The Deserter (10 page)

But there were surprises in the rest of the roll call.

“Lieutenant Seth Morgan?”

When there was no answer, the sergeant spoke up louder, “Lieutenant Morgan? Seth?”

There was still no answer. Seth's fellow officers looked at each other. The sergeant leaned toward a corporal and muttered a question. The corporal, who was acting as company clerk, consulted his sheet. “No, sir,” he said. “He's not here no place among the wounded.”

“Well, what about the dead?” whispered the sergeant.

“He's not there neither.”

The sergeant whistled under his breath. The clerk moved his pencil to the column headed “MISSING” and scribbled, “1st Lt. Seth Morgan,” and the sergeant continued to call the roll.

When he got down to the
Ps
there was another pause after he called the name of Private Otis Pike. During the silence there were snickers.
Otis must have skedaddled
.

“Put the damn fool down as missing,” said the sergeant, but then the corporal leaned toward him and whispered, “No, sir, that ain't right, sir. Otis Pike's daid.”

“Dead!”

The corporal tapped his sheet and pointed to a name.

“Well, if that don't beat all. How did the poor bastard manage to get himself killed?”

The corporal looked around and whispered to another sergeant, then cleared his throat. “Sir, Sergeant Willow here was in the burial detail.” The corporal wagged his head in the direction of Culp's Hill. “He found Otis layin' out there daid.”

“Out there?” The first sergeant couldn't believe it. He raised his eyebrows at Sergeant Willow, who stepped forward and gave his report.

“Private Pike, that's right, his body was out there, sir. I didn't recognize it at first because his head was all”—the sergeant swept a hand across his face—“well, it was mostly gone, but he had a tag on him, and it was Otis all right. He was out there way in front.”

“In front? What do you mean, in front?”

“Right behind Colonel Mudge, sir, that's where he was.” Sergeant Willow looked uncomfortable. “Believe it or not, sir.”

“Well, if that don't beat the devil.” The first sergeant cleared his throat and called out the next name. “Alpheus Peterson?”

“Here, sir.”

“Private Scopes?” The first sergeant looked more closely at his list. “Private Lemuel Scopes?”

No answer.

“He's daid, sir,” said the corporal.

“What about his brother?” The sergeant read the name aloud, “Rufus Scopes?”

Again there was no answer.

“Both of 'em's daid, sir,” murmured the corporal. “They was twins.”

“I know they was twins,” said the first sergeant angrily. Muddled, he looked fiercely back at his list. “Private Tatum?”

“Daid too, sir.”

When the miserable morning report was completed, the regimental adjutant called out, “Company captains, I believe two of you are replacements? I hope both of you took down the names of the dead and missing, because you're supposed to write to their next of kin.”

Then the first sergeant bent his head over the corporal's roll, signed his name, and handed it to the company's new captain, who also signed his name, and then the regimental adjutant gathered up all the morning reports and took them to his soggy tent on the outskirts of Gettysburg, there to be consolidated and sent on to the acting assistant adjutant general of the Second Brigade. From brigade level the expanded report would be passed along to the headquarters of the First Division and from there to the central command of the entire Twelfth Corps. At last the report containing the final official figures for all the regiments of the First Division during the Battle of Gettysburg would make its way to the staff of General Meade himself, to be tallied in his final battle report and packed off to the headquarters of the Army of the Potomac in Washington, where it would become part of the vast collection of papers documenting the land campaigns of the entire Union army and the maritime history of the navy.

General Meade's final battle report was of no concern to the staff officers of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. But Sergeant Willow, who had been in charge of removing the bodies to the place where they were to be temporarily buried—a pit was being dug for them beside the field hospital for the Twelfth Corps—was dissatisfied.

He should have piped up during roll call when Otis Pike was reported dead. He should have spoken up then, because he had something to say about the burial detail and the body of Otis Pike. After all, collecting corpses was not the jim-dandiest detail you could ever be on, because of the smell in the first place, and then you had to keep the varmints at bay, not to mention the grief of the thing, so he had only been doing his unfortunate duty, groping around all those swollen bodies into their pockets and so on, looking for personal possessions to be sent home to grieving wives and sweethearts. And then when he got to Otis's corpse he had been mystified by the small amount of blood on his coat.

Sergeant Luther Willow was an ardent reader of dime novels. He was familiar with the gallant exploits of the London police in their pursuit of dastardly criminals. And like the admirable police detective Benjamin Bone, Sergeant Willow always examined the pattern of the bloodstains on the bodies of the men he found dead on the battlefield. Of course they were battle casualties, not murder victims, but in making his own personal investigations he felt like a colleague of Detective Bone.

The rebel shell that had blown away the face of Private Otis Pike had left very little blood on the coat—that was the peculiar thing. You would have thought it would be soaked in blood, if not on the front, then on the back, where he was lying in it. Instead, there was only a little on the lining and some superficial stains on the front, almost like the prints of a hand. It didn't seem natural.

In his perplexity Sergeant Willow had removed the coat from the body and set it aside, along with the metal tag and the items from the pockets of both the coat and the trousers. He had written the words “PVT. OTIS PIKE” on a piece of paper and pinned it to Otis's shirt. Maybe tomorrow, he'd go around to wherever the Tenth Maine had settled down, the regiment of provost guards for the Twelfth Corps, and interest somebody in this little battlefield mystery.

Unfortunately he didn't get around to it for a couple of days, and by then it was too late. Tenth Maine, Second Massachusetts and the entire rest of the army were on the move again. Pike's possessions, including his mysteriously clean sack coat, were carefully ticketed and sent away to a collecting point in the city of Washington, along with thousands of other personal possessions of the men who had died at Gettysburg.

Sergeant Willow never saw the coat again.

PART IX

THE NUTTINESS OF
EBENEZER

THE HAIR
PRESUMPTIVE

I
t was even worse than they had feared.

They had not written to Howie “Ebenezer” Flint to tell him they were coming. They had not even phoned, in case he put them off.

Therefore when he opened his front door a crack and saw them standing on his sagging front porch, his jaw dropped and his face flushed, deepening from pink to purple.

Howie had never met Homer and he had not seen Mary since they were children. And yet he seemed to guess at once that they were a threat. “You can't come in,” he whispered. “I am the hair presumptive.”

“You're what?” Mary put out her hand. “Oh, come on, Howie, we're kinfolk. Remember when you came to Concord with your family? When we were children? I'm Gwen's sister Mary and this is my husband, Homer. We just want to talk to you.”

Howie's eyes swiveled back and forth between the two tall people standing on the drooping floorboards of his front porch. His eyes were small and glittering behind little old-fashioned glasses. They failed to see Mary's friendly hand.

It was obvious that the idiotic boy Gwen had known as a child had fulfilled his early promise. “Actually,” said Howie, keeping a firm grip on the door, “I am quite ill. Last week I was at the point of death.” He coughed.

“Oh, look, Howie”—Mary adopted her best wheedling tone—“we've come all this way. You can't refuse to see your own third cousin twice removed.”

Reluctantly Howie at last opened the door just wide enough for them to squeeze through.

Only when they were inside did the full glory of his whiskers burst upon their gaze. Howie's whiskers were full and dark, thick and hateful, a bushy growth eighteen inches long. Homer decided gleefully that they were a sort of statement—
I may be a total flop at everything else, but at least my chin is a genius
.

“Thank you, Howie,” said Mary, trying not to exclaim at the extravagant growth of his beard nor stare around at the rubbish in the hall. The interior of Howie's house was a classic case of the newspaper headline,
OLD COUPLE FOUND DEAD AMONG STACKS OF OLD NEWSPAPERS.

“My name's not Howie,” growled Howie, “it's Ebenezer.”

“But didn't it used to be—”

“Legally changed in a court of law. I have chosen to be known by the name of my great-great-grandfather.”

“Your great-great-grandfather was called Ebenezer?”

The little eyes flashed behind the tiny specs. “Right. And he was not a traitor like
your
great-great-grandfather.”

The shaft went home, and Mary winced. But perhaps this fool had found out something she didn't know. Quickly she said, “You mean Seth Morgan was a traitor? What kind of traitor?”

The little eyes shifted. “I don't know exactly. I just know it was something shameful.”

Something shameful
. It was the old family story. Mary was disappointed. The silly man knew no more about Seth Morgan than she did. “Listen here, Howie,” she began boldly. “Oh, sorry, I mean Ebenezer. We'd like to see the things you”—she stopped just in time to avoid the word
swiped
—“the things you borrowed from my sister's house last month.”

Ebenezer twiddled his fingers in his beard and said craftily, “I didn't borrow them. Actually, I took what is jurisdicially mine.”

“Yours! But you removed them from her house without permission.”

“Since we have the same great-great-
great
-grandfather,” said Howie, jutting his chin forward stubbornly—a fearsome gesture because his whiskers jutted forward at the same time—“all family documents belong to the posterior equally. I am a legal derelict and posterior. Therefore I have as much right to them as she does. Or you neither.”

Bewildered, Mary turned to Homer, who was keeping a firm hold on the muscles of his face. In a strained voice he said, “I think Ebenezer is referring to posterity.”

“Oh, of course.” Mary turned back to Ebenezer. “But surely that's not so. Those things have been in my sister's house for nearly a hundred and fifty years.”

“I think you will find,” said Ebenezer smugly, “that the entire specter of the law is on my side.”

ONCE AGAIN, HER FACE

T
his was no time to quibble about who owned what. Homer nudged his wife. “Show him the photograph we bought in Gettysburg.”

“Yes, of course.” Mary rummaged in her bag and unwrapped the little leather case. Opening it, she said, “I don't know who this young girl is, but I recognize her. I know I've seen her before, perhaps in Gwen's attic. I wonder if you have her picture among the things you took away?”

Ebenezer stared at the photograph. At once his demeanor changed. He became the proud antiquarian. “Hey, you guys, you want to see what I got?”

“Oh, yes,” said Mary.

“Follow me.” Zigzagging between the piled-up boxes in the narrow front hall, he led them into a cluttered room.

“My Civil War museum,” he said grandly, flourishing a pudgy hand. From somewhere, as if by magic, there was music, fifes and drums.

His museum was a chaos of miscellaneous objects arranged on a couple of card tables and a sideboard. “Priceless,” said Ebenezer, spreading out his arms. “My collection is priceless.”

Homer bent to look at a crosscut saw and said, “You're into carpentry?”

Ebenezer chuckled. “Amputational instrument from Bull Run. Cut off thousands of arms and legs, I'll bet.”

“Umph,” said Homer, who had bought a similar saw at Vanderhoof's Hardware Store. Politely he moved on to the next item on display, a small box with a gold ring nestled in a bed of cotton.

“You won't believe my good luck,” said Ebenezer, cooing over it. “This very ring”—his voice took on a reverent vibrato—“was removed from the finger of Abraham Lincoln by his grief-struck wife on the occasion of his decease.” He rolled his eyes. “Pricey, it was very pricey.”

“Mmm, I should think so,” murmured Mary. The object in the box was obviously a fraternity ring from some jolly Greek-letter band of brothers.