Free Alice's Tulips: A Novel by Sandra Dallas Page A

hardly at all at first, because he was having such a good time in Keokuk. But now he’s got the misery, and he writes every week to complain. He’s seen the elephant, as the soldiers who’ve been in battle put it, so he’d just as soon come on home. Charlie drills and drills and drills some more, then goes through knapsack inspection, draws picket duty, and takes his turn with the mess. Harve Stout is one of Charlie’s five messmates, all of them from Iowa, and Harve’s the best there is for making boiled pudding out of hardtack. Hebreaks up the hard crackers and mixes them with water or sometimes a little whiskey, and bacon grease, pours the mess into a sock, and boils it. I write, “Is the sock clean?”
    “Shoot no,” Charlie writes back. “How do you think it gets the flavor?”
    Charlie says they have the hard crackers three meals a day, and they have to be soaked in water or coffee before they can be chewed. Even then, hardtack isn’t any too choice, on account of things living in it. One of the Rangers bit into his cracker and says, “There’s something soft in here.”
    “A worm?” Charlie asks him.
    The fellow spits in his hand and looks at it. “Nope, a tenpenny nail.”
    The food isn’t the only thing that has got Charlie down. The weather is as hot as Lucifer’s back pocket, but worse, there is nothing for the soldiers to do. Charlie says he’d rather fight Rebs than sit around all day; he is that bored with the lazy camp life. He’s not much for playing with spotted papers, as they call cards, and he won’t gamble. Now Charlie has always liked his good time, but even so, he can’t abide the foul talk and bad ways. Me and Mother Bullock send Charlie newspapers and books, but he gets them only half the time. I guess some general is sitting in his tent reading Charlie’s copy of Mrs. Stowes’s
Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands,
which I mailed him. Charlie is close with his money, like he always was, and sends us most of his pay, when he gets it. He even made himself some extra money by buying drawers from the soldiers who don’t wear them and selling them to those that do, but the army hasn’t issued any lately, so that little business is done with.
    The worst thing for Charlie is he is down with the dysentery, which has pretty near put him in the hospital. He says more men die from camp sickness than wounds. Mother Bullock, who knows about such things, sent him dried raspberry leaves and told him to make himself a tea. The Rangers met up with a company of Rebs, but Charlie was so sick that he had to stay behind and listen to the gunshots and the shouts and the screams,and he says that was worse than fighting. Now he fears the boys will call him a coward. Harve told him anybody who fought like Charlie did in that skirmish awhile back is as brave as there is. Charlie wishes he’d been shot instead of got diseased, but he says with his currently bad luck, he’d have got shot in the foot, and I wouldn’t want him back. “Now, Doll Baby, you never said nothing about dancing with a man inflicted with the Arkansas quickstep,” he writes. Well, who would have thought to say it?
    I wasn’t sure I was going to tell you this, but since we confide in each other about everything, and I already mentioned dancing, and you know who the last person was I danced with, well, just guess who came along when I was picking chokecherries? The cherries grow wild all along the creek about a half mile from the house, and as I was tired of working in the corn, I decided to gather cherries one afternoon, then make conserve and jelly and pickle some because sugar costs us twenty-five cents the pound. I thought to make cherry bounce, too, since it would vex Mother Bullock more to waste the cherries than to ferment them. Besides, we can use the bounce for dosing ourselves when we get sick. I was having a grand time, eating the cherries and singing loud enough to scare crows. And I looked a fright, I can tell you, with