To Sail Beyond the Sunset (12 page)

Father looked at me—looked worried. “Do you see?” I think he was honestly seeking my opinion, my approval.

“I—” I stopped and sighed. “Father, I think I see. But at times like these I am forced to realize that I am not very experienced. I just want this war to be over so that you will come home and Tom will come home…and—”

“And Brian Smith? I agree.”

“Well, yes. But I was thinking of Chuck, too. Chuck Perkins.”

“Chuck is going? Good lad!”

“Yes, he told me today. His father has agreed and is going to Joplin with him tomorrow.” I sniffed back a tear. “I don’t love Chuck but I do feel sort of sentimental about him.”

“That’s understandable.”

Later that day I let Chuck take me up on Marston Hill and defied chiggers and Mrs. Grundy and told Chuck I was proud of him and demonstrated it the very best I knew how. (I did use a sheath; I had promised Father.) And an amazing thing happened. I had gone up there simply intending to run through some female calisthenics to demonstrate to Chuck that I was proud of him and appreciated his willingness to fight for us. And the miracle happened. Fireworks, big ones! I got all blurry and my eyes squinched shut and I found I was making loud noises.

And about half an hour later the miracle happened again. Amazing!

Chuck and his father caught the eight-oh-six out of Butler the next morning and were back that same afternoon—Chuck sworn in and assigned to the same company (C Company, Second Regiment) Tom was in, and with similar delay time. So Chuck and I went to another (fairly) safe spot, and I told him good-bye again, and again the miracle overtook me.

No, I did not decide I was in love with him, after all. Enough men had had me by then that I was not inclined to mistake a hearty orgasm for eternal love. But it was nice that they happened since I intended to tell Chuck good-bye as often and as emphatically as possible, come what might. And did, right up to the day, a week later, when it really was good-bye.

Chuck never came back. No, he was not killed in action; he never got out of Chickamauga Park, Georgia. It was the fever, whether malaria or yellow jack, I’m not sure. Or it could have been typhoid. Five times as many died of the fevers as were lost in combat. They are heroes, too. Well, aren’t they? They volunteered; they were willing to fight…and they wouldn’t have caught the fever if they had hung back, refused to answer the call.

I’ve got to drag out that soap box again. All during the twentieth century I’ve run into people who either have never heard of the War of 1898, or belittle it. “Oh, you mean that one. That wasn’t a real war, just a skirmish. What happened? Did he stub his toe, running back down San Juan Hill?”

(I should have killed them! I did throw an extra dry martini into the eyes of one man who talked that way.)

Casualties are just as heavy in one war as in another…because death comes just one to the customer.

And besides—In the summer of 1898 we did not know that the war would be over quickly. The United States was not a superpower; the United States was not a world power of any sort…whereas Spain was still a great empire. For all we knew our men might be gone for years…or not come back. The bloody tragedy of 1861-1865 was all we had to go by, and that had started just like this one, with the president calling for a few militiamen. My elders tell me that no one dreamed that the rebel states, half as big and less than half as populous and totally lacking in the heavy industry on which modern war rests—no sensible person dreamed that they could hold out for four long, dreary, death-laden years.

With that behind us, we did not assume that beating Spain would be easy or quick; we just prayed that our men would come back…someday.

The day came, the fifth of May, when our men left…on a special troop train, down from Kansas City, a swing over to Springfield, then up to St. Louis, and east—destination: Georgia. All of us went over to Butler, Mother and Father in the lead, in his buggy, drawn by Loafer, while the rest of us followed in the surrey, ordinarily used only on Sundays, with Tom driving Daisy and Beau. The train pulled in, and we made hurried good-byes as they were already shouting “All abo…ard!” Father turned Loafer over to Frank, and I inherited the surrey with the gentle team.

They didn’t actually pull out all that quickly; baggage and freight had to be loaded as well as soldiers. There was a flatcar in the middle of the train, with a brass band on it, supplied by the Third Regiment (Kansas City) and it played all the time the train was stopped, a military medley.

They played, “Mine eyes have seen the glory—” and segued right into “I wish I was in de land ob cotton—” and from that into “Tenting tonight, tenting tonight—” and “—stuck a feather in his cap and called it macaroni!” Then they played “In my prison cell I sit—” and the engine gave a toot and the train started to move, and the band scrambled to get off the flatcar and into the coach next to it, and the man with the tuba had to be helped.

And we started home and I was still hearing “Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are marching—” and that tragic first line. “In my prison cell I sit—” Somebody told me later that the man who wrote that knew nothing about it, because wartime prison camps don’t have anything as luxurious as cells. He cited Andersonville.

As may be, it was enough to make my eyes blur up and I couldn’t see. But that didn’t matter; Beau Brummel and Daisy needed no help from me. Just leave the reins slack and they would take us home. And they did.

I helped Frank unharness both rigs, then went in and upstairs. Mother came to my room just as I closed the door, and tapped on it. I opened it. “Yes, Mother?”

“Maureen, your
Golden Treasury
—May I borrow it?”

“Certainly.” I went and got it; it was under my pillow. I handed it to her. “It’s number eighty-three, Mother, on page sixty.”

She looked surprised, then thumbed the pages. “So it is,” she agreed, then looked up. “We must be brave, dear.”

“Yes, Mother. We must.”

▣

Speaking of prison cells, Pixel has just arrived in mine, with a present for me. A mouse. A dead mouse. Still warm. He is so pleased with himself and clearly he expects me to eat it. He is waiting for me to eat it.

How am I going to get out of this?

“When Johnny Comes
Marching Home—”

The rest of 1898 was one long bad dream. Our men had gone to war but it was difficult to find out what was happening in that war. I remember a time, sixty-odd years later, when the malevolent eye of television turned war into a spectator sport, even to the extent (I hope that this is not true!) that attacks were timed so that the action could be shown live on the evening news. Can you imagine a more ironically horrible way to die than to have one’s death timed to allow an anchor man to comment on it just before turning the screen over to the beer ads?

In 1898 the fighting was not brought live into our living rooms; we had trouble finding out what had happened even long after the fact. Was our Navy guarding the east coast (as eastern politicians were demanding), or was it somewhere in the Caribbean? Had the
Oregon
rounded the Horn and would it reach the Fleet in time? Why was there a second battle at Manila? Hadn’t we won the battle of Manila Bay weeks ago?

In 1898 I knew so little about military matters that I did not realize that civilians should not know the location of a fleet or the planned movements of an army. I did not know that anything known to an outsider will be known by enemy agents just minutes later. I had never heard of the public’s “right to know,” a right that cannot be found in the Constitution but was sacrosanct in the second half of the twentieth century. This so-called “right” meant that it was satisfactory (regrettable perhaps but necessary) for soldiers and sailors and airmen to die in order to preserve unblemished that sacred “right to know.”

I had still to learn that neither Congressmen nor newsmen could be trusted with the lives of our men.

Let me try to be fair. Let us assume that over 90 percent of Congressmen and of newsmen are honest and honorable men. In that case, less than 10 percent need be murderous fools indifferent to the deaths of heroes for that minority to destroy lives, lose battles, turn the course of a war.

I did not have these grim thoughts in 1898; it would take the War of 1898 and two world wars and two undeclared wars (“police actions,” for God’s sake!) to make me realize that neither our government nor our press could be trusted with human lives.

“A democracy works well only when the common man is an aristocrat. But God must hate the common man; He has made him so dad-blamed common! Does your common man understand chivalry? Noblesse oblige? Aristocratic rules of conduct? Personal responsibility for the welfare of the State? One may as well search for fur on a frog.” Is that something I heard my father say? No. Well, not exactly. It is something I recall from about two o’clock in the morning in the Oyster Bar of the Benton House in Kansas City after Mr. Clemens’s lecture in January 1898. Maybe my father said part of it; perhaps Mr. Clemens said all of it, or perhaps they shared it—my memory is not perfect after so many years.

Mr. Clemens and my father were indulging in raw oysters, philosophy, and brandy. I had a small glass of port. Both port and raw oysters were new to me; I disliked both…not helped by the odor of Mr. Clemens’s cigar.

(I had assured Mr. Clemens that I enjoyed the aroma of a good cigar; please do smoke. A mistake.)

But I would have endured more than cigar smoke and raw oysters to be present that night. On the platform Mr. Clemens had looked just like his pictures: a jovial Satan with a halo of white hair, in a beautifully tailored white suit. In person he was a foot shorter, warmly charming, and he made of me an even more fervent admirer by treating me as a grown lady.

I was up hours past my bedtime and had to keep pinching myself not to fall asleep. What I remember best was Mr. Clemens’s discourse on the subject of cats and redheads…composed on the spot for my benefit, I think—it does not appear anywhere in his published works, not even those released by the University of California fifty years after his death.

Did you know that Mr. Clemens was a redhead? But that must wait.

News of the signing of the peace protocol reached Thebes on the twelfth of August, a Friday. Mr. Barnaby, our principal, called us all into the lecture hall and told us, then dismissed school. I ran home, found that Mother already knew. We cried on each other a little while Beth and Lucille were noisy around us, then Mother and I started in on a complete, unseasonal spring cleaning so that we would be ready when Father and Tom (and Mr. Smith?—I did not voice it) got home sometime next week. Frank was told to cut the grass and to do anything else that needed doing outdoors—don’t ask; just do it.

Church on Sunday was a happy Praise-the-Lord occasion, with Reverend Timberly being even more long-windedly stupid than usual but nobody minded, least of all me.

After church Mother said, “Maureen, are you going to school tomorrow?”

I had not thought about it. The Thebes school board had decided to offer summer high school (in addition to the usual make-up session for grammar school dullards) as a patriotic act to permit older boys to graduate early and enlist. I had signed up for summer school both to add to my education (since I had given up the idea of college) and to fill that aching emptiness caused by Father and Tom (and Mr. Smith) being away at war.

(I have spent the longest years of my life waiting for men to come back from war. And for some who did not come back.)

“Mother, I had not thought about it. Do you really think there will be school as usual tomorrow?”

“There will be. Have you studied?”

(She knew I hadn’t. You can’t do much with Greek irregular verbs when you are down on your knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor.) “No, Ma’am.”

“Well? What would your father expect of you?”

I sighed. “Yes, Ma’am.”

“Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Summer school was your idea. You should not waste that extra tuition. Now git! I will get supper by myself tonight.”

They did not come home that week.

They did not come home the following week.

They did not come home that fall.

They did not come home that year.

(Chuck’s body came home. The GAR provided a firing squad and I attended my first military funeral and cried and cried. A bugler with white hair played for Charles: “—sleep in peace, soldier brave, God is nigh.”

(If I ever come close to believing, it is when I hear “Taps.” Even today. )

After that summer session in 1898, when September came it was necessary to make a choice: go to school or not, and if so, where? I did not want to remain home, doing little but play nursemaid to George. Since I could not go to Columbia, I wanted to go to Butler Academy, a two-year private school that offered a liberal arts course acceptable at Columbia or at Lawrence in lieu of lower division. I pointed out to Mother that I had saved Christmas and birthday presents and “egg money” (“egg money” was any earned money—taking care of neighbors’ children, minding a stand at the county fair, and so forth—not much and quite seldom)—I had saved enough for my tuition and books.

Mother said, “How will you get back and forth?”

I answered, “How does Tom get back and forth?”

“Don’t answer a question with a question, young lady. We both know how your brother did it: By buggy in good weather, on horseback in bad weather…and he stayed home in the very worst weather. But your brother is a grown man. Tell me how you will do it.”

I thought about it. A buggy was no problem; the Academy had a barn for horses awaiting their masters. Horseback? I could ride almost as well as my brothers…but girls do not arrive at school wearing overalls, and sidesaddle was not a good idea for weather not suited to a buggy. But even good weather and a buggy—From late in October to early in March I would have to leave home before daylight and return home after dark.

In October 1889 Sarah Trowbridge had left her father’s farm to go four miles by buggy to Rich Hill. Her horse and buggy came home. Sarah was never seen again.