“Oooh, Lord. Oh, sweet Lord Jesus.”
The faster the train went, the louder Lemuel’s terrified moans grew. I had been stunned when he’d boarded the cavalry train and took a seat beside me. There was no way that the hulking country boy, who was my height but had an easy thirty pounds on me, could have made it into the cavalry on the square. I realized then that Lem was a sight slyer than he let on and must have gone to Vikers to get his papers doctored just as I had. I had no chance to bring our shared secret up, though, for the instant the train jerked into motion, my friend took leave of his senses, and as the screeching, speed, and swaying picked up he went completely, moon-baying crazy.
When Lem’s eyes commenced rolling in his head, I feared he was about to go full possessed by the spirit and I clapped my hand over his mouth. Our car was packed. Lots more men than seats. Lemuel and me’d been lucky to grab two and I didn’t want to lose them anytime soon.
“Lem, don’t trouble yourself, man. This the way trains do. Nothing to fret over.” But Lem continued making low howls in the back of his throat, his eyes wide and wild. And he wasn’t the only one out of his head with fear. Though I let not a trace of fear appear on my face, I was also among those on the verge of making water in their pants. And why not? Fastest I’d ever moved in my life before this was whatever top speed a balky mule chose to attain, and now we were careening along in an iron box at, some said, close to twenty mile an hour.
Add to that the shrieks of the iron wheels against the iron rails, the rocking, the sudden jolts that pitched us all near out of our seats, and the eternal trickery of the white man, and who really knew what was to befall us? No wonder a right smart of the men had already heaved up their guts and the stink had the rest of us wobbling on the edge of doing the same.
And no hope of a breath of fresh air, either, as all the windows had been nailed shut and painted over. The Yankees could order the Rebs to carry us on their Central Virginia R.R., but it was up to the Seceshes how they’d do it. And nailing shut and painting the windows black was how they chose. Both to make the ride a torture for us and so whites couldn’t see their worst nightmare come to life: railroad cars filled with black soldiers wearing the blue suit about to be given guns and horses. Just like Solomon had warned, Southerners looked on us, not so much as cattle been rustled away from them, but as the rustlers themselves who’d stolen their God-given property. Ourselves.
Luckily, the painters had done a poor job and if I scooted down in my seat, I had a passable view through a spot they’d missed. What I saw was a country in ruins. The fields where cotton and corn had once grown were nothing but charred stalks. Sheridan had burned every barn and left nothing growing in the fields except stinkweed and bur grass. Soldiers more skeletons than men, their shoes tied to their feet with rags, tramped back to homes that probably weren’t there anymore. We chugged past a gaunt woman and her children, thin blond hair whipped about by the train wind that blew hissing steam and hot cinders their way.
Should I have felt pity for these miserable souls? I did not. I wished with all my heart that I could of wiped the windows clean so that every planter, Rebel, pattyroller, slave catcher, and all the poor whites whose fondest hope in life had been to have their very own slave to whip could see us riding high above them. Only two things the South ever had was land and slaves. Now one was burned to ashes and the other was riding away on the railroad.
“Justice Vikers wants that seat,” Greene barked, startling me. Being Vikers’s buddy had put starch in the spine of that bat-eared fool. Vikers followed and the men packed into the aisle like a cartridge rammed down the throat of a musket made way as best they could.
“Cathay,” he said, smooth as a master who didn’t need to remind a slave who owned her. One word from him and some army clerk’d start checking the records and find out that Cathay, William, was meant for the infantry.
Reluctantly, I stood.
“You too, Mule,” Caldwell, the no-neck one, added.
Lem and I wedged in among those afoot. I put Vikers out of my mind and concentrated on imagining the Southerners out beyond the painted windows watching the source of their wealth and pride and way of life slip from their cruel grasp forever.
In that dark, puke-stinking box rocking us north, I smiled as I delivered the news to Iyaiya, I have escaped. I am captive no more.