He went upstairs and made a bundle. There wasn’t much which he needed to take, there was not much which he could take. He gathered a few keepsakes from the dresser . . . silhouettes of his mother and father when they were young. He took Grandpa Briggs’s watch, which the widow would not consider selling in direst season. He slid his fife down into those inner loops of his jacket which Merry’s mother had sewn according to specifications. Softly he tore the mosquito-bar from a window above the kitchen roof and went across the roof and down the apple tree—a route he had traveled often since he was six or thereabouts. With basket and bundle he thought of himself as the traditional fugitive of caricature. He thought that he should have had a stick over his shoulder, and the bundle swinging from the end. He climbed across a stone fence and circled through the weedy orchard behind the Striver house. He met only Rudy Banton, who carried a string of suckers; and Rudy Banton was peculiar in the head—he cared only about hunting or fishing, and could not talk plain: it made little difference, meeting him. Once on the river road, Merry hurried to Darwin’s Bend, which he had indicated when he spoke with those strangers at the landing. Sure enough there was the barge, anchored off shore—one young man sitting in it, the other concealed in his skiff among drooping willows. A few minutes later Merry was aboard the larger craft; they drifted down the Susquehanna, shadows of hills covered them.
The cousins were named Norton, and they came from Towanda, where their fathers were in partnership, owning a forge. . . . Our line is iron. Born to it. They showed Merry some of the materials included in their cargo: grilles and hinges and such. These they would sell in Harrisburg—part would satisfy certain orders, the rest would have to go on the open market. Merry nodded as if he knew as much about hand-wrought iron as he did about the home baking business.
We’re Paul and Silas, the cousins told him. Everybody knows the Nortons, up Towanda way. Born in the same week.
No, said Silas. Nine days apart. Remember that, Paul: I’m still your elder.
And went to the same church and same school, and our fathers are brothers, and what’s more than that, our mothers are first cousins. How do you like that, hey? Thicker than thieves, aren’t we, Si?
Thicker than fleas, Paul. Yes sir, Mr. Meriwether Kinsman: they don’t come any thicker than we two. Just like two fingers on your hand. . . . Why, what are you a-fingering of? What you got there? . . . Well, I swan, it’s a fife. Can you play it? . . .
There were obstructions, rapids to be encountered and traveled past. Some of it was heavy work—loading and unloading the barge, beating paths through weeds, lugging ironware. The light tiny skiff was an eggshell: Paul Norton could hike it up on one wide shoulder and carry the thing. But they had a set of rollers on which the barge must be hauled when it was necessary to land it; and Merry’s job was to lift out the rear roller as soon as it was exposed by the boat’s progression, then carry the thing to the front and insert it there, and repeat successively. There were nights when his body, unaccustomed to such concentrated exertion, ached steadily like a sore tooth. He thought his arms and legs would fall off. But the Cousins Norton praised him for his willingness and, later, aptitude. Merry loved this. Scarcely had he ever been praised by anyone—except Uncle Bijah, when at last Merry mastered the rapid intricacies of a freakish tune called Hell On The Wabash. . . . There were long days, comfortable and lazy, when they dropped smoothly in wide easy current, with only a pole to be thrust down now and then. It was fun to trail a fish-line over the side. Soon they had more fish than they could eat, but the Nortons said, Keep fishing, Merry; we can trade for garden truck. The cousins smoked great pipes with curved stems, smoked them perpetually. They said they had cut their pipes from the same block of cherry root, had sent away to the city for proper amber stems, and naturally the two pipes were just alike. Paul and Silas squabbled good-humoredly sometimes; one claimed that the other had taken his pipe—he could tell by the taste of the spit therein.
What’s this place? they’d call to a man on shore.
Shickshinny.
And what do you call that, over there?
Mocanaqua.
...Drifting down, down the gentle river. Oh, Mister, what lies over beyond there?
That, friends, is the great and aggressive city of Wapwallopen. . . . Farther, farther against the sun: Hey, stranger, what’s this place?
Berwick to be sure.
And yonder?
Oh, acrost and up the road you’d come to Nescopeck.
It seemed sometimes as if Indians were all around them in canoes. That week there rode a moon, comforting, serene. Merry watched the great silver whiteness as it freed its surface from eastern hills and pushed higher, higher in clarity . . . half asleep on a blanket he contemplated the moon. Maybe Paradise was up there. Now his mother was there . . . Uncle Bijah played his fife on the moon . . . that was where the gathering of linsey-woolsey Americans was taking place . . . tufts of willow shadowed on a sandbar ahead. Ah, red Indians, Merry thought, advancing in their birch-bark boats. A night bird cried in the sky.
They cooked on the barge; they had a box which they would fill with sand, they could build their small fire. It was fun to cook on a boat. Tender fish would curl and sizzle, salt fat perfume of frying would drift. There were other adventures: Silas Norton encountered a cross bull when he was cutting through a pasture to trade for eggs at a farmhouse. And all three of the voyagers—the broad-shouldered brown-haired cousins, and the skinny blond Merry—were chased out of an orchard by a watchful farmer, when they thought to appropriate a few apples of the Early Harvest variety.
Hey, boy, what’s this river flowing in, here on the right?
The Juniata, Mister.
Then they could sing and put their hearts in it . . . Wild roved an Indian girl, bright Alfarata . . . where sweep the waters of the blue Juniata. . . . Spires of Harrisburg rose before them, there must be a parting. It would take the Nortons some days to dispose of their wares, before they would be ready to enlist. Merry Kinsman could not afford to sit idly; he felt that he dared not spend money at a tavern, because he had so little money with him, so little in the world. Actually he did not care about money, because it seemed now that the mapled world of America belonged to him completely, and the Susquehanna as well, and the fabled fabric of the Juniata. Generously the Nortons offered him a share in proceeds, if he would help them with their delivering and haggling. But Merry said No. He knew that they did this purely out of kindness, and he would be cutting into their profits; he would not really be able to assist, he would have to be shown and told what to do. His strong slender hand disappeared repeatedly in the huge grip of the Nortons. He was presented with a gift to remember them by (as if he needed reminder!): a pipe which the cousins bought for Merry on arriving at Harrisburg. He had admired their manner of smoking pipes, had enjoyed the scent of tobacco, said bashfully that he might wish to try, himself. He felt grown and manly with this untried pipe and a paper of tobacco in his shirt pocket.
After leaving the Nortons he inquired of a few bearded soldiers, asking where he might find the recruiters.
What for? Does your Pa want to join? and there was laughter.
They told him: they said that the best thing for Merry to do was to go out to Camp Curtin. That was a long hot walk but eventually Merry found himself standing under a tent fly. A sergeant with a red face and sunburn peeling all over it— The sergeant said, What might your name be?
Meriwether Kinsman.
Good enough name, but I reckon the ranks of the Boys’ Brigade are full up. Again that laughter from the idle and clustering. How old might you be, Meriwether?
Fourteen.
That would be a trick! Is your family hot after you—or maybe the uncle you ran away from?
Sergeant Glisson, ordered a vigorous young captain who had just come stooping under the fly, don’t you go to signing up any children! Just mean trouble for us later o
n. He frowned at Merry accusingly.
Sir, said Merry. Here’s the point: there ain’t no one chasing me. There ain’t nobody to chase me, there ain’t no one knows where I’ve gone; I’ve got no one. He told how he had left the village the very afternoon of his mother’s funeral, and who was there now to transport him back up the Susquehanna? Who would want to, anyway, and why? It was so obvious that he was telling the truth that the young captain relented, he put his hand on Merry’s sleeve. Glisson, he said, could be that they have need of another drummer in the tiger band. Can you rattle a drumstick, bub?
No, sir, I can do better than that.
Out came the fife. Merry Kinsman played Jefferson and Liberty as he had never played it before; he played it as Abijah Parker might have played it when homespun columns were approaching the Saranac River. Before he finished, the captain was smiling and twisting his thick black mustache with approval. His black eyes danced; and two boys behind the sergeant were beating out a drum accompaniment on cracker boxes.
Oh, go and get our Principal Musician! cried Sergeant Glisson in delight. Go long, one of you, and fetch him. What’s his name, what’s that new chief musician—Cassidy? Tell him we’ve got a fine addition to his Sheepskin Battery!
That day Merry Kinsman was sworn in. His age was put down on the rolls as eighteen; that was the practice. Later he encountered a good many boys two or three years older than he; but Merry was said to be the youngest in the regiment, and he was the smallest of all the fifers. In no time at all, after he had learned the strains for regimental and camp duties, he was accounted also the best. Shortly before they prepared to depart for Cockeysville, Maryland, a new company came moving up to take its place alongside Merry Kinsman’s company, and there rose a combined roar of recognition. There stood Paul and Silas Norton, side by side in a rank. It was a stout friendship, a valuable one, but all too short. The cousins went out of life together as they had entered life and faced it. Both were killed at Chancellorsville, next May.
...Reveille, Second Camp, Third Camp . . . many bars away the fifes silent, drums rolling. Slow Scotch . . . again the roll. The Austrian, and roll, roll. Quick Dutch, The Hessian, Quick Scotch, roll, roll, roll. Drumsticks were like dry bones of the past become hot fresh bones of the present. Sometimes Merry Kinsman thought his fife was the child of the drums, sometimes he thought his fifes fathered the drums. . . . Peas Upon A Trencher. How merry the tooting of the brisk two-four . . . how surprised he was to learn that there was one call for breakfast, an entirely different call for supper. How naked and piercing the notes poured from under his fingers: the Surgeon’s Call (Quinine Call, the boys named it) and a dozen different Guard Mounts, and Assembly and Retreat and Tattoo! He wished that Uncle Bijah was there to hear him spraying out the Single Drag. Maybe Uncle Bijah was there.
In ranks of the drum corps (one drummer and one fifer from each of the ten companies, with a regimental bass drummer thrown in) he met musicians of a dozen different communities. Two or three older men had traveled far and learned a lot. All Take Tea, The Squirrel Hunters, Biddy Oats, On the Road To Boston . . . many more he heard for the first time. He learned them. Here’s a new one, the Principal Musician said, and here’s the way she goes: When we go down to Washington, when we go down to Washington, I was shot five times in the ankle bone, and once at Manassas Junction. . . .
This is a hard one, son, said a tall fifer with a whiskey breath. (Yet somehow he reminded Merry of Uncle Bijah.) A clog, and tis hard to do. We call it the Corn Cob. . . . And this here one. His hand went down through firelight and lifted a tin cup: stolen whiskey mixed with water therein. Old Tupley was becoming drunk again, but still he could fife, he said that he could fife better when drunk than when sober, but Merry decided early that this was not true. Now we’re heading into another six-eight, Tupley said. One maybe you never heard before. Tis called, Go To the Devil and Shake Yourself.
Meriwether Kinsman drank deeply of Tupley’s lore. He did not drink whiskey, he only smoked his pipe and listened, but the tunes squirted into his memory and nothing could dislodge them. It was heartbreaking to participate in the final tragedy surrounding Tupley, but duty decreed that Merry must. During the same battle in which the cousins Norton lost their lives, Tupley disappeared. He was supposed to carry stretchers, he carried none; he was required to assist at a field hospital, he was not there. Later a sergeant discovered the old fellow drunk and quaking. He had hidden himself in a thicket behind an oak tree, had pulled leaves over his head in an effort to conceal himself. He was dragged out, arrested, confined. After the Northern army crossed a flooded Rappahannock in retreat—after the broken regiment was bedded down in a camp, Tupley was drummed out by the very musicians who once had respected his skill. It was a sad day, but they played, they obeyed orders. Shattered companies lined up, musicians massed . . . poor Tupley, coat hanging open, face like a mussel shell, beard dripping with drool as he passed in disgrace with big signs hung upon him, signs saying Coward front and back. The Rogues’ March shrilled. War was not all a pic-nic, though Merry found it a better pic-nic than most until he was captured.
The Sheepskin Battery became a hospital brigade in every battle. Drums were left behind, fifes put aside. Musicians went out hunting amid thickets and haycocks, hunting for the fallen, and some of them were killed doing this. Merry himself was nicked in the side on the second day of Gettysburg; blood came freely although the wound did not hurt much. He was frightened. Still he recognized that at last he was one of the elect: he had Shed Blood for His Country. . . . He climbed a wall. The countryside was thick with smoke, thicker with noise; but Merry ducked his head, and was bound and determined to go over that wall because someone yelled that young Brinkoff of Company C had tumbled wounded behind it. Merry Kinsman did not find Brinkoff; he found instead a party of crouching men in gray who glared at him, poked guns at him. One of them marshalled him away through mats of smoke to where other lugubrious captives were herded behind a barn. You hurt bad, Baby Yank? asked a Rebel. He ripped Merry’s shirt when Merry lifted his torn jacket, he examined the wound. Hell, ain’t nothing wrong with you that a good piece of sticking plaster wouldn’t cure! Just set here and don’t move till the firing stops, else you’ll get shot by your own men! That night Merry was taken to the rear of the Rebel lines with others. So he became a captive and remained a captive through the long winter at Belle Isle, and then was taken to Andersonville.
He celebrated his sixteenth birthday by watching the raider chiefs fall and dangle. Because of extreme youth and litheness, he remained in fair shape until August, then went downhill rapidly. Of the several members of his regiment who survived in the stockade at this time, there was only one with whom he had been fairly well acquainted previously: a youth somewhat older than himself, named Stricker. Stricker was captured in the same battle which made Merry Kinsman a prisoner. Stricker had but one hand, he could render little aid to Merry after scurvy began to bend and shrink him. Merry tried to flank out with detachments removed in September, but failed. He was knocked down by Henry Wirz, who became hysterical at seeing invalids trying to pretend that they were sound. Merry Kinsman was turned back inside and languished alone, since Stricker had become a Parole at the hospital (and later would become a patient).
Merry had recollection of being carried somewhere in a blanket. At this time he was thinking, as he usually thought, of his lost fife. It had remained in his possession through Belle Isle; there he played it to the diversion of fellow prisoners. Also to the pleasure of the Belle Isle superintendent, Lieutenant Boisseau, who often asked Merry to strike up a tune, and once had him to dinner. Lieutenant Boisseau frequently fed Belle Isle prisoners who caught his fancy; but such a thing was unheard of at Andersonville, except among favored Paroles detailed directly under Wirz.
Merry’s fife was taken from him by a guard while they journeyed south from the Richmond-Manchester area, so he arrived at Camp Sumter fifeless. Here he met up with a young
fellow of his own age who had managed to retain his fife. Occasionally the boy lent it to Merry, but only occasionally, since it turned out that Wabash Davey was jealous because Meriwether Kinsman could play more skillfully than he. Finally the condition of Wabash Davey’s mouth was such that he could no longer build a tune. Merry now sought to bargain for the abandoned instrument, but had practically nothing to offer, and Wabash sat upon his fife—a dog in a manger. After he died his mates in the shebang held the fife for a high price. One morning the thing was reported as stolen; at least it disappeared. If some raider had taken it and found that he could make no music, he might have thrown the fife into the marsh. . . . Merry encountered also several musicians, most of them drummers, minus their instruments; during their season of comparative strength they sat in fury whenever they heard bleating across the stockade’s rim. There was a single fifer who played camp duties for the Georgia Reserves. He could play but one tune: the Bonnie Blue Flag, and that badly. It was The Bonnie Blue Flag for Guard Mount, Reveille, Mess Call, everything. Federal musicians cursed until severally they lost interest. One by one they died. Only two of the little group straggled out in the autumn, when able prisoners were removed. A freemasonry had held them together because it was the habit of many soldiers to regard musicians patronizingly or even with scorn. The term Sheepskin Battery was somehow derisive when applied by others. But in their own cult fifers and drummers were proud of the name.
...Stronger people carried him in a blanket, bent double with scurvy as he was, gums puffed into a wad. On this day, so early in the morning, there loomed a vacancy; Merry Kinsman was conveyed to the hospital. Some attempt had been made to separate types of cases, but exigency decreed that often the gangrenous would lie among scorbutics or those suffering from diarrhoea. Merry emerged from a spell of sodden unconsciousness to listen to wailing on one side of him, to feel the loose splashings of his left-hand neighbor shooting warm against his leg. A face swam above him often during the icy weather . . . he shivered and shook with cold. The face said, Lad, I’ve brought you a scrap of blanket. Hands pressed the fabric around him, Merry was weakly grateful. Face was attached to the body of a surgeon. Face wore great spectacles. Face brought to him sips of diluted vinegar with a bit of salt added. Once Face even brought him a trickle of some burning fluid which he said was whiskey . . . Merry Kinsman remembered that once there had been an old whiskey drinker named Tupley who was drummed out of camp. . . .
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