Across Five Aprils (6 page)

“Pa and John—they air so sure. I mistrust myself, I mistrust my way of thinkin’ when I see how sure they be. I want to be one with ’em, fer John and me is close and Pa is close to both of us. And yet, I git full of anger when I see how sure they be.”

“Bill, don’t talk about it anymore.” The plea came involuntarily from Jethro’s lips.

Bill nodded then, and reaching down, tucked the quilt about Jethro’s shoulders. “I hadn’t ought to be sayin’ these things to you, young feller. You go to sleep now. We got a stack of work cut out fer us tomorrow. We won’t be talkin’ about these things anymore. Fergit ’em if you kin.”

Work was heavy that fall with two hands short, and there was a heaviness, too, that weighed down upon the spirits of those who worked. Jethro labored for long hours beside Bill, and both of them were grave; but no mention was ever made of the things that had been said on the night of Jethro’s nightmare. And the days followed, one after another, much the same except that each was shorter as autumn grew later.

Autumn was blithely indifferent to the tumult in the land that year. Color was splashed through the woods as if it had been thrown about by some madcap wastrel who spilled out, during the weeks of one brief autumn, beauty enough to last for years. There was yellow gold, burned gold, and gold turning to brown; there were reds blending with browns, greens with grays, and solid browns shining like silk. Jethro stood on the top of Walnut Hill one warm afternoon in October and yearned over the color that was his for the moment and would be gone at the whim of the first windswept rain that came to usher in the bleak days ahead. Oak, maple, and poplar; sumac, wild-grape, and dogwood—they all smiled at him that afternoon, and they said, “What war, little boy, what war?”

He loved Walnut Hill in spite of the sadness of the place since Mary died. There had been no sadness for Jethro when only the little boys were there; these three had been imaginary playmates for him when he was younger. He had talked with them, acquainted them with family gossip, instructed them occasionally when it had seemed timely and proper for him to do so.

Once Matthew Creighton, standing concealed among the trees, had heard Jethro explaining a new slingshot to someone very real to him.

“Bill made this fer me,” he was saying that day. “You ‘member Bill, don’t you? Of course you do. He’s a pretty good ol’ Bill—better’n Tom or Eb. John, he’s good, but he’s got a young’un of his own, and he likes him best. Well, you want to try this slingshot once, little Nate? Sure you kin—I’ll help you. Now you two other boys mind yore manners jest a minute, you’ll have yore turn....”

Matt had watched Jethro’s whereabouts more closely after that, and the boy realized that for some reason his father did not approve of his going up to play on Walnut Hill. After Mary was there, he stayed away through his own choice. He knew that Mary was dead, and it made a great deal of difference.

On that afternoon in the autumn of’61, he made one of his rare visits to the hill, drawn to it by the beauty of the surrounding woods and perhaps by the somber mood of the times. He no longer talked to the children though; a phase of innocence had passed, which would never be recaptured.

At the foot of the hill, Crooked Creek flowed on its noisy way across the farm, spanned at a point where it was widest by a wooden bridge that had swayed threateningly for as long as Jethro could remember, but had never quite given in to total collapse. Across the creek the brown fields stretched, bounded by staggering lines of gray rail-fences. The crossed timbers supporting the rails had the look of bayonets when they were silhouetted against a twilight sky.

A line of wild geese flew southward far overhead, and Jethro stood motionless as he watched them disappear from sight. So engrossed he was with the flight of the geese that he did not hear Bill’s footsteps until his brother was quite near. He caught his breath at sight of Bill’s face, which was swollen and beginning to grow discolored from a deep cut and many bruises.

“What’s hurt you, Bill?” he asked, his voice barely audible, for he was pretty sure he knew.

“We had a fight, Jeth, about an hour ago. We fit like two madmen, I guess.”

“You and John?”

Bill’s sigh was almost a moan. “Yes, me and John. Me and my brother John.”

Jethro could not answer. He stared at the cut above Bill’s right eye, from which blood still trickled down his cheek. Somewhere, far off in another field, a man shouted to his horses, and the shout died away in a cry that ran frightened over the brown water of the creek and into the darkening woods.

He had heard cries often that autumn, all through the countryside. They came at night, wakened him, and then lapsed into silence, leaving him in fear and perplexity. Sounds once familiar were no longer as they had seemed in other days—his father calling cattle in from the pasture, the sheep dog’s bark coming through the fog, the distant creak of the pulley as Ellen drew water for her chickens—all these once familiar sounds had taken on overtones of wailing, and he seemed to hear an echo of that wailing now. He shivered and looked away from his brother’s face.

Bill sat down on the ground beside him. “Did ever Ma tell you, Jeth, about when John and me was little and was goin’ to school fer the first time? At night I’d git a book and I’d say to Pa, ‘What air that word, Pa?’ and when he would tell me, I’d turn to John, jest a scant year older, and I’d say, ‘Did Pa call it right, Johnny?’ Ma and Pa used to laugh at that, but they was pleased to talk about it. They was always set up at John and me bein’ so close.”

“I know it.” Jethro’s words came from a tight throat. “What made you fight, Bill?”

“Hard feelin’s that have been buildin’ up fer weeks, hard feelin’s that fin‘ly come out in hard words.” He held his hand across his eyes for a minute and then spoke quickly. “I’m leavin’, Jeth; it ain’t that I want to, but it’s that I must. The day is comin’ when I’ve got to fight, and I won’t fight fer arrogance and big money aginst the southern farmer. I won’t do it. You tell Pa that. Tell him too, that I’m takin’ my brown mare—she’s mine, and I hev the right. Still, it will leave him short, so you tell him that I’m leavin’ money I made at the sawmill and at corn shuckin’; it’s inside the cover of his Bible. You tell him to take it and buy another horse.”

Jethro was crying unashamedly in the face of his grief. “Don’t go, Bill. Don’t do it,” he begged.

“Jeth ...”

“I don’t want you to go, Bill. I don’t think I kin stand it.”

“Listen to me, Jeth; you’re gittin to be a sizable boy. There’s goin’ to be a lot of things in the years ahead that you’ll have to stand. There’ll be things that tear you apart, but you’ll have to stand ‘em. You can’t count on cryin’ to make ’em right.”

The colors were beginning to fade on Walnut Hill. A light wind bent the dried grass and weeds. Jethro felt choked with grief, but he drew a sleeve across his eyes and tried to look at his brother without further weeping.

“Where will you go, Bill?”

“To Kaintuck. I’ll go to Wilse’s place first. From there—I don’t know.”

“Will you fight fer the Rebs?”

Bill hesitated a few seconds. “I’ve studied this thing, Jeth, and I’ve hurt over it. My heart ain’t in this war; I’ve told you that. And while I say that the right ain’t all on the side of the North, I know jest as well that it ain’t all on the side of the South either. But if I hev to fight, I reckon it will be fer the South.”

Jethro nodded. There were things you had to endure. After a while he asked, “Air you goin’ tonight, Bill?”

“Right away. I’ve had things packed in that holler tree fer a couple days. I’ve knowed that this was comin’ on, but I couldn’t make myself leave. Now I’m goin’. The little mare is saddled and tied down at the molasses press. I’ll go as fur as Newton tonight; in the morning I’ll take out early.”

He got to his feet. “There’s lots of things I want to say, but I reckon I best not talk.” Without looking at Jethro he laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Git all the larnin’ you kin—and take keer of yoreself, Jeth,” he said and turned abruptly away.

“Take keer of yoreself, Bill,” Jethro called after him.

Across the prairies, through the woods, over the brown water of the creek, there was a sound of crying. Jethro ran to a tree and hid his face. He had heard his mother say that if you watch a loved one as he leaves you for a long journey, it’s like as not to be the last look at him that you’ll ever have.

Twice
during the month of February in 1862 the bells rang in every city and town throughout the North, and the name Ulysses S. Grant first became familiar to Jethro.

The first real victory for the North had come with the fall of Fort Henry down in Tennessee, just a few miles south of the Kentucky line.

“God bless Grant,” people shouted over and over in a rising chant the day Jethro went to Newton with his father after the news of Fort Henry. Guns were fired, and people hugged one another in the streets. Here was something to make them proud, something to give them hope after the despairing stories of Bull Run and Ball’s Bluff and Wilson’s Creek.

Two weeks later came the news that Fort Donelson had also fallen to General Grant. Then people really went wild with joy.

“God bless old U. S. Grant,” they shrieked. “Bless old Unconditional Surrender Grant.” They laughed and cried, and nearly everybody thought that the war would be over in a matter of weeks.

“What do you think, Pa?” Jenny asked eagerly a few days later, as she put down the paper she had been reading aloud to the family. “Do you think it’s about over?”

Matt’s face was grim. “With the Army of the Potomac doin’ nothin’?” he asked. “Maybe my wits ain’t good; maybe I ain’t got the sense to grasp what it is they’re doin’, but I can’t see the end in sight. That general the papers had us believe was so fine—brilliant, they called him—what does he plan? What’s the matter with him?”

“General McClellan has had typhoid fever, Pa. You know how weak that left Shad. We mustn’t judge him too harsh.”

Matt nodded. “Maybe I misjudge the man, Jenny. God knows I hope that one of these days you kin say that yore pa was wrong about General McClellan.”

He reached for the week-old paper and read again the letter that was the great tonic and stimulant of the day:

Matt read on farther down the page. “It says here that this General Buckner and Grant was comrades at West Point,” he remarked, without lifting his eyes from the paper.

“Yes,” Jethro heard his mother say softly to herself, “and my Bill and John was even closer than that—”

They were worried about Tom and Eb. It was likely that the two boys were with Grant’s army; the fighting, especially at Donelson, had been bitter. Some of the details of the battle neither Matt nor Jenny had read aloud to Ellen.

Finally one day Ed Turner brought them a letter from Tom. Ed looked pinched with cold after his long drive, but he wouldn’t stop for coffee.

“A fam’ly needs to be alone when one of these letters comes,” he said in answer to Ellen’s invitation. “I’d be pleased if you’d let me know what the boy has to say—later on when Matt has the time to drop over.”

Jenny had gone with her father to see about some stock, and Jethro was alone in the cabin with his mother. When Ed Turner was gone, she handed the letter to Jethro.

“My hands is shakin’, Son,” she said. They were, indeed, but both she and the boy knew that the real reason she was forced to hand the letter over was the fact that she could not read.

The envelope was crumpled and stained, the letter written in pencil in a round, childish hand. It was probably among the first three or four letters that young Tom had ever written.

Jethro noticed that his mother’s face was strangely twisted when he looked up from the letter; there was a look about her as if sorrow had been frozen in her face, a look he had not seen there before—not even on the day when he had come home from Walnut Hill to tell her that Bill had left. She stared at Jethro for a time without saying a word; then she got up and went into the pantry, closing the door behind her.