The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  But there were surprises in the rest of the roll call.

  “Lieutenant Seth Morgan?”

  When there was no answer, the sergeant spoke up louder, “Lieutenant Morgan? Seth?”

  There was still no answer. Seth’s fellow officers looked at each other. The sergeant leaned toward a corporal and muttered a question. The corporal, who was acting as company clerk, consulted his sheet. “No, sir,” he said. “He’s not here no place among the wounded.”

  “Well, what about the dead?” whispered the sergeant.

  “He’s not there neither.”

  The sergeant whistled under his breath. The clerk moved his pencil to the column headed “MISSING” and scribbled, “1st Lt. Seth Morgan,” and the sergeant continued to call the roll.

  When he got down to the Ps there was another pause after he called the name of Private Otis Pike. During the silence there were snickers. Otis must have skedaddled.

  “Put the damn fool down as missing,” said the sergeant, but then the corporal leaned toward him and whispered, “No, sir, that ain’t right, sir. Otis Pike’s daid.”

  “Dead!”

  The corporal tapped his sheet and pointed to a name.

  “Well, if that don’t beat all. How did the poor bastard manage to get himself killed?”

  The corporal looked around and whispered to another sergeant, then cleared his throat. “Sir, Sergeant Willow here was in the burial detail.” The corporal wagged his head in the direction of Culp’s Hill. “He found Otis layin’ out there daid.”

  “Out there?” The first sergeant couldn’t believe it. He raised his eyebrows at Sergeant Willow, who stepped forward and gave his report.

  “Private Pike, that’s right, his body was out there, sir. I didn’t recognize it at first because his head was all”—the sergeant swept a hand across his face—“well, it was mostly gone, but he had a tag on him, and it was Otis all right. He was out there way in front.”

  “In front? What do you mean, in front?”

  “Right behind Colonel Mudge, sir, that’s where he was.” Sergeant Willow looked uncomfortable. “Believe it or not, sir.”

  “Well, if that don’t beat the devil.” The first sergeant cleared his throat and called out the next name. “Alpheus Peterson?”

  “Here, sir.”

  “Private Scopes?” The first sergeant looked more closely at his list. “Private Lemuel Scopes?”

  No answer.

  “He’s daid, sir,” said the corporal.

  “What about his brother?” The sergeant read the name aloud, “Rufus Scopes?”

  Again there was no answer.

  “Both of ’em’s daid, sir,” murmured the corporal. “They was twins.”

  “I know they was twins,” said the first sergeant angrily. Muddled, he looked fiercely back at his list. “Private Tatum?”

  “Daid too, sir.”

  When the miserable morning report was completed, the regimental adjutant called out, “Company captains, I believe two of you are replacements? I hope both of you took down the names of the dead and missing, because you’re supposed to write to their next of kin.”

  Then the first sergeant bent his head over the corporal’s roll, signed his name, and handed it to the company’s new captain, who also signed his name, and then the regimental adjutant gathered up all the morning reports and took them to his soggy tent on the outskirts of Gettysburg, there to be consolidated and sent on to the acting assistant adjutant general of the Second Brigade. From brigade level the expanded report would be passed along to the headquarters of the First Division and from there to the central command of the entire Twelfth Corps. At last the report containing the final official figures for all the regiments of the First Division during the Battle of Gettysburg would make its way to the staff of General Meade himself, to be tallied in his final battle report and packed off to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac in Washington, where it would become part of the vast collection of papers documenting the land campaigns of the entire Union army and the maritime history of the navy.

  General Meade’s final battle report was of no concern to the staff officers of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. But Sergeant Willow, who had been in charge of removing the bodies to the place where they were to be temporarily buried—a pit was being dug for them beside the field hospital for the Twelfth Corps—was dissatisfied.

  He should have piped up during roll call when Otis Pike was reported dead. He should have spoken up then, because he had something to say about the burial detail and the body of Otis Pike. After all, collecting corpses was not the jim-dandiest detail you could ever be on, because of the smell in the first place, and then you had to keep the varmints at bay, not to mention the grief of the thing, so he had only been doing his unfortunate duty, groping around all those swollen bodies into their pockets and so on, looking for personal possessions to be sent home to grieving wives and sweethearts. And then when he got to Otis’s corpse he had been mystified by the small amount of blood on his coat.

  Sergeant Luther Willow was an ardent reader of dime novels. He was familiar with the gallant exploits of the London police in their pursuit of dastardly criminals. And like the admirable police detective Benjamin Bone, Sergeant Willow always examined the pattern of the bloodstains on the bodies of the men he found dead on the battlefield. Of course they were battle casualties, not murder victims, but in making his own personal investigations he felt like a colleague of Detective Bone.

  The rebel shell that had blown away the face of Private Otis Pike had left very little blood on the coat—that was the peculiar thing. You would have thought it would be soaked in blood, if not on the front, then on the back, where he was lying in it. Instead, there was only a little on the lining and some superficial stains on the front, almost like the prints of a hand. It didn’t seem natural.

  In his perplexity Sergeant Willow had removed the coat from the body and set it aside, along with the metal tag and the items from the pockets of both the coat and the trousers. He had written the words “PVT. OTIS PIKE” on a piece of paper and pinned it to Otis’s shirt. Maybe tomorrow, he’d go around to wherever the Tenth Maine had settled down, the regiment of provost guards for the Twelfth Corps, and interest somebody in this little battlefield mystery.

  Unfortunately he didn’t get around to it for a couple of days, and by then it was too late. Tenth Maine, Second Massachusetts and the entire rest of the army were on the move again. Pike’s possessions, including his mysteriously clean sack coat, were carefully ticketed and sent away to a collecting point in the city of Washington, along with thousands of other personal possessions of the men who had died at Gettysburg.

  Sergeant Willow never saw the coat again.

  PART IX

  THE NUTTINESS OF

  EBENEZER

  THE HAIR

  PRESUMPTIVE

  It was even worse than they had feared.

  They had not written to Howie “Ebenezer” Flint to tell him they were coming. They had not even phoned, in case he put them off.

  Therefore when he opened his front door a crack and saw them standing on his sagging front porch, his jaw dropped and his face flushed, deepening from pink to purple.

  Howie had never met Homer and he had not seen Mary since they were children. And yet he seemed to guess at once that they were a threat. “You can’t come in,” he whispered. “I am the hair presumptive.”

  “You’re what?” Mary put out her hand. “Oh, come on, Howie, we’re kinfolk. Remember when you came to Concord with your family? When we were children? I’m Gwen’s sister Mary and this is my husband, Homer. We just want to talk to you.”

  Howie’s eyes swiveled back and forth between the two tall people standing on the drooping floorboards of his front porch. His eyes were small and glittering behind little old-fashioned glasses. They failed to see Mary’s friendly hand.

  It was obvious that the idiotic boy Gwen had known as a child had fulfilled his early prom
ise. “Actually,” said Howie, keeping a firm grip on the door, “I am quite ill. Last week I was at the point of death.” He coughed.

  “Oh, look, Howie”—Mary adopted her best wheedling tone—“we’ve come all this way. You can’t refuse to see your own third cousin twice removed.”

  Reluctantly Howie at last opened the door just wide enough for them to squeeze through.

  Only when they were inside did the full glory of his whiskers burst upon their gaze. Howie’s whiskers were full and dark, thick and hateful, a bushy growth eighteen inches long. Homer decided gleefully that they were a sort of statement—I may be a total flop at everything else, but at least my chin is a genius.

  “Thank you, Howie,” said Mary, trying not to exclaim at the extravagant growth of his beard nor stare around at the rubbish in the hall. The interior of Howie’s house was a classic case of the newspaper headline, OLD COUPLE FOUND DEAD AMONG STACKS OF OLD NEWSPAPERS.

  “My name’s not Howie,” growled Howie, “it’s Ebenezer.”

  “But didn’t it used to be—”

  “Legally changed in a court of law. I have chosen to be known by the name of my great-great-grandfather.”

  “Your great-great-grandfather was called Ebenezer?”

  The little eyes flashed behind the tiny specs. “Right. And he was not a traitor like your great-great-grandfather.”

  The shaft went home, and Mary winced. But perhaps this fool had found out something she didn’t know. Quickly she said, “You mean Seth Morgan was a traitor? What kind of traitor?”

  The little eyes shifted. “I don’t know exactly. I just know it was something shameful.”

  Something shameful. It was the old family story. Mary was disappointed. The silly man knew no more about Seth Morgan than she did. “Listen here, Howie,” she began boldly. “Oh, sorry, I mean Ebenezer. We’d like to see the things you”—she stopped just in time to avoid the word swiped—“the things you borrowed from my sister’s house last month.”

  Ebenezer twiddled his fingers in his beard and said craftily, “I didn’t borrow them. Actually, I took what is jurisdicially mine.”

  “Yours! But you removed them from her house without permission.”

  “Since we have the same great-great-great-grandfather,” said Howie, jutting his chin forward stubbornly—a fearsome gesture because his whiskers jutted forward at the same time—“all family documents belong to the posterior equally. I am a legal derelict and posterior. Therefore I have as much right to them as she does. Or you neither.”

  Bewildered, Mary turned to Homer, who was keeping a firm hold on the muscles of his face. In a strained voice he said, “I think Ebenezer is referring to posterity.”

  “Oh, of course.” Mary turned back to Ebenezer. “But surely that’s not so. Those things have been in my sister’s house for nearly a hundred and fifty years.”

  “I think you will find,” said Ebenezer smugly, “that the entire specter of the law is on my side.”

  ONCE AGAIN, HER FACE

  This was no time to quibble about who owned what. Homer nudged his wife. “Show him the photograph we bought in Gettysburg.”

  “Yes, of course.” Mary rummaged in her bag and unwrapped the little leather case. Opening it, she said, “I don’t know who this young girl is, but I recognize her. I know I’ve seen her before, perhaps in Gwen’s attic. I wonder if you have her picture among the things you took away?”

  Ebenezer stared at the photograph. At once his demeanor changed. He became the proud antiquarian. “Hey, you guys, you want to see what I got?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Mary.

  “Follow me.” Zigzagging between the piled-up boxes in the narrow front hall, he led them into a cluttered room.

  “My Civil War museum,” he said grandly, flourishing a pudgy hand. From somewhere, as if by magic, there was music, fifes and drums.

  His museum was a chaos of miscellaneous objects arranged on a couple of card tables and a sideboard. “Priceless,” said Ebenezer, spreading out his arms. “My collection is priceless.”

  Homer bent to look at a crosscut saw and said, “You’re into carpentry?”

  Ebenezer chuckled. “Amputational instrument from Bull Run. Cut off thousands of arms and legs, I’ll bet.”

  “Umph,” said Homer, who had bought a similar saw at Vanderhoof’s Hardware Store. Politely he moved on to the next item on display, a small box with a gold ring nestled in a bed of cotton.

  “You won’t believe my good luck,” said Ebenezer, cooing over it. “This very ring”—his voice took on a reverent vibrato—“was removed from the finger of Abraham Lincoln by his grief-struck wife on the occasion of his decease.” He rolled his eyes. “Pricey, it was very pricey.”

  “Mmm, I should think so,” murmured Mary. The object in the box was obviously a fraternity ring from some jolly Greek-letter band of brothers.

  “Oh, there’s so much more.” Ebenezer’s enthusiasm bubbled over. He grew more and more excited, showing them one absurdity after another.

  They looked on politely, but Homer was more interested in Ebenezer’s euphoric state than in the exhibits in his museum. Enthusiasm was all very well—in fact he himself moved through life on cresting waves of euphoria—but Ebenezer’s was completely out of control. Combined with stupidity and ignorance, it was positively dangerous.

  “I’ve got John W. Booth’s pistol here somewhere,” he said. He scrabbled in the mess on one of the card tables, knocking aside a bag of groceries, which tipped over and fell with a crash.

  “Whoopsie,” said Ebenezer. With a hysterical giggle he dropped to hands and knees.

  Mary helped him pick up the tumbled soup cans, trying to think of an excuse to get away. The day was getting on and it was a long drive home. But then under the last tin of chicken noodle soup she found another small leather case. It had fallen open, displaying the photographs of a man and a woman.

  The glass over both pictures had been broken, but the woman on the right was the one whose likeness they had bought yesterday in Gettysburg.

  Beaming, Mary stood up and showed the battered case to Homer.

  “My God, you were right,” he said. “It’s the same woman. The man must be her husband. He must be Seth, your great-great-grandfather. Then the woman would be your great-great-grandmother.”

  “Well, perhaps that’s who they are. Anyway, I remember the two of them together.” Gently she laid the case on the table and set down beside it the one from Gettysburg.

  “Goodness me,” said Ebenezer, gazing at them. “Where did you get the other one?”

  “In Gettysburg. What was the name of the shop, Homer?”

  “Bart, the guy’s name was Bart. Bart’s Battle Flag Books, that was it.”

  “May I ask,” said Ebenezer sweetly, “how much you paid for it?”

  Mary told him. His eyebrows shot up and he whistled.

  “Oh, Bart was a scoundrel,” said Homer. “All his prices were ridiculous. He said it was part of a set. He tried to sell us a whole bunch of other stuff that was supposed to go with it, but he wanted a couple of thousand for it, so we left.”

  “Other stuff?” whispered Ebenezer. “What sort of other stuff?”

  “Oh, there was a uniform coat. He was really proud of the coat because of the blood on it, and—ouch.” Mary had stepped on his foot. “Oh, well, I dunno what else he had,” he finished lamely. “We didn’t offer to buy it. We couldn’t afford it.”

  Ebenezer seemed to forget about the matching pictures, the bloodstained coat and Bart’s bookstore in Gettysburg. He waved them across to the display on the sideboard.

  And here Mary took alarm at another priceless piece of Lincoln memorabilia, a kerosene lantern labeled “THE LAMP BESIDE THE DEATHBED.” Well, that was ridiculous. But so was the attached price tag: $350.

  She looked at Ebenezer, scandalized. “Are these things for sale?”

  He looked modestly down. “But you see, I am a well-known dealer in historical momentos.” />
  Her heart sank. “Ebenezer, you’re not selling the family things?” Before he could answer, she snatched up the little broken case again and turned it over. A price tag was pasted on the back. Ebenezer was offering for sale this precious photograph of two people related to the family—his family as well as hers—for $750.

  There followed a nasty scene—rage on Mary’s part, giggles and protestations on the part of Ebenezer and an attempt at rational argument by Homer.

  Glowering at Ebenezer, he warned him that they were on their way to visit a friend in the local judiciary. This old friend would clap a restraining order on Ebenezer, forbidding him to sell a single solitary thing that had been removed from Mary’s sister’s house.

  Ebenezer had an immediate change of heart. “Take it,” he said, thrusting the broken pictures into Mary’s hands. “Here, these too. And here’s some more.” He snatched up scraps of yellowed documents without looking at them and held them high.

  Mary looked at his handfuls with scorn, but Homer accepted them graciously and folded them to his chest. “Come on, my dear,” he said. “Thank you, Ebenezer. We’ll come back another day.”

  “Homer,” said Mary, as the door slammed behind them and they teetered across the sloping porch, “who do you know on the bench in Washington?”

  Homer grinned. “Not a soul. But I don’t trust old Ebenezer, that important posterior and derelict, any farther than I can see him. Somebody at home must know a practicing magistrate around here. In the meantime, I doubt Ebenezer will dare to sell a thing.”

  “Oh, good for you, Homer.”

  “But we’re not going home yet.”

  “We aren’t? Oh, Homer, I’m dying to go home.”

  “There’s something we’ve got to do first. We’ve got to get back to Bart’s Bookstore in Gettysburg before Ebenezer gets there first and snatches up that goddamned bloody coat.” He unlocked the car, tossed Ebenezer’s trash onto the backseat and got in behind the wheel.