by Sarah Bird
“Are you deaf?” Terrill barked at the driver, his sniveling ways gone now. “Get that…”
The wagon jerked away, and in the hail of insults and curses that Terrill hurled after me, I could hear the hint of a Southern accent.
We circled back to a cluster of patchy tents and lean-tos set off behind the nice, fancy tents. In the open yard in front of them, iron tripods held up cauldrons the size of hogshead kegs over fires of logs so stout they put out heat had me sweating before we even came to a halt.
Ahead of us was a line of more wagons filled with foraged food being unloaded by the contrabands and runaways who swarmed about. Other freed slaves busied themselves poking the fires, adding more wood, pouring buckets of water into the heating pots. A couple of men sat cranking the handles on big grinders. One for coffee. One for corn. Every time the drawer of a coffee grinder was full, the fellow cranking’d spring up and run to dump it in one of the pots.
With each dump, the man at the center of it all would crack the fellow on the back of his head with the cast-iron ladle in his hand and holler, “Keep a-crankin’, son! General likes his coffee strong enough to fight back! Rest of all y’all,” he yelled at the ones lolling about, “what is your affliction? Were you all born tired and raised lazy? No work, no food. I ain’t y’alls’ master. I didn’t put no cash down on a single one of you. You starve, makes me no nevermind.”
He noticed our wagon, pointed the ladle at it, and ordered a couple of men, “Eli! Jonathan! Get them provisions unloaded.”
Before I knew it, the strong country boys, both of them already a little stooped from having spent their early years hunched over chopping and hoeing, shoved me aside like I was a barrel of wormy apples. I ended up standing alone in the middle of a whirlwind of to-and-froing, all spinning around the boss cook wielding that ladle like a mule skinner cracking the whip on his sullen beasts.
He was a sight. And not one for sore eyes. The man had one of those long, narrow faces made for frowning and scowling. Which he did plenty of. Freckles spattered his high cheeks like specks of molasses. Skinny as a scarecrow, he had a strange menagerie of garments flapping about him. He wore a top hat looked to have been sat on a time or two, a pair of bottle-green britches near covered in gaudy patches, and a drummer boy’s short, shiny-buttoned jacket that had a scorched-looking hole below the shoulder where the previous owner had been shot.
But oddest of all, he had a long, stretched-out rat, might of been a baby weasel, running free across his shoulders, goosing its head out like a snake about to strike, then darting back behind the cook’s neck to poke his head around on the other side. Most disgusting of all, though, when that varmint decided it didn’t like what it saw, it ducked into the cook’s shirt and skittered around until it found a comfy spot then nestled there, pouching the shirt out like a roll of squirming belly fat.
As the men unloaded the food stolen off of Old Mister’s farm, the boss cook inspected every keg and barrel. When he peered into a lumpy tow sack, he proclaimed, “Hallelujah! Sweet taters! Can make the General his pie now. Eli, dump them out over there.” He pointed to a low bench next to where I was standing off to the side, away from the commotion. The bench had a fine Green River knife with a stag-horn handle stuck into it.
Eli, acting like he was a house servant and me a no-count field hand, about ran me over as he went to dump out a small mountain of sweet potatoes beside the bench. A couple of the taters took hard bumps and cracked open, showing bright orange meat against the mucky black dirt.
When one of the men hauled in that last scrawny pullet of Old Mister’s, the boss cook glared at the empty wagon and demanded, “That all the meat they brung?”
“’Pears so, Mr. Solomon.”
Solomon.
“Well, dog it to hell. Quartermaster ain’t sent two beans out in over a week. Commissary’s empty. Not enough here for a stew for two white ladies much less the officers’ mess. Jonathan, go on and forage me up some meat.”
“Naw, suh, cain’t do that. Ever farm herebouts been stripped clean.”
“Well then, go on shoot some varmints for this stew.”
“I already done got every jackass rabbit in three counties,” Jonathan answered.
Solomon hoisted up the rifle and issued a general order to all the assorted shirkers and hangers-on, “Half a sweet tater for anyone brings me a squirrel or a jack. Hell, coon or possum’ll do.”
Jonathan snatched the old musket up and the others crowded around as he bore his prize away. It was a rare thing for a black man to be in possession of a weapon and they intended to make the most of it. The boss cook yelled after them, “And don’t come back empty-handed. You know the General. You black he think you can make cobbler outta clay.”
“And hash out of horse shit, isn’t that right, Solomon?”
At the unmistakable sound of General Sheridan’s voice booming out behind him, Solomon jerked to attention like a rifle been shot off next to his ear. The General stepped into view and Solomon and I both saluted.
“General, sir, didn’t know you was…” Solomon’s pitiful wheedling trailed off. Sheridan didn’t bother to return our salutes the way he did with the blue suits. Just waved them off like we were children playing at being soldiers, tipped his chin at me and asked Solomon, “So, what do you think of the helper I emancipated for you?”
I drew myself up in my raggedy britches, hair uncovered and going ever which way, and for the first time, Solomon took me in. He was none too pleased with what he saw.
“Him?” the cook asked, his face as sour as if he’d bitten into a green persimmon. “Beggin’ your pardon, Gen’l, suh,” he continued, turning down his boss voice and general intelligence level until he sounded like an old plantation uncle. “But I do believes I specifically requested a girl, suh. A house girl. Least a house boy. I’m ’bout wore out with these ignorant field hands, don’t know ’nough to cook an ashcake. Don’t stay long enough to learn. Had a whole bunch run off just yestiddy. Not even worth catchin’ they names.”
Boss cook was mealymouthing and the General was not one for mealymouthers. “By thunder, Solomon, I’ll not have another ______ pox-ridden female cooking for me and my officers. You’ll ______ make do with this fine, husky buck.”
For some reason, hearing the General call me a “husky buck,” even a fine one, made the feel of the soldier’s palm stroking my cheek, telling me I was a handsome woman, come back and my heart knocked sideways with hurt. I wanted to yell at them that a blind, dying man had enough sense to know that I was female. It felt so much like these two were stealing away the one pretty thing that had ever been mine that I rared back and spit out, “I am female.”
Solomon stared at me like I was a two-headed calf and asked, “You? A girl?”
If the General was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Enough of this. Solomon, you asked for a female and I have fetched you a female,” he said, just like he’d transformed me on the spot. “And there’s an end to it.” To me he added, “Solomon is the finest ______ cook in this man’s army. So mind what he tells you. Especially about sweet potato pie.”
At that Solomon grinned like a simpering fool and the General lashed out, “Get to it, the both of you! I’m hungry enough to eat the hind leg off the Lamb of God!”
Solomon chuckled and called after Sheridan’s retreating back, “Don got that on the menu, suh. But we sho’ nuff gon get you that sweet tater pie. Gen’l likes his sweet tater pie. Yassuh. He sho’ do.”
As soon as Sheridan was gone, the cook’s grin dropped, replaced by that green-persimmon look of disgust. He stuck his face so close to mine the critter in his shirt bumped its snaky head on my belly and I saw that the man was old. Had to be within sniffing distance of forty.
“You a girl,” he demanded. “Why you wearing britches?”
Any other female would of been bulled down by his rough-and-haughty manner, but Mama had taught me all about rough and haughty. And all about scrawny men like Solomon. How they pu
ff themselves worse than a mean dog ruffling its fur to look bigger and scarier than they are. She always told me that the worst thing to do, mean dog or mean man, was to back down. I had to stand up to him from the get. Ruffle myself up even bigger than he was. Let him know I wasn’t to be trifled with or I’d have a snout up my ass the rest of my livelong days.
So I got right up on him, stood tall enough that I could see the bald spot size of a half-dollar top his head, and I answered back smartly, speaking the way Daddy would of, “I wear what I please, I do what I please. Back home my mama, she ran the place. She’s the daughter of an Africa queen. And that makes me the daughter of a daughter of a queen.”
That cut him right down. It surprised me how quick he folded, and respectful now, he said, “Daughter of a daughter of a queen. That right?”
“Right as rain in August. Solomon.” I made his name sound like I was saying “Fool.” And I sure didn’t add any “mister.” Slave days were behind me. Smash ’em Up Sheridan himself had said I was emancipated. I was done forever with “mister.”
“So that how it is,” Solomon said, not asking, just nodding his head in agreement.
I’d never seen a man break down so easy. Even Mama generally had to throw a few punches. But I figured the boss cook had just felt the power of my Africa blood. With considerable satisfaction at having established myself, I folded my arms and agreed, “Yeah, that how it is.”
Without another word, Solomon shoved me so hard I near knocked over the bench he slammed me down on. “You a queen. Here’s your throne. Now get to skinnin’ them taters ’fore I forget General sent you. If he didn’t have his eye on you, I’d chop you up into little queen pieces and make me a queen stew! Fit for a king. Which right now means me, Mister Solomon Yarnell out of Van Buren County, Tennessee.”
My hand was on the Green River knife and I was on my feet before another thought went through my head. I jabbed that steel blade in Solomon’s direction to show I meant business and I wouldn’t have him or anybody else knocking me on my ass.
But Solomon just smiled, held both hands out high with his palms up, and said, “Come on ahead then,” daring me to move on him. He stood there cool as a frog’s belly, which cut my heat enough that I saw the obvious: I was surrounded. As far as the eye could see there was nothing but soldiers and tents with soldiers in them. I was bobbing on an ocean of armed men. And Solomon was one of theirs. And I was not. I sunk back down on the bench.
“Like I thought,” he said. “All vine and no taters.” Then he leaned in and laid down the law like Moses giving the Israelites the Ten Commandments. “You listen to me, your majesty. ’Less you the daughter of the daughter of Ulysses S. Grant hisself, you shit in shoes just like the rest us. Ain’t no more do what you please. Them do-what-you-please days is over. You in the army now, Queenie.”
He went on for a good bit more, elaborating on how ignorant, worthless, and ugly I was. Finally, checking to make sure that none of the others were paying any attention, he whispered, “You smart, you keep that Queenie nonsense to yourself. Hear? Fact is, you gon live a lot longer you don’t let on you female at all. Girl on her own? No man to protect her?” He shook his head. “Shee-yit. This pack of shiftless, passin’-through dogs? They’ll use you like a rented mule then leave you behind so Rebs can lynch what’s left of you for a traitor. And that ain’t plantation scare talk.” He placed his varmint on the bench, slipped a lasso of twine around her neck, tied it to the bench, ordered me to watch the snaky thing, and left.
I was trapped good and, oh, how I hated being trapped. Hated how the dying soldier had opened a tender place in me only to have it stomped on. Hated that I had failed Clemmie. Hated that I had left my mama with tears in her eyes. Mostly I hated how weak it all made me feel. How ashamed Mama would be if she could see me brought so low. All those hates boiled away the tears choking up at the back of my throat and turned them to hot steam that drove my hand as I stabbed the knife back into the bench.
The cook’s varmint came skittering up then to investigate and I saw that it had black button eyes, a pink nose, and a black mask over its eyes like a raccoon. While I was studying it, the thing struck quick as lightning, put its pink nose on my hand, and would of climbed right up my arm, but I jerked my hand away and buried it deep in my armpit.
I had landed in a low spot and tried to comfort myself by imagining I was back with my soldier. Suddenly though the men with bandanas tied over their mouths like stagecoach robbers intruded upon my sweet memories and they were blown away in a cloud of lye powder whirling up from a burial pit.
It hurt to think of that terrible white powder falling across the soldier’s soft lips the way the moonlight had during those long nights in the wagon. So I made my mind go blank and sat there like a stone that nothing and no one could hurt. Like a tombstone with the name Wager Swayne chiseled into it.
Chapter 7
It was high noon when Solomon and his boys returned with a string of jacks all skinned and dressed out. I jumped up off that bench and hurried to meet him.
While Solomon was explaining to his boys how he wanted the jacks chopped and seasoned, I broke in and informed him, “I can pot a mess more varmints than y’all did. And I won’t ruin the meat with gut shots, either,” I added, nodding at one critter been blown into tatters.
“You don’t say,” Jonathan said in a sneery way.
“You don’t believe me, give me that old musket you got, and I’ll show you. I’m a dead shot.”
I made to grab for the gun, but Solomon jerked the long arm away, saying, “Shot dead, more like it. Slave with a gun? Any white ever seen that, you’d of been swinging ’fore nightfall.”
He got that right. Horses and reading and rifles, they were all forbidden. You got caught riding or reading, there’d be a whipping. Maybe worse. But a rifle? Lord. That’d guarantee you a long drop from a short rope.
“Yeah,” Solomon’s boy Eli put in. “How’d a slave ever get a gun?”
“Took it off a dead Rebel,” I answered, and my head filled with the sound of buzzing like a hive been bust open. That was the sound that had led Mama and me to that dead Reb one day when we were out clearing timber for a new field. The bees had turned out to be a cloud of green-eyed flies feasting on the pulpy remains of what we figured to be a Secesh deserter. His right leg was swole up to where it had ripped open the leg of his trousers. “Copperhead,” Mama said, naming the viper that had bit him.
“He had a rifle beside him,” I explained. “A beautiful German yagger.”
I knew the name, for Mr. Pennebaker had one and never tired of gassing on to Old Mister about his fine German yagger rifle with its stock special-made of fine burled wood and a patch box, muzzle, and trigger guard of polished brass.
“And what?” Solomon demanded. “Your sweet old master put up some targets? Took you out and learned you how to shoot?”
“No, my grandma did.”
“Your grannie?” How they hooted at that.
“Well, not her so much as the stories she’d told us about being—”
Solomon cut me off, saying, “Seems you’re mighty good with stories.”
I sulled up then like a possum playing dead at him calling me a liar to my face and didn’t go on to explain that I’d watched Mr. Pennebaker load and shoot his yagger a hundred times. Or that Clemmie stole pinches of black powder and minié balls from Old Mister for loads. Or how, with my strong, steady hands and eagle eyes, I was a natural. How I got to where, using the flip-up rear sight, I could peel a squirrel off a high branch fifty yards away. I wished most fervent that I had my yagger at that very moment, for I would of shut them all up with a few dazzling shots. But my beloved long arm was in the woods back home where I’d hidden it inside a hollow ash tree. Someday, I swore, I would reclaim it.
Without another word, Solomon grabbed me by the collar of my shirt, dragged me back to the bench, saw the mess I’d made of the few taters I’d tried to skin and the big pile I hadn’t touched.
“Get your filthy hands off—” I started, but the poke of the Green River knife digging into my throat shut me up quick. Pausing only to stuff a couple of potatoes into his pockets, Solomon drug me off.
The camp was a town of canvas and mud that went on for miles in all directions. After tromping past endless rows of the regular soldiers’ low tents, we approached an open field. Here new recruits were attempting to march to the beat pounded out on a drum by a redhead boy looked to be all of ten years old. They succeeded only in tangling themselves up like a nest of snakes.
I couldn’t make out the strange army commands the jug-eared drill sergeant was barking out. The aspersions he cast upon them, though, came through loud and clear. He called them hayseeds, Paddies, dagos, Limeys, Krauts, Wops, and greasers. Mostly, though, he shouted out, “Hay foot! Straw foot! Hay foot!” This made no sense until we drew abreast of the marchers and saw that the plowboy soldiers had tied a wisp of straw to their right foot and hay to the left so as to tell one from the other.
Farther on, veteran soldiers who had some polish on them were lined up in three rows. They could of been windup toys the way they all moved together when the man in charge yelled out orders. At the commands “Handle cartridge,” “Tear cartridge,” “Charge cartridge,” the men in the first row pulled out a cartridge, ripped it open with their teeth, and poured the black powder and bullet down the barrel of their upturned musket. I imagined the balls they fired cutting through a line of Rebels and could of watched all day. But Solomon, his face set graveyard grim, dragged me on.
In the middle of camp we came across a fellow, mother naked, stuck in a barrel. His arms poked out the two holes that had been hacked into the sides and his head popped up through another hole at the top. His face was sun-scalded red as a boiled tomato where it wasn’t flaking away entirely. The ground around the bottom of the barrel was wet from him doing his business right there. I reckoned he must of slit someone’s throat in their sleep to rate such a punishment and wished I could read what the sign hanging from a knife stabbed into the barrel said.