| jAMES
P. OTHMER
Overnight the temperature had fallen to ten below and out
on the lake the wind sweeps across the ice field like a phantom
herald of the coming sunrise. The boys stand outside
the group of some fifty workmen and stomp their boots and
clap their gloved hands. When a laborer asks if the
ice is thick enough to support the heavy snowfall and the
horses, the foreman from the ice company dismisses the question
with a wave of his hand and assures the group that they’ve
already augered fourteen inches deep in the middle of the
lake where the ice is clear enough to read a newspaper through.
Implicit in his tone: if you think the ice is too thin, then
go home, without pay, because we’re cutting.
The foreman separates the workers into teams, assigning the
best rigs and easiest tasks to those he knows best. The boys
and their father are given an old plow horse shod with sharp
calks and harnessed to an eight-foot wide scraper. The
ice field they are to clear is marked with iron stakes as
far as they can see. They walk the old horse to the
far end of the grid where their one-armed father circles the
horse and plow, inspecting the harnesses, the blade of the
rig and the thick-roped slip knot around the horse’s
neck and hung over its hames. He checks the makeup of the
knot a second time and stares hard into the horse’s
eyes as if looking for some clue to its inner constitution.
After climbing onto the tailboard of the plow, he nods to
Emerson, his eldest son, gives a tug at the reins, and the
rig begins to move. They are the first of four plowing
teams and their line must be the straightest because it is
the initial cut and all other passes feather out off of their
run. The blade slices into the hard-packed snow and
slowly scrapes the ice clean. Because there is more than twelve
inches of snow, the rig halts every dozen feet or so and the
boys unhitch and empty the plow beyond the grid.
“I don’t think my hands can take too much of this,”
Henry tells Emerson as they bend to re-engage the plow.
“Keep moving and you’ll be fine. Soon we’ll
get full sun and you’ll be stripping off layers.”
“The sun hits this snow, it’ll be like lifting
rocks. Damn, I hate the damned cold. Feels like
my eyeballs’d freeze if I stopped blinking. Bet
there’s no cold like this out west.”
“It’s plenty cold out there in the hills.
Hills there are bigger than our highest mountains. Besides,
they say a cold like this is good for you. Clears the
air of ill humors.”
“Ill humors? Shit, right now my humors couldn’t
be iller.”
“Maladies. Warm winters bring on the cholera and
such.”
“What a barrel of shit,” Henry says. “We’re
out here near death and you’re looking for the bright
side.”
“I just try to look for some good in things. Makes the
day to day pass easier.”
As he speaks the old horse lets go a stream of urine that
splashes yellow and steaming upon the ice. The boys
look at each other and Henry jerks his head in the direction
of the still-pissing horse. “Tell me, Sunshine,”
he says to Emerson, “what good can you find in that?”
Emerson looks at the steaming puddle. “Well, for
one, it could have been shit,” he says as he grabs from
the tailboard a small shovel and a bottle of formaldehyde.
Handing them to Henry and looking at his father, he adds,
“And secondly, instead of you, I could’ve been
the shine boy who had to clean it up."
***
They work through the morning in silence. The wind has almost
ceased and the strengthening sun has the newly scraped ice
groaning and popping as if some primordial beast is thrashing
beneath. Before lunch the teams have already cleared
and scored a one-acre field. Closer to the shore, four
men are using bar chisels, finishing the cuts in a spudding
area where the floats will be split into individual cakes
and guided toward a clear channel that leads to the shore.
At eleven o’clock the report of a pistol splits the
frozen air. The unexpected sound surprises their father,
forcing him to release the reins and slip off the rig onto
the ice. As he scrambles from his back to his knees
his face reddens and his eyes flash with a ferocity that Henry
has never seen. Henry starts forward to help, then stops
when he sees his father stand and brush snow off his pants
with his left hand. He cocks his head toward shore,
where the foreman is holstering his pistol.
“That’s a heck of a way to call supper break,”
he says, and Emerson laughs. Henry laughs too, but it
is forced. He is thinking about the way he felt when
the old man went down, something strong and from the gut that
had nothing to do with grudges or pride or anything else in
his head. For that instant he felt like the only thing
to be done in this universe was getting his father up and
on his feet because he did not belong on his back flailing
like a bug. Now he thinks about the way his father’s
eyes flashed when he fell, the living heat behind them, and
he commits it to memory.
They tie the horse to a stake in the ice and start for shore
in half steps, concentrating on the newly revealed surface.
On land near the frozen water’s edge they gather in
small groups around scrap wood fires. Their father squats
at the edge of a group that includes some of his old neighbors
and two men from Cold Spring he recognizes from the war.
He motions for his sons to come closer and pulls from his
rucksack three biscuits and a chunk of ham. With his
buck knife he starts slicing the near-frozen meat, but because
he doesn’t have a second hand to steady it, the ham
shifts beneath the blade. Henry watches his father struggle
with the cuts because he wants to see how he will pull this
off, but Emerson puts an end to it. He leans forward
and takes away the knife. “Break open these rolls
Henry,” Emerson says, “I’ll divvy
up this ham.”
As the boys make up the sandwiches, the men from Cold Spring
sit on either side of their father. They’re wearing
the same blue sack coats and worn forage caps with faded patent
leather peaks that they wore in the rebellion. The boys
have never seen either of the men and regard them warily.
“Henry. Em. This is Corporal Miller and
Corporal Carr, friends from the army.” Turning
from the boys to the men, their father continues, “Apparently
you’ve harvested all your ice to be over here in Lake
Mahopac.”
Carr shrugs. “They won’t cut down there
no more. Figured we’d take our chances up here
to make a little money before spring.”
“Either that or eat bark till the weather turns,”
Miller adds
“Tell you one thing,” offers Carr.
“That foreman can say what he wants, but this ice is
no where’s near 12 inches thick.”
Miller spits tobacco juice into the snow. “They’re
greedy, especially with Tweed involved. Had a weak first
harvest, so they want to sneak in a second crop before the
thaw. Maybe he’s thinking of selling to someone
and is guaranteeing two cuts a year. Like it works this
way every year, right?”
“Shit,” Carr says. “He’s buying
up the land, the hotels, the lake houses. Might as well
own the ice, too.”
Miller looks at the boys’ father. “What
do you make of it, sarge?”
The boys turn to their father. It has been a long time
since they’ve seen him engaged in more than the most
cursory of conversation. A long time since they’ve
seen his opinion solicited. They watch him take a bite of
his sandwich and look down at his boots. “It would
not surprise me if Tweed profited on the air we breath,”
he says. “All the talk about how he’s gonna
save this town. Bring us a railroad. A boulevard
around the lake. Turn it into an American Arcadia.
But this hero is the man whose Tammany Tigers made a fortune
on war contracts off the tattered blankets, maggot-covered
meat and spoil’t hard tack they gave us down in the
Shenandoah. Did that to his own people fighting to protect
the soil on which he made his millions. But like you
said, Tweed or not, if they’re paying…”
They are quiet. Henry looks at the others, watches how
they react to this resurrected version of his father, and
wonders if it could ever completely return. “I told
you there’s another aspect to the man,” Miller
says to Carr. “You talk like the Tweed can do
no wrong.”
“Maybe. But he’s got his eye on the future.
Ain’t that right, Sarge?”
Their father touches his left hand to blunted end of his right
arm and looks at his sons. “I’m more concerned
with getting through this day and hope that at the end of
it, I’ve lived a little, and not died a little.”
They all consider this for a moment and just as it seems like
the topic will pass, having been put into profound perspective,
Henry leans forward and looks at his father. “And
what is usually the case?” he asks. His father
returns his stare but does not speak. “What do
you tell yourself?”
His father scratches his beard and looks at him. “It
all depends on the day, son.”
After a long silence Miller points at the flapping sleeve
in his old friend’s coat. “How you doing
as far as that goes?”
“Doing okay. The leg is the problem. But
don’t be looking for me grinding no organ or selling
pencils down in the city.”
They finish their food and keep glancing back at the ice.
Whenever one looks the others turn and look as well, as if
expecting it all to have changed, but nothing does. After
a while, Henry rises and walks toward the old horse.
He pets the side of his head and offers him a piece of brown
sugar and quietly says his name.
***
Their father does not flinch with the next gunshot.
He expected it. As its report bounces off
the hills and comes weakly back, he wonders which is worse,
a life spent expecting the next gun shot, or one in which
every shot knocks you onto your ass. He stands and stretches,
followed by Emerson, then Miller and Carr. From a distance
Henry watches Carr lean forward and whisper into his father’s
ear, watches his father smile as the private words register.
Henry wishes he knew the shared past behind words that could
elicit such a smile, a smile he loves and resents at the same
time.
***
They plow through the midday sun and into the early dusk.
Across the field that they had cleared this morning the plow
saws have already passed and men are now breaking off sixteen-foot
floats and using pike poles to spud them through the channel
towards shore. In the fading light, the brilliant white
of the snowfield and the glare of the shaved ice grid are
transformed back to the muted blue grey of dawn. By
four o’clock the boys are too tired to speak and since
lunch their father has not said a word. He grips the
reins and concentrates on the path before him. Earlier,
when the low-arcing sun had reached its peak, the ice had
groaned and creaked with expansion. But now the sun
is gone and the wind is back, rushing in from the west, and
the groans and creaks have turned to sharp and violent cracks.
With the drop in temperature the snow that had briefly begun
to melt is already freezing again, forming hard-packed ridges
and imperfections that repeatedly bring the rig to a standstill.
After a series of starts and stops the plow hangs up on yet
another ridge. The horse tries to move but cannot.
Henry looks up from beside the rig just as his father raises
a small snap-whip and brings it down across the horse’s
flank. When the horse still does not move he again cracks
the whip.
“He’s hung up on a big knot,” Henry explains
to his father. “This ice here is all a mess.”
His father does not look at Henry. Instead he whips
the horse again and it surges several feet forward before
it gets hung up on another ridge. As his father raises
the whip once more, Henry yells for him to stop. “Don’t
hit him any more. This ice here’s bad. They’ve
been augering test holes all over here and the ridges of are
cured like cement.”
His father lowers the whip. “We’ve got to get
past this. It’s almost dark and we’ve got
the rest of this field to do. We finish this field,
the foreman said there’s an extra dollar for each us.”
“Fine,” Henry says, looking at Emerson.
“But let’s re-hitch the plow up ahead where the
ice is smooth and then we’ll shovel this by hand.”
The boys empty the plow and hook it back onto the rig.
As the rig moves off they scramble to begin shoveling around
the troubled patches of ice. “That extra dollar
sure sounds good,” Emerson says.
“Yeah. But it doesn’t mean he’s got
to beat snot out of the damned horse.”
“He was just nudging it.”
“Anybody ever nudges me like that…” Before
he can finish Henry is interrupted by a crack and a great
splash, then the panicked neigh of the old horse. He
is in the water, up to his neck and thrashing. The boys drop
their shovels and run. The rig is flipped on its side
and their father is scrambling on the ice close to the edge
of the break. His one hand is gripped tightly on the
choke rope around the horse’s neck but the horse is
bucking in the freezing water and it takes everything he has
to hold on. When the boys arrive he yells for them to
grab the far end of rope but to stay in back of him.
“Grip it but don’t wrap it,” he yells, “or
he’ll pull you down too.” The boys grab
the rope, Henry behind his father and in front of Emerson.
He tries to set his boots into or against something but there
is nothing. The field all around them is shaved flat
and clean. The horse bucks and squeals in the black
water. His eyes bulge and his head snaps up and to the right.
For a few seconds he gets his forelegs up on the ice but its
hooves are smashing through the fractured edge and it is slipping
back, pulling the father and sons closer to the precipice.
“Goddamn,” Henry says. “Ain’t
somebody gonna help us?” He looks over his shoulder
and sees a dozen men approaching. But their steps on
the bare ice are deliberate and it looks to Henry like they
will never come. The horse raises his head and cries
again, a hollow, weaker cry. Henry yells toward the
shore, “Move, goddamn it!” He is crying.
“Hold on, Hank,” Emerson says. We’ll get
him out. But if he starts going down, you let go quick.”
The first five men to arrive grab the rope. It snaps
taut and closes snugly around the horse’s throat.
The boys and their father relinquish the rope. The father
leans near the edge of the ice and tries to calm the horse
with talk. As the knot cinches tighter on his throat,
the horse begins to wheeze. Within seconds it is almost
still and finally it is unconscious. “Christ,
they’re killing him,” Henry says to anyone who
will listen, but no one acknowledges his words. Now
another group of men arrives with a stack of long planks.
They spread the planks across all four sides of the break.
Henry moves to the edge for a better look at the silent horse.
“He’s dying,” he tells his father. “If
he don’t freeze first they’re gonna choke him
to death.” He turns and yells to the others, “Stop
choking him before you kill him!” As Henry starts
to move toward them his father grabs him from behind and slaps
him across the face.
“Stay clear of this. You don’t know what
you’re saying or what we’re doing.”
Henry steps back and looks at his father. He touches
his gloved fingers to the red welt on his cheek. “If
you were so sure of what you were doing,” he says, loud
enough for many of the men around them to hear, “you
wouldn’t have whipped that horse and driven him into
this lake to begin with. And next time you touch me,
be prepared to expect something back.” The two stare
at each other. Behind them the men have leveraged two
planks under the horse and have secured a line around his
trunk. Two other horses arrive and are kept at
a distance from the break. The long rope is tied to
a split harness attached to the rescue horses. A man
gives a signal and they begin to pull free the trapped horse.
Soon he is jerked up over the edge of the ice and before they
can loosen the choke knot on his throat he pops up onto all
fours, shaking and twitching, staring wildly at the world
it had almost left.
As they walk the horse toward shore and a dry barn, the father
asks his eldest son, “Where’s Henry?”
Emerson shakes his head. He’s still thinking about
the hole in the ice that had caused all of this. Wiping the
frost off his moustache with the wet sleeve of his damaged
arm his father says as much to Emerson as himself, “Even
though I was doing everything I could to save it, he thought
I was trying to kill that horse.
* * *
He stands on an island of ice surrounded by blackness.
Alone on the lake in the frigid night, walking an ice float
through a channel, guiding it with a spud bar from the shore
to the spudding area and back again. Every fifteen minutes
he does this to keep the channel from freezing so it can be
ready when the harvest resumes at dawn. For doing this
he will get one dollar and the ice company will not have to
spend many dollars re-cutting the channel the morning after
a night of such severe cold. Including the money, the
main appeal is that at least until dawn he will not have to
go home.
He is supposed to be with a partner, for safety reasons, and
for a while he was. But at nine o’clock the man,
Thaddeus Wixom, said he had to briefly return home to check
on his sickly daughter. But now it is three hours later
and he has not returned. Henry thinks it is just as
well. Wixom had been drinking since the day shift had
ended and had been rambling on about rebels and dairy cows
and women, and though he could usually tolerate such talk,
Henry didn’t want to hear it tonight. When the
float comes to rest at the head of the channel, he splashes
water into the air with the bar and watches it come down transformed
as tiny pearls of ice. He lays the bar on top of a border
plank and stares off in the direction of the house his family
had recently left because they could no longer afford it.
He tries to think of what life inside that house was like
before the war, when the fields were plowed and the clapboard
was freshly painted. But he was too young then. He knows
it was not all warm fires and sweet breads in the oven, but
it was surely better than this. His teeth have taken
to chattering and when he stands still his feet ache with
cold. He could go up to the shanty to thaw out
and read but he would surely fall asleep and bring further
humiliation upon himself. So he begins walking the outline
of the shore, staring at the night and cursing Wixom, even
though he’s glad he has not returned. As he turns
a corner at the mouth of a cove he sees Venus revealed white
and solitary above a swaying pine tree, a clean white hole
in the neverending wall. He stops and considers
its distant flicker, thinks of the white speck as a door or
a window, or, better yet, a keyhole. He tries to imagine an
up close peek through that hole at the life that burns beyond,
and before sleep takes him, he wonders if the father he had
before the war can be glimpsed through that hole.
* * *
A hand grabs him by the arm and shakes him awake. He
sits up and rubs his face with his gloved fingers. He
tries to stand but his legs are cramped and numb with cold.
A tin cup of coffee is held out to him.
“Have a sip of this. It’s not boiling
but it’ll warm you some.”
He recognizes his father’s voice, then nods and takes
hold of the cup with his palms because his fingers cannot
grip the handle.
“They have you out here all alone?”
“Wixom said he’d be back.”
“Well, he’s not. And you can’t stay
out in this any longer. Sleeping on a plank. Why
didn’t you go in the shanty?”
“Cause I figured I’d conk out if I got too comfortable
and this’d freeze solid.”
“Instead it’s you who’s frozen solid.”
“I told them I’d keep it open.”
“Well, you did. I’ll run this float through
one more time, then we’ve got to get you home.”
“I told them I’d stay the night and that’s
what I’m doing.”
His father starts to speak then catches himself. He
takes a breath and says, “You’re right. You gave
them your word and you should keep it, even though others
didn’t keep their word to you.”
“All the more reason to see this through.”
“Uh-huh,” his father says, pulling the boy to
his feet. “Start up to the shanty. I’ll
clear this once more and meet you inside. See if you
can get a fire going in the Franklin.”
* *
*
The father walks into the shanty and stares at his son, shivering
on a crate before the struggling fire. Spud poles, ice
saws and augers lean against the walls. He walks to
the fire and pokes at the smoldering kindling. The fire
is barely drawing and smoke is backing up into the room.
He adjusts the damper lever, pokes at the wood again, and
the smoke starts giving way to flame. When the fire
catches he half opens the shanty door, creating a fresh draft
to clear the smoke. For ten minutes neither speaks.
Henry has taken off his gloves and flexes his bare hands close
to the firebox. Steam rises from his fingertips and
his teeth continue to chatter but already he feels warmer
just from the sight of the fire. Finally his father
rises, closes the shanty door and looks at him. “With
that horse today. You think my whipping it had something
to do with it going under. But whether I whipped it
or not didn’t matter. That ice wasn’t ready
for all that snow and horse and man. We knew that when
we started but we needed the money. Now maybe that wasn’t
fair to the horse since he had no say in the matter.
But we knew there were risks, and what happened was an accident.”
Henry looks up from the fire. “Like smacking me
was an accident.”
“I wish it was, son, but you were not talking sense.”
“That horse was dying.”
“We choke the horse on purpose. Instead of keeping
air from him, it keeps air in him. Keeps him from using
it all up, thrashing up the rest of the ice around him.
It may not make sense but the best way to save him was to
keep him from trying to save himself.”
Henry takes off his jacket and hangs it on a nail next to
the stovepipe. With the heat the room smells of smoke
and wet woolens. His father rises, rolls his neck and
shoulders. Henry watches him turn his back to the fire
and run his hand up and down the length of his half arm.
The hand settles on the stump of the arm and he stands like
that for a while.
“I want to know why you ran.”
“I know you do. Why is it boys need to know all
the things that men want to forget?”
“It’s important. The running and your wounds
is why we are what we are and I need to know. I’m
not like Emerson.”
His father touches his beard and takes a strong breath.
“I wanted you and your brother to find out or at least
understand by watching me. Living with me. Not
by my having to explain myself. No true man should have
to explain himself. But lately everything I have done,
no matter how well intended, you have bent into the shape
of something else and you see me as something less than a
man. For losing our farm, losing that horse. Not
making a fortune like Tweed and his ring. For running
from a fight five years ago. And now you need to know.
Will telling you vindicate me? Maybe, because I’ll tell
it too well. Or maybe you’ll see it as it was.”
“Maybe it will make you feel better to tell it.”
He stares at Henry for a long time and manages something close
to a smile. “Yeah,” he says. “Maybe.”
* * *
“My brother talked me into joining. Not so much
talked me into it but forced me to go along ‘cause he
wasn’t more than a boy and he needed watching.
Either way your mother was not happy about me going.
We’d just started the farm and just had another child.
I told her I’d rather join and be with my brother than
be conscripted later with strangers. Many men did not serve
at all, including some of the very same civic leaders who
give patriotic speeches and pass judgment on me today, because
they found doctors who would confirm an old weakness, or consumption,
or a foul knee. Later they’d be able to buy their
way out for $300. But I couldn’t afford that,
or a doctor. Besides I had my brother to protect and
in truth I felt an excitement about what adventure might lie
ahead that to this day I’m ashamed of. In 1862
everyone had dreams of glory but that all changed by ’63.
After the first brush with real war all but the craziest dreamed
of nothing but home and peace. By the time we reached
Cedar Creek in the fall of ’64 we had seen action near
Gettysburg and Petersburg and Harper’s Ferry.
We had been away from our kin for two years. We had
seen more versions of death than a sane mind can handle. I
saw boys I grew up with die in a flash and die for what seemed
an eternity, lying in fields too close to the Rebel pickets
to be saved. And soon I would see the brother I had
gone to protect layed out dead in the back of a wagon.
“Here is another view of it. From the home
you lived in then: Every week I received a letter from
your mother. For two years she raised four children and tried
to run the farm that took up all the money we had and were
to have for years to come. At first I lived for her
letters. They were filled with love and encouragement.
I found gold in the smallest of details and begged her to
share them. Were they thrashing the oats? Had
the leaves turned on the big maple? Anything about the children,
about you. But with time the letters changed.
The winters were harsh. The children were a burden for
a woman alone. Food was scarce and the relief money
the town provided the families of soldiers was not enough.
I sent home all I could but she was losing her grip on the
farm. In late-September she wrote that baby Cynthia was not
well and asked for me to get leave to come home. We
had just skirmished with Early at Opequon Creek and then again
at Berryville. The battles are not famous but the fighting
was as fierce as the ones of legend. Just smaller numbers
of men killing high percentages of each other. After
we routed the Rebs at Winchester it looked like we had them
whipped for the year and probably for good in the Shenandoah.
I requested furlough the next day and was denied. No
one was to be given leave until we drove the Rebs out of the
Valley. I thought of the farm all the time. Soon
after we fought and won at Fisher’s Hill. When not fighting
or preparing to fight we were ordered by Sheridan to turn
the Valley into a barren waste. We killed the land,
burning crops and mills. Barns. Grain. Taking
the last livestock from families just like ours. We
did not leave them with an ounce of bread, meat or firewood.
As barns burned and smoke fouled the sky, I felt more like
a criminal than a soldier. I wrote home that we’d
soon prevail in the Valley and I’d be home as soon as
possible. At night by the fire I shook so much I needed
two hands to hold my coffee tin. On the morning of October
18 my brother Richard was picked to go on a foraging party
to the south of Cedar Creek. I thought of volunteering
to replace him but my mind was on home and the farm.
At noon a mail wagon arrived. The letter from your mother
said that Cynthia’s fever had worsened and she feared
for her life. I sat in my tent and cried. All
along I had thought I would rather my children mourn my death
than my disgrace but I knew I had to go home. I packed
my haversack and sat waiting for Richard to return.
Just before dusk he did. Behind the small group of infantrymen
was a wagon pulled by a team of mules. Richard’s
body lay in the wagon bed beside a carpenter from Somers and
a saloonkeeper from Poughkeepsie.
“I guess you could say that I had something of a breakdown.
I went to my commanding officer, Major Compton from the bank
in town, and begged him to let me go home. He had let
others go for lesser reasons but he refused me and told me
I would be shot if I tried. There was bad blood between
us from before the war, almost from the time you were born.
It didn’t matter anymore, though. I left camp
before dawn.
“That morning, with the fog spilling across the creek
and the valley floor, filling the hollows, my first steps
were not away from but toward something. Toward my sick
child, my family and my farm. But it is never that simple.
Because anyone who runs toward something is also running away
from something. It all depends on how you see it.
“The Rebels surprised us, rushing across the creek
at dawn and routing our left flank. Thousands were startled
and driven from their tents that morning but I was tagged
a coward because the Major had noticed I was missing minutes
before the first bullet flew. I wasn’t yet to
the Valley Pike when I heard the first volleys. I stopped
to listen, thinking it was no more than a skirmish, but soon
our men came racing toward me, half-dressed and many without
weapons. I turned and ran with them. At some point
we stopped and formed a line. The story goes that Sheridan
raced up the pike to rally us and maybe he did. But
I never saw him and even if I had I would not have rallied
and returned fire because of the hat waving of an officer.
I fought because we were going to die if we did not.
My mind blurs here but I know we started something of a counter
charge. I was struck first in the thigh, just above
the knee, and had begun to crawl toward the shelter of a tree
when a minie’ ball passed through the inside bend of
my elbow, taking the knot of the joint with it on the way
out. There was smoke and screams and the sound of metal
ripping the air. The moans of the living and the silence
of dead. I sat crying, holding what was left of my arm
and hoping that death would come swiftly as the last major
battle in the Shenandoah unfolded before me. The gunfire
and artillery continued, relentless, but I was beyond fear.
I thought of my brother, my daughter. All of us at dinner
on the farm. Soon the last of the men who had charged
with me retreated right back past me again and for a while
the shooting ceased and there was a silence like a dream as
I sat alone in the fog and smoke of the field. I was
surrounded by dead and dying but after a while you get accustomed
to the screams of the dying and it becomes part of the silence.
Soon the Rebels came out of the woods, hollering as they swarmed
past. Some knelt beside me to take aim and one young
man fell dead with a bullet in the chest that I heard hit
like a fist. I held my arm and cried and listened to
the bullets of my own army whistle past. With the next
wave of Rebels came the scavengers. These men had no
boots on their feet and many wore the coats of Union soldiers.
They were bone-thin and hollow-eyed. One stopped and
took my boots, commenting when he saw my knee that I wouldn’t
need them anymore, anyway. They took my ammunition,
my belt, my last plugs of tobacco. A boy not much older
than you took the blanket from my haversack and said, Sorry,
Yank. I couldn’t speak, could only look at him.
After a moment, he considered me with different eyes, then
ripped a rag from his trousers and tied it around my arm just
below the shoulder. Probably saved my life but not my
arm. Soon after the Union counter charge would come,
and everyone who had run one way would run the other again.
It struck me that this is what the war had become. Running
back and forth, killing each other over vacant strips of land.
I came to in a field hospital as they were taking off the
rest of the arm. There’s no need to describe that,
unless you’d like. One thing I’ll tell you
is that I watched it all. For some reason I thought if you
looked straight on at that kind of bad there would be nothing
to be afraid of again. While if you closed your eyes
to it, you’d see it forever. But I still see it.
Sometimes I feel it more than when it was there. And
I still fear many things.
“Two days later in a hospital in Maryland I was
handed a letter from your mother telling me that our Cynthia
had died. By the time I got home your mother had had
a breakdown of her own that has come and gone ever since.
You must never blame her for what she’s become.
While I was gone she stayed and tried to save the family.
We once had dreams like every boy and girl you’ll ever
know. Before we became an embarrassment we had been
a couple that made people feel good just watching us walk
past.
“When I finally came home the war was over and
there was a parade for our regiment and a great many speeches.
It was called a great war and a monument was unveiled in town
with Lincoln’s words on it near the very spot where
our leaders had denounced Lincoln and the war in ’60
and again in ’64 when he did not even carry the vote
in our county. When I finally had to go to the
bank to try to save the farm they refused to help me.
Compton had told everyone his story, which no doubt varies
from mine. With so many people prospering elsewhere
you wonder why I didn’t pack us up and leave.
I considered it, but there was no way. Physically.
Financially. Not to mention the state your mother and
I were in. I know you don’t think much of me.
You see men getting rich all around you and you want in on
it. You want me to be like them. But I can’t.
I’ve had to settle for more modest ambitions.
You want me to make you proud but that’s really up to
you, Henry. Make your own story as good as you can,
son, because my part of it’s told and done.”
* * *
A rogue squall lashes snow against the side of the shanty.
Henry rises stiff-legged and shivering. The shanty is
empty, the fire out. He touches his boot-tops, then
wraps his arms around himself. His hands tremble as
he struggles to put on his gloves. He thinks of his
father’s tale, the longest he’s ever heard the
old man speak, and tries to separate what was truth and dream,
because even now, opening the door to the blue wall of the
coming dawn, he feels less than awake. The squall has
passed and he looks up to see that Venus is gone, dropped
into the sky of another place. Saturn is the morning
star but he doesn’t notice it in the bluing heavens.
Snow crunches under his boots like small bones breaking.
He knows now that he was wrong about his father. For
years he had hoped he was wrong, that there was a reason that
he wasn’t as ambitious, as successful as just about
everyone else, but now that he knows he was wrong it feels
worse than if he had been right. He thinks of his father
crying in that unfamiliar field, clutching his shredded arm,
knowing that his brother lay dead and untended in an abandoned
cart close by and his daughter lay alone in her baptismal
dress in the smallest of graves far away. When he reaches
the lake he sees the abandoned spud pole and the channel glassed
over and clear-sealed like the portal to another world, and
he knows that his father is down there beneath the newly formed
surface, drifting in the slack tide of an endless dream.
And it doesn’t matter whether he slipped or jumped,
dived headfirst or eased into it like it was a soothing bath.
He is down there and it is not his fault.
He stands at the edge of the frozen lake, watching the pale
luminance to the east. A flickering yellow in the sunless
sky. Watching miniscule debris from the first
moment of time, remnant silicate dust from the creation of
compacting planets, the expanding bow of space, swirling in
some other time and for all time. Watching the rays
of the still-hidden sun bouncing off these original grains
appearing now on his horizon in a broad glowing arc.
It is a false dawn, the rare chafe of a moonless night, intricate
steps of celestial choreography, but to Henry the bright glow
resembles nothing less than the hard-burning lights of a thriving
metropolis just over the next hill. He imagines
the pulse and swagger of such a world, watches its kinetic
shimmer until it vanishes in the day’s true light.
At the edge of the channel he picks the bar up off the plank,
wraps his gloved hands around its shaft and, with the first
tears that he cannot will away, he begins to chop at the thin
pane of ice. Chops with the beveled edge of the cold
iron, ice shattering like glass. Chops until there’s
room enough to drag the float through the passage he’d
been charged with keeping open.
has had stories
published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Sonora Review,
The Madison Review, and Crab Orchard Review.
His first novel, The Futurist, will be published
by Doubleday in May, 2006.
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