by Sarah Bird
The less lucky were carried back in tall, rickety ambulances to join the poor souls waiting for the sawbones to turn them into cripples or corpses since there wasn’t but one treatment in those days: amputate.
The ones who came up flat out of luck didn’t return at all. On the banks of Opequon Creek or Tom’s Brook or up on Fisher Hill, those mothers’ darlings were laid to take their eternal rest, never to rise again.
Every battlefield had a Dying Tree, the highest, prettiest tree around where friends of the mortally wounded dragged them so that the dying boys might take their leave of this world amidst a bit of beauty. I was haunted by the sight of those doomed faces, watching out of their hollow eyes as we left them behind. Too tired to struggle anymore, they had a kind of glow on them like they were already halfway into the next world and didn’t bear us any grudge for abandoning them.
In spite of our terrible losses, we ripped through the Breadbasket of the South, burning fields heavy with a harvest the starving Rebs needed to survive. We gathered up their livestock, scattered what horses and mules we didn’t need, and freed the slaves to wander where they would. What the General had done to Old Mister, he was doing now to every farmer and plantation owner who had the misfortune to be in his path. Every day, the sun rose on a vision of the Shenandoah Valley’s fresh green heaven ahead and the smoking, charred black inferno we left behind. We were shutting down the South’s pantry. No food. No fight. It was a new way of doing war and it was an awful one.
The fear of returning to slavery, and believing that I could help Mr. Lincoln keep that from happening, made me into the best cook’s helper Solomon ever had. I skinned peels off sweet potatoes so thin you could of read through them. Water was always fresh and plenty and at Solomon’s side even before he hollered for it. Pots were scrubbed until any fine lady’s dainties could of been sudsed out in them.
As soon as we started running into new units with their rearguard of contrabands, I spent every second when I wasn’t scrubbing or fetching, asking if anyone had seen my sister or my mother. I explained that my sister was a quiet, sweet-faced girl, frail and fine-boned, and that my mother was a mighty woman, sturdy and tall as me, both of them marked with rows of scars pretty as strings of pearls resting above their hearts.
Lord, the answers I got.
I heard tales of every bump and pockmark ever to blight a female body. And I won’t go into detail on the ones who peeled off shoes or hiked up shirts and lowered britches to display their own disgusting assortment of warts and bunions. And scars. Lord, the libraries of scars I was shown. I saw backs had been lashed until it looked like garter snakes were writhing across them. And ankles and wrists with thick bracelets of scars from iron manacles. Though those marks told the story of how much worse than me others had suffered, no one had seen Mama or Clemmie. Then one day, I met up with a fellow said he’d followed Grant from Shiloh to Vicksburg. I showed him the pearl scars on my collarbone and asked if he’d ever seen the like.
“’Deed, I have,” he answered even before I could describe Mama and Clemmie. Figured I either had a confabulator on my hands or one of them’d go on and describe every skin peculiarity he’d ever come across. Which he did. Though he wasn’t particularly old, the man didn’t have a tooth in his head. Watching his baby mouth open and close, gummy balls of spit stretching between his lips, gave me the creeping willies to where I could hardly look his way.
So I wasn’t paying much mind when he raised his hand up high and asked, “These gals you’s hunting? The old one tall? Strong? Skin near coal black? No titties to speak of?”
I started to walk away for all in the world this jasper was doing was throwing off on me by guessing how my mother would look based on my appearance.
“The other one?” he called after me. “Little frail thing?”
I stopped.
“She ’bout yay high?” he asked.
I checked and could see Clemmie fitting right in beneath the palm he raised up to his shoulder. Not a height anyone would of guessed from looking at me.
“Pretty gal?” he asked.
Also not what a body’d reckon from looking at me. I nodded.
“Both of them all bumped up here.” He drew his fingers across the space between his collarbone and the place where his chest swelled.
He had every speck of my attention now. “Yes,” I said, barely breathing. “You know where they are?”
“’Deed I do.” He nodded slow, pleased with himself that he had something I wanted.
“Where? Where are they?”
“You want to know where that pretty li’l gal and the big ’un are at?”
“That’s what I’m asking you.”
He paused and inspected his nails. “How much’s it worth to you?” he asked.
I saw the way things were going and, not caring for his approach, I clamped my hand around his throat, put the Green River to his neck, leaned in and growled in his ear, “Enough to stick this knife in your throat and lick your blood off the blade when it comes out.” Hard cases like him sometimes required a persuading detail or two.
He pursed his lips even farther into his mouth like he was pulling the strings of a reticule tight. He was pretty sure I wasn’t going to put him under, but didn’t care to place a bet on how bad I’d hurt him. “Last time I saw that pair,” he said. “I was throwing dirt on their naked bodies for they had already had the clothes stole off them.”
My hand dropped. “You’re lying.”
“Why’d I do that? I was lyin’, I’d tell you I knowed where they are. Make you pay to find out. Naw, they dead.”
That toothless hole went on opening and closing right in front of me, but the words came from far off as he went on, “I was on buryin’ detail. They was scrubwomen. Heard they took sick with breakbone fever. Bad way to go. Might could be the worst. Way they seize up there at the end. Trying to scream but can’t pry they jaws open.”
I felt my hands rising up to stop the man’s words from hitting my ears. I forced my hands down but couldn’t stop my feet from carrying me away from the sight of that gummy mouth. Still his words followed me. “Though lockjaw, now, lockjaw’ll take you down hard. Wouldn’t want no…”
I ran and didn’t stop until my legs gave out on me.
Chapter 13
The next week, we encamped at Cedar Creek and Sheridan swore that that was where we would hold the line. That he and every soul under his command would die before he’d allow the Rebs to cross Cedar Creek.
Third night there, I made the General his cup of tea way I knew he liked it. Dark as tar, with a touch of blackstrap molasses and two tablespoons of a new delicacy, Gail Borden’s milk that came in cans they called “airtights.”
I handed the cup to Solomon, but he passed it back. “You take it to him tonight.”
“Me?” I asked, certain I hadn’t heard right. Solomon had been nice, almost gentle with me, since the night a week back when I told him about Mama and Clemmie. He had even patted my back a little and given me Matildy, saying I needed the company, something warm to love on when sleep failed me. Next morning, after I’d cried until dawn, he let me sleep late then did most of my chores himself. And now here he was telling me to take the General his tea.
I was so nervous walking to Sheridan’s tent my hands were shaking with the bumfidgets. The General always stayed awake, studying maps and writing dispatches and whatnot, long after the rest of the camp had doused their candles and slush lamps and turned in. So, as usual, his was the only tent glowing in the darkness. It reminded me of the pumpkin lanterns Little Miss and her brothers were partial to carving back before the war when there was food to waste.
As I approached, I heard the General chanting low in the “me boyo” accent that I’d come to learn was Paddy Yankee. Through a slit in the flaps, I saw that he was on his knees beside his cot praying to the Irish goddess he favored. He clutched a string of beads and said one prayer for each pearly bead he counted off. When he ticked off the last one
he whirled the cross hanging from the beads around his head and shoulders.
He brought the cross to his lips to kiss and I caught a glimpse of the Irish Jesus nailed there. I had heard about Jesus and the Crucifixion and the Crown of Thorns from the white preacher Old Mister made us listen to, but the only cross I ever saw was two plain boards nailed together. This was my first look at the fellow himself bleeding and near naked and drooping from where he was nailed to the cross. It was gory enough to have come out of one of Grandma’s stories and it raised my opinion of Jesus considerable.
I tiptoed to the flap of the General’s tent and though I was barely breathing, Sheridan grabbed up his saber and whirled around, ready to skewer any intruder. He had a ferocious, slaughter-minded look on his face would of done that lunatic King Andandozan with his bone-crunching hyenas proud.
Recalling my father’s instruction in correct speaking, I plucked myself up and piped out, “Begging your pardon, General, I am here to deliver your tea.”
And just that quick, the warrior switched off and Sheridan said, “Ah, my tay,” in his Paddy manner. “Come in. Come in.”
I pushed through the canvas flaps. Inside, the air smelled of cigar smoke, kerosene, camphor, sweat, and gun oil. A rug, a genuine parlor rug, covered the dirt floor. He had himself a cot, a spindly table, and a chair cut out of a barrel half so that it had a back. On the table was a saucer with the butts of several stogies crushed out on it, a gold-nibbed pen, and a stack of laid paper. His hat and greatcoat hung from a nail pounded into the back support.
Sheridan’s dark eyes were bright and quick as a hawk’s. It seemed he recognized me. But that might just of been my pride hoping such a thing was so since I wanted the General to see what I’d made of myself since being a no-count pissing down her leg in a barrel.
“Put it there.” He nodded to the table.
I placed the mug on the table next to the saucer of stogie butts and waited for my next order. But the General’s attention had already turned to a map spread over another table and I backed quietly away, leaving him to reckon how best to smite Jubal Early so that Lincoln could get reelected and I could stay out of chains. I was content knowing that I’d made the cup of tea’d help him do that, and was almost through the canvas flaps when Sheridan, eyes still on the map, raised a finger, pointed it in my direction, and said, “You.”
I stood unbreathing. He turned to face me, jiggling that finger my way as though he was trying to shake something off it. “You, you are the contraband I freed, aren’t you? The one who intends to sing at my funeral.”
He knows me. General Philip Henry Sheridan knows who I am.
I was as proud as Iyaiya must of been when the scout saw her for who she really was. I wished more than anything that my soldier could of seen me at that moment. A grin I couldn’t control went east and west, and I popped back, “Yessir, I’m keeping in tune, sir.”
Sheridan tipped his head to the side, and the lantern light fell full on his face. He was as fierce as any Africa warrior. Even the ones from old times like Iyaiya who sharpened their teeth into points to rip the throats out of the king’s foes.
My heart lurched and my smile dropped, though, when I saw that I had riled him. The thing about the powerful is that sometimes they like a peppery comment from those beneath them so they can laugh along and show what sports they are. And sometimes they don’t. And what with interrupting his Mary prayers and all, it appeared that this was a don’t time.
“Sir, I … Sir … I…”
“You what? Don’t want me dead?”
“Last thing on earth I want, sir. What I want is for you to stomp a hole in Jubal Early so wide the whole Union Army can ride through it and squash them Rebs like the vermin they are. That’s what I want. And unless God’s a possum that is what General Philip Henry Smash ’em Up Sheridan is going to do.”
He gave me something in the vicinity of a smile and said, “Good night, contraband.”
Without thinking, I saluted him, but the General’s back was already turned.
Chapter 14
I was up before dawn next morning, setting a big slab of corned beef to boiling so as to leach some of the salt from the hunk of meat. We had us a world of provisions now pouring in from every bit of the Shenandoah Valley that our troops had captured. To say nothing of the supplies that came in after we took the Central Virginia Railroad. Jubal Early was starving and the General was eating corned beef.
I was chopping up the eighteen head of cabbage that came along with the beef when Solomon, stretching and scratching, appeared and told me, “You’re gon help serve tonight.”
“Did the General request me?” I asked. “By name?”
Solomon crunched into a pale triangle of cabbage heart, which he considered a delicacy, and snorted. “Name?” He flapped his lips like a horse, snorting at my foolishness. “Took the man three years of me cooking every bite of food he put in his mouth to learn my name. Here.” He pulled the sliver that remained of his bar of soap from the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to me. “Go on, get you a bath. You smelling a bit blinky.”
“What? And you think you a lilac in spring?”
He ordered me to git and I slipped away on down to the source of all that water I’d been hauling up to camp, the famous Cedar Creek that marked the line General had beaten the Rebs back to. The line he swore Jubal Early and his demon hordes would never come north of while he drew breath.
I followed the creek until the noise of camp fell off, lost in the wind rustling through the tall, shaggy cedars it was named for. When that and the soft gabbling of turkeys off in the brush and a few melancholy hoots from an unseen owl were the only sounds that could be heard, I found myself walking through a quilt brighter than any stitched by the hand of woman. High up along the ridge tops, yellow chestnuts and red oaks looked to be on fire. Mid-slope, the maples were orange as a patch of pumpkins. The lowlands along the creek were roofed with clouds of yellow leaves puffing out from tall poplars. The carpet was sumac gone red as rubies with Virginia creeper hanging wine-purple in the dark shadows.
I felt like I was off in the woods with Mama again back during the winters and fallow times when we were sent out to clear the woods to make new fields for more tobacco. I started out fetching water and bundling pine knots. Time I was twelve, though, I was taller and stronger than any boy on the place. With my skirts looped up around my waist, I could swing a broadax sure and steady from can’t see to can’t see and was cutting half a cord a day like any man.
As soon as we got out of hearing of the others, Mama schooled me on what I needed to know when the three of us escaped. How to rub coal oil with snuff and cayenne pepper mixed in it on your feet to put the dogs off. Where to find mulberries, gooseberries, hickory nuts, and acorns. How to eat cattails, monkey flowers, and milk thistle. How to use sneeze weed to open up your head and cure deafness. Mostly, though, Mama showed me how to move through the woods so not a leaf rustled, twig cracked, nor bird left its nest. When I got to where I could sneak up on Mama herself, she gave me the most important lesson of all—how to follow the North Star to the free states.
Now, as I strode along beside Cedar Creek, I felt like Mama was with me, just ahead, out of sight, leading me to a safe place where no prying eyes would find us and she could tell me Iyaiya’s stories.
A distant gurgling promised that a swimming hole deep enough that I could have a proper dunking was close. I followed the sound to where vines grew thick along the creek, parted them, and peeked through. What I’d taken for gurgling was the sound of two whites, up to their posteriors in the water, naked as newts, loving on each other.
The woman had the perfect hourglass of her back to me. It shone pale as polished ivory in the dark shade. She blocked my view of the fellow who was larruping at her neck, but I caught a glimpse of his uniform on the bank and was considerably relieved to see that it was blue. He was one of our boys and had plucked himself a lovely local flower. Most of him was hidden from
my view. And then the soldier kneeled down in front of the gal, gripped the pillows of her hindquarters with his long fingers, and pulled her to what had to be his mouth.
I found this queer Yankee procedure puzzling in the extreme, however the country gal appeared quite content with it and grew more so every minute it continued. She threw back her head, revealing the pale arch of her neck. It was stretched tight as she gasped, sucking in and blowing out harder and harder until a rush of moans that trailed off like a mourning dove’s call slid from between her parted lips. Then, wobbling in the fellow’s grip, she fell silent and he rose to hold her.
Yank or Reb, no white would tolerate a colored spying on him sparking in such a peculiar manner, so I commenced backing on out of there. Just as I did, though, I caught a glimpse of the soldier head-on. Beneath his hair, barbered off neat as Sheridan’s, was a face I took to be a young boy’s as it was entirely free of whiskers, stout jaw, or apple of Adam. In addition, he also had him a pair of bouncy titties with nipples big as silver dollars. As I’d never set eyes on a boy, white or colored, built like a broody hen that way, I had to conclude that what I was looking at was, not one, but two women.
After a good deal more kissing and splashing and giggling, the couple waded arm in arm to the bank where both of them proceeded to put on uniforms. I blinked several times to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing as they helped each other wrap bindings tight around their breasts, button their jackets up, and get their caps set on straight.
I slipped away like Mama had taught me all those years ago. Not a twig snapped as I made my way back down the creek. Barely pausing to wash under my arms and up my skirt and rub my teeth and tongue with a bit of ball moss, I flew back to Solomon with my amazing revelation.
All Solomon did, though, when I told him about the white ladies in the blue suits was to slurp up a taste of the stew and tell me, “Too salty. You didn’t boil the beef long enough.”