The Deserter

by Jane Langton

Second Lieutenant, 18th Mass. Vols., January 24, 1862; First Lieutenant, October 24, 1862; Captain, May 4, 1863; Aide to General Reynolds at Gettysburg; Lieutenant Colonel, 56th Mass. Vols, July 22, 1863; Colonel May 6, 1864: Brevet Brigadier General, U.S. Vols., March 13, 1865; mustered out, July 12, 1865. HUGELY IMPORTANT, FIRST DAY AT GETTYSBURG!

  Order from General Reynolds in Weld’s diary:

  “Ride at once with your utmost speed to General Meade. Tell him the enemy are advancing in strong force, and that I fear they will get to the heights beyond the town before I can. I will fight them inch by inch.”

  Thomas Rodman Robeson, 1861

  (Polly Ann and Augustus Tompkins)

  Second Lieutenant, 2d Massachusetts Vols. (Infantry), May 28, 1861; First Lieutenant, November 30, 1861; Captain, August 10, 1862. DIED AT GETTYSBURG, July 6, 1863.

  Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., 1861

  (Ludovico, a Respectable Gentleman)

  Private, 4th Battery Mass. V.M., April 1861; First Lieutenant, 20th Mass. Vols., July 10, 1861; Captain, March 23, 1862: Lieutenant Colonel (not mustered), July 5, 1863; A.D.C., mustered out, July 17, 1864.

  WOUNDED BEFORE GETTYSBURG.

  William Yates Gholson, 1861

  (Great Lyric Tragedienne)

  First Lieutenant, 106th Ohio Vols., July 16, 1862; Captain, July 24, 1862; killed at Hartsville, Tennessee, December 7, 1862. DIED BEFORE GETTYSBURG.

  Henry Pickering Bowditch, 1861

  (Brabanto, a Hasty Old Codger)

  Second Lieutenant, 1st Mass. Cav, November 5, 1861; First Lieutenant, June 28, 1862; Captain, May 13, 1863; discharged, February 15, 1864; Major, 5th Mass. Cav, March 26, 1864; resigned, June 3, 1865. PROBABLY IN CAVALRY BATTLE AT GETTYSBURG, JULY 3, 1863.

  Henry Weld Farrar, 1861

  (Mr. Snoozle)

  Vol. A.D.C., staff of General Sedgwick, March 1863; Second Lieutenant, 7th Maine Vols., April 10, 1863; First Lieutenant, March 15, 1864; Captain, June 7, 1864; Brevet Major, October 19, 1864; Brevet Lieutenant Colonel.

  PROBABLY AT GETTYSBURG.

  John Bigelow, 1861

  (Montano, caught in a row but not disposed to fight)

  Captain, 9th Mass. Battery, February 11, 1863: Brevet Major, U.S. Vols., August 1, 1864; resigned December 11, 1864. HERO IN BATTLE OF THE PEACH ORCHARD, July 2, 1863, AT GETTYSBURG!

  NOTE!!! In the first Hasty Pudding production of this 1861 class in March 1860, Sir O. Pikestaff was again responsible for “These Tearfully Comical Sidereal Abominations Involving Gaulish Chieftains, Druids, Bards, etc., Which Have Been Got Up with Utter Recklessness as to Pecuniary Considerations!!”

  “Well, it’s a very nice collection,” said Homer, looking at Mary’s pasted pages, “but are we any closer to exonerating your great-great-grandfather?”

  “Oh, I suppose not,” said Mary. “I was carried away, that’s all.”

  PART XVI

  FINDING LILY

  THE B&O

  Lily LeBeau had boarded the train several cars farther forward. Ida told herself to keep a sharp lookout at every stop and be ready to jump down if Lily got off, because if she lost Lily, how would she ever find Seth?

  Oh heavens! For a moment, everyone in the car bounced and swayed as the train floundered over a rough place on the track. Ida guessed that the rails had been torn up by the enemy and patched together again. The car wobbled and lurched, and its occupants lurched with it, their possessions rolling in the aisle.

  Ida clung to the back of the seat in front of her and thought about the safety of the infant growing so rambunctiously inside her. She didn’t really worry. The child had given her no trouble so far. But some of the other passengers glanced at her in concern. She smiled confidently back, and when the rails smoothed out, she devoted her attention to the view racing past the window.

  She was fascinated by the size of the fields, so much bigger than the rocky tracts of arable land at home. Every one of these endless rail fences must enclose a dozen acres or more. The corn was tasseling everywhere. There were long slatted barns and broad fields of tobacco. She saw a woman in a sunbonnet sitting high up on the seat of a cultivating machine in one field, the reins of the plodding horses in her hand.

  Leaning against the glass to look back, Ida wanted to jump off the train and tell her that it was the same at home. Her father was dead and her husband was in the war, so now it was up to the women and children to carry on.

  Last fall, it had been Ida and Eben, Sally and Josh who had wandered around the apple orchard, picking up the windfalls. Their mother had followed after them, helping little Alice gather good ones in her pinafore. Of course, thought Ida, smiling to herself, Mother Morgan had never helped at all, being too sickly, or so she said.

  This summer, who would load the wagon and carry the peaches to market? Hired help was hard to come by, and it was a grueling drive in the middle of the night. Perhaps this year they would take them in on the cars. It was strange, thought Ida, how little she blamed herself for staying away from home in this busiest of all seasons. Perhaps being with child had made her selfish. But child or no child, she was determined to find Seth, no matter what terrible thing he had done, no matter how cruelly he had chosen another way.

  “Your ticket, ma’am,” said the conductor, appearing beside her.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t have a ticket. May I buy one?” Ida held out a five-dollar bill, hoping it would be enough.

  The conductor shook his head. “Well, ma’am, we ain’t supposed to sell tickets on the train, but everything’s topsy-turvy anyhow.” He handed her the ticket with her change.

  Ida smiled and said, “Thank you.”

  But the conductor was in a conversational mood. Taking hold of the brass loop on the back of her seat, he explained why things were topsy-turvy. “First of all, there’s all them crates of medical supplies for the hospitals down there.”

  “Hospitals?”

  “In Washington. The whole city’s turned into one whopper of a hospital. And then there’s all them trucks of coal. Look, missus, quick now. See ’em there on the siding? Abe Lincoln, he says they’ll all be dark as pitch if we don’t get ’em there in a hellfire hurry.”

  “Goodness me,” said Ida.

  The conductor expanded in the warmth of her interest. “Biggest problem is the men. Mr. Garrett, he’s commandeered ten locomotives to carry ten thousand men, that’s a thousand apiece.”

  Ida was happy to have someone to talk to. “Who’s Mr. Garrett?”

  “You don’t know Mr. Garrett? Why, he’s the most important man in Baltimore. He owns this here railroad. And if Mr. Garrett says ten thousand men’s going out today, ten thousand men will go out today. Did you see them fellers back there at the depot in Baltimore? Couple thousand, he said they was all supposed to go out today, heading for some godforsaken place.”

  “I see,” said Ida.

  “Well, thank Gawd, ma’am, this here’s only a passenger train with decent folks like you on board.”

  “Can you tell me when we’ll arrive in Washington?”

  He pulled out his watch. “Couple hours yet. When the train pulls in, I’ll help you down with your things.”

  “Oh, no, that’s all right,” said Ida, uncomfortably aware that she had no things. “I won’t need any help, but thank you just the same.”

  IDA FORLORN

  As the time of arrival grew near, Ida gathered her strength for the ordeal ahead. Whatever happened, she must not miss Lily. She would keep her place in the cars and watch all the passengers as they moved along the platform below her window.

  The outskirts of Washington were ugly with cattle yards and wagon sheds. An enormous corral held thousands of horses. The smell of a slaughterhouse seeped into the car. Ida was disappointed. Could they really be approaching the great capital city of the United States? She had seen photographs of splendid marble buildings like temples in ancient Rome, but so far, it looked more like a stockyard or cattle market.

  With a hiss of steam and
a squealing of brakes, the train slowed down and chugged into the station. At once all the other passengers stood up and collected their bags and bundles and moved along the aisle. A moment later they appeared on the platform below Ida’s window.

  The station was an imposing building with a tower that rose high above the track. Ida watched intently as streams of passengers from the other cars flooded slowly toward an open door—well-dressed businessmen, or perhaps they were congressmen, sharp-looking salesmen with heavy cases, shabby women in untidy bonnets, handsomely dressed ladies, whole families with children and babes in arms and strolling clusters of men in uniform, black soldiers as well as white. Some of their uniforms were outlandish, with baggy red trousers and tasseled fezes—like pictures in The Arabian Nights.

  In the sodden August heat even the fashionable women looked disheveled, their crinolines tussled in the push and shove of other people’s baggage. One well-dressed man took off his tall hat and mopped his bald head, and Ida thought he must surely be a senator. A boy with a tray hanging from his shoulders was selling iced lemonade, and for a homesick moment Ida wondered if the ice had come from one of the ponds at home, packed in the hold of a ship that had sailed all the way from Boston harbor, the great blocks keeping each other cold.

  She caught her breath and leaned closer to the window. Was that Lily’s pretty parasol?

  No, it tilted sideways and the face beneath it was not Lily’s.

  “End of the line,” said the conductor. “May I help you, missus?”

  “Oh, thank you.” But Ida was grateful for his hand as she stepped heavily down to the platform.

  She had missed dozens of people. Hungrily Ida stared right and left, looking for Lily. But the crowd was thinning, the train was gathering steam and blowing its whistle and the powerful rods on the driving wheels were beginning their mighty seesawing motion. The great wheels turned slowly at first, then faster and faster and faster. The locomotive whistled and thundered out of the station, followed by its rattling train of cars, leaving no one on the platform but a couple of baggage porters, a stevedore with a cart piled with mailbags, the lemonade seller packing up his ice—which came, perhaps, from the North Pole—and Ida, forlorn.

  Only then did she see that there were two doors into the station. Lily must have gone into the farther door, never passing Ida’s window at all.

  Almost running, she made her way through the other door. In the lofty waiting room a few people were sitting on benches and a few more were heading out the wide portal into the street. Ida hurried after the departing passengers, looking for a pretty plump woman in a soaring bonnet and a fetching outfit. When she had boarded the train in Baltimore, Lily had been wearing her favorite gown, her “Clothilde,” with its lacy little cape.

  Outside on the broad avenue, cab horses were ranged along the curb. One had a nose bag, and Ida was reminded that she had not eaten a morsel since a hasty breakfast in the station at Baltimore, and then it was only a bun.

  People were climbing into the hacks, the men handing in their wives, the wives gathering up their billowing skirts and settling down.

  Ida hurried along the row as the drivers flicked their whips across the broad backs of their horses and set off at a trot, heading for splendid lodgings or magnificent hotels somewhere else in the city. Soon all the cabs had sped away in the direction of an imposing marble building a little farther up the avenue. The dome of the building was covered with scaffolding. Ida had seen pictures, she knew what it was. It was the Capitol of the United States.

  Painfully disappointed, she sagged down on a bench beside the door of the depot. Every one of the passengers from the Baltimore train had left the station, including Lily LeBeau.

  THE NEW SHAPE

  OF THE WORLD

  Only a few weeks ago, Ida had trembled on the verge of finding her lost husband. Now she was alone and friendless in a strange city. She had only one harum-scarum acquaintance, and now Lily LeBeau had become a needle in a haystack. How would Ida ever find her in this labyrinth of unknown streets? Where might she have gone? To some nameless hotel or boardinghouse? To a theater? Was she dashing helter-skelter to a rendezvous with Seth?

  Despairing, Ida stumbled away from the station. Turning her back on the Capitol, she began walking up an avenue, heading away from the glaring sun. Tramping along heavily, she was the object of inquisitive stares. But by now, Ida was grimly accustomed to being “the cynosure of all eyes,” and she ignored the curious looks and the knowing grins.

  And in the open air she soon recovered her spirits. Ida, after all, was a fatalist of the sturdiest New England kind. She was the daughter of a farmer who had endured one natural disaster after another—the wild winds that had torn the apples off the trees, the demented sow that had devoured her piglets, the gripe that had seized the milking cow, the early thaw that had brought along too soon the blossoms on the fruit trees, the lightning stroke that had set fire to the barn, the rainy spring that had flooded the lower field, the wasting disease that had taken Aunt Clara, the strange troubling of Seth’s mother’s mind and, most terrible of all, the tree in the woodlot that had twisted on Father’s ax and crushed him where he stood.

  In the last few weeks, blows like a dozen falling trees had fallen on his eldest daughter. They might have broken any other young woman, but Ida’s mental habit had always been to absorb harsh tidings and step forward briskly into the new shape of the world, whatever it might be.

  She stepped forward now, looking about her, curious to understand a city in which marble temples alternated with shanties and weedy vacant lots. The faces on the street were both white and black—the colored were free now. When a middle-aged white woman smiled at her, Ida spoke up boldly. “Excuse me, ma’am, I wonder if you know of a boardinghouse nearby?”

  The woman was in mourning dress. “Why, yes, my dear, I certainly do. There’s my own.”

  What good luck. Walking along with her, Ida learned that Mrs. Broad had been forced to take in lodgers after Mr. Broad was killed by a runaway horse while crossing New Jersey Avenue, only just around the corner from this very spot, and how in the blink of an eye poor Mrs. Broad had found herself a widow, forced to turn her home into a respectable boardinghouse. “Of course, I only take in folks of the better sort. You know, dear, what I mean.”

  Ida didn’t know, but she said, “Oh, yes.”

  “I have six spare rooms but only four ladies at present, and one gentleman and wife, because Mrs. Poff got so wearied of working in the Dead Letter Office, she went home.” Mrs. Broad took Ida’s arm and whispered, “My dear, when are you expecting?”

  “Next month,” said Ida gratefully. “But I’m fine. I’m here for just a few days, and then I’ll go home.”

  “Well, I have a woman friend experienced in the healing arts who could be of assistance, just in case.”

  Mrs. Broad’s was a neat wooden house on G Street. She showed her new tenant around, starting with the parlor, where two women looked up from a checkerboard and an anxious-looking man lowered his newspaper.

  Mrs. Broad introduced them as Mr. and Mrs. Tossit and Miss Whitley. “Mrs. Morgan is here just for a little spell,” she explained, “before returning to …”

  “Massachusetts,” said Ida. She bobbed politely, then followed Mrs. Broad up the carpeted stairs.

  “Here’s your room,” said Mrs. Broad, throwing open a door.

  The room was small but neat, and the bedding was clean. A shining white bowl and pitcher sat on the washstand and a matching vessel was visible under the bed.

  “It will do very well,” said Ida.

  She pulled off her shawl while Mrs. Broad explained the rent and mealtimes and gossiped about the other lodgers. “The Tossits, they’re here from Maryland. One of those battles, his barn got burned down and so did his cornfield. He’s here to get compensation, three thousand dollars he feels like he’s owed, so every other day he goes to his congressman to present his case, and next day he goes to the quartermaster gen
eral. Miss Whitley, she’s on night duty in the Capitol.”

  Ida was interested in the lives of people in other places. “Does Miss Whitley work for a congressman?”

  “Oh, laws, no.” Mrs. Broad laughed heartily. “She’s a baker. All the soldiers in the city, thousands of them, they got to be fed, and there’s thousands of poor wounded men. So there’s a big bakery down there in the basement of the Capitol. Another of my boarders is in the Sanitary.”

  “The Sanitary Commission? She’s a nurse?”

  There were screams from outdoors. Mrs. Broad lifted her hands in a gesture of dismay. “It’s Annie’s boy, she does the wash.” Mrs. Broad went to the window, threw up the sash and shouted into the backyard, “You there, Jacob. Those sheets, you leave them be.”

  Ida looked out too. The backyard was full of laundry. A small black boy and girl were running in and out. One sheet sagged to the ground.

  “You hear me, Jacob?” screeched Mrs. Broad. “You peg up that sheet.”

  “Mrs. Broad,” said Ida anxiously, “you say the city’s full of wounded men?”

  Her landlady closed the window. “Oh, my goodness, yes. There’s hospitals all over. They ship them upriver from Virginia or carry them down from the North in the cars. That big fight in Pennsylvania, those poor young soldiers, they’re dying all over this town.”

  THE LIVING STATUE

  Ida’s first impression of the nation’s capital was renewed next morning when she began a pilgrimage to the city’s theaters, following the directions of Mrs. Broad. Blocks of marble cluttered the grounds of the Capitol, there were coal and lumber yards along the Mall and a muddy canal ran through the heart of the city. Often she saw cattle being driven along the grandest streets, and Mrs. Broad complained that there were more pigs than cats.

  The four theaters were not far apart. Ida was a tall young woman with strong bones. Even carrying a robust infant eager to be born, she could walk for miles, pausing only once in a while to lean against a picket fence or rest on a marble stairway.