Paradise Alley (41 page)

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They finished cleaning their rifles in the twilight, Tom going over every inch of his with the brushes and rags, the lens-cleaning kit he had bought in the camera shop back in Washington City. It had cost him five dollars but he was willing to spend it; he had learned the value of having a reliable weapon in the field. He gave it a complete going over at least once a week, whenever they were in camp. Oiling the barrel and the trigger mechanism until it shone. Dry-firing the Springfield two, three times before he was satisfied.

Even that wouldn't tell him enough, he knew. The gun pulled to the left no matter what he did, and it was better than many. Just as much depended upon the ammunition, the cartridges they were given. The shoddy contractors liked to spike it with dirt, or saltpeter, as much as they could get away with, or more. It would cause the flash to sputter out—or, worse yet, explode in a man's face, tear the barrel right off the stock.

Nonetheless, he liked how the Springfield felt in his hands, something real and substantial to defend himself with, or at least to hang on to, out in the chaos that was the battlefield. He was almost sorry to stack it at night, in front of the tent with the others. Fearful that he would pick up some other fool's Enfield in haste the next morning, have the damned thing misfire on him when he needed it most.

Yet that, too, was a delusion, he knew. Only in the rare fight did it
ever come down to anything like that, one man against another. War was mostly one dim, distant line arrayed against another. A stray shot or a shell fragment tearing into you before you could even see where the enemy was.

War was marching, and making camp, and marching again, until the soles of your shoddy boots were worn through. And war was all the time in between. Before, he hadn't known that so much time could exist. Time to be filled up with songs, and puffing around the campfires—and tedious practical jokes, and sheet-iron crackers, and drinking, and shivering with fever in your tent.

At least I'm out of it for now,
he told himself, sitting around the field hospital while the rest of the army lumbered south after Bobby Lee.
Maybe even for good.
He would not be back in the line anytime soon, and he was due leave, and then they would most likely go into camp for the winter.
Surely, the war couldn't last much longer than that.

Three masked figures rose up before him in the summer dusk. He stacked his rifle and looked up, unable to keep from smiling. It was Snatchem—George Leese—and Danny Larkins, and Feeley, looking much better from his wound. Grinning back at him behind the dark cloths they had tied over their faces like highwaymen.

“Faith, if it ain't the ribbon men, come to steal the landlord's cattle.”

“C'mon along. We're off to requisition a fat German goose from some fat German farmer,” Snatchem told him.

“No, no, it won't do for me to be gallivantin' around the countryside with this leg.”

“It'll be an easy thing,” George insisted. “These farmers'll be so glad we come to save 'em, they'll throw in their daughters besides—”

“I doubt it,” Tom said, trying to keep a straight face. “Better you should see you don't find yourself on the business end of a shotgun, like what happened up at Newburgh.”

He saw George's face moving beneath his mask, laughing silently. Then he was laughing with him. They had all signed up together—Snatchem and Feeley, and John J. Sullivan, and Black Dan Conaway. The only
b'hoys
from the Black Joke who had enlisted.
More fools us—

He and Snatchem went all the way back to when they had both run with the Break o' Day Boys, when they had actually stolen an entire schooner from the East Side docks. They had taken to sailing it up the
Hudson and raiding the little towns along the river there. Breaking into farmhouses, grappling with the farmers' well-fed daughters over their kitchen tables. Smashing the eggs and overturning the sugar, just for the hell of it. Some wit had even gotten hold of a skull and crossbones and they had hoisted it from the mainmast, as if they were regular pirates.

Of course, it had been too brazen to go on for very long. After a couple of weeks, the farmers had been waiting with their shotguns and pitchforks. They had had to run for their lives back to the boat, with the whole country raised behind them, the church bells ringing out the alarm.

“—an' then, when we was all back an' ready to shove off, there comes George! Runnin' hell-bent for leather, with a big, Dutch farmer right behind, wavin' his blunderbuss—”

“Oh, but Jesus, the thing must've been from the French ‘n Indian Wars!”

“But here comes George—still tryin' to hold on to the chicken he's got under one arm, an' the pig under t'other. An' he's almost there, he's runnin' down the bank, slippin' an' slidin' in the mud, but he's still got a hold on that pig an' that chicken. An' just then the farmer fires that blunderbuss—”

“Ah, but it must've been brought over with Pete Stuyvesant!”

“—an' he fires it an'
—boom!—
a great cloud a black smoke comes out, an' little enough otherwise, but by Jesus the sound throws Georgie off his footing. He goes slidin' down the riverbank on his face
—I swear to God!—
slidin' right through the mud, so when he gets to the bottom, he looks like he does right now, like he's wearin' a mask. But—he still has hold of that chicken an' that pig!”

The both of them were laughing so hard with the memory of the thing, and with relief that the battle was over and that they were still alive, that the tears rolled down their cheeks. Snatchem had to pull down the mask to wipe his face and his eyes.

“You sure you won't come with us, then?”

“You go on with yourselves, ya topers. I got some sow belly with the tits on, an' I'll make meself some skillygalee. Good luck with yer gobbling, though to be sure I shouldn't wish it for ye.”

Snatchem smirked at him, then pulled his mask back up. Stalking off into the gloaming with the others.

• • •

Tom watched them go, then started his small fire. He threw a bit of pork fat and some salt into his skillet, then pulled the thick chunk of hardtack out of the mess tin where he had been soaking it in water all day. He fried the cracker in the pork fat until it was browned all over. Then he brewed himself some coffee, black and thick as pitch, and crumbled up another tablet of hardtack into that—making sure to skim off the weevils that bobbed instantly up to the surface.

“Though God knows why I shouldn't eat ya, you'd be more meat than I've had all month!” he told the struggling insects as he tossed them away.

He ate the skillygalee slowly, savoring the substance of the meal, though like all army rations, it was mostly tasteless. Thinking of Snatchem out hunting down a shoat.

The war was another sort of game to men like George,
Tom reflected.
One more scheme.
Back in the Five Points, he had always had a dozen things going—stuss games, working the fights as a bloodsucker. A little moll buzzing and house cracking on the side. Once in the army he had settled immediately into new schemes, new games.
Requisitioning
what he could from the quartermaster, and the local farmhouses. Taking other men's pay with crooked dice and marked cards.

He was no worse than the rest.
The sutlers and mule sellers who cheated them blind. The manufacturers of shoddy, churning out their rotten rations and rottener shoes, guns that didn't fire and uniforms that fell apart. The politicians, getting themselves commissioned officers so they could curry more votes.

What was some farmer's fat goose, to all that?

Tom sat thinking by the tent for a little while longer, watching the twilight turn to night. The insects already beginning to swarm, insects and flies, thick as soup.
God knows, I must have been bit by every creature that flies or crawls in God's creation—

But all across the encampment now, he could hear the sounds of the wounded men settling in for the night. Their voices genial and good-hearted, knowing there wasn't going to be a fight the next day, or anytime soon.

It was almost pleasant, the war, at times like these,
when the weather was warm, and there was no hard work to do. Listening to the birds
gather, twittering and cawing loudest just before the dark silenced them. He didn't know what they were called, he had never been a country boy, but he knew them by their calls now, after so many months marching about with the army.

A few men, here and there, were singing, too, the quiet, sentimental evening songs of the camp:

Hard times, hard times, come again no more;

Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,

Oh! Hard times, come again no more—

He roused himself, and lit the candle in the small lantern that hung from the top of the tent pole. From where he was he could see hundreds, maybe thousands, of other lights, campfires and lanterns and torches, flickering across the rolling fields.
Men announcing themselves upon the land.

Rummaging around in his pack, his hands felt their way over the contents he knew by heart—his mess kit, and his gun cleaners, and the small water bottle he carried instead of the heavy, metal canteen, discarded long ago down some dusty Virginia road. There was a Bible and a devotional book as well; his one change of underwear and two pairs of socks, and his housewife—the small mending kit he had become adept at using over the past ten months.

At last he found the lead pencil and a few leaves of paper he had been able to bum from a hotel back in Chambersburg. Clamping his white clay pipe between his teeth, sucking at it dry while he tried to concentrate on the writing.

Before he began, though, he pulled out the locket he wore at all times, on a chain over his chest. Popping the clasp and gazing at the serious, beautiful face of the woman there, her eyes large and luminous even in the daguerreotype. Deirdre. His wife, the mother of his children. The woman who had saved him.

How he had hated her.

He thought now, as he often did, of the last time he had seen her. Up in that wretched camp, by the central park. Everything filthy, the water seeping in everywhere from the swampy ground. The men drunk all the time, brawling and bickering, rolling around in the mud like so many hogs. They'd had to post a provost's guard, twenty-four hours, with orders to shoot any deserters. There hadn't
been enough tents for all of them, or enough wood to make cabins. The flimsy Brooks Brothers uniforms and shoes falling apart in the first good rain—

Every morning, parading out across the muddy ground, he had thought of how it had been her idea. The whole City, with his home and his family, still just there, below him. Practically visible, behind the scrawny trees, and the dismal, rocky hills. He had not been able to restrain himself, had said it straight out, the first Sunday she had come to visit:

As if life wasn't bad enough.

He had watched her face fall when he said it—looking more hurt than if he had hit her, which he would never do. Which had been just what he had wanted at the time, he had wanted her to feel the misery that he went through every day.

As if life wasn't bad enough already. And always what she said it should be. Getting up every day to trudge off to the job, hacking and digging at the land. Worrying day and night if he would make enough to keep up the house payments. And hardly a drop of the creature—never any relief at all but the Sunday mornings sweltering in a pew, watching the back of a priest.

Yet even then he had been softening, he knew. Even before he threw his words in her face, he knew that she understood. Seeing her look over the camp, taking in the way they lived.
Realizing what she had done.
She had gotten herself up in her finest dress for him, even better than her usual clothes for Mass, the cut-velvet gown with black Chantilly lace that she had bought with her own money, and worn only for their wedding, and the children's christenings. A matching hat, and ribbons tied through her delicate brown hair.