Daughter of a Daughter of a Queen Read online

  A unit marched past, and every head swiveled in my direction. Shame heated my cheeks.

  Solomon wrote two words on a piece of paper and stabbed the sign into one of the staves like he wished he was punching it between my ribs.

  “What’s my crime?” I asked.

  “BAD COOK.”

  “That’s no crime.”

  “To the General it is. To me it is. Whether you steal it or burn it, you’re taking his food.”

  “Solomon, wait. You can’t—”

  “Can’t what? Leave you here to piss and shit down your leg until the sun turns your tongue into a stone in your mouth? You got off light, Queenie. Only reason you’re even still alive is ’cause the General took an interest in you.”

  “Solomon, I tried.”

  He thumped his hand down on the top of the barrel so hard I staggered and tumped over. No turtle on its back could of been more helpless than I was with the stumps of my lower arms flailing about for the ground they couldn’t reach and my feet kicking uselessly on account of my knees being trapped in too tight to bend much.

  Solomon glowered at me, his arms folded across his chest, and watched like I was a beetle on its back, waving its tiny arms in the air. Finally, he righted me. Again he pounded so hard on the barrel that my teeth clacked together. “You maybe might of tried with your hands,” he thundered. “But you for God sure never tried with your heart. ’Cause you think you’re too good, don’t you? Too good to help make a decent meal for men ready to lay they lives down so your pitiful self can be free.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d heard him go on like that, but at that moment I couldn’t put up with one more annoyance, so I came back, “The Yank soldiers? They ain’t fighting for me. You, neither. We’re nothing to them. They’re fighting ’cause they’d get shot or hung if they didn’t.”

  Solomon shook his head like I was too sorry to waste words on and said, “I hope you rot in there. What you deserve.”

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of calling after him, begging to be let loose. There wasn’t anything that cook could dish out that I couldn’t take.

  First few days were tolerable. Sun hadn’t sucked all the water from me yet and I had figured out a way to take the weight off my legs by bracing up against my knees and posterior. If it wasn’t for having to pee down my leg, I’d of enjoyed the time off from fetching water and scrubbing pots.

  Two nights of not sleeping and days with no water, though, and I was all kinds of miserable. My legs had seized up and I came near to strangling myself the few times I dozed off and went slack. Every bone in my body ached and my mouth was dry as dust. Worst, though, was when the soldiers came by to laugh and make smart remarks. A couple of them relieved themselves on the side of the barrel.

  One joker cracked an egg on my head. I appreciated what dripped into my mouth, but the green-headed flies that came for what dried in my hair drove me half-crazy. The lowest moment, though, was when General Sheridan rode past on his black gelding. I knew he recognized me because his face curdled with disgust. Shame made me wish I would hurry up and die on the spot.

  Knowing I would either die in the barrel or come out as a laundress or a hardtack girl opened my eyes to my own mule-headedness. Suddenly, I realized that I had taken to thinking like a man. Which is to say, I had stopped allowing the possibility that I might ever be wrong.

  With my eyes open, I finally saw what had been in front of me the whole time. I saw that behind the scraggly whiskers most of the “men” in camp were boys no older than me in age but a heap younger in knowing. And, like boys, what they did most of when they weren’t marching or cleaning was play.

  As soon as the bugler blew what I’d learned was retreat in the evening, all the soldier boys fell to cutting up. They ran foot races, wrestled, and made towers of themselves, stacking one on top of the other in a pyramid with the smallest drummer boy scrambling up a staircase of soldiers to perch at the top for a few trembling seconds until they all collapsed. They played cards, checkers, dominoes, chuck-a-luck, and a Yankee game called baseball, running full-out if they managed to whack a wad of horsehair tied into a ball.

  What they were most partial to, however, was fighting. They fought foraged cocks when they could get them. They conducted heated battles between ants and the lice they picked out of bedding, the seams of uniforms, and off their own bodies. But mostly, what they fought was each other.

  When they’d broken enough bones doing that or just generally wore each other out, they talked about the sweethearts and wives they’d left behind. One loudmouth whose eyes crossed put it out in his strange Yankee talk that his girl was “none of your one-horse gals.” I took that to be good, as was his brag that she was a “regular stub and a twister.” He liked to read her letters out loud. And, though they mostly concerned how the hens were or were not laying, she always ended with the sweet words “My pen is bad, my ink is pale; my love for you shall never fail.” I reckoned stubs and twisters weren’t too particular about their sweethearts and would take even a cross-eyed loudmouth into their hearts.

  When campfires grew bright in the gloom of an evening, the soldiers would hunker down and one of them’d commence tootling on a fife or sawing away at a fiddle. Then, sounding like a choir of track hounds with toothache, they’d sing sad songs about the dear mothers and sweet homes they’d most likely never see again. The singing eventually made the younglings among them put their heads down between their knees, and then their shoulders would rise up and down, and shake from crying. They were that homesick. And scared of dying.

  The third night I was barreled up, I’d been shivering and listening to soldiers snore for a few hours when a little fellow in a short drummer boy’s jacket tippy-toed out of the darkness. He was one of the boys I’d seen crying over his dear mother and sweet home. He had no more whiskers yet than God gave a guppy and I feared he had come to jab me with his saber or some other such mischief.

  Instead, he held his tin cup to my lips and tipped cool water down my parched gullet, then fed me tidbits of salt pork and hardtack he’d saved out from his own rations. He’d already gone to the trouble of softening the jawbreakers in coffee and picking the drowned weevils out.

  As he refilled the cup from his canteen and watered me again, he whispered that, though most of the others didn’t care any more about the coloreds than they did the lice that was eating them alive, him and his folks back in Maine were abolitionists. I had heard of such before when Old Mister would cuss the like so fierce he jeopardized his religion. I never reckoned, though, that such a cloven-hoofed menace would appear and hold a cup of water to my lips. Or that one would whisper in a sweet voice, high and piping as a meadowlark, that he’d joined up to fight so that I could be free and never again have to live like some slave he knew of name of Uncle Tom. Whose master, Simon Legree, made Old Mister seem like Baby Jesus in the manger.

  I thanked him for the food and water and for coming to fight for me.

  He patted me on the head for some time, enjoying the springy feel of my hair. This caused him to talk about how much he missed his good old dog Buttons. After sniffling back a few tears, he slipped off back into the night.

  Next day, a strange quiet fell over the camp. The men didn’t heap themselves up in big piles or wager on which fellow could drag a Dutch oven farthest with a rope between his teeth. Instead, they huddled up and jawed the way men on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line are wont to do, with a lavish of pointing this way and that, chin stroking, and undertaker-serious nods. Then one’d break away from his confab and scamper off to caucus with another one. I’d catch a few words here and there. Most puzzling of all was how they kept asking each other if they’d “seen the elephant.” The day ended without a touch of the usual merriment for a new grimness had fallen on the camp.

  Before sunup, Solomon roused me out of a crouching half-sleep by slamming a dress, apron, and comb down on the head of the barrel and declaring, “Up to me, I’d let you rot. General�
�s taken pity on you, though. Fairer sex and all that bull hooey. He even gave me the money to get you outfitted from his own pocket. So if you want to come outta there, you gon have to come out proper. You come out ready to help the General win this war. You come out in a dress, your hair fixed. You come out with your mind right. You come out like you are somebody, hear me?” He shrugged and added, “Or you stay in this barrel and starve. That’d be my druthers. Either way, we move out today.”

  Grumpy as he was, Solomon couldn’t tamp down the excitement in his voice when he added, “Shenandoah Valley Campaign’s about to commence. Gon drive them cursed Seceshes off of Mr. Lincoln’s back porch and all the way back down South to hell where they belong.” He started to stomp off like he had a Johnny Reb waiting to be herded back to hell at that very moment.

  “Solomon. Solomon!” I yelled at his retreating back.

  “What,” he answered, prickly, not turning around.

  “Thought you said a female’d get tore up.”

  “A female without a man or another whore with a pepper pot to watch her back will. But if you come out proper, you’ll come out as the General’s girl, and no one’ll mess with you.”

  I had my useless arms out waving at the dress I couldn’t reach. “Mind handing me that?”

  He didn’t move.

  “Sir,” I added.

  He still didn’t budge.

  I sweetened my voice and said in a girly simper, “I would be much obliged for your help, sir.”

  Solomon handed me the dress.

  Long before the sun rose, I’d been to the creek and was washed up and dressed. My life had been saved and I set my mind hard on making it into one the General would tip his hat to next time he saw me. A salute. That’s what I really wanted. I wanted General Sheridan to look on me and see someone worthy of saluting.

  When I had my hair plaited back smooth and neat like Clemmie had showed me, I presented myself to Solomon. He looked up from stoking the fires under the officers’ coffee water, nodded, and said, “All right then, baby sister. I hope you’re ready to see the elephant.”

  Chapter 11

  The elephant was war and, over the next few weeks, I came to know the beast from tail to trunk. But that morning, when I went back to the officers’ mess, those who saw me took me for an entirely different person than the reprobate they figured had perished in the barrel. Solomon had put it out that, though I was a girl, the General had me under his protection and they were to leave me be or answer direct to Little Phil. That was as good as quarantine with yellow fever for keeping the men away.

  All that day we crammed Solomon’s kitchen wagon with pots, ladles, Dutch ovens, various knives and long forks, coffeepots, grinders, and what stores of sugar, salt pork, parched corn, desecrated vegetables, and flour as remained. The soldiers packed their knapsacks with field rations of hardtack, salt pork, and coffee. Then they stuffed in their Bibles, their letters from home, and tintypes of their wives and sweethearts. With tent halves and bedrolls strapped on the packs, they were ready to march.

  By the next morning, the tent town was torn back down to muddy ground polka-dotted with black holes where cook fires had been, the stink of latrines now replacing the clean smell of the woods. From dawn all through the night, companies of infantrymen marched out, cavalrymen rode, and each regiment’s wagons followed carrying the field officers’ baggage, rations, telegraph equipment, blacksmith necessaries, and kitchen supplies.

  Swallow-tailed guidon banners snapped in the breeze, fresh-polished tack creaked, bridles jingled, horses nickered, and sergeants hollered out, “Left! Right! Left! Right! Left!” for the hay and straw had been removed from the new boys’ shoes and they marched like soldiers. Our columns must have stretched four miles or more. I fell into rhythm, marching with them alongside the cook wagon.

  We made a fine parade and, though I was tickled to be part of it, it didn’t take more than a mile before I missed my britches for I had lost the knack of accommodating a skirt. Where britches were barely more trouble than a second skin, Solomon’s infernal dress was like wearing a long broom. I marched the miles, dusty and muddy alike, sweeping up the trail with that cursed garment.

  I’d swapped a few taters for a broken-down old pair of brogans from the graves detail and I had them strapped on my feet with pieces of twine. There were so many holes in the soles, though, that it was little better than going barefoot. I kept falling behind the cook wagon every time I veered off into the woods to fetch strips of smooth bark off a paperback maple to stick in the shoes and cover the holes. After my last bark hunt, I had to run to catch up with Solomon. When I did, he peered down at me, panting alongside the wagon, and grunted out, “Up here,” like each word was costing him a greenback.

  I didn’t wait for a second invitation, but hopped onto the buckboard’s foretop next to him and we rode on in style, part of the Army of the Potomac’s Cavalry Corps under the command of Major General Philip Sheridan himself. Up high, I saw that the Shenandoah Valley was as pretty a stretch of country as the Maker had ever fashioned, green as a billiards table where it wasn’t covered with miles of field crops, mostly wheat that shimmied golden in the sunshine.

  It was a right chill morn and there was enough of a nip to the air that I welcomed the feel of Matildy’s warm body curling about my neck. Solomon shook his head at the sight of his pet draped over my shoulders and muttered, “Just like a woman. Go to the one hates her.”

  “I don’t hate her,” I protested. “Like everything else about the army, she’s tolerable once you get used to her.”

  The cool weather and excitement of moving out worked a tonic on Solomon and he actually laughed as he snapped the reins on the mules. And though the contrary beasts didn’t vary their speed a whit, Solomon sat up like a dandy on race day and crowed, “Damn Rebs won’t be crawling up this valley any time soon, slipping in Mr. Lincoln’s back door. Think they can steal the election from him.” He snorted at the idea then blowed on about how bad it made Mr. Lincoln look that he couldn’t even sweep the Rebs off his own back porch, which is what he called the Shenandoah Valley.

  Seems all I had to do was put on a dress, plait up my hair, and call him “sir” and Solomon became my buddy gee. He jabbered on for the next few hours like we’d been old campaigners together forever. And, though I never would of told him, Solomon Yarnell showed himself to be the second-smartest man I’d ever known, right after Daddy. He turned that clanking, creaking wagon into a classroom and his subject was the Civil War.

  “We don’t get started cleaning them Seceshes outta the Shenandoah Valley before the election come November,” Solomon explained, “Yanks might take a mind to elect that chickenshit traitor Union General George McClellan.” Only person Solomon hated more than Old Jube, the fearsome Rebel General Jubal Early, who was leading the Rebs we were chasing, was Lincoln’s opponent in the election six weeks away, the chickenshit traitor McClellan who’d once commanded the whole Union Army.

  “Back in ’62,” Solomon went on, “Lincoln gave that chickenshit traitor one hundred and twenty thousand men. Blast if McClellan couldn’t of squashed Lee right there and then. Drowned the whole damn Confederacy like the sack of rabid pups they are. War’d been over two years ago. But would that pusillanimous nancy boy attack? No, he would not! Kept telling Abe he had to have reinforcements. McClellan stalled. Wouldn’t attack. Gave that sick pup of a Confederacy time to grow into the rabid dog it become. Now McClellan has the gall to run against Old Abe on a peace platform. Peace platform! Know what that means?”

  I thought about Mama and Clemmie and answered, “Means slavery would be legal and even if you could escape there wouldn’t be anywhere in the whole country to run to.”

  “All right, baby sister, you listening.” Solomon nodded approvingly. “You learning. If the chickenshit traitor gets elected, it all goes back the way it was. Means we live in a country ruled by the wicked and all the fighting and all the dying and all the misery was for naught.” His vo
ice was mournful and lost when he repeated, “Everything goes back way it was. Only worse.”

  A cold, sick feeling came over me as I thought of what the Rebs would do if they ever got power over us again.

  Thousands of feet pounding in time like a big heart beating became the music that chased off such gloomy thoughts. We were the Army of the Shenandoah and we were marching to battle to keep Old Abe in the White House, to keep the country together, and to rid it of the abomination of slavery. We’d win this war for Mr. Lincoln. All of us. Together.

  When the sawed-off drummer boys and fife players went to tootling and pah-rumping, the soldiers and all us contrabands joined in singing, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” Our voices joined up together and rolled on mighty as a wave and caused tears to jump out of me from a place I never knew existed before.

  I swallowed them back hard and fast, but Solomon caught sight of their gleam in the hard morning light and nodded. Just one slow dip of that crumpled top hat of his, but it was enough to show that the very same tears were stinging his eyes. That he knew what was in my heart because it was in his heart, too: we, all of us marching south, were in this together.

  Chapter 12

  For the next few weeks all I saw of the great beast of war was the tail. The hind end of all the battles fought up at the front lines. And those battles were so terrible and so plenty that in a war that had nothing but terrible battles, the road from Washington, D.C., to Richmond that cut through the Shenandoah Valley came to be called the Bloodiest Hundred Miles in America.

  Just after dawn, the boys marched off to face the enemy, stepping high and acting brave even if they’d just aired their paunches, heaving up that morning’s coffee and hardtack. The lucky eventually came back, stunned faces black with gunpowder, the smell of cordite and fear heavy on them.