When the War Is Over (4 page)

When Catto was tired of the company street he drifted out to the corral and found a soft patch of grass under a nearby tree, and watched the horses for a while, or dozed. Hillis tolerated him. What Hillis despised was the experts who came gaggling around and showed off for one another. Fetlocks and pasterns. Or tried to talk him into setting up a race. He asked the colonel once to declare the corral out of bounds, which proved impossible. Hillis never minded Catto, though. Catto just sat, letting his equine affinities unfold and expand. Horses were old friends; conversation was unnecessary.

Catto was half asleep one afternoon, the sunlight warm, motherly, dappling through the chestnut leaves, when Jacob and the boy came walking along and leaned on the fence.

“That one,” Jacob said. “That one there long in the hind leg.”

“He's bigger than the others,” the boy said. “And fatter.”

“And stronger.”

“Maybe.”

“But that sergeant won't let them race,” Jacob said, and laughed quietly. “He's a hard man.”

“He's all right,” Thomas Martin said. “He don't look funny at me like the others. He don't act like a soldier at all, really.”

“That's true,” Jacob said. “He call me Jacob.”

“What's everybody else call you?”

“Darky,” Jacob said, “or nigger, or coon, but not Jacob. One major called me black'moor once. Never heard that before.”

“Well, you're free.”

Jacob laughed again. “That's right. And I like it. Silver dollars. All the same.”

“All the same what?”

“When I was a slave in Tennessee,” Jacob said, “everybody call me Jacob.”

The boy shrugged. “Don't matter much what they call you. Long as you get paid. You get beaten much before?”

“No,” Jacob said. “I tell you the difference between slave and free.”

The boy smiled. “All right. Tell me. We never had a slave.”

“In Tennessee was forty men working for one man. Here, is one man working for forty men.”

They both giggled, and then overflowed, cascading splashes of hawhawhaw, hawhawhaw. Catto grinned. This was, he felt, instructive, and he enjoyed the warm, soft, chewy southern voices.

After a time Jacob said, “They don't like me. Some of these here soldiers never see a nigger till the war. They scared. They scared of Jacob,” and he laughed again.

“They ain't scared of me,” the boy said ruefully.

They talked more about the horses.

“Hey,” Catto said. “How you, boy?” He had frightened them, and was sorry.

“Didn't see you, Lieutenant.”

“Hello, Jacob.”

“Yessa,” Jacob said.

The boy's face relaxed into curiosity. He was wary but there was a baby's innocence to him. It kept breaking through. “How you feeling, Lieutenant?”

“Some better,” Catto said. “I see they let you loose.”

The boy nodded, and tried a shy smile. “I reckon they figure I've done all the harm I'm going to.”

So Catto answered his smile: “Probably. No hard feelings.”

“Well, that's good,” the boy said. “I never shot a man before.” And after a moment, “I don't feel right about it.”

“C'est la guerre.”

“What's that mean?”

“That's war. I don't suppose anybody feels right about it.”

“Is that so,” the boy said. “You ever shoot anybody?”

“Yeh. Killed some. I don't expect I'll ever feel right about it.” And yet. And yet.

“Then there's lots going to feel bad for a long time,” the boy said. “You should have left us alone.”

“I won't argue politics with you. Main thing is to stay alive and not get crippled up.”

“Yeh,” the boy said. “I reckon you're about to win this war anyway.”

“Looks like,” Catto said. “That's one way to end it.” He rose, a bit stiff here and there. The boy and Jacob moved together.

“Thomas Martin,” said Catto. “Well, that's a name I'll remember. Last fellow shot me, I never had time to get his name.”

“Well, I wish I hadn't,” Thomas Martin said.

“So do I,” said Catto, but he was laughing, and soon the boy laughed too, and then Catto left them, smacking the boy a friendly punch on the arm as he passed by. The boy was all right. He looked straight at you. When he grew up and got a little strength to his nose, a little character around the eyes, he would make a lot of trouble for a lot of girls. For a moment Catto might have been his father.

Soon the bivouac as a whole began to show signs of humanity and intelligence. The certainty of departure—which now amounted almost to the certainty of peaceful retirement—gave the men a new grace, a new calm. Catto came upon them sewing, or boiling off lice, or cutting one another's hair. Thomas Martin was issued new clothes. He betrayed no discomfort in Union blue. The men ragged him about turning coat, and he smiled his bright smile. Shooter and shot met in the company street, and the boy burlesqued a scowl and said, “I never did get to wear gray.”

“You look just fine in blue,” Catto said. “Like a soldier.” That cheered the boy. The weather held good and cheered them all. They were gliding into October and nights were cooler, but the days were warm, dry, sunny, full of life, as if this year would see no bleak decline, no southering swarms of geese, no bare, black, leafless forests, no seas of snow. Catto's first year or two were all rain, it seemed now. The Johnnys were only the second enemy. He had marched through weeks and months of rain, counties and states of rain; he fought in rain and slept in mud, and weapons fouled overnight. Why did he remember the rain and forget the rest? They had chanted:

Now I lay me down to sleep

In mud that's many fathoms deep;

If I'm not here when you awake,

Just hunt me up with an oyster rake.

Catto had never seen an oyster. He had eaten freshwater clams and liked them.

Well, now he was dry and now he was safe, and so were they all. Not a man there had honestly believed he would survive the war, and now not a man thought otherwise. They smiled without knowing why. Forgot to complain about the food. Teased the boy about women until he loured in confusion; that was their own impatience. Smug, they were, and seemed fatter. Catto laughed aloud, thinking that they were like a company of women with child: slow of gesture, pleasant of mouth, complacent of eye.

His shoulder gave him no pain; it was stiff, but the fever was gone and he was left sleepy. When the colonel announced that they would break camp next morning, Catto asked Phelan to come and remove the wrappings. Phelan bragged a bit, and after the noon meal they went back to Catto's tent, and Phelan removed the sling and had Catto straighten the arm, and then he cut through the dressing and very carefully lifted off his enigmatical mound of ox blood or sassafras or whatever it was.

The wound was clean and smoothly healed, with a pretty dimple. “Good work,” Catto told him. “You're hired. I suppose you want a greenback to hang on the wall.”

“It was a hard case,” Phelan said. “The patient was not robust, and was born simple.”

“All right. Now. What was that garbage you used for medicine? That stuff inside the bandage?”

“Oh that. Merely man's best friend. Nature's remedy. God's cure for the ills of the flesh.”

“Poetry. What was it?”

“I'll show you,” Phelan said, and there was that odd, melancholy look to him, like a conjurer pitying his yokel audience because only he knows that his tricks are really magic, and the sly questions from the know-it-alls mere foolishness. He held forth the dressing, to let Catto look.

In the little hollow were four fat white maggots.

II

Catto was offended by the court-martial. What had been a duel, lost honorably and without resentment, became a charade, himself an inept harlequin, a clown in blue. His first notice of it was a letter, instructing him to appear before the court, when and where (the how he knew: full uniform, sword; and the why he supposed he knew, from an occasional twinge in his shoulder). The letter galled him, not by its message but by its presumption, its bland reduction of Catto himself to a minor comic character tripping on doorsills, codpiece flapping, eyes rolling whitely. He had heard no gossip, no whisper, and had hoped that the army, his army, would have the good sense to be manly, reasonable, chary of such trivia, perhaps spanking the boy and sending him along home. More than that: it did not seem right to him that the boy be accused, much less locked up, marched about under guard, flung into the maw of justice, records, history, without Catto's consent. All that for an honest misdemeanor when even Haller, his best soldier, was a free felon, a thief of beef, of bags of beans and sacks of sugar sold or swapped for cash or tobacco. “This I do not like,” he grumbled, waving the letter.

“The Confederacy in gratitude has offered you a decoration,” Phelan said.

“Shut up. These sons of bitches are going to court-martial the boy. I have to testify.”

“Court-martial!” Silliman was shocked rigid.

“Then lie,” Phelan blathered. “Tell them you shot yourself in the hope of an early return to your job at the bank. It would be less humiliating.”

“You are a funny fellow and all that. But I don't like it. What can they do to the boy? Hang him? Throw him into a jail? No. So why do they have to bother? It is a kind of machinery for its own sake. I have learned only one thing in the army, really.” He stood up, and paced. Phelan had a Sibley tent to himself, like a grand, luxurious tepee, one of the last, you hardly saw them now, his infirmary, medications and instruments heaped and scattered on small tables, and three cots for his patients, and a stove, and two large chests, and two wooden armchairs, salvaged or commandeered.

“Not to keep your head down, that's sure.”

“No.” Catto smiled; he looked back upon his second wound with a gentle affection. “Or yes. In the field, no, but in Cincinnati, yes. Keep your head down and never look authority in the eye, or it will notice you and strike up a conversation. Haller knows that and would rather be a sergeant than a lieutenant. And these niggers we have around now. Nobody can tell them apart and they are safe that way. So the Martin boy looked somebody in the eye and now he is noticed and they are about to strike up a conversation. Unnecessary and worrisome.”

“Garrison life disagrees with you,” Phelan said. “It was you he looked in the eye, just before he pulled the trigger. The hell, man, the army has a certain honor and dignity, and cannot allow children to snipe freely at its officers.”

“Then they ought to ask me before they go complicating matters.”

“You miss the point. He wasn't shooting at you. He was shooting at a uniform.”

“And? He was on the other side.”

“So he was.” Phelan prinked, smoothing both wings of his belligerent mustache. “But I wish he had worn, or had about him, some article of regular Johnny equipment.”

“Me too,” Catto said. He gloomed, then cheered. “Oh well. I'll speak up for him.”

“Do that,” Phelan said. “Tell them you were running away at the time. It's unsporting to shoot a sitting lieutenant. One may, however, take them on the rise.”

“I think I'll tell them,” Catto said tentatively, “that I was about to shoot the boy myself.”

“No. Don't lie. Whatever you do don't lie. Because if you lie and he tells the truth then they will call him the liar. Whatever the stories. You understand?”

“That's right. Fair enough: no lies.”

“Good. Let's eat.”

“Yours to command. By the bye, I want to get Routledge out of the army. He's too old for this, and more trouble than use. Can you help?”

“There you go again,” said Phelan, “looking authority in the eye. I will not lie for Routledge. But I know a pretty young thing who could give him the pox.”

“God Almighty,” Catto said. “Surgeons.”

Silliman was scarlet.

Catto was also offended by Cincinnati, by a populous garrison, by company streets, by reeking latrines, by idle men. He had not become a soldier to suffer stinks, to bestow groceries, to rebuke country boys for relieving themselves on public thoroughfares, to inspect for lice and order boilings. Even bayonets had retired, to become furniture, jabbed deep into earth or wood, a candle wedged within the ring: soldiers' lamps. “They were never any use,” Phelan said. “Maybe one wound in two hundred was a bayonet wound. You are all cowards.”

“Damn right,” Catto said. “A line of them coming at you, and it takes you fifteen seconds to load. If you miss, you do not loiter. You run away.”

“Ah, yes, of course.” Phelan's brows bounced; his eyes brightened, jolly. “It reminds me of an old story.”

Catto waited respectfully.

“A famous battle,” Phelan went on, “between the English and the French, long since. They were all in those lunatic lines of battle that no one had the sense to improve upon, everybody standing up straight right next to everybody else, and the English tipped their hats, or their gold bonnets or whatever, and said, ‘Gentlemen of the French guard, please fire first.'”

“Good God. That's more manners than I have.”

“That's what most people say. But it was not manners at all. Whoever fired first was helpless for half a minute afterward, what with reloading, and blinking their eyes, and wiping their noses, and coughing out the smoke, and the young ones changing their trousers. The English were being sly.”

“And the French fell for it, and the English whipped them.”

“Not at all. Practically anybody is smarter than an Englishman. The French declined the honor.”

“And massacred the English.”

“Wrong again.” Phelan was visibly delighted with himself. “The English fired first, and blew the French to pieces. Cut them to shreds.”