by Sarah Bird
The woman’s body I was hiding was like an old friend I missed more than I could say. Gently I sudsed all the parts I had to keep hidden and felt a tiny bit less scared and alone. I whispered to my hidden self and told her that she was my twin, my sister, my secret strength, and that I would always protect her and keep her from the men meant to do her harm. As I washed, I cried without making a sound and that was a relief, too.
Chapter 37
“Sem come lem! Sem come lem!” Lemuel’s country accent softened the numbers as he rattled the dice in his hands, stopped to blow on them, rattled a bit more, threw them up against the barracks outside back wall, and crapped out.
“Thank you, Mule, thank you! Always a pecuniary pleasure to play with you.” Vikers swept what was left of Lem’s first month’s pay into his pocket. I’d already signed mine away to him. And by the look of how many others weren’t gambling or buying extra food or even the gun-cleaning supplies army regs said we were supposed to purchase out of our own money, Vikers had done a right smart of paper doctoring and hired reading. At least I could stop worrying about him revealing that I was supposed to be a foot soldier since he’d changed so many others’ papers.
What Vikers actually collected was half our pay, since none of us recruits’d see our full thirteen dollars until we joined an active unit. And that day couldn’t come soon enough. Every one of us hated the barracks food, which, aside from the addition of cold corn bread sopped with “gravy” made of naught but hot water and flour and an occasional treat of three prunes apiece, was the same green salt pork and mush as what I slopped out to the prisoners every day.
While we waited for our group to fill out to the ninety men we needed to make a company, every recruit was worked like a draft mule. And, aside from mucking out stables, never a lick of any of it had to do with guns or horses.
In the evenings, after we were done with our digging, painting, sweeping, mopping, and such, we met up with an old white sergeant who had small, tight, squinty eyes and a small, tight, squinty mouth to get educated about the redskins. He’d come from the Indian Territories and could go on for hours about the depravities that awaited us there if we were ever to be captured. According to him, the best we could hope for from the heathens was a quick arrow through the heart or a sweet crack to the back of the head with a tomahawk.
The old sergeant held us spellbound with stories about how the Indians’d do you if you ever fell into their cruel hands. You’d get scalped, or roasted alive. Or buried in the dirt up to your chin with your eyelids cut off so your eyeballs’d barbecue in the sun while you starved to death. Or staked out naked and spread-eagled over a red ant bed after having your private parts sliced off, stuffed in your mouth, and your lips sewed together. A person tended to remember a torture when the best part of it was getting your lips sewed together.
The point of all his stories was simple enough. “They ain’t human,” he repeated again and again. “No matter what the nancy boy Quakers and pusillanimous politicians in Washington say, redskins ain’t human.”
Most of the men, wide-eyed with terror, hands folded protectively over their crotches, nodded in agreement. Sergeant tended to finish up terrifying us by delivering a lecture about how my race needed to “learn the meaning of discipline.” I bit my tongue to keep from telling him that “my race” could school every soldier in the U.S. Army on discipline for we’d been learned by the finest whip hands in the South.
It turned out that the entire purpose of Jefferson Barracks was to break a man down and make a soldier out of what pieces might be left. A soldier who would salute, say “yessir,” and obey. Questions and “no” were for civilians. Those who weren’t snappy enough with their “yessirs” and salutes were taught army discipline by way of being barreled up, marched half to death carrying a pack loaded with bricks, or buck and gagged. This last training technique had a soldier gagged and hog-tied up with an iron bar run through the space between his knees and elbows and left that way. When the man was untied, he couldn’t straighten up right for a month.
There were other harshnesses.
One morning, I steered my cart of mush and molasses over to the guardhouse and found a dozen white prisoners creeping out. They were breaking for daylight when two guards, still wobbling from being bashed in the head by the escapees, appeared at the door. Without a single word, not a cry of warning, not an order to return, those guards fired their rifles and laid out four of those boys quick as they could reload. They winged another four and shot two more who’d already surrendered and were coming back with their hands waving high up over their heads. Between that and the bucking and gagging and the redskin scare stories, I saw that the army meant business and I was having my doubts if it was one I wanted any part of.
These doubts took on solid form that evening during another crap game. As usual, we were outside, and Vikers, with his bottomless wad of forgery and reading dollars, was corralling what was left of the men’s first pay, leaving them nothing to buy so much as a pasty pie or two with from the sutler to quiet their growling bellies with.
When his pockets were full, Vikers stood and announced that he had to see a man about a horse, and the whole bunch of them rose and adjourned outside where it was dark. As I edged off to the privy, I watched them form a line behind the barracks, and set loose their manly arcs. In the middle of seeing who could hit the Mississippi, Vikers yelled back at me, “Stanky, you too good to piss with your bunkies?”
“Naw, I’m fine. Heading to the—” I pointed to the outhouse.
“Man takes a lot of shits, don’t he?” Greene, who never missed an opportunity to suck up to Vikers, announced in a loud voice.
Vikers jumped right in. “He does, doesn’t he?” he said, pretending like he’d just now noticed that I never unzipped in front of the others. “Mule, what ails your buddy?”
“Cathay just don’t like doing his business front of folks,” Lem answered. “Why you care anyhow, Little Man?”
So casually it made shivers run up my spine, Vikers answered, “Next time you call me ‘Little Man,’ Mule, I will slit your throat while you sleep.”
I waited long enough to see Lemuel walk away safe, then rushed to the privy. Soon as I got the door closed, I pulled the bindings off and drew a breath. The past weeks had packed the air hard in my lungs. I couldn’t take this army, couldn’t take Vikers, couldn’t take being what I was not, couldn’t take being so completely alone that the only friend I had didn’t know the first, not the very first, most essential thing about me.
That night was even more uneasy than most.
As usual, I rose early the next morning so I could get to the washroom before everyone else. The pump screeched as I worked the handle to send a rush of water into the long tin trough. It hit the metal and echoed loud and hollow off the white tiles on the floor and walls of the high-ceilinged room. I’d just splashed water on my face when Vikers and his boys surrounded me.
They were bare-chested, suspenders looping down by their sides. The vicious stares they kept trained on me made my heart gallop. Standing next to me, Vikers plunked his straight-edge razor down on the shelf that ran above the trough, and lathered up for a shave.
Keeping my eyes on that straight-edge, I dried my face and turned to leave, but Vikers, his mouth a black hole opening and closing in the middle of the white foam, said, “Cathay, you’re not going to shave? We been here a month, but I’ve never seen you shave. Have any of you boys seen our man here shave?”
They all muttered how, no, they had not seen me shave.
“So, Cathay,” Vikers said. “You never shave with us. You never piss with us. You never bathe with us. Care to tell us why that is?”
The men waited for what I was going to say. If they were dogs, the fur on the back of their necks would of been bristled up, they were that ready to attack.
I rubbed my palm over my jaw, and said slow and casual like, “Thanks for reminding me.” I plucked the foamy brush out of Vikers’s hand, la
thered up, and said, “All that Cherokee blood in me, I almost never have to shave. But when I do…”
I snatched Dupree’s razor out of my pocket, flicked it open, shaved off a strip of lather, snapped it into the trough, and concluded, “I always cut close.”
I finished my “shave” and left. The trembling didn’t start until I was halfway to the guardhouse. I had thrown the pack off again, but it didn’t matter. Vikers and his curs had my scent. One way or another, they were coming for me. One way or another, if I stayed, they’d kill me.
Chapter 38
As soon as I finished at the guardhouse, I took my cart, but instead of wheeling on back to the kitchen, I kept right on going. Whatever life I’d have as a civilian surely couldn’t be any worse than what Vikers and his men had planned for me.
A mile or so outside the post, a pack of freedmen, women, and children were huddled up next to the road. They swarmed about me, thrusting victuals my way. One woman had a basket of roast sweet taters, two for a penny. An old man, eyes so filmed over they were solid gray, held out a trembling hand with a palm’s worth of ground corn. A bold little fellow had a single egg, “stole fresh that morning,” that he hounded me to buy off him for a nickel. I told him he ought to be selling brass as he had a mite too much of it.
I was trudging down the road toward St. Louie, when the very distinctly military sound of iron halters and bits jingling, tack creaking, and hooves drumming along smartly up ahead caused me to jump off the road and hide myself behind the cane grass growing there. Five riders approached. One of them carried a swallow-tail guidon that snapped in the wind above their heads.
As they came within sight, my eyes went first to the men’s rank insignia. It had become second nature to check that even before looking at a face: a first sergeant flanked by four corporals. Each one was spit-and-polished to such a high gleam that they looked to have been punched out at the Perfect Soldier factory.
Before I could even make out the first sergeant, I knew who he was from the way he sat his horse. I stepped back into the road, my hand frozen in a salute would have done the Kaiser of Prussia proud.
The Sergeant reined up, returned my salute, and asked, “Private, could you direct me to Carlisle Barracks? I need to meet my new unit and begin training as quickly as possible.”
I gave First Sergeant Levi Allbright directions, turned my barrow around, and wheeled back to post.
Chapter 39
The real first day of the army for me was the day Sergeant Allbright said to us, “As of this moment, I take command of Ninth Cavalry, Troop J. Today we begin training to become the finest troop in not only any colored regiment, but in any regiment anywhere in the United States Army!” From the first word he spoke, we believed Sergeant Allbright and wanted to follow where he led.
All the bullshit assignments stopped immediately. I was pulled off guardhouse detail. The rest who’d been parceled out laying bricks and weeding the officers’ wives’ flower gardens stopped that nonsense and we all fell to drilling. I am not bragging just stating a simple fact when I say, as far as marching formations, no one in the troop could touch me. After my time with Sheridan, I’d already been in the damn army for near a year. Plus, the way I came up with Mama? I knew how to hold my head up and tamp down every bit of emotion might ever threaten to play across my face.
The third day, the Sergeant pulled me out of formation and put me at the head of the line so that the fumble-footed could copy me. Out of the whole sorry company, it delighted me to see that Vikers was the sorriest. The man was almost white in how long it took him to get in the habit of following an order. Corporal’d say “Right,” and that brain of his, always so busy figuring out the angles, would balk and he’d go left. Ended up there were only five boys out of our troop of nearly ninety privates who had to have straw and hay tied to their feet. And Vikers was one of them. Every night in the barracks he went on about how marching was for “ground-pounders” and that he refused to learn it since “equitation” was his “natural means of conveyance.”
He didn’t have long to wait, for, very next day, when we formed up on the parade grounds, the Sergeant greeted us from high atop his noble steed, saying, “Today you become cavalry soldiers. Today we begin riding. Most of you have never ridden anything but narrow-headed mules and swaybacked plugs. Many of you have been forbidden by law, perhaps upon pain of death, from even swinging a leg over a fine mount. You have been told that people of color do not make good horsemen. I am here to tell you that that is a lie!
“How do I know? I know because I have seen the Comanche and there are two things I can tell you about those fearsome warriors. They are the finest horse soldiers the world has seen since Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes. And, like the Mongols, they are men of color. Do you hear me? Men of color!”
“Yessir!” I sang out first and loudest.
“Men, let me tell you this. They are going to give us the worst horses, the worst gear, and the worst duty! And do you know what we are going to give them back?” Silence greeted his question and he asked again, “I said, do you know what we will give them back!”
“What, sir?” I sang out.
“I will answer you with another question: tell me, gentlemen, can I smite my enemy, the enemies of the United States of America, of which we are citizens, with one finger?”
He held his pointer out straight, and tipped off by that Bible word “smite,” we called back way you’d call back to a preacher on Sunday, “Uh-uh!” “No, sir!” for we knew a lesson was coming.
“Can I smite him with my thumb?”
“No, sir!”
“Can I smite him with my fist?” He raised a fist mighty as a blacksmith’s hammer.
We liked this smiting business just fine. It was what we’d signed up for and we thundered back, “Yessir!”
“Yes!” he said. “We are going to come together like separate fingers clenching tight to make one mighty fist! We are going to drill and practice until no man on earth is our equal on the back of a horse or behind the sight of a Spencer repeating carbine. We are going to abjure pettiness and rise to levels of greatness that the U.S. Army has only dreamed of before!”
His voice hummed through us like a pitch pipe calling out the note that brought every one of us into harmony.
“I repeat, they are going to give us the worst horses, the worst gear, and the worst duty! And, I ask you again, what are we going to give them back?”
He raised his fist high in the air and, without thinking, every one of us did the same. A stillness fell as we waited, fists to the sky, for First Sergeant Allbright to deliver the answer unto us.
“I said, do you know what we are going to give them back!”
“What, sir!” I hollered back.
“Gentlemen, we are going to give them the best damn horse soldiers the world has ever seen! Am I right?”
A roar ferocious as any lion’s answered him then. With me roaring loudest of all. Though I had seen my folly in believing Allbright was my dead soldier, damn if his words didn’t cause a power to move in me that was not of this mortal earth. It was the same power he’d used back at the recruiting. Same one that had made me feel like he recognized me, saw me, knew me personal. And now, that power was working on every man in the troop. All of us, friend and foe alike, were bound up together. If Allbright had asked us to dump coal oil over our heads and spark a flint to it, not a one of us would of hesitated.
The Sergeant’s four corporals began leading saddled horses from the stables and went to matching up mount with rider. I saw right off that most of the nags should have been heading for the glue factory. They were windblown, spavined, swaybacked, trappy, long-toothed, and droopy-lipped. And I couldn’t wait to get mine.
A corporal name of Masters came up to Lem and me, took one look and called the Sergeant over.
“Private Cathay?” Sergeant Allbright’s lips formed my name, but it was a full ten seconds before I could piece together that a question had been asked
of me and that I was standing there with my fly trap open. I cringed at the sorry, tongue-tied impression I was making.
“Sir! Yessir!” I snapped off a salute sharp enough to chop hickory.
“You and Private Powdrell, you are too tall for cavalry.”
I tipped my head back to meet his eyes, for Allbright was as tall as Lem. Allbright sussed out my question and informed me, “I was riding with the cavalry before they instituted the height limits. We demand a great deal of our mounts. The gear we require them to carry along with our weight places a heavy burden on them. Were you two not measured and weighed at the recruitment depot?”
“I sure was,” Lem said. “And they were going to put me afoot but for I’m a farrier.”
So that was it. Lem was a horseshoer. This was news to me and gives you an idea of how different men were with their friends. Had Lem and I been girls, of the normal sort rather than my tomboy brand, we’d of known everything about each other from favorite color to which of our friends riled our nerves so bad one of us was bound to stick an ice pick in her. I surely would of known that my best friend shoed horses, making him the one person, giant or midget, no cavalry outfit could do without.
“Excellent,” Allbright exclaimed. “I was afraid we’d have to train someone. A suitable mount will be found for you, Powdrell. What about you, Cathay? Did some gin-soaked local doctor simply wave you on without so much as a thump on your chest?”
“No, sir,” I answered. “I was examined in minute-most detail.” It always amazed me how, when I most needed him to, Daddy would place the correct words and the correct manner of speaking them in my mouth. “My minascular abundance of height, so to speak, got shrunk down on account of my conspacious knowledge of horseflesh, having been a groom or, actually, more of a barn foreman.”