No Common War

by Salisbury, Luke;

  “How awful for a child,” said Helen. She squeezed my hand.

  “Oedipus and the Sphinx,” I said. “Damned if you’re right, dead if wrong.”

  Helen kissed me. “You’re not a child now.”

  “A father tells a son to shoot, and heads on stakes watch the generations until someone answers the question.”

  “Have you learned the question?” Helen asked.

  “I tried at seminary, but did not.”

  “And now?”

  “No, but the answer is Gib Watkins,” I said, suddenly feeling brave that I had an answer. It was easy to feel brave in the presence and warmth of Helen.

  “Then I know the question,” she said, taking my face in both her hands. “They ask, ‘Are you like us? Or do you fight for another cause?’”

  “I fight for another cause,” I said. “And I love you.”

  Mason

  Goodbye

  May 1861

  5

  Our boys left on May 9th. Lorenzo and I would go with them as far as Utica. His boy Merrick, two years older than Moreau, had also joined the 24th New York Volunteers. Both were in Company G.

  The train chugged slowly into Sandy Creek station, belching smoke and cinders from a wide funnel and filling the air with the smell of burning wood. The engineer slowed so everyone could hear the Ellisburg and Belleville bands which had gotten on with Company K at Pierrepont Manor. Men hung out the windows and waved to the crowd which cheered wildly. As Company G got ready to board, they were swarmed by mothers and fathers and girlfriends and relatives and friends. Suddenly it was time to go and tears mingled with manly hugs, desperate kisses, slapped backs and shouts of “You’ll whip them rebels and be home ‘fore hayin’ time.” Pies and sandwiches and carefully packed baskets appeared from everywhere and were given to men on the train and men getting on. Mothers and girlfriends climbed aboard for a last goodbye and squeeze. Pride and loss struggled in many faces, even the soldiers’.

  Moreau and Helen parted by the train. They trembled, aware they were watched by parents, friends, soldiers, me. They embraced. Her green bonnet got pushed back; his tussled hair disappeared under the parasol. For the briefest of moments they had each other, and kissed—cheek—mouth—goodbye. So careful and public. So full of longing.

  It hurt to watch.

  I glanced at Mary. Her tears glistened in the sun. She wiped them quickly. They weren’t for show.

  Moreau gave Helen a white stone from the creek. Heart-shaped. Polished by eternities of water running to Lake Ontario. A stone to symbolize the constancy of his feelings. Helen gave Moreau something small. He kissed it, held it to his chest, and had it in his hand as he got on the train.

  “It’s a button,” Mary told me. “A tintype, with her picture on the metal. It’s the latest thing.”

  I shook hands, accepted promises of votes, and got on the train with the dignitaries. Mary stayed. She only wanted to say goodbye once.

  The next stop for the “Union express,” as the boys dubbed it, was Mannsville, where more men, pies, and another band got on. Speeches were declaimed, prayers offered, and girls and young women dispensed flowers, affection, and the communal sensuality of wild affirmation. It was like a camp meeting—duty and spirit and higher things simultaneously liberated into kissing, hugging and pledging. I spoke of the bravery of mothers and fathers, as well as the soldiers.

  “If this is the army,” Moreau told Merrick, “then bless it.”

  “Imagine what they’ll do when we get back!”

  In Rome, all the men and bands marched with more men and more bands down the main street. The first speaker mentioned the classical name of the city and invoked the Trojan War. He did this without mentioning the bickering of the commanders over a whore, the madness of Ajax, the adultery of Clytemnestra, or the mutilation of Hector. The parallels were inspiring, if selective.

  The next speaker shook his big head and silver mutton chop whiskers. Such facial hair was not yet called “sideburns.” The speaker spoke with bursting optimism. The Greek parallels became Roman models, which got mixed with Jesus Christ, the Crusades and the spirit of Oriskany and Saratoga. He spoke of the New Englanders who came to the Mohawk Valley “with a mighty tradition.”

  “They named cities after Greek and Roman places. Syracuse, Utica, Rome, Carthage, Ithaca! A renaissance in New York State founded on ancient learning and the ancient experiment of democracy! All equal before the law! Equal before work! Equal before God Almighty!

  “Depart and do His work!”

  The speaker, hurling whiskers and white forelock into a cool breeze, didn’t mention other enthusiasms that swept New York, though their heat had been felt by many in the crowd. In the past half-century, no place in America had seen so much unbridled imagination and wild energy. Central New York was the “burned-over district” because of the blistering waves of evangelism that regularly poured over the country. It started in 1821, when Charles Grandison Finney, a lawyer in Adams, went to the woods, prayed, wasn’t eaten by a bear, and received word directly from God. Break with Predestination! Each must establish a personal relationship with Me! Each saves or damns him-or herself! The news spread like fire and the message inflamed central New York.

  “Burned over.” Spiritualism was born in Hydesville, near Rochester, when two sisters, bored and cold during a long winter, heard rappings. The rappings turned into an industry—the Other World spoke and New York listened. The citizens listened to anything—lectures about bumps on the head, lectures about bumps in the night. Electricity. Mesmerism. Abolition. Wondrous cures and patent medicines, like those John D. Rockefeller’s father sold out of a wagon. Religions and cults sprang up like corn. Some folk waited for the world to end, others practiced free love. Many believed if alcohol were banished, the lion would lie down with the lamb. For others, paradise was giving women the vote. A man named Miller said the world would end on a particular day in 1844. The world didn’t oblige; Miller selected a new date and his following grew. Twenty-one-year-old Joseph Smith saw an angel in Palmyra who gave him The Book of Mormon on gold tablets, which, like a British cannon lost at the Battle of Big Sandy—a famous local story—disappeared in the mud. My father said if people didn’t have chores, they’d all be taking off their clothes and communicating with the dead. Central New York went over the nineteenth century in a barrel.

  Now it was war. All the passion, rational, spiritual, crazy, was coming together. It didn’t matter how the speakers invoked God or American ideals. The country was moving. Men were going to war. More would follow. Everything was simplified and lives would be transformed. Men had found the Lord, helped runaway slaves, chatted with the dead, waited for the end of the world, but after Sumter and Lincoln’s call for volunteers, all the energy and craziness marched under one banner. The moment of truth, the beginning and end of worlds, had come. What mattered was the moment. Whether men were fighting to free slaves, save the Union, or get out of town, they were going. The moment was militantly simplified. Moreau and Merrick and all the volunteers, all the speakers and all the crowds were following the energy—the dreams—of their fathers.

  I spoke last. The mayor of Rome forgot the Assemblyman from Sandy Creek and summoned me as an afterthought. By then I was mad enough to spit, and was hardly noticed as I took the podium. Families were folding blankets, packing up picnic baskets, and un-uniformed soldiers made ragged lines to get on the trains. I looked at retreating, chattering people, put aside my speech, lowered my head, and recited the 23rd Psalm. People stopped. Eyes welled up. I spoke slowly. I wanted to upstage the mayor, but as I spoke, the psalmist’s words matched what I felt, what we felt, named what we feared, and called for the strength we would need. Men bowed their heads. Women went to their knees. Voices joined mine. When I finished, I wasn’t upstaging anybody. Tears were on my face too.

  It was genius.

  When I found Moreau by the train at Rome, I hugged him hard. I’d prepared parting words—thought they were neede
d—but when I held my son, the holding and squeezing and warmth and smell of Moreau were all that mattered. The embrace broke and Moreau stepped onto the train. I said, “God bless you.”

  We hugged again.

  “Maybe we’ll meet in church,” Moreau said.

  I didn’t know why he said it.

  6

  Lorenzo and I got back to Sandy Creek late. We walked from the station under a cold moon and stopped at the mill. I opened the door and located a bottle of corn liquor. Lorenzo sat on a sack of corn meal and petted Rufus, the mill cat. Moonlight flooded through the open door. The stones were quiet. Water sluiced over the dam and we smelled the fine, strong smell of milled grain. I found tin cups and we drank to the boys.

  Moreau

  Hearing the Elephant

  May 1861-September 1862

  7

  Father and I had hugged by the train at Rome. That was important. I didn’t like what got said at the creek. I didn’t like what had got said for months. I pretended to forgive. There was meanness in that. Father is a man who’ll say anything to get what he wants. I’m a man who can be mean. We’d deal with it when the war was over.

  The train left Rome—this time with no bands—for Geneva. Some of the boys slept with pie-filled bellies. Others talked. The recent female attention was an irresistible stimulus. I closed my eyes and remembered leaving Sandy Creek the first time. I left to talk to God and to not talk to Father. I left to become a preacher. I wanted to be a different kind of talker.

  Father left once, but it didn’t work. He didn’t find a rich woman or friends in Washington City. He got a whipping, a good marriage, and Sandy Creek. I know how he felt. I didn’t want the limits of a good life in a good town, a church full of relatives, and a gristmill. I used to think the difference between us was that I was afraid of the dark and he wasn’t. Now I saw Father was afraid of other things and covered his fear—covered it better than any man I knew. I was afraid and couldn’t cover my fear. I went to seminary because I had bad dreams and because I didn’t want to be my father.

  On the train I thought about William and John Salisbury who killed an Indian and got punishment worthy of Saul. William was a Welshman and a Baptist who came to the new world to find land and baptize his children. It wasn’t Eden, not by a damn sight. Some were Elect, others weren’t. It wasn’t God who decided, but hard men in Plymouth and Boston. William Salisbury wasn’t Elect. The Serpent was here. English Cain slew Indian Abel. Men who came to live by God’s word cheated their neighbors, killed Indians, hanged witches, profited by the slave trade.

  When I was a child, dawn hours away, I used to see severed Salisbury heads at my window. They gibbered. Their tongues were cut out. Ants crawled in black mouths. “Where is God?” I blubbered to my parents. In our hearts, I was told.

  I went to seminary to cleanse my heart. I couldn’t put the world right, maybe I could put myself right. Maybe I could cleanse the notion I was cursed. “The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.” I tried prayer and poetry. I told myself the heads were symbols, a Sphinx. This helped, but who wants to be Oedipus? Oedipus didn’t know he was talking to the devil.

  I memorized Emerson’s “The Sphinx:”

  Who’ll tell me my secret,

  The ages have kept?

  I awaited the seer,

  While they slumbered and slept

  Out of sleeping a waking

  Out of waking a sleep;

  Life death overtaking

  Deep underneath deep?

  Powerful. Tricky.

  “Who’ll tell me my secret?” What was my secret? That Salisburys were baptized in blood?

  The poem asked good questions, but the answers were slippery. That’s poetry, I suppose. Emerson and his Sphinx talk in riddles. Life death overtaking? That could be salvation, but the sage doesn’t tell how to do it. Deep underneath deep? That’s good. What’s it mean? Damnation? Truth that sets free? Hell if I knew.

  The train moved slowly and I kept looking at the button Helen gave me. It had a tintype of her face set in a black rim with a steel back. Her hair was parted in the middle and those eyes, those marvelous, knowing eyes, seemed to say so much. The button was the size of a five-dollar gold piece and I sewed it to my cuff so I wouldn’t lose it and could look at it whenever I wanted. The button was wondrous.

  I remembered how, after I returned from Seminary, Merrick said, “Talkin’ like a preacher don’t make you one. And for God’s sake, don’t walk like one.” I had tried to talk like a preacher, with new words and smart arguments, and felt I could answer any question from this world—meaning father—with good grammar and Jesus Christ. I hoped I didn’t walk like a preacher now. I don’t know exactly what Merrick meant, but men hate hearing they walk funny.

  I knew Seminary did not cleanse my heart. Seminary did not answer the heads. Would war? I milled that on the train. Was Gib the answer? Boy, that sounded good when I told Helen, but everything sounded good with Helen. I wasn’t so sure on the train. I was sure I was angry at Father. All Father’s talk and ambition came together as the Honorable Mason Salisbury, Assemblyman from northern Oswego County. The Honorable wanted his son in the Army of the United States, not the army of God. I resented the equation. Anger made it easier to leave.

  I was so lonely for Helen on the train. I was never desperate to flirt, marry, or prove myself in the universal proving place, but always liked having women about. After Helen, women were all one woman, and the need for them and their mystery was all Helen. Helen Warriner, who knew her heart where God and man were concerned. I had my memory—the indelible day, she called it—the place in my heart. The girl left behind me. The song was played over and over at stations and on the train.

  Can you fall in love in an afternoon? Yes, if you go to war. War will speed or end it, and it will speed or end you too.

  The train moved quicker. Cinders and smoke blew in the window. Fellows talked and lit up cigars and speculated on how quick the fight would be. We chugged by greening fields and thick forest. I shut my eyes and thought of Helen. I praised and cussed going to war. Helen wouldn’t have sought me out if I hadn’t volunteered. Without war, no yesterday, that day of days, when we had everything and nothing to prove, and listened to each other, and held each other, and found such quick, deep understanding. Volunteering brought Helen. Good things come to good men.

  I suppose.

  Merrick slept, head against a sooty window. He was taller, heavier, had lighter hair. I knew he’d be the better soldier. Who was stronger hadn’t yet been settled by countless wrestling matches “‘tween sack-totin’ city-slicker and honest farmer.” Merrick was the better shot. Uncle Lorenzo had made sure his son could shoot. Merrick was the better fighter. I’d my share of fights, usually draws, but Merrick had a reputation. He didn’t mind getting hurt. He liked to fight. I wanted him by my side.

  In Geneva, amid more adulation, kisses and speeches about a short conflict with “men like this, at the ready,” we marched to a steamer at a dock on Seneca Lake. The lake was beautiful in the late afternoon sun. Merrick and I stood by the railing and enjoyed the invisible moment when day slips into evening over water. Lake Seneca was cut from the soil by the same glacier as Lake Ontario. The glacier left five deep trenches that look like a hand reaching for New York’s western tier, the Finger Lakes. The gorges, hills and mirror-like water reminded the settlers of Swiss lakes.

  We were fed by local ladies. Later, after long marches and shivering nights, I would remember the food and generosity of home. The day was magic. Most of the boys had never been twenty miles from the place they were born. Never been away from family. Never felt like a hero. Merrick and I had seen Syracuse, Rochester, Watertown and the glittering Thousand Islands in a sunset, but not this beautiful lake… Or so many girls… Each company was made up of men who knew each other—cousins, neighbors, rivals, “pards.” The “boys,” we called ourselves. We would fight. For each other, if nothing else.

 
“Is this where the women declared independence?” asked Merrick, when we found a place on deck by the stern. Both of us were tired of crowds and prayers and pies and hoots and jokes. Afternoon turned into the beauty of evening. The lake lapped at the side of the steamer. I missed Helen and remembered how day faded and love grew, just twenty-four hours ago. The memory was as true as the shimmering light playing on the face of Seneca Lake.

  “That was Seneca Falls,” I said. “The world hasn’t been the same since.”

  We laughed.

  “Don’t laugh,” said Merrick, laughing harder. “First the Negroes, then the women. Who said that? The Douglass fellow?”

  “What do the women want?” I said, still smiling.

  “That question requires a tolerable clever answer.”

  We rested on our knapsacks that contained our bedrolls. We were prepared. Some fellows didn’t bring anything to sleep on, as if they were going to a hotel. I unlaced my new boots, crossed my arms behind my head, and watched evening darken the lake.

  “Our fathers once seen Washington City,” said Merrick.

  “What’ll we see?” I said.

  Merrick shrugged.

  All day speakers told us the war would be quick and easy and provided good reason to think so. If asked, most of the men would agree and looked forward to a quick and glorious victory. Many weren’t sure why they were going. To preserve the Union, of course, and prove we couldn’t be licked, which men are always trying to prove. You could throw in freeing the slaves and punishing Simon Legree, but the price, the price of war where armies moved by railroad, weapons were factory-made, medicine was mostly amputation and the word antiseptic wasn’t yet in Webster’s—that price…that price…no man could calculate.