The Calm and the Strife

by David J. Sloat

  Wes, studying Will out of the corner of his eye, admitted to himself that it was hard not to like him. But Wes had good reason to resent his brother. Will was everything that Wes could never be and everyone knew it, especially their father. To the elder Culp, Wes was a poor imitation tagging along in the wake of a perfect original. And so Wes listened in silence as Will talked about the future, a future which for Wes was becoming more distant and unreachable.

  At the end of September, just before Hoffman’s shop was to move, the foreman told Wes that he no longer had a job. That same week his mother took a serious turn for the worse, and since he was no longer working, Wes spent much of his time with her. The doctor had ordered her to bed, and while Annie and Julia took care of her needs and ran the house, Wes stayed by her side.

  At night he would sit for hours holding her hand and listening to her labored breathing. Sometimes he would read to her in the late hours when she couldn’t sleep, struggling to make out the words in her battered copies of Elia’s essays and Donne’s poetry, two of her favorites. Most of the time they sat in silence, Wes watching her struggle with pain and with the knowledge that she was dying. The sorrow he experienced at the thought of losing his mother merged with the loneliness of being left behind. It created a dull, black hopelessness that constantly tugged at him, sucking his spirit down into a deepening depression.

  He blamed his misery on the hostile relationship he had with his father. Only death could end the fierce despair into which he was falling. Perhaps when he died of a broken spirit, his father would finally feel some remorse for his attitude.

  It grew worse in the following weeks. Will and his family left with the others for Virginia. The summer heat was gone, replaced by the relative cool of fall. All around, the green foliage ignited in a blaze of red, yellow and orange as the leaves burned their lives away. But Wes saw none of it. Without a job to go to in the morning, he spent more time in his room or beside his mother. He could see her condition deteriorating, and regardless of how many visits the doctor made, she slipped a little farther away from him each day. Wes felt himself slipping away with her, cut off from any kind of meaningful life. Ginnie came with Julia after school one day to visit, but Wes would not see her. His plans for them had been defeated and he was too ashamed to face her and confess his impotence.

  As the weeks wore on, his father repeatedly demanded that he go out to look for work. But he continued his vigil at his mother’s bedside since she was now in a coma from which the doctor said she would not recover. Wes felt as if he was peering at life down a long, empty hallway filled with distant echoing sounds. There were only scattered moments of clarity in his days. He remembered once seeing Julia standing on the other side of the bed, caressing their mother’s head lovingly and then looking with a strange and worried expression at him. He remembered looking through the window and seeing people proceed in a kind of slow motion to destinations that had nothing to do with him. He remembered studying the big oak tree visible from his mother’s bed, watching the leaves fall one at a time, certain that when the last one finally let go both he and his mother would depart with it.

  Then one morning he woke to find his mother looking at him, her eyes focused and clear, a smile on her face once again. After a week of senseless babbling while racked with fever, her sudden clarity startled Wes. He got up, knelt by her bed and took her hand.

  Her voice sounded high and frail, but it was clear. “Wesley. Why are you here?”

  He was surprised by the question, wondering whether she was looking for someone else. “Do you want me to get Annie or Julia?”

  She shook her head. “No. I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been lying here looking at you.” She paused, trying to catch her breath. When she spoke, the words came out in short gasps.

  “When you were young, I remember how different you were from your brother. Will and your father were so practical. But you were a dreamer. Like me.” She smiled softly, sadly. “Promise me something.” Wes nodded, carried away by her intimate words. “Don’t let them stop your dreams. I’ve had my life and it’s been a good life. I wanted lots of things that never happened. But my dreams held me up and kept me going. You fight for your dreams because without them you’ll be lost.”

  She slid off into silence and closed her eyes. Wes thought she had fallen back to sleep. But a moment later she looked at him again. “I always knew that, of all my children, you were special. There is so much promise in you. I have a feeling that you’ll do great things. I only wish I could be here to see them.” After another silence she fell asleep again, a peaceful smile on her face. Eventually, Wes moved back to his chair. He stared out the window for a long time.

  She died the next morning, never having wakened again. There was a flurry of activity in the house as friends and neighbors stopped to offer condolences, bringing food and wreaths. The casket maker came to take the measurements and returned later with the casket. Julia and Annie were constantly busy cooking, cleaning and entertaining visitors who thought it proper to make sympathy calls. The family dressed in mourning and there was an oppressive silence in the house, a cloud of sadness that obscured their perceptions and muffled their words. Wes’ father seemed to carry on as usual, rejecting any show of emotion.

  Wes felt distanced from everyone, as if he was watching them all act out their parts in some strange play for which he was the only audience. Aunts and uncles, cousins and children of all ages constantly filled the sitting room, talking, moving about, creating a quiet commotion. He tried to stay to himself, to avoid having to deal with any of them.

  But when Will came home, everything changed. With a few words, he rekindled the hope which Wes had thought was lost forever.

  Wes suddenly became eager to see Ginnie, but the funeral and other family duties prevented him from going to her. On the third day after his mother’s death, Ginnie appeared nervously at the door to pay her respects. Overjoyed to see her and grateful for the opportunity to escape his gloomy family, he quickly accompanied her outside.

  Ginnie’s face mirrored an inner uncertainty and after a few steps she turned to him. Hesitantly she said, “I was afraid you didn’t want to see me anymore.” Wes realized how he had neglected Ginnie in the past weeks and how differently he felt from the last time he had talked to her.

  “It’s been very difficult,” he said. “I’m sorry I wouldn’t see you that day. It was just t-t-too hard. But I’m glad you came today. I’ve missed seeing you. I was going to come to your house as soon as the family left so I could t-t-tell you the news.”

  “News?”

  “I’m leaving Gettysburg. I’m going south to work with Mr. Hoffman, like I wanted to in the first place.”

  Ginnie’s face fell for a second before she recovered, feigning excitement. “Oh, that’s wonderful. But I thought your father said you couldn’t go.”

  He smiled confidently. “I’m old enough to make my own decisions now. I’ve been t-t-talking a lot to Will since he came home for the funeral. He’s given me the money for a ticket and told me that Mr. Hoffman will hire me if I go down. My father doesn’t have any say in the matter anymore.”

  Ginnie accepted this pronouncement in silence as they continued their walk out past the family farm to the foot of Culp’s Hill. Finally, when the silence had become awkward, Wes turned to Ginnie.

  “This doesn’t change anything between us. I still want to come back for you, Ginnie.”

  The hopelessness which had been his constant companion for the past weeks had magically departed, replaced by a new confidence in their dreams. His mother’s words sounded inside his head, leaving him nearly dizzy with elation. Her death had not signaled the end of his life, but had brought into being a whole new future. His sorrow was mitigated by an overwhelming sense of freedom. He no longer felt tied to his father, and Will’s simple words, asking him to come south with him, had released the final bond and freed him to pursue his goals.

  He took Ginnie’s hand and led her up t
he slope to the familiar grove of trees that stood as sentinels toward the top. The trees were naked, but the breeze still held a bit of the autumn softness. Below, the town began to twinkle as the street lamps came on one at a time.

  He turned to her at length and asked, “Do you ever wonder if you’re meant for greatness?” Her blank look revealed her confusion at the question. “I mean, we’re all here for some reason, right? But some of us are here to be a part of something bigger. The people in this town are so shortsighted. They only see who you are now, they only know where you came from. Tomorrow I could be a great man. But they wouldn’t understand how it happened because they knew me when I was a boy, when I was nothing, and they thought I would always be nothing. That’s why I have to leave here. Do you see that?” She paused in contemplation, then nodded with bright eyes. Wes sighed, looking down at the town again. “Don’t you ever think that when you get older you’ll be a great person?”

  Ginnie looked out on the town and said softly, “I never really thought about it much. But I guess I’d rather have a family and happiness and health than fame. I mean, when you’re great you don’t have time for your family, and everyone is jealous of you. They resent you and say mean things about you.”

  “They say mean things about me now,” Wes responded. “But if I was someone important, they would look up to me. When I get to the South, I’ll save up all my money and buy lots of land. Then I’ll be making enough money to build a big mansion on a hill somewhere, a hill just like this one, where we can look down on the town. And then I’ll come back to Gettysburg in one of the fine big carriages that Mr. Hoffman makes, and I’ll pick you up in it and take you away with me.”

  “It sounds like a fairytale,” she said.

  “But it’ll come true. I just know it will. Everything will be better when I get away from here.” He grasped her hands again and pulled her closer. “You will wait for me, won’t you?”

  Startled to be so near to him, she looked into his face, her eyes wide. He could smell her hair and see her face coloring with excitement. “Yes, of course I’ll wait for you. And I do believe you’ll be a great man someday, Mr. Culp.”

  He laughed, then suddenly leaned closer and kissed her lightly on the lips. She tensed at first, then relaxed and kissed him back. When he drew away to gaze at her, he saw that tears of joy sparkled in her eyes.

  “And you will be the wife of a famous man, Miss Wade, or should I say ‘Mrs. Culp’?”

  They laughed at the thought, then melted together in a gentle embrace, holding each other close. The touch of her hair on his face, of his breath on her cheek, joined with the caress of the wind to complete the enchantment. Then, reluctantly, they began their descent back down into the real world, to the place of relatives and noise, of death and rejection. But their hands were joined and their hearts united in a vision of the future that the others could not see.

  Chapter 4

  DEPARTURE

  Gettysburg, Pennsylvania/Shepherdstown, Virginia

  November 17, 1856

  The rhythmic clatter of the train’s progress blurred the world outside into a gray streak. Wes sat uncomfortably in his best suit, his face pressed to the window watching hopefully for any changes. They had been traveling for an hour already and would soon be approaching Shepherdstown, but the landscape looked the same to him.

  Will and his family slept across the aisle, oblivious to the excitement. Wes envied their easy familiarity with something that was so completely new to him. He wished for the day when he could take such a trip with the same utter disregard. He had never been on a train before. Although it seemed to move with breathtaking speed, each new hill only revealed more hills beyond. The landscape was endless, the people they passed numberless and each new second carried him further into the unknown.

  For most of the past week, Wes had waited for the formalities to end following his mother’s burial. He knew he should mask his eagerness to leave, but every now and then his sorrowful facade slipped and the impatient excitement shone through like a ray of sunlight. Julia had noticed, and Ginnie, and perhaps even his father because on occasion he found them staring at him with a look of mild reproof. Wes’ father had aged in the past week. He took his wife’s death stoically, its full impact hidden even from himself, but at times Wes could see the pain steal through the opaque barrier of his eyes. Wes, anticipating his own future, realized that his father could look forward only to sorrow and this sudden emptiness.

  That morning, Wes had walked past his father’s door and caught a glimpse of him standing by a dresser. The old man tenderly held a silk scarf in one hand, rubbing the material between his fingers. He was staring out the window, and if he heard Wes’ approach he gave no indication of it. Wes moved on, leaving him to his reveries.

  Jesse Culp had argued when Wes once again announced that he was moving south, but not so vigorously as before, and Wes knew that he had won. For just a moment before his father relented and gave his consent, Wes detected remorse in the man’s eyes, a subtle sorrow. It was a little thing, but in that sad moment Wes nearly regretted leaving. His father had always seemed so large and commanding, and Wes realized now that he was neither. With new eyes, Wes saw him not as a bellicose adversary but as a lonely, tired old man. Perhaps the pity showed, for his father’s granite stare was quickly back in effect, never again to be broken in Wes’ presence.

  Talking to Ginnie had helped a great deal. She was a willing ear for his tumultuous thoughts, refining his dreams with glimpses into her own small world. Together they laid out the landscape of their future. They walked long hours along the crest of the hill above Henry Culp’s farm, holding hands and rehearsing over and over again the hopes they had already expressed many times.

  This morning had dawned like all others; people went about their business oblivious of the importance it held for Wes. Sleep had been impossible the night before and he was wide awake long before the rest of the house. Will and Salome calmly ate their breakfast before leaving for the new train station, while Wes nibbled distractedly at a chunk of bread. He had said his farewell to Ginnie the day before since her classes would force her to miss his departure. With all the loose ends neatly tied, Wes’ single focus was getting onto the train.

  When they arrived at the station, Mr. Emery, the station master, announced that the train would be late. Wes nearly screamed in frustration, pacing nervously along the track while his father, sisters, Will and his family sat on the benches. Finally, the distant chug of the engine broke on the crisp November air. Wes’ heart raced, as if trying to adjust to the thundering pulse of the locomotive.

  As he turned back to the others, he saw Ginnie on the platform, her hands self consciously smoothing her blue dress. She looked more like a little girl than Wes had remembered. Her presence disturbed him; now he would have to find some way to say another goodbye. But as he approached her, he saw the tears in her eyes.

  “What is it?” he asked, taking one of her hands.

  “I just came to say goodbye.” She was struggling to keep from crying, but a single drop broke free from the corner of her eye. He glanced at his family down the platform, watching them rise as the train steamed into the station. She followed his look, pushing back the hair from her eyes. “I shouldn’t have come,” she mumbled. “Miss Jenkins will miss me and I’ll be in for it.”

  Her pain was nearly tangible and Wes was overcome by a tender concern. The train whistle deafened them and for a moment they could only look into each other’s eyes. When the whistle stopped, Wes took both her hands. “No. I’m so glad you did.”

  Now that the impatient hours of waiting for the train were over, Wes felt pressured by its arrival. He would have given anything for another five minutes to spend with Ginnie. He realized, however, that more time would only prolong the pain.

  He pressed her hands tightly, gazing into her eyes. The train’s whistle sounded again, warning the passengers to be aboard. “I’ll come back for you, Ginnie. I promise. It w
ill be just as we planned it.” She attempted to smile, but was overcome by emotion. Wes could think of nothing to say. “D…d…d...don’t cry, Ginnie,” he stammered, overwhelmed by his feelings.

  Will called from down the platform and Wes looked up. “I’ve got to go.” She nodded. He ran down to where his family was standing, shook hands with his father and gave Annie and Julia a hug. Julia hung on to him and he couldn’t miss the tears glistening in her eyes. He smiled at her, kissed her on the forehead, then ran to help his brother load the cases up the narrow steps into the car. When the conductor yelled a final warning for passengers to board, hoping to regain the lost time with a short stop, Wes found a seat and pressed his face to the window. His family had gathered below and his eyes touched each of them briefly before passing on to look for Ginnie. For a frantic moment he thought that she had left, going back to school before the train departed. But then he found her, backed into the shadowed overhang of the station’s eaves. He waved to her and she stepped forward to wave back.

  The shrill steam whistle startled him again, and he looked down to see Julia smiling up at him, the proud look on her face replacing the tears. As the train lurched forward, Ginnie’s wave became more animated and she stepped out into the sunlight. Now he could see that she was smiling and he knew that everything was all right. He waved until she was out of sight, grinning wryly at the irony. For years he had been desperate to leave Gettysburg; now, when the moment had finally come, he found himself crying.