Authors: MacKinlay Kantor
On the afternoon of February fourteenth the eight surviving members of the Moon Hotel mess were counted out of Belle Isle with exactly five hundred and ninety-two other prisoners. Wishful gossip in camp suggested that they were about to be exchanged, perhaps aboard a warship at some coastal port, but most of the wiser guessed the truth. They would be sent South, possibly to Savannah or Charleston. They hoped to go South because there they would find sunlight and maybe oranges and flowers; rivers would not be nearly frozen over as the James had been. The Moon Hotel mess had no business being numbered in this first contingent. Not a man of them was in the designated Hundreds. They flanked out, adroitly as imaginative and resourceful young men might do. Others—incompetents—sought to accompany them and were hustled and dragged away. You had to be sly about a thing like that. The foppish discipline of the Moon Hotel mess, once derided by people in adjacent tents, was showing its profit.
In this railroad train now, according to testimony of more talkative guards, they were being shipped to a prison called Camp Sumter. Yep, that’s at Charleston, said some, recalling the first month of the Rebellion. Hope we get some decent shelter from rain. Hope the Rebs didn’t blow down all them walls when they first fired on the Nationals there. Wiser folks knew that Camp Sumter and Fort Sumter must be two entirely different places. One night, while encamped beside the track, Dolliver and his friend Kirke had some conversation with a genial Rebel officer in command of the guards. This captain wore his left sleeve folded and pinned at the forearm; he said that he had encountered a chunk of red-hot shot at Sharpsburg. He said that he needed buttons for a new jacket which his wife was remodeling from the uniform of a friend who’d died. Dolliver traded four gilt metal buttons for four whittled from bone, which the Rebel was then wearing; he thought that he could get the bone ones sewn on sooner or later. In appreciation the Confederate disappeared for the better part of an hour and then came back and whispered, Sonny, here’s some rations for you. He offered a little wooden pail containing thick stew—one of the most delicious substances Dolliver and Kirke had ever tasted in this life. It included potatoes, sweet potatoes, onions and a delicate meat which they thought might be squirrel or possum—it had a gamey flavor. Loyally they awakened the other six, and they ate the stew, turn and turn about, a spoonful at a time, until there wasn’t a drop of grease left in the bucket. The captain had given them information also: he said that the Camp Sumter for which they were bound was in Georgia, not South Carolina, and was brand new—no prisoners had ever been kept there before. This was wonderful, for there would be no lice. Georgia in February would be Heaven compared to Virginia. The officer never came back for his bucket, so they took it along with them.
...Eben Dolliver’s head ached where the gun butt had jabbed it. The skin of his scalp was broken, a trickle of blood stiffened his hair. Wonder the blow didn’t crack his dome wide open! Throb or no throb, he made light of his injury: that was the manner of the Moon Hotel mess—to make light of unpleasant things, after a primary howl of distress. Also it was the manner of the Dolliver family, a jovial set of millers (for five generations). Certain distant cousins were lawyers and politicians, prominent in the new State of Iowa from its inception. Eben’s branch of the family was comparatively humble, but open-handed and proud. His father had been responsible for organizing the first Campbellite church in the county when Eben was a little shaver. Jotham Dolliver was a long-armed long-legged man with a red beard which turned silver when he was still in his forties. His booming untrained voice lifted continually above the mill’s whine . . . Joth Dolliver loved to chant of celestial hurricanes, far golden rivers, forested shores, mansions in the sky . . . his joy was in the rich illusion of Paradise as pictured by David and the Prophets, dripping with flame and jasper in The Book of the Revelation, solidified in song by Isaac Watts and later poets. He practiced his benevolent preachments through every waking moment, and communed pleasantly with his Creator when asleep. Never shrewd or tight-fisted in the grasping fashion ascribed to millers, Joth kept his numerous family on short commons because of his native improvidence, his native generosity. When a poor man came to mill, Joth was willing to grind his grain for nothing. The family loved him as they would have loved a prankish elder brother or a rollicking sheep dog, instead of as a father. In straitened wartime hours when Eben Dolliver thought tearfully of Home and its beauties, he recalled how his father towered at the front of the one-room church, admired by the preacher (the greater share of whose keep came from Joth) and leading in hymns; and how the shrunken yellow-haired little mother, with seamed face and big-knuckled warped hands and faded gray-and-pink shawl, would look up at him with quicksilver in her glance as if to say, My Joth, my dear Joth, how splendid you are, truly.
Dolliver’s Mill stood on the west bank of the Boone River. Thickly forested hills, seeming like young mountains to the gaze of prairie dwellers, arose on the east side; but smaller hills on the west bank of the river already stood denuded of timber, and white men had lived in that country only a few years when Joth Dolliver moved up from Poweshiek County.
Again and again the dam was torn out by crunching barges of ice at the end of winter. Black walnut posts had to be re-established at great expense and with grueling labor. Once, when Eben was thirteen, the entire end of the mill was knifed away by towering shifting masses of ice: it dropped into the ravenous river, and was swept off, and left machinery and piles of flour sacks exposed to view. The Dolliver family lined on the bank, watching the tragedy, weeping loudly—weeping, every one of them, from the eighteen-months-old baby up to mighty Joth. It was strange, but other men didn’t cry, simply and naturally in the way of children, as Joth cried.
When very young it had seemed to Eben that his father was a normal man; and other fathers and neighboring men were not at all normal because one never saw them cry. Once Jotham rented a breaking plow, to open a breadth of raw prairie on a ridge across the road from his house (no sense in letting that fine land go to waste! Many days there was no grinding to be done at the mill, no one came with grists; Joth would be a farmer as well as a miller, and prosper at it) and little Eben ran after the big plow, trying to help. The plowshare ripped through a bumblebee’s nest, and the next moment Jotham Dolliver was on the ground, rolling and bellowing. No, no—stay away, little Ebe, he was gasping between sobs. Oh, oh, oh, how it hurts, oh God, oh Lord forgive me for taking Thy name in vain, ow, ow, it hurts. Didn’t know bumblebee stings could hurt like—Ow, ow! The unstung oxen stood and regarded him mildly. Eben jigged and wrung his hands; then he scooted to the house, bawling for his mother. She came to comfort her wailing husband, to plaster his swellings with cool mud.
Was Joth honestly a baby? Not so’s you’d notice it.
The Campbellites joined with parent and somewhat snobbish Methodists—and with their fellow immersionists the Baptists—in organizing a camp meeting that same year. They chose the season after corn was too high for plowing and before small grain needed to be cut. In this brief period there might be only haying to interfere with an intense, informal period of devotion. Since Dolliver’s Mill was more or less a gathering point for neighbors, and since the river offered charm for the young—they could wade in mud, catch crawdaddies, hunt for mussel shells while their elders listened to preaching—a platform was built in the walnut grove across from the mill. The idea appealed, socially as well as religiously, and people rode or drove or even walked from miles around. The grove held from a hundred to three hundred devotees at any given moment during the four-day session. Naturally all the ministers in southern Hamilton County took turns at preaching, together with various laymen (Joth Dolliver was one, to the pride of his family) who got up and exhorted.
This rural festivity, with sagging baskets of good things and with pretty girls bound to turn up, excited the interest of certain hulking youths who had a dangerous reputation throughout the community. Folks called them the Monger gang or the Monger tribe. There were two Monger brothers and a Monger cousin, with several cronies trailing along. Most other young fellows from respectable homes gave them a wide berth; they were said to go armed, the tricks they played were cruel and ugly, often they staggered drunkenly in public. Well, they came along to camp meeting on the second day and stood haw-hawing on the outskirts. Slowly their deviltry crept into the session and before long was close to disrupting it. They lounged, grinning contemptuously under the wide-brimmed black hats they all affected, and when hymns were tuned up the Monger gang made meeowings and calf-blattings under cover of the music. Old Reverend Grosscup went tiptoeing toward them and was heard to say, If you boys can’t act civilized in true Christian fashion, we ask that you withdraw. They pretended not to have heard his quavering voice, but kept winking at one another; they planned fresh mischief. Eben Dolliver could watch his father’s face getting redder and redder, and he shivered to think what might happen . . . perhaps his father would order the riffraff away, and one of them would pull out a pistol and. . . .
One of the Mongers had a bottle of turpentine; a yellow dog trotted near. People at the back of the congregation could see what actually happened, the rest could only hear the outcry. Those young men caught the yellow dog and smeared turpentine on its rear. The creature rushed howling in circles, alternately bounding into the air and dragging its burning bottom across the grass in a frenzied attempt to allay the hurt. Joth Dolliver arose and called in a rough voice, Excuse me, Parson, and then forced his way back through the crowd.
The Mongers saw him coming. They stood in a tight group, waiting. The nearest fellow brought up a sly knee as Joth came close, but Joth stepped back quickly and caught the young man’s leg with his two hands. He had tossed grain sacks about for thirty years. He turned this youth upside down in the air and dropped him on his head; folks nearest thought that the fellow’s neck must be broken. Next thing Joth snatched the two biggest—Arney Monger and Benton Hakes— He caught them by their shirt collars, one by the back of his collar, one by the front. He flung them together, head against head, with all his strength, and both dropped to the ground. Arney Monger was rendered unconscious . . . you could hear the crack of those two skulls coming together, clear across the grove.
Bent Hakes got up on his haunches and reached for his clasp-knife, but before he could get it out of his pocket Joth Dolliver kicked him in the jaw. Bent shrieked to high heaven. His jaw was broken, and he gasped and struggled on the trodden-down grass, spitting out blood and teeth.
Sorry I was compelled to ruin you, Bent, but if it takes ruination to teach you Christian decency I’ll work the ruin. Used to be the meanest rough-and-tumble man in Dubuque before I saw the New Light. I’ll take you together or singly.
The Mongers were in full flight by this time, hustling toward the underbrush—all except the three on the ground. People gathered around them, and Doctor Dawson went to his wagon for his satchel. People feared that the Monger gang might try to shoot Joth Dolliver from ambush, after that, but so far as was known they never attempted revenge—perhaps for fear of the lynching which might follow. One youth went to California that same year and was said to have been killed by the Comanches on his way back to Iowa. Well did Eben Dolliver know the fate of two others: Benton Hakes and Elston Monger. They died at Shiloh along with numerous others of the Thirteenth Iowa Infantry.
Watching his father deal out justice as he dealt it, Eben yearned for the day when he also would be grown and imposing in stature, and generally looked up to. But he grew only to average height by the time he was twenty. They had no accurate method of measuring in the prison pen, but he stood barefoot and back-to-back against Olin Claver from Michigan, and Olin had his growth long since—he was twenty-seven, and said that he stood five-feet-nine-and-a-quarter. They were of identical height. Eben had grown but an inch since he enlisted over two years before. He was pleased that from birth he had exhibited the reddish coloration of Joth Dolliver—reddish skin, reddish hair with a curly shine to it. Also he had his father’s clear eager gray gaze, and usually through his childhood and teens Ebe’s gaze wore the expression of a hungry youngster who has just been told that he may eat with the grown-up folks—he need not wait for second table. Joyfully he appreciated the commonplace and felt pity for those who could not. His laughter rang easily until he was weakened by captivity; still he laughed more readily than most.
His father’s glee was found in song, his mother’s in flowers. However demanding the cares of the family, Elizabeth Dolliver always snatched an hour to go gathering the first pasque flowers which blew like lavender bolls of cotton on breezy summits. She would cry in rapture, and sit by the furry little things with unheeded bees coming near— She actually talked to flowers, and her children smiled to see and hear her do it. There were six living children in 1861; three others had died. All had Biblical names: the living were Eben, Neri, Ruth, Jacob, Naomi, Jesse. All could sing. People used to stop their teams in the road to listen to the Dollivers. The first banker in the county seat cried in scornful envy, Guess I’d better go out and get myself a pile of debts and work my fingers to the bone, and not have a dime to show for it at the end of every year. Then maybe I could sing like those Dollivers. . . . Those Singing Dollivers, everyone said. When Ruth and Naomi were just knee-high to a bunny and a mouse, respectively, they were in demand to warble at patriotic or political functions. Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue (Blue-blue-blue)— That was one of their mainstays in the way of secular songs, along with Robin Adair and Flow Gently, Sweet Afton. The boys had a quartet—Jesse joined it when he was only four—and they did noble things with The Minstrel Boy, and Hail To the Chief, and Open Thy Lattice, Love. But their father liked best to hear Land Of the Leal, and of course he always joined in and drowned them out.