The Drummer Boy of Shiloh

      In the April night, more than once, blossoms fell from the orchard trees and lit with rustling taps on the drumskin. At midnight a peach stone left miraculously on a branch through winter, flicked by a bird, fell swift and unseen, struck once, like panic, which jerked the boy upright. In silence he listened to his own heart ruffle away, away, at last gone from his ears and back in his chest again.

      After that, he turned the drum on its side, where its great lunar face peered at him whenever he opened his eyes.

      His face, alert or at rest, was solemn. It was indeed a solemn time and a solemn night for a boy just turned fourteen in the peach field near the Owl Creek not far from the church at Shiloh.

      ‘… thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three …’

      Unable to see, he stopped counting.

      Beyond the thirty-three familiar shadows, forty thousand men, exhausted by nervous expectation, unable to sleep for romantic dreams of battles yet unfought, lay crazily askew in their uniforms. A mile yet farther on, another army was strewn helter-skelter, turning slow, basting themselves with the thought of what they would do when the time came: a leap, a yell, a blind plunge their strategy, raw youth their protection and benediction.

      Now and again the boy heard a vast wind come up, that gently stirred the air. But he knew what it was, the army here, the army there, whispering to itself in the dark. Some men talking to others, others murmuring to themselves, and all so quiet it was like a natural element arisen from south or north with the motion of the earth toward dawn.

      What the men whispered the boy could only guess, and he guessed that it was: Me, I’m the one, I’m the one of all the rest won’t die. I’ll live through it. I’ll go home. The band will play. And I’ll be there to hear it.

      Yes, thought the boy, that’s all very well for them, they can give as good as they get!

      For with the careless bones of the young men harvested by night and bindled around campfires were the similarly strewn steel bones of their rifles, with bayonets fixed like eternal lightning lost in the orchard grass.

      Me, thought the boy, I got only a drum, two sticks to beat it, and no shield.

      There wasn’t a man-boy on this ground tonight did not have a shield he cast, riveted or carved himself on his way to his first attack, compounded of remote but nonetheless firm and fiery family devotion, flag-blown patriotism and cocksure immortality strengthened by the touchstone of very real gunpowder, ramrod, miniéball and flint. But without these last the boy felt his family move yet farther off away in the dark, as if one of those great prairie-burning trains had chanted them away never to return, leaving him with this drum which was worse than a toy in the game to be played tomorrow or some day much too soon.

      The boy turned on his side. A moth brushed his face, but it was peach blossom. A peach blossom flicked him, but it was a moth. Nothing stayed put. Nothing had a name. Nothing was as it once was.

      If he lay very still, when the dawn came up and the soldiers put on their bravery with their caps, perhaps they might go away, the war with them, and not notice him lying small here, no more than a toy himself.

      ‘Well, by God, now,’ said a voice.

      The boy shut up his eyes, to hide inside himself, but it was too late. Someone, walking by in the night, stood over him.

      ‘Well,’ said the voice quietly, ‘here’s a soldier crying before the fight. Good. Get it over. Won’t be time once it all starts.’

      And the voice was about to move on when the boy, startled, touched the drum at his elbow. The man above, hearing this, stopped. The boy could feel his eyes, sense him slowly bending near. A hand must have come down out of the night, for there was a little rat-tat as the fingernails brushed and the man’s breath fanned his face.

      ‘Why, it’s the drummer boy, isn’t it?’

      The boy nodded, not knowing if his nod was seen. ‘Sir, is that you?’ he said.

      ‘I assume it is.’ The man’s knees cracked as he bent still closer.

      He smelled as all fathers should smell, of salt sweat, ginger tobacco, horse and boot leather, and the earth he walked upon. He had many eyes. No, not eyes, brass buttons that watched the boy.

      He could only be, and was, the General.

      ‘What’s your name, boy?’ he asked.

      ‘Joby,’ whispered the boy, starting to sit up.

      ‘All right, Joby, don’t stir.’ A hand pressed his chest gently, and the boy relaxed. ‘How long you been with us, Joby?’

      ‘Three weeks, sir.’

      ‘Run off from home or joined legitimately, boy?’

      Silence.

      ‘Damn-fool question,’ said the General. ‘Do you shave yet, boy? Even more of a damn-fool. There’s your cheek, fell right off the tree overhead. And the others here not much older. Raw, raw, damn raw, the lot of you. You ready for tomorrow or the next day, Joby?’

      ‘I think so, sir.’

      ‘You want to cry some more, go on ahead. I did the same last night.’

      ‘You, sir?’

      ‘God’s truth. Thinking of everything ahead. Both sides figuring the other side will just give up, and soon, and the war done in weeks, and us all home. Well, that’s not how it’s going to be. And maybe that’s why I cried.’