Fire by Night

by Lynn Austin

  “Thank you, Daddy! Thank you!” She ran around his desk and surprised him with a hug, then hurried from the room before he changed his mind.

  Chapter Six

  Washington City

  December 1861

  Phoebe bent to crawl out of the Sibley tent at morning reveille and came upon a small surprise: three inches of fresh snow had blanketed the frozen ground during the night. A gray, icy haze hung over the camp, and the mess sergeant was chipping through a layer of ice in the frozen water barrel with an ax. Phoebe fastened all the buttons on her new winter overcoat and hunched her shoulders against the cold.

  All around her, the other soldiers huddled together in their long overcoats as they tried to shake off their slumber. Some smoked cigarettes, while others cupped their hands and blew on their fingers to warm them. A few stood near the cook’s fire, waiting to fill their mugs with hot coffee. The snow crunched beneath their boots, and their breath fogged the air as they waited for morning roll call and breakfast.

  The camp was starting to feel like home to Phoebe and to look like it, too. She and the other soldiers had fashioned tables and improvised other furnishings from whatever they could find—logs, empty crates, upturned barrels—to make the camp more comfortable. Near the door of her tent, her brand-new .58-caliber Springfield rifle was stacked teepee-style with five of her tentmates’ rifles. The army had finally issued the new weapons, and on this cold December morning the men were going to drill with them for the first time. Phoebe carefully separated hers from the others and brushed off the snow with her bare fingers, wiping it dry on the sleeve of her coat. She would have kept the gun inside the tent with her last night if she’d known it was going to snow.

  When the metal was reasonably dry, she stuck the rifle under her arm and shoved her hands in her pockets to warm them. Ted had gone off toward the latrine earlier, and she gazed in that direction until she saw him striding back. He was easy to spot; the sleeves of his new greatcoat hung below his fingertips and the lower hem reached nearly to his ankles.

  “Hey, our rifles aren’t going to get rusty sitting out here, are they?” he asked, pushing up his sleeves. “Maybe we should keep them inside with us.”

  “I was just thinking the same thing.” She pulled her hands out of her pockets and helped Ted remove his rifle from the stack. He wiped off the snow, then slung the strap over his shoulder so the gun hung behind his back.

  “You know, this blasted thing is heavy,” he said. “I’m going to wish I had my fence rail back if they expect us to march with these things all day.”

  “You don’t really wish that,” she said, gently poking him in the ribs with her gun barrel. “Can’t shoot Rebels with a fence rail, you know.” She lifted the gun to her shoulder and sighted down its length, aiming into the distant woods and squeezing the trigger. “I can’t wait to try this thing out. How ’bout you?”

  “It would be a real treat to shoot it—especially at Johnny Reb. But knowing the army, they’re just going to make us march around in circles with it until we’re too tired to stand up. I’ll bet it’ll be months before they even give us any ammunition.”

  “Boy, I hope you’re wrong,” she said, lowering the rifle again.

  So far, their schedule in this new camp varied only slightly from the one they’d followed in their first training camp in Pennsylvania. Phoebe and Ted drilled endlessly, sometimes eight hours a day. But now their company of recruits was part of a new regiment—which meant hundreds and hundreds of men marching together, with bands playing and drums pounding and regimental flags waving. Phoebe was starting to hear the tramp of marching feet in her dreams.

  Here in their winter quarters inWashington, General McClellan was whipping them into fighting shape. Phoebe often saw him watching their dress parades, riding around on his big black horse or strutting around like he was cock of the roost. The men called him “Little Mac” or “the young Napoleon” because he wasn’t a very big fellow. But they loved their commander, and they were ready to follow General McClellan to the ends of the earth.

  Phoebe and the others had learned to form a marching column of four men abreast, then change to two tightly packed battle lines on command. The way they all whirled and twirled at the same time, playing follow-the-leader, reminded Phoebe of a row of baby ducklings following the mama duck wherever she went. They had also learned to tell the difference between twenty-two different drum rolls and thirty-four different bugle calls.

  “Once the battle starts,” their commanding officer had explained, “there’ll be so much noise you won’t hear me shouting orders anymore. You have to know what each drum roll and bugle call means and be able to respond to it right away.”

  The new routine also included a daily sick call. Phoebe grew worried when hundreds of her fellow recruits took sick with silly kids’ diseases like measles and chicken pox. One of her biggest fears was that she would wind up in the hospital and her secret would get found out, so she kept to herself to make sure she wouldn’t catch anything. This morning there were two more suspected cases of measles, including a man from her own tent. Dozens of men were coughing. One recruit, who had a rag tied around his jaw because of a sore tooth, argued loudly with the sergeant who wanted him to report to the regimental physician.

  “Nobody’s pulling my tooth!” he insisted. “We’re starting rifle and bayonet drills today, and I ain’t missing out.”

  Ted was so eager to begin that he wolfed his breakfast, then stood beside Phoebe, nagging her to finish. But when they finally fell into formation and began the drills, Ted’s prediction proved all too true. To Phoebe’s great disappointment, they weren’t given any ammunition. All morning long, as the sun slowly burned away the haze and the blanket of snow melted beneath hundreds of trampling feet, the recruits practiced the nine steps required to load and fire their new weapons—with imaginary ammunition.

  “Your goal,” Sergeant Anderson told them, “is to load, take aim, and fire three rounds a minute.”

  By the time Phoebe marched back to camp for the noon meal, her feet were soaked and frozen. “I think the army’s trying to kill us off and save Johnny Reb the trouble,” she told Ted.

  “You know what?” he said wearily. “I wish I’d joined the cavalry or the artillery instead of the infantry. This blasted gun is heavy!”

  Sergeant Anderson had warned Phoebe not to ask questions, but when she saw him sitting on a tree stump eating his lunch all alone, she couldn’t help wandering over and asking just one more question.

  “Sergeant Anderson? Um, I was just wondering …Please don’t yell, but …when are we gonna get us some target practice?”

  “When you see the whites of the enemy’s eyes,” he said without looking up.

  Phoebe thought he might be joking, but he bwasn’t smiling.“Won’t that be too late, sir?”

  “Nope.” He looked up at her. “You’ll be motivated not to waste ammunition then, won’t you.”

  “I guess so. But, sir…?What are we waiting for?”

  His reply was one word: “Spring.”

  As the calendar changed to a new year, 1862, Phoebe’s regiment crossed the Potomac River into Virginia and pitched their tents on the Rebel General Robert E. Lee’s estate in Arlington.

  “Hey, let’s see how he likes that!” Ted said. “We’re camping right on his front lawn.”

  “Maybe if he comes by to chase us off, the army will finally give us some ammunition,” Phoebe said.

  In spite of all the waiting and drilling and more waiting, she was certain that life in the army beat chasing kids and slaving in a hot kitchen—even if she was right back home in Virginia again. Besides, the monthly wages the government gave her were a sight better than what Miz Haggerty would have paid her. It was kind of hard, sometimes, explaining why she didn’t use the public latrine alongside the others or bathe in the river on mild days, or why she always got up early every morning before anyone else and went off alone. Eventually Ted and her other tentmates go
t used to the notion that Ike Bigelow was a shy, quiet young fellow who liked his privacy.

  In early February, Phoebe’s company was given four days’ rations of salt beef, hardtack, coffee, and sugar and was ordered out on a probing mission into Rebel-held territory. They filled their cartridge boxes with real live ammunition, too. Phoebe was so excited, it was all she could do to stay in formation and march instead of running on ahead to find some Rebels. But as the day wore on, her rifle grew heavier and heavier, her overcoat hotter and more cumbersome, her feet wetter and colder, and her knapsack and bedroll began to feel like someone had stuffed cannonballs inside when she wasn’t looking. What made it even worse, she didn’t see a single sign of the enemy all day.

  The winter days were short, so the company halted before sunset to pitch camp in a small pine forest. They cut pine boughs for bedding and gathered wood to build a campfire in the middle of the clearing. By the time the fire was kindled and camp was made, everyone was starved. Phoebe sat down on a log beside Ted and watched as he tried to bite off a piece of hardtack.

  “How do they expect us to keep all our teeth when they give us rations like these?” He banged the rock-hard cracker against his tin cup for emphasis, then tackled a piece of the tough dried beef, trying in vain to bite off a piece. “Argh! I think they gave us the hide instead of the meat!”

  “I guess I’m gonna try cooking mine,” Phoebe decided. “Good thing I brought along your frypan.”

  There had been times today when her pack had felt so heavy she’d wished she could fling the pan into the bushes. Now she was glad she hadn’t. She poured a little water into it from her canteen and set it on the coals to heat, then she took out her knife and began slicing her ration of salt beef into the pan. Ted watched her, licking his lips.

  “Hey, Ike …um, do you think…?”

  “Yeah, sure. Throw yours in here, too. It’s your frypan.” She handed him the knife when she was finished with it. “Here. Go on and slice the beef up in pieces.”

  She could tell pretty quickly that Ted didn’t know what he was doing. When it started to look like he just might slice off one of his fingers, she took the knife back without a word and sliced his beef into the pan herself.

  “Thanks,” he said sheepishly. “My mother did all the cooking back home. I never went near a kitchen.”

  The meat began to smell pretty good as it cooked, and soon the other men started crowding around to watch. While Phoebe waited for the beef to get tender, she crumbled a piece of hardtack into powder in the bottom of her cup, then added it to the broth so it would thicken into gravy.

  “I was thinking,” she told Ted, “maybe if we poured the gravy overtop the hardtack, like it was a biscuit, it might soften up and not taste half bad.”

  The other men had grown very quiet. Phoebe finally looked up to see why. Every last one of them was watching her and licking his chops. “How’d you learn to cook like that?” one of them asked.

  “Well, after my ma and pa died, it was just my three brothers and me. I either had to learn to cook or go hungry. So I learnt.”

  “Do you suppose you’d be willing to cook my rations like that for me?” someone asked.

  The last thing Phoebe wanted to do was slave over a hot fire all night cooking for everybody. That’s why she’d left the Haggertys.“Why should I?” she asked.

  “I’ll pay you two bits.”

  “Yeah, I’ll kick in two bits if you cook mine, too,” another soldier said.

  Phoebe thought of all the fancy cakes and other sweets the sutlers sold when they drove around to the camps back in Washington. Ted said their fresh oysters were tasty, too. She just might like to try them.

  “All right,” she said. “Two bits each. And whoever carries the frypan tomorrow gets his grub cooked for free.”

  They all laughed, and someone gave her a friendly thump on the shoulder. She had let her guard down for once and learned that it was like opening a window just a crack to let in fresh air. By the time they’d eaten their fill, she’d earned everyone’s respect—and had gained new friends.

  As night fell, they sat on logs around the campfire talking for a while, their faces bright in its glow. Pine needles sent a shower of sparks swirling upward whenever someone tossed in another branch. The freshly cut wood was damp and unseasoned, and Phoebe’s eyes stung from the smoky fire. Some of the men whittled, others smoked cigarettes; most of them talked about the wives or girlfriends who were waiting for them back home. Phoebe could only listen in silence, wondering what it would be like to have a sweetheart.

  The men were all tired from the long first day’s march. After divvying up the sentry duties, everyone turned in for the night. Instead of Sibley tents, each soldier had been given a section of canvas sheeting to use any way he wanted. Some decided to sleep under it like a blanket, others made a lean-to out of it, but most of the men had chosen a partner and fastened two sheets together to make a pup tent.

  “Hey, want to hook ours up and make a tent?” Ted had asked Phoebe when they’d set up camp earlier that evening. She had agreed, and together they’d cut two straight tree branches for poles and built a nice-looking little tent. The opening faced the campfire for warmth, and the pine boughs they’d cut made a soft, fragrant bed beneath them.

  Now, as she crawled inside the snug little shelter, Phoebe discovered that the cozy space felt very different from sleeping in a big tent full of men. Ted was lying really close beside her, all rolled up tight in his blanket and overcoat. They were alone, just the two of them, and she realized with alarm that her heart was racing like a scared rabbit’s. Was something wrong with her? What if her heart wouldn’t stop pounding this way, and they had to send her back to Washington to see a doctor? What if her heart worked so hard it got all tuckered out and stopped?

  As Phoebe’s imagination raced through the terrible possibilities, Ted suddenly gave a contented sigh. She could smell the coffee on his breath and a fresh whiff of pine every time he moved. “Isn’t this just the greatest life, Ike? Being out here, chasing Rebels all day? When I was working as a clerk back home, nothing exciting ever happened. I just sat inside all day, adding numbers.” He paused.“You know what? I don’t think I’ll ever go home.”

  “Yeah …I know what you mean.” She felt so strangely breathless she could hardly reply. There was something wonderfully thrilling about the sound of Ted’s soft voice murmuring close beside her in the dark. She wanted him to keep talking like this all night.

  “Now, if only I had a sweetheart waiting for me back home, my life would be just about perfect.” He rolled over onto his side to face her. They were inches apart. “Sometimes I can’t help thinking about what it would feel like to hold a pretty girl in my arms, maybe steal a little kiss. Do you ever think about that stuff, Ike?”

  Phoebe swallowed. “You sure make it sound nice.”

  Her heart was going to thump itself to death. For the first time in her life she wanted to be held by a man, to feel his arms around her. She had never wanted to think of herself as a girl before, had always tried to be just like her brothers. But Ted made her feel different— and very much aware that she was a woman. She didn’t understand it at all.

  “Hey, if we get some time off back in Washington,” Ted said, “let’s you and me find us some pretty girls, okay?”

  “I don’t know…”

  “Why not?”

  “I—I don’t think anybody could ever fall for someone like me. I’m such a homely cuss.”

  “That’s not true. Whoever said you were homely, Ike?”

  “Just about everybody in school back home.”

  “Aw, don’t listen to them.” He rolled over again and stared up at the canvas above their heads. “They made fun of me, too.”

  “Why would they pick on you? You’re good-looking.”

  “No, I’m too short. And I’ve got beaver teeth. Be glad you’re tall. Lots of girls won’t fall for a man unless he’s taller than they are.”

&n
bsp; “Well, there’s plenty of short girls in the world. One of them’s bound to fall for you.” She heard a tremor in her voice and wondered what was wrong with her now.

  “I’ve made up my mind to come back from this war a hero,” he said, yawning. His voice was growing sluggish with sleep. “All the girls will think differently about me when I come home a hero. You wait and see.”

  Ted fell asleep first. Phoebe heard his breathing grow slower and deeper. Milky blue moonlight washed through the open end of their tent, and she lay in the dark and watched him. Her heart finally slowed. Outside, the woods were quiet except for the occasional hiss and snap of the dying fire and the soft murmur of the sentries as they changed shifts. She listened to the rustling whispers of the forest, sounds she’d grown up with and loved. They reminded her of home.

  But Phoebe didn’t want to go home. She didn’t have a good friend like Ted back home.

  They marched for two days, stopping to camp at night, poking around in the woods during the day as if there might be Confederates nearby. Then, without sighting a single Rebel, they turned around and hiked back to Washington. As Sergeant Anderson had predicted, Phoebe never did find out what it was all about.

  “That’s okay,” Ted said. “We got a taste of what war’s going to be like—tramping through the woods, sleeping under the stars at night—and I’m glad I joined up. Aren’t you?”

  “Yeah,” she said, remembering how his face had looked in the moonlight. “Mighty glad.”

  In the spring, rumors began circulating that General McClellan was going to march his huge army toward the Confederate capital of Richmond soon. Every soldier in Washington grew excited at the prospect. By the time they learned that Union forces had captured Nashville, the men in Phoebe’s company were spoiling for a fight. With spring fever in the air and no Rebels to scrap with, the men began scrapping amongst themselves.

  Phoebe had gone off by herself for a walk one evening and was just returning to camp when she saw one of the Bailey brothers, the camp bullies, reach into Ted’s open knapsack when his back was turned and snatch his bottle of Dr. Barker’s Blood Tonic.