by David Mason
I slipped my sword inside my pantaloons
so when they captured us I walked stiff-legged.
A revel Sergeant much in sympathy
as me where I was hit and offered help.
I told him I fell off my horse and cracked my knee
and he said, “Suh, I b’lieve that hoss was shot.”
Looking back, the whole thing seems unreal,
the way we walked along like two old friends.
Scattered shooting broke the night behind us,
though I could see that most of us were taken.
The rebels built a bonfire out of rails,
and in the firelight brought more prisoners in.
My Colonel hugged me like a baby, said,
“Mitch, you were worth your weight in gold today.”
He said he knew that I could handle men
and would make Major if we could escape.
But we were told to sit down in the dark
and held at gunpoint all that weary night.
Next morning we were searched for valuables.
I hid my jackknife down inside my boot;
a ring I made from California gold
I wrapped in tobacco, pretending it a chew.
The officer in charge strolled up to me
and said, “Now I will have to have that sword.”
He waited, arms crossed upon his tunic.
I didn’t want to be dishonorable.
General Hull in the Revolution, who
commanded two of my own ancestors, broke
his sword in the ground when taken prisoner.
“I’m not going to make a Hull of myself,”
I said, but made no move to give it up
and offered silence to this officer.
It only made him madder. He detailed
three men with loaded pieces to take aim:
“Suh, I do not wish to use harsh measures.”
I saw those barrels pointed at my breast
and thought of Mrs. Mitchell and the baby,
saw my chance for escape would have to wait,
unbuckled my sword and handed it across.
I felt just like twenty-five cents. They asked
whether my name was on the sword. It was not.
They regretted that it could not be returned.
I wished that I had given it to the rebel
Sergeant who saved my hide the night before,
but now I had to watch this officer
replace his rusty saber with my own.
Then I felt like six-and-a-quarter cents.
The Country I Remember
Mrs. Gresham:
By the time the train pulled into Portland, I
knew there was no one who could save my life
but me. Now I was twenty-nine years old,
a spinster with a love of poetry
and no money, experienced at cooking.
Portland was a brick city on the river
with some degraded shanties for the poor.
Fishermen, lumberjacks and prostitutes,
bartenders and bankers rambled her streets,
and I saw quickly it was rougher than
the frontier village that my Papa knew.
And wet. I swear it rained all winter long,
the smell of fish and cut wood everywhere.
I spent a week just wandering the streets,
looking for work to pay for my hotel,
but what could I do? I couldn’t bring myself
to sing in a saloon with sawdust floors
or join the mission at the riverfront.
I saw that I had lived with family
to fortify me far too many years,
and I would have to learn to live alone.
The hotel keeper, Mr. Jenkins, must
have pitied me. He offered me a job,
first as kitchen help, then behind the desk
keeping his accounts. It paid my room and board
and something extra that I set aside—
my first Christmas away from home I sent
small presents to the folks at Pomeroy.
I had a private room on the first floor,
a bed and dresser and electric light
for reading so I didn’t strain my eyes.
“It rains across the country I remember.”
That was a line from Trumbull Stickney, read
in another room some other, later year,
but I remember feeling it in Portland,
closing my eyes and burrowing in the sheets
to listen to the water streaming down
the walls outside, the brick streets rushing
all that dark water downhill to the river
where it kept on going silently to sea
and clear across to China. I was alone.
I was alone and it was more than I could bear
to lie there listening to that driving rain.
Maybe that is why we go on talking,
always trying to show someone we’re here,
and look—I have a past just like you do,
a stream of words that fills the empty night
and sweetens troubled dreams, or so we hope,
and tells us not to linger long on bridges
staring at all the water passing by.
I thought my whole ambition was to make
the past and present come together, dreamed
into a vivid shape that memory
could hold the way the land possesses rivers.
They in turn possess the land and carry it
in one clear stream of thought to drink from
or water gardens with.
I learned that I must first talk to myself,
retelling stories, muttering a few
remembered lines of verse, to make the earth
substantial and to bring the sunlight back.
I thought of all the bones out on the prairie,
or Mrs. Kress who came aboard our train
in a tight corset, so my sister Beatrice
said she looked like an ant. I thought of land
that flowed far out beneath us like a river
turning the dead face-upward in the wake
to talk to us of all their ruined lives
in a Babel of tongues. And then I knew
I worked to keep these troubled dreams at bay
and keep the talking dead from drowning me.
“It rains across the country I remember.”
When spring came, Mr. Jenkins offered me
employment of another kind—a ring
along with all the duties of a wife.
He’d put his best suit on when he proposed
and I could see why others might have faltered,
fearing nights alone, but I was expert
at saying no and hardly knowing why.
I told him I would leave for California.
Sojourners
Lt. Mitchell:
Some fella told me mankind always moves
from east to west, but in my day I’ve traveled
back and forth like a saw blade cutting wood.
When I was young I worked my father’s farm,
but when at twenty-one I became a man
I left the farm work and the biting flies
to drive an ox team out to Oregon.
That was back in 1852.
The journey took three months, a lot on foot.
I saw whole households strewn across the prairies,
all extra furniture discarded when
we reached the bluish foothills of the mountains.
We added graves to those beside the trail
and traded worn-out oxen as we went.
At Cheyenne we picked up new wagon ruts
and followed them northwest across the hills
until high forests closed us in, the trail
full of growth we had to cut with axes.
I’d never seen such str
eams—what the poet called
“The cataract of death far thundering from
the heights”—clean as Heaven, shot with rainbows.
I’d say the mountain raised my spirits up
more than any sermon ever did.
I met a man who wintered there and looked
a granite carving brought to life by magic.
Everywhere I went I wondered how
it looked before it fell to human eyes,
before some storyteller called it home.
The mountains were home only to the gods,
according to the Indians, and I,
well I was young and I believed so much
the world was mine for taking.
At last we came
to Portland, a town of log cabins then.
Never was a land so full of rain—
the ground soaked it up and squished when you walked.
The sky was always like a tattered mist
and most days keeping dry was hard to do,
but the woods was full of game, the lakes of fish,
and you could feed yourself with hardly a sweat.
I met a man named Barley who would fish
the river with a gill net like the natives,
hauling in salmon half as big as a man.
Joe Barley had come from Massachusetts
not for gold, but because he had no life
to hold him in the East. I fished with him
one fall, learned how to build an alder fire
and keep the coals banked low to smoke the fish.
I said I’d travel south to California;
Barley had a notion of coming too.
We panned for gold on the Humboldt, cut wheat
with cradles in the Sacramento Valley
the hottest month I ever labored through.
We packed mules to prospect in the country
near Mount Shasta and were lost for three days.
We heard about the Indian fights up north
and how the Rogue and Klamath picked a fight,
and then we joined the Oregon Mounted Dragoons
in 1856. They made us Corporals
and I recall my horse was so damned slow
I was always catching up. That’s how I missed
half the fight in the Siskiyou Mountains,
rough, thick-wooded hills with lava outcrops,
where I saw Barley die, pierced by an arrow.
It wasn’t more than three men we were chasing,
four months after Colonel Wright was murdered.
Some said Wright had raped an Indian girl,
some that she was the one who ate his heart.
A few of our men were still hot for revenge.
Barley, who had ridden out in front,
was nearly dead of bleeding when we found him.
They’d taken his horse, left barley in the sun
where we found him sitting up, swatting flies
and watching his own blood cover the grass.
“Mitch,” he said, “I wish I’d stuck to fishing.”
The Indians were hiding in the rocks.
Our men dismounted and were loading rifles,
shooting into the rocks, then running up.
The one they caught that day regretted it.
I was too busy holding my old friend
to notice all the noise on the hill above.
I must have looked up, though,
and when my eyes came back to Barley’s face
the life had left it. I dug Barley’s grave
and carved his name on a marker made of wood.
We had a preacher with us who could sermon:
“For we are strangers before thee,” he said,
“and sojourners, as were all our fathers:
our days on the earth are as a shadow and
there is none abiding.” He read some more
but those are words I don’t think I’ll forget.
They made me miss the farm in Illinois.
I knew my father must be getting old.
I thought of sojourners in the train’s darkness,
hauled with other Union men to Richmond.
I fretted about the way I lost my sword,
and the stench of packed-in men hardly helped.
There wasn’t room to tend the wounded ones
whose moans, together with the chugging train,
dragged through our days and nights of traveling.
The Chickamauga prisoners were kept
at Libby Prison down on Carey Street,
beside the James River and the Lynchburg Canal,
a brick warehouse built to hold tobacco
where now a thousand Union officers
huddled on its upper floors and learned
to sleep like spoons when nights grew long and cold.
“Well, you ’uns look like we ’uns, quite a little.”
That was our greeting from the Reb commander,
pointing out his cannon aimed at the walls,
his soldiers eager to shoot all Yankees
attempting to escape. But I don’t think
the man was evil; that night he fed us
beans and meat, never so much food again—
his men were hungry too, quite a little.
The Blacksmith
Mrs. Gresham:
Howard Gresham pried a “yes” from me
by shear stubbornness. He was a strong man
and he simply wore me down. I’d lived alone
some years and thought I’d always live alone,
but fell for him as though I were a girl.
He wasn’t a poet any more than I,
but he reminded me of some old verses:
“His hair is crisp, and black, and long,
His face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat,
He earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face,
For he owes not any man.”
Those were lines my Papa used to love.
Howard was a real blacksmith for ten years
who worked his way out west from Minnesota.
When I met him he owned a dry goods store
in Santa Rosa, where I worked as a cook
in a restaurant. He had these big strong arms
from wielding a heavy hammer all those years
and looked much like the fellow in the poem.
He’d come by the restaurant once and seen me
going in to work, and then he came back
and asked me on a picnic in the hills
outside of town. It was summer. “For lo,
the winter is past, the rain is over and gone;
The flowers appear on the earth . . .” Those words
were dancing about inside my head that day.
The hills of Santa Rosa had turned golden.
Sometimes they reminded me of the Palouse,
but winter wasn’t hard in California.
I loved to take long walks outside of town,
so I said yes, and then I think I laughed
and said, “For lo, the winter is past.” Howard
knew the verse and finished speaking it.
Right there is the restaurant that drew me
to him in a way I’d never felt before.
He knew the verse, though he’d had little school
because his father died at Gettysburg
and he’d had to learn a trade. I said yes,
I’d join him on his picnic in the hills.
That night I thought about it, doubts came back.
I told myself my travels were not done.
I still had thoughts of Mexico and further
south if money hadn’t slowed my progress.
I had an idea that I would write a book,
but I could never sit still long enough.
I hardly knew this man, but clearly saw
that I could settle
down and live with him.
No, I’d think, to marry him is to betray
yourself. Look at all the women you’ve known
who wear a path from house to school to church,
yoked like oxen, milked like cows, and told
to be as pretty as the foliage;
as if the noise of children’s not enough
they nurse the manhood of their husbands too.
I ranted alone inside my rented room,
rejected Howard half a dozen times
when all he’d asked me was to go for a walk.
And when I tried to sleep I thought of love
and thought he would be capable of it.
And then: why would any man want me?
I’m such an old maid, thirty-six years old!
The picnic was a Sunday I had off.
We dallied for a long time on the ridge,
talking about our fathers and the war
and what we hoped for, coming west. I thought
the kindness in his face was kindness earned
by hardship and a solitude like mine.
He was forty-five and still a bachelor,
kept from marriage by his work and travel.
His family were all dead but a sister
in Minnesota he wrote postcards to.
For our picnic he brought sandwiches and beer
and threw a blanket on the grass, and we
sat in the shade of a black elm and talked.
When he returned me to my room that night
I had a wire that told me Mama had died.
When you have gone away to help yourself
a death at home is somehow more your fault,
as if you could have stopped it, made a mood
of happiness that would keep death at bay.
But I had not seen Mama since the day
she shrank beside my Papa as the train
pulled out—my last view of her, after all.
The train back home ran through the corridor
of rain to Portland, then by the river east.
I have never grown used to trains going east,
but the hills were familiar, farms of wheat
and standing herds out in the heat of summer.
All of my sisters were there, kids and husbands
with them, my shy brother and his new bride,
and Papa, standing on the platform, still
like a soldier, erect, his thinning hair
