But still, I’d always heard abolitionists was bad for forcing their view on us, so that was what I told Mr. Ward. “I guess slavery should end, but it’s got to end its own way. No Yankee musket can force it on us. That’s why there’s so much bloodshed.”
“The old ways are hard to change,” said Mr. Ward. “It seems to me that force, and only force, will change them. Make no mistake, young Andrew. Change they must and change they have. No matter the outcome of this war, slavery cannot survive. There are more blacks in the state of Mississippi than there are whites, did you know that?”
“No, sir,” I said.
“It’s the truth. They have tasted freedom, and they will not go back to enslavement. Isn’t that right, Joshua?”
“Yes, sir,” the servant said, startling me. I’d just about forgotten he was there.
“I purchased Joshua some fifteen years ago,” said Mr. Ward. “I gave him his freedom straight away, and then I offered to pay him to stay on and work for me, which, happily for me, he did. Because of this, he’s been able to unite his family and build a better life for them. That is the promise of this country, Andrew, and now that all men have tasted its hope, they starve for more of the same. Slavery cannot survive, although I fear much bloodshed is to come before my neighbors reach the same conclusion and reconcile themselves to this new world we live in, one where all men are created equal.”
He sounded just like the pacifist preacher, except he weren’t no pacifist. He knew it would take more fighting to get his way. He was a smart man, and brave too. Most folks with Union loyalties ran off to the North when the war broke out, but he stayed, just moving his family over to Jackson. I admired him greatly and only wished he was on our side in this war. I couldn’t answer his speech, so I objected in the only way I could think to.
“I still don’t see why Miss Mary couldn’t go writing a letter to my brother,” I told Mr. Ward. “It would have done his spirits good and then maybe …” I stopped. I’d said too much already.
“Maybe what?” Mr. Ward leaned toward me. I shoved a chunk of biscuit into my mouth to buy a moment to think. I didn’t want to let on that Julius had deserted the Confederate Army. Mr. Ward probably would have been glad to hear, and I couldn’t bear to see his gladness over my brother’s shame.
“Don’t pester him, James,” Mrs. Ward suddenly said, breaking the silent vigil she’d kept so well at the table. Mr. Ward gave her a stern look, but she did not relent. “The boy has come a long way and has the right to know,” she said.
“To know what?” I asked.
“That I’m here,” Julius said, bursting into the room with Mary behind him. He looked older than I remembered him when he left, skinnier and with heavy lines on his forehead and a scar on his cheek that hadn’t been there before.
I was so stunned to see him in the room that I just sat and stared.
Dash recognized him in an instant. The big dog jumped up on the table, knocking the fine china and the silver and the cut glass bowl of gravy to the floor, where it smashed.
Joshua yelled, Mrs. Ward gasped, and Dash barked, jumping onto Julius, tail a-wagging, and just licked him all over his face. If ever a happier dog existed in all the world, I couldn’t imagine it. Dash knocked Julius back through the dining parlor door with his jubilation.
I was still dumbstruck. I expected finding him to be a harder task, but now that I’d found him, I didn’t know what to say. He’d been a coward and a sneak and he’d dishonored our family by running off, and now I had to find the right words to say to bring him back.
“I … uh …” I said, and then I turned to Mr. Ward, and all I could think to say was, “That’s why Pa don’t let Dash in the house.”
Joshua took to cleaning up after Dash, sweeping up the broken dishes and the spilled food. I tried to apologize, but he just waved me off. Mr. Ward led me to the back of the house, where Julius and Dash were playing in the cool evening grass, rolling about and wrestling.
We watched them from the doorway. The moon was clear and bright, and everything shined in its glow. Watching Dash and Julius play, it was easy to forget all the bad that’d happened and all the bad what was still to come.
Dash would bark and nip at Julius, who then wrapped his arms around the dog and rolled him. Dash would squirm and spring, bounding this way and that, and Julius would laugh and try to catch his tail.
“I haven’t seen your brother this happy since he arrived here,” Mr. Ward told me.
“How long he been here?” I asked, biting my lower lip.
“The start of October, I suppose,” he said. “Over a month ago.”
That got me mad at Julius all over again, and no amount of pretty moonlight could make me forget it. All this time when Ma and Pa and me was worried that Julius’d been hurt or killed, my brother’d been living the good life with the rich Ward family.
“I urged him to write your parents,” Mr. Ward added, understanding, I suppose, why my face got all crimped and creased and red with anger. “Julius refused. I believe he feels a great deal of shame over his choice to leave the army and also a great deal of revulsion at what occurred during his service. He will not speak it of it — at least, not to me.”
I remembered what he wrote in his letter: I have seen a man along the picket line before the battle so wracked with fear of the advancing blue uniforms across the misty field, that he turned his musket on his self…. I saw one boy from our side, a boy no older than you, running in a brave charge ahead, when a chain fired from a Yankee cannon sliced him in half. The poor boy’s legs kept running even as the top half of him flopped on the ground like a fish.
It was a terrible thing to think on, but I’d seen terrible things too, and I was younger than Julius. I seen Winslow shoot a man in cold blood. I seen the hospital and its gruesome healing. I seen our house burned down by Union men. I didn’t go hiding out. I was still trying to do what was right and proper. Why should Julius get to hide out when I don’t? Why should he get to roll around and play in the grass instead of doing his duty to his state and his family?
I whistled for Dash. The hound dog stopped playing, and his head popped up to look at me. His ears perked.
“Come on over here,” I commanded.
Dash looked down at Julius. Then he looked back to me. One of his front paws lifted in the air, like he was on the hunt, which I know meant he was thinking real hard, or at least, hard as a coonhound can think. Even across the yard, I could hear him whine. It don’t suit a dog to have two masters, and I guess I was making him choose between us.
Julius looked over at me, his face a question mark. He looked a bit like Dash that way, and I knew I’d done something dumb, putting the dog in the middle of what was rightly a fight between brothers. Dash sniffed the air. Julius patted him on the side and whispered something, and then Dash came running over to me to sit at my heel.
Julius got up off the grass real slow and brushed himself off. He took a deep breath and walked on over to me.
“I’ll let you two boys talk,” Mr. Ward said, excusing himself and going back inside. The night hummed and chirped with the usual bug business, and I was almost jealous of them bugs. They didn’t worry so much as people did. I was jealous of Dash too. He had two masters trying to tell him what to do. Right then, it felt like I had no one but myself.
“Why’d you come out all this way?” Julius asked.
“I come to —” I started, but I wasn’t rightly sure how to finish. He waited for me without looking. My words tangled up.
Julius bent down and patted Dash on the head while I stood as dumb as a stalk of wheat, blowing in the breeze. “Ma and Pa okay?”
“They’re all right, I suppose….” I said.
“We heard what happened in Meridian,” he said. “I thought of comin’ back to check up on you, but I worried, what with you helping out the Home Guard, I’d get arrested. Maybe hanged. Or worse.”
“That don’t make no sense,” I told him. “What’s worse than get
ting hanged?”
Julius didn’t answer me. He just bit on his lip and his mouth twitched a little, and he got a faraway look on his face, like was staring through a pond, looking at a reflection of the sky and looking at the fish swimming underneath too. A double picture.
“I asked you what was —?” I started, but he cut me off.
“Why’d you come all this way, Andrew? If you figured I was here, you coulda written a letter. When I saw you, I thought something happened to Ma and Pa.”
“I said they’re all right.”
“So then you better tell me why you came after me.”
“Why’d you run off? Why’d you leave your regiment and turn deserter?” I felt my face turning red again, my mouth twisting all frowny without my say-so. I was afraid he’d say it was my fault. I know it don’t make no sense, but I felt like he could see how I sinned, letting that slave girl get away, and now he’d tell me he knew it and he was punishing me. “Were it my fault?” I asked, and my voice cracked, and just asking was enough to set me crying.
I buried my face in my hands, burning up with shame.
“Hey,” Julius rested his hand on my back. He shook his head and bent down to look at me. “What are you jabbering on about? Your fault? Why should it be your fault?”
I’d carried around all these secrets and now, they just poured out of me with the tears. I told him all about Winslow killin’ the deserter and the slave girl I let go, and what I saw at the hospital, and the man stealing Ma’s silver, and the abolitionist preacher, and how I didn’t know right from wrong anymore, and how him running off was the Lord’s way of punishing me for my doubts.
When I finished talking and crying and wiping my face on my sleeve, Julius hugged me close. “Listen here, brother, it ain’t no fault of yours. I’m real proud of you, in fact, for what you done. Lettin’ that girl go was a good thing, and I woulda done the same in your place, and I reckon Pa would’ve too.”
“That mean we’re abolitionists now?” I wondered.
Julius shrugged. “I don’t know what’s what anymore, Andrew,” he told me. “But I know one thing: It ain’t your fault I ran off.”
“So why did you?” I said. “If it weren’t because of me, then I got to know why. You was the one who always talked real big about fighting for Freedom and Liberty and the Great State of Mississippi.”
“Maybe it ain’t so great as I thought it was before,” he said.
“You was never a coward before,” I said.
He let go of how he was huggin’ me and looked like he was about to toss me in the grass and punch me. I braced myself, but he held his fist clenched and didn’t move.
“Running to ain’t the same as running away,” he told me, his face hardening against me like a block of granite. “I saw terrible things in battle, Andrew. Things worse than any nightmare. But that ain’t why I ran off. I ran off because I’m in love. I’m in love with Miss Mary and no war between the states is gonna come between me and my true love. There aren’t enough armies in the world.”
He crossed his arms, and I was grateful for that, because he was still bigger’n I was and I didn’t want to get laid out by a fist. Not when I had a lot more to say. Talking for me’s like letting water out of a dam. Once it starts, there’s just no stopping it.
“You ran away, Julius, and we both know it,” I told him. “You wrote so in your letter how you was scared. Just ’cause you all mushy-eyed for that Union girl don’t mean you get to pretend it’s noble that you ran away. Hear that? Away! You made a promise to fight for our freedoms, and you made a promise to fight for our state, and you made a promise to fight because Pa’s too old and I’m too young, and then you run off on account of a girl? I think that’s the worst kinda cowardice and that’s why Dash and I come up here, to tell you so! To tell you that you’re a coward and a no good brother to me and that you’ve mixed me up even more than I was mixed up before, and that ain’t what an older brother’s supposed to do!”
I was crying again already, but the tears were different this time. I didn’t feel guilty anymore. I felt mad. Dash whined beside me, and he tucked his tail up under his legs. He didn’t like the sound of my shoutin’, and to the tell the truth, I didn’t like the sound of it much either, but I was going and there was no stoppin’ me.
“So you want to stay here and be a coward, that’s fine. I’ll tell Ma and Pa the kind of son you are.” I jabbed my finger up at him. “But I’m not too young anymore, I reckon, and I’m going back to find your regiment and sign up to take your place, and when we march back into Jackson here, you’ll be sorry you chose some girl over your own kin!”
I stormed off the porch and marched across the yard, set on walking straight out of Jackson under the cover of darkness and joining up in the war myself.
“Andrew, you can’t go off an’ —!”
I stopped and turned back to Julius, cutting him off with a look. “Tell Mr. Ward I’m real sorry about the mess Dash made and real grateful for the meal. And tell him I ain’t fighting to keep folks like his servant as slaves. I’m fightin’ ’cause I’m proud of where I come from, unlike my no-good brother.” Then I whistled and waved to my dog. “Come on, Dash,” I called him. He hesitated, and I sure hoped he’d come with me this time.
I didn’t want to go into war alone.
I crept through the silent street, my loyal dog at my side. He snuffled quietly at the ground, and every few minutes he’d stop and his ears would perk, and I’d duck down to hide by a fence or a shrub or the trunk of a gnarly old tree. There was a curfew set and the Union soldiers that controlled Jackson figured anyone out on the street after dark was a Confederate spy and they’d shoot ’em on sight.
They wouldn’t be so wrong, neither. I was on my way to join up with the Confederate Army if I could, and I meant to tell them everything I knew about the Union forces in Jackson. I guessed that’d balance out for the spyin’ Preacher William’d done. Fair was fair, after all, and one side shouldn’t have secrets while the other side had none.
Whatever Dash heard, it weren’t no soldiers coming to arrest me, so we kept on. I took a glance back toward the Ward house, but the windows was dark and not a soul stirred. I felt lonesome out there on the road, and I began to think maybe I shouldn’t have stormed off like that. I should’ve at least had Julius write Ma and Pa at Cousin Thomas’s to tell ’em I’d gone off to fight for their honor. Someone in the family had to do it, and I wanted them to be proud of me for taking responsibility. As things stood now, they’d worry I’d gone missing when I didn’t show up in a few days’ time. I’d made a promise to Pa, after all. But I was making up for the promise Julius’d broken. I couldn’t figure which promise were more important, and I couldn’t keep them both.
I skirted the city, swinging wide the long way, which took most of the evening to get around, but I saw not a soul, citizen or soldier, the whole time. When I got about a mile out of town, I reached a thick hedge. On the other side of the hedge, was this old post fence, and on the other side of that, I saw a whole regiment of men in blue uniforms. I dove down into the dirt and pressed myself flat as I could. Dash lay down beside me, a sign of his good sense and the smart trainin’ that Julius had put him through for stalking prey.
The men and their muskets and their officers on horseback and their big cannons and the fieldworks sat straight between me and the road back to Meridian.
The moon was bright, and that was like a double-edged sword, cuttin’ on both sides. I could see almost clear as day, but the soldiers in blue could too, and their lookouts would spot me comin’ if I weren’t careful. I could keep to the edge of the fence and maybe make it around, careful-like, but I feared my blond head would shine like gold in the moonlight.
I grabbed up some dirt and rubbed it in my hair and on my face so I’d be just another shadow shifting in a shadow-some night. Dash, I figured, could creep well enough beside me, and he sure was a dirty enough dog not to get spotted too easy.
I picked
up some more dirt from the ground and rubbed it on the back of my neck. I didn’t want to make an easy target if I had to take to runnin’ away. The dirt was cold, and it sent a shiver through me as I rubbed it on. I guess the dirt weren’t the cause of my shiver, really, but there was no use dawdlin’ here. It was time to sneak around if I was gonna find the Confederate lines by sunup.
I took a deep breath and pushed myself up off the ground, and Dash gave out a whine just a moment too late. A hand shot out from the hedge beside me and clamped on my wrist and yanked me right back down to the dirt.
“What’d you smear yourself dirty for?” Julius hissed at me from inside the hedge. He pulled me back, and I slid into the tangle of branches and leaves on my belly. Dash wiggled in after.
“I was trying to disguise myself,” I explained, and I did my best to hold down my smile, because after that first fright, I was mighty glad to see him. I didn’t know how I was gonna find my way alone. But I didn’t want him to know I was glad to see him, because I was still mighty angry at him too. “What’re you doin’ here? Shouldn’t you be back with Miss Mary making mushy faces at her?”
“We do not make mushy faces at each other,” Julius grumbled. “You wouldn’t understand.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Anyway,” said Julius. “I can’t let my little brother go runnin’ off to war. Ma an’ Pa would have my head.”
“You can’t stop me,” I said. “Our family needs a hero, and if it ain’t gonna be you, it’ll be me an’ Dash.”
“You just a boy,” said Julius.
“Am not,” I told him. “I talked to a private outta Texas, says a boy my age can be a drummer. And a cavalryman already spoke up about Dash being a fine soldiering dog.”
Julius grunted. He held my wrist tight. I tried to yank it away, but he was still stronger than I was, for the time being, anyhow.
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