by Sarah Bird
I leaned forward, straining to hear every word he spoke, so that I could match them with how my soldier spoke. No matter what sense and the facts told me, no matter that he’d never choose me now, no matter that I’d seen him carried off to the burying pit, I still believed and I still had to know.
He spoke. “The war has been won! We are free!”
For a second the silence held. It was like we had all just heard the news for the first time. Then everyone went to whooping and hollering, happier and lifted higher than we had been even when we saw Robert E. Lee surrender. I couldn’t open my mouth, though. I was lost in comparing my memory of the soldier’s voice with the one I was hearing. They matched. I believed again. That was Wager Swayne.
The crowd quieted down and he started back in. He said, “I am…” Then time stopped while I waited for him to say the name I knew was his: Wager Swayne.
“… First Sergeant Levi Allbright…”
Levi Allbright.
“… of Troop D, Ninth Cavalry, and I come to you tonight with a message.”
As the sergeant spoke, I understood why I had believed that he knew me. He stared at every one of us, man, woman, and child, the way he had at me. Like he knew us. The real us. Not the pitiful bunch we were then. No, Sergeant Allbright saw who freedom would make us into.
“Men of color,” he went on, his voice sounding less and less like my soldier’s with every word. “We must use our freedom well.” This voice now rang out strong and vibrant with life and clear as church bells on Sunday morning. Compared to it, Wager Swayne had sounded like what he was, a dying man. My dreams had gotten the better of me. Made me see, and for a moment hear, what wasn’t there. Much as I wished it, this wasn’t the kind and true man who had touched my face and breathed his last to the sound of my voice. The only place where that sweet soul still lived on was in my dreams and no amount of wishing otherwise would ever change it.
“We must heed the words of Brother Frederick Douglass well,” First Sergeant Levi Allbright proclaimed. “‘Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters, U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket, there is no power on earth which can deny that he has earned the right to citizenship!’ My brothers in freedom, let us earn that right!”
Solomon took his arm from my shoulders and the three of us clapped until our palms smarted. Sergeant Allbright couldn’t speak two words without the cheers breaking out again, but he was a commander and knew how to make himself heard. He told us that the army had set up six brand-new colored regiments that’d be sent out west of the Mississippi to fight the heathen savages.
Most important, we’d get paid thirteen dollars a month. After a lifetime of earning naught but parched corn and floggings, that was a sum to make your head spin. Then he added one last particular that made it all seem like he was laying out a path specially for me to follow. “Our commander is to be General Philip Sheridan, whom Lincoln has named Governor of the Fifth Military District.”
I glanced at Solomon. He was nodding, and I reckoned he was as pleased as I was that we had the chance to serve with our old commander again.
“I grew up out West,” Sergeant Allbright continued, “and I know that a new world awaits us there. A world of promise and plenty, where a man can be judged as a man. Uncle Sam stood up and fought a mighty war so we might be free. Now, I say to you all tonight, my brothers in freedom, stand up with your Uncle Sam and help him win the fight to make the West a land of peace and prosperity for all. A land where we can live our lives and raise our children to be free citizens of these United States!”
Oh, we cheered aplenty at that. Brothers and sisters alike.
“A recruitment depot will be established in town tomorrow. Inspections start at dawn. Those qualified will be transported to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis to be trained for service in the United States Army. Who will join me?” he shouted, holding a hand high. All the men shot their hands up. “Who will join your brothers in the Ninth Cavalry?”
The brass band broke into a march that could barely be heard over the crowd roaring like the Gates of Heaven had just been swung open for them as Sergeant Levi Allbright and his men marched offstage. Even Solomon was swept up in the jubilation, waving his hat over his head and shouting hurrahs for the mighty Ninth as the soldiers marched away.
I had to holler in his ear for him to hear me. “You gonna join up?”
“Me? What they want an old man like me for?”
“It’s like you always say,” I reminded him, “you need an old dog for a hard road.”
He tipped a little smile at hearing his own words come back to him and said, “Tell you what, though, I’d sign on as cook if it meant I’d be feeding our … our…” His voice wobbled and he stopped for a few seconds before he could finally finish up. “Our own boys wearing, really wearing, the blue suit.”
There was too much feeling in both of us for talk, so I took his hand and squeezed it. Solomon’s eyes snapped open wide and, after considering for a moment, he squeezed my hand back. An understanding passed between us then that somehow the two of us, maybe even our children if the Lord saw fit, were going to be part of the new world out West where black men wore the blue suit and rode horseback and defended their own.
A fiddle band took the stage and tore into a lively breakdown and clumps of dancing and whooping erupted here and there.
“Cathy,” Clemmie said, her cheeks flaming with excitement. “My unit leaves tomorrow. I’m going with them. Come with me. Both y’all. We can be together again. Things be different for black folk out West.”
“What you say, Queenie?” Solomon asked. “Baby sis is right. They’d hire us no question. You, me, Clemmie, and Matildy out West? Cooking would still be better than a day of picking cotton, right?”
“Go with them to cook?” I asked.
“What else you thinking about?”
“Enlisting, of course. In the cavalry.”
“What?” Solomon said, like he hadn’t heard me right.
Before he could say anything else, I rushed to ask, “Aren’t you about sick of cooking? I know I am. Solomon, listen, you’re not too old to enlist. Wear the blue suit. I could … I could—”
“Uh-uh,” he said, trying to stop what he knew I was about to say.
I said it anyway. “Solomon, I could enlist with you.”
His mouth dropped open, but before he could object, I rushed to remind him, “Lots of girls did it during the war. You know they did.”
Solomon laughed, pretending I was joking, and told Clemmie, “Now I know for sure your sister is crazy as a betsy bug.”
“Crazy?” Clemmie said. “That girl is wild! Wild as an acre of snakes. Always has been. You never seen the like. She be dead now our granma hadn’t thrown a protection spell over her.”
I ignored Clemmie and told Solomon, “Solomon, I’m serious. We go in together like them other couples you say you seen, we can do it. I can do it. Be hard. But we’d have each other’s back. I’d be looking out for you way you’ve always done for me. Where else we gon make thirteen dollar a month? That’s twenty-six between the two of us. We do our hitch, two, three year? We’d have enough saved up to buy us a place. Place out West where we can live the way we want to live. No one ever tell us what to do again.”
Solomon said to Clemmie, “Tell this fool to stop talkin’ like a crazy lady.”
“Why not?” I asked. “They did it. Them other females. Why can’t I?”
“Why not?” Solomon asked. “How about it was wartime for starters. Everyone spread all out in tents. Off by themselves. And those young soldier boys? The drummers? Most of them looked like girls. And since it was wartime, army let anyone in. You had teeth enough to rip open a powder cartridge, you were in. Peacetime be a whole other deal. No Rebels trying to destroy the country, they gone get picky. Have a hard look at what they’re letting in. Top of all that, all them other females were white.”
�
�What?” I interrupted, tired of his eternal gloominess. “You don’t think I’m good enough to wear the blue suit? My color wrong?”
“Not your color we’re talking about, you know that.”
Solomon drew away. I was left alone and, after all the merriment, lonely. This mournful feeling caused me to see clear what I was doing: throwing away what I had right in front of me to go chase after a dream didn’t even exist just like I’d mooned after a soldier who no longer existed. I needed to be the girl I believed I was. The one who faced facts. Right then and there, I made up my mind.
“Solomon,” I said, “I’d rather die than stay here in the South. I want to go out West, but I can’t do it alone. Wouldn’t be safe on my own. I’d rather join up and serve. But, if I did, without a partner, other soldiers’d kill me or worse if they ever found out. No, can’t risk either one alone. The three of us, though, you, me, Matildy, out West, we stand a chance of making us a decent life. Have some dignity. Some respect. Have…” I paused. “We’d have each other. How’s that sound?”
Clemmie put in, “Sounds like you’re proposing a damned tactical maneuver’s what it sounds like. Solomon, what I think my sister is saying is, I think she’s asking you to marry her.”
Solomon nodded slowly. “That so? Thought she might be.”
“Well?” I said, already getting huffy at him not jumping at my proposal.
“Well,” Solomon started off, then stopped, took my hand, looked into my eyes, and said, “I suppose that’d be all right.”
Maybe the words don’t sound romantic writ on the page, but we were pledging our lives to each other and that beat romantic all to smash in my book. Solomon and I would leave the misery of the South and go out West. We stared into each other’s eyes, and nodded: the deal was done.
The fiddle band began sawing out a rousing version of “Leather Britches.” Solomon took his crumpled top hat off, bowed at the waist, and asked if he might have the pleasure. Then he whirled me into his arm and spun me around until the lights and faces all smeared together. My head kept whirling even after Solomon was ripped out of my arms.
I have recounted what happened next a million times in my head and never once found a way to stop it. To make it all come out different. Only in memory can I force those few seconds to pause. I was standing there, wobbling and laughing, for I thought Solomon was having a bit of fun turning me loose after spinning me like a top, when I saw that a white man had grabbed Solomon. It was Dupree.
Quick as a rattler striking, without a word spoken, Dupree stabbed a bowie knife into Solomon’s gut, pulled it down hard with both hands, yanked it out, and disappeared into the crowd.
Chapter 26
“Lay that whip on, girl!” I yelled up to Clemmie sitting in the driver’s seat of our wagon. I was in the back tending to Solomon, my hand on the spot where the knife had stabbed in, pressing hard to keep the life from flowing out of him.
“Camp’s not far,” I told Solomon. “You’re gon see Sheridan’s personal surgeon. Puny as that trashy rascal was, you’ll probably only need a stitch or two.”
I had nestled Matildy on Solomon’s chest so he’d have the comfort of her twining about him while I cooed gentle as a mourning dove for him to rest easy.
“We’ll get the General’s doc, I promise. You be fine. Trip out West’ll be a vacation for you now. Pretty sneaky of you to fix it so’s I’ll be the one holding the reins, working that jerk line the whole way.” I tried to make a joke, but it hung false in the air and only showed off the truth of how scared I was.
Solomon reached up, pulled me close, and in a strangled, raspy voice said, “Cathy, I got money inside my jacket. Take it. Go out West.”
“Solomon Yarnell,” I said, anger boiling up the way it always did when I wanted to snuff out fear or sadness or weakness. “I told you, I don’t want to hear that talk.”
“Cathy.” He held my eyes. “I’m dying. Let me do it in a bed. Then bury me. Proper.”
“No, Solomon. Not gon be that way. We’re going out West. You, me, Clemmie, Matildy. Things be different out West.”
“Cathy, we never lied to each other, did we?”
“No, Solomon, we didn’t.”
“Not the time to start now, is it?”
I refused to answer. Refused to let another good man pronounce a verdict I would never be ready to hear.
“Cathy, take the money.”
I looked about, frantic for some sign of camp ahead, for help, for a way to stop what was happening. Up ahead, in the darkness, I caught the glimmer of a lantern burning in the window of a cabin at the edge of a burned-out plantation. I hollered for Clemmie to make for it. Double-quick.
“You be in a bed fore you know it,” I said, clinging tight to Solomon’s hand. “Then we can get you doctored up proper.”
Solomon laid his hand on top of mine, stroked it as gentle as he always stroked Matildy, pulled it to his lips, kissed it, and said, “Mighty glad I got to know you, Cathy Williams. You are something else, Queenie. Something else entirely.”
Those were the last words of Solomon Yarnell.
Chapter 27
“Stop right there!” a freedwoman ordered, pointing an old muzzle-loader at me as I approached the door of her cabin. She stepped out into the moonlight followed by three children, two young girls and an older boy who held a lantern high.
The woman was a teeny little thing, down to gristle and grit, eyes big and wild as a cornered possum. It was no trick seeing that she’d been beat down hard by slavery and even harder by life after Sheridan burned the plantation house and the crops and the white folks fled, leaving her to fend for herself and her little ones. I could appreciate that she was ready to blow the next person who did her wrong to kingdom come.
“Ma’am,” I said, kindly as could be, “I don’t want nothin’ from you. I got a man here gone just now to where the woodbine twineth. A good man. Needs a peaceful spot to take his eternal rest. That’s all I’m asking of you. Just let me bury him here.”
She didn’t answer.
“I’ll pay you.”
“How much?”
“Four bits.”
“Lemme see.”
I counted out a few of the coins I had taken from Solomon’s pocket. She snatched them away and tucked them into her bodice without ever lowering the barrel of her muzzleloader. For another two cents, she let me have the use of a half-burned shovel that turned my palms black when I held it. Her boy, Tad, led us around back. The youngest girl, Bethany, followed.
I picked a spot beneath a tall willow with branches long enough that they’d stroke Solomon’s grave when a south wind blew. The digging felt good. Stabbing the shovel into the earth hard and regular held off the sadness. Clemmie offered to spell me, but it seemed I couldn’t pry my fingers from the handle, so she sat holding Matildy who was chittering with nervousness.
“She’th thcared,” said young Bethany, a round-headed child who was missing her two front teeth along with the fear of strangers that kept her mother at the open door, firearm trained on us.
“You wanna hold her?” Clemmie asked.
The girl had a gentle touch that calmed Matildy until Solomon’s pet was all but purring in her lap.
With help from the boy, Tad, I worked steady through the night, Bethany chatting away the whole time. “We been livin’ on flour dust,” she informed us, seeming to speak mostly to Matildy, as though she’d been waiting her whole life for a creature to come along who’d listen to her and her alone. “I’s the onliest one small enough to crawl up into the bolting chest after the white folk done locked up the mill and refugeed off down to Richmond. I swept up near three bushel!” she bragged to Matildy. “I picked out the worms and Mammie been baking us up real bread. Leastwise until we run out. We were gon starve so Mammie kilt our mule, Carl, and we ate off him until he went bad cuz we don’t have no salt and the Yanks burnt up the smokehouse.”
Near dawn I hit rock and asked for a pickax to finish the job, but Ta
d said the Yankees had not only burned the plantation and the crops, and carried off the livestock, they’d smelted down every plow, harrow, spade, pickax, and anything on the place could be used for bullets. The boy had scavenged the shovel, a plow, and some nails from the ashes of another place been burned out. But no pickax. “Yanks even took our daddy,” he finished mournfully.
I didn’t mind Sheridan doing the Rebs that way, but he ought to of spared those who were never with them and already been punished more severe than need be.
With no further digging to be done, Clemmie and I said the prayers for the dead that Mama and Iyaiya had taught us. I took what I found in Solomon’s pocket: his broken pocket watch, a small button-polishing card, his folding knife, and pipe. Soon as I could, I would get a personal effects box from the graves detail and have them store his things in a pretty little pine container for when Solomon’s kin came looking for him. I promised Solomon that I would see him soon in my dreams and in the times when I missed him and in all the moments when I went to ask him something and he wouldn’t be there.
When we finished, Clemmie told me, “My unit’s moving out at daybreak. They’ll take you on. Always need another washerwoman.”
I said nothing.
“Cathy, you can’t go out West now. Not by yourself. Not without a man to protect you. Come with me. Least we’ll be together.”
I saw myself scrubbing my life away, my hands chapped and burning from lye soap, no more count to anyone than a draft horse. Or having some ruttish stranger work me over top a barrel for a couple of taters. Or even a sparkly pair of earbobs. Both prospects made me feel like crawling in next to Solomon.
“Cathy, you hear me? We runnin’ outta time.”
The long night’s weariness fell on me heavy as a wet quilt.
“What other choice do you have?” she asked. “These are lawless times. Woman without a man to protect her? No telling. They’ll kill you, Cathy. Or worse. Come with me. We’ll find you a decent man, get you married off, you’ll do all right. Stay alive. Aren’t you gon say something?”