by Sarah Bird
“Solomon, didn’t you hear me?” I waved my arm toward all the soldiers and said, “There are women in some of those uniforms.”
“You just now figuring that out?” he asked, tossing a handful of pepper into the kettle. “Chunk in some them Irish spuds. They’ll do to soak up the salt you failed to get out.”
“You knew? About the women?”
“’Course I knew. They’s lots of them. Were more at the start when they all thought war was going to be like skipping off to a picnic. Seen ’em come in with their husbands, their sweethearts. Surprised it took you spying some lady lovers naked to take notice. Given’s how you’re near female yourself.”
“So no one cares if a woman signs up?” I asked, ignoring his jibe about me being “near” female.
“Oh Lord, here we go again. You gon tell me ’bout your warrior-lady blood and what a dead shot you are and how you’d be better at soldierin’ than Robert E. Lee and Gideon what led the Israelites combined, they only gave you the chance.”
“If no one cares, then I got the chance, right?”
“Hold up there, Dead Eye. Didn’t say that. Them two lady lovers? They already been reported to Sheridan. Heard it myself. A woman comes in with her husband, boyfriend, that’s one thing. But two women?” Solomon made a face like he was smelling spoilt milk. “Uh-uh. That won’t pick no cotton. It’s all over once they get reported. Them two gal boys be gone by retreat.”
“What about a woman come in on her own?”
Solomon snorted like the question was too stupid to answer and said, “Woman alone? She be dead by retreat. Used up in ways I will not specify. Now switch your fanny, Queenie, you burnin’ daylight. Tonight’s a big night. One of Sheridan’s favorites’s coming for supper. Brigadier General George Armstrong Custer. Boy General himself in from the Western front.”
Chapter 15
“Solomon,” the General said that night, hoisting a cup of what the camp surgeon who’d contributed it called “spiritus frumenti,” but which looked, smelled, and had the merrying effect of whiskey. “Me own ma herself couldn’t have done better with the corned beef.” The more spiritus the General imbibed, the more Irish he became. Couple more tipples and I reckoned he’d be up doing a jig.
“Thank you, sir,” Solomon answered, briefly dipping his head into the globe of candlelight that domed up around the men gathered at the table outside the tent.
“Hah,” I whispered to Solomon. He caught my meaning: the General liked my corned beef. Mine. Not too much salt. Good as his ma’s.
The General had George Armstrong Custer set right beside him and they kept their heads tipped together whispering and passing comments like a couple courting. As for Custer, the Boy General was a peacock of the first order. He had long yellow hair he shined up with grease that hung in long curls that bounced off his shoulders. And his uniform! Where all the other officers might as well been wearing tow sacks for how crumpled and baggy and speckled with cigar ash and hardtack crumbs they were, Boy General could of stepped out of a bandbox. He was that pretty and shiny new.
It was hard keeping my eyes from him, mostly on account of he gussied himself up with the exact intention of drawing every eye his way. Like the prettiest lady at the ball, he expected folks to make over him.
“Sheridan,” Custer said, producing a bottle. Being careful to hide the label with his hand, he filled the General’s cup. “Libbie sent this down with her regards.”
Usually Sheridan was a gulper and a bolter, stuffing victuals down his flytrap like a man shoveling coal into a boiler. Except when he forgot the whole matter of eating entirely until he nearly fell out from hunger or thirst. But now, for the first time, I saw him taking dainty sips of what Custer had poured and glorying in each one.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the General exclaimed, “if this isn’t Bushmills whiskey from County Antrim I’ll be a Hottentot with a bone through me nose!”
The Boy General sat back and beamed.
“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” Sheridan said. “Your wife, the lovely Libbie, is as clever as she is beautiful.”
As Custer refilled Sheridan’s glass, the other officers cut glances back and forth that any slave could of read a mile off. They were blowed up like toads at the Boy General for shining up to the master. They were even madder at themselves for not thinking of it first and maddest of all at their wives, who weren’t Lovely Libbies with an eye toward getting them that next promotion. But that wasn’t the only trick the intruder had up his sleeve.
Custer clapped his hands, called out, “Sergeant!” and a noncom with a fiddle tucked under his arm stepped forward. “General,” Custer said, “name your mother’s favorite tune.”
“Me boyo, no one outside of County Cavan, Ireland, would have ever heard of me ma’s favorite tune.”
“Try my man, here,” Custer insisted. “Sergeant Paddy O’Hoolihan.” The General hooted at the name, then sighted in on the fiddler like he was a doomed squirrel and barked out some growly words sounded like “See an Owl Run.”
The sergeant, a stumpy fellow had that kind of thin Irish skin that went to wrinkling and spotting about the time its owner shucked off diapers, tucked the fiddle up under his chin and sawed out a few notes caused the General to rear back a hair. Then, in a voice mournful as a mother sheep bleating over a dead lamb, the fiddler sang,
I wish I was on yonder hill.
’Tis there I’d sit and cry my fill.
And every tear would turn a mill.
From the look on Sheridan’s face, it could of been his own mother crooning. Custer smoothed his mustaches even smoother, looking, as usual, a mite too pleased with himself.
The only one of Sheridan’s other officers I knew much about was his aide-de-camp, Colonel Aloysius Terrill, who I’d met on that fateful night when Sheridan plucked me off of Old Mister’s farm. In the time I had been at camp, I’d learned that Terrill was a finicky, high-nosed fellow out of Covington, Virginia, who took a bath every week and was forever bustling about Sheridan. He clipped the General’s cigars, wrote down official dispatches, checked that the inkpot was full and the quills sharp for Sheridan’s personal letters, and generally fussed over him the way a wife would. In Terrill’s case, however, the wife of a man who clearly could not stand her.
And, now, just like a wife whose husband was paying too much attention to a woman younger, prettier, and a heap more fun than she was, Terrill glared at the Boy General who was making Sheridan laugh with bits of whispered gossip and comments about this one and that. Sheridan and Custer were two bad boys egging each on. General loved being a scamp and Terrill was more a scold than a scamp.
When the air was blue with cigar smoke and the kind of cussing’d make a peg-leg pirate blush, Terrill snapped his fingers and twirled them around the empty glasses. Solomon and I filled them up even though the bottle was right there in front of that prissy colonel. When Terrill’s glass was topped up, he abruptly raised it in a jerky fashion as the man was incapable of ever acting natural, and said, “A toast to the General for he has broken the Confederacy. Thanks to Sheridan, the Rebels’ backs are against the wall and they shall crumble now that we’ve whipped them on the battlefield and starved them out at home. To the General!”
“To the General!” the men roared, and down the gullet went every drink except for two: the one sitting untouched in front of the General and the one in front of Custer. The two men just sat there trading low-lidded glances like someone had passed wind. Little by little, the clinking and guzzling stopped. When the officers saw that their commander had gone black in the eyes and wasn’t drinking, the jolly drained off fast and silence fell heavy on the little party.
Even the fiddler noticed and stopped playing so that, though the General spoke quiet, we all heard when he asked, “Terrill, tell me, Colonel, have you ever been hungry?”
Solomon caught my eye, but I didn’t need his warning. The General’s anger was as easy to read as thunderheads gathering in the north. Terril
l, though, Terrill didn’t have the sense to look up when the sky went dark and he answered in his highborn Southern Yankee way, “Well, ah, rations have, ah, upon occasion, ah, been short.” The poor fellow sounded more sheep than man with all his ah-ah bah-bahing.
“What I mean, Terrill,” Sheridan pressed. “There on your father’s plantation…” Sheridan never missed an opportunity to bullyrag his adjutant about coming from a rich Southern family. “Did ye ever have to go to bed night after night with your guts rumblin’ from hunger?”
“I’m not sure I—”
“I mean, Terrill, did you ever have to listen to your wee brothers and sisters cryin’ themselves to sleep?”
Terrill, finally feeling the horns sinking into his hindquarters, pulled himself up straight and stammered, “No, but I fail to see—”
“Failure to see, Terrill, precisely. I’d count failure to see as the greatest weakness of your kind. Colonel, what place did you graduate in your class at West Point?”
“General, we’ve already been over this. Several times.”
“What place, Colonel?”
Reluctantly, he answered, “First.”
“First, yes. Yes, now I recall. First, that’s right. And you, Custer, where did you graduate?”
“Dead last, sir,” the Boy General piped right up, like him near washing out was some kind of blue ribbon.
“And myself, Terrill. Tell our guests what you know of my history at the Point.”
“I don’t believe I recall the particulars, General.”
“Thirty-fourth out of fifty-three. That was my rank. But there is something more notable about my time at our alma mater, is there not, Terrill?”
“I wouldn’t know, sir.”
“Oh, come now, Terrill. Don’t be modest. We share a bit of family history, do we not?”
Terrill worked his jaws, his nostrils flinching from anger held in.
“Why, indeed we do,” the General persisted. “Let me tell the lads the story. I was suspended, wasn’t I, Terrill? Sent down my third year. I’d gotten into a bit of a scuffle, right? And who was my opponent, Terrill? Came from the finest of families. Big fellow. Had half a foot and fifty pounds on me. Who was that lad? Terrill, remind me. Who was he?”
Maybe it came with being a warrior, or being short as he was, but there was a meanness to the General. When he took out after someone, he was a rooster wouldn’t stop until he pecked feathers down to blood. I’d seen him do it myself many a time. Pitch in after a man just for the fun of it. Terrill, he’d lost a lot of feathers in his time. Still Sheridan went on pecking. In the next few minutes I learned why the General kept him around to do just that.
Finally Terrill unseamed his lips and the words burst out. “My brother, sir. You beat my older brother, William, near senseless.” Terrill wasn’t tripping over any “ahs” now. “After you attacked him with a bayonet.”
“In a fight he started by calling me…” Sheridan snapped his fingers like he couldn’t recollect the particulars. “Help me out, Terrill. What was it your brother called me?”
“I don’t think—”
“Oh, is that the way of it, then?” Sheridan said in a viperous low tone. “You don’t see and you don’t think. A blind idiot I’ve got for an aide, is it?” Of an instant, he slammed his fist down on the table and roared, “Colonel Terrill, I order you to tell the assembled what your brother called me!”
Terrill sat grim and white as death while the others looked everywhere except at him. Finally, he whispered, “A mick…”
“Eh?” Sheridan said, putting his hand behind his ear, playing at being deaf. “I’m not sure we all caught that.”
Seeing no way out, Terrill said, “A mick nigger.”
“Ah, yes, mick nigger, that was the charming term used by your charming brother, that I had no choice but to defend myself against. Then your family saw to it that I was tossed out for a year, didn’t they, Colonel?”
Terrill bit his words back.
“Terrill, you are an ass if you presume to know how ferociously a hungry man will fight for his home, his family, his dignity. You and your sort might count a man out because he’s hungry and ragged, but that would be a grave mistake. A very grave mistake, indeed.”
Terrill’s nostrils flared and he breathed heavy as a man’d run five miles. All at the table took to studying their spoons, the dirt under their fingers, anything that’d keep their eyes from falling his way.
The silence went on uncomfortable long before Sheridan hollered at the fiddler, “Paddy, pray tell me, laddie, will you not be giving us a tune with some fun to it? A jig perhaps to cheer me boyos up? Faces around here are as long as old Abe Lincoln’s himself.”
The fiddler struck up a jig and the men fell all over themselves clapping and playing at having fun. Even Sheridan went along, pretending to be having a high old time until, halfway through the tune, he smacked his hands on the table, stood, and announced, “Carry on with your festivities, gentlemen. I must leave in a few hours for Winchester to confer with the secretary of state. I trust you won’t let Old Jube cross Cedar Creek and take back the Shenandoah Valley in my absence.”
Everyone har-harred at that except Sheridan, who suddenly seemed uneasy and troubled in his mind, the evening’s previous jackassing forgotten. He motioned for the camp commander, Major General Wright, to join him and they slipped outside. I exchanged a look with Solomon as we gathered up the dirty dishes. We both knew something was up and that the General needed looking after. Solomon tipped his head toward Sheridan. I put down my stack of plates and followed.
Outside, a big, low-hanging harvest moon gave the camp a ghostly silver glow. The air was crisp enough that mist wreathed Sheridan’s head when he spoke. Even hanging back in the shadows as I was, Sheridan’s order to Wright was clear. “General, I am leaving you in command of the Army of the Potomac’s cavalry. Mind that pickets are posted every night.”
“Yessir, General,” Wright answered in a jolly way as though he and the General were still throwing back Mrs. Custer’s whiskey. “But we’ll have to stake it pretty far south, hard as we’ve pushed those damned Secesh back. Yes, I doubt Johnny Reb will be disturbing our peace much anymore now that you’ve dealt him a mortal wound.”
I couldn’t believe the man was saying such a stupid thing.
There was a sharp edge in the General’s voice when he asked, “General, were you not listening to a ______ word I just said? A wounded ______ snake can ______ kill a man fast as a healthy one.”
Sheridan pivoted on his heel and, without returning Wright’s salute, stomped away. At that moment, the General must of been pretty sure he was surrounded by saps and nincompoops and he’d have to win the damn war all by himself. Everything in me wanted to tell him he wasn’t alone. That all he needed do was say the word and Cathy Williams’d follow him through the gates of hell.
Chapter 16
“What in holy hallelujah?” Solomon, looking around his mess, demanded the next day after Sheridan and his cavalry corps rode off. All around us soldiers, sergeants, commanders, even the other contrabands in Sheridan’s staff who usually at least tried to look busy, were lolling about, taking their ease. “Did Robert E. Lee surrender and nobody told me?”
The whole camp had turned into a county fair with troopers pitching horseshoes, playing music, smoking rabbit tobacco, and generally loafing about. Solomon glanced around at the shiftlessness and asked me, “They think the damn war’s won already?”
Since he couldn’t do it in words, Solomon chastised the lazy white boys by working his crew double hard, patrolling the mess area, scrubbing little bits of rust off the cast-iron pans with sand, and grinding up enough parched corn to feed Pharoah’s army twice. The others grumbled at Solomon doing them that way now that Sheridan and his officers were gone and the Seceshes all but whipped. I even acted mad myself. But I wasn’t.
I was well acquainted with Rebel snakes and I knew that the General was right: they had enough poison stored
up in them to snuff your candle not just when they were wounded, but even after they fell down stone-cold dead. Fact is, the Rebels were trapped so tight in their harebrained dream of what the South was, even death wouldn’t release them. So Sheridan was right to be worried about the near-whipped Rebs, and I worked that day like he was standing there watching me.
That night, as I slept, Wager Swayne came to me as he had many and many a time before. The dreams always ended with him being fit and alive. He’d sit up, take the bandage off his eyes, declare he felt grass-fed and groomed twice, hop off that wagon, and take my hand to help me down.
We’d run into the woods, which were misty, yet bright and sparkling with light, find a nest full of turkey eggs, or a hive of generous bees and have ourselves a treat. Then, while he was stretched out on a blanket of primrose, bee balm, black-eyed Susans, larkspur, and butterfly weed, I’d flap my arms and soar off into a sky bright blue as a prairie lily. After I took his breath away with the audacity of my swallowtail swooping, he would be overcome with admiration and holler up to me, “My pen is bad, my ink is pale; my love for you shall never fail.”
In the dream I had that night, though, when I lifted the bandages from my soldier’s face, graveyard things wriggled where his eyes had been. I jerked awake to escape the ugliness, then fell back asleep five more times and four more times horror waited under the bandages. Once I found Old Mister staring up at me with his vacant eyes, brain-fevered from dying of the spider I’d put to bite him. Then it was Old Miss squinting hate at me. Then there were rows of dog’s teeth, spiders, and snakes where the soldier’s eyes should of been. The fifth time, though, Daddy was hidden beneath the bandages. My father was alive and he told me he was on his way home to me and Mama and Clemmie and would never leave, and I sobbed until I woke myself up. After that, I slept no more.
The next night, scared that the graveyard things would come to disturb my rest again, I went to find peace where I always had in the past, off by myself in the woods. I wandered out a quarter mile or so to the perimeter of camp where Sheridan had his picket line posted with guards switching off every two hours all night to make sure no Rebs crept up on us.
