Across Five Aprils (7 page)

Jethro sat quietly beside the fireplace. There was no sound in the cabin except the crackling of the fire, and there was no feeling inside him except a great loneliness. He picked up Tom’s letter and read it again; then he smoothed it carefully and returned it to the envelope. It seemed strange that this scrap of paper had actually come from a battlefield, that Tom’s big hand had actually touched it. He tried to imagine what the ironclads looked like and how they had taken Fort Henry; how the guns must have roared in Donelson; whatever in the world had possessed Tom and the other soldiers when they threw away good winter coats and blankets.

The pantry door opened after a while, and his mother came back into the kitchen.

“Yore ma’s no comp’ny fer you this afternoon, Son.”

“That’s no matter, Ma.”

“Maybe it would be good fer you to go down and visit Shad fer a while,” she suggested after a pause. “You need a mite of change.”

He turned to her eagerly. “Could I, Ma?” he asked, half in disbelief that he had understood her.

“I want him to read Tom’s letter,” she said, taking up the envelope. “Maybe after Pa and Jenny has seen it, you could take it on to Shad.”

“Sure. Sure, Ma, I’d be proud to do it fer you.”

Ellen smiled wanly at his eagerness. “It’s terr’ble cold, but I reckon you could stay the night with him if he’s a mind to ask you; then you’d hev only one way to walk.”

“You’re doin’me a real big favor, Mis’ Creighton.”

“I allowed it would be, Jeth. Well, you and Shad hev a good visit tonight; ask him to come here for supper tomorrow. Him and little Jenny ain’t got many more evenin’s to be together.”

The prospect of a visit with Shadrach changed the color of the world around Jeth, and he rushed to get his chores done early. He stacked a high pile of wood outside the kitchen, where it could be reached quickly during the night. Out in the barn, he threw hay down from the loft and carried buckets of corn from the crib in preparation for the evening feeding of the stock. He was still working when Jenny came out to find him shortly after she and her father returned from their work. He noticed that her eyes were heavy with tears.

“You read Tom’s letter?” he asked.

She sat down on a mound of hay, and the tears started again. Jethro stood beside her without speaking.

After a while she looked up at him. “Ma says you’re goin’ to go up to Shad’s tonight.”

“Ma’s hevin’him here fer supper tomorrow night so’s you and him kin talk some,” he said, recognizing the envy in her look.

“Ma understands. She’d let me marry Shad before he leaves, but Pa won’t. He talked to me about it this afternoon. It was the same old story—”You’re too young to be married, Jenny; you’re jest a little girl.’ Oh, Jeth, it’s horrible to be so young. Why does there have to be a war to take Shad away from me before I’m of an age that Pa thinks is old enough fer marryin’?”

Jethro was sympathetic and terribly uncomfortable. He shifted from one foot to the other and touched her shoulder timidly. She put her hand over his for an instant and then got to her feet.

“I reckon I got precious little right to be cryin’ over my troubles.”

He knew she was thinking of Tom, away somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee with Grant’s army. They didn’t speak again until they were nearly up to the kitchen door.

“I’ll help you git bundled up fer yore trip,” she said then, and added hurriedly, “remember to tell me everything he says, Jeth. Will you do that fer me?”

“I sure will,” he answered soberly. There was a time when he would have teased her, but not that evening. There was no time for lighthearted teasing about Shadrach Yale now that the winter term of school was over.

Inside the house, she helped him pull on two pairs of heavy knitted socks, which helped to fill out the pair of Tom’s old shoes he was wearing, and she buttoned a heavy sheepskin coat around him, tying the collar up around his ears with her own red woolen scarf.

Ellen drew a flat loaf of white bread from the ashes of the fireplace and wrapped it in a clean cloth.

“This will keep yore hands warm fer a part of the way, at least. It ain’t much of a gift to carry, but maybe the two of you will relish a little change from corn bread....”

He was patient. He knew that after a while they would let him go. There might be another adjustment of his collar, another gift for Shad, more admonitions about his “comp’ny manners,” but, finally, they would let him go. And they did—finally. He had to have his coat unbuttoned at the last minute and Tom’s letter pinned securely inside his shirt, but after that there seemed to be no other reason for detaining him—nothing to do but stand at the window watching as he plunged out into the cold late-afternoon for his visit.

The deep ruts in the road were frozen and glazed with ice; the wind had a clean sweep across the prairies, a sweep that sometimes seemed about to carry Jethro before it. Tears froze on his cheeks, and the cold pounded against his forehead as he trudged along, weighted by the heavy, oversized shoes and the many layers of clothing. It was bitter, but not beyond the ordinary; suffering at the mercy of the elements was accepted by Jethro as being quite as natural as the hunger for green vegetables and fresh fruit that was always with him during the winter. When one found comfort, he was grateful, but he was never such a fool as to expect a great deal of it. The hardships one endured had a purpose; his mother had been careful to make him aware of that.

The schoolhouse with the teacher’s log room adjoining it stood almost a mile from the Creighton cabin. It had been customary in years past for the schoolmaster to room and board with first one family and then another throughout the district, but young Yale had protested against the lack of privacy, and Matthew Creighton had been sympathetic.

“A man has the right to the dignity of his own fireside after a day’s work,” he said, and he had allowed his sons and Shadrach to cut down trees from his own land for the annex.

Shadrach Yale put down an armful of wood when he saw his guest approaching and came out to the road to meet him.

“You look half frozen, Jeth,” he said, and taking the boy’s hand ran with him up to the log annex. “Come on inside; I’ll have you thawed out in a minute or two.”

Shadrach’s long, narrow room was cheerful and attractive in spite of its roughness. A bright red and gold paisley cloth covered his homemade table and fell in full folds almost to the floor; there were a few braided rugs of warmly colored woolens scattered about, and on the mantel of the fireplace were candlesticks of heavy brass worn to a smooth satin finish. Opposite the fireplace were shelves made of logs split in half and nailed against the wall to hold the books that Shadrach had brought with him from college.

A guitar hung on the wall at the south end of the room, and at that end, too, there was a wide bed made up with several comforters which Ellen had loaned him from her own store of bedding. A cupboard of heavy walnut put together with wooden pegs stood near the fireplace and held dishes, food, and cooking utensils. To Jethro the room seemed perfect, as beautiful as any man had a right to expect.

Shadrach helped him out of the sheepskin coat and put him in the armchair in front of the fireplace, where the flames struck at a great log and shot up in hot tongues now and then, as the fat from a roasting chicken dripped into the fire. The warmth, the smell of food and wood smoke, overpowered Jethro for a while, and he would have sat silent, drinking in content, if his obligations as a guest had not demanded more of him.

“Going to spend the night with me, Jeth?” Shadrach asked, removing the boy’s heavy shoes and chafing his feet with cheerful vigor.

“Ma allowed I could if you was of a mind to ask me.”

“I think she knew pretty well that I’d be of a mind to ask you.”

“She sent that loaf of white bread fer our supper; it’s fresh out of the ashes.”

“Good. I’m glad now that I had the sense to start a chicken roasting. Fresh bread and chicken should make a pretty good meal for a couple of hungry bachelors like us, eh?”

Jethro flushed with pleasure. Shad was like that. He was different. He had book learning and was almost twenty-one; still he could make a ten-year-old schoolboy feel proud as a man.

“How’s—Jenny?” Shadrach asked after a time.

“She was cryin’ a little. Pa’s been talkin’ to her about bein’ too young fer—”

“Marrying me, I know.” It was the schoolmaster’s turn to flush, and he looked stern, as he did sometimes in the classroom.

“Ma would let her git married to you, Shad. But Pa—sometimes Pa kin be so good, and then agin, he kin be awful strict.”

Shadrach stared gloomily at Jethro’s foot, which he still held in his hands.

“I respect him so much,” he said after a while, “and I owe him so much, but I think he’s overshooting the mark when he sets himself up as knowing exactly what is right or wrong for two other people. I think he’s being tyrannical and—” he stopped himself abruptly.

Jethro felt a twinge of loyalty for his father in the face of Shadrach’s obvious anger.

“Of course Jenny is real young, Shad,” he said, with the gravity of a small parson.

Shadrach raised a black eyebrow. “Thou too, Brutus?” he asked, grinning a little sourly.

Jethro did not understand the allusion, and Shadrach seemed to be in no mood for explanations.

“There wouldn’t be any question about it if it weren’t for this war,” he said, after a moment with his own thoughts. “I’d be willing to wait years for Jenny, but when I think of leaving her, maybe for—a long time—I guess panic hits me a little.”

“When do you go, Shad?”

“Next week—John and I. He’ll go as far as Chicago with me; I’ll go back to Philadelphia.”

“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”

“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty or fifty years of my life, and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”

“Do you hev to do it then?”

“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”

“Maybe—maybe it will be over soon. I know Pa don’t think so, but people in Newton was sayin’ that it would, and Jenny even read it in the paper.”

“What is that saying of your mother’s—about hope making a fool out of reason? We finally—
finally,
mind you—have a victory at Forts Henry and Donelson. Then—hooray! The end of the war is in sight for the optimists. I’m afraid not, Jeth.”

The mention of Forts Henry and Donelson made Jethro remember the letter. He hastily unpinned it from the inside of his shirt and gave it to Shadrach.

“I fergot this—it’s from Tom. Ma wanted you to read it.”

Shadrach took the letter eagerly and held it so that it was lighted by the fire as he read. When he had finished, he folded it slowly and looked into the flames.

Jethro sat quietly watching his teacher’s sober face. He thought of boys frozen under the snow at Donelson, he remembered that he had not loved Tom as he had Bill and Shadrach, and suddenly the warm, firelit room, the smell of food, the shelves of books, all wakened a feeling of guilt in his mind. He wondered if Tom had a coat and blanket; he thought of the bitter cold outside and shuddered involuntarily.

Shadrach looked up at him. “Still cold, Jeth?”

“Nothin’ to speak of.”

“You were thinking of the letter?”

“I guess so.”

Shadrach shook his head. “It’s all a brutal business. There are going to be a lot of letters—worse than this one.”

“If this victory wasn’t so much, Shad, why was people in Newton yellin’ so and sayin’, ‘God bless Grant’?”

“It
was
an important victory, Jeth; don’t misunderstand me. Look, I’m going to show you something....” Shadrach got to his feet and brought pencil and a piece of rough paper from the bookshelves. He drew the paisley-covered table up closer to the fire and motioned Jethro to join him beside it. “Come here. We’ll have a little lesson together.”

He was sketching rapidly, first the outline of a block of states, then lines to represent rivers and railroads and small squares for towns. His eyes began to shine with interest in his project as he worked.

“Now, this is the Confederate line, Jeth, beginning over here in eastern Kentucky.” Shadrach studied his sketch and added a row of x’s to represent the Confederates. “Here it comes across the Blue Grass country; then it crosses the Mississippi about here; on it stretches across Missouri and on over here into Indian Territory—a line several hundred miles long. Now, all of this is under the command of a Confederate general named Albert Sidney Johnston—you’ve heard of him, maybe?”

“I think I’ve heered Pa speak the name.” Jethro was seeing in his mind’s eye gray-clad men standing side by side, forming a single line across miles of fields, hills, and rivers; grim, forbidding men except for one familiar face. He wondered if Bill could feel comfortable in that long gray line of strangers. Then he pulled himself back to Shadrach’s running explanation, which accompanied his sketching.

“Here are two rivers, the Tennessee and the Cumberland. See how they run side by side and only a few miles apart as they come up toward the Ohio, and notice that they are crossed by the Confederate line. Now, over here on the Ohio our gunboats have been lying, some at the mouth of the Cumberland, some at the mouth of the Tennessee—a threat to this Confederate line, you see.”

Jethro shook his head. “What if they did threaten it? Gunboats couldn’t lick that long line of Rebs stretchin’ across the map, could they?”

“No, but look what they could do—what, in fact, they’ve already done. Notice how the Cumberland dips down into Tennessee and flows past these towns—Clarksville here and Nashville here. It’s from these towns that the Confederates have been getting their supplies; this line can’t move far or fight our armies if it doesn’t have food, guns, ammunition. These things have been coming up the river and this—” Shadrach made a small square on the line representing the Cumberland and labelled it “Donelson”—“this is the fort that the Confederates thought would be enough to keep our gunboats from controlling their supply line.”