The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  “He sure did. Listen to his letter.” Homer cleared his throat. “It’s addressed to ‘Captain John Beardsley, Tenth Maine, Commander, Provost Guard, Twelfth Army Corps,’ and the first part’s dated July tenth, 1863.”

  “A week after the battle ended? Bring it in the kitchen,” said Mary. “Read it to me while I do something about supper.”

  GOBRIGHT’S REPORT

  Homer’s vanishing brain cells had reversed course. They were charging back, and throngs of eager neurons were rushing here and there to link them all together. And of course the sound of his own voice was always a comfort. While Mary hovered over the stove he began to read aloud Lieutenant Gobright’s report.

  TO MAJ. CHARLES F. MORSE, COMMANDER OF

  REGIMENT, SECOND MASSACHUSETTS

  VOLUNTEER INFANTRY. 17 JULY, 1863

  About seven o’clock on the rainy morning of 4 July, I made my way to a church on the Baltimore Pike, the hospital for the First Corps, to visit a gunner from another battery, wounded the day before by a twelve-pound rebel ball.

  Finding him recovering, I left the church and returned along the road, covering my head and shoulders with my blanket. On the way I encountered bands of drunken men, splashing around in the puddled road. Although suspecting them of being skulkers, I felt it was not up to me to return them to duty.

  But when I saw an old acquaintaince sheltering from the rain in the doorway of a log barn, I stopped at once and hailed him, because his coat was drenched with blood. I thought he must be badly wounded. Otis Pike was an old acquaintance, a private in the Second Massachusetts, a regiment in which I had many other friends from college days. For a moment Private Pike failed to hear me, so I came closer and uncovered my head. Recognizing me, he staggered back and nearly fell, but when I offered to help him to White Church hospital, he muttered that he was tolerable and needed no assistance. At once he pushed past me into the downpour and headed south.

  However when I saw that he had left several articles behind, I picked them up and ran after him, calling his name. Only then did I notice the shoulder boards of an officer on his bloodstained coat. I assumed that Pike had risen in rank and was no longer a private.

  To my surprise, he did not turn around. It occurred to me that his hearing might have been affected by the roar of the guns the day before. After handling a twelve-pounder Napoleon with Capt. Bigelow’s battery in the peach orchard on 2 July and taking part in the artillery duel on 3 July, I was a little deaf myself.

  However when he began to run, I remembered an unfortunate rumor about my old classmate Otis Pike. Some of my friends in his regiment had told me privately that he was perpetually on the brink of desertion.

  Once again I told myself that his case was the business of the Twelfth Corps, not of the Artillery Reserve. Putting his papers in my pocket, I forgot about him. The previous three days had called for violent exertion on the part of the Artillery Reserve, as they did of every regiment in every corps. After the artillery duel our brigade had been placed with those of General Gibbon’s Second Corps directly in the path of the charge by the rebel infantry, where we sustained many losses.

  Here I am tempted to quote a passage from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome about Lars Porsena at the bridge—:

  And how can man die better

  Than facing fearful odds?

  But since this is a military report, I will forbear.

  There was a pause while Homer took this in.

  Mary looked up from her pot of soup and said, “I think it’s a joke.”

  “Oh, right.” Homer went on reading.

  When it became apparent that the enemy had left the field, I was ordered by Brig. Gen. Henry Hunt to see to the repair of all artillery pieces damaged in the three-day battle. Thus I remained behind while the rest of the Artillery Reserve followed in pursuit of the rebel army.

  In fulfilling my duties I was assisted by members of other batteries. On 15 July, I was in the company of a gunner from the Artillery Brigade of the Twelfth Corps. To my dismay, he told me of the deaths of Lt. Col. Charles Mudge and Capt. Tom Robeson, two of my friends in the Second Massachusetts.

  He also passed along the sad news that my old friend 1st. Lt. Seth Morgan had apparently deserted. And then to my astonishment, he informed me that Prvt. Otis Pike had been killed in the very forefront of the battle on the morning of 3 July. His face, said the gunner, was too battered for recognition, but his identification tag was certainly Otis Pike’s.

  Since I had seen Private Pike alive on the morning of 4 July, far from the place where the others had been killed the day before, I knew that the body on the field could not have been his, no matter how it was identified. I decided to inform you at once of the discrepancy and ask the following important question:

  Could it be possible that Private Pike, who, I am told, had deserted three times before, was again abandoning the field, and in so doing, had stumbled upon the body of Lieutenant Morgan? Might he then have stolen his coat and identification and joined the other skulkers on the road to Baltimore?

  I must add another piece of evidence. Among the articles left behind in the log barn by Private Pike on 4 July was an envelope addressed to 1st Lt. Seth Morgan, enclosing a letter from his wife.

  In this report my intention is not to condemn Private Pike, but to restore the good name of a gallant soldier, my old friend 1st Lt. Seth Morgan.

  I have the honor to remain,

  Your Obt. Servt.,

  N. GOBRIGHT,

  First Lieutenant, Artillery Reserve,

  Ninth Battery, Massachusetts Light, First Volunteer Brigade

  (McGilvery)

  “Well, good for Lieutenant Gobright,” said Mary, measuring a spoonful of cumin and stirring it into the soup.

  “Wait a minute,” said Homer. “There’s more.”

  It would perhaps, sir, be of interest to record here my meeting with First Lieutenant Morgan’s wife. I came upon Mrs. Ida Morgan one evening a few days later, lying asleep on the battlefield.

  “What?” Mary dropped her spoon in the soup.

  Homer grinned. “I thought that would electrify you.”

  “Well, we know from one of her letters that she was in Gettysburg, but, my God, Homer,”—with difficulty, Mary fished up the spoon—“she must have been pretty damned pregnant. She was sleeping on the ground?”

  “I suppose she was looking for Seth all over the place. But she was okay. Listen.”

  Of course I felt constrained to help a woman in her somewhat delicate condition. When I learned that she was Seth Morgan’s wife, and that she had spent the day walking all over the battlefield looking for her husband, I commandeered an empty ambulance at the hospital for the wounded of the Twelfth Corps and drove her back into town.

  On the way, she told me that she had read in the Philadelphia newspaper after the battle that her husband was listed as missing. Thinking that he might have been wounded, the poor woman had come to Gettysburg to look for him. She had been directed to the barn that was the hospital for the Twelfth Corps, but failing to find him, had fallen into an exhausted sleep on the ground.

  I am now deeply sorry that in an attempt to comfort her I said that Seth might still be alive, that he had perhaps simply deserted, and that she might find him in Baltimore. I have no doubt that she set off for that city the next morning.

  Not until later did I learn about the strange confusion of identities on the battlefield and begin to suspect that her husband was not a deserter, but a battle casualty, his identity purloined by a member of his own company.

  Thus I am doubly anxious to clear her husband’s name. I hope, sir, that this report will be acted upon at once.

  1st Lt. N. Gobright

  “But it wasn’t, I’ll bet,” said Mary, dishing up the soup.

  “It couldn’t have been, or that famous shame would never have come down in your family.”

  “Too bad. Poor Ida. You mean it just sat there, all these years, unread?”

  “Fi
led away forever,” said Homer sadly, “under Miscellaneous.”

  OUTPOSTS OF THE

  CRANIUM

  Next morning the summer storm was over, the air was fresh, the sky was clear. In his nightshirt Homer blundered through the house to the front porch to look out at the great curve of the river.

  Thank God, it was still there, flowing north from Lee’s Bridge and spreading wide as it turned the corner. Somewhere out there a couple of great blue herons would be lurking along the reedy shore. When a small flock of Canada geese came flapping over the hill, Homer watched them cup their wings and splash down, squawking noisily. Near the island a solitary enthusiast was out early, paddling upstream. Homer envied him his tranquil sojourn on the water. For Mary and Homer the river was a more or less sacred stream, a reminder of their courtship—the word sacred depending on one’s view of the grasping clutch of holy wedlock.

  But at the moment the island and the river and all its denizens were irrelevant. What was needed now was a clarion call to the remotest outposts of the cranium. Sighing, Homer turned away from the river and went indoors.

  He found Mary in the front room, wide-awake and fully dressed. She was looking around with a critical eye. “We’ve got to clear everything out of here, Homer,” she said, heaving up a large potted plant and dumping it in his arms.

  “Whatever for?” whined Homer, lugging it out to the porch.

  “Because we’ve got to think.”

  They set to work at once, lowering all their electronic equipment to the floor, half a dozen blocky chunks entangled in wires and cables. “Good Lord, Homer,” said Mary, “your keyboard’s choked with crumbs.”

  “Dearie me, so it is.” Homer turned the keyboard upside down and batted it. “I’ll do something about the jelly later.” He set the keyboard down and turned his attention to a heap of file folders. “Hey, what’s this?”

  Under the folders lay a dried-up piece of buttered toast. “Uh-oh,” said Mary, “my fault.”

  The clearing out took half an hour. It wasn’t simply a matter of sweeping all the papers together. They had to be organized and shuffled into orderly bundles. The library books were a fearful threat because so many of them were nearly overdue. Mary stuck due dates on them and piled them on the piano, after removing the bust of Dante Alighieri to the front porch.

  When the physical task was done, they still couldn’t face the intellectual labor. And anyway, it was high time they had breakfast.

  But eventually there was no excuse. After drinking second cups of coffee to stimulate the mental fibers, they made a start by setting down on the bare table all their ill-assorted pieces of evidence. It took the rest of the morning to make sense of them and work out a convincing argument in favor of changing one of the names on the tablets in Memorial Hall.

  At two-thirty in the afternoon Homer had a new thought. After a good deal of telephonic confusion, he managed to get through to a reference librarian in the public library of Oshawa, Ontario.

  At four-thirty, the librarian called back. “I found it,” she said. “It’s on the way.”

  Hastily they reattached their equipment, and soon the image from the Durham County Courier of February 1, 1866, appeared on the screen. It was the picture Lily LeBeau had held back when she wrote to Ida about the death of the man she assumed to be Ida’s husband.

  The image was only an engraving, but the artist had made an exact copy of a photograph they had seen before. It was the man in the top hat.

  “It’s him,” cried Homer. “It’s Otis Pike.”

  “But the name underneath isn’t Otis Pike, it’s Seth Morgan.”

  “So it is, by God.” Homer was exultant. “But it isn’t Seth, we know it isn’t Seth, it’s Otis Pike. He didn’t die at Gettysburg. He died three years later, under the ice on Lake Ontario.”

  “Well, hurray,” said Mary, “I guess.” She was exhausted. “Who do we talk to? Who’s the big boss in charge of Memorial Hall?”

  “A certain very important person,” said Homer. “I know who he is. I’ll make an appointment.”

  THE GREAT ROLL CALL

  IN THE SKY

  Instead of telephoning for an appointment, Homer walked into University Hall and conned the secretary of the very important person into admitting him into the presence of the great being.

  But after hearing Homer’s reason for wanting an appointment, the important person drummed his fingers on his desk and frowned. “The removal of a name from one of those tablets would be a very serious matter indeed.” Rub-a-dub-dub.

  He was very old. His voice was sepulchral, rising from some hollow crypt deep within his chest. Homer watched his tapping fingers and wondered if the old man might perhaps be the last surviving drummer boy from the Battle of Gettysburg.

  “Of course it’s a serious matter,” said Homer. “But the omission of a name that should be there is also a serious matter.”

  “Mmm,” said the superannuated drummer boy doubtfully, beating a tattoo on his knees. Afterward Homer explained it to Mary. “Suppose the old gentleman enlisted as a ten-year-old drummer boy in the Army of the Potomac in the year 1863. He would now be exactly one hundred and fifty years old. Admittedly that’s pretty ancient, but aren’t there a few very aged men and women in Nepal whose cardiovascular systems are still in great shape because they climb mountains every day? Might not the old man be a dedicated mountain climber?”

  “Oh, Homer, what piffle.”

  “Anyway, our appointment is for ten o’clock tomorrow morning. We’ve got to box up all this stuff.”

  “All of it? You mean everything? But Homer, all we have to prove is that Seth died at Gettysburg and Otis Pike was alive afterward.”

  So in the end all their proofs fitted into a briefcase.

  Next day the old drummer boy was not in a receptive mood. Grumpily he said, “The President and Fellows are meeting in half an hour.” But then he bent his shaggy head dutifully over the table to examine their evidence—the note warning Otis, “Don’t do it again,” the memorial biography of Private Otis Pike with its apologia for his habit of leaving the ranks, the “Miscellaneous Unbound Regimental Papers” of Lieutenant Gobright and the photograph of Seth Morgan unearthed by the proprietor of Vanderhoof’s Hardware Store.

  Nervously, the mouldering drummer boy tapped the table and said, “Humph.” He seemed to be only half listening to their descriptions and explanations and arguments.

  Then Homer produced the new trump card. “And here, sir,” he said smoothly, laying it on the table and setting the others down beside it, “are three images of Otis Pike.”

  “The soldier who died at Gettysburg?” The antediluvian percussionist glared at Homer with a fierce and doubting eye. “The one whose name you wish me to erase from the roll of honor in Memorial Hall?”

  “Exactly.” Homer could not resist going too far. “Well, of course, as you will see, sir, Otis Pike was present a few years later at the great roll call in the sky, but no, he did not die in the Battle of Gettysburg.”

  Mary jumped in quickly. “This photocopy,” she said, handing it to the old gentleman, “is a photograph of Otis Pike in the album for the graduating class of 1860.”

  “Found in the Harvard Archives,” added Homer, feeling sure that this highly respectable source would impress the old fossil.

  “And this”—Mary picked up the photograph of the man in the top hat—“is obviously the same man a few years later. In other words, it’s another picture of Otis Pike.”

  The doddering drummer boy’s gnarled old hands rattled a double tattoo on the table, and he said, “So what?”

  Patiently Mary explained the third image, the 1866 newspaper engraving they had summoned electronically from the library in Oshawa, Ontario.

  “Well, all right,” said the old man testily, “it’s the same man, I can see that.”

  “But you see, sir,” said Homer, “his name is different. Here he’s called Seth Morgan.”

  “Why, mercy me, so he
is.”

  Once again they repeated the information from Gobright’s report. They recited Seth Morgan’s splendid regimental history of service at Antietam and Chancellorsville, and Homer explained his theory about the behavior of Private Otis Pike on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

  But it was the three images of Otis that captured the attention of the old drummer boy. He kept looking at them, turning his shaggy head to peer at one after another.

  In the end he agreed that the really serious matter was not the removal of a name from one of the tablets in Memorial Hall but the denial to another of its rightful place. The mistake, he said, must be rectified at once. Sitting down with a thump, the old man drummed a call-to-arms on the table and croaked that he would see what he could do.

  “Of course he didn’t promise anything,” said Mary, as they walked away across the Yard. “He still has to consult the other members of the Corporation.”

  “And he’s so old,” worried Homer. “I hope he talks to them soon, before it’s his turn to answer the great roll call in the sky.”

  FRESH AND BLEEDING

  Almost everything falls away. Slyly, the entire past falls away. Vanishing is what it does best, leaving little trace—a picture, a letter, a garbled rumor. Children get the story wrong and pass it along. And of course some things are mistaken from the beginning.

  Ida Morgan never knew that the beloved husband she had searched for on the battlefield of Gettysburg and in the cities of Baltimore and Washington was not a deserter.

  And Mary and Homer Kelly never understood that Seth was a murder victim, rather than a casualty of the battle.

  But at least they had uncovered his innocence. They had persuaded the important person in charge of the historic tablets in Memorial Hall that Seth’s name should replace that of the actual deserter. And the gristly old drummer boy had convinced his distinguished colleagues. Therefore there was to be a ceremony in honor of the new tablet.