When the War Is Over (22 page)

Edward Flagg Silliman, who was fictional, returned to the mill but never ran for Congress. To mark his homecoming a grand ball was held, at which he was observed to be distraught, perhaps less dashing and appreciative than was meet; this was attributed to the horrors of war. Shortly he announced that he intended to continue smoking cigars, and fell to work improving the business: he modified certain machines, instigated reckless expansions, and persuaded his joyful father to persuade the proper authorities to run a spur from the depot to the mill. It is almost unnecessary to add that he replaced, perhaps ousted, his father sooner than that tycoon had expected; at which the elder Silliman fizzed with pride and dragged his tired gray wife to Europe. Ned married at twenty-nine, taking unto himself a bright-eyed, snub-nosed, dimpled and rich local girl, daughter of a man who owned four thousand acres and lived in town. In ten years she was featureless and dowdy. They raised four children.

Ned remembered Thomas Martin but in time dismissed him as one of the accidents of war. He kept making money and joining clubs and interfering with his pastor and his alderman, so that he was soon a very important man, and it seemed to him that much was expected of him, and he was not wrong about that. With each directorship, with each chairmanship, with each charity, with each five pounds, with each deeper shade of gouty red, he altered the story of Thomas Martin imperceptibly, and eventually heard himself making it quite clear that he had refused absolutely to participate in any such barbarous proceedings. Occasionally he thought of tracing Catto through the army, but one thing or another always came up.

Judge William Martin Dickson, who was real, remained one of Cincinnati's first citizens, in which capacity, in the 1880s, he wrote a letter to the editor—what else? how earnest! how futile! the perfectibility of man! Irate Citizen! Pro Bono Publico!—about Thomas Martin, the only words written about the boy for a century. That is a long silence. “But why revive these harrowing incidents of the war?” Dickson perorated. “As well ask, why tell the story of the war at all. If it is to be told, let us have the whole. Let the young not be misled: the dread reality has something else than the pomp and circumstance, however glorious. Besides, there will be other wars and more generals. Let these remember that an abuse of power will rise up in judgment against them.” Foolish optimism, in the style of the time, but most would agree that it was worse not to talk back at all. Dickson died in an accident at sixty-two.

Judge Johann B. Stallo, who was also real, became our Minister to Rome and, in his scientific disguise, elaborated aspects of the conservation of energy, said elaborations being of the first importance to later physicists. His residence in Cincinnati, at 2107 Auburn Avenue, is still standing. He died full of years and honors.

Jack Phelan, who was fictional, did indeed go to Chicago, did indeed become a baby doctor. An air of doom, of mysteries, of profound grapplings clung to him; mid-wifing was perhaps his answer to the ultimate questions. He married Nell. Believing in repentance and redemption, he had no quarrel with her past; knowing men, and the value of gentleness, she had no quarrel with his corrugated face. They early lost track of Charlotte, who went to New York and was swallowed up. The Phelans prospered and multiplied, and the surgeon—to his startled pleasure—grew corpulent. In time he sported a magnificent row of fobs across a grandly convex vest. He corresponded with Catto, remained devout, and died in 1897 of what used to be called an apoplexy. God knows what became of him then.

General August Willich, who was real, b. 19 Nov. 1810, Braunsberg, Prussia, rejoined his command in Nashville and was then ordered to New Orleans, where he conversed with the upper classes in English, German, French and Italian, and sipped a light wine from time to time. In public he stood for temperance, abstinence from tobacco and gambling, and the perfection of humanity through the exercise of reason and self-restraint He never lived to see his beloved republic—still awaited—but fought for it always, in the pages of
Der Deutsche Republikaner
and by personal example, and in hundreds of speeches to German groups and veterans' organizations. As a brevet major-general with a disabling wound received in action he enjoyed a pension of thirty dollars a month, and in his sixties he moved to St. Marys, Ohio, where he lived in a rooming house, founded a Shakespeare Study Club, and stood on a street corner near his lodgings every morning and afternoon, watching the children walk to and from school, loving the future in them, thinking his own sad thoughts. The Roman governor Gratus in General Lew Wallace's
Ben Hur
is a portrait of him. In 1878 he died in his sleep.

Marius Catto, who was fictional, rode his hitch west (as a sergeant; he declined the commission) bearing a bedroll and Thomas Martin's rifle, horn and pouch, which he swapped for two months' worth of a Shoshone chief's daughter. He managed to stay out of irons and not to kill. In the last year of his tour he was posted to California, and after his discharge he rode down south and took a job with a freight company, an office job, literacy being prized in that time and place, a job that lasted only until he had met, wooed and won a banker's daughter. She had honey-colored hair and a fine figger, and they lived on the shores of the Pacific and got six children, desisting only when he achieved what should have been a full measure of respectability by becoming, in the best American tradition, a vice-president in his father-in-law's bank.

He did not enjoy his work. He persisted in seeing money as worthless scraps of paper and chunks of metal, and he disliked an occupation and a circle in which jokes about niggers, kikes and greasers (and often, after a furtive look over a fat shoulder, micks) were apparently a necessity. His future was limited also by certain quirks and blasphemies. Except for his own wedding he declined to set foot inside a church; rather, he enjoyed sitting on his front porch Sunday mornings in an undershirt—the vice-president of a bank!—downing a frothy stein of beer while all those respectable citizens who did not curse or daydream betook themselves to divine services. And while he voted in every election from 1868 on, it was always, as he explained vociferously, for the Greenbacker, the Vegetarian, the Prohibitionist or some Chicken-Every-Sunday lunatic, because he would not knowingly support any man with the slightest chance of election, any more than he would have a politician or a preacher to dinner.

Just before the onset of true madness Catto was saved: the town built a hospital, and he transformed himself from financial adviser into administrator, leaving the bank in delight and spending the rest of his active days amid the soothing moans of the moribund. He often wore a stethoscope, and was humored by physicians, and told the interns stories of ancient simples and nostrums. One day he had a note from Nell: Phelan was dead. Catto drank himself unconscious for the first time in thirty years, weeping like a man because he was weary of his loneliness. He mellowed then, and joined a men's club, and sometimes when the whiskey was running he told the tale of Thomas Martin. He maintained that life had no meaning but what we brought to it, and he considered himself the last truly free man in a world careering toward universal slavery. He had no time at the end to reflect or repent, and so died intact; he lived to be eighty-two and was killed by the sun while he marched in a Memorial Day parade. At last his war was over.

About the Author

Stephen Becker (1927–1999) was an American author, translator, and teacher whose published works include eleven novels and the English translations of Elie Wiesel's
The Town Behind the Wall
and André Malraux's
The Conquerors
. He was born in Mount Vernon, New York, and after serving in World War II, he graduated from Harvard University and studied in Peking and Paris, where he was friends with the novelist Richard Wright and learned French in part by reading detective novels. The recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Becker taught at numerous schools throughout the United States, including the University of Iowa, Bennington College, and the University of Central Florida in Orlando. His best-known works include
A Covenant with Death
(1965), which was adapted into a Warner Brothers film starring Gene Hackman and George Maharis;
When the War Is Over
(1969), a Civil War novel based on the true story of a teenage Confederate soldier executed more than a month after Lee's surrender; and the Far East trilogy of literary adventure novels:
The Chinese Bandit
(1975),
The Last Mandarin
(1979), and
The Blue-Eyed Shan
(1982).

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1969 by Stephen Becker

Cover design by Kat JK Lee

ISBN: 978-1-5040-2691-8

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com

EARLY BIRD BOOKS

FRESH EBOOK DEALS, DELIVERED DAILY

BE THE FIRST TO KNOW—

NEW DEALS HATCH EVERY DAY!

EBOOKS BY STEPHEN BECKER

FROM OPEN ROAD MEDIA