And now your mother soaked her old dresses and hats and petticoats in basement wash basins until they were the hue of soot and remember now how your mother wandered pale and silent, dressed in black and her face masked, the gauze fallen over her expressionâ
And you could not know the figure of your mother weeping alongside the empty caskets of men and boys dead by gunshots and bayonets, of boys and men dead by starvation and frostbite, of men and boys killed by gangrene and food poison, of men and boys dead by bayonets plunged through the chests and the necks; you could not know the figure of your mother in the front rows of churches weeping for the figures of men and boys buried beneath a foot of soil those miles distant. You could not know the figure of your mother mourning-dressed and wandering silent through the parlors of complete strangers, and there the casket and the tintype or the hand-painted portrait of the man or boy your mother had never known, although she said to the mother or to the wife or to the sister who stood silent by the casket, “I knew himâ¦long agoâ¦we wereâ¦I'm so sorry.”
And in those times your father sent your mother many letters. Your father wrote, “The enemy is constant and everywhere,” and “He gazes upon me as I drink my coffee, as I meet with generals in hotels we have seized. We require a million more soldiers to have any hope. Even now, their eyesâAh, my darling, I write this as ever in our private code. I pray you recall how to read a letter composed in lemon juice.”
And your mother claimed your father asked after your height, your weight, your athleticism, your proficiency in the long jump, your school chums, your school marks, your attitude toward the “young ladies.” Remember those letters your father composed from the field, in tents to the bursting clots of dirt, the long-off whistling of shells, the explosions and the men they blew apart, and how your mother claimed he remembered fondly those evenings you and he sat upon the back stoop as he smoked his pipe, and how she claimed he expressed unto you your duties as a man, toward your mother, toward his lawn. How you found these letters beneath your mother's ink pot, her newspapers, the lists of casualties she transcribed and pored over, and how you saw instead very little mention of you in these; rather, how he asked after Walter's slate marker, how he insisted she daily “clean his stone for weeds. Coo unto him when the mood strikes. Light him a candle on dark days. And finally, make certain
the other
doesn't knock the lawnmower against the stone, best you can, for we both know he is apt to make a mess of things.”
And thereafter you dreamed your father vanished beneath the whirling smoke of his enemies.
“Where have you gone? Who looks after you there?”
And under your watch the weeds grew until they obscured Walter's tombstone entirely. And you sneered at this boy, dead in the ground.
“Who sings you to sleep? Who brushes the hair from your brow?”
And when the war was at its lowest, Abraham was visited by the face of the Lord in the night. Remember now this man Abraham, alongside his wife, and how she snored while he lay awake watching the shadows fold and unfold upon the ceiling. Remember how the Lord, great and nameless in all, called to him in the voice of shadows upon the ceiling: “This war of yours,” the Lord spoke, “calls for the blood of a son. Let the red stream flow.” And how sorrowful became this man Abraham, how his every gaze followed the figure of his boy, Willie, this boy he loved more than his very soul, this boy Willie and the war noises he made unto his lead soldiers, and there Abraham stood in his top hat, and there Abraham said unto the boy, “This union shall not perish from the earth.”
Remember this boy on the front page of the papers, his face cocked to the side and his half-smile, his coal black hair, his lace frills and velvet jackets, dead of what they officially called a “bilious fever.” Remember now this boy who raced goats along the capital lawn with his brother. Remember now this boy of your age and height and hair color, dead in the morning. Remember how the official release spoke of his emaciated body wrung dry. Remember this boy who sought to execute his play soldiers until his father pardoned them by official letter. Remember now this boy, dead in his bed-clothes, and how Abraham wept and murmured through the day, “You were too good for this earth, Willie my boy, it is a hard, hard thing to have you die for this cause.”
And how all the world seemed born into wailing and the tolling of church bells and twenty-one gun salutes, how Mary Todd in her black gowns and gauze pressed her nose to the windows overlooking the lawns and the roads, and how she said, “Where are they? Why aren't they here to pay their respects?”
Remember those days were the days of caskets, and now Willie's was but one of these.
Remember how Abraham's figure stooped over Willie's, the slow melt of ice along the floor boards sopping into the Persian rug, Abraham's face buried in his hands, how he attended not to his papers, his war. And how Abraham paced, moaning, before the boy's casket. How he slept before his son, his great figure curled, his legs drawn up and how his white stockings and whiter flesh shown beneath his black trousers, and when he sat awake all your valley knew the sound of his pitched weeping. And in the still midnight how Abraham said unto his wife, “I need a glass of water” and instead journeyed to the body of his son on display and laid kisses upon that once sweet brow, and how he sought to remove the silver dollars from the boy's lids, whispering, “Please, please my boy, oh my boy, my heartâ” Remember how servants found Abraham asleep and draped over Willie's casket, the boy's jacket sodden with Abraham's tears, and Abraham wept for what he called “his guilt,” and so it was said Abraham cleansed and cleansed until the blood dripped from his rubbed-red hands.
And now Abraham and his youngest son Tad curled into bed with each other, and Abraham whispered stories until this tender lad dozed. And Abraham excused himself from cabinet meetings for his weeping, for his dazed expression, his strange wandering mind, and he called out “Quiet down now Willie” or “Play with your carriages elsewhere lad,” and when his sobs were heard by those he trusted most, these said unto each other, “We may need a new president.”
Remember how Abraham twice exhumed Willie, stood by while government workers shoveled free and mounded the soil. How he fell upon the casket raised above the soil. How he fell upon the figure of his boy once the crowbar pried free the lid, the dust and gases of the grave and all others fell to coughing and gagging while Abraham held tight the disassembling body of his son, the body grown to dust, to soil, the body burrowed through and rotten, the body of hair grown long and tangled, the body of fingernails, of gases. This body of the boy he kissed now, this body he wept upon, this body ever of his boy, this body ever of his body.
And it was said Mary Todd would not rise from bed for the death of Willie, and it was said Abraham crouched by her catatonic figure and fed her soup by prying her gray lips open with one hand and sliding the spoon in with his other, and he hummed the tunes he knew she had loved to hear Willie sing “Yankee Doodle” and “the Camptown Ladies” and Abraham said finally, “Mother, you must pull together or you see that white building across the way?” and he gestured to the hospital across the street. “Mother, we will have to send you there. And my heart will be too lonesome to bear.”
Your father sent letters at the time of Willie's death which read, “I know well our Abraham's pain.” And indeed, in years past, your father constructed pyres of dead leaves and branches and stray kindling on the anniversary of Walter's death, and he sat in the weird glow of his blaze while ashes collected in his hair, in his beard. Remember how his eyes gathered the flicker of flames, how his hands wrenched the turf loose into clumps of sod while the black smoke drifted ever about him, and when you asked why he set these fires, he turned to you with his eyes smeared with tears and sweat and soot, and he said unto you, “If I don't, how will my boy ever see?”
He asked your mother to “gaze upon my boy for me please” and he said, “I will light these rebel cities into fires in his honor.”
And your father wrote you a letter in the aftermath of Willie's death which read, in part, “A boy must ever grow to wither and die. We gaze upon the pink of his brow and know well the infirmities of the flesh. Ever we are born into the house of our death. Ever we are heir to the dust. My son, I will do what I must so that this will never happen to you,” except he several times called you “Walter.”
“We must quiet our nightmares now”
And so many sons dead, and buildings burned, and cities cindered. And these fields where bodies lay mounded for the hogs to root. And the blood-stained lockets of lovers clasped in cold hands. Entire towns were diminished. And no longer did anyone care, on either side, to fight any further. Yet the war continuedâ
The war continued and the fur and leather factories were emptied of so many workers, of the sounds and smells and attitudes of those who shoveled heaps of pelts from steamships and wagons, those workers who shot the Flanders Farm mink and marmot and bison with bolt guns, those who slit open the animals and cut free the fur, those who cleaned and softened the fur, those who removed what flesh remained and those who stretched the fur, those who leathered the fur and dyed the fur, those who bleached the fur and cut the fur, those who carried the carcasses and ground the carcasses and gathered the extraneous clumps of meat from the floors for “Flanders Sausage” and “Flanders All-Purpose Canned Feed.”
And there were those who proposed hiring women and the unpaid. Your father disapproved, and your father wrote to your grandmother, who held no sway, and to managers who cared none for your father's opinions, and he said, “The unpaid will not work to our standards,” and he said, “Paying them will be of negative influence. The unpaid must be made to labor and even then only simple tasks for the brutes.”
The war continued and fathers and older brothers and uncles and cousins died. Remember the blonde boy who went missing from class, the boy whose empty desk day after day filled the classroom, the girls theorizing he had died of the pox and others said diphtheria, before finally your teacher said that this boy had lost his father in the war, and when he returned the girls brought him sandwiches wrapped in twine and wax paper, and cookies baked the night before, and they led him behind the schoolhouse and “we just held hands” little Sarah Westerberg in pigtails told her friends loud enough for you and the other boys to hear, this little blonde boy who left the classroom for weeping fits, this little blonde boy who thinned, whose under-eyes blackened, this boy you watched in the midst of girls and pigtails and presents and cooing. This boy you watched with your friends, mumbling, “I wish my father got killed,” and how that night you prayed unto the Lord for forgiveness.
“I cast them out as dirt in the streets”
This war continued and lines of unpaid coiled outside the factories, the apples they peeled with pen knives, their silent watching.
And there were nights you woke believing your town thundered with the boots of soldiers, with the songs of rebels, and you woke in the night thinking they were burning the houses with clumps of flaming grass, and you woke in the light of the moon and believed it the fires of houses and schools and shops, and you dreamed the land became as one under those fires.
This war continued and the rivers became choked and sodden with the corpses of men in gray and blue woolen uniforms, bloated and their skin gone yellow or brown or black, those men shot or gouged miles downriver. Their bodies fished out by unpaid workers recompensed with one hand-me-down trouser for every ten bodies. Or these bodies fished out of the water with bayonet tips by fat bellied militiamen swilling from flasks of whisky. The rotten and pulverized bodies of dead men piled onto docks and skiffs and those in gray burned in pits, the sky choked black with their fumes, the bodies of the men in blue buried in mass graves while “Taps” was played.
And no more the noise of steamships, the chattering of passengers, of natives and trappers and traders long away from what they called the “civilized world,” no more the whistling of steamships, no more the passage of ships mounded with burlap and tarpaulin-covered pelts. This war continued and now rivers alive with the woolen-coated figures of troops, bayonets aloft, the soldiers patrolling, steel eyes penetrating, the cigarette and pipe smoke fumes of soldiers, faces lost in the blue smoke coiling, faces lost as if traversing a fog. These steamships silent and drifting past your town, the gusts of steam, the whistles, the black eyes of soldiers in place of all you had ever known.
And now the gloomy drift of ironsides, their black smog and slow chugging, their names like Alligator and Cairo and Stonewall and the eyes of children shielded from their grim armor, their monstrous works. These machines Abraham insisted they build, and so they did, for in those times no ambition seemed beyond the clutches of man.
“Fear thee not for I am with thee”
The bullets of the enemy spurted up the dust as if from a pelting rain.
And this war continued into the wilderness, that dismal wilderness, into dense thickets and choked undergrowth, into the uncanny light, the strange quiet. And when the brush caught, the bodies alive but unmoving on the floor of the forest burned, their screams lost in the crackling of trees, in the fumes, the hellish light, and their bones ever after, bleached and ashen. The sky trembled with soot, and one camp cried to the other, “You hear that Reb?” and the other cried, “I surely do. I surely do.”
This war continued and men knew now to fear the dust clouded on the horizon, the ominous stream of wagons and glittering gun metal, the white wagon covers against the smote black landscape.
And everywhere the debris of war, massed in unsightly ruins, wheels broken and poles shattered, ammunition and burst shells scattered, and rats crawling within the corpses of horses, and scurrying throughout the remnants of blankets and hogs rooting the rotted harnesses, canteens, bits of leather, and the buildings burnt and crumbled, the trees torn and rent, the ground strewn. And in fields and in forests shallow graves were found dug and opened by wild dogs and foraging soldiers, overgrown with wild flowers and forget-me-nots, and now polished skulls lay along the floors of forests and fields, and leg bones, arm bones, and rib bones, the toes of shoes, and weather-worn uniforms emptied of life, the grinning bony fleshless faces.