“What in holy hallelujah?” Solomon, looking around his mess, demanded the next day after Sheridan and his cavalry corps rode off. All around us soldiers, sergeants, commanders, even the other contrabands in Sheridan’s staff who usually at least tried to look busy, were lolling about, taking their ease. “Did Robert E. Lee surrender and nobody told me?”
The whole camp had turned into a county fair with troopers pitching horseshoes, playing music, smoking rabbit tobacco, and generally loafing about. Solomon glanced around at the shiftlessness and asked me, “They think the damn war’s won already?”
Since he couldn’t do it in words, Solomon chastised the lazy white boys by working his crew double hard, patrolling the mess area, scrubbing little bits of rust off the cast-iron pans with sand, and grinding up enough parched corn to feed Pharoah’s army twice. The others grumbled at Solomon doing them that way now that Sheridan and his officers were gone and the Seceshes all but whipped. I even acted mad myself. But I wasn’t.
I was well acquainted with Rebel snakes and I knew that the General was right: they had enough poison stored up in them to snuff your candle not just when they were wounded, but even after they fell down stone-cold dead. Fact is, the Rebels were trapped so tight in their harebrained dream of what the South was, even death wouldn’t release them. So Sheridan was right to be worried about the near-whipped Rebs, and I worked that day like he was standing there watching me.
That night, as I slept, Wager Swayne came to me as he had many and many a time before. The dreams always ended with him being fit and alive. He’d sit up, take the bandage off his eyes, declare he felt grass-fed and groomed twice, hop off that wagon, and take my hand to help me down.
We’d run into the woods, which were misty, yet bright and sparkling with light, find a nest full of turkey eggs, or a hive of generous bees and have ourselves a treat. Then, while he was stretched out on a blanket of primrose, bee balm, black-eyed Susans, larkspur, and butterfly weed, I’d flap my arms and soar off into a sky bright blue as a prairie lily. After I took his breath away with the audacity of my swallowtail swooping, he would be overcome with admiration and holler up to me, “My pen is bad, my ink is pale; my love for you shall never fail.”
In the dream I had that night, though, when I lifted the bandages from my soldier’s face, graveyard things wriggled where his eyes had been. I jerked awake to escape the ugliness, then fell back asleep five more times and four more times horror waited under the bandages. Once I found Old Mister staring up at me with his vacant eyes, brain-fevered from dying of the spider I’d put to bite him. Then it was Old Miss squinting hate at me. Then there were rows of dog’s teeth, spiders, and snakes where the soldier’s eyes should of been. The fifth time, though, Daddy was hidden beneath the bandages. My father was alive and he told me he was on his way home to me and Mama and Clemmie and would never leave, and I sobbed until I woke myself up. After that, I slept no more.
The next night, scared that the graveyard things would come to disturb my rest again, I went to find peace where I always had in the past, off by myself in the woods. I wandered out a quarter mile or so to the perimeter of camp where Sheridan had his picket line posted with guards switching off every two hours all night to make sure no Rebs crept up on us.
I found the wooden picket stakes driven into the ground to mark right where the watch should have been, but there wasn’t a soul about except for an owl hooting high up in an oak tree. Hoping it was just that one guard who’d abandoned his post, I hurried along to the next set of stakes. Nothing and no one. When I saw that every blessed post was deserted, I tore out for camp like a kerosened cat.
“Solomon,” I gasped, out of breath when I got there. “There’s not a single, solitary guard out there on the picket line. We don’t have any lookout.”
Though I expected him to leap to his feet and sound the alarm, Solomon stayed right where he was, resting his behind on a stump, digging at the bowl of the clay pipe he took in the evenings.
“Didn’t you hear me?” I asked when all he did was poke around with a twig until the embers flared, sending sparks into the dark night.
“I heard you fine. Also heard Terrill and Wright laughing about General maybe being a little spooked. Maybe needing the Rebs to seem worse than they are to impress folks in Washington. Maybe needing to big himself up enough so’s he’d get him another star.”
“You hoaxing me?”
“Cathy, we beat them Rebs like a drum. We beat them, burned them, next little bit we gon bury them. You been jumpy as a wild yearling since General left. Rest easy now. Not a Reb within a hundred miles. Least not a live one. ’Sides Sheridan’s only twenty mile away in Winchester.”
“Twenty mile? Might as well be twenty thousand, them Rebs sneak in on us.”
Solomon rolled his eyes and took a long, sucking draw off his pipe, signifying that he was wore out with my foolishness.
Though I planned to stay awake and on guard all night long, sleep overtook me. This time I dreamed my grandmother’s dreams. In them, I wore a necklace of boar’s teeth and fired an ancient flintlock musket that had a garden of flowers scrolled on the silver trigger plate. I fired until the rifle grew too hot for me to hold and still King Ghezo’s enemies marched forward. They held fiery spears above their heads and carried shields of flame out front. They were coming to kill us. Or worse, they were coming to take us as slaves and sell us to the Portugee.
As I watched my bullets bounce off the attackers’ shields, I realized that the attackers had survived Sheridan’s Burning. They were demons from the other world, and no human hand could kill them for they were already dead. As they drew nearer, I found my legs had disremembered how to run. I could not escape even as I saw that, there at the front, leading those dead soldiers, was Old Mister, his black and rotting hand held high. He had come to seek vengeance on me, his murderer.
Clemmie appeared at my side, clutching me and whimpering, “Stop him, Cathy. Stop him. Don’t let him touch me.”
As she went on begging, “Save me. Save me. You have to save me,” I realized it wasn’t Clemmie at all. It was Iyaiya and she was screaming back to me from the coffle of slaves being marched away to be fed alive to a pack of cackling hyenas.
I wondered idly in my dream how I’d come to know what a hyena shriek sounded like. But the nonsense of it did nothing to stop the nightmare and the awful cries went on causing my heart to race until I woke up, gasping. But though my eyes were wide open, the hideous hyena shrieks did not stop and I knew them then for what they were: Rebel yells.