Gob's Grief (3 page)

“Hold on, you son of a bitch,” said the Reb. Tomo could just make him out if he squinted. It was a cloudless night, and the moon was bright, but the river was wide. The Rebel bent over the water and pushed something out. It was a little boat, made from bark and string. It sailed slowly across. Johnny caught it downstream, lifted it from the water, and walked away back towards camp, serenely ignoring the escalating curses of the Rebel, who fired blindly at them when he ran out of curses. His fire was answered by other pickets. Tomo and Johnny ran away back to Aaron Stanz’s dog tent, where they wrapped themselves up in blankets and passed Aaron Stanz’s long pipe, filled with Rebel tobacco, between them.

The Rebels were gone in the morning, and the brigade began to pass over the river. Company C was one of the first to cross. Tomo sat in the bow of a dugout canoe while Aaron Stanz and the Weghorst twins rowed. Tomo looked for Confederate spoor on the far shore, and found only a discarded butternut hat, which had a tear in the brim. He stomped it into the earth, then kicked it into the river.

They camped at the river for a few days, then began a slow journey over Raccoon Mountain, where Tomo saw not a single raccoon, though he was constantly on the lookout for them. Aaron Stanz had presented him with a Springfield, sawed off to fit him, and Tomo practiced loading, tearing the paper cartridge with his teeth, pouring in the powder and the minié ball, then ramming the paper down with his stubby ramrod. He fired at Rebel oaks and cedars and squirrels, and one Rebel sparrow, missing all the animals and all but two trees.

The mood of Company C was turning. Tomo played them somber music at the fire while they acquainted him with the dead of the Ninth, most famous among whom was their former colonel, the much respected Robert McCook, of the Cincinnati “fighting McCooks”—he had four brothers also at war. He was quoted before every battle by his most ardent admirers: “The Secessionists are our brothers no more. If they will not submit, then they must be exterminated.” Colonel McCook was killed outside Athens, Alabama. Sick in an ambulance, he was ambushed by a Mississippi regiment, who stabbed him ten times and set his body on fire. These same Mississippians had already earned the enmity of the Ninth when they buried some Niners facedown after Shiloh. Every Niner hoped to shoot one.

Tomo’s big toe hurt terribly the whole slow way over the mountains, and he was tired of walking. He wished for a horse; he wished that it had been a cavalryman fortuitously riding the train the night he departed from Homer; and he wished for a battle, finally, since that was what he had come for, after all, a chance to shoot at some Rebs.

News came as they were coming down from Raccoon Mountain that Bragg had abandoned Chattanooga. There were cheers so thunderous that it sounded to Tomo as if the dramatic landscape had itself found a voice and was proclaiming bully for the Union. Tomo sang with the rest of the Ninth:

“Old Rosy is our man,
Old Rosy is our man,
He’ll show us deeds, where’er he leads,
Old Rosy is our man!”

He thought about General Rosecrans, who happened to be Homer’s only famous son. It would be quite a story to tell the people back home, if Tomo ever returned; he had gotten a glimpse of Rosecrans, back at the camp, and resisted the urge to go and introduce himself as a fellow Homerite. Maybe when we get to Chattanooga, Tomo thought. Then I will tell him that I am from Homer. But I will not say that I am a Claflin. Tomo prepared himself for a triumphant march into Chattanooga, wishing he had kept that Rebel hat, because surely the Secesh widows would lean out of their windows to spit on him.

A few nights later, Tomo was sleeping comfortably and dreaming of shooting his grandfather with his new gun when Aaron Stanz shook him awake. “Go and bugle the boys into a hurry,” he said. Tomo had gone to bed spry and grand, but woke with clammy hands and a feeling like he would vomit, which he did, right in the middle of a sleepy toot. He walked along next to Aaron Stanz all through the night, dropping off towards dawn, asleep on his feet but still shuffling along. Aaron Stanz picked him up and carried him like a sack of grain, and passed him to another man of the company when he got tired. Raimund Herr-man took him for a while, carrying him like a bride, and the Weghorst twins passed him back and forth for a few miles. Tomo was feverish and sweaty when they stopped, for all that it was getting very cold, and his sock was soaked through with blood. But he walked stubbornly along when they started up after only a few hours, until he slept and was carried again. When he woke, it was dark again, and the company was marching through smoke. Someone had set fire to the fence rails on either side of the road, and the flames cast harsh shadows over the faces of the men, making their features grim and weird, so Tomo thought as he came awake that he was in a company of strangers.

Wherever it was they were going in such a hurry, they arrived there just after midnight. It seemed to Tomo an entirely unspecial place. Under the light of the moon, he could see fields broken up by patches of woods—it could have been Homer, and was to Tomo’s mind a bad place for a battle. There were too many trees to hide behind—he wanted broad sweeping fields across which thick columns of men could pour unhindered, and upon which they could crash into each other like the fists of angry gods.

Company C was ordered to guard the supply wagons. Tomo slept beneath one with his head on the bare ground. A faint rumble tickled his ear and woke him in the morning. He rolled out from beneath the wagon, tangled in his blankets. Looking up from where he lay, he saw Aaron Stanz standing in stark relief against the ridge that loomed in the distance behind the Union line.

“Ah, Fenzmaus, you’ve made a sausage of you,” Aaron Stanz said as he bent down and unraveled Tomo from his blankets. All night, Tomo had been cold no matter how many covers he heaped on, and yet his shirt and coat were soaked through with sweat. Aaron Stanz told him to go and find a doctor. “You got the ague,” he said, “or worse.”

“Ague can’t lick me,” said Tomo. “Typhoid tried and I sent him home to his mama.”

“Go,” said Aaron Stanz, pushing him away towards the rear just as a terrific noise of guns broke out north of them, rushing south as the enemy was engaged down the line. Somebody rode up to call the Ninth away from the wagons. Aaron Stanz pushed Tomo again in the direction of the hospital tents, then ran off with the rest of his company. Tomo took three steps, then turned and followed Aaron Stanz, pausing only to grab his rifle from beneath the wagon. He had to hobble some with his toe hurting like it was, and because he really was sick, he was slow. He caught up with Company C just as Colonel Kammerling had given the order for the whole regiment to fix bayonets and charge.

Tomo had no bayonet for his little gun, but he ran along with the Ninth anyhow into a forest-ringed cornfield. He was angry again—angry at all the damned Rebels, angry that Gob was missing all the excitement, angry that he was sick and weak, angry that he was just a boy. But he wasn’t afraid. When the opportunity presented itself he swung the rifle by the barrel and clipped a Rebel in the head with the stock. The Rebel—an old man with a droopy, greasy-looking mustache—was surprised to see a boy pop out of the corn with murder in his face, and did not move to defend himself until it was too late. The old man fell with his head on his outstretched arms, and so looked like he was sleeping, but there was a great and obvious concavity at his temple. Tomo turned the man’s face with his boot, and watched as the white of his left eye turned to lurid angry red.

The men of the Ninth stabbed viciously at the now shy, shrinking Rebels; some of them, their guns knocked from their grip, held up their hands in demure gestures against the bright steel, as if to say,
No thank you.
It’s a wonder I’m not shot, Tomo thought to himself as he stood there looking. He was keenly aware of the bullets, but felt no urge to move. He was thinking how the sound the minié balls made was very singular indeed, and quite impossible to describe, except that he thought he heard in it something of the buzzing of a bee, the mewing of a kitten, and the snapping of fingers. He left his reverie only when he noticed a Rebel threatening Raimund Herrman, tracking the big man smoothly as he ran towards a captured Union battery. Tomo was quite hidden by the corn as he ran. If the Rebel marksman had looked he might have thought some elemental of the air was rushing towards him, but he never turned. Tomo struck him in the hip just as the Rebel fired, and when he fell among the stalks, Tomo stepped up and swung his rifle over his shoulder, like an ax, and crushed the man’s throat. Then Tomo ran after Raimund Herrman, who was poking his bayonet at a Rebel beside a shiny napoleon.

“This gun is ours, you shithouse sergeant!” cried the Reb.

“No,” said Raimund Herrman, “this gun is
unser
.” Tomo came up behind and whacked the Reb in his kidney. When he fell to his knees, Raimund Herrman stabbed him through the head. To Tomo it seemed a rude gesture, that stabbing. He would have preferred that all of them lay about them with their stocks like civilized folk, but that was not happening. All around him, the Ninth was stabbing away at the Rebs, and carrying the moment. The Rebs broke and ran as another Union regiment came up to the recaptured battery. Tomo returned to the brigade with Raimund Herrman, where the enemy was crowding in now on the left, and the Ninth charged again. They were incorrigible chargers. “Any excuse to fix bayonets!” joked other regiments, and they asked why the Ninth bothered at all with ammunition.

Tomo was not the least bit tired during the battle—there was a thrill in his blood so strong he did not think he’d ever sleep again—but it seemed like a sweet rest when he got to lie prone behind a felled tree and shoot across a field at the Rebs. Aaron Stanz had found him and scolded him, then hugged him fiercely. Now they were shooting side by side, their lips, teeth, and tongues black from tearing open cartridges. Johnny was shooting, too, cursing viciously between shots. “Jeff Davis drives the goat!” he shouted into the din. “Mrs. Lee is a crusty old whore!”

The fighting seemed to stop very suddenly. One minute Tomo was lining up a Rebel hat to shoot at, and the next the Rebs were all gone, and there was nothing to sight on but the shadows between trees. Farther up the line he could hear them still pounding away, but where the Ninth was it was all peace and quiet. The Ninth took advantage of the lull to take their first meal of the day. Tomo was so hungry he ate a half pound of unrinsed salt beef, which stung his blistered tongue, and puckered up his face so tight he could barely open his eyes. The quiet stretched on and on, into dusk, so the Ninth thought it was done for that day, but just as the sun passed over the ridge an incredible abundance of Rebels came screaming out of the woods. They charged through the field of low grass, across to the trees where the Ninth sheltered, and almost overwhelmed them.

It was then that one of the Weghorst twins died. As they rose to fall back with the rest of the company, he opened his mouth to say something to his brother, and got a bullet there, through his mouth and out through the back of his head. Tomo heard quite distinctly the noise of his shattering teeth, a terrible sound. When he heard it, Tomo was frightened for the first time. He wanted to run, then, away from the echoing noise in his head, away from the living Weghorst’s screaming, away from the charging Rebs. But Tomo wasn’t Gob. He wouldn’t run away to Homer and hide under the bed.

Tomo backed off slowly, loading and firing as he went, until he walked into a private of another Ohio regiment, come up with a whole division to reinforce them. The line held till full dark came. Tomo kept firing blindly into the darkness. Eventually Aaron Stanz came and put a hand on his shoulder, and pushed his arm down so his gun touched the earth.

“No more tonight, Fenzmaus,” Aaron Stanz said, and then he yawned, so big Tomo thought his whole face would disappear into his mouth, and so hard his breath washed over Tomo’s face. Tomo went to the rear, then, at Aaron Stanz’s insistence, while the rest of the unwounded Ninth began to throw up earthworks. At the hospital tents, Tomo said he had only come to serenade the wounded, but the truth was he was feeling sicker. He was hot with his fever now, instead of cold, but that suited him fine, because it was turning out to be a frigid night. He was having strange visions, too. He supposed his brain was too hot, so he dunked his head in a basin, but still he saw a black bug crawl out of a wounded man’s ear and circle his head before crawling back in, and twice he saw the moon turn into an eye and wink at him.

Tomo played sweet music for the wounded all through the night because he could not sleep. A hospital steward brought him hot food; crisp bacon and a stew of chicken and hardtack. At the bottom of the bowl was a hard-boiled egg. Tomo fished it out and ate it with great precision, nibbling away the white until he had a perfect globe of yolk pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He swallowed it like a pill. When he finished eating, he went to visit the living Weghorst twin, thinking to play him something to comfort him, but when he found him still weeping over his brother’s body, all he could do was stare numbly and clutch Betty to his chest. He thought of his mama, back in Homer. If she were there, she’d say that the dead Weghorst now inhabited the Summerland, a place where all good spirits lived.

He went and sat next to the surviving Weghorst, put his hand on the big fellow’s hand, and burst so violently into tears he felt as if his whole head had exploded in a shower of salty water. Tomo cried because it is a terrible thing that brothers should be separated, and because he missed his own brother. He suffered suddenly from the unreasoning conviction that Gob was dead, that a Rebel bullet had traveled hundreds of miles up to Homer to shatter his brother’s teeth and blow out the back of his head all over their bedroom wall. Tomo put his head on the dead twin’s chest and wept, thinking he would keep on until he was only dry skin and bones and brittle desiccated organs. The living twin petted Tomo’s hair, to comfort
him
, which was not the plan at all, and the world seemed to Tomo a place entirely mixed up and unjust before he suddenly fell very hard into sleep, as if into a deep ditch.