The Soldier’s Return by Shelley K. Davenport

The Soldier’s Return by Shelley K. Davenport

There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now;
if it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all.
Since no man, of aught he leaves, knows what is’t to leave betimes, let be.
—Hamlet

My story begins on the afternoon that Miss Morse boxed my ears and locked me out of the house. As soon as she was out of sight, I stuck out my tongue at her, put my book of fairytales into my pocket, and climbed the pear tree. The one saving grace of our ugly new home, it was large and luxuriant, mainly because it had never been pruned to make it bear fruit. We had no other front yard, just the square hole in the pavement through which the tree had struggled upwards.

My mother had died in June, soon after we arrived in the city, and Father hired Miss Morse to help. Released from the army at the end of the war, he was busy with his new job designing and testing dirigible prototypes, and I was too young to keep house by myself. Miss Morse—a bony and morose woman I mentally referred to as Miss Horse—disliked all children, but I think she actually hated me.

It was a lovely day in early September, but I felt cranky and my ears ached. I sat for awhile with the book unopened on my knee, despising everything around me, so different from the blue mountains and golden fields we had left behind us in Arcadia. I passionately hated the city of Port Kittanning. I hated the steep hills denuded of trees, and crusted over with slapdash wooden houses. I hated the brown rivers and the steamboats that chuffed up and down them. I hated the perpetual smoke and stink of the iron mills.

What else did I hate? I enumerated my hatreds with relish. I hated childbed fever and negligent doctors. I hated living in a world in which babies could die before they took their first breath. I hated the war for making my father into a stranger. I hated myself for not keeping a civil tongue in my head. I hated Miss Morse for punishing me for it. As I tried to decide where Miss Morse ranked in my list of hatreds, I saw the soldier.

It was common to see soldiers returning from war. Since the hostilities ended in April, they’d all begun to come home, the men and boys in their proud, faded blue. Sometimes they came in trickles and sometimes in floods. The 155th Pennsylvania Regiment, for instance, had returned to the neighborhood of Pearysville with great fanfare in early June. There was a parade, and speeches, and triumphant music playing. I only heard the cheers and horns from a distance, because my grandparents, my stupefied father, and I were at the graveyard burying my mother and baby brother.

I studied the soldier from my vantage point in the tree. Usually, such a return caused a commotion. Families came running out of houses, cheering and crying with joy. This man was alone, and no one seemed to see him. The front of his uniform was soaked in blackness that I rightly assumed to be blood. He wore no hat on his dark head, and carried a rifle loosely upright against his shoulder. As he drew closer I saw that his trouser legs were muddy and torn. He stopped directly before our house and stood staring at it. I should say that there was nothing remarkable about our house. It was exactly like all the other row houses—dull, flat-faced, with a tiny front stoop and the pots of mostly dead flowers on the steps. What was he looking at?

I stayed still as long as I could, but finally I twitched and leaves gave a little rustle. Instantly the soldier looked up. His eyes were a strange, translucent gray that I had never seen before or since.

“Hello,” he said.

I returned his greeting warily, thanking my lucky stars that I was safely in a tree and he could not eat me, or whatever it was men did to little girls in the city. (I had been warned of their ill intent, but not the details.)

“What day is it?” he asked.

“September second,” I replied.

“Is it?” he said, sounding thunderstruck. “How about that.” He thought for a while and then said, “Is this your house?”

I considered. My father and I did indeed occupy it, although we rented and did not own it.

“In a manner of speaking,” I said loftily. I was precocious and knew it.

“May I come up?” he asked.

“What?” I said in alarm, but he had already begun to climb, swiftly and deftly.The branches should not have been able to hold him—though it was a large pear tree it was not the size of a maple or oak—but soon he was seated across from me in a little fork, and I saw that his weight had no effect on the branches. It was then that I realized he was a ghost. I concluded this calmly, probably because the previous year had been so full of horrors that I was ready to believe in anything. And as it turned out, I was less afraid of a ghost than I would have been of a strange, solitary man.

“What is your name?” he asked. He needed a shave.

“Florence Tree. Flossie.”

He nodded, and did not say “Is that why you like to climb trees so much?” which is what every adult always said.

Instead, he remarked, “That means ‘flowering tree.’ It’s a good name.”

“What is your name?” I inquired.

“Thomas Done,” he said. (I later learned, to my embarrassment, that his name was spelled Dunne, but I thought at the time that Done was a remarkably good name for someone who had died.)

He was still staring at the house between the leaves of the pear tree.

I wanted to ask him questions, like how long he had been a ghost and what it was like to die and why had he not gone to heaven? An uncomfortable thought struck me.

“Was this your house?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “But it was for sale and I wanted to buy it. I was going to be married and I thought it would be a nice place to raise a family.”

I quite disagreed with him there, but did not wish to contradict.

“I thought I would paint it white,” he mused, “and then paint the shutters blue. And I would have liked to build flower boxes for all the windows. I was going to be married,” he repeated.

By dying, I saw, Mr. Done had lost his wife-to-be, or that more properly she had lost him. I myself knew something of lost lovers. I had left my own sweetheart back in Arcadia, the deeply adorable Johnny Stuart. He had black hair and blue eyes and no matter how hard he tried, he could never outrun me, which was partly why he was in love with me. I knew in my heart I would never see him again. I swallowed hard, and looked at the house, trying to see it as Mr. Done did, as a home for himself and his wife, and not the place of torture it was for me.

“My father has battle fatigue,” I said abruptly.

He looked at me, and I thought he must be about my father’s age, thirty-five. “Is that so?”

“Yes. He was a chaplain, but he saw things too terrible to speak of at Spotsylvania and now he doesn’t sleep. He wanders around the house at night. He goes to work at the shipping company every day, but then he comes home and stares at the wall and sometimes he talks to himself.” I knew that he wandered at night because I did not sleep much more than he did. “He’s not a chaplain anymore,” I added for clarification.

“Ah, Spotsylvania,” said Mr. Done, grimacing. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Were you there? Is that where you…er…?” I wanted to say “killed” but could not bring myself to do so. I looked at his jacket with the loose brass buttons, the black gash in the breast, and the light spatter of blood across his face. I supposed ghosts could not take baths or change their clothes. Did he still have a hole in his heart?

“Hm?” he said, still looking at the house.

“I said, how long have you been a ghost?” I asked, politely as I could.

“Since April.”

“The war ended in April,” I said, surprised.

“Yes, it did,” he replied.

We sat quietly for a few minutes.

“I’m curious about why you can see me,” he said.

I certainly didn’t know. Since then I have considered several possibilities, but never come to any firm conclusions. It happened because it was meant to—like in a fairytale. Sometimes these things just happen and one must shoulder them with grace.

He went on. “No one has seen me since I died, unless you count animals and some other ghosts. But you aren’t dead, are you?”

“Certainly not,” I said with some asperity. “Although sometimes I think it would be a relief.” This was something I had overheard my father say.

“I can tell youthat it isn’t,” said Mr. Done. He said it very quietly so that I wanted to change the subject.

“Why is it called Pearysville?” I asked. “Is it because of all the pear trees?”

He smiled. I liked the way his smile changed his face. “There was an orchard here,” he said. “A long time ago. Both pear and apple trees—and maybe even peaches. But it was actually named after the farmer, Mr. Peary, who lived here before all the houses were built.”

“Where is his farm now?”

“I imagine they tore it down when they built the mill houses. It could have been anywhere.” He gestured around.

I scowled. I had spent the last five years on my grandparents’ farm—a veritable paradise of creeks, hay lofts, and trees—and was appalled at the idea of it all being torn down and built over. Never mind a mill clanking and gouting black smoke! The idea of a ghostly farm house living invisibly behind the ugly city houses made me sad. The soldier and I were sadly quiet together for a little while.

At length the church bell chimed six. The sun had been getting lower, and I thought it must be about time to eat. I did not wish to further antagonize Miss Morse by failing to come in at the correct time. I closed my book and said to Mr. Done, “It’s been lovely speaking with you, but now it’s dinnertime.”

“Then you should go. It was nice to meet you.”

“Thank you,” I said, and began to climb down. “It was nice to meet you too.”

As I passed him, the tip of his boot—he had some kind of substance to him—brushed my elbow. Something happened then. I thought about it a lot afterwards, and I  can only describe it by saying my mind tripped and I fell into his memories, like a stone falls into clear, fathomless water.

His only thought was to get home. He walked steadily, day and night, unable to tire. He traversed striped cornfields and skirted scummy green ponds. He could walk straight over rivers, although he longed to submerge himself in the cool, flowing water, to feel the current caressing and cleaning his dusty, bloody body. When the ground began to roll and swell like the breakers of the sea, he felt relief, a loosening of the cords that kept him tethered to the earth in those endless flat fields of war. This was his country, these mountains, these winding rivers, these long valleys and white farms. In the mountains especially, sometimes an animal would accompany him. Birds flittered around him, tweeting as if to start a conversation. A beautiful fox vixen followed him for miles, and once a mountain lion padded silently beside him all night. Dogs barked at him when he looked into the windows of the farmhouses to see dinner being laid out, or children reading at lamplight, and sometimes he heard a banjo being played on a front porch and smelled sweet tobacco smoke. The corn grew taller. The sunsets became sad and pink, and the apples reddened in dry green trees. Brambleberries grew darkly in the briars. He realized that summer was ending. When would he get home? But at last the city began to rise up around him. The hills became smaller and steeper. and the roads dwindled to twisting lanes and tight hairpin byways. Train tracks and bridges crisscrossed overhead on bridges and underneath in ravines. Atop the final little hillcrest, he beheld the old smoky city, cradled in the hills and divided at its heart by three rivers. It looked the same as ever. Fueled with joy, he crossed the final river and headed toward his old neighborhood. He passed the train station, the grocers, the post office, the three churches. Here he found uneven brick streets, long slopes leading steeply up and down, and familiar groups of houses both dingy and grand. For awhile he stood outside Seton House, the boarding house where he had lived since his mother died. This was home…but somehow he felt unsatisfied, because was it home? No one greeted him, no band of musicians celebrated his return, there was no cheering crowd or joyous, weeping friends. He had been so anxious to get home that he had not stopped to think what home meant to a man in his situation. He turned around in the middle of the street. He was completely alone.

I found myself swaying on the pavement, hand pressed against the tree trunk. I felt almost nauseated, so vast and foreign had his memory been to my child’s mind.

“Flossie?” I heard him say, but I dared not look up. I felt I had trespassed on his private property. I felt his awful homesickness.

Miss Morse stuck her head out the door then and glared at me. “Did you or did you not hear the bell?” she snapped.

“Yes,” I whispered obediently.

Over my shoulder I glanced into the tree branches but there was only a robin with a bright eye and a deeply red breast. It seemed to cock its head at me, and then took to the wing and flew away down the hill and into the hazy sky.

& & &

For awhile after this I was dreamy and nervous, and felt I might scream at every provocation. My father and I ate dinner together with Miss Morse every night, she eating with knife and fork in hand, very businesslike, horsey jaws grinding away at the gristle. Father forced the food into his mouth the way one might something medicinal. I picked at my food, but I was not allowed to leave the table until I had finished, no matter how bland or overcooked it was. At night I lay awake listening to the whistling trains and the coal barges that slid bellowing on the rivers. The gas lamps made true darkness impossible. When I did sleep I had nightmares in which I walked and walked and never got anywhere.

On Sunday night I saw Mr. Done again. My father had taken me to church twice, as was his custom, once in the morning and once in the evening, for an hour-long sermon and some unpleasantly jingoistic hymns. I did not know why we attended this church, so unlike the lovely one we’d left behind in Arcadia. This one was filled with granite-faced men and their nervous wives. I could tell they did not like Father, and I believed it was because he had failed at war by getting battle fatigue. Battle fatigue made him unpatriotic, ungodly, and worst of all, unmanly.

As we were walking back, lamps hissing above us, he sighed, gritted his teeth, and shook his head, obviously having a silent conversation with someone who was not there. Gingerly I put my hand in his. He clasped it without looking at me, but he did not drop it. I did not notice at first, therefore, that Mr. Done had come out of the shadows and was walking alongside of me. When I saw him, I checked to make sure that my father did not see him, then gave the soldier a quizzical sideways look. He nodded at me.

When we reached the house, I asked my father if I could water the plants on the front stoop. It was the Sabbath, but it was full dark and he gave me brief assent. I filled the watering can at the pump and lugged it out to the front step and saw Mr. Done still standing by the house. He leaned back against it, rifle propped up, arms crossed, looking at the moon which was so bright it cast shadows. It was on the wane.

“Are you visiting me?” I asked, trying to keep a tremble out of my voice. He did scare me, a little, or at least the idea of him.

I flooded the top pot of pansies, which were probably beyond resuscitation.

“Yes,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind. There isn’t anyone else I can talk to.”

I shook my head brusquely. I wanted to tell him I did not have anyone to talk to either. Truthfully, I think had I been ten years older, I might have been in love with him. But he was, after all, a grown man, as old as my father. We shouldn’t have been friends, but I liked him. More than that, because he was a soldier the same age as my father, I was helplessly drawn towards him.

“Were you very afraid during battle?” I asked him, setting down the watering can.

He shook his head slowly, still staring at the moon, heavy and golden.

“Only before,” he said. “The night before was always bad. In battle I didn’t feel afraid because I was too busy issuing orders and staying alive.”

“Did you kill very many men?” I asked.

He sighed and did not answer.

“What is it like to kill someone?” I persisted. I really wanted to ask what it was like to die, but somehow that seemed rude, like inquiring about his bedtime habits.

“Like nothing, right then,” he said. “But later you think about it. You can’t help but think about it. Especially at night.”

I had finished watering the other plants and sat down, trying to keep my voice low so no one in the house could hear me.

“Tell me a story,” I said.

He smiled at this and told me about the regiment’s pet chicken, Varina, who was named after Jefferson Davis’s wife. They kept her in a basket and fed her from their own meals. When Varina got run over by a cannon wheel, tragically, at the battle of Front Royal, they gave her a funeral with full military honors.

“Poor Varina,” I said.

Another time, he told me, he somehow got separated from his company and ran into a Rebel soldier in a stand of trees. Wildly startled, they aimed their guns at each other, but after a long moment neither pulled the trigger. By unspoken consent they decided not to kill each other. Instead, they set their weapons down, sat down on a log, and shared a pipe. They talked about their sweethearts, and he showed the Rebel the picture of his fiancée. He said he was from Port Kittanning in Pennsylvania of the Eastern Mountains, and the Rebel said he had heard of it, and he was from the Ozarks in Arkansas. They both agreed that the present landscape was much too flat for their tastes. When the pipe was finished, they shook hands, picked up their guns, went back to their own armies. He never told anyone about it.

“Can I see it?” I asked.

“See what?”

“The picture of your fiancée.”

“No,” he said. “I…lost it somewhere along the way.”

I suspected this was not true, but I said, “What was her name?”

“She was called Maisie Knox.” His quiet tone confused me. Did he sound angry?

But I couldn’t seem to stop myself. “Where is she now?”

He did not want to talk about Maisie any more than he wanted to talk about killing other men. He hoisted his rifle and took a step away. I saw that he was on the verge of leaving. I jumped up and went to him.

“Don’t go,” I said, and I foolishly put my hand on his sleeve.

If anything, he was surprised when the Rebel soldier plunged the long bayonet into his chest. He wobbled for a moment, looking the other man in the eyes. The Rebel jerked the bayonet out, bringing forth a gush of blood, and ran onward. Thomas dropped his own rifle and fell backwards onto the muddy grass. He knew he felt pain, but it was obscured from him somehow, held in trust at a distance. He was aware of the men running past him, the roar of cannon, and the constant bang of gunfire. Other men, his own men, twisted and dropped. In the distance the band was still playing Nelly Bly, over and over frantically, the gaiety and swing of which song contrasted horribly with the blood and grappling and dying. He could not move but, then, he did not want to. He stared up at the fresh blue sky. It had rained yesterday, but today was fine. (Nelly Bly, Nelly Bly, bring de broom along.) The trees, although shrouded by gun smoke, had a fine mist of green upon them. He pressed his hands to his chest, thinking to stanch the blood, but the bayonet had run him through the heart and the blood pulsed between his fingers. Would someone drag him off the field? Did no one notice him? A riderless horse careened past him, saddle sliding sideways. He felt himself getting warm in the sun. The trampled grass smelled earthy (Nelly Bly, Nelly Bly…) and someone tripped over him, got up and staggered on. He began to feel sleepy. That was all right. He would go to sleep and when he woke up everything would be over and he could go home. He looked at his gory hands, glad that for once the blood was his, and did not belong to another man. He had survived so many battles, seen so many other men die, listened to the screams of the hospital tent, seen the piles of limbs, heard full-grown men crying for their mothers in the dusk. It was all right now, he thought. It was all right. If only they would stop that awful song. (Heigh! Nelly, ho! Nelly, listen lub to me!). He closed his eyes and felt himself sink down, down, down, away from the pain and the noise, down into the kind green grass.

“Oh!” I said. “Oh.” I took several rapid steps backwards.

Mr. Done looked at me, worried. “Are you hurt?”

Yes, I was hurt, I was mortally wounded, wasn’t I? And yet here we were, talking on the street, a little girl and a ghost soldier, like it was perfectly natural, when we had just died.

“No,” I said. I sat down on the step hard. “I’m sorry,” I heard myself say.

He studied me with concern, but could not, of course, deduce the source of my distress, and I was not about to tell him.

“Where,” I said, through numb lips, “Where was your last battle?”

“Five Forks, they called it,” he answered after a pause.

I imagined five pieces of cutlery laid out in a sunburst pattern, tines out, handles together. Like a table laid out for a macabre dinner party.

“I just don’t like the sounds of it,” I said.

At that moment my father opened the door.

“Who are you talking to?” he asked, looking up and down the street.

“Myself,” I said. “You do it all the time.”

Mr. Done winked at me and was gone.

“It’s bedtime,” said Father. “Too late to be outside. Go wash up and say your prayers.”

A few nights later I lay on my bed, thinking about dying. I pressed my hands to my chest above my heart and closed my eyes. I imagined growing warm and tired, sinking into the grass which began to grow improbably tall around me. My limbs relaxed, my body losing its grip on this world. I tried to imagine the pain, but it still seemed to be coming from a very great distance: such a violent and unbelievable injury could not be actually felt. Warm blood seemed to seep between my fingers as I stared up at the stained ceiling, imagining it to be a fresh blue sky of April.

My father walked past in the hall. My door was partway open, and he stopped and looked in.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

I was so surprised by his noticing me again that I said nothing, but dropped my hands and stared at him. He came in and sat on the foot of the bed.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

I could not tell him that I was practicing dying. My mouth moved silently as I considered, then discarded words. At length, I said, “I’m homesick.”

“You miss the farm,” he said.

I blinked, furiously fighting tears. I wanted to tell him that I missed him too, I missed Mama, but of course he already knew that.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I miss it too. Nothing grows here. And there are no fireflies. Have you noticed that?”

I nodded.

“At least you have a tree to climb,” he remarked. “You always liked to climb trees.” A dark thought crossed his mind, for he flinched, grimaced, and stood up.

“It all ends, doesn’t it?” he said, and went away.

& & &

The third time I saw Mr. Done was outside the grocer’s. Miss Morse had sent me to buy apples and flour, so she could make another incredibly soggy pie which I think she thought was a great specialty of hers. I was feeling a good deal better that day. I came out into the sunny morning with the laden basket in both hands. I saw Mr. Done a ways down the street, looking at something on the other side of the church. I went down to him and stood beside him, looking through the iron fence into the graveyard. It was a really lovely cemetery, shaded by huge sycamores and oaks, the monuments white and gracious, and paths curving this way and that. It was more like a park in some ways.

“That’s where they’re going to bury me,” he said.

“How do you know?”

“Because my mother is buried there, and my sister, Elizabeth.”

“What about your father?”

“He died before I was born. He’s buried in Harper’s Ferry. I never knew him.”

A gentleman passed me, looking at me askance. I stayed quiet until he was out of earshot and then said, “When are they going to bury you?”

“After my body arrives,” he said. “I somehow got here first.”

I saw how this could be inconvenient.

“Is that why you are waiting?” I asked.

“Waiting?”

“Waiting to go to heaven. You want to see your funeral first.”

He looked down at me. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really want to go to my funeral, but I probably will. In any case I’ll be happier when the rest of me arrives in town. Whatever is left of me, that is,” he added, looking chagrined. “And then we’ll see about heaven.”

“My baby brother is buried in there,” I offered. “With my mother.”

“Oh dear,” he said.

I tried to be cheerful. “It’s a nice place to be buried, I think.”

He agreed. “It could be worse, yes.”

We began to walk home. He whistled a tune that I recognized as a folk hymn called Pleading Savior. He whistled it often—I came to associate it with him. I kicked at the pebbles underfoot. I was feeling slightly guilty because I had taken two memories from him, and he probably didn’t know about it. Not that I wished to confess. I felt protective of these memories, somehow, as if they had been entrusted to me. They’d begun to seem incredibly precious and became more so all the time. No one else knew what I knew. That was both a weight on me, and a point of pride.

“Did they bury you after you died? In…”

“Virginia,” he said. “And yes, they did. You ask a lot of awkward questions,” he added.

“I never conversed with a ghost before,” I said haughtily, adding, “I feel I can learn quite a lot.”

“Well, I am glad to be of service,” he said, sounding only a little ironic.

I was silent for a little while. We passed several other pedestrians, and I didn’t want to talk to Mr. Done in front of anyone else. I bit my thumbnail and thought about what he had said. When we were alone again, I said, “If you were already buried, why did they take you out of the ground and bring you…your body…here?”

He took this question with grace. “I imagine my brother-in-law Andrew paid for me to be brought back. He’s quite well off. You should see Elizabeth’s memorial stone.” He gestured up at the sky, as if demonstrating a tower of some sort.

I had no desire to go into the graveyard again. They buried my brother in my mother’s arms, and it made me feel sick remembering it.

We paused on the bridge that crossed a steep crevice, such as is common in Port Kittanning. A steam horn blew. He set his rifle down and propped it against the railing, then rested his elbows and looked into the distance. I knew I shouldn’t do it, but the urge was unbearable. I reached out and brushed my knuckle across the hem of his jacket.

He left the city on September second, when the 155th mustered up. The mood at the train station was festive. Horns blared Hail Columbia and drums rolled. Flags fluttered in the breeze, and people gave hurrahs at the sight of him, bidding him luck, calling him a brave man. Some of the girls kissed him. Every man in blue had more kisses than he could handle. The Mayor made a speech to cries of approval and agreement. The morning sky was crystalline, unmarred by smoke, and the shabby houses looked fine. Even the devilish old mills glinted in the golden morning sun. He thought the old city looked beautiful, despite its grime. He looked around for Maisie in all the cheering crowd. Of course she wasn’t there. Maisie was—no, try not to think of Maisie. Try not to think of their last awful conversation, the trite letter she wrote him, the apologies that rang so false. Of course she wasn’t here to see him; she was married now, and she wasn’t Maisie Knox and she wasn’t Maisie Dunne: she was Maisie Weaver. She lived across the river now with her new, rich husband. But surely, she could have come to see him off because he was going to war and might never return, couldn’t she? Vainly he searched the masses. He knew that she was not there. For a moment he hoped fiercely that he would die, and that she would have to come to his funeral and feel nothing but sharp and cruel regret. He wanted to see her cry. He did not know whether he hated or loved her more, but the train whistled, and it was time to go. He boarded the car, knapsack on his back, hat at an angle. The other soldiers called him “Tom” and some of them “Lieutenant” (Andrew had gotten him a commission). They shook his hand and clapped him on the back and drew him into their midst. The train started and they were off to adventure and glory on the battlefield. They were ready to fight the Confederates and free their slaves and preserve the Union. They would serve their country; they were invincible and would come back as heroes. Soon he was joking and laughing with the others and planning all the fierce justice he would bring down upon the Rebels. He scarcely noticed the city falling away from them, home slipping out of sight.

I blinked. She jilted him, I thought. I felt a surge of rage on his behalf so intense that I gasped. Thankfully he did not hear me. He gazed down into the chasm below us, the narrow slanting street with its line of wooden houses that lived in constant shade. In the distance was the river, and at this angle, touched by sunlight, it looked wistful green rather than brown. The trees had just begun to burn scarlet and orange, and for a moment I saw why he loved the city that I so desperately hated.

After a while, he walked me home and I pondered my discovery. He had been engaged to a girl named Maisie, and she had broken off their engagement to marry someone else, a man with the last name Weaver. No wonder he had signed up for the army! How would I feel if I returned to Arcadia and found Johnny Stuart had taken up with another girl? I would have to go to war too!

I promised myself I would not touch Mr. Done again. But his memories were potent and had an addictive quality to them. Despite the pain they caused me, I was growing to crave them. At the same time, part of me rebelled against the experiences as unnatural and perhaps dangerous. It was like creeping up to the edge of a cliff and looking into the precipitous drop below. It made your heart bang against your ribs, and your head get swimmy, and you knew you ought to stay away. Yet you still looked, every time.

“Come away from the edge,” I said out loud.

“What was that?” he asked.

I looked up at him and tried to discern if he was handsome and, if so, why Maisie had left him. I could not tell. Though I wanted to ask him, I bit my tongue.

“Nothing,” I said, to the confusion of the fat woman leading a little boy by the hand. She looked at me suspiciously and crossed to the other side of the street.

When I got home, Father was at the table, surrounded by brass cogs and wheels. He had taken apart the mantel clock, which had broken, and was in the process of cleaning and fixing it. I had not seen this much initiative in him since he came back from the war. I sat down and observed him.

I was four when the war began, but my father did not immediately leave us. He stayed home after the beginning of the war, serving as the chaplain for the cadets at Fort Roberdeau. For three years he watched his young men go off to war and never return. He was the loveliest of fathers to me, reading to me, playing the banjo at night, building me tree forts and snow forts, and whittling toys out of wood by the fire. But after the Battle of Gettysburg and the address given by President Lincoln, he felt that he simply had to sign up for the army. My mother supported him as she always did, but I was fiercely opposed and would not say goodbye to him. Of course I now believed that I was partly to blame for his coming back with battle fatigue. I thought how sad it must have made him that I did not say goodbye.

My mother and I moved into my grandparents’ farm, where I turned seven and spent my life waiting on my father’s visits. He came home, as I have said, on leave, and in between visits I spent long hours hanging on the gate, hoping to see him walking up the road towards me. Sometimes I climbed the maple tree to its very top and looked down the valley to where the white road came around the blue haunch of the mountain, humming, “When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again” to myself. But of course, when he did come home, stumbling and blank-eyed, he was not a man I recognized.

I watched him polishing bits of the clock with a greased rag.

“Do you miss Mama?” I asked.

He looked up at me, startled. He had not seen me there. He stared at me for a full five seconds before saying, “Yes, very much.”

“Are you angry that she left you?”

Another long stare at the spring he had in hand as he considered this. I liked this about him—he always took my questions seriously. In fact, he took all questions in the world seriously, and could be maniacal in the pursuit of the truth.

“It wasn’t her fault,” he said. “It was mine.”

I opened my mouth but could not say anything. I suspected what he meant, but I did not want to know more. As a child, I wanted to stay far away from certain adult secrets. But the fact that he felt guilty was a revelation to me. Did Mr. Done blame himself about Maisie? I decided that probably he did not, because she was obviously in the wrong.

“Are you angry at her?” Father asked me, wiping his greasy fingers on his leather apron.

It was my turn to stare. Oh yes. I was. I was very angry. On my behalf yes, but also on his, and the dead baby, and it somehow got mixed up in my anger at Maisie Knox, who had forced a man to go get killed in a war, and I took a trembling sigh.

“I have a headache,” I said tightly, something I noticed older women said when they didn’t want to deal with a situation.

Miss Morse came in. Somehow she had gotten winded on the way from the kitchen, and she wheezed through her long nose. “Ah, thank you, Flossie,” she said, accepting the basket from me. She counted the apples and, finding one with wormholes, her nostrils flared. But she said nothing. She was usually on her best behavior in front of Father, and so he did not suspect that she had a nasty side.

“Pie!” she said cheerfully, retreating to work her culinary horrors.

“Better go lie down,” said Father to me, twisting a screw into place. “Unless you want pie.” He had drifted away again into his private misery where I could not follow. If only, I thought, I could touch his arm and feel and see what he saw and felt. Then maybe I could figure out how to help him.

I spent the rest of the day in reverie, thinking how to get revenge on Maisie Knox, or Maisie Weaver, which was her married name. It was easier to think about her awful behavior than to think about what happened to my mother. When I thought about Mama, I remembered the strange pain Mr. Done felt when he was stabbed, how it stayed a distance away because it was just too big. That, I thought, was how I felt about mother. I could not rightly consider her loss. So instead, inside my head I composed a blistering letter to Maisie Knox that I would write out and take to the post office. Except—I did not know how to address it. I chewed on this. She lived “across the river” with her new, rich, husband. That did not help me much. There were three rivers and Lord knew how to determine how many sides, and it all seemed impossible for a child of nine, so I reluctantly gave up.

I did not see Mr. Done for some time. The nights were beginning to grow chilly, and the moon hung like a half a golden wafer in the sky, over the greasy lights of the city. My pear tree turned yellow, and its leaves scattered the ground. I should have been in school, but I didn’t want to go, and fortunately neither Father nor Miss Morse seemed to remember. I read a lot of fairytales during those days, taking mental notes on how to lift a curse, how to wake someone from an enchanted sleep, and how to complete the quest. Perseverance and cleverness seemed essential, and while I deemed myself clever, perseverance was a previously unconsidered attribute.

On a pale sunny day I was up in the pear tree again with my fairytale book. Mr. Done came by and looked up at me. I beckoned him up. I thought he looked unwell, or paler than usual. For the first time I considered what I would do if he left me. The thought was almost unbearable.

“You look sad,” he commented, resting his rifle across his ghostly knees.

“I’m reading a sad story,” I said, closing the book. “Everyone in it dies.”

He nodded. “Everyone dies,” he repeated.

 I wanted to ask what was bothering him, but that seemed somehow rude or sassy of me. Miss Morse always said I was sassy.

“What have you been doing?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Wandering. I don’t know where my body is.”

“That must be uncomfortable,” I said.

“It is. How old are you, Flossie?”

“I will be ten soon,” I said.

“Oh. You’re younger than I thought,” he remarked.

I thought this was a compliment and preened a little.

“Well. I changed my mind,” he said, fixing me with those translucent eyes. “I do have a picture of Maisie. If you still want to see it, I will show you. I want someone else to…I don’t know. Do you want to look at it?”

Of course I put out my hand immediately. He reached inside his jacket and withdrew a small, oval brass locket. He cracked it open with his thumbnail, and then placed it in my palm. I saw, briefly, a rosy-cheeked girl with a shy smile and then—

On the fourth of July, Thomas and his friend Josiah Girty walked down to the park to see the fireworks. Everyone had the day off from work. War had just broken out, and demonstrations of patriotism seemed especially important. All the songs and flags were determined and bright, and there had not been many casualties so far—surely the war would be over in a few months. They walked down the street together, laughing over some joke that Josiah related. They greeted the few people coming up the hill, but most were going down to see the festivities. The evening air was windless and hot, a lovely and perfect summer evening, with peachy clouds massed high on the horizon, the warm gray blue sky. As Thomas walked and laughed, his eyes fell upon a young lady in a modest white dress, with brown hair and pale skin. She looked up at him with very dark blue eyes and a stab of pure silver pain shot through him. He took a sharp breath and turned to watch her go on up the hill. “Who is that?” he asked. Josiah looked back and said, “The girl in the hat? She’s called Maisie Knox. My sister knows her. Caught your fancy, did she?” Thomas could not reply. Thunder rolled in the distance and the air was full of gunpowder and river water and a tremble of lightning. He thought Maisie had carried with her a whiff of something sweet, like lilacs in April. He looked up at the hills rising steeply on either side of him, saw lightning again, and gray clouds chasing their bright brethren. The sky was a narrow oblong, and he had the peculiar feeling of looking up from a deep hole in the ground, while Maisie Knox looked down at him, eyes blue as violets and wet with tears. Shaking off the premonition, he searched for her that summer, and when he found her—though she had only twenty to his thirty-two years—he courted her with single-minded intent. It never occurred to him that they would not marry. Before this shy girl, before this revelation of the sharpness of love, he had felt ashamed about not going to war. Now he was glad he had not, for he was determined that he would never hurt her, never make a widow of her. He would stay by her side until the stars and moon went out.

I found myself sitting on the pavement beneath the tree, the wind knocked out of me. Mr. Done was kneeling before me saying my name.

“You fell,” he said. “You looked at the locket, you closed your eyes, and fell. I caught you and set you down.”

I still could not breathe, but looked at him dumbly. It was Maisie that made me breathless. I had not known that eyes meeting could outweigh the pain of a bayonet to the heart. The sweetness was visceral agony and I bent over it, realizing again how very far out of my depth I was. I felt it but did not understand. I did not want to understand.

“Flossie,” he said, worried.

“She’s pretty,” I said hoarsely, face in my knees.

“She is.”

“I’m sorry she left you.”

“How did you know that?” he asked, pulling back a little.

To answer this, I would have had to admit that I had been inside his mind.

“I meant…that you had to leave her,” I said, climbing to my feet, avoiding his offer of a hand. “That you had go to war.”

He studied me. I felt grievously sick and wanted to lie down right there on the street.

“What is it?” he asked gently, sounding a good deal like my father.

“I don’t know. I—I’m sad. I think I will see you later.”

He reached for me, but I turned and fled into the house.

& & &

My birthday arrived. I had been preoccupied, and honestly only remembered it was my birthday because Father said something about it at breakfast. He was theorizing, as he did when he was in a good mood, and I listened to him gladly. Apparently, my birthday fell on the equinox.

Equal daylight and nighttime, he told me. Halfway and half. A hinge in the year, a clean division.

“And you are going to turn ten,” he said, and I jumped, surprised that he remembered I had a birthday at all, although he clearly did not know it was today. “You are about halfway to being grown up. And I am thirty-five, and midway through life. In a dark wood,” he added grimly. (Later, when I read Dante, I understood this reference.)

“But the year is more than halfway over,” I said, befuddled. I was getting confused a lot these days, half from chronic insomnia, and half because of the sheer weight of Mr. Done’s memories.

“Yes, that’s not what I meant, though. I only noticed that a lot of things are in halves right now. I think it might even be a half moon. You know…” he went on, but I could not follow him.

After unsuccessfully trying to read all morning, after lunch I went in search of Mr. Done. I had not seen him since I fell out of the tree, and was afraid that maybe he thought I was avoiding him. But I could not find him anywhere, not on the bridge, or by the grocer’s, or near the graveyard. Dejected, I returned home, only to find him sitting on our step, looking more bloody, more ragged, and more tired than ever.

“It’s the equinox,” I told him. “And it’s my birthday.”

He said, “It’s the day of my funeral.”

“How—” but it didn’t matter. His body was back in Port Kittanning. Somehow, he knew.

“I have to go,” he said. “I have to attend my own funeral.” He paused. “Will you go with me?”

Much later in life I understood that, as an adult, sometimes the world becomes too terrible, and you find yourself leaning all your weakness on a child. It shouldn’t happen, but it does. I don’t blame him now, but I also believe he ought not to have asked me. At the time I did not think any such thing.

“When is it?” I asked.

“I don’t know. We should go to the cemetery and wait.”

“All right,” I said.

Father was at work and Miss Morse was always happier if she did not see me. We walked down the road in silence towards the church. I scuffed at the leaves, while he passed silently over them. It was a cool day, and getting cooler. We paused at the iron gates of the cemetery, which stood ajar.

“This way,” he said, and I followed him. I know the sun was shining, but it all seemed strangely dusky, under the huge, variegated trees that canopied the well-kept paths. We arrived at a tall sycamore tree. Very near it was a modest gravestone with “Martha Dunne” written on it. (Dunne, I thought, not Done! I felt very stupid.)

“My mother,” he said. And then, “You see?” He pointed to a sort of white obelisk, decorated with carved vines and flowers. “Elizabeth Cooper, wife of Andrew Cooper,” it said. The dates of her life were written on it. Elizabeth was his sister, I recalled.

Next over was a ragged, rectangular hole in the grass, gaping deep and black and cold, and beside it a big pile of dirt. When I saw it, I wanted to run away, but I clenched my teeth instead and stood my ground. There was no stone yet. The funeral party had not arrived. We walked around nervously, pointing out different headstones: this one very old, this one new, see all the soldiers in rows, not buried with their families but with their comrades. This person had a funny name, this person had no date of birth, and this poor person’s stone had toppled over and could not be righted. I was trying to distract him, to make him laugh—I had never heard him laugh, I realized.

“Look at this abomination,” I said, trying out one of my favorite big words, and pointing to a lichen encrusted piece of granite in the shape of a lamb.

“Flossie,” he said.

I turned and saw the funeral procession approaching. They were all in black, and the only color was the red and blues of the flag that draped the coffin. I pressed my hand to my mouth, frozen.

“Hide,” he said.

I ducked behind a mausoleum, peering cautiously around the side. There were horses with black crepe, and everyone wore black arm bands on their black sleeves and black feathers in their hats. It was not so different from my mother and brother’s funeral, except there were many more people. He’d had a lot of friends, I saw, and probably had been popular in the neighborhood—in my neighborhood. The mourners, some of whom I recognized from the streets, circled around the grave and the waiting, flag-draped coffin. I stared at the wooden box, and then looked up at Mr. Dunne. He looked grim, with lines around his mouth, and I noticed that he was watching a woman who had her back to us. She had thick brown hair and a fair neck. She stood next to a blonde man with a beard. When she turned her head, I could see tears flowing down her cheek.

Maisie, I thought. Good, I hope she cries herself to death.

In her arms she held a baby of about a year old, a girl with a halo of hair so blonde it was almost white, with her mother’s dark blue eyes. The baby chewed her finger with little white teeth. When she saw Mr. Dunne in his uniform, bloody and haggard, she pursed her mouth and then began to cry.

“Hush, Pearl,” said her mother, but the baby cried harder.

Mr. Dunne knew exactly what to do. In an instant he disappeared and in his place was a cheeky little robin. In the form of a robin, he hopped from stone to stone, dove down through the air, frisked his feathers, and chirped. The baby watched him solemnly, and at last she smiled. Then she put her head down on her mother’s shoulder and closed her eyes.

After that, he resumed his usual soldierly shape. No one had marked me, and I ventured out to stand a safe distance away and watched. The minister was speaking, saying all the familiar words.

The Lord is my Shepherd.
I am the way the truth and the life.
Worms shall eat this body, yet in my flesh shall I see God.
Ashes to ashes.
We commit our brother.

 Then the coffin was lowered by ropes into the hole, and everyone threw their own handful of dirt upon it, making a sort of muffled clatter.

Mr. Dunne’s hand grasped mine tightly, painfully, but this time it did not trigger a flood of memory. Together we watched the undertaker’s men shovel the dirt. It seemed it took forever, but at last it was finished. The hole was filled in and the men departed with their shovels. The mourners had dispersed to have coffee and sandwiches and talk in hushed tones in the drawing room and go to bed early, as we had done after my mother’s funeral. Evening was falling fast. We walked forward and looked at the low mound of dirt. He finally let go of my hand and stepped onto it, making no prints. Then, like a young child, he put his hands on the ground and lowered himself until he was lying on his stomach in the dirt, rifle at his side.

“What are you doing?” I asked fretfully. The moon had come up, half bright and crisp, half lost in dark.

“I’m so tired,” he said.

I sat down, arranging my gingham skirt over my crossed legs. It was growing cool and the few remaining crickets sounded dismal.

“Don’t leave me,” he said, his eyes still closed.

“I won’t. Don’t leave me.”

“One short sleep past,” he said, more to himself than me. Then, “Will you sing to me?”

I could not think of a single hymn or lullaby to sing to him. Afterwards I thought of plenty, but all I could think of at the time was Nelly Bly, and I could not sing that.

“What song would you like?” I asked.

He had his cheek pillowed on his hand, lashes dark on his skin.

“Hard Times,” he murmured.

I knew Hard Times. Everyone did. It was by Stephen Foster who was buried in this very cemetery. Mama used to sing it to me at night. I knew all the words.

I did not have a strong voice, but I could carry a tune, so I began. He lay still, and seemed to drowse. The tune was more like a lullaby than I remembered, especially the refrain.

‘Tis the song, the sigh of the weary
Hard times, hard times, come again no more.
Many days you have lingered around my cabin door,
Oh, hard times, come again no more.

I noted with growing dread that with every verse he was falling more deeply asleep, and as he did so, becoming more indistinct. He was sinking into the ground, going back to his body. He was leaving me. But I kept singing because it was the right thing to do. I was stalwart. I persevered.

When I got to the last verse, my voice began to break.

‘Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave,
‘ Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore,
‘ Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave, –

I stopped, unable to sing, and whispered the final line to him.

Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.

He disappeared like mist. I don’t know how long I sat there, head in my arms, but I know I never cried so hard in my life. The sleeves of my dress were soaked. My nose ran. When I finally got too cold, I crawled to my feet and began to stumble home, wishing I had my own grave to disappear into. The moon and stars had disappeared and I could scarcely see my path. He was gone. Gone! But I remembered him and so he remained with me. Gone but not gone. Part of him, at least, was preserved. I brought each of his memories to mind, this time in reverse order.

Maisie and his pierced heart.
Mustering for war.
Dying alone.
Walking home, and finding none.

I found my way out of the cemetery and into civilization. After a hellish climb up the hill, I reached my house. I had no idea how late it was, but I was sure I was going to catch it from Miss Morse. But when I entered the warm room, my father was sitting on the sofa waiting for me.

“Where have you been?” he asked, jumping up. “And what have you been doing?”

My face was swollen and my heavy head ached. He bent over me.

“I went to the graveyard,” I said. I knew he thought I had gone to see my mother and brother, but it didn’t matter. It was all the same. Then I burst into tears again. He picked me up and held me on his lap as he had not done in a very long time.

“Everything is so sad,” I said.

“It is,” he said. “It is so sad. I know, my little girl.”

I wiped my face with his handkerchief and sobbed a little longer.

“I want—to—help—you,” I managed to choke out.

“You want to help me?” He was baffled.

“Feel better.”

“Little girl, it isn’t your duty to make me feel better. It’s my duty to help you. I think I forgot that.” He was quiet a moment. “I’m—I’m sorry.”

I think he began to sing to me—as he used to when I was a baby—but I don’t remember what the song was. It might have been Pleading Savior. In a few minutes, warm and wrung out, I was asleep in his arms, and woke the next morning in my own bed.

& & &

Well, I had turned ten and I had helped Mr. Dunne go to sleep forever. I still carried his memories like wounds, jealously, but I found I could somehow keep living my life. A rainy October came and went, and winter threatened. I got scarlet fever, and Miss Morse put aside her dislike to care for me. My illness scared Father awfully. Throughout my fever I hallucinated sitting beside a new grave in the dusk, waiting for someone to get up and say my name. No one ever did.

It was a cold winter, snowy and dark. After I got better from my fever and after a strange, poverty-stricken little Christmas, I had to go to school. My teacher loved me, even though I spent most my time gazing out the window at the clouds. But somehow the world began to feel lighter and freer. My nightmares slowly went away. Father grew happier each day. He ate more, began sleeping (I could tell from the snoring), and then, by spring, actually laughing sometimes, and playing his banjo in the fragrant evenings.

I did not understand how it had happened, but I believed with all my child’s heart that by enduring the agonizing task of singing a dead soldier to sleep, I had rescued my own father from his misery. Perhaps, in the context of a fairytale, it made sense. To tell the truth it still does.

It has been forty years. Little Johnny Stuart grew tall and strong, caught up with me at last, and married me. I tempered my hatred of Port Kittanning and chose to raise our three children here, close to their grandfather. My father is seventy-five. He never remarried, but was honored to fly in the first transatlantic dirigible flight. Because he had had a hand in developing it decades ago, the pilot let him steer a little, and it made him very proud. I fill my time reading and writing fairy tales, keeping a small garden, and tending to my still-handsome husband. Soon, I have learned, I will be a grandmother in my own right.

My life is full, though not without its sorrows and trials. Pleading Savior still makes me cry. I grow moody in April; I talk to robins. And I have never forgotten the war, Mr. Dunne, or the month I turned ten. The memories I received from the ghost soldier still rest in my heart, warm and solid as blue eggs in a nest. I do not know why I received them, but I am content to carry their bittersweet weight with me; indeed, I am honored to do so. Sometimes I go to visit my soldier’s grave, with its fine white headstone, carved eagle, rippling banner and all. I bring my soldier flowers, especially in September. Sometimes I sing to him.

* * * * THE END * * * *
Copyright Shelley K. Davenport 2024