Raintree County (88 page)

—Let me see, Shawnessy, the General said, I don't seem to remember your war record. You
were
in the big fight, weren't you?

—Yes.

The General brandished a drumstick and bit bigly into the bulge of it. His teeth, still strong and white, cut cleanly to the bone.

—Goddammit, the General said, those were the days. The Nation had some guts then. I've never been as happy since. What fights were you in, Shawnessy?

—I fought in your corps, General.

—The hell you did! the General said.

His teeth crushed the big end of the legbone for the marrow.

—Say, then, you'll enjoy reading this book. The whole history of our corps is in it. Everything. Shucks, Shawnessy, don't you long sometimes for the old Army life? I tell you, this generation lacks sand. Hell, if they had another war now, we wouldn't have enough Army to defend Raintree County. Say what you will, goddammit, those were good days.

Mr. Shawnessy looked up and down the table. The fifty veterans were talking soldier talk, reviewing battles, marches, incidents of camp life, reciting names of dead comrades. The words and emotions of 1865 were a little tattered and faded like the blue uniforms that covered the aging bodies of 1892. He was reminded of the collection of Civil War books he had bought at secondhand a few years before, of the sonorous titles, the pomp of language, the repetition of
once memorable names and phrases, but all on yellowing pages in gilt bindings.

Mr. Shawnessy looked at the General's manuscript lying on the table. These words too would find their way into thousands of American homes and go sifting down from generation to generation, on yellowing pages, until they dropped at last into the deepest vaults of the biggest libraries and at the bottom of the pile in a back room of the secondhand bookshop. Like a hundred million other words written about the Great War, they were not great words. Yet they were steeped in the sadness of the greatest of all wars; they were the costumed, pompous words in which the War had become an epic in the Republic's memory. Intuitively, Raintree County's soldier-general, a man of practical energy and profane tongue, had put on the mantle of the grand style. He did it as well as a thousand others who had written books about the Civil War.

Mr. Shawnessy ran his eyes over the first page:

OFF TO THE WARS
(Epic Fragment from
Fighting for Freedom
)

. . . Who can forget the simple pageantry of the enlistment ceremony and the strong pride that animated the patriot's breast as he swore the oath to preserve and defend his country's honor! Who will forget his last day of civilian life, his leavetaking for the wars! Perhaps his final memory of the old life was a mother's face at parting, wet with tears, perhaps the memory of a girl who promised forever to be true, perhaps the strong hand of a comrade in his own, the pat on the shoulder, the wordless wish that he might return soon and safe from battle. But whatever the manner of his going, go he must and go he did, for . . .

—Goddammit, Garwood, the General was saying to the Senator on his far side, we're countin' on you to put some guts into that next pension bill.

—Jesus, Jake, we already let more blood from the taxpayer with those pension bills than the Army gave on the altar of Freedom. However, you can assure all my old comrades-at-arms that I won't let 'em down. Do you think the Army is solidly behind Harrison?

—No one can deliver the G.A.R. vote, Senator, but the boys were pleased by the last pension act.

—The General's still fighting a good war, the Perfessor whispered to Mr. Shawnessy. I suppose in time of war, the Republic needs these muscular bastards, but they're an expensive luxury in peacetime, with campaign medals on their tits and pension bills in their mitts. Every cowardly finagler who managed to get his name on the rolls can live forever on a fat pension—and his widow and his orphans. The heroes of the Republic! And half of 'em never got any closer to the front than the cathouses of Louisville. It hurts when you think that boys like you fought, bled, and squittered from Chattanooga to the Sea, and now you get less than some guy who did his combat duty in a brothel and earned a lifelong disability pension for a case of the clap.

—Well, it was all part of the War, Mr. Shawnessy said. The Republic is generous. After all, the War was more than a big fight. It scarred us all, one way or another.

—By the way, just how much combat did Garwood see?

—He was a Copperhead till after the Election in '64. Then with the issue of the struggle no longer in doubt, he bared his breast to the sleet of battle—five hundred miles behind the lines. He whipped up a volunteer regiment and sneaked out with a colonelcy—and a conspicuous absence from all major engagements.

—Shawnessy, the General said, turning around for a moment, have you been in Indianapolis lately?

—No, sir.

—I've clean lost track of the Monument there. How far along is it, anyway?

—A year ago, the State Legislature appropriated another hundred thousand dollars, and I guess that heaved the shaft a little higher.

—I hardly been back since the dedication ceremonies, the General said.

—What monument is this? the Perfessor said.

—The Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in the middle of Indianapolis, the General said. The only memorial in the world erected to the private soldier.

—I had a humble part in getting it started, the Senator said.

—How high is it? the Perfessor said.

—It'll be over two hundred and eighty feet, the General said, counting the puss on top. Greatest monument in the world.

—They'll have to hurry it up, the Perfessor said, or the generation that sees it completed won't remember what it's for. In this country, we're always about fifty years behind in our monuments. Just a plain shaft, or ornamental?

—Ornamental as hell, the General said. You've seen the plans, haven't you, Shawnessy? As I remember it, they'll have a Peace Group on one side with a great big gal about a hundred sizes bigger than real in the middle holding up a flag. A lot of symbolic figures will be grouped around her—a farmer, a blacksmith, a veteran, and a dinge at her feet holding up a busted chain. Another woman is floating through the background shaking a wreath and an olive branch, and the sun is rising way in the back. On the other side is the War Group. I helped plan that one myself. In the middle is a female with a torch in her hand, and all around her are men dying, shooting, dead, a guy on a horse behind with sabre raised, guns, a broken drum, horses' heads, and a woman flying in the background with a flag and a mittful of arrows. Say, just one of the soldiers in that group is as high as this schoolhouse. We tried to crowd every typical figure of the War into that tableau and damn near succeeded.

—How about a private squittering and a Chattanooga whore? the Perfessor asked mildly.

The General's chest swelled and from his throat burst a series of spaced hahs.

—After all, he said, this is for beauty and the ages. The main entrances at the base are guarded by four heroic-size figures representing the various branches of the armed forces. Then out from the main groups are a couple smaller groups. One is a soldier boy just leaving the homefolks. Paw is sitting on the plow and holding out his hand to the boy, and Maw has her arms on the boy's shoulders, his gun is laying on the ground, and he's just about to give 'er the farewell kiss. Very spirited group.

—I thought that was to be a soldier coming home, the Senator said.

—Tell you the truth, I forget which it is, the General said. You can take it either way. On the other side are three of the boys sitting in the middle of a battlefield, one of 'em wounded. There'll be fountains and cascades and wide stairs leading to the base and a stairway inside that brings you to the balcony at the top.

—You mentioned a lady on the summit, the Perfessor said. Who is that?

—Victory! the General said, shaking his white locks and digging himself a gob of mashed potatoes. Thirty-eight feet tall, but up that high, they tell me she'll look like a kid's doll.

—It makes you proud of the State, Senator Jones said, pulling out all the lower stops in his great organ voice, to think it will have the most impressive shaft ever erected by mankind.

Mr. Shawnessy was thinking of mounds beside the river, forgotten battlegrounds, and cities piled on cities. He was thinking of a great war long ago, the young men who fought it, its causes and consequences, the dwindling memory of it in tattered books and broken stones.

Forgotten. Forever lost—memories of a war on the land in ancient days. Forgotten—faces of bearded boys, hellraisers, hard marchers, the anonymous architects of History. Forever lost.

But I will build a monument to the private soldier greater and more costly than any ever builded by mankind. I will build a private monument out of memories of comrades.

O, stony and stately magnitudes! Immense fragments of myths, simple and strange with the attitudes of an old war. From these, the ten thousand gilded books in which the Republic remembers that it is One Nation Indivisible with Freedom and Justice for All.

Then did you fight in that Great War for the Preservation of the Union and the Emancipation of a Race? Were you South in that long marching? Did you fight in those battles? Were you a soldier and brave?

Now I will go to a place where the roads of the Nation converge like spokes to the hub of a wheel and walk around and around the vast memorial and find the forgotten faces.

They shall be stone! They shall be a hundred times natural size!

And I shall find the face of one who departed from Raintree County in his twenty-fourth year. I shall see the colossal tears of stone on the colossal stone face.

Did he not fight and die in that old war to preserve the Union and free a Race? Did he ever come back again? And who in a thousand days of the years will remember

LOCAL BOY OFF TO THE WARS
(Epic Fragment from the
Free Enquirer
)

A large company of friends and well-wishers was yesterday assembled at the railway station to see one of our most promising local boys off to the wars. Young John Wickliff Shawnessy, whose life was recently saddened by a bereavement that has touched the whole community, has decided to rally to the grand old flag and do his part in quelling the hideous hydra of rebellion. Mr. Shawnessy, whose amusing and informative compositions have frequently titillated the readers of these pages, repaired to the railway station at nine o'clock. Most affecting were the farewells exchanged upon this occasion, so that hardly an eye refused the tribute of a tear. The most indurate bosom could not repress a sigh at this scene so oft repeated in these melancholy days, and never was the pathos of parting more poignantly expressed than in the words of Mrs. Shawnessy, the boy's mother, who remarked that a better boy never lived and that this was the fourth son whom she has seen consecrated to the sacred task of preserving the Union. As for us, pained as we are by the sorrow of departure, we can better spare this young Cincinnatus than can the Republic for whose existence, never more gravely imperiled than now, he is girding himself to fight. And we say to him, ‘Farewell and hail, brave young heart. Would we could join you in the contest! Raintree County loses for a time a shining citizen. The Republic gains a gallant warrior. Go, and God bless you. Hail and fare . . .'

—Well, well, well! Cash Carney said, coming into the station. So you're going to get into the fuss after all, John! What time does the train come in?

—Any time now, T. D. said.

Johnny was sitting beside Ellen on a bench in the station. The great thing was to cut clean and not to cry. He would simply not think of anything.

—John, you'll have to send us some articles from the front, Niles
Foster said. How does it feel, Mrs. Shawnessy, to have your last son go to the War?

—If they need him, I suppose it must be, Ellen said. Johnny wanted to go.

Johnny didn't look at her.

—I think I hear the train, Cash said.

Johnny stood up and fumbled at his suitcase, but Niles Foster already had it. Everyone stood up around him as if to shield him from something.

—Yes, it's the train, T. D. said, looking nervously through the station window. Well——

Johnny looked at his father's face. The mild blue eyes blinked at him. T. D. rocked back on his heels and attempted a smile.

—John, he said, his voice quavering, here's something to help you out a bit.

It was a twenty dollar gold piece. Johnny wondered how in the world his father had managed to get so much money all in one piece. T. D. blinked harder.

—Now take care of your health, John. Be sure to let them know about your medical experience with me. After this big victory at Gettysburg, I don't think the War can last much longer, and I expect you'll be back to us any time. I take a hopeful——

T. D.'s voice was drowned in clanging. The black body of the train slid past the window and stopped.

T. D. looked around, confused. He held up his hand.

—Let us pray, he said.

Niles and Cash removed their hats. Johnny put his head down, swallowing hard.

—Dear Lord, T. D. said.

He stopped. People were pushing through the door, talking loudly.

—Please bring this boy back safe. Amen.

It was the shortest prayer T. D. had ever given.

Johnny shook T. D.'s hand and, turning, looked at his mother for the first time since they had come to the station.

—All aboard, came the voice of the trainman calling. All aboard for Beardstown, Indianapolis, and parts West. All aboard, all aboard.

With a movement quick like a bird, Ellen Shawnessy pressed her small grieving face against Johnny's and hugged him fiercely. Briefly he had seen her eyes sightless with tears. He held her small body, felt it shaking. He kissed her, getting his cheek wet.