Across Five Aprils (24 page)

Daily the color of April grew brighter. The apple and peach orchards were in bloom again, and the redbud was almost ready to burst. The little leaves on the silver poplars quivered in green and silver lights with every passing breeze, and Jenny’s favorite lilacs bloomed in great thick clusters, deep purple and as fragrant as any beautiful thing on earth.

Then suddenly, because there were no longer any eyes to perceive it, the color was gone, and the fifth April had become, like her four older sisters, a time of grief and desolation.

People would ask for many years: “Where were you when you heard? What were you doing? Who brought you the word?”

Jethro would remember a sunlit field and a sense of serenity and happiness such as he had not known since early childhood. He would remember that he had stopped his team when he saw Nancy running toward him, that Nancy’s face had been as white as it was during the days of waiting for a letter after the battle of Chickamauga, that she had sobbed against his shoulder.

He thought at first that something had happened to his father, or that word had come of John’s being one of those last soldiers to die when peace was almost within reach.

Then Nancy said, “Jeth, it’s the President—they’ve killed the President.”

 

The,
work of the farm had to go on. Ellen had washed and scrubbed and cooked for her family the summer her three children had died, and in the spring of ’65, Jethro went back to the fields and plowed the same furrows he had plowed for the past four years. But there was no longer any beauty in the world about him or any serenity in his heart. Sometimes he cried as the closing lines of his letter from the President flashed into his mind: “May God bless you for your earnest effort to seek out the right; may He guide both you and me in that search during the days to come.” And again he remembered Ross Milton’s words: “My hope lies in Abraham Lincoln.... if he can control the bigots, if he can allow the defeated their dignity—”

Little by little the story came through—details of the assassination, the attempted murder of the Secretary of State, the nation’s wrath and woe. And then the news of a train on its way from the East, a train carrying Abraham Lincoln back to Springfield, Illinois.

One thought was with Jethro constantly during those April days as the train bearing the President made its slow journey across the miles toward Springfield.

“I want to see him; just once I want to look on his face. Springfield is only a hundred miles away....”

But the hundred miles might just as well have been a thousand. The yoke of the farm had settled firmly across Jethro’s shoulders; his work in the fields at the proper season was the sole source of food for his parents, for John’s family, and for himself. There was no time or opportunity to go to Springfield, no hope of looking upon a face at once the plainest and the most beautiful, the humblest and the most magnificent, that Jethro would know in his lifetime.

It was the saddest and most cruel April of the five. It had held out an almost unbelievable joy and had then struck out in fury at those whose hands were outstretched. Jethro had learned to accept the whims of fate, schooled as he was in the philosophy of men who work the soil. The rains came or they were withheld, the heat ripened the grain or blasted it with a scorching flame, the ears of corn matured in golden beauty or they were infested by worms or blight. One accepted the good or the evil with humility, for life was a mystery, and questions were not for the lowly. But on the last Sunday of that April, a Sunday of sunlight and bright sky, Jethro lay in the grass on Walnut Hill, and rage mingled with the grief in his heart.

“Why did it happen? Why—why—did it have to happen?” He lay with his face close to the earth, clutching the fresh spring grass with both hands. “Never before has a president been killed; they’ve been looked after, watched over, and now this one, the one that has carried the load of this war till he’s old and tired, the one that was my friend—”

He tried for a while to believe that the agony inside him was part of one of the nightmares that had recurred so often ever since the early stories of Wilson’s Creek. But the warm April breeze stirred his hair, and the smell of the earth and the cry of the birds in the trees above him were a part of reality. This was no dream. Abraham Lincoln had been senselessly slain by the hand of a madman, and Jethro Creighton, with all the people of his time, had suffered an irreparable loss.

He heard steps approaching, and a moment later a hand was laid on his shoulder. He thought it might be Ed Turner or maybe old Israel Thomas, kind and full of sympathy, but of no help to him in this hour. He could not talk, nor did he wish to listen, and so he lay quietly, hoping the intruder would go away and leave him to the pain of this latest and mightiest blow.

But the hand was not lifted, and after a long moment someone spoke. Recognition of the voice drew Jethro up in startled surprise. The man who knelt beside him was thin and gaunt, with a soft, dark beard covering his cheeks; he was a young man, but his eyes were tired, and there were a few strands of gray in his dark hair. Jethro would have passed him on the streets of Newton without recognizing him, but the voice had not changed. It was that of his teacher—his brother now—Shadrach Yale.

He had not embraced one of his brothers since the days of his very early childhood, but that morning he put his arms about Shadrach, and slowly the joy for the living assuaged a little the grief for the dead.

“Shad, it’s a day I’ve dreamed about,” he said, and even as he spoke, he vaguely wondered why it was that he should whisper the words.

Shadrach did not speak at first. He sat looking at Jethro as if he, in turn, doubted the reality of his senses. Finally he said, “Jeth—Jeth, how you have grown, how much you look like Bill—I can’t believe it.”

They were silent for a long time, each studying the other’s face. An onlooker, not understanding the situation, would have wondered at the strange intensity of the two; an onlooker might have believed for a moment that they were man and boy suddenly bereft of their reason.

Jethro finally broke the silence. “Jenny?” he asked eagerly.

Shadrach smiled then. “She’s up at the house, Jeth, all eagerness to see you. I asked if I might come out and find you first—it has been such a long time—”

“How did you get here, Shad? You didn’t let us know.”

“Mr. Milton met us in Olney last night and loaned us his horse and buggy to drive up here today. We wanted to surprise you; we had hoped it would be a perfect homecoming.”

He paused, and Jethro understood. No perfect pearl. The editor had been right.

“I wanted to see him so much, Shad. Pa had said that maybe after the war was over I could go to Washington, maybe I could shake his hand.”

Shadrach could only nod. He placed his hand for a second on Jethro’s shoulder.

“Did you see him, Shad, more than the one time you wrote me about—the time he was ridin’ with Grant?”

“We saw him that night, Jeth, the night of the fourteenth. Jenny and I had gone for a stroll after supper, and as we walked along we noticed that a little crowd had congregated, and then down the street we saw the President’s carriage. There was some cheering, and he looked out at us and smiled. His face looked very old, but it was a happy face that night, I feel sure of that.” Shadrach paused as if he were not sure he should say any more, but finally he continued. “We were awakened about eleven o’clock by noise and shouting in the street; we could understand only a few words of the shouting, but they were enough to make us dress and hurry outside. There was a soldier standing on the corner; he was crying, but he told us.”

The distant horizon blurred a little, and the birds’ trills and the soft golden blanket of sunlight over the fields and orchards seemed out of place—like laughter in a church.

Shadrach was speaking again. “I could take you to Springfield, Jeth. Mr. Milton and I talked about it last night; he doubts if it is best. There is no Abraham Lincoln for you to see, you know—only the empty shell. We think it would only hurt you.”

“I reckon you’re right.”

“You’re going to have help with the work this summer.” Shadrach strove to bring lightness into his voice. “Jenny is going to help your mother; I’ll go out to the fields with you. And John will be here in a few weeks. We saw him just a while before we left Washington.”

Jethro nodded, while a crowd of thoughts raced through his mind. “Will you teach the school again next winter, Shad?”

Shadrach’s eyes lighted at the question. “That is something I should let Jenny tell you, Jeth, but I can’t. I’m going back to college. My uncle can get me a teaching position while I finish my work. And Jenny and I have decided that you’re going with us. You’ve plowed long enough, Jeth; you’re going to study now.”

Jethro’s hand found a sharp stick, and he dug it into the earth, twisted it around and around, and stared at the hole he had made as if it had some meaning.

“It would be the finest thing on earth for me, but what about my folks? My ma has lost three little boys and Mary—and Tom—and Bill. I’m the youngest; they depend on me.”

“You are their pride, Jeth. Those two want the very best for you. And they won’t be alone. Eb will be back, and there’s always John. He wants you to get an education and then later to help his own boys along the same road. It’s going to work out, Jeth; you’ll see.”

Jethro smiled slowly. “Don’t build me up too much, Shad,” he said after a while. “Somethin’s like to break inside of me.”

At that moment a voice sounded across the field from somewhere near the cabin. “Shad—Jeth—you two boys better come in now. I’m gettin’ real vexed with both of you.”

“Yes, let’s go see Jenny,” Jethro said huskily.

They walked together across the bridge that spanned Crooked Creek and through the half-acre south of the cabin, where four years before Jethro had helped his mother plant potatoes on a day when the news of Sumter had not quite reached the prairies.

A little distance up the road, past the hedge of lilacs and under the silver poplars of the dooryard, Jenny stood at the gate, waiting for them. She seemed taller in her city clothes, thinner and more delicate. But she was the same Jenny. Her arms were held out to Jethro, and for that moment when he ran toward her, all the shadows were lifted from the April morning.

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