White People (26 page)

For David Holding Eil (1981–)
and for Robert Langland Eil (1983–)

Dear madam: No doubt you and Frank’s friends have heard the sad fact of his death in hospital here, through his uncle, or the lady from Baltimore, who took his things. (I have not seen them, only heard of them visiting Frank.) I will write you a few lines—as a casual friend that sat by his death-bed. Your son, corporal Frank H. Irwin, was wounded near fort Fisher, Virginia, March 25, 1865—the wound was in the left knee, pretty bad. He was sent up to Washington, was receiv’d in ward C, Armory-square hospital, March 28th—the wound became worse, and on the 4th of April the leg was amputated a little above the knee—the operation was perform’d by Dr. Bliss, one of the best surgeons in the army—he did the whole operation himself—there was a good deal of bad matter gather’d—the bullet was found in the knee. For a couple of weeks afterwards he was doing pretty well. I visited and sat by him frequently,
as he was fond of having me. The last ten or twelve days of April, I saw that his case was critical. He previously had some fever, with cold spells. The last week in April he was much of the time flighty—but always mild and gentle. He died first of May. The actual cause of death was pyaemia, (the absorption of the matter in the system instead of its discharge). Frank, as far as I saw, had everything requisite in surgical treatment, nursing &c. He had watches much of the time. He was so good and well-behaved and affectionate, I myself liked him very much. I was in the habit of coming in afternoons and sitting by him, and soothing him, and he liked to have me—liked to put his arm out and lay his hand on my knee—would keep it so a long while. Toward the last he was more restless and flighty at night—often fancied himself with his regiment—by his talk sometimes seem’d as if his feelings were hurt by being blamed by his officers for something he was entirely innocent of—said, “I never in my life was thought capable of such a thing, and never was.” At other times he would fancy himself talking as it seem’d to children or such like, his relatives I suppose, and giving them good advice; would talk to them a long while. All the time he was out of his head not one single bad word or idea escaped him. It was remark’d that many a man’s conversation in his senses was not half as good as Frank’s delirium. He seem’d quite willing to die—he had become very weak and had suffer’d a good deal, and was perfectly resign’d, poor boy. I do not know his past life, but I feel as if it must have been good. At any rate what I saw of him here, under the most trying of circumstances, with a painful wound, and among strangers, I can say that he behaved so brave, so composed, and so sweet and affectionate, it could not be surpass’d. And now like many other noble and good men, after serving his country as a soldier, he has yielded up his young life at the very outset in her service. Such things are gloomy—yet there is a text, “God doeth all things well”—the meaning of which, after due time, appears to the soul.

I thought perhaps a few words, though from a stranger, about your son, from one who was with him at the last, might be worth
while—for I loved the young man, though I but saw him immediately to lose him. I am merely a friend visiting the hospitals occasionally to cheer the wounded and sick.

W.W.

Dear Mother, It’s Frank here, hoping a last time to reach you, and doubting I can but still I’m really going to try, ma’am. I want you to put your mind at rest about it all, Momma. That is why I am working hard to slip this through. You must really listen if this gets by the censors and everything, because I have limited time and fewer words than I’d like. I would dearly love to be there soon for breakfast and see that cussed little Wilkie come downstairs grumping like he always does till he’s got a touch of coffee in him. I would even like to hear the Claxtons’ roosters sounding off again. I remember Poppa, God rest him, saying as how other men kept hens for eggs but the Claxtons kept roosters for their noise and it was our ill luck to draw such fools as neighbors! The old man that wrote you of my end had the finest gray-white beard and finest-speaking voice I ever met with, finer even than parson Brookes we set such store by. The man who wrote you was here most days after lunch, even ones I now recall but parts of. He brought ward C our first lilacs in late April, great purple ones he stuck into a bedpan near my pillow. Their smell worked better on me than the laudanum that our Army chemists were so sadly out of. He read to us from Scripture and once, my hand resting on his safe-feeling leg, I asked him for a ditty and he said one out that sounded fine like Ecclesiastes but concerned our present war, my war. I told him it was good and asked him who had wrote it and he shrugged and smiled, he nodded along the double row of cots set in our tent here, like showing me that every wounded fellow’d had a hand in setting down the poem. He was so pleasing-looking and kind-spoken and affectionate, I myself liked him
very much. Ice cream he brought us more than once—a bigger vat of it I’ve never seen, not even at the Bucks County Fair. Him and our lady nurses kept making funny jokes, bringing around the great melting buckets of it and the spoons and he himself shoveled a good bit of it into my gullet, grateful it felt all the way down. “Now for some brown.” He gave me samples. “Now pink, but best for you is this, Frank. You’ve heard Mrs. Howe’s line ‘in the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea’? This vanilla’s that white, white as your arm here. Makes vanilla cool the deepest, my brave Pennsylvania youth.” How I ate it. Cold can be good. If you hurt enough, cold can be so good. Momma? I do not love Lavinia like I forever said. I do not know how I got into being so mistruthful. Maybe it was how her poppa was Mayor and I liked the idea of pleasing you with our family’s possible new station or how everybody spoke of Miss Lavinia’s attainments and her skills at hostessing. It is my second cousin Emily I loved and love. She knew and knows, and it was just like Em to bide that. Em met whatever gaze I sent her with a quiet wisdom that shamed and flattered me, the both. Once at that Fourth of July picnic where the Claxtons’ rowboat exploded from carrying more firecrackers than the
Merrimac
safely could, I noticed Emily near Doanes’ Mill Creek gathering French lilacs for to decorate our picnic quilt later. You were bandaging Wilkie’s foot where he stepped on a nail after you told him he must wear shoes among that level of fireworks but he didn’t. I wandered down where Emily stood. She had a little silver pair of scissors in her skirt’s pocket and I recall remarking how like our Em that was, how homely and prepared and how like you she was that way, Momma. She was clipping flowers when I drew up. I commenced shivering, that fearful of my feelings for her after everybody on earth seemed to think Lavinia had decided on me long-since. “Frank,” Emily said. I spoke her name and when she heard how I said hers out, she stopped in trimming a heavy branch of white blooms (for, you know that place by the waterwheel where there are two bushes, one white, one purple, grown up side by side together
and all mixed?). Emily’s hands were still among the flowers when she looked back over her shoulder at me. Tears were in her eyes but not falling, just held in place and yet I saw the light on their water tremble with each pulse from her. It was then, Momma, I understood she knew my truest feelings, all.

“Why is it we’re cousins and both poor?” I asked her. “Why could it not be just a little different so things’d fall into place for us more, why, Emily?” And she lifted one shoulder and turned her head aside. She half-fell into the sweet bushes then, white and green and purple, but caught herself and looked away from me. Em finally spoke but I half-heard with all the Roman candles going off and Wilkie bawling. She said quiet, looking out toward water through the beautiful branches, “We will always know, Frank, you and me will. Hearing as how you understand it, that already gives me so much, Frank. Oh, if you but guessed how it strengthens me just to say your name at night, Frank, Franklin Horatio Irwin, Jr., how I love to say it out, sir.” Lavinia was calling that same name but different and I turned, fearful of being caught here by her, me unfaithful to the one that loved me if not strongest then loudest, public-like. “Excuse me, Cousin Emily,” said I, and walked off and then soon after got mustered in, then snagged the minie that costs the leg then the rest of it, me, and no one knowing my real heart. Mother? I never even kissed her. Momma? Treat her right. Accord my cousin Emily such tender respects as befit the young widow of a man my age, for she is that to me, and not Lavinia that made such a show at the funeral and is ordering more styles of black crepe from a Boston catalogue even now, Momma. Have Emily to dinner often as you can afford it, and encourage her to look around at other boys, for there’s not much sense in wasting two lives, mine and hers, for my own cowardly mistakes. That is one thing needs saying out.

I used to speak to my bearded visitor about brother Wilkie and all of you and I thought up things I’d tell my kid brother who has so bad a temper but is funny throughout. I’d want Wilkie to be brave and not do what the town said he should,
like pay court on a girl who’s snooty and bossy just because of who her kin is and their grand home. I would tell Wilkie to hide in a cave and not sign up like I did, with the bands and drums and the setting off of all fireworks not burned up in the Claxtons’ calamity rowboat—but, boy, it sure did look pretty going down, didn’t it, Momma? My doctor took some time and pains with me and, near the end, got like Lavinia in telling me how fine a looking young man I was. That never pleased me much since I didn’t see it all that clear myself and had not personally earned it and so felt a little guilty on account, not that any of it matters now. The Lady from Baltimore combed my hair and said nice things and I am sorry that she never got the watch and the daguerrotypes to you. She is a confidence artist who makes tours of hospitals, promising to take boys’ valuables home but never does and sells them in the shops. Still, at the time, I trusted her, her voice was so refined and hands real soft and brisk and I felt good for days after she left, believing Wilkie’d soon have Poppa’s gold watch in hand, knowing it had been with me at the end.

Just before they shot me, Momma, I felt scared to where I considered, for one second, running. No one ever knew of this but I must tell you now because just thinking on my failing cost me many inward tribulations at the last. “I could jump out of this hole and run into that woods and hide and then take off forever.” So the dreadful plan rushed forth, and then how I stifled it, choked practically. I never in my life was thought capable of even thinking such a thing, and here I’d said it to myself! Then, like as punishment, not six minutes after looking toward that peaceful-seeming woods, I moved to help another fellow from Bucks County (Ephraim’s second cousin, the youngest Otis boy from out New Hope way) and felt what first seemed a earthquake that’d knocked the entire battle cockeyed but that narrowed to a nearby complaint known just as the remains of my left leg. It felt numb till twenty minutes later when I seriously noticed. It takes that kind of time sometimes to feel. It takes a delay between the ending and knowing what to say of that,
which is why this reaches you six weeks after my kind male nurse’s news, ma’am. I asked him once why he’d quit the newspaper business to come visit us, the gimps and bullet-catchers, us lost causes.

He leaned nearer and admitted a secret amusement: said he was, from among the thousands of Northern boys and Reb prisoners he’d seen, recasting Heaven. Infantry angels, curly-headed all. “And Frank,” said he, “I don’t like to tease you with the suspense but it’s between you and two other fellows, a three-way heat for the Archangel Gabriel.” I laughed, saying as how the others had my blessings for that job just yet. He kept close by me during the amputation part especially. They said that if the leg was taken away, then so would all my troubles go. And I trusted them, Momma. And everybody explained and was real courteous and made the person feel manly like the loss of the leg could be his choice and would I agree? “Yes,” I said.

My doctor’s name was Dr. Bliss and during the cutting of my leg, others kept busting into the tent, asking him stuff and telling him things and all calling him by name, Bliss, Bliss, Bliss, they said. It helped me to have that name and word drifting over the table where they worked on me so serious, and I thanked God neither you nor Emily would be walking in to see me spread out like that, so bare and held down helpless, like some boy. Afterwards, my friend the nurse trained me to pull the covers back, he taught me I must learn to look at it now. But I couldn’t bear to yet. They’d tried but I had wept when asked to stare below at the lonely left knee. It’d been “left” all right! Walt (my nurse’s name was Walt) he said we would do it together. He held my hand and counted then—one, two, three … I did so with him and it was like looking at what was there and what was not at once, just as my lost voice is finding you during this real dawn, ma’am. He told me to cheer up, that it could’ve been my right leg and only later did I see he meant that as a little joke and I worried I had let him down by not catching on in time. I have had bad thoughts, lustful thoughts and evil. I fear I am yet a vain person and always have been secretly, Momma.
You see, I fretted how it’d be to live at home and go downtown on crutches and I knew Lavinia’s plan would change with me a cripple. Lavinia would not like that. And even after everything, I didn’t know if I could choose Emily, a seamstress after all, over so grand a place on Summit Avenue as the Mayor’d already promised Lavinia and me (it was the old Congers mansion, Momma).

It seems to me from here that your Frank has cared way too much for how others saw him. It was Poppa’s dying early that made me want to do so much and seem so grown and that made me join up when you had your doubts, I know. You were ever strict with me but I really would’ve turned out all right in the end … if it hadn’t been for this.

Momma, by late April, I could feel the bad stuff moving up from the leg’s remains, like some type of chemical, a kind of night or little army set loose in me and taking all the early lights out, one by one, lamp by lamp, farm by farm, house by house it seemed. The light in my head, don’t laugh, was the good crystal lantern at your oilclothed kitchen table. That was the final light I worried for—and knew, when that went, it all went. But, through chills and talking foolish sometimes, I tried keeping that one going, tried keeping good parts separate, saved back whole. I felt like if I could but let you hear me one more time, it’d ease you some. Your sleeping so poorly since … that’s just not like you, Ma, and grieves me here. Dying at my age is an embarrassment, on top of everything else! It was just one shot in the knee, but how could I have stopped it when it started coming up the body toward the last light in the kitchen in the head? You told me not to enlist—you said, as our household’s one breadwinner, I could stay home. But the braided uniform and the party that Lavinia promised tipped me over. Fevered, I imagined talking to Wilkie and all the younger cousins lined up on our front porch’s seven steps, and me wagging my finger and striding to and fro in boots like our Lt.’s beautiful English leather boots, such as I never owned in life. I talked bold and I talked grand and imagined Emily was in the shady house with
you, and beside you, listening, approving my sudden wisdom that’d come on me with the suffering, and on account of the intestine cramps, and after the worst convulsion Walt got me through, still that lead was coming up the thigh into my stomach then greeting and seizing the chest and then more in the throat and that was about all of it except for the great gray beard and those knowing eyes that seemed to say Yes Yes, Frank, even to my need to be done with it, the pain (the last white pain of it, I do not mind telling you, was truly something, Momma). I couldn’t have held out much longer anyway, and the idea of choosing between my two loves, plus living on a crutch for life, it didn’t set right with vain me.

This I am telling you should include that I hid the five-dollar gold piece I won for the History Prize at the Academy commencement up inside the hollowed left head-post of my bedstead. Get Wilkie to go upstairs with you and help lift the whole thing off the floor and out the coin will fall. Use it for you and Emily’s clothes. Bonnets might be nice with it. Buy nothing but what’s extra, that is how I want it spent. I should’ve put it in your hand before I left, but I planned to purchase my getting-home gifts out of that, and never thought I wouldn’t. Selfish, keeping it squirreled back and without even guessing. But then maybe all people are vain. Maybe it’s not just your Frank, right?

If you wonder at the color you are seeing now, Momma, the pink-red like our fine conch shell on the parlor’s hearth, you are seeing the backs of your own eyelids, Momma. You will soon hear the Claxtons’ many crowers set up their alarum yet again and will catch a clinking that is McBride’s milk wagon pulled by Bess, who knows each house on old McBride’s route. Your eyes are soon to open on your room’s whitewash and July’s yellow light in the dear place. You will wonder at this letter of a dream, ma’am and, waking, will look toward your bedside table and its often-unfolded letter from the gentleman who told you of my passing. His letter makes this one possible. For this is a letter toward your loving Franklin Horatio Irwin, Jr., not only from him. It is your voice finding ways to smoothe your
mind. This is for letting you get on with what you have to tend, Momma. You’ve always known I felt Lavinia to be well-meaning but right silly, and that our sensible and deep Emily was truly meant as mine from her and my’s childhoods onward. You’ve guessed where the coin is stowed, as you did ever know such things, but have held back on account of honoring the privacy even of me dead. Go fetch it later today, and later today spend it on luxuries you could not know otherwise. This is the rich echo that my bearded nurse’s voice allows. It is mostly you. And when the pink-and-red opens, and morning’s here already, take your time in dressing, go easy down the stairs, let Wilkie doze a little longer than he should and build the fire and start a real big breakfast. Maybe even use the last of Poppa’s maple syrup we tapped that last winter he was well. Use it up and then get going on things, new things, hear? That is the wish of your loving eldest son, Frank. That is the wish of the love of your son Frank who is no deader than anything else that ever lived so hard and wanted so so much, Mother.