Read Online March Toward the Thunder by Joseph Bruchac - Free Book Online

what I was doing before I joined up meself. As sure as me name is Coyngham, I was one of them canal lads who finished shoveling Clinton’s ditch all the way across the fair state of New York in October of 1825.”
    Louis nodded in understanding. His own father had worked for a time digging out the great Erie Canal.
    Supply Sergeant Coyngham waved a hand toward the southwest.
    â€œNow, the Rebels over there, they have another way of doing it. D’ye know that they have their slaves with them doing that hard labor of weaving those wicker baskets we call gabions and shoveling up the red earth into them to make their bombproof walls? They’ve pulled ’em from the plantations and the cotton fields to do all of the dirty work of war except for the actual killing. There’s tens of thousands of ’em over there behind those lines. And there’s a wee bit of irony. Here we are in this war that our wise abolitionists tell us is a struggle to free those poor benighted Negroes. And there they are over there sweating blood to build the fortifications to keep us out.”
    Coyngham shook his head. Then he clapped Louis on the shoulder. “But enough of me jabbering, lad. Go and tell your captain that supplies are on the way to the Sixty-ninth.”
    When Louis got back to the company there was barely time to eat a bit of the salt pork stew Merry had concocted over a campfire in the skillet that their mess shared. There were greens in it that actually added a surprising amount of flavor.
    Though it might just be the hunger that has been eating at my belly so much that even an old shoe would have tasted good. I don’t know which I worry about most—getting shot or not getting anything to eat!
    Louis wolfed the final bite of his meager breakfast and washed it down with the last cup of coffee from the pot Merry had carried with him, tied with a spare shoelace to the back of his pack. Then he looked around at the other men in their mess.
    Mess, another one of those new words I’ve learned. But now I take it for granted as much as breathing.
    A mess was the smallest and the most informal of all the units in any army. And in some ways, Louis had learned, it was the most important, made up of those men who chose to take their meals together in the field.
    They all shared the duties of cooking, cleaning up, fetching water to fill the canteens and the coffee pot, and—when they could pry it out of Merry’s hands—carrying the iron skillet. Joker Kirk and Scarecrow Dedham, Possum Page (flat on his back and snoring, his hat over his chubby face, able to take a nap anywhere), Merry, Happy Smith with his perennial scowl, Songbird Devlin, Knapp, Ryan, Kinney, Bishop. One by one he found the familiar faces of the other ten men in their mess. One apostle short of twelve, as Joker put it.
    Not a one was missing. Men from other messes, like Wilson and O’Day, had died or become casualties. It was a small comfort that none of the men in their mess had been lost or even wounded in the hurly-burly of the previous day.
    Every one of them, though, had broken fingernails and black, blistered hands. A stack of shovels lay piled against the side of their rifle pit. Their faces looked like those of the men Louis had seen once in a minstrel show, although the charcoal smears were not from burnt cork but from powder and ashes and Southern dirt.
    And there—at the edge of the group—was one extra face. That face wore a look on it Louis had not seen before—a mix of uncertainty and hope.
    â€œBelaney’s asked to join us,” Devlin said. “Every man in his mess was kilt or wounded. We’ve chosen to wait on a vote till you arrived. Ready? All in favor?”
    It seemed Louis was not the only one who’d noticed how Bull Belaney had shown a new side to himself in the fight. Every man raised his hand. Even Possum, who woke up when the vote was called.
    â€œThank ye all,” Bull