Across Five Aprils (15 page)

Jethro sat at his sister’s side and studied the page to which she had turned. His own name was at the bottom of the long list—Jethro Hallam Creighton, born January 13th, 1852.

“That was the name of the old doctor that the folks set such store by,” Jenny explained. “Dr. Jethro Hallam. I remember him just a little. He used to hold me on his lap, and once he give me candy because I didn’t cry when he had to swab my throat.”

Jethro looked at her respectfully. She knew people and times unknown to him. He could not agree with his father that Jenny was so very young.

Directly above his name were three lines that his father had filled out just ten years ago that summer.

The tragedy of that summer had never impressed Jethro so deeply as it did that afternoon when the dates stared up at him with terrible significance.

“Do you remember them, Jenny?” he asked soberly.

“Oh, yes. They’re growin’ more and more dim in my mind, though. I can remember that Ma set me to rockin’ little Matt’s cradle once, and I got so carried away with my singin’ to him that I rocked the cradle too hard and the little round baby rolled right out onto the floor. That stands out in my mind—I was so fearful that I’d hurt him.” Jenny smiled a little. “We was always wantin’ to hold the youngest one; lots of times Mary and me and even Nate would fuss over who was to hold you next. Ma would say, ‘Wait till he starts cryin’; then we’ll see who wants him,’ and sure enough, once the cryin’ started, we was ready to hand you over.”

It seemed very far away and unreal to Jethro. “Sometimes I forget that they was older than I am. I always think of them as the little boys.”

“I reckon that’s the way it’ll always seem-they’ll never be old.”

“It seems strange, don’t it, Jenny, that the sickness struck the three of them and passed over the rest of us?”

She nodded. “It’s a thing no one can explain. I remember that Israel Thomas took Mary and Tom home with him—Eb wasn’t yet with us—and Bill took you and me over to Ed Turner’s. He carried you in his arms and led me by the hand, almost like he was our pa, though he wasn’t much more than a boy then. Some of our folks made the rounds every day to see about us—they was so fearful that the disease might strike more of us. But we stayed well; it was a miracle.”

Her name was next on the list—Jenny Elizabeth Creighton; then the name Mary Ellen Creighton, with the date of her death, January 12th, 1859, written far out in the righthand column. Above was the line Jenny must fill out: Thomas Ward Creighton, born May 10th, 1843. She made the notation, Died at Pittsburg Landing, April 6th, 1862, with great care and she wiped her eyes quickly lest the ink of the record be smudged.

The long list climbed on. In the years 1837 and 1838 John Robert and William Taylor were born, the two who had once been closest in affection—cut from the same bolt, Ellen had said. Above these were three other names that belonged to complete strangers as far as Jethro was concerned. The twin girls, Lydia and Lucinda, long since married and moved to Ohio, were born in 1834. The name at the top of the list was Benjamin Hardin Creighton, born in 1832. After his name Matt had written: Left for Californy in 1849.

“I wonder if he ever found any gold,” Jethro mused.

Jenny shook her head, and he noticed that her face looked very tired. To cheer her, he pointed to the space for a marriage date opposite her name.

“Some day we’ll be writin’ in this space: Married to Shadrach Yale—and then your weddin’ date.”

The smiles and blushes that usually came at the mention of Shadrach were missing that day; Jenny’s dark eyes were very large and grave.

“I’m so scared, Jeth. Seems I hadn’t known what war was till Danny Lawrence come bringin’ us this awful word of Tom.” She closed the Bible and crossed her forearms on its faded cover. “I used to dream about the nice home Shad and me would have and how I’d keep it bright and pretty, how I’d wait of an evenin’ to see him comin’ down the road toward home. Nowadays I don’t make any plans; I just don’t dare to have any dreams for fear someday a soldier will come home and tell us that he was standin’ beside Shad, the way Danny was standin’ beside Tom—”

She got up abruptly and put the Bible back on the shelf among the books Shadrach had left. Together she and Jethro walked silently out to the barnlot and got their team ready to go back to the fields.

They needed recreation and laughter as they needed food. In other years the little house had buzzed with the teasing and squabbling and hilarity of a crowd of young people. There had been dances and cornhuskings and candymakings throughout the neighborhood; there had been afternoons of horseshoe pitching and evenings of charades. Shadrach had organized a singing school for winter nights, and sometimes there was a spelldown at the school followed by a box supper, which was partly a fundraising project and partly an opportunity for romantic developments. Jethro had not participated in these activities, but he had watched the fun from the sidelines, and that had been enough; some of the laughter and gaiety had overflowed to touch him, and he had felt himself a part of it.

Now the cabin had the look of a lonely old man brooding in the summer sunlight. Beyond the chatter of Nancy’s little boys, there was no lightness within the cabin or anywhere nearby. In New York, of course, the papers stated that society had never been so gay; that the sale of jewels and fine fabrics and sundry baubles of high fashion had never been so great. People were going to the opera, to balls, to glittering dinners in the great hotels, in spite of casualty lists and the fact that the war showed no signs of ending.

In Jasper County, however, laughter was a scarce luxury that summer, but as the weeks of 1862 marched on toward fall, an incident occurred that appealed to the rough humor of the times and to the satisfaction of many who saw justice finally finding a niche for itself. It was an incident that brought down a storm of ridicule upon Guy Wortman, was welcomed by those who had shuddered before the picture of mob violence spreading throughout the county as it had downstate, and was as effective in silencing Wortman as a prison term would have been.

The incident revolved about Sam Gardiner, the pudgy, round-faced proprietor of the general store in Newton. Gardiner had minced no words in his anger over what had happened at the Creighton farm that spring, and knowing what to expect from the Wortman-led element in the county, he stayed night after night in his darkened store waiting for an attack and his chance to answer it. He was a marksman of no mean ability; he was, moreover, stubbornly tenacious under his mild manner—two facts well-enough known around town to make the night prowlers wary for several weeks. The newspaper office was broken into and valuable material destroyed; Lafe Edwards’ saloon was given similar treatment; but the general store was untouched.

Finally Sam Gardiner grew tired of waiting and taunted his foes by taking on a role of smugness and boasting of his immunity to Wortman’s vengeance. After a few days he took pains to let the community at large know that his store was to be closed for a week while he went to St. Louis on business. At Olney he waved to some acquaintances from Newton as he boarded the train; then, getting off at the first stop, he was brought back to Newton during the night by an accomplice. In the darkness he climbed to the loft of his store, where he stayed for three days, living on cold provisions from his stock and biding his time.

On the third night the ruffians struck. A back window was pried open, and the vandalism was proceeding in full force when a blast of buckshot sent three men leaping into the darkness and caught Guy Wortman, as Gardiner had intended it to do, directly in the hindquarters.

The rest was comic opera. A doctor was summoned to the scene, and a crowd of men soon gathered in the store where the round little merchant, in his nightshirt, held a lamp aloft to light the doctor’s work, and clucked in gentle sympathy while the buckshot was dug from the backsides of a moaning Wortman.

Men all over the county roared at the story Ross Milton embellished with cutting sarcasm and published in his weekly paper, a story that caused Wortman to be demoted, even by his own lieutenants, from the role of a swaggering desperado to that of an inept and ridiculous figure, whining in his misery. Sam Gardiner’s blast of buckshot brought a number of people to their senses and gave to a number of others the blessed gift of a night’s sleep free of anxiety and terror.

While the county paper carried details of Guy Wortman’s humiliation, the city papers carried a war story that had its own overtones of the ridiculous. General Halleck had shuffled the generals at Pittsburg Landing after the battle there, assigning Grant to an ineffectual position as assistant commander and taking command of the field himself. Then there had begun a snaillike approach of the Union Army toward Corinth, where General Beauregard had withdrawn with the Confederate Army—day after day of digging entrenchments, marching a little distance, stopping to dig more entrenchments. Grant had been criticized for not entrenching at Pittsburg Landing; Halleck, it seemed, was determined to entrench himself all the way from Pittsburg Landing to Corinth.

Then came the entry into Corinth. Northern newspapers, never very warm toward Halleck, wrote with a note of glee in their bitterness of the hoax by which Beauregard had managed to evacuate his sick and enfeebled army, thereby leaving for Halleck a deserted railroad town. General Halleck had confidently expected to bag an enemy, which he had reported to the War Department as being nearly 200,000 strong. Beauregard had withdrawn from Corinth leaving campfires burning, dummy guns with dummy cannoneers behind them, and a few drummer boys to play in the deserted streets, as if Confederate soldiers by the hundred thousands were still there to listen. Freight cars rattled through Corinth all during the night, covering the sound of withdrawal; and shrill rebel yells from the remainder of the army greeted the arrival of each train, suggesting that reinforcements were arriving by the hour.

Halleck occupied Corinth the next day, it was true, but there was an empty ring to his boast that this was a “victory as brilliant and important as any recorded in history.” The papers suggested that perhaps it was Beauregard who, by managing to save the remnants of his army, had won something approaching a victory.

Jethro sat on the edge of the kitchen porch, fondling the dog as it nuzzled against his knee and looking out at the fields, where twilight was rapidly draining the green and gold from corn and wheat fields that stretched out below and beyond Walnut Hill. His eyes were wide and troubled with his thoughts. He had a high respect for education, for authority of men in high places, and yet the stories in the newspapers made him wonder. McClellan, the most promising young officer in his class at West Point, was now the general who either didn’t move at all or moved ineffectually ; Halleck, the author of a book on military science, was now the author of boasts that somehow branded him as a little man, even to a country boy who was hungry for a hero. There were stories of generals jealously eyeing one another, caring more for personal prestige than for defeating the Confederates; there were Pope and Sheridan, who blustered; there was Grant and the persistent stories of his heavy drinking. Nowhere in the North was there a general who looked and acted the part as did the Confederates’ Lee and Jackson.

“What’s the matter, Cap?” Jethro said aloud, bending down to look into the dog’s deep eyes. “Ain’t we in the right? And how does it happen, if we’re in the right, that the Lord lets Jeff Davis get men like Lee and Jackson and gives us ones like McClellan and Halleck?”

That, in essence, was what men in high places were wondering that late summer; it was what the President himself was wondering, and the thousands of soldiers who were coming nearer, day by day, to Antietam, to Fredericksburg, and to Chancellorsville.

The
autumn of ’62 was grim. Looking back to the spring and early summer, Jethro realized that, although the early months had meant anxiety and fear for himself and his family, the cause of the Union had been going well in the West. He counted the Federal victories beginning with Fort Henry and Fort Donelson, always to be associated in his memory with that last firelit evening he had spent with Shadrach-on to Pea Ridge, from which Mr. Roscoe’s grandson had emerged unharmed-to the Mississippi, where grim old Admiral Farragut had done the impossible and had taken over New Orleans, and where General Pope, blusterer though he might be, was hailed as a hero after he had taken New Madrid and the powerful Confederate fort at Island No. 10.

Jethro studied the map of the Mississippi carefully. Only a strip of the river between Baton Rouge and Vicksburg was then under Confederate control.

“We’re doin’ better than Shad allowed we would,” he told Jenny. He measured the short strip on the map with his fingers. “Look, it’s just a little piece of river; once we take that, it’s like Shad told me—the Confederacy will be cut in two.”

It was a very short strip as measured by his fingers, but a shadow swept across his eyes as he recalled Shadrach’s words, “Think how hard the fighting was at this little dot on the map called Donelson.” He thought of another dot, which was only peach orchards and an old church, where Tom and thousands of others had died-a dot that seemed a hateful place to him. He would have to grow older and learn from history that the battle had been one of great importance for the Union, that the Confederate attempt to regain western Tennessee had failed and was therefore a bitter blow to the government of Jefferson Davis. But in 1862, Jethro hated to think of Shiloh, not only because of Tom, but because it seemed to him to have been an empty victory.