by Jerry Buck
WHEELER’S
CHOICE
WHEELER’S
CHOICE
JERRY BUCK
M. EVANS
Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK
Published by M. Evans
An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom
Distributed by National Book Network
Copyright © 1989 by Jerry Buck
First paperback edition 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:
Buck, Jerry,
Wheeler’s Choice / Jerry Buck.
p. cm.—(An Evans novel of the West)
I. Title. II. Series.
PS3552.U3328W47 1989 89-17228
813’. 54—dc20
ISBN: 978-1-59077-336-9 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN: 978-1-59077-337-6 (electronic)
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
For Carol,
who is my choice,
And to her father,
Ben Boese,
who lent his first name,
And to the memory of my father,
Harold Campbell Buck,
a cattle rancher as flinty
as Angus Finlay.
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter One
Truly, we were in the bowels of the earth. Squeezing us, inching us forward in the blackness and the wet and the cold. I could feel the closeness, the pressure building. Ready to propel us through. We were ready. Oh, God, we prayed for release! We prayed for escape! We prayed for freedom!
Once again I awkwardly raised the wooden plank and shoved it into the damp earth. The clayey soil was stubbornly unyielding and my strength was nearly spent, but I felt the sharpened end of the makeshift shovel penetrate an inch or so. An inch closer to the end. An inch closer to freedom! An inch closer to completing the tunnel.
Freedom lay at the end of the tunnel, and we had to finish it. We had to drive this underground passage from our barracks, past the stockade fence, past the pickets, to the waiting green fields. There we could climb back into the fresh air and the light. Back into the world.
Whenever we weren’t digging, we plotted our escape route.
The majority, led by Moses Thatcher, favored going north to Canada. Old Moses would look up at me from his book of Blackstone and say, “It’s pure logic, Ben Wheeler. The Yanks expect us to turn south toward home, but we hightail it to Canady. ” The rest, egged on by Timothy Stevens, wanted to head south, cross the Ohio into Kentucky, push on to Virginia, and get back to fighting for Jeff Davis and Robert E. Lee.
It’s not that we didn’t want to take up arms again. It’s that we figured we stood a better chance by going through Canada. Lord knows, I wanted to get back into it. I’d been in this hellhole the Yankees called Camp Chase for more than a year. I’d been riding with Major Mosby’s Partisan Rangers back when we were on our own and later when we joined up with the 43rd Battalion and Jeb Stuart’s boys. I took a shine to Jeb Stuart, just like I had to Mosby. I guess I stood a head taller’n either one, but they both had the itch for a fight.
When a bluebelly guard told me they killed Stuart at a place called Yellow Tavern, it got me some riled. His real mistake was to laugh about it. He ain’t likely to laugh again for a long time. I spent six weeks in the Hell Box in the summer sun. Ohio gets mighty hot and mighty humid in the summer. It was worth it to wipe the smile off that bluebelly’s face. Moses gave me holy hell when I got out. He said digging the tunnel was more important than revenge. My mind told me he was right, but my heart wouldn’t agree.
Moses was like a pa to me, more so than my own pa, God rest his tormented soul. I had been reading law with Moses, using the few books he had managed to save. Every night, when I wasn’t in the tunnel digging, we talked about it. Over and over he told me, “Don’t just learn the law, Ben. Learn respect for the law, too. Law ain’t much good to nobody if you stick to the letter of the law and ignore the spirit.”
Moses was too old and too weak to dig in the tunnel, but he was our leader and inspiration. In the past few months the consumption had been on him something terrible. But he had a mind like a fiercely burning fire. Get near him and you could feel the warmth of his intellect. Moses said I had a feeling for the law. All I knew was that it had a way of taking the rage and wildness out of me. Of course, Abby’s had a lot to do with taming me down, too.
Abby comes in with the Quaker ladies. Abigail Carter was her name. The bluebellies didn’t much like it, but them Quaker ladies run over them like Mosby’s Rangers riding through the Yankee pickets in Loudoun County.
My eyes were closed to keep the dirt out, but if I opened them I still would have been blind. I could not see my hands in front of my face, or the makeshift shovel my hands were holding. The darkness in the tunnel was the blackest black I had ever seen. A frightening black that turned your gut to ice. An enveloping black that gripped your throat and tightened it and stifled the scream struggling to get out.
I twisted the plank and broke off a few chunks of soil. I felt it with my fingers, then shoved the dirt back between my body and the walls of the tunnel.
I was facedown in the tiny, cramped tunnel. I could only work the shovel by extending it awkwardly ahead of me. Yet I hardly felt the ache in my arms and body. It had long ago turned to numbness. I was nearly naked, to protect my uniform, and the damp cold went through my flesh tomy bones. My lungs ached from breathing the foul, oxygen-starved air.
I pressed my body against one side of the tunnel so that I could speak to the man behind me.
“Bring up the light,” I whispered.
We never talked above a whisper in the tunnel and tried to muffle the sounds of our digging. We knew the Yanks had listening posts to detect an escape tunnel. They had every right to be suspicious. We had tried before and been caught.
The man behind me passed the whispered command along. Then I heard nothing more.
I thrust the plank against th
e soil again and broke off a few more pieces of dirt. As I shoved the dirt back, a yellowish glow penetrated the blackness, and the flickering candle was passed up to me. Even the faint light from the candle hurt my eyes. I held out the candle and surveyed the work I had done in the last hour. I couldn’t tell much, but I particularly wanted to inspect the roof of the tunnel to see if there was any sign of weakness. We’d have to shore it up quickly. The Yanks never figured out why the barracks were so cold. We cut up most of the firewood to make shoring for the tunnel.
“Bring up the measure,” I said.
“On the way,” the man behind me whispered.
He pushed the rope into my hands, and I pulled it tight against the raw end of the tunnel. The rope was a rigging of every piece of hemp and cloth we could get our hands on. It appeared to be more knots than anything. Every piece was joined by a granny knot, and every measurement was marked by a slip knot.
“How much?’’ came the anxious whisper behind me.
“How much?’’ he pleaded again. He tried inching himself forward in the tiny space between my body and the tunnel wall.
I estimated the distance from the last knot to where my thumb and finger pressed the rope to the dirt. I looked back at the man’s tense face. It was nearly covered by beard, and what the beard didn’t hide of his flesh the dirt did. His haunted eyes stared at me from the blackness.
“Five inches,’’ I said. ’’Five inches or pret’ near.’’
The face behind me broke into a gap-toothed grin. I hadn’t recognized Bill Avery in the darkness until that moment. As Bill passed the word back, I tied a knot in the rope. Later, we’d slip the knot to gain a few inches of rope.
I went back to hacking at the dirt. I was weakening and not making much headway. In a while I felt Avery tug at my leg.
“Moses says it’s time,” he said in a hoarse whisper.
Those were welcome words. I began to back out of the tunnel.
The Yankees counted noses three times a day. We’d gone into the tunnel as soon after the noon count as we could. I had no idea what time it was. You lose track of time in the darkness because there is nothing to relate to. Even if you carried a pocket watch and a candle to read it by, time seemed unreal in the tunnel.
That night, huddled around the potbellied stove, we talked of home and the war and loved ones. It was cold in the barracks, and outside a harsh February wind, gathering speed since Lake Erie, picked up the snow on the ground and hurled it against the wooden sides of the barracks like grapeshot.
I was reading one of Moses’s precious law books. He had started the war with enough books to fill a knapsack. Now he had only five, and three of those were held together by string. We guarded them as zealously as we did the tunnel. Moses had been a lawyer in Tennessee, and when the war came he enlisted as a private. I didn’t know how old he was, but I knew he’d had a grandson who was a colonel with Lee.
One of the prisoners, with a glazed look in the eye, whispered conspiratorially, “I hear’d it today. Fella from Alabam, two huts down tol’ me.” He looked around suspiciously. “Says ol’ Robert E. hisself is comin’ to bust us out. Says he’s done passed Harper’s Ferry and’s most to Wheelin’. Be here—”
Moses, mending a tear in his jacket, stopped him. “Hush, you old fool,” he said. “You gonna get everybody all riled up for nothin’. Lee ain’t goin’ nowheres. He’s got his hands full just holdin’ off Useless S. Grant. So stop spreadin’ that fool—”
Moses was seized by a racking cough.
He couldn’t stop, and it nearly doubled him up. I put down the law book I had been reading and got the tin cup of water from the top of the stove. I poured a little down his throat. The hot water usually eased the coughing. It was the only remedy we had. Sometimes, when he was spitting up blood, it didn’t do any good at all.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and smoothed his white beard. “Thank you, Ben,” he said. “Sometimes I think the consumption is going to get me down.”
“Don’t talk like that,” I said. “Before you know it, we’re going to finish that tunnel and you’re going to be in Canada and get some real medical treatment.”
Moses shook his head. “I don’t know, Ben. I swear it looks hopeless sometimes.”
“That’s the ailment talking,” I said. “There ain’t nothing hopeless, Moses. You told me that yourself. Lord knows, you told me that enough times. And what better example you got right here than me, Ben Wheeler?
“I was headed straight for hell. Wild and mean and reckless. Ran away from home when I was a pup. Punched cows in Texas. Carried a tin star a time or two. Shames me to say it, but I also worked the other side of the law. I was a right smart gunfighter. Maybe not too smart. The only reading I did was on a whiskey label, and my community spirit was shooting up the saloon on Saturday night. You turned me round, Moses. You turned me round. Maybe not completely—I still got lotsa piss an’ vinegar in me—but you done it.”
Moses laughed with just the tiniest cough following it. “I’m politician enough to want to claim all the credit I can get away with, Ben. But the fact is I can’t claim it all. Don’t forget Abby. She done her share—and then some!”
In the past year, Moses and his books had become more precious to me than life. More important than the tunnel. More profound than the war. It was the first time I had found a purpose to my life.
But the dearest and sweetest thing of all was Abby. “You will be a man of the law when the war’s over,” Abby told me during her visits to the prison camp. She came in with the Quaker ladies, but she wasn’t one of them. Presbyterian, I was to learn.
Other women I had known had aroused only lust in me. I could not think an impure thought in Abby’s presence. I felt at peace in her presence. The rage left me. She was the gentlest woman I had ever known. She thought only of helping others. Yet, I don’t think she had reached her eighteenth birthday.
She talked to me about farming. Her pa raised corn, just like my pa did when I was a young’un back in Virginia. Our place was in the mountains, more rock than soil, and Pa brewed most of the crop into com liquor. He was his own best customer, and it didn’t improve his disposition none. He had the rage, too. I expect that’s where I got it.
She also talked to me of peace. Abby had more in mind than just the end of the war. “You just can’t pick up a gun when somebody does you wrong,’’ she said.
“I’m supposed to turn the other cheek?’’ I asked.
“Don’t mock the Bible,’’ she admonished. “You must learn to control your temper. You can accomplish more by control and reason than by letting your temper run wild.’’
I shrugged. “I been wild all my life.”
“Yes, I know,” Abby said, “and you must be proud of it to brag like that.”
“I wasn’t bragging,” I said in protest, then fell into shamed silence. I had been bragging and I had been proud of it. That’s what a man did.
“There’s more to being a man than fighting and carrying a gun,” she said. There were times when I would swear she could read my mind.
“Who is the braver—and the wiser?” she asked. “A man who takes offense at every imagined slight, or the man who overlooks petty offenses and is able to forgive? My pa says it takes more courage to hold back than to charge in with fists flying.” She laughed. “He calls it ‘intestinal fortitude.’ But once when he didn’t know I was around, I heard him call it ‘guts.’”
I had found my tongue again. “A man’s got to stand up for what he thinks is right.”
“Of course,” she said, “and I’ll stand there beside you. All I’m saying, Ben Wheeler, is the time for wildness is past and you have to keep your temper in check.”
I was so enthralled by Abby that I didn’t see the guard until I felt the point of his bayonet under my chin. The bayonet was at the end of his Spencer, and he was holding it as if he’d like nothing better than to run me through.
“What the hell you doin’ tal
kin’ to a woman, Johnny Reb?” the guard demanded. He shoved the bayonet tighter against my skin.
Abby jumped to her feet. “He has every right to talk to me,” she declared. “Now you put that knife and gun down this instant! Sergeant Wheeler is a gentleman.”
The guard eyed her suspiciously. “Y’sticken’ up for a Reb agin yer own kind?”
He turned his scorn against her. He said. “Wait’ll th’ lieutenant hears we got a southern sympathizer here. Playin’ up to them Rebs like some kinda dance hall floozy.”
My hand was on the bayonet shaft, and I had it aside, ready to wrestle the rifle from the guard’s hands.
But Abby had anticipated my move. “Stop it!” she shouted. “Stop it, both of you!”
The commotion had attracted the attention of the prisoners nearby and of several of the Quaker ladies.
The three of us—Abby, the guard, and myself—were in a circle of anxious faces. Abby spoke first.
“I’m afraid the sentry tripped,” she explained. “Sergeant Wheeler reached out to prevent his fall.”
A Yankee lieutenant pushed his way through the crowd. He looked at Abby, then me, and finally the guard. “The lady said you tripped, Private Biggens. Is that what you say?”
Private Biggens studied the ground for a moment. “Yes, sir,” he said finally. “That’s what happened. I tripped.”
“Let’s break it up,” the lieutenant said. “You prisoners know you ain’t permitted to bunch up on the grounds. Move along. Private Biggens, get back to your post. And, ladies, I do believe you have duties tending to the sick.”
He moved closer to me and said in a half whisper, “You ain’t fooling nobody, Wheeler. You come this close”—he held a finger a hairs-breadth from his thumb—“to getting the Hell Box! You better keep your nose clean!”
After the lieutenant walked off, Abby smiled and said, “See, you don’t have to wrestle in the mud. Or end up in the—” She hesitated before saying the word “Hell Box.”
A coquettish smile crossed her face. “I would not like you in the”— again a pause—“Hell Box. I’ll be back next Saturday.”