by Peter Bowen
My gold-headed cane about beat the damn door through before a bouncer come. He greeted me civilly and let me in and went off to fetch Susie. When she come I told her about the gold and Bill’s last request. Susie let out a beller of pure mirth.
“Damn,” she said, “he was the pure quill, wasn’t he? Him and you and Pardee and McKinnick come here drunk as lords and sing hymns till you passed out.”
Susie went on remembering for a while. I didn’t mind.
“Pure quill, sure enough,” she said, and she went off dabbing at her eyes and rousted the girls out. They took quite some time getting as dressed as they ever do and come downstairs in twos and threes, yawning and making tabbycat sounds.
Susie tried to explain it, but the whores just crowded around the little table I’d put the gold on, and some grabbed and then they got to shoving and in about three seconds there was the biggest damn catfight I ever saw in my life. I left when the crockery started flying and other weapons such as fireplace pokers and curling irons was picked up and used. They was fighting over Bill’s gold like the buzzards in the watered-silk vests was fighting over his body. I have never much liked critters that bunch up unless they eat only grass.
I caught the next train from Denver to California. I looked out the windows of the club car at the country, passed places where I’d killed good men and bad, saw farms where there was once nothing but grass, went through little cities got electric lights and trolley cars, fer Chrissakes.
It was a fine country back then, and I don’t like it so good now. The train wheels clacked over the joints in the track and I began to think of how I came to be here at all. Like all of life, it wasn’t much of a thing got me headed this direction. I had wanted to go to sea, and I’d ended up in a sea of grass, back when the Indians ruled all the Great Plains and most of the mountains.
My little ranch is a tiny part of old General Bidwell’s spread. He used to own everything from Sacramento north to Oregon. He’d given me a little piece a long time ago, and I raised horses and a few cows, didn’t need the money but it kept my hand in.
I knowed when I got back there would be a lot of hell to pay, and there was. I had bags of mail and telegrams and five reporters in the shrubbery who had found out I was with Bill when he died.
The reporters let me into the house civil enough, and when I come out I had a shotgun and shells full of rock salt and I run them off civil enough. (When their editors complained I said it could have been buckshot.)
There was a telegram from Teethadore Roosevelt. He’d been on a trip down the Amazon and survived the piranhas and bushmasters and crocodiles, damn it. Our ex-President wanted a full and found report on Bill’s dying breaths. Likewise Miles wanted a report, likewise about three hundred newspapers.
I took all of this garbage down to the big irrigation ditch and tossed it in.
The hell with you all, I thought, watching the paper flow away on the water, he was my friend, and I don’t owe none of you bastards nothing at all.
2
I WAS BORN IN Oneida, New York, in 1851, and I run off in January of 1865, almost fourteen, and joined the Union Army. Now there’s a lot went on between those two dates, but I ain’t going to tell you that now. Other than I found it a fine idea to leave Oneida in the dead of night, over a woman.
Me being a young pup of thirteen, it was an older woman of sixteen that caused all of the trouble, her and a mule name of Oxnose. If this here woman hadn’t been the daughter of the Episcopal Bishop I’d maybe have got off with a stern lecture and I would have been spared much.
I was out late that afternoon helping old man Hoeft haul ice up from the pond to the icehouse. We’d slide a block up on a stoneboat and brace it down on the pond, and mule-haul it up the hill to the icehouse, slide it inside, and shovel sawdust all over and around it. I got to scamper up to the loft where the sawdust was stored and fork bushels of it over, and the fine wood dust made me sneeze.
It was about ten degrees above, with a bitter wind off the lake, and that summer lemonade was sure a damn long ways off. I never did get any, come to think of it.
The haul road from the ice pond was a snakey, churned-up thing, and unusable unless it was frozen. There was a spring seeped out of the hillside and leaked down to the pond, and it filled the tracks the runners on the stoneboat cut with water that froze right off. The stoneboat slid better on that ice, but Oxnose had trouble with it, never knowing what he’d step into next.
The Bishop’s house was just uphill from the icehouse, a huge building with gables and turrets and bay windows and a lot of ugly ornamental trim. The architect tried to hide his mistakes under a lot of foolery.
Old Oxnose was a placid sort of mule, the kind that will wait for years for one good shot at kicking you into eternity. One of the hames got foul on his harness and I jumped down to release it, leaving old man Hoeft with the reins, and dashed across behind old Oxnose. Oxnose decided to kick then, but he was some out of practice, and he missed me by an inch or two and both hooves hit the crosstree and busted it all to matchwood. One of the strap-iron caps on the end swung off on a bust leather and caught me right where my spine joined my skull. It probably would have killed me but for the heavy rolled stocking cap I had on. As it was I fell facedown in the snow, out like a poleaxed shoat.
I come to in a bed in a strange room, with a cool wet cloth on my forehead. I blinked my eyes. Someone had took off my clothes. There was a rustle of cloth off to my left. I moved my head slowly that way, and where the iron had thumped me I got a quick stab of pain.
There was this beautiful young woman sitting on a chair next to the bed. Deep blue eyes, black hair, pale skin—after all these years that face comes back to me unbidden.
There was an oil lamp off somewheres turned down low and a candle, which she picked up and held over me. She bent down and looked at my eyes, and I could smell her, lavender and thyme.
“You’re awake,” she said. She looked at my eyes for a long time and then she turned the cloth on my forehead.
“Thank you,” I said. I must have been breathing through my mouth when I was knocked out, my throat was dry and I croaked.
“Pretty,” she said, stroking my cheek. Her eyes was glittering a little. I was still sort of groggy, and it took me a few minutes to grasp that she had set the candle down and was removing her clothes.
You know, the first time I saw a beautiful woman taking off her clothes I thought that this was what I wanted to do in life, and I sure have and don’t you know, I love them all still, even after all the damn trouble they have caused me.
I laid there paralyzed while she took off the last of her things, and she stood there for a moment, curve of hip, dark thatch between her thighs, lovely breasts, slender and poised. The roof could have failed in at that moment and I wouldn’t have knowed or cared. She slipped into bed with me and she began to kiss me and run her hot hands over me and it occurred to me that I didn’t have the foggiest notion about where exactly I’d fit into her. I don’t think she did neither, and we thrashed around for a while, tossing the bedclothes off on the floor. Finally I slid in and we both gasped and I went off right then.
Well, bless youth. I hadn’t given off but about four gasps and the odd moan of pleasure when my dick rose up and we went at it again. She was drawing long red weals over my back and moaning and she give off a little shriek and that was what did us in.
The door slid open, and I looked over my shoulder to see the Bishop, his own self standing there in a long red flannel nightgown and a tasseled cap. He was holding a candle and seemed stunned.
The poor son of a bitch was so shocked he just stood there for several moments while his daughter thrashed and panted under me.
Finally he give off this strangled croak. “Charmian?” he said. Her head shot up like a spooked horse’s.
“Papa?” she said. I wondered who else she might have been expecting.
Then she looked back at me, her eyes white and wide all around.
&
nbsp; Now, as bad as my luck has been sometimes, it always manages to hold just enough for me to miss judgment. I ain’t making a case for the justice of it, but there it is.
The Bishop fainted dead away, and he fell into the room, taking a good chunk of the doorjamb along with him. He weighed a good two-fifty and all small objects in the room rose up and settled back down. And there was me and Charmian, all hot and distracted.
She slithered out from under me and made a dive for her clothes and I made one for mine. I noticed she was tearing her underclothes up some, and having a quick if not exactly decent mind the conniving little piece had sure showed me which way the wind blowed.
While she was bent over tearing a few holes in her stockings I crowned her medium hard with the Meissen pitcher from the washstand. It was full of water so it put her to sleep pretty good.
I shucked on my boots and looked one more time at this father and daughter and left them to sort out their differences as best they could. I took off like a stripe-ass ape.
I skedaddled to home, leaped up on the woodshed, prised up the window to the room I shared with my far too many brothers, pulled my few possibles out from under my bed, stuffed them in the sack I used for schoolbooks, and then slid back down the roof and made a beeline for the rail yard.
My luck was running good. There was a freight made up and moving south, and I wiggled in between a couple of crates. It was an open car and the wind was cold, so I hunkered down and tried just to stay warm.
My crazy uncle Arthur, when we’d go camping and fall out of the canoe or the storm would tear our tent away, used to holler happily, “Jaysus Kay-rist, Kelly, I can’t remember when I been so happy!” I hated him for it some, but that was what I chanted down there between the crates, which weren’t braced and tied good and sort of kneaded me whenever we went around curves.
I rode till almost dark and then the train got to pulling into Albany and I wriggled out of my hidey-hole and jumped off. I had about a dollar on me, in coins, a pocketknife, and no idea in all the world what to do except stay the hell away from Oneida. Jails never appealed to me much.
The police, I figured, would likely be looking for me, so I steered clear of the railroad station and hotel lobbies and spent a cold night stamping my feet and walking. Early in the morning I come across a pieman who sold hot fried cakes to the men who worked in the mills. The cakes was three for a penny. Little ways along I found another vendor who sold a big mug of sugared tea for a penny. The mug warn’t too clean but I didn’t complain.
It was a bright day, and the wind was brisking up. I was dressed warm enough as long as I was moving, and I wandered the streets, looking at the shops and officemen hurrying to their tall buildings.
Then I heard a fife and drum heading my way. They warn’t much good, but they was loud and pretty soon the scrawny soldiers come round a corner, strung out behind a big flag. Some of the men had a banner saying that Old Glory and the Union needed me. I followed them down the street. They made a smart right turn into a barracks was part of the Armory.
Having left home so hurriedlike I of course had no plans other than not getting hung. I had a good idea right then. My parents had instilled in me all sorts of good virtues, like not telling lies, so I dug around in my sack for a stub of pencil and a scrap of paper—had to tear the flyleaf out of a schoolbook. I chucked the schoolbook into the gutter, thinking I likely would not need it. I scribbled eighteen on the paper, unlaced my shoe and put the scrap inside, put the shoe back on, and stalked across the street to save the Union.
A gross, potbellied Kraut recruiting sergeant was setting in front of a plank desk in the first building, the mess hall. He had a stack of forms under his elbow. (You may wonder how I knew he was a Kraut. Well, there was this sort of mudslide down the front of his misbuttoned tunic made up of sausage scraps, pretzel dust, and beer.)
“Yaaassss?” says he, blowing a breath would’ve singed pinfeathers off a turtle. “Wass veyou?”
“Aim wantin’ ta jine up,” I said, imitating the nasal whine of the laborers who came to Oneida for the harvest, men mostly from Maine.
“Vhow olt?” he said. I thought maybe he’d speak better if he’d had a few beers.
“Eitch-cheen,” I says, “free, white, and over eitch-cheen.”
And that was all it took. He shoved a form at me, which I signed, thinking up a new name on the spot. He then tossed me to a dentist and a doctor who looked at me for maybe three minutes total and pronounced me fit. The recruiting sergeant took me to the quartermaster, who issued me boots and kit, and then a miracle happened. He took me to the paymaster who paid me one thousand dollars in greenbacks. I’d have preferred gold, but I took it.
The Union Army was real close to whipping the Rebs. And so many men were sneaking away to be home for spring planting that it was a real worry to Lincoln and Grant that Grant have enough soldiers to whip Lee when they met. So worried that they were paying good money—damn good money, a doctor made maybe five hundred a year—to keep and to get soldiers.
As an almost-fourteen-year-old accused rapist, I thought it damn handsome of my government and I have never wavered in my regard for my country or them as runs it.
Of all things I even had a money belt, belonged to my crazy uncle, and I put the money in it and put the belt on and wondered when I’d get a musket.
Luke Pabst I was, private, 33rd New York, and for three days I did nothing but guard my money from my fellow soldiers and try to march in step with the rest when we marched out to snare some more recruits.
“If you run with that Union bounty we’ll catch you and hang you,” the paymaster kept reminding me. It was the first time that the army throwed in with the civilian government but not the last, by a long goddamn.
One morning a sergeant bellered us out of bed at four in the morning and we was given twenty minutes to pack and then we moved out, slipping on the frosty cobblestones. We was marched down to the rail yard and put on a troop train with some regulars.
These was tough men, these regulars, and they had been fighting for a long time on seven dollars a month and eating what they could find. They was tanned and hard-bitten and their uniforms were faded and patched and they didn’t wear socks and they were lean and scarred and good at their business.
The rumor that there was bounty men on the train had come to them, and they was not a bit happy at sharing the train with green boys who each had been given the price of a farm and this late in the war would not see any fighting at all. For a lot of the men, the hardest of all was the knowledge that their families had done without or starved, and here with victory in sight the damned government was insulting them with these useless, rich, fat boys.
One of my fellows who warn’t too bright wandered off up into the next car to jawjack, and a few men stood up and I heard one startled yelp and after a while the men sat down again and divvied up wads of greenbacks taken from the feller they’d killed and tossed out the window.
We rode all day and the next night and then come down to the big yards in Washington. The regulars formed up and swung off and was gone.
All but the one of us didn’t survive the trip down stood around in the cold for a few hours. We had no officer with us and other than a rumor that we would be guarding prisoners we knew nothing at all, not even how to get fed. I was feeling good and sorry for myself now, and I didn’t have anyone to blubber at. I wanted to write my mother and tell her I was all right, but I couldn’t. (Later on my mother told me she never worried once. She understands me, you see.)
Then an officer and two sergeants and a paymaster carrying a paybox come striding around the end of a freight line and up to us.
The officer greeted us and the paymaster said that any soldier who wanted his bounty safe should deposit it with him. So all of them did but me. They never saw their money again, and I think maybe the army was smart enough to know that any fool who’d trust them didn’t deserve a thousand dollars.
We was marched off across th
e city, headed west, and finally to a tent camp—not so bad as it sounds, all the tents had wood floors—and we was assigned tents and given some salt pork and hardtack. First time you ever encounter salt pork and hardtack you know right off the enemy is nothing compared to the food.
The paymaster’s clerk tracked me down and hauled me off and the paymaster and then a one-eyed, one-armed, one-legged captain come in and said something in a low voice and the paymaster turned his hands up and looked heavenward. The captain laughed and he clapped him on the shoulder and I was told to go get some sleep.
The camp was all wired and fenced except where we come in, and by the time I got back to where I lived now there was three sutler’s wagons pulled up and the troops was buying food and notions from them at outrageous prices.
I bought some coffee and a big tin coffee cup and a couple of ginger cakes, but they was glycerine and sawdust and cinnamon mostly so I spat it out and attacked the hardtack and salt pork, which was filling and made me thirsty as hell.
We still hadn’t been issued guns and so I went back to the sutler and showed him some greenbacks and he sold me a two-shot derringer and ten rounds of bullets for it for forty dollars. It was an English gun and I still have it. I said I wasn’t buying until I knew the gun worked, so he prised the top off a flour barrel and fired the gun twice, and the noise was lost in the racket of camp.
Next morning a couple sergeants from the 33rd New York come by and chose five of us. We tossed our gear in a wagon and went off walking behind. We did that for three days and ended at a miserable camp of wet tents along the Rappahannock. We was to watch—and shoot if they tried to escape—a huge batch of Confederate prisoners all jammed into a barbed wire depot, mostly without blankets or shoes. Dozens was dying of pneumonia every day. All they had for shelter was old Union Army bell tents too rotten and torn to use much. The word had got round that the South was starving Union prisoners and so this is what we done. The whole South was starving and had been since Sherman went through Georgia, which was the pantry, so to speak.
