March Toward the Thunder Part 1

March toward the Thunder.

by Joseph Bruchac.

For our grandchildren; may they live to see a world in which there is no war.

Old Virginia, the Heartland of the Civil War.

As he lay in the stinking mud of the trench outside Petersburg, Louis thought about what had brought him there.

The money?.

More greenbacks than a boy of his age could ever hope to earn- especially one who was just an Indian. Cash enough to buy good clothing for his mother, even a horse to carry her loads so that her feet might not ache so much at the end of a long day of walking the road into town. A thick enough stack of the new paper dollars to buy a little piece of land that would be their own, so that no one again could order them to leave their camp like common vagrants. On such land he could even one day raise a family. And as he thought of that, the image of Azonis's sweet face briefly came to him and made him smile.

Yes, the money made such a future possible. But it wasn't just the money that brought him to this killing field. No more than it was just the trail that brought the deer within range of the hunters' guns.

The insults?.

He thought back on the gang of boys who'd met M'mere and him as the two of them tried to slip into town, loaded down with sacks full of baskets.

"Gypsies, dirty Indian gypsies!" the tallest boy yelled at them, his face twisted with contempt.

"Go back where yuh come from, yuh blamed tramps," shouted a fat-faced redhead. He bent, picked up a potato-sized cobble and threw it. It would have struck his mother if Louis hadn't s.h.i.+elded her with his body and felt the stone bounce off his own broad back. He clenched a fist.

"Non." Marie Nolette, his gentle mother, grasped his sleeve with her healing hands, palms rough and scarred from many seasons of weaving ash withes into baskets. "Patience. Nous aller. They will grow tired of this game."

Although she was trying to hold him back, even though there were six or seven in the mob, he was about to take his mother's walking stick and wade into them. They were likely about his age, fourteen, fifteen, but none of them as big as he.

But before Louis could get hold of that stick, something else caught the eyes and ears of the boys. The flash of blue cloth and the glint of oiled metal. The thump of a drum and the measured tramp of feet.

"It's our boys in blue!"

"Soldiers!"

And, just like that, the gang of boys turned and ran off after the squad of marching men who'd just turned the corner a block away. By the time they reached the soldiers, the boys had dropped their stones and replaced them with sticks held up to their shoulders in imitation of the .58-caliber Model 1861 Rifle Muskets carried by the new recruits. Each and every man was dressed in a blue flannel thigh-length sack coat and blue wool trousers, a slouch cap perched on his head, chin held high and proud.

"Kill some Rebs for us, sir."

"Take it to them Sessesh snakes!"

As those neatly uniformed marching men and the boys who copied them went around the corner and out of sight, they all began to sing.

"We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree!

We'll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree!"

It was a stirring song. But what Louis remembered most were those fine, clean uniforms.

In a uniform like theirs, Louis thought, I would not look like either a ragged gypsy or a dirty Indian.

CHAPTER ONE.

HEAR THAT.

Sat.u.r.day, April 2, 1864.

"Kina?" Marie Nolette said, her head lifted like a deer sniffing the air. "Hear that?"

Her voice was soft. Most people wouldn't have heard her speak, since hooves and wagon wheels clattered on the cobblestones of Broadway. Dozens of people were talking as they pa.s.sed along the sidewalk. It was a busy Sat.u.r.day morning in front of the hotel where she and Louis were carefully placing their ash splint baskets on display.

Louis Nolette, though, was used to paying attention to his mother's quiet voice.

"Ayup," he replied.

How could he not have heard that deep rumble? It was a hundred times louder than the wheels of a heavy wagon over the plank road that led out of town toward their camp north of the village. It came not from nearby nor from the earth, but from above. It was the distant voice of Bedagi, the ancient thunder being. In the stories of long ago, before the coming of the white men, Bedagi's arrows of lightning destroyed the monsters that threatened his people.

But Louis knew that what his mother had said was not just about hearing the thunder. It was about its meaning. Far-off thunder might mean danger was near.

The deep rumble came again. It touched something inside the broad-shouldered boy as he stood there, muscular arms full of the baskets they'd made. Old Bedagi was walking the sky somewhere above the Kaydeross Range to the north of the town. Maybe he was looking down now from the clouds over the swamps by Ireland Vly where Louis had found the black ash trees for these baskets.

Papa, Louis thought, you taught me well. I have not forgotten one bit. I know how to find the right trees, how to thank them properly before cutting them. I remember how to use the heavy club to pound along the peeled ash trunk as it is on the ground. Tunk-tunk tunk, tunk-tunk tunk. Two strikes forward, then one back. My arms have grown stronger doing this work.

To do it right you had to move slowly down the length of the peeled log, breaking the fibers in between the seasonal ring so that the withes would lift up to be pulled free. Thin rings were laid down in times of drought, thicker ones in seasons when the rains were good and steady.

Louis nodded. Spring thunder is also a good sound. Rains coming. Soon everything will turn green and grow in the moons of planting and hoeing that lay ahead. Maybe in this year of our Lord, 1864, me and M'mere will earn enough to buy a few acres.

There was a chance of that. They had been making a little more money this spring. Not just from their baskets, but also from his mother's doctoring and birthing.

They'd only been camping in the area for three months, but word had spread about "Aunt Marie, the Abenaki doctoress." Country folk hereabouts had learned that Marie Nolette was the best to call upon for certain things, especially the way she understood what to do when a mother's time came to bring her child into the light of day.

Not only that, M'mere, she knows when the need for her is great. She shows up at the door of some farm far from town just when some frantic husband, he is about to send for help.

More often than not these days, though, it was a worried mother-in-law and not a husband. So many men were off to war, lonely wives having babies who might never see their fathers' faces.

Louis quickly turned his thoughts away from children whose fathers were gone.

M'mere, she is a healer, as well.

It didn't matter if it was a broken limb or a burn or even one of those deep wounds that so often happened to people when they were doing farm work around plows and pitchforks and scythes. Or if someone had a deep hacking cough, she would know what tea to make-from the needles of the white pine, perhaps-to clear away catarrh. Aunt Marie, everyone said, held the way to treat just about every injury or ailment one could imagine-short of bringing a person back from the dead.

Not every family could afford to pay her cash. Sometimes she might be given food or used clothes rather than the few coins a poor family might sc.r.a.pe together. But other times, knowing Marie and her son as basket-makers, a family would grant them permission to go into their woodlot and take any of the black ash that grew where the soil was moist. Louis had marked more than fifty such trees to be cut when the season was right.

Louis nodded to himself as he put the last of the baskets down. Yes, in another year or two they might earn enough to put down a payment on a little farm. There was good land hereabouts to buy-more than usual. Many acres went unplowed these days with such a mult.i.tude of men off to the conflict and so many never coming home again.

Louis looked down at the newspaper. It had been dropped on the sidewalk by a dandy who'd spent a good bit of time eyeing their baskets without buying a one. It wasn't the swells who usually bought baskets from them, but ordinary folks who used them around the home. At least he'd left that paper for Louis to read.

Louis prided himself on his ability to read in both English and French. In their old home up in Canada, he and his parents had always mixed languages together. Sometimes they spoke in Abenaki, sometimes in French, sometimes even a little English. It was a wise thing to know languages. Like most other Indians, they traveled from place to place to make their living. One season might be spent in the lands to the south where only English was heard, another among the Quebecois who refused to speak anything other than their beloved French. Even more than most other Abenakis, Louis had a gift for languages.

When he was a schoolboy at St. Francis he'd often been praised by the nuns who were his teachers. He'd also been an altar boy. Father Andre tried to talk him into going into the priesthood. When he told his parents about the old priest's idea, they looked at each other and then back at their son.

"The Father," Louis said, "he a.s.sures me that I will make a fine priest."

That resulted in another long silence.

"What do you think, my son?" his father finally asked.

"I think," Louis replied, keeping his voice as serious as possible, "it is likely to happen . . ."-he paused-"when fish turn into birds and fly south for the winter."

Louis smiled at how he and his parents had laughed on that day. Back then, when he was eleven winters old, his ambition was to be just like his father. He would hunt and trap, make baskets. When they needed cash money, he would do as his father did every other year-travel south to work as a logger.

That same autumn day when he teased his parents about becoming a priest, his father and other men from St. Francis left for lumber camp in Maine. Papa promised he would return in the spring after the drive down the Kennebec.

"Look for me after the first tonnerre. I'll be back with ribbons for your hair, mon femme, and a new fusil for you, mon fils."

What came to them after that first thunder, though, was not his beloved father. It was word that Jean Nolette drowned during the drive down the Kennebec. He'd been buried on a hill above the bend in the river where he'd lost his life.

Four winters had pa.s.sed since his father left them. It still seemed as if it was just yesterday. Some mornings Louis woke up certain he would see his father coming down the trail with that new rifle for his son slung over his shoulder.

Louis had to turn his thoughts away from that memory. He stared at the front page of the newspaper at his feet. News of the war. Since it began three years ago he'd followed every development in the struggle between the North-which seemed to him to have the right on their side seeing as how they were going against slave-holders-and the South.

"Their fight, not ours," his mother said over his shoulder.

Louis nodded, hardly hearing her. His mother spoke those same words more often. She worried about the way his eyes grew faraway each time he read of the Union Army's heroic struggles. Accounts of battles held a fascination for him like nothing else.

Louis did notice, though, how newspapers were printing good news again. Everything was going fine. It'd been that way when war was declared in '61 after the firing on Sumter. Papers and men on the street swore it'd all be over in a month, maybe two. The Sesseshes would crawl back into the Union like whipped puppies, tails between their legs.

Then came Bull Run. General McDowell's invincible Union Army went out to face the outnumbered Confederates for what most folks expected to be a lark. Ladies and gents and members of Congress drove their coaches out to where the battle was to take place, spread blankets out on the hills, brought out picnic lunches. Northern troops in their new uniforms stopped to pick the ripe blackberries gleaming along the Virginia roadsides that twenty-first day of July.

But General Pierre G. T. Beauregard and his Confederate boys had plans of their own that didn't include picnics or turning tail. The day ended with 2,900 Union soldiers dead or wounded. It was only because the Rebs took 2,000 casualties of their own that they hadn't just marched right in and taken over Was.h.i.+ngton.

Since then there'd been too many b.l.o.o.d.y battles to count. s.h.i.+loh, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg. Those were the ones Louis remembered best from the news accounts. He'd been both thrilled and horrified. On the one hand, it made him glad that he was safe and far away from battle. But he couldn't help but wonder.

Me, would I measure up to be a soldier?

The war was still going on, but the papers declared that the Southern cause was doomed. Only the Copperheads-those fool Southern sympathizers with their calls for peace at any price-saw things differently. Arkansas and Louisiana were back in the Union fold. Gettysburg had been a great Union victory. With General Ulysses S. Grant in charge, the reins were in the hands of the North. But there were still thousands of men coming home in boxes or limping back so badly wounded they'd be crippled-up for the rest of their days.

Louis's eye was caught by a piece farther down the page. The United States Senate had pa.s.sed a joint resolution on April 8 approving the Thirteenth Amendment by a vote of 38 to 6. The Emanc.i.p.ation Proclamation, which President Lincoln issued back in 1862, was finally going to be ratified.

Louis wondered about that.

Why'd it take so long for the Union to free the slaves? Why was there slavery in the first place?

Back in Canada slavery had long been outlawed. That was why the runaway Negroes headed there.

How can one man own another?

It made no sense. Nor did it make sense that so many white people in the "free states" still owned slaves. From what Louis heard, even General Grant's wife owned a slave or two. Some said the war wasn't about slavery but about the right of states to do what they pleased. That too didn't make sense to Louis.

Am I too young to understand these things? He shook his head. I've only seen fifteen winters, but it seems to me that slavery's what the battle ought be about.

A war to free the slaves-that touched his spirit. Louis had met some escaped slaves in Canada. They were dark-skinned men and women and children who traveled at night toward the winter land, following the star shape Louis knew as the Great Bear-though they called it the Drinking Gourd. They'd stop by the Nolette camp on the river and stay the night, grateful for the good vittles the serious-faced Indian boy (his skin only a shade lighter than theirs) and his gentle mother shared.

It wasn't unusual that he and his mother helped those runaways. Most Indians didn't hesitate to make a place by the fire for any fugitive who needed a bed for the night and a bite of food. After all, Abenakis knew what it was to run for their lives.

Before his great-grandparents came to Canada, they'd lived in Ndakinna, their old homeland now named Vermont and New Hamps.h.i.+re. If they hadn't fled, they might have been killed like so many other Indians back then. Wave after wave of Englishmen swept in, was.h.i.+ng over the hills, turning Native land into New England. Those English even turned some captured Indians into slaves-like those darker-skinned men and women they later brought from across the ocean.

Louis shook his head. He didn't like thinking about such things-neither the bringing of slaves nor the sad day when their allies the French gave up their long war against the English and left the Indians on their own to fight or die, hide in the hills or retreat.

The thunder rumbled again, closer than it had been before.

"Sounds a bit like cannon fire, does it not, young fellow?" said a voice from his left.

CHAPTER TWO.

THE RECRUITER.

Sat.u.r.day, April 2, 1864.

Louis didn't look up. He'd sensed the white man standing there, but had not acknowledged him. He didn't look the sort who'd pay attention to a pair of basket sellers. He was far too well-dressed to be a farmer or even a merchant. Tall beaver hat and that silk vest, watch chain hanging out of it. With those polished boots and that cane in his hand, he seemed too full of himself to be buying a basket. But why else would he stoop to talk to a brown-skinned young man?

Unless a white man wanted to buy from you or hire you or you were in his way and he expected you to step aside, there was no reason for a gentleman dressed like a lawyer to take notice of an Indian boy.

His mother pointedly paid no attention to the man. She focused on their baskets, arranging them on the long pole. They didn't have a sign out. The baskets were sign enough. Plus most of their customers knew them, seeing as how they were here five days a week. Folks had learned that a Nolette basket was woven tight and strong.

"A good basket can outlive the hand that made it," his mother often said.

Ash is tough and it holds on, Louis thought, as we do.