By the next morning those speakers loomed, dormant of sound, and those young men and middle-aged men and young boys who lied about their age, crammed into wagons with rifles and muskets, their heads swaddled in beaver-fur hats and their bodies tufted in coon and bison hides, these men lined city blocks from the doors of makeshift enlistment offices, the white puffs of their breath, while frozen flags waved stiff as tarpaulin from second story windows, from gas lamps, from balconies.
And no matter his proclamations or assurances your father soon stood at the top of the stairs in his dress blues, his tassels, the jangle of his many medals, the glint of his polished saber, and your father said, “While I would rather not leave,” and he placed his hand gently upon your shoulder, “I must see these rebels and their families and their homes eradicated.” And he stooped to you and said, “I have ever loved you boys with all my soul” and he gestured now to your mother's closed door, saying, “You look after her.”
Entire towns were said to enlist and prepare to march. And brothers marched with brothers and fathers marched with sons. And now young men kissed their sweethearts and promised to return before the month was out, and young men shook their father's hands as if they were now equal, they hugged their sobbing mothers and tousled and patted their kid brothers on the heads and hugged their sisters, young ladies in ribbons and bonnets who perhaps pinned for and secretly mourned for some boy down the road who somewhere bade his own family farewell, for along the land this scene was played out a thousand, thousand times, and these boys pledged their hearts, never realizing all the girls they would meet along the way, receiving kisses in a good many places, and giving the same.
Main Street brimmed on either side with this sea of blacks and grays, with beaver coats and coon coats and woolen coats and bison hides, with the blood exuberance of mothers and fathers and children, their red faces cheering and singing, the flags they waved, and remember marching bands led the way, batons and tubas and clarinets, how thereafter the cobbled street filled with the stiff backs of militiamen, young boys and men dressed in hand me down uniforms from wars past, the stained suits of fathers and uncles and grandfathers, suits of wool and dust and mothballs, these men and boys, the jolting of their boots, their bayonet tips. And remember, at the fore of these, your father taciturn atop a white stallion, his saber aloft and flashing. Remember the air streaming with the litter of red, white, and blue confetti, while flags were unfurled from every window, lamppost, balcony, while children dangled from lamp posts and oak tree limbs, giggling and hooting and cheering the death of those rebels. And while your mother wept first for the light of a sun so long unseen, she soon recognized every boy marching past as the son or cousin or second nephew of some man she had known as a school girl, and she said this soldier's presumed name as if it were of precious substance yet when she saw your father astride his horse her face seemed to gray and she fell silent.
And now your city became a city of militias marching from distant towns, a city of parades and confetti, of flags unfurled and waving, and all waited for the announcement of attack, and many silently feared the rivers would soon fill with rebels armed and murderous and bent on fornicating with your women, reclaiming their unpaids, obliterating all the factories and forcing the little boys of the land to till the soil.
And you and your mother watched the sky, the moon pale and frozen, those stars and the soft chirruping of crickets and frogs, while from somewhere came a high whistling, a low crackling, another whistling, and you grew rigid and your mother murmured, “Only fireworks” and thereafter you listened stiff and trembling to the far-off sounds of some anonymous celebration.
And your father and the first militias left the towns of their birth, very often the only towns they had ever known, and men such as your father believed those boys would return, unscathed, in a few weeks' time, while young men on the march wrote home to their fathers, “I will ever remember these sublime moments when even the most common amongst us are willing to sacrifice for their country” and soon everywhere in newsprint and plastered to the sides of buildings was the illustration of a grinning fellow who said, “Joining the army is like small poxâ¦it's catching!” and letters home from young boys named Johnny or Peter were written by firelight, full of wonder at “life's richness” and “the great adventure before us.”
And what proud young man did not pose in full regalia, with arms folded and expression stern and noble, or a hand slid into his pocket, or the white gloves of the dandy proudly displayed, or gesturing over the landscape as if sighting new lands to conquer, and now even General Grant was photographed, slouched or perhaps dozing on some saloon chair, and silver-haired General Lee was snapped, gazing off, buckskin gloves aloft, astride his white stallion, and, so too was the pious blue-eyed killer General Jackson, with calfskin Bible clasped to his breast.
Soon howitzers the size of railroad cars sat upon the hillsides and there the grasses gently trembled.
And General McClellon wanted only to drill and issue medals for posture and manliness and he suggested if he had “a Napoleonic impulse” he would march upon the capital and take the country from that “Apish Abraham” for himself, and he insisted to his wife that the people of the land, and all the soldiers, would cheer him the while, but he had no stirring to engage in any conflict but the conflict of how much sugar to ladle into his tea or how long to trim his whiskers.
And General Grant, ordinary and scrubby, with no gait, no station, no manner, wandered off in the night, dazed and wild with whiskey, and woke three days later some hundred miles south of his camp and there he worked in a general store and boozed until ordered home by Abraham.
And your father was considered mad by many for the way he moaned in his sleep, and the way he anticipated enemies in all the shadows of the buildings, and how he bayoneted behind curtains for “spies” and how he claimed, “No man may kill me by bullet alone” and of this, tangled rabble Abraham could only sigh, could only say, “We must use those instruments at hand” and thus they set out to annihilate the enemy.
And many lined the tops of hillsides with blankets and chairs and nibbled picnic lunches of cold roast goose and baked ham and drank lemonade as they watched those first battles with opera glasses and applauded the hardy volleys and the heroic “hurrahs,” until the fury and horror of the rebels outclassed your boys and the wailing of the rebels turned your boys' blood cold, and your boys scurried in every direction, some spouting blood, some covered in dirt and mud, some glazed in the eyes, some screaming names of relatives and some screaming gibberish, and how those along the hillsides knocked over their chairs and fled on horseback while the gun smoke and the screams of dying men clouded their way.
And soldiers lined the streets, exhausted and bloodied, and newspaper men snickered, “Where are your proud boasts from which you went forth? Your banners and your bands of music? Your ropes to haul back prisoners?”
And soldiers camped in the streets, expressionless, soot and blood streaked, and women in aprons ladled bowls of chicken broth from vats, and now these soldiers in vacant lots and on front steps, in basements and on porches, clutched their rifles and whistled in their dreams, whistled the sounds of shells into the ears of comrades, the brothers and cousins and boyhood friends they held close in sleep.
And recruits wandered barnyards and prairies, baffled and circling and humiliated and terror-numb, and stray dogs followed them with tails flickering, with low hungry moans, and lapped the blood spreading their brows, their throats, with clammy tongues and yellow breath.
And this fellow with his blood and mucus-thick whiskers, and this man, the bones white and blood blackened, punching out where his leg shattered, and every other officer injured, through the faces, the skulls, through the chest and neck, the wheezing sounds and sucking noisesâThis man's horse struck and knocked down by eight bullets and before he could pick himself up, five more bullets slammed into the dead animal, and before he could die, he simply lay beneath this house of meat, this fortress of rot, and later wrote home, exhilarated, “The air was alive with lead,” although he neglected to tell of the gases singing as they escaped from horses, bloated and shot-through.
And soldiers drew their last breaths in the arms of dear good friends and brothers, and they asked these comrades to write their mothers and fathers “How I died today for the most honored of causes,” and even if they scampered and ran and were shot in the back, even if they were mistakenly shot by their own men, even if the bullet first ricocheted off some rock, even if they died of disease, even if they died slow and over the course of days, slow draining of blood, gangrenous, or even if they were shot by some sniper while they ate baked beans and sang “The Battle Hymn” off-key by flickering embers, invariably they asked their friends to say, “I died with my sword raised and glory in my heart.”
And recruits too young to shave woke in bleached-white tents scattered along soot-black fields. In the morning the grounds were hard and cold and paled with a light frosting, smoke coiling from their campfires as they brewed coffee. They wrote letters home, to mother, to father, to the girl they believed they would marry: “You cannot imagine,” these boys wrote, “the sound of the sky as it is ripped open by their shells. And the clots of soil as they burst upward. As shells rain in fragments. As legs and horse limbs andâ” as bacon and ham and eggs sizzled in the kitchens of the mansions generals such as your father appropriated, sometimes throwing the owner into the stockades, sometimes smoking the owner's tobacco and drinking his brandy there on the porch while in the fields below the moaning bloody bodies of his troops, those troops who watched their generals and sneered and said, “This war is but a wealthy man's conflict. No man but the saddest and the poorest is trampled for the gain of these fellows.”
And cannonballs burst the soil, “the shells tore our feet apart,” and soldiers staggered along mud roads and fell in the dark, gashed themselves on rocks and cursed aloud, and the curses of blood-smeared recruits echoed, and soldiers fired muskets and rifles and pistols into rock-throwing mobs, and anti-war mobs threw rocks at soldiers on parade, and seemingly everywhere, the dried brown blood of civilians smeared cobbled streets.
And so many boys, now men, wrote home of forced marches to rescue men they never knew from death and to bring men they never knew to death. Forced marches in woolen uniforms, in fogs of mosquitoes, forced marches until they collapsed, dehydrated, forced marches until sunstroke, forced marches in the clay dust kicked up and over the bodies of soldiers fallen dead or dying by heatstroke, forced marches and the speed of these, at a near trot into clouds of dust until their throats became throats of clay while dust from clouds smeared like ash across their faces, forced marches into clouds of dust mixed with sweat and blood until their woolen figures seemed composed of mud.
And boys died with photos of sweethearts or parents or brothers clasped, and men died with photos of wives and children in hand. And thus they were found, stilled of life, impossibly pale, their eyes as if yet gazing unto those they held most beloved in life. Eyes slid shut, letters composed home: “He died gazing upon your expression. He died with you foremost in his heart.”
And although no one in your town would say as much, there were those along the land who well understood that the rebels were winning.
*
“How long will you hide your face from me?”
Back home, your mother hounded the casualty lists, and she hoarded newspapers and pasted the obituaries of all she'd known or claimed she'd known into scrapbooks, the boys dead by “gunshot in right shoulder” and “bayonet to the stomach” or “into the hand of the Lord after some days convalescence,” and now always her brow and fingers smudged and inky, so many men and boys your mother wept over, those who were the brothers of “a fellow who worked in the office for my father” or “a boy, I believe, it must be him, you remember, he stocked shelves at the general store, the gentle lad, it's so sad,” or perhaps the cousin of a man she'd once held affection for, “I suppose you could say Charlie courted me; he held his cousin in such regard, a terrible tragedy, all of this loss, this war, oh this bloody horrid war” and later, how bitterly she wept, “oh, how my heart breaks for Charlie” and the hours thereafter spent scouring newspapers for some remnant of his name, his family.
And your school friends who lost their fathers, their brothers, their cousins, they did not cry or wail the way your mother cried for these men and boys she claimed to have known years before.
And in those days you lived always in the fear that your father's name would follow, and when you expressed yourself thus your mother sneered and snorted and said, “Oh, him? Don't worry about that man. Men like your father never receive so much as a scratch.”
Your mother scuttled along the streets at each new posting of a casualty list, the dead heaped and tossed into shallow graves, graves soon exhumed, and the lists of their names your mother copied from postings, your mother in her beaver-fur hat and beaver-fur coat, her hands red and cracked in the cold, while other women dressed in mourning, or soon to be dressed in mourning, crowded and shoved and shouted to let them nearer, and all the land confused with their tears and wailing and curses. Your mother wept for the boys of the land, and women stopped her on the street to say, “Oh no! Not the general,” and to this your mother chuckled and said, “Him? Ha! Not that man!”
And soon your mother was contented no more by the sound of names and now she attended the funerals of these men she had never known or had scarcely known or claimed she recollected or knew by virtue of their blood associations. And now many mornings your mother pulled on her beaver-fur cap and her beaver-fur coat while you lay feverish, some cold rag sopped upon your brow, and when you moaned for her to stay she said, “You always were a selfish boy”, and when those hours later she returned, pale and bloodshot and slightly ecstatic she recounted the sounds and sights of the funeral, those who attended, how they were attired, the sight of the boy who lay at rest. And the while you lay shivering and numb and vomiting into a spittoon, and when finally she brushed your hair aside, you asked, “Am I going to die?” and she answered, “Of course not! Why would you say such a thing?” and you said, “Because you're cryingâ”