Fire by Night (8 page)

Phoebe was barely off the train, her head still spinning and her knees all wobbly, when Sergeant Anderson herded all the new recruits together and began to yell at them. He was almost as short as Ted but very broad across the chest, and he wore a look on his face like he was about to pick a fight with someone. He turned red all over when he yelled, and his neck swelled up and his eyes popped until he reminded Phoebe of a bullfrog.

Sergeant Anderson ranted on and on about how he was going to turn this trainload of pantywaists and mama’s boys into real men, how he’d better not hear any bellyaching from anybody or they’d find out what hell on earth was really like. He screamed for the longest time, until Phoebe was not only getting a headache but was also starting to worry that the man would maim his vocal cords if he kept on that way. When she couldn’t stand any more, Phoebe took a step forward, raising her hand politely like she’d learned to do in school.

“Excuse me, mister, but I don’t reckon you have to yell like that. I can’t speak for everyone, but I can hear you just fine. Besides, I saw a man who was hard of hearing trying to enlist, and they wouldn’t let him.”

She heard ripples of nervous laughter behind her. Sergeant Anderson bellowed a word that might have been
“Quiet!”
but he was so angry, Phoebe couldn’t tell. She’d never seen a face as mean as his in her life. He stuck it right up close to hers and roared so loudly and for such a long time that her ears rang and she started to see spots. He scared her so badly she didn’t catch most of what he said, but she did understand that she had to report to his tent after all the others were dismissed.

“Good-bye, Ike. It’s been nice knowing you,” Ted whispered when the time came. She could tell he was trying to make a joke of it, but his boyish face looked paler than usual.

“Aw, I’ll be fine,” she replied, trying to believe that she would be. “I reckon he can’t shoot me—that’s Johnny Reb’s job. I just hope he don’t start hollering in my face again.”

When she first arrived at Sergeant Anderson’s tent, Phoebe did have to listen to him yell for a while. He carried on about military discipline and how she needed to learn to hold her tongue and to show respect for officers, but he’d clearly run out of steam after screaming at all the other recruits for the past two hours. She sup-posed that even a rattlesnake had to slither off and make some new venom after biting two or three people, and she felt a little sorry for Anderson.

Her punishment was to clean up after him—tidy up his tent, wash his clothes, clean his lanterns, scrub the mud and manure off his shoes, shine all his uniform buttons. It was women’s work and probably would have been very demeaning if it weren’t for the fact that she was a woman. True, she had joined the army to get away from cleaning and scrubbing and things like that, but her brothers had left much bigger messes for Phoebe to clean up than Sergeant Anderson had.

“Can you clean and oil a rifle?” he asked when she was finished with everything else. His voice was softer this time, and truth be told, he sounded a little hoarse.

“I ain’t never had a rifle,” Phoebe replied, “but my pa taught me to clean his shotgun as soon as I was old enough to hold one.”

“Let’s see how you do with this.” He handed her a brand-new Springfield rifle, and it was the most beautiful gun she had ever seen, with a smooth walnut stock and shiny metal bore. She lifted it to her shoulder, sighting down its length.

“My, oh my …I bet I could hit a fly off a fence post with this,” she murmured.

“Are you a pretty good shot, Bigelow?”

“I’m a crackerjack shot! I been trying to tell the army how I hardly ever miss, but they ain’t seen fit to let me show ’em what I can do.”

He studied her for a moment through squinted eyes. She could tell he was trying to look mean, but she thought he was probably a little curious, too. “How about if I take you out tomorrow afternoon, Bigelow, and you can put your money where your mouth is.”

His words baffled Phoebe. “Put my money…? No, sir. I ain’t got any money, but if I did, I don’t think I’d want any of it in my mouth.”

Sergeant Anderson started to laugh, and he laughed so hard he began to cough and had to sit down for a minute on his campstool. “You’re something else, Bigelow,” he said when he caught his breath again. “No, what I meant was, how would you like to show me what you can do with a rifle?”

“I’d like that real fine!”

While Phoebe lovingly cleaned Sergeant Anderson’s rifle, they talked about different kinds of guns and how they both liked to go deer hunting. By the time she returned to her own tent, Sergeant Anderson didn’t seem quite so mean anymore.

He sent for her the next afternoon, as he’d promised, and they walked out to the edge of camp with his Springfield rifle. For the next hour, Phoebe hit every target he gave her, big and small, until they ran out of old tins and bottles to shoot at.

“I’ve never seen anyone who could shoot as good as you, Bigelow,” the sergeant said as they walked back to camp. “I should put your name in for a sharpshooter.”

“That’d be just fine with me.” Phoebe ran her hand over the smooth wood one last time before she had to give the rifle back. “I can’t wait to get me one of these,” she said. “In the meantime, can I ask you a favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Will you let me come back tonight and clean it again?”

Anderson snorted. “You’re a corker, Bigelow. All right, report to my quarters after dinner and I’ll let you clean my rifle.”

Phoebe was very disappointed that she didn’t get to shoot it again. Her daily routine took on a numbing sameness that bored her to tears. She was awakened at dawn by the off-key squeal of fifes and the clatter of drums and was forced to scramble out to the lane in front of the long row of tents so Sergeant Anderson could call roll. Everyone quickly ate breakfast, then for the next two hours, she and the other recruits learned to march—elbows touching, rows thirteen inches apart—using short lengths of fence rails for rifles. They learned to march in a column, to form a battle line, to march double-quick, to dress the line. They drilled until the noon meal, then drilled for two more hours after that. There was a brief rest period in the afternoon, but they were expected to use that time to clean themselves up and polish their buttons—“I told you so,” Ted said with his toothy grin—then get ready for another roll call and inspection. Sergeant Anderson would strut up and down the rows, carefully looking them over from head to toe, and Phoebe could tell he was just itching to find a reason to yell.

After inspection they drilled until dinner, and by that time she and the others had been on their feet for most of the day. She figured they’d probably marched several miles and could have caught up to some Rebels if they’d been allowed to keep going instead of hiking back and forth across the same field all day. Shortly after dark, everyone fell asleep, exhausted, and then woke up at dawn to do it all over again.

Every day was the same, drill and more drill. By the end of the first week Phoebe had finally had enough. Instead of joining the scramble for breakfast after roll call one morning, she went forward to talk to Sergeant Anderson.

“Excuse me, sir, but I don’t get the point of all this marching around in circles all day. What does it have to do with shooting Rebels? Seems like we’re just wearing out our new shoes for nothing.” Anderson’s eyes bulged. A scarlet flush began slowly creeping up his neck to his face. “Please don’t yell at me,” she said quickly, “but I just don’t understand what it’s all for.”

“It’s not your job to understand,” he said through gritted teeth. “Just do what you’re told.” He turned to stride away with all the dignity of an officer, but Phoebe easily kept pace beside him. Anderson’s legs were so short and her legs so long that it was like a stubby little burro trying to outpace a Thoroughbred.

“It’s just that it seems like a mighty big waste of time,” she continued, “turning this-a-way and that, coming and going and marching around all day until you end up right back where you started. Don’t anybody care that there’s a war to fight?”

He halted suddenly, glancing all around as if to make sure no one was listening. “Listen, Bigelow. You’re going to get yourself in big trouble if you keep shooting off your mouth like this. I’ll tell you the reason why we drill because I like you. But in the future, you have to stop asking so many questions and just do what you’re told, okay?”

Phoebe nodded.

“It’s my job to get everybody in shape for long marches. If you learn to advance in neat rows, then everybody will keep up and there won’t be stragglers. You’re also learning how to quickly form a battle line from a marching column. And as ugly as this sounds, I’m teaching you to dress the line so that you’ll move together, elbows touching, after the fellow beside you falls. You’ll keep on firing and hold your line so it doesn’t fall apart. Our troops weren’t prepared at Bull Run, and it turned into a shambles. But we have a new commander now, and General McClellan is determined to be ready this time.” Anderson finished his speech with a curt nod, his chin jutted forward as if ready to take on the entire Confederate army all by himself. Phoebe would have gladly joined him.

“When do you reckon we’ll get to fight?” she asked.

“You’re just a foot soldier, kid. You’ll be the last person to know what’s going on and when it’s going to happen. Sometimes your company will go on the march for two or three days, then march back again without ever knowing what it was all about. Usually when the whole army marches, only the generals know where they’re going and why. It’s better that way, see? If you get captured, you can’t tell the enemy our plans. Understand, Bigelow?”

“I guess so …sir.” She remembered to salute, then watched the sergeant’s retreating back as he finally strode away.

Ted sidled up alongside her, chewing a piece of bacon. “Hey, you’re awfully brave asking questions like that. What did he say?”

“He says we’re gonna keep on marching and drilling until we don’t have to think about it anymore, just do it in our sleep.”

“Well, next time you talk to him, tell him that I march up and down that blasted field every night in my dreams.”

After a month in training camp, the U.S. Army finally loaded Phoebe’s company of recruits onto a train bound from Harrisburg to Baltimore. They spent the night in a rest home for soldiers, then boarded another train the next morning and headed south toWash-ington. Phoebe enjoyed her second train ride much more than her first. In fact, now that she knew how fast a train could go and how many miles it could lick up in a day, the knock-kneed horses and rickety farm wagon back home were going to feel like they were standing still. As more and more army encampments came into view outside her window, she nudged Ted, who was napping on the seat beside her.

“You better wake up. I think we’re almost to Washington City.”

“How do you know?” he said without opening his eyes. “Ever been there before?” Ted’s voice, thick with sleep, made Phoebe smile. But then, lots of things about Ted made her smile.

“No, I ain’t ever been there, but it’s starting to look like fields of cotton out my window, only it’s acres and acres of white tents all lined up in rows. And soldiers everywhere. Like a mess of blue grasshoppers.”