American Meteor (3 page)

In November 1861, I joined the “13th Brooklyn,” as the 87th New York Regiment was called, and went to war. My last look at Brooklyn—though not at Walt Whitman, as I would come to know my lunatic—was at the ferry slip where the regiment embarked on the steamboat
Marion
for Washington City, after a send-off at Fort Greene. His Honor, the mayor of Brooklyn, had declared in an aria of high-flown flapdoodle that the “flag will have to be born aloft through seas of blood,” including, as it turned out, mine. I would never again see the city of my birth and rearing, but Whitman—him I’d see in the Armory Square Hospital and, years later, in Camden. We didn’t speak or even so much as acknowledge each other on the ferry dock. He didn’t recognize the oyster boy who had unwittingly overheard his thoughts on the coming storm, in which I was now about to be engulfed and, later, would be struck down.

Whitman moved amid the crowd of hoarse-throated soldiers, setting down the departing words of some in a notebook until he was swallowed up by fluttering handkerchiefs, brandished stovepipe hats, and particles of soot that descended from the
Marion
’s funnels in memory of our departure. Later, I would learn that the man I seemed all year to have dogged through the streets of lower
Manhattan had recently been the editor of the
Brooklyn Daily Times
. He accompanied us during the last few hours of our youthfulness—suffering with us the fulminations of a righteous gang of government stooges and starched churchmen; parading with us down Myrtle Avenue into Prince Street, into Gold, and on to Vinegar Hill and the ferry depot to stand with us on the pier above the East River, where we waited impatiently to throw ourselves into the pit that hath no bottom. For so it proved to be. He did not take down
my
words, and I would have had none to give him.

I stood at the rail of the
Marion
, next to William Kidd, the regimental drummer who’d lose at Groveton something more vital to breath than an eye; and I bugled a martial air to silence the patriotic mob so that Marie Bisbee, of Brooklyn, could shout her farewell poem at us. She went at it hammer and tongs. Lucky for you, Jay, I remember just the first words:

            
It is the martial sound of drum,

            
The thrilling pipe is heard!

            
And now alas! the hour has come,

            
To say the parting word.

            
Farewell brave youths, to battle field

            
Thy country calls thee now!

            
May He who does the widow shield,

            
Watch o’er thy fervid brow.

We weren’t taken in by her horseshit—at least Little Will and I weren’t. He looked at me slyly, two fingers pinching his nostrils shut in disgust, while I blew the spit out of my horn.

Aboard the Steamer Marion, December 1861

In recollection, all our bivouacs and battlefields were alike, at least for those of us who did their living and fighting and oftentimes their dying there. War’s architects saw them from loftier vantages where, in Union blue or Confederate gray, soldiers were no more than meteors or moths, uniform, fugitive, and doomed. Soon enough, I grew to hate warfare and took no interest in its bewildering strategies or reckless campaigns, as monotonous as the tunes I blew on my bugle, which I had named Jericho in honor of Joshua’s trumpet.

When I first arrived in Lincoln—in 1882, that was, before you came out here—I played the trumpet in the town’s brass band. I wasn’t much good, and the burden of sociability proved too much for me to stay with it. But I was one hell of a bugle boy, Jay, and I wish you could’ve heard me!

The bugle—one day I’ll have its likeness carved on my headstone—tells a story of its own concerning my service with the 13th—days neither thrilling nor glorious: a dent gotten at Bull Run during the Great Skedaddle, our panicked troops snarled in the rout of picnickers who’d driven out from the capital to enjoy a festive day of slaughter; another dent gotten at Yorktown, when I was nearly trampled by a horse; another, at Oak Grove, compliments of a Johnny Reb sharpshooter who must have thought my tunes sour; and still another at Chantilly, where our regimental strength was so bled that the enlisted men among us were incorporated into the 173rd New York Infantry. The 87th Regiment having been disbanded, our officers went home to swagger in their uniforms.

A slightly built thirteen-year-old recruit, I was too weak to handle a musket. By the time I’d grown into one, I was
too practiced a bugler to swap it for a firearm. The adjutants often complimented me on the clarity of my renditions of “Assembly,” “Call to Quarters,” “Boots and Saddles,” “Go Forward,” “To the Left,” “To the Right,” “About,” “Rally on the Chief,” “Trot,” “Gallop,” “Rise Up,” “Lay Down,” “Commence Firing,” “Cease Firing,” “Disperse,” and that ever-popular air among soldiers, “Retreat.” Those of the opinion that the worst a bugler had to fear was an angry boot shied at him for crowing reveille at dawn are mistaken. It required an imperturbable disposition to stand and tootle, in a commotion of men and horses, in a confusion of smoke so thick and acrid that it would blind us with tears and choke us with the bitterness of war. But this is not a story about war—not even so grisly and scarifying a one as our own Civil War. Suffice it to say that, during four years of terror and mayhem, I bugled my way, like a worm traversing a dog’s guts, through historic battles (notable for their casualties), whose hallowed grounds one day would be picturesque destinations for tourists armed with Kodaks and charged with the discipline of ice-cream-eating brats. Bull Run, Yorktown, Williamsburg, Seven Pines, Oak Grove, Malvern Hill, Harrison’s Landing, Groveton, Second Bull Run, Chantilly— those “curious panics” that became a national obsession and our common property, whether we’d fought in them or not.

We would stall outside Richmond, and—blow as heroically as I might—I could not persuade General McClellan out of his damned timidity to advance, although Jericho surely put the fear of God into many a Jeff Davis boy, who, like me, were frightened out of their wits. If I’d been armed with something that expended lead rather than breath, I’d have shot our half-pint general gladly. I’ve killed only three
men during my fifty-three years aboveground in our beautiful, spacious, and altogether murderous country. I can’t say whether or not they deserved their fates, though I had good reason at the time to pack them off to glory or perdition.

Because the skirmishes and slaughters in which I played a part, however small, appear in my mind to have been all of a piece, I’ll relate the battle in which I gave up my eye for the Union and the slaves—and let it stand for them all. To be truthful, I was in no almighty hurry to benefit the latter, never having known a black man to speak to until, much later, I fell into the Delaware and was fished out by one.

But before I recount the Battle of Five Forks, Virginia, I want to say something about our boat trip from Brooklyn to Washington City. You’d have thought we were on a weekend excursion, the way we carried on. On deck, the regimental band (its members would be sent home to mothers and sweethearts after the rough going on the Peninsula) played “America the Beautiful,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” “John Brown’s Body,” and a number of sweet airs like Stephen Foster’s “The Village Maiden” and “Beautiful Dreamer.” The bugle was considered uncouth, and bugle boys were shunned by the band’s high-toned personnel, outlandishly dressed like French soldiers in North Africa: Zouave jackets, red pants, white leggings, blue sashes tied around their waists—the insanity topped off by white turbans!

While the men swallowed the treacle served up above, Little Will and I sweat over craps with the stokers in the infernal weather of the steamboat’s hold.
Craps
—a vulgar word whose origin is
crapaud
, meaning “toad” in French— refers to a crap shooter’s squat, if you’re curious. We must paper ourselves with facts, even if we are mistaken in them.
I would not tell you to lie, although it would not behoove you to be overly fastidious concerning the truth. Conjecture and speculation are how the West was won, and much else besides. In any case, craps suited us fine, and I would have lost my bugle to a coal-blackened son of a bitch if a sergeant hadn’t smelled us out and kicked Little Will and me topside with his brand-new boots. They’d look like hell’s own pitch after we landed in Washington City, where the December mud swallowed horses and caissons whole.

All along the East River and through the Narrows, people stood and cheered, waving hats and babies in the air and shouting after us to “hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree.” There is no gaiety to equal that hatched by rancor. Fire company bands blared fighting tunes, and a skiff overloaded with drunks tried to foist a trio of barroom floozies on us. We cheered
that
, I can tell you! But the sailors, swearing under their breath at the intolerance of authority, were ordered to drive them off with poles.

“It’s a shame to throw a fat fish back into the water,” Little Will said.

I took his meaning, but I supposed we were too green to have gotten much by way of nourishment from a floozy, even if we had been afforded the opportunity.

“I’ve got a firecracker in my pocket,” I said to prove I was a hell-raiser, too.

“Let’s toss it down the Charlie Noble,” he replied, referring to the copper stack venting the galley.

I lit the cracker and dropped it down the stack. To the discerning ears of two hellions, it produced a most agreeable sound, like a pig’s bladder when pent-up air is suddenly let loose. The squib set pots and pans to chiming and roused
the cook from his greasy lair, armed with a knife useful in flaying carcasses. Only the boat’s yawing saved us from a terrible end. Little Will and I crawled into a lifeboat and fell asleep while Barbados rum was ladled into tins to revive the courage of men whose hearts, like bobbins, were being emptied with each nautical mile of the mystic thread of affection—their heart’s needle listing to the north. By the time the war was finished, the thread would stretch almost to breaking. On that night aboard the
Marion
, many knew an ecstasy they would not know again, except for a few of them who would find a transporting madness in murder. Those, I think, were the truly damned among us—lives blasted away from the common thoroughfare.

Unseen by Little Will and me, who were kept a while longer blameless and unharmed in childish sleep, the
Marion
steamed along the Brooklyn and Long Island coasts and then into the Atlantic. Black smoke pouring from her stacks, she hurried southward—rounding the Delaware peninsula, past Fort Monroe—and entered Chesapeake Bay and on to the Potomac River. Often, during the four years to come, she’d steam north through the Narrows to Vinegar Hill—a likely Calvary—her hold packed with Union soldiers wearing wooden coats. In the days after the Draft Riots, the northbound
Marion
might have passed corpses of former slaves lynched and butchered by New York’s resentful poor—their bodies dumped into the East River and left for the currents to carry them, resignedly, south into everlasting captivity.

Washington City, December 1861–March 1862

What boy wouldn’t be satisfied with days spent playing soldier? That’s what it was like to be in the Army of the Potomac that first winter in Washington City, when the only hardships were mud, which was of a sovereign quality, in keeping with our nation’s capital; rats that deserted the riverbank to join the Union’s sprawl of tents (the rats, too, were sovereign); and the wringer of the interminable drills McClellan put us through while he sat on his high horse, with a hand—like Bonaparte’s—tucked up inside his coat. We were lucky to have missed the Washingtonian mosquito, said to be reared in the pestilential swamps to possess a sparrow’s heft and the sting of a cottonmouth.

On second thought, our bivouac on the Potomac grew stale. Even so engrossing a bit of theater as pretending to kill rebel soldiers with musket or bayonet can become tedious. I missed Broadway and the Battery, the Brooklyn saloons where I sold oysters and, too often, coaxed and kicked my old man home (if you could call it that) from his stupefying and inglorious binges. How fondly I remembered hearing in an Ocean Avenue barroom a waltz tune, cheerful among the shiftless—notes falling unheeded, like gobs of spittle on the sawdust-sprinkled floor! I missed Sheepshead Bay and would gladly have stood up to my knees in winter salt water, raking oysters till my arms dropped off, to be back there again.

I became an expert on my instrument, as Little Will did on his drum. We also became veterans of the boudoir, although the girl on whom we practiced lay not in a swank bedroom on tasseled pillows, but in a hut where black-bound testaments and chaplains’ issues of holy gear
were stored. We were too young, Little Will and I, to savor the delicious incongruity. I mean, goddamn it, we gave no thought to irony and none at all to love while we strained after the satisfaction said to fill a man lying in a woman’s lap. To me, it felt like riding a lumpy sack of meal. We were also too young to realize that what a woman is willing to sell a man will not slake, for long, the passion in which he boils.

“Did you enjoy yourself any?” I asked Little Will afterward, while we ran combs through our tousled hair.

“I’d rather wrestle an alligator,” he said, and I had to agree.

Having no more to say on the subject, we ran off to play baseball with other soldiers of Company B who were, like us, temporarily at loose ends. We would look back on this time of childish folly and insouciance with fierce longing, as old men will on the perished days of their youth. Soon enough, we’d all be hotfooting it in hell’s vestibule. But we’d have some colorful tales to tell—those of us who didn’t get themselves scorched.