Columbia is the story of Theodore Lomax, a nineteen-year-old Union solider in the American Civil War, who is as committed as any to the ideal of human freedom. After being assigned to the army of William Tecumseh Sherman, shortly after the general’s infamous March to the Sea, he willingly participates in the destruction of civilian property in Columbia, South Carolina, believing his acts are justified by Southern resistance to the Northern cause of emancipation. But when the destruction escalates into violence against the civilians themselves, he becomes disillusioned, and feels compelled to strike out in opposition to his own countrymen.
The novel is told from Lomax’s point of view, but there are ten other supporting characters, each with a story of his or her own. There was a time when I thought these stories, or these “Reflections in Broken Glass,” should alternate with the chapters in Columbia, presenting a richer but perhaps more tangled tapestry of the lives that painfully converge in the novel’s climactic scenes. But Columbia is clearly a more coherent narrative without them. Still, they were valuable to me as an author, and so I’ve decided to share them here.
“Tommy,” centers on the character of ten-year-old Tommy Pepper, and describes his adventures when playing hooky from school on the day that the Federal Army arrives in Columbia.
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Playing hooky from school was getting so easy, Tommy Pepper thought that morning as he and his best friend Jackie Watson ran down the gully between the schoolhouse and the railroad tracks. It hardly seemed like they spent any time there at all anymore. There was a time when he would have caught hell for being marked absent from school -- caught hell from his Pa -- but his Pa had been off in the war for three years now, and his Ma was not able to control him. Never had been. She would read the notes they sent home -- not the ones they gave him to deliver; no, not those. Those he would simply tear up and burn in the wood stove. But the ones they mailed or delivered in person, those she would read and then she would sigh heavily, and say, “Tommy, what am I to do with you? You simply must go to school. You must!” And Tommy would dutifully say, “Yes, Ma,” and that would be the end of it until the next note arrived and the cycle was repeated. If his Ma thought that was going to be enough to keep him in school while half the other kids were spending their days running around the city and getting into mischief, she had another thing coming. The war had brought all kinds of interesting things to Columbia for enterprising boys like Tommy and his friends to see and get tangled up with, things much more interesting than the dusty slates and rote memorization that pervaded the schoolhouse. It was downright stupid to think they would not take advantage of these opportunities when they presented themselves.
And this morning had been no exception. Tommy and his friends had been on hand to witness all sorts of events and spectacles that had come to the streets of Columbia. Early in the war there had been numerous regiments mustered in the town square, thousands of men from all over the county converging on the city to be counted, sorted, and put into orderly rows, while gray-uniformed officers walked among them, issuing orders and seeing to the dispersal of sacks and blankets. Tommy’s own father and older brother had been part of one of these musterings and they, like so many of their countrymen, had brought their own rifles and ammunition to help build the necessary firepower against the aggressors from the North. These events were more like holidays than anything else, with businesses closing, politicians making speeches, and whole families turning out to wish the young men well, cry, and cheer them as they marched in motley ranks out of the city. No one really expected Tommy and his friends to be in school on these festival-like days, but after the men had been made soldiers and the soldiers had gone to war, much of the heady fever that had gripped the city went with them, and the expectation that boys should be in school returned, like so many others associated with daily life.
But once given the taste of adventure, Tommy and his friends found its lure difficult to resist. They kept their ears to the ground as much as possible, thirsty for any rumor which would give them reason to skip school. A regiment from further south marching through town on its way to the front. A general or government official staying over in one of the downtown hotels. They would gladly wait for hours on a street corner if it meant getting out of school for the day, even if the rumored regiment failed to appear or the sequestered dignitary never left his hotel room. As time passed and they got more and more comfortable with the idea of thwarting the wishes of the elders and more and more adept at getting away with it, their reasons for cutting class got flimsier and flimsier, and eventually they dispensed with the need for a reason altogether. The simple glory of being free and available for the next unknown adventure, they eventually understood, was all the inducement they would ever need.
In this spirit they had gotten themselves into a fair amount of trouble, most of it never reported to their schoolteachers or their parents. There were so many children like them, so many who should have been in school and weren’t, that most of the adults who ran afoul of their wanderings simply gave them a cursory chase. If they scattered as they all invariably did, the adult usually considered that a victory and went back to their business. There weren’t enough truant officers left in the city to effectively deal with the situation anyway, so as long as the children kept out their sight, each individual merchant, laborer, or newspaperman considered the situation someone else’s problem.
But compared to all the adventures they previously had, all the interesting things they had seen and games they had played, this morning had promised to be something special. The granddaddy of all rumors had been circulating in the streets of Columbia for a month now, that Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, who had marched his army of 60,000 combat veterans through the heartland of Georgia -- burning Atlanta, capturing Savannah, and destroying everything of value in between -- had turned his column north into South Carolina, and was bearing down inexorably on their fair capitol city. It had started as speculative whispers in the barber shops and sitting rooms, and had grown steadily in proponents and general acceptance until it had reached a near fever pitch, an absolute certainty that had some people hiding their valuables and others leaving the city. And yesterday came news that men in blue uniforms -- the Enemy -- had been spotted on the roads south of town, and would almost certainly be within Columbia the next day or the day following.
Tommy clearly remembered the conversation he had had with his friends about it the previous day.
“The bluebellies are coming for sure,” he had told them, reporting the news as he understood it. “Mister Jacobson saw them coming back from Gaston last night. They chased him and shot at him. If he hadn’t had his best team pulling the wagon, he wouldn’t have escaped with his life!”
“Is it Sherman?” Tommy’s best friend Jackie said, a tall and pigeon-toed boy with thick red hair, freckles, and two enormous front teeth erupting out of his mouth.
“Of course it’s Sherman!” Tommy exclaimed. “Who else do you think it’d be, Abe Lincoln? My Uncle Seth says he’s coming to do to Columbia what he did to Atlanta. Burn it to the ground and slaughter all the women and children!”
Tommy’s uncle Seth was a baggage master at the main train depot in town who had avoided service in the army on account of a back injury he had supposedly suffered with ever since a cask of cornmeal had fallen on him years ago. They certainly heard plenty of rumors circulating all over town, but it would be a lie to pretend Uncle Seth wasn’t the boys’s main source of information.
“What do they want to kill us for?” Pete Crutchfield asked innocently. Pete was a small boy, smaller than even Tommy, with a restless manner and dark, deep-set eyes. “We ain’t done nothing to them. We ain’t off fighting no war.”
Tommy shook his head and looked at his friend as if he was a simpleminded fool. “That’s what them bluebellies do, Pete. They’re a bloodthirsty lot. Uncle Seth says they eat babies for breakfast, roasting them over their fires like rabbits.”
It was an interesting image. Tommy had a younger sister and he had many times tried to imagine her stuck on a spit and a bunch of bluebellies crowded around her, one of them turning her slowly over a fire in order to get her meat done equally on all sides. It was somehow horrible and funny at the same time.
“They don’t really do that, do they?” Jackie asked. “How could they?”
Tommy’s tone turned positively dire. “Just ask those poor folks over in Georgia if they don’t. They’ll tell you the truth. Eating babies and lots worse. It’s been in all the papers.”
It wasn’t long after that the three of them decided they would definitely skip school the next day and head out to the edge of town to get a good look at these baby-eating bluebellies.
It was strange, exciting, and even a little scary. The war had been going on for almost four years now. Tommy’s father and brother had been gone for nearly that entire time, as countless other fathers and brothers had been gone from Columbia and from all across South Carolina and the South. The battles had all been widely reported in the newspapers -- big battles like Antietam and Gettysburg, and small battles like Perryville and Stone Mountain -- and the politics behind them all had been on-going topics of conversation for everyone in town for so long it was difficult to remember what anyone talked about before the war came. In fact, the war had been going on for so long and boys like Tommy were so young that very few of them could clearly remember the time before the war, when families were whole and things like school and church actually mattered. In their wanderings Tommy and his friends even sometimes saw wounded veterans, men returned from the war with their bodies too torn and battered to make them useful at the front -- men with both legs shot off, or with pieces of their skull missing, or with flaps of skin putrefying on their persons and invariably hiding some deeper scar that cut into their very souls. Tommy would look at these men and try to imagine the same injuries on his father or brother, and in doing so would realize with an attenuated sense of the surreal he could no longer remember exactly what they looked like, the faces of his dearest relations no more distinct than the careworn faces of the walking dead he saw more and more around him.
And through all of this, through all these past four years, no one -- no one among his friends and no one in Columbia who had not gone off to fight in the war, not even any of the returned veterans who had seen the elephant and knew what to look for -- not a single one of them had seen a Federal soldier on the streets of their home city. The Enemy, as they were often called, the capital E evident in everyone’s speech, was, in truth, little more than an abstraction, and not just to schoolboys with overactive imaginations like Tommy Pepper. How many were there? A hundred thousand? A million? Ten million? Were their weapons better than ours? More powerful? More accurate? Did their cavalry ride better horses? Or war elephants, reportedly loaned to their diabolical president by the King of Siam? Were they all ten feet tall? Did they breathe fire? Eat babies for breakfast? There was no shortage of speculation about the innate qualities of the Enemy, and in the absence of any hard experience, it tended to run away with itself for young boys, sewing circles, and tavern leagues alike.
Tommy’s uncle Seth called them bluebellies, and so did Tommy, and that word seemed to fit them best. It reminded Tommy of a small reptile, scurrying around on short, squat legs and trying not to get stepped on. Some people in town claimed the Federal soldiers were men, claimed they had to be men, men not terribly unlike the men who had been mustered early in the war in Columbia’s town square, but Tommy didn’t believe them. Once planted, the image of them as reptiles was a difficult one to get out of his mind, and its presence there made the accusations that they breathed fire and ate babies that much more persuasive.
The night before their expected arrival passed excruciatingly slowly for Tommy, worked up as he was over the idea of finally confirming what kind of creatures the Enemy actually were. In the daytime, whenever he got too excited about something, Tommy had the unconscious tendency to jump up and down, flapping his hands like tiny wings on the ends of his arms. He couldn’t control himself, and his father had often disparagingly compared him to a baby bird desperately trying to take flight. At night, these same compulsions kept him tossing and turning, several times practically bouncing himself off the mattress and onto the floor. The nervousness and anticipation he felt at the prospect of actually seeing the bluebellies for himself was that palpable, and they kept his heart beating at such an elevated pace throughout the night that he was unable to get more than a wink or two of sleep.
When the morning finally arrived, Tommy was out of bed and dressed before his mother came to wake him. He waited anxiously as his mother prepared breakfast for him and his sister, and ate only a few hurried bites of it before pushing himself away from the table, grabbing his coat, and heading for the door.
“Tommy, where are you going in such a hurry?” his mother asked him.
“To school,” Tommy said, the lie practiced but suffering some from his excitement.
“Not today,” she said. “They’ve closed the school today and are asking everyone to stay inside their homes. It’s for our protection.”
Tommy looked at her incredulously, but not for the reason his mother believed. In her typically sugary and slightly far-away tone she reassured him everything was going to be fine, that they were going to be perfectly safe, that others acting on their behalf had seen to it, and that it was important for them to do as they had been asked. A piece of the Federal Army -- you know what that is, don’t you, Tommy? The Federal Army? The people your daddy and brother have gone off to fight -- was just outside the city and would be coming in to occupy it today. The mayor has been in communication with their commanding general and has received assurances no one who stayed peacefully inside their homes would be harmed. She thought the three of them could spend the day playing games together and making puzzles. With the windows closed and the drapes pulled shut they would light candles and pretend it was Christmas. She even had some things she would wrap up so they could open them and make believe they were presents. Wouldn’t that be fun? A day off from school and a play holiday?
Tommy was dumbfounded. He had no intention of spending this of all days cooped up in the house with his mother and baby sister. But with the school officially closed, what excuse did he have to leave?
“Do you want another biscuit?” his mother asked him sweetly.
“Uh huh,” Tommy grunted, his head nodding absently and his heart rising into his throat the way it always did when confronted with an intractable situation. He desperately tried to think of a way out, but the stuff between his ears felt thickened, as if with molasses, and he struggled even to make the simplest of connections. What were Jackie and Pete going to think of him if he didn’t show up as they had planned? Would they wait for him? How long? Certainly not all day. They would wait a little while, but eventually they would give up on him and go off to the edge of town to see the bluebellies for themselves. What was he going to do? What could he do?
“What game shall we play first?” his mother called from the kitchen, and it was the distant sound of her voice more than anything that helped Tommy break out of his suffocating fog and realize she was in one room and he was in another, sitting in his coat with the front door only a few steps away.
Clearing his mind and forcing his heart back down into his chest, Tommy was up and gone in a flash, not thinking of anything in that desperate moment except for escape. Had it been possible for a part of him to stay behind and see the look of fear and abandonment that came over his mother’s face when she returned from the kitchen, a cold biscuit on a small china plate held delicately in one hand and seeing his sister sitting alone at the table smiling around a spoonful of oatmeal, he might have actually stayed with her throughout that long and painful day.
He ran to the schoolhouse as quickly as he could, petrified at the thought his friends might have gone on without him, but when he arrived he discovered he had not been the only one held up by the strange circumstances of the day. Jackie was there, his shock of red hair standing out starkly against the white clapboard of the schoolhouse, but Pete was nowhere to be seen.
“Where’s Pete?” Tommy asked as he skidded to a stop next to Jackie, exhaling heavily from the exertion of his run.
“I dunno,” Jackie said. “His Ma probably wouldn’t let him come. They closed the school today.”
“I know,” Tommy said. “I almost got stuck at home myself. Did your Ma give you any problems?”
“Nah,” Jackie said dismissively. “She don’t give a whit about what I go and do. You know that. School or no school, as long as I’m not under her feet, she’s just fine with it.”
They quickly formulated their plan, taking the precaution that the schools had been closed as a clear indication the bluebellies were in fact coming into town that day. All the information they had indicated the Union Army was approaching the city from the south, so they decided to go as quickly as possible to the southern edge of the city, figuring they would either start bumping into the arriving bluebellies on the streets themselves or, if they were lucky, arrive before the Union column entered the city, allowing them a splendid view of the blue legions marching up the approaches. In a minute they were off, neither one of them giving any more thought to their friend Pete as Tommy feared either one of them would have given him had he been too late in coming.
By this time they knew their way around the city pretty well, learning early in their excursions which alleys connected with which streets and which streets led to which places. They did not run, knowing it was too far for them to maintain that pace and that it would tire them out and ultimately only retard their progress. They moved instead at a brisk walk, taking the longest possible strides, Tommy’s sense of excitement and adventure easily pushing his legs to keep up with the longer ones of his companion. They quickly passed the landmarks and familiar locations of their own neighborhood, hunching their shoulders instinctively in fear that someone they knew would see, recognize, and confront them as to why they were out on the streets when the mayor had evidently ordered everyone to stay in their homes. Neither Jackie nor Tommy had ever met the mayor, but Tommy had seen him on the day his father and brother had been mustered into their regiment. Tommy had even taken a few minutes that day to listen to the speech he was making, stopping only after realizing neither the words nor the message made any sense to him. The mayor was likely a nice enough man, but like Tommy’s mother, if he thought a simple decree was going to keep Tommy inside on a day like this, he really had another thing coming.
And it was obvious Tommy wasn’t alone. Far from deserted, Tommy and Jackie found the streets fairly well full with people, and absolutely choked with them as they approached the southern end of town. They were clearly not the only ones who had decided to go and see the bluebellies for themselves. There were plenty of other children in the crowd -- mostly boys like themselves, but some girls as well -- and more adults than Tommy would have thought possible. He had been there when the thousands of men had marched out of town in their regimental lines at the very beginning of the war, and had seen the crowd that had been left behind, almost entirely made up of women and children. He had thought that was all that had been left in Columbia when the soldiers had left, but today he saw far more men on the streets of the city than had shown their faces that day. Old men, certainly, men too old for the volunteer ranks that were formed in those early days, but young men as well, men of fighting age, some of whom were obviously veterans who had already served their time and bore the pinned-up sleeves and crutches to prove it, but many, many more who looked perfectly sound and able to shoulder a musket if necessary. Men like his uncle Seth.
“Hey, boys!” Seth called to them, coming up from behind and clapping them warmly on their backs as if they were both old drinking buddies of his. “Are you two coming down to see the bluebellies?”
“We sure are, Uncle Seth,” Tommy answered for the both of them, less surprised than he would have thought to bump into someone they knew in such a mass of strangers.
“Well, stay close to me, then,” Seth said, hooking them both almost painfully around the necks. “Some of our boys are armed and are going to see if they can keep the lousy yanks out of our fair city. I’d hate to see either one of you tagged by a stray bullet.”
Seth was not like any other adult Tommy knew. His teacher, his mother, even his father -- they all would have been mortified at the idea of Tommy exposing himself to danger, and would have grabbed him by the ear and dragged him back home if they had caught him unawares as Uncle Seth had just done. But not Seth. For Seth this was all just one grand adventure, and there was no reason why kids like Tommy and Jackie shouldn’t partake in it. Despite the early hour, Tommy could not mistake the smell of liquor on Seth’s breath, and that was sure to be affecting his judgment. But drunk or sober, Seth was a man who was always up for a little excitement, and usually saw no reason to separate those pursuits from those more traditionally associated with boys of Tommy’s age. There had even been plenty of times when Seth had come to join Tommy and his friends on the school yard -- running, chasing, and tackling in good-natured frivolity -- exactly as if he was no more than ten years old himself.
There was a building on the very edge of the city, a livery stable, that stood several hundred yards out from the rest of the buildings that made up the city proper, and it was here that most of the crowd had gathered. It stood on a small rise south of town and commanded an impressive view of the swampy countryside surrounding Columbia. As Seth led the boys there, Tommy was amazed to see how many people stood clustered around it, almost as if the bluebellies themselves were holed up inside and everyone was struggling to get a peek at them through the gaps in the wooden planks framing the structure. Tommy and Jackie each held tight onto one of Seth’s sleeves as he bobbed and weaved his way through this crowd, making unmistakably for the building’s front entrance. Tommy looked around at the people he passed, bumping into several, but none noticed him, engaged as every one of them were in a vocal argument with one or two of their neighbors. The noise of all their voices was almost deafening, but Tommy could no more hear the content of any of their individual conversations as he could hear his own heart beating inside his chest.
Seth stopped suddenly within the open doorway of the building itself. Tommy saw it was a stable, or at least had been once, with the entrance easily wide enough to allow four horses to walk in side by side and the entire interior one massive space subdivided into numerous hay-strewn stalls. But today there was not a horse in sight, all of them -- he supposed -- off fighting in the war like his father and brother, and the area in which they had once slept, ate, and shat now housing only a small group of men, their relative isolation a stark contrast to the throngs who stood shoulder to shoulder only a few paces away. One of these men, a tall one with a dirty face and a long knife clutched in one hand, stepped forward upon Seth’s appearance and clasped him in a tremendous embrace.
“Seth, you old son of a bitch!” he shouted gleefully, the outer din of voices less overwhelming here beneath the ancient timbers. “I was beginning to wonder if you were going to show up. Are you ready to show them bluebellies something?”
Seth broke away from the taller man and responded with equal enthusiasm. “Just point me in the right direction, Obadiah,” he said. “Give me a gun and point me in the right direction. Them bluebellies won’t know what hit them!”
The man named Obadiah withdrew a shiny pistol that had been hidden somewhere behind his back and pushed it quickly into Seth’s hands. “There you go, Seth. I told you I would set you up. Her name is Betsy and she acts best when you treat her like a lady, if you get my meaning.”
The two men laughed and Obadiah continued to clap Seth warmly on the shoulders as Tommy’s uncle tucked the weapon named Betsy under his belt in easy reach of his right hand. The joke was lost on Tommy so he looked inquisitively around at some of the other men in the stable. They were a mean and low looking bunch, none of them clean enough to be seated at his mother’s table and all of them possessing a weapon of one kind or another. Most had rifles or pistols, but those that didn’t, like Obadiah, had long and wicked-looking knives.
“Well now, Seth. Who are these young ‘uns you’ve brought with you?”
The reference to his own person quickly brought Tommy’s attention front and center. Looking up at Obadiah, he saw an odd twinkle in the older man’s eye, and got the decided sense he was being studied and evaluated.
“This is my nephew, Tommy,” Seth said, nudging the boy forward.
Tommy needed little encouragement. He practically leapt forward and extended a hand to Obadiah. “How are you, sir,” he said loudly, the excitement in the crowd around him flowing freely through his veins.
“Pleased to meet you,” Obadiah said, shaking Tommy’s hand and giving him another twisted look.
“And this is his friend Jackie,” Seth said, urging Jackie forward as he had just done with Tommy.
Jackie came forward a little less enthusiastically. He, too, extended a hand in greeting, but Tommy jumped in before he and Obadiah could exchange a similar pleasantry.
“What’cha planning to do with that knife, mister,” Tommy said. “Stick it in one of them bluebellies when they come into town this morning?”
Obadiah exchanged an approving look with Seth before turning to address Tommy. “Well, yes,” he said. “That’s exactly what I plan to do if’n I can get close enough to one of them. I aim to stick this here knife in one of them fat bluebellies, pull it out, and see what color they are on the inside.” His tone was exactly as if he was referring to a hog that was ready to be butchered and brought to the supper table.
“You think they’re blue on the inside, too?” Tommy asked with a hopeful uncertainty.
“Well, I’m not sure,” Obadiah said. “I’ve heard some say they’s red on the inside just like us, but I’m going to have to see that with my own eyes to believe it.”
“And today’s the day,” Seth said ominously. “Today’s the day when we’ll all see just what them bluebellies are made of.”
For it was their plan to go out and confront the bluebellies -- the Union soldiers -- with their rifles and their pistols and their knives and, if necessary, their fists; confront them and pay them back for what they had done to their South Carolinian and Georgian neighbors, to show them they couldn’t just march up and sack Columbia as they had done to dozens of other Southern cities. As Tommy learned over the next several minutes, they had talked about it in the tavern the night before -- Seth and Obadiah and some of the others -- they had talked about the arriving Federals while they had drank their homebrew, and as a group they had agreed to gather in the morning at this abandoned livery stable and make a stand in defense of their homes and their honor. Word of their plan had spread quickly through Columbia’s network of back streets and taverns, and several more, maybe a dozen, had decided to lend their might to the noble struggle, while many more, several hundred at least, had decided to come and see just how far these passionate few were willing to go. Those who had fallen into the first camp, those whose sense of justice and depth of inebriation had compelled them into action, were gathered now inside the livery stable, while those who had fallen into the second camp, those who had no intention of risking what little they had left but who were always ready to witness a spectacle, were clustered several dozen layers deep around the ramshackle building.
Obadiah brought Seth and the boys into the inner circle of combatants.
“Now wait just a goddamn minute!” Seth exclaimed, looking around at the small number of men who stood there. “Is this it? Is this all we have? Where’s Palmer? And Whitley? And Bob Newcastle? Jesus Christ! I knew those cowards weren’t going to show this morning!”
“It’s cold, Seth,” an enormous man with a hairy face and wearing dirty coveralls said. He held a rifle in one hand while the butt of a pistol stuck out of one of the front pockets of his coveralls.
“Well, of course it’s cold, Fred,” Seth said. “It’s February. But those yellow bastards weren’t worried about the cold last night when they were shooting their mouths off about what they planned to do to the bluebellies. You heard them as well as I did, Fred. We all did.”
The circle of men mumbled their agreement with Seth’s sense of outrage, but in a muted way, their grunts clearly tinged with the understanding that the threat of the Federal Army was somehow less compelling in the cold bleary sunlight than it might have been in the warm throbbing night.
Cursing under his breath, Seth withdrew a mostly full bottle of moonshine whiskey from inside his coat. “I guess it’s a good thing Marty gave me this before leaving the tavern last night,” he said, cracking it open and taking a spiteful drink. “You boys sure sound like you need some warming up.”
Tommy watched as his uncle passed the bottle to Obadiah on his right, and he counted the others as the whiskey made its way around their small circle. There were seven of them in all, with Tommy and Jackie making nine, and they all stood more or less silently as they waited for their turn on the bottle. On the first and second passes the man on Jackie’s left skipped the two of them completely, stepping behind them to give the bottle back to Seth, but on the third pass he actually gave it to Jackie, evidently forgetting as he grimaced who it was that was next in line. Jackie looked fearfully at the dark liquid, and hurriedly passed it without drinking from it to Tommy, who studied the spit sloppy bottle with more curiosity than his friend had shown. He had never touched the stuff before -- neither his father nor mother had ever kept any in the house -- but he had seen its effects on his Uncle Seth enough times to wonder what it was like and what it might do to him. His heart rising in his throat again, Tommy moved the bottle closer to his lips and looked up at Seth apprehensively, uncertain what his reaction would be.
Seth was looking warmly at his nephew, and spoke with real emotion in his voice. “Go ahead, Tommy,” he said. “Just a sip. It won’t kill you.”
It would have been difficult for Tommy to express the feeling that came over him then. Happy that his desire was not being thwarted. Proud that his Uncle Seth thought he was ready for such a grown-up thing. Boastful that he had the courage to do something Jackie would not. Wicked that he was doing something his parents would not approve of. They were all rolled up into one, and together they easily blew his fear away and pushed his heart back down into his chest. Tipping the bottle quickly, he let the brown liquid splash over his lips and into his mouth… and before he really knew what was happening he found himself doubled over forward and coughing, the whiskey turned suddenly to fire in his mouth and his eyes tearing up and blinding him. Trembling from the spasms that wracked his whole being, the vile liquid fell out of his mouth and dripped from his scorched lips into a small puddle on the dirty wooden floor.
The circle of men laughed, their voices ringing in Tommy’s ears, and as Seth knelt down to take the bottle out of Tommy’s hand and pat him compassionately on the back, Tommy realized Seth was laughing, too. But even distracted by the all-too-slowly subsiding pain, Tommy realized their laughter was not really at his expense. They had all expected what had happened, had known from experience a boy of his age would have just this reaction to his first mouthful of whiskey. Ordinarily, Tommy would have been insensitive to the passions and reminisces of grown men, but now their laughter swaddled him, and in it Tommy could clearly hear both their joy for the boys they used to be and their wistfulness for the little piece of Tommy’s boyhood that had just been washed away.
Their laughter also broke the ice that had been forming among them. As the bottle resumed its journey -- no one giving it to either Jackie or Tommy again -- they all began speaking in turn, none of them really engaging in any conversation, each of them instead asserting something he felt strongly about or reporting some piece of information he thought the others needed to know. The bluebellies were definitely heading this way. Tom Crawford had ridden out on his mule and had almost gotten captured by them. This musket belongs to the state militia and there’s more to be had if we need them. If them lousy bluebellies thought they were going to do to Columbia what they had done to Atlanta, they had another thing coming. Sherman himself is leading the column into town. One of us should definitely shoot him off his damn horse if we can.
As Tommy’s world slowly returned to normal, he listened to all the words and looked around at all the grimy faces, and knew there was a real power among them, a real force to be reckoned with, and the fury of it all would possess him and carry him over any obstacle his developing conscience or the mother who tried to nurture it would try to put in his way. These few men, who due to either their lack of fitness or enthusiasm had avoided service in the regular army of their country, now stood shoulder to shoulder with one another and were steeling themselves with camaraderie and whiskey to go into battle against their sworn enemies. As young as he was, Tommy could sense the emotions that surged through them -- the anger, the fear, the hatred, the determination -- and it energized him, it puffed him up and lit a fire in his belly exactly as if he had managed to swallow the liquor that was now almost gone. He wanted to go with them. He had no real thought of taking up a weapon or of doing anything violent, but he did not want to stay behind when the group of them decided the time had come to test themselves and their mettle. The thought of them leaving him with the rubbernecking masses clustered outside was enough to make him jump out of his skin. Unconsciously, his hands began to awkwardly flap at the ends of his arms and his feet skipped around on the horse-dirtied floor as if he needed to make a trip to the outhouse.
Jackie put a hand on his arm as if to steady him. “Tommy, settle down,” he said with practiced concern. “What’s got you all jumpy now?”
The adults did not take notice of them, a disjointed conversation going on all the while above their heads and not able to be derailed by the hushed discussion of these two young boys.
“Let’s go, Jackie,” Tommy said, turning toward his friend and grabbing him roughly on the shoulder.
“Go?” Jackie said. “Go where?”
“With Uncle Seth,” Tommy said enthusiastically. “Let’s go with Uncle Seth and his boys.”
Jackie’s face went pale. “What?” he said. “We can’t do that. They won’t let us.”
“Sure they will,” Tommy said confidently, and then turned back to his uncle, jumping up and down in place as he spoke. “Uncle Seth!” he cried. “Uncle Seth! We want to go, too! We want to go with you to fight them bluebellies!”
The men in the circle all laughed again, and said it was a grand idea. Sure, let them come, several of them encouraged Seth. Why the hell not? Makes sense that ten-year-old Southern boys would be more than a match for an equal number of cowardly bluebellies. Look at that one. He’s about to wet his pants he wants to go in battle so bad. Atta boy!
Seth, to his credit, looked suddenly unsure of himself, probably knowing, even with his maladjusted judgment, what his sister would think of such an idea. “Oh, I don’t know, Tommy…” he started to say, but was quickly shouted down by his comrades in arms.
The no-neck giant named Fred, the man with the hairiest face Tommy had ever seen, stepped forward. His bearing was dramatically changed since the time Tommy had first seen him, almost as if the whiskey had stiffened his back and swelled him up to an even greater height. “Here, son,” he said, pulling the pistol from out of his pocket and holding it up in front of Tommy’s face. “You ever use one of these before?”
Tommy, eyes wide in amazement, took the weapon out of Fred’s hairy-knuckled fingers and brought it close to his bosom, holding it and stroking it like a wounded bird. It was old and a little rusty, orange flakes coming off on his fingers as he rubbed it. “Gee, thanks, mister,” Tommy said, his voice awed as if the gun was made out of the purest gold, but then his thoughts suddenly shifted and his eyes popped up suspiciously. “Is it loaded?”
“Is it loaded?” Fred scoffed. “Wouldn’t do much good if it wasn’t! Do you want to come with us and shoot one of them bluebellies with it?”
Seth tried to step back into the exchange. “Come on, Fred,” he said to the bearish man. “Leave him alone. He’s my sister’s kid.”
Fred shoved Seth back, moving more quickly than Tommy would have thought possible, and actually knocked his uncle to the floor.
“Come on, boys!” Fred suddenly shouted, his hair stuck to his sweaty forehead and his eyes blazing wildly. “We’ve pissed around here long enough. If we’re going to do this thing let’s get a move on and do it. Who’s with me?”
A cheer went up from everyone except Seth and Jackie. It was long and loud, and not unlike the Rebel yell that had been screamed on hundreds of other battlefields for the past four years.
Amidst the raucous noise, Fred bent close and spoke almost tenderly to Tommy. “What was your name again, son?”
“Tommy,” he said, looking up at the gigantic man named Fred, his heart feeling about to burst out of his chest. “Tommy Pepper.”
“Well, stick close to me, Tommy Pepper, and you’ll be just fine.”
Tommy had no doubt about it. The group of them were heading for the door of the stable and Tommy would have allowed himself to be swept along with them had Jackie not held him back with a forceful tug on his arm.
“Come on, Jackie,” Tommy said excitedly. “Let’s go. They’re going to leave without us.”
“I’m not going, Tommy,” Jackie said. “And I don’t think you should either.”
Seth was just regaining his feet, and tottered over to stand behind Jackie.
Tommy roughly pulled his arm out of his friend’s grasp. “What do you mean? You heard what that big man Fred said. He’s going to let me shoot one of the bluebellies.” He suddenly held up the rusty pistol almost as if he had forgotten about it. “And he gave me this gun to do it with!” he cried.
“Come on, Tommy,” Seth said. “Jackie’s probably right. You should stay here in the livery stable. I’ll come back and get you when it’s all over.”
Tommy shook his head vigorously. “No, I’m going. You guys stay here if you want, but I’m going.”
And much like he did on his mother and sister an hour ago, Tommy simply turned and ran. Except this time his uncle and friend weren’t distracted with some other errand in another room. They were standing right in front of him asking him to do something even Tommy deep down inside knew was for his own good. But the temptation was just too strong for him to resist. He was going into battle -- just like his father and brother before him. He was going into battle against the bluebellies. It was his turn to serve his country, and he wasn’t going to miss what might be his only chance.
The rest of the men had already left the stable, and one of the big horse doors had even swung mostly shut behind them. Sure he was being left behind, Tommy forced his heart back down into his chest and rushed as quickly as he could through the opening, but immediately found himself stuck in a tremendous throng of people, the men who had been passing the whiskey bottle around in the stable literally mobbed by the crowds who had been waiting for their appearance.
“Clear out!” the man named Fred was shouting at them, his voice booming out across the crowd from a head that stood shoulders above the rest. “Clear out of our goddamn way!”
Tommy positioned himself directly behind Fred, determined not to get separated from him again, and nearly got stepped on several times as the crowd jostled the mostly inebriated warriors. They wanted to congratulate the men from the stable, Tommy quickly saw and heard, each and every one of them pushing forward to shake hands, clap shoulders, and provide enthusiastic encouragement for the task the warriors had set before themselves. In the chaos of it all, Tommy felt a hand drop upon his shoulder. Looking up, he saw his Uncle Seth had joined him, his face appearing grim and, if Tommy hadn’t known better, sober.
“You stay behind me, Tommy,” Seth said to him, shouting to make himself heard over the din.
Fred began physically pushing back against the press of the crowd and actually began moving them forward. Tommy hooked a few fingers into one of the yawning belt loops on the big man’s coveralls and gave his uncle a hostile look, indicating with the tilt of his head he meant to stay with Fred.
“No, Tommy!” Seth shouted at him, grabbing the young man roughly by the arm to keep himself connected as the crowd both parted ahead and closed in behind them. “You stay with me. If anything happens to you your mother will never speak to me again. Do you understand?”
Tommy did not respond, but neither did he attempt to dislodge Seth’s hand from his arm. In the crush of the crowd that apparently satisfied Seth, and the two of them mostly kept their heads down until Fred’s strength and determination had gotten them clear of their admirers and they found themselves standing separated from the city. They were just atop a small rise that commanded an impressive view of the road to Gaston and the swampy flat land through which it turned.
“What? What’s this?” Fred said, twisting around to see Tommy and his Uncle Seth connected to him and each other as if they had all been playing a school yard game. Realizing what had happened, he let out a loud and raucous laugh. “Well, that’s one way to stay close to me, Tommy,” he said, “but, I must say, Seth, I expected a little more courage out of you.”
Several other men laughed at the insult, but Seth was not amused. “As I said back in the stable, Fred, he’s my sister’s kid. If he’s going to come with us, I need to keep an eye on him.”
“Fair enough,” Fred said, nodding his head with satisfaction. “Just make sure the two of you stay out from under my feet. I don’t want—”
“Hey, Fred,” Obadiah said ominously. “Look.”
Fred, Seth, Tommy, and everyone else in their little company went still and silent. They fanned out just enough for each of them to get a clear look down the Gaston road. Half a mile or so in the distance, a small cluster of men were walking towards them and the city at their backs. Tommy couldn’t tell how many of them there were, but the dark blue color of their clothing was unmistakable.
“Bluebellies!” Tommy shouted gleefully. “Those are bluebellies headed this way, ain’t they, Uncle Seth?”
Not a word escaped the lips of Seth or any of the other six adults who stood around Tommy.
“Uncle Seth?” Tommy said again, raising his rusty pistol up and practicing his aim. He knew the bluebellies were too far away for him to hit, but they wouldn’t be for long and he wanted to be ready. “Those are bluebellies, ain’t they?”
It was Fred who finally answered Tommy, his voice soft and distant as if locked away in a dungeon. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, kid. Those are bluebellies all right.”
“What do we do, Fred?” Obadiah asked quickly, his voice revealing even to Tommy’s untrained ear that he thought they might already be in over their heads. “You think they’ve seen us yet?”
As Tommy sighted down his barrel at the small group of figures he saw them suddenly split apart and fan out as individuals on both sides of the road, each of them breaking into a steady jog across the muddy and partially frozen ground. For the first time Tommy caught the glint of steel in their hands.
“Yeah,” Fred said, still in that imprisoned voice. “Yeah, I think they’ve seen us.”
“Oh, shit!” one of the other men suddenly started shouting. “Oh, shit! Oh, shit! Oh, shit!”
“Shut up, Filbert!” Obadiah shouted back at the trembling man, and then desperately to Fred, “What do we do, Fred? What do we do?”
“What do we do?” Fred said, as if waking from a comfortable dream. “We do what we came here to do, Obadiah. We go give them bluebellies some holy hell! Who’s with me?”
It was said with the same passion as the entreaty he had offered back in the livery stable. But out here on the road he got a much different reaction from his troops. Tommy lifted both his pistol and voice in support, but surprisingly -- especially to Tommy -- he was the only one. Looking around at the men, several of them had shifted positions, as if being pulled slowly back towards the city.
Fred looked at them all angrily. “You chicken shit bastards!” he shouted at them. “You mean to tell me the only one of you who’s got any hair on his balls is this ten-year-old boy?”
No one answered Fred directly, but several of them spoke hurriedly to one another, Tommy overhearing the two closest to him considering and then agreeing to go back to the livery stable and warn the people waiting there the bluebellies were coming. As they turned to go without so much as a word to their companions, Fred suddenly shouted after them.
“God damn you, Purvis, where they hell are you going? You’re the asshole who talked me into coming out here to teach them goddamn bluebellies a lesson. Remember?”
Purvis and his companion did not respond, did not even turn to acknowledge Fred’s anger. If anything, Tommy thought, they quickened the pace of their retreat. Fred hollered at them furiously, brandishing the hunting rifle he was carrying over his head.
“Goddammit, don’t you leave, Purvis! Come back here or I’m going to kill you the next time I see you. I mean it, Purvis! You are going to find yourself with a great big hole in your goddamn—”
There was a sharp crack and Fred’s throat and the lower half of his face suddenly exploded, bursting forth in a shower of blood, gore, and teeth, a good deal of it raining down on Tommy and his Uncle Seth. The big man remained standing for a second, his eyes rolling around and up into their sockets, and then his knees buckled and he collapsed at Tommy’s feet. In the distance, one of the bluebellies rose from the kneeling position he had assumed and continued his advance, a cloud of rifle smoke dissipating behind him.
After that, the remaining warriors who had ventured forth from the livery stable broke and ran, dashing back to the city as fast of their legs, wobbly both with drink and fear, could carry them. Seth joined them, dragging Tommy along with him, his hand clamped even more firmly around his nephew’s arm. Tommy had no real understanding of what had happened, the image of Fred’s mutilated and truncated face seared into his mind like a mystic puzzle, as he struggled both to keep his feet moving under him and to wipe the hot, syrupy gunk out of his eyes. They quickly covered the distance back to the livery stable and found themselves deep within the crowd they had fought their way through a few minutes ago. The crowd, like the warriors they had desperately tried to touch and possess, were scattering north in all directions. Everything around Tommy was a blur, so many people moving apparently without thought in so many different directions, and amidst it all there was no one Tommy recognized. He momentarily thought of Jackie, the friend he had abandoned at the stable and who had urged him not to go out with the grown men. There was no sign of him, although Tommy quickly discovered it was impossible to both study the frenzy around him, trying to identify familiar faces or forms, and keep his feet from tripping over each other as Seth continued to pull him along. At one point, upon catching a glimpse of a small figure that wore the same type of coat Jackie had been wearing, Tommy lost his footing completely and fell to the ground. Seth turned and hauled him back up, screaming at him to get up, get up, get the fuck up and keep moving, and the look on his uncle’s face frightened Tommy more deeply than anything he had seen on the rise south of town. From that point on, wherever Jackie had gone, Tommy simply hoped he was safe and he tried to put his friend out of his mind.
Seth kept himself and his nephew moving until they were well within the city. Then, unexpectedly, he brought them to a halt in front of a low, dark building in one of Columbia’s ill-swept alleyways. Tommy followed his uncle’s look up once at the sign that hung over the building’s entrance -- a tavern, the letters barely visible beneath the layers of grime -- and then back towards the street from which they had come, frantic people from the livery stable crowd still streaming past the alley Seth had turned down. With his eyes lingering in that direction, Seth pulled Tommy inside the building, across a wooden floor, and towards the bar. The place was deserted with the shades pulled down, candles extinguished, and dead chairs with their legs in the air atop all the tables. Seth picked his nephew up, set him down on one of the barstools and, for the first time since leaving the livery stable, released him from his iron grip. Seth walked purposefully around to the proprietor side of the bar, rummaged beneath it for a few moments, and then suddenly rose with a glass in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.
“Where are we, Uncle Seth?” Tommy asked, uncomfortable in the deep silence of the room and shifting awkwardly on the bar stool.
Seth shook his head and gave Tommy an impatient look as he set the glass on the bar and, with a hand that was noticeably trembling, poured it half full of liquor. Tommy opened his mouth to ask again but thought better of it as he watched his uncle quickly bring the glass to his lips, drain it completely in one swift movement, and then return it to the bar for another generous dollop of whiskey. He was sloppy about it, splashing some whiskey onto his fingers and on the bar, the golden liquid soaking deep into its rough surface. Seth paused momentarily over his second glass of liquor and Tommy took that moment to study his uncle’s face. Very little sunlight found its way down the alley and around the shades hanging in the tavern’s windows, and in that dim and unfamiliar light Seth’s face looked both careworn and deeply lined. His face was dirty, streaked with a grime which had arisen both from the soil of the earth and the flesh of his fellow man. As Seth’s eyes looked into the glass of whiskey before him, it looked more to Tommy like his uncle was staring into a bottomless pit.
“Uncle Seth?” Tommy said uncertainly.
Seth closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then downed his second glass of whiskey, taking it a little more slowly this time, the structures of his throat clearly moving up and down as he swallowed the fiery liquid. When he was finished, he set the glass back down on the bar and slowly brought his gaze down on his young nephew, his teeth gritted against an inner pain.
“I’m all right,” he said phlegmatically. “Just give me a minute and I’ll be all right.”
“What happened, Uncle Seth?” Tommy asked quietly. “I thought we were going to kill us some bluebellies.”
The look Seth leveled at his nephew would have melted iron. “What are you, fucking crazy, or something, Tommy?” he shouted. “Didn’t you see what happened to Fred? You’ve got his goddamn blood all over your face.”
Tommy touched the wetness on his cheeks with a movement almost secretive and self-conscious. Seth picked up the whiskey bottle and shakily poured himself another drink, spilling even more of the liquor onto the bar than he had the last time. In raising the glass to his lips he caught sight of Tommy craning his neck to get a peek at himself in the mirror hung behind the bar. For the first time he noticed the boy’s eyes were glassy and unfocused.
“Oh, shit,” Seth said, slamming his drink down onto the bar and looking around for something to clean Tommy’s face with. A stack of bar towels was at his elbow and he knocked several down onto the floor as he clutched at one and dashed as quickly as he could back around the bar.
“Who’s down there!” a voice suddenly bellowed from atop a set of stairs at the very back of the room. “You’d better git! I’ve got a gun!”
Seth was holding the back of Tommy’s head in one hand and scrubbing his face roughly with the towel in the other. “Marty, bring me some water!” he hollered back at the voice.
“Who is that?” Marty yelled back. “Is that you, Obadiah?”
Seth removed the towel momentarily to inspect his work and discovered, as he had expected, that all he was doing was smearing the gore in wet, ropey sheets all over Tommy’s face. From within that horrific mask his nephew’s wooly eyes stared back at him without a trace of understanding.
“No, it’s Seth, goddammit! Now get your fat ass down here, Marty, and bring me some fucking water!”
Martin Argyle owned the tavern Seth and the others had spent much of the previous night in, and had heard them talk about what they had planned to do in the morning. Seth and the others had asked him to join them -- Marty was a good guy, they knew, hating the bluebellies as much as they did, even spending a year in the army fighting them before getting shot, and drinking with them just as often as not -- but he had strangely avoided committing himself. He lived in a small room above his tavern and had been reluctant to tell them he planned to flee the city this morning before the Union troops arrived. If Seth and his nephew had been ten minutes later in arriving that morning, in fact, they would have missed him completely.
After a few more exchanged shouts he brought the water Seth was demanding and together they cleaned as much of the grime as they could off Tommy and his clothes. In doing so they found the rusty pistol Fred had given Tommy still clenched tightly in the boy’s hand. Prying it loose, Seth removed it and wordlessly set it on the bar behind him. They worked in simple unison with one another, like a pair of surgeons performing an operation they had done several times before, and as they worked, Seth told Marty everything that had happened that morning, even referring to Tommy as a physician might an unconscious patient he was examining.
“They shot Fred right in front of us, Marty. Blew half his goddamn face off. Right in front of Tommy, here. But I don’t think he remembers it. At least I hope he doesn’t.”
“What was he doing out there with you, anyway, Seth? A boy his age on a day like this. He should be heading north with his mother, not heading south to stand toe to toe with a squad of Northern regulars.”
“I know,” Seth said, dunking his towel in the blood-stained water and wringing it out again. “Let’s just get him cleaned up.”
Tommy heard everything they said and understood every word, but decided not to say anything or give them any indication he could hear them. He knew Fred had been shot; knew the bluebellies had done it. He even remembered what the bluebelly who did it looked like. He had been too far away for Tommy to recognize his face, but he had no beard and wore a tall black hat with a big, floppy brim. Tommy saw that much and remembered it clearly. He even knew Fred had been killed and that was why they had all fled so suddenly. None of them wanted to get killed like Fred, because getting killed meant you had lost and the bluebellies had beaten you, and none of them wanted that, not even Tommy. But Tommy would have liked to have stayed and at least tried to kill one of the bluebellies. Wasn’t that what they had gone down there for? Now, he wondered if he would ever get his chance.
When Seth and Marty had done all they could, ruining three of Marty’s bar towels in the process, Marty took a greasy comb out of his pocket and used it to flatten down the boy’s wild hair, and Seth took a step back and inspected their work.
“Are you all right, Tommy?” Seth asked him hesitantly.
Tommy nodded his head, still not sure if he should say anything.
Seth exchanged an uneasy glance with Marty.
“What are you going to do now?” Marty asked.
Seth shook his head. “Take him home, I guess,” he said, his voice clearly indicating he knew it was the right thing to do but that he dreaded the idea of trying to explain this to his sister.
“And then what?” Marty asked.
Seth looked puzzled. “What do you mean, and then what? That’s going to be hard enough with all them bluebellies coming into town.”
“Absolutely,” Marty said directly. “That’s why when you get him home you should gather him and his mother up and get them out of town, Seth. Those Federal soldiers, they’re not going to go easy on this city. They’re going to burn the whole thing down before they’re done, you mark my words. It won’t be safe here for anyone.”
Seth’s look of puzzlement turned to one of anger, not directed, Tommy saw, at the Northern invaders or their prophesized actions but, strangely, at Marty. “Jesus Christ, Marty! What the hell are you talking about? How do you know what the bluebellies are planning to do?”
“I was in the army, remember?” Marty said patiently. “Back at the beginning of the war when we still had a chance of winning it? I’ve faced the bluebellies in action. I know what they’re capable of and what they’ll do with an opportunity like this.”
“Oh, Christ!” Seth bellowed back at Marty, telling him he didn’t know shit and berating him for constantly lording over the group of them because he had actually been in combat. It was partly the liquor talking, Tommy knew that. He had seen the drink change his uncle too many times not to recognize this sudden anger. He’d come to his senses in a few minutes, but Tommy wasn’t willing to wait. Whether or not the man named Marty was successful in talking Seth into fleeing the city, his uncle was determined to return him to his mother, and that was the last place Tommy wanted to go. He wanted to go kill himself a bluebelly. His excitement over the idea was every bit as powerful as it had been back in the livery stable, and his frustration at potentially getting stuck in the first trap he had barely escaped that morning was just as throat-tightening as any of the other frustrations he had faced that day. But strangely, unlike all those other times, inside and out Tommy felt as cool and serene as a barn owl, waiting only for the right moment to swoop silently down and snatch his prey.
He waited until the argument between Seth and Marty had reached what he thought was its hottest point, when his uncle would be most distracted by his anger, and then, leaping off the barstool, he snatched Fred’s pistol from off the bar and scrambled as quickly as he could for the tavern door.
“Whoa, wait a minute!” Seth hollered in surprise, reaching out a restraining arm, but only knocking his fleeing nephew momentarily off balance. Tommy righted himself as neatly as if eluding one of his playmates in the school yard and dashed across the wooden floor, out the door, and into the alleyway beyond.
He didn’t stop there, knowing both his uncle and probably the overweight tavern owner would give chase. He ran as quickly as he could to the end of the alley and into the street it connected to -- the one once choked with the fleeing crowd from the livery stable and now all but deserted. Tommy heard Seth call after him numerous times, but not once did he look back, knowing that to do so would only slow his progress and put him in danger of capture. Instead, he turned as many corners as quickly as he could, hoping to put enough distance between him and his uncle to allow him to duck into some hidden place unseen. It would be a risk, but there was little else he could do, and when his lungs felt about to burst he took the chance, flinging himself against a shut door and fumbling desperately for the knob. It turned, the door opened, and Tommy rushed inside, making sure to close the door securely behind him. Sliding down to the floor with his back against the door, his chest heaving and taking in great gulps of air, Tommy closed his eyes and waited to see if his subterfuge had been successful.
He did not need to wait long. Seconds later, he heard Seth’s footsteps on the street outside -- approaching, passing, and fading off into the distance. The silence that followed was seductive, and Tommy instinctively did not trust it, staying exactly where he was for several more minutes, waiting for his heartbeat to return to something closer to normal. His eyes darted around at his new surroundings and found them darkened like the objects in the tavern had been. The room was an apothecary, with a counter opposite the entrance on which sat a cash register and a pair of scales, now perfectly balanced with nothing on either side of the fulcrum. Beside a small door, shelves covered the wall behind the counter, each lined with a series of small or medium-sized glass jars, dutifully labeled and containing varying quantities of unknown substances. Across from the counter, to Tommy’s left, three wooden chairs sat in front of an enormous shade-covered window, the strong mid-morning sunlight peeking in around the shade’s edges and giving everything within an ethereal glow. There were advertisements and other notices posted on the walls which Tommy could have read had he taken the time to do so, but he knew it wasn’t really necessary. Everything he needed to know about this small space was readily apparent. It was deserted and, with his Uncle Seth far off down the street and probably around the next corner, he would be safe here until he chose to leave.
And it was just that feeling of safety which allowed him to take his next risk. Tucking his pistol into his belt, he crept over to the establishment’s front window, carefully hooking the edge of the shade with an index finger and pulling it back just far enough for him to get a single eye’s view of the street outside. From that vantage point, he could only see a portion of it and only in one direction, but what he saw reassured him. Like the apothecary, it, too, was deserted, its only inhabitants the stacked bales of rotting cotton the city had been unable to export since the Union blockade had completely closed after last year’s harvest. Emboldened, Tommy pulled the shade back a little farther in an attempt to turn his gaze down the street in the other direction and, in doing so, accidently jostled its mechanism just enough to send the shade flying upward and retract noisily around its roller. Sunlight blasted into the room and into Tommy’s unaccustomed eyes, and he leapt up as if he had been shot, darting around in frantic confusion and passing in and out of the only shadows remaining, those thrown by the letters, “R. M. Bagley; Apothecary” stenciled across the window glass.
There was no one within or without the building to have heard the noise, but Tommy knew he couldn’t take any chances, and did not like the idea of remaining in such an exposed location should someone happen by. In its rapid acceleration, the pull cord had wrapped itself around the roller along with the shade, and Tommy did not think he could reach it even if he stood on one of the chairs. He instead turned towards the door behind the counter, finding it unlocked just as the one leading out onto the street had been. Once through his eyes immediately fixated on a flight of stairs and he took them, two at a time, and began moving through the upper story of the building. Everywhere he went, he found the place as empty as the front shop had been. He quickly saw the second level had served as living space for the apothecary and his family. He found two bedrooms -- one obviously for a child, a girl, not much older than he, to gauge by the photograph of her with her parents he found hanging on one of her walls. The man in the photograph -- the apothecary -- wore a stiff white collar and looked nothing like Tommy’s father, like Tommy imagined all fathers were supposed to look. Spectacled and with strictly parted hair, he looked uncomfortable in the photograph, as if posing with his wife and daughter was about the most strenuous thing he had ever been asked to do. The woman appeared much more relaxed, adorned in a long white dress with lace at the neck and wrists, and a wide colorless hat, its brim drooping down and a tremendous white feather floating above it as if held aloft on a cool breeze. Between them, seated on a high stool to put her at a near-equal level with her parents, the young girl looked out at Tommy with severe and penetrating eyes. She was dressed much like her mother, with a wide and silly-looking bow hanging down practically to her ears on either side of her head, but in posture and demeanor she was modeled more directly after her father. Tommy spent a long time, probably longer than he should have, studying the picture and wondering where the three of them were now.
He eventually settled into a parlor at the very front of the building, its two large windows commanding a detailed view of the street below. The shades there had been left up, and Tommy decided against lowering them, judging that at this elevation it was less likely he would be spotted and expecting there would come a time when he would want an unhindered view of everything going on outside. Laying down on one of the short sofas in the room, his head on an embroidered pillow and his shoes hanging off the side of one of the cushions, he began to reflect on everything that had happened to him that day.
His thoughts passed over each of the people who had played an active role since getting out of bed that morning in bringing him to this moment in time. His mother, his sister, his friend Jackie, his uncle Seth, the men who had gathered in the livery stable to confront the Union soldiers -- Obadiah with his long knife, Fred who had given him his pistol, the ones called Filbert and Purvis, and the others -- the advancing bluebellies, especially the one with the black hat who had shot Fred through the throat from that incredible distance, Marty the tavern keeper -- even the stiff-looking apothecary and his family. They all passed through his juvenile mind with its jumbled sense of right and wrong, fun and danger; but none of them lingered there for very long. He did not wish for the safety of his mother’s embrace, did not worry over the unknown fate of his friend, did not grieve over the senseless death of a man he had just met. Tommy Pepper was a ten-year-old boy whose father and older brother had gone off to war when he was seven and had not yet returned, and about all he thought of now and since then was what it might be like to be with them, to do the things they were doing, and to eventually become what they already were. In that, he wasn’t much different than any other ten-year-old boy in the country, North or South.
As he lay there in the apothecary’s parlor, Tommy slowly drifted off to sleep, his body if not his mind exhausted by all the excitement he had experienced and fatigued by its lack of rest the night before. And in the dream that came to him, his thoughts created a reality of their own. He was with his father and brother, attired as they were in the uniform of their country. He had no knowledge of where they were, whether they stood in defense of some Southern city or ready to attack some Northern metropolis, but it was clear from the thousands of others who stood with them in a great, long line of gray that they were about to go into battle. His father and brother looked at him approvingly, and together, a bayoneted rifle clutched in his young hands, they climbed over an embankment and began to charge across an open field toward the entrenched position of their bluebelly foe. Tommy did not so much run as he flew, and as he hurtled across the countryside he saw the Northern cannon ahead of them belch forth both fire and smoke. No grape, no canister, no cannon balls of any kind -- in the war of Tommy’s imagination such things did not exist, and neither did the amputations, decapitations, and the meat-grinder injuries they had inflicted on a hundred thousand American boys. The great gray wedge floated unhindered across the battlefield, led by Tommy’s father at its apex, his officer’s sword extended before him, and when they collided with the bluebelly army, the Enemy fell by the dozens and by the hundreds at the lightest touch of one of their blades. Tommy killed his share, using his bayonet like he had actually been trained in its lethal potential, but there was no tearing of flesh, no spurts of life-giving blood, no cries of bitter anguish. One by one the bluebellies came up to him and took their deaths almost good-naturedly, as if in falling before Tommy’s wish fulfillment they were completing a destiny they had long sought and prepared for. When the battle was over the Enemy lay before Tommy like so many sleeping birds, covering the ground as far as the eye could see exactly as he had once seen in the waking world when his father had taken him to the shoreline during the spring roosting season. The unbroken field of blue made Tommy realize he had supplanted his father at the tip of their attack wave -- that he now, in fact, wore his father’s uniform with its gold braids and gleaming sword -- and that all who had joined him in the battle now stood behind him. Turning, he was surprised to see that like the field before him, the ground behind him was carpeted in bodies, these creating a patchwork of gray and butternut, and each of them with their faces shot off in the bloody and disfiguring manner he had seen earlier that day.
Tommy woke suddenly at the sound of shouting on the street outside the apothecary.
“They’re coming! Come on! Get a move on! They’re coming!”
Tommy bounded off the sofa and, much like he had done downstairs, ran frantically about the room until an awareness of where he was and what was going on came back to him. Gathering a few of those wits together, he hunkered himself down on the floor, crept over to one of the front windows, and peered over its bottom ledge and down onto the street outside.
The first thing he saw was the fire. It seemed like the entire street was on fire, and it took him a few moments to realize it was the rotting bales of cotton which had been set ablaze. And once he had identified that he saw the men running amongst the bales, men with torches in their hands, deliberately setting them on fire.
“Come on!” one of them shouted, his voice coming through the window glass as if it wasn’t even there. “Move it! Light that goddamn cotton and let’s get the hell out of here!”
They were not bluebellies. It was difficult for Tommy to comprehend why men from Columbia would set their own cotton on fire, but he had no trouble seeing the truth of it with his own eyes. In a few moments more they were gone, leaving behind them brightly burning bonfires where each pile of cotton had previously been placed. Like the voices, Tommy could hear the roar and feel the heat of the fires coming through the glass, and he shrank away instinctively, crouching against the wall beneath the window.
The memory of his dream was already gone, his mind now preoccupied with what was going on outside the window and what it all meant. The man had said ‘they’ were coming. He was frantic about it, as if ‘they’ were right around the corner, on their very heels. But who were ‘they?’
It wasn’t long before Tommy had his answer, and he found himself both thrilled and a little frightened by it. ‘They’ were, of course, the bluebellies -- Sherman’s army, the one he had marched from Atlanta and then from Savannah -- and they had finally arrived in Columbia in force. Tommy first heard the rumble of their footsteps on the dirt-covered streets of his city, then saw the clouds of dust they stirred rise up over the tops of the buildings on the other side of the street as they progressed up another thoroughfare, then felt the vibrations they sent through the apothecary’s wooden structure as they approached his location -- all before a saw a single bluebelly on the street below him. And when they did appear, they did not appear individually or in a small group as they had on the rise south of town. They appeared all at once and by the thousands as they poured up the street in a tremendous blue wave. Had it not been for the way they parted, passed, and reformed around the burning cotton bales without extinguishing them, Tommy would have thought the city was being flooded by a great blue ocean surge. There were so many of them and they moved so quickly Tommy had difficulty picking out individuals in the mass, but he saw dozens, maybe hundreds, of the black hats like the one worn by the bluebelly who had shot Fred. They didn’t all wear them. Tommy saw plenty of blue caps and bare heads speckled throughout the throng, so they couldn’t have been part of their standard uniform, but there were enough of them to indicate they weren’t a single soldier’s fanciful concept of fashion. They had a special meaning to the bluebellies, Tommy reasoned, and that thought, the idea the bluebellies weren’t all the same, even to the extent some of them wore black hats, some of them wore blue caps, and some of them went bare headed, filled Tommy with an uneasy feeling he could neither fully identify nor explain.
In fact, the more he looked, the more he realized each and every one of the bluebellies shouting and streaming past his upper story window was a unique individual. It was difficult to do for long periods of time -- it was like trying to pick out individual birds in a swift moving flock -- and it made him dizzy if he focused on it for too long, but when he tried he was able to see this one was a young man with blonde hair and a gray blanket rolled up and slung over his back, and that one was an older man with a full beard and three canteens flopping up and down at his belt as he tramped along, and that one had one of those floppy black hats on and he, by God, was a colored man with a great big barrel chest and the stub of a cigar clamped between his teeth, and so on and so on and so on until Tommy had to fuzz out his vision and turn them all back into the swift moving blue river they first appeared to be.
Tommy pulled himself away from the window, slumped down against the wall again, and found himself wondering how many bluebellies there were, not just outside the window or in Columbia but in the entire world. And could they all be individuals like the ones he had just seen? And if so, what did that mean? Why were they here? What were they doing? What did they want? Although he was too young to fully comprehend it and would fail to integrate it into his thinking and actions in the hours ahead, this glimpse of individual Federal soldiers, something he had never seen before and had never even really imagined, made him for the first time realize his underlying assumption about bluebellies was fundamentally flawed -- an assumption that now, being challenged by this surprising new visual evidence, revealed itself as never fully formed in the first place. Bluebellies were not … what was the word? Pieces? Instruments? They were not part of some amorphous and ill-defined entity known as The Enemy. Bluebellies were, in fact, people.
It was an idea almost too far-fetched to believe. Peering up over the window ledge again Tommy was able to confirm that, to all outward appearances, it was evidently true. The bluebellies continued to stream past the window, rushing like mad to get somewhere other than where they were, and each and every one of them was a unique individual. Some young, some old, some white, some black -- but all men of one stripe or another. And as the realization sunk into Tommy, a good deal of the initial fear he had felt at the first massed appearance of the bluebellies began to subside. They were not, after all, monsters, as he and his friends had often imagined them to be. They were not ten feet tall, none of them were breathing fire, and, as far as Tommy could tell, it didn’t appear a single one of them had eaten a baby that morning for breakfast. There were hundreds, thousands of them, too many to really count, but they were all just men, and if that was so, then any one of them could be killed just as easily as any other man could. Killed, for example, by a bullet from a rusty old pistol a giant named Fred had given him.
With his course set firmly in his mind, Tommy crept away from the parlor window, down the stairs from the living quarters, and into the apothecary itself, the pistol held out in front of him the entire way as if he expected one of the bluebellies to jump out and attack him at any moment. He was going to do it. He was a little intimidated when we saw the mass of soldiers in blue streaming past the storefront window -- the lower elevation giving them a more menacing appearance than they had had from above -- but he steeled himself against the fear and redoubled his determination to see this thing through to the end. He had fled from his mother that morning, and gone out on the rise south of town with the warriors from the livery stable, and eluded capture from his Uncle Seth, and had explored the deserted rooms of this vacated building -- he had done many things this day he had never done before and had felt trepidation about doing each before attempting them, and they had all worked out just fine. Knowing this was just one more task like all the others he crossed the room to the outer door. Hesitating only momentarily, thinking of what he would tell Jackie and the kids back at school after he had killed himself a bluebelly, he turned the knob, yanked the door open, and rushed out into the street.
He immediately found himself face to face with a Union soldier, a sergeant by the number of stripes on his sleeve and his coat open over a ruffled red shirt, whose forward progress had been brought to a halt by Tommy’s sudden appearance, while the rush of other soldiers continued unabated around them. Tommy leveled his pistol directly at the man’s chest and pulled the trigger.
“Bang!” Tommy unconsciously said as he had done hundreds of times pointing a stick at one of his friends in the school yard, and both his voice and the roar of the crowd around him easily drowned out the dry click of the pistol’s hammer falling down on an empty chamber.
The sergeant flinched, exactly as if he had actually been shot, but quickly realized his error and looked menacingly back at Tommy.
“Bang! Bang!” Tommy shouted, pulling the trigger two more times and thrusting the pistol forward as if to add the force of his own life to the death he expected to spew forth.
The sergeant’s face broke out in a bemused grin as he stepped forward and easily took the rusty pistol out of Tommy’s hand. “Very funny, kid,” he said gruffly, opening the chamber and visually verifying the weapon was not loaded. “Now, get the hell out of my way before I knock your goddamn head off.”
Tommy stood motionless before the Union sergeant, shocked both that the pistol had not fired and that the bluebelly was not dead.
After tucking Fred’s pistol into his own belt, the sergeant stuck out a stiff arm and unceremoniously knocked Tommy backwards and off his feet. Tommy landed roughly on his buttocks in the dirt, and the sergeant was suddenly past him, moving on down the street as he had been prior to Tommy’s appearance.
His pride more wounded than anything else, Tommy called out after the sergeant and, eventually, at the flooding masses of bluebellies that continued to stream past him, taunting them with every curse and dirty word he could think of. Scooting back against the façade of the apothecary, Tommy called them all cowards and rascals and finks and, of course, damned dirty bluebellies, but none of them stopped to confront him. Indeed, it was very much like none of them even heard him.
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“Tommy” is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can follow him on Twitter @ericlanke or contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
Image Source
https://www.history.com/topics/american-civil-war/shermans-march
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