Gob's Grief

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THOMAS JEFFERSON WOODHULL WAS ELEVEN YEARS OLD when he ran away from home to join the Union army. One night in August of 1863, he sprinted down a white road that seemed to bloom out of the darkness as a bright moon climbed higher and higher in the sky above him. He was in a hurry to catch the train that passed a mile east of the shack where he lived with his brother, his mama, and her family, the notorious Claflins of Homer, Ohio.

The train was halfway gone when he got to the tracks. Tomo ran alongside the boxcars, cursing at the top of his voice. “You shit for a train won’t you just stop?” He would have been grateful for just a bit of slowing. But the train moved on speedy and serene. He wished he had a gun to shoot it with.

Glancing back, Tomo saw that the caboose was coming up fast. He cursed again, louder and fiercer, the curses escalating into a wordless howl as he threw himself up at an open boxcar, managing a precarious grip, which he knew he must lose in a moment because he was not strong enough to hold on. He had resigned himself to slipping away, and launched a final “Shit on you!” at the train, when suddenly a set of pale hands came out from within the car and hauled him up and in.

“Why are you making all that racket?” asked his savior, who was just a dark shape until he put Tomo down and turned up a lamp. The man had brown hair and bright blue eyes, and fat lips so red that they seemed stolen from a girl. “Why are you being so noisy? Do you know I was trying to sleep?” He spoke, like Tomo’s grandmother, with a heavy German accent.

“I didn’t think I was going to make it,” said Tomo.

“Where are you going, that you call a train a shit and wake a poor soldier from his sweet dreams?”

“To the war,” said Tomo.

“The war? I think you had better go home to your mama, little Fenzmaus.” His fellow passenger started to push Tomo toward the door, telling him to roll when he hit the ground. Tomo spun away, out of the man’s grip, and threw himself to his knees on the rough floor of the car.

“She’s dead!” Tomo cried. “My mama’s dead, with my papa and my brother and my aunts, my uncle and my granny and grampy! We all got the typhoid and I ought’ve died too, but I didn’t, ‘cause I’m the damned unluckiest boy who ever breathed a breath. Throw me out! Go on! I don’t care. It’s all shit anyhow. I’ll just lie down by the tracks and die.” Tomo dropped down on his stomach with his head on his arms, and wept with great drama, peeping up a little to see the man standing above him with both hands on his head, as if holding a hat down against a high wind. It was all a lie. Tomo’s family were sleeping peacefully in the falling-down shack they called home. His twin brother ought to have been with him, but he wasn’t. He’d stayed in Homer for the sake of cowardice. Tomo pounded his fist against the floor in imitation of despair, but really it was rage against his brother that moved his hand.

“I …” the man said, kneeling down to touch Tomo on the shoulder. He stood up and crossed the car, then came back to kneel again, and push something gritty against Tomo’s wet cheek. “Would you like a cookie?” he asked. “My little Frieda baked them, so I could take them back to my Niners. Do you see? Do you see the nine?”

Tomo sat up and took the thing. It was a molasses cookie, fully half the size of his head, and stamped like a coin with the number nine in the center. Still crying his false tears, Tomo bit, chewed, and swallowed.

“Do you like it?” asked the man.

Tomo nodded.

“Children and soldiers, they both love cookies. Poor Fenzmaus. Haven’t you got anybody to watch over you?”

“Don’t need nobody,” said Tomo.

“No family. Not anywhere?”

“Just Betty.”

“Betty? Is that your sister?”

Tomo shook his head. “My horn,” he said, indicating the bugle that hung at his side. He put her to his lips and blew, not a military tune, but something sad and angry that he made up on the spot. The man leaned back on his heels and covered his eyes with his hands. “I know camp music, too,” Tomo said, and played “Boots and Saddles.” Tomo was a splendid little bugler — he knew all the drill calls, be they for bugle or fife, for cavalry, infantry, or artillery. He could play anything if he heard it once.

“So pretty!” declared the man. “Play me another.”

Tomo played and played, until it was almost dawn, and the man said it was time for them to go to bed. They had become acquainted, between songs. The man’s name was Aaron Stanz. He was a private on French leave from the Ninth Ohio Volunteers, who were camped in Tennessee, awaiting orders from General Rosecrans. In a contest of lots Stanz had won the privilege of visiting his young wife, whom he had not seen since he kissed her goodbye at Camp Harrison in the summer of ’61. “How long can a man and his wife be apart?” he asked Tomo, who said, “Always,” because he was thinking of his mama and papa, divorced since before the war.

The Ninth, as it happened, was short on field musicians. And Company C, from which Aaron Stanz hailed, had only a drummer; their fifer had died at Hoover’s Gap. Tomo closed his eyes and had a brief vision of departing horses — it had been his hope to bugle for a cavalry regiment — but then he said he felt it was divinely sanctioned that he go and bugle for Company C. Aaron Stanz said he did not believe in God, but admitted the convenience of the arrangement. It would not be traditional or entirely in accord with regulations, having a bugler instead of a fifer, but he was sure Captain Schroeder would agree that Tomo must do in this pinch. Anyhow, though there were no angels except in the minds of men deranged by their religion, Tomo blew like one, and Aaron Stanz could not imagine that the Captain would resist the charms of Tomo’s bugling.

When it was time for bed, Tomo lay down on Aaron Stanz’s rubber blanket, and tried to sleep with his head pillowed on that man’s arm. He complained that it was too bright to sleep, and that he wanted to go look at green Kentucky passing by outside the door. Aaron Stanz put his cap over Tomo’s face, and called him Fenzmaus again, which was pipsqueak — Tomo’s grandmother Anna called him and his brother that sometimes, though never with such gentle affection as Aaron Stanz invested in the word. Eventually, Tomo drifted to sleep, lulled by the steady noise of the train, but shortly woke with a start from a dream of falling. The cap fell from his face, and he cried out softly. Tomo reached around him for his brother, away from whom he had never spent a single night. But then he remembered how Gob was back in Homer, afraid of the war and the great wide world.

The journey south was uneventful, except for a stop in Tullahoma, where a soldier poked his head into the car and made a perfunctory search while Tomo and his new friend hid behind stacked barrels of salt pork. “He wouldn’t understand my special arrangement,” said Aaron Stanz.

They arrived at Camp Thomas, after rolling from the train near Winchester and walking for some five miles, during which time Aaron Stanz was always supremely certain of his way. He was welcomed in camp not like a technical deserter, but like a hero. Stanz’s welcome had to do with his popularity — it was immediately obvious to Tomo that he had had the good fortune to fall in with the best-liked fellow in his company — and with the gifts he brought back. In addition to his wife’s molasses cookies, he’d brought two sacks stuffed with roast turkeys and soft bread, new boots for three men (each boot filled with candy and chewing gum), and best of all a small barrel of cool beer. The Ninth Ohio was an all-German regiment, and every man in Company C greatly missed his beer. There was little opportunity to get any in the wilds of Tennessee.

That evening, they had a little party. Though the company had died back to half its original strength of one hundred and two, there was only enough beer for every man to have a few swallows directly from the tap. Fortunately every third turkey was stuffed with a bottle of whiskey. Aaron Stanz called it oil of gladness and poured a cup for Tomo, who took it behind a wedge-tent and did not drink it, but only held it under his nose, and thought of his papa, because when they were very small he and Gob had snuggled up to him, sometimes, after he’d drunk himself senseless.

While Tomo was savoring his cup of whiskey, another boy came up and accosted him rudely. The boy was about Tomo’s age, and very fair; blond as a broom straw and white as a grub. Without so much as a how-do-you-do he knocked Tomo’s tin whiskey cup from his hand, then kicked him over and sat on Tomo’s belly. The boy pulled out a set of drumsticks and played a brutal little number on Tomo’s head.

“Looky here,” said the boy. “There’s only one drummer in this regiment, and it ain’t you.” He raised his sticks again, but Tomo had grabbed his cup out of the dirt, and he crushed it against the boy’s face before he could bring his sticks down. The boy fell over to the side, and in a moment Tomo was straddling his chest. Tomo took the sticks and drove them into the ground on either side of the boy’s head.

“I got nothing to do with drumming, I’m a bugler,” Tomo said, taking Betty out from under his jacket. Aaron Stanz had told him to hide her there, because he wanted to surprise his comrades with music, a last gift. Not only did Company C have no fifer, the Ninth’s regimental band had been absent since September of ’62, when the government had refused to salary them any longer. Tomo blew a note straight into the small white ear of his assailant. “See?” he said. “I got nothing to do with drumming.”

“I can’t hear a thing!” screamed the boy.

Aaron Stanz dragged Tomo off of him. The noise had attracted a swarm of men.

“He deafened me!” the boy wailed, sitting up now, and brandishing his sticks again.

“Shut up, Johnny,” said Aaron Stanz. The men were looking at the bugle, glinting in the light from the torches that lined the camp streets.

“I forgot to tell you, boys. The Fenzmaus is a bugler. Isn’t that a lucky thing?” The men of the company stared wordlessly at Aaron Stanz. Then there was a rush of murmuring all around the circle.

“Jesus sent me here to play for you,” said Tomo. The boy called Johnny laughed cruelly.

“Also, spiel mal!” said a man, whose name, Tomo would come to know, was Raimund Herrman. He picked Tomo up and put him on one of his massive shoulders, and then pranced down the company street to a big cook fire. Tomo stood on the empty beer barrel, which some clever soldier had labeled “molasses” to confuse the authorities, and blew out tune after tune, while the men of Company C drank and danced with each other. Tomo blew marches, because they were soldiers, and vile polkas, because he knew that was the sort of music his grandmother liked, and she was the only German whose tastes and habits he knew. Men called out song names to him, begging him to play “Anna Engelke,” or “Romberg Park: Elf Uhr,” or “Liebe Birgit.” Tomo knew none of those songs, but if they hummed a few bars he could make something up, and that seemed to satisfy them. The boy called Johnny skulked out of the darkness, with his big Eagle drum, and though he sat far away from Tomo, he offered up a friendly beat to Tomo’s bugling. Men from other companies came to listen, and they danced, too, until the dancing pairs were four and five deep around the fire.

Tomo could have played all night, but the party only lasted until somebody got the idea of serenading Colonel Kammerling in his tent. A procession was formed, with Tomo and Johnny at its head. They marched the revelers across the camp, to the Colonel’s tent, where they fell into rank and sang in voices that were deep and lovely and drunk.

Colonel Kammerling appeared behind an adjutant who was shouting himself hoarse trying to silence the crowd. There were cries from the men of “Speech, speech!” The Colonel stepped up to Tomo, who was still tooting merrily, snatched the bugle from his mouth, then handed it back, bell first. Tomo took it meekly, because Colonel Kammerling was a severe-looking gentleman.

“Go to bed, boys,” was all he gave for a speech. He turned and went back to his tent, and the party was suddenly over. As soon as he stopped playing, Tomo felt very sleepy. He clutched Betty to his chest and followed Aaron Stanz back to his dog tent, where he slept between Stanz and another soldier, Private Frohmann. He found he could not sleep in the middle, so he rolled over Aaron Stanz, who mumbled “Frieda!” at him, and kissed the back of his head, and snored like a hog. That night, Tomo dreamed that his brother was looking for him all over their small room. Under the rickety bed, in the old wardrobe with the shrieking hinges — over and over again Gob looked in the same places, over and over again he asked of the air, “Tomo, where are you?”

Aaron Stanz shook Tomo awake at five o’ clock the next morning.

“Get up, Schlaftier!” he said. “Get up, Fenzmaus! You’ve got your work to do!” Aaron Stanz dragged him, still half asleep, across the silent camp, and stood him on the barrel near the ashes of the previous night’s great fire. Johnny the drummer boy was waiting for them. Tomo rubbed his eyes and yawned, and looked out over the slumbering camp. The air, warm and heavy, hung in low blue patches between the tents. Tomo yawned again and said, “It ain’t even lightened yet.” But he took a deep breath and blew the assembly. It rang out brashly through the still air. Johnny said it was too queer, the bugle and drum playing for infantry. “You won’t last a week in this company!” he yelled at Tomo, then stormed off, beating angrily on his drum. “Don’t you pay any mind to him,” said Aaron Stanz.

Tomo played the call again, and a wave of steady grumbling washed up and down the company street. The men cried, “We ain’t no hay-burners!” and “Put the bugler in the guardhouse!” and then, when Tomo played the call a third time, someone shouted, “Kill that rooster!” This last precipitated a moment of perfect silence. Then the shouter was shouted at in fast ruthless-sounding German that Tomo could not follow, for all that his grandmother had often cursed at him, fast and ruthless, in her native tongue.

Tomo and Aaron Stanz walked back to their tent against a steady flow of men headed towards the sinks. When they arrived, Aaron Stanz kicked awake his tentmate, who sat up and rubbed violently at his face. Aaron Stanz handed Tomo a cup of water, which he drank, not realizing he was supposed to wash with it. Aaron Stanz and Private Frohmann laughed until they cried, while a murderous rage built up in Tomo, and he was about to strike out at someone when Aaron Stanz picked him up and hugged him, and shook him, and hugged him again, and declared him the most precious Fenzmaus there ever was.

Tomo played Company C through its day. It was a happy day, for him and for them. It was happy for them because they had something more than dry drum music to regulate their day, and happy for Tomo because this was precisely the sort of life he had envisioned for himself, a life beyond Homer, beyond his mama’s miserable humbugging world. The situation lacked only Rebs to lick, and he did not doubt that they would come. It lacked his brother, too. Tomo’s anger against him was ebbing, so he was glad and not glad that Gob was not with him.

Tomo tooted reveille while the company stood at parade rest, all of the men in full uniform, though if you looked a few hundred yards away to where the Fifty-Ninth Ohio stood in rank you would see men still in various states of undress, some without coats, some without shoes, a few only in hats and shirts. Not only was the Ninth an all-German regiment, they were the sort of Germans that Tomo had never encountered before, not the crazed, superstitious sort, but the neat, hardworking sort. The regiment was famous throughout the whole army for its efficiency and bravery, pitied only because it could not keep a chaplain. But the Ninth drove away its chaplains on purpose. By and large the men were skeptics, except for a few Bavarian Catholics, who bothered the Protestant chaplains with their devoted Mariolatry.

After the reveille Company C gave Tomo a triple hurrah. The sonorous, Teutonic sound washed over him as he stood on his barrel. He played their breakfast call at six-thirty, their sick call at eight. He stood outside the hospital tent watching the invalids line up — in Company C there were only a few, and they were all genuine sick, not shirkers — and sipped the thick, bitter coffee Aaron Stanz had given him to drink in a soup can. Tomo strode up to a man in line and said, “My papa’s a surgeon.” The man had a green face and stank of ammonia. He said nothing to Tomo, but smiled weakly. Tomo ran back to his barrel and played fatigue call, then went and watched as Aaron Stanz helped to bury dead horses. The company had saved them up for him, a perfunctory punishment for his temporary desertion. His coworkers were two men who had stolen a pie from a sutler. The horses were ripe. Three times the two thieves took time out from the work to retire into the bushes, where they made a noise that was like hurrah! without the h.

“That grave’s too shallow!” Tomo kept saying to the two, but they had no English, and weren’t inclined anyway to listen to a boy. Aaron Stanz was working on his own grave, but when he came over at last to see how their work was coming along he said as much as Tomo had. There followed a brief argument, which ended when they dragged a stinking carcass over and pushed it into the hole. The legs stuck out a good two feet above the ground.

“Oh, that’s spicy!” Tomo said, leaning over the grave and getting a faceful of the rotten miasma. He did not watch as the thieves went to work with saws, but ran back to his barrel to play the drill call. He tagged along the back of the line as Company C drilled in the rising heat of the morning. He fetched water for Private Frohmann, and for a pair of twin corporals named Weghorst to whom Tomo naturally gravitated.

At noon, he was back on his barrel, playing the dinner call. He took a meal to Aaron Stanz and the thieves, who had skipped drill to continue their work, but they would not eat, so Tomo split the food with Johnny the drummer boy, who was by turns sullen and friendly all through the day. Tomo played another drill call after dinner, then watched from a tree with Johnny as the battalion marched and turned on the parade ground.

At quarter to six, he blew the call to inspection and dress parade, then shaded his eyes against the bright boots and brass of the Ninth. They were a shiny bunch, and Tomo felt somewhat slovenly among them. He was glad for the dusk which hid his dirty Claflin britches, his stained shirt and patched coat. As the camp darkened he played the supper call, and later, with beans still on his breath, the assembly of guard.

He spent some time fashioning crosses from twigs and twine, while Aaron Stanz stomped down the last of the horse graves. After Tomo had planted the crosses, he went back to the barrel and played tattoo, summoning the company to the last roll call of the day. The very last name read was his own — or rather the one he had adopted. “Alphonsus Hummel!” shouted the first sergeant, but there was no response. Tomo, sitting on his barrel with his chin on his fist and his eyes closed, had fallen asleep. The whole company had a chuckle at him. Aaron Stanz carried him sleeping to the tent, but woke him later to play taps. That was Tomo’s favorite tune — he always felt something settle, deep and peaceful, inside of him when he blew the last note. He heard the fifers in other companies blowing that last note, and other drummers knocking out the few final beats of the day. Johnny had overcome his distaste for bugle-infantry miscegenation and was tapping similarly next to him. Tomo stood on his barrel and watched the lighted tents go dark one by one, and then he waited in vain for another party to begin. His napping had left him wide awake, but the previous evening’s revelry had been solely a function of Aaron Stanz’s return, and not an every-night occurrence. So, after Johnny left him, Tomo sat next to the remains of the party-fire with a balled-up rag muffling his bugle, and he played the whole day through twice more before he retired.

“This company is cursed,” said Johnny. “They lost three fifers since Shiloh. Death wants ’em. They can’t keep ‘em.”

“I ain’t a fifer,” said Tomo. The boys were watching an artillery drill. Tomo wanted them to hurry up and fire the guns, but they only seemed to be dragging them haphazardly all over the field. He had been in camp a whole week and not yet heard a big gun fired.

“That’s no matter,” said Johnny. “Death’ll gobble a bugler just as quick, if he’s dumb enough to march with Company C. We ain’t marched yet, though. It’s early enough you could live, if you ran off now.”

“You put that curse up your ass,” said Tomo, and then cheered and blew a toot on Betty, because six guns had very quickly been lined up, and, in what seemed like the space of a few breaths, were loaded and fired. There came a second group of explosions as the shells burst near targets at the end of the field. One gun overshot and destroyed the top of a tree in the woods. Tomo blew a soft dirge for the departing magnolia.

“That’s your song, you dead bugler, you rotting blowhard,” said Johnny, but there was little venom in his voice. That first week, he had made himself Tomo’s companion. Tomo did not mind him. He was lonely for Gob, and it was good to have a body around to talk to, for all that Johnny said doom when he was not bragging about how his drum had been blown up by a shell at Shiloh.

When the drill was over, they ran across the field, into the woods to look at the fallen magnolia. For a little while they played in unnaturally low branches, until Johnny ducked behind the tall stump and sat down. He told Tomo to come and sit by him.

“Time to pet my snake,” he said, lifting his hips so he could pull his pants down to his knees. Tomo had seen this thing done before, but it was not something he thought he would like to do himself. Didn’t he pet his snake? Johnny asked him. Didn’t nobody ever show him how?

“It’s only about the best thing ever,” he said, tugging languidly at his member, which was even whiter and more grublike than its proprietor. “Go on,” he said. “Give it a try.” Tomo took down his pants and gave himself a few pulls, just to shut the boy up. “Ain’t that grand?” asked Johnny. He closed his eyes and leaned his head against the tree. Tomo pulled up his pants and climbed up to the new top of the magnolia. There was a little fire there, which he patted out with his coat sleeve.

Below him, Johnny kicked his feet and bounced his hips up and down, and turned his head to kiss the tree. “Ah, Mrs. Davis, you are a fucking beauty!” he moaned, and then shouted wordlessly three times, each time louder than the last, the last so loud Tomo thought the guard must come into the woods to see who was being murdered. Johnny uttered an expansive sigh, then put his hands behind his head.

“Where are you, bugler?” he called. Tomo whistled above him. Johnny climbed up and shaded his eyes to look out over the camp, which sprawled as far as they could see.

“I think I see General Thomas,” said Tomo.

Johnny said, “Pretty soon I’ll start to spurt. Then I’ll find a girl and have me some babies.”

In another week, the Ninth marched out. Tomo played on Betty as he walked next to Aaron Stanz. They were going south and east, into Georgia, their movement part of a grand design to maneuver Bragg out of Chattanooga. “Chattanoogey,” Tomo kept saying to himself, and giggling. “I never been to Chattanoogey.”

“You seen one of Reb cities,” said Aaron Stanz, “you seen all.” But Tomo had never seen a Reb city. He imagined Chattanooga, a city full of Negroes and furious widows. He made up a song as he walked and called it “Chattanoogey.”

That first day, his feet were sore and bleeding: his ill-fitting boots had pinched his toes up all funny, and he had walked the nail right off his left big toe. He shook the nail out of his boot and threw it on the cook fire. Aaron Stanz told him to make a wish on it, so Tomo wished that Gob might wander miraculously into camp, having pursued him down from Homer. And then he burned his hand snatching the nail from the fire, because it seemed to him that he had made an ill-advised wish. He didn’t want his brother here. He put the nail back in the fire, wishing that a snake would crawl into the bed he had formerly shared with Gob and bite him on the ass. And then he wished he had another nail, to wish his brother to him after all.

With a tin plate balanced on his knees for a desk, he wrote a letter:

Secessia, August 23, 1863

Brother,

Well, this is the life, and you are missing out on it. No Mama and no Buck, no humbugging. Every night I eat my fill, and people here give a bugler his due. Is this what you feared, to live a good life? When you are sensible again, you can join me and see, though maybe by then Richmond will already be burned.

Yours in war,

Jigadier Brindle T. J. Woodhull

p. s. see how rapidly they have promoted me you can be my adjutant

He bought an envelope and stamp from the sutler and put the letter in his coat pocket, where it remained unmailed. From the sutler he also bought an abundance of pies, because it occurred to him that he had not yet spent a dime of the money he’d brought with him — ten whole dollars hoarded over the course of many months from the family’s humbug profits. He went back to Company C with pies stacked in his arms, and was hailed by every man as a righteous pie boy. It was seven men to a pie, but somehow there seemed enough to go around.

After supper, the Weghorst twins threw down four square crate tops to make a dance floor. Tomo and Johnny and a fiddler from the Second Minnesota played while the boys of Company C danced, not in pairs this time, but singly. Everybody had his own dancing style — Aaron Stanz kept his arms straight at his sides, his palms turned up behind him, and moved his head like a chicken while his feet skibbled furiously. The Weghorst twins kept their hands and arms above their heads, and bent from side to side at the waist, towards each other and away again. Raimund Herrman pointed his nose at the black sky, put his hands on his hips, and pedaled furiously. Tomo spun around in a circle while he played, till he got so dizzy he fell over, and thought he would lose his pie, from the dizziness and the heaving, shaking laugh that he laughed.

They marched through the Cumberland Mountains, where Tomo blew echoing notes out into misty valleys and Aaron Stanz collected late-blooming wildflowers for his wife. He pressed them into a Bible he only opened for that purpose. It was almost empty of them now, but had been stuffed full when he went home. Stanz told Tomo how he had spent a whole night laying them out for his wife on the floor of their home, naming them and telling her where he had found each flower. “Dwarf irises,” he said to Tomo, tickling him under the chin with one. He asked if he wouldn’t like one to send home to his mama, and then he blushed and asked Tomo to forgive him. He said he would take Tomo home with him to Cincinnati, when the fighting was all done, where sweet Frieda would bake him molasses cookies the very size and shape of a whole boy.

When they came to the place where Battle Creek empties into the Tennessee, Tomo got his first glimpse of a live Rebel. Pickets faced each other across the river. Tomo went down with Johnny, who called out across the water, “Good evening, you damned Rebels!”

“Go to hell, you damned Yankee,” came the reply.

“I got newspapers,” said Johnny, “and coffee, if you got smoke.”

“Hold on, you son of a bitch,” said the Reb. Tomo could just make him out if he squinted. It was a cloudless night, and the moon was bright, but the river was wide. The Rebel bent over the water and pushed something out. It was a little boat, made from bark and string. It sailed slowly across. Johnny caught it downstream, lifted it from the water, and walked away back towards camp, serenely ignoring the escalating curses of the Rebel, who fired blindly at them when he ran out of curses. His fire was answered by other pickets. Tomo and Johnny ran away back to Aaron Stanz’s dog tent, where they wrapped themselves up in blankets and passed Aaron Stanz’s long pipe, filled with Rebel tobacco, between them.

The Rebels were gone in the morning, and the brigade began to pass over the river. Company C was one of the first to cross. Tomo sat in the bow of a dugout canoe while Aaron Stanz and the Weghorst twins rowed. Tomo looked for Confederate spoor on the far shore, and found only a discarded butternut hat, which had a tear in the brim. He stomped it into the earth, then kicked it into the river.

They camped at the river for a few days, then began a slow journey over Raccoon Mountain, where Tomo saw not a single raccoon, though he was constantly on the lookout for them. Aaron Stanz had presented him with a Springfield, sawed off to fit him, and Tomo practiced loading, tearing the paper cartridge with his teeth, pouring in the powder and the minié ball, then ramming the paper down with his stubby ramrod. He fired at Rebel oaks and cedars and squirrels, and one Rebel sparrow, missing all the animals and all but two trees.

The mood of Company C was turning. Tomo played them somber music at the fire while they acquainted him with the dead of the Ninth, most famous among whom was their former colonel, the much respected Robert McCook, of the Cincinnati “fighting McCooks”—he had four brothers also at war. He was quoted before every battle by his most ardent admirers: “The Secessionists are our brothers no more. If they will not submit, then they must be exterminated.” Colonel McCook was killed outside Athens, Alabama. Sick in an ambulance, he was ambushed by a Mississippi regiment, who stabbed him ten times and set his body on fire. These same Mississippians had already earned the enmity of the Ninth when they buried some Niners facedown after Shiloh. Every Niner hoped to shoot one.

Tomo’s big toe hurt terribly the whole slow way over the mountains, and he was tired of walking. He wished for a horse; he wished that it had been a cavalryman fortuitously riding the train the night he departed from Homer; and he wished for a battle, finally, since that was what he had come for, after all, a chance to shoot at some Rebs.

News came as they were coming down from Raccoon Mountain that Bragg had abandoned Chattanooga. There were cheers so thunderous that it sounded to Tomo as if the dramatic landscape had itself found a voice and was proclaiming bully for the Union. Tomo sang with the rest of the Ninth:

“Old Rosy is our man,

Old Rosy is our man,

He’ll show us deeds, where’er he leads,

Old Rosy is our man!”

He thought about General Rosecrans, who happened to be Homer’s only famous son. It would be quite a story to tell the people back home, if Tomo ever returned; he had gotten a glimpse of Rosecrans, back at the camp, and resisted the urge to go and introduce himself as a fellow Homerite. Maybe when we get to Chattanooga, Tomo thought. Then I will tell him that I am from Homer. But I will not say that I am a Claflin. Tomo prepared himself for a triumphant march into Chattanooga, wishing he had kept that Rebel hat, because surely the Secesh widows would lean out of their windows to spit on him.

A few nights later, Tomo was sleeping comfortably and dreaming of shooting his grandfather with his new gun when Aaron Stanz shook him awake. “Go and bugle the boys into a hurry,” he said. Tomo had gone to bed spry and grand, but woke with clammy hands and a feeling like he would vomit, which he did, right in the middle of a sleepy toot. He walked along next to Aaron Stanz all through the night, dropping off towards dawn, asleep on his feet but still shuffling along. Aaron Stanz picked him up and carried him like a sack of grain, and passed him to another man of the company when he got tired. Raimund Herr-man took him for a while, carrying him like a bride, and the Weghorst twins passed him back and forth for a few miles. Tomo was feverish and sweaty when they stopped, for all that it was getting very cold, and his sock was soaked through with blood. But he walked stubbornly along when they started up after only a few hours, until he slept and was carried again. When he woke, it was dark again, and the company was marching through smoke. Someone had set fire to the fence rails on either side of the road, and the flames cast harsh shadows over the faces of the men, making their features grim and weird, so Tomo thought as he came awake that he was in a company of strangers.

Wherever it was they were going in such a hurry, they arrived there just after midnight. It seemed to Tomo an entirely unspecial place. Under the light of the moon, he could see fields broken up by patches of woods — it could have been Homer, and was to Tomo’s mind a bad place for a battle. There were too many trees to hide behind — he wanted broad sweeping fields across which thick columns of men could pour unhindered, and upon which they could crash into each other like the fists of angry gods.

Company C was ordered to guard the supply wagons. Tomo slept beneath one with his head on the bare ground. A faint rumble tickled his ear and woke him in the morning. He rolled out from beneath the wagon, tangled in his blankets. Looking up from where he lay, he saw Aaron Stanz standing in stark relief against the ridge that loomed in the distance behind the Union line.

“Ah, Fenzmaus, you’ve made a sausage of you,” Aaron Stanz said as he bent down and unraveled Tomo from his blankets. All night, Tomo had been cold no matter how many covers he heaped on, and yet his shirt and coat were soaked through with sweat. Aaron Stanz told him to go and find a doctor. “You got the ague,” he said, “or worse.”

“Ague can’t lick me,” said Tomo. “Typhoid tried and I sent him home to his mama.”

“Go,” said Aaron Stanz, pushing him away towards the rear just as a terrific noise of guns broke out north of them, rushing south as the enemy was engaged down the line. Somebody rode up to call the Ninth away from the wagons. Aaron Stanz pushed Tomo again in the direction of the hospital tents, then ran off with the rest of his company. Tomo took three steps, then turned and followed Aaron Stanz, pausing only to grab his rifle from beneath the wagon. He had to hobble some with his toe hurting like it was, and because he really was sick, he was slow. He caught up with Company C just as Colonel Kammerling had given the order for the whole regiment to fix bayonets and charge.

Tomo had no bayonet for his little gun, but he ran along with the Ninth anyhow into a forest-ringed cornfield. He was angry again — angry at all the damned Rebels, angry that Gob was missing all the excitement, angry that he was sick and weak, angry that he was just a boy. But he wasn’t afraid. When the opportunity presented itself he swung the rifle by the barrel and clipped a Rebel in the head with the stock. The Rebel — an old man with a droopy, greasy-looking mustache — was surprised to see a boy pop out of the corn with murder in his face, and did not move to defend himself until it was too late. The old man fell with his head on his outstretched arms, and so looked like he was sleeping, but there was a great and obvious concavity at his temple. Tomo turned the man’s face with his boot, and watched as the white of his left eye turned to lurid angry red.

The men of the Ninth stabbed viciously at the now shy, shrinking Rebels; some of them, their guns knocked from their grip, held up their hands in demure gestures against the bright steel, as if to say, No thank you. It’s a wonder I’m not shot, Tomo thought to himself as he stood there looking. He was keenly aware of the bullets, but felt no urge to move. He was thinking how the sound the minié balls made was very singular indeed, and quite impossible to describe, except that he thought he heard in it something of the buzzing of a bee, the mewing of a kitten, and the snapping of fingers. He left his reverie only when he noticed a Rebel threatening Raimund Herrman, tracking the big man smoothly as he ran towards a captured Union battery. Tomo was quite hidden by the corn as he ran. If the Rebel marksman had looked he might have thought some elemental of the air was rushing towards him, but he never turned. Tomo struck him in the hip just as the Rebel fired, and when he fell among the stalks, Tomo stepped up and swung his rifle over his shoulder, like an ax, and crushed the man’s throat. Then Tomo ran after Raimund Herrman, who was poking his bayonet at a Rebel beside a shiny napoleon.

“This gun is ours, you shithouse sergeant!” cried the Reb.

“No,” said Raimund Herrman, “this gun is unser.” Tomo came up behind and whacked the Reb in his kidney. When he fell to his knees, Raimund Herrman stabbed him through the head. To Tomo it seemed a rude gesture, that stabbing. He would have preferred that all of them lay about them with their stocks like civilized folk, but that was not happening. All around him, the Ninth was stabbing away at the Rebs, and carrying the moment. The Rebs broke and ran as another Union regiment came up to the recaptured battery. Tomo returned to the brigade with Raimund Herrman, where the enemy was crowding in now on the left, and the Ninth charged again. They were incorrigible chargers. “Any excuse to fix bayonets!” joked other regiments, and they asked why the Ninth bothered at all with ammunition.

Tomo was not the least bit tired during the battle — there was a thrill in his blood so strong he did not think he’d ever sleep again — but it seemed like a sweet rest when he got to lie prone behind a felled tree and shoot across a field at the Rebs. Aaron Stanz had found him and scolded him, then hugged him fiercely. Now they were shooting side by side, their lips, teeth, and tongues black from tearing open cartridges. Johnny was shooting, too, cursing viciously between shots. “Jeff Davis drives the goat!” he shouted into the din. “Mrs. Lee is a crusty old whore!”

The fighting seemed to stop very suddenly. One minute Tomo was lining up a Rebel hat to shoot at, and the next the Rebs were all gone, and there was nothing to sight on but the shadows between trees. Farther up the line he could hear them still pounding away, but where the Ninth was it was all peace and quiet. The Ninth took advantage of the lull to take their first meal of the day. Tomo was so hungry he ate a half pound of unrinsed salt beef, which stung his blistered tongue, and puckered up his face so tight he could barely open his eyes. The quiet stretched on and on, into dusk, so the Ninth thought it was done for that day, but just as the sun passed over the ridge an incredible abundance of Rebels came screaming out of the woods. They charged through the field of low grass, across to the trees where the Ninth sheltered, and almost overwhelmed them.

It was then that one of the Weghorst twins died. As they rose to fall back with the rest of the company, he opened his mouth to say something to his brother, and got a bullet there, through his mouth and out through the back of his head. Tomo heard quite distinctly the noise of his shattering teeth, a terrible sound. When he heard it, Tomo was frightened for the first time. He wanted to run, then, away from the echoing noise in his head, away from the living Weghorst’s screaming, away from the charging Rebs. But Tomo wasn’t Gob. He wouldn’t run away to Homer and hide under the bed.

Tomo backed off slowly, loading and firing as he went, until he walked into a private of another Ohio regiment, come up with a whole division to reinforce them. The line held till full dark came. Tomo kept firing blindly into the darkness. Eventually Aaron Stanz came and put a hand on his shoulder, and pushed his arm down so his gun touched the earth.

“No more tonight, Fenzmaus,” Aaron Stanz said, and then he yawned, so big Tomo thought his whole face would disappear into his mouth, and so hard his breath washed over Tomo’s face. Tomo went to the rear, then, at Aaron Stanz’s insistence, while the rest of the unwounded Ninth began to throw up earthworks. At the hospital tents, Tomo said he had only come to serenade the wounded, but the truth was he was feeling sicker. He was hot with his fever now, instead of cold, but that suited him fine, because it was turning out to be a frigid night. He was having strange visions, too. He supposed his brain was too hot, so he dunked his head in a basin, but still he saw a black bug crawl out of a wounded man’s ear and circle his head before crawling back in, and twice he saw the moon turn into an eye and wink at him.

Tomo played sweet music for the wounded all through the night because he could not sleep. A hospital steward brought him hot food; crisp bacon and a stew of chicken and hardtack. At the bottom of the bowl was a hard-boiled egg. Tomo fished it out and ate it with great precision, nibbling away the white until he had a perfect globe of yolk pinched between his thumb and forefinger. He swallowed it like a pill. When he finished eating, he went to visit the living Weghorst twin, thinking to play him something to comfort him, but when he found him still weeping over his brother’s body, all he could do was stare numbly and clutch Betty to his chest. He thought of his mama, back in Homer. If she were there, she’d say that the dead Weghorst now inhabited the Summerland, a place where all good spirits lived.

He went and sat next to the surviving Weghorst, put his hand on the big fellow’s hand, and burst so violently into tears he felt as if his whole head had exploded in a shower of salty water. Tomo cried because it is a terrible thing that brothers should be separated, and because he missed his own brother. He suffered suddenly from the unreasoning conviction that Gob was dead, that a Rebel bullet had traveled hundreds of miles up to Homer to shatter his brother’s teeth and blow out the back of his head all over their bedroom wall. Tomo put his head on the dead twin’s chest and wept, thinking he would keep on until he was only dry skin and bones and brittle desiccated organs. The living twin petted Tomo’s hair, to comfort him, which was not the plan at all, and the world seemed to Tomo a place entirely mixed up and unjust before he suddenly fell very hard into sleep, as if into a deep ditch.

The next morning, Tomo woke suddenly to the noise of cannon. He had been having a dream: he was in the house at Homer, sharing a plate of pancakes with Gob, while their mama read aloud from The Tempest. There was a big fire built in the hearth, and Tomo was comfortable and very happy because his grandpa Buck was dead — his head was stuffed and mounted above the mantel. Tomo shoveled pancakes into his mouth: they were drenched with butter and tasted very salty. Suddenly there was a noise outside, like thunder, and his mama leaped from her chair, shrieking, “Oh Rosy, there was no hole but the one you made! Yet now truly there’s a hole in our center and Longstreet has seen it!”

Somebody had put Tomo under a tent with Johnny, who slept through the artillery noise, hugging his drum. Tomo rose and poured water over his hot aching head, and drank a cup of coffee. Johnny woke up and hastily scribbled out a note with his parents’ names and address, which he pinned to his coat. “Ought to have done this yesterday,” he said. After a few moments’ reflection, Tomo did it too. He wrote his real name, and then his mother’s name: “Victoria C. Woodhull (The Great), Town of Homer, Licking County, Ohio.”

Tomo and the rest of Company C were two miles north of the hole in the line into which Longstreet poured three divisions later that morning. Just after noon two-thirds of the Army of the Cumberland was in headlong flight up the road to Rossville and Chattanooga. Old Rosy was nobody’s man that day; he fled to Chattanooga. Tomo did not flee there, though he still had in him a hankering to see the place. He stayed with the Ninth, who got called up, just as things were falling apart, to Snodgrass Hill, where Thomas made his famous stand.

Tomo spent the whole day up there. Twice the Rebs crested Tomo’s portion of the hill and planted their colors on it; twice Tomo rushed out with the Ninth to push the colors over and bludgeon the panting Rebs. All pooped out from their run up the hill, the Rebs had very little fight in them by the time they reached the top.

A third time the Ninth charged out. The Rebs had a round of canister and grape ready for them when they rushed out from behind their works. Tomo tripped and fell on his face, and the volley passed over him. Raimund Herrman lost his head to an erroneously loaded cannonball. His big body took a few more steps and then seemed to kneel down before it fell over. A load of shot took the living Weghorst twin in the chest. Aaron Stanz, in the rear of the charge, kept running after Tomo, stranded in the front, after his comrades had turned back or flattened themselves on the ground. The artillery spent itself as Aaron Stanz ran, and did not touch him, but then he came under furious, withering rifle fire, and seemed to disappear before Tomo’s eyes. Little pieces of Aaron Stanz — a finger, a portion of his hat, part of his nose — were suddenly not there, and then he proceeded to disintegrate as butterfly-sized pieces of flesh and bone flew away from him. He ran to within a few yards of Tomo before there was not sufficient body left for his will to propel.

That horror caused Tomo to experience a reversal of feeling. Now all his former battle-mindedness left him, replaced by terror, which rose up in him until he felt he could not breathe because he was drowning in it. It was so much worse than what he’d felt the day before. Now he did want to run away to Homer, to cower under the bed and not ever come out. He and Gob would have a stolen pie and a jug of cider, a candle, and a book. What else did a boy need besides all that and his brother? They could eat and read and scratch each other’s back. They could look out into the darkness beyond the candle and say it together: “I’m afraid. I’m afraid to die.” Overcome by fever and fear, Tomo closed his eyes and rested his head on the ground.

It was night when he woke to the noise of Rebels cheering their victory. The sound was muffled by the dead piled on top of him — one Union and three Rebel, entwined in a heavy confraternity that must have protected him from flying bullets. He emerged from under the bodies. General Thomas was gone, leaving Tomo and the dead behind him.

Tomo went west, walking, where he had to, over the soft bodies of the dead. Amid the cheers of the Rebels he heard the moans of some wounded, and he was certain his steps would elicit a groan at some point, but they never did. He kept walking towards the ridge, dodging campfires. When he heard a group of Rebs approaching him, he fled into a patch of woods, becoming quite lost there among the pine and scrub oak, where more dead lay scattered amid the smoldering underbrush. Eventually, Tomo lost sight of the ridge, lost all sense of direction, and came at last to a swift cold creek, which he passed over, sliding down one steep bank and clawing his way up the other, grateful for the chance to dunk his whole body. Tomo felt so hot now he thought he must soon burst into flame and draw the Rebs down on him like moths. Not knowing that he was completely turned around, he headed east on the far side of Chickamauga creek. “Gob,” he called out softly as he walked through the dark woods. “Where are you?”

His fever visions kept up. An owl alit on a low branch and said, “Tomo! Tomo!” The moon flipped in the sky like a tossed coin. A little boy brandishing a wooden sword led a troop of headless soldiers towards the creek. And a man in an immaculate white chiton rode out from a shadow on an elephant the size of a pony.

“Thomas Jefferson Woodhull,” he said. “I know you.”

“I don’t know you,” said Tomo, sitting down and rubbing his eyes. He did know him, though. He recognized him from the stories his mama told about her enormous destiny, about all the spirits in whose shadow she walked. He began to cry.

“There,” said the man. “There now. There’s no need to cry. You wanted to see the elephant, didn’t you? Well, here he is!”

Tomo said nothing, but only put his head in his hands and cried harder. The elephant played a friendly tune on its trunk as the man dismounted and came to sit by him. Only then did Tomo notice he’d lost Betty in the creek. The man took Tomo’s hands from his face and held them in his own. His hands were cool and dry and too smooth to be made of real flesh.

“Oh my boy,” he said. “Your troubles are almost over. You are very near the road home. In yonder clearing squats an officer who can send you on your way.” The man in white raised a bare arm and pointed. Tomo got up and ran, not so much because he believed the fever-vision, but because he wanted to get away. Sure enough, there was a figure in the clearing, squatting next to his horse with his pants down.

Tomo’s half-spoken friendly greeting turned to a howl of rage when he saw the man in the clearing was a Rebel, and a general for that matter — his stars shone very clearly in the bright moonlight. Tomo brought his gun up as he ran, but when he fired, he missed. As he neared the General, he flipped the rifle and caught it by the barrel, lifting it above his head, ready to deliver a crushing blow. The General raised his pistol and shot twice before Tomo could reach him. The first bullet went wide, but the second passed into Tomo’s left eye, and killed him dead. Tomo fell down in the cool grass, and his fever began very slowly to depart from him. The General came over on his knees to better see his assailant. Already, there was noise in the trees. The General’s staff was coming to look for him — his camp was not very far away.

When the General saw it was a little boy he had killed, he pounded his hand against his head and tore out a piece of his hair, cursing the Yankees that they should send children against him, and, because he happened also to be a priest and a bishop, he prayed gently and sincerely over the boy’s body, pleading with God to please, please give this little one a home in Heaven.