Whiter Than Snow (12 page)

This time of year, the sun did little to warm the graves under the pine trees of the Mountainbrook burial ground. Minder Evans stood in the shadows and shivered a little, because he had seen some years. At seventy-five, he was too old to tramp the cemetery each day in the winter’s cold. But he came, even these past few days, when he’d had to wade through the heavy snow the storm had dumped on Swandyke. It was a pact he’d made with himself when he sold his interest in the Fourth of July Mine—to visit the cemetery every day instead of just on Sunday, as he had for years. People thought it was a little odd, he knew, this remainder of the Grand Old Army coming to the graves so often, but then, the Civil War veterans were a strange lot. Folks had grown used to seeing Minder wandering among the stones, not just those of the Union soldiers but of the Confederate ones, too, for in the end, the two sides had enough in common to override their differences of long years ago.

There were not many Civil War graves, just twenty-two, but the tending of them took time. There may have been more, undoubtedly were, but these were the ones marked with the names and ranks and units. These were the graves of soldiers who wanted to be remembered for their part in the conflagration, men for whom the war never ended. Minder stopped at each one, said a word or two to the dead, swept the gravestones clear of snow in the winter and pine needles in the summer, repaired and painted the five wooden markers, cleaned the marble and stone ones.

The number of veterans was of no consequence to Minder, because he had nothing else to do except, of course, to care for his grandson, Emmett. The boy was ten now, and Minder walked him to school each day, because Emmett was timid, and his grandfather was all he had. And Emmett was all that Minder had. They were like two old men together, and precious to each other. Minder thought he would not live if anything happened to the boy. He had lost everyone else. His wife and his daughter had both taken the pneumonia and died on the same day, when Emmett was not yet old enough to walk. And then Emmett’s father had taken out. Minder hadn’t heard from him since the day the man had gone off to work, saying he’d come home for dinner, but he’d never come home for dinner. Instead, he’d left out, and they’d never seen him again. The deaths had put Minder himself in misery so deep that he could hardly blame the young man. But the father should have put aside his sorrow for the sake of the boy. He hadn’t, and that meant Minder had the care of Emmett. No one else would take him, and Minder wouldn’t give him over to an orphan asylum. So he’d raised the boy himself, taught him to work and have good manners. “Just doing those two things will keep you out of trouble,” he told Emmett. But Minder knew better.

Minder wasn’t thinking about Emmett now as he stood in front of the grave of Junius Cable (“Co. D, 18 Ohio Inf.”). The plain marble stone, rounded at the top like a church window, was surrounded by an iron fence. He hadn’t known Junius Cable, who had died in 1869, and Minder wondered again if the man had perished from the lingering effects of the war. So many of them had, especially the Southerners, like Cyrus Cheek (“Virginia”—the rest of the identification had worn off). He’d died in 1872 and was buried on the other side of the cemetery. Minder didn’t know for sure if the war was the cause of Cyrus Cheek’s death, either, but he’d known the man a little, and he’d come to believe it was. Either that or he’d died of plain meanness. Cyrus wouldn’t give a person the sweat off a black cat’s eye, and he acted as if the Virginia cavalry, of which he’d been a member, had won the war.

Minder trudged on to Theodore Wesley Arden’s grave (“7th Ohio Inf.”), which was marked by a red sandstone obelisk, broken off at the top, decorated with sandstone leaves. He’d known Ted Arden, too, a righteous man who thought he was a sinner because he loved to dance, and indeed, he could cut a step like nobody else. But the poor old fellow was stroked, and at the ending up, he could barely talk. His last words to Minder were, “I never was arrested, and I never was a juror. I never rode in an automobile, and I have one tooth left. You think I’ll go to heaven?”

“I believe you’ll go on past heaven,” Minder replied, and the old man pondered that as he took his last breath.

Minder walked the same route every day, beginning with Lieut. S. P. Key (“Co. K, 3rd Colo. Cav.”) and ending with Sgt. Frank Comb (“Co. B, 1st Minn. Inf.”). He’d made a path through the snow from grave to grave, half of them clustered together, the rest spread out in family plots. The cemetery was deserted that day, as it usually was in winter. The ground was so hard that you had to use dynamite to blast out a grave, and folks wished the dying would hold out just a little longer, until spring, so the burying would be easier. Few came to visit the dead when the weather was bad, only the old widow, Mittie McCauley, and she did not intrude, just nodded, because she had her own ghosts to ride. Or maybe she liked the solitude, too.

In the summer and fall, the cemetery was filled with women tending the graves, for women were the survivors. They came with their bouquets of columbine and lupin summer’s-half-over set in jars of water and propped them beside the markers. Women in Swandyke were charged with caring for the departed, most of them dead from accidents in the mines or on the gold dredges, much the way the widows of the South carried on what they called the “noble cause” after that terrible war. They had forgotten there was nothing noble about war, about the killing and the maiming. Minder’d never forget the dead men, nor the smell of rotting flesh that had risen up when he’d stepped on a severed leg or guts that had spilled out onto the red dirt. Or the sounds—the guns, the cries of the wounded, the rebel yell, which could chill a Union soldier to the bone. And the silence when it was all over. That had been even worse, the silence as you walked among the dead and praised God that you were still alive, although you never knew why. Why had God spared him and not the rebel boy who had lain at his feet, his head lying off to the side, the skull cleaved as cleanly as if it were a split melon? Why had God saved Minder and not his pard? It made a man wonder if God cared or if there really was a God. Over the years, Minder had decided there wasn’t. And even if there was, Minder didn’t like him much.

Then there were the worst sounds of all, the noise of the explosion and the screams of the men burning, drowning, calling out as they sank into the water and then were still. Those were the sounds of Minder’s own personal hell, the sounds that he believed would follow him into eternity.

The old man walked on to the next grave, stopped, and greeted Alfred Totter. He’d known Al Totter, worked beside him for five years at the old Irish Queen Mine in the 1870s before either one mentioned he’d fought in the war. And then they’d considered each other warily, like dogs circling, before they found out they were both Union volunteers. They’d talked about the war as only two men who’d shared a terrible time could do, because no one else understood. Neither wives nor children, especially not wives. Minder had never told his wife about the worst of the war. She was a good woman and had suffered, too, but she hadn’t seen her friends dying around her, their faces torn off, their limbs severed.

Nor had he ever told anyone else about that terror he relived every day.

Minder picked up a pine bough on the Totter grave and shook off the snow, then replaced the branch. He thought of those branches as quilts, and in winter, he placed them on the graves reverently, as if to keep the occupants warm.

Now, he looked out at the sun shining on the snow and saw Mittie McCauley trudging up the trail to the graveyard, and suddenly he felt the need of a human voice. The day’s work at the cemetery made him gloomy, and he wanted to shake off the feeling before Emmett came home, bursting through the door with news of his day. Emmett didn’t like going off in the morning, was afraid of the new day, but he was happy when he walked home with his little friends.

Minder waved to Mittie and watched as she came through the iron arch with
MOUNTAINBROOK CEMETERY
spelled out in big iron letters. Seeing Minder waiting for her, the old woman went over to him, adjusting her scarf, retying it under her chin. Her face was brown from the sun, but smooth, and she was as fit as anyone her age—my age, Minder thought, maybe a little younger. She ought to marry again, her being a widow for ten, fifteen years. He himself had given it a little thought. The boy needed a woman around. But Minder didn’t want to adjust to someone else. Besides, better men had courted the woman and had no luck, and he’d known his chances were poor.

“You do them proud,” the woman told him now. “You don’t let them be forgot.”

“It’s little enough. I’m the lone sentinel around here.” He had a sudden thought. “Did Frederick fight in the war? Was your husband a soldier? I ask you: Was Fred one of us?”

She looked off at the far mountains, sky blue in the distance. “He was. Frederick fought for the Union, was at Shiloh. But he wouldn’t talk of it.”

“I could tend his grave for you, save you the trouble of tramping out in the cold.”

“No, it’s my job. I can talk to him up here, talk out loud. People must think I’m touched.”

Minder smiled. He talked out loud to the graves, too.

“I look at the ground when I tell him things, but I like to think he’s up there.” She pointed upward with her chin and laughed a little. “I guess I’ll never know. There’s things can’t be explained in this world.”

“If Fred McCauley’s not in heaven, nobody’s there,” Minder replied, although he wasn’t so sure. The old woman’s husband had fallen into temptation at times.

“I wonder…” she said, and she stopped, and Minder waited. “I wonder if he finds peace now. I wonder if any of them do.”

Minder had wondered that, too; every day he’d asked that question. “I’m not for sure knowing, but I think some of them do. Maybe. But not all. No, I think not all.” He was one of those who would never find peace.

Minder was eighteen when he went for a soldier. He’d wanted to join earlier, but his pa said he’d do more good at home, working on the farm, instead of turning himself into cannon fodder for the Secesh. Besides, who cared about freeing the slaves? the old man asked. Minder thought he knew what it was like to be a slave. It was for sure that his father worked him like one, got him up before daylight, rode him like a mule until it was too dark to see, beat him when he felt like it, because the father was that cruel. The difficult life had taken everything out of the old man but meanness and cussing.

Minder was raised hard. The eldest of five boys, he was low like his father and pack-jam full, as solid as a pine knot, and was used to the relentlessness of farmwork. He’d had two precious years of school, had it only because his mother had insisted on it, and then she’d fallen and been disabled to work. She’d taken a fever, and cut off her hair, which was long and thick and as red as cherries, and his father, a Bible-thumper when it suited him, had smacked her for it, saying, “If a woman cut her hair, let her also shave.” It was only a matter of time, living with the old man, that she went in meanness, too, and told Minder that, at nine, he was old enough to do a man’s work. He’d tried to protect his brothers, especially the one who wasn’t just right in the head and almost too sickly that he couldn’t be raised up, but the parents had a way of turning the boys against one another, so after a time, Minder looked out only for himself.

He asked his father about joining up. Minder thought it would be a lark, tramping off to the South to fight the Secesh. The old man cussed him out, said he’d beat the starch out of him if he tried to leave, use him like a mule to pull the plow, which was the father’s way of punishing the boys, sometimes yoking two of them together. Minder didn’t know that, at eighteen, he had the right.

The old man didn’t trust the boy to stay on the farm, and he watched him, so Minder bided his time. He waited until he was ordered to the blacksmith with a plowshare to be mended. He went, spent the day in town, waited until dark to go home, met the old man on the road, because the father had thought the son had joined up and was on his way to drag the boy back. Minder felt smug, said the blacksmith had been busy, so he’d had to wait all day. He figured that the next time Minder went to town, the old man wouldn’t be so anxious to see him home, and that might buy him an extra day. So Minder buried his few possessions—a knife, a dollar in pennies and nickels, a marble, an eagle claw, a rock he’d seen fall out of the sky—in a stone crock near the road and waited until he was sent on another errand. He collected his treasure then, and instead of walking to the town, he hitched a ride in a wagon with a farmer who was going all the way to the Mississippi River to Fort Madison, Iowa, and he joined up there. It was an easy thing to do. He scratched the pen to the paper, and he was a soldier in the United States Army.

Minder met Billy Boy Forsythe in Fort Madison on that first day. Billy Boy had joined up, too, and his family had come along to see him off—two brothers, three sisters, his mother and father. The women cried, and the men shook Billy Boy’s hands and told him how proud they were of him. “I hate to leave you boys with the work,” Billy Boy told his brothers, but they punched him in the arm and replied they were glad he was going to do his part to preserve the Union.

“You’ll make a brave and loyal soldier,” one of them said.

Minder watched them. He wasn’t jealous, but more curious, because he’d never seen a family act that way, didn’t understand it. He stared at Billy Boy’s sisters, and reddened when one turned and caught him looking. He expected her to raise her nose in the air the way the girls at home did, but instead she went over to him and asked if he was part of her brother’s unit. Minder didn’t know, but Billy Boy said, “If you just joined, I bet you and me are going to fight this war together.” And so Minder sat with the family when they opened the picnic baskets and shared the fried chicken and cake and lemonade. And later, he and Billy Boy shared the pint that Billy Boy’s brothers passed around as a going-away present. It was a fine day, the finest of his life. He’d met Billy Boy, joined the army with a pay of thirteen dollars a month (more money than his entire family had ever had at one time), acquired the first whole suit of clothes he’d ever worn, and a pair of drawers. Minder had never worn drawers before. He thought he was a swell.