Fire by Night (19 page)

“Feeling any better?” she asked Ted.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “The sergeant was right about coming out here in the fresh air. It really helps.”

Phoebe still felt woozy herself, especially when she looked down at the gray, storm-whipped water or watched the deck rise and fall. But if she kept her eye on the land and remembered to take deep gulps of the cold, bracing air, she just might be able to make it to Fortress Monroe without turning green like most of the other soldiers on board.

She and Ted had hardly been able to contain their excitement as they’d boarded the
Lady Delaware
and sailed out of the port of Alexandria, Virginia, heading down the Potomac River to Fortress Monroe. The ships that made up the Union fleet seemed to come in every size and shape imaginable: oceangoing vessels with tall masts that stuck up in the air like a forest; river steamers, like the vessel they rode on, with belching smokestacks and thumping paddlewheels; long, flat trains of barges, helped along by wheezing tugboats.

And the equipment they carried! Thousands and thousands of tents, horses, and artillery pieces. Boxes and barrels of food and supplies and ammunition. Wagons and caissons, and pontoons for building bridges. Roll after roll of telegraph wire. The dock had teemed with contrabands working for the army, loading endless tons of equipment. Phoebe and Ted had watched the spectacle in awe.

“Would you look at that?” Ted had repeated every second or two. “And look at that over there!” He had pointed to an almost endless row of cannons, lined up wheel to wheel; to a boatload of army mules; to a pyramid of wooden crates. “Did you ever see anything like this in your life?”

Phoebe had been equally amazed. “No, I sure haven’t. And look at all them cannonballs, Ted. I’ll bet you can’t even count them all.”

Sergeant Anderson told them that the campaign had begun two weeks ago, with more than four hundred ships shuttling back and forth to the tip of the York-James Peninsula, ferrying the 120,000-man Army of the Potomac and everything they would need to wage war. When Phoebe and Ted’s turn had finally come, they’d boarded this river steamer on a blustery day in March.

Now they were nearing the end of their two-hundred-mile voyage and entering the choppier waters of Chesapeake Bay. They would land at Fortress Monroe that afternoon—which was hardly soon enough for Phoebe. She was half starved because she had decided to stop eating after seeing where everybody else’s rations had wound up.

“Do you suppose Johnny Reb knows we’re coming?” Ted asked suddenly.

“Sure he knows. It’s pretty hard to keep all this a secret.” She gestured to the parade of boats on the river and to their own ship’s deck, which resembled an arsenal. “This is a pretty dumb way to sneak up on somebody.”

“What do you mean?”

“I spent a lot of time in the woods back home, hunting deer and snaring rabbits, and I learned that it’s best to sneak up on your prey from downwind. You don’t want to let him hear you coming. Or get a whiff of you, either.”

“This isn’t a deer hunt, Ike,” Ted said stiffly. “It’s war. And General McClellan knows everything there is to know about war.”

Phoebe didn’t argue with him. Ted would defend his commanding officer no matter what she said.

She could smell the ocean now, and the waves were growing rougher. She turned around to look toward the east. Beyond the last tip of land, gray clouds met the gray horizon with water as far as she could see. She quickly turned back.

“I sure wouldn’t like to cross that ocean,” she said. “I’ll bet it makes a person feel awful small to be sailing way out there.”

“Hey,” Ted said a few minutes later. “Maybe the Rebels will see us coming with all of this and figure out it’s a lost cause. I know I’d surrender if I saw all these cannons and soldiers and guns, wouldn’t you?”

Phoebe thought about the question for a moment before answering. “You know what? If someone came after my land this way, I’d fight like a mother bear protecting her cubs. I mean, what if all these soldiers were marching up to your hometown in Pennsylvania, threatening your ma? Would you give up?”

“Never thought of it that way.”

“Don’t plan on the Rebels waving any white flags, Ted. I figure they’ll fight like wildcats to protect what’s theirs.”

Late that afternoon, the ship landed at Fortress Monroe in the pouring rain. The water was so choppy that Phoebe thought for sure that she would land in the drink as she teetered down the narrow ramp to the landing. The scene on shore looked the same as the one they’d left in Washington—scores of soldiers and ships, and raggedy, dark-faced contrabands stacking endless piles of supplies and equipment.

Phoebe’s regiment marched inland and camped in the woods near the fort. The low flatlands near the river were heavily wooded, the ground where the soldiers pitched their tents damp and teeming with wood ticks and mosquitoes. When camp was made, the men sat waiting for a long, dreary week. For every warm, sunny day there were two cold, wet ones, until Phoebe was sure she would never feel completely dry again. They were waiting, she learned, for the remainder of the army and for General McClellan himself to arrive and direct the invasion.

Every morning and evening she and Ted sat on damp logs near the smoldering campfire and picked off wood ticks, a dozen or so of the bloodthirsty critters every day. Ted kept a tally of how many they’d caught, the way he’d once counted stuff in his uncle’s factory. He wasn’t a country boy, so wood ticks were new to him. Phoebe taught him how to pry them off.

“You gotta dig down with your fingernails and pinch them off, like this,” she said. “They burrow down pretty deep, and you’ll only get the top half of them if you don’t dig. Then the sore will fester. You can’t hardly squash the little beggars, neither, so you better throw them in the fire.”

“Ugh! I’ll bet these are Rebel ticks,” Ted said, digging one off his ankle.

“You got one on your neck that’s dug in real deep,” she told him. “You must’ve missed him yesterday. You’ll have to hold a match or a firebrand to him and heat him up good. Then he’ll come crawling out mighty quick.”

“I’ll bet the Confederates enlisted these ticks and mosquitoes to fight on their side,” Ted said as he pitched a tick into the flames.“They’re probably breeding them like horses up there in Richmond.”

“Yeah, and I’ll tell you what else,” she said as it began to drizzle again. “This blasted weather is on their side, too.”

On the day they finally broke camp and began the twenty-mile march to Yorktown to confront the Rebel army, the sun was shining, the grass was spring green, and the peach trees were in bloom. Phoebe felt on top of the world. With Ted marching beside her all day and snoring beside her in their pup tent at night, she had never felt happier in her life.

But the next day the rain fell in a downpour. Thousands of tramping feet and horses’ hooves and wagon wheels quickly turned the road into a sticky, sucking mudhole, trapping the heavy wagons up to their axles in gumbo. Phoebe and Ted’s company marched near the rear of the long column of men, and when they weren’t helping the teamsters heave the wagons out of the muck, they were standing in a steady deluge, waiting while the other soldiers took their turns at heaving. They reached Yorktown in the early afternoon and heard the sound of Confederate artillery and rifle fire for the first time. It sobered everyone up right quick. After a wet night sleeping on the marshy ground, Phoebe found out the next day what they were up against.

The Confederates were hunkered down behind earthworks fifteen feet thick, surrounded by ditches ten feet deep and fifteen feet wide. If she was within sight of their fortifications, she figured she was also within range of their cannons.

“We’re gonna have a fight on our hands for the next few days— that’s for sure,” she told Ted. “But I’m ready to go at them, aren’t you?”

“I’ve been ready since I put on this uniform last October,” he said. “They’ve had me toting this heavy gun all over the place; it’s about time I had a chance to shoot it.”

“The Rebels can’t possibly have as many soldiers in there as we’ve got out here,” Phoebe guessed, “or they’d be standing cheek to jowl with no room to move. I figure we’ll storm the place, don’t you think?”

“Little Mac knows what to do. He’s a military genius.”

But they soon learned that General McClellan had decided not to attack. He dug earthworks of his own instead, parallel to the enemy’s, so he could lay siege to Yorktown. The first work crew went out with their shovels under cover of darkness to begin digging. Laboring in silence all night, they made a trench deep enough to crawl into, piling the dirt in a mound that would be high enough for a daytime crew to hide behind. Phoebe and Ted were part of the next day’s crew, crouching behind the new mound of dirt, digging like crazy to make the trench deeper, the rampart higher. As she and the other soldiers continued shoveling for the next week, the Confederates occasionally sent artillery shells whistling over their heads, forcing the workers to hunker down in their ditches until they heard the explosion.

“Good thing their aim isn’t too good,” Ted said after a missile struck a hundred yards in front of them, showering them with dirt.“They haven’t done a lick of damage.”

“They’re not really trying to stop us from digging,” Phoebe said.“I figure they’re just testing their aim to see how far they can shoot. Then when our whole army is lined up out here in these holes, they’ll be able to kill a whole bunch of us at once. If you ask me, it’s a stupid idea to give them free target practice. We should attack the enemy now, before they get their guns all lined up.”

But she and the others continued to dig trenches, day after day, with rain falling two-thirds of the time. The only enemies Phoebe had a chance to attack were armies of insects. She was growing disgusted.

“I joined the army nearly eight months ago,” she complained, “and all we done so far is march in circles, pick off ticks, and dig holes. I never thought you could win a war this way, did you?”

But Ted’s confidence in his commander never wavered. “Little Mac knows what he’s doing. You’ll see.”

Work in the trenches continued for a month. Phoebe also helped construct ramps and log platforms for gun emplacements, preparing sites for the fourteen batteries of heavy cannon the army’s engineers were busy hauling through the knee-deep mud to Yorktown. Some of those guns were so massive it took a team of one hundred horses to haul them.

Around the time Phoebe and Ted grew used to the occasional artillery shell screaming over their heads, the Confederates came up with a new game. They sent out a sharpshooter to watch over the trenches, and he picked off workers one by one, whenever somebody accidentally poked his head up too high. Phoebe needed to be especially careful because she was a good three or four inches taller than the others to start with. And the sharpshooter’s favorite target area was right where she and Ted were assigned to work. Two men Phoebe had marched with and drilled with since Harrisburg had already been killed when they forgot to keep their heads down.

“Why don’t we go at them and fight like soldiers instead of like moles?” she said after the second man died. “When are we gonna quit digging ditches and fight?”

“Little Mac studied modern warfare over in Europe,” Ted insisted. “He even wrote books about it.”

Phoebe leaned against her shovel. “Well, I’ll tell you what. The Rebels are dug in like gophers over there, and I don’t need a book to tell me that you can’t catch a gopher by digging a hole across the road from him and sitting in it. That varmint will sit tight right where he’s at—or else dig himself a back door and skedaddle when you ain’t looking. If you want to catch a gopher, you gotta go down his hole, chase him out of it, and hunt him down.”

“That’s why we’re building these gun emplacements,” Ted said. “As soon as we’re ready, Little Mac’s going to
blast
the Rebels out.” Without thinking, he stepped up onto the gun platform they were building to gesture enthusiastically toward the Rebel lines.

“Ted, get down!”

Phoebe dove at him, grabbing him around the knees, knocking him off the platform. But at the same instant that she tackled him, she heard the sharp crack of gunfire. Ted hit the mud in the bottom of the trench, and Phoebe fell on top of him.

“Oh, God,” she prayed as she scrambled to her knees. “Oh, God …oh, God!” She was scared to death that she’d reacted too slowly, that Ted would have a bullet hole through his head like all of the sharpshooter’s other victims.

Ted lay on his back in the mud. Phoebe didn’t see any blood. He was stunned and gasping for air after having the wind knocked out of him, but he was alive.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah …I think so.” He slowly sat up, then reached to retrieve his cap, which lay a few feet away. “Hey, he shot a hole through my hat!”

Phoebe turned away, fighting tears of relief. She was angry for her girlish reaction and furious at the Rebel who’d nearly killed her friend. If Ted had been an inch taller, he’d have been a goner.

“That does it,” she said, throwing down her own hat. “I’m gonna get me a job as a Yankee sharpshooter and kill that fella myself!”

Sergeant Anderson overheard her words as he hurried over to check on Ted. “Do you really want to have a go at him, Bigelow?” he asked. “Because if anybody can get him, you can. I’ve seen you shoot.”

“I sure would, sir. If you let me climb up one of those trees over there and see where he’s at, I’ll shoot him down like a treed raccoon.”

“All right. I’m tired of losing men. If you want to volunteer to go after him, you have my permission.”

Phoebe knew that if she was going to do this, she needed to do it right now, while anger still pumped through her veins and the memory of Ted’s close call was still sharp and clear. She picked up her gun, removed the bayonet, and made sure her rifle was properly loaded. Then she checked her cartridge box for spare ammunition— although, if she missed the sniper on the first shot, she’d be a sitting duck until she had a chance to reload.

“Don’t do it, Ike,” Ted begged. “It’s too dangerous. You’ll have no cover while you’re out in the open climbing a tree, and if he sees you, he can pick you off before you even take aim. We know what a good shot he is. …
Please
don’t take a chance.”