by Sarah Bird
The private behind the table squared up the pile of forms in front of him, dipped his pen into a little ink bottle, flicked the excess off, and asked, “Name?”
Caught off guard, I squeaked out, “What?” sounding, for the one and only time in my life not just female, but feeble-minded to boot.
From behind me came Vikers’s high-pitched cackle. His cronies joined in laughing at me. The sweat ran down my face in rivulets.
A drop of ink plopped onto the form from the tip of the private’s pen as he stared, blinking into the early morning sun up at me, and ordered, “State your first name.”
When I responded by opening and closing my mouth like a gaffed bass, he and his buddy at the next table exchanged little snorts of sad amusement directed, not just at me, but at my people in general. “Step aside!” he ordered. “We got men to process. Ranks to fill. Step aside!”
“Naw, naw,” a gentle voice behind me muttered. “Give the man a second.” The stranger leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Don’t have to be your slave name. Go on. Pick your own name your own self.”
The man’s kindness steadied me and I said, “Williams.”
“Is Williams your first name?” the private barked. “Or is Williams your last name? If Williams is your first name, do they call you Billies for short?”
Oh, how the white soldiers and Vikers and his crew, standing behind me, snickered about that weak little joke.
I tucked my head down, almost crushing my chin into my neck to make certain my voice’d be good and low, and said, “William. First name’s William.” My voice was so deep I’d of made John Henry sound like he ought to of been serving tea at a quilting bee.
“Last name!” the private barked.
“Cathy, sir!” I barked back even louder.
“Cathay,” he said as he wrote down my name the way he heard it. “You are eighteen, aren’t you?”
“Every bit of it,” I snapped right back, as he’d made it clear that eighteen was what he and the U.S. Army wanted me to be. He filled that in, handed me the paper, and told me to proceed to the barn.
I stepped out of line and got my first look at the kind soul who had come to my aid. He was a bull-built country boy, every solid inch of him, with shoulders like a set of smoked hams. His face was broad and open as whatever cotton patch he’d fetched up out of, and when he smiled, his teeth were big and white with a gap between the two front ones probably made him a champion watermelon-seed-spitter. Soon as he finished with his enlistment form, he stepped over to me, his hand stuck out, and said, “Pleased to make your acquaintance, William.” He had the velvety-soft, molasses-slow accent of the Deep South, but his hand was big and hard as a hickory knot.
As he told me about “’nother William I knows back home though he ain’t got your height,” we took our place in the next line, this one leading into the barn. The whole time, I kept an eye on Vikers. He was a true leader, a man who could influence those around him. What he appeared to be leading his growing crew toward, though, was being bullies, for they mocked and picked on anyone in their vicinity. Most of them he bullied ended up flocking with his gang as it is considerably more entertaining to bully than to be bullied.
When Vikers stepped up to the enlistment table, he made a big deal of taking the pen from the private and sweeping it around in the air several times before plunging it down to the paper to fill in his name and age. His cronies then begged him to do the same for them. Soon they were all signing their Xs on pieces of paper that I took to be IOUs as Vikers collected one from each man whose forms he filled in and signed.
The barn line was barely moving and Vikers and his boys fell in behind us just as the country boy announced to me, “Why, I believe I’ll call you Bill. They calls me Lemuel.”
To which Vikers squawked out, “Lummox, did you say? You’re saying your mammy named you Lummox?” In spite of most of them not having the faintest idea what a lummox was, Vikers’s followers knew it to be an insult and and cackled loud.
Lemuel took no offense and merely replied, “No, sir, I goes by Lemuel. Not Lum … Lummah … Whatever you said.”
I winced, for, as I’d learned from Mama, being polite to most men, but bullies in particular, was a terrible mistake. Politeness being the first inch of the mile of misery they’d take from you.
“Oh, excuse me for my error,” Vikers said.
“Nuthin’ to excuse,” Lemuel answered, with a gap-toothed smile. “Folks don’t hardly never catch it first time.” He offered his hand. “I’m Lemuel Powdrell out of Tallapoosa County, Alabama.”
“Oh, I have it now,” Vikers replied, turning his back on us so as to address his cronies. “Mule. Mule Powdrell.”
Being as I hated nothing more in life than a bully, Vikers’s insult made the blood pound at my temples. My fists were balling up and, for one second, I almost forgot that I couldn’t be Cathy Williams anymore. I was Bill Cathay and my life depended on passing unnoticed.
And passing unnoticed is just what I’d of done had not Vikers then added, “Well, Mule, maybe you two field apes…”
Field ape?
Had that little runt just called me a field ape or had I gone deaf from hate? The open guffaws of his gang told me I had heard right.
His next words came in loud and clear. “Perhaps you two hadn’t noticed, but you’re not standing in some field in Hog Dick, Alabama, picking goober peas, so Mule, if you and your odoriferous friend would step forward…” He whisked his fingers at us like he was flinging snot off of them.
Lemuel, who wouldn’t take up for himself, now did so when the attack included me and muttered, “They ain’t no cause to be so ugly.”
“Oh, they ain’t, ain’t they?” Vikers singsonged, mocking Lemuel’s country accent. Next he brayed out for the benefit of his buddies, “Lincoln should have given these country boys a brain instead of freedom.”
Well, that cut it. I wheeled on him and said, “Listen here, Little Man, Lemuel can learn to speak proper, but you ain’t never gon learn to be a full-size man.”
Because I caught them off guard, a couple of his new buddies laughed. Laughed hard. The one I’d heard being called Greene was a skinny country boy had a head and eyes the shape of almonds with ears placed so high they were near level with his eyebrows. The whole arrangement made him look like a baby possum. The other one, name of Caldwell, was a strapping fellow nearly as solid built as Lemuel. He had a big head and eyes, no neck, and sloping shoulders, all of which gave him a striking resemblance to a six-foot owl.
Little Possum Greene was laughing so hard he had to hang on to Big Owl Caldwell, as Caldwell hooted out, “Hoo-WEE! Little Man, Little Man, Stinky done hit you a straight lick with a crooked stick!” Hooting and gasping, Caldwell even laughed like an owl.
Lemuel joined in with one of those hard sucking-in laughs sounded like a mule braying.
The only one not amused was Vikers, who’d gone flinty and black in the eyes. He cut his boys with a stony gaze and asked in a voice more low and slithery than his usual high and piercing tone, “Caldwell, Greene, did you two suddenly learn to read?”
That tone even more than the words caused them to snap their yaps shut.
Vikers went on, “If you did, then you won’t be needing me to watch out for you, will you? Won’t need me to read the papers the army’s gonna get you to sign. Won’t need me to make sure they don’t trick you.” Vikers shrugged real casual, like it was their funeral and none of his concern. “Who knows? Maybe you’ll sign yourself right back into slavery.”
You think that didn’t bring them to heel? Then you don’t know the least little bit about the unimaginable trickery inflicted by whites upon my people. I fought hard against the urge to lick Vikers’s boots myself and get on his good side so he’d read for me, too. Before I had time to turn myself into a toadying ass sucker, however, the door of the rickety barn creaked open and a white corporal came out, blinking into the bright sun, and yelling, “Next six men! Step forward!”
>
Grinning like there was a taffy pull going on inside that barn, Lemuel said, “Come on, Bill, it’s our turn,” and practically danced inside. Not wanting any further word or scrutiny from Vikers and grateful to Lemuel for shouting out my new man name at every opportunity, I followed him in.
Coming in from the dazzling sun, it took my eyes a bit to adjust to the gloom inside the old barn. For a few seconds, all I could see were horizontal stripes of daylight shining through the gaps between the weathered boards and the dust motes floating through them. The rusty hinges of the barn doors creaked as the soldier slammed them shut then planted himself in front to guard that no one got out.
As soon as my eyes adjusted, I saw that all the men of color, both those being examined and those waiting, were naked as boiled chickens. I stood there, stunned. I can’t say exactly what I expected, but it did not involve airing out my particulars before a barnful of naked men. Surely that pair of lady lovers I had seen slurping on each other back to Cedar Creek hadn’t been required to show all that God had given them.
Peacetime be a whole other deal. I heard Solomon’s voice clear as if he was standing next to me, complete with his told-you-so laugh.
A private holding a musket with a bayonet attached shouted in my ear, “Strip down and line up!” He jerked back sharp, though, when he caught a whiff of Dupree’s rank garments.
I stepped forward to where Lemuel was already bent over taking off his britches. He straightened up and became another sturdy trunk in an orchard of dark-barked trees. I froze, conspicuously dressed amidst that forest of naked bodies. The back of my neck prickled and I glanced around to find Vikers studying me like a hawk focused on a baby squirrel. He glared, letting me know that he had a heavy score to settle on account of my mocking him.
“Bill,” Lemuel said, “you best shuck off them leathers, man.”
“I need to…” I pointed vaguely off toward the back of the barn.
Lemuel gave me a knowing nod. “See a man about a horse?”
When I continued searching for a possible escape route that didn’t pass by either Vikers or the guard at the barn doors, Lemuel clarified, “Means you got to go wee-wee. You might could slip in behind one them stalls back there.”
I shuffled out of the line, and performed the magic trick that all slaves were good at: I turned invisible. Of course being a walking heap of stinking hides helped.
With folks clearing out of the way of my stink shield, I was looking to sashay on out when Lemuel sang out big as glory, “Bill, hey, Bill! I got your place saved right here. Come on now. You up next!”
Chapter 31
There were two stations I could be herded to. At each one a doc examined a naked man. At the first, the doctor carefully thumped on a fellow’s chest, looked in his eyes, had him show off his grinners, weighed him, measured him, listened to his heart, had him hop about on one leg, then the other and, worst of all, he took a full tour of the recruit’s man business. That first doctor was thorough and competent: the last two things on earth I needed at that moment. At the second station was a sawbones with the swimmy eyes, trembling hands, and swollen, rumbud-blotched nose of a dedicated soak. That was my man. I lurched his way.
Figuring the doc’d have sympathy for a fellow stewpot, I stumbled forward like I was loaded to the gunwales, and pretended to trip so as to near fall into his arms. As I suspected, the doc’s tippy, hungover stomach lurched at the stink of Dupree’s buckskins. Fighting off the heaves, he shoved me as far from himself as his puny arm strength would allow.
“There,” he said, speaking into his shoulder. “Just stay right there.” Still keeping his distance, the doctor told me to jump up and down. I flapped about a bit, broadcasting even more of Dupree’s fragrance.
“Fine, fine, superb specimen,” he said into the hand he held in front of his face. Then, in an accent that marked him as a local, he ran down a list of afflictions that would have tried Job, and asked if I had: Tumor. Teeth unable to rip open a musket load. Rupture. Flat feet. Deafness. A wound of the head that impaired judgment. Convulsions.
I couldn’t mutter, “Naw, suh,” fast enough to keep up with the ailments he was meant to be looking for himself.
Completely ignoring the double yardstick at his side, the doc asked his assistant, “Corporal, what would you put this man’s height at?”
The corporal eyeballed me, said, “He’s a tall one, sir. Reckon he’d go five nine minimum.”
“I concur,” Doc said, and that’s what the corporal scribbled down on my enlistment form.
“Weight?” he asked next, paying no mind to the scale the good doctor at the first station was making all his men stand on.
Corporal sized me up like he was buying me by the pound. “He’s skinny, but looks to be all muscle, sir. He might be tipping one twenty. One thirty.”
Doctor shook his head, muttered to the corporal, “And you Yankees insisted that we mistreated these creatures so abominably you had to go and fight a war to ‘free’ them. Why, look around at these husky bucks.” He waved a hand at all the fine young men. “See what excellent condition they are in. Lies. It was all lies. Why, it was in our interest to maintain our property. And we did. Cared for them like prize bulls. It was my people who were starving. My people who suffered.” His voice trembled and his watery eyes got a bit waterier at the injustice. Shaking his head, he signed my form and waved me off toward yet another line.
Two soldiers stood at the head of this line. Beside them were huge piles of army jackets, shirts, suspenders, and trousers. Each recruit who stepped forward was sized up then handed a bundle of those items. I noted that there were two piles of caps. One pile had the hunting horn affixed to it, which marked out the ground-pounders of the infantry. I’d seen enough during the Rebellion to know that their miserable lives held no glory and little more dignity than a slave’s had. The other pile, now, those caps were crowned with the crossed sabers of the U.S. Cavalry, the real soldiers like the General and Sergeant Allbright. The ones that rode tall mounted on a fine horse. No question about it, it was the cavalry for me.
“What’s your size?” the soldier handing out the duds asked a man in front of me. He held up a pair of britches in each hand and said, “We got too big and too small,” and then without bothering to check if the fellow was a size Too Small or Too Big he thrust a uniform at him.
When my turn came, the private snapped the form out of my hand and went to gathering up my bundle without a word about my preferred service. When he popped one of them horn caps atop the bundle, I piped up, “Gimme a saber cap. Cavalry. I’m going for cavalry.” I added politely, “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d prefer to ride.”
The private shot his buddy a look that had that combination of twinkly and scary unique to Paddies that meant someone was about to be taken down a notch or get the shit kicked out of him. Usually a painful combination of both. “Foley,” he said to his buddy. “Our man here said he’d prefer to ride.”
Prefer. That was a mistake.
“You don’t say,” Foley chimed in. “Well now, meself, I’d prefer to be carried about in a gilded coach such as emperors and queens and the like prefer. What about you, Byrne? What would be your preferred mode of transport?”
“Now that you ask, Private Foley, I’d prefer to be conveyed by an elephant painted up like a flowered teapot with a great, bloody plume waving about its head like I was the focking lord of all India.”
They interrupted their jackass hee-hawing long enough for Byrne to shove the enlistment form in my face, stab a grimy fingernail at something the rumpot doc had written along the side, and read out, “Says ‘Infantry.’ Savvy?”
“But they never asked me if—”
“This is the army, Sambo. There ain’t no asking. You’re too focking tall for the cavalry. Get some sturdy boots, boy. It’s infantry for you, you ______.”
I was hurried off with the two Paddies cussing me out using unnecessary swears of a racial-type nature that I ha
ve no intention of repeating. For, as I’d learned during my time with the army, of all the whites, none could beat the Paddies for low-rating people of color. Excepting, of course, the Missouri pukes, Maryland craw thumpers, South Carolina weasels, Texas beef heads, Mississippi whelps, Georgia crackers, Kentucky corn crackers, and soon as they learned to speak American, the Krauts, dagos, Hunkies, and boxheads could also lay on some heavy slurs. I was sure the Bowery Boys I’d met up with on the Shenandoah Campaign meant us no good with their comments, but as no one could understand their New York City chatter, I couldn’t swear to it.
Come to think of it, you could count on near any white getting a dig in unless they were abolitionists, Quakers, or your more advanced type of Kraut. And even then, there’d be a Quaker now and again who had once owned slaves and had yet failed to shake off the habit of regarding us as property.
Outside the barn, I stood blinking in the hazy Virginia sunshine watching the naked men pop hands into shirtsleeves and hop from one foot to the other pulling up their army britches. Complaints rang out as they examined the tattered muslin shirts and stained trousers.
“This ain’t the blue suit. I signed up for the blue suit.”
“These rags ain’t fit to scare crows in.”
The bucktoothed corporal appeared and informed us, “What you have there is your recruitment issue. Proper uniforms will be issued at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louie. Infantry will form up here tomorrow at five in the morning to begin the march north. Cavalry will move by rail.”
March to St. Louie?
I had already marched down the whole of the Shenandoah Valley with Sheridan, I did not intend to spend the next three years of my life wearing out any more shoe leather for the U.S. Army. I would just toss out my papers and head on with the cavalry bunch.
Then the corporal added, “Each one of you must have the proper enlistment form to be admitted to either group.”
That was a nut I did not know how to crack.