LABOURING ON ANOTHER FARM & DECIDING TO TAKE ON AGAIN UNDER UNCLE SAM’S BANNER
AS YOU CAN SURELY TELL BY NOW SIR THIS IS NO DIARY like I did want to write back when the Great General Sherman gave me the notion. It is no fine memoir of my Life & Times in the West like you see so many folk reading by the by. It is something different altogether. I would not write it at all surely if it was a testament to be read by any other but yourself for there are shameful things to come that should not be shifted from the dark of the mind where they are held. These things have no right to ink & paper in regular times for regular men.
But a man’s life does take some wild turns & if only so that there is a record of the life myself & my brother lived on this Earth I will go on. I will continue so that there will be some small sign that we existed on it & that we played our best with the cards we got dealt. Well only for this I will go on scratching these pages though it does make my heart ache to do it.
LATER THAT SAME WEEK after we left the Harris farm Tom & myself found work on another. I cannot recall the new farmer’s name Curse of the Devil on him anyway. It was a larger holding than the Harris stake a 2 day walk from Chillicoth & for a week we laboured there in the turnip fields beside freed black men & women for 55¢ a day. And though it was a fair stretch from the 75¢ we took under Harris we did not gripe over it because beggars as we ought not be choosers & at least we took our lodging in the barn while the blacks made do on less money with no lodging at all.
A small part of me then seen this as injustice for our work did be the same black & white & I learnt off 1 of the black fellows that he & his wife & their small children (who did also labour with us in the fields) made their home under the canvas of a surplus Army wedge tent strung between branches in a nearby stand of trees in all weathers. So I did feel at least some good fortune in being among the white men of this country though as 2 poor Irish boys we were in truth little better to the farmers of Ohio than the niggers & in some ways worse because we demanded better pay.
If ever I stopped to ponder why we were sheltered with the beasts but not as beasts like the blacks well I reckoned that at least we had some learning for to read a seed bag or such & in my foolishness I considered that it may be this that made us deserving of finer lodging. But in truth no farmer did care if you could read the whole of the Bard Shakespeare or the Blessed Holy Bible itself. A hiring farmer checked your hands for hardened blisters to see are you used to work for that is all they gave a D___ for. Some were good about it & did shake your hand like a fellow well met & got a rub of your palm that way while others pure ignorant did tell you outright, “Show me your hands before I hire you boy.” It was the way of things then & may still be now. We were accustomed to it.
But when the rain came down over Ohio & made the fields into mud as thick as blackstrap & turned the nights damp & cool well I did wonder on them Africans under canvas their children wet & hacking with the croup & my heart swoll up some with guilt. For in truth I know that though we are weathered farm boys Tom & myself & able for the work of 2 men each & that we are fine men for the animals & such well I know too that there be no bodies more fit to hard labour than them brought to this country & bought & sold on the back of it like the black Africans.
But on the other hand my heart rode the guilt only so far when I stopped to reckon that Tom took a minie ball in the mouth for to free them from terrible bondage. After all under canvas in a wood & free was better than no freedom at all & many American & foreign boys suffered a great & terrible cost to get it. So mostly I thought that what Tom & myself suffered in the name of liberty for them Africans was worth a kip with the beasts & wages 10¢ to the ripe side of their own at the very least.
In truth it was not hard to stamp out any shame I might of felt. For though the African lad labouring beside us there at that farm & living under canvas in the wood did seem a fine & decent fellow him quick to smile & proud of his wife & children & comfortable in his liberty as if like any white man he was entitled to it well in spite all this I never did call a black man a friend & likely never would because it is just not the way of things. Just as no well heeled Methodist gentleman would take the hand in friendship of a Catholic Irish man or the vicey versa. It is not done in this country & it never will be because there does be too much between us by way of hard ideas & ill feeling. Each to his own so it is said for it is hard enough understanding ourselves & those like us without having to trouble ourselves trying to know them that are so different. (This does not be always true in the Army as you know Sir but I will let it bide for here I am talking of life in the world outside it.)
So let that black fellow himself beg the farmer for a proper hay stuffed bed or better wages because it is every man for his own self in America & every man living in her wide spaces knows it or goes hungry & May You Be F______ For Your Troubles! as the saying goes.
But sometimes when my thinking was like this I did call a halt to it & wonder was my brother’s foul & fevered view on the world starting to put a warp to my own way of looking on things? The possibility of this turned me woeful & something at a slant to things myself. In truth I think a thing 1 minute & then something different the next. I knew many black whores in the war & some I did surely call friend if only for the short time we passed together God Forgive Me. Life is a queer thing.
Yet all the workings of my mind & my conscience were of no real matter for in the end it was the black hand & his wife & childer who did be kept on in the farmer’s employ while Tom & I were for the road. It was us the hungry ones & I will never know if we were cut loose because Harris’s slander did finally worm its way to the new farmer’s ear or because the new farmer finally decided that he could work 4 blacks for the price of 2 white veteran soldiers who though hard men for the work did no doubt be hard men to look at & harder men to warm to with Tom’s hollowed out face & bitter eyes.
So the road for us & I well recall it stopping 1/2 way from hell to nowhere wondering what would become of us with 13$ between us & only our haversacks for a home.
“So where now brother?” says Tom to me after us walking half the day going where only God knows. He was squatting on the roadside sharpening that Bowie with a whetstone by way of a habit he has when one of his angers is after stirring inside him. It is like men who when vexed do smoke more or chaw at their nails. It is the same with Tom sharpening that knife but you would not care to see it.
And as I stood there with fields of corn shifting in the wind to either side of the road & with a grey sky above us & the waning heat of September upon our shoulders I felt tears rising in my eyes & I did rub at them with scabbed knuckles. For though I knew it was not all Tom’s fault that the 2nd farmer gave us marching orders with no blessing for the trail well some small mean part of me blamed the ugly roasted head of Tom & the way his eyes never just looked upon a thing but instead hunted it my brother’s eyes like them on a falcon instead of a regular man of the world. I tell you them eyes would put the fear of God in any farmer with sense on him. So while 1 part of me did blame Tom for this another part felt guilt for the blaming & as if to rid my heart of such feelings a rage as pure & dark as one of Tom’s rages did brew up inside me & I tell you I could of wept with it. Black notions filled me like soured milk in a pail bubbling & rotten.
“May this whole country & all in it be f_____,” says I to myself for what it done on us. May it be f_____ for what it done on the nice packet we saved in the war & put aside to buy a parcel of land for to live on. May it be f_____ for its War Between The States & what that War wrought on Tom & f___ as well the Army for thinking his injuries did be not bad enough by 1/2 to warrant a proper pension. And may every one of them freed darky niggers be f_____ for taking our labouring jobs at slave’s rates & f___ every tight fisted farmer stuffed to the guts with the greed of a land agent’s fattest daughter. And f___ the Sullivan boy them years back for the soft head of him & for dying under a blow that would not of felled my sweet mother God Be With Her & driving us brothers from Ireland & off into the terrible wide world. And most of all f____ Tom for the notion he had that no matter what the world did to him he would do to the world one worse.
Mad with pity for myself I was & for my plight. Well I could of kilt my brother stone dead there on the roadside but soon the feeling passed only for sadness to settle down in its place.
“We could take on again with the Army,” says Tom in Irish with his knife back in its scabbard & the calm come on him again like a storm gone past us. Says he, “A free ride West & some savings before we skedaddle by night & claim ourselves a farm of land as we did plan all along.”
Well I did want to scream at my brother then. The Army! The poxed & cursed Army? Has the pig f_____ Army not took enough off you to sate it? Have you not took enough off it to last 2 men 2 lives? But I did not holler all this & May God Forgive Me my restraint.
Instead I scinched my eyes tight closed for to staunch the tears of anger hoping fierce that when I opened them we might not be standing on a roadside tween cornfields in Ohio but somewhere else & better altogether.
“The Army Tom? Have you gone mad have you?” says I back to my brother.
“Sure there are worse things we might be getting on with the hard days that are in it,” says he. “I cannot abide no more farmers Michael. I might just gut one of them & then where would we be?”
He did smile as he said this & I thought Well isn’t it a fine thing you can laugh at what is not so much a joke at all?
“There must be something else for us if we think on it Tom,” says I.
“Thinking of work does not fill a man’s belly.”
My face went dark. I know it did because with Tom everything does be in deadly earnest until of a sudden it becomes a joke. You never know when & it makes life a trial with him betimes. Says I, “You do try a man’s patience Tom.”
“Poor Mickaleen. Hunger makes you like a vexed wife.”
“It is not hunger,” I said back to him. “It is you & your wild notions.”
“So will it be the Army then brother?” says he still smiling like the most ugly lunatic in the asylum.
“The f______ Army then G___ D____ you!” says I knowing I would say it & knowing I would regret the saying. But as you may be thinking Sir I did not know how much I would regret it.
So our decision was made just like that with little thought given to it. At least our bellies will be full I told myself more than once 100 times even! as we walked on down the road for Columbus where there was a depot where we could take on again with Uncle Sam. I tell you Sir there was no better fools than us fit for this very Army of fools.
The only thing that kept my feet going 1 foot in front of the other was knowing that the Army would surely send us West where we might with our saved wages once again aspire to buy a small farm of land. Or maybe we will just stake claim on a plot of some acres for it is said they are nearly giving land away there is so much of it west of the Mississippi & all of it in want of men to work it or beasts to graze it.
“And there is gold out West,” says I to myself the earth bulging up over the seams with it so goes the scuttlebutt in taverns from Boston to Baltimore. It is said all a fellow has to do is throw a spade at the dirt in Virginia City or Silver Creek & he will be riding the pig’s back his pockets bursting for the weight of gold & silver. Well every soul knows about saloon tales & I never did believe all of them but sure there it was in my head as I walked for I was searching the very air for reasons why taking on again with the Army would be good for us brothers & not as bad as it turned out the last time.
3 days we walked & the weather was fair for September in Ohio & we slept in hayricks or under trees on the roadside. On the 3rd day we bummed a lift up on a farmer’s wagon. That farmer was a veteran soldier of an Ohio volunteer regiment himself the 34th I think & a man who after some time saw us for boys who like himself once met the Elephant of War & lived to tell of it Thank God. Truly he was a blessing him & his slow horse & cart.
“You are lucky boys,” says he. “Taking on with Uncle again. I would up & join you if it was not for the farm & the wife & children. Course if it was not for the farm & wife & children I would have no yearning to join you.”
The farmer did smile at this & tap lightly on the horse’s back with his long switch & I took note that Tom was at his ease with the man riding beside him on the buck board while I sat in back on a barrel behind them. To my eyes my brother’s face was calm with no madness or bitterness or bile brewing underneath it & I thought then that perhaps we made the right decision after all to sign on again for there was some comfort to be had at least with other men who knew what it was to fight for a living. There was comfort to be had from sharing a thread of understanding though that thread may be dipped & dyed in the gore of battle.
And as if to confirm my ruminations after some minutes of riding in silence with the cart bumping along in the rutted tracks of the Columbus road the farmer says to Tom, “The war was hard on you my friend. You must of taken that ball standing.”
Now Sir you have to understand that others almost never spoke of Tom’s face from fear of what they saw in Tom’s eyes or from kindness or both maybe & I flinched a little at the farmer’s words.
“I did,” says Tom. “Chickamauga Tennessee in ’63. Sure I was fierce pretty before that fight I was.”
I repeated his words for the farmer molding the muddle from Tom’s mouth into something the farmer could understand & the farmer smiled back & jigged the reins across the horse but there was sadness in that farmer’s smile.
“I lost my brother at Peachtree Creek. I still think to tell him things I seen or heard in town. I right forget a good deal of the time that he aint around no more.”
Tom doffed his hat & said, “We are sorry for your troubles Sir.”
The farmer gave a nod. “Thank you kindly boys.”
Well there was an understanding between us & we rode together on that wagon in a peace I feel was the last real peace we ever had in this life though I know there must of been other times I now forget at this late hour.
But God Bless him that farmer brung us the whole way to Columbus & paid us 25¢ each for to unload his wagon. He told us as well that he wished he could hire 2 strong veteran boys like ourselves but that his holding was small & there was scarce enough work on it for 1 man never mind 3.
“Uncle will fit you up nicely anyhow,” says the farmer when we were finished. “And you might get the chance to plug an Injun or 2 in the bargain.”
“Grub & kit & a wage is all we are looking for,” says Tom. “I have no mind to plug any b______ ever again for I did plug enough in the War.”
I translated my brother’s words (not even 1/2 believing them) & the farmer then shook our hands bidding us fine luck & good fortune.
After this we did what any boy who is to take on the next day as a soldier would do God Forgive Us & we spent our last few greenback dollars on whores & whiskey in several taverns on the lanes around the Columbus Recruit Depot.
Of course Sir you would be right to say that all our troubles which I am going to tell you of in these pages did later arise from whores & whiskey. But then I would say to you in reply that if we did not have whiskey & whores well how could we stand to live in this world at all? It is strange how things can be at once both good & bad for a body.