Chapter 8: Prisoner

Seth woke in a large, open field along the Darnestown Road just west of Rockville's court house. His hands were tied together, and for a moment he wondered where he was. He stretched carefully and felt pain knot his leg muscles and his backside. His knee hurt, too. He bit his lip to keep from crying out and massaged his calves and thighs, but he could not move freely because one of his ankles was tied to the leg of the snoring man lying next to him.

The hazy sky grew slightly brighter, and he soon recognized the body sharing his blanket as his bearded captor, Corporal Wainder. Man-sized bundles of brown, gray and faded green lay scattered over the sparse pasture in groups of three or four. A few ragged tents squatted among them with their sides open to catch any passing breezes. Only yards away a hunched form bent over a few sticks and some dry grass trying to coax a fire to life. I've got to get home, thought the boy also feeling the immediate need to empty his bladder.

It had been another hot, still night, and many of the sleeping Confederate soldiers lay uncovered, looking like the dead on some grassy battlefield. Only a faint haze of morning dew dampened the long-burnt land. The brassy sun soon pushed through the treeline where the picketed horses stood and promised another searing day.

Seth lay back and looked up at the cloudless sky, watching the stars disappear and twisting at the rope tying his wrists together. Late yesterday as they rode north, he had seen little more than brown cornfields and gray farm ponds showing their bare sides. They had stopped at several dry wells and crossed a number of streams that barely trickled in their stony beds. Some mills seemed deserted, the wheels cracking for lack of water. The boy struggled out of his corner of the smelly blanket watched only by the distant horses, several crows and a few passive cows on the hillside. Color slowly returned to the black and white world.

Seth was hungry and his legs ached like a raw-nerved tooth. Except for a biscuit the frail Mrs. Bouve had given him, he had not eaten since the Sunday dinner Corporal Wainder had violently interrupted. The soldier snored softly beside him, and Seth carefully began working on the knot at his ankle. There is something I have to do, he thought shaking his head and trying to clear his puzzled mind. Something important is going to happen today. He wondered where his shoes had gone and then saw them and his battered hat near Wainder's boots on the other side of the sleeping man.

The boy had been so tired when they reached this field that he had fallen into an exhausted sleep before the soldier had even finished tying him up. What was so important? It was something the cavalryman told Mr. Bouve. Jubal Early, that was it. He inhaled sharply as the thought bloomed. General Early's men would be in the capital tomorrow. The men had laughed together and clapped each other on the shoulder. Wait. That was today. He had to get away, to warn people. The knot at his ankle opened.

He ignored his shoes and crawled down toward the creek feeling his sore knee and the abused muscles of his legs complain and then seem to catch fire. He trembled and kept crawling and stumbling. At the small stream that barely meandered through the pasture, the boy pulled himself upright with the help of some tree roots and relieved himself. Then he sat on the dry creek bank looking at the black and white cows and trying to decide what to do next while he worked on the knot between his wrists with stretched thumb and fingernails.

I'm five or six miles from home, he thought. At least I know where I am. Guess I could hike it in a couple of hours, but my legs and rear end sure do hurt, knee hurts too. Barefoot doesn't matter if I stay to the side of the dirt road. He looked back where the cavalryman still slept by his shoes. I'd do a lot better on a horse. It hurt to think about climbing onto a saddle again, and he made a face as he plucked at the knot with his thumbnail. Maybe I could get Mr. Bouve's little riding horse back to him. He sure was unhappy when Corporal Wainder said it was confiscated, carried on something awful. Thought he would have been happy to help the Confederates. Shoot, I was at first. Hope he took that note to Momma. Guess it was his wife's horse.

Seth stuck his feet down into the little stream and enjoyed the coolness. Guess Mr. Bouve thought he had just loaned his horse to the Rebs. I always liked Mr. Bouve. Never heard anybody talk better down at the store, or anyplace else for that matter. When he explained about habeus corpus and Mr. Lincoln and what he was doing to the Constitution, it was enough to make most anybody run off and join Robert E. Lee to fight for his rights. Now he looked awful sad and his poor wife looked even worse. Guess things changed when their boy got killed at Chancellorsville.

Seth struggled to his feet and tried to ignore the pains in his knees, legs and rump. He moved as fast and as quietly as he could toward the trees where the horses were tied. He guessed it must be almost six o'clock. More soldiers were starting to rouse themselves, so Seth made his way uphill along the stream bed as far as he could. He glanced back where he had left Wainder sleeping, but he could not be sure if the man was still there. The lumps all looked pretty much alike, and the rising sun revealed scores of sleeping men.

Seth moved in a zig-zag way to avoid the small, scattered fires where knots of soldiers were starting to boil coffee and fry meat. He was almost to the first horses, looking for that fat, little bay, when he heard a voice somewhere behind him.

"Hey! Where the hell do you think yer going?"

Seth tried to run, but his legs would not obey him. He wobbled across the field.

"Stop that boy!" Wainder yelled as Seth stumbled, caught himself on his elbows and knees, rolled over and ran on toward the shade and the horses, who eyed him nervously and pawed the dirt behind a rope line.

"Halt!"

Seth looked up, his bound hands held out before him. He had almost run into a soldier carrying a rifle taller than he was. He must have stepped out from the line of horses where he had been on guard duty. To Seth he seemed to spring from the ground like the warriors in the story of Jason that his mother had given him to read. The small soldier backed up a step and commanded in a squeaky voice, "Y'all stop now or I'll fahr, y'hear."

His legs quivering with pain, Seth stopped, panting, and over the sound of the blood racing in his ears, he heard Wainder cursing as he approached, crunching the dry grass, thumping the hard ground. With nowhere left to run, Seth stood quietly, exhaling and looking more closely at the soldier who had prevented his escape. He found himself gazing into the clear blue eyes of someone about his own age. Couldn't be sixteen, thought Seth, certainly never shaved. He started to ask the soldier how old he was as Wainder arrived, out of breath and patience, grabbed Seth by the collar of his shirt and spun him around. The trooper smacked him across the face twice, palm and knuckles, and called him several names, some of which Seth had never heard before.

Wainder hauled him back down the hill by the rope knotted between his wrists and pushed him to his knees near a smoky campfire. "Sarge," his captor said, "watch this here monkey for a minute or two, will yuh?" The trooper stomped off without waiting for an answer. Seth sat, crossed his legs and felt around the inside of his mouth with his tongue. The soldiers near the fire did not seem interested in him.

Seth looked back up the hill but could not see the young soldier who was guarding the horses. Guess Mr. Bouve has given a horse to the Cause. But I've still got to get home, he thought. They wouldn't have caught me if I had headed for the blackberry brambles. Durn horses anyway. His stomach growled. He thought about his home and his mother fixing breakfast, frying bacon, stirring batter.

Seth smelled food and turned his mind back to the small fire. The soldiers he sat with concentrated on their eating although to Seth's way of thinking they didn't have much to concentrate on. They had fried some fat meat in an iron skillet, the kind some folks called a spider, and then made corn mush in the grease. They ate with their fingers from the black pan that sat on its own three legs right in the smoldering fire beside a tall coffee pot. Seth watched curiously as a soldier broke a big hardtack cracker in two and then banged the halves against each other before dunking one in his tin of black coffee. He noticed the boy staring and told him, "Sometimes they got weevils or worse in 'em. Don' like meat in mah coffee." He smiled at Seth, and the boy grinned back.

All the men looked faded and tired, and Seth wondered where the cavalrymen with the clean uniforms and gleaming sabers were, the ones pictured in the illustrated weeklies. He did not see any fancy hats or flapping pennants, not even any flags.

The grizzled sergeant, Seth's temporary guardian, handed him a tin plate with a piece of greasy meat and some mush on it. All the food was the same color, gray, but Seth pushed it into his mouth and then licked his fingers. Sure was awkward eating with your hands tied together. Nobody seemed to notice that. He was glad his mother could not see him, but thinking of her made him say "thanks" when he handed back the empty plate.

He tried squatting on his haunches as the soldiers were, but his sore thighs complained too much, so he sat on the hard ground and listened to the men who, for the most part, ignored him. The troopers had ridden almost thirty miles, from near Frederick, yesterday while Seth and Wainder explored some of Washington's defenses. They had fought a brief, evidently bloodless battle with some cavalrymen, Massachusetts they thought, on the other side of town before riding back and settling in this field for the night.

They praised each other's good sense for joining a cavalry unit and heaped scornful pity on the poor infantrymen who had probably been on the road for an hour or so already. Old Jube would keep them moving, that was the general consensus. They would gobble up the miles just as they had for Stonewall; foot cavalry, they called them.

Stonewall. These men fought under Jackson. Seth's old feeling of Southern pride came flooding back like a tidal bore. He was camping with Stonewall Jackson's men, even eating with them. He was one of them. These might be the men who captured my brother. They were at Bull Run, First Manassas, three years ago. These were the men who were getting ready to invade the capital. That's what they said. They might raid my farm, harm my mother and sister, burn my house. It was right on the way, just down the road. What can Annie and Momma be thinking? I've got to get home, warn folks, get help, do something. Wait till Billy Marbury and old Caroline hear that I camped with Thomas Jonathan Jackson's men, the Second Corps.

"Shoot, them fellers can do twenty, thuty miles easy if they got a'mind to," one soldier said, pulling off his tattered boot. "Tain't that far."

"Hell," said the sergeant, "right after we beat them Yanks on the Monocacy Saturday, I knew we could do it. We'll be on Wash'ton streets today, right on Pennsylvania-by-gawd-Avenue. Oh them busy bars and fancy wimmen, all that cold beer. Just hope McCausland gits to lead the way like we done up north. Don' wanna eat dust all day." The man combed his bushy beard with his fingers. "Wanna look good when we gits to town." He chuckled and licked his lips.