From as-yet unpublished novel

Reveille: A story of survival, war, family

Family.

Without that foundation, some children flounder and become the lost souls of society; others thrive in an environment that teaches independence at an early age; still others will do whatever it takes to become part of a familial unit.

Even if that means forsaking friends and going to war.



Chapter 1
Running the streets


At fifteen Charles Andre didn’t know much for certain.

He knew he was an orphan. He knew he had a stand-by-his-side-no-matter-the-consequences friend named Ian, whom he considered a pure-dee idiot.

He knew he had a friend named Sarie Beth that he wanted to be more than a friend, but they were both too young to do anything about it. And, them being Catholic, even if they were older and if they were so inclined to do something about it, couldn’t do it anyway without something bad happening to them both.

He knew he wanted to grow up quicker than he was doing and make decisions for himself rather than have others make them for him.

And he knew he was better than people thought he was, or thought he could ever be. Someday he would prove those people wrong.

Or die trying.



Summer. New Orleans. 1860.
The city held the stink of old, wet garbage close to it, like a grieving woman clutching her stillborn baby. Rotting fish heads with skin cracking across the bones. Spoiled cabbage. Rancid, maggot-encrusted table scraps. Decaying ooze from dead animals. Metallic stench of dried blood. Thunder mug residue.

Charles Andre wrinkled his nose and shook his head as if he could sling the stench away. Then he shook his head again, slowly, sadly, knowing what he was trying to do was impossible. Nearing the alley behind Fettermann’s General Store, the smell intensified, took a more ominous interpretation. Charles chanced a look down the alley. Huge bones, including one intact rib cage from a butchered cow carcass were strewn about the alley; a dozen snapping, growling dogs fought over the tendrils of meat hanging from the bones, and slitherings of worm-like tendons and gristle.

It surprised him that he actually stopped to watch the spectacle. It was not a sight he should want to remember. Putting his sensibilities and common sense aside, he focused on four dogs fighting over a denuded hindquarter, the hoof barely attached by a single sickly white tendon. Charles’ eyes jumped back to the rib cage; curlicues of meat hung from it like wisps of Spanish moss from a flooded cypress. The dogs were oblivious to this unclaimed prize, seemingly content to fight and bite and growl over a single, greenish chunk of decaying meat.

What is ‘bout those dogs that they gather up and focus on that lone hindquarter?

It was a rhetorical mental spasm. The answer was clear. It was the same instinct, same urge, same force that made him think about fighting on occasion. In his darkest thoughts, he could see himself – lips curled back, neck and chest ligaments taut, hands forming claws – to defend the simplest of things, like his open-sided ticking mattress stuffed with dung-strewn straw centered under the huge south bay window at St. Mary’s Orphan Boy’s Asylum.

But, in his simplistic reality, Charles was not a fighter.

What would he fight for? he thought. Was there anything?

Life and territory.

Simple concepts of survival.

If your life was threatened, or you “owned” something or thought you did, you protected it, fought for it, and, if necessary, died for it. Next to breath and food and being loved, owning something, anything, was a driving force of life. His life, for certain. He had breath, enough food to survive (never enough, but . . . enough), and he had his place under the window. In his position, at this time, three out of four wasn’t bad.

Placing his mattress under the big south-facing window at the overcrowded orphanage was a simple, common sense thing to do. And Charles Andre, by all accounts including his own personal analysis, was a simple boy, blessed with an abundance of common sense . . . and an overwhelming, sharp-edged sense of survival.

The south side of the orphanage caught a night breeze that, sometimes just for a few precious moments, cleansed the air and eradicated the smell of the inner city and the sleeping room filled with other orphans from his nostrils. Charles lived for that breeze, for those few breaths before the gut-roiling smell beat back the freshness of the ocean’s perfume.

An orphan with lower social status than a shanty house whore, his world encompassed the worst of smells, sights, and sound. His eyes were constantly downcast, limiting his view to legs from the knees down, discarded cigar butts, wet, lumpy chunks of masticated plug tobacco, and feces – always feces, animal and human. He, like the city’s other orphans, homeless vagabonds, and unattached coloreds, walked in the gutter. The street was for the buggies, wagons, and horses carrying passengers participating in acts of commerce or for pleasure; the sidewalk was for the gentry— high-bred men and women and those who attended to them. They, he knew, thought they were born to rule; they carried themselves in a manner that left no doubt they were peacock-proud of their position, not ever walking in the gutter. It was not expected – by them or others.

Sometimes, Charles watched them in the reflections of storefront windows: The men with the slick, polished shoes (sometimes tipped with silver, filigreed toe-taps) shiny, striped pants, waistcoats, ruffled shirts, gold and silver watch fobs, and high-top hats with saucy ribbons at the bottom of the crown; the women with the tiny, pointy-toed shoes with bright ribbons for laces, billowing, brocaded dresses with tiny flowers on a field of white lace or heavy, iridescent stripes of contrasting colors . . . purple and yellow, red and blue, green and brown.

He thought it interesting that he confined his clandestine viewings to clothing, not facial features.

Why is that?

He did not covet anything the gentry had.

Not a single thing.

He had convinced himself of that personal truism time and again. But he could not understand why, then, he hated them so.

Is it hatred? he thought. Or envy?

Can’t be envy. I hate envy!