News of the World(6)
He slid between two collapsed timbers and when he reached for Thompson’s outflung arm the sand erupted around him as if tiny explosive charges had been set underground. The firing was continuous. He laid hold of the bloodied arm and its torn shirtsleeve and dragged Thompson back into the shelter of the crisscrossed cabin timbers. He pulled him over a broken mirror and a calendar and some spoons. Thompson’s boot heels caught the calendar and its pages rolled over—March and April and May.
When he got him back under cover the captain was dying. It was a strange thing to roll a man’s body over on its back and look for signs of life. A thing invisible. He had been hit in the V of his throat. Where’ve you been all the day, Randall my son? O Mother, make my bed soon for I am sick to my heart, and I fain would lie doon. He had heard that song all his life and now he knew what it meant. He tore open Thompson’s military jacket, his shirt; he saw life draining away, draining away.
You’re hit, Sherman said. Look at you, you’re hit.
I am? Jefferson Kyle Kidd, sixteen years old last week, lay back in the yellow dirt and looked down his own body, the homespun brown pants and square-toed boots and his lanky long legs, the spreading red stain on the outside of his right hip. The weave of the homespun had been driven into his flesh. I’m all right, he said. It’s all right.
Later they had to pull his pants off and truss up the bandage around his hip bone and his crotch, which was embarrassing, but it healed well.
He was elected sergeant because they were told they needed one. Sherman moved up to lieutenant and Hezekiah Pitt was made captain to replace Thompson. So there he was with a rank he knew nothing about.
After the battle he sat in a tent with some of the officers of the Thirty-ninth U.S. Infantry to ask them about the duties of a sergeant and made a list. He was anxious to do well and to get everything right. They laughed at him; elected sergeant and not even twenty years old yet. Such was the militia. They laughed at the way he spoke. They were men from Maine and New York, they said noiss and reaftah and keaf. He bent tight to the paper so they could not see his puzzled expression and eventually figured out these words meant nurse and rafter and calf.
He wrote down, in a neat list, all the obligations of a sergeant because written information was what mattered in this world, from after-action reports to scout maps to the list of company clerk duties. Then the Georgia and Tennessee militias and the Army regulars started out for Pensacola. They were in the country the people called Alabama, and the United States government called Mississippi Territory.
Since he had carried himself well at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and was of age he was forwarded to the Thirty-ninth Provost Marshall’s Department. They needed him. He was a big tall cracker. It was a long march to Pensacola. They marched south out of the Alabama hill country and down into the sawgrass country, through wastes of fan palm standing at a height to rake at his hip wound, all of it covered in green briar vines that grew thorns on every inch of their whipcord trailers and all along the march the company musician played “Stone Grinds All” and “Little Drops of Brandy” on his breathless Irish tin whistle in the key of D, over and over. At Pensacola the Army put him to transporting prisoners. He hated it.
He learned all the devices of interrogation and the secret codes with which his British prisoners communicated with one another, how to use wrestling holds on a fighting prisoner, a thumb lock. He learned the uses of manacles and leg irons, the maintenance of prisons in the hot sands of the Florida gulf. Within a few months he talked his way out of the Provost Marshall’s unit and its commanding officer’s managerial hands and into the message corps. The runners.
Then at last he was doing what he loved: carrying information by hand alone through the Southern wilderness; messages, orders, maps, reports. Jackson’s army had no other signal capacity, not like the Navy. Captain Kidd was already over six feet tall and he had a runner’s muscles. He had good lungs and he knew the country. He was from Ball Ground, Georgia, in the Blue Ridge, and covering ground at a long trot was meat and drink to him.
At that time his hair was a deep brown tied up in a pigtail and nothing pleased him more than to travel free and unencumbered, alone, with a message in his hand, carrying information from one unit to another, unconcerned with its content, independent of what was written or ordered therein. He ran at the far fringe of Jackson’s Tennessee Regulars and their crossed white bandoliers. He saluted the adjutant at a staff tent, received instructions, stuffed the messages in his bag, and he was off.
A lifting, running joy. He felt like a thin banner streaming, printed with some regal insignia with messages of great import entrusted to his care. He was given a runner’s corps badge made of silvery metal. He smeared bacon fat on it and dusted it over so it would not shine and give him away as he jogged on through the hills, through the sand and fan palms of the coast. They gave him a flintlock pistol to carry but it was heavy and the gooseneck cock was always catching on something so he pulled the load and carried it in his knapsack.
He dodged artillery and musket fire at Fort Bowyer in Mobile and then back across the Georgia line to Cumberland Island with his messages in a leather budget both on foot and riding those little Florida horses called Tackies. Two years of directed flight across Georgia and the Alabama country, solitary, with his information in hand. Once he fell asleep exhausted in a big empty ash hopper by a cabin to wake up and find himself in a farmyard full of Brits. He stayed where he was until it was hot noontime, when they all left. If they had discovered him they would have shot him dead in the hopper.