“You seen one of Reb cities,” said Aaron Stanz, “you seen all.” But Tomo had never seen a Reb city. He imagined Chattanooga, a city full of Negroes and furious widows. He made up a song as he walked and called it “Chattanoogey.”
That first day, his feet were sore and bleeding: his ill-fitting boots had pinched his toes up all funny, and he had walked the nail right off his left big toe. He shook the nail out of his boot and threw it on the cook fire. Aaron Stanz told him to make a wish on it, so Tomo wished that Gob might wander miraculously into camp, having pursued him down from Homer. And then he burned his hand snatching the nail from the fire, because it seemed to him that he had made an ill-advised wish. He didn’t want his brother here. He put the nail back in the fire, wishing that a snake would crawl into the bed he had formerly shared with Gob and bite him on the ass. And then he wished he had another nail, to wish his brother to him after all.
With a tin plate balanced on his knees for a desk, he wrote a letter:
Secessia, August 23, 1863
Brother,
Well, this is the life, and you are missing out on it. No Mama and no Buck, no humbugging. Every night I eat my fill, and people here give a bugler his due. Is this what you feared, to live a good life? When you are sensible again, you can join me and see, though maybe by then Richmond will already be burned.
Yours in war,
Jigadier Brindle T. J. Woodhull
p. s. see how rapidly they have promoted me you can be my adjutant
He bought an envelope and stamp from the sutler and put the letter in his coat pocket, where it remained unmailed. From the sutler he also bought an abundance of pies, because it occurred to him that he had not yet spent a dime of the money he’d brought with him — ten whole dollars hoarded over the course of many months from the family’s humbug profits. He went back to Company C with pies stacked in his arms, and was hailed by every man as a righteous pie boy. It was seven men to a pie, but somehow there seemed enough to go around.
After supper, the Weghorst twins threw down four square crate tops to make a dance floor. Tomo and Johnny and a fiddler from the Second Minnesota played while the boys of Company C danced, not in pairs this time, but singly. Everybody had his own dancing style — Aaron Stanz kept his arms straight at his sides, his palms turned up behind him, and moved his head like a chicken while his feet skibbled furiously. The Weghorst twins kept their hands and arms above their heads, and bent from side to side at the waist, towards each other and away again. Raimund Herrman pointed his nose at the black sky, put his hands on his hips, and pedaled furiously. Tomo spun around in a circle while he played, till he got so dizzy he fell over, and thought he would lose his pie, from the dizziness and the heaving, shaking laugh that he laughed.
They marched through the Cumberland Mountains, where Tomo blew echoing notes out into misty valleys and Aaron Stanz collected late-blooming wildflowers for his wife. He pressed them into a Bible he only opened for that purpose. It was almost empty of them now, but had been stuffed full when he went home. Stanz told Tomo how he had spent a whole night laying them out for his wife on the floor of their home, naming them and telling her where he had found each flower. “Dwarf irises,” he said to Tomo, tickling him under the chin with one. He asked if he wouldn’t like one to send home to his mama, and then he blushed and asked Tomo to forgive him. He said he would take Tomo home with him to Cincinnati, when the fighting was all done, where sweet Frieda would bake him molasses cookies the very size and shape of a whole boy.
When they came to the place where Battle Creek empties into the Tennessee, Tomo got his first glimpse of a live Rebel. Pickets faced each other across the river. Tomo went down with Johnny, who called out across the water, “Good evening, you damned Rebels!”
“Go to hell, you damned Yankee,” came the reply.
“I got newspapers,” said Johnny, “and coffee, if you got smoke.”
“Hold on, you son of a bitch,” said the Reb. Tomo could just make him out if he squinted. It was a cloudless night, and the moon was bright, but the river was wide. The Rebel bent over the water and pushed something out. It was a little boat, made from bark and string. It sailed slowly across. Johnny caught it downstream, lifted it from the water, and walked away back towards camp, serenely ignoring the escalating curses of the Rebel, who fired blindly at them when he ran out of curses. His fire was answered by other pickets. Tomo and Johnny ran away back to Aaron Stanz’s dog tent, where they wrapped themselves up in blankets and passed Aaron Stanz’s long pipe, filled with Rebel tobacco, between them.
The Rebels were gone in the morning, and the brigade began to pass over the river. Company C was one of the first to cross. Tomo sat in the bow of a dugout canoe while Aaron Stanz and the Weghorst twins rowed. Tomo looked for Confederate spoor on the far shore, and found only a discarded butternut hat, which had a tear in the brim. He stomped it into the earth, then kicked it into the river.
They camped at the river for a few days, then began a slow journey over Raccoon Mountain, where Tomo saw not a single raccoon, though he was constantly on the lookout for them. Aaron Stanz had presented him with a Springfield, sawed off to fit him, and Tomo practiced loading, tearing the paper cartridge with his teeth, pouring in the powder and the minié ball, then ramming the paper down with his stubby ramrod. He fired at Rebel oaks and cedars and squirrels, and one Rebel sparrow, missing all the animals and all but two trees.
The mood of Company C was turning. Tomo played them somber music at the fire while they acquainted him with the dead of the Ninth, most famous among whom was their former colonel, the much respected Robert McCook, of the Cincinnati “fighting McCooks”—he had four brothers also at war. He was quoted before every battle by his most ardent admirers: “The Secessionists are our brothers no more. If they will not submit, then they must be exterminated.” Colonel McCook was killed outside Athens, Alabama. Sick in an ambulance, he was ambushed by a Mississippi regiment, who stabbed him ten times and set his body on fire. These same Mississippians had already earned the enmity of the Ninth when they buried some Niners facedown after Shiloh. Every Niner hoped to shoot one.
Tomo’s big toe hurt terribly the whole slow way over the mountains, and he was tired of walking. He wished for a horse; he wished that it had been a cavalryman fortuitously riding the train the night he departed from Homer; and he wished for a battle, finally, since that was what he had come for, after all, a chance to shoot at some Rebs.
News came as they were coming down from Raccoon Mountain that Bragg had abandoned Chattanooga. There were cheers so thunderous that it sounded to Tomo as if the dramatic landscape had itself found a voice and was proclaiming bully for the Union. Tomo sang with the rest of the Ninth:
“Old Rosy is our man,
Old Rosy is our man,
He’ll show us deeds, where’er he leads,
Old Rosy is our man!”
He thought about General Rosecrans, who happened to be Homer’s only famous son. It would be quite a story to tell the people back home, if Tomo ever returned; he had gotten a glimpse of Rosecrans, back at the camp, and resisted the urge to go and introduce himself as a fellow Homerite. Maybe when we get to Chattanooga, Tomo thought. Then I will tell him that I am from Homer. But I will not say that I am a Claflin. Tomo prepared himself for a triumphant march into Chattanooga, wishing he had kept that Rebel hat, because surely the Secesh widows would lean out of their windows to spit on him.