Afternoons with Emily (37 page)

Davy too was studying his new subject: war. He had had a part in two skirmishes this fall. He wrote:

You could not call them battles. I have never yet seen Johnny Reb — though I know he’s aiming at me when I hear his bullets
whistling past. It still seems very impersonal. “The enemy” is still an abstraction, not an American man my age who wants
to kill me.

Instead I am more concerned with the practicalities of camp life, and getting better at it every day. After we march, I can
drop down and sleep anywhere, even in the open rain — though sleeping out of doors as we do can make a fellow’s clothes moldy.
But now we have matting on the ground, and my friend Chuck Baird has a small iron bed, and I have three stools to sleep on.

When night falls a few of our young officers come to talk awhile. Each has his own pipe and somebody comes up with a brandy
flask, and the conversation flows briskly about the last Fight, the next Fight, and whether it is better to change our shirts
now or wait until the end of the month. Of course, when I dream, it’s always of you.

In December, Battery B, Chicago Light Artillery, received a new general: Ulysses S. Grant, a West Point graduate and an Illinois
man. Davy wrote, “They say he was a star in the Mexican War. Now at least we will be led by experience. This is no place for
amateurs!”

Father and Aunt Helen and I went over to Springfield for a quiet Christmas with the Howlands; Kate’s babies were the only
ornaments. Helen Miranda had now become Elena, which was Greek for “Helen.” She was miraculously like Kate, gentle and beautiful
and affectionate. Kate happily sang carols for us — “as a change from lullabies!”

On New Year’s Eve, we toasted “Victory in 1862!” Then I wondered what that toast might mean. Any victory implied death and
suffering on both sides. We spoke of “victory” as a beacon on a headland, like the signal fires that told the end of the Trojan
War. But what pain, what loss, had been required before those ancient bonfires blazed their glorious news!

In February of the New Year, Davy was involved in an authentic battle. Fort Henry, a Confederate gun emplacement on the Tennessee
River, fell to General Grant and a fleet of Union gunboats. I followed this on the huge map Father had mounted in our entrance
hall, banishing a Latham portrait to do so. The map explained the Union’s urgency to reach and hold the great central artery
of the Mississippi, and thus divide the Confederacy.

Fort Donelson, in Tennessee, also fell to Grant in February. Thousands of prisoners were captured, along with what Davy called
“the biggest and best guns in the South.” During this battle in the bloody snow, Davy met rebels close-to, alive and dead
— but he still imagined a distance and a detachment from the enemy in combat.

His Battery B was honored for their marksmanship by Grant himself. He chose them to salute the Stars and Stripes with thirteen
guns, as it rose over the captured fort. Davy reported all this with a zest that made him sound like a schoolboy on holiday:
“Everybody was shaking hands with everybody else and embracing one another. Miranda, my own dear sweetheart, this war can’t
last long. When the birds wing their way back north for the summer, I shall surely be among the flock.” Perhaps this lightheartedness
was his defense, in the way that feeling nothing was mine.

Then in April 1862 came a great battle — Shiloh — and the war and the men fighting it changed forever. For the past year,
the Civil War had still seemed a political gesture, with long encampments punctuated by short thrusts and parries, and significant
intervals when diplomacy might yet have been possible. After the holocaust of Shiloh, a single bloodbath that claimed more
lives than all of America’s previous wars together, both the Union and the Confederate nations were committed to the very
last death.

By the Tennessee River, among the freshly plowed fields of spring, a hundred thousand men fought in bloody mud for three rainy
days and nights. At tiny Pittsburg Landing, a random cluster of wharves and sheds, twenty thousand casualties waited on the
docks for help. Three thousand corpses lay in the fields around the little log chapel named Shiloh. The bodies sprawled so
thickly on the ground that those who went to seek out the wounded treaded on the grisly carpet of dead and dying. Hastily
organized burial details interred bodies two deep. Davy wrote me: “And all the monument raised to the bravery of these poor
souls was a board on which I cut with my pocketknife the words ‘35 Union’ or ‘110 Rebels’ — which I affix to each separate
trench.”

For a week, the news swung back and forth; then we heard it had been a Union victory. But in that week, the spirit and concept
of the war had changed forever. Now I saw it as a terrible entity with a life of its own. It was an implacable monster, a
machine grinding up our flesh and treasure, insatiably devouring the future.

I was in Hell for a week. I will be there in dreams and memories of Shiloh all the rest of my life. Hell is a night sky full
of screaming shells, falling on boys asleep — what matter the uniform? Hell is a wounded man drowning in a puddle, too weak
to raise his head.

I have seen a flowering orchard shot bare with rifle bullets. I have seen two generals bleed to death. I have seen yesterday’s
battlefield, ghastly by lightning, where hogs root at the bodies. Days later, we ate the hogs.

I worried for him, not just for his physical safety but for the impact this war was having on his interior, on his soul. Would
these heart wounds ever heal, and if so, what hidden scars would remain?

Later in April, he wrote again:

It is all settling down in my mind, Miranda. I know there will be many other battles, but Shiloh was my coming-of-age. Now
I see that I reached twenty-one amazingly innocent. I had a comfortable, happy childhood; then I met you and loved you. How
could I know what the world was really like?

I always thought men were basically good and wished each other well. I thought the human body was noble and beautiful. Now,
I know the body is no more than a fragile covering over the unspeakable — and as to the character of man, every sort has been
revealed to me. I have known the very best — but, oh, the worst!

Uncle Thomas Bulfinch came to visit after Easter. He had never met Davy, but he knew about our engagement. He was particularly
gentle with me. When he asked of Davy’s spirits, I showed him the two letters about Shiloh, and he shook his head sadly.

“A young Greek might have written these from the Trojan beaches.” He gave me a weak smile. “Except the Greek couldn’t write!”

“Do you think he’ll ever be the same after this?”

“No, Miranda — but neither will you. We have always taken our best citizens and changed them in our wars. How are you managing?”

“By hiding,” I admitted. I smiled, remembering Emily’s poem and the mollusk in Barbados. “By wearing the mail of anguish.”

“I guess that wearing armor is your way of surviving. You’ll come back out someday, when it’s safe. Meanwhile you can study.
You don’t need feelings for that.”

His compassion touched me. And Miss Adelaide’s insight was moving too:

Your Davy and my three nephews must have tried to kill one another, there at Shiloh. There is death all around us — neither
the ivory tower of your lecture hall nor my walls of sweet fragrant stalks protects us from it. But nothing will ever come
between us, Miranda — not between you and me, not ever.

Yes, I thought as I put the letter into my desk, there must be Davys on both sides.

Aunt Helen was very disturbed about the ignorance of her women friends, the good wives and mothers of Amherst. After Shiloh,
she spoke her concern.

“You should see them, Jos! They’re all chasing around in circles like chickens in a thunderstorm. They know what has happened,
but they don’t know why — so they just flap and cluck! Couldn’t we put them to work instead?”

“One of my old students is high up in the Sanitary Commission in Washington,” Father informed her, referring to the coordinating
agency that oversaw the various women’s relief efforts across the Union. “He can tell you how to organize your ladies for
the Union. There are a lot of Shilohs ahead of us, I’m afraid. There will be a tremendous need for bandages and dressings,
and they’ll all have to be folded by hand.”

So Father wrote, and Aunt Helen made arrangements and lists — and in a very short time our house was transformed. Our elegant
Hitchcock seats were stored in the stable until peacetime. Now there were backless benches and trestle tables in the temple,
and bolts of gauze and cheesecloth crowding the stage. Long rows of capped ladies cut and folded and rolled mile after white
mile of dressings and bandages. The temple had become a factory.

In our nearly five years here in Amherst, Father’s and Aunt Helen’s social lives had evolved quite differently. Father traveled
around New England for various academic reasons and enjoyed the stylish alumni and the lecturers at Mrs. Austin Dickinson’s
opulent soirees. He was much in demand in various circles. Aunt Helen was popular with the faculty families and was a Doric
column of our First Congregational Church. Father was less devout. Once we were established in the village, he had dropped
his Bible class. He attended church only on alternate Sundays. Now, with the war a year old, my father’s and my aunt’s circles
overlapped.

In the temple Aunt Helen was a martinet; she demanded cleanliness and silence. Any lady was welcome any weekday, from two
to five — but only to work and listen to a reading. We began every session with one or two newspapers so that each of us was
as well informed as possible with the war’s course; then I presented a suitably serious novel, the weight of Dickens or Hugo.
The ladies preferred having me read every day rather than taking turns among themselves.

“Everyone is very much calmer now that we have something useful to do,” Aunt Helen reported at supper. “But these women talk
so
foolishly!
They all tell one another rumors, and they don’t have any notion what a newspaper story really means.”

So once a week Father joined us for an informal talk and to take questions about war news as gleaned from newspaper accounts.
Armed with his big map and a blackboard and a pointer, he taught us by speaking simply and directly, and always with a clear
progression. He never condescended, and answered our questions with patience and courtesy.

I was proud of him. When I praised him sincerely, he gave me a wry smile. “I’ve always wished you could know me as a teacher,
Miranda. I’m much better as a teacher than as a parent.”

It was a poignant moment of soft regret. So we were both learning and adjusting.

At the end of the day, the workers packed and roped the dressings into bales. Every other day, our stableman, Sam, hauled
a wagonload to the main rail line in Springfield. The quantity of dressings and bandages produced was staggering, but so was
the thought of a million future wounds, pulsing and spilling and soaking our work. Davy might bleed into a dressing folded
by our town’s hands.

Spring of 1862 was also an emotional time for Emily, only because of her own unique and personal causes. During the past year,
I had become increasingly critical of her astounding detachment from the war. Until now, our national cataclysm had not interested
her in the slightest — not even the great bloodstain of Shiloh. She continued with her confined miniature life and its tiny
challenges — its birds and books and baking. She read; she corresponded; she wrote and rewrote, unaffected by her nation’s
deadly division.

Now suddenly Emily was distraught, wringing her hands and her adjectives, totally obsessed with the death of a single Amherst
boy. This was Frazar Stearns, the promising young son of President Stearns of the college. Frazar was well known to the Dickinsons
and much beloved in the village.

Frazar enlisted early, like Davy. He served in the 21st Massachusetts Volunteers under Colonel William S. Clark, his former
chemistry teacher at the college. He was killed in New Bern, North Carolina, only a few feet away from his mentor.

This was the first time I witnessed one of Emily’s manufactured passions from start to finish. She took what seemed to me
an unhealthy interest in the physical facts of Frazar’s death: the details of his wound, the shipment of his poor body, the
funeral procession through Amherst, and the service in the church, which of course she did not attend. She described all this
to her Norcross cousins in a style just as maudlin as that of those lady poets Mr. Bowles encouraged. The Norcrosses were
the family that mostly died of consumption when Emily was a very little girl. These two cousins were a bit older than I; they
were the survivors of that winter.

I had never understood Emily’s connection with the Norcrosses. She wrote them constantly in a very superior fashion, as if
they were toddlers and her responsibility. She instructed them in health and weather; she advised them on morals and preserves.
She read these letters to me proudly. She seemed to enjoy pretending a maternal role and ordinary friendship. She proudly
showed me this latest letter, which I could only skim:

. . . Just as he fell, in his soldier’s cap, with his sword at his side, Frazer rode through Amherst. Classmates to the right
of him, and classmates to the left of him, to guard his narrow face! He fell by the side of Professor Clark, his superior
officer — lived ten minutes in a soldier’s arms, asked twice for water — murmured just, “My God!” and passed! Sanderson, his
classmate, made a box of boards in the night, put the brave boy in, covered with a blanket, rowed six miles to reach the boat,
— so poor Frazer came. They tell that Colonel Clark cried like a little child when he missed his pet, and could hardly resume
his post. They loved each other very much. Nobody here could look on Frazer — not even his father . . . .

The bed on which he came was enclosed in a large casket shut entirely, and covered from head to foot with the sweetest flowers.
He went to sleep from the village church. Crowds came to tell him goodnight, choirs sang to him, pastors told how brave he
was — early soldier heart. And the family bowed their heads, as the reeds the wind shakes. . . .