The Deserter Read online

  —CHARLES CARLETON COFFIN

  A STUDY OF

  WHISKERS

  Beginning with his wife’s embarrassing ancestor, Homer was being drawn into the whole progress of the Civil War.

  “You see,” he said grandly, “I have an earthshaking new theory of history.”

  “Oh, Homer, what is it this time?”

  “First you have to back away and look at the nineteenth century as a whole.”

  “Well, all right, I’m backing away. So what?”

  “If you look at everything, absolutely everything, you see that there was a general crescendo. Everything got louder and crazier and more and more exaggerated as the decades went by, until at last the war broke out in a general smashup and the boil of the antagonism between North and South burst at last.”

  “To mix a metaphor or two.”

  Homer swept all the papers off his desk. “I’ll show you. Look what happened to women’s skirts. Wait a sec—I’ve got a book here somewhere.”

  “There was a crescendo in women’s skirts? That’s your theory? Oh, I know, you mean the way they got wider and wider.”

  “Exactly. At precisely the moment the war began at Fort Sumter, after the feelings on both sides had been firing up for decades, women’s skirts reached their hugest circumference. Look at this.” Homer slapped open a book of old photographs. “See? It’s Mary Todd Lincoln in full regalia. That skirt of hers must be seven yards around.”

  “Hmm, I see what you mean. And everything else was swelling too, in some kind of frenzy. Think of the furniture, all carved within an inch of its life and upholstered and doileyed and antimacassared. Even the mantels had petticoats. How strange.”

  “And what about genius? The boiling up of poets and writers? All that stuff we teach, Whitman and Melville, Thoreau and Dickinson. My God, masterpieces were busting out all over.”

  “You’re right, Homer, it’s amazing. I never thought of that.”

  “Wait a sec, there’s more.” Homer snatched up a paper from his desk. “What about the fashion in facial hair? I’ve been making a study. Take a look.”

  It was a page of caricatures—

  Mary laughed. “Oh, Homer, you should write a scholarly paper.”

  “Of course. I’ve already got the title—Victory and Defeat in the Civil War with Reference to the Growth of Facial Hair,”

  “Great. It would enhance your reputation no end.”

  Homer tossed his sketch aside. “How’re you doing with that old skeleton in the closet?”

  “What? Oh, that. You mean my great-great-grandfather.” Mary bit her lip. “It’s funny, but it bothers me. It shouldn’t, I suppose, but it does. Oh, Homer, there’s a nice woman in the Archives department. She found a book for me, the album for the class of 1860. It was so sad. There was a page for Seth Morgan’s picture, with his name at the bottom and his regiment, but the picture itself was missing. They must have removed it.”

  “They? Who do you mean by ‘they’?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. His classmates, probably. Poor old Seth, I’d just like to know what he did that was so bad.”

  “My dear, why should you care? After all, your great-great-grandfather was four generations back.”

  “I know.” Mary looked stubborn. “But I do care, I really do.”

  “Well, there must be records. What was the regiment he belonged to?”

  “The Second Massachusetts. It was one of the classier ones, I know that.”

  “And what about your family? There must be old trunks in your sister’s attic. My God, your family’s lived in that house since the dawn of time. Have you tried Gwen’s attic?”

  “No, but I will. That’s the next thing. Gwen and Tom are back from Australia. Why don’t we drop in on them with a meal? You know, a casserole or something. Do people still make casseroles? And then we can go up-attic.” Mary frowned. “Because I’ve just got to find out about Seth Morgan. Honestly, Homer, I really do.”

  “For the honor of the family?”

  “No, nothing like that. I want to resurrect him, dust him off, take a good look at him.”

  “Even though he was a scoundrel?”

  “How do we know that for sure? I want to weigh all the evidence in court. That’s it, Homer. I just want to give him a hearing.”

  UP-ATTIC

  Mary Kelly’s sister Gwen was the wife of Thomas Hand. Gwen and Tom lived in the old Morgan house on Barrett’s Mill Road in Concord. The place was still a working farm, but lately much reduced to a few acres of orchard behind the house.

  Gwen was nearly as tall as Mary, but chunkier. “The house is a mess,” she said, opening the door.

  In truth, it was a mess. Mary laughed. Her sister and brother-in-law were just back from an instructional tour of the world. This time Tom had been bringing his professional know-how to orchardists in Australia. Their unpacking was spread all over the downstairs. The only bare spot was the kitchen table.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Mary, setting down her pan of macaroni and cheese. “All we need is the attic.”

  Tom snorted. “The attic? Well, the attic’s neat enough, all right.”

  He led the way. Homer looked left and right as they climbed the stairs. Mary had been living in this house when they had first met. In fact, she had grown up here. Indeed, her Concord ancestors had lived here as far back as the Civil War, which was why it was important to see the attic.

  Homer caught a glimpse of the antique second-floor bathroom as Gwen opened the door to the attic stairs, and he wondered if the bathtub drain was still reluctant. But of course the care of this ancient house was none of his business, thank God.

  “You’ll be disappointed, I’m afraid,” said Gwen, pushing back the trapdoor.

  They stepped out on the wide old boards of the attic floor, four tall people ducking under the slanting roof beams.

  “But there’s nothing here,” said Mary, gazing around.

  “Right,” said Tom.

  “Well, he left a few things behind,” said Gwen. “A portfolio of Annie’s drawings, John’s mineral collection, that kind of thing. He wasn’t interested in those.”

  “He? What do you mean, ‘he’?” Mary was appalled. “You mean you sold everything to somebody else?”

  “Oh, no.” Tom glanced at Gwen. His smile was grim. “She loaned it to somebody. That is, she thinks it was only a loan.”

  “Cousin Ebenezer Flint,” said Gwen. “He’s only a third cousin twice removed, or something like that, and his name isn’t really Ebenezer, it’s Howard. He’s decided to call himself Ebenezer after his great-great-grandfather. Don’t you remember when his part of the family came for Thanksgiving? He was Howie then, a real pain. None of us could stand him. Oh, I suppose you don’t remember. You were only two.”

  Homer was bewildered. “You mean your third cousin twice removed walked off with everything in the attic?”

  Tom took Homer’s arm. “Come back downstairs and we’ll explain the whole damn thing.”

  Tom’s office was furnished with mementos from their travels. On the wall hung a grass skirt from the South Seas, along with a Japanese print of apple blossoms, a Balinese shadow puppet, and a brass tray from Benares. Twelve ebony elephants paraded across the mantelpiece.

  But the office was less cluttered than the front room across the hall, where all the furniture was buried under clothing and books and Christmas presents for the grandchildren—plastic boomerangs, stuffed emus and a hand-carved platypus.

  “I’d forgotten all about Howard Flint—Ebenezer, I mean,” said Gwen, waving Homer and Mary toward the sofa.

  “He’s this big genealogist and architectural historian,” said Tom. “Or so he claims.”

  “He went crazy over the house,” said Gwen. “We had to show him around. We kept saying we didn’t have time because we were packing up to go to Australia, but he just charged up the stairs on his own, so we had to follow him. And then he made up the most ridiculous theories.”
r />   “You know the kind of thing,” said Tom. “The crack in the ceiling meant it was once a stairwell. The fireplace in the kitchen must have been a lot bigger and it probably had a beehive oven. The house was once a saltbox. Well, it was all just baloney.”

  “You should have seen him,” said Gwen. “He had a wild bushy beard and little glittering eyes and the craziest way of talking. Well, he was just bonkers. I had to take him to the attic to study the beams up there, because he was so positive he’d find proof about the saltbox idea, but when he got up there and saw all the trunks and cardboard boxes he forgot about the roof beams and began clawing through the boxes. In two seconds there was stuff all over the floor.”

  “Didn’t you stop him?” said Homer, fascinated by another example of human folly.

  “Well, naturally,” said Tom, “I hollered at him, but the guy was just insane. He kept babbling that genealogy was his field of expertise, and since his great-great-grandfather was the brother of Gwen’s great-great-grandmother, it was perfectly all right because all this stuff belonged to him too.”

  “But surely—” said Mary.

  Gwen laughed bitterly. “Well, it was pretty dramatic. You should have seen your dignified brother-in-law take Ebenezer by the scruff of the neck and haul him downstairs, still babbling and flapping his hands. I was afraid he’d charge Tom with assault and battery.”

  “He didn’t?” said Homer. “Too bad. I’d have galloped to the rescue with expert legal advice.”

  “Oh, no,” said Tom, shaking his head gloomily. “It was worse than that.”

  Gwen reared up from her chair, strode to the fireplace, and stared fiercely at the elephants on the mantelpiece. “All of a sudden, he stopped arguing and complaining and went very quiet. He just bowed and smiled his way out the door, and we thought we’d heard the last of him.”

  “So,” said Tom, “we went happily off to Australia, leaving the house in the care of one of the kids.”

  “Uh-oh,” said Mary. “Which one?”

  “Well, it was Benny.”

  “Oh no, not Benny.”

  “I’m afraid it was Benny.” Gwen began turning the elephants around, heading them back the other way.

  “I can guess what happened,” said Homer. “I suppose Ebenezer showed up and Benny let him in.”

  “Exactly,” grumbled Tom. “He came back and sweet-talked old Benny into letting him look through a few things in the attic because he was this big important scholar.”

  “Oh, poor Benny.” Mary laughed. “For the genius of the family he can sometimes be pretty stupid.”

  “‘Righto,’ says Benny.” Gwen plumped herself down in her chair. “And then what does he do, our Benny? He goes traipsing off on a camping trip with his friend Stuart Grebe, and does he lock the door? He does not.”

  “Oh God,” groaned Mary.

  “Well, that empty attic is what happened,” said Tom. “When we got home on Tuesday, we knew something had happened, because Benny was gone again and there were bits and pieces of stuff trailing down the attic stairs.”

  “One of Mother’s old dresser scarves, for instance,” said Gwen angrily.

  “You mean Benny didn’t notice?” said Homer.

  “Oh, he came back and he was all apology. He’d trusted this guy, he said.”

  “Our Benny,” said Homer sourly, “the little friend of all the world.”

  “And I must say,” said Gwen, “he pitched in and helped us clean up. But you saw what’s left.”

  “Nothing,” said Mary.

  “Ebenezer took it all. He must have rented a pickup truck.” Tom slapped his knees and stood up. “Who’s for a drink?”

  They trooped into the kitchen. But as he accepted his glass, Homer struck a lecturing pose and proclaimed, “History can be defined—”

  “Uh-oh,” said Mary again.

  “History, as I was saying, can be defined as that which is left in the attic after everything of interest has been discarded by the children.”

  “Or the third cousin twice removed,” said Gwen.

  “Surely you can get everything back,” said Mary. “Do you have his address?”

  “I’ve got an old letter somewhere,” said Gwen. “I think he lives in Washington, D.C.”

  “We’ll call on Ebenezer on the way home from Gettysburg,” said Homer.

  “You’re going to Gettysburg?” said Gwen. “That’s nice.”

  “So I guess we’ll also tour the nation’s capital,” said Mary.

  “Be sure and go to the Smithsonian,” said Tom.

  “Right,” said Homer. “We’ll see the Smithsonian and the National Gallery and we’ll also pay a call on one Howard Ebenezer Flint.”

  PART VI

  SKEDADDLING

  AGAIN

  It was 1 pm by my watch when the signal guns were fired … and as suddenly as an organ strikes up in a church, the grand roar followed from all the guns of both armies.

  —LT. COL. EDWARD PORTER ALEXANDER,

  ARTILLERY RESERVE,

  FIRST ARMY CORPS,

  ARMY OF NORTHERN VIRGINA

  PURE HAPPINESS

  At first glance they looked like an entire company, but they weren’t marching down the pike in any kind of order.

  It took Otis only a second glance to see that they weren’t a company, they were sensible boys like himself on their way elsewhere, but they were all muddled together with a bunch of wounded men who were limping to the rear.

  He didn’t want to fall in with that outfit, because any minute now a company of provost guards would come along, shouting and flailing with the flats of their swords, driving the skulkers back where they came from.

  So as soon as he could, he dodged into a lane that led across lots in the direction of the Taneytown Road. The noise of the battle around Culp’s Hill was louder here, the rapid fire of musketry from both sides and the shrieks and screams of thousands of men dutifully trying to kill each other.

  Poor old Lem and Rufus, they were still in the thick of it. Right now they’d be out there in the open swale, scrabbling in their cartridge boxes and ramming the cartridges down in the scorching muzzles of their guns—an operation that took six seconds—while the rebels behind the barricades fired at their helpless heads and hearts and lungs and livers and everything else of vital importance that was packed inside them someplace.

  Otis hoped the two boys would come out all right, but there was nothing he could do about it. The fight for possession of the scorched and blasted hill that belonged to some old Dutch farmer was no longer any concern of his.

  He slogged along easily, meandering up and down with the lay of the land. There were a few other skulkers on this road too, but by mutual agreement they avoided looking at one another.

  Then Otis slowed down and stopped. Beside the road stood the stone schoolhouse, the one they had passed last night. He remembered his keen desire to walk away from the column and enter the classroom and teach the pink-cheeked boys and girls the axioms of Professor Eustis, only it had turned out to be a hospital.

  But the stone building still looked attractive to a gentleman on the loose. Otis walked up and tried the door. It was locked. Looking in a window, he could see the desks, the dusty slate blackboard and a map of the world with pale blue oceans and a patchwork of pink-and-yellow countries. The desks were screwed to the floor, and therefore the hospital cots had been jammed between them, but all the beds were empty of shot-up men. Behind the building stood a pair of privies, but Otis chose to relieve his bladder in a stand of trees. Then he went back to the schoolhouse and flopped down in its shade, sitting up comfortably with his back against the cool stone wall.

  The sound of the battle on the other side of the trees was dying down. Soon he could no longer hear the rattle of the guns that had been so busily engaged in killing miscellaneous human beings variously dressed in blue or butternut or gray.

  It occurred to Otis that his haversack still contained a few scraps of food more or less fit
for human consumption. He groped in the sack, found his slice of salt pork and laid it between two pieces of hardtack, remembering the joke about somebody who found something soft in his hardtack, only it wasn’t a worm, it was a tenpenny nail. For a while he wrenched at the sandwich with his teeth, washing it down at last with the tepid water in his canteen. Finally, stretching out luxuriously on the sun-dappled ground, he took a small book from an inner pocket of his coat and a pipe from an outer pocket, struck a match against a rock and settled down for a moment of midmorning repose.

  The book was his own copy a popular play called The Marble Heart, or the Sculptor’s Dream. Otis had underscored the lines for the part of Phidias, and in the margins he had scribbled a few changes in the high-flown dialogue.

  Now, as the sun rose over the embattled hill and climbed higher in the sky, pouring midsummer light and heat down on the 160,000 men of the two armies that faced each other across the broad and flowering meadow, Otis studied his book and poised his pencil over the page.

  The next line was another absurdity—

  No, no, Diogenes! Gold cannot buy genius!

  Swiftly Otis scribbled another version in the margin—

  Naturally, Diogenes, gold cannot buy genius, at least not that much gold. How about coughing up a little more?

  Then he began inventing speaking parts for the living statues.

  It was pure happiness. It was what Otis was good at. What a waste if this gift were to be destroyed in the carnage of the battlefield!

  The day was growing hotter still. Before long, Otis put away the little prompt book and stretched out full-length beside the school-house wall. He could see no harm in taking a noonday nap. After all, there was no need to hurry. Walking away from the war would be easier come nightfall. And anyway, maybe the entire battle was over, the whole monkey show.

  OLD HARVARD CHUMS