Whiter Than Snow (13 page)

Just before the boys marched off, the girls hugged and kissed Billy Boy, and one gave Minder a peck on the cheek. It burned like fire. “You have a look out for Billy Boy. He’s just turned seventeen,” she told him.

The army was the time of times for Minder Evans. Billy Boy complained about the food—said it would make a mule desert—and the graybacks and the endless marches where the soldiers tramped for miles in their hot uniforms, buckled and belted with half a dozen straps across their bodies to hold ammunition, canteens, haversacks, knapsacks, and such. But Billy Boy was part of a rich family that had hundreds of acres, dozens of cows, and a hired hand or two, or three. He had come up easy, not overworked like Minder, so he didn’t know hardship. Minder did, of course, and in the army, he ate better than he ever had in his life and slept better, too, because he had a wool blanket and a fine bunk in a dog tent instead of a tattered quilt on a dirt floor under a leaky roof. Even the marching was easier than plowing the fields. Oh, it was a swell time—at first anyway.

Minder, who had joined to get away from the farm and because he thought the war would be a great adventure, didn’t care about freeing Negroes, and he wasn’t sure about preserving the Union, because he hardly understood what the Union was. Billy Boy explained it to him. “You can’t tear a country in half. Then it wouldn’t be the
United
States, would it?” Billy Boy asked, and Minder guessed not. “A man’s life isn’t worth much if he allows his country to be torn apart by traitors,” Billy Boy continued. Minder liked the pretty words and later used them himself when another recruit as dog-raw as himself asked Minder why he’d joined.

He liked the good times with his compatriots when they raised Old Scratch. After they left Fort Madison on a Mississippi River steamboat, they tapped a keg of beer someone had stolen and smuggled on board and got roaring drunk and sang “John Brown’s Body” at the top of their lungs, the whole lot of them, even Billy Boy, who said he’d never had a taste of stimulant in his young life until he joined up. When another of the company made fun of Billy Boy for that, called him a sissy, Minder fisted him.

In camp, they joined a group of Iowans and went off searching for what one of the men, Josiah Hatch, called “horizontal refreshments.” Josiah had been to town before and said it was a regular Sodom and
Gomorrow
. Some of the girls were from New Jersey, he explained, as if New Jersey were as exotic as Persia. Minder was game. He’d never had a girl before, never even kissed one, and he thought the girl—a woman, actually—at the place Josiah took them was the most amazing creature he had ever seen. Her hair was a curious yellow, and she powdered her face, the powder mixing with sweat in the wrinkles of her cheeks. When the woman took Minder into her bed, Minder decided she was as old as his mother, and that unnerved him, but not for anything would he quit her, because his friends would have been merciless. When he was done and had paid, he thanked her, and she gaped at him, for nobody ever thanked her.

“How was it?” asked Billy Boy later. Billy Boy had not indulged himself.

“Hurrah for hell!” Minder replied. He felt strange the rest of the day.

They were a pair: Minder, tough and scrappy, ready for adventure, while Billy Boy, slender and quick, thought things through before he committed himself. Minder looked after Billy Boy, while Billy Boy was right clever to Minder, teaching him about books and history and explaining why there was a war against the South. Minder had thought the war pitted the slaveholders against those who did not own slaves. He was surprised to discover that there were Secesh who were themselves abolitionists.

“My sister Kate says she’s of a mind to write you, since you don’t get any letters,” Billy Boy said after they’d been in the army a few weeks. “She asks if you’d object, says if you have a sweetheart at home who’d fuss about it, she won’t.”

Minder had no sweetheart and had never received a letter in his life. So the idea thrilled him, and he and Kate began a correspondence. Her letters were chatty and funny, written in a fine hand on writing paper. Barely literate himself, Minder wrote back on slips of paper, scratching out words in the dirt beforehand so that Billy Boy could tell him if they were spelled properly. Kate sent him newspapers, and Minder read them slowly, sounding out each word, until over time, he could read most anything if the words were simple. Once, Kate gave him a tiny Bible, inscribed “May God protect the loyal soldier Minder Evans is the earnest wish of his friend Kate Forsythe.” Minder carried the Testament in his pocket and read it by the campfire, asking Billy Boy what the strange words meant. And so the two engaged in many a theological discussion about God’s plan for mankind in general, and the Union soldiers in particular, because it was the belief of all that God himself was a Union man.

Minder cherished the letters from Kate and wrote that he’d rather have them than a solid gold watch. As Minder’s writing skills improved, he revealed parts of himself to Kate that he’d never shown to anyone. When the war was over, he wrote, he planned to go west, maybe find a gold mine, since he was tired of being poor. He told about the pranks and adventures of the army, such as the time he and Billy Boy, tired of camp rations, shot a cow. Stealing was against the army’s rules, so they skinned the animal and lugged it back to camp, claiming it was a slow deer. Much of what he wrote was about food, because by then, the rations were not as good as when Minder first joined the army. Hardtack, so hard that it had to be soaked in water to be edible or pounded into pulp with a rock, was the butt of many army jokes. Minder wrote Kate that he had bit into a piece of hardtack and remarked to Billy Boy that he felt something soft.

“A worm?” Billy Boy asked.

“No, a nail,” Minder replied. The incident was an old joke in the army, but Minder didn’t think Kate would mind if he appropriated the story for himself.

He also drew pictures of camp life, showing Billy Boy cooking over a campfire and cleaning his rifle. He pictured the officers hiding behind trees, with the bullets flying around them, or drinking coffee as they ordered the soldiers into battle. Minder even drew a series of pictures of himself, first asleep, then wakened suddenly as a bee stung his nose, and finally a picture of his face with the swollen proboscis.

Along with her letters, Kate sent him gifts—a box of cookies, a pen wipe (which he carried in a pocket over his heart, since he had never had a pen to wipe), a housewife that she had made herself, with compartments for buttons and thread and needles, even a tiny pair of scissors. And in time, Minder believed himself in love with Kate. He told Billy Boy that after the war, he intended to declare himself and ask if she would have him. Minder could not remember which sister she was—the one with the blond curls, the brown-haired one, or the girl with the spectacles—and he was embarrassed to ask Billy Boy. But it did not matter. He would have taken any one of them.

After they had exchanged letters for a time, Kate sent Minder her likeness, but it was small, not much bigger than his thumbnail, so he still wasn’t sure who she was. He studied the brown-tinted photograph, which he kept in his Bible, and sometimes in his mind, he mixed up Kate with the prostitute. Those were nasty thoughts, and Minder tried to keep them away. Kate had an aura of purity about her, and Minder did not want her sullied in his mind. Nonetheless, at night, when he could not sleep, he imagined Kate, dressed naked, lying beneath him.

Like the others in their company, Minder and Billy Boy chaffed under the endless drilling and the boredom of camp life and itched to get into a fight before the war was over. After all, it was 1864, and the South was made up of degenerates who couldn’t keep up the pace much longer. The two feared that the war could end before they had a chance to fight it. From time to time, the Iowa soldiers engaged in skirmishes. One of them was nicked in the elbow. Another broke his rifle. They captured two rebels, who were poorly thin and barefoot and didn’t amount to a cuss, and Minder thought it was a fool of a job to fight against such. He told Billy Boy that a bobtail dog with a bayonet on his tail could have captured the Confederates.

“At least we didn’t run,” Billy Boy told him, and Minder wondered if Billy Boy was a coward, because Minder wasn’t afraid. But it was unlikely that Billy Boy was yellow. He was just more of a thinking man.

The two became the leaders of their bunch of Iowa fellows, Billy Boy the brains and Minder the daring. Minder led an assault on a Secesh barroom, where the soldiers liberated the whiskey, rum, brandy, gin, and wine, and got as drunk as the devil. The boys cheered when Billy Boy suggested they take a few bottles back to the officer who was in charge of guard duty, hoping for a reprieve from that onerous chore. And they did not blame Billy Boy when they discovered that the officer they’d picked was an abstainer, who poured the purloined liquor onto the ground and assigned them duty that very night.

Minder and Billy Boy’s companions did more than wage war on saloons. Once when half a dozen of the company were reconnoitering, they came across the engine of a Confederate freight train parked on a siding. The crew had gone to mess call in the camp a few hundred yards away and left the train unattended.

“It’d be a lark to capture an engine,” one of the soldiers joked.

“Why, that’s a fine idea,” Billy Boy said. The others laughed, but Billy Boy was serious. “We couldn’t take it back with us, but could be we could use it to give a goodly dose of damage.”

Minder saw immediately what his friend meant and asked, “Anybody know how to drive an engine?” Minder himself had never been inside a train, had never even seen one before he joined the army, but one of the others said he allowed as how he could. “Then quick, boys, uncouple the cars, and we’ll climb aboard,” Minder told them. The others followed his orders, releasing the cars and jumping onto the engine. They took off down the tracks, Minder being so bold as to reach over and blow the whistle as they encountered a group of Confederates near the tracks. The soldiers jumped aside, and one or two waved, and the Iowa boys waved back, laughed at being taken for rebels. They passed a Negro, too, and Minder thought it was funny when the black man jumped off the tracks so fast that he fell down and cussed himself in Negro talk. Minder didn’t have much use for colored people.

“Now, what are we going to do with this train?” Minder asked after they’d passed the encampment.

“I’ve pondered that,” Billy Boy said. “We can’t take it back to camp with us. So we’ll get up a good head of steam and derail the engine on that curve just before the bridge. That way we’ll take out the bridge and the engine both.” And that was what the boys did. They fired up the boiler as good as they could, then slid off, leaving only Minder, who volunteered for the duty, as the engine headed full speed toward the river. At the last minute, he, too, jumped and watched the engine careen into the bridge, then plunge into the water.

It was a bold plan, but with one minor complication. As they had demolished the bridge and jumped out of the engine on the near side of the river, they had to swim their way across to the Union camp. Billy Boy didn’t know how to swim, so Minder put him on a log and pushed his friend across the river, Billy Boy shivering a little. Nothing scared him more, he said—not bullets nor fire—than a watery grave. Minder did not understand fear, but he was glad to protect his friend. After all, hadn’t he promised Kate (or perhaps one of her sisters) that he would look after her brother?

Capturing lost rebs and even hijacking a steam engine were larks, but the boys longed to be in a battle, to kill their share of cowardly rebels and maybe even get a bead on old Jeff Davis or General Lee himself. They knew it wasn’t likely they’d encounter the leaders of the traitorous South, of course, but they hoped to show off their patriotism and their marksmanship by striking down a Confederate or two. And so it was with great excitement that these Iowa volunteers were ordered to a place called Spotsylvania. As the recruits marched smartly into the Union encampment, one of them called out to the weary veterans who had already fought the first day of the battle, “Iowa’s here, boys! Iowa’s here!”

They were met with catcalls and hoots of derision, one fellow shouting as he squatted beside a campfire, “I-o-way. What way is that? Turn tail and run away is what.”

“Fresh fish!” cried others.

One old soldier who was chewing tobacco, drooling juice down his chest, leaned over and spat, then remarked, “They don’t know enough to learn a dog to bark.”

“It’d take just about three pairs of minutes for them boys to cry for mama,” added his companion, a man whose eyes were bright with fever. His mouth hung open, and he sat on a rock, his hands on his thin knees, looking like a corpse.

The Iowans didn’t mind the remarks, because they were full of themselves. Nor did the old soldiers really care much about the attitude of the newcomers. Many of them were morose old fellows, fatigued by war, and they were glad for reinforcements. Others found the Iowans targets for jokes and pranks and perhaps saw them as marks for games of chance—if they survived the fighting. A few of the veterans took the Iowans under their wing, however, and warned them about the next day’s battle. Billy Boy listened to them, but Minder thought them sour fellows. He itched to fight. “I expect to dispatch a few Secesh to hell to pump thunder at five cents a crack,” he wrote Kate that night, too keyed up to sleep.
Dispatch
was something Billy Boy said, and Minder thought it a right smart word.

He almost could not stand the slow and careful way the men prepared for the fight, because he was ready to rush the enemy. He waited impatiently, until at last the chaplain stood before them and said, “Men, remember that you are fighting for a glorious cause. The Lord is on our side, and if by chance you are struck down, you will be with Him this day in heaven. May God be with us in our fight to preserve the Union.”

Minder was not much for preachers. Nor were some of the others. One man called, “You be with us, preacher, or you be behind a stout tree?” But he was hushed by others, who said the chaplain was a gallant man who would indeed be with them, and welcome. The day before, he had carried a bottle of brandy into the battle instead of a gun, administering it to those in need, which was just about everyone.