The Deserter

by Jane Langton

  “I may be late,” said Mary, rushing off to teach a class. But Homer was early. When he pulled open the south door of the corridor, the caterers were just setting up a table. The clattering of dishes and the tinkling of glassware echoed from the marble floor and the wooden vaults. Homer stood in the middle of the lofty hall, gazing up, staring at everything, seeing the building in a new way.

  For more than a century it had been just another useful part of the university. But at the time of its construction, the galling sores left by the human losses in all those innumerable battles were still fresh and bleeding, the pious words on the walls still passionate with meaning, and the names on the tablets inseparable from the faces of remembered men.

  For Homer, as he rambled around the great spaces of Memorial Hall, the building began to turn into the Civil War. Men were stepping down from the tablets to fight again the battles in which they had been killed. As his imagination took fire, he could almost see Colonel Mudge burst through the south door crying, “It’s an order,” then fall in a hail of bullets from the phone booth at the other end of the hall. High above the door in the west wall, the small gallery had become a boulder on Little Round Top, and there stood Strong Vincent, colonel of a Pennsylvania regiment, pointing and shouting and toppling over the railing, struck down by a sharpshooter on the staircase across the corridor.

  Boom, boom, where was the gunfire? Homer found his way into the dining hall and looked up at the balcony. Drawn up among the chairs, the twelve-pounder Napoleons were roaring in concert, firing down at the students munching their sloppy joes at the tables on the floor below. He watched in horror as one of the guns misfired and killed poor Henry Ropes of the Twentieth Massachusetts.

  And tremendous things were going on downstairs. Lined up in military order against the wall, the white busts of generals were taking command, opening their marble mouths to shout orders, and Homer was astonished to see Major General Frank Barlow, class of 1855, leap down from his memorial window in a shower of stained glass.

  But, oh God, what to do with the bodies? Bloated and repulsive, they were mounded all over the floor around the tables. They were a problem, they were in the way, because the dining hall was full of first-year men and women, a thousand of them, all hungrily eating lunch and pretending not to notice. Well, it was too bad—Homer shook his head in sorrow—but there was nothing he could do but heave the putrid corpses up on the tables among the chicken fingers and the cans of diet Coke, while the poor kids recoiled in disgust and scraped back their chairs and scuttled away.

  Puffed up with importance, Homer strolled back into the corridor, the general of all he surveyed, and headed for Sanders Theatre. Surely Sanders might serve some useful purpose. Standing in the glowing ambience of the wooden chamber, he looked up at the stage and saw at once that it was the perfect place for a field hospital. The surgeons could amputate up there in perfect comfort, piling up the sawed-off arms and legs around the marble gown of President Josiah Quincy.

  But people were gathering in the corridor. Homer swept away his imaginary Civil War, with all its detritus of swords and rifles and battle flags and careening Parrott guns and caissons, and joined the celebration. But he couldn’t help wishing for a mock skirmish or two, right here in Memorial Hall. One or two reenacted battles might wake up the kids as they sat at the tables among the marble busts and painted soldiers. It might persuade them to stand up and take a look at Charles Russell Lowell, who fell at Cedar Creek, and James Savage, killed at Cedar Mountain, and Wilder Dwight, mortally wounded at Antietam, and Robert Gould Shaw, who died at Fort Wagner among the black enlisted men of his Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers.

  But above all, Homer wanted everyone who entered the building to read the tablets in the corridor and grasp the terrible meaning of their inscriptions—Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor.

  Surely that would be a good thing?

  THE FLOWER OF

  THE NATION

  They should have been listening as the venerable drummer boy stood beside the gleaming new tablet, explaining the substitution of the name of Seth Morgan for that of Otis Pike, but the old man was maundering on at great length.

  Only a few people had been invited to gather around him in the memorial corridor. Hamilton Dow, the president of the university, was there as an old friend of Homer and Mary Kelly. Gwen and Tom had been invited of course, along with their children—John and his wife Virginia, Annie and Joe, Fred and Linda, Amanda and her new boyfriend. Even Benny had condescended to witness the restoration to honorable memory of his great-great-great-grandfather. Benny’s hair was emerald green.

  Cousin Ebenezer had not been informed.

  Mary shifted her weight from leg to leg. She was tired of standing, and she was also suffering from a depression of spirits. The return of Seth Morgan’s name to the roll of honor did not make her as glad as she might have expected. In spite of everything, she was saddened by the fact that his classmate, poor old Otis Pike, had been dumped in history’s rubbish heap. He had died gallantly after all, out there in Oshawa, Ontario.

  “The tablets that rise around us on these walls,” droned the old man, “represent the flower of the nation. Just as the playing fields of Eton sent their best and finest to die in the trenches of the First World War, so the cream of an entire generation, students at this university, enlisted eagerly in the Union army. Here are recorded the names of those who died, one hundred and thirty-five young men of shining promise who lost their lives in heroic battle, their destinies as future leaders of the nation tragically unfulfilled.”

  Homer almost piped up to point out that the life of an Illinois farm boy had also been full of promise, but he refrained.

  Afterward there was a polite gathering around the refreshment table. The relatives clustered and gossiped, the superannuated drummer boy beat “Parade Rest” on the pockets of his pants and excused himself to take a nap and Homer wandered off with Ham Dow, walking south along the corridor.

  “How many names did he say there were?” said Ham.

  “A hundred and thirty-five, I think,” said Homer.

  The tablets beside the south door recorded the names of Law School graduates who had died in the Civil War. Ham looked up at them dreamily and said, “Suppose a hundred men out of that total of one hundred and thirty-five might have married and had offspring if they hadn’t died. How many children would have been born in the next generation?”

  Homer caught Ham’s drift. “Well, if you make a conservative estimate, say two kids apiece, it would be two hundred. Two hundred unborn and nonexistent citizens, children who failed to be born around the year 1870.”

  “Good,” said Ham. They turned and strolled past the tablets on the other side. “Then suppose,” Ham went on, “that four hundred more children were born to those two hundred—or rather, not born.”

  “Right,” said Homer. “Roughly speaking, they would have failed to appear around 1895.”

  “And the third generation? Children who would never have seen the light around the year 1920?”

  “Eight hundred more?” Homer was enjoying the game. “And sixteen hundred in 1945?”

  “That means thirty-two hundred in 1970.”

  “And sixty-four hundred in 1995.”

  “So if we stop there, how many have we got?”

  They paused beside the north door, mumbling and counting on their fingers, then said it together, “Twelve thousand six hundred.”

  With the same impulse, they turned to gaze back along the corridor at the dim white panels recording the names of men who had attended the college in the middle of the nineteenth century, who had paid a bond of four hundred dollars to the President and Fellows to have the privilege of shivering in cold rooms or buying coal from the registrar, who had attended morning prayers and lectures by the likes of Lowell and Longfellow, Sparks and Channing, who had clowned in Hasty Pudding and delivered earnest orations at commencement. Or perhaps for som
e of them, it had not been like that at all. Perhaps they had merely endured four friendless college years before going off to die on a hundred distant battlegrounds.

  Homer was more fantastical by nature than Hamilton Dow. He grinned at Ham. “Why don’t we invite all those unborn guys and gals to a celebration?” Flinging himself at the doors opening on Kirkland Street, he shouted into the empty air, “Come on in, y’all! The party’s on us.”

  As usual, he was making himself conspicuous. The clusters of friends and relatives stopped talking and stared. Ham laughed and said he had a meeting. The others shook hands, hugged each other and said good-bye.

  But later on, as Mary took the wheel and drove home along Route 2, Homer closed his eyes and expanded the vision in his head.

  There they would be outside, nearly thirteen thousand unborn descendants, waiting in a great throng, and they would pour into the building and crowd into the dining hall and sit down at the tables, and there would be wine and song and a six-course banquet, followed by toasts and speeches of thanksgiving. And then all the proud achievers among them—including one or two saviors of the human race—would be asked to stand up, and there would be thunderous applause.

  But that was impossible, of course, because if their ancestors had not died in the Civil War, the building itself would not be there at all. That colossal building, that massive displacer of air and sky, would never have occupied the triangle of land bounded by Kirkland Street, Cambridge and Quincy.

  And therefore the banquet for all the unborn descendants would have to take place somewhere else. They would have to hire a hall.

  THE HORRID BANG

  So it was all over, except for one small detail.

  Mary came upon it while clearing up everything, inserting new folders in her file cabinet, packing a box with the child’s nightdress, the Shaker bonnet, the bloodstained coat and the two little cases of photographs.

  Only the handkerchiefs remained to be put away. And it was while she was tucking them back in their silken envelope that the delicate fabric of the lining gave way, releasing a wrinkled sheet of lavender paper. It was another letter from Lily LeBeau.

  Mary unfolded it, expecting another piece of foolish silliness.

  Lily’s letter was silly all right, and foolish in the extreme, but it delivered a blow.

  21 April ’65

  Darling Ida,

  Tho not in touch these 2 yrs this is to inform you unfettred by any restraynt that we are safe and sownd. Such ecsitment! We were backstage at the time but when we heard the HORRID BANG we were AGAST as you can immagin but we wayted not a moment. We galoped awy on our trustie steed well acshully a hack with an old nag!

  S. wore a grey wig and my black mantua and bonnet you remember the one with yellow posys and fethers and by good luck his whiskers was all shaved off beforehand so as to look like ancient Grease so we were 2 RISPETABLE LADEYS! Because he was always talking about the old days in that club when they dressed up like girls! How I laffed! We were so quik we got across the Chayn bridge altho I heard they baricaded it soon therafter to prevent excape of You Know Who, but one of the gards was a gentelman friend of mine so I really had to laff!! We gave the hack man $50!!!

  The theatre here is more of a tavern not ezactly what we are accostomed to. For yr sake I hope the baby was a boy, tho prefering girls myself.

  Yr loving Lily

  Mary pushed open the door to the porch and shouted at Homer. He was banging out a dent in the aluminum canoe, making such a din that he didn’t hear. But when she screamed at the top of her lungs, he put down his hammer and followed her indoors.

  “Look at this, Homer,” she said, thrusting the letter at him. “It’s a bombshell.”

  “Another letter?” Homer’s attention had drifted far away from the problems of his wife’s remote ancestor. He glanced at Lily’s letter. “What on earth is she talking about?”

  “Oh, Homer, don’t you know? Can’t you see?” Mary ran to her file cabinet, wrenched open a drawer, and jerked out the folder for Ida Morgan. “Look at the playbills,” she said, rattling them under his nose.

  “Well, of course I remember the playbills. They’re all cut up with scissors.”

  “Exactly. Ida did it. She cut out a name from all of them. The same name, one of the actors.”

  “One of the actors?” Homer gaped at her stupidly. “You mean Seth Morgan? Otis Pike?”

  “No, no, of course not. Homer, just look at her letter. There was a horrid bang, and then Lily and Otis escaped from the theater and ran away. It was April 1865, and only a week later they were safely across the border in Canada.”

  Homer understood at last. He said, “My God.”

  “So that’s what the family was so ashamed of. Oh, poor Ida, if only she could have known that it wasn’t Seth who was mixed up with all those people, it was Otis Pike. No wonder they kept it hushed up, all my ancestors, generation after generation.”

  “Of course,” agreed Homer. “What could have been worse? The truth at last.”

  Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,

  Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,

  With the pomp of the inloop ’d flags with the cities draped in black,

  With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,

  With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,

  With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads,

  With the waiting depot, the arriving coffin, and the somber faces,

  With dirges through the night, with the thousand voices rising strong and solemn,

  With all the mournful voices of the dirges pour’d around the coffin,

  The dim-lit churches and the shuddering organs.

  —Walt Whitman

  VARIOUS PATRIOTIC

  REMARKS

  I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.

  —THOMAS JEFFERSON,

  Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781

  “The good Lord have pity on us!” said Aunt Chloe. “O! it don’t seem as it was true! What has he done, that Mas’r should sell him!”…

  He leaned over the back of the chair, and covered his face with his large hands. Sobs, heavy, hoarse, and loud, shook the chair, and great tears fell through the fingers on the floor: just such tears, sir, as you dropped into the coffin where lay your first-born son; such tears, woman, as you shed when you heard the cries of your dying babe. For, sir, he was a man, and you are but another man. And, woman, though dressed in silk and jewels, you are but a woman, and, in life’s great straits and mighty griefs, ye feel but one sorrow!

  —HARRIET BEECHER STOWE,

  Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1852

  I hear another ask, Yankee-like, “What will he gain by it?” … Well, no, I don’t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul … No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes carry their blood to.

  —HENRY THOREAU,

  “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” 1859

  Those of us whose fortunate lot it was to enlist in the army, during that magic epoch of adventure which has just passed by, will never again find in life a day of such strange excitement as that when they first put on uniform and went into camp … the transformation seemed as perfect as if, by some suddenly revealed process, one had learned to swim in air, and were striking out for some new planet.… Now … already its memories grow dim … The aureole is vanished from their lives.

  —THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

  Captain, 51st Mass. V. M., 25 September, 1862: Colonel, 1st S. C. Vols. (33rd U. S. Colored Troops), 10 Nov., 1862; discharged, for disability, 27 Oct., 1864.

  … if you have been in the picket-line at night in a black and unknown wood, have heard the splat of bullets upon the trees, and …
felt your foot slip upon a dead man’s body, if you have had a blind fierce gallop against the enemy, with your blood up and a pace that left no time for fear … you know that man has in him that unspeakable somewhat which makes him … able to lift himself by the might of his own soul …

  As for us, our days of combat are over. Our swords are rust … I do not repine. We have shared the incommunicable experience of war; we have felt … the passion of life at its top.

  —OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES, JR.

  Private, 4th Battery Mass. V. M., April, Vols., 10 July, 1861: Captain, 23 March, 1861: First Lieutenant, 20th Mass. 1862: Lt. Colonel 5 July, 1863 …

  mustered out, 17 July, 1864.

  The men were brought down from the field and laid on the ground beside the train and so back up the hill ‘till they covered acres.… By midnight there must have been three thousand helpless men lying in that hay.… All night we made compresses and slings—and bound up and wet wounds, when we could get water, fed what we could, travelled miles in that dark over these poor helpless wretches, in terror lest some one’s candle fall into the hay and consume them all.

  —CLARA BARTON

  Second Bull Run,

  4 September, 1862

  We heard all through the war that the army “was eager to be led against the enemy.” It must have been so, for truthful correspondents said so, and editors confirmed it. But when you came to hunt for this particular itch, it was always the next regiment that had it. The truth is, when bullets are whacking against tree-trunks and solid shot are cracking skulls like egg-shells, the consuming passion in the breast of the average man is to get out of the way.

  —DAVID THOMPSON

  9th New York Volunteers, at Antietam

  I asked if any one would like to have his wounds dressed? Some one replied, “There is a man on the floor who cannot help himself, you had better see to him.” Stooping over him, I asked for his wound, and he pointed to his leg. Such a horrible sight I had never seen and hope never to see again. His leg was all covered with worms.… I am being more used to sights of misery. We do not know until tried what we are capable of.