March Toward the Thunder
Page 20
The next was a corporal who tried to explain that there was no way a mother could just sweep in and take her son with her. Although a patient, Private Nolette was still a soldier.
“And you have used him up,” Marie said. “Now you go to cut off his leg. So what use will he be as a soldier? Him you do not need. You give him back to me.”
Louis watched openmouthed. He hadn’t realized how well his mother could speak the English language that she always said stuck in her throat like a fish bone.
The cowed corporal was replaced by a sergeant who ended up shaking his head and going for a lieutenant. By now a crowd of soldiers on crutches, nurses, and orderlies had formed around the tent.
“I will stay here to fight for my son if it take me all summer!” Marie Nolette said, standing beside his cot and crossing her arms on her chest. She turned to wink at Louis to let him know her choice of words had been no accident.
“You tell him, ma’am!” a soldier leaning on two canes shouted out from the bandages that covered most of his face.
“They ain’t gonna back her down!” a one-armed private chipped in, pumping his remaining fist in the air.
A loud Hurrah! went up from the crowd as the befuddled lieutenant retired from the field of battle. This was the best entertainment that had ever come to Depot Hospital.
My mother!
There was so much hope and pride in his heart now that Louis thought it might burst. He was grinning as widely as all the others who’d gathered to take his mother’s side.
The captain, who was the last to arrive, came with a handful of papers.
Louis’s mother took half a step forward, her chin up, her index finger raised. Before she could speak, the officer raised his hand in a conciliatory manner.
“Mrs. Nolette,” the captain said, in an extremely polite voice, “we’ve looked into your son’s records. He’s due to be honored with several commendations, it seems. Wouldn’t you like to see him stay here to get his medals?”
“You want him to have medals, you send them to him, eh?” Marie Nolette pressed her lips together and nodded.
The captain nodded back to her.
The man is trying not to laugh. He’s smart enough to be as amused by this as everyone else—except that sawbones.
Louis could see the doctor out of the corner of his eye. Clearly displeased, he’d been pushed to the back of the crowd—hopefully holding the dirty saw he’d retrieved from the muddy tent floor.
“In that case,” the captain said, handing the papers to Louis’s mother, “if you accept the consequences of removing him from professional hands, we’re placing your son in your care.”
The captain produced a pen. “Just make your mark here, ma’am.”
Artis helped him to his feet, wrapping a blanket around his shoulders. Louis’s head was spinning even more than it had been from his fever. People were cheering, patting him on the back, grasping his hands.
“Good luck to you, laddie.”
“’Bout time somebody on our side had a victory.”
“Your ma’d make a better general than the sorry lot we been saddled with!”
Then they were in the sunshine outside the tent, Artis supporting him with an arm around his shoulders on one side, M’mere under Louis’s arm to his left.
“Nigawes, my mother, I have no clothes for traveling.”
“In my bag,” Marie Nolette replied.
A cheer went up from somewhere behind the tent they’d just left.
Louis turned to look. Near the back of the crowd Jake cupped his hands to shout to Louis.
“Had a little ac-cy-dent back here. Doc fell into the sinkhole!”
The elation that gave him strength began to fade as they moved away from Depot Hospital. They were on one of the roads now that led up from the river.
Don’t know if I can take another step.
A wagon pulled up next to them.
“Sorry I’m late, ma’am,” a bearded wagoneer said to Louis’s mother.
Artis slipped his arm from around Louis’s shoulders. “Grab hold.”
Louis grasped the side of the wagon to steady himself.
His mother wrapped her arms around Artis. Louis could see from the surprised look on his Mohawk friend’s face how much strength Marie Nolette was putting into that hug.
Bet she cracked at least two of his ribs, Louis thought as his mother let loose and Artis took a deep breath.
His mother whispered a few words and then put something in Artis’s hand. He nodded and slipped the medicine she’d given him for protection into his pocket.
The tall Mohawk boy turned back to Louis.
“Far as I go, brother,” Artis said. He squeezed Louis’s shoulder and stepped back. “You travel well. Your ma will take care of you. From what I have seen of her, she can cure everything except that bad case of the Abenaki uglies you got.”
Artis looked up for a minute, took a deep breath, then reached down to his belt. He untied the bag of marbles and placed them in Louis’s hand. “I’ll win these back from you after the war.”
Then Artis walked away without looking back.
Should of told him that no Abenaki ever beat a Mohawk in an ugly contest.
But the moment had passed. Artis had taken his leave in true Indian fashion.
We don’t have words for good-bye.
“Climb on,” the yellow-bearded driver said.
As soon as they were settled in, his mother cut off the moist dressings.
“Wet bandages! Fools! Do they not know you must keep a wound dry.”
She reached into her bag and brought out a flask filled with brown liquid.
“Drink,” she said.
Louis drank, warmth spreading from his throat through his chest. He breathed in and out, each breath bringing him a little more strength.
His mother held out a pair of moccasins. She helped him pull off his boots, threw them into the back of the wagon as he put the soft moose skin slippers on his feet. He lay back and his mother wrapped the blanket around him.
It was dark when the wagoneer dropped them off in the countryside.
Where are we? These woods look as thick as it was in the Wilderness.
His mother helped him down. Easier to walk with moccasins on his feet, though his leg ached some. She led him along a barely visible trail through the brush. It came out in a large clearing. Canvas-covered huts made of brush and bent saplings were mixed in with small log cabins in a circle around a central fire.
“Nidobak,” his mother said. “Friends.”
People with brown faces came up to them. Some wore clothing made of skin. Others were dressed like Southern farmers.
Indians, Louis thought.
Their words sounded like Abenaki, but the accent was strange. He was led into a cabin, placed on a bed.
An old man, his face as lined as a map, looked at the open wound in his leg, the one that smelled of gangrene. He and M’mere nodded heads in agreement.
The old man went outside. When he returned it was with a bark cup that he handed to M’mere. She carefully reached in, began to place the contents of the cup along the edges of the wound in his thigh where flesh had begun to rot. Small things the size of white beans. They squirmed as she held them. Maggots.
The old man patted Louis’s shoulder, said something in Indian. Because of the accent, it took Louis a minute to understand.
Clean good. Eat sickness away.
He nodded and closed his eyes.
A deep, loud sound woke him.
Cannons!
He sat up from his blankets, heart pounding, reaching for the rifle that should have been by his side. But his Springfield wasn’t there.
Where?
His mother’s hands grasped his shoulders, gently pushing him back down.
“The fever, she is gone,” M’mere whispered. “Oligawi. Sleep good.”
Louis relaxed. He remembered where he was.
Not guns. The rumble of thunder.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
ABOVE THE TOWN
As Louis sat in the bent wood chair he’d finished making that morning, he looked out over the land. Fields and woods and in the distance the blue haze of the Green Mountains of Vermont. What M’mere had said in her letters had turned out to be true. Fishing was good in the pond. Pickerel, perch, bullhead. The farm had fine fertile ground for growing corn and beans and potatoes. Plenty of good trees. And this view . . .
You surely can see a wide swath of God’s Creation from the top of Cole Hill.
It was especially beautiful today, now that the first frost had touched the sugar maples. The land was a patchwork of gold and scarlet sewn in among the green of pine and spruce and cedar and hemlock. He looked at the crutches leaning against the wall of their small cabin. A spider had set up shop between them. The harvest of dried fly carcasses at the bottom edge of the web showed that it had been doing good business at its prime location for some time now.
Louis stretched out his leg. The scar pulled a little, but his limb was as strong as it had been before.
Fit to chase down a deer by the moon when the leaves fall.
As he thought that, a feeling of guilt swept over him.
He walked to the southeast corner of the porch. At night the valley below was dark save for a few scattered lights from farmsteads. Louis thought back on those nights when he’d looked from high places to see the glow of countless thousands of army campfires, the lights of the Rebels’ camp across the line like a reflection.
I pray to God I never see such a sight from this hill.
He touched the hip pocket where he’d put the letter. It arrived for him at the post office in the Greenfield General Store a week ago, but he’d just picked it up yesterday.
M’mere must have told him where he could reach us.
Louis pulled it out, unfolded it, and read it for the tenth time.
Faithfully yerz, Mr. Artis Leander Cook
Louis walked back to the chair and sat again. It was time he had some employment, now that he was all healed up. It wasn’t right that M’mere should be the only one earning money—though he was still drawing his pay and could apply for a pension as a disabled soldier.
Except I’m not. I’m fit as a fiddle.
He thought about what it would be like that night. His birthday supper. He’d finally turned sixteen. Only sixteen. After all he’d seen, he felt like it ought to be sixty. He was a long way from the killing fields of Virginia, but even further away from the boy he’d been. He woke up every night missing the feel of his Springfield next to him. Despite his mother’s remedies, he still had bad dreams.
Azonis and her parents and her brothers would be at dinner that night. She was no longer a little girl for sure. He saw the two of them marrying and settling down. He smiled at the thought of the way Azonis looked at him. As if he was some sort of hero.
Not a man who’d deserted his friends.
Louis sighed. He knew how they’d react when he told them tonight.
No.
You already done your duty.
Strong as she was, his mother would cry. But she’d realize that her son, who was just as stubborn as his father, had made up his mind.
Are you certain sure?
Louis raised his eyes beyond the hills. He saw in his mind those Virginia mountains, those tidal rivers, that terrible beautiful landscape he realized he couldn’t leave behind just yet.
He held up Artis’s letter.
“Be seeing you boys soon,” he whispered to the wind.
Louis’s journey through the battles of the Irish Brigade’s Virginia Campaign in the summer of 1864
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This novel is deeply rooted in fact. The events it describes in the Civil War, the weaponry, the military terms, the language used by the characters, the food they eat, even the songs they sing, are all real and the result of many years of research on my part.
Although the protagonist and his closest companions are fictional, all of the other characters and events are from the historical record. Plus, though I chose to call my main character by a different name, Louis Nolette is based on my own great-grandfather, an Abenaki Indian from Canada who did serve in the Irish Brigade in 1864.
Like many Americans, I’ve always felt a close connection to this war. When I was a child, my family drove south each summer to spend time with my great-uncle—my grandmother’s brother Orvis Dunham. A Northerner, he had chosen to live in Virginia, where he managed the Warm Springs Hotel. Our stops along the way always included Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where we would tour the battlefield, and Washington, D.C., where we visited museums and historical sites. We always knew when we crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, for it was a segregated South that we entered back then. The gas stations had separate drinking fountains for White and Colored. My grandfather Jesse Bowman, whose own Indian skin was the darkest in our family, only made that trip with us once after being told by a gas station attendant that he could not use the restroom with the sign WHITES ONLY on its door.
In Virginia, Great-Uncle Orvis took us on more battlefield tours, reliving stories he’d learned from men who’d survived those grim struggles. He also took us to visit African American friends who’d been his employees at the big hotel, bringing them food or presents for their children. Their shacks were a sad contrast to the homes of white Virginians. If the war had really been fought to free the slaves, I remember thinking back then, then why were things still this way in Virginia? Although it all happened long before I was born, the American Civil War was never just a distant memory to me.
My grandfather Jesse Bowman’s own father, Louis Bowman, was a Civil War veteran. But I knew little about it. Grampa Jesse told me that his father would never say anything about his experience in the war. It was better not told. But the memories of it were always with him, for he’d been gravely wounded and left for dead on the battlefield. “When I told him I’d enlisted for World War I,” my grandfather told me, “my father broke down and cried.”
I knew that my great-grandfather had served in a New York regiment, but I didn’t know that much about the details of his service until my sister Margaret, our family’s best historian and most dogged researcher, came to my aid as she always does. (You’ll find Marge credited in the author’s notes of many of my historical novels.) Among other things, she managed to get the pension records from the National Archives of our great-grandfather, listed not as Louis, but “Lewis” Bowman. Despite the discrepancy in the first name, there was no doubt from the details that it was he.
Soldier’s certificate # 208738
Lewis Bowman
5’ 8½", dark complexion, dark hair, black eyes
born in Canada
farmer and laborer
resident of Porter’s Corners
Town of Greenfield, Saratoga
recruited by Captain Forsythe at East Troy, New York
Private, Company E, 69th New York Infantry
Commander Peter W. Sweeney
Medical discharge August 14, 1865 at Stanton General
Hospital, Washington, DC
My great-grandfather was Canadian, but a Canadian of Native descent whose ancestral roots were in what became the United States. Records list his birth place as St. Francis, the name then used for the Abenaki Indian reserve of Odanak, a mission village made up largely of refugee Indians from New England who fled north to escape the English during the eighteenth century. (I’ve written about the eighteenth-century experiences of Odanak Abenakis in two of my earlier novels, The Arrow Over the Door and The Winter People.) Like numerous other young Canadian Indian men, my great-grandfather came south to find work because little was available around the reserve.
And, i
n 1864, it was in the United States that a recruiter for the Irish Brigade found him.
THE IRISH BRIGADE
During the Civil War, it is estimated that more than 150,000 Irishmen fought for the Union. There was also an entire Southern brigade of Irishmen that fought on the side of the Confederacy. Why was this so? The answers can be found in recent Irish history.
Despite centuries of struggle against British rule, throughout the nineteenth century Ireland was still a colonial possession of England. Although Irish men and women had already been coming to the United States for many years in large numbers, the greatest influx of Irish immigrants occurred in 1846, as a result of a blight that destroyed the Irish potato crop in 1845. In one of the greatest disasters in history, the population of Ireland dropped from about 8.5 million to 6.5 million. Many starved, but an estimated 1,600,000 Irish men and women came to the United States.
These new immigrants were generally not welcomed. They were Catholic in what was then a largely Protestant nation. They were competing for scarce jobs in a struggling economy. Many refused to hire anyone with an Irish name. Signs reading NO IRISH NEED APPLY began to appear in American cities.
In 1851, well before the Civil War, the Irish citizens of New York City formed a volunteer militia that was accepted as part of the New York State Militia as the 69th Regiment. After the attack on Fort Sumter, the 69th, led by Colonel Michael Corcoran, fought at the first battle of Bull Run, serving as the rear guard during the Union retreat. Two more New York regiments that were mostly Irish, the 63rd New York and the 88th New York, and two other regiments, the 28th Massachusetts and the 116th Pennsylvania, were added to the 69th to form the Irish Brigade.
With a lack of opportunity for other jobs, the example of prominent Irish Americans, the generous cash bonuses being offered to recruits . . . it’s not surprising that many Irish jumped at the chance to enlist. Moreover, by the mid-nineteenth century the Irish already had a long and honorable history of military service, having signed on as mercenary soldiers in wars all over the European continent. Becoming a solider was a familiar path for a young Irishman with no other road to take. Although the cash bonuses offered for volunteering were attractive, their motives were not just monetary. Some saw it as a way to gain military experience that they might use when the American Civil War was won, in a later battle to free their own homeland from British rule.