The Storm Before Atlanta (7 page)

C.S. for “Confederate States.” Jeremy froze, his canteen in his hands. He was in the presence of the enemy.

And Jeremy was all alone. He wondered if he should yell for help. But what kind of coward would do that, faced with one lonely enemy soldier, and not even a full-grown one at that? He stared at the enemy. The enemy
looked back, an amused half-smile on his face. The enemy didn’t have a weapon, as far as Jeremy could see. Neither did Jeremy, except his pocketknife. The thought of sticking his pocketknife into someone had never occurred to him before, and now that it did he didn’t like it.

“What’s your name?” asked the enemy.

“Jeremy DeGroot, drummer boy, 107th New York, Second Brigade, called the Red Star Brigade, First Division, Twentieth Corps under General Hooker, Army of the Cumberland, Department of Ohio under General Sherman,” Jeremy blurted.

That didn’t intimidate the enemy any—he just laughed. “A bit free with the information, ain’t you? Name’s Charlie Jackson.”

“Are you a drummer boy?” Jeremy asked, to cover up his embarrassment at having said so much.

“Nope, full-in soldier.”

“Tell me another one.”

“It’s true,” said Charlie. “Been in it since Shiloh. I have seen the elephant. Unlike some people.” He smiled, to take the sting out of the words, and Jeremy had an awful feeling that he could like this enemy.

“How do you know I ain’t been in battle?” said Jeremy.

“People look different after. In their eyes. They’ve seen the elephant.”

Jeremy looked at Charlie’s eyes and tried to see any reflection of elephant there. Charlie’s eyes were brown and
amused, and yes, there was a knowing look to them, but Jeremy had seen that look in lots of people’s eyes, and he wasn’t sure it had anything to do with elephants.

“Reckon y’all are coming into Georgia to see him, though,” said Charlie, still friendly enough. “We’ll show him to you. We’ll eat the 107th New York for breakfast.”

“At least you’ll have something to eat then,” Jeremy said, noticing how big the C.S. buckle was on Charlie’s tightly cinched belt.

Charlie picked up a pebble from the riverbank and tossed it at the opposite shore, making it fall in the water a few feet short of Jeremy. “We got plenty to eat.”

“What’ve youse got to eat over there?” said Jeremy. Only a week out of Shelbyville he was already tired of camp rations.

“Corn bread. Goobers. All kinds of stuff.”

“Really? You got corn bread?”

“Yup. Got some right here.” The boy reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a leaf-wrapped cake. “What’ve you got to trade for it?”

Jeremy felt his mouth water. But he had to admit the awful truth. “Hardtack.”

“Really?” Charlie’s eyes lit up. “Show me.”

Jeremy dug out a thick cracker about the size of a playing card and not much different in taste. “You really want this?”

“Nah, but I’ll do you a favor,” said Charlie. “Seein’ as how you want the corn bread.” He was already splashing
across the creek, and Jeremy noticed for the first time that Charlie was barefoot.

“Bread,” said Charlie, smiling at the hardtack like a long-lost friend.

Hardtack was bread like a fossil was a fish. But Jeremy was too busy eating the corn bread to argue. There were bits of grit that stuck in his teeth, but at least his teeth could get into it. He luxuriated in the chewability of it. Charlie, meanwhile, was squatting down, soaking the hardtack in the creek.

“There’s probably bugs in it,” Jeremy pointed out, with his mouth full.

“If they stay clear of my teeth they won’t get hurt,” said Charlie. “You don’t have any coffee, I suppose.”

“Not on me,” said Jeremy.

“Reckon you could get some?” said Charlie. “I could trade you tobacco for it.”

Jeremy didn’t use tobacco, but it was hard to resist the longing in Charlie’s voice. “Sure. We got tons of coffee. I’ll bring you some.”

“Really? Capital!” Charlie stopped soaking the hardtack, put it in his mouth, and tried to bite it. He winced.

“Sometimes we boil the hardtack,” said Jeremy helpfully. “That softens it up good, and the worms float to the top.”

“When can you bring the coffee? Where y’all headed?”

“I don’t know,” said Jeremy.

“You don’t know at all?”

“Well, they don’t tell us,” said Jeremy.

“Well, I can tell you that, anyway. Y’all are aimin’ for Atlanta,” said Charlie. “Ain’t gonna get there, ’cause we’re gonna stop you, but that’s where you’re headed.”

“Oh,” said Jeremy.

“That’s Taylor Ridge up there,” said Charlie, pointing. “Y’all are probably figurin’ to cross at Buzzard’s Roost.”

Jeremy shrugged. The land ahead was all green mountains to him, something they were supposed to get over somehow.

Charlie squatted down to soak his hardtack some more. He reached into the water and pulled something out. At first Jeremy thought it was a big rock.

They both looked at what Charlie was holding.

“Whush!” said Jeremy.

“Chickamauga, you reckon?” said Charlie, giving it an appraising frown.

“Are we on the Chickamauga battlefield?” Jeremy hadn’t known that.

“Close to. Hard to say, really. Battles go on for miles and miles. Could be this fella was wounded and came here to get a drink of water.”

Jeremy stared at the thing Charlie had found: a skull, green with algae, and missing its lower jaw. Jeremy felt something drain out of him, and he had an awful feeling it might be his courage. “Is he one of yours or one of ours?”

“Kind of hard to tell now, isn’t it?” Charlie looked
amused again, which seemed to be his permanent expression, as if the world was just about to let him in on the joke and he could see it coming. He poked around in the water.

“Don’t see no bits of uniform or anything here.”

“Where’s the rest of him?”

“Maybe downstream, or maybe animals dragged the bones off.” Charlie put the skull back in the water. Then he stuck the hardtack cracker in his pocket. Jeremy was relieved, at any rate, that Charlie wasn’t going to go on soaking his hardtack in the creek. Jeremy himself decided he would empty out his canteen at the first opportunity. But he didn’t want Charlie to see him do it.

“Why’d they let you in the army so young?” Jeremy asked. If Charlie wasn’t going to worry about the skull in the water, Jeremy was blamed if he was going to look like he did.

“I was a drill officer. They brought us from the military academy to drill the recruits. Then when they tried to take us back, I wouldn’t go.”

“How old were you?”

“Twelve.” Charlie shrugged. “Old enough, I reckon. And now I’m near fifteen.”

“I’m eleven,” Jeremy confessed. “But my pa’s in jail.” He wasn’t sure why he added this. Maybe to make up for being so young.

“Really? What for?”

“Chawing a man’s ear off.”

“That’s all?”

“Well, Pa don’t believe in gougin’ out eyes.”

“Seems a bit thin to send a man to jail for gettin’ in a fight.”

“Well, they
said
he was stealin’ a horse,” Jeremy admitted. “But he wasn’t. It was his own horse. Only this fella said he traded it with him and Pa didn’t, or at least he was drunk and didn’t mean it.”

Jeremy wished now that he hadn’t started the story. You could tell when Pa had got drunk, because he always came home with a horse that wasn’t his own, and it was always a worse horse than the one he’d left home on, and he was always laborin’ under the misapprehension that it was a better one.

“Sounds like he should’ve got him a better lawyer,” said Charlie.

Just then Jeremy heard voices coming from upstream. “There’s more soldiers coming—on my side,” he said. He realized he was warning Charlie, that he didn’t want him to get caught.

Charlie looked upstream at the trees. The voices came closer, but there were still no soldiers to be seen. Without looking particularly worried about it, he turned and splashed across the creek. When he was across he turned to look back at Jeremy. “We’ll meet up again to trade for that coffee, all right? I’ll find you by the water.”

“What water?” said Jeremy.

“Any water.” Charlie lifted a hand in farewell. “Been
a pleasure meetin’ with you, Jeremy. Hope to make your better acquaintance.”

Jeremy was surprised at the polite words and was still trying to think of the correct response as Charlie vanished into the woods on the other side of the creek.

SEVEN

A
N ARMY ON THE MARCH GOES ON FOR MILES
. M
ILES
from front to back, miles from one side to the other. General William Tecumseh Sherman entered Georgia with 98,000 soldiers. Ninety-eight thousand soldiers take a long time to pass by, no matter how you spread them out. And then there were wagons, hundreds of them, pulled by six mules each, and a vast herd of cattle, to be eaten as they went along—Jeremy tried not to look them in the eye. There were ambulances, with drivers and stretcher bearers. And there were hundreds of civilians. There were soldiers’ wives, keeping well back because Sherman didn’t allow women, and children hawking cold drinks and fruit to the soldiers. There were sutlers, morticians, and the officers’ servants, most of them contraband, and more contraband, and people who didn’t appear to have any particular reason to follow the army but were just doing it anyway. And then there were dogs, and a pet pig, and some buzzards circling overhead.

An army isn’t an easy thing to hide. But it isn’t an easy
thing to find, either, spread out across the high mountains of northwest Georgia, making its many ways along high, twisting trails and roadways, seething through the mountain passes. The Rebs were somewhere to the east of them, and the two armies sent out scouts to look for each other, trying to predict where the other was going next.

“I don’t reckon Johnny Reb will put up a fight,” said Dave. “We’re not likely to see any fighting till we get to Atlanta, if you want my opinion.”

“Oh, this is just a demonstration,” scoffed Jack. “We’re not going to Atlanta, we’re just out to show the Johnnies our strength, and then we’ll go back to Chattanooga.”

“I hope we don’t go back!” said No-Joke. His eyes shone black in his narrow, hollow-cheeked face. “If we take Atlanta, the Secesh will know we mean business!”

“They already know we mean business,” Lars said. “Hey, Little Drummer Boy, why ain’t you drumming?”

They were on the march, if you could call it that, along the west side of a stony mountain ridge that rose stark and gray above them. There was no point in drumming; the men couldn’t have kept time if they’d wanted to, scrabbling for footholds on the steep hillside. Jeremy wished Lars at perdition.

Once, Dulcie had seen a runaway slave caught by dogs. Her name was Anne, and seven dogs had brought her down, and bitten her again and again—they were trained
to do that. To bite without tearing out the flesh. Dulcie had been five then, and had buried her face in her mother’s skirts to hide from it. They hadn’t let the dogs kill Anne. Instead they’d let the bites heal, then whipped her two hundred lashes in front of all the slaves. Dulcie had tried to hide her head in Mama’s skirts again, but Missus had grabbed her away from Mama and turned her around and made her face Anne. They had brought in an overseer from another farm to do it. Dulcie closed her eyes tight, but she could still hear the gunshot crack of the whip, even now, six years later, as she walked through the cool running brook in her bare feet.

That was when she’d first realized that she, Dulcie, belonged to Mas’r and Missus and not to Mama and Papa. Mas’r and Missus had complete control over their lives, and though the preacher might come sometimes and tell the slaves that God wanted them to obey Mas’r and Missus, Dulcie found it hard to believe that anybody, even God, had more power over her than Mas’r and Missus did. She understood that Papa belonged to a different mas’r and missus, and then they had sold Papa further south, and they could do that too. They could kill you if they wanted. It would be against the law, but there wasn’t a chance in a hundred the law would say anything if they did.

Dulcie remembered the doctor saying that to Missus about Anne, later. “Even if she does die,” he had said,
kneeling on the clay floor in the cabin amid the flies and the smell of infection, “since it occurred naturally, in the course of condign punishment, it’s not a crime.”