No Common War

by Salisbury, Luke;

  “I heard of the casualty from Seward’s office,” said Oren. “I’m sorry.”

  The men removed their hats. Oren’s was a fine beaver, Lorenzo’s a slouch. My brother hugged Mary and said, “We must go for them.”

  I nodded.

  Mary was crying silently. She didn’t speak.

  We sat in the parlor and Mary went for cider, escaping to the cellar. Escaping with her feelings. Her tears.

  “And the battle?” I asked.

  “The battle is well lost,” said Oren.

  “Some say our generals lost it again,” said Lorenzo. “I don’t know, but the Rebels haven’t gotten to Washington.”

  “We’ve sent so many fine men,” said Oren.

  “And supplies and money and everything required,” I said.

  “There’s defeatist talk in Washington,” said Oren. “Peace Democrats. Men who want to compromise. Men who think the war is about property.”

  Mary came in silently with a tray of cider, freshly baked bread and biscuits. She might be terrified, but she would feed our guests. And show herself composed.

  “I must go to Washington,” said Oren. “I shall tell Seward, and anyone who will listen, there’s no quit in the North Country.”

  Mary looked intently at Oren. She shook her head. Mary didn’t speak, but couldn’t control her head, which bobbed perhaps in agreement, perhaps in disbelief.

  “I can help find the boys,” said Oren.

  “Thank you,” whispered Mary.

  “The Rebels are close to Washington,” said Oren. “There’s going to be a big fight. The war may be decided. Seward tells me Lincoln wants to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, but William counsels waiting for a victory. Much hangs in the balance. Perhaps the country itself.”

  “We shall go,” I said. “Who’ll look after the farm, Lorenzo?”

  “I engaged two Canadians. They’re good for a month or two.”

  “It’s harvest time,” said Mary.

  “We will find the boys,” said Lorenzo.

  “If…” I stopped.

  “If,” said my brother. “We do that, too.”

  “You will find them,” said Mary. “I know it.” Her head stopped moving. Her eyes were steady. No tears, no trembling, no whisper. “You will find them and I shall take care of things here.”

  37

  I packed my carpetbag. Mary came in and added articles I’d forgotten. She found a shaving brush, soap, cufflinks, a black cravat—things I never forget, but I was distracted. Mary rearranged the items and said, “This is your most important journey, Mason. When you went to Washington City with the Cheese, it was for yourself. Now you go for your son.” I started to speak, but Mary put her finger to my lips. “Now I shall speak. I may not see you for a while.” Mary kissed me on the cheek and mouth. She was warm, her hold firm, her hands strong.

  She stepped back.

  “I have heard your speeches, Mason. Some were very fine. I know your heart. You truly believe in the Cause. You believe men should be free. Much of what you said has come to pass. America is called to judgment for this terrible sin of slavery. The judgment has come, and at a terrible price. A price we imagined but, not until this day, truly knew. The price is our hearts.

  “This is your most important battle. This is for your family. Our son. No Cause, or idea, or principle is stronger. This I know as I know the psalms.”

  Mary paused.

  “You are a master of gesture and words, Mason. Now we are beyond gesture and breath and recrimination. I know your fears, Mason, your hard ambition, your scheming for Moreau to enlist. I forgive you. I love you. I trust you. Just find our son, and God preserve you. Go, Mason, with all my love and my confidence.”

  I put my arms around her.

  Before dinner I overheard Mary and Helen in the kitchen. They were cooking together, as had become their habit. Mary kneaded bread dough. Helen cut apples for a pie whose crust had been rolled and rested on the counter by the soapstone sink. A beef stew simmered in a big iron pot. The room was warm with cooking, the women intent on work and talk.

  Another day I might have barged in, but I stopped in the pantry.

  “If you slice those apples so thick, that pie will never bake,” Mary said.

  Helen put down the knife. Her hands were shaking. “Mother, what if it’s Moreau? What if he’s badly hurt?”

  Mary stopped kneading. “We must wait, child. We must be ready for him to come home.”

  Helen took the white heart-shaped stone from the velvet bag she wore around her neck, and rubbed it. “We wait and hope and pray… But…” Her voice trailed off.

  “Mason will find them.” Mary started kneading again. “When the men leave, we must stay close.”

  Tears filled Helen’s eyes.

  “You will be strong, Helen. I know it.”

  Mary stopped. It took a lot for her hands to be stilled. She wiped her floured hands on her apron and hugged Helen. “I was lucky, Helen. The man I love left Sandy Creek only once. He didn’t find what he was looking for and came back. We’ve had a good life since. But Mason had to find what the world is like first. Moreau is like that too. Moreau and Mason seem very different, but they aren’t. Each has had to find a cause. And Moreau, I pray, will come back, and know this is where he should be.”

  “Why do men leave?” Helen whispered.

  The kitchen and pantry, the whole house, was filled with savory aromas. Bread dough rising. Two freshly baked pies on the counter, another to come. The stew added the scent of lamb, carrots, onions, peas, potatoes. The smell of home.

  “It’s their…” Mary stopped. “…genius,” and smiled through her tears. “They don’t know home until they return.”

  38

  Our trip with the Cheese didn’t prepare us for what we faced on this journey. The trains were jammed. Soldiers, cattle, lumber, crates of dresses, apples, wagon wheels, coffins, cannon limbers. The world was moving by railroad. The stations were busy, disorganized, crowded, and insane. Oren Earl was solicitous of wounded soldiers. Lorenzo less so. My brother thought if a man could ride a train sitting up, he couldn’t be that badly hurt. I wanted to know where each man was from. I asked about the 24th New York. How many battles in a month’s time? Three? Four? Five? It sounded like one continuous fight. Continuous and awful. I restrained skepticism when talking to officers attached to a general’s staff. Many men’s sons served without carrying a rifle. Lorenzo wouldn’t talk to them.

  Always I wondered: Which one? How bad?

  We passed through New York City and soldiers on the train drank to McClellan’s return and the Army’s deliverance. The Sandy Creekers didn’t drink. We watched the crowds at stations. Endless wagons, endless supplies were lifted into boxcars or put on flat cars by men Lorenzo thought could be fighting. Everywhere people and cargo moved. Chimneys belched smoke. The Hudson River and New York harbor were jammed with every sort of vessel. The urgency and bustle and confusion dwarfed what we saw in 1835, the time of the Cheese.

  “Money is being made, brothers,” said Oren Earl. “Fortunes. Win or lose.”

  We watched trains pass, teamsters crowd city streets, ambulances line up to receive stretchers—it hurt to see them—the crush of New York, the rumble of Philadelphia, soldiers guarding the tracks in Maryland. We watched in awe.

  “The country grew up,” I said.

  “Like the boys,” said Lorenzo.

  Our sons were on our minds every minute. The closer we got to Washington, the more troops, the more frenzied the reports of Union disaster, the more I thought and prayed. Yes, I prayed. There are no prayers like the prayers of an unbeliever. Not for intensity. I got down on my knees. I didn’t care who saw or how the click and bounce of the iron wheels on iron track hit my arthritic knees. Lorenzo put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Say one for me.”

  Forgive me, Moreau.

  I’m usually talkative, especially with strangers; now, surrounded by them, I stopped. I was overcome with forebod
ing. A circle was closing. The circle went through Washington City. My first trip brought a mission and a voice—a mission and voice used ever since. This trip might fetch a dead or maimed son.

  Trust me.

  At seminary Moreau once dreamt he saw his head, my head, and Lorenzo’s on stakes. I told him, “You use the story to make yourself important, like you used it to get your mother’s attention. Then, it was her. Now it’s everyone.”

  “Like you and the scar?” Moreau said.

  “The story is your mirror,” I said. “Don’t mirrors exaggerate? Make us large?”

  “Oh,” he said, hurt. “Didn’t you ever dream of those heads on stakes?”

  “I don’t use the sins of my ancestors to make me a saint,” I said.

  “Saint?” Moreau smiled. “You said they were American. American because they had a gun and used the gun.”

  Now Ro, as they called him, had gone to the Army and the Army was losing. Men were wounded. Dying. Thousands. One of ours. I was going to help if my son was wounded. I was going to apologize for thinking he wasn’t brave enough to go on his own.

  I love you.

  Around my waist, under my clothes, was a belt containing a hundred and fifty dollars in gold pieces. In an inside pocket was a derringer. Lorenzo carried gold and a bigger pistol. We were lucky we could afford to go. If a man didn’t, his son might not get proper care. He might not get his son’s body. The boy would lie in Virginia or Maryland, in strange ground, under strange trees, strange grass—grass and trees his mother would never know. I had sent my son. If he were hurt, or worse, I would bring him back. That was the deal. My deal.

  I kept thinking somewhere behind it, under it, hidden, was the old story. The heads. Oedipus’ riddle. Shame and fate. I always said the heads didn’t talk to me. Let the dead bury the dead. On the train they talked.

  You—you—Mason Salisbury, are not done with blood.

  I could not drive that from my mind.

  Mary’s words could not drive that from my mind.

  Suppose I met Seward or Lincoln? Would I tell them the war must go on, no matter how many die? Yes. For whom would I be speaking? My wounded son or nephew? My career? The oft-displayed, oft-expounded scar? I watched the Maryland countryside and thought, I love you, Mary.

  I thought of my speeches. All that talk of war and Abolition and Union, as if I were the soldier or the Deliverer of the Union. Now fathers, mothers, and political men talked of war, Abolition and Union as if they were holy mysteries sanctified by our sons’ blood. Oh, fine talk! The train shook and soot came in the windows. I tried to sleep but remembered the men and women we hid in the mill. I remembered trips to Canada and the look in their dark eyes when they realized I meant what I said. Trust me. There’s divinity in meaning what we say. As much as I need. It was different now. We were vulnerable. Forgive me. Sandy Creek was vulnerable. All of us. My talk and speeches and trips north seemed easy. Contained a bit of acting, hadn’t they? A touch of the stage? Really, my scar was hardly visible.

  I love you.

  Lorenzo and I didn’t talk much in Maryland. Lorenzo rode with a brakeman, a man with a limp from Watertown, and learned everything he could about the locomotive, cars, wheels, coupling, brakes, care of the tracks. I envied Lorenzo’s hard, practical curiosity. I kept my hand on the derringer.

  In Baltimore, we watched a wounded boy who couldn’t have been more than sixteen carried off the train to a weeping mother and stoic father. Slaves loaded and unloaded the train. They grinned at passengers and soldiers. They were waiting. Why not? Everything was changing. No country could be so convulsed with cargo and rumor and wounded and not change.

  Washington was frantic. Crowded, hot, dusty. Lincoln had abolished slavery in the District in February. Gangs of free blacks roamed the streets among the silk hats, soldiers, women, and teamsters. The streets were a tangle of wagons, hacks, ambulances, horses, and men, some in uniform, some not.

  39

  We got a back room at Willard’s Hotel, paid the astronomical sum of five dollars, and were ushered through the crowded lobby of the Capitol’s most famous hotel. Talk in the lobby hovered at the edge of panic or satisfaction about what rooms Lee and Stonewall might occupy tonight. Black-coated men smoked, talked, bargained, shook their heads. Money changed hands; papers were signed. The air was filled with smoke, the smell of whiskey and excitement.

  Oren went to meet Seward. Lorenzo and I slept on an unmade dirty bed. We slept until late afternoon, removing only our coats and lying back to back. Around five, Lorenzo got up, yawned, stretched, and wondered if we could find something to eat before the Rebels occupied the hotel. At the desk we found a message from Oren saying he had no news but would keep trying. Fearing prices at the Willard dining room, we ventured into the crowded street and ate something called pork pie from a cart on Constitution Avenue.

  We passed a dress shop with long black gowns and purple ribbons in the window. Next door was a harness shop, then a storefront full of hay. We watched a grizzled pig eat garbage in the dusty street. The pig reminded me of the black-coated men at the hotel. I smelled fish, sweat, rotting vegetables, and started to speak, but Lorenzo was staring at another window.

  “Jesus.”

  In the window was a corpse in a new suit in a polished oak coffin propped up on sawhorses, so passersby could admire the work of Mack & Miller, Embalmers. A discreet, hand-lettered sign read:

  Officers $50

  Enlisted men $30

  Coffins $4 to $7

  “Damn,” I said.

  “Like buying a plough,” said Lorenzo.

  Where did this man come from? Who was he? Why was he displayed?

  “They sell the corpse too?” Lorenzo spat.

  I put my hand on Lorenzo’s shoulder but Lorenzo didn’t notice. He was lost in a hard stare. The coffin rested on newly made sawhorses; sap ran down a back leg. The best coffin, the best body, a well-swept floor, and a cheap, pine sawhorse. I was horrified by this exhibition of mortician’s skills. Did Mack & Miller think they were cheating death, or just customers? Lorenzo stood bow-legged, bent at the waist, a farmer in the city, a plain man out of place. I thought he might smash the window.

  “God damn,” said Lorenzo. “Let’s get a drink.”

  I was glad Mary couldn’t see this.

  40

  The next day we heard fighting had broken out along Antietam Creek near Sharpsburg, north of Harper’s Ferry. Oren still had no news, but procured a carriage. We were told it was impossible, but Oren got one. The most important man in Sandy Creek could operate in Washington City. Two other fathers, western Yorkers, a doctor and a lawyer, joined us. We left at noon as rumors swirled through the hot morning. The North Country men had heard enough speculation, lies and hope masquerading as news not to believe anything except rumors of fighting.

  I left, despising Washington City. If the capitol was bad, what was the battlefield like?

  I left in an open carriage, money cinched around my waist and carrying a pistol, overcome by a dread I called fate. Silently I repeated Hamlet’s words: “If it be now, ‘tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come.” Those words, the rhythm, precision, the seeming paradox, were a comfort. The carriage bounced, stopped; the driver cursed and threw his hands in the air as the line of vehicles crawled, stopped, grew. Men were going for their sons. Women too.

  Hamlet says, “The readiness is all.”

  What was readiness? Faith our sons weren’t dead this very hour?

  We got out of Washington City, and the space widened between vehicles. The line moved more quickly. The afternoon was hot, the sky high and beautiful. Lorenzo studied the countryside. Oren listened to the doctor, who chattered nervously. The lawyer, a skinny fellow with a sharp nose, read a small bible. I watched the sky and silently recited Hamlet. Numbness and panic were at the tips of my fingers, and inwardly I chanted, “There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.”

&n
bsp; Hamlet’s own, ominous, beautiful epitaph. How does the Prince find providence? He’s killed Polonius, unsealed the letter calling for his death, sent his school friends to an English executioner. He’s lost control of his life, yet finds providence. Is providence knowing that nothing can be changed, that one must reconcile oneself to the world as it is? Hamlet returns to Denmark, no longer a grieving son, a disillusioned lover, a prince interrupted, but king of himself. He addresses death as an equal.

  Hamlet had no son. No wife.

  I had never felt such dread. Father, son, fate. I repeated it silently. Like a child’s rhyme. Like a riddle. Age fifty-three, riding through the Maryland countryside, I understood. How does one address death?

  One speaks the truth. Only the truth.

  I looked at Lorenzo, who looked out the open carriage. I admired his calm. Lorenzo was waiting for a chance to assert himself. Oren listened to the doctor. I resented the chatter, but that was Oren’s way. The tact and patience that got a room and carriage in Washington City. The road was crowded with men and vehicles coming the other way. We passed ambulatory wounded. Were they from Bull Run? South Mountain? Deserters straggling back to Washington City? Was a Salisbury among them? We saw two-and four-wheeled ambulances going in both directions. Carts and broken caissons. Spavined horses. Sullen teamsters. It was a preview. The world marches to battle, but limps away.

  We saw fathers, mothers, uncles, sisters, brothers, wives heading for Antietam Creek. Readiness. Leave early. Take whiskey. Take money.

  The lawyer looked up from his bible and said, “What’s the difference between Hell and here?”

  No answer.

  “In Hell, only sinners are punished.”