Fire by Night

by Lynn Austin

  “I sure hope they don’t expect us to carry this stuff very far,” she said. “Feels like somebody’s hanging onto the back of my pack, trying to pull me over backward.”

  She looked down at Ted and saw that the little fellow was bent nearly double beneath his load. She’d watched him pack a lot of extra stuff from home into his knapsack—three books, four extra pairs of socks, two flannel shirts, two spare suits of underwear, a sewing kit, a mirror and shaving items, a jar of homemade preserves, paper and writing utensils, and a bottle of Dr. Barker’s Blood Tonic.

  “I …um …hope you don’t take offense, Ted, but you better get rid of some of that extra gear you’re carrying or you’ll be a hunchback by the time the war ends.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, puffing slightly. “Hey, I think we’re supposed to go on over to the train depot when we’re done changing. You know where that is?”

  Phoebe shook her head.

  “Come on, I’ll show you.” She set off down the lane beside Ted, both bearing their loads like pack mules. Phoebe’s shoes squeaked and groaned. When she and Ted walked side by side, their tin cups, canteens, and other equipment jangled and clanked and rattled so noisily they sounded like a tinker’s wagon going down a bumpy road.

  “I think I know why the Union ain’t won very many battles,” Phoebe said.

  “Why’s that?” Ted asked, panting.

  “I reckon them Rebels can hear us coming for miles.”

  The army fed them supper in the town’s only hotel, then billeted them there for the night, cramming as many recruits into each room as they possibly could. When the train arrived before breakfast the next morning, it seemed to Phoebe that the entire town turned out to see their boys off. The ladies boohooed, waved their handkerchiefs, and threw flowers as mothers and sisters and sweethearts said farewell to their loved ones. With no one to see her off, Phoebe was the first one to board the train, and she took a seat by a window. She’d never been on a train before—had never even been this close to one—and she didn’t know if the tremor that rumbled through her was from the huge steam locomotive or from her own excitement and fear.

  Outside on the platform, a woman who had to be Ted’s mother cried a cloudburst of tears and gripped him in her arms as if she had no intention of ever letting go. She was small and squirrel-like, too, with the same tanned skin and curly brown hair that Ted had.

  “Teddy! Oh, my Teddy! Don’t leave me. Don’t go,” she cried in such a heartbroken voice that tears filled Phoebe’s eyes. She sometimes dreamed of someone holding her that way, rocking her, loving her, but as far as she knew they were only dreams, not memories. She slouched down on the stiff bench seat, pulling her forage cap over her face and closing her eyes to block out the sight of hugs and kisses and expressions of love beyond her reach. She didn’t open her eyes again until the train whistle shrieked, nearly startling her out of her seat.

  “Hey,” Ted said a moment later. “Mind if I sit here?”

  “Go ahead. It ain’t my train.” She tried to sound indifferent and gruff, but she was secretly pleased to see him. They’d only met yesterday, but she’d already taken a liking to the little fellow. She moved over to make room for him.

  Ted perched on the edge of the seat, shrugging off the straps of his bulging backpack so he could set it on the floor. He balanced a huge parcel wrapped in brown paper on his lap.

  “Confounded woman got me all wet,” he mumbled, wiping his face against his shoulder. “Did your mama bawl and carry on like that when you left home?”

  Phoebe glanced at him, then quickly looked away. The tears Ted was trying to wipe away were his own. “My ma died when I was pretty young,” she told him.

  “Oh. Sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I don’t remember her at all, so I can’t really miss her.”

  That much was true. But Phoebe did miss knowing what a mother’s love was like. She’d seen mothers like Mrs. Haggerty who yelled all the time and went after their kids with a hickory switch when they didn’t mind. But she’d also seen mothers back in Bone Hollow who looked at their kids like they were made of gold or something. Those mothers couldn’t stop touching their kids’ cheeks or ruffling their hair all the time. She was willing to bet that Ted’s mother was the second kind—the kind Phoebe dreamed of.

  The whistle screamed again, drowning out the last good-byes and cries of farewell from the platform. The train gave a huge lurch, nearly pitching Phoebe out of her seat. It began rolling forward, hissing steam and huffing like a tired horse plodding uphill. She gripped the armrest, excited and scared at the same time.

  “Guess your ma was sorry to see you go, huh?” she asked, trying to push away her fear as the locomotive picked up speed.

  “Yeah, I’m all she has now that my sisters are all married and my father’s passed on.” Ted’s voice sounded even shakier than usual. “She didn’t want me to go to war at all. Begged me and begged me not to enlist. But I had to get away, you know? See new things, meet new people. I’ll have to send my paycheck home every month so she’ll have something to live on.”

  He unwrapped the parcel while he talked, and Phoebe saw that it contained food—fried chicken, a square of johnnycake, several dill pickles, a couple of turnovers, a jar of plum jelly. It also contained a small frypan, a pair of homemade mittens, a pocket-sized Bible, and three more bottles of Dr. Barker’s Blood Tonic.

  “What’re you fixing to do with all that stuff?” Phoebe asked. “Your knapsack’s gonna burst at the seams if you try and put anything else in it.”

  “Hey, I’ll make you a deal. If you help me carry some of this, I’ll share my food with you.”

  Phoebe reached for one of the turnovers. “It’s a deal.”

  Outside her train window, the rolling Pennsylvania countryside flew past faster than a whole team of horses could have carried her. She was on her way to an exciting new adventure, with good food in her stomach, new shoes on her feet, and a new friend by her side. Nobody knew that she was a girl. Phoebe Bigelow had never felt happier in her life.

  Later that day they arrived in Harrisburg, and Phoebe’s happiness quickly began to fade. She and the other recruits were thrown together with greenhorns from other small towns across southern Pennsylvania, and army life truly began. She had her first taste of U Army rations—stringy beef, overboiled potatoes, and bitter coffee. She spent her first night in a Sibley tent, a round, pointytopped contraption where eighteen recruits slept spoon-style, their feet pointing toward the middle. And she met her new drill sergeant.

  Phoebe was barely off the train, her head still spinning and her knees all wobbly, when Sergeant Anderson herded all the new recruits together and began to yell at them. He was almost as short as Ted but very broad across the chest, and he wore a look on his face like he was about to pick a fight with someone. He turned red all over when he yelled, and his neck swelled up and his eyes popped until he reminded Phoebe of a bullfrog.

  Sergeant Anderson ranted on and on about how he was going to turn this trainload of pantywaists and mama’s boys into real men, how he’d better not hear any bellyaching from anybody or they’d find out what hell on earth was really like. He screamed for the longest time, until Phoebe was not only getting a headache but was also starting to worry that the man would maim his vocal cords if he kept on that way. When she couldn’t stand any more, Phoebe took a step forward, raising her hand politely like she’d learned to do in school.

  “Excuse me, mister, but I don’t reckon you have to yell like that. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can hear you just fine. Besides, I saw a man who was hard of hearing trying to enlist, and they wouldn’t let him.”

  She heard ripples of nervous laughter behind her. Sergeant Anderson bellowed a word that might have been “Quiet!” but he was so angry, Phoebe couldn’t tell. She’d never seen a face as mean as his in her life. He stuck it right up close to hers and roared so loudly and for such a long time that her ears rang and she started to see spots. He scared her
so badly she didn’t catch most of what he said, but she did understand that she had to report to his tent after all the others were dismissed.

  “Good-bye, Ike. It’s been nice knowing you,” Ted whispered when the time came. She could tell he was trying to make a joke of it, but his boyish face looked paler than usual.

  “Aw, I’ll be fine,” she replied, trying to believe that she would be. “I reckon he can’t shoot me—that’s Johnny Reb’s job. I just hope he don’t start hollering in my face again.”

  When she first arrived at Sergeant Anderson’s tent, Phoebe did have to listen to him yell for a while. He carried on about military discipline and how she needed to learn to hold her tongue and to show respect for officers, but he’d clearly run out of steam after screaming at all the other recruits for the past two hours. She sup-posed that even a rattlesnake had to slither off and make some new venom after biting two or three people, and she felt a little sorry for Anderson.

  Her punishment was to clean up after him—tidy up his tent, wash his clothes, clean his lanterns, scrub the mud and manure off his shoes, shine all his uniform buttons. It was women’s work and probably would have been very demeaning if it weren’t for the fact that she was a woman. True, she had joined the army to get away from cleaning and scrubbing and things like that, but her brothers had left much bigger messes for Phoebe to clean up than Sergeant Anderson had.

  “Can you clean and oil a rifle?” he asked when she was finished with everything else. His voice was softer this time, and truth be told, he sounded a little hoarse.

  “I ain’t never had a rifle,” Phoebe replied, “but my pa taught me to clean his shotgun as soon as I was old enough to hold one.”

  “Let’s see how you do with this.” He handed her a brand-new Springfield rifle, and it was the most beautiful gun she had ever seen, with a smooth walnut stock and shiny metal bore. She lifted it to her shoulder, sighting down its length.

  “My, oh my …I bet I could hit a fly off a fence post with this,” she murmured.

  “Are you a pretty good shot, Bigelow?”

  “I’m a crackerjack shot! I been trying to tell the army how I hardly ever miss, but they ain’t seen fit to let me show ’em what I can do.”

  He studied her for a moment through squinted eyes. She could tell he was trying to look mean, but she thought he was probably a little curious, too. “How about if I take you out tomorrow afternoon, Bigelow, and you can put your money where your mouth is.”

  His words baffled Phoebe. “Put my money…? No, sir. I ain’t got any money, but if I did, I don’t think I’d want any of it in my mouth.”

  Sergeant Anderson started to laugh, and he laughed so hard he began to cough and had to sit down for a minute on his campstool. “You’re something else, Bigelow,” he said when he caught his breath again. “No, what I meant was, how would you like to show me what you can do with a rifle?”

  “I’d like that real fine!”

  While Phoebe lovingly cleaned Sergeant Anderson’s rifle, they talked about different kinds of guns and how they both liked to go deer hunting. By the time she returned to her own tent, Sergeant Anderson didn’t seem quite so mean anymore.

  He sent for her the next afternoon, as he’d promised, and they walked out to the edge of camp with his Springfield rifle. For the next hour, Phoebe hit every target he gave her, big and small, until they ran out of old tins and bottles to shoot at.

  “I’ve never seen anyone who could shoot as good as you, Bigelow,” the sergeant said as they walked back to camp. “I should put your name in for a sharpshooter.”

  “That’d be just fine with me.” Phoebe ran her hand over the smooth wood one last time before she had to give the rifle back. “I can’t wait to get me one of these,” she said. “In the meantime, can I ask you a favor?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Will you let me come back tonight and clean it again?”

  Anderson snorted. “You’re a corker, Bigelow. All right, report to my quarters after dinner and I’ll let you clean my rifle.”

  Phoebe was very disappointed that she didn’t get to shoot it again. Her daily routine took on a numbing sameness that bored her to tears. She was awakened at dawn by the off-key squeal of fifes and the clatter of drums and was forced to scramble out to the lane in front of the long row of tents so Sergeant Anderson could call roll. Everyone quickly ate breakfast, then for the next two hours, she and the other recruits learned to march—elbows touching, rows thirteen inches apart—using short lengths of fence rails for rifles. They learned to march in a column, to form a battle line, to march double-quick, to dress the line. They drilled until the noon meal, then drilled for two more hours after that. There was a brief rest period in the afternoon, but they were expected to use that time to clean themselves up and polish their buttons—“I told you so,” Ted said with his toothy grin—then get ready for another roll call and inspection. Sergeant Anderson would strut up and down the rows, carefully looking them over from head to toe, and Phoebe could tell he was just itching to find a reason to yell.

  After inspection they drilled until dinner, and by that time she and the others had been on their feet for most of the day. She figured they’d probably marched several miles and could have caught up to some Rebels if they’d been allowed to keep going instead of hiking back and forth across the same field all day. Shortly after dark, everyone fell asleep, exhausted, and then woke up at dawn to do it all over again.

  Every day was the same, drill and more drill. By the end of the first week Phoebe had finally had enough. Instead of joining the scramble for breakfast after roll call one morning, she went forward to talk to Sergeant Anderson.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t get the point of all this marching around in circles all day. What does it have to do with shooting Rebels? Seems like we’re just wearing out our new shoes for nothing.” Anderson’s eyes bulged. A scarlet flush began slowly creeping up his neck to his face. “Please don’t yell at me,” she said quickly, “but I just don’t understand what it’s all for.”

  “It’s not your job to understand,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just do what you’re told.” He turned to stride away with all the dignity of an officer, but Phoebe easily kept pace beside him. Anderson’s legs were so short and her legs so long that it was like a stubby little burro trying to outpace a Thoroughbred.

  “It’s just that it seems like a mighty big waste of time,” she continued, “turning this-a-way and that, coming and going and marching around all day until you end up right back where you started. Don’t anybody care that there’s a war to fight?”

  He halted suddenly, glancing all around as if to make sure no one was listening. “Listen, Bigelow. You’re going to get yourself in big trouble if you keep shooting off your mouth like this. I’ll tell you the reason why we drill because I like you. But in the future, you have to stop asking so many questions and just do what you’re told, okay?”

  Phoebe nodded.

  “It’s my job to get everybody in shape for long marches. If you learn to advance in neat rows, then everybody will keep up and there won’t be stragglers. You’re also learning how to quickly form a battle line from a marching column. And as ugly as this sounds, I’m teaching you to dress the line so that you’ll move together, elbows touching, after the fellow beside you falls. You’ll keep on firing and hold your line so it doesn’t fall apart. Our troops weren’t prepared at Bull Run, and it turned into a shambles. But we have a new commander now, and General McClellan is determined to be ready this time.” Anderson finished his speech with a curt nod, his chin jutted forward as if ready to take on the entire Confederate army all by himself. Phoebe would have gladly joined him.

  “When do you reckon we’ll get to fight?” she asked.

  “You’re just a foot soldier, kid. You’ll be the last person to know what’s going on and when it’s going to happen. Sometimes your company will go on the march for two or three days, then march back again without ever
knowing what it was all about. Usually when the whole army marches, only the generals know where they’re going and why. It’s better that way, see? If you get captured, you can’t tell the enemy our plans. Understand, Bigelow?”

  “I guess so …sir.” She remembered to salute, then watched the sergeant’s retreating back as he finally strode away.

  Ted sidled up alongside her, chewing a piece of bacon. “Hey, you’re awfully brave asking questions like that. What did he say?”

  “He says we’re gonna keep on marching and drilling until we don’t have to think about it anymore, just do it in our sleep.”

  “Well, next time you talk to him, tell him that I march up and down that blasted field every night in my dreams.”

  After a month in training camp, the U.S. Army finally loaded Phoebe’s company of recruits onto a train bound from Harrisburg to Baltimore. They spent the night in a rest home for soldiers, then boarded another train the next morning and headed south toWash-ington. Phoebe enjoyed her second train ride much more than her first. In fact, now that she knew how fast a train could go and how many miles it could lick up in a day, the knock-kneed horses and rickety farm wagon back home were going to feel like they were standing still. As more and more army encampments came into view outside her window, she nudged Ted, who was napping on the seat beside her.

  “You better wake up. I think we’re almost to Washington City.”

  “How do you know?” he said without opening his eyes. “Ever been there before?” Ted’s voice, thick with sleep, made Phoebe smile. But then, lots of things about Ted made her smile.

  “No, I ain’t ever been there, but it’s starting to look like fields of cotton out my window, only it’s acres and acres of white tents all lined up in rows. And soldiers everywhere. Like a mess of blue grasshoppers.”