The South, the War and ‘Christian Slavery.’

As TH White tells us in The Once and Future King: All not forbidden is compulsory.

This “Gospel civilization,” many believed, didn’t just permit slavery — it required it. Christians across the Confederacy were convinced that they were called not only to perpetuate slavery but also to “perfect” it. And they understood the Bible to provide clear moral guidelines on how to properly practice it. The Old Testament patriarchs owned slaves, Jewish law clearly assumed its permissibility and the Apostle Paul’s New Testament letters repeatedly compelled slaves to be obedient and loyal to their masters. Above all, as Southerners never tired of pointing out to their abolitionist foes, the Gospels fail to record any condemnation of the practice by Jesus Christ.

Read the story here.

Notes on this work in progress.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Any reader making it close to what is presently called Chapter 16 will recognize that this is the sort of novel that's going to make more sense with repeated readings.  I'm not writing this as a deliberate puzzle for the reader to try to decipher, but intend that the pieces will fall together of their own accord.

Part of the problem for the reader (and the author) is keeping track of a vast cast of minor characters.  It's unnecessary for the reader to try to construct family trees to keep all the relationships straight; however, it's vitally important for the author to do so in order that the many relations will not be stepping on each other across generations and family units and through time and space.  Unfortunately about a month or so ago one of my flash drives containing fictional genealogical material became inoperable, and so one of the things I've been working on today is reconstructing those trees from a lot of notes.

Before I spent a month writing Chapter 11, I already had numerous other subsequent chapters more or less ready to be uploaded, with a little cosmetic work here and there.  Now, having spent much of this morning streamlining Chapter 17, I've concluded that some rather extensive, but not too serious, rewriting is required for Chapters 13, 15, and 17, which all recount the visit by the Isaiah Cutter family to the home of Jerusalem John Cutter near St Joseph, Buchanan County, Missouri, in the second week of August, 1855.  This rewriting will probably take a few days.  The rewrites of Chapters 13 and 15 will simply replace what is posted on this website now.  After Chapters 17 and 18 are uploaded I'll probably have to spend a longer amount of time working on Chapter 19, of which nothing more than a trifling few notes have been written yet.

I might add that it's probable that many of these very short chapters will be spliced together and merged into longer "real" chapters in a later draft.  Keeping them short and modular like this means that I may be able to shift them around and put them in a different order later if I deem it desirable to do so.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 16.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



He came south and east along US 169, at first still hoping against hope to see the old James farm in Kearney.  But he'd already been too long delayed.

He crossed a stream.  What was it?  He saw no sign.  But it could only be the Little Platte River again, he felt sure.  That meant he was only a few miles downstream of the railroad disaster from early in the war, after Wilson's Creek, about the time of Lexington.

In the moonless night the engineer couldn't see that saboteurs had fired the trestles under the onrushing bridge.  Tons of steamer locomotive going airborne, plunging forward, twisting and inverting in midair, screwing itself snout down into riverbed muck.  Thin-skin passenger cars following, merciless causal linkage cause-effect, cause-effect, plowing one into another in the waters below.  Sudden night-piercing screams of ripping steel, and waves running ripples lengthwise through glass windows that explode in sequence, breaking sleeping human bodies apart.  Cars split longitudinally like oysters divulging tender sweets, propel the bleeding and the dead into hot black iron corkscrewed rails, cold water, and savage long metal prongs and spikes and fat chunks of burnt wooden splinters.  Crushing smoke and fire and huddled half-ghosts gather together in shock, exsanguinating half-drowned rats pulled up on the banks in the perilously silent again night like stunned ducks, no idea of what was happening.  Somewhere Tom, fifteen years old by then, eyes shining, hears the story of murderous bushwhackers marauding in northwest Missouri.  "Glad we left," his mother chuffs.  "Rules of war," Price excuses in his letter to Halleck.  We all belong to the same fingerprint-besmeared manuscript of the ages.

It occurred to Max suddenly that Jerusalem John Cutter's farm ought to be somewhere close by.  He wondered whether the old man had gone to the aid of the victims of that senseless attack.  No, he was probably still in Nebraska with Nancy and the kids.

Terrorism we'd call it now.  Then, it hit like an inexplicable outrage, lightning out of a blue sky, an unexpected slap in the face, but it was only one of the first impacts.  Its horror dissipated in the escalations that followed.  Sliding scales of horror don't make those killed and maimed any less dead or mutilated, though.  The wounds they carried afterwards we still bear.  Vengeance.  Despair.  Cruelty.  Rage.  Channeled into subsequent generations, cutting erosive through the tender topsoil of infinite possibility that unfolds before the unsullied eyes of children.  Tragedies cataclysmic or undistinguished, remembered or forgotten, no matter.  The dead and wounded influence our passage.

After another ten miles the road angled due south.  The sky was beginning to relax in golden and tangerine bands over the wide, grassy hills and fields that held the bare trees at bay, pushed well back from the road.  The edge of the woods.

He was wondering about Sterling Price.  The man was an enigma.  A tall, handsome, pompous ass, surely, sphinx-like, absorbing any hopes and aspirations projected upon him by his affronted Southern constituents, a ready-made symbol for resistance to Northern aggression.  In the decade before the war Price had been governor of Missouri, and early on he'd even opposed secession; in fact, his initial dubious loyalties later threatened his relationship with Jefferson Davis.  Not that he'd ever enjoyed much of a relationship with Davis.  And never mind Davis' own initial jolt of fear at the thought of presiding over the Confederacy.

Those were heady days, the first few months of sixty-one, with Lincoln sneaking into Washington, sneakin' Lincoln, and cadaverous Davis, flaunting, openly training up to Montgomery, moody, sullenly speechifying along the way the party-pooper, and local heroes running on testosterone and adrenalin scrabbling to grab hold of whatever they might hope to control.  Price's opinions tipped toward rebellion when irascible Nathaniel-Lyon-of-the-flaming-mane-of-red-hair peremptorily seized the arsenal in St Louis.  How dared the Federals appropriate those weapons in such a highhanded manner!  And the riot after all the militiamen at Camp Jackson were taken prisoner.  So reminiscent of the Boston Massacre, at least in the minds of those primed to kill Yankees.  Price found it expedient to forget that pro-slavery men on the Kansas border had seized the Liberty arsenal shortly after Fort Sumter.  Flamboyant M Jeff Thompson in between careers, ex-mayor of St Joseph and not yet Grant's bothersome swamp fox, divvying up the commandeered gunpowder among his unwashed ragamuffin bosom buddies hiding in the hills.  And cagey Price, still teetering on the fence, also ignored the fact that Jefferson Davis had himself authorized a secret shipment of mortars and siege guns to St Louis in order to snatch up the arsenal before the Unionists could.  Details, details.  But maybe history overran Price before he could decide for himself.  Cloistered away with the pigheaded governor:  that could have been no picnic.  That might account for the Boonville debacle.  Price excused himself on the eve of what looked to be an imminent disastrous battle to go home because of um er well you see diarrhea.  Price trots away in the face of the enemy.  Maybe to buy a little time to try to come to terms with finding himself on either side despite his constitutional mugwumpism. 

Having been hastily consecrated to the Southern cause ‑‑ too hastily? he must have considered, given the potentially grave consequences ‑‑ Price landed command of the Missouri State Guard from Governor Jackson.  It happened very quickly.  No time to think.

Everyone was making profound, life-altering choices early in sixty-one, Max thought.  In the excitement of the moment.  Little realizing those impulsive decisions would change their lives forever.

A few months later Lyon was killed at Wilson's Creek, having chased Price too far south.  Price had the good fortune to team up temporarily with Ben McCulloch from Texas, and the Union forces were outnumbered.  Newly promoted, Nathaniel Lyon was the first Union general killed in the war.  Fortune had smiled on Price, who soon advanced north toward Lexington.  McCulloch went back to Arkansas.

I'll be in Lexington tomorrow, Max thought.  I'll see it for myself.

Darkness was falling when he made the left turn after Smithville.  Reluctantly he gave up on reaching Kearney on this trip.  You can't do it all.  He was driving east under rapidly darkening skies and resetting the glowing GPS on a new route for the motel in Liberty.  Fifteen minutes later he'd checked in at the desk and lugged his bag upstairs.  It was quite dark out and very cold.  In the room he soon he had the heater on and the power strip with its various chargers and adaptors plugged in.

He felt tired.  He watched a little of the weather on TV.  A storm system was following him, coming in from Colorado and Kansas.  The next few days should be cold and drizzly, especially in St Louis on Sunday.

He uploaded his pictures from Leavenworth and took some time to write a brief email to Flynn.  After getting a bite to eat from a pizza joint next door -- I wonder whether the Liberty arsenal was located anywhere near the pizzeria? -- he came back to the warm motel room and climbed into bed.

His throat was raw and sore.  He'd get something for his cold in the morning.  For now, the first day was over.  Sleep awaited him.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 15.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



"When you said we were retiring to the smokehouse," one of the men said, "I fear I had visions of hams and chains of sausage hanging from the rafters.  This is some hidey-hole you've got here, JJ."

"We use it for different things," JJ said.  "Meetings.  Elections.  Sometimes we even used to have church services here, back in the old days.  But this is what I like best.  Coming out with a few good friends for a smoke after a meal."

"You sure do it up right!"

Tom didn't know who all these people were.  A lot of them were JJ's relatives, he knew.  That made them Cutter's relatives.  Many of them were named Cutter, too.

JJ was a funny man.  He could tell a story so that you had to laugh.  This was JJ's farm.  He had given them bottles of sarsaparilla to drink earlier today.  Tom had never had sarsaparilla before.  Across the room he saw Isaac and Cyrus, who were JJ's sons.  Frank and he had spent the day with Cyrus and John and Henry.  John and Henry were with the women in the parlor now because of their ages.  Tom wondered why he got to come out with the men and John and Henry had to stay in the house.  And there was Gideon Cutter and his son Thomas.  Gideon was old like JJ, but he was somber, or even sour; when other men laughed, Gideon Cutter just barely smiled.  Tom thought he looked a little sick and green.  Gideon's son, who was another Thomas, was about nineteen or twenty years old, and he was also serious, but not the same way as his father.  He appeared to look on all these people with a measure of disapproval, Tom thought, watching them silently with a small, forced smile, as though he were observing them and silently judging them.

And there was the sheriff ‑‑ Tom forgot his name ‑‑ and that pinched-face man, Hurd, who seemed like he didn't belong, and the rich man Fouts in his neat brown suit, and several others as well.  Now that they were out in the smokehouse away from the dinner table they were all talking in small little knots so that the room was bright and noisy and already beginning to fill with the earthy reek of cigar smoke.

Tom moved among them, looking to see where Cutter had gone.  He found his stepfather some distance away talking to JJ.  He came up behind him as Cutter was saying in a half-whispery voice:  "Do you hear anything about the Mowers in Maryville?"

JJ looked around Cutter's shoulder at Tom and his face brightened.  "Tom!  But grain alcohol and cigars aren't good for a boy, are they?"

Cutter whirled, eyeing Tom behind him.

"Isaac!" JJ called.  "Where are you?"

"Here, Pa."

"Take young Mr Tom back to the house for a glass of punch, and then both of you hurry right back."

"Pa. . . ."

"Go right ahead now!  Do as I say."

"Oh, all right."  Isaac found a place to put down his cigar and glass and eyed Tom with displeasure.  "Come on, then."

They went back into the warm darkness outside.

"I don't know why they let you in anyway," Isaac muttered as he hurried across the yard.  Tom was having to hurry to keep up with him.  "The smokehouse ain't for boys."

Tom looked up.  Again the night sky reminded him of their arrival yesterday.  The trip took longer than expected because of the rain and because they'd gone all the way to Russellville on the Nodaway River to avoid Maryville, coming down through the uncleared farm sections with only a few acres plowed for corn or oats around uniformly crude, low houses daubed in mud with sod chimneys and small flocks of white sheep like little patchy clouds in the grassy fields.  Down through Savannah they passed on the way south.  During the early afternoon they had seen the white clouds massing steadily in the western sky and advancing directly toward them, darkening as they came until all the blue sky was gone.  When the storm broke the rain was not heavy but it was never-ending and cold, turning the road beneath the wheels slick at first and then progressively thicker with gray muck.  For three or four hours the rain seemed to come down continuously until finally in the very late afternoon the clouds finished passing over them and moved on eastward.  Already by then the blue beyond was fading to a softer and clearer, airy color.  The late afternoon sky seemed somehow hollow to Tom then, and clean.  The full darkness wasn't yet on when at last they reached the outskirts of the city.  Mary and he could see the city off to the right with the sun sinking toward the horizon beyond and lighting it up all orange and golden.  Under his dripping hat Cutter too had his eye on the sun, and he kept urging them forward faster, faster, from where he walked up by the team, tugging on their trappings.

St Joseph was the biggest city Tom had ever seen, but they didn't go into the city.  They went past it and then out into the patchwork of farm fields where more industrious men were still working as the night was rushing toward them.  The wagon wheels were still sucking in the muck and Tom was beginning to feel sleepy at the end of another day on the road.  The first points of stars were emerging in the east when Mary called:  "Look!"  She flung her little arm out, pointing, and then Tom saw something he had never seen before, silhouetted against the last crescent of light in the sky:  a team of Negroes out in a wide white field of cotton.  They were a long way away, but he looked at them as closely as he could from the back of the wagon where he rode.  Black men in ratty gray clothes.  Slaves.

Isaac and he went into the house.  "Hettie!" Isaac called out.  "This child needs a cup of punch!"

Hettie and Nipper and Tom were still busy clearing off the mess in the dining room.  The large Negress eyed them closely when they came in, weighing them.  Her smile split her face and she turned from what she was doing to find a cup for the punch bowl.  She poured a cup and handed it to him.  "Here you are, little gent," she said.

"Thank you," Tom said, his voice low and meek.

"Come on," Isaac growled.  "Let's go."

They turned and went outside and back to the barn.

Again the barn was bright and cheerful, but by now the smoke was growing thick.  Isaac and he came inside, and immediately Isaac left him.  He saw where Cutter was sitting and moved in to slink down next to him.  His stepfather's hair was spiky like always, but at least he'd cleared away the stubble from his chin and cheeks.  Cutter eyed him suspiciously with his now empty punch cup, but he did not speak to him.

The men were telling stories of some adventure that several of them had been on together.  Many were speaking at once, or else they were interrupting each other, bursting in and disrupting each other's words.  They were laughing so much, and drinking and finishing each other's sentences, that it was hard for Tom to follow what was being said.

"And so I says to him," JJ said, with his thumbs in his suspenders and his head thrown back, "I says, well, we're here to protect the ballots."

"Protect them!" someone said.

"Sure, protect them.  Protect them from foreign trespassers.  We're good Democratic men, and we value the principle of freedom, fair and simple.  It's to be a fair election--"

"Fair, provided the right side wins--"

"Of course the right side must win.  The right side must always win.  That's the proof of democracy's triumph.  That's what this country is about."

"This country--"

"Our country.  Not a little piece of the Yankee North broken away and trying to invade--"

"That's the problem right there, JJ.  Invasion.  You're right.  It is an invasion.  They've got no right--"

"And where's this Harding house where you held your little soirée?"

"Just across the river.  Elwood."

"Oh."

"--trying to occupy our lands and take our rights away.  We didn't do that to them, did we?  We wouldn't do that to them.  But they lack proper comportment."

"Which is why they're they and we're we.  By what authority do they--"

"Did you make it to the Keytesville rally, JJ?"

"No, but I was at Lexington last month."

"Good turnout?"

"Good.  Very good.  Lafayette and Ray Counties are solid with us."

"The Yanks are going to regret they ever heard of Kansas.  They were supposed to get Nebraska, and we'd get Kansas.  Don't they know that?"

"Of course they do."

"But they have to go and stick their damned fool noses in our business."

"You heard about the boys meeting with the governor in Pawnee?  Apparently old Andy Reeder, with his whiskers like satchel handles, made a big speech about setting aside our differences and everybody pitching in to do the work of the territory.  Right about then is when the legislature voted itself right out of the governor's pride and joy, a nice new two-storey stone capitol building.  Reeder just about died of apoplexy.  Ran after them all the way back to the Shawnee Mission, tail between his legs.  Guess the governor's mansion in Pawnee now is full of mice.  At least they ought to have a quorum."

"Those are good boys.  They've got good laws on the books now.  Keep the abolitionists in their place."

"You'd better believe it, Jim.  They're under the thumb now.  No slipping away."

"Right where we want them!"

"They say Woodson's going to appoint Jones sheriff over Lawrence."

"Who?"

"Samuel Jones, of Weston."

"Sam Jones?  That's good news, if true.  Jones will keep up the pressure."

"It's that Doc Robinson is the worst of the bunch.  Nigger stealer and underground railroader.  Something needs to be done about him."

"Something will be done if they get Sam Jones over there.  You can rest assured of that."

"So did you get to vote then?"

"Did we get to vote?  Of course we got to vote!  Were we not in Kansas Territory?  We were.  We were, then, resident in Kansas Territory; we were, then, residents of Kansas Territory."

Everyone laughed.

"And besides that, one or two even had claims in Kansas Territory‑‑"

"Preferably," the sheriff murmured, "jumping those of the encroachers trespassing in that abolitionist hole of Lawrence."

"When that vulgar little Garrisonite Bryant--"

"Feculent!"

"--tried to challenge our residency, you ought to have seen Judge Leonard, face flaring up all fiery red, push right up to the front of the crowd and shout out the nomination of Colonel Scott as the other election judge.  The motion carried by acclaim with a mighty roar, selah!"

"Hurrah for Judge Leonard!"

"Then you should have seen the blood drain out of Bryant's face.  Because he knew right then, you see, that we were going to win Kansas for ourselves:  all of Kansas.  The damned invaders had been out-invaded."

"Damned abolitionists come to our country and stealing our niggers!"

"If Yanks can vote in Kansas, then by God, Missourians won't be stopped from voting in Kansas!"

"How about you?" someone said in a lowered voice to Isaiah Cutter while the other conversation was going on.  He was sitting on the other side of Cutter and Tom couldn't see him very well.  The man's brittle voice made Tom think of ashes dropping from burning twigs, thin, dry bony fingers glowing orange and then fluffing off white and dusty.  "Are you here to fight the war in Kansas Territory, too?"

But despite the lowered tones JJ overheard, and dropping out of the general conversation he leaned down over Tom and toward Cutter and the man beyond.  "Isaiah's here to see me about some business up in Atchison County.  I'm setting him up in Rock Port."

"In Rock Port?" the stranger said, obviously skeptical of the proposition.  "Don't you know that place is crawling with the damned Dutch?  And all of them brewers, it seems.  Northern sympathizers and brewers, that's where you're consigning your kin.  A hard place to make a go of it, JJ.  A hard place."

JJ straightened up again laughing, his great, gurgling laugh that rippled through his ample belly.

"Ah, Nelson, I have great confidence in my nephew.  Besides, the thirst for beer will never replace that for moonshine.  Not in this country."

"Tell you what you ought to do," the man called Nelson drawled, now sounding more thoughtful to Tom.  "Somebody ought to do it.  With all these trains coming in and all these sun-struck and gold-struck pioneers pushing out into the prairie and mountains beyond, somebody's going to get rich someday setting himself up with a mail order business in Chicago or somewhere.  You set yourself up with a big warehouse of dry goods, and then you can send pioneer families everything that they really want and need and that they can't get at their local little country stores.  Sell it to them direct and ship it out by train.  The man who figures out how to do that stands to make a killing."

JJ laughed again.  "You're a dreamer, Nelson.  A dreamer!  But don't you stop.  Someday even you may make a killing."

"Now JJ, I'm just saying--"

"I know; I know what you're saying.  You just keep on saying it, and keep on thinking it.  Keep right on figuring all the time."  Then JJ stood up straighter, still chuckling, and re-entered the greater swirls of conversation floating in the air all around him.

Tom was thinking.  He thought he had heard the name before.  Maybe Cutter and Ma had talked about it sometime.  The Mowers of Maryville.  What did it mean?

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 14.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Leaving Leavenworth and Kansas behind (although he thought he might drive up through the John Brown country of the eastern Kansas borderlands when the trip was at last in its final stages), Max crossed the river back into Missouri, driving north through the farmlands of Platte and Buchanan Counties on his way to St Joseph.

He'd never learned precisely where Tom's regiment would have been stationed here.  Up on the hill at the old Fort Smith?  Probably down in town.  Didn't matter.  He only wanted to get a general feel for the lay of the land.

Memories of the physicality of the country will be useful in retrospect when I know more in the future.

Time had been compressed and heated and melted and squeezed and re-congealed into a solid, metamorphic object.

Past and future and present.  All the same:  a deep-stacked manifold of long passed days, thin as onion skin.  Geologic pressure acting on sediment.  Filmy veils of crystalline nanopaper pressed incalculably close.  Casimir Effect.

During Tom's childhood long parades of steamers would have been vying for passage all the way up the Missouri River as far as St Joe, tying together this veritable Lover's Leap into the West all the way back, by way of the Ohio River, to Pittsburgh.  Removing his hat and putting it down in the vacant seat next to him, Max wiped his forehead and swept back his hair and looked at the clock.  Six-thirty flat.

Two hours stolen away.

He considered those steamer days when the bison holocaust was underway, boats loaded with their stinking hides at anchor up and down the river banks.  Indians mixing and trading freely with white men, slaves, French, German, Italian, Welsh and Irish pioneers and tawdry hangers-on.  Great herds of antelope and elk still rambled over the rolling Missouri plains then.  Exotic, blanketed Indians alongside shaggy mountain men clad in fringed buckskin with tangled beards and sunburnt cheeks.  Blacksmiths and other tinkerers laboring to stamp out uncountable numbers of wagon wheels for the big push West, hot workrooms full of men at their anvils and their hammers ringing incessantly all day and late into the night.  He pictured herds of nervous cattle and teams of mules contending for right of way through the dusty white streets, and great red oxen, resolute, plowing over anyone foolish enough to get in their way, with their heavy yokes and complex harnesses of straps buckled over their brutish and brawny bodies.  Always the oxen trains before the mules.  That was the season of cholera, too, billions of vibrioids burning through St Louis downriver, and the sick and the hypochondriacs alike subsisting on a nasty, inefficacious mash of cornmeal doused in whiskey.  A few years later, consumed by a different disease ‑‑ gold fever ‑‑ forty-niners swarmed through St Joe, their red eyes fixed and staring at the open plains, delirious for California.

Joseph and Louis were sainted cousins, endpoints on the Little Dixie river arc, he thought, but it was the railroad chord strung between them that turned St Joe into the great jumping off point.  Kansas City was only a remote landing at the end of a crude boardwalk.  St Joe the most populous city only after St Louis.  Train from Samuel Clemens' Hannibal bearing civilians, soldiers and Pony Express mail.  Take a chance.  Take a chance.  Go West. 

A month before secessionist governor Claiborne Fox Jackson was driven out of Jefferson City, Merriwether Jeff Thompson briefly thrust St Joseph into national headlines by hacking down the stars and stripes from its position above the post office and hurling it down to a crowd of rabid, rodential rowdies in the street below, who passionately ripped it to shreds.  This notorious incident ushered in numerous exchanges in martial and quasi-martial dominations over the local civil sector as Union forces and ruthless bushwhackers vied with varying degrees of exuberance, or lack thereof, for control of northwest Missouri throughout the war.  The Pony Express was defunct before the year was out, and the town would never fully recover its reputation or former glory.

Through four decades the endless, melodious steam whistle calls drifted up from the muddy Missouri.  But now, as he drove alongside the river, St Joseph looked to him like any bleary, busy city, almost without character, nondescript warehouses and silos, heavy traffic, modern and industrial.

The river bluffs tumble and melt down like the ruins of another conquered Goliath.  Another supine giant fallen alongside a wild river's corrosive edge.  Maybe the mud-churned bones of drowned fenians once upon a time rolled along under these bluffs, all the way down from Montana.  Meagher ‑‑ Here?  So far from home? ‑‑ What the Kell?  Book of Balls.  Insular hero, Meagher; not continental.  Fare thee well the great fluttering emerald banner.

He stopped by the little white clapboard house with dark green shutters where Robert Ford killed Jesse James two decades after the war began.  The surrounding streets were empty.  Quiet.  He looked around a little, soon convincing himself there wasn't anything to see.  It was getting on seven already and the shadows were lengthening.  Tomorrow would be a long day.

He'd seen what he needed to see here.  The general lay of the land.  There was no reason to spend any more time in St Joseph.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 13.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Mr JJ Cutter owned a sixty acre tobacco farm in Buchanan County, located about ten miles southeast of St Joseph.  Within the month JJ had acquired another eighty acres lying immediately adjacent to his parcel of land, but it still lay fallow; nevertheless, this dinner was a kind of celebration marking the occasion of his parochial social promotion attendant upon the land purchase.  He was sixty years old and he lived on the farm with his wife, Sarah, and the seven children still at home, ages six to seventeen.  Presently he pushed himself back from the grand dining table, which was the signal for the others to begin doing likewise.

"Well gentlemen," JJ said, patting his ample belly, "I find there's nothing quite like an after dinner smoke to settle the meal and the mind.  Please join me out in the smokehouse for some fine Cutter leaf cigars."

"And ladies," JJ's wife, Miss Sarah Cutter, added quickly, "we'll be moving into the parlor for some special sweets the girls were all afternoon preparing."  She picked up her silver bell and gave it a twinkling tingle.  "Now, where is Miss Hettie got herself off to?"

"Here I am, Miss Sarah," the matronly woman answered as she hurried into the dining room.  Her gray curls were cut very close to the brown skin of her face, flecked with tiny darker blotches.  Close behind her followed Nipper and Tom, dressed unconvincingly in formal livery.  The three commenced to clear the great table while the others left the room, the women proceeding to the parlor on the right, and the men outside the back door on the left.

JJ turned.  "Just follow Isaac," he directed them with his beaming smile.  He was counting heads as they passed by down the steps outside.

"I hope you got something more spirited than just cigars waiting out here," one of the passing men said.  He was a smallish man with an unshaven face and dangerous, dark eyes.  He'd come up that day from Weston and hadn't bothered to change his clothes.

"I'm sure you'll find everything to suit your desires, Mr Hurd," JJ said in a lowered voice.

When the last man came outside JJ frowned.  "That's thirteen," he said.  "You'd better go back for your boy."

"Francis is sick," Isaiah Cutter replied.  "He won't be able to join us."

"Well, get your other boy, then.  What's his name ‑‑ Tom.  Go get Tom."

Isaiah was reluctant.  "Tom's just a child."

"Well, we can't have thirteen," JJ replied, "and I'm sure as hell not going to bring in Nipper.  Just you go and get him and come out to the first barn.  You'll see the lights."

Reluctantly, Isaiah went back in the house and found Tom with the wives and children in the parlor.  He signaled him to follow, and they went outside.

Tom looked up into the sky.  The night had come on during dinner.  A great purple sheet full of stars stretched overhead.  The air was still warm.  In the distance bullfrogs croaked.  He was hurrying alongside Cutter toward a building where bright light and the laughing voices of men spilled from the seams.

"I must make a good impression with JJ," Isaiah said to him as they walked, his voice lowered.  "Do you understand?  You just keep your mouth shut."

"I will," Tom said.

The night sky reminded him of when they'd arrived yesterday.  Later than Cutter had wanted, and he kept trying to hurry them forward in the darkness.  Only last night it was through the mud after the rain.  Today though the sun had been hot and had mostly dried the ground out again.

They reached the first barn and Cutter opened the door.  It was very bright inside with many lanterns already burning, and JJ going around lighting more.  Also a fire already was leaping up on its irons under a great chimney at the far end of the room even though it was so warm.  Cutter swept into the room but Tom fell back at the door, surprised by what he saw.  It looked like a barn on the outside, but here were many chairs and benches and tables scattered about.  The men were passing around a box of cigars, and at the rear of the room someone was pouring a clear liquid into glasses, and these were being passed around too.  Everyone seemed to be laughing, sniffing a big fat green cigar or else drinking, raising private toasts to one another in the din of voices.  After the stifling formality and politeness among the ladies in the parlor it seemed to Tom that he'd stumbled across a kind of secret, magical clubhouse, a sequestered enclave of light and merriment plucked out of the dark night.

The difference between women and men, he thought.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 12.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Bravery, or folly?  Friends in high places.  Straight-spined Jason sailed between the clashing rocks, Hera's unwavering eye on high watching him.  Hera's protection.  Right into the teeth of the Planctae.  Sprays of plankton-seething streamers of foamy sea ribbons, surging jets spurting heavenward among gnashing, grinding chondritic molars.  Release a dove into India inky storms raging on a rolling, churning dead man's sea.  Thanks a lot, the emancipated fowl of fate must have mused, eying her liberator coldly.

But he was more Odysseus than Jason, he thought, bereft of benefactors or well-wishers.  He worked alone.

Day after day, solitary, brow furrowed, taking up dividers and compass and charts, he sought to contrive intricate windings beneath the beetling rocks, down dangerous alleyways and dark avenues toward another rendezvous contrived as if by chance.  And he had only argyle socks for luck.  They looked foolish, but they remained hidden under the cuffs of his slacks.  Mostly hidden.

In reverse the movie he ran, as if, at first, but warmer in the car it was, and no wind, and then:  quitting the cemetery he retrograded townward northwise, up (you know what happens when you're), but wanderingly veering off, he divagated wonderingly down past the grain silos and across the train tracks (grottle, grottle) to Riverfront Park, still on the Kansas side of the river.  He was feeling satisfied and ready to go (up up), but one obligatory observance first there was to enact.  He'd come up (and when you're up) just south of the sky-blue bridge's doubled arcing spans (they're kicking you) like a capital B knocked down (when you're down) and lying on its back.  Gemini arches.  Clear away all.

Max parked the car.  He faced again into the sharply cutting breeze.  Soberly walking down the seam line cut straight in the concrete slab, small grassy tufts striving fitfully on (the smallest sprout shows there is really no death), he trundled down a muddy-plunging boat ramp to the urgent river's very shoaly limit.  He knelt and gazed over the channel, watching the river flow, trying to see the past in it, or through it.

Through the water, eternal river.  But no go.  Time swirls away as if down a drain.

This river had run half way across the country already.  He envisioned its silty, turbid volume redoubling that of the Mississippi at St Louis, rounding the corner and disgorging its dross and uselessly acquired floating artifacts and souvenirs and castoff couldabeen lifetimes at the base duality of parabolic paradigmnity, that silvery sovereign solitudinarian as yet light-years removed from conceivable in the spring of 1850.

Formerly a deck hand on the steamer Minnesota was found.  Passive voice.  Dispassionate reportage on the last deportage.  The Minnesota on the Missouri.

Bobbing snags twisted and turned along in the flow.  Somewhere upstream those grapplers swept free had left gashed-gums of waterlogged banks bleeding red clay trickles into the water.  He thought of the shallow-drawing steamboats that had battled every inch of these devious waterways, floating along the river surface in dawn's early light like a dream, their great big pincers in front struggling to sweep a path through the perils of floating debris.  The West Wind and the Benton, loaded down with green recruits, Old Tom among them, had steamed past this very point where he now stood, plying the shallow brown waters to a fateful rendezvous with confederate raiders half way across the state.  On past Sibley and little Camden and Wellington they went, to Lexington, and on to Glasgow.

Curtis was here in Leavenworth, too.  I forgot him earlier.  A tough old Iowan.  No nonsense.  None of this brutish Southern rebellion for him.  He ignored Sigel's advice and won the day at Pea Ridge.  Good boy.  And a passion for gardening, of all things.  Harding came through here with the boys.  And Fisk?  Clinton B Fisk was all over northern Missouri.  Lewis and Clark came poling up this river fifty years before Old Tom ever saw it, fighting snags all the way.  Sandbars melting and reforming before they could properly ink their maps.

He reached down to feel the swift, cold river rushing by, peering out toward the dense thicket of trees on the opposite shore.  His mind filled with bloody-minded bushwhackers and border warriors whose horses had to swim back and forth across the torrent.  Dangerous to cross in the winter, frozen or not.  But much drier in the summer.  Shallow enough to wade, sometimes.

It's fare thee well my dear, I'm bound to leave you

Look away, you rolling river

Shenandoah, I will not deceive you

Look away, we're bound away across the wide Missouri

The Eastern man forever sundered from his love, from the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains.  Cast alone and lonely into the Wild West beyond the untamed waters.

Maps had filled his mind, then:  different maps.  For the negotiation of time and space, all shattered glass and a dying, flickering flame.  A slim needle slipping through ruffled fabric.  What faithful companions had he?  All lost and forgotten.  No heroes, only the ghosts of the accursed and condemned.  Tantalus.  Sisyphus.  Orion.  How far can the rules bend before they snap?  Seeking out random passages through a Brownian sea of strangers and ragged people.  Newtonian, sailing strange seas of thought alone.  Faces.  Prefer always morphing, interchangeable unknown gray-brown souls to friend or foe.  Intersection video mounted high on traffic light poles to freeze frame speeders red light runners and license plates.  Flatten four dimensions to two with a court-admissible timestamp.  To butter you like a butterfly pinned on a toasty time slice.  Spies everywhere, their bowties are cameras.  Melt into anonymity.  Draw no attention to one's self.  Now chose:  light or shadow?  Either Orwell.  Paranoia's encircling coils.  Long suburban runs and short series of arcs in poorer quarters and backtrack past the horseless racetrack where fish skeletons school in the Rialto and dart past Grant Glenn Fort Lowell Prince, culminating for a too brief flickering moment between bookstore stacks or a glimpse from the floor level to an upper walkway in an acid bright-lit shopping mall or, just once, for two hours in the back of a cool, darkened movie theater.  Unrepeatable.  Eschew pattern.  Wander.  Stagger.  The crowds of anonymous passersby are suggestive of half-aware stragglers, but secretly sharks prowl the cold waters.  Like police cruisers gliding through crouching, dubious fire-blackened neighborhoods.

Fare thee well.

Memphis Blues Again: Book I, Chapter 11.

Copyright © 2012 Bob R Bogle



Slicing its way down through the cottony cocoon webs of blissfully suspended consciousness, a reveille bugle's off-balanced warble beckoned him to come back, come back up through the mazeland of vision-crowded recumbency, past the sharp-edged shards of fractured dreams.

First he felt the only marginally diminished ache in his legs.  Having arrived with his fellow shufflers, stampers and plodders at their destination, yesterday's exercises had proven even more physically draining than the several days of precedent mindless marching.  Next he grew aware of his deep hunger, his muscles crying out for revitalization.

Opening his eyes to slits, he saw over the top of his thin quilt that the day was opening without a dawn.  Outside the high, narrow windows the early morning sky was black with rain that drummed hard and cold against the fragile roof.

All around him, likewise roused too soon from deep slumber brought on by excessive labor, the men in the dimly-lit barracks looked like evil bears clambering from their cots.  A few struck matches to light lamps.  They grumbled, swearing darkly because of the weather outside and the damp floor underfoot.  But they dressed quickly, and then for an hour they drilled under the drenching sheets of rain on a muddy parade ground before shuffling back inside en masse for breakfast, every one of them dripping in their seats with hair plastered down to their foreheads and soaked through to the skin.  It was quieter in the mess today than it had been the day before.  Uniformly dispirited at the prospect of drilling all day in the rain and mud, they focused while they could on their coffee, inhaling the steamy vapor rising from tin cups and trying to shake off the cold.

Joseph sat at a long bench between his brothers.  Neither of them wanted to talk this morning either.  Joseph was silently eating several strips of bacon he'd piled on his plate.  That was one good thing about the army, he thought.  They fed you well.  But that only reminded him of what the drill-major had said the day before yesterday when they'd arrived in camp.  Just off the long march from home, his new companions and he had been shoved into ranks out on the parade ground, none of them even knowing how to properly stand at attention.  Brodbeck had ridden his sorrel mare back and forth before them, looking them over, shaking his head in disgust.  Long, reddish whiskers hung down from his weathered yellow cheeks.  Joseph imagined he looked a little like the engravings of wild-eyed Nathaniel Lyon that he'd seen in the newspapers.

Already Lyon was more than a month dead, fallen at Wilson's Creek, and so many Iowa boys lost with him.  And what action was Frémont taking in St Louis?  None.

No, not none, Joseph corrected himself.  There were these regiments massing in Dubuque, and down in Davenport.  And elsewhere across the north.  That was action being taken, if somewhat belatedly, and that was a lot.  Slowly, perhaps, but steadily, a dark storm was gathering itself together, preparing to descend over that rebellious country:  Frémont's Department of the West.

They might feed us well, but that doesn't mean the army cares about us, he reminded himself.  That was the drill-major's message.  Brodbeck.  Best to keep that in mind.  The army's only bulking us up, toughening us up in advance of throwing us to the slaughter.

They arrived about noon on Thursday after marching sixty miles behind the rumps of the officers' horses, all the way from Fayette.  Captain Towner, and Lieutenants Neff and Tisdale, and Sergeant Gwin rode before them.  He remembered the heat of the sun and the tiny white puffs of clouds far away, and the small brown birds that flitted in the high prairie grass, and a few deer that watched them alertly from under the eaves of a distant copse of trees on the second day.  At night under the stars they heard the distant quailing voices of wolves.  The moon was in its first quarter and the September nights were still reasonably warm.  They were about sixty men, he the youngest, mostly farmers, marching in ranks to Dubuque.  More men would follow in the days to come.

His memory slipped back a few days before the march when they were in Fayette.  September fifth.  He'd never forget that date, he felt certain.

"Tell them you're seventeen, that you'll be eighteen in a month," Andy advised him on the ride to town.  But when they'd stepped up to the recruiter's desk, Joseph had looked the man directly in the eye and declared himself to be eighteen years old.

The recruiter looked him up and down skeptically.  Joseph knew the man doubted his claim because of the baby fat that remained in his face and his full lips.  His hair was thick, more like Bill's than Andy's, tending to part itself naturally in the middle.  With an attempt to convey deep conviction he tried to hold onto a serious expression, but he could tell it was no sale.  The recruiter turned an incredulous look on Andy and Bill.

"He's with you?"

"That's right," Andy affirmed.  At thirty Andy was the oldest.  Sometime in the last year he had grown a thick, curling beard, but his moustache was thin, and his eyes were pressed somewhat close together under brows that seemed to remain somewhat farther apart, all of it imparting an unlikely suggestion of maturity and wisdom to his features.  Under the recruiter's close scrutiny Andy glanced sideways at Bill, adding:  "He's our brother."

The recruiter looked down at the papers Andy and Bill had already signed.  "Garner."  He looked up at Joseph, and then back at Andy.  "He's not old enough."

"He's eighteen," Andy repeated.

"You'll vouch for him?"

"Yes," Andy said.  "We will."

"Eighteen, yes," Bill said, nodding.  Twenty-four year old Bill had thicker, wavier hair than either Andy or Joseph, and he too had grown a beard, but it was a sort of smart goatee with his cheeks clean-shaven, and his eyes were clear and the brows came somewhat close together so that he looked naturally honest and open, and with his lifelong history of jests and tale tales he could always get away with bending the truth better than his brothers could.

The recruiter scratched his chin.  He looked Joseph up and down again, trying to reach a decision.  He sighed.

"You're big enough, and you look strong enough.  Hope you know what you're getting yourself into."  He pushed the paper across to Joseph, who quickly signed it.  "Of course you don't."

Marching into Dubuque at last, Captain Towner left them standing in the street and went upstairs to the quartermaster's private offices.  The men looked the town over while they waited.  Joseph had never been to Dubuque before.  It was the biggest city he had ever seen, with brick buildings soaring up into the sky, and frenetic with men on horseback and ladies in carriages and barking dogs and children running down the streets.  Soon the quartermaster came down the rickety stairs with the captain to greet the men and give them a little welcoming speech.  Winslow was his name.  He seemed to Joseph a fine young Dane, an affable man with stylish mutton chops and a proud strut, prancing about in his fine blue coat.  Something in his manner immediately began erasing memories of the long walk and the dust and the unfavorable view of the officers' horses.  Winslow had the fine sensibilities to conduct them all to an elegant hotel only a few blocks away.  It was supplied with magnificent furniture and dark, polished furnishings in its parlors, and none of its regular guests or patrons appeared either surprised or affronted by this sudden invasion of road-dusty soldiers; indeed, many of the finely-attired men among their number bowed appreciatively to these new arrivals.  They passed into the grand ballroom, where the quartermaster won their undying gratitude by providing them with an excellent beefsteak dinner, the best by far that they'd had since leaving home.  Fine white linen and shining cutlery and chinaware graced the tables, paintings of garden scenes and wilderness jungles adorned the walls, and at the far end of the room artisans were still installing an enormous pale green fresco of Lady Liberty guiding white wagon trains across fields of golden grain into the West.  When the meal was concluded they went back outside and then, mounting his own horse and riding alongside Captain Towner, their host guided them to the camp, located an additional two miles north of town.  Along the way Joseph marveled to see numerous other companies of soldiers in the city streets, including a military band marching down Main Street with drums and fifes ablaze.  A proud, patriotic surge lifted his spirits.  There was a cause for the dusty march, he now remembered; before them lay glory and victory.

It was only about two o'clock in the afternoon when they arrived on the parade ground, where about five hundred men were marching in column while another band played at its head.  Officer Winslow guided them first to his quartermaster's shack where they were provided with preliminary supplies, kettles and pans and cups and utensils and the like, and some coffee and bread.  Then they continued on to the newly-erected barracks.  They were to be formally mustered in within the hour.

They were still settling into the barracks, Andy and Bill and he staking claim to a trio of cots that were clustered close together, when he heard someone calling his name from the open door:  "Private Joseph Garner!"  His heart thumped in his chest.  They're not going to let me go, he thought, exchanging glances with his brothers before crossing the room alone.  Somehow they found out I'm only sixteen.  He felt all their eyes on him as he went by.

Joseph was yanked back out of his reverie by his brother's voice.  "Maybe they'll cancel drill today," Bill grumbled to no one.

"Not a chance," Andy said, "not with Price advancing on the Missouri River.  They'll have us leaving for St Louis as soon as possible, you'll see.  In the meantime they'll squeeze in every moment of training they can. "

"No one ever accused the army of being the most efficient or farsighted organization in the world," Bill said.  "And anyway, how can they expect us to drill in the rain?  You can't see two feet ahead out there."

"You  think they cancel battles just because it rains a little?"

"It's not a little rain.  It's a lot of rain, and it doesn't look like it'll let up anytime soon."

Joseph was finishing his bacon when a very bright flash of light and a quick peal of thunder startled him, his gaze jerking reflexively up to the windows that ran just under the ceiling.  Lines of water trickled down the walls at the ends of the windows.  The mess was built exactly like the barracks, the same shabby design.  Lightning flashed and thunder boomed again, and he thought the black rain was coming down harder than before, fortifying Bill's argument.  He sat watching the rain through the high windows.  It reminded him of something.  What?  He remembered then how he used to sit at the window at Aunt Charlotte's house and watch the weather outside, the rain in the summer and the snow in the winter.  He remembered how beautifully it had snowed for Angelina's birthday -- how long ago?  He counted.  Nine months.  It seemed years ago.

Aunt Charlotte.  Foolish old woman, he thought, but she wasn't even that old.  In her mid-thirties was all.  She had forbidden anyone to talk about the coming war.  She had refused to accept there ever could be a war.  But the war had come anyway, even if the final crisis was delayed for a few months after the election.  South Carolina was gone before December was over, followed by a landslide of secessionist states in January.  Citadel cadets fired on The Star of the West, driving her from the Carolina coast ‑‑ had the name of a ship ever carried more symbolic weight?  With turmoil swirling throughout the land, the addition of Kansas as a free state was overlooked by just about everyone.  Overnight the darling Kansas Territory, everyone's favorite damsel in distress, had become tired old news.  Finally winter broke and then, with the inevitability of April showers, fireballs bloomed in the night over Charleston harbor.  President Lincoln's declaration of war followed swiftly.  War!  Henceforth only two parties:  patriots and traitors!  Years of talk, of heads shaking in disbelief over the inexplicable, reckless actions taken by their Southern cousins, abruptly came to an end.  The bonds were broken.  Real war had come.

Despite the steady drumbeat that had sounded throughout the winter, it was as if Joseph, along with everyone else in the country, was only slowly stirring from a long sleep.  They'd all been lost in a make-believe fantasy for a long time.  For years time had passed so slowly in Ben's and Aunt Charlotte's fine house, but now time began to speed up.  Everything was changing.

Those were not quiet days anywhere, not even in little Volga City.  Ben's long-anticipated homecoming became impossible.  He was required to spend longer stretches of time than ever before away in Ohio, on war business.  Everyone it seemed had additional new responsibilities.  No longer could Ben arrange for friends and family to visit and comfort Aunt Charlotte at home.  No one had time for such luxury anymore.  Aunt Charlotte's nervous energies, long choked back, were now beginning to break loose.  Her temper flared up more with each passing day.  She found herself left to her own devices as her old and familiar life crumbled and began giving way to the strange new world that was taking its place.  She depended on Joseph to take on more and more of the household chores and obligations, and she was quick to scold him when he did not respond promptly enough to her new demands.  He was always rushing about trying to help prepare for another of her parties, but as she disallowed any discussion of the dreadful war news at her fêtes, Joseph had noticed that fewer guests were attending these days, and the ones who did come tended to head for home before the sun had set.  It was a tiring cycle, caring for the animals, caring for the barn, maintaining the house, cleaning the house, preparing for parties, cleaning up after parties, and starting all over the following morning.  He had never had a lot of time to himself, and now he found to his dismay there was no time at all.  It all struck him as futile and absurd. 

No matter how it rankled, Aunt Charlotte could do nothing to arrest the war fever spreading across the land.  Talk about events unfolding across the country, or speculation about events that might unfold across the country, was ubiquitous.  Talk of liberty and freedom, of traitors and punishment and retribution, and of slavery and abolition, and of flags and patriotism prevailed everywhere one went.  "Hail, Columbia!" was on everyone's lips.  Who fought and bled in freedom's cause.  The headlines were on fire in the little newspapers printed in every town.  Ad hoc rallies were called in Farmersburg and in Littleport.  Parades and marching bands had been seen in the streets of Elkader, followed by speeches at the courthouse by Professor Kramer and AF Tipton and Lieutenant Leffingwell.  How everyone burned to teach the damned traitors a lesson.

Joseph longed to hear from his brothers.  What did Bill and John and Andy make of all this war talk?  But they never contacted him, which wasn't unusual.  He tried to soak up as much news as he could at Jeremiah's dry goods store or at the tack supplier's, drawing out his visits there as long as possible on the off-chance that he might accidentally overhear some strange tidbit of information.  At first it was only a matter of curiosity and the excitement of the day infecting his imagination, but as he heard more about the passionate speeches being delivered by small town mayors and dignitaries, and about the drills and parades taking place throughout the state, and then about the first volunteers stepping forward to sign their names in the recruiter's ledgers, he grew more restless.  Then came all the excitement General Lyon stirred up in St Louis, and him finally pushing the treasonous governor out of Missouri.  But the end of July brought word of the disaster of Bull Run, followed the next month by the crushing news of Lyon's death at Wilson's Creek.  Then Joseph found it was no longer mere curiosity, or excitement, that captivated his imagination.  He felt some other kind of unrest unfolding and expanding within himself, a desire to take some kind of action beyond keeping Aunt Charlotte's house in good order.  No longer simply hearing what others were saying, he was beginning to respond to what was being said.  It meant something to him personally, even if he couldn't say why.  He was beginning to formulate his own opinions about what was going on.

Angelina understood this although no one else did.  "You won't do anything foolish, will you," she asked him on the last afternoon when they were alone in the parlor and the sheet hung in the doorway.

"What do you mean?"

"You know what I mean."

"No I don't."  He felt exasperated, a little, sitting there in the chair.  She sighed then, kneeling down on the floor in front of him.  "The war," she said.

"What about it?"

"You can't go," she said.  "You said it yourself.  Remember?  You're not old enough."

"Who said I want to go to the war?"

"No one said it.  But anyway you can't go."

She was always that way, he thought now as he popped the last of the bacon into his mouth.  So smart.  She always knew what I was thinking before I did.

He would miss her, more than any of the rest of them.  He already did.  He thought how cheerful she was, and how bright her smile was with the dimples flashing at the corners of her mouth, her black hair hanging around her face, and her shining eyes.  But she was always secretly so serious, too, if you ever broke through that smiling picture book face she showed to the world.

"I can't stay here with her," he said.

"You'd leave me here with her?"

"That's different.  She's your mother."

An uproar from outside the mess called him back to the present again.  The men stopped drinking their coffee and looked around at each other.  What was it?  It had sounded like a cheer coming from the other mess hall located across the muddy lane.  Was it news from the war?  They started speculating among themselves.  The fighting in Missouri.  Had the traitors moved on Jefferson City, or even St Louis?  A few of them nearest the door stood up and walked over to look outside.

"What is it?" Joseph said.

"Who knows?" Bill said.  "Could be anything."

"Maybe we're shipping out," Andy said.

"Maybe the rebs surrendered.  Maybe the war's over," Bill said.  "I guess we'll find out soon enough."

The rebs surrendered? Joseph thought.  Surely not.  He didn't want to have to go back home.  Not yet.

Not ever.

Nothing happened for a few minutes.  Andy and Bill finished their coffee.  It was almost time to go back outside anyway.  They were just standing up from their seats at the table when the officer came in, water pouring from the wide brim of his hat.  The room instantly was plunged into silence, all eyes on the new arrival, who looked quickly around the room.

"I was sent by Adjutant Scott," the man said.  "I'm instructed to inform you men that, due to inclement weather, and the generosity of General Vandever, General Orders have been suspended for the day.  The regular drill schedule will resume on Monday.  That's all."

It was difficult to hear the last words of his announcement because of the cheer that went up in the room.

The three brothers soon decided to take advantage of the unforeseen interruption of their training and trek down the treacherous, muddy lane through the storm.  It was hard to see as they walked together all hunched forward against the rain that slanted down full and hard into their faces.  "Let's go have our portraits made in town," Bill had suggested.  "We can send them back home.  It'll help get the ladies off our backs for running off to fight."

Mary Jane, Bill's wife, was at home minding their four children, Cordelia, Bill Jr, Erastus, and little Ben, who was not even one year old yet.  Andy had left his two daughters home with Emily.  Joseph knew that neither Emily nor Mary Jane was very happy that their husbands had gone off to whip the traitors, but it was impossible to keep the men home during time of war.  It was the war fever, and anyway if they didn't enlist there was the threat of the draft looming, and that would be a disgraceful way to go.  Not that there was any chance Bill and Andy would have waited for the draft.  After Joseph had fled Aunt Charlotte and Volga City and come home to his brothers, he'd found them to be just as eager to enlist as he was.  Only John wanted nothing to do with the fighting, and he was staying home to oversee all the farms, which after all were located on adjoining tracks of land.  Together Emily and Mary Jane, along with John's wife, Jane, could look after all the children while Andy and Bill were gone away for the few months that the war would last.

"What was that hotel where we ate with the quartermaster?" Joseph said, shouting to try to be heard through the storm.

"The Peaslee House," Andy shouted back.

"Right.  Do you think we could have dinner there again?"

"We'll see.  Let's talk about it later."

Yes:  the Peaslee House, Joseph remembered.  That was what it was called.  He remembered  then what red-whiskered Brodbeck, the drill-major, had said after the mustering-in ceremony:  I hope you boys enjoyed your last supper at the Peaslee House, because your pampered life as civilians is over.  His words had seemed so ominous, only now, after only one single day of drilling on the practice field, Joseph supposed that maybe Brodbeck had spoken too soon, the storm having won them this reprieve.  Maybe the military life wasn't so terrible as the drill-major had made them believe.  S lugging forward through the mud, Joseph recalled how they'd been dressed down on the difference between civilians and soldiers, and on the sacred duty of the latter to die.

Do you know what a veteran is? Brodbeck had harangued them.  Civilians think veterans are soldiers who have seen long service and therefore deserve respect.  But civilians don't know anything about the army, or about their own country, for that matter.  A veteran is a disgusting old soldier who failed to properly die.  He lives on ingloriously after his brethren-soldiers have fallen dead all around him, and there's nothing praiseworthy about that.  When you go into battle, you'll watch some of these men who are standing around you right now dying of disease or gunshot wounds, or you'll see artillery rounds taking off their arms and legs and heads, or ripping out their hearts and lungs and guts, right in front of you.  You'll have their blood and guts and brains sprayed across your faces, and you'll learn the stink of the battlefield.  Then, if you survive that, as a veteran (he spat it out like a curse word) you'll carry with you a maddening guilt, because you watched them die while you came through unscathed.  That's a shameful way to live, as a veteran.  Even if civilians don't know it, you'll know it, and any soldier you meet will instantly know it about you, that you failed to do your duty, to die.  Nothing is more sickening to a soldier than to encounter a veteran who has never been seriously wounded.  Your wounds are the only proof you have that you did everything possible to try to die.  Your duty is to die, not to try to come through the fire still alive.  Your country does not want veterans, who are failed soldiers.  Veterans turn into helpless, pathetic old men who grow sickly and require pensions.  This Union does not want to be in the business of caring for you after the war.  Your country expects that you will do everything in your power to insure that you don't survive:  there is no other point for an army's existence but to be ground down while exterminating the enemy.  That's why you're here today.  We're going to teach you how to be professional soldiers.  How to properly die.

Joseph understood.  The purpose of an army was to be used up.  Any other outcome was uneconomical.

Ben should understand that, he thought.  Money and waste.  Ben of all people.  He remembered again when they were settling into the barracks and through the open doorway he heard his name being called:  "Private Joseph Garner!"  And all the room fell silent with the men looking curiously at him as he walked across the barracks with his heart drumming in his chest, and him thinking that he wasn't going to be able to go after all because somehow they had learned his true age.  And he felt their eyes watching him, boring into him as he made that walk and then stepped outside to find out what might be his fate.

And then he remembered again the last night at Aunt Charlotte's house.  There had been a party, but only a few people had come, and they had so disappointed her by all leaving so very early for home.  Afterwards the children had stretched a sheet across the doorway between the parlor and the hallway so they could play the shadow pantomime game.  He remembered how much fun they had had, and how the little girls had laughed.  Angelina was very good at the game but fat Sam was not.  His hand-animals always resembled nothing but knuckly blob-shadows projected onto the sheet in the flickering candlelight in the hall, even attempts to make something so simple as a bat or a butterfly.  Sarah and Lillie so enjoyed the game, though, and anyway it kept them distracted and away from Aunt Charlotte, who sat brooding alone in the darkness of the kitchen with no candle or lamp.  They had left the sheet hanging there when they went to bed, and there it remained all the next day because Aunt Charlotte stayed in bed with one of her headaches and no one bothered to take it down.  It was still there in the late afternoon when Angelina was talking to him about the war and about how he was not old enough to go fight in it.

He noticed an itinerant wind tugging and tossing through the trees that surrounded the muddy lane they walked down, but when the gusty bellows blew down the cleared roadway they were mostly at his back and only helped to push them forward.  Still, if the gusts kept up they would be turned walking headlong into the wind and rain later tonight on the way back to camp from town.  He wanted to believe that every step he took cut him off that much further from the past but he knew that wouldn't really be true until they finally boarded a steamer down on the riverfront docks that was bound to deliver them safely beyond the Iowa borders.  Until then anything might still happen to stymie his escape, even though he didn't think anything would happen, not now.  If something was going to stop him it would have happened yesterday when he emerged from the barracks alone, fearing he had been found out, and waiting for him outside the cool barracks in the hot sun, still astride the horse that Joseph himself had taken out of the barn the day he had fled, was flat-faced Ben, whose piggish, crooked eyes fixed immediately on him, burning with both anger and satisfaction at having caught him up.  Joseph imagined immediately how his half-brother must have got word from Aunt Charlotte and had had to cut his work short to return home to Volga City on account of a family emergency, to come in search of Joseph and try to prevent his doing anything so foolish as enlisting in the army and running away.

"This him?" said the clerk who had called Joseph's name -- "Private Joseph Garner!" -- a weasel-faced boy-man from the camp whom Joseph had never seen before.

Ben did not reply but only shifted his great turgid weight down out of the saddle, taking the reins in his hand and moving a few steps closer to where Joseph stood, never lowering his glowering gaze.  Joseph stiffened, and he didn't turn away from Ben, either, not even when, in his peripheral vision, he noticed the weasel boy-man shrug his shoulders and skulk away.

Like fighting cocks they stared at each other only a few feet apart, and through Joseph's mind flashed again the strange scene with Aunt Charlotte that afternoon when she had torn down the sheet and moved in screaming at them like a crazy woman.  How he had leapt up from the stuffed red velvet chair -- maybe the finest chair in the state of Iowa -- and Angelina, who had been kneeling before the chair with her hand on his knee, imploring him not to leave, was also surprised and startled and had leapt upward, too.  And Aunt Charlotte had ferociously flung Angelina aside back behind her and was pounding on Joseph's chest screaming at him to get out get out and leave now and never come back and more that Joseph didn't understand at all about him taking advantage of her hospitality after years and years of eating at their table and taking his share of their hard-earned money even in the hard times, and him not caring about any of it and now bringing his corruption into their house under their roof and get out get out and do not ever come back, with her clawing at him and Angelina a short distance away screaming and the sound somewhere in the house of the girls' running footsteps, and the hot, furious tears flowing out of Aunt Charlotte's maddened eyes.  So he gave Angelina one last look but Aunt Charlotte only renewed her attack and he hurried out the door to the barn and picked the best horse and set out immediately for his brothers' farms down past Strawberry Point in Fayette County.  It was well after dark when he arrived at Bill's house and told him what had happened, and the next day Bill rode back to Volga City on his own horse, walking Ben's horse on a long lead, and left it in their barn without talking to Aunt Charlotte or anyone else about it.  As it happened Bill and Andy were already getting ready to go up to Fayette to enlist, and when they'd heard his stories about life among the Broyles they were ready to have him come along with them, although John didn't think it was a good idea, but where else Bill asked could Joseph go?  Back to their crazy cousin's house?  And anyway Joseph wanted to enlist.  All these things and more passed through his mind as Ben and he stared each other down, and without ever looking away Ben eventually spoke in a tight, forced voice.

"Charlotte told me what you did."

"I don't know what I did, and I don't care."

"She saw you."

"I didn't do anything."

"Your shadow was on the sheet in the doorway.  You and Angelina.  She saw you."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Ben didn't answer, but momentarily he tried a new tact.  "You can't enlist.  You can't go to the war.  You're too young.  You'll be killed."

"Maybe.  But still, I'm going."

"Why?"

"Maybe I have a duty to be killed."

"You need to grow up.  Where are Andy and Bill?"  Joseph did not answer him.  "Didn't they try to stop you?"

"They're my brothers.  They care what happens to me."

Ben licked his fat lips.  He still hadn't looked away from Joseph's eyes.  He said:  "Get your things.  We're going home."

"No."

"I could get your sergeant, or lieutenant, or whatever you call him, and tell them your real age.  You'd have to come with me."

"Then get them.  Even if you take me back to Volga City, I'll run away again."

Ben did not answer him.  He appeared to be struggling for something to say.

"Did Aunt Charlotte send you here?"

"No."

"Then why did you come?"

"Because I'm in charge of you."

"Not anymore."

"Joseph.  Listen.  The war is no place for a boy."

Joseph swore.

In a moment Ben said:  "You're not a man yet.  But I'm trying to treat you like a man.  I'm trying to help you, Joseph.  If you go ahead with this there'll be no turning back.  I won't be able to help you anymore."

"I don't want any of your help.  I never did."

He heard footsteps at his back, which he recognized.  Ben broke the stare then, looking up at the new arrivals.  "You two are just going to let him go get himself killed?"

"I think Little Joe can take care of himself," Andy said.  "And if he can't, he's got us to keep an eye on him."

"You're crazy," Ben said.

"There seems to be a certain amount of craziness in the family," Bill said.

"Listen," Ben said.  "Whatever you may think you know or understand, let me tell you this.  I don't want anything to happen to Joseph.  Do you understand me?  If you two are dumb enough to go off and get yourselves killed that's your business.  But you take care of Joseph."

"Glad to see you care so much about the family," Andy said, sounding bored.

Ben looked back at Joseph.  Slowly he lifted an arm.  He put his hand on Joseph's shoulder.

"You come back.  Do you understand?  Don't try to be a hero."

Now, walking in the wind and rain to have his portrait made in Dubuque, Joseph could still feel the weight of Ben's hand on his shoulder.  That was nothing that his half-brother had ever done before.  It had meant something more than anything Ben had said.  Joseph still thought that strange.  It hadn't changed anything, though.

He remembered the last thing he had said to Ben, who afterward nodded to Andy and Bill and got back on his horse and rode slowly out of the camp.

"I'll be back."