“Sem come lem! Sem come lem!” Lemuel’s country accent softened the numbers as he rattled the dice in his hands, stopped to blow on them, rattled a bit more, threw them up against the barracks outside back wall, and crapped out.
“Thank you, Mule, thank you! Always a pecuniary pleasure to play with you.” Vikers swept what was left of Lem’s first month’s pay into his pocket. I’d already signed mine away to him. And by the look of how many others weren’t gambling or buying extra food or even the gun-cleaning supplies army regs said we were supposed to purchase out of our own money, Vikers had done a right smart of paper doctoring and hired reading. At least I could stop worrying about him revealing that I was supposed to be a foot soldier since he’d changed so many others’ papers.
What Vikers actually collected was half our pay, since none of us recruits’d see our full thirteen dollars until we joined an active unit. And that day couldn’t come soon enough. Every one of us hated the barracks food, which, aside from the addition of cold corn bread sopped with “gravy” made of naught but hot water and flour and an occasional treat of three prunes apiece, was the same green salt pork and mush as what I slopped out to the prisoners every day.
While we waited for our group to fill out to the ninety men we needed to make a company, every recruit was worked like a draft mule. And, aside from mucking out stables, never a lick of any of it had to do with guns or horses.
In the evenings, after we were done with our digging, painting, sweeping, mopping, and such, we met up with an old white sergeant who had small, tight, squinty eyes and a small, tight, squinty mouth to get educated about the redskins. He’d come from the Indian Territories and could go on for hours about the depravities that awaited us there if we were ever to be captured. According to him, the best we could hope for from the heathens was a quick arrow through the heart or a sweet crack to the back of the head with a tomahawk.
The old sergeant held us spellbound with stories about how the Indians’d do you if you ever fell into their cruel hands. You’d get scalped, or roasted alive. Or buried in the dirt up to your chin with your eyelids cut off so your eyeballs’d barbecue in the sun while you starved to death. Or staked out naked and spread-eagled over a red ant bed after having your private parts sliced off, stuffed in your mouth, and your lips sewed together. A person tended to remember a torture when the best part of it was getting your lips sewed together.
The point of all his stories was simple enough. “They ain’t human,” he repeated again and again. “No matter what the nancy boy Quakers and pusillanimous politicians in Washington say, redskins ain’t human.”
Most of the men, wide-eyed with terror, hands folded protectively over their crotches, nodded in agreement. Sergeant tended to finish up terrifying us by delivering a lecture about how my race needed to “learn the meaning of discipline.” I bit my tongue to keep from telling him that “my race” could school every soldier in the U.S. Army on discipline for we’d been learned by the finest whip hands in the South.
It turned out that the entire purpose of Jefferson Barracks was to break a man down and make a soldier out of what pieces might be left. A soldier who would salute, say “yessir,” and obey. Questions and “no” were for civilians. Those who weren’t snappy enough with their “yessirs” and salutes were taught army discipline by way of being barreled up, marched half to death carrying a pack loaded with bricks, or buck and gagged. This last training technique had a soldier gagged and hog-tied up with an iron bar run through the space between his knees and elbows and left that way. When the man was untied, he couldn’t straighten up right for a month.
There were other harshnesses.
One morning, I steered my cart of mush and molasses over to the guardhouse and found a dozen white prisoners creeping out. They were breaking for daylight when two guards, still wobbling from being bashed in the head by the escapees, appeared at the door. Without a single word, not a cry of warning, not an order to return, those guards fired their rifles and laid out four of those boys quick as they could reload. They winged another four and shot two more who’d already surrendered and were coming back with their hands waving high up over their heads. Between that and the bucking and gagging and the redskin scare stories, I saw that the army meant business and I was having my doubts if it was one I wanted any part of.
These doubts took on solid form that evening during another crap game. As usual, we were outside, and Vikers, with his bottomless wad of forgery and reading dollars, was corralling what was left of the men’s first pay, leaving them nothing to buy so much as a pasty pie or two with from the sutler to quiet their growling bellies with.
When his pockets were full, Vikers stood and announced that he had to see a man about a horse, and the whole bunch of them rose and adjourned outside where it was dark. As I edged off to the privy, I watched them form a line behind the barracks, and set loose their manly arcs. In the middle of seeing who could hit the Mississippi, Vikers yelled back at me, “Stanky, you too good to piss with your bunkies?”
“Naw, I’m fine. Heading to the—” I pointed to the outhouse.
“Man takes a lot of shits, don’t he?” Greene, who never missed an opportunity to suck up to Vikers, announced in a loud voice.
Vikers jumped right in. “He does, doesn’t he?” he said, pretending like he’d just now noticed that I never unzipped in front of the others. “Mule, what ails your buddy?”
“Cathay just don’t like doing his business front of folks,” Lem answered. “Why you care anyhow, Little Man?”
So casually it made shivers run up my spine, Vikers answered, “Next time you call me ‘Little Man,’ Mule, I will slit your throat while you sleep.”
I waited long enough to see Lemuel walk away safe, then rushed to the privy. Soon as I got the door closed, I pulled the bindings off and drew a breath. The past weeks had packed the air hard in my lungs. I couldn’t take this army, couldn’t take Vikers, couldn’t take being what I was not, couldn’t take being so completely alone that the only friend I had didn’t know the first, not the very first, most essential thing about me.
That night was even more uneasy than most.
As usual, I rose early the next morning so I could get to the washroom before everyone else. The pump screeched as I worked the handle to send a rush of water into the long tin trough. It hit the metal and echoed loud and hollow off the white tiles on the floor and walls of the high-ceilinged room. I’d just splashed water on my face when Vikers and his boys surrounded me.
They were bare-chested, suspenders looping down by their sides. The vicious stares they kept trained on me made my heart gallop. Standing next to me, Vikers plunked his straight-edge razor down on the shelf that ran above the trough, and lathered up for a shave.
Keeping my eyes on that straight-edge, I dried my face and turned to leave, but Vikers, his mouth a black hole opening and closing in the middle of the white foam, said, “Cathay, you’re not going to shave? We been here a month, but I’ve never seen you shave. Have any of you boys seen our man here shave?”
They all muttered how, no, they had not seen me shave.
“So, Cathay,” Vikers said. “You never shave with us. You never piss with us. You never bathe with us. Care to tell us why that is?”
The men waited for what I was going to say. If they were dogs, the fur on the back of their necks would of been bristled up, they were that ready to attack.
I rubbed my palm over my jaw, and said slow and casual like, “Thanks for reminding me.” I plucked the foamy brush out of Vikers’s hand, lathered up, and said, “All that Cherokee blood in me, I almost never have to shave. But when I do…”
I snatched Dupree’s razor out of my pocket, flicked it open, shaved off a strip of lather, snapped it into the trough, and concluded, “I always cut close.”
I finished my “shave” and left. The trembling didn’t start until I was halfway to the guardhouse. I had thrown the pack off again, but it didn’t matter. Vikers and his curs had my scent. One way or another, they were coming for me. One way or another, if I stayed, they’d kill me.