Andersonville (101 page)

Lucy peeked with him at the window. I make no doubt, Poppy, that we have our dear Harry to thank. Remember his ministration to the girl? . . . She hurried out on the gallery.

Miss Lucy, crowed Mag, we done heard about your going to get married! We do thank you, and the surgeon too, count of you all done so much for poor little Laurel. We hain’t got much to offer, but I made a wreath: wedding wreath, kind of. Twould be good for Christmas greens as well. . . . You Zoral! Let go that now!

She snatched up a wreath which the boy had been plucking at. It was quite handsomely made, of dark holly with pine cones attached; the cones were tied with fragments of old ribbons.

And Coral—he went and shot you a coon. They’re right good roasted now. Zoral, you yield up that coon, baby boy—tain’t your’n, belongs to Miss Lucy! Zoral screamed and struck when she took the dead raccoon from him.

You’re much too kind and, oh so thoughtful, Lucy cried. I just naturally love roast coon! And such a pretty wreath! I declare, we’ve had no time to think of Christmas greens. . . . Ira came to make sure that Coral could negotiate the steps on his crutches. The three were escorted inside to become a portion of the Dearly Beloved Assembled.

 LIV 

T
he first memory which Meriwether Kinsman held was of a crooning. The song was played by a bird which adhered to topmost twigs of a vase-shaped elm which grew against a corner of the Kinsman cottage. The cottage was small, old, white-painted. The elm had grown large during years since the house was built, and swelling of its gray seamed trunk actually had pushed the cottage askew. Lichens were thick upon shingles and on the north side of the elm’s trunk—it was hard to tell where trunk left off and shingles began. In this tree, almost a part of the house, the brownish-gray bird gave its fluting. A bird not only gray . . . tints of peach and blue . . . this was a mourning-dove which sang, although Meriwether Kinsman did not know its name, would not know it for years. The bird made promise of peace and strength intermingled; it blew upon an instrument, a wet wooden instrument. The boy was very young at the time, indeed it was his first memory. He was in bed, a ragged colored comforter over him. He remembered . . . he had been playing with the squares of material in the old crazy quilt. He bent and folded the cover in small hands, trying to match red with red, lilac with lilac. Then warbling came from on high.

What is it? he thought. Oh, what is it?

He was in his trundle bed, the quilt had been cut down to size. He rolled over the low edge of bed and ran to the open window, he pushed his tufted yellow head out of the open window, and looked up . . . space between the leaves, Merry could see all the way to the elm’s top because one branch had been broken in a recent storm. There lived the bird in earliest morning serenity against light sky. There it fifed its rich low tone. So it was his first memory. So Merry Kinsman would go fifing into Eternity.

His mother was a widow, a bakeress, proud of telling how she was forty-two years old when her son Meriwether was born; she had not expected that she would ever have a child. Merry’s father died when the boy was a baby, died because he was drunk and caught his clothing ablaze in the middle of the night when he sought to prepare an oven fire. Promptly Mrs. Kinsman took over the full task of baking in which she had merely assisted before. The child’s next memories were of yeast and flour and dough—always dough—and great heat. And awareness also that in summer the Kinsmans had more money than in winter, because many wives of the village refused to bake themselves along with their bread; although they preferred to make their own bread in cooler weather.

Merry went to school only until he was eleven. Then Mr. Adams, the miller at the edge of town, refused to let Mrs. Kinsman have any more meal or flour until her debt was paid, and Merry went to help at the mill. . . . There were sacks of grain stored in an upper story of the mill, and the sour-faced Mr. Adams instructed Merry to fetch the grain down to a lower floor, to pile sacks near the hopper. After dragging down only one of the lubberly sacks, and falling on the stairs and nearly breaking his back, the boy began to speculate upon some other method. The water gate was closed, the mill was not turning, Mr. Adams had gone to vote. Merry rigged a competent trough out of smooth-sawn planks and extended this trough on a slope from the upper story to the lower. He arranged an open sack at the bottom end, and began pouring grain into the trough above. By this means the entire burden was conveyed soon to its proper destination. Merry ran down to cord up each bag again when it was filled. Miller Adams returned at the moment the child was tightening the last sack in triumph. He did not praise Merry for his ingenuity. He said that the boy had demonstrated how lazy he was, and Mr. Adams would tolerate no lazybones about the place. He slapped Merry, to make him remember; then ordered him to drag all the sacks up the stair to their original position, and bring them down again, as he had been told to do in the first place. He said that this was a lesson which Meriwether Kinsman would not forget. It was in fact a good lesson: it taught Merry to avoid fiends in human form, such as Mr. Adams, whenever he could.

Mr. Adams was a part of America . . . Merry preferred to forget that portion of America. He thought that America should be constituted of men and objects deserving of veneration. Some children worshipped guns which hung in their homes, and guns were a good thing, they were part of the Nation, a sustaining part; but Merry had something which he adored more. Toby Rambler bragged about his father’s rifle with its tawny maple stock, and stars and crescents of brass; and in Micah Jones’s house there was a Queen’s-arm above the fireplace. But neither these boys nor others owned a fife, and Merry Kinsman had a fife. It had belonged to Aaron Briggs, his mother’s father.

He found the fife several years before—he was seven at the time, he was hunting peppermints. His mother had bought him peppermints as a Christmas treat. They were delectable wafers, odd as to shape, but bearing the same pink beauty and same pink taste. She said that Merry must not eat them all at once, he must save some for a rainy day. Well, a January thaw had set in, and this was a rainy day, with dark water drilling steadily into big pocked drifts around the cottage. Mrs. Kinsman was busy over pies, and no one restrained Merry as he explored for mints. Several high shelves hung on brackets in a corner of the parlor, and Merry had observed that often things were put up there to be kept out of his reach. He labored to put a smaller chair upon a larger chair, and then a hassock atop this structure. By such means he could clamber aloft, his seven-year-old eyes and fingers might proceed with their examining. He did not find the mints but he found something else. It was a stained tube of pale brown wood with a peculiarly-shaped hole cut near one end, and six smaller holes piercing the tube farther down. Rims of metal were inlaid at either end of the thing. It was a fascinating object, he did not know what it could be. It seemed that one might play upon it . . . he tried to blow in the end but no sound issued.

Merry teetered on his crazy structure for too long. The hassock began to slide. Merry came down abruptly, chairs and all, in noise and pain. He howled, but the strange implement was unhurt in his hand. His mother rushed to see that he was not killed, then she gave him a spanking. Often she spanked him when still she had flour on her big angular hands; often his breeches were white on the seat, a fresh spanking would dust flour into the air like smoke. Merry roared until punishment was concluded, then forgot it promptly in wonder of the thing he had found.

Ma, what is this?

Tis Pa’s fife.

What’s a fife?

It makes music. My Pa—your Grandpa—played that when he was fighting gainst the British.

I want to play music on it, Ma.

Well, I don’t know how. But you can play
with
the fife, if you mind and keep it careful.

She did indicate the one hole which should be blown upon, but Merry could not sound a note. He had a strange sensation that some utter beauty, some almost religious joy was being withheld from him. Was there no one in the neighborhood, or perhaps in all of Pennsylvania or in America or in the World—no one to show him how? It seemed that there was no one.

The next summer an event of patriotic interest was celebrated in a grove beside the Susquehanna. (Ah, he loved the sound of the river’s name, he loved all those names: Wyalusing, Towanda, Mehoopany, Meshoppen. Lovely places, he had heard of them, their Indian sound sent a prickle through his being, they had the accent of America; so did Tunkhannock and Wyoming and Minooka. He thought of feathers and paint, and moccasins made from deer’s hide; he thought of birch bark, arrows whistling, a gobbling yell going up. He thought of Grandma Rummer’s house on the edge of the village across from the mill. It was the oldest house in town: there were logs under modern siding, and the original door still hung upon its great hand-forged hinges, a door low and narrow—tall men had to stoop—but thick, strengthened with iron. There was a deep triangular gash driven into this thick wood, and children were fond of gathering on the step and poking their fingers into the cut. Everyone knew the story. Indians had come speeding along that road, long ago . . . just before dawn, it was said, of an autumn day. A tall Indian with a hideous face dashed up the path to the Rummer house and tried to push open the door. When the door would not budge he yelled, he struck with his hatchet. Here was the mark to prove it. Did the Indian run away, did someone shoot him as he threatened on the doorstep? No one knew, least of all Grandma Rummer. She was deaf, aging. . . . Oh, yes, children, she’d say, in answer to questions. Twas in Grandpa’s time, but he’s long dead. Twas when he was young. That’s just where that red Indian hit with his tomahawk. And then the townsfolk banded together and drove the villains off, and I’ve heard tell some was killed on both sides. . . . This was something to think about, in autumn, in mornings when mists of night still made their curving pattern above the shining Susquehanna. Oh, there were other towns of which men spoke: a place called Blackwalnut, a place called Sugar Run; there were Luther’s Mills and Eagle’s Mere and Greene’s Landing. They were not Indian names; but somehow they sounded like Indians, like America.)

His mother might not attend the patriotic celebration; but she said that Merry could go along with the Rambler family, and she provided him with crullers and pies. Merry might trade with other children, and thus come in for his share of chicken and salad and cold spiced beef. His mother gave him a half-dime. He could buy lemonade if it were being sold.

He rioted round the grove with other boys. Life was not a pic-nic for Meriwether Kinsman; indeed he had seen little of pic-nics, so he enjoyed this one utterly. . . . A cannon which some young men had dragged there . . . when it went off, it sounded like the hills along the Susquehanna falling apart. With throbbing ears and starting eyes Merry Kinsman peered through smoke to see whether indeed the hills were blown apart.

But greater delectation lay ahead, it came marching. Distantly above squall and chatter in the grove sounded a high-pitched round-throated wailing. This wailing was sustained by a grumble: old voices of the past talking together in slamming monotone, talking of wars, talking of something native and peculiar to the landscape on which people stood and stared. A rude platform had been erected to hold speakers and other dignitaries; but the program was not yet commenced, and Merry Kinsman and a troop of other boys trampled on yellow planks, cutting capers. He was on the platform when he heard the distant piping and spasm of drums which came along. Then he was in air, floating through air as he leaped from the platform, floating through space as he ran toward the cart path which wound from the main road into this oak and chestnut wood. A homely procession appeared. People said, My, just look at the old soldiers! There were seven of the old soldiers, marching with a few younger men in blue uniforms. The old soldiers were not in uniform, although Uncle Dan Ellis was among them, and he wore a strange-shaped cap which Merry had never seen him wear in his butcher’s shop. Judge Ephraim Knowles was one of the old soldiers; truly he was not so old: there was not a glint of gray in his hair, his luxuriant brown beard bristled with challenge. Seven of the old soldiers walking together . . . they had fought the British, their noses had sniffed powder smoke. Uncle Dan Ellis was glad to show any child the place where a portion of his ear had been shot away, and where an old blue-silver streak raked behind his ear, where thin graying hair would not grow.

More wonderful than their presence, more wonderful than their momentary exultation and enduring fame, was the music coming along with them. A tall man with cottony white hair—a stranger—sustained in his hands a fife very much like the one which Merry had found upon that high shelf at home. It spoke with the crying of hawks, high wild lift of an eagle’s shriek. There were two small drums muttering in accompaniment, one larger drum booming at intervals in uninterrupted cannonade; but Merry had eyes and ears only for the fife, for the fierce-eyed man who played it. The tune was ragged, savage. The old man played it over and over, and Merry Kinsman ran before him, looking up and back. He trotted backward most of the time. Once he fell, in a muddy place where the cart path turned; he got up, trotted on, keeping pace ahead of the martial music. The tune began with a slow and ponderous threat in lower registers. You thought of horses, war horses, parading off somewhere, going in cumbrous decision to engage in a battle. The great decisive powerful horses wore trappings of leather and brass; dragoons bestrode them. Solid shot flew but they kept coming. Above the storm, hawks and eagles began to soar. They were over the trees, far over powder smoke, they carried glinting banners in their beaks. They said, Here we are: ferocious, untrammeled . . . the Conestoga wagons rumble in roads beneath . . . muskets are being charged and fired, bayonets find the blood of invaders. But here we are, high and fluting! We have power not possessed by more orchestral flutes, we carry a shot-riddled flag held in many beaks. Our tanned wings are wheeling . . . we are America, embattled America. High, proud, far and high!