The Land of Long Ago Part 12

to-day, and every time I clean house, thinks I to myself: 'I'll make their work jest as light as I can;' so I git rid of all the rubbish, burn it up or give it away to somebody that can use it. But after all my burnin' and givin', I reckon there'll be a plenty of useless things left behind me. Here's this Shaker bonnet; now what's the use o'

savin' such a thing? But every time I look at it I think o' Friend f.a.n.n.y Lacy and the rest o' the old Shakers, whose like we'll never see again, and somehow I keep holdin' on to it."

She thrust her hand into the bonnet, and holding it off, regarded it with a look of deep affection. The straw was yellow with age, and the lining and strings were faded and time-stained; but looking at it she saw the Shakers in shining garments, going through the streets of the old town, in the days when the spirit of Mother Ann burned in the souls of her followers and the blessing of heaven rested on Shakertown.

Sighing gently, she laid the precious relic aside and took up the song she was singing when I called her to the porch to see the April snow-storm. It was Byrom's "Divine Pastoral:"

The Lord is my shepherd, my guardian and guide; Whatsoever I want he will kindly provide, Ever since I was born, it is he that hath crowned The life that he gave me with blessings all round.

Thro' my tenderest years, with as tender a care, My soul like a lamb in his bosom he bare; To the brook he would lead me, whene'er I had need And point out the pasture where best I might feed.

The Lord is my shepherd; what then shall I fear?

What danger can frighten me whilst he is near?

Not when the time calls me to walk through the vale Of the Shadow of Death shall my heart ever fail; Tho' afraid, of myself, to pursue the dark way Thy rod and thy staff be my comfort and stay, For I know by thy guidance, when once it is past, To a fountain of life it will lead me at last.

She sang it to the cheerful tune of Hinton, as oft before when Parson Page had given it out from the pulpit of Goshen church, and she and Abram sat side by side singing from the weather-beaten hymnal that lay now near the Bible on the centre-table. I took it up and turned its yellow pages, wondering at the queer "buckwheat" notes and reading the names of the old church music, "Federal Street," whose tones beat the air like the wing of a tired and home-sick angel; "Windham," that holds in its minor strains the melancholy wails of an autumn wind; "Brattle Street," whose rich full chords are like a confession of faith,--all those old tunes that have grown richer and sweeter by carrying heavenward on the wings of song the devotion of worshipping souls.

Suddenly Aunt Jane's voice ceased in the middle of a word. I looked up. She was sitting motionless, holding in her hand a piece of rusty iron and gazing at it with tragic eyes. As she gazed, that which had been its sheath fell from it in flakes, and there before us, wasted to half its size by the dampness of years, was the dull ghost of a bayonet that once had glittered in the sun's rays on many a southern battle field.

"It's that old bayonet," she said, slowly and sadly. "I ricollect the day Abram plowed it up and brought it to the house. The soldiers camped all around our place durin' the war, and to this day you can't run a furrow without turnin' up a minie-ball or an old canteen or somethin' o' the sort to carry you back to war times and make your heart ache for days to come."

She ran her finger slowly down the bayonet, laying it against the point, while the lines in her face deepened under the shadow of bitter memories.

"To think," she said at last, "that human bein's made in the image o'

G.o.d, men and brothers, would make a thing like this to use against each other! The longer I live, child, the stranger that war seems to me. I couldn't understand it before it come nor while it was goin' on, and now, after all these years, it's jest as mysterious as it ever was. You know it begun in the spring, the war did, and there's a certain kind o' spring wind and the way the air smells that takes me back to the day when the news come to Goshen that Fort Sumter'd been fired on; and if I was to live to be as old as Methuselah, I don't reckon there'd ever be a spring that wouldn't bring back the spring of '61.

"The comin' of war is a curious thing, child. You know how it is when you're sittin' in the house or on the porch of a summer's day doin'

some piece o' work and thinkin' about nothin' but that work, and the sun'll be shinin' out doors and everything pretty and peaceful, and all at once you'll look up and notice that it's gittin' dark, and you'll hear a little thunder away off yonder in the hills, and before you're ready for it, why the storm's broke and the rain's beatin' in at the windows and doors and the wind's blowin' through the house and carryin' everything before it. Well, that's the way the war come.

You've seen the seal o' this State, haven't you, child?--two men standin' together holdin' each other's hands, and the motto around 'em: 'United we stand; divided we fall.' Well, that's jest the way it was in Kentucky before the war come and sp'iled it all. Kentuckians stood together and loved each other, and n.o.body ever thought they could be divided. But all of a sudden a change come over everybody.

Folks that'd been friendly all their lives stopped speakin' to each other; if two neighbors come together and stopped to talk, there'd be high words between 'em, and they'd both be mad when they parted. Out in our neighborhood, instead o' talkin' about the weather and the crops and folks' health and the sermon they'd heard Sunday and the weddin's that were goin' to be, why, it was nothin' but slavery and secession and union and States' rights, and it looked like there was a two-edged sword in every house.

"Father was mighty fond o' readin'. He took two or three papers, and every Sunday mornin' and on their way back home from town the neighbors'd drop in and hear the news; and any time you'd pa.s.s his house you'd see a porch full o' men listenin' to Father readin' a speech that somebody'd made in Congress or in the legislature, and Mother, she'd leave her work and come to the door every now and then and listen and, maybe, put in a word.

"I ricollect hearin' Father talk about Crittenden's big speech, the one made in Congress when he was tryin' to head off the war. Father thought pretty near as much of Crittenden as he did of Clay. There never was a speech o' Crittenden's that he didn't read, and he'd say, 'I'd rather handle words like that man does than to be the King of England; and,' says he, 'it's all jest like he says; Kentucky will stand by the Union and die by the Union.' Says he, 'She couldn't do otherwise without goin' back on her own word, and that word's cyarved in stone too. There it is,' says he, 'on the block o' marble that we sent to help build the monument at Washington:

"'The first state to enter the union will be the last to leave it.'

"Says he, 'We can't go back on that word.'

"And then he turns around to Mother and says he, 'Deborah, what do you think about it?' I can see Mother now. She'd been fryin' some meat, and she turned around with the fork in her hand and looked at Father a minute before she answered him, and says she, 'What's the use in askin' me what I think? I'm nothin' but a woman, and what a woman thinks is of mighty little importance.' Says she, 'You men have got this thing in your own hands, and us women, we'll have to put up with whatever comes.'

"I'll never forgit the day Father come from town with the speech that Crittenden made at Lexin'ton right after Fort Sumter'd been taken. It was April, and jest such a day as this, the flowers all comin' up and the sky blue and the bees hummin' around the water maples, and it didn't look as if there could be such a thing as a war comin'. I was at Mother's that day helpin' her take a quilt out o' the frame.

Father come in, and old Uncle Haley Pearson, my great-uncle, with him, and they set down on the porch and Father read the speech out loud, stoppin' every now and then to explain somethin' to Uncle Haley, and when he got through Uncle Haley says: 'Well, as near as I can make it out, Crittenden wants us to stand still betwixt the North and the South and try to make 'em keep the peace; and if we can't do that, we're to get on the fence and stay there and watch the fight.' And Father says, 'Yes, that appears to be about the meanin' o' what I've been readin'.' Says he, 'Maybe I don't rightly understand it all, there's so many big words in it, but that's about what I make out of it.'

"Uncle Haley was leanin' over with both hands on his cane, and he shook his head right slow and says he, 'It appears to me that Crittenden ain't as well acquainted with Kentuckians as he might be, and him a Kentuckian and a Senator too.' Says he, 'There ain't a man, or a woman or a child or a yeller dog in Kentucky but what's on one side or the other, and you might as well put two game roosters in the same pen and tell 'em not to fight as to start up a war betwixt the North and the South and tell Kentucky to keep out of it.'

"And Uncle Haley was right about it. The legislature met the very next month and they said jest what Crittenden said, that Kentucky mustn't take sides. But when it come to the p'int o' goin' to the war or stayin' at home and lookin' on, out o' every hundred Kentucky men old enough to go to the war ninety of 'em went on one side or the other.

That's the way Kentucky stays out of a fight, honey. I've heard Father say that the war cost Kentucky thirty thousand lives. But that's jest the soldiers; and if you go to countin' the lives that was lost in any war you can't stop with the soldiers. There's my mother; she never saw a battle-field, but the war killed her the same as it did my two brothers."

Here Aunt Jane removed her gla.s.ses and leaned back in her chair. By these signs I knew there was to be a digression in the course of the story.

"I wish I could make you see jest what kind of a woman Mother was,"

she said thoughtfully. "Every generation's different appearin' from the one that comes before it and the one that comes after it. I'm my mother's own child. Folks used to say I had Mother's eyes and Mother's hair, but I'm a mighty different woman from Mother. And my daughters are jest as different from me, and as for my granddaughters, why, you wouldn't know they was any kin to me. I'm a plain old woman and my granddaughters are fine ladies. My grandmother, you know, was the old pioneer stock, and Mother was her oldest child, and she was somethin'

like the pioneer women herself. I ricollect when I was at that meetin'

of clubs in Lexin'ton, the time I went to see Henrietta, one lady got up and said that a woman ought to be somethin' besides a mother. I reckon that's right for this day and generation, but if you'll go back to my mother's day and my grandmother's day, you'll find that if a woman was a mother then, she didn't have time to be anything else.

Bringin' a family o' children into the world and takin' care of 'em, cookin' for 'em, sewin' for 'em and spinnin' and weavin' the cloth for their clothes--that's the way Mother did. She was jest a mother, but that was enough. You know that Bible text, 'Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friend.' I always think o' that text when I think o' the old-time mothers; they had to give up their lives for their children.

"Mother's name was Deborah, and I always thought that name suited her.

She was taller and stronger than the common run o' women, and Father used to laugh and say he believed she was half sister o' the Deborah in the Bible, the one that judged Israel, and that was 'A mother in Israel.' Father always looked up to Mother and asked her advice about things, and, as for us children, Mother's word was our law. She ruled us and judged us like the Deborah in the Bible, but I can look back now and see that there never was any love greater than my mother's love for her children. Of course a mother, if she's the right kind of a mother, will love all her children jest because they're hers. But then, over and above that sort o' love, she'll love each one on account o' somethin' that it is or somethin' that it does, and that way every child has a different sort o' love, and maybe one child'll have a little bit more love than the rest. We always accused Mother of bein' partial to my two brothers, Jonathan and David, and Mother never denied it. She'd laugh and say, 'Well, what if I am? The rest of you ain't mistreated, are you?' And when I ricollect how brother David and brother Jonathan looked and what kind o' men they were, I can't blame Mother for bein' a little prouder and a little fonder o' them than she was o' the rest of us. Mother always called 'em her twins, because there was jest a little over a year betwixt 'em and mighty little difference in their size. David was the oldest, and Mother named him for her father; and when Jonathan was born she said, 'Now, I've got a Jonathan for my David. And,' says she, 'Maybe they'll be good boys and love each other like David and Jonathan did.' You ricollect what the Bible says: 'The soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David; and Jonathan loved him as his own soul,' and when Jonathan was killed you ricollect how David said, 'Thy love to me was wonderful, pa.s.sing the love of woman.'

"And sure enough, child, that's the way it was with my two brothers.

Their souls appeared to be knit together, and they loved each other with a love 'pa.s.sin' the love of woman.'

"The rest of us children used to fall out now and then, like children will, even when they love each other, but David and Jonathan--why, there never was a cross word or hard feelin' between 'em, and it was the prettiest sight in the world to see them two boys walkin' together holdin' each other's hands and laughin' and talkin' like sweethearts.

I ricollect once they was sittin' on a bench readin' out o' the same book, and Mother looked at 'em awhile, and says she to Father, 'Do you reckon there's anything in this world that can ever come betwixt David and Jonathan?' And Father he laughed, and says he, 'Yes, there's one thing that can come betwixt any two men G.o.d ever made.' And Mother says, 'What is it?' And Father laughed again--he always liked to tease Mother--and says he, 'Why, a woman, of course.' Says he, 'Jest let them two boys fall in love with the same woman and that'll put a stop to all this David and Jonathan business.'

"But it wasn't a woman that come between my brothers, it was the war.

It was a long time before the family found out that David and Jonathan didn't think alike about States' rights; and when we did find out, we paid mighty little attention to it, for we thought they'd come to an agreement about this jest as they had about every other question that'd ever come up between 'em. But when the President made his first call for soldiers, David and Jonathan both went to Mother and asked her consent to enlist. They was of age and might 'a' done as they pleased. But as long as one of us children stayed under Father's roof, we never took a step of any importance that we didn't first ask Mother's consent.

"Well, Mother looked at 'em awhile, standin' before her so tall and strong and handsome, and she says, 'My sons, you'll never have my consent to goin' in the army.' And David and Jonathan looked at each other, and then David spoke. 'Well, Mother,' says he, 'if you won't give your consent, we'll have to go without it.' And Mother says, 'You boys never disobeyed me in your lives, are you goin' to disobey me at this late day?' And David says, 'No, Mother, we're goin' to obey you,'

says he. 'You've told us from our youth up that we must listen to the voice of conscience and do whatever we thought was right,--I think one way about this matter and Jonathan thinks the other, but we're both listenin' to the voice of conscience and doin' what we think is right jest as you taught us to do.'

"Well, of course, Mother couldn't answer that, and so the word went out that David and Jonathan was goin' to enlist, and all the married brothers and sisters gethered at the old home place to say farewell to 'em.

"Maybe you know, child, how you feel the mornin' after there's been a death in the house. It hardly seems worth while to do any thing, for your heart's in the coffin in the dark room, but you go on and cook and put the house in order and try to eat the same as if nothin' had happened. And that's the way we all felt the mornin' my brothers went to the war. Mother wouldn't let anybody help her cook breakfast. Says she, 'It's the last thing I can do for my boys, and I don't want any help.' So she cooked the breakfast and waited on the boys and watched 'em while they eat, the same as she'd been doin' all their lives. And when the meal was over, Father was at the gate with the wagon to take 'em to town to catch the mornin' train to Louisville, and from there Jonathan had to go to Camp Joe Holt over in Indiana--that's where the Federals had their recruitin' place--and David, he was to go to Camp Boone in Tennessee. All of us went out to the gate to say farewell, and there wasn't a tear dropped nor a useless word said. If one had cried we'd all 'a' cried. But we saw that Mother was holdin' her tears back, so we all did the same. And we stood and looked till the wagon was out o' sight, and then everybody went back to the house feelin' as if we'd jest come back from a buryin'. Well, from that day on, all we lived for was to hear the news from the battles and find out which side beat. Some o' the neighbors was on the side o' the North and some on the side o' the South, and one could rejoice to-day and another one to-morrow, and one was prayin' for Lee and the other for Grant, but Mother she'd say, 'It's all one! It's all one! There's no rejoicin' for me no matter which side wins, and the only prayer I can pray is "Lord! Lord! put an end to this war and give me back my boys."' People used to come over and talk to Mother and try to make her see things different. Uncle Haley says to her once, says he, 'Deborah, can't you think o' your country? There's a great question to be settled. n.o.body knows which is the strongest, the government up yonder at Washin'ton, or the government down yonder in South Carolina and right here in Kentucky. It's a big question,' says he, 'and it's been botherin' this country ever since it's been a country, and this war's goin' to settle it one way or the other for good and all, and no matter which side a man's fightin' on, he's doin' his part in the settlement.' Says he, 'You've got a son on each side, and you ought to feel proud and glad that you're doin' so much for your country.' And Mother's eyes'd flash and she'd say, 'Country! You men never told me I had a country till you got up this war and took my sons away from me.

I'm nothin' but a poor old woman that's spent her life raisin' up a family, and what's a country to me unless I've got my sons?'"

The mother-heart! It beats to the same measure, be it Garibaldi's time in Italy or war-time in Kentucky.

And when Italy's made, for what end is it done If we have not a son?

When you have your country from mountain to sea, When King Victor has Italy's crown on his head.

(And I have my dead.)

"If David and Jonathan had been on the same side," continued Aunt Jane, "it would 'a' been easier for Mother; but she used to say it was like havin' her heart torn in two, and one half of it was with David and the other half with Jonathan, and she worried herself nearly crazy over the fear that one of her boys might kill the other. And the fightin' kept on, the battles longer and harder all the time,--Mana.s.sas and Fort Donaldson and Pea Ridge and Mill Spring, and there was hardly a time when it wasn't Kentuckian against Kentuckian, and at last come the battle o' Shiloh."

On that fatal word Aunt Jane's voice broke. She turned away from me and covered her face with her ap.r.o.n, and there was a long pause. The rains of more than forty springs had cleansed the earth from the taint of blood; gra.s.s and flowers and grain were growing over the old battle-field; but, like the wand of a wizard, the rusty bayonet had waved out of sight and out of mind the decades of peace, and her tears flowed for a grief too deep to be healed by the flight of mortal years.

Presently, with trembling hands she began arranging the boxes and bundles on the shelves. There were no unfinished tasks in Aunt Jane's life; the closet must be cleaned, and a story once begun must be told to the end. She steadied her voice and went on.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'DAVID! JONATHAN! MY BOYS! WHERE ARE YOU?'"

_Page 257._]

"You know, honey," she said, "the battle o' Shiloh lasted two days and the evenin' of the first day a curious thing happened. Mother was stayin' with me, for Father was with the home gyards, and in them days the women had to huddle up together and protect each other the best they could. I was in the kitchen cookin' supper, and Mother was in the front room sittin' in her old rockin' chair by the winder lookin' out at the pretty sky, when the sun had about gone down. I could hear her rockin' and the old chair creakin'. Pretty soon it got so dark I couldn't see what I was doin', and I lit a candle, and jest as I was settin' it on the shelf above the table, I heard Mother give a cry and go runnin' to the front door. I picked up the candle and went out to see what was the matter, but as I opened the door o' the front room a gust o' wind blew out the candle, and I run out in the dark, and there was Mother standin' in the door leanin' forward as if she was lookin'

and listenin', and before I could git to her she rushed out on the porch and around the house callin' 'David! Jonathan! My boys! Where are you?'

"I thought certain Mother had lost her mind, and I went after her and caught her by the arm, and, says I, 'Mother, what on earth's the matter? Come back in the house; you're gittin' your feet all wet with the dew.' And she jerked away from me and went on clear around the house lookin' in every dark place under the trees and the vines and callin' her boys. And when she got to the front door again, she stopped and said to me, 'Jane, didn't you hear the foot-steps?' And I says, 'What foot-steps, Mother' and she says, 'Why, Jonathan and David's, of course.' Says she, 'I heard 'em comin' up the front walk jest like I've heard 'em a hundred times before, comin' in from the field at night.' And she started around the house again, and says she, 'May be they're hidin' out somewhere tryin' to surprise me.'

"Well, it was the longest time before I could persuade Mother to come in, and all the evenin' she talked about the footsteps and how plain they sounded, and every now and then she'd go to the door and look and listen and call their names.