Voices from the Past Part 156

For my dear Son, Charles-

love, Mother

I read most of my mother's Bible. It was a solace and a threat; it was a puzzlement because I could not disentangle legend from fact.

Was there such a city as Zidon?

Was there a Goliath?

My mother's Bible had a few maps-they led me to travel by camelback, through Egypt and a.s.syria. At night, in my attic, I imagined the sacred tabernacle, the pyramids. I repeated some of the Song of Songs.

September 20, 1864

The Library

To a great extent, this war is capitalism versus a kind of feudalism. On one hand we have free labor and on the other slave labor. The North boasts more millionaires than the South, in normal times. New York City probably has more millionaires than the entire South. John J.

Astor is an example of an individual who has ama.s.sed wealth by canny manipulations-his kind is unseen in the South. As I understand it, Northern labor practices are questionable at times, shackling the workers; this must be leveled out in years to come.

Strange, seeing beggars on Northern streets; yet none in the South.

As the war continues I learn that Southern railroad cars lack windows for lack of factory labor. House gla.s.s can not be replaced; conventional gla.s.sware for the table can not be replaced. If a man wishes a prescription filled he must furnish his own bottle or packet. Needles, pins, scissors, knives are smuggled in and sold on the black market. Drugs have vanished from pharmacopoeia.

The White House

October, 1864

Tonight my watch lies on my chest of drawers. Ah yes, the seconds are pa.s.sing, the minutes are pa.s.sing. Jim Maitland is dead. Colonel James Maitland, Ma.s.sachusetts man. His handsome face, his humor, leaders.h.i.+p, bravery, gone. I thought him my protege and friend. I was to grant him a Major's commission.

The seconds, the minutes, ran out too quickly for Maitland. As I stare down at the second hand, in its small circle, I see his face; I see him dressed in his Zouave uniform.

Tad will miss him.

For a moment he held the enemy flag in his hands, then a shotgun blast.

Executive Mansion

October 2, 1864

An officer has given me a war diary kept by a Southern soldier, Fred Parker, corporal. Rain has soaked its pages; pages are missing. Here are four entries, written during the Wilderness Campaign:

May 6, 1864. Face-to-face fighting all day.

Rifles. Pistols. No help from our cavalry or artillery. Pine woods surround. Trees close together. Weather poor. Fred died beside me at midday. Jeffrey has had his leg shot at the knee; knee shattered; men carried him away. We hide, shoot, duck, lie down.

May 7. Not much to eat. Awful hungry. Rifle fire constant.

May 8. Grant's forces surround us. 120,000 men.

May 9. Dead and wounded everywhere, behind trees, under bushes. I see pieces of a sweater. Shoes. Boots. A hat. Bayonets.

Broken musket. A bra.s.s belt buckle.

The diary tells me that life must be more than a belt buckle.

Executive Mansion

October 15, 1864

Hamlet's thoughts, his moods, fit the conflict that a.s.sails our country.

...We defy augury; 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 has aught of what he leaves what is it to leave betimes? Let be.

Let be. Do we?

Little Tad heard Mary speaking about Maitland's shotgun death; he climbed onto Mary's bed and talked about our friend's funeral-tearful details about the White House ceremony, details bitter for childish emphasis.

Perhaps it is repugnant to write here when men are dying. Perhaps my diary should not have been written; perhaps I should have been attending the wounded in the hospitals. But that confusion, that confusion of pain and sorrow, would not, could not, carry me forward.

Executive Mansion

October 21st, '64

My desk

How vividly I summon up the hundreds of exhausted soldiers in the streets of Was.h.i.+ngton.