The mettle of a man

Chapter 9


Far off, men swell, bully, and threaten;
bring them hand to hand, and they are feeble folk.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Private Wilmer Scoggins was not someone Charles would ever seek out as a confidante or to pass the time in a friendly game of Wisk. Scoggins was not a man to sit around a campfire and enjoy a give-and-take round of casual conversation. Every time Charles saw the burly former bullwhacker he had the same reaction.

If he were on fire, I’d go to the creek to get some water to put him out. But I’d walk damn slow going and coming.

The hulking private had the face of a bully: Flat face, squashed nose slumping to one side like a wind-whipped, thick-trunked willow, and tiny, black river-pebble eyes lost in a face puffed from countless bottles of bad whiskey and the hammer of bare knuckles. Scar tissue dotted both cheekbones; busted ear cartilage, bulbous and fiery red, pulled his expansive ears away from his head.

If’n he could flap those things, he might soar high like a buzzard.

Scoggins was a loud, profane dullard, who thought being drunk was as close as he would ever get to Heaven. He hated the army, hated the officers of the Ninth, and only got along with two or three men in the company, all of his ilk – tough men, with the brains of moles, eyes always on the look-out for prey, fists always clinched in response to some indescribable internal rage.
The men of C Company acknowledged Scoggins’ strength was a blanket of unwavering courage he wore into battle. Or, his audacity in battle could be because, as one solider said in a whisper, “He’s just plain asylum-bound.”

Scoggins took an instant dislike to Charles for the smallest of reasons: The youngster’s slight stature.

“You’re too small and buggery looking to be much good for nothing,” Scoggins said more than once, eyeing Charles like a corn snake sizing up a crib mouse.

For the most part Charles consciously stayed out of the bully’s way. Like all slow-to-focus, dull-eyed, mouth-breathers, Scoggins’ attention was easily scattered and could be swayed from an intended target with relative ease.

It was fall and there was a faint chill in the air. The regiment was still encamped just south of the small village of Duroix Crossing. Charles Jacob Skimmer, a newcomer to the drum corps from the Twenty-first Michigan (who was reassigned to the Ninth “on an accident,” as he put it), was sitting under a chestnut tree near a small creek. Charles lightly tapped out sick call on a flat rock for practice while Jacob twittered on about life in Michigan. “Shore, it can get cold back home. But heck, it gets cold everwhere. The coldest I ever got in my life was in Mississip last winter. Damn near froze off my twig and berries! But it don’t get hot up home like it gets down here. Lord, but it’s hot. I hate wet heat worsen I hate the wet cold of the South.”

Scoggins stumbled onto the pair and quickly decided that tormenting the young drummers would be perfect pre-supper fun.

“Well, well, well,” Scoggins said, running blunt, dirty fingers through his bird’s nest of a beard. “If it ain’t the Rebel squirt and that other skin-beater. Whatcha doin’, boys, beatin’ on your skins!” He hee-hawed at this own joke.

Charles jumped up like he had sat on a hornet’s nest. Putting his right hand to ear, he said, “Hark! Hark, I say!”

Jacob squinted at Charles like he was about to have a fit. Scoggins’s beady eyes shrunk to the size of lentils.

“Hark!” All three held their breath. “I swear that’s cannon fire. Sounds like the Rebs are coming up the north road. Come on, Jacob! The colonel will be wanting us quick-like.”

As they ran back toward camp, Jacob looked hard at Charles. “I didn’t hear nothing. What did you hear?”

“Nothing!” Charles said, laughing. “But it was the best nothin’ I never did hear.”

They ran on toward the camp, laughing the frenzied cackle of the men jerked back from the edge of the grave.

“Hark?” Jacob said, wheezing between gulps of breath and forced laughter.

“I read it once in a book,” Charles said. “It sounded like the right thing to say at the time.” He paused. “Hark! Yep, that’s a right fine word.”

Thirty minutes later, as Charles and Jacob gathered up their supper rations, they saw Sergeant Rooney, a square-headed Irish tough squared up with Scoggins. The sergeant was screaming.

“The fooking Rebel Army is a-comin’, now ya be saying? Well, where they be, that’s a question I’ll be askin’ you?”

“Sergeant, that damn squirt—"

“You be shuttin’ your face, Private Scoggins. But since you think that the entire Rebel By Gawd Army be comin,’ I’m going to let you dig us a nice, deep hole so we can all hide in it. I want that nice, deep hole right next to the nice, deep pit at the end of that nut orchard. And, while you’re at it, cover up the old pit.

“In fact, get in the hole that you be coverin’ up. I’m sure you’ll feel right at home in that nice, deep, shitty hole with all your relatives.”

The sergeant stomped off toward the mess area and the two boys ducked quickly behind a tent as Scoggins scanned the area, his face a thunderhead of hatred.

“Best you stay out of his way for a spell,” Jacob said, rolling his eyes.

“Oh, yeah,” Charles answered. He tried to sound fear-free and knew he failed.



Over the next several days, Charles spent a goodly amount of time on the lookout for Scoggins. When he went about camp on errands for the surgeon, the quartermaster, or one of the company or regimental officers, he blended in with groups of men going somewhere, or walked fast along the road next to the bivouac, keeping to its center and away from covering brush.

He admitted to himself that he was afraid of Scoggins; any sane man would be. He convinced himself that keeping away from the man was good, solid, New Orleans, Catholic, orphan common sense. Being hurt at the hands of a bully served little purpose.

Am I afraid of Scoggins?

He asked himself the question more often than he realized.

Not afraid, exactly, more like . . . cautious.

No, maybe afraid is what I am.

Not having had much experience in rough-and-tumble and none at all in what Brother Bartholomew had called the “art of pugilism,” Charles simply didn’t see any reason to fight the menacing soldier. That left plenty of reasons not to fight the man.

A couple of months after his run-in with Scoggins, Charles was headed toward the quartermaster to pick up some plug tobacco for Colonel Healy. A moisture-laded, steady breeze from the south nipped at his face and fingers as he burrowed further into his wool coat. His bedroll blanket served as a cape and scarf, but failed to keep the wind’s icy fingerlings from digging at his neck.

A roar to his right straightened him just as a blurred force knocked him from his feet. The impact launched him several feet; his momentum was retarded by a two-man tent, which collapsed under his weight. He later remembered hitting something solid inside the tent, an elbow maybe, or a knee, most likely. Yelps and grunts of pain came simultaneously from Charles and the tent’s occupant as Charles’ momentum carried him over the tent and into a small circle of men squatted around a campfire.

Stopping just short of the fire, Charles jumped up quickly and turned just in time to receive a numbing blow to his neck and shoulder. Backwards he stumbled before losing his balance and hitting the ground with his face facing the fire. Someone grabbed his leg and tried to flip him over onto the fire, but Charles kicked with his free foot, landing a squishy blow that elicited a satisfying grunt.

Rolling clear of the fire, Charles rose in a crouched position, ready to run if possible
. . . or fight, if necessary.

Scoggins!

Anger scorched his brain, a heated flatiron left on a cotton shirt. Fiery sparks hit the back of his eyes and blossomed into white-hot embers, as his brain tried to comprehend a logical solution to the problem.

He could feel his brain sluggishly starting to evaluate all angles of the situation just as a fist swept by his cheek, connecting like an iron bar into his shoulder. The blow knocked him to the ground a third time. Gathering his feet under him, he launched himself at his tormentor. With a banshee scream and fingers extended forward—eight daggers searching for a tender target—Charles left the ground and felt a high degree of satisfaction as the straightened fingers of his right hand struck Scoggins’ neck at the apex of his prominent Adam’s apple, as his left sliced into the big man’s right ear. Scoggins was trying to take a step backward to set himself firm but caught his right heel on a root, causing him to bend to the right. At impact he went ass over teakettle, turned a complete somersault, and ended up with his legs scattering the blazing campfire logs.

Scoggins grasped his neck with both hands; bawling sounds accompanied by a gagging noise strangled their way out of his open mouth. He only had time to make one feeble kick to disperse the flaming sticks when Charles started kicking him in the head with both feet.

(One soldier, recalling the scene in a letter home, wrote, “The young’un was poundin’ on him with both feet and it made a thumpin’ sound, like mess call on a little drum.” Every time he told that story to a new audience, the laughter was loud, raucous, and sustained.)

One kick connected with Scoggins’ chin and another was headed at the same target when Charles felt his feet leave the ground; his breath whooshed out by a chest-crushing weight. A feathering of red hair sprouted over his right shoulder; he grabbed the hair with both hands and yanked forward. A sharp yelp slapped his right ear like a blow from a flat stick.

Charles went airborne, hit the ground on his right side and rolled twice before his hip slammed into the trunk of a small pine. He lay still. Very still. He wanted to move, felt he should move out of a survival instinct, but his muscles refused to obey brain commands. He shook his head, trying to clear it, and took stock of the extent of the damage to his hip. The intense pain and dizziness quickly eased. Despite the confusion gripping him, he jumped to his feet and ran at Scoggins, still sitting on the ground, still holding his throat, screaming like a swamp cat beset by a pack of hunting dogs.

A heavy hand grabbed a headful of hair and jerked him off his feet. Pain sliced through the back of Charles’ head and a bubbling of tears hit the corner of both eyes. Grimacing and grinding his teeth so hard they ached, he forced his eyes open and through a thick veil of tears, he stared into the wild eyes of Sergeant Phillip Reilly of I Company.

The soft voice belied the crazed look in those eyes. “I’m trying to help you, boy. Now calm yoreself down.”

Trying not to move, Charles nodded with his eyes, blinked twice. The pressure on his hair eased, his feet found ground. “Now, git!” the gruff sergeant whispered loudly.

Charles turned to force his way out of the circle of soldiers. He stopped and slowly twisted his neck to stare at Scoggins, who was still on the ground. Charles noticed with satisfaction that there was blood on Scoggins’ shirt and a red ripple of blood ran from his ear, down his neck and dripped onto the fine dirt of the camp. He inwardly grinned when he heard the man blubbering. Consciously trying to lower the tone of his voice, he said in a sawmill whisper: “Private Scoggins, if you ever touch me again—ever touch me again!—I will kill you. That’s no threat, that. C’est une promesse. That’s a promise.”

He turned and walked away. A circle of men he didn't remember being there parted to let him through. More than one hand slapped him on the shoulder as he passed.