He did not like to ask others to write letters on his behalf like some of the other illiterates or semiliterates, so when Galvin would find dead Rebel soldiers with letters on them he would send them to Harriet in Boston so she might hear of the war firsthand. He would write out his name at the bottom so she would know where the letter came from, and he included a local flower petal or a distinctive leaf. He did not want to bother even the men who liked to write. They were so tired all the time. They were all so tired. Galvin could often tell by the slowed expressions of some men’s faces before a battle—almost as though they were still asleep—who would surely not see the next morning.
“If I could only get home the Union can go to Hell,” Galvin heard one officer say.
Galvin did not notice the diminishing rations that angered so many, because much of the time now he could not taste or smell or even hear his own voice. With food no longer particularly satisfying, Galvin began a habit of chewing pebbles, then scraps of paper torn from the assistant surgeon’s dwindling traveling library and from Rebel letters, to keep his mouth warm and occupied. The scraps got smaller and smaller, to conserve what he could find.
One of their men who grew too lame on a march was left at camp, and was brought in two days later, murdered for his wallet. Galvin told everyone that the war was worse than Napoleon’s Russian campaign. He was dosed with morphine and castor oil for diarrhea and the doctor gave him powders that made him dizzy and frustrated. He was down to a single pair of drawers, and the traveling sutlers who sold them from wagons asked $2.50 for a pair worth thirty cents. The sutler said he would not lower the price but might raise it if Galvin waited too long. Galvin wanted to bash the sutler’s skull inside his head, but he didn’t. He asked the adjutant to write a letter to Harriet Galvin asking her to send two pairs of heavy wool drawers. It was the only letter that was ever written for him during the war.
Pickaxes were needed to remove bodies fixed to the ground with ice. When the heat came again, Company C found a stubble field of unburied black bodies. Galvin marveled at so many blacks in the blue uniform, but then he realized what he was seeing: The bodies had been left in the August sun for a full day and were burned black by the heat and crawling with vermin. Men were dead in every conceivable position, and horses beyond count, many of them seeming to kneel genteelly on all fours, as though they were waiting for a child to saddle them.
Soon after, Galvin heard that some generals were returning escaped slaves to their masters and chattering with the slave masters like they were meeting for cards. Could this be? The war made no sense at all if it was not fought to better the slaves. On one march, Galvin saw a dead Negro whose ears had been nailed to a tree as punishment for attempted escape. His master had left him naked, knowing well how the voracious mosquitoes and flies would intercede.
Galvin couldn’t understand the protests raised by Union soldiers when Massachusetts formed a Negro regiment. One Illinois regiment they came upon was threatening to desert as a group if Lincoln freed one more slave.
At a Negro revival Galvin had seen during the first months of the war, he listened to a prayer blessing the soldiers passing through the town: “De good Lord take dese ’ere mourners and shake ’em over Hell, but don’t lieff ’em go.”
And they sang:
“The Devil’s mad and I am glad—Glory Hallelujah!
He’s lost a soul he thought he had—Glory Hallelujah!”
“The Negroes have helped us, spied for us. They need our help as well,” Galvin said.
“I’d rather see the Union dead than won by niggers!” a lieutenant in Galvin’s company shouted in his face.
More than once, Galvin had seen a soldier take hold of a Negro wench fleeing her master and whisk her off into the woods to roaring cheers.
Food was gone on both sides of the battle lines. One morning, three Rebel soldiers were caught scavenging for food in the woods near their encampment. They looked nearly starved, jowls hanging out. With them was a deserter from Galvin’s ranks. Captain Kingsley ordered Private Galvin to shoot the deserter dead. Galvin felt as though he would vomit blood if he tried to speak. “Without the proper ceremonies, Captain?” he finally said.
“We’re marching for battle, Private. There’s no time for a trial and no time to hang him, so you’ll shoot him here! Ready . . . aim . . . fire!”
Galvin had seen a punishment for a private who had refused such an order. It was called “bucking and gagging,” having one’s hands tied over his knees with one bayonet lodged between his arms and legs and another tied in his mouth. The deserter, gaunt and empty, did not look particularly perturbed. “Shoot me, then.”
“Private, now!” ordered the Captain. “You want your punishment with them?”
Galvin shot the man dead at point-blank range. The others ran the limp body through a dozen or so times with the blades of their bayonets. The captain recoiled, an icy glow in his eyes, and ordered Galvin to shoot the three Rebel prisoners on the spot. When Galvin hesitated, Captain Kingsley yanked him to one side by the arm.
“You’re always watching, aren’t you, Possum? You’re always watching everyone like you know better what to do in your heart than we do. Well, now you’ll do just what I say. Now you will, by thunder.” All his teeth were bared as he spoke.
The three Rebels were lined up. After “Ready, aim, fire,” Galvin shot each of them, by turn, in the head with his Enfield rifle. He could feel as little emotion, as he did so, as he could smell, taste, or hear. That same week, Galvin saw four Union soldiers, including two from his own company, molesting two young girls they had taken from a local town. Galvin told his superiors and, as an example, the four men were tied to a cannon wheel and had their backs beaten with a whip. Because Galvin had been the one to inform on them, he had to employ the whip.
At the next battle, Galvin didn’t feel like he was fighting for one side or another, against one side or another. He was just battling. The whole world was battling and raging against itself, and the noises never ceased. He could barely make out Rebel from Yank, in any case. He had brushed against some poison leaf the day before and by nightfall his eyes were almost completely shut; the men laughed at this because, while others had their eyes shot out and heads split open, Benjamin Galvin had fought like a tiger and didn’t get a scratch. One soldier, who was later put in an asylum, threatened to kill Galvin that day, pointing his rifle at Galvin’s breastbone and warning him that if he didn’t stop chewing that damned paper, he’d shoot him dead right then.
After Galvin’s first war wound, a bullet to the chest, he was sent to be a guard at Fort Warren off Boston Harbor, where Rebel prisoners were being kept, until he could fully recover. There, prisoners with money purchased nicer rooms and better food, regardless of their levels of culpability or of how many men they had killed unjustly.
Harriet begged Benjamin not to go back to war, but he knew the men needed him. When he anxiously rejoined Company C in Virginia, there had been so many openings in the regiment from death and desertion that he was commissioned a second lieutenant.
He understood from newer recruits that rich boys back home were paying three hundred dollars to exempt themselves from service. Galvin boiled over with anger. He felt heart-wrenchingly weak, and he did not sleep for more than a few minutes a night. But he had to move: to keep moving. During the next battle, he dropped among the dead bodies and fell asleep thinking of those rich boys. The Rebels, poking through the dead that night and finding him, picked him up and took him to Libby Prison in Richmond. They let all the privates go because they were not important, but Galvin was a second lieutenant, so he spent four months at Libby. Galvin remembered only blurry images and some sounds from his time as a prisoner of war. It was as though he continued to sleep and dream the whole time.
When he was released to Boston, Benjamin Galvin was mustered out with the rest of his regiment in a big ceremony on the State House steps. Their tattered company flag was folded and given to the governor. Only
two hundred of the original one thousand were alive. Galvin could not understand how the war could be considered done. They had not come close to meeting their cause. Slaves were freed, but the enemy had not changed its ways—had not been punished. Galvin was not political, but he knew that the blacks would have no peace in the South, slavery or no slavery, and he knew also what those who had not fought the war did not know: that the enemy was all around them at all times and had not surrendered at all. And never, never for a moment had the enemy been only the Southerners.
Galvin felt he now spoke in a different language that civilians could not understand. They could not even hear. Only fellow soldiers, who had been blasted by cannon and shell, had that capacity. In Boston, Galvin began to travel in bands with them. They looked haggard and exhausted, like the groups of stragglers they had seen in the woods. But these veterans, many of whom had lost jobs and families and talked about how they should have died in the war—at least their wives would get a pension—were on the prowl for money or pretty girls, and to get drunk and to raise Pluto. They no longer remembered to watch for the enemy and were blind just like the rest.
While Galvin was walking through the streets, he would often begin to feel that someone was following him closely. He would stop suddenly and spin around with a frightful look in his wide eyes, but the enemy would vanish into a corner or a crowd. The Devil’s mad and I am glad . . .
He slept with an ax under his pillow most nights. During a thunderstorm, he woke up and threatened Harriet with a rifle, accusing her of being a Rebel spy. That same night, he stood in the yard in the rain in his full uniform, patrolling for hours. At other times, he would lock Harriet in a room and guard her, explaining that someone was trying to get her. She had to work for a launderer to pay their debts, and pressed him to see doctors. The doctor said he had “soldier’s heart”—fast palpitations caused by battle exposure. She managed to convince him to go to a soldiers’-aid home, which, she understood from other wives, helped tend to troubled soldiers. When Benjamin Galvin heard George Washington Greene give a sermon at the soldiers’-aid home, he felt the first ray of light he could remember in a long time.
Greene spoke about a man far away, a man who understood, a man named Dante Alighieri. He was a former soldier, too, who had fallen victim to a great divide between the parties of his sullied city and had been commanded to journey through the afterlife so that he might put all mankind right. What an incredible ordering to life and death was witnessed there! No bloodshed in Hell was incidental, each person was divinely deserving of a precise punishment created by the love of God. What perfection came with each contrapasso, as the Reverend Greene called the punishments, matched with every sin of every man and woman on earth evermore until final judgment day!
Galvin understood how angry Dante became that the men of his city, friend and foe alike, knew only the material and physical, pleasure and money, and did not see the judgments that were rapidly at their heels. Benjamin Galvin could not pay close enough attention to Reverend Greene’s weekly sermons and could not hear them half enough; could not get them out of his head. He felt two feet taller every time he walked out of that chapel.
The other soldiers seemed to enjoy the sermons as well, though he sensed they did not understand them the way he could. Galvin, lingering one afternoon after the sermon and staring at Reverend Greene, overheard a conversation between him and one of the soldiers.
“Mr. Greene, may I remark that I greatly liked your sermon today,” said Captain Dexter Blight, who had a hay-tinted handlebar mustache and a strong limp. “Might I ask, sir—would I be able to read more about Dante’s travels? Many of my nights are sleepless, and I have much time.”
The old minister inquired whether the soldier could read Italian. “Well,” said George Washington Greene after being answered in the negative, “you will find Dante’s journey in English, in all the detail you wish, quite soon enough, my dear lad! You see, Mr. Longfellow of Cambridge is completing a translation—no, a transformation—into English by meeting each week with something of a cabinet council, a Dante Club he has formed, of which I humbly count myself a member. Look for the book next year at your bookseller, my good man, from the incomparable presses of Ticknor and Fields!”
Longfellow. Longfellow was involved with Dante. How right that seemed to Galvin, who had heard all his poems from Harriet’s lips. Galvin said to a policeman in town, “Ticknor and Fields,” and was directed to an enormous mansion on Tremont Street and Hamilton Place. The showroom was eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, with gleaming woodwork and carved columns and counters of western fir that shone under giant chandeliers. An elaborate archway at the far end of the showroom encased the finest samples of Ticknor & Fields editions, with spines of blue and gold and chocolate brown, and behind the arch a compartment displayed the latest numbers of the publishing house’s periodicals. Galvin entered the showroom with a vague hope that Dante himself could be waiting for him. He stepped in reverentially, his hat doffed and his eyes closed.
The publishing house’s new offices had opened only a few days before Benjamin Galvin walked in.
“Here answering the ad?” No response. “Excellent, excellent. Please fill this out. Nobody better in the business to work for than J. T. Fields. The man’s a genius, a guardian angel of all authors, he is.” This man identified himself as Spencer Clark, financial clerk of the firm.
Galvin accepted the paper and pen and stared widely, relocating the bit of paper he always carried in his mouth from one cheek to the other.
“You must give us a name for us to call you, son,” said Clark. “Come on, then. Give us a name or I shall have to send you on your way.”
Clark pointed to a line on the employment form, so Galvin put his pen there and wrote: “D-A-N-T-E-A-L.” He paused. How was Alighieri spelled out? Ala?-Ali? Galvin sat wondering until the ink on his pen had dried. Clark, having been interrupted by someone across the room, cleared his throat loudly and snatched the paper.
“Ah, don’t be shy, what have we got?” Clark squinted. “Dan Teal. Good boy.” Clark sighed disappointedly. He knew the chap couldn’t be a clerk with writing like that, but the house needed every hand it could find during this transition to the massive New Corner mansion. “Now, Daniel my lad, pray just tell us where you live and we can start you tonight as a shop boy, four nights a week. Mr. Osgood, he’s the senior clerk, he’ll show you the ropes before he leaves tonight. Oh, and congratulations, Teal. You’ve just begun your new life at Ticknor and Fields!”
“Dan Teal,” the new employee said, repeating his new name over and over.
Teal thrilled to hear Dante discussed when passing the Authors’ Room on the second floor as he rolled his cart of papers to be delivered from one room to another for the clerks to have when they arrived in the morning. The fragments of discussions he overheard were not like Reverend Greene’s sermons, which spoke of the wonders of Dante’s journey. He didn’t hear many specifics about Dante at the Corner, and most nights Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Fields, and their Dante troop did not meet at all. Still, here at Ticknor & Fields were men somehow allied with Dante’s survival—speaking of how they might go about protecting him.
Teal’s head spun and he ran outside and vomited in the mall at the Common: Dante required protection! Teal listened in on the conversations of Mr. Fields and Longfellow and Lowell and Dr. Holmes and gathered that the Harvard College board was attacking Dante. Teal had heard around town that Harvard, too, was looking for new employees, since many of its regular workers had been killed or disabled in the war. The College handed Teal a day job. After a week of work, Teal managed to change his assignment from yard gardener to daytime caretaker in University Hall, for it was there, Teal learned by asking the other workmen, that the College boards made their all-important decisions.
At the soldiers’-aid home, Reverend Greene shifted from general discussions of Dante to more specific accounts of the pilgrim’s journey. Circles separated his steps through Hel
l, each leading closer to the punishment of the great Lucifer, the possessor of all evil. In the anteroom of Hell, Greene guided Teal through the land of the Neutrals, where the Great Refuser, the worst offender there, could be found. The name of the Refuser, some pope, did not mean anything to Teal, but his having turned down a great and worthy position that could have ensured justice for millions made Teal burn with anger. Teal had heard through the walls of University Hall that Chief Justice Healey had point-blank refused an assigned position of great importance—a position that asked him to defend Dante.
Teal knew that the bookish adjutant from Company C had collected thousands of insects during their marches through the swampy, sticky states, and had sent them home in specially crafted crates so they would survive the trip to Boston. Teal purchased from him a box of deadly blowflies and maggots, along with a hive full of wasps, and followed Justice Healey from the courthouse to Wide Oaks, where he watched the judge say good-bye to his family.
The next morning, Teal entered the house through the back and cracked Healey’s head open with the butt of his pistol. He removed the judge’s clothes and stacked them neatly, for man’s garments did not belong on this coward. He then carried Healey out back and released the maggots and insects onto the head wound. Teal also speared a blank flag into the sandy ground nearby, for under such a cautionary sign Dante found the Neutrals. He felt at once that he had joined Dante, that he entered the long and dangerous path of salvation among the lost people.
Teal was torn up inside when Greene missed a week at the soldiers’-aid home due to illness. But then Greene returned and preached on the Simoniacs. Teal had already been alarmed and panicked at the arrangement made between the Harvard Corporation and Reverend Talbot, which he had heard discussed on several occasions at University Hall. How could a preacher accept money to bury Dante from the public, sell the power of his office for a rotten one thousand dollars? But there was nothing to be done until he knew how it was to be punished.
The Dante Club Page 42