1824: The Arkansas War tog-2 Page 46

  The one thing from that episode he did remember clearly was the surgeon grunting, "Well, he's a lucky one."

  If he'd had any strength at all, he'd have hit him. As it was, he lapsed into unconsciousness again.

  So, when his eyes opened and he saw the hand, he spent some time just looking at it, getting reacquainted with having a clear head. It was a delicious sensation, as enjoyable as one of the glasses of iced milk his mother made on occasion when she could afford ice.

  Sheff had never drunk much whiskey, anyway. But he made a promise to himself then and there that he'd avoid liquor altogether henceforth, except when doing so would be socially ungraceful. He'd never appreciated before what a blessing it was to have an unfettered consciousness. Why would any sane man go out of his way to imitate an experience that a battle wound provided?

  It was a small hand, quite nicely shaped. Female, clearly. The hand wasn't moving, just lying loosely on an open book. He couldn't see the thumb, just the fingers. They were spread out on the pages, curled up a bit. The book was the Bible, he realized after a while. From what he could tell, open to some passage midway through the Old Testament.

  Eventually, it occurred to him that the hand belonged to an arm, and the arm belonged to a person. So his eyes began moving up along the forearm, then past the elbow. He couldn't see the arm itself, though, above the wrist. It was covered in the sleeve of a calico blouse, which seemed better made than usual. That didn't necessarily mean it was store bought, since there were women who could cut and sew that well. Sheff 's mother was one of them. But he had the sense that this blouse was tailor made. The common everyday calico seemed more finely dyed than usual.

  His eyes got as far as the shoulder, which was puffed out in one of the new-style gigot sleeves. What his mother called leg-of-mutton sleeves. Then, his eyes couldn't roll any further in their sockets. He had to decide whether he had the strength and interest to shift his position.

  He was in a bed, he suddenly realized, covered by a thin blanket. He wondered how that had happened. There were no beds in the tents of army surgeons. You were lucky if you got a cot.

  It dawned on him that he wasn't in a tent to begin with. This was a room. In a house of some kind.

  For that matter His eyes rolled back, coming to bear again on the hand.

  Yes, that was a woman's hand, sure enough. No chance of error. A young woman's, too, he was certain. But there wouldn't be any women in an army medical tent, either, certainly not young ones. Nursing wounded soldiers was a filthy business.

  He was interested enough, and he thought he had the strength and energy. So, painfully-champing down a shout when he placed weight on the left shoulder and felt a spike of agony-he managed to shift position enough to be able to look up at the woman's head.

  Which turned out to be pointless. The woman was asleep, her head slumped forward with her chin resting on her chest.

  At least, Sheff assumed the chin was on the chest. He couldn't actually see any part of the woman's face. Her head was covered by a large bonnet with a flaring brim. Sheff thought the technical term for it was "cabriolet," but his mother just called them coal-scuttle bonnets. She had one herself, since they were handy out in the sunshine.

  A thought finally occurred to him, then, and he experienced what might just possibly have been the single most frustrating moment in his life. Was this:

  Tarnation, he couldn't move. No more than he had, anyway, and he'd almost fainted doing that much. And what good would it do, anyway? He couldn't very well shake the woman awake, even if he could have reached her.

  Fortunately, his quandary was resolved.

  "Stop fidgeting, young man! You'll reopen the wound, and I'll have to get the surgeon around again."

  Well, he knew that voice. Courage, he told himself. He'd faced U.S. regulars, hadn't he? Hadn't even flinched, so far as he could remember.

  Turning his head a little, he saw the dragon in the doorway. She was glaring at him as usual.

  Well:not quite. The look on her face seemed more one of exasperation than outright hostility. So did the look she bestowed upon the mysterious woman sitting by his bed.

  "The two of you!" he heard her mutter. The dragon came into the room and laid a hand on the leg-of-mutton shoulder. Then, gave it a little shake.

  "Wake up, Imogene. Your precious captain's come around."

  The head popped up. Yes, that was Imogene under the brim.

  "Oh," she said.

  Julia Chinn was now looking at the open Bible on Imogene's lap.

  "I told you!" Firmly, she moved Imogene's hand aside and, more firmly still, closed the Bible. "You too young to be reading that."

  Puzzled, Sheff tried to remember what part of the Old Testament Oh.

  Fortunately, he didn't say it out loud. He even managed not to smile. He could remember the time his own mother had caught him engrossed in the Song of Solomon the way no proper thirteen-year-old boy ought to be.

  To cover the moment's awkwardness, he cleared his throat. "I'm not a captain, Miz Julia. Just a second lieutenant."

  Julia gave him that same exasperated look. "I wish! Boy, I will say you are prob'bly the most tenacious critter I ever met."

  But the tone in her voice didn't seem as chilly by the time she got to the end of the sentence as it had when she started it. She reached down and tugged his blanket back into position and said quietly to Imogene: "Five minutes, girl. Then I want you out of here."

  After she'd left the room, Imogene burst into a smile so wide it looked to split her face in half. That expression, with her full lips, brought out the African part of her ancestry, which was normally overshadowed by her light skin and hazel eyes. More green than hazel, really.

  For the first time, Sheff felt a surge of passion. No poetic abstraction, neither.

  Fortunately, he was still too weak to embarrass himself. The hand that would have impulsively reached for her lay limp on the blanket. So did:well. Everything else.

  "They promoted you, Sheff! All the way to captain."

  "That's:" He tried to decide how he felt. Pleased, of course. But "I'm not even eighteen years old. Won't be, till next month."

  The smile wasn't fading at all. "Don't matter! The whole town's talking about it. Oh, Sheff, I'm so proud of you!"

  " 'Doesn't' matter," he corrected.

  "You and Mama!" She waved a dismissive hand. Which, on the way back, somehow found its way into Sheff 's. "Both nagging me."

  He had enough strength to squeeze the hand. "You listen to your mama. Listen to me, too. She wants you talking proper. Properly. I'm trying myself."

  The smile was replaced by a serious look. "Do-does it really matter, Sheff?"

  "Yes, Imogene. It does."

  In the corridor of the boardinghouse just outside the open door, where she'd been eavesdropping, Julia Chinn pressed the back of her head against the wall. It was either that or bang it against the wall.

  The next three minutes weren't any better. She could have handled a rascal, easy as pie. This one:

  "Imogene, that's been five minutes, for sure!" she shouted.

  "Mama!"

  "You listen to me, young lady!"

  Sheff 's firm voice could be heard clearly, even through the wall. "Best do as your mama says, Imogene."

  Julia had heard the talk herself. It couldn't be avoided, anywhere you went in New Antrim. Parker by the wall. For just that moment, she had a deep sympathy for the U.S. regulars who'd faced him. If only they'd:

  But that thought led to a place Julia Chinn never wanted to go. There were limits. Whatever else, there had to be limits, or there was no point to any of it. She might as well sell Imogene to a slave brothel right now. Or herself, for that matter.

  Sheff 's mother arrived shortly thereafter. She was all solicitous concern, fussing over him, but Sheff thought that was mostly her way of handling the grief caused by her brother's death. Sheff was still trying to come to grips with it himself.

  It was hard. He sti
ll had that iron shell around him. The battle shield, he'd come to think of it. As useful as it was-indispensable, perhaps-it was now getting in the way of normal emotions. He was pretty sure he'd have to be careful about that. Taken too far, or too long, it could rub a man's soul so hard it became just a callus.

  But he wasn't ready to deal with it yet. So, the two hours his mother spent in the room before she had to go home were mostly taken up with practical concerns.

  There, fortunately-in a horrible sort of way-his uncle's death had eased the strain.

  "The bank says it's canceling the loan outright," his mother said quietly. "On account of Jem. Well, your uncle's part, anyway. We still got to pay yours off. But Mr. Crowell told me they'd take your service as being complete. So there won't never be no interest."

  Sheff knew the bank had adopted a policy of canceling any loans secured by a soldier's pay in the event the soldier died in the line of duty. The chiefdom's legislature was also talking about providing some subsidies for widows and orphans, but Sheff didn't think anything would come of it. Arkansas was actually thriving, economically, on account of all the new construction and manufacture. The war hadn't even put a dent in it-probably stimulated it, in fact. But wages were very low, with the constant influx of freedmen, and there just wasn't that much money to throw around.

  Still, between the increased pay that would come with his promotion to captain and the work his mother got as a tailor, they should manage. She was paid a real tailor's wage, too, not the much lower rate most girls got in the garment manufactories. He was pretty sure they'd even be able to let Dinah keep going to school instead of her having to go to work in the shops.

  His mother was holding up pretty well, too. She had her own version of a battle shield.

  "The truth is, Sheff, we're doing better than we were back in Baltimore, with your father and uncle bringing in whatever they could. Which weren't never much. So you just make sure when you can get about again, that you keep fighting for Arkansas. You hear?"

  Cal McParland came to visit him later that day. He brought John Ridge and Buck Watie with him.

  "Congratulations," Ridge said immediately after walking into the room. "You heard about your promotion, I take it?"

  "You'll give him a swelled head," Cal chided. But he was smiling as he said it. "Jumped him a rank, even."

  Buck Watie slid into a chair. "Gave you the Legion of Honor, too. Only one who got it except Captain Dupont."

  Cal laughed. "My cousin says the Laird got the idea from Napoleon, but he's obviously going to be a lot stingier than the emperor ever was."

  Sheff had been wondering what a Legion of Honor was. For the most part, the Arkansas Army was patterned after the American, since that was the experience of most of its veterans. The American army didn't have the custom of awarding decorations for valor or merit, as did most of the European armies.

  But that thought was swept away for the moment. "How's the captain doing?"

  The good cheer left the room. Buck Watie shook his head. "Captain Dupont didn't make it, Sheff. The Americans returned his body the day after the battle."

  "At least he didn't die slowly from being gut-shot," Cal added. "The Americans think he must have bled to death before the fighting was even over. From what I heard, our surgeon who looked at his body agreed with them."

  Well, that was something. Sheff had liked Charles Dupont, even if he'd found his heavy accent hard to understand sometimes. He'd been a lot less prone to judging people simply by skin color than most of the Creole freedmen from New Orleans were.

  As a group, Sheff didn't care for them much. Some of them had even been slave-owners themselves, and they still retained a lot of the attitudes. If they hadn't been forced out of the city after the Algiers Incident, most of them would still be in New Orleans. As it was, they tended to cluster together in one part of New Antrim that people were starting to call the Creole Quarter.

  But Sheff hadn't really been close to Dupont, so there wasn't any personal grief involved. Besides, he was still short of eighteen, and:

  He tried to figure out how to ask without seeming full of himself.

  Fortunately, Cal saved him the effort. "Yup. The Legion of Honor. The Laird established it right after the battle. Announced he would, before the day was over, even."

  "Established" was a word that seemed a little absurd if they only gave out two of them. But that mystery got cleared up by Buck.

  "He also established what he's calling the Arkansas Post Medal, and they're handing those out like candy. Everybody who was there gets one, except the steamboat crews, and they're complaining like nobody's business."

  "Them!" Cal snorted. "They didn't get within half a mile-not even that-of a shot being fired."

  He gave Sheff a big grin. "Don't get your hopes up too soon, though. What I heard, it'll be weeks before they can get around to actually making the things. There's a big squabble over who gets the contract."

  That brought a little laugh to the room. The Arkansas House of Representatives was even more notorious than its American counterpart for the fervent dedication of its members to advancing the interests of their constituents. If anything, the House of Chiefs was worse.

  The next half hour was spent bringing Sheff up to date on what had happened in the battle after he'd been taken out of combat. It was a cheerful discussion until Sheff asked about the Chickasaws.

  His three fellow officers exchanged glances, their smiles either fading or seeming frozen in place.

  "Well," said Cal.

  "That got a little sticky," John Ridge added.

  His cousin Buck gave him a glance that was at least half angry. The rest of it seemed derisive.

  "You talk! We were the ones had to do the dirty work."

  John made a face. So did Cal.

  "Give," said Sheff. "What happened?"

  Cal provided the answer. The first part, anyway. "They got really hammered in there, Sheff. Near as we can tell, half the warriors in the tribe died in the Post-they never had but a little over six hundred, to begin with-and a fair number got killed or badly wounded during the escape. So:well, by the time they could pull themselves together, the Laird already had their slaves in custody. By then, Houston was back with the Second Infantry. And-ah-he'd already moved over my battery and the others from the Third."

  "The women and old men raised Sam Hill, of course, but:" John Ridge shrugged. "Wasn't really much they could do to stop him. Houston was in no friendlier mood than the Laird. Neither was General Ball, of course."

  They fell silent again. "So?" Sheff demanded.

  Buck provided the rest. "So, the Chickasaw warriors finally got there and starting hollering and making threats. Real nasty threats, not just name-calling. And-" He took a deep breath. "We followed orders. Cut loose with both batteries. Canister-and we were targeting the Colbert clan."

  "The Laird told us to spare as many full-bloods as we could," Cal added. "And we did. But they were pretty well mixed together, and canister's what it is. There ain't much left of the Colberts, I can tell you that."

  "Oh:Jesu-Sam Hill," Sheff murmured, barely avoiding the blasphemy.

  John Ridge's face was stiff. "Sam Hill is right. My father's furious. So's Chief Ross, although he's hiding it better. Even the Choctaw chiefs are hollering about it. The Creeks will be, too, soon as they hear."

  "Sure, and nobody likes Chickasaws," Buck chimed in, "but:" He shook his head. "I did what I was told-well, watched, anyway-but I can't help think the Laird'll come to regret it. This could even start a civil war."

  Callender McParland started to say something but broke off before he got a word out. From the quick look he gave his two Cherokee companions, Sheff had no trouble figuring out what he'd been about to say.

  So he went ahead and said it for him. He was too weak to summon up the energy to be diplomatic.

  "Fuck the Chickasaws. And fuck the Choctaws and the Creeks. And-sorry, fellows-but if push comes to shove, fuck you Cherokees, too.
You got Sam Hill's nerve, as far as I'm concerned, expecting us niggers"-he rolled his eyes at Cal-"and some white boys to do your fighting for you while thinking you'll keep us in slavery."

  Anger that had been quietly festering for a long time finally came to the surface. "Fuck you," he stated flatly. "Learn to work. I've been working since I was ten years old."

  "Me too," said Cal. "My family's poor Scots-Irish-well, not poor any longer-from New York. We never owned any slaves. And sure as hell aren't gonna start now."

  He gave Buck a look that had none of its earlier friendliness. "And I'd be real careful, was I you, Lieutenant Watie, making too many noises about 'civil wars.' You think we can't do the same thing at Tahlequah we just done at Arkansas Post, best you think twice."

  So there it was: the threat naked and right out in the open. Strangely, perhaps, that was enough to start draining away Sheff 's anger.

  "Come on, now, Cal-there was no call for that. Buck was just expressing a concern. He wasn't making no threats."

  Hastily, he corrected himself. "Any threats."

  Their voices had gotten raised a bit. You never knew. Imogene might be somewhere close enough to overhear. Worse, so might her mother.

  Cal took a long deep breath. Simultaneously-it almost made Sheff laugh, watching it-the two Cherokees did the same.

  They let it out at the same time, too. Then Cal said: "Sorry. Didn't really mean it that way."

  John chuckled. "Sam Hill, you didn't! Still:"

  He sighed, and wiped a hand over his face. "The truth is, Buck and I don't really disagree with you. And I already told my father so. Our newspaper will have some criticisms of the way the Laird handled it, I imagine, but we're not going to make any bones about the rest of it. There's no slavery in Arkansas-that's established, right there in the Constitution-and since the Chickasaws sought refuge in Arkansas, they had to abide by Arkansas law. And the threats they were making went way beyond anything you could rightly call a petition in redress of grievances."