March Toward the Thunder (21 page)

Seeing how they took to one another, Louis used every spare moment to get the three of them together. Sometimes it was to play marbles—which Artis always won. Or they'd wrestle. Artis and Jeff were evenly matched there, but neither had been able to throw Louis. Other times, they'd just talk. Or, more accurately, Artis and Louis would listen to Jeff hold forth. His plan after the war was to become a preacher.

Makes sense. Never heard a better talker. Not even Father Andre
.

So here they were, Artis half asleep in the sun, Louis whittling, Jeff speechifying from the pulpit of a pine stump about what might have been had certain white officers been as sharp as the black men they led.

“Yessuh,” Jeff repeated, “them thirsty hosses.” He paused, waiting.

“What horses?” Louis asked.

“The ones what pulls the artillery carriages,” Jeff replied. “We was all set to move out towards them Rebs three hours before they let us go. But some officer misremembered that hosses needs to drink. Then when they finally saw how thirsty them hosses was, they unhitched um from the wagons and took um down to the river. And that was when we was supposed to be attackin.' Had to wait a good two hours whilst they got them hosses back in their traces.”

“What's that?” Artis said.

Louis shaded his eyes with one hand as he closed the jackknife against his leg with the other. Some kind of commotion was going on in the camp below them. People were circling around a small group of men on horseback. The tallest rider was the Big Indian himself, General Parker. But the other two men, one of whom was a bearded civilian in a dark suit, were unfamiliar to him.

Jeff followed Louis's glance.

“Mah Lord,” he exclaimed, standing up, brushing off the seat of his pants, and throwing on his jacket. “You know who that is?”

“The Big Indian,” Louis said.

“General Ely Parker, one of my people,” Artis added with a grin.

“No, next to him. That's the man hisself. Old Father Abraham.”

Jeff started down the hill at a trot with Louis and Artis close behind him.

By the time they reached the expanding circle of the Colored Troops gathered around the three mounted men, Louis recognized who the third person on horseback, a man much smaller than the other two, had to be. Although he was suited up in the uniform of a common soldier and not the resplendent finery some officers wore, the stars on his shoulders showed that he was none other than Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant.

As Louis and Artis approached, General Parker's eyes caught theirs. He nodded to each of them in turn. Just one Indian to another. No one else in the crowd noticed it, not even Jeff, who was right by Louis's side. Every other face in the crowd was fixed on the person in the black suit.

The lanky, bearded man took off his hat and circled with it toward the sea of dark faces, using his reins to gently turn the horse he rode so that he presented that gesture to every face looking up at him. A loud cheer rose up through the crowd.

“We's with you, Mistah President,” someone yelled.

“God bless you, suh!” Jeff shouted, waving both hands above his head.

Men began reaching their hands up to gently touch his horse or the hem of his coat, then pull their hands back to press them to their mouths or their hearts. Everyone was smiling, but there were tears in many eyes, including those of President Abraham Lincoln himself.

Lincoln held up his hand. Silence came as quick as a heartbeat. Everyone waited for words from the Great Emancipator.

“Men,” Lincoln said in a rough, choked voice. “Men of the Eighteenth, I . . .” His voice broke and he paused to take a breath. “Men,” he continued, “for that is what you truly are. Thank you for your cheers, even though I am not worthy of them. I should be cheering for you, for your courage and your sacrifices. I promise you this. We accepted this war as a worthy object, and this war will not end until that object is attained. Under God, I will not rest until that time.”

Virtually unnoticed as he sat his horse a few yards back from the swirl of admiring former slaves and free men, General Grant nodded at the president's words.

Louis saw that nod and the determined look on Grant's face.

Louis looked over at Artis, who raised an eyebrow and nodded back at him.
You got it right
.

The inspired Negro soldiers around them were cheering even louder now, but Louis hardly heard them. A knot the size of a fist formed in his stomach.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

ONE MORE THRUST

The thump of cannon, the crackling of muskets, the shouts and screams and confusion were behind him. Hard as that was to believe.

And I'm alive,
Louis thought, looking at his blackened hands. His knee ached from running into something, there was a new tear in his shirt, his right hand was bleeding and he couldn't recall exactly what had caused any of that.

A sound came from the tent behind him. Songbird. But the only song that was issuing from his lips right now was a soft snore from the cot where he lay fully clothed, despite the heat. After stumbling back into camp from the futile Union attack, he'd been too tired to even take off his boots and his coat.

I'm bone-weary too, but I can't sleep
.

Louis wiped some of the dirt and gunpowder stains off onto his pants.

Give thanks, his mother's remembered voice spoke in the back of his head.

“Bon Dieu, for preserving my friends yet again,
ktsi oleohneh
. Great thanks.”

He plucked another briar from the torn cuff of his trousers. Then, picking up a stick, he began to draw in the dirt the way he'd seen Sergeant Flynn do so many times.

Here's our Second Corps,
Louis thought, drawing three short lines in a row to stand for the Union divisions. He drew three more short lines below and behind them.
And here's Wright's corps just arrived
.

With the point of his stick Louis scratched two arrows, one for each of the corps, pointing toward the west.
And there's the way we was supposed to go to cut the Weldon rail line.
Nothing to it. Just cross the Jerusalem Plank Road and go two more miles west.

Louis shook his head. That had been the plan. But, as always seemed to be the case with everything in this campaign, things had gone wrong.

As they marched through the darkness and crossed the Jerusalem Plank Road, they found themselves in the sort of unpleasantly familiar tangle of woods and brush that E Company had encountered time and again since the Wilderness.

Within a hundred yards Wright's corps lost contact with Birney's.

Louis drew a third arrow coming from the west.

The only thing they'd been able to do was retreat. And even that had been bungled. Not that many killed or wounded, but so many cut off and caught. A whole Union battery—six cannons and all their crew. Hundreds and hundreds of soldiers so beat down by weeks of battle that they just threw down their rifles and raised up their hands.

Louis thanked his lucky stars for his good night vision and always being able to remember ground he'd crossed. He'd helped E Company get back through the woods in a fighting retreat, kept their battle flag from being taken.

No flag of the 69th had ever been lost to the enemy, right on down to this last battle. According to Flynn, no other regiment of men in blue could make that claim.

Louis thought about those who had been taken along with their flags. Seventeen hundred of the Second Corps now on their way to Andersonville, the Rebel prison that was one step lower than Hades.

Being captured worried him more than being a casualty. According to last week's newspapers, that prison camp down in Georgia held more than thirty thousand men penned like hogs. The only two ways out were escape or death. Lots of ways to die there, too—starvation, sickness, getting beaten to death or shot by the guards.

Back at the start of this war, Louis knew, when one side captured a man from the other side, they'd just ask him to promise not to do any more fighting and then let him go. That hadn't worked so well, seeing as how the Union found itself capturing the same men again and again. Then they tried prisoner exchanges. That meant if you got caught, you'd be treated pretty well, since you could be used to get back some of the other side's own boys.

Louis scraped the point of his stick across the ground, wiping out the lines and arrows he'd drawn. No sense to it. No matter how many diagrams you drew, war was just plain crazy and nothing in it would ever be simple. Louis sighed. Too much thinking about it was just making it worse. All you could do was try your best and help the men closest to you.

Louis studied the position of the sun. A good hour left before they'd have to assemble for roll call. He could crawl back into the tent next to Songbird. But even that seemed like too much of an effort right now. He leaned his arms and head forward on his knees and closed his eyes.

Hope I don't dream
.

And in what seemed no more than the time it took to close his eyes, a hand was shaking him. He looked up at Corporal Hayes. One of the corporal's eyes was closed, the ends of his mustache were singed, and the left side of his face was swollen and scratched.

Despite the bruises, the impassive look on the corporal's face was gone.

“The sergeant wants to have a word with us all,” Hayes said, pulling Louis to his feet. “And thanks again, Chief,” the corporal added in a softer voice, patting him on the shoulder, “for lifting up that heavy tree limb. I would have been caught for sure by those Rebs who were on our tails.”

“Wasn't nothing,” Louis said, “sir.”

“Lads,” Sergeant Flynn said, “I'm glad t' see ye hale and hearty. But as ye know, the rest of our lads were not so lucky. There's so few of us left that our three New York Regiments, the Sixty-third, the Sixty-eighth, and our own Fightin' Sixty-ninth are bein' consolidated.”

Flynn paused and as he did so Joker raised a bandaged hand.

“Sergeant, can you tell me what it means to be consolly-dated? Will it hurt much?”

It was a weak joke, but a few men still laughed. The laughter, though, quickly died away as the serious look stayed on their master sergeant's face.

“T' be consolidated means that our poor regiments have been so shot into pieces that”—he held up three fingers on his right hand and then grasped them with his left—“we'll all three be combined into one. Now, that's not such a bad thing, for our own Captain Richard Moroney of the Sixty-ninth is to be the man in command of the consolidated regiment. But that's not the whole of it. As you know, we lost Colonel Kelly, our commanding officer of the Second Corps, last Saturday. And we'll not see his like again for that cool courage and gentle manners and modesty and honesty of his that made us love him.”

Flynn took off his cap and held it over his heart for a moment of silence. There'd been no irony in his words, even though Louis knew that the sergeant shared their opinions about the foolishness of the orders that had led to the suicidal charge the day before.

“So,” Flynn said, “to reward us for all our sacrificin', the army will not be replacing him. Instead, our own dear brigade is itself to be consolidated into the Third Brigade of the Second Division under the command of Colonel Thomas Carroll. 'Tis an ungracious and ungenerous measure, but it's not for us to decide. The Irish Brigade as it once was is no more, though the name will still be used for our command unit.”

Flynn's face looked so dark and dismal that Louis wished he could think of some words to say to encourage him. Seeing their sturdy sergeant so cast down lowered their weary spirits even more.

Louis began to count them up in his head.

The Wilderness.

The Bloody Angle where Possum had died.

Then Scarecrow and Happy right after.

That awful fight where Captain Blake had fallen at his feet.

They'd lost Merry then too. But in a way that brought no hurt to his heart. The little private was safe at home. Louis had read aloud the letter Mary sent to him and the other men in their mess. She missed them and thought them—next to her husband—to be the finest men on all of God's green earth. She would always regard them as brothers. Her husband, though he'd walk with a cane all his life, had survived in good enough shape. She was nursing him back to health. The door to the O'Shea home would always be open for any and all of them. She'd always keep an extra place set at their table. Even Kirk had grown misty-eyed.