With Every Drop of Blood

by James Lincoln Collier

  We came to another wagon track leading away from the breastworks down a hill. I took a glance back. In the distance I could see the three horsemen stopped about where me and Cush had got knocked over by the shell blast. I hit the mules a lick, and we tore down the hill. In a minute we were over the brow and out of sight.

  Where the ground leveled off at the bottom, there were open fields rolling up and down low hills. Now that it was April, there was a touch of green in the fields where weeds and grass were beginning to grow, and here and there in the hills a few farmhouses and barns. There wasn’t much else; there’d been fighting in these parts for a year now, since the siege of Petersburg started and everybody who could get out was gone. I pushed the mules on at a steady trot, following the road as it wound into the hills. The sound of shelling was dying out, and about twenty minutes later I’d put two or three miles between us and the front and felt a little easier. I took a look back at Cush, which wasn’t hard, for the wagon cover was ripped to shreds. He was still lying where I’d heaved him in, but his eyes were open. “I notice you aren’t dead,” I said.

  He sat up. “Mighty near. I got the worst blame headache you could think of.”

  “I’m mighty glad. For a while I was sure you was dying.”

  “I’m mighty glad myself,” he said.

  “I figured you didn’t have a chance. But I flung you aboard anyway, just in case.”

  He reached down his leg and had a look at the cut. “That was mighty good of you, Johnny. The way them shells was coming in, by this time I likely be scattered across a half acre of ground.”

  “How’s your leg feel?”

  “The leg don’t feel too bad. It’s my blame head—it feels like they’s something inside trying to hammer its way out.”

  “Listen, Cush. Just when I was leaving, three fellas on horseback came up and looked around where we got hit. Do you reckon it was Bartlett?”

  “Can’t tell. But it’s mighty sure that somebody will be looking for us. They got you figured for a spy, and got me mixed up in it somehow. When Bartlett can’t find hide nor hair of me, he’ll start wondering, am I dead or did I run off with you?”

  “Maybe I should have left you there.”

  “Maybe. But in the meantime I could of got blowed up.”

  I took a look around. Down the road a little there was a farmhouse set on one side of the road and a barn on the other. There was a hole in the roof of the house, but the barn looked solid. “What about holing up in that barn for a while, just to see if anyone’s after us?” I said.

  “What if they take a look inside?”

  “I think we got to chance it,” I said. “We can’t stay out here in plain sight. No telling when they might come along.”

  So we did. The barn was standing wide open, like the farmer had got out of there so fast with his wagon and livestock he didn’t take the time to close the door behind him. We drove the mules and the wagon inside and pulled the doors tight. It was pretty dark, but there were a couple of windows high up that gave some light. Besides, it was an old barn; the boards were shrunk, so there were a good many cracks between them where slices of light shone through.

  I helped Cush out of the wagon, ripped some of the torn canvas from the wagon, and bandaged up his leg as good as I could. We sat there in the dark watching bits of dust float around in the slices of sun falling through the cracks, and in a little while we heard the sound of horses’ hooves in the hard dirt road, coming fast. I jumped up and ran to the front of the barn, and Cush hobbled over after me. We stood side by side peeking out through the gaps in the boards. A half minute later three bluecoats tore by—a white officer and two colored soldiers.

  “That’s him, all right,” Cush said.

  “Who’re the others?”

  “One of ’em was Sergeant Crawford. I didn’t see the other one good enough.”

  “What’s he like, Sergeant Crawford?”

  “Mighty tough. Been wounded three times and won’t quit. Don’t pay to mess with Sergeant Crawford.”

  We stood there for a minute thinking, and then Cush hobbled away from the barn wall and sat down again on the dirt floor. “First thing, we got to get ourselves outten these here blue jackets and into regular duds.”

  “How do you aim to do that?”

  “Easiest way is to take ’em offen dead bodies. Ain’t much shortage of that. These here Rebels, half of ‘em don’t have regular uniforms, but dressed like plain farmers.”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll get haunted afterward?”

  “Naw. Everybody done it. Done worse—some soldiers go out at night after a battle and rob the bodies. You can find all kinds of truck on them bodies—money, gold rings, gold lockets with their sweethearts’ pictures in ‘em. Wouldn’t do that myself. There’s where you’d get in trouble with the spirits—cuttin’ off some pore body’s finger to get his ring.”

  “Would they do that?”

  “Sure, if they can’t get it off no other way.”

  Well, it might come down to robbing clothes off a body, but I wasn’t in a hurry for it. But Cush was right, that we had to get out of the Union uniforms; Federals who came across us would take me for a spy and him for a deserter. And if we were to run into Southern troops, they’d jail me and like as not shoot Cush where he stood. “Maybe we’ll come across an empty house where they left some clothes,” I said.

  “Doubt it. By now the country around here is picked clean.”

  “Well, for now we got to chance it. We got to get out of this barn before Bartlett and them come back searching.”

  Cush shook his head. “Mostly likely won’t come back. More’n likely they swing around on some other road where we might a gone.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a risk either way.” To tell the truth, I had another reason for not sitting around that barn for hours; I was afraid Cush’d bring up that blame speech of Lincoln’s. “If we get out of this, Cush, where do you aim to go?”

  “I don’t know. Sure like to get home to see how my mammy is doing. Ain’t seen her for near a year. No telling what could have happened. I like to see if she all right.”

  “Mightn’t they come looking for you back there?”

  He picked up a little piece of straw that was lying on the dirt floor of the barn and stuck it in his teeth. “I reckon the Rebs is about beat. That’s what they all say. They ain’t gonna trouble theyselves about one little colored boy. All they know, I might have crawled off somewhere and died.”

  “What about your old master? What’s he going to say when you turn up? Maybe he’ll report you.”

  “Ain’t likely he report me to the Yanks. That ain’t the worrisome thing. Big problem is, how is things gonna be after the war? Lincoln promised that colored folk is free, but he ain’t gonna be in the Shenandoah Valley seeing that it’s so.”

  “You keep forgetting I’m a Reb.”

  “That’s so, Johnny. It’s on account of you being in that there blue jacket.”

  But I knew it wasn’t. It was because he couldn’t think of me as the enemy anymore. “Suppose the South wins after all? Suppose Lee schemes something out?”

  “Lee’s schemin’ days is about over, I reckon. There ain’t no chance the Rebs can win.

  “There’s always a chance,” I said.

  “And keep all us niggers slaves.”

  “Blame it all, Cush, don’t jump so fast. Pa said the war didn’t have nothing to do with slavery. He said most people’d be better off without them. We aren’t for slavery.” But the truth of it was, I wasn’t sure anymore. If the war wasn’t about slavery, what was it about? States’ rights, sure—I didn’t want the Yankees pushing us around any more than anybody did. But states’ rights to do what? The whole thing had me mighty confused. I sure didn’t want to see Cush going back to his old master and get whipped whenever the master felt like it, for I could see he wouldn’t like getting whipped any more’n I did. And if it wasn’t right for Cush to be whipped regular,
why was it right for any of them to get whipped? “Well, we can’t settle it right here. What we got to do is get ourselves safe somewhere. I reckon we ought to head off south. Bartlett and them can’t follow us too far into Southern territory.”

  Cush shook his head mighty firm. “You can go south if you want, Johnny. I can’t. Minute some cracker down there lays half a eye on me, I’m back in the slave cabins and due to stay there until the Federals get me out.” He gave me a kind of funny look out of the sides of his eyes. “You best leave me here and get yourself someplace safe till you can get home to your ma.”

  Well, it was what Pa would want me to do, all right—not to trouble myself about some darky bluecoat, but get on home as quick as I could to take care of Ma and the little ones. “Cush, if I had any brains at all, that’s exactly what I’d do. But seeing as I haven’t got the sense I was born with, I reckon I better cart you along in the wagon until your leg gets healed up some.”

  He looked down at the ground, and patted a bit of dirt smooth. “I figured you say that, Johnny. I just wasn’t sure.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The best idea, we figured, was to head due west. This would carry us away from Petersburg and the fighting. Then when we’d got shet of the armies, we’d swing north and over the mountains into the Shenandoah Valley. Meanwhile, we’d keep our eyes out for ordinary farmers’ clothes. Once we were dressed like plain folks, instead of soldiers, we’d be pretty safe, especially if Cush set up on the mule and I rode in the wagon. That’d seem natural enough to anybody from Virginia. But until we could change our clothes, we had to travel by night and hole up by day. We went along like that for three or four days, spending the days in empty barns or patches of woods away from the roads. Cush’s leg got a little better each day, but he was still limping.

  We were hungry a good deal of the time, but we were able to scrape up enough food to keep us going by rummaging around in empty barns and houses. There wasn’t a whole lot left lying around, for people generally took what they had when they ran. But once we found a barrel of dried apples somebody had forgot; we put the whole thing in the wagon. Another time we came across a root cellar dug into the side of a hill where we found some potatoes and a chunk of cheese. Our best luck was to run into a chicken wandering loose in a barnyard. We caught it, wrung its neck, plucked it and then cleaned it with Cush’s bayonet, and cooked it over a fire we made in the barn. That was the best-tasting chicken I ever ate.

  If we hadn’t the mules and the wagon, we could have cut across country. With the wagon, we had to stick to the roads, and we were always going by farmhouses where they hadn’t run off but could see us going by in the moonlight if they took the trouble to look out the window. We skirted around any towns we came to as best we could, but we weren’t always able to do it. We just kept on going, across Hatcher’s Run, and White Oak Creek, and smack through a place called Blacks and Whites, which gave us the first laugh we got out of anything for a while. And then to a place called Dudley’s Bridge, and Farmville, crossing railroad tracks and rivers all the way—the Sandy River, the Bush River, the Buffalo River. Finally we came to the Appomattox River and began to follow that along, for I knew that it went generally west.

  What bothered us most was that we couldn’t get shet of the war. We figured by now we’d left it behind us; but we hadn’t, for the whole time we were traveling we could hear to the north of us the steady thunder of cannons. Sometimes at night we could see the sky there lit up with flashes from the shells. It seemed like the war was traveling along with us a few miles away. So we couldn’t turn north toward the Shenandoah, but had to keep traveling west.

  A couple of times we talked about turning north toward the fighting, where there was bound to be bodies we could strip for clothes. But we dassn’t: with the mules we’d get spotted a mile away. So on we went, and we were so busy hunting up food and keeping out of the way of the war that it wasn’t until the third day, when we were holed up in a nice thick patch of woods by a stream, that Cush brought up that cussed speech of Lincoln’s. “Now’s the chance,” he said. “We ain’t got nothin’ better to do except listen to them cannons firing.”

  Well, I knew it had to come sooner or later. I got hot. “I’m too blame hungry to think about it, Cush.”

  “It take your mind offen your belly,” he said. He reached into the breast pocket of his blue jacket and took out that little scrap of paper. It was so smudged and worn I couldn’t hardly read it, but by this time I’d got it near memorized. I reckoned I was the only person in the entire Confederacy who learnt a speech of Abe Lincoln’s by heart.

  “I was thinking of taking a little snooze,” I said.

  “Now don’t try to get out of it. You promised.” He handed me the scrap of paper and moved over close so’s he could read along with me.

  I was pretty well stuck. Why in tarnation had I decided to learn Cush wrong? Well, I guess I could remember why. It made sense at the time—it seemed like the right thing to do. Same as deciding to join up with the wagon train, and going back on my promise to Pa. It went to show that a lot of times what seems right at the time doesn’t turn out right. I hoped the whole thing would learn me a lesson. I didn’t know if it would, but I hoped so, for I didn’t want to get into any more pickles like this one.

  I took the piece of paper and looked at it. “Cush, I got an idea we ought to start all over again. My head’s so confused by everything the last few days I forgot what half of this here thing says.”

  “I didn’t forget it,” he said. “Four score and seven years ago, our fort fighters broke—”

  “Well I’ll be blowed, Cush,” I said, feeling hot and sweaty. “Is that the way I learned it to you?”

  “Sure it is.”

  “There. Just goes to show how addled up my mind is. It isn’t that at all. It’s ‘Four score and seven years ago, our forefathers brought—’ ”

  “You mean you learned me that part wrong?” He gave me a steady look.

  “It seems like I did. That part, anyway.”

  “What about this here?” He jabbed his finger down onto the paper. “Where it says ‘a new nation, conceived in libraries.’ “

  I couldn’t look at him. “Blamed if I know how I got so addled up. It’s supposed to say, ‘conceived in liberty.’ ”

  “You mean you been learning this whole speech wrong?” He stared at me pretty wild.

  I put on a puzzled look, like I couldn’t figure out how it happened. “Seems like I did. I don’t understand it.”

  He jabbed his finger at the paper again. “What about this here part, where it says, ‘Brought forth on this comet a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created eagles?’ ”

  I looked down at the ground. “That ain’t right, neither,” I whispered.

  “What’s it supposed to be, Reb?” he said, mighty fierce.

  I went on looking at the ground. “It’s supposed to say ‘All men are created equal.’ ”

  He didn’t say anything, and the time ticked along, with only the babbling of the stream and a little breeze in the trees making the only sound. Then he said, “You been learning me the whole thing wrong.”

  I looked up at him. “I guess I was just so worried about Ma and the little ones back home my mind got tangled up.” I looked him in the eye as best as I could.

  He stared at me hard. “You wasn’t tangled up. You done it on purpose.”

  “Honest, Cush, I didn’t.”

  “Yes, you did, Johnny. You done it on purpose, for you was determined to keep me from finding out the real meaning of it—about all men being created equal—about what Lincoln promised, what the Declaration promised. You ain’t no different from the rest of the buckra.”

  “That isn’t true,” I said. It wasn’t neither, for I was only trying to get out of learning him to read.

  “God damn you, Johnny. I trusted you was learning me right.”

  I was beginning to lose my temper myself. “You got to blame you
rself, Cush. You captured me and was sitting up there high and mighty, waving my great-grampa’s sword around like you were King of the Moabites. Why should I learn you right?”

  He snatched the speech out of my hand and stood up. “I don’t trust you no more, Johnny. I ain’t staying here one more second.”

  I jumped up. “Go on then. You’ll only get yourself killed for it, and serve you right, too.”

  He turned and started off through the patch of woods, limping pretty bad. My heart was sick, watching him. He couldn’t begin to run. The minute anyone saw him, he was a gone goose. Some farmer was bound to see him and fetch some Confederate troops. He didn’t have a chance of getting away at all.

  “Damn you, Cush,” I shouted. He was out of sight in the trees and I didn’t know if he heard me. I started after him. Even with his limp he was making pretty good time, for I didn’t spot him until I came to the edge of the woods. He was about fifty yards into a field, heading toward a little farm road at the other side. He was cutting across it at an angle, so he couldn’t see what was coming along the farm road behind him, but I could. “Cush,” I screamed.

  He stopped in the middle of the field and turned halfway around to look at me. “Come back, Cush,” I screamed. I pointed back up the farm road. About a dozen Confederate cavalrymen were sailing down the road, pulling a cloud of dust along behind them. Cush took one look and began to hobble back toward me across the field as fast as he could. Curse that speech, I thought. Curse everything.

  He was almost at the woods before they spotted him in that blue jacket. Then two of them wheeled their horses off the road and started for us. I raced back to where the mules were hid, ripping off my blue jacket as I went. I flung it off in among the trees. Cush came hobbling along after me, and right behind him there came the two cavalrymen, waving their revolvers. “Wait,” one of them shouted.