From where Dan lay it was a long way into the town. They made it slowly, waiting while the battle marched before them. When they crossed the ridge and began to descend toward the first houses, they could see the Confederate force that had turned the Federal right swinging down from the north toward Gettysburg; and from the hill beyond the town Union cannon were playing on these troops. The brothers paused for many rests. Dan’s foot began to bleed again, and Mat stopped that; and he asked where Will was, and Dan said:
‘He’s somewhere here. He’s assistant surgeon of the Sixth Wisconsin. He always wanted to be a doctor. Remember? I was in the Second Maine, but when my time expired I joined them to be with him.’ And he asked for Tom.
‘Tom’s my Captain,’ Mat said. ‘But he got a bullet through the body at Fredericksburg. They pulled a silk handkerchief through the hole, and he’s still in hospital, but he’ll get well.’ He asked: ‘How’s father?’
‘Fine! I haven’t been home since the war began, but I get his letters. He’s always the same.’
Mat nodded. They were resting for a moment by the roadside, sitting on the bank. ‘That’s what I remember about him. He was always the same. I’d like to see him again.’ He said in a low tone: ‘But I couldn’t stand it at home.’
‘We wanted you to come home, before the war began.’
‘Tom and I talked it over,’ Mat assented. ‘But Tom’s family was down there, and the people had been good to us. We liked them.’ He asked awkwardly: ‘Is mother the same as ever, Dan?’
‘She’s sick,’ Dan told him. He added honestly: ‘But I guess she’ll never change.’
Mat said slowly: ‘Father’s a great man. We all know that. Feeling about him the way we do holds us four together—no matter where we live.’
Dan nodded. He said: ‘I heard—some Georgia prisoners told me—that you’re married, Mat.’
Mat grinned. ‘Yep! I went home last winter to see my son.’
‘Is he going to be as big as you?’
‘Bigger!’ Mat bragged. ‘He’ll begin where I left off.’
There began to be a lull here about them. The fighting ahead seemed to have passed beyond the town. As they moved on, wherever the Federal troops had made a stand they saw dead men and wounded men in blue and in gray, and all the dreadful wreckage of the battlefield; and once they met a file of more than a hundred Federal prisoners, marching under guard, and drew aside to let them pass. They came into the town and Mat said: ‘I’ll find a place to leave you somewhere here, send one of our surgeons to look out for you tonight if I can.’
He watched hopefully the houses along the way, and presently a woman came out on her front stoop to watch them pass. They stopped and Mat asked: ‘Ma’am, can you take this man in?’
She said in strong tones: ‘I’ve a spare bed he can have, yes—but no Rebel’s going to cross my doorstep!’
Mat took off his hat. ‘I’m your servant and your debtor, ma’am,’ he told her gravely. This is my brother, Captain Evered of the Sixth Wisconsin.’ He helped Dan toward the steps.
‘Sixth Wisconsin?’ she repeated. ‘We’ve had Captain Harris and two Lieutenants of that regiment here already, but they got away before the Rebs came along. Sergeant Evans is still here.’ She was speaking to Dan. ‘So come you in.’
Dan stood on one foot and she gave him her shoulder. Mat said: ‘I’ll send a surgeon, Dan. Tell father that Tom and I love him. Good-bye!’ Dan tried to speak steadily. ‘Good-bye, Mat. Take care of yourself.’ Then he hopped painfully into the house, leaning on the stout shoulder of the woman who had offered him asylum here.
VII
She was Mrs. Hollenger, and as soon as Dan was indoors her daughter Julia came to help her tend him. They put a bed for him in the room with Sergeant Evans.
‘They got me in the legs, sir,’ the Sergeant explained, recognizing Dan. ‘That was right at the edge of the railroad cut. I saw you go down a minute after.’ He lowered his voice cautiously. ‘When that lot surrendered, I could walk, with a couple of muskets for crutches, and Colonel Dawes gave me their battle-flag to keep. I wrapped it around my body and got this far with it. Miss Julia cut a slit in the bedtick and hid it there and I’m lying right on top of it, so it’s safe and sound till we drive the Rebs out of here again.’
Dan was too tired and weak to care about flags, or about anything but sleep. He was almost indifferent when hours later the surgeon Mat had sent came to dress his wound, and thought the foot might be saved. ‘We won’t know for a day or two,’ he said. ‘It will be stiff the rest of your life, anyway. I’ll try to come back later.’
But Dan never saw him again. Next day through a fog of fever he heard the roll of guns and the steady musket fire during the bloody battle to the southward; and Mrs. Hollenger, coming to pack wet cloths upon his head and to bathe and bandage his torn foot, told him there had been dreadful fighting down between Mr. Sherfy’s peach orchard and the hill called Round Top. Dan remembered the orchard past which they had marched the day before, and the rocky underbrush where that battle must have been fought; and his fever-spurred imagination peopled those rugged thickets with yelling Rebels, men who leaped out from behind great boulders, their mouths wide open showing yellowed teeth like fangs, their red eyes glaring madly. That night he fought over many fields in his disordered sleep, and screamed with rage and battle lust, and Mrs. Hollenger and Julia took turns in easing him. In the morning of the third day his senses were clear again, till somewhere near-by a tremendous cannonade began; and the thundering detonations shook the house where he lay, and thirst tormented him so that the women wetted his parched lips hour on hour. He had intervals when he knew everything that passed; and once Julia Hollenger came like an angel with shining eyes to tell her mother that the Rebels were beaten, and Dan yelled with triumph and pride. That night he heard marching feet in the street outside, and he saw Julia and Mrs. Hollenger watching at the windows of the room where he and Sergeant Evans lay, and he heard Sergeant Evans telling the women that the Rebs were retreating, going back the way they had come. ‘And we’ll be on their tail,’ the Sergeant cried exultantly. ‘Damned few of them will ever get home again.’
For hours, either in sleep or in delirium, Dan lost all sense of his surroundings; but when the sun rose his mind was clear. Sergeant Evans was moving, limping about the room, and Dan saw him draw out from the bedtick the captured colors. ‘I’m going to take them to the Colonel,’ he told Dan; and by him Dan sent a message to Will. He was clear-headed enough when toward noon Will came; but he thought Will had aged ten years in these three days. The other’s eyes were red with sleeplessness.
‘I’d have come sooner, Dan,’ he said. ‘But I’ve been at it steady, taking care of the poor devils. This was hell and repeat!’ He was streaming with sweat, dusty, haggard, stained. ‘Sergeant Evans said your foot was smashed.’ His tone was empty of all feeling, bleak with dreadful fatigue.
‘You’ve had it hard,’ Dan said.
‘How much of it were you in?’
So Dan told him, speaking slowly, all about that first day. When he spoke of Mat, Will asked no questions, but he leaned forward to listen more intently. Dan finished, and Will nodded. He pulled his chair nearer the bedside and began to remove the bandages on Dan’s foot, talking in dull tones while he did so.
‘We came on into town that day,’ he explained. ‘But that afternoon we saw the Rebels coming down from the north so we pulled back behind the cemetery.’ He removed the last bandage and made a little woeful whistling sound at what he saw, but he spoke steadily enough. ‘The brigade cleaned the Rebs out of the woods you saw them go into,’ he said. ‘And what the Sixth did at the railroad cut rolled up a whole Rebel brigade and they drove the Rebs back a mile or two; but then the Rebs brought up more men and flanked our line and pushed it back into town here. The Sixth damned near got cut off. They had to crawl through a high board fence, like a lot of boys stealing apples, but they made it, and went on to a hill east of town. Culp’s Hill they call it.’
He wiped his forehead. ‘Dan, the brigade lost eleven hundred men out of eighteen hundred, that first day. They had some hard fighting the second day, too; but yesterday they had it pretty quiet.’ His tone did not change. ‘I guess I’ve cut off a hundred legs. I’ll have to cut off your foot, Dan. I’ll go get some men to hold you.’
‘I thought you’d have to,’ Dan assented. T didn’t like the smell of it. But you won’t need any men, Will. I’ll lie still. Mrs. Hollenger and Miss Julia will get you what you need. Go ahead.’
‘Like hell I will! I can’t have you jerking around right in the middle of the job.’
‘I’ll lie still,’ Dan repeated. ‘Go ahead.’
Will hesitated. ‘Oh, all right,’ he said then in a dead weariness. T guess you can. You’re like father. You can do anything. I’ll call the women!’
What followed was not, on the whole, as bad as Dan had thought it would be. When the saw touched the bone, he set his teeth to fight back waves of dreadful faintness, and the plucking and the tugging at his torn flesh made his stomach sick; but presently the thing was done.
The wound healed readily, and in late July, Dan started on the long journey home.
6
BANGOR’S contribution to
the war had been from the first a heavy one. The city served as the focal point for all martial activities east of Augusta, and Bangor industries had turned in large measure to war work. The foundry of Hinckley and Egery remodelled and rifled eighteen old smoothbore cannon, making them potentially usable for coast defense; and the guns were mounted in Portland, Wiscasset, Rockland and elsewhere. Wheelwright, Clark and Company manufactured cloth for uniforms for eight of the Maine regiments recruited in 1862. The city itself undertook to provide support for the families of men absent on service; and except for the relatively small group of secessionists—the Peace Party had thirty- one votes out of nineteen hundred and ninety-two cast at the election in September, 1861—public sentiment was strong and unified in support of the war.
In the first year there were nine hundred and fifty-eight volunteers from the city, out of a population of some sixteen thousand, and before the war ended, twenty-seven hundred Bangor men would go into the national service and three hundred of them would never return. Throughout the war there were so many volunteers and substitutes provided by Penobscot Valley towns that most of them had to furnish no drafted men; but in this summer of 1863 when Dan came home there was talk in a few localities of resisting the draft. Dexter was occupied by a detachment of the State Guard, with some light field guns, to handle expected trouble there, while even in Bangor preparations were made to deal with any riots that might occur. The arms and ammunition in the State Arsenal, to prevent their capture by rioters, were removed and put in what seemed to Mayor Dale safer places, and Joseph Downe was placed in command of the city and made responsible for keeping order. His preparations were so thorough that those who might have contemplated violence thought better of their plans.
The city, in addition to its direct sacrifices, suffered indirectly from the collapse of the lumber business. Men were too sorely needed on Southern battlefields to be spared for the big north woods. Along with the decline of trade, silver currency disappeared from circulation. General Veazie’s bank put out scrip in denominations of ten, twenty-five and fifty cents to supply the need for fractional currency, and almost a hundred thousand dollars’ worth of his paper circulated in eastern Maine until the Government scrip came to supersede it.
II
Dan was not the first Bangor man to come home maimed, nor was he alone in his homecoming. A score or so of returning soldiers, some wasted by disease, some like himself minus a foot or a hand or a leg or an arm, some weakened by wounds which had been slow to heal, were in that company on the train. Despite their weakness, when they saw from the windows the rising hills and familiar contours of this land that was their home, their spirits lifted; and when, some 011 crutches and each helping each, they descended from the train into welcoming arms, there was in them a gladness so great that they were half-amazed at the tender tears which greeted them.
Dan, as the train slowed to a stop, saw his father standing, scanning the windows of the cars; and beside John was Jenny, and Meg was there too, and a tall young woman whom at first Dan did not recognize as Beth. The watching crowd raced along the platform to keep up with the car in which the homecoming soldiers rode; and Dan was suddenly a little ashamed of that leg of his which ended in a neatly sewed-up fold of his trousers. He dreaded to face so many eyes. Nevertheless he rose, steadying himself on one foot and adjusting the crutches to which he was not yet well accustomed, and followed the others to the car door. When he appeared upon the platform, below him there was a compact mass of men and women and children, each grouped around some one of the soldiers; but he saw his father making a way gently through the press, and John called some smiling word and lifted his hand, and Dan eased himself down the steep steps of the car and so into his father’s arms.
They kissed each other, as though Dan were a boy again; and then John said: ‘Here’s mother, Dan.’ So Dan, balancing himself on one foot, his father’s steadying hand under his arm, swept her close.
Jenny was outwardly as composed as ever; but he felt her twitching and trembling against his breast. Her lips on his were dry and hot and fevered, and she was thin and wasted, her arms like slender cords around him, her bony frame seeming to wear no garment of flesh at all, so that it was as though he held a skeleton. He felt a strong revulsion and compassion too, his heart full of tenderness and sorrow for her while his healthy flesh shrank from touching her, feeling the abhorrence a man feels for a serpent on the ground or for any miserable hurt and wretched thing, wishing to destroy it forever.
Meg was near, watching them; and even while Dan held Jenny in his arms, he saw Beth. She was smiling through streaming tears, and her lips were moving, saying his name in a queer, choking rush over and over. She was as tall as Meg, and as lovely as Meg had always seemed to Dan to be, with her mother’s clear eyes and open countenance in which no shadows lay, and no unrest, but strength and peace and long content; and Dan, looking now at Beth, had a contrasting memory of stricken battlefields and dead men and hurt men screaming and he remembered the struggles of a horse he had seen at Sharpsburg. The horse had been hit by a cannon ball that ripped open its belly and tore its leg half away so that the dangling leg was all entangled in its own spilled intestines. The memory of that horse had haunted him more persistently than any memory of human suffering, spoiling his dreams, waking him sometimes to shuddering, sweating terror; and it was strange that to see Beth now should bring it back to him—until in that same moment, while he still held his mother in his arms, meeting Beth’s eyes, the blunt horror of that memory faded and was gone, and he knew it would never torment him more. Beth was the cure for it. Merely to see her made all the ugliness and pity of these years seem distant and unreal—and yet at the same time these things which he had seen and done were now no longer meaningless, but became part of an ordered and somehow splendid whole.
And he thought even in this moment that women can always look on birth and on death with calm and steady glance, understanding and unafraid, finding neither in birth nor death that mystery which lends them terror; and he thought that a man without a woman is not complete and whole.
Thus his thoughts in the long seconds while he held Jenny straining in his arms. Then he turned to Aunt Meg, and her arms were strong and firm, and she kissed him, and she was as beautiful as he remembered, but in more generous and finer ways. Then Beth was strongly gripping his hand, smiling through tears; and all of them were saying empty words—words that were empty because there were no words for the things they wished to say. And then John helped him with his crutches, and they moved toward the carriage, and Jenny bade Meg and Beth come to supper, and Aunt Meg said smilingly:
‘Not tonight, Jenny. You’ll want him to yourself tonight.’
Beth added: ‘And Dan’s tired.
He’ll need to go to bed, to rest.’ Her eyes did not leave his.
Then John helped Dan into the carriage and so they were driving home; and the streets were the same and the people were the same; and when they turned into the drive their own house, staunch and strong with that great beam for a rooftree, was as it had been and would be for a hundred years and more.
III
Jenny, when they came indoors, went directly to bed; but she insisted that they must eat supper with her in her room on a table set there, and John promised they would do so. When she had gone upstairs he told Dan:
‘She got up to go to meet you, son, but it was hard for her. She’s been in bed most of the time since last winter, and she’s very weak; but for a fortnight now, since we heard from Will that you would soon be coming home, she’s been getting up awhile every day, walking, gaining strength to meet you.’
‘She’s awfully thin and weak. Is she sick?’
‘Yes,’ John assented. ‘Her back is worse all the time, hurts her more and more.’ He hesitated, said soberly: ‘I don’t think she’ll ever get well, Dan. I think she’s dying.’
Dan thought so too, thought the mark of death was on her, yet he asked: ‘What’s the matter with her?’
John did not answer directly. ‘I’ve had every doctor in town,’ he said, ‘till she won’t let them come any more.’ He asked awkwardly: ‘Want me to help you upstairs, son?’
‘I’m getting pretty good with these things,’ Dan said in cheerful reassurance, handling his crutches. He looked down at his leg. ‘It’s just my foot that’s gone, you know; and Will says that I can have a sort of high boot made with stiff bracing in it, and have it come up to just under the knee and strap it on and I’ll be able to manage fine. But I’ll have to wait till the stump’s completely healed before I can put any weight on it.’
John cleared his throat. ‘We’ll work that out,’ he agreed. He came behind Dan to the stairs; but at the stair foot he checked Dan to say quietly:
The Strange Woman Page 60
