At least that was something I could understand.
Chapter Three
Pa lingered on through the fall. Sometimes he seemed a little better and would go out to the woodshed and try to split some wood, or curry the mules. If he could help at all, he would. Other times he’d take for the worse. It’d hurt him so much to walk around he’d stay in bed. He always got up for meals, no matter how bad he felt. He wasn’t a baby, he said, to be fed in bed—he’d get up and eat like a man. But he wouldn’t eat much—not that there was a whole lot to eat anyway—and go right back to bed.
For years all of us had got down on our knees every morning before breakfast and every night before bed—Sarah, Sam, Ma and me—and prayed to the Lord to bring him home to us. Now he was home and nothing was changed. Ma and me were still stuck with all the work, and more of it than ever, for there was Pa to take care of now—wash him when he felt too poorly to wash himself, help him get dressed in the morning when he felt good enough to get up.
I got a fair amount of teamster work that fall, for the bluecoats had taken a lot of people’s horses and mules. The ones that still had stuff to sell—corn or apples or cider or something—had to get it over to Stanardsville or Port Republic. They needed me. In peacetime those farmers down in the valley were mighty prosperous and would haul off to market wagonload after wagonload of corn and hay and cured pork or beef. But now, of course, the Yanks had stolen their horses and wagons, like as not. It was sorrowful to see them loading onto my wagon nothing but a couple of baskets of dried apples or a few thin slices of beef, so that the wagon wasn’t half filled. And it wasn’t a big wagon, neither—three feet wide and six feet long, covered over with a canvas tent four feet high. But it meant a little money for us, and I was mighty glad to have the work.
One time I was gone for three nights hauling a wagonload of corn from over at Harrisonburg through Port Republic and Brown’s Gap and on down to Charlottesville. I didn’t get back until alter dark of the fourth day. Ma heard the wagon swing around back to the barn and came out. I got down from the wagon. She put her hand on my arm. “Pa’s took real bad,” she said. “You better go see him.”
“I will,” I said. “Soon as I get the mules unhitched and fed.”
“No. Go now. I’ll see to the mules.”
I felt myself grow scared and cold. “How bad is Pa?”
“He’s bad. You better go quick. He wants to tell you something.”
My heart beating fast, I went in. Pa was lying in bed, propped up with a couple of pillows. His breath was coming fast, his face was white and wet with sweat. The candle by the bed flickered as I came in, and a ray of light crossed his face. Back in the shadows in a corner Sarah and Sam sat squeezed in side by side in the old rocking chair, not saying anything, just watching.
“Johnny?” Pa said. His voice was soft and hoarse.
“Yes, Pa.”
“I can’t see too good anymore,” he said in that hoarse voice. “Hold the candle up.”
I picked it up off the little table by the bed and held it up. The room brightened a bit, and I could see the little ones better. They were scared, their faces white, and there were smudges of tears on their cheeks. I looked at Pa. “That’s better,” he said.
“Can you see me, Pa?”
“More or less. Good enough. I can see where you are, anyway.”
“I’m sorry I was gone so long,” I said. “I had to go all the way down to Charlottesville. It took longer than I reckoned on.”
“It’s all right,” he said. What with his breath coming so fast it wasn’t easy for him to talk. “I’m glad you got back in time. I was scared you wouldn’t.”
“Maybe you’ll get better, Pa. Maybe it’ll pass.”
“No. Not this time. I’ll be gone soon.”
He coughed. “Johnny, over the past while I did a lot of talking about states’ rights and the honor of the South and such. I wish I hadn’t.” He coughed again.
“Why, Pa?”
“It’s bound to get you riled up to fight.”
“Pa, anybody’d get riled up to fight after what the Yankees did around here. It wasn’t just what you said. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth,’ it says in the Bible.”
“Even so, I wish I hadn’t.” He reached out his hand and I took it. It felt cold and damp. “Johnny, I want you to promise me something.”
If I hated the Yankees before, I hated them worse now. “I’ll get even with them for you, Pa.”
He coughed again, and shook his head. A kind of shudder went over him. “Water,” he whispered.
“Sam, get Pa some water.”
Sam darted away.
“I knew that’s what you were thinking, Johnny,” Pa said. “I knew you were bound to let your feelings run away with you, and might go off to fight. You got to promise me you won’t. I took care of our duty to Virginia. I took care of the honor of the South. You got to see to our duty to the family. Ma can’t take care of the little ones alone. You got to help.” He began to cough again.
“Pa—”
He held up his hand until he was done coughing, and I stayed still. Then he whispered, “You got to promise me, Johnny.”
Sam came in with a dipper full of water. I took it from him and held it up to Pa’s mouth. He took a few sips, but he was having trouble swallowing and couldn’t drink much. “Pa, let me sit you up a little higher, so’s you can drink.”
He shook his head and pushed the dipper away. “It doesn’t matter. I can stand a dry throat a little bit longer.” He looked at me for a minute. “Now, Johnny, promise.”
There wasn’t anything else I could do. “I promise, Pa.”
“You promise you won’t get any foolish notions about running off to fight for the honor of the South.”
“I promise.”
“And you’ll stay to home and see to things here.” He coughed again. “The little ones.”
“I promise.” I hated to, for there wasn’t anything I wanted more right then than to run a sword through a couple of Yankees.
He took my hand again and squeezed it. “I trust you, Johnny.” He shivered and coughed. I waited till he was done. “All right, go help your ma with the mules. I guess I’ll last a little longer.”
I hurried outside. Ma had got the mules out of harness and into the stalls. She was up in the haymow pitching down some hay for them.
“I’ll do that, Ma. You go on in and tend to Pa.”
She put the pitchfork down and clambered down the haymow ladder. “What did he want to tell you?”
“He made me promise not to run off to fight. He made me promise to stay here and help with things.”
“I figured that was it,” she said. “Did you promise?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad,” she said. She put her arms on my shoulders and looked me square in the face, for we were about the same height. “It’d kill me to lose another one, Johnny.”
Then we heard a shriek from inside the house. The kitchen door slammed open and Sarah busted into the barnyard. “Ma, Ma,” she screamed. “Pa’s dead.”
Mr. Reamer over at Conrad’s Store made the coffin for us, just a plain pine coffin. I said I’d do some teamstering for him to pay for it. I picked it up. We put Pa in and I nailed the top on. Then we drove over to the little Baptist church in Port Republic where we went. To be honest, we didn’t get over there very often, for it was ten miles over and ten miles back. We didn’t have any money for a stone, so I made a cross of wood and lettered on it Pa’s name and his dates—1825-1864. It wasn’t very pretty, for I wasn’t much of a hand at sign painting, but I figured when the war was over and I was grown and had some money, I’d buy him a regular headstone.
Riding home from the cemetery was the hardest thing I ever did in my life. It felt like I was tied back there to that wooden cross by a string from my guts. Ma had got over crying and the little ones sat quiet—I don’t think they really understood it. But my feelings busted loose. I couldn’t
stop crying and cried for near an hour before I could get hold of myself. Pa meant that much to me.
It was a long time before I felt better, too. Oh, how I wanted to get at those Yankees for it. I thought about it all the time, catching one of ’em alone and chopping at him with Great-grampa’s sword.
But the weeks went along. Christmas came and went, and bit by bit I stopped thinking about Pa all the time, and what the worth of it was. The truth was, I didn’t have much time to think about anything, for it was about all we could do that winter to scrape together dinner every day and get up enough firewood to keep the house warm. The Federal troops under Sheridan had driven General Early out of the Shenandoah and stripped it. They wanted food for their own troops, of course, but the main idea was to starve the South out so we’d have to quit fighting. A lot of darkies went with them, too. They said that since Lincoln had freed the slaves, slavery was illegal and they were contraband. But folks generally agreed that was just a fancy word for taking people’s property, no different from taking their horses and hay.
We just managed. We had enough potatoes to last for a while and some beef that Ma had hid from the Yankees that time. In the early spring I sent Sam and Sarah out to collect fiddlehead ferns, enough for two or three meals, and later there were dandelion greens, too. But that was all the vegetables we’d have until we got the garden in.
The one thing good about the shortages was that if you had anything to spare, you could get an awful big price for it. Things of every kind were scarce—shoes, corn, cloth, thread, nails. Anything you want to name, there was a shortage of it. Salt was going for sixty dollars a sack, where before the war it was a dollar and a half. Oh, the Yankees had messed us up good; I’d have given anything to have a crack at them. Sometimes I even wished they’d come back up on our mountain and jump me, for then I’d have to fight them, no matter what I promised Pa.
Then, along about the middle of March, when things were beginning to warm up a little, I went over to Stanardsville with a couple of barrels of cider for somebody. Stanardsville was down the other side of the mountain from the Shenandoah Valley, and hadn’t been as hard hit. There was still a mill standing there, a couple of stores, and most of the town still going. I delivered my cider to one of the stores, and after I finished unloading it, I sat down on the porch, with my legs dangling over, to rest a little before I started for home again. Just then out of the store came a teamster I’d seen there before. “Hello, youngster,” he said.
“Hello, Jeb.”
“How’s things back home?”
“We’re managing, but it’s awful close,” I said. “How about you?”
“So long as there’s teamstering work, I’ll get along. Provided them Yankees don’t come along and shoot me off my wagon.”
“They mostly don’t shoot people. Starve ’em to death, maybe, but they don’t shoot ’em.
“Depends,” Jeb said. “We’re plannin’ on gettin’ up a wagon train to bring food into Richmond. I don’t doubt but that the Yankees’ll shoot first and ask questions later if they ketch up with that one.”
That perked me up some. Richmond was where President Jeff Davis and the Confederate government was. A lot of folks figured it would be safer to have our capital way down south in Atlanta or someplace, but old Jeff Davis was determined to show the North he wasn’t afraid of them, so he put the capital in Richmond, which wasn’t more than sixty or seventy miles from the Yankee border—maybe a hundred miles from Washington itself. Naturally, the Yankees were hot to capture our capital, but they hadn’t done it yet—General Lee was too much for them. “What’s the plan of it, Jeb?”
“They reckon to set out from here in a week or so—soon as they round up enough wagons.”
“You going?”
“I reckon. Pay’ll be mighty good ‘cause there’s a risk to it. I guess I’ll chance it. Anyway, I got a duty to do it. So long as I’m willing to teamster, I don’t have to put on a uniform.”
“What if you come across Yankees?”
“They’re going to send some of Mosby’s Rangers along as guards. They ought to be able to fend off the Yankees.”
Mosby’s Rangers were famous. Colonel Mosby and his hunch were fighting pretty much on their own around Virginia. They lived off the land. They’d race into a bluecoat camp, shoot the place up, grab whatever they could find loose, and race away before the bluecoats knew what hit them. Or they’d follow along behind a Union army, picking off stragglers and shooting up the supply wagons coming along behind. They were dreadful fearsome, and the Yankees were afraid of them. “I don’t see what the risk would be if you have the Mosbys along.”
“That’s what I reckon, but you never can tell. There’s bound to be some risk.”
“How do they figure on getting into Richmond if it’s surrounded?”
“There’s still holes where you can get in and out. That’s where the real risk comes in, for once we get close, there’ll be Yanks everywhere.” He squinted at me. “You thinking about coming along, youngster?”
Well, I was. The idea of it excited me. It was a chance to get even with the Yankees for what they did to Pa. Besides, I hated the idea that Jeb and a lot of other fellas were in on things, and I was kept out of them. But there wasn’t any way around it. “I promised Pa when he lay dying that I wouldn’t fight, but would stay home and look after the little ones.”
“We ain’t aimin’ to fight,” Jeb said. “It’s just teamstering.”
That was so. I was getting tempted. Still, it might come to fighting. “I don’t know.”
“Mighty good pay for a few days’ work, it looks like.”
That was another point. “We sure could use the money.”
“Whyn’t you go talk to the major?” He pointed over his shoulder to the door to the store. “He’s just in there.”
Well, I knew I shouldn’t go. It was teamstering, not fighting, that was true. Still, there was a chance of getting shot or captured or something, and where’d Ma and the little ones be then? But blame me if I didn’t want to go in the worst way.
But I shouldn’t. I stood up, resolved to get out of there before I gave in to myself. And just then there came out of the store a white-haired man with a short white beard. He limped a little and walked with a cane. Jeb stood up and took off his hat. “Hello, Major.”
“Hello, Jeb. You going to be in the party for Richmond?” He had a loud, crackling voice.
“Reckon so, Major.” He pointed to me with his thumb. “Here’s another one you might recruit.”
He turned and gazed at me. I stood up, too. “You have a team and a wagon, son?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, pointing. “Those are my mules.”
“Good. We need every wagon we can get.”
“Sir, I promised my pa when he was dying I’d stay home and take care of Ma and the little ones.”
“Your pa? What did he die of?” he said in that loud voice.
“He was wounded at Cedar Creek, and died of it after he came home.”
In my heart I was hoping the Major’d come up with some reason why I had to go. I wondered if dead people really looked down on you the way some people said. I hoped Pa wasn’t looking down on me right then.
“Surely he’d want you to help against the Yankees.”
“He said he’d done our share of the fighting, it was up to me to take care of the family, since he wouldn’t be there to do it.”
“A lot of people have suffered and died. Your ma will have to endure it if it comes to that. You have a duty to Virginia. That comes first over everything. No Southerner can neglect his duty and keep his honor.”
I wondered what Pa would say to that. I knew of families in the valley where they’d lost two or three men, and the women and children had to get along as best they could. “I don’t know, sir. I promised him when he was dying. I’d hate to go back on a promise like that.”
He banged his cane on the porch floor. “He shouldn’t have made you promise that. It’
s your duty to Virginia that’s in question. You can’t make a promise against that.”
I could hear Pa, just as clear as if he was there, saying that he’d taken care of our duty to Virginia. But I wanted to go in the worst way. “I’ll ask Ma. Maybe she’d let me go if there wasn’t too much of a risk in it.” I was hoping the major’d say it was safe as churches.
But he didn’t. “A man of honor doesn’t ask what the risk is, he asks where his duty lies.”
Suddenly Jeb put in, “Tell your ma it’s four hundred dollars—that ought to carry some weight with her.”
If I convinced Ma that there wasn’t any risk to it, but a good deal of money, she might agree. “How many Mosbys are going along?”
“I heard it was fifty,” Jeb said.
That seemed like a good number. “I’ll talk to Ma,” I said.
I thought about it hard all the way home. Would the Yankees dare attack us if we were guarded by fifty Mosbys? Besides, the Yankees didn’t know the countryside and the Mosbys did, and could guide the wagon train along little back roads the Yanks wouldn’t know about. And when you figured the amount of money I could bring home, it was hard to see how I couldn’t go. After all, what better could I do for the family than earn all that money, especially as there wasn’t much risk in it? Suppose the bluecoats came up on our mountain again and cleaned us out altogether. The little ones would go hungry, and maybe starve, unless we had some money tucked away where the bluecoats couldn’t find it. When you looked at it that way, it seemed like it was my duty to the family to go to Richmond. Pa was certain to see that.
It was a pretty good argument. But deep down, I felt kind of uneasy. How risky really was it? Would Pa really agree that I had a duty to go? Was he looking down on me? God looked down on you, I knew that. God knew everything that was going on everywhere. To be honest, I didn’t see how He could do it—keep that many people straight in His head, saying nothing of the cats, dogs, leaves, stones, rivers, and I don’t know what all else. But the Bible said He could, and so did the preacher, and I figured they knew a blame sight more about it than I did.
With Every Drop of Blood Page 3