Across Five Aprils (19 page)

Jeth realized he was not going to be able to go to sleep. There was a candle in his room; there was some ink and an old pen that Bill had sometimes used. There was also Ross Milton’s book-the book on English usage. Jethro got up in the quiet of the night, lighted his candle, opened Ross Milton’s book, and began to write on a piece of rough lined paper.

The next morning he hid Jenny’s sandwiches inside his coat, and at the barn he picked up a few eggs from the nests up in the loft. He dug an apple out of the straw in the apple-cave; no one would question that—a boy needed something to munch on in midmorning. He would like to have taken some coffee beans—a man lying out in the woods all night needed a hot drink; but that item was one he would not take. Not for Eb, not even for Bill or Shad, would he have taken his mother’s coffee. He knew where there were good sassafras roots in the woods; maybe he would burn some brush in the fencerows and heat a little water for sassafras tea. He filched an old kettle and two lumps of sugar, just in case.

Eb was feeling a little better that morning. The quilts Jethro had taken from Nancy’s house had made the long night more comfortable; he had washed himself in the creek and looked refreshed.

“You’ve brung me a feast, Jeth,” he said gratefully.

They sat together for a while and talked in low voices.

“I’ll be gittin’ out in a day or so, Jeth. I caint hev you takin’ all this risk.”

“If you could go back to the army, you would, wouldn’t you, Eb?”

“You’re askin’ a man if he had a chancet to live, would he take it. But I’ve told you, Jeth-a deserter caint go back. I’ll be hunted the rest of my days-but the rest of my days ain’t goin’ to be too many.”

Jethro said nothing, but as he plowed that morning he made up his mind to send the letter. It was a frightening thing to do, but if one did nothing-well, that was frightening too. He knew Eb was not really planning to leave-Eb was a lost and frightened boy, and there was nowhere else to go. For Jethro there was nothing to do but send the letter.

The plowshares needed sharpening, Jethro told his father that noon. Hadn’t he better drive over to Hidalgo and get that work done? He’d pick up the mail, too, for themselves and for Ed Turner. Was that all right with his father?

Matt seldom questioned Jethro’s decisions. The boy was doing a man’s work; he was due the dignity accorded to a man. Matt assented to the trip readily, and Jethro, with the letter in his pocket, drove off down the road, his heart pounding with excitement.

In Hidalgo the old man who took care of the mail glanced sharply at Jethro when he noticed the inscription on the envelope. But he was a silent man with problems of his own; as long as a letter was properly stamped and addressed it was no affair of his. Privately he thought that some people were allowing their young ones to become a little forward, but that was their concern. He threw Jethro’s letter in a big bag that would be taken by wagon down to Olney that evening.

The long wait for an answer was interminable. Jethro tossed at night and wondered: had he done an impudent thing, had he laid himself open to trouble, had he been a fool to think that a boy of his age might act without the advice of his elders? Sometimes he got up and walked about his narrow room, but that was bad, for Jenny would hear him. Once she came to his door, and she was crying.

“Jeth—Jeth, what is it? What’s botherin’ you? Ain’t we good friends anymore, ain’t you goin’ to tell me?”

He had to be curt with her to forestall any more questions. After that she didn’t come to his door again, but he knew that if he stirred or moaned under his burden of worry, both Jenny and Nancy would hear him and worry through a sleepless night.

Eb’s often reiterated, “I’ll be goin’ on soon, Jeth; I won’t be a burden to you much longer,” became like the whippoorwill’s cry-always the same and never ending. Jethro closed his ears to it, but the tensions within him mounted, and the necessity of providing for Eb’s needs in strictest secrecy became a task that seemed to grow in magnitude as the days went by.

“If I could be sure I’m doin’ the right thing,” he would say to himself, as he watched the dark earth fall away from his plowshares. “If I could feel really set-up about doin’ a fine thing, but I don’t know. Maybe I’m doin’ somethin’ terrible wrong; maybe the next time they come, the Federal Registrars will take me.”

 

The
letter came one noon when they were all seated at dinner. As so often happened, it was Ed Turner who brought the mail out from town. Jenny ran to the door, eager for a letter from Shadrach; Nancy’s eyes pleaded for word from John.

But Ed held only one large envelope, and that was addressed to Jethro in a small, cramped handwriting done in very black ink. It was postmarked Washington, D.C.

“Looks like purty important mail you’re gittin’ Jethro,” Ed said quietly. His eyes were full of puzzled concern.

Jethro’s head swam. This was the showdown; now, all the family, Ed Turner, and soon the neighborhood would know everything. In the few seconds that passed before he opened the envelope, he wished with all his heart that he had not meddled in the affairs of a country at war, that he had let Eb work out his own problems, that he, Jethro, were still a sheltered young boy who did the tasks his father set for him and shunned the idea that he dare think for himself. He looked at the faces around him, and they spun in a strange mist of color—black eyes and blue eyes, gray hair and gold and black, pink cheeks and pale ones and weather-beaten brown ones.

He read the letter through, word for word, and while he read, there wasn’t a sound in the cabin beyond the slight rustle of the page in the shaking hand that held it. When he was through, he held the letter out to Jenny, with a long sigh.

“You can read it out loud, Jenny.”

Jenny stared at him as if he were a stranger; then she shook her head.

“It’s your letter, Jeth; you’d best do the readin’.”

He didn’t know whether he could or not—there was a great pounding in his ears and his breath was short-but he ran his hand across his eyes and swallowed hard. After the first few words, his voice grew steady, and he read the letter through without faltering.

In
May of 1863 news came from the East of another Union disaster, this time at Chancellorsville. It was frightening news for, whatever one wished to believe, the very obvious fact was that a Union army with the advantage of greatly superior numbers had been terribly beaten by a Confederate army with the advantage of a greatly superior general. The contrast between Robert E. Lee and Joseph Hooker was not one to bring either pride or hope to the Union cause.

The papers had carried stories and pictures of Joseph Hooker all during the winter of ’62-’63. He was a tall, handsome man with wavy blond hair and the look of a daredevil in his eyes. He was a hard drinker and a hard fighter: “Fighting Joe Hooker” he was called, an arrogant man, highly contemptuous of McClellan and Burnside, of the Confederate Army, and of the possibility of his own defeat. Here was a dashing, fighting, confident man, the papers had said, the kind of general the North so desperately needed. And so he replaced Ambrose Burnside as Commander of the Army of the Potomac. Then there was Chancellorsville, where handsome Joe Hooker folded helplessly before Lee’s onslaught, and in the early summer of ’63, papers that had expressed admiration for his spirit and confidence were screaming for his head.

But the fall of General Hooker was of little importance compared to the fact that seventeen thousand Union soldiers had gone either to their deaths or to a Confederate prison camp as a result of the battle at Chancellorsville. The same old fear haunted Jethro and his sister, as they silently plowed the young corn during the weeks when more stories of the disaster came with each newspaper: was Shadrach Yale one of the seventeen thousand?

But in late June a letter came from Shadrach, a letter which reflected the deep gloom that hung over the Army of the Potomac, and the anger felt-not only by the common soldier, but by many of the generals-for the kind of leadership Fighting Joe Hooker had exhibited.

There was awe, too, in Shadrach’s realization that once more a freak of chance had allowed him to come through alive, but there was no optimism in his hope for future battles.

A letter from John was more cheerful. The Army of the Cumberland was on the march with General Rosecrans; for weeks they had been drilling, but now they were sure that action was about to begin. There was Confederate General Bragg in Tennessee, who must face “Old Rosy” before the snows fell. Most of the letter, though, was not about armies or campaigns, but of home, of Jethro’s letter from the President, of Eb’s behavior; there were long paragraphs in which John wanted to know how Nancy was faring, if she was well, how much the little boys had grown, whether or not they remembered their pa. It was a good letter; Nancy read it to the family and over again to Ellen, whose lips moved while she listened as if she were trying to memorize each word.

Eb wrote to Jethro from Mississippi. He was on a river called the Yazoo, not far from Vicksburg, digging ditches, chopping wood, and building bridges. The heat and the dirt were bad, he said, and there was an added hardness to his life brought on by his weeks of “improper absence,” but Eb accepted it with humility.

Eb thought the Confederate General Pemberton, up in Vicksburg, was beginning to sweat, and that was fine-but the mosquitoes were awful, and lots of the boys were sick with malaria.

The papers had much to say of the operation around Vicksburg. What was Grant doing down there, editors wanted to know. Was he going to continue stumbling all around the country, hesitating, bumbling, waiting week after week with an army mired down in disease-infested marshes? The men who wrote for the newspapers that Jenny and Jethro read aloud at night did not believe the Confederate Pemberton was “beginning to sweat”; Vicksburg, perched high on the bluffs of the Mississippi, had a natural fortification that Grant, with his inept stupidity, could not successfully storm any sooner than Joe Hooker could overtake Robert E. Lee.

It was known that the President was being besieged to get rid of Grant. After all, wasn’t it true that it was not Grant who had been the victor at Fort Henry, but Admiral Foote and his ironclads? And on second thought, white-haired old C. F. Smith had actually been the brain behind the victory at Donelson. Nobody could deny that Grant had waited too long and had been surprised at Pittsburg Landing, and certainly he had been driven back at Oxford, Mississippi. And in all these stories came the vague charges of drunkenness on the part of the discredited general. The stories were never verified, but they occurred often enough to arouse deep anger in the minds of people whose sons had died under Grant’s command. Ellen and Matt felt that anger ; for many months neither Jethro nor Jenny ever mentioned Grant before their parents.

Despite the pressures, though, the President did not remove General Grant. But Joseph Hooker was removed-another one of the President’s generals acknowledged as a failure in the command of the Army of the Potomac. Now, a new name came more fully into the public eye: George Gordon Meade. The men who came of a Sunday afternoon to talk of the war with Matt wondered how long this new general would last.