Across Five Aprils

by Irene Hunt

  “What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at?”

  “You and Mary hev lamed him right from wrong, Ed.”

  “But they’re bein’ cheered on, Matt. Congress—the whole country—is happy with ‘em; these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin’. Mary and me has had to guard aginst that way of his.”

  Matt looked at his friend with troubled eyes; any words that he could think of seemed useless, worse than silence.

  Ed got to his feet. “Well, it shorely will be over soon. It’s got to be over soon. The South can’t hold out much longer.”

  That was what the papers were saying, too, along with the politicians and the men who congregated in little groups at the country stores. Surely it would be over soon. The South was starving, its railroads and seaports gone; Grant was only a few miles from Richmond; Thomas was in Tennessee; and Sherman was roaring up through South Carolina. Any week now, any day, any hour, the great terror that had gripped the land for four years would be over.

  Eb wrote from Tennessee. He was with General Schofield’s army, and they were marching toward North Carolina to join Sherman when he reached there.

  .... Its all goin to be over soon. I figger to be home to help Jeth with the spring plowin and plantin. I hev not felt in sech good spirrits sence the erly days when Tom and me allowed this war was goin to be pure fun. We was like fulish young uns....

  But the war went on. In Virginia more soldiers died each day in Grant’s army and in Lee’s because the South, even in its death throes, would not admit defeat, and the tragedy of these deaths was even greater when the hopes of homecoming and peace were just within realization.

  Jethro had just turned thirteen in early 1865. He had grown tall during the years of the war, and although he was still slender, there was a taut look about his body, as if all his muscles had attained a fine precision in working together for the achievement of a needed strength. His face was becoming more angular and the great blue eyes of his early years were darkened by shifting lights of gray and green. Matt and Ellen noticed a change in him; he was gentle with them and with Nancy and her children, but there was a reserve about him that had grown steadily greater with the years. They watched him anxiously, wondering and sometimes fearing a little; he was so much like Bill, and Bill, the gentlest of all their sons, had walked out of their lives with a finality that cut like a knife. To lose Jethro would have been too much; unconsciously they clutched at him.

  “It’s bin long sence you hev told me any of the old lessons Shad used to larn you, Jeth,” his mother remarked one morning, as she sat before the fire watching him pace aimlessly.

  He took a handful of crumbs and tossed them out to the sparrows that hopped on crusted snowdrifts outside. When he came back he put his hand briefly on her shoulder.

  “Seems sometimes that the old lessons are bein’ lost in the worry of new things happenin’ each day, Ma,” he said quietly. “Somehow I don’t have the heart for things that used to set me up so much.”

  “What was on yore mind jest now, Jeth, while you was pacin’ back and for’ard?”

  “I guess I was thinkin’ of some things Mr. Milton said the last time he spent the night with us, things about the war—and peace when it comes.”

  “Do you want to tell me of ’em? I be proud to hear the things that air in yore mind.”

  Jethro felt a wrench of pity at her little plea, but he stood before her silent and troubled.

  “I can’t put it the way Mr. Milton does, Ma,” he explained after a while. “I can’t make you understand; some things he says I don’t quite understand, either. I just have a feelin’ for them, and I can’t form the thoughts into good words.”

  Ellen nodded meekly. There were, indeed, many things that she could not understand. Most of Ross Milton’s talk was beyond her comprehension. But it was having Jethro talk to her that she wanted, not an understanding of Ross Milton’s words.

  Jethro walked slowly out of the house. The look in his mother’s eyes troubled him; so did the things the editor had talked about on a recent night when he and Jethro sat before the fire in the cabin, after Matt’s weariness had forced him off to bed.

  “Don’t expect peace to be a perfect pearl, Jeth,” Ross Milton had warned. “This is a land lying in destruction, physical and spiritual. If the twisted railroads and the burned cities and the fields covered with the bones of dead men— if that were all, we could soon rise out of the destruction. But the hate that burns in old scars, and the thirst for revenge that has distorted men until they should be in straitjackets rather than in high office—these are the things that may make peace a sorry thing....”

  Jethro had not liked to hear the editor talk like that. To him peace had been a shining dream, with Shad and Jenny back home, with John more of a brother now and a hero in Jethro’s eyes, with Eb coming home in pride instead of degradation. No, of course, peace would not be a perfect pearl, not with young Tom never to return, not with the possibility of Bill’s return only the most shadowy and remote of chances. Still, peace would mean a glorious sense of relief; in all his years Jethro had heard either the talk of war’s imminence or its reality. He had wished that Ross Milton would not rip up his dream of peace.

  He had said to the editor that night: “But we have the President, Mr. Milton. Don’t you remember the last of his speech a few weeks ago on Inauguration Day: ‘to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who should have borne the battle’? Won’t the President do away with this hate and revenge that you’re tellin’ me about?”

  Ross Milton had taken a brand from the fireplace carefully between his long fingers, and he waited until he had lighted his pipe before he answered Jethro’s question.

  “My hope lies in Abraham Lincoln. He has four years before him and the power of a mighty office; if he can control the bigots, if he can allow the defeated their dignity and a chance to rise out of their despair—if he can do this, then maybe peace will not be a mockery.”

  They had talked of the thirteenth amendment that night. It had been passed by Congress, and now it was up to the states; Illinois had already ratified it—Jethro felt proud that his state was the first to do so—and there was little doubt that three-fourths of the others would follow. Then slavery would be constitutionally abolished once and for all.

  “It’s a great thing, isn’t it, Mr. Milton?”

  “It’s a far star, Jeth; it’s a dim pinpoint of light in the darkness.”

  Jethro had been provoked. “I don’t know why you talk like that,” he exclaimed.

  The editor reached out and put his hand on Jethro’s knee. “Because, Jeth, after the thirteenth amendment has become a part of our Constitution and for years afterward—twenty-five, maybe fifty—there will be men and women with dark faces who will walk the length and width of this land in search of the bright promise the thirteenth amendment holds out to them.”

  He turned with a sudden thrust of his crippled body to Jethro. “What’s going to happen to them, Jeth? What will become of men and women who have known nothing but servitude all the days of their lives? They are without experience, without education; they’ll be pawns in the hands of exploiters all over the nation. You watch this thing, Jeth, you watch the abolitionists who have ranted against the South; see if they extend the hand of friendship to the uneducated, unskilled men who will come north looking to them as to a savior. Look what has happened in our own armies; our soldiers have been angered by the dark man who has assumed they were his friends. Sure, the North has talked loudly against slavery. I have joined in that talk, but I tell you, all of us are getting a little quieter when the question comes up as to w
hat we are to do about the products of slavery.”

  Jethro tramped the frozen fields and thought of the things Ross Milton had said. He remembered the supper table that night in mid-April of 1861 and Wilse Graham’s angry voice exclaiming, “Would yore abolitionists git the crocodile tears sloshed out of their eyes so they could take the black man by the hand? Would they say, ‘We want you to come to our churches and yore children to come to our schools—why, we danged near fergit the difference in the colors of our skins because we air so almightly full of brotherly love!’ Would it be like that in yore northern cities, Cousin John?”

  The waiting for word of peace went on. February passed, the bitterest cold of the year coming as usual in that month. Then March came, breaking the back of winter with warmth permeating the cold, and with the smell of spring drifting daily to tease hope and to give shy promise of a coming radiance.

  Then, finally, the fifth April of the war arrived, and in southern Illinois it came in a burst of warmth and color that seemed prophetic to those who waited for word from Washington. That fifth April had moved only into its second week when the news came that the guns were silent, that the terms of peace had been signed by two tired men somewhere in Virginia at a place called Appomattox Court House.

  Jethro rode into Newton with Ed Turner and was allowed to spend the night with Ross Milton. By the time he reached the little county seat, the bunting was spread out by the yard, flags flew from almost every house, a long unused cannon boomed from the cliffs above the river. They had lifted the trapdoor in the roof of the jail, allowing the half-dozen delinquent citizens of the county to climb outside so their voices might add to the clamor. Men danced in the streets and embraced one another; some drank a continuous string of toasts to Lincoln, Grant, and a dozen others, until their bottles were empty and the compliments had to be started all over again with new purchases at one of the saloons. Others wept while they shouted; there was hardly a home in the county that had not felt the fiery lash of the war’s tongue.

  The editor took Jethro to the restaurant for supper. This time the place was milling with people who had come into town to celebrate. Plump Mrs. Hiles was bustling about in a near-frenzy, but she took time to speak to Jethro and to lament his golden curls, which had straightened out into a slightly waving thatch of light brown hair combed neatly back of the ears.

  “You ain’t as purty as you was three years ago, young Creighton,” she said brightly. “You’re gittin’ a little of the owl-look of yore friend Red Milton here.”

  She clapped him on the back briefly and went on to her duties, knowing very well she had said a thing that pleased Matt Creighton’s youngest boy.

  That night there was a great display of fireworks, and then the town’s band played while nearly a thousand voices joined in singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” Jethro’s heart swelled in his breast. He thought suddenly of the tired face of the President.

  “How I’d like to shake hands with him tonight,” he thought. He turned to look at Ross Milton, who stood beside him, balanced painfully upon his crutches. The editor’s eyes were fixed on something far away above the heads of the crowd, and Jethro noticed that tears were running down his cheeks.

  At home the next day he tried to describe the details of the celebration to his parents and to Nancy, who listened with eyes as radiant as Jenny’s used to be when she received her first letters from Shadrach. The little boys had caught some of their mother’s happiness. “Do you remember him, Jeth?” they asked, with some awe of Jethro’s thirteen years. “Do you remember what our pa looks like?”

  Daily the color of April grew brighter. The apple and peach orchards were in bloom again, and the redbud was almost ready to burst. The little leaves on the silver poplars quivered in green and silver lights with every passing breeze, and Jenny’s favorite lilacs bloomed in great thick clusters, deep purple and as fragrant as any beautiful thing on earth.

  Then suddenly, because there were no longer any eyes to perceive it, the color was gone, and the fifth April had become, like her four older sisters, a time of grief and desolation.

  People would ask for many years: “Where were you when you heard? What were you doing? Who brought you the word?”

  Jethro would remember a sunlit field and a sense of serenity and happiness such as he had not known since early childhood. He would remember that he had stopped his team when he saw Nancy running toward him, that Nancy’s face had been as white as it was during the days of waiting for a letter after the battle of Chickamauga, that she had sobbed against his shoulder.

  He thought at first that something had happened to his father, or that word had come of John’s being one of those last soldiers to die when peace was almost within reach.

  Then Nancy said, “Jeth, it’s the President—they’ve killed the President.”

  The, work of the farm had to go on. Ellen had washed and scrubbed and cooked for her family the summer her three children had died, and in the spring of ’65, Jethro went back to the fields and plowed the same furrows he had plowed for the past four years. But there was no longer any beauty in the world about him or any serenity in his heart. Sometimes he cried as the closing lines of his letter from the President flashed into his mind: “May God bless you for your earnest effort to seek out the right; may He guide both you and me in that search during the days to come.” And again he remembered Ross Milton’s words: “My hope lies in Abraham Lincoln.... if he can control the bigots, if he can allow the defeated their dignity—”

  Little by little the story came through—details of the assassination, the attempted murder of the Secretary of State, the nation’s wrath and woe. And then the news of a train on its way from the East, a train carrying Abraham Lincoln back to Springfield, Illinois.

  One thought was with Jethro constantly during those April days as the train bearing the President made its slow journey across the miles toward Springfield.

  “I want to see him; just once I want to look on his face. Springfield is only a hundred miles away....”

  But the hundred miles might just as well have been a thousand. The yoke of the farm had settled firmly across Jethro’s shoulders; his work in the fields at the proper season was the sole source of food for his parents, for John’s family, and for himself. There was no time or opportunity to go to Springfield, no hope of looking upon a face at once the plainest and the most beautiful, the humblest and the most magnificent, that Jethro would know in his lifetime.

  It was the saddest and most cruel April of the five. It had held out an almost unbelievable joy and had then struck out in fury at those whose hands were outstretched. Jethro had learned to accept the whims of fate, schooled as he was in the philosophy of men who work the soil. The rains came or they were withheld, the heat ripened the grain or blasted it with a scorching flame, the ears of corn matured in golden beauty or they were infested by worms or blight. One accepted the good or the evil with humility, for life was a mystery, and questions were not for the lowly. But on the last Sunday of that April, a Sunday of sunlight and bright sky, Jethro lay in the grass on Walnut Hill, and rage mingled with the grief in his heart.

  “Why did it happen? Why—why—did it have to happen?” He lay with his face close to the earth, clutching the fresh spring grass with both hands. “Never before has a president been killed; they’ve been looked after, watched over, and now this one, the one that has carried the load of this war till he’s old and tired, the one that was my friend—”

  He tried for a while to believe that the agony inside him was part of one of the nightmares that had recurred so often ever since the early stories of Wilson’s Creek. But the warm April breeze stirred his hair, and the smell of the earth and the cry of the birds in the trees above him were a part of reality. This was no dream. Abraham Lincoln had been senselessly slain by the hand of a madman, and Jethro Creighton, with all the people of his time, had suffered an irreparable loss.

  He heard steps approaching, and a moment later a h
and was laid on his shoulder. He thought it might be Ed Turner or maybe old Israel Thomas, kind and full of sympathy, but of no help to him in this hour. He could not talk, nor did he wish to listen, and so he lay quietly, hoping the intruder would go away and leave him to the pain of this latest and mightiest blow.

  But the hand was not lifted, and after a long moment someone spoke. Recognition of the voice drew Jethro up in startled surprise. The man who knelt beside him was thin and gaunt, with a soft, dark beard covering his cheeks; he was a young man, but his eyes were tired, and there were a few strands of gray in his dark hair. Jethro would have passed him on the streets of Newton without recognizing him, but the voice had not changed. It was that of his teacher—his brother now—Shadrach Yale.

  He had not embraced one of his brothers since the days of his very early childhood, but that morning he put his arms about Shadrach, and slowly the joy for the living assuaged a little the grief for the dead.

  “Shad, it’s a day I’ve dreamed about,” he said, and even as he spoke, he vaguely wondered why it was that he should whisper the words.

  Shadrach did not speak at first. He sat looking at Jethro as if he, in turn, doubted the reality of his senses. Finally he said, “Jeth—Jeth, how you have grown, how much you look like Bill—I can’t believe it.”

  They were silent for a long time, each studying the other’s face. An onlooker, not understanding the situation, would have wondered at the strange intensity of the two; an onlooker might have believed for a moment that they were man and boy suddenly bereft of their reason.

  Jethro finally broke the silence. “Jenny?” he asked eagerly.

  Shadrach smiled then. “She’s up at the house, Jeth, all eagerness to see you. I asked if I might come out and find you first—it has been such a long time—”

  “How did you get here, Shad? You didn’t let us know.”

  “Mr. Milton met us in Olney last night and loaned us his horse and buggy to drive up here today. We wanted to surprise you; we had hoped it would be a perfect homecoming.”