March Toward the Thunder (2 page)

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.

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 would 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.

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.

Back in Canada slavery had long been outlawed. That was why the runaway Negroes headed there.

It made no sense. Nor did it make sense that so many white people in the “free states” still owned slaves. From what Louis heard, even General Grant's wife owned a slave or two. Some said the war wasn't about slavery but about the right of states to do what they pleased. That too didn't make sense to Louis.

Am I too young to understand these things?
He shook his head.
I've only seen fifteen winters, but it seems to me that slavery's what the battle ought be about.

A war to free the slaves
—
that touched his spirit. Louis had met some escaped slaves in Canada. They were dark-skinned men and women and children who traveled at night toward the winter land, following the star shape Louis knew as the Great Bear
—
though they called it the Drinking Gourd. They'd stop by the Nolette camp on the river and stay the night, grateful for the good vittles the serious-faced Indian boy (his skin only a shade lighter than theirs) and his gentle mother shared.

It wasn't unusual that he and his mother helped those runaways. Most Indians didn't hesitate to make a place by the fire for any fugitive who needed a bed for the night and a bite of food. After all, Abenakis knew what it was to run for their lives.

Before his great-grandparents came to Canada, they'd lived in Ndakinna, their old homeland now named Vermont and New Hampshire. If they hadn't fled, they might have been killed like so many other Indians back then. Wave after wave of Englishmen swept in, washing over the hills, turning Native land into New England. Those English even turned some captured Indians into slaves
—
like those darker-skinned men and women they later brought from across the ocean.

Louis shook his head. He didn't like thinking about such things
—
neither the bringing of slaves nor the sad day when their allies the French gave up their long war against the English and left the Indians on their own to fight or die, hide in the hills or retreat.

The thunder rumbled again, closer than it had been before.

“Sounds a bit like cannon fire, does it not, young fellow?” said a voice from his left.

CHAPTER TWO

THE RECRUITER

Louis didn't look up. He'd sensed the white man standing there, but had not acknowledged him. He didn't look the sort who'd pay attention to a pair of basket sellers. He was far too well-dressed to be a farmer or even a merchant. Tall beaver hat and that silk vest, watch chain hanging out of it. With those polished boots and that cane in his hand, he seemed too full of himself to be buying a basket. But why else would he stoop to talk to a brown-skinned young man?

Unless a white man wanted to buy from you or hire you or you were in his way and he expected you to step aside, there was no reason for a gentleman dressed like a lawyer to take notice of an Indian boy.

His mother pointedly paid no attention to the man. She focused on their baskets, arranging them on the long pole. They didn't have a sign out. The baskets were sign enough. Plus most of their customers knew them, seeing as how they were here five days a week. Folks had learned that a Nolette basket was woven tight and strong.

“A good basket can outlive the hand that made it,” his mother often said.

Ash is tough and it holds on
, Louis thought,
as we do
.

You might pound on ash to raise the rings from the trunk and pull off the withes, but it stayed strong as sinew. A thin strip of ash could hold the weight of a man if you looped it over a limb.

The man cleared his throat.

“Good morning, young man,” he said. Something in the tone of his voice made Louis pay attention. The man wasn't just being polite. He wanted something.

So his father, Jean, used to say. It was now Louis's motto. Two fingers held up meant the basket cost twenty cents. A nod or a shake of the head was all that was needed to transact the sale after that. More than one person who bought from them went away thinking Louis and his mother spoke no English at all.

But this might be their first sale of the day. Saying something could make a difference. So Louis used his best English, not even a trace of a French accent in it.

“Good morning, sir,” he replied.

Only three words, but they earned Louis more than he'd bargained for.

“Ah,” the man said, showing his teeth in a broad grin that looked more hungry than friendly. “You speak English.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent! I thought that might be so when I saw you studying that newspaper. You can read as well, can't you?”

“I can,” Louis answered, his voice a little slower this time.

“So you have been following the fortunes of our valiant lads in this great War for Abolition, this Struggle Against Slavery.”

Louis's mother was no longer arranging her baskets. She moved next to her son and grasped him by the elbow. He knew what that meant. But he ignored the touch on his arm that meant he should end this conversation.

“You could say that,” Louis replied. More words than needed.
Why am I trying to prove that I speak English as well as a white man?

“Indeed.” The man's smile was so broad now that you could count his teeth. It made Louis think of a picture he'd seen once in a book. A big-mouthed, sharp-toothed thing called a crocodile. “Might I ask what sort of work you do, lad?”

“Mostly I'm a common laborer,” Louis said, beginning to feel relieved.

“Excellent! And how old might you be?”

The kind of question a stranger ought not to ask. His mother tugged at his arm again. But Louis saw no harm in answering. “Just turned fifteen, sir.”

The man looked disappointed. For half a heartbeat the crocodile smile slipped from his face. He stroked his broad chin with the long thumb of the skinny clawlike hand that held the cane.

“Fifteen, fifteen,” the man said in a musing tone. “But big enough.”