With Every Drop of Blood

by James Lincoln Collier

  We were all still as could be. Sarah and Sam stared at Pa, their mouths half open. I wondered if I’d be able to stand up to fighting like that. Pa went on looking out the window. “As many times as I see it happen, it took me by surprise. It was like getting slugged there with a club. I went numb, and the next thing I remember I was crawling up out of the creek holding on to myself where I’d got hit. My rifle was gone, I don’t know where. I guess I dropped it in the creek when I got hit. It didn’t matter, for I wasn’t going to need it anymore. Then the numbness wore off and it began to hurt something awful. I crawled away and lay down behind some trees where I wasn’t so likely to get run down by those Yankee horses. I sat there holding on to myself, biting into the collar of my shirt so as to keep from hollering out. But even so, every once in a while I’d hear this sound come out of me, like a cow bellering. It was funny—it didn’t seem like I was making the noise—it was just coming out of me.”

  He stopped talking and looked at us.

  “What happened next, Pa?” Sam said.

  “I was lucky. The fighting passed on away and it wasn’t more than an hour or so before the stretcher-bearers came along and carried me back to where they’d got a tent set up for the doctors. That wasn’t much fun, being jolted along on that stretcher, but I got there by and by and they took the ball out of me and stitched me up. After that I lay in an old storehouse they’d fixed up for a hospital. In about a week I was well enough to bump along in a wagon without it hurting me too much. I picked up rides here and there to come home. Most people are glad enough to help a wounded soldier out. They’d share what they had.” He looked at us all once more. “And here I be.”

  None of us said anything for a minute. Then I said, “How soon do you think you’ll heal, Pa?”

  He turned his head to look out at the sun shining down on the hayfìeld stubble. “That’s up to the Lord, Johnny. ‘What man is he that liveth and shall not see death?’ Let’s hope He sees fit to spare me.”

  Ma turned and walked out of the room. She didn’t say anything, but I knew she was crying. That was when I began to wonder what the war was for.

  Chapter Two

  For a while it seemed like Pa was getting better. Ma tried to keep him fed as best she could, so as to give him strength to heal. After a couple of weeks he was getting around a little better, and even started to help with the chores some. He couldn’t do any heavy work, like chopping wood or pitching hay, but he could do light work, like splitting kindling for the stove or currying the mules. Sometimes he helped Ma with the kitchen work. It was funny to see Pa doing women’s work, like peeling potatoes. But he said Ma had done plenty of men’s work while he was off fighting; turn about was fair play.

  It was mighty hard to keep a farm going without a grown man around. Sarah and Sam did the best they could, but they were six and eight, and beyond the chickens, weeding, and maybe some berry picking in season, there wasn’t much they could do. I’d learned a lot in the time Pa was gone—how to milk the cow and strip her teats clean of milk afterward so she wouldn’t get infected, how to butcher a hog and get it ready for market, how to harness the mules and drive them. Mules take a lot of doing. They get used to one driver, and won’t obey any other. Bridget, Regis, and Molly had got used to Pa, and I had to get them used to me. It took a while, but now I could get them to go anywhere—up a rocky slope, through the woods, down a steep trail. It was all in the way you talked to them.

  Of course, it fell to me to cut all the wood for the house—chopping trees down in the woodlot, trimming off the branches, splitting the biggest logs with a maul and wedges, bringing the logs up to the house with the mules and wagon, and sawing them up on the sawbuck. Cold winter days I’d do that all day long, sunup to sundown, ten, twelve hours, until my legs ached and my arms were so tired I didn’t think I could move them anymore. And the whole while a cold wind whistling through my clothes, freezing the sweat to my skin. Sometimes there’d be snow swirling around, too. By the middle of the afternoon I’d want nothing more in the world than to go home and sit by the fire, but knowing if I did, soon enough there wouldn’t be any fire to sit by.

  Our mistake was to think that the Yankees couldn’t fight, and wouldn’t fight if they could, and it’d all be over quick. At first everybody agreed with that. It was even in the newspapers: the Yankees hadn’t the gumption for war. As soon as they saw the sun glittering off Southern bayonets, they’d turn tail and run. Everybody was certain of it. We’d be in Washington in a month, and the Federal government would hightail it up to Boston or someplace. Then our president Jeff Davis would sit down with old Abe Lincoln and tell him how he wanted things done. Everybody said it was bound to come out that way, for any good Southerner could whip a half dozen Yankees, easy.

  But it didn’t work out that way. Pa and I talked about it, sitting in front of the woodshed on the log pile while Pa showed me how to sharpen a saw. To tell the truth, I’d let the tools get pretty dull. Sharpening a saw or ax was fussy work and I wasn’t very good at it. “Johnny, you’re just making work for yourself using dull tools. See here? There isn’t enough set to these teeth. You got to bend each one out just a little or the cut’ll be too narrow and the wood’ll bind the saw.” He started to work on the teeth with a pair of pliers and I watched careful. “You got to learn these things, Johnny. Lots of hard times still ahead, that’s for sure. Grant’s got Bobby Lee penned up in Richmond, and he’s closing the noose. Hard days to come.”

  I’d always figured we were bound to win in the end, but the way Pa was talking made me feel uneasy. “You don’t think we could lose, Pa?”

  “We still got a chance, I reckon. Bobby Lee’s the greatest general there ever was. Everybody says that. If there’s a way to win, he’ll find it.”

  “But we fought so hard and lost so many men killed, it just isn’t right for us to lose.”

  “Oh, we can lose all right. We were just plain dumb thinking the Yanks wouldn’t fight, but would just roll over and die for us. They fought, all right. I saw them fight plain enough at Gettysburg. We should have had sense enough at the start to realize we couldn’t beat them one to two, much less one to six, the way people around here were saying. If we could have beat them one to six, we’d have won years ago. But we couldn’t. They’re good fighters and there’s a lot more of them than us.”

  He was making it sound worse and worse. “How much of a chance do you think we got, Pa?”

  He shook his head slowly. “Can’t tell, Johnny. Grant’s having a shove at Petersburg, south of Richmond. Petersburg’s the heart of Lee’s supply lines into Richmond. If Petersburg goes, Richmond won’t last a week. The only hope then’ll be for Lee to give up Virginia, pull his army back down South, and see if he can hold out in the Carolinas and out west until the Yanks get tired of it.”

  “But then here in Virginia we’d be caught by the Yanks, Pa.”

  He nodded. “Could happen that way. It isn’t just that they’ve got more troops than us. They’ve got a sight more factories than we have, and ships, and a navy. We never had anything you could really call a navy, not many of our own ships. We thought we were rich because we had cotton. Cotton was king, everybody said, the rest of the world couldn’t get along without our cotton, and they’d do what we wanted so as to get it. Maybe the North didn’t have cotton, but they had ships and factories for making rifles and cannon and shoes and railroad spikes.”

  “Even so, Pa, we almost had ‘em beat once.”

  He nodded his head. “If we’d been able to bust through to Washington after Manassas right at the beginning, the way we almost did, we might have won. If we’d been able to get at them before they got their factories cranked up, we might have got them to settle with us—leave us alone to run things for ourselves. But we didn’t, and they’re plumb wearing us down. See this saw?” He shook it by the handle, making it rattle. “Even that’s made up north—in Connecticut.” He stared off toward the hayfield beyond the barn. “But we aren’t giving up
yet.”

  Now he held the saw up to his eyes and sighted along the teeth. “You got to make sure all the teeth are set the same, Johnny. Otherwise the widest one’s be doing all the work for the rest. A sharp saw’ll go through a log like a hot knife through butter, but one that ain’t set right’ll leave you with a sore arm for a week.”

  Suddenly it came to me that Pa was doing an awful lot of teaching me since he got back. Now that I thought of it, it seemed like he could hardly let a minute go by without giving me some advice on something. If we were just sitting on the back steps, resting a minute, he’d start in—the best way to straighten a bent nail, what kind of food to fatten hogs with, how to patch up a piece of harness that busted when you were on the road.

  It wasn’t just me, neither. At dinnertime he’d go to work on Sarah and Sam about their schooling. He’d make them read a couple of verses from the Bible, and then he’d take the book from them and have them spell out words to him. If it wasn’t spelling, it was points of geography—what was the capital of France, and where Cuba was. Or arithmetic—two plus two for Sam, the times table for Sarah. The little ones would kick each other under the table and complained as much as they dared. But Pa said they’d missed half their schooling because of the war and had to catch up. He was specially strong on reading and writing. “Half the men I soldiered with couldn’t write their own names if you put a gun to their head. Those fellas aren’t going anywhere in life at all. They’ll spend the rest of their born days behind a plow looking at the wrong end of a mule.”

  All this teaching scared me. It was like Pa figured he had only so much time to cram it all in, and had to keep at it every day. What would we do if Pa died? I hated to think about it. Of course, he was right, for if he died I’d be the man around the place and had to know how to do things. That was Pa: he always did things right and wouldn’t give up on them till they were done right. I’ve seen the time when the plow hit a boulder in the field: where another farmer would just plow around it and keep on going, Pa’d wrestle that ornery thing out of there. Ma always said, “Your Pa hates to leave a thing until he’s got it right.” What would we do if he died? And then suppose we lost the war anyway—he’d have died for nothing.

  I couldn’t ask him about that straight out, so instead I said, “Pa, are you sorry you joined up?”

  He looked out past the barn to the hayfield again, squinting. “Johnny, that’s a hard one. I thought about it a good deal. Of course, a man’s got a duty to fight for the honor of his country. I couldn’t let the other men go and sit home safe myself while they did the fighting for me. I got too much respect for myself to do that. The Bible says, ‘A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.’ Sometimes you can’t get around things. But a man’s got other things to look after along with the honor of his country—his wife and kids, his neighbors, his church. When it started, there wasn’t a question in my mind but I had to join up. Your ma didn’t want me to go, but she saw that I had to. But if I’d a known at the start how long it would go on and how bad it would be, I might a thought twice. I hate to see you all working so hard and growing up without me around to see that you get raised proper.”

  “If only those Yankees weren’t so blame hot to turn the darkies loose.”

  “Believe me, Johnny, I didn’t go out there and get myself shot over a passel of nigras. That wasn’t the point of fighting. Why would I fight for slavery? We don’t have slaves, nor do half the people in the valley, neither. And most of them who do, don’t have more than one or two and could get along just as well without them. Better, more’n likely. Half your slaves aren’t worth the trouble. You got to feed ’em and clothe ’em and doctor ’em when they’re sick and can’t work. And you got to watch over ’em every minute to get any work out of ’em. I wouldn’t have a slave on this place if you gave him to me.”

  “The newspapers always say that slavery’s part of the Southern way of life and we can’t give it up.”

  “You don’t want to believe everything you read in the papers, Johnny. Oh, I reckon them mighty fellas with their big houses and thousand-acre spreads figure they need their slaves. But blame me if I can see the sense of it. Pay a white man a fair wage, and he’ll give you twice as much work as any nigra, and you don’t have to feed and clothe him, in the bargain.”

  “Then what’s the war for, Pa?”

  “Why, you wouldn’t want us to just roll over and die in front of the Yankees, would you, Johnny? The U.S. Constitution says each state is equal, and if Virginians let the Federals take away our slaves or say we can’t take them into the new territories out west, there’s no telling where they’ll stop. Next thing you know the Federal government will try to tell us what to grow or who we can sell our cotton and tobacco to. No, Johnny, this here war isn’t about slaves at all—it’s about a state’s right to govern itself.”

  Well, that made sense. Why should the Federal government tell us what to do? “I wouldn’t want them bossing me around,” I said.

  “Well, there it is. The way it used to be, things were even between the North and the South. But things have changed. Now the North has the most states and the most people and has got rich from all those factories and such. They can outvote us in Congress whenever they want. If you give ’em the chance, they’ll run the whole country to suit themselves—North, South, Injun territories, and everything else. That isn’t the way George Washington and Jimmy Madison and those other fellas set it up. I know what Jimmy Madison would have said if he could see the way the North has got the upper hand and was trying to push us around. He’d say it wasn’t right. He’d say the states weren’t beholden to the Federal government, that they’re free and independent. That’s what the war is all about—states’ rights, the way it says in the Constitution. Why, Jimmy Madison got a whole amendment added to the Constitution just to make sure the states hung on to their rights.”

  “What’s that, Pa?”

  He shook his head. “The tenth amendment is what it was. I can’t quote it right off exact. But the meaning of it is, the Federal government can’t interfere whenever it wants in a state’s own business.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like—if we can or can’t have slaves,” Pa said. “That’s for each state to decide.”

  I was getting sort of confused. “You said the war isn’t about slavery.”

  “It isn’t,” Pa said. “You got to see the difference, Johnny. It isn’t about whether we can keep slaves. It’s about who decides—the states or the Federals. My pa told me that when I was just a tad, and he was right.” He put his hand on my shoulder and looked me straight in the face. “Johnny, life won’t be nothing for us if the Yanks take over down here. We’d be worse off than the nigras, for they don’t know what it’s like to be your own man. But a white person, who’s lived free and independent, he won’t be able to stand it.”

  “Pa, why are the Yankees so dreadful set on coming down here and pushing us around?”

  He spit. “Some of ’em are all fired up about slavery. But a lot of them very Yanks that are down here getting themselves shot to pieces don’t want nigras around any more than I do. You ought to hear them talk.”

  “Did you ever talk to any Yanks, Pa?”

  “Sure I did, Johnny. You got to remember, we won a few fights ourselves. We captured a good many of ’em, and even picked up their wounded. Some of ’em are hot to end slavery, but a lot of ’em, so far as I could judge, don’t much care about it one way or another.”

  “Then what are they in it for?”

  “I don’t rightly know, Johnny. Course the rich fellas that own the factories want to get hold of our cotton cheap, so they probably like the idea of slavery. But you take an ordinary mill hand, some of ‘em were saying that it kept their wages down when the South had unpaid workers, but I don’t know if that’s right. Maybe it’s the pioneers who don’t want slavery out on the Plains.”

  “Why didn’t the Yanks try it before?”
>
  “They couldn’t, before, Johnny. We equaled them in strength. But as soon as they got the edge on us, they wanted to take over.” He looked off down to the hayfield once more. “Whatever else there is to it, a man who took any pride in his Southern honor couldn’t sit still for it, no matter what the odds were.”