by Maria Hummel
“That’s not what I’m saying,” Laurence said to the trees.
“He means we should train them to fight alongside our regiments,” Woodard said, interrupting for the second time. His high, reedy voice did little to persuade the others.
“What’s to say they don’t start firing at us, too?” Gilbert countered.
“Who?” Laurence turned to him.
“Your regiments of niggers.”
Laurence shook his head and bent over to search his bag for the book of poems. Wrenching it out, he cracked it open, hoping the lines would swim through his mind and replace the ugly indifference of the men. Lives less precious, his father’s voice intruded. Ready to serve for the love of serving. George Lindsey had begged his son to train with the officers, but Laurence had refused.
“They wouldn’t fire,” John Addison offered after a strained minute, “but they might not fight so good, either. I’m ready to try myself, though.” This seemed to settle the matter, and the soldier began to play “Lorena,” a ballad about a soldier and his lost love. Pike sang the verses, the muscles of his thin neck rippling, and the others joined in when they knew the words. At “What we might have been, Lorena, had our loving prospered well,” Gilbert Rhodes cupped his crotch and everyone laughed.
The car’s tiny windows were ringed by a scum of black mildew, making the outside world blur at the edges, as if a shadow were encroaching on all sides. As the men’s voices filled his ears, Laurence looked to the endless south stretching before them. It was like peering through a dozen keyholes at once, each one holding its own version of the same hidden room beyond.
Chapter Six
“Watch this,” said Gilbert. He was sitting at the mouth of the tent he shared with his brother, Laurence, and John Addison. The others were sleeping, except Laurence, who lay on the damp earth, writing in a crack of sunlight. Every few moments, he would have to shift the paper to change the place illumined by the ray, but he was too exhausted to go outside. After a week of marching, camp-raising, and drilling in the hot July sun, most of the recruits could barely move on their free afternoon. Gilbert was eternally awake, however, his undershirt tight around his ribs, the uniform his mother had sewn for him dripping from a tent line. He had already washed it twice. “Watch this,” he said again, and Laurence turned on his aching side to see Gilbert thrust one foot out of the shadow of the tent.
With a soft grunt, Lyman Woodard fell facedown against the earth, his blond hair streaming over his cheeks. At the sound of the impact, John Addison cracked one blue eye, then let it fall slowly shut. Laurence sighed and stared at his letter. Every day since they had arrived in their camp outside Washington, Gilbert had managed to trip the clumsy soldier.
“When you going to learn to watch your feet, Woodard?” Gilbert grinned. “When the secesh start shooting at ’em?”
“That’s unfair,” Lyman Woodard said, pushing himself onto his knees. “You know that’s unfair.”
“Since when is drill unfair?” Gilbert said. “I just invented a new drill, that’s all.”
“Well, I don’t like it.” Woodard stood up and brushed himself off. He squinted into the shadows of the tent. “Who you writing to, Lindsey? You got a sweetheart?”
“My cousin,” said Laurence, blushing. They wouldn’t understand his friendship with little Bel.
“Girl cousin,” Pike amended, although the only way he could have guessed this fact was if he had been reading over Laurence’s shoulder.
“How do you know—” Laurence began.
“Keeping the money in the family, ain’t you?” Gilbert interrupted, grinning. He fingered a limp dark curl. “Just wait till I start courting her.”
“It’s not like that.” Laurence covered the letter with his arm, glaring at Pike, who scrabbled busily in his haversack and refused to return his gaze.
“Sure it ain’t.” Gilbert nodded.
“I’m going over to the contraband camp tonight to hear them sing, Lindsey. Wanna go?” asked Woodard. The former slaves who took refuge with the government army were given the nickname “contrabands” for their status as war bounty. They were treated terribly, given the worst jobs in camp and often made the subject of soldiers’ pranks, but the evenings were their own, and they held rousing prayer meetings a short distance from camp.
“I can’t,” Laurence said. “I’m on picket.”
“Well, some other Sunday, then,” Woodard said hopefully. He continued to brush himself off. “I might not go tonight.”
Gilbert snorted. “What a bully idea. Learn me some nigger songs, why don’t you, Lindsey. When you go.”
“I will,” said Laurence coldly. He took out the poetry book and propped it over the letter. Silence fell over the tent again.
“Is it good?” Addison asked Laurence in a voice entirely awake, although he did not open his eyes.
Laurence nodded. “Listen to this: ‘I know that the hand of God is the elderhand of my own. I know that the spirit of God is the eldest brother of my own, and that all men ever born are also my brothers.… ’”
“Do you really believe that?” Addison’s eyes remained closed.
“I do,” Laurence said. “At least when I’m reading it, I do.”
Woodard was still hovering at the mouth of the tent, blocking Laurence’s single ray. “Get on,” Gilbert said. “You don’t have my permission to stay.”
“So? You ain’t captain.”
“Then how can you shoot a secesh?” asked Addison, pursuing his line of questioning. “When the time comes.”
“Get on!” Gilbert yelled this time, and swiped at Woodard with his fist. The other soldier backed up clumsily.
“You ain’t captain,” he repeated bitterly, but he turned and began to shuffle away.
“Let’s play,” said Pike, sitting up to pull out a deck of cards, arching them at the tips. “I want to play.”
“When the time comes, I guess I might feel differently,” Laurence said, turning to Addison, but his friend was snoring softly, his body quaking with the first spasms of sleep.
This kind of scenario happened so often in their tent, Laurence had learned to have conversations with the others in his mind, battling with their ignorance and unkindnesses as they sweat through drill and later when they rested together, their bodies stretched along the warm earth. It was easier this way, the quiet settling over the damp, ruined grass inside their quarters, the haversacks heaped beside him, a canteen passed from hand to hand. When the flare of whiskey touched his lips and tongue, he gave the appropriate gusty sigh.
After two weeks in sunny Virginia, he suspected that the others viewed him as a useful but somewhat odd accessory to their tribe, asking him to write their addresses in his neat cursive, to decipher their own missives from home. He knew Addison liked him, but he could not quite understand why and so accepted his friendship grudgingly, as if he were doling out a favor to the handsome soldier. Watching him sleep now, Laurence wondered what it would be like to wake in Addison’s body, to open his eyes and see what Addison saw. It would be a light-filled world, he decided, like a spring day in Boston when the harbor gleamed like some lost treasure and, walking beside it, a young man could watch his own reflection lengthened and shattered and lengthened again.
* * *
At dusk, they stumbled out to picket, a sentry duty that spread men a half mile apart in the woods, guarding in shifts. Most soldiers, it was discovered, were more afraid of the dark than of any imminent secesh attack. False alarms sounded the first few nights, until Captain Davey, the company’s weary-eyed leader, told them he’d shoot the next man who cried wolf.
Laurence liked the solitude after the close quarters of camp life, and he eagerly followed his comrades out to the Big Reserve, the prostrate woodlot where men waited to go on their shifts. Damp spiderwebs tore across his face and made him think of his mother, whose graying hair had dragged over his cheek as she kissed him good-bye, begging him not to forget his family. What this request really m
eant was that he should not lose his position in the world, son of the richest man in Allenton, that he must return after this youthful escapade and assume the mantle of his father’s business. The spiderwebs stuck to his fingers after he tore them from his eyes. He could not imagine going home.
When he reached the Big Reserve, Laurence dismissed Allenton from his mind and sat down to watch the boxing match. The first night he had gone on picket, he had realized he had never before seen men fight in earnest, heard the hollow thud of fists on flesh, the crack of bone. Tonight, the often-victorious Gilbert had been challenged by a stocky drummer boy, and Pike scurried among the men, taking their bets of pennies, doughnuts, and dirty pictures.
Meanwhile, Gilbert launched into his elaborate prefight routine. First, he stripped off his shirt and hung it carefully over a branch. Then he uttered a brief prayer from the Psalms while he flexed his arms, popping his knuckles: “‘My soul is among lions: and I lie among them that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword.’”
He had just finished pronouncing the last words when the drummer boy swaggered up, rocked back and forth on his heels a few times, and crashed to the ground like a felled tree. A disappointed murmur spread through the men, and the boy’s companions confessed that he had been drinking all afternoon.
“Who else?” Gilbert shouted into the close, cloud-covered night. The fire flickered weakly and men averted their eyes one by one. None of them liked fighting the older Rhodes, who had a twisting punch that could leave a lingering bruise.
“I’ll take on two of you, then.” Gilbert tossed his head.
“Not tonight, Gilbert,” someone called finally. A wind lifted through their wool uniforms, making the men scratch and shift their positions on the earth.
Gilbert toyed with his shirt but did not put it back on. “So you mean to tell me that I’ve got to go into battle with a bunch of goddamn cowards who won’t even fight a body two to one.”
Above the clearing, the branches of an oak speared the moon. A silvery light fell through the forest.
“I’ll fight you,” came Pike’s small voice. “I ain’t no coward.”
The younger Rhodes walked toward his brother, his fists lifted. There was something both grand and defeated in his posture, something Laurence recognized but could not place until Pike crossed a strip of moonlight, and seeing him silhouetted there, Laurence saw his uncle Daniel seated across from his brother at the dinner table, losing every argument, accepting it.
Before he was fully aware of what he was doing, Laurence leapt to his feet, pushing Pike away. “You don’t need to fight your own kin,” he said, disgusted. “I’ll do it.”
Pike resisted his shove at first, and the three of them stood in the center of the ring, so close that Laurence could smell the sweat darkening Gilbert’s hair and Pike’s sour breath.
“I’ll do it,” Laurence repeated harshly, and Pike stepped away, his eyes as hollow and lightless as the interior of a walnut shell. A weak cheer rose from the men as Laurence stripped off his shirt clumsily, his arms snagging in the sleeves. The cool air pricked his skin. He could feel the workings of his muscles as he took a few swings at the empty air.
“Can I change my bet?” called a man, and a loud clamoring ensued, Pike dodging among them with his head lowered like a dog. The last soldier to fight Gilbert was still limping, and he threw a bet down on his former opponent with a flourish. There was the rushing sound as a flock of birds descended to a tree nearby, and then everything fell silent. Even the noise of Laurence’s breath lifted away from him as he danced opposite Gilbert, waiting for the other man to swing.
It had been Gilbert’s strategy to stare down his opponents until they threw their first wild punches. Then he would knock them off balance with a blizzard of tiny jabs. Laurence and Addison had discussed this tactic and how to oppose it. “Just wait him out,” Addison had said. “That’s what I’d do. Smoke him out like a nest of bees.”
Under the pressure of Gilbert’s gaze, his dodges and feints, Laurence found it hard to follow this advice. He wanted the fight to be over, to plunge headlong into it the way he had plunged through his father’s rage when he told him he had enlisted, not as an officer, but as a foot soldier. They had stood opposite each other on the muddy spring earth outside the house, shouting as melted snow trickled down the brick walls and over the ludicrous green awnings his mother had ordered from Paris. At Laurence’s news, his father had tried to box him on the ears, but Laurence had pushed him away clumsily and run off through the muddy streets so that his father would not see the tears on his face.
Shrugging off the memory, Laurence waited. Around him, the men sang out their complaints. The fire sank to a dull red coil.
Finally, Gilbert punched toward his gut. Instinctively, Laurence blocked him, and soon after that, the storm of fists descended, battering his mouth and neck. He closed his eyes and hit back, his fists opening. His skull rattled with pain. Somewhere on his face, the skin split, and when he could look again, Gilbert’s fists were streaked with red.
Laurence danced away, an old defiance overtaking him. He remembered being five years old, rising in a midnight thunderstorm and running to the kitchen to beat a cast-iron pot with a wooden spoon while thunder boomed outside. Awakened by Laurence’s loud response, his father had appeared in the threshold and told him to go back to bed. When Laurence kept clanging on the pot, he carried his son outside in the rain. Lighting flashed around them.
You’re not loud enough to drown it out, are you? his father had said as rain spattered Laurence’s nightshirt and made it hang heavy on his shoulders. You never will be.
“Smoke him out,” he heard Addison call, and he stood his ground just beyond Gilbert’s reach. He resisted the urge to touch his throbbing cheek or turn his head to see the others.
“C’mon,” Gilbert snarled. “I ain’t waiting all night to win.”
Laurence shook the blood from his eyes and maintained his distance. His brogans carved small circles in the earth, the weeds unrooted, kicked aside. Gilbert pursued him all the way to one flank of the audience, and Laurence felt the men’s breath on the backs of his knees as his opponent swung.
This time, Laurence waited for him to throw his whole weight into the punch, taking the blow but responding with one of his own. Laurence’s ribs screamed, but he was rewarded by the sight of Gilbert staggering back, holding his cheek. The crowd murmured as Laurence struck again, this time against the father who had tried to stop him from fighting because he thought that this war was just another kind of storm. Then, blood-blinded, he only glimpsed pieces of the other soldier before he hit them: the arch of Gilbert’s shoulder, the veins that branched above his temple, the ash of whiskers on his chin.
Gilbert wavered and fell to his knees under Laurence’s fury. A howl rose from the crowd. The sky shifted colors, going red, then blue-black, then red again, and Laurence, lifting his fists, felt it wash over his body. It was like a lake, that sky, and when he lowered his hands, he was swimming up through it, able for one split second to look down on them all, standing together in a deep woods dotted with lonely sentries dreaming of home.
His cut lower lip made it impossible to speak when the recruits crowded around him. It was better this way. Silent, he could be one of them, and if he spoke, he would once again become a stranger, saying something they could not hear or understand, something about the way some men waited dully in a dark wood for their time to pass and others called out, frightened by the whispering trees and the certainty that somewhere, something was watching them.
Only Pike did not join the throng, going immediately to nurse his brother, who was still kneeling a few paces away. Out of the corner of his eye, Laurence saw the boy pull out an already-blood-spattered handkerchief and dab at his brother’s wounds.
“Never thought there were a fighter in you,” said the man who had lost to Gilbert three days before, thumping Laurence on the should
er with his bruised hands. They both winced.
Addison came up close and his blue eyes met Laurence’s. They were lit with a strange emotion, part envy, part satisfaction, the way a gull looks just after it gets tossed a fish. Laurence blinked. “Smoked him out.” Addison grinned and shook his head, then turned swiftly toward Gilbert, who was now lying flat against the earth, his jaw working but no sound emerging.
“He said he’s all right,” came Pike’s clarion voice. Laurence felt blood trail down from the gash on his cheek, curving until it touched the corner of his mouth. It tasted warm and salty. The men continued to gather around him, the few who had won the bet shoving in to thank him. As he accepted their praise, he thought he heard the hoarse whisper of Gilbert, who still lay splayed on the ground.
“He said he’s all right,” Pike said again to the unlistening crowd. “Just leave him alone for a while.”
Chapter Seven
A yellow boy with a nose as flat as a plate stood in the center of a sagging tent of contrabands, singing. “I see the angels beck’nin, I hear them call me ’way; I see the golden city, and the everlastin’ day!” It was a potent, magical voice, higher and richer than a white man’s, with a timbre seasoned like Virginia, by warm weather, days of rain.
The other contrabands, with eyes shut and feet stamping, came in on the chorus. “Oh, I’m gwine home to glory; Won’t you go along with me, Whar the angels beckon, an’ the Lord my savior be?”
Crouched together behind a thicket of blackberries outside the tent, Laurence, Woodard, and Pike listened to the roar and pulse of the hymn. Soles slammed the earth, calves bunched, and spines twitched like trees in the wind. A woman Laurence had seen bowed over her daughter by day had her arms raised, mouth open, drinking the air. He wondered if he would ever see his runaway among them, dancing on his crippled foot.
