There were two stations I could be herded to. At each one a doc examined a naked man. At the first, the doctor carefully thumped on a fellow’s chest, looked in his eyes, had him show off his grinners, weighed him, measured him, listened to his heart, had him hop about on one leg, then the other and, worst of all, he took a full tour of the recruit’s man business. That first doctor was thorough and competent: the last two things on earth I needed at that moment. At the second station was a sawbones with the swimmy eyes, trembling hands, and swollen, rumbud-blotched nose of a dedicated soak. That was my man. I lurched his way.
Figuring the doc’d have sympathy for a fellow stewpot, I stumbled forward like I was loaded to the gunwales, and pretended to trip so as to near fall into his arms. As I suspected, the doc’s tippy, hungover stomach lurched at the stink of Dupree’s buckskins. Fighting off the heaves, he shoved me as far from himself as his puny arm strength would allow.
“There,” he said, speaking into his shoulder. “Just stay right there.” Still keeping his distance, the doctor told me to jump up and down. I flapped about a bit, broadcasting even more of Dupree’s fragrance.
“Fine, fine, superb specimen,” he said into the hand he held in front of his face. Then, in an accent that marked him as a local, he ran down a list of afflictions that would have tried Job, and asked if I had: Tumor. Teeth unable to rip open a musket load. Rupture. Flat feet. Deafness. A wound of the head that impaired judgment. Convulsions.
I couldn’t mutter, “Naw, suh,” fast enough to keep up with the ailments he was meant to be looking for himself.
Completely ignoring the double yardstick at his side, the doc asked his assistant, “Corporal, what would you put this man’s height at?”
The corporal eyeballed me, said, “He’s a tall one, sir. Reckon he’d go five nine minimum.”
“I concur,” Doc said, and that’s what the corporal scribbled down on my enlistment form.
“Weight?” he asked next, paying no mind to the scale the good doctor at the first station was making all his men stand on.
Corporal sized me up like he was buying me by the pound. “He’s skinny, but looks to be all muscle, sir. He might be tipping one twenty. One thirty.”
Doctor shook his head, muttered to the corporal, “And you Yankees insisted that we mistreated these creatures so abominably you had to go and fight a war to ‘free’ them. Why, look around at these husky bucks.” He waved a hand at all the fine young men. “See what excellent condition they are in. Lies. It was all lies. Why, it was in our interest to maintain our property. And we did. Cared for them like prize bulls. It was my people who were starving. My people who suffered.” His voice trembled and his watery eyes got a bit waterier at the injustice. Shaking his head, he signed my form and waved me off toward yet another line.
Two soldiers stood at the head of this line. Beside them were huge piles of army jackets, shirts, suspenders, and trousers. Each recruit who stepped forward was sized up then handed a bundle of those items. I noted that there were two piles of caps. One pile had the hunting horn affixed to it, which marked out the ground-pounders of the infantry. I’d seen enough during the Rebellion to know that their miserable lives held no glory and little more dignity than a slave’s had. The other pile, now, those caps were crowned with the crossed sabers of the U.S. Cavalry, the real soldiers like the General and Sergeant Allbright. The ones that rode tall mounted on a fine horse. No question about it, it was the cavalry for me.
“What’s your size?” the soldier handing out the duds asked a man in front of me. He held up a pair of britches in each hand and said, “We got too big and too small,” and then without bothering to check if the fellow was a size Too Small or Too Big he thrust a uniform at him.
When my turn came, the private snapped the form out of my hand and went to gathering up my bundle without a word about my preferred service. When he popped one of them horn caps atop the bundle, I piped up, “Gimme a saber cap. Cavalry. I’m going for cavalry.” I added politely, “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I’d prefer to ride.”
The private shot his buddy a look that had that combination of twinkly and scary unique to Paddies that meant someone was about to be taken down a notch or get the shit kicked out of him. Usually a painful combination of both. “Foley,” he said to his buddy. “Our man here said he’d prefer to ride.”
Prefer. That was a mistake.
“You don’t say,” Foley chimed in. “Well now, meself, I’d prefer to be carried about in a gilded coach such as emperors and queens and the like prefer. What about you, Byrne? What would be your preferred mode of transport?”
“Now that you ask, Private Foley, I’d prefer to be conveyed by an elephant painted up like a flowered teapot with a great, bloody plume waving about its head like I was the focking lord of all India.”
They interrupted their jackass hee-hawing long enough for Byrne to shove the enlistment form in my face, stab a grimy fingernail at something the rumpot doc had written along the side, and read out, “Says ‘Infantry.’ Savvy?”
“But they never asked me if—”
“This is the army, Sambo. There ain’t no asking. You’re too focking tall for the cavalry. Get some sturdy boots, boy. It’s infantry for you, you ______.”
I was hurried off with the two Paddies cussing me out using unnecessary swears of a racial-type nature that I have no intention of repeating. For, as I’d learned during my time with the army, of all the whites, none could beat the Paddies for low-rating people of color. Excepting, of course, the Missouri pukes, Maryland craw thumpers, South Carolina weasels, Texas beef heads, Mississippi whelps, Georgia crackers, Kentucky corn crackers, and soon as they learned to speak American, the Krauts, dagos, Hunkies, and boxheads could also lay on some heavy slurs. I was sure the Bowery Boys I’d met up with on the Shenandoah Campaign meant us no good with their comments, but as no one could understand their New York City chatter, I couldn’t swear to it.
Come to think of it, you could count on near any white getting a dig in unless they were abolitionists, Quakers, or your more advanced type of Kraut. And even then, there’d be a Quaker now and again who had once owned slaves and had yet failed to shake off the habit of regarding us as property.
Outside the barn, I stood blinking in the hazy Virginia sunshine watching the naked men pop hands into shirtsleeves and hop from one foot to the other pulling up their army britches. Complaints rang out as they examined the tattered muslin shirts and stained trousers.
“This ain’t the blue suit. I signed up for the blue suit.”
“These rags ain’t fit to scare crows in.”
The bucktoothed corporal appeared and informed us, “What you have there is your recruitment issue. Proper uniforms will be issued at Jefferson Barracks in St. Louie. Infantry will form up here tomorrow at five in the morning to begin the march north. Cavalry will move by rail.”
March to St. Louie?
I had already marched down the whole of the Shenandoah Valley with Sheridan, I did not intend to spend the next three years of my life wearing out any more shoe leather for the U.S. Army. I would just toss out my papers and head on with the cavalry bunch.
Then the corporal added, “Each one of you must have the proper enlistment form to be admitted to either group.”
That was a nut I did not know how to crack.
As I stood there studying that cap with the stupid horn on it weighing out whether putting on a harness and pulling a plow would be any worse than being in the infantry, I caught sight of Vikers and what looked to be his new bodyguards, Greene and Caldwell. The three of them were making a big show of adjusting their caps so that the crossed sabers of the United States Cavalry on the front caught the sunlight and gleamed like gold. Vikers and Greene were shrimp. But Caldwell. He was one of the few men taller than me. Vikers caught me staring and grinned. I don’t know how, but he’d managed to get them all into the cavalry.
Chuckling as they passed me by, the possum-faced Greene yelped out, “Enjoy your tramp to St. Louie, Stanky. Might air you out some.”
I watched Vikers and his new cronies strut off. Even in the shabby recruitment uniforms, they seemed to stand taller, walk prouder. It was the cap that did it. That cap with the crossed sabers. It was poison for me to have to ask anyone for anything and I already knew that, besides whatever IOU he would make me sign for his help, Vikers would demand a thorough licking of his hindquarters, but I didn’t see as I had any choice in the matter.