Bull Run (3 page)

By Jukes, wasn't that a time! I walked forty miles with the rest of our company to catch the train to Montgomery. It was the first locomotive I'd ever seen. Didn't she come charging into the station, snorting steam like a dragon! “Mind the undertow!” someone called out. “Don't get sucked under!” I dashed away from the tracks for dear life. When I judged it safe, I scampered aboard, the whistle blew, and away we went. My, but we ripped along like the wind! Most all the passengers were soldiers. Those in the boxcars broke holes in the sides with their guns to see where they were going. Men hung out windows and climbed on the roof, yelling and singing and drinking all the while. We all knew that the war was as good as won. Northern ribbon clerks would never fight. America had cut free from England, and now we'd cut free from the Yankee tyrants and would be independent forever after. A white-haired schoolmaster riding in the car heard our talk and shook his head. Every secessionist's swaddling clothes are woven in Massachusetts, he said. His hobbyhorse is built of Maine cedar, his wedding ring worked by a Rhode Island goldsmith, his Colt revolver made in Connecticut, and his tombstone quarried in the hills of Vermont. There was silence. Then came a lively, democratic discussion, at the end of which we agreed not to throw him off the moving train, on account of his age, but to wait until we stopped at a station.

I'm a dry-land sailor. Been from Maine to Mississippi. Horse, wagon, camera, and chemicals. I'd tie up, take portraits at twenty cents apiece, then move along down the road to fresh faces. In the spring of '61 the birds were bound north, but I was steering south for Washington. Soldiers by the thousand were camped there, and every one of 'em wanted his picture made.

It was May when I arrived. The city itself was nothing you'd want to photograph. The streets were shank deep in mud and slops. Cows were slaughtered beside the Washington Monument. The stench from the canals must have turned God's own stomach. But beautiful lilies rise out of swamps. It was in Washington that my luck bloomed.

I set up next to a Michigan regiment, and a boisterous, brawling lot they were. I painted a sheet with cannons blazing, hung it for a backdrop, set up my camera, and was swarmed with customers. How fiercely they glared! How proud their postures, each one a Caesar to himself and his family. That very first day I was taking the portrait of a Swede when some reveler fired off his gun and my subject fell dead on the ground. There was mourning and fighting. The man was carried off. I thought the portrait ruined by his moving, but developed it out of respect. It showed a blurry human shape seeming to step out of the standing man's skin. I nearly discarded it. Then a notion struck me. My heart commenced to flutter like a hummingbird. And that evening, like so many others after, I did a brisk business, at ten cents a head, in exhibiting what I billed to be the first photograph of the human soul, plainly leaving a dying body. I have never gone hungry since.

I walked from Arkansas clear to Virginia. I'd a time tracking down the cavalry, and when I did it was long full up. I told the officer I'd groom the horses. An hour above the knees and an hour below was the regulation. I was the only one who didn't complain. Other times, I mended saddles or doctored sick horses or watched the drills. It was grand to see the men ride in formations, sabers straight as church steeples. In the evenings they used them to roast rabbits and chickens. They were as fond of wagering as of food. They'd race horses any chance they got. If the ground was too muddy, they'd race sticks in the stream, and at night they'd pluck lice from off their blankets and race those, whooping 'em on like thoroughbreds.

One morning a captain came up to me. There was measles in the camp and a man had just died. The captain led me to the man's horse, said that I could join Company A, and walked away. The horse was named Greta. She was a small, bandy-legged gray. Teeth rotten. Ragged mane. Some might have waited for another man to die. But to me, no finer horse ever breathed. I stood where she could see me plain. My heart was pounding. “My name's Shem,” I said. She lifted her ears. We gazed at each other. “I sure am pleased to know you,” I said.

For the first time in four years I didn't feel myself a foreigner. Nearly all the regiment was German. The welcome scents of sausage and sauerkraut rose from every cookfire at evening. We had good lager beer and the finest band in the camp. Visitors were surprised to hear our commands shouted out in German. None, though, could doubt our love for the Union. It had given us all a new life.

As when we'd first come to this country, the women had been left behind. From New York the boxes soon began coming. Jams, pickles, books, writing paper, thread, and a hundred other useful things were sent by the Soldier's Aid Society. I will always remember the first box that reached our tent. It was filled with linen shirts and handkerchiefs lovingly sewn by the women. We soon discovered that each held a note. One read “Brave friend, I pray for you daily.” Others urged us to remain hopeful and healthy. All were encouraging, and cherished. Hearing them read, I felt I could see the women, merrily chatting while they sewed. The shirt I received was of fine workmanship, the stitches nearly invisible. When I opened it up, a photograph fell out. It showed the head of a woman, light-haired and young and most attractive. Then I noticed the note she'd enclosed, unsigned. I picked it up and felt suddenly cold. I did not read it aloud, like the others. It said only “I fear I will take my own life.”

Man is the deadliest of God's creatures. None could doubt it who'd watched the troops train. The recruits received guns and were shown how to shoot them. The use of the bayonet was explained. The cannoneer's craft was passed on from old to young—how to measure the fuses of shells that they might explode when amid the enemy, piercing scores of men with lead balls and scrap iron. How intently the men studied the art of killing. With what care their officers refined their skills through drilling, precision parades, mock charges. And yet, when the bugles are blown in earnest, how shocked we are that men bleed and die, as if we'd not striven day after day toward that very end.

My trade is healing, the opposite of a soldier's. Knowing there would indeed be bleeding and dying, I offered my services. My task was to keep a regiment of one thousand North Carolina men healthy. Many were felled long before we saw battle. The paths between their tents were sewers, the aroma conspicuous half a mile away. The men drank fouled water, were crawling with vermin, and tormented their stomachs with a gut-strangling diet of salt pork fried in rancid grease. Typhoid and measles raced through the ranks. Scurvy and pneumonia claimed victims as well. Dysentery was exceedingly common, and diarrhea all but universal. On many a day, fully one third of the men were laid low with illness. I felt defeat at each death, and consolation. Those who'd died, I told myself, at least hadn't lived to maim and murder countless other men in battle. It was a thought I never shared with the officers.

Patrick entrusted Father's glasses to a peddler who was heading our way. The man returned them to Father the next week and predicted that Patrick would make a fine soldier. Father sent him away without purchasing so much as a pin.

The wheat grew up past my knees, then my waist. The sod house seemed dismal without Patrick, and I stayed outside as much as I might. I spoke to him when alone in the fields. I told him how much I missed him and how I wondered what he was doing and seeing. He heard my words. One day I walked to town, stepped into Mr. May's store, and was told a letter was waiting for us. My eyes went wide. It was from Patrick. I read it then and there by the window He was camped, he said, outside Washington. He could glimpse a Rebel flag across the Potomac. He said he wished we'd seen him in his uniform, which had looked quite fine until two days before, when it had almost dissolved in the first hard rain. The vile profiteers who sold them would, he hoped, be hanged. The Minnesota men still lacked guns and marched with cornstalks on their shoulders instead. He described his day's schedule in detail and a game he'd learned, called baseball, in which one swung a stick at a yarn-covered walnut. His letter replenished me, as if it were food. I felt joined to him again. When I reached home and showed the others, they rushed to gather round, all but Father. He affected no interest at all and left. Yet when I reread the letter the next morning, I found his large thumbprints on all five pages.