That evening, they had a little party. Though the company had died back to half its original strength of one hundred and two, there was only enough beer for every man to have a few swallows directly from the tap. Fortunately every third turkey was stuffed with a bottle of whiskey. Aaron Stanz called it oil of gladness and poured a cup for Tomo, who took it behind a wedge-tent and did not drink it, but only held it under his nose, and thought of his papa, because when they were very small he and Gob had snuggled up to him, sometimes, after he’d drunk himself senseless.
While Tomo was savoring his cup of whiskey, another boy came up and accosted him rudely. The boy was about Tomo’s age, and very fair; blond as a broom straw and white as a grub. Without so much as a how-do-you-do he knocked Tomo’s tin whiskey cup from his hand, then kicked him over and sat on Tomo’s belly. The boy pulled out a set of drumsticks and played a brutal little number on Tomo’s head.
“Looky here,” said the boy. “There’s only one drummer in this regiment, and it ain’t you.” He raised his sticks again, but Tomo had grabbed his cup out of the dirt, and he crushed it against the boy’s face before he could bring his sticks down. The boy fell over to the side, and in a moment Tomo was straddling his chest. Tomo took the sticks and drove them into the ground on either side of the boy’s head.
“I got nothing to do with drumming, I’m a bugler,” Tomo said, taking Betty out from under his jacket. Aaron Stanz had told him to hide her there, because he wanted to surprise his comrades with music, a last gift. Not only did Company C have no fifer, the Ninth’s regimental band had been absent since September of ’62, when the government had refused to salary them any longer. Tomo blew a note straight into the small white ear of his assailant. “See?” he said. “I got nothing to do with drumming.”
“I can’t hear a thing!” screamed the boy.
Aaron Stanz dragged Tomo off of him. The noise had attracted a swarm of men.
“He deafened me!” the boy wailed, sitting up now, and brandishing his sticks again.
“Shut up, Johnny,” said Aaron Stanz. The men were looking at the bugle, glinting in the light from the torches that lined the camp streets.
“I forgot to tell you, boys. The Fenzmaus is a bugler. Isn’t that a lucky thing?” The men of the company stared wordlessly at Aaron Stanz. Then there was a rush of murmuring all around the circle.
“Jesus sent me here to play for you,” said Tomo. The boy called Johnny laughed cruelly.
“Also, spiel mal!” said a man, whose name, Tomo would come to know, was Raimund Herrman. He picked Tomo up and put him on one of his massive shoulders, and then pranced down the company street to a big cook fire. Tomo stood on the empty beer barrel, which some clever soldier had labeled “molasses” to confuse the authorities, and blew out tune after tune, while the men of Company C drank and danced with each other. Tomo blew marches, because they were soldiers, and vile polkas, because he knew that was the sort of music his grandmother liked, and she was the only German whose tastes and habits he knew. Men called out song names to him, begging him to play “Anna Engelke,” or “Romberg Park: Elf Uhr,” or “Liebe Birgit.” Tomo knew none of those songs, but if they hummed a few bars he could make something up, and that seemed to satisfy them. The boy called Johnny skulked out of the darkness, with his big Eagle drum, and though he sat far away from Tomo, he offered up a friendly beat to Tomo’s bugling. Men from other companies came to listen, and they danced, too, until the dancing pairs were four and five deep around the fire.
Tomo could have played all night, but the party only lasted until somebody got the idea of serenading Colonel Kammerling in his tent. A procession was formed, with Tomo and Johnny at its head. They marched the revelers across the camp, to the Colonel’s tent, where they fell into rank and sang in voices that were deep and lovely and drunk.
Colonel Kammerling appeared behind an adjutant who was shouting himself hoarse trying to silence the crowd. There were cries from the men of “Speech, speech!” The Colonel stepped up to Tomo, who was still tooting merrily, snatched the bugle from his mouth, then handed it back, bell first. Tomo took it meekly, because Colonel Kammerling was a severe-looking gentleman.
“Go to bed, boys,” was all he gave for a speech. He turned and went back to his tent, and the party was suddenly over. As soon as he stopped playing, Tomo felt very sleepy. He clutched Betty to his chest and followed Aaron Stanz back to his dog tent, where he slept between Stanz and another soldier, Private Frohmann. He found he could not sleep in the middle, so he rolled over Aaron Stanz, who mumbled “Frieda!” at him, and kissed the back of his head, and snored like a hog. That night, Tomo dreamed that his brother was looking for him all over their small room. Under the rickety bed, in the old wardrobe with the shrieking hinges — over and over again Gob looked in the same places, over and over again he asked of the air, “Tomo, where are you?”
Aaron Stanz shook Tomo awake at five o’ clock the next morning.
“Get up, Schlaftier!” he said. “Get up, Fenzmaus! You’ve got your work to do!” Aaron Stanz dragged him, still half asleep, across the silent camp, and stood him on the barrel near the ashes of the previous night’s great fire. Johnny the drummer boy was waiting for them. Tomo rubbed his eyes and yawned, and looked out over the slumbering camp. The air, warm and heavy, hung in low blue patches between the tents. Tomo yawned again and said, “It ain’t even lightened yet.” But he took a deep breath and blew the assembly. It rang out brashly through the still air. Johnny said it was too queer, the bugle and drum playing for infantry. “You won’t last a week in this company!” he yelled at Tomo, then stormed off, beating angrily on his drum. “Don’t you pay any mind to him,” said Aaron Stanz.
Tomo played the call again, and a wave of steady grumbling washed up and down the company street. The men cried, “We ain’t no hay-burners!” and “Put the bugler in the guardhouse!” and then, when Tomo played the call a third time, someone shouted, “Kill that rooster!” This last precipitated a moment of perfect silence. Then the shouter was shouted at in fast ruthless-sounding German that Tomo could not follow, for all that his grandmother had often cursed at him, fast and ruthless, in her native tongue.
Tomo and Aaron Stanz walked back to their tent against a steady flow of men headed towards the sinks. When they arrived, Aaron Stanz kicked awake his tentmate, who sat up and rubbed violently at his face. Aaron Stanz handed Tomo a cup of water, which he drank, not realizing he was supposed to wash with it. Aaron Stanz and Private Frohmann laughed until they cried, while a murderous rage built up in Tomo, and he was about to strike out at someone when Aaron Stanz picked him up and hugged him, and shook him, and hugged him again, and declared him the most precious Fenzmaus there ever was.
Tomo played Company C through its day. It was a happy day, for him and for them. It was happy for them because they had something more than dry drum music to regulate their day, and happy for Tomo because this was precisely the sort of life he had envisioned for himself, a life beyond Homer, beyond his mama’s miserable humbugging world. The situation lacked only Rebs to lick, and he did not doubt that they would come. It lacked his brother, too. Tomo’s anger against him was ebbing, so he was glad and not glad that Gob was not with him.
Tomo tooted reveille while the company stood at parade rest, all of the men in full uniform, though if you looked a few hundred yards away to where the Fifty-Ninth Ohio stood in rank you would see men still in various states of undress, some without coats, some without shoes, a few only in hats and shirts. Not only was the Ninth an all-German regiment, they were the sort of Germans that Tomo had never encountered before, not the crazed, superstitious sort, but the neat, hardworking sort. The regiment was famous throughout the whole army for its efficiency and bravery, pitied only because it could not keep a chaplain. But the Ninth drove away its chaplains on purpose. By and large the men were skeptics, except for a few Bavarian Catholics, who bothered the Protestant chaplains with their devoted Mariolatry.