by Eric Flint
“Pretty crude,” he muttered.
Even Sheff could see that that was true. The boardinghouse, from the outside, had looked more like a huge log cabin than any boardinghouse or hotel Sheff had ever seen in Baltimore. On the inside, it looked about the same.
But, again, he couldn’t have cared less. He had a uniform! The garment was a magic shield, shedding all the minor cares of life as if they were so many raindrops.
“Never you mind, Jem!” Sheff ’s mother shook her head. “Me and Dinah can patch up what needs it.” Shrugging: “It’s solid built, whatever else. A lot more solid built than you and my little boy are, when men start shooting at you.”
“There ain’t no war going on, Ma,” Sheff protested. But, even in his high spirits, he didn’t miss the fact that his uncle had grimaced slightly.
No, there wasn’t a war going on. Leaving aside clashes with wild Indians, anyway. But even at sixteen, Sheff knew enough about the world to know that a war was most likely coming.
He couldn’t have begun to explain the politics that would drive that war. He was only just beginning to even think in those terms.
It didn’t matter. All he had to do was look down at that wonderful green uniform he was wearing. Would the sort of men who’d murdered his father just for being a black freedman allow the father’s son to wear a uniform?
He didn’t think so.
But he also didn’t care. What mattered was that he did wear the uniform of the army of Arkansas. And he made a solemn vow to himself, right then and there, that he’d learn everything a soldier needed to learn. So that when the men came to murder the mother and the daughter, the son would murder them instead.
“And why are you lookin’ so fierce of a sudden, boy?” asked his uncle.
Best not to answer that directly, or his mother would start squawking again. “Ah…just thinking of the Bible, is all.”
Uncle Jem smiled. “The Old Testament, I hope.”
“Book of Judges. Book of Samuel, too.”
CHAPTER 7
By evening, Sheff ’s elation had become leavened by caution. According to the terms of their enlistment, Sheff and his uncle had been required to report for duty before nightfall. Which they’d done—and immediately found themselves assigned to a barracks on the outskirts of the city that made the construction of the boardinghouse look like the work of fine artisans.
Just a very long empty log cabin was all it was, with a single door at either end. The building had a row of bunks down each side, in three tiers, except for a fireplace on the north wall. The bunks were crammed so close together there was barely room to squeeze between them. They’d have covered up the windows completely, except there weren’t any windows to begin with. And the space between the bunk tiers was so short that it looked to Sheff as if his nose would be pressed against the mattress of the man sleeping above him. Unless he got assigned to one of the top bunks, in which case his nose would be pressed against the logs of the roof.
The air would be horrible up there, too, with this many men crammed into so little space. To make things worse, there was still enough chill in the air at night that the fireplace in the middle of the barracks was kept burning. It had a chimney, of course, but Sheff had never seen a fireplace yet that vented all the smoke it produced.
There didn’t seem to be enough spittoons, either, for that many men, half of whom Sheff could see were chewing tobacco. On the other hand, he couldn’t see any sign that the men crammed into the barracks had been spitting on the floor, either, so maybe they emptied them regularly.
Chewing tobacco was a habit Sheff planned to avoid, himself. It just seemed on the filthy side, even leaving aside the fact that his pious mother and uncle disapproved on religious grounds. Sheff wasn’t sure exactly why they did, since he’d never found anything prohibiting tobacco in the Bible, not even in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He ascribed it to the fact that, in his experience so far in life, he’d found that people who were really devout tended to think a lot of things weren’t proper, even if they couldn’t exactly put their finger on any one place in the Bible where it said so.
About fifteen seconds after he and his uncle entered the barracks, standing there uncertainly after closing the door behind them, one of the men playing cards on an upended half barrel at the center of the room looked up.
“Just joined?” he asked.
Uncle Jem nodded. Sheff added, “Yes, sir.”
The man exchanged thin smiles with his two fellows at the barrel. There was something vaguely derisive about the expressions.
“Sir, no less,” one of them chuckled. “Lord God, another babe in the woods.”
All three of the men at the barrel were black, but this one was so black his skin looked like coal. The eyes he now turned on Sheff were just as dark.
“We ain’t ‘sirs,’ boy. We the sergeants of this outfit. ‘Sirs’ are officers. You salute them and act proper when they’re around. Us, you don’t salute. And while’s you’ll learn to act proper around us, too, it’s a different set of rules.”
Jem cleared his throat. “And those are…what?”
“You’ll find out. Soon enough.”
The third of the trio had never looked up from his cards. He now spoke, still without looking. “Only bunks open are two in the back,” he said, giving his head a very slight backward tilt. “Both top bunks, but don’t bother complaining.”
He flipped a card onto the barrel. “I’m Sergeant Hancock. This here”—a flip of the thumb toward the sergeant who’d spoken first—“is Sergeant Harris. The one as black as the devil’s sins is Sergeant Williams. He’s the friendly one.”
Williams grinned. “And he’s the one who tells lies all the time.” When he turned the grin onto Sheff and his uncle, it seemed full of good cheer. “I’m actually mean as Sam Hill, you cross me. But I’m sure and certain you boys wouldn’t even think of that. Would you?”
That didn’t really seem to be a question that required an answer, so Sheff kept his mouth shut. So did his uncle.
Williams grunted. “Didn’t think so. Go ahead, now. Get yourselves settled in. So to speak. The captain’ll be along shortly. Maybe—if you’re real unlucky—the colonel, too.”
Sheff and Jem did as they were told, edging themselves and their little sacks of belongings past the three sergeants at the barrel. None of them made the slightest effort to clear any space for them as they went by. From what Sheff could tell, they’d forgotten about the new arrivals altogether and were concentrating completely on their card game.
As Sheff and his uncle made their way to the back of the barracks, Sheff was surprised to spot three white men among the soldiers. He’d had the impression that the army of Arkansas was all black, except for some of the officers.
That officers would be white was a given. The only thing surprising there was that Sheff knew some of them were black, even including the colonel who commanded the regiment. But he hadn’t expected to encounter white men in the enlisted ranks.
Two of them were no older than he was, either. Including, he discovered as he came up to the bunk he’d been assigned to, the soldier who’d be sleeping below him.
The situation was…strange. Confusing, too.
The white boy on the middle bunk looked away from the book he was reading and gave Sheff a smile. “Got stuck on the top, did you? Poor bastard. But at least you’re in a corner bunk. There’s enough cracks in the wattling that you’ll be able to breathe. Some, anyway. ’Course, you’ll hate it come winter. But who knows? By then you might be promoted, or dead. That’s for sure and certain my plan.”
Sheff wondered how he’d been able to read at all. The space in the middle bunk was so tight that the boy had had to keep the book pressed practically against his nose.
Now the boy lowered the book onto his chest—which didn’t require shifting it more than two inches—and gave Sheff ’s little sack a scrutiny. “Won’t be no room for that, up there. But there’s still some space under the bott
om bunk.”
Seeing Sheff ’s hesitation, his smile got more cheerful still. “Relax. Bean’t no thieves in this company.”
The black man on the middle bunk across from him snorted sarcastically. “You livin’ in a dream world, Cal. Plenty of these curries be thieves. It’s just that they terrified thieves.”
He rolled over to face Sheff, his shoulder barely clearing the bunk above him. There was no smile on his face, but he seemed friendly enough.
“He’s right, though, boy. You don’t got to worry about nobody stealing nothin’ here. Not from another soldier, anyway.”
This soldier was much older than Sheff or the white boy. At a guess, somewhere in his midthirties—about the same age as Sheff ’s uncle. On his way down the line of bunks, Sheff had noticed that the age spread among the soldiers was considerable. None of them had seemed any younger than him, but he’d spotted one man who had to be at least fifty.
That seemed a little odd to him, also. But, then, he really knew very little about armies and soldiering.
Yet, anyway. He planned to learn, applying himself to the task.
“My, don’t he look fierce of a sudden?” chuckled the white boy. “Must be thinking of the Bible. I just hope he don’t talk in his sleep, like Garner does. Not sure how much Leviticus I can take, droning in my ear when I’m trying to sleep.”
The older black soldier across from him echoed the chuckle. “Say that again.”
That really did seem like a friendly smile on the boy’s face. Sheff felt tension he hadn’t even realized was there start to fade away.
He had other memories of white people beyond those of hateful and screaming faces beating his father to death, after all. One of his closest playmates, growing up, had been a white boy from a family living nearby. Until…
The world pulled them away from each other. Ed Rankin, his name had been. Sheff still found himself missing him from time to time.
So, finally, he smiled himself. “I do read the Bible,” he allowed. “But I don’t talk in my sleep—and I bean’t too fond of Leviticus anyway.”
By then, his uncle had muscled his way onto the top bunk above the older black soldier. “Lord in Heaven,” he muttered, edging into blasphemy. “What kind of no-account carpenter built a bunk bed that don’t give you no more than two foot of space from the ceiling?”
“His name’s Jeremiah McParland,” said the white boy immediately. “He’s not a carpenter, though. He’s the member of the family in charge of the bunk bed department, and he designed them. The space is twenty inches, by the way.” The boy shook his head. “I had words with him about it. Pointless though it be. He always was the greediest member of the family.”
Seeing the confused look on Sheff ’s face, the boy’s smile widened. “I’m Callender McParland. Family’s rich now that we set up in Arkansas, since we own the biggest furniture company here. And the captain’s a cousin of mine. Don’t do me no good, though. The colonel’s that monster Jones. General Ball’s still worse—and the Laird is worse yet. Even if cousin Anthony was inclined to play favorites—which he ain’t, the bastard—he wouldn’t dare nohow.”
There was a commotion at the far end of the barracks. Peering around the corner of the bunk, Sheff saw that two men had come in through the same door he and Jem had used.
One was white; one was black. The white one was average size; the black one was very tall and long-legged. Both of them were officers, from the fancy look of the uniforms.
The three sergeants at the barrel had come to their feet. “TEN-shut!” hollered Sergeant Harris.
Immediately, the white officer said loudly, “At ease, men.”
From what little Sheff could tell at the distance, he seemed a friendly enough sort. Although it could just be that he’d been smart enough to realize that it would take nigh on forever for men crammed into three-tiered bunk beds to come to attention on the floor.
The black officer with him, though, didn’t seem friendly at all.
The white officer came forward a few steps. “We’ve had five more recruits since my last inspection. My name’s Anthony McParland, for those of you who don’t know, and I’m the company captain.” He nodded back toward the black officer. “And this here is Colonel Jones. He’s in command of the regiment.”
They were both young men, Sheff suddenly realized. The uniforms had confused him, at first, automatically imparting an aura of age along with authority. But now he could see that Captain McParland was somewhere in his midtwenties and Jones not more than a few years older.
“Our complement is now full,” the captain continued. “That means we start real training tomorrow. Early tomorrow.”
Suddenly his face broke into a big smile, and Sheff could easily see the family resemblance to the young soldier in the bunk next to him. “We’ll start teaching you how to kill white men. With some exceptions. Me, for starters. Anybody else in a green uniform. Civilians, of course.”
The black colonel moved forward. Unlike the captain, his face was marked by a scowl.
“Don’t get all eager, you dumb curries. You want to know how you kill white men? Lots of ’em, I mean, in great big heaps. Not just maybe one, here and there, while you’re running like rats.”
He waited, still scowling, while silence filled the barracks.
“Didn’t think so,” he grunted. “Well, boys, forget any fancy dreams you got about muskets and cannons and such. The way you kill lots of white men—any color of men—is by learning how to walk better than they do. Walk faster, walk farther, walk longer—and do it while carrying more than they can. Simple as that. By midmorning tomorrow—I guarantee it—you’ll have learned that lesson. And you’ll keep learning it, and keep learning it, and keep learning it, until even curries as ignorant as you understand it in the marrow of your bones.”
He grunted again. “You’ll find out.” With no further ado, he turned and walked out of the barracks. The captain made to follow but paused in the open doorway and looked back. The smile seemed as wide and cheerful as ever.
“Don’t eat much,” he said. “I mean it. You really don’t want to eat much. Neither tonight nor—specially—tomorrow morning. Of course, you probably won’t have time anyway.”
Then he was gone.
“I do believe I’m going to forgo the big repast I was planning,” McParland said. “Of salt pork and potatoes, that being all we ever get, pretty much, so it ain’t no big hardship.”
Sheff decided he’d do the same. Despite the smile, he didn’t think the captain had been really joking.
They were spilled out of the bunks by the sergeants somewhere around four o’clock of the morning. Felt like it, anyway. It was sure and certain still dark outside.
“This is ‘morning’?” complained one of the soldiers. Softly, though, almost under his breath. The sergeants were definitely not in a joking mood.
Sheff shared the sentiment, but…
He reminded himself of the Book of Judges and—most of all—of a mob beating his father to death, and he kept his mouth shut.
By ten o’clock that morning, miles into the most godawful set of hills and hollows Sheff had ever seen, he was on his knees puking up what little food he’d had in his stomach. Cal McParland was kneeling right next to him, doing the same.
His feet ached, his legs felt as if they were burning from coals within, and the heavy pack on his back seemed like the Rock of Ages. They’d been marching since dawn, with the captain and the sergeants setting a murderous pace. At the start of the march, Sheff had been disgruntled that they hadn’t been provided with muskets—or, indeed, any sort of weapon beyond the knives they all carried in scabbards at their belts, which were really more in the way of tools than fighting gear. Now he was deeply thankful for it.
“Funny thing is,” McParland finally managed to half whisper, “I don’t actually got nothing ’gainst white men. Being’s I’m one myself.”
Sheff had wondered about that. “Why’d you enlist, then?” he ask
ed, in the same strained half whisper. “Your family bean’t poor, like mine.”
Somehow, McParland managed a shrug under that huge pack. “Something of a family tradition, now. And…well, we like Arkansas. Got nothing against the United States, really. But if they come here, not being polite about it, we decided we’ll send them back.”
There was something about that answer that seemed awfully fuzzy to Sheff. But…
There was also something about it that would probably look real good, clarified up some. He thought he was finally coming to understand—really understand—what Abraham’s people felt when God led them into the Promised Land.
“On your feet!” bellowed Sergeant Williams, trotting down the line of exhausted men. “Break’s over!”
Williams didn’t look any more tired than if he’d just come back from an evening stroll. Sheff envied him that ease, but mostly it just filled him with determination. If Williams could learn to do it, so could he.
He heaved himself to his feet, giving Callender McParland a helping hand as he did so. The white boy was a lot more slender than he was. That pack had to be just about killing him.
“Thanks,” McParland murmured. He managed something of a chuckle, once he was erect. “And will you look at these uniforms? Good thing they made ’em out of whatever this awful cloth is. Dirty as they are, least they bean’t torn.”
Sheff looked down at his own uniform, which was just about as dirty and scuffed up as his companion’s. There wasn’t much left of the new look it had had when he got it the day before.
“I don’t mind,” he said softly. “It’s still green, and it’s still a uniform.”
Williams came trotting back, whacking a few slow-movers with one of the fancy-looking sticks the officers and sergeants carried. A baton, Sheff had heard them called.
