound of hoofbeats and men’s voices came from the yard below.

“Maybe it’s Yankees,” said Dulcie hopefully, going to the window.

“Hsst! Shut up, girl.” Missus was right behind her, sounding frightened. She gripped Dulcie’s shoulder tightly.

“It’s not Yankees,” said Dulcie, wincing under Missus’s grip. “It’s our side.” Again that
our
.