When the War Is Over (5 page)

Catto guffawed.

“You laugh. But the French won the battle,” Phelan said sternly. “That is called justice.”

“I'm glad I missed it,” Catto said. “It sounds worse than bayonets, which I am also glad I missed.”

“Afraid of cold steel,” Phelan scoffed. “Not like the Irish guards at Waterloo.”

“Never mind Waterloo. And never mind your omnis morris equus either.”

“The truth is they were Scots,” Phelan said sadly. “The colonel and I would like more sulphate of iron in the sinks. You want the job?”

“Yes. And anything else you find. I have to keep the men busy.”

“That's the problem now.”

“They're gambling.”

“They'll be brangling in a month.”

For a time his men had been no trouble. (“My men”: now and then he called them that, smiling down a childish pride. But they were less than a gallant band, his scrubby fraternity of tatterdemalion kerns.) They cheered and whistled at their new log barracks, shouted “Hey cookie, beefsteak tonight” at the fat, weary master of pot and pan, gazed upon the officers' cabins as if upon Rome, and fell into reverent silence before the freshly turned, cleanly patterned grid of sinks, with shovels evenly spaced, upright, permanent as crosses in a graveyard. (Tubby, unwashed Private Franklin had already eased himself against a log wall and been cursed out by Catto, who called him, among other exquisite epithets, a pig's bladder, causing Haller to cackle aloud. Franklin was thenceforth known as Piggy.)

Cincinnati itself was still some way off, but the dust of the roads, the passage of horses, of mule-drawn wagons, of buckboards bearing women and children, all betrayed peace and civilization. The men settled in, and sexless marriages were dissolved; any two who shared a dog tent were called the old man and the old woman (“Who's your wife?” was a common question, and not a joke), but now they all slept in two rows of ten or a dozen, an aisle between. A potbellied stove presided at one end of the barracks so that a sooty pipe could run the length of the building, saving fuel, lavishing heat; each man in turn sat up for two hours, watching in the night and adding billets. City life. They boiled water in the cook-pots and washed clothes, blankets, kerchiefs, everything but themselves, until Catto issued soap and orders. “Feet,” he said. “If nothing else, your cruddy feet. Draw socks this afternoon. I catch you without them, you stand on a barrel all day.”

And then Catto became a foreman, an alderman: the men were a sulking mass of inept municipal employees. Garbage-men, carpenters, ditch-diggers, tailors, grocers, courthouse loiterers, road-menders, tinkers, cooks, petty grafters, wheelwrights—anything but soldiers. Traders and hagglers: half of them had lost, or discarded, or swapped their blankets and overcoats, traded off Canton flannel drawers for coffee; they were allowed forty-two dollars a year for clothes but relied on generous quartermasters. They used postage stamps and scrip for money, and came to Catto when the rain had pulped their life's savings. In three weeks they turned sullen. After almost three years Catto was learning what it meant to be a soldier. “Only because the war is over. Over for us, and everybody knows it, and they want to go home.”

“Keep them in line,” the colonel said. “General Hooker is a tough one, and will come down on them hard. Make sure they know that. Hooker has the whole department on his hands and does not want to be distracted by us wee folk.”

“I don't suppose you could have me transferred.”

“No.”

And he lived a mile from the stables now; even that diversion was denied him. He smiled still, as when a recruit joined them and the men sent him to draw an umbrella, and the young fellow trotted off eagerly; but his smiles were brief and testy. “New men!” he said to Haller. “We need to get rid of the old ones.”

“Yeh. They'll all be sick soon. Get rid of a few that way.”

“Spoken like a sergeant,” Catto said. “I'd rather die like Garesche.”

“Garesche?” Haller was startled. “That priest in Cincinnati? The chaplain?”

“No, hell, no, that's his brother. The dead one was an officer at Murfreesboro. The time I talked with Rosecrans. You mean I never told you that?”

“No.” Haller half smiled. “You going to draw a long bow on me?”

“God's truth,” Catto said. “I was scouting at Stones River and chasing back to headquarters, on foot, when Rosecrans came pounding up on that crazy-legged bay he liked, and all his staff galloping behind, and he was bright red. I mean crimson. His uniform was soaked and his hat was dripping. ‘General!' I called out. ‘You hurt?' And he shouted, ‘Get on with it, boy. It's Garesche's blood,' and he galloped off. They told me later that he and Garesche were riding along side by side and a cannonball sheared off Garesche's head. Clean off. One second Lieutenant-Colonel Julius Garesche, the general's chief of staff, next second the headless horseman spraying blood like a geyser. Burst like a boil. I was damn glad to be on foot and low to the ground.”

“Wouldn't have helped. I knew a man had both legs crushed by a cannonball. He was just standing there in the sunshine wondering which way to run. Hell of a thing.”

“Yeh. I went back for an ambulance wagon one time and passed a stack of arms and legs big as a haycock, where they were amputating. Jesus. That had a stink to it.”

“War stinks.”

“War stinks is right. Well, that's our trade. Now I have to go and get that boy out of trouble. Rather be fighting any day. You ever been court-martialed?”

“Nope. I'm what they call a shrewd old soldier.”

Catto smiled. “That's what I hope to be some day. We got bold soldiers and we got old soldiers. But we got no old bold soldiers.”

Haller, who had heard everything before, nodded politely.

“Well, I better not be late,” Catto said. “Wish me luck.”

“It's the boy that needs it.”

Catto bumbled huffily up the white wooden steps, chopped a surly salute at the athletic young sentry, and after brief palaver was ushered to an anteroom, a sun parlor, bare and chill and not much warmed by the presence of Corporal Godwinson and Private Poo Padgett. “Stand up at least,” he said. They did so, Godwinson smiling slightly, and Catto said, “For God's sake, sit down.” Padgett was one of those boys of nineteen or so, five feet nine or ten, medium-dark, fine teeth, one pimple, never sick a day since the mumps, who escorted their girl friends home from church. Godwinson was Godwinson, and sat calm, not fidgeting, invulnerable. Catto too sat down, exhaled like a blown horse, and stared in panic at his polished boots. “Greatcoat time,” he said.

They sat in silence. In the nervous interval Catto grew conscious of his body. Not its shape or color or health, simply its corporeality. The weight of his hams on the hard chair; muscles of the thigh and calf that seemed to flex and extend now of their own will, invisibly and irresistibly; the gentle rise and fall of his chest, the air streaming through his nostrils, the light, persistent beat of his blood. And I will sit there with a rumbling stomach. Or twitch, or break wind, or the colonel will admonish me to wipe my nose. Well. Just keep my hands still and think pure thoughts, and mind my language, and come down hard on any devils inside me.

He stood to attention, once more a wooden soldier. One colonel, one major, one captain, one lieutenant and one sergeant ignored him. The colonel was a black beard, the major sideburns, the captain a red beard, the lieutenant mustachioed, also the sergeant. Blue eyes, brown eyes, snake's eyes, cow's eyes. To Catto's left another sergeant, at ease, armed. Catto was conscious of Thomas Martin, of whispers, lawyer-soldiers, men with pens, and he ached for the field, for a tent beside a stream and a plump bird to roast.

Then he was swearing to something, and was seated, and saw the boy, held down an impulse to wave, and was asked to recite, confining himself to fact and observation. He did so, not omitting the pigeons but passing over the loops and circles of red and yellow light.

“And do you recall what was said by the prisoner upon his capture?”

Catto recalled.

“And what was found upon the prisoner?”

Catto catalogued.

“Not one article of rebel issue?”

Not one.

“And afterward?”

“We took him back,” Catto said. “He made no trouble. He was locked in a barn for a day or two but then paroled. Temporarily. He helped out around the bivouac.”

“That's irregular.” The sergeant had spoken. Ah, damn sergeants!

“It's an irregular war. Let me tell you a story. I heard this from a friend in Georgia.” Ten eyes, astonished: do go on. “There was this Dutchman in the Twenty-sixth Illinois, and a Johnny wanted to quit and come over. So the Dutchman said, ‘All right, all right, come on,' and the Johnny came over, and the Dutchman had been filling canteens at a spring, so he told the Johnny to load up with them and come along, and he never bothered to take away the Johnny's rifle and all that. So the two of them came in, and there was the colonel, and the Dutchman says, ‘Colonel, here is a prisoner that has come over.' And the colonel looked at them and said, ‘For God's sake, Dutchman, which one is the prisoner?'”

Silence.

Catto stewed in annoyance and embarrassment. “What I mean is it's that kind of war, you see. In the lines I've traded Johnny salt for fresh vegetables. I got a jug of whiskey once for cigars.”

Private Catto, he thought. They ripped away his buttons and broke his sword. Drums. He shuffled down the long dusty company street. The pariah dog Catto. His own men turned away. Women spat.

“Lieutenant Catto,” the colonel said, “you are not on trial here—not yet, at any rate,” and five fighting men tittered, “and the import of your humorous story is not lost upon us. But as the sergeant said, releasing the prisoner was irregular.”

“But we've sent rebel officers home by the dozen,” Catto objected.

“Ah yes,” the colonel said, amiable, benign. “Officers.”

Catto risked a glance at the sergeant, whose eyes were downcast. “Yes sir,” Catto said.

“Major Wayne. Your witness.”

A bald major bore down briskly, all eyebrows and nostrils. A fraternal smile for Catto, who nodded and crossed his hands on his lap. “You have some experience in the line, Lieutenant?”

“Yes sir. I came in in sixty-two and have been in the line since. Wounded at Stones River. Commissioned in the field.” Good of you to ask. My scars. Here and here.

“And therefore some discerning judgment, of your own men and the enemy as well.”

“Well, I wouldn't—”

“Now, now. This is not the time for modesty, Lieutenant.”

“All right. Yes.”

“You used the word ‘parole.' Did you mean by that that the prisoner received the same treatment usually accorded rebel soldiers?”

“No sir. When any body of rebel soldiers was taken, we kept a close watch on them.”

“Ah. But a single prisoner? Say, one who had come over, as with your Dutchman.”

“Well, he'd be watched for a time, but then he'd be like one of us. Until we got back to a garrison.”

“So you treated the boy like one of those prisoners.”

“Yes sir.”

“Why was that?”

“What? Why was that?” After a moment of perplexity Catto said patiently, “Well, he was a captured rebel soldier.”

“He had shot you. Did you treat him roughly?”

“No sir. Of course not.”

“Did you have reason to doubt his story?”

“You mean about Colonel Jessee?”

“Yes.”

“No. I've seen younger than that fighting. In regular Johnny regiments. Saw a boy about fourteen once with no legs.”

“Did you ever hear Cook's Guerrillas mentioned with reference to the boy?”

“No sir.”

“Where is Colonel Jessee now?”

“I have no idea, sir.”

In time, and with generous cooperation from his witness, the major made it plain that in better days Thomas Martin, like any handsome young soldier, would have been resplendent in gray, cap-a-pie, dashing, cool, one against hordes. After that first glance Catto had refrained from looking at the boy but did so in the end, and saw him wide-eyed, dazzled by visions of his own splendor. This accomplished, Catto was dismissed, stood to attention, faced about smartly, and strode to the door. There he turned in brief mutiny, said, “Oh send him on home,” and skipped away like a brassy schoolboy.

A couple of nights later Catto entered the barracks almost unnoticed, ducking quickly out of a cold black silence into a yellow, fleshy, murmurous warmth; men sat, sprawled, lay; wrote, sang, read, played, dozed. Lowndes made love to his banjo. Catto's eyes went immediately to Haller, who sat smoking a pipe, and then to Godwinson, who frowned and scribbled. One of the two tables, sadly lame, seemed to be for scholars, the other for gamesters: he saw a checkerboard. He was noticed then, and sound died slowly. Faces bloomed. The men were immobile; he felt their faintly malign hesitation. At length Haller rose and called the others to attention. Catto waited, bearing what he hoped was an expression of tolerant and amused despair. When they were all afoot he said, “As you were,” and admired the general collapse.

“I have the feeling,” he said, “that you better be a bit quicker and snappier now. I'm talking to the first platoon but you others may as well listen: I imagine I speak for Lieutenant Silliman too. Let's just see how fast you can get up, and how straight you can stand. Not that the army likes to impose on you. We appreciate your generosity in joining us here, and the sacrifice of your valuable time, and putting up with the food and all. But just the same. Now, then: attention!”

They leapt.

“Oh, much better,” he said, “although the book seems out of place. What are you reading, Padgett?”

Padgett crimsoned; men snickered.