The Storm Before Atlanta (6 page)

If anything, Missus was more panicked than before. “Run, girl! Hide Begonia!”

“Hide her where, Missus?”

“I don’t know where! Do I have to tell you how to do everything, girl? Just hide her! I’ll keep the gentlemen busy.” And Missus whipped her hair under her bonnet, fluttered herself into shape, and headed for the stairs. Soon Dulcie could hear her making welcoming noises out on the porch.

Dulcie thought fast as she ran to the barn. There weren’t too many places you could hide a horse. None of the places the slaves hid things would do—under the floor, up in the roof beams. Down the well was definitely out, and Dulcie had never seen a hollow tree big enough to slip Begonia into.

Dulcie breathed in the sweet hay smell of the barn and took Begonia’s halter down from the nail outside her stall.

“Come on, Begonia. Good horse. Good girl. Gotta hide you from the Secesh.”

Begonia lowered her silver-gray head, made a munching motion with her lips, and shuffled her hooves against the barn floor. She looked at Dulcie with her deep black eyes and let her slip the halter over her head. Dulcie fastened the halter and stroked Begonia’s warm, smooth neck; then she took the halter rope and opened the stall door. She tugged the rope, and Begonia clopped obediently after her. At the barn door they stopped. Dulcie heard men’s voices on the porch, Missus’s gay laugh, and the clink of glasses. Missus must’ve served them drinks with her own lily-white hands, and now the Confederate officers had to sit and drink them—they could no more have broken the rules of politeness than they could have sprouted wings and flown.

Dulcie looked toward the woods. No, that was where slaves headed when they ran away. Down there to the creek. Then they brought the dogs after ’em. Dulcie didn’t want dogs chasing Begonia.

“Come on, Begonia. I know where they’ll never think to look. Quiet, now!”

Horses are not good at quiet. Especially when you lead them up wooden steps. With each resounding clomp Dulcie expected the chatter on the front porch to cease. She tried to make up for Begonia’s noise by being extra quiet herself, practically gliding across the back porch. Overhead she heard the mockingbirds quarreling in the chestnut trees, and she wished them louder.

Silently she shut the kitchen door behind them.

“
Good
girl.” She put a hand up to stroke Begonia’s solemn silver-gray face. Begonia blinked one calm black eye at Dulcie and flicked her tail.

There was a resounding crash.

“I’ll see what it was. That girl is always dropping things,” Missus’s voice sang merrily down the hall. Dulcie tried to hide behind Begonia’s thick, warm body. She saw what had smashed—a big clay pot of sorghum molasses, done in by Begonia’s tail. A sticky, burnt-sugar-smelling pool leaked across the scrubbed pine floor. Dulcie, who seldom got anything sweet to eat, knelt down and stuck her finger in it.

“What—” Missus gasped, then swallowed the sound quickly. She grabbed Dulcie’s arm and wrenched her to her feet. “Get that horse out of this kitchen at once!” she hissed.

“Yes’m.”

Dulcie held her breath until Missus was out on the porch again.

“—don’t even have a horse anymore, I’m afraid, gentlemen,” Dulcie heard her say. “Though I surely would like to help out the Confederate cause, and do my duty by giving it up, if I did have one. You’re welcome to look in the barn—it’s around here.…”

Stupid! Southern politeness would prevent them from contradicting Missus, but it wouldn’t keep them from seeing, as soon as they looked in the barn, that a horse lived there.

Begonia was eating a bunch of collard greens from the kitchen table. Dulcie didn’t try to stop her; she figured Begonia had a right to them. She looked out the back door. She could see them out there—two Confederate impressment officers, in mostly gray uniforms, and Missus hovering anxiously beside them, her hoopskirt bobbing like a duck on a river. There was no getting Begonia out that way—they’d be seen at once. Anyway, it isn’t that easy to turn a horse around in a kitchen.

“Come on, Begonia.”

Begonia followed obediently, clattering and slipping over the polished wooden floor of the hallway and the parlor. She whickered a greeting to the Secesh officers’ horses, whose reins were looped around the porch rail. Dulcie heard the heavy plop of something landing wetly on the parlor carpet.

She decided not to think about this.

“Come on, girl. Can’t go out the front door, they’ll be back there in a minute.”

The stairs weren’t easy. Begonia could manage a few steps, but a whole staircase she thought was a mountain. She really wanted to gallop up it, but Dulcie was in the way. It took a lot of patience and stumbling on the part of both girl and horse before they finally reached the top and trotted into Missus’s bedroom.

“Well, we sure are sorry you haven’t got a horse, ma’am.” Dulcie could hear the officers outside, returning from the barn. “What with so many of our troops being
unmounted cavalry now, and our wagons sitting still for lack of anything to pull them.”

“I surely do wish I could help out,” Missus fluttered.

“Course if you did have a horse and we didn’t get it, the Yanks’d have it soon enough,” said the other officer. “They aren’t twenty miles northwest of here, if you follow the railroad.”

“But surely our brave, noble soldiers aren’t going to let them get any closer!” said Missus.

“I surely hope not. Be hard to stop ’em when we don’t have horses, though, ma’am.” They were on the porch now. “Oh no, let us take those trays in for you, ma’am.”

Downstairs, the front door opened. There was a sound of footsteps in the parlor, and then a long, heavy, considering kind of silence.

Upstairs, Begonia started eating Missus’s candlewick bedspread.

Dulcie could almost taste the Confederate officers’ dilemma, as they stood in the parlor below. On the one hand, they saw—and smelled—clear evidence of horse-ness before them. On the other hand, good manners and the nature of the evidence struck them dumb.

“Stop eating that, Begonia.” Dulcie reached to pull the bedspread out of Begonia’s mouth, and Begonia shook her head angrily and backed into Missus’s dressing table, which went over with a crash.

Footsteps came pounding up the stairs.

“Well, I never!” said Missus.

“I did,” said one of the officers under his breath. “Third horse in a bedroom this week.”

“I certainly never told her to!” said Missus. “Dulcie, how dare you try to hide Beg—er, a horse, this horse, wherever you got it from, from the Confederate government!”

Dulcie looked at the officers. They looked back. Dulcie looked at the cowhide hanging by the door. Missus would whip her later, of course. Not in front of the officers. Missus was too well-bred for that, but she would add in extra effort to make up for the wait. Well, Dulcie had had enough. She was through. She walked around the officers, and around Missus. At the top of the stairs she turned and curtsied. Then she went down to the kitchen and took a measure of parched corn and what was left of a ham and tied them up in a napkin. Then she walked out onto the back porch, and kept on walking.

Somehow she’d known she was going to do it as soon as she heard the cannons in the distance. She didn’t stop to say goodbye to Aunt Betsy and Uncle John. They wouldn’t have to say they’d seen her leave. She went to the stream, the way people did, and she walked into it, the water cool on her bare feet. Northwest, they had said. West like the sun that sank over the mountains each evening. North like the North Star at night. Dulcie followed the stream that way.

SIX

A
T LEAST
S
HELBYVILLE
, T
ENNESSEE
,
WAS SOMEWHERE
different, Jeremy thought. People talked differently, the trees were different, the streets and the way the wagons were hitched were different. Jeremy was seeing the world, and that was something. People from the Northwoods had always been going out into the world, heading west to get rich. Usually they came back as poor as they went, but richer by the things they’d seen—the plains with endless herds of buffalo like living rivers, Indians on horseback watching them from the prairie hilltops, the great snowcapped Rockies, the goldfields of California and the unsteady streets of San Francisco. Jeremy longed to see the world, and now he was seeing it.

But to his great disappointment, Shelbyville was a Unionist town. Tennessee had been the last state to secede from the Union, and the people in Shelbyville hadn’t wanted to secede at all. It seemed like everyone there loved the Union and loved its soldiers. There wasn’t an enemy in
sight all winter long. The U.S. soldiers spent much of the winter being invited to dinner parties by Tennessee loyalists, and having them to dinner in their camp in return. The men danced the Alabama Flatrock with the Tennessee ladies, and when the ladies couldn’t make it to the dances some of the soldiers pretended to be ladies, and they danced anyway. Jeremy refused to be a lady, because the soldiers hadn’t got around to realizing he was a man yet. The only other person who refused to be a lady was No-Joke. But No-Joke didn’t have Jeremy’s excuse. No one doubted he was a man. It was just that No-Joke was never any fun.

Jeremy played marbles with the boys in Shelbyville—he wore his Union musicians’ corps uniform and basked in their admiration. When it got really cold, so cold the river froze over, which none of the Shelbyville boys had ever seen before, he pretended it was nothing and showed them how to slide on the ice on a board. In January, he turned eleven years old, but no one noticed. He learned to play base ball, a new game that he’d heard of but never seen.

Finally, at the end of April 1864, orders came for the 107th. They were to become part of a new corps, the Twentieth Corps, led by General Hooker. They were to reduce all their possessions to what they could carry. They would be traveling as light as possible—they weren’t even supposed to carry tents. They were not told where they were going or why. It wasn’t a soldier’s business to know that.
Jeremy felt a thrill at being a real soldier—he wouldn’t know what was happening till it happened before his eyes.

“Better send your things on home,” said Dave gloomily. “I sent stuff to the government warehouse before, and I ain’t never seen a stitch of it again.”

Jeremy didn’t have a home to send his things to, so he gave away what he had, which was mostly some marbles—he gave them back to the boys he’d won them from—and a couple of dime novels, and a copy of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
that a missionary lady from the tract society had given him. All three books he had read, lent out, and reread several dozen times. He kept a blanket, his canteen and mess kit, and, of course, his drum.

The 107th had marched out of Shelbyville a week ago. They were in Georgia now, and as far as Jeremy could tell, the state was all mountains and trees. No people lived here.

He beat his drum for the march when he could. Most of the time he couldn’t. They were marching over steep mountain roads that seemed more like trails, and it was hard enough just to keep on his feet and carry a pack and a heavy wooden drum, never mind play it.

It was noon, and Jeremy was hot and tired from marching over the mountain passes. His company was waiting its turn to cross Pea Vine Creek. They had been waiting all morning. There were wagons and ambulances crossing ahead of them. Most of the mules balked and
wouldn’t put their feet in the water. It was hot and dusty and everyone from the mules to the officers had gotten fussy and snappish. Jeremy’s messmates were acting like they didn’t like having a drummer boy hanging around them, and so was everyone else, and Jeremy was missing his friends back in Shelbyville already.

Jeremy’s canteen was empty, so he wandered upstream to fill it. The soldiers had been warned not to drink muddy water. Around a bend and out of sight, Jeremy found a clear place. He crouched down at the edge of the creek, trying to tilt his canteen enough to get the water to run into the neck of it without stirring up silt from the river bottom. Suddenly he became aware of someone on the other side of the creek.

He looked up. A boy was looking back at him. The boy was tall and scrawny and older than Jeremy. He was dressed in a gray homespun shirt and a pair of too-big Union trousers, with a red patch on one knee cut into the shape of a steam locomotive. He wore a belt cinched tight with a buckle that said C.S.—except for the letters, it was just like Jeremy’s belt buckle.