Eric Flint - 1824 - The Arkansas War

He glanced at Sheff 's mother and sister, and then at Sheff. "In your case, that means we'll loan you a thousand dollars even. No interest accumulates as long as either you or young Sheffield is still in the colors. Once both of you have finished your terms of duty-assuming you were discharged honorably-we'll start charging you three percent on whatever the balance is. The truth is, you can't find a better loan anywhere. Either here or in the United States."

Sheff had no idea if he was telling the truth or not, since what he knew about banking was that:well, it was a white man's business. He'd never known a black man who even went to a bank, much less owned one.

From the dubious expression on her face, it was obvious his mother was just as ignorant. But his uncle seemed satisfied. Not, probably, because he actually knew anything. But just because, as with Sheff himself, he was inclined to trust Mr. Crowell.

Crowell was famous, too, after all. And if most of that fame was due to his horrible mutilation, there wasn't actually any sign of it on the man himself. Not visibly, anyway, covered with that fancy clothing. Maybe he was a little fatter than he would have been otherwise. But it was hard to know. Men that big usually ran to fat, some, once they got a little older.

Sheff thought he was a nice man, though. Not that it really mattered. Even if Crowell had been poison mean, Sheff would have been inclined to take his word for something. The man was a banker. The only black banker Sheff had ever heard of.

"We'll do it," said Sheff 's uncle firmly. "Be quiet, Lemon. You've had your say, and you ain't my mother, even if you are older than me."

"I'm Sheffield's mother."

His uncle smiled, and nodded toward Sheff. "And so what, girl? I mean, look at him. You tried to stop your son, he'd just run away and enlist anyhow."

Sheff tried to look innocent when his mother gave him a sharp glance. It wasn't easy. He'd spent a good part of the past half hour trying to decide between two different ways he could run away and join the army. Daytime or nighttime.

There were advantages and disadvantages, either way. Daytime would be harder to make his getaway without his mother catching him, but he could probably enlist on the spot. Wherever the spot was. Nighttime, he'd have to wander around some in the dark.

"Would you do that, Sheff?" his mother demanded.

"No, ma'am. 'Course not."

She just rolled her eyes and threw her hands up in defeat.

By midafternoon, Sheff was in a state that bordered on sheer ecstasy. It was all he could do not to bounce up and down like a little boy.

He had a uniform!

True, it was too big, and his mother insisted the tailoring was poor, which it probably was. The cloth was pretty stiff and rough on his skin, too.

Sheff couldn't have cared less. It was a uniform!

His uncle Jem seemed almost as pleased as he did.

"Oh, stop nagging, Lemon," he said to Sheff 's mom. "They didn't cost us nothing. 'Sides, why don't you just do the fixing-up yourself when we get a chance? You're handy with a needle."

"Needle!" Lemon Parker gave the uniforms a look that was none too admiring. An outright glare, in fact. "Need a knife-no, a spear-to punch holes in that stuff."

Uncle Jem grinned. "Maybe they're bulletproof, then."

Before his sister could continue with her protests, Jem turned away from her and examined the room they'd gotten in the big boardinghouse. Now, his own expression took on a look of disapproval. Not deep disapproval-certainly nothing akin to the glares Sheff 's mother was still giving the uniforms-just the skeptical look that an experienced carpenter bestows on the work of lesser craftsmen.

"Pretty crude," he muttered.

Even Sheff could see that that was true. The boardinghouse, from the outside, had looked more like a huge log cabin than any boardinghouse or hotel Sheff had ever seen in Baltimore. On the inside, it looked about the same.

But, again, he couldn't have cared less. He had a uniform! The garment was a magic shield, shedding all the minor cares of life as if they were so many raindrops.

"Never you mind, Jem!" Sheff 's mother shook her head. "Me and Dinah can patch up what needs it." Shrugging: "It's solid built, whatever else. A lot more solid built than you and my little boy are, when men start shooting at you."

"There ain't no war going on, Ma," Sheff protested. But, even in his high spirits, he didn't miss the fact that his uncle had grimaced slightly.

No, there wasn't a war going on. Leaving aside clashes with wild Indians, anyway. But even at sixteen, Sheff knew enough about the world to know that a war was most likely coming.

He couldn't have begun to explain the politics that would drive that war. He was only just beginning to even think in those terms.

It didn't matter. All he had to do was look down at that wonderful green uniform he was wearing. Would the sort of men who'd murdered his father just for being a black freedman allow the father's son to wear a uniform?

He didn't think so.

But he also didn't care. What mattered was that he did wear the uniform of the army of Arkansas. And he made a solemn vow to himself, right then and there, that he'd learn everything a soldier needed to learn. So that when the men came to murder the mother and the daughter, the son would murder them instead.

"And why are you lookin' so fierce of a sudden, boy?" asked his uncle.

Best not to answer that directly, or his mother would start squawking again. "Ah:just thinking of the Bible, is all."

Uncle Jem smiled. "The Old Testament, I hope."

"Book of Judges. Book of Samuel, too."

1824: TheArkansasWar

By evening, Sheff 's elation had become leavened by caution. According to the terms of their enlistment, Sheff and his uncle had been required to report for duty before nightfall. Which they'd done-and immediately found themselves assigned to a barracks on the outskirts of the city that made the construction of the boardinghouse look like the work of fine artisans.

Just a very long empty log cabin was all it was, with a single door at either end. The building had a row of bunks down each side, in three tiers, except for a fireplace on the north wall. The bunks were crammed so close together there was barely room to squeeze between them. They'd have covered up the windows completely, except there weren't any windows to begin with. And the space between the bunk tiers was so short that it looked to Sheff as if his nose would be pressed against the mattress of the man sleeping above him. Unless he got assigned to one of the top bunks, in which case his nose would be pressed against the logs of the roof.

The air would be horrible up there, too, with this many men crammed into so little space. To make things worse, there was still enough chill in the air at night that the fireplace in the middle of the barracks was kept burning. It had a chimney, of course, but Sheff had never seen a fireplace yet that vented all the smoke it produced.

There didn't seem to be enough spittoons, either, for that many men, half of whom Sheff could see were chewing tobacco. On the other hand, he couldn't see any sign that the men crammed into the barracks had been spitting on the floor, either, so maybe they emptied them regularly.

Chewing tobacco was a habit Sheff planned to avoid, himself. It just seemed on the filthy side, even leaving aside the fact that his pious mother and uncle disapproved on religious grounds. Sheff wasn't sure exactly why they did, since he'd never found anything prohibiting tobacco in the Bible, not even in Deuteronomy and Leviticus. He ascribed it to the fact that, in his experience so far in life, he'd found that people who were really devout tended to think a lot of things weren't proper, even if they couldn't exactly put their finger on any one place in the Bible where it said so.