Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 3.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Passing outside the car around him was the Missouri countryside that was so familiar from his last visit:  the round yellow hay bale wheels on their sides out in the open, mowed grassy fields, and the ubiquitous bare-branched trees preparing to wake up from winter.  They looked exactly like bony, ashy, brown-black hands reaching up out of the cold ground.  It was familiar and welcoming, this winding rural road.  Extraordinary to be here again with no cheerless thoughts from home cluttering his mind.

Minutes passed, slipping away.  Ten.  Twenty.  Out in the country.  The road bent left along wide open golden-brown stubble fields, and then right again.  Then he saw the massive pale blue steel of the bridge looming ahead, humping up over the water.  He rolled forward through its tresses.  Below were the shimmering ripples of the wide, brown river now close at hand.  Then he was in Kansas.

Fort Leavenworth was off to his right a short distance ahead.  Funny to think that Joe Johnston and JEB Stuart had been here, out in the western half of the continent.  They were such prototypical Easterners.  Virginia boys.  It was hard to think of them out of their element, Johnston with his domed head over sharp eyes and a sharp, pointed beard, and Stuart's eyes twinkling mischievously and his silky, curly pirate's beard.  Only maybe Stuart didn't affect the beard yet in his Kansas days.  But they were here, loyal citizens serving their country in the decade before the unpleasantness.  Johnston had spent time at Jefferson Barracks, too.  Later, when Lee sent him creeping forward to the dingy old Harpers Ferry shed under a white flag bearing an ultimatum, JEB Stuart placed old John Brown right away, recognizing him from his time out here.  A reconnaissance mission it was, spying out the ground before the assault.  Don't mess with the Marines.  Well, a lot of those men were familiar with the West; they'd come through on the way to Mexico and back.  JEB Stuart met his bride in Kansas, too.  Maybe they walked along these streets.  Veni, Vidi, Victus sum he claimed, and it was true, at least for a while.  Even McClellan was at Leavenworth.  Little Mac, strutting about full of himself.  How'd McClellan ever manage to compress so much ego within a single puffed out peacock body?  An entire lifetime utterly blind to his own limitations.  Fantastic.  Even saintly Lee himself was nearby, stationed unhappily down in Texas.  History adheres to and trails behind some of these people like gray muck on a wagon wheel.  Still, to walk in the footsteps of Stuart and Johnston and McClellan in Leavenworth.  No Easterner would believe you.

Fort Leavenworth was not Max's destination.  He turned left at the first light and headed south in parallel to the river, among the tree-lined lanes.

He sensed other celebrity ghosts out there, reaching for him.  Did any locals in town remember them now?

The foliage had been thinner in the closing years of the 1850s than it was now, small patches of shade over dirt roads where those famous foster brothers once strolled, Bill Sherman and Thomas Ewing, Jr, and Hugh.  They were foster brothers and brothers-in-law, because Cump married his foster-sister.

But cousins used to marry all the time, Max thought.  Take Joe.  After his parents died, Old Joe was raised by his cousin, Charlotte Garner, and she herself had married Old Joe's own half-brother, Ben.  Confusing.  Close-knit roots, that's one way of putting it.  But. . . .times and traditions.

Now that had been a branch of the real Ewing clan.  Thomas Ewing, Jr was the original item, not who shot JR.  It was odd how their names were mostly forgotten now, because once they had been so very powerful.  Kingmaker-types.  Thomas Jr played a pivotal role in Missouri history on more than one occasion.  In the right place at the right time, and controversy be damned.  And in Washington, after the war, too.  He must have had unshakable faith in the law to do what he did, Max thought, defending some of the accused conspirators in the death of a friend.  His eyes were darkly hooded and forward-looking.  One look at him and it was clear he would make something of himself.  He would go far.  Their law office had been located near here, Max knew, on the very street where he now drove.  It was no glassy Dallas skyscraper.  Their offices were on the second of two storeys, a high-rise for its time.  The private Ewing home, too, was tucked back in nearby, a block or two toward the river.

Worlds without end open up and open up continuously before our weary feet, Max thought.  The paths we tread were cut out of the wilderness by the hard labor of a thousands and thousands of slaves since time immemorial.  They're the unsung and forgotten ones who truly wrought civilization.  And Sherman walked these streets.  Think of that.  A shabby, middle-aged, red-haired man soon to take a teaching position in Louisiana.

But Max didn't slow down.  He drove all the way to the cemetery.