News of the World: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

the battle he sat in a tent with some of the officers of the Thirty-ninth U.S. Infantry to ask them about the duties of a sergeant and made a list. He was anxious to do well and to get everything right. They laughed at him; elected sergeant and not even twenty years old yet. Such was the militia. They laughed at the way he spoke. They were men from Maine and New York, they said noiss and reaftah and keaf. He bent tight to the paper so they could not see his puzzled expression and eventually figured out these words meant nurse and rafter and calf.
    He wrote down, in a neat list, all the obligations of a sergeant because written information was what mattered in this world, from after-action reports to scout maps to the list of company clerk duties. Then the Georgia and Tennessee militias and the Army regulars started out for Pensacola. They were in the country the people called Alabama, and the United States government called Mississippi Territory.
    Since he had carried himself well at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend and was of age he was forwarded to the Thirty-ninth Provost Marshall’s Department. They needed him. He was a big tall cracker. It was a long march to Pensacola. They marched south out of the Alabama hill country and down into the sawgrass country, through wastes of fan palm standing at a height to rake at his hip wound, all of it covered in green briar vines that grew thorns on every inch of their whipcord trailers and all along the march the company musician played “Stone GrindsAll” and “Little Drops of Brandy” on his breathless Irish tin whistle in the key of D, over and over. At Pensacola the Army put him to transporting prisoners. He hated it.
    He learned all the devices of interrogation and the secret codes with which his British prisoners communicated with one another, how to use wrestling holds on a fighting prisoner, a thumb lock. He learned the uses of manacles and leg irons, the maintenance of prisons in the hot sands of the Florida gulf. Within a few months he talked his way out of the Provost Marshall’s unit and its commanding officer’s managerial hands and into the message corps. The runners.
    Then at last he was doing what he loved: carrying information by hand alone through the Southern wilderness; messages, orders, maps, reports. Jackson’s army had no other signal capacity, not like the Navy. Captain Kidd was already over six feet tall and he had a runner’s muscles. He had good lungs and he knew the country. He was from Ball Ground, Georgia, in the Blue Ridge, and covering ground at a long trot was meat and drink to him.
    At that time his hair was a deep brown tied up in a pigtail and nothing pleased him more than to travel free and unencumbered, alone, with a message in his hand, carrying information from one unit to another, unconcerned with its content, independent of what was written or ordered therein. He ran at the far fringe of Jackson’s Tennessee Regulars and their crossed white bandoliers. He saluted the adjutant at a staff tent, received instructions, stuffed the messages in his bag, and he was off.
    A lifting, running joy. He felt like a thin banner streaming, printed with some regal insignia with messages of great importentrusted to his care. He was given a runner’s corps badge made of silvery metal. He smeared bacon fat on it and dusted it over so it would not shine and give him away as he jogged on through the hills, through the sand and fan palms of the coast. They gave him a flintlock pistol to carry but it was heavy and the gooseneck cock was always catching on something so he pulled the load and carried it in his knapsack.
    He dodged artillery and musket fire at Fort Bowyer in Mobile and then back across the Georgia line to Cumberland Island with his messages in a leather budget both on foot and riding those little Florida horses called Tackies. Two years of directed flight across Georgia and the Alabama country, solitary, with his information in hand. Once he