“Speech, Mason! Speech!” cried the Salisburys.
I didn’t give a speech.
56
In the days that followed, Moreau’s life hung in a balance of fever, hope, advance and retreat. We took turns at night, sitting with him. I didn’t pray. I didn’t think Moreau would die. He was home, away from the bullets and the noise and the surgeons—away from battle and the battles to come. I couldn’t bear the thought that Moreau might die. I knew whose fault that would be. No filter for that.
Helen visited daily, frequently spending days at a time at our house. She held Ro’s hand and felt his strength begin to return. Helen changed his clothes, washed him and whispered to him. She whispered when he was awake, asleep, or delirious.
He needed her. He needed us. Didn’t he?
“Live,” Helen whispered. “Please live.”
Ro heard, and fought.
“For Mason. For Mary. For me.” That was Helen’s prayer, if prayer is, as she believed, the deepest appeal to the deepest power. Helen didn’t abandon or blame God; she did what was humanly possible. All she asked was for Ro to come home with arms, legs and a face, and maybe they weren’t so important. She asked for a chance to make him well. She would render unto God what was God’s later.
Moreau rocked with fever. When he didn’t sleep, we didn’t. When he called, we answered. He sweated; we washed. Every day was filled with concern, bandages, and morphine.
But he was home.
There was the matter of his ankle. It had to be cleaned every day, and this was done as the surgeon in Keedysville said. A piece of cloth was run through it. At first Dr. Bulkley did it. Mary provided silk, which she cleaned daily, boiled and ironed it, as if she couldn’t bare the sight of his blood on it. After a week, Mary took over cleaning the wound. I watched her unwrap the ankle, sponge the wound with a warm, damp cloth, attach a strip of clean silk to a darning needle, and put the needle through his ankle. Moreau would groan or turn, never cry. Mary would remove the needle and pull two feet of silk through the wound, back and forth, until she was sure it was clean. The wound had to be kept from closing on the surface. This kept it from becoming infected. It had to close from inside and stay clean. The process would take a year, if Moreau lived.
I couldn’t do it. I tried. I jabbed my son with the needle and couldn’t hold it steady. The wound bled and Moreau twisted away. I stopped. My hand shook. After failing, I couldn’t watch. This was cowardice. Unfiltered. Look at what he did. Look at what you can’t do. I had seen many wounds in Maryland, but could not tend one in Sandy Creek.
From then on, his mother did it.
The sick room was off the parlor. The room was kept as clean as the wound. Between Mary, Helen and Sara, Moreau couldn’t have been cared for better by a band of angels. I held his hand. I told him I loved him. I told him I admired and respected him, but I could not clean his wound, and we did not speak of it. His eyes spoke. We did not.
The cleaning of the wound was done in the morning, if Moreau could stand it then. It was done in the afternoon, if he felt stronger. Never at night. Mary did it after I left the house. She wouldn’t let Helen do it. She said Helen did enough. Helen’s job was to be wonderful, to give Moreau the certainty and confidence a man needed to be a man.
57
On Christmas Day, a month and a half after returning home, Moreau opened his eyes and said, “Helen.” The fever was gone. His hair was no longer slick with sweat. Color had returned to his face. His eyes were clear. The pallor of the other world had receded. He looked at his mother and said, “Merry Christmas.” We celebrated with glasses of Madeira. Mary kissed me and said, “You may rest easier, Mason.”
I was toasting President Lincoln, and telling myself: Saved! Not guilty!—and would have finished the bottle when word came that Lorenzo was on the Salt Road. Our neighbor, Norman Scripture, said my brother, two white mules, the wagon with a flag-draped casket and a tombstone dusted with snow, had been seen an hour ago. The short-stocked shotgun was across his lap. He didn’t respond to greeting.
Mary and I took the sleigh. It was cold. Snow was five feet in the fields and higher by the side of the road. The town tried to be gay for Christmas with red and green ribbons, American flags, and big wreaths on the front doors. Through the bubbles and swirls of imperfect glass, we saw candles in tiny sconces balanced on the branches of freshly cut fir trees. The German custom had arrived in Sandy Creek. People found magic in bringing a green tree into a house to celebrate Christ’s birth and rebirth.
58
News of Lorenzo reached his farm before he did. Catherine, his wife of fifteen years, wasn’t comforted by the word that her husband was close to home. She hadn’t heard from Lorenzo since he left Frederick City. Catherine said she stood in her kitchen and watched the wagon, two mules, and a man who looked old as grief approach the house. He got closer and she saw the ancient family gun across his lap, a snow-covered flag over a coffin, and a stone, also snow-covered, that made the wagon list left. He wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves.
Lorenzo drove to the stable, got down and walked like a man whose feet hadn’t recently touched ground. Jean and Dany, the hired men, came out of the stable. Catherine came out, a red and white apron her only protection against the driving snow, and stood, hands clasped, head bowed, as the men acknowledged each other. The men straightened the flag, took the casket out of the wagon, and carried it into the stable. They placed it on two sawhorses under a rusty lantern hanging from a beam.
Lorenzo waved Jean and Dany away and went to Catherine. He carried the shotgun in his left arm. “Thank you for running the farm,” he said, and went in the stable and closed the doors. He did not touch her.
Catherine let snow pelt her face, then turned and went in the house. His eyes looked dead to her. She stood at the kitchen window and watched a red-tailed hawk circle high over the white fields and thought the bird, like Lorenzo, had no place to go.
This is what I believed happened.
In the solitude of the stable, Lorenzo put the shotgun, stock down, against a leg of a sawhorse. He brushed snow off the flag, lifted a corner, and touched the casket. He looked at the lantern. A rooster pecked at feed in the trampled straw. Four horses shook their heads and neighed. Forty cows paid no attention. Sparrows roosting for the winter crowded the rafters.
Lorenzo knelt. “Poor boy,” he said. “You’re home.”
He picked up the shotgun and ran his hands over the barrels, knocking off a crust of ice. He pulled back each hammer with his thumb. The noise brought a cry from the rooster. Lorenzo put the gun in his mouth. His aching body relaxed. He took comfort in the icy metal. Lorenzo had a covenant. He would drive Merrick home and kill himself. Lorenzo would drive so all might see. He would not wear a hat.
Merrick’s mother lay in Stevens Cemetery, the little burying ground on the Orwell Road. Merrick would lie there too. He wouldn’t be alone.
Before leaving Frederick City, Lorenzo had gone to Captain Ferguson. In a letter home, Merrick told Lorenzo he’d given the shotgun to the Captain before Antietam. Lorenzo found Ferguson in a private home, recovering from wounds received at South Mountain. The Captain shook Lorenzo’s hand and said, “He told me to give it back to you.”
“Thank you.”
“He said you’d come for it.”
“I come for him,” said Lorenzo.
“He said so.”
Merrick wanted Lorenzo to have the gun. He must have thought it would protect his father, if not himself. Lorenzo thought that on the way home. What good would the ancient weapon have been in the cornfield? What good, when all were equal before death?
Lorenzo had always told Merrick, “Don’t be scared. Be prepared.”
Lorenzo drove through rain, past ripe orchards, kept away from cities, accepted only feed for the mules, water for himself. People understood. In the town of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, a man came out with an American flag and said, “If you would, please,” and draped the flag over the ca
sket. “My boy was killed outside Richmond. We didn’t get him back. Been savin’ this.” So Lorenzo took the flag. No slavers, no brother, just casket, covenant and flag. The gun meant, “I will come. I will follow. Anywhere.”
The night he died, Merrick said, “It ain’t your fault. You done what I asked. You didn’t let them cut.”
“I chose wrong,” Lorenzo said.
“If I’d a had the gun, that surgeon’d be dead.”
Lorenzo stroked his son’s hair.
“I seen men die of shock after amp’tation. Let me die here with you.”
“You’re a brave man,” Lorenzo said.
“I wanted to be like you,” said Merrick.
The night brought higher fever, moaning, and talk of a woman. The end was near. The delirium broke before dawn and again Merrick said, “I wanted to be like you.”
“I wasn’t a soldier,” said Lorenzo.
“You was always a soldier.”
Lorenzo, for the only time anyone had ever seen, wept.
In the stable, the freezing metal of the gun stuck to Lorenzo’s lips, tongue, the roof of his mouth.
“I’m coming,” he whispered.
The gun had a last enemy. Grief.
Lorenzo’s finger stuck to the double triggers. He opened his mouth and pulled his tongue off the barrel. Skin came off. Tongue and lips stung.
Covenant.
Lorenzo pulled the triggers.
59
On our way to Lorenzo’s farm, Mary and I drove past familiar fields, familiar even under snow. The runners of the sleigh hummed as they glided over the packed and rolled Salt Road. What would I say to my brother? After a lifetime of brother talk, what could I say on this hard Christmas day? Who could have imagined Keedysville?
John Brown’s back swayed in the clear, cold, Christmas afternoon. Mary huddled against me. Lorenzo’s life had changed. The supreme moment hadn’t involved courage, fighting or talk. Only luck. Readiness wasn’t all. No solace in this divinity. No comfort in this end. What filter could my brother have?
Could I help him? Wind stung my face.
“Mary, I didn’t let the surgeon amputate because I couldn’t bear to watch. My cowardice saved Moreau’s leg.”
“Does it matter?”
I prodded John Brown, whose breath rose in short puffs. “It might to Lorenzo.”
“I don’t think so, Mason.”
I looked at the frozen fields. “Everything dies, rests, grows again,” I said. “Except children. The Lord does not give them back.”
Mary sat hard by me, hood pulled neatly around her tired face. I felt her warmth. I was glad she was with me.
“Our son lived,” I said. “It wasn’t fair.”
“That was not up to us,” said Mary.
I squeezed her. It was luck. That was all.
The woods were thick and dark. The town once put a bounty of fifty cents on wolves. Once there were bears. Once no one lived between the lake and Tug Hill in winter. Only wolves, bears, foxes, mice tunneling under snow. Only animals that survive winter, storms that pile snow twenty feet high, and winds howling at zero. Was Ro ready for winter? Would Lorenzo ever leave?
“Moreau has left the valley of the shadow,” said Mary. “I believe Merrick sent him back.”
“He came back for you,” I said. “And Helen.”
“And you, Mason.”
Was that true?
The sleigh hummed, hissed and bumped over the Salt Road. Snow melted on our faces and dusted the tracks and ruts in the rolled highway. Trees cracked with the cold, a quick, harsh sound. Winter breaks everything.
“The boys returned today,” I said trembling, as we approached Lorenzo’s farm.
“Will Lorenzo shoot himself?”
Mary’s openness shocked me. I had feared it since Lorenzo left Frederick City. “Not until Merrick is buried.”
“Talk to him, Mason.”
John Brown kept a steady pace and we drove in silence. The neighbors said Lorenzo was carrying the family gun on his lap. How did Lorenzo get that damn thing? I’d thought it lost in Maryland. Jesus, it might explode if fired. The gun wasn’t a weapon, but a talisman. I shuddered.
“It wasn’t Lorenzo’s fault,” I said. “He just chose wrong.”
“It wasn’t yours,” said Mary. “It was in God’s hands.”
I shook my head no. No. God was not to blame. God wasn’t there. We made our choices. They were hard, but they were ours. I could not face my brother and talk about God. I brushed snow from my beard.
“It could have been different, Mary. All of it. Lorenzo could have killed the man who whipped me. Moreau might have stayed at Seminary. Merrick might have lived.”
Wind chafed my face. My eyes teared.
“Just talk to him,” said Mary.
We saw smoke rise from the chimney of Lorenzo’s house. The wagon was in front of the stable. The wind picked up, scattering particles of snow. The red stable doors were open. The wagon was empty save for the tombstone. Snow stuck on the embossed letters MERRICK SALISBURY that curved across the top of the stone, and on the numerals 1837-1862. I couldn’t read the rest. I put my hand on Mary’s shoulder, then got out of the buggy.
Lorenzo walked out of the stable. His boots left prints in new snow. I saw an old man. Where is the gun? Lorenzo’s hair was whiter than the snow sprinkled on his beard and coat. His face was a mask of the face I knew. The lines around his eyes might have been cut with a trowel. Where is the gun? The beard was thick, untrimmed, spackled with ice. The eyes were blank. His lips were chapped and bleeding. Where is the damn gun? Lorenzo stopped two paces in front of me.
“He’s in the stable,” said Lorenzo.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
Lorenzo didn’t move.
“Christmas,” I said.
“Is it?”
We stared.
I looked in the stable. The casket, draped with a snow-matted flag, rested on sawhorses. The lantern moved in the wind. Had Lorenzo slept in the wagon? Had he never left Merrick? The short-barreled shotgun in the straw. A rooster pecked at it. I had to get that gun.
“Damn thing jammed,” Lorenzo said. He turned away. “I’ll bury him in the spring.”
It was an old man’s voice. Not weak. Old.
“Do I have your word?” I said. Lorenzo knew exactly what I meant.
“Yes.”
Snow blew horizontally between us. Cold, brilliant, sparkling. I watched my brother’s footprints blow away. The red-tailed hawk made a high, wide circle. I looked in Lorenzo’s eyes. Empty as wind. My brother. I hugged him but he didn’t seem to notice. He was seeing with the eyes of the dead.
Mason
Helen in Winter
January-February
1863
60
In the weeks after Christmas, when Helen wasn’t helping, she was staring at Ro’s face. Fever finally gone, he was between agony and bliss. He looked at her and perused her face as Ophelia says Hamlet perused hers, as though he would draw it. Ro stroked her hands; Helen stroked his. Their eyes met and played and danced. He drank morphine and slept, and Helen watched. She had drawn that face in her mind many times. Ro looked terrible—scraggly beard, pale yellow face, ribs showing—but that was changing. What hells had he been loosed from? We could only guess. But now he was getting color and gaining weight. Ro would be what Helen wanted and Helen wanted a soldier, a poet, a lover. She wanted intimacy. She had been faithful. She couldn’t have been more faithful had Ro been at her side those fifteen months. She loved him. Anyone could see that. And he loved her. His letters said so; now his eyes did. It was a miracle of faith, hers and his. Hamlet says, “You shall know I am set naked on your kingdom.” Their kingdom was before them. So we thought. So we tried to think.
Helen watched and stroked him. She loved a certain expression of disbelief that flickered around his eyes. He had been in Hell, now he was here and they were together. Ro had paid the price. That’s what I wanted to believe. The p
rice for being a Salisbury. And for being my son. Whether for heads on stakes, me, Gib, his conscience, his pards, it didn’t matter now. He was safe. Let wind howl, snow pelt, and creek freeze, Moreau was safe. I wouldn’t tell his secret. Let everything be as it was.
On New Year’s Day while Moreau slept, Helen found me in the parlor. Mary had retired upstairs. Helen joined me on the sofa in front of a roaring fire, declined a glass of port, and asked, “Must sons always ransom a father’s love?” Moreau was out of danger now, and Helen, apparently, was free to speak her mind.
“Yes,” I said. “I suppose they do.”
“Always?”
“I suppose,” I said.
“It’s eternal?” A hint of Warriner irony.
“Eternal as memory,” I said.
“‘I have some rights of memory in this kingdom,’” she said.
“Yes,” I said, impressed that she had quoted Fortinbras, last witness to the slaughter in Elsinore. “Yes, Miss Warriner, you have rights.”
“Has Ro paid the debt for the heads?” she said quickly.
“How can I say?” I said.
“You sent him to war.”
“It wasn’t for that.”
“No,” she said. “It was for being a Salisbury. For being your son.”
“I could tell you it was the Lord’s will, the price for slavery, or the pound of flesh I took for my ambition. They are all true.”
I expected, and deserved, a quarrel. She had reason. But she surprised me.
“We all sent him,” she said, quietly. “It was right, wasn’t it, Mr. Salisbury?”
“It was right,” I said. It must be. It had to be.
“I felt so righteous,” said Helen, slowly. “So proud.”
The fire lowered and rose, illuminating her handsome profile. She looked at me and looked away.
“He’s a better man than I am,” I said.
We didn’t speak for a while.
“I wanted him to go before I even knew him,” she said. “I wanted a soldier. It was long ago.”
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