March Toward the Thunder Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE - HEAR THAT

  CHAPTER TWO - THE RECRUITER

  CHAPTER THREE - NEW BLOOD

  CHAPTER FOUR - BUGLES AND MUSKETS

  CHAPTER FIVE - MARCHING

  CHAPTER SIX - SMOKE

  CHAPTER SEVEN - STRANGE CONVERSATIONS

  CHAPTER EIGHT - NEW WORDS

  CHAPTER NINE - FISHING

  CHAPTER TEN - ACROSS THE PO

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - THROUGH THE RAIN

  CHAPTER TWELVE - THE MULE SHOE AND THE BONNIE BLUE FLAG

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - MAIL

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - ANOTHER INDIAN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - HEALING LEAVES

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - THE IRISHMAN AND THE INDIAN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - MARY O’SHEA

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - IN THE RIVER

  CHAPTER NINETEEN - SKILLYGALLEE AND SONG

  CHAPTER TWENTY - AFTER COLD HARBOR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE - STALEMATE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO - THE INDIAN GENERAL

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE - ACROSS THE WIDE RIVER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR - THE UNITED STATES COLORED TROOPS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE - ATTACK AT ALL HAZARDS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX - A VISIT TO THE LINES

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN - ONE MORE THRUST

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT - THE MINE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE - THE FEINT

  CHAPTER THIRTY - THE CRATER

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE - CITY POINT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO - REAMS STATION

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE - DEPOT HOSPITAL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR - THE ANGEL

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE - HEALING

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX - ABOVE THE TOWN

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  THE IRISH BRIGADE

  Selected Bibliography

  DIAL BOOKS

  A member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by The Penguin Group

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  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Copyright © 2008 by Joseph Bruchac

  All rights reserved

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for

  author or third-party websites or their content.

  The map of Virginia (on page v) originally appeared in the May 4, 1861

  edition of Harper’s Weekly newspaper.

  .S.A.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Bruchac, Joseph, date.

  March toward the thunder / by Joseph Bruchac.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Louis Nolette, a fifteen-year-old Abenaki Indian, joins the Irish Brigade in 1864

  to fight for the Union in the Civil War. Based on the author’s great-grandfather; includes

  author’s note.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  eISBN : 978-1-4406-3324-9

  1. Abenaki Indians—Juvenile fiction. [1. Abenaki Indians—Fiction.

  2. Indians of North America—Fiction. 3. United States—History—Civil War,

  1861-1865—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.B82816Mar 2008

  [Fic]—dc22

  2007027998

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For our grandchildren; may they live to see a world in which there is no war

  Old Virginia, the Heartland of the Civil War

  As he lay in the stinking mud of the trench outside Petersburg, Louis thought about what had brought him there.

  The money?

  More greenbacks than a boy of his age could ever hope to earn— especially one who was just an Indian. Cash enough to buy good clothing for his mother, even a horse to carry her loads so that her feet might not ache so much at the end of a long day of walking the road into town. A thick enough stack of the new paper dollars to buy a little piece of land that would be their own, so that no one again could order them to leave their camp like common vagrants. On such land he could even one day raise a family. And as he thought of that, the image of Azonis’s sweet face briefly came to him and made him smile.

  Yes, the money made such a future possible. But it wasn’t just the money that brought him to this killing field. No more than it was just the trail that brought the deer within range of the hunters’ guns.

  The insults?

  He thought back on the gang of boys who’d met M’mere and him as the two of them tried to slip into town, loaded down with sacks full of baskets.

  “Gypsies, dirty Indian gypsies!” the tallest boy yelled at them, his face twisted with contempt.

  “Go back where yuh come from, yuh blamed tramps,” shouted a fat-faced redhead. He bent, picked up a potato-sized cobble and threw it. It would have struck his mother if Louis hadn’t shielded her with his body and felt the stone bounce off his own broad back. He clenched a fist.

  “Non.” Marie Nolette, his gentle mother, grasped his sleeve with her healing hands, palms rough and scarred from many seasons of weaving ash withes into baskets. “Patience. Nous aller. They will grow tired of this game.”

  Although she was trying to hold him back, even though there were six or seven in the mob, he was about to take his mother’s walking stick and wade into them. They were likely about his age, fourteen, fifteen, but none of them as big as he.

  But before Louis could get hold of that stick, something else caught the eyes and ears of the boys. The flash of blue cloth and the glint of oiled metal. The thump of a drum and the measured tramp of feet.

  “It’s our boys in blue!”

  “Soldiers!”

  And, just like that, the gang of boys turned and ran off after the squad of marching men who’d just turned the corner a block away. By the time they reached the soldiers, the boys had dropped their stones and replaced them with sticks held up to their shoulders in imitation of the .58-caliber Model 1861 Rifle Muskets carried by the new recruits. Each and every man was dressed in a blue flannel thigh-length sack coat and blue wool trousers, a slouch cap perched on his head, chin held high and proud.

  “Kill some Rebs for us, sir.”

  “Take it to them Sessesh snakes!”

  As those neatly uniformed marching men and the boys who copied them went around the corner and out of sight, they all began to sing.

  “We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree!

  We’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree!”

  It was a stirring song. But what Louis remembered most were those fine, clean uniforms.

  In a uniform like theirs, Louis thought, I would not look like either a ragged gypsy or a dirty Indian.

  CHAPTER ONE

  HEAR THAT

  Saturday, April 2, 1864r />
  “Kina?” Marie Nolette said, her head lifted like a deer sniffing the air. “Hear that?”

  Her voice was soft. Most people wouldn’t have heard her speak, since hooves and wagon wheels clattered on the cobblestones of Broadway. Dozens of people were talking as they passed along the sidewalk. It was a busy Saturday morning in front of the hotel where she and Louis were carefully placing their ash splint baskets on display.

  Louis Nolette, though, was used to paying attention to his mother’s quiet voice.

  “Ayup,” he replied.

  How could he not have heard that deep rumble? It was a hundred times louder than the wheels of a heavy wagon over the plank road that led out of town toward their camp north of the village. It came not from nearby nor from the earth, but from above. It was the distant voice of Bedagi, the ancient thunder being. In the stories of long ago, before the coming of the white men, Bedagi’s arrows of lightning destroyed the monsters that threatened his people.

  But Louis knew that what his mother had said was not just about hearing the thunder. It was about its meaning. Far-off thunder might mean danger was near.

  The deep rumble came again. It touched something inside the broad-shouldered boy as he stood there, muscular arms full of the baskets they’d made. Old Bedagi was walking the sky somewhere above the Kaydeross Range to the north of the town. Maybe he was looking down now from the clouds over the swamps by Ireland Vly where Louis had found the black ash trees for these baskets.

  Papa, Louis thought, you taught me well. I have not forgotten one bit. I know how to find the right trees, how to thank them properly before cutting them. I remember how to use the heavy club to pound along the peeled ash trunk as it is on the ground. Tunk-tunk tunk, tunk-tunk tunk. Two strikes forward, then one back. My arms have grown stronger doing this work.

  To do it right you had to move slowly down the length of the peeled log, breaking the fibers in between the seasonal ring so that the withes would lift up to be pulled free. Thin rings were laid down in times of drought, thicker ones in seasons when the rains were good and steady.

  Louis nodded. Spring thunder is also a good sound. Rains coming. Soon everything will turn green and grow in the moons of planting and hoeing that lay ahead. Maybe in this year of our Lord, 1864, me and M’mere will earn enough to buy a few acres.

  There was a chance of that. They had been making a little more money this spring. Not just from their baskets, but also from his mother’s doctoring and birthing.

  They’d only been camping in the area for three months, but word had spread about “Aunt Marie, the Abenaki doctoress.” Country folk hereabouts had learned that Marie Nolette was the best to call upon for certain things, especially the way she understood what to do when a mother’s time came to bring her child into the light of day.

  Not only that, M’mere, she knows when the need for her is great. She shows up at the door of some farm far from town just when some frantic husband, he is about to send for help.

  More often than not these days, though, it was a worried mother-in-law and not a husband. So many men were off to war, lonely wives having babies who might never see their fathers’ faces.

  Louis quickly turned his thoughts away from children whose fathers were gone.

  M’mere, she is a healer, as well.

  It didn’t matter if it was a broken limb or a burn or even one of those deep wounds that so often happened to people when they were doing farm work around plows and pitchforks and scythes. Or if someone had a deep hacking cough, she would know what tea to make—from the needles of the white pine, perhaps—to clear away catarrh. Aunt Marie, everyone said, held the way to treat just about every injury or ailment one could imagine—short of bringing a person back from the dead.

  Not every family could afford to pay her cash. Sometimes she might be given food or used clothes rather than the few coins a poor family might scrape together. But other times, knowing Marie and her son as basket-makers, a family would grant them permission to go into their woodlot and take any of the black ash that grew where the soil was moist. Louis had marked more than fifty such trees to be cut when the season was right.

  Louis nodded to himself as he put the last of the baskets down. Yes, in another year or two they might earn enough to put down a payment on a little farm. There was good land hereabouts to buy—more than usual. Many acres went unplowed these days with such a multitude of men off to the conflict and so many never coming home again.

  Louis looked down at the newspaper. It had been dropped on the sidewalk by a dandy who’d spent a good bit of time eyeing their baskets without buying a one. It wasn’t the swells who usually bought baskets from them, but ordinary folks who used them around the home. At least he’d left that paper for Louis to read.

  Louis prided himself on his ability to read in both English and French. In their old home up in Canada, he and his parents had always mixed languages together. Sometimes they spoke in Abenaki, sometimes in French, sometimes even a little English. It was a wise thing to know languages. Like most other Indians, they traveled from place to place to make their living. One season might be spent in the lands to the south where only English was heard, another among the Quebecois who refused to speak anything other than their beloved French. Even more than most other Abenakis, Louis had a gift for languages.

  When he was a schoolboy at St. Francis he’d often been praised by the nuns who were his teachers. He’d also been an altar boy. Father Andre tried to talk him into going into the priesthood. When he told his parents about the old priest’s idea, they looked at each other and then back at their son.

  “The Father,” Louis said, “he assures me that I will make a fine priest.”

  That resulted in another long silence.

  “What do you think, my son?” his father finally asked.

  “I think,” Louis replied, keeping his voice as serious as possible, “it is likely to happen . . .”—he paused—“when fish turn into birds and fly south for the winter.”

  Louis smiled at how he and his parents had laughed on that day. Back then, when he was eleven winters old, his ambition was to be just like his father. He would hunt and trap, make baskets. When they needed cash money, he would do as his father did every other year—travel south to work as a logger.

  That same autumn day when he teased his parents about becoming a priest, his father and other men from St. Francis left for lumber camp in Maine. Papa promised he would return in the spring after the drive down the Kennebec.

  “Look for me after the first tonnerre. I’ll be back with ribbons for your hair, mon femme, and a new fusil for you, mon fils.”

  What came to them after that first thunder, though, was not his beloved father. It was word that Jean Nolette drowned during the drive down the Kennebec. He’d been buried on a hill above the bend in the river where he’d lost his life.

  Four winters had passed since his father left them. It still seemed as if it was just yesterday. Some mornings Louis woke up certain he would see his father coming down the trail with that new rifle for his son slung over his shoulder.

  Louis had to turn his thoughts away from that memory. He stared at the front page of the newspaper at his feet. News of the war. Since it began three years ago he’d followed every development in the struggle between the North—which seemed to him to have the right on their side seeing as how they were going against slave-holders—and the South.

  “Their fight, not ours,” his mother said over his shoulder.

  Louis nodded, hardly hearing her. His mother spoke those same words more often. She worried about the way his eyes grew faraway each time he read of the Union Army’s heroic struggles. Accounts of battles held a fascination for him like nothing else.

  Louis did notice, though, how newspapers were printing good news again. Everything was going fine. It’d been that way when war was declared in ’61 after the firing on Sumter. Papers and men on the street swore it’d all be over in a month, maybe two. The Sesseshes wo
uld crawl back into the Union like whipped puppies, tails between their legs.

  Then came Bull Run. General McDowell’s invincible Union Army went out to face the outnumbered Confederates for what most folks expected to be a lark. Ladies and gents and members of Congress drove their coaches out to where the battle was to take place, spread blankets out on the hills, brought out picnic lunches. Northern troops in their new uniforms stopped to pick the ripe blackberries gleaming along the Virginia roadsides that twenty-first day of July.

  But General Pierre G. T. Beauregard and his Confederate boys had plans of their own that didn’t include picnics or turning tail. The day ended with 2,900 Union soldiers dead or wounded. It was only because the Rebs took 2,000 casualties of their own that they hadn’t just marched right in and taken over Washington.

  Since then there’d been too many bloody battles to count. Shiloh, Second Bull Run, Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg. Those were the ones Louis remembered best from the news accounts. He’d been both thrilled and horrified. On the one hand, it made him glad that he was safe and far away from battle. But he couldn’t help but wonder.

  Me, would I measure up to be a soldier?

  The war was still going on, but the papers declared that the Southern cause was doomed. Only the Copperheads—those fool Southern sympathizers with their calls for peace at any price—saw things differently. Arkansas and Louisiana were back in the Union fold. Gettysburg had been a great Union victory. With General Ulysses S. Grant in charge, the reins were in the hands of the North. But there were still thousands of men coming home in boxes or limping back so badly wounded they’d be crippled-up for the rest of their days.

  Louis’s eye was caught by a piece farther down the page. The United States Senate had passed a joint resolution on April 8 approving the Thirteenth Amendment by a vote of 38 to 6. The Emancipation Proclamation, which President Lincoln issued back in 1862, was finally going to be ratified.

  Louis wondered about that.