The American: A Middle Western Legend Page 2

  Asking the soldiers, “How old you got to be? How old you got to be?” Pete kept pace with them, until Bjornson grabbed him by the shirt and said, “This I’ll tell your father.”

  “How old you got to be?”

  The soldiers, most of them freckled farm boys, well under twenty grinned at Pete and advised him, “To hell with the old Dutchman. Come along, kid.”

  And though he drove back to the farm with Bjornson, the words echoed and reechoed, “Come along, kid, come along, kid, come along, kid”; the quality of warmth which had accompanied the offhand phrase magnifying itself more and more, developing a richness like old wine, “Come along, kid,” one comrade to another, “Come along.” Nothing like that had ever been said to him before; nothing like that had ever happened before.

  VI

  “I’m going to war,” he told the father.

  He was not given to many words; sometimes, in a week, he spoke to the father only once or twice, to the mother no more, and only a little more to his brothers and sisters.

  “Yes,” the father said. “You stay here. The work—”

  “I’m going to war,” Pete said. “To war. That’s all. I made up my mind—I’m going.”

  And seeing that he meant it, that in his words there was neither doubt nor hesitation nor indecision, the father measured his son, as for the first time and very likely the first time, measured him up and down and sidewise too, the short legs, the hard muscles, the ugly face, the brush hair, and the split lip and the son’s eyes met the father’s in return appraisal, telling him—No more beatings. I am a man, you hear me, a man. Then the father said:

  “When you go, you go. All right. Until you go, you do your work. You work, you hear me?”

  “I hear you,” Pete said.

  So for another year, he bided his time and worked; it did not occur to him that the war might be over, for by now war was a natural condition on the land, just as rain was and snow was. Inside his head, a dream developed, and for the first time he knew a curiosity for his country. The war was in the south, and he would ask questions concerning the south, or sing Dixie to himself, “Look away, look away, look away down south in Dixie,” where there was no summer, no winter, only balm and blue skies and pink pelicans. There were beautiful women, and who knew what might not happen to a soldier? The rhythm of his body was different now, and the things he had wanted once were nothing to the fires that began to consume him. It affected his work; he would pause in the middle of a job, slow down, do things wrong until complaints came back to the father:

  “That boy of yours, his head is empty.”

  But the father didn’t beat him; it was understood that a beating would mean a struggle, and the struggle would have only one outcome. Instead, the father warned him:

  “The neighbors call you a fool.”

  “Then I’m a fool.”

  “A halfwit, you hear me, a person with only part of his senses.”

  “All right.”

  “The shame is mine,” the father reminded him. “But you do your work, do you hear me?”

  In English, Pete answered, “I hear you, sure.”

  For a whole year Pete waited, bided his time, asked questions, gleaned information, became crafty and sly about the ways of warfare. To just go out and become a soldier was not so simple; it could be done, but it was a complicated procedure, and Pete learned that those who did it were fools. A smart man sold himself into the National Guard. Group by group, the militia were being called up as volunteers, and for every volunteer, the county paid a bonus of one hundred dollars. In this anti-war region, there was an active business done in substitutions, for a hundred dollars might be a fortune to one man, and yet to another nothing as compared with the hardships of war. Thus, when talk became current that the 48th Regiment of the National Guard was being formed, Pete hunted up a militiaman whose name had been given him. A litle talk, a signature on a piece of paper, and the deal was concluded whereby the boy became a soldier of the Republic and a hundred dollars richer all in one moment. Pete returned to his home, frightened, freed and bound at the same time, breathless with the wonder of what he had accomplished by his own will, his own forethought, his own planning, and wealthy by the hundred dollars he clutched in his hand. He returned home and told the father, “Well, I done it, I became a soldier,” and then found the old fear returning as anger flowed into his father’s face, mottling it, purpling it, making the muscles bulge and the veins stand out. Fear made him thrust out his clenched hand, and the greenbacks unbent themselves like a flower blooming, blossomed and fell to the floor, like a contrived scene in a bad play. And both he and his father stared at the money until the old man said:

  “Where? How?”

  They were the bereaved, father and son, the world moving and changing, positions reversing, for here was more money in actual dollars than either of them had known, turning, curiously, their anger and resentment and fear into the blocked and tired emotions of the wholly frustrated. The father knew that his son would go away, and the son knew it too, although now, this moment, the father was no longer an enemy, no longer a dreadful foe, but only a work-tired, life-tired, aging peasant in a dirty shirt and dirty jeans. And the barefooted, sunburnt boy, shockhaired and ugly, was suddenly the father’s son, the firstborn, the lifeblood, and the only realization of immortality a man has or can hope for. The boy bent, gathered the money, and said simply:

  “Bounty.”

  Then he gave it to his father, who took it, held it a moment, and counted it, counted it twice. One hundred dollars. He called the mother, who came, and then the brothers and sisters came.

  “A hundred dollars,” the father said.

  “A hundred dollars,” the others said.

  The mother sobbed, and the father muttered, knowing that his words sold his son into bondage, “You will need money to be a soldier.”

  “I need nothing,” Pete answered, speaking in his father’s tongue, taking victory and admitting defeat.

  “A hundred dollars,” the mother said, for her thoughts were so tumultuous that no other phrase could even approach them.

  “You neéd a little money.”

  “Nothing.” He was free; didn’t they understand that?

  “But ten dollars,” the father said, offering it, a gesture, the first such gesture in the boy’s life. What matter how the money came? It was the father’s now, and he was giving his son ten dollars. The boy took it.

  VII

  At a quartermaster’s depot they were given uniforms, blankets, messkits, canteens, guns, and ammunition. Pete would see war, some day, become a different thing from this haphazard, hit-or-miss method. He would see other things too. When the blue uniforms fell to pieces after a few months’ wear, he would have something to remember that eventually would work itself into a part of a great pattern, as when a gun blew up in a soldier’s face, or a canteen poisoned the water, or leather shoes turned into paper and woolen blankets into shoddy. But now it was all wonderful, and by virtue of the sovereign State of Ohio, he was garbed as never before. It was true that the uniform was several sizes too large, and it was also true that on the first day the guns were issued, one of them went off and blew a tall, slow-spoken, and good-natured young volunteer out of this world, but those were minor incidents in the first romance he had ever known. How could it compare with the major fact that for once in his life he was treated as a man among men, sharing their doubts and uncertainties, sharing their surprises and excitements, not so ugly as he had been considered once; for in this amazing variety of the short, the tall, the thin, the fat, the gainly, and the ungainly, his own ugliness was a smaller factor than it had ever been before. He rode on a train for the first time in his life, but so did half the regiment for the first time in their lives. For the first time in his memory he was out of the State of Ohio, but that was also the case with most of the regiment, excepting the few hard-bitten veterans, non-commissioned officers mostly, contemptuous of these green recruits, warning them
this was not war, this frolic from the supply depot to the training center; but what use was it for a veteran to describe a rebel when they knew so well that Johnny Reb was a dirty, yellow, slinking coward who would run away the first time a shot was fired? Anyway, the war was almost over; they would add the finishing touch and they would do it gloriously. No one could tell them different. So they swaggered on the train and boasted and chewed tobacco, many of them for the first time, and got sick, and threw out their chests proudly at local stations where crowds turned out to receive them, until the veterans could only say, “Hayseeds, hayseeds, Jesus God Almighty, what stinking lousy hayseeds.” But they only grew more proud of themselves, roaring, “We are coming, Father Abraham—” and Pete added his voice to theirs.

  But a hundred miles from Washington, the situation changed. They were turned out of the cars into a pouring rain at a little wayside station, and now the non-coms had their revenge, driving them into line, snapping and snarling at them, and there in the rain they stood for two full hours, waiting for the colonel.

  The colonel was a small, dry, bearded man, who drove up in a chaise, chewed an unlit cigar, and stared at his regiment long and coldly, stared at the home-guard officers who grinned at him and then suddenly stopped grinning The colonel had been wounded three times, the last time when his battered line of Ohio Abolition Volunteers had been wiped out at Shell Mound. Now he called for Captain Frank, who came on the double and saluted smartly.

  “We have twenty-two miles to march before we make camp,” the colonel said.

  “But it’s getting on to night, sir, and it’s raining.”

  “I saw that it was raining.”

  “But—” Then the captain nodded and turned away. Then he remembered, halted, turned once more, and saluted.

  VIII

  They marched through Washington, but they were not proud any more. Their uniforms were faded and dusty, and their shoes crunched ankle-deep in the June mud. Two weeks of training had convinced both them and their colonel that they would not be soldiers, yet they had learned how to load their rifles, how to fire in unison in the same general direction, and not to sneer at that legendary figure, Johnny Reb. They had learned too to make camp and break camp, and they were beginning to learn how to march. In Washington, they were just another regiment passing through, and there was an endless stream of such regiments, and in the end they all came back, limping, decimated, on litters and in wagons—or sometimes they did not come back at all and they would be canceled, as it was termed, since you can’t reconstitute a regiment out of two or three survivors, not when you’re in a hurry, not when the situation is as desperate as it was then, in the summer of 1864, so desperate that this bedraggled line of Ohio farm boys was ordered to the front, as the colonel said, “To murder?”

  “To murder, if you think of it that way,” the general answered.

  “With two weeks of training? They’re not troops, they’re nothing.”

  “They’re men, aren’t they?”

  “Then it’s murder.”

  “If you want to call it murder, call it murder,” the general agreed.

  Of this, only rumors came to Pete; he knew that they were marching south, and already he had seen more of the world than he had ever dreamed existed. He had seen great cities, and he had seen the nation’s capital. And the edge had gone; fear came into his heart and mind, and into his legs too, the whole fabric of him, fear that hung like a pall over the nation, so great was the slaughter, so constant, so fruitless. Yet he was harder than he had any right to be at the age of sixteen, harder than the ten or twelve who had run away already out of homesickness and terror, harder than the one who was caught, brought back, and hanged before parade ranks. Sergeant Jerry O’Day said he had the makings of a soldier, and some of the men shared chewing tobacco and liquor with him, and he was strong as a young horse, used to going barefoot, so that when the paper soles of his shoes wore through, his feet did not bleed, but only became tougher than before. If not for the fear, if not for the sense of disaster which increased constantly as they moved south, translating itself into confusion, hesitation, marching and countermarching, he would have been reasonably happy. He had enough to eat, and marching was not as hard as work. They no longer sang, it was true, but at night, in bivouac under the summer stars, he had men around him who were his comrades; he had never known that before. There was talk, and he loved talk, loved to listen to it, to the sound of words, to the soft, lazy American accents, and to the wonderful commonplace of:

  “God, I’m tired.”

  “Sonovabitch, I ain’t going to have no feet left, just wear them down to the ankles and polish the bones:”

  “Tell you something, Jed, you wear them down to the ankles and sure enough they’ll send you home.”

  “You ain’t going home a long time, soldier.”

  “Going to write a letter to Johnny Reb.”

  “How?”

  “Going to pacify us both—just meet and shake hands.”

  “Just shake, stranger, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And he puts a lead in your belly, huh?”

  “That’s right.”

  Every night there was such talk, so much of it. Pete didn’t want to be shot—be heard terrible tales of men who were shot; but he didn’t want to give up this life either.

  He was not a demanding person; he complained less than the average soldier, and he was so grateful for small favors that the men in his company came to have a real affection for him; if they wanted something done, the kid would do it. If they put turtle eggs or live frogs into his pack, the kid grinned as if he really enjoyed it. One day, bivouacked outside of a little town, four or five went to see a prostitute, taking Pete with them, he who had never even kissed a girl or spoken to one outside of necessary do or don’t words, ouside of his own sisters, and then they laughed at his fright and shame. But the shame passed, and his dreams turned more and more into the three dimensions of life. The force inside of him throbbed so hard and so wildly sometimes that once, when asked what he was going to do after the war, he answered:

  “Everything. Everything.”

  Speech, which had been such a halting, difficult thing for him, came more readily, and he gained a sense of confidence and power from the black fuzz that began to cover his cheeks, thinking that some day this would be a full fine beard, covering his split lip, covering his large chin. Change fermented in him, and he groped for ideas that would have never started in him only a few months ago. A soldier from Cleveland, who had been a parson before the war, gave him a novel to read, The Redemption of Blackfist Megee, and as he struggled through it, only half understanding it yet losing himself in its incredible vulgarity, still another horizon opened. And he sat one night by the fire, listening to a furious argument between an Abolitionist and a blackbaiter, taking from the talk, for the first time, a whole impression of the war in which he was involved as one minute and unimportant unit. Yet from this came the beginning of consciousness concerning many things, four million black slaves, a Union that had grown from the blood and suffering of men, abstract principles of right and wrong, natural rights, and many other half-formed ideas which set his head to spinning and aching, and made him partly crazy at the thought of how full and large and incredible the world was.

  IX

  Yet fear and confusion predominated, and he could make no real pattern either from the war or his concern with it. A great battle was going on across the James River, and although they approached it for crossing four times, each time they turned back. He heard that an argument was going on between their own officers and headquarters, as to whether they were ready for battle; certainly, the lines of wounded coming back across the river told of the need for them, raw as they were, and the fact that their own officers held them in such contempt didn’t add to morale. As a reaction, they took to boasting, and once, when a report came through that they would be sent went into Kentucky to work on a railroad as service troops, the
mood of the men turned black and savage, and they spoke of a strike. It was the first time Pete had ever heard the word mentioned, and it was more puzzling to him than the desire of his comrades to see action, for he too felt something of the growing drive that impelled them to fulfill themselves or die.

  The nearest they came to battle was when a detachment of Rebel cavalry forded the river one dark night and struck a savage, slashing blow at the reserve’s flank. If the blow had been followed in force, the whole of the Ohio and Illinois reserve might have been routed, and temporarily at least the course of the war changed; but the Rebels sent over only a few companies and the raid burned up and died away like a quick brush fire. But the time it lasted was the wildest, strangest few hours in Pete’s life—turned out of bed half naked into the night by shots and trumpet call, men fumbling for guns, bayonets, and outside in the moonless camp woeful confusion, random shots, shouting, and then finally panic. It surprised Pete that he was not wholly a part of the panic, that when several hundred men ran helplessly in whatever direction they thought least dangerous, he stayed outside his tent until a bugle called him into ranks, then marched under directions of his sergeant down to the river and kept his station there all night long.

  He might have taken great pride in the fact that he was not a worse soldier than most, but the next day he came down with fever, and both pride and confidence disappeared in a malarial oven. For two days he lay in his damp tent, shivering, pleading for blankets to keep himself warm, while his brief glory died away, while his brief manhood changed itself into the adolescent whimpering of a halfgrown boy. During much of that time, the tall parson who had given him the book sat beside him and begged him to prepare himself to leave this world and enter the next; but Pete’s good nature had gone, and he snarled back like a cornered animal. The sergeant tried to find a doctor for him, but when two days had passed with no hope of getting a medical man, they gave it up and carried him by litter to the nearest field hospital.