March Toward the Thunder

by Joseph Bruchac

  ANOTHER INDIAN

  Sunday, May 15, 1864

  The Lord’s Day seemed to make little difference to those who were running the war. One day for killing was the same as the next. This Sunday, though, seemed destined to be a quiet one.

  We’re both worn out, Louis thought. Blue and Gray alike.

  Morning services had ended no more than an hour ago, but he couldn’t recall a word the chaplain spoke. He raised his face up to the noon sun, shining down brightly for a change.

  Be thankful, he thought. The old words his father taught him came back to his mind.

  Ktsi Kisos, okeohneh. Great Sun, thank you for shining down on me.

  May, but warm as a summer day in August back north. If it weren’t for the throbbing in his burnt hand, he might have been able to imagine himself back there.

  “Louis!”

  “Chief!”

  Louis sighed and opened his eyes. He wasn’t surprised. He’d heard the feet of people coming his way across the field.

  Joker, Songbird, Bull. Merry too. But, to his surprise, someone else was with them.

  “Look who we’ve brung ye,” Songbird said, gesturing forward the stranger standing behind them.

  “One a’ yer own,” Belaney said, an unaccustomed smile on his dark face.

  “We got you a red brother!” Joker grinned.

  Louis had never seen the Union soldier who stepped forward before. The young man’s skin, though, was the same brown as his. His eyes were as dark, his hair as thick and raven black. He was shorter and stockier than Louis, but he carried himself the way one does when years of outdoor living have made you as graceful and strong as a wolf. There was a little twist to his lip, a half smile there as his eyes took Louis in.

  “Sehkon,” the other Indian said in Mohawk, a language Louis recognized, even if he didn’t speak much of it.

  Great, he thought. They have brought me an Iroquois!

  Louis rose to his feet and raised a hand in ironic greeting. “Kwai kwai, Maguak,” he replied.

  The half smile on the other young man’s face twisted a little farther.

  “Abernaki, eh?” he said.

  “Un-hunh,” Louis replied, taking a stiff-legged half step forward.

  “Adirondack is what we call you. Porcupines, Bark-eaters,” the Mohawk soldier said, taking his own stiff step, the two of them almost chest to chest now.

  By now, Louis’s friends from E Company were exchanging worried glances. This wasn’t going like they’d expected.

  Louis thrust his chin forward. “Maguak, we call you. Those afraid to fight us.”

  “Friend of those French pigs who burned our fields!”

  “Ally of those English dogs who destroyed our villages!”

  Out of the corner of his eye Louis could see that Joker was standing with his mouth wide open. Songbird looked stricken, Belaney shocked, and Merry seemed about ready to cry.

  “Enemy of my friends,” Louis growled.

  “Friend of my enemies,” the Mohawk soldier hissed back.

  “Now we must fight each other,” Louis said, bumping his chest against the other man’s.

  “A struggle to the death,” the young Mohawk soldier agreed, bumping back.

  “Or not,” Louis said, unable to keep a straight face any longer.

  “Not, for sure.” The other man chuckled, his round face splitting into a wide, friendly smile.

  The two of them turned to look at Louis’s fellow members of Company E and began to laugh.

  “Boys,” Louis said, “you just been introduced to Indian humor.”

  There was a moment’s pause as his four friends took in what had just happened. Then Joker raised his palm up to his chin. “Boys,” he said, “I do believe we have just been paid back for all our teasing.” Then he too began to laugh and the others joined in.

  Louis turned and held out a hand. “Louis Nolette from St. Francis.”

  “Artis Cook,” the young Mohawk said, “from St. Regis.”

  The handshake he returned was unlike that of a white man. His grasp was as relaxed as Louis’s, neither turning their loose clasp into a contest of strength or a means of proving their manliness by crushing the other’s fingers. It had been a long time since Louis had felt a handshake like the one Artis returned to him.

  “Good to meet you,” Artis added.

  “You too,” Louis said. Then he turned to his friends. “Thank you,” he said.

  “Boys,” Artis said, “I thank you too, even if all you could find for me was an Abenaki. But seeing as how my grampa was an Abenaki himself—we Mohawks have been known to make mistakes—I guess he’s just as good as any of my relatives.”

  “Or as bad,” Louis said, “eh?”

  “Eh!” Artis guffawed.

  Louis grinned, knowing that he was making his white friends as confused as he was happy. He was letting a part of himself be seen that he had kept bottled up inside for so long.

  Artis snapped his fingers. “Hey, would you boys like to go swimmin’? I have found a perfect swimmin’ hole not far from here. Just down the hill from where my company is camped.”

  “Not me,” a voice said loudly.

  To Louis’s surprise it was Merry. He was backing away, holding up both hands.

  “Merry, lad,” Devlin said, grabbing at the small soldier’s sleeve. “Why say nay? Wouldn’t y’ like to wash away the stink of sweat and battle and blood that’s on you as sure as it is on us all. You could take your clothes off and wash them good for a change.”

  “No! I can’t. I . . . I’m afraid of water.” Merry’s eyes were strange as he tried to pull free. He looked at Louis pleadingly.

  “Songbird,” Louis said.

  Devlin let go of Merry’s sleeve. As soon as he did, Merry turned and ran away from them.

  Louis shook his head. What’s wrong with him? He’s been just about my best friend and now he runs away like that. Is he that shy to be seen with his clothes off? Or is it something else. Is he jealous about my finding another Indian to talk to?

  Artis looked just as confused as the rest of them. He lifted up his hands. “Well,” he said.

  “Swimming,” Louis replied. “We’re going swimming.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HEALING LEAVES

  Sunday, May 15, 1864

  The swimming spot Artis Cook led them to was a shallow, willow-shaded pond fed by a little stream.

  “Start of the war,” he said as they floated in the placid pool, “lots of us tried to join up. Even those of us like me who was too young. Even now, I’m only seventeen. Though you know how it is with white men. All us Indians look alike to ’em. Most can’t tell if we’re fourteen or forty.”

  Louis turned his head to the side. Kirk, Devlin, and Belaney were piling a rock dam at the head of the pool to try to make it more than neck deep. Not that they were making much headway. They were spending more time splashing water at each other than working.

  “I know,” Louis said.

  “But you know what they told us then? Said it was a white man’s war. Us Indians was not needed. It’d be over in a week or two. We just nodded, went back home, and waited. Once that week turned into two years, they come to beg us to join up! Isn’t this a white man’s war, we asked? Ain’t our skins still brown? But we only teased ’em for a while before we took pity on ’em and said we was ready to serve.”

  Artis and two cousins had signed up together six months ago. Both cousins had been injured in the Wilderness. They were still at the Brigade Hospital.

  “Not to have any limbs sawed off,” Artis explained. “Cousin Andrew Cook had most of the hair on his head burnt off, even his eyebrows. Cousin Albert Cook, he is sure to have a hitch in his get-along once he starts walking again. I have visited ’em twice. They figure to be back on the line before mid-summer.”

  He turned, took a few lazy strokes, then rolled onto his back.

  “Got any relatives in the battle, Nolette?”

  “None,” Loui
s said. “My mother, she is all the close family I have. My father, he was a soldier when he was young. He fought for the Americans against the British in 1812.”

  Is that another reason I joined the army? Because my father did so himself?

  He kicked his feet in the water, making little waves.

  “But he came back after the war. Then it was as a lumberjack that he worked. That’s the reason I know how to swim. Papa said he saw many a man on the river who could ride the logs but never learned to swim a stroke and would drown if he fell in and there was no one there to pull him out. Although swimming did not help him, no, for he died on a log drive. I have some cousins, but they are all back at St. Francis. My mother, she is both a basket-maker and knows medicine. I joined up while we were in the States selling our baskets. At Troy it was, you know the town? At the time it seemed to me like the right thing to do. I don’t know. What do you think, eh?”

  Louis paused to take a breath. It was the longest speech he’d made since joining the army. Having another Indian to converse with seemed to make words flow out of him like the sap from a maple tree in the spring.

  “You’re a talkative one,” Artis observed. “Ain’t you?”

  “No!” Louis said. Then he began to laugh, so hard that he breathed in a mouthful of water.

  They slogged back to shore and sat on the bank in their long johns to let the sun dry them out before they put their clothes back on. Bull, Joker, and Songbird climbed up to join them. As his friends sat down, Louis shifted himself to the side and winced. He’d put his palm down on a sharp stone.

  “Let me see that, Nolette,” Artis said.

  Louis held out his hand, palm up.

  Artis nodded, then pulled on his pants and his boots. “Wait here.”

  He ran up the slope and soon came back holding a broad-leafed plant he’d uprooted.

  “My auntie uses this,” he explained. “She knows medicine like your mother. This is one the white men brought, which is why it takes over wherever it grows. Good for burns. Don’t worry. I remembered to say Niaweh, thank you, when I pulled it up.”

  Louis took the plant from Artis Cook’s hands. It was new to him, but he had seen it before. Just as it had appeared in his vision of his mother, fuzzy blue flowers bobbed above the green leaves.

  Oleohneh nigawes. Thank you, my mother, he thought as he squeezed green juice from the leaves into the seared skin of his left hand.

  “That helping some?” Artis asked.

  “Yup,” Louis replied.

  Joker chuckled. “Don’t expect more than a word or two from our friend Louis,” he jibed. “He is our company’s stoic redman. Getting him to give a speech is like trying to squeeze blood from a stone.”

  Louis raised one eyebrow as he looked over at Artis.

  Artis nodded back.

  “What are you Indians grinning about?” Joker said.

  “Nothing,” Louis replied.

  “Everything,” Artis added.

  Then, while Louis’s friends from Company E tried to figure out what was so funny, the two of them laughed till tears came to their eyes.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE IRISHMAN AND THE INDIAN

  Sunday, May 15, 1864

  The time to themselves Flynn had told them to take was short-lived. No sooner had they returned from their swim than the order came to re-form their companies.

  Artis Cook was with another New York regiment. Chances were they’d be close enough to see each other after the battle. Providing they survived it.

  “Good luck on you, Nolette,” Artis said, shaking Louis’s hand. “Lord watch over you—as our old priest up at St. Regis says.”

  “You, too, Cook. Olipamkaani. Travel well.”

  And now, long after midnight, they were marching along yet another muddy and rutted road.

  Sergeant Flynn, who’d chosen to walk beside Louis, was in an expansive mood.

  “I’ve been thinkin’ on something, Louis, m’lad.”

  Thinkin’, Louis said to himself, means I’m about to hear one of Flynn’s lectures. His legs and his lungs both of iron must be made.

  The sergeant leaned closer. “Now, me son, this is for yer ears alone. I’m hoping that it’s not crazy ye’ll be thinkin’ me, but I have been cogitatin’ upon this for some time. And what I have concluded is that ye Indians and we Irish are one and the same.”

  One and the same? What white man has ever said that to me before?

  The image of the gang of boys throwing stones at them as he and his mother came into town returned to Louis’s mind.

  Sergeant Flynn cleared his throat.

  “Now, I’m not talking about that common kinship of humanity that we all share, ye and me and all those poor deluded Rebels and even those whose skins are as dark as the pitch-black of midnight. That common humanity is nothing to scorn, begorrah. For like Shakespeare’s Shylock said, if ye prick us we all do bleed, and I’ve never seen a man of any race whose blood is anything but red. We all breathe in the same air. We eat the same and sleep the same and our bodies have those same private functions, each and every man.”

  Flynn tapped himself on the chest and then reached over to thud his broad hand against Louis’s shoulder.

  “It’s the same mix of meat and blood and bone in us all, every one. But it’s more than that upon my mind. What I’ve been thinking on is that there’s a deeper bond between us, lad. There’s a common thread sewn between those of us who come from the dear lost soil of the Emerald Isle and those like ye whose homeland is the earth beneath our feet. D’ye know what it is?”

  Flynn paused.

  No need for me to make a reply, Louis said to himself. It was clear that the Irishman would do enough talking for both. Plus Flynn seemed to understand better than most how Louis could answer a question by listening.

  “Arghhh,” the sergeant from Killarny said, his voice half growl and half sigh. “It’s the cloth of history into which we’ve both been sewn, the red-haired Irishman and the red-skinned Indian. Put those histories side by side and it’ll be the thing itself and its image in the mirror. Y’know how the English came over here and tried t’ wipe out yer people? Well, they tried t’ do it t’ us first. Cromwell and his evil band of murderers hoped t’ wipe our race off the face of the land like we was no more than dirt on the floor. Because the color of our hair was different—they said we was savages and vermin and a curse upon the land, better dead and gone. We fought back against them as men fight, hand t’ hand, as brave and foolish as ever a warrior might be. But they cut us down with their finer weapons and their greater numbers. They even bought off some of our own people with gold and promises and turned ’em t’ take up arms against us. And does that sound familiar t’ you, boyo?

  “Then they gave our land t’ their own people and pushed us into the roughest, hardest places to live, sometimes allowin’ us t’ work for them, for a few potatoes and a crust of bread t’ survive upon. And then when they could not kill us all or force us all t’ leave the land, they tried t’ force us all t’ speak their tongue and not the beautiful Gaelic that my sainted parents made sure I cut me eyeteeth upon. Erin go bragh.

  “Then they saw another use for us and that was in their armies, trusting we’d show the same courage we did when we fought against ’em. And we did it in spite of all that history. We did it t’ prove to them the kind of men we were and to make a place in the world for us and our children to come.”

  Flynn’s voice caught.

  Louis felt a similar lump in his own throat.

  He understands. And so do I.

  Bad as it had been and as bad as he knew it would be in the days ahead, Louis knew then that he was in the right place. It was not just a white man’s battle that they were fighting. There was no place he’d rather be than in the presence of his sergeant whose words touched the heart of his heart.

  What would Jean Nolette have thought of Sergeant Michael Flynn?

  He would have shaken his hand.

&nb
sp; They plodded along in silence for a mile or more before Fynn cleared his throat and spat.

  “And here we great fools both are,” the sergeant said as they began to labor up a slope. “In this brigade, that’s always called upon when there’s work t’ be done that is desperate, absurd, or forlorn. And what do we get in the end? A small bit of ground t’ bury our bones? A handful of coin and perhaps a bit of ribbon and metal to wear on our chest? Or the right to call ourselves men?”

  Flynn raised his arm.

  “Column halt!” he called out.

  They stopped, more or less. Some of the exhausted men who’d been walking in a half sleep kept on for a step or two before being stopped by the backs of the soldiers in front of them.

  They’d reached a high hilltop. A line of lights flickered below them from the farther hills beyond a wide field. Hundreds of Southern lanterns, candles, and campfires burning behind their entrenchments.

  And there’s the line we’ll be attacking at dawn without the benefit of a wink of sleep or a bite of food. Two hundred yards of open ground to cross while being pounded by artillery and struck by a storm of bullets.

  Louis looked to their left. The rest of Hancock’s Union forces were coming up, Artis Cook’s company among them. The Irish Brigade and the Corcoran Legion would hold the extreme right.

  Louis sighed.

  “So, lad,” Flynn asked, “what do we do, the Mick and the Indian?”

  Louis answered that question with spoken words.

  “The best we can, sir.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MARY O’SHEA

  Wednesday, May 18, 1864

  The shell that whistled by was ten feet above him. Not that close, but Louis kept his head down anyway.

  Doesn’t sound like a Napoleon, he thought. Too small.

  Napoleons was what everyone on both sides called the Model 1857 twelve-pounder field guns. Favorite artillery pieces for both North and South, they were smooth-bored weapons that could throw a twelve-pound shell, solid shot, or canister 1,600 yards.