by Chris Adrian
After the reveille Company C gave Tomo a triple hurrah. The sonorous, Teutonic sound washed over him as he stood on his barrel. He played their breakfast call at six-thirty, their sick call at eight. He stood outside the hospital tent watching the invalids line up—in Company C there were only a few, and they were all genuine sick, not shirkers—and sipped the thick, bitter coffee Aaron Stanz had given him to drink in a soup can. Tomo strode up to a man in line and said, “My papa’s a surgeon.” The man had a green face and stank of ammonia. He said nothing to Tomo, but smiled weakly. Tomo ran back to his barrel and played fatigue call, then went and watched as Aaron Stanz helped to bury dead horses. The company had saved them up for him, a perfunctory punishment for his temporary desertion. His coworkers were two men who had stolen a pie from a sutler. The horses were ripe. Three times the two thieves took time out from the work to retire into the bushes, where they made a noise that was like hurrah! without the h.
“That grave’s too shallow!” Tomo kept saying to the two, but they had no English, and weren’t inclined anyway to listen to a boy. Aaron Stanz was working on his own grave, but when he came over at last to see how their work was coming along he said as much as Tomo had. There followed a brief argument, which ended when they dragged a stinking carcass over and pushed it into the hole. The legs stuck out a good two feet above the ground.
“Oh, that’s spicy!” Tomo said, leaning over the grave and getting a faceful of the rotten miasma. He did not watch as the thieves went to work with saws, but ran back to his barrel to play the drill call. He tagged along the back of the line as Company C drilled in the rising heat of the morning. He fetched water for Private Frohmann, and for a pair of twin corporals named Weghorst to whom Tomo naturally gravitated.
At noon, he was back on his barrel, playing the dinner call. He took a meal to Aaron Stanz and the thieves, who had skipped drill to continue their work, but they would not eat, so Tomo split the food with Johnny the drummer boy, who was by turns sullen and friendly all through the day. Tomo played another drill call after dinner, then watched from a tree with Johnny as the battalion marched and turned on the parade ground.
At quarter to six, he blew the call to inspection and dress parade, then shaded his eyes against the bright boots and brass of the Ninth. They were a shiny bunch, and Tomo felt somewhat slovenly among them. He was glad for the dusk which hid his dirty Claflin britches, his stained shirt and patched coat. As the camp darkened he played the supper call, and later, with beans still on his breath, the assembly of guard.
He spent some time fashioning crosses from twigs and twine, while Aaron Stanz stomped down the last of the horse graves. After Tomo had planted the crosses, he went back to the barrel and played tattoo, summoning the company to the last roll call of the day. The very last name read was his own—or rather the one he had adopted. “Alphonsus Hummel!” shouted the first sergeant, but there was no response. Tomo, sitting on his barrel with his chin on his fist and his eyes closed, had fallen asleep. The whole company had a chuckle at him. Aaron Stanz carried him sleeping to the tent, but woke him later to play taps. That was Tomo’s favorite tune—he always felt something settle, deep and peaceful, inside of him when he blew the last note. He heard the fifers in other companies blowing that last note, and other drummers knocking out the few final beats of the day. Johnny had overcome his distaste for bugle-infantry miscegenation and was tapping similarly next to him. Tomo stood on his barrel and watched the lighted tents go dark one by one, and then he waited in vain for another party to begin. His napping had left him wide awake, but the previous evening’s revelry had been solely a function of Aaron Stanz’s return, and not an every-night occurrence. So, after Johnny left him, Tomo sat next to the remains of the party-fire with a balled-up rag muffling his bugle, and he played the whole day through twice more before he retired.
“This company is cursed,” said Johnny. “They lost three fifers since Shiloh. Death wants ’em. They can’t keep ‘em.”
“I ain’t a fifer,” said Tomo. The boys were watching an artillery drill. Tomo wanted them to hurry up and fire the guns, but they only seemed to be dragging them haphazardly all over the field. He had been in camp a whole week and not yet heard a big gun fired.
“That’s no matter,” said Johnny. “Death’ll gobble a bugler just as quick, if he’s dumb enough to march with Company C. We ain’t marched yet, though. It’s early enough you could live, if you ran off now.”
“You put that curse up your ass,” said Tomo, and then cheered and blew a toot on Betty, because six guns had very quickly been lined up, and, in what seemed like the space of a few breaths, were loaded and fired. There came a second group of explosions as the shells burst near targets at the end of the field. One gun overshot and destroyed the top of a tree in the woods. Tomo blew a soft dirge for the departing magnolia.
“That’s your song, you dead bugler, you rotting blowhard,” said Johnny, but there was little venom in his voice. That first week, he had made himself Tomo’s companion. Tomo did not mind him. He was lonely for Gob, and it was good to have a body around to talk to, for all that Johnny said doom when he was not bragging about how his drum had been blown up by a shell at Shiloh.
When the drill was over, they ran across the field, into the woods to look at the fallen magnolia. For a little while they played in unnaturally low branches, until Johnny ducked behind the tall stump and sat down. He told Tomo to come and sit by him.
“Time to pet my snake,” he said, lifting his hips so he could pull his pants down to his knees. Tomo had seen this thing done before, but it was not something he thought he would like to do himself. Didn’t he pet his snake? Johnny asked him. Didn’t nobody ever show him how?
“It’s only about the best thing ever,” he said, tugging languidly at his member, which was even whiter and more grublike than its proprietor. “Go on,” he said. “Give it a try.” Tomo took down his pants and gave himself a few pulls, just to shut the boy up. “Ain’t that grand?” asked Johnny. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the tree. Tomo pulled up his pants and climbed up to the new top of the magnolia. There was a little fire there, which he patted out with his coat sleeve.
Below him, Johnny kicked his feet and bounced his hips up and down, and turned his head to kiss the tree. “Ah, Mrs. Davis, you are a fucking beauty!” he moaned, and then shouted wordlessly three times, each time louder than the last, the last so loud Tomo thought the guard must come into the woods to see who was being murdered. Johnny uttered an expansive sigh, then put his hands behind his head.
“Where are you, bugler?” he called. Tomo whistled above him. Johnny climbed up and shaded his eyes to look out over the camp, which sprawled as far as they could see.
“I think I see General Thomas,” said Tomo.
Johnny said, “Pretty soon I’ll start to spurt. Then I’ll find a girl and have me some babies.”
In another week, the Ninth marched out. Tomo played on Betty as he walked next to Aaron Stanz. They were going south and east, into Georgia, their movement part of a grand design to maneuver Bragg out of Chattanooga. “Chattanoogey,” Tomo kept saying to himself, and giggling. “I never been to Chattanoogey.”
“You seen one of Reb cities,” said Aaron Stanz, “you seen all.” But Tomo had never seen a Reb city. He imagined Chattanooga, a city full of Negroes and furious widows. He made up a song as he walked and called it “Chattanoogey.”
That first day, his feet were sore and bleeding: his ill-fitting boots had pinched his toes up all funny, and he had walked the nail right off his left big toe. He shook the nail out of his boot and threw it on the cook fire. Aaron Stanz told him to make a wish on it, so Tomo wished that Gob might wander miraculously into camp, having pursued him down from Homer. And then he burned his hand snatching the nail from the fire, because it seemed to him that he had made an ill-advised wish. He didn’t want his brother here. He put the nail back in the fire, wishing that a snake would crawl into the bed he had former
ly shared with Gob and bite him on the ass. And then he wished he had another nail, to wish his brother to him after all.
With a tin plate balanced on his knees for a desk, he wrote a letter:
Secessia, August 23, 1863
Brother,
Well, this is the life, and you are missing out on it. No Mama and no Buck, no humbugging. Every night I eat my fill, and people here give a bugler his due. Is this what you feared, to live a good life? When you are sensible again, you can join me and see, though maybe by then Richmond will already be burned.
Yours in war,
Jigadier Brindle T. J. Woodhull
p. s. see how rapidly they have promoted me you can be my adjutant
He bought an envelope and stamp from the sutler and put the letter in his coat pocket, where it remained unmailed. From the sutler he also bought an abundance of pies, because it occurred to him that he had not yet spent a dime of the money he’d brought with him—ten whole dollars hoarded over the course of many months from the family’s humbug profits. He went back to Company C with pies stacked in his arms, and was hailed by every man as a righteous pie boy. It was seven men to a pie, but somehow there seemed enough to go around.
After supper, the Weghorst twins threw down four square crate tops to make a dance floor. Tomo and Johnny and a fiddler from the Second Minnesota played while the boys of Company C danced, not in pairs this time, but singly. Everybody had his own dancing style—Aaron Stanz kept his arms straight at his sides, his palms turned up behind him, and moved his head like a chicken while his feet skibbled furiously. The Weghorst twins kept their hands and arms above their heads, and bent from side to side at the waist, towards each other and away again. Raimund Herrman pointed his nose at the black sky, put his hands on his hips, and pedaled furiously. Tomo spun around in a circle while he played, till he got so dizzy he fell over, and thought he would lose his pie, from the dizziness and the heaving, shaking laugh that he laughed.
They marched through the Cumberland Mountains, where Tomo blew echoing notes out into misty valleys and Aaron Stanz collected late-blooming wildflowers for his wife. He pressed them into a Bible he only opened for that purpose. It was almost empty of them now, but had been stuffed full when he went home. Stanz told Tomo how he had spent a whole night laying them out for his wife on the floor of their home, naming them and telling her where he had found each flower. “Dwarf irises,” he said to Tomo, tickling him under the chin with one. He asked if he wouldn’t like one to send home to his mama, and then he blushed and asked Tomo to forgive him. He said he would take Tomo home with him to Cincinnati, when the fighting was all done, where sweet Frieda would bake him molasses cookies the very size and shape of a whole boy.
When they came to the place where Battle Creek empties into the Tennessee, Tomo got his first glimpse of a live Rebel. Pickets faced each other across the river. Tomo went down with Johnny, who called out across the water, “Good evening, you damned Rebels!”
“Go to hell, you damned Yankee,” came the reply.
“I got newspapers,” said Johnny, “and coffee, if you got smoke.”
“Hold on, you son of a bitch,” said the Reb. Tomo could just make him out if he squinted. It was a cloudless night, and the moon was bright, but the river was wide. The Rebel bent over the water and pushed something out. It was a little boat, made from bark and string. It sailed slowly across. Johnny caught it downstream, lifted it from the water, and walked away back towards camp, serenely ignoring the escalating curses of the Rebel, who fired blindly at them when he ran out of curses. His fire was answered by other pickets. Tomo and Johnny ran away back to Aaron Stanz’s dog tent, where they wrapped themselves up in blankets and passed Aaron Stanz’s long pipe, filled with Rebel tobacco, between them.
The Rebels were gone in the morning, and the brigade began to pass over the river. Company C was one of the first to cross. Tomo sat in the bow of a dugout canoe while Aaron Stanz and the Weghorst twins rowed. Tomo looked for Confederate spoor on the far shore, and found only a discarded butternut hat, which had a tear in the brim. He stomped it into the earth, then kicked it into the river.
They camped at the river for a few days, then began a slow journey over Raccoon Mountain, where Tomo saw not a single raccoon, though he was constantly on the lookout for them. Aaron Stanz had presented him with a Springfield, sawed off to fit him, and Tomo practiced loading, tearing the paper cartridge with his teeth, pouring in the powder and the minié ball, then ramming the paper down with his stubby ramrod. He fired at Rebel oaks and cedars and squirrels, and one Rebel sparrow, missing all the animals and all but two trees.
The mood of Company C was turning. Tomo played them somber music at the fire while they acquainted him with the dead of the Ninth, most famous among whom was their former colonel, the much respected Robert McCook, of the Cincinnati “fighting McCooks”—he had four brothers also at war. He was quoted before every battle by his most ardent admirers: “The Secessionists are our brothers no more. If they will not submit, then they must be exterminated.” Colonel McCook was killed outside Athens, Alabama. Sick in an ambulance, he was ambushed by a Mississippi regiment, who stabbed him ten times and set his body on fire. These same Mississippians had already earned the enmity of the Ninth when they buried some Niners facedown after Shiloh. Every Niner hoped to shoot one.
Tomo’s big toe hurt terribly the whole slow way over the mountains, and he was tired of walking. He wished for a horse; he wished that it had been a cavalryman fortuitously riding the train the night he departed from Homer; and he wished for a battle, finally, since that was what he had come for, after all, a chance to shoot at some Rebs.
News came as they were coming down from Raccoon Mountain that Bragg had abandoned Chattanooga. There were cheers so thunderous that it sounded to Tomo as if the dramatic landscape had itself found a voice and was proclaiming bully for the Union. Tomo sang with the rest of the Ninth:
“Old Rosy is our man,
Old Rosy is our man,
He’ll show us deeds, where’er he leads,
Old Rosy is our man!”
He thought about General Rosecrans, who happened to be Homer’s only famous son. It would be quite a story to tell the people back home, if Tomo ever returned; he had gotten a glimpse of Rosecrans, back at the camp, and resisted the urge to go and introduce himself as a fellow Homerite. Maybe when we get to Chattanooga, Tomo thought. Then I will tell him that I am from Homer. But I will not say that I am a Claflin. Tomo prepared himself for a triumphant march into Chattanooga, wishing he had kept that Rebel hat, because surely the Secesh widows would lean out of their windows to spit on him.
A few nights later, Tomo was sleeping comfortably and dreaming of shooting his grandfather with his new gun when Aaron Stanz shook him awake. “Go and bugle the boys into a hurry,” he said. Tomo had gone to bed spry and grand, but woke with clammy hands and a feeling like he would vomit, which he did, right in the middle of a sleepy toot. He walked along next to Aaron Stanz all through the night, dropping off towards dawn, asleep on his feet but still shuffling along. Aaron Stanz picked him up and carried him like a sack of grain, and passed him to another man of the company when he got tired. Raimund Herr-man took him for a while, carrying him like a bride, and the Weghorst twins passed him back and forth for a few miles. Tomo was feverish and sweaty when they stopped, for all that it was getting very cold, and his sock was soaked through with blood. But he walked stubbornly along when they started up after only a few hours, until he slept and was carried again. When he woke, it was dark again, and the company was marching through smoke. Someone had set fire to the fence rails on either side of the road, and the flames cast harsh shadows over the faces of the men, making their features grim and weird, so Tomo thought as he came awake that he was in a company of strangers.
Wherever it was they were going in such a hurry, they arrived there just after midnight. It seemed to Tomo an entirely unspecial place. Under the light of the moon, he could see fields
broken up by patches of woods—it could have been Homer, and was to Tomo’s mind a bad place for a battle. There were too many trees to hide behind—he wanted broad sweeping fields across which thick columns of men could pour unhindered, and upon which they could crash into each other like the fists of angry gods.
Company C was ordered to guard the supply wagons. Tomo slept beneath one with his head on the bare ground. A faint rumble tickled his ear and woke him in the morning. He rolled out from beneath the wagon, tangled in his blankets. Looking up from where he lay, he saw Aaron Stanz standing in stark relief against the ridge that loomed in the distance behind the Union line.
“Ah, Fenzmaus, you’ve made a sausage of you,” Aaron Stanz said as he bent down and unraveled Tomo from his blankets. All night, Tomo had been cold no matter how many covers he heaped on, and yet his shirt and coat were soaked through with sweat. Aaron Stanz told him to go and find a doctor. “You got the ague,” he said, “or worse.”
“Ague can’t lick me,” said Tomo. “Typhoid tried and I sent him home to his mama.”
“Go,” said Aaron Stanz, pushing him away towards the rear just as a terrific noise of guns broke out north of them, rushing south as the enemy was engaged down the line. Somebody rode up to call the Ninth away from the wagons. Aaron Stanz pushed Tomo again in the direction of the hospital tents, then ran off with the rest of his company. Tomo took three steps, then turned and followed Aaron Stanz, pausing only to grab his rifle from beneath the wagon. He had to hobble some with his toe hurting like it was, and because he really was sick, he was slow. He caught up with Company C just as Colonel Kammerling had given the order for the whole regiment to fix bayonets and charge.
Tomo had no bayonet for his little gun, but he ran along with the Ninth anyhow into a forest-ringed cornfield. He was angry again—angry at all the damned Rebels, angry that Gob was missing all the excitement, angry that he was sick and weak, angry that he was just a boy. But he wasn’t afraid. When the opportunity presented itself he swung the rifle by the barrel and clipped a Rebel in the head with the stock. The Rebel—an old man with a droopy, greasy-looking mustache—was surprised to see a boy pop out of the corn with murder in his face, and did not move to defend himself until it was too late. The old man fell with his head on his outstretched arms, and so looked like he was sleeping, but there was a great and obvious concavity at his temple. Tomo turned the man’s face with his boot, and watched as the white of his left eye turned to lurid angry red.