Andersonville (104 page)

But some peace came to Merry later, when they put the Widow Kinsman into the ground, because now she would be in recollection and literally a part of American soil which bold men had enriched. Some of the bold men were her forebears. Merry thought that it would have been appropriate if fifes and drums fluted and banged above her mound, because she was the daughter and the granddaughter and the wife of soldiers. Would ever she be the mother of a soldier? . . . He heard her tight thin voice say, Merry, what tune is that? Pa used to play that. He contrived a scene wherein she was being welcomed by a conclave of Briggses and Kinsmans and their kind . . . bony men in three-cornered hats, frontier women in bonnets. Also there seemed to be a few Indians coming out of the woods, with baskets of fish or popcorn, as they had come to the Pilgrim Fathers. Distantly, persistently fifes blended. They were playing Oh, Lassie, Art Thou Sleeping Yet? . . . drums grumbled with spirit. Why, of course that was Uncle Bijah playing—Mr. Abijah Parker. He had been gone nearly a year . . . Mrs. Kinsman would sit on a cabin step beside him, and say, My own Pa—Aaron Briggs—used to play that. Did you know him when you was at the Saranac?

Meriwether Kinsman poked beside the Susquehanna. He had no desire to go back to the house: it was gloomy, with the minister and Squire Hart and several other people sitting around and talking about Merry. Mr. Rothrup held the mortgage on the house . . . there was the question of who should serve as guardian for Merry, and to whom, perhaps, he should be bound. Someone suggested, Better bind him out to Enoch Adams, since he already knows the mill work. When informed of this, Mr. Adams declared, with a cry which sounded almost like an oath, that he would never take Merry. Then they talked of Farmer McMurchie. He was nothing like so mean as Mr. Adams, but still short-tempered and plagued by rheumatism. His wife had a reputation as a disgusting cook, an incompetent housekeeper.

...Sun approaching the nearest hill to the west, the Susquehanna glinted. A flat small barge stopped and anchored at some distance, and its crew of two young men were pulling toward the shore in their skiff.

Hey there, they said to Merry Kinsman. Where can a feller buy tobacco around here?

At the grocer’s.

Where’s that?

He told them, he pointed up past the first brick house and shading elms. He asked the young men where they were bound.

Harrisburg, they said. That was more than one hundred and fifty miles down the river. It was the State capital . . . oh, how he longed to go there.

We’re taking a load of stuff to sell, in the barge, they said, and told him that they were cousins. First we’ll sell the load, then the barge and this here skiff. Then we’ll join.

Join what?

Why, the army, of course. A great log gate swung open, smoke of battle drifted in . . . or maybe it was the door of Grandma Rummer’s house swinging, tomahawk dent and all. . . .

How much would you gentleman charge, to take a passenger along to Harrisburg with you?

How much you got?

There was more talk; it did not take long. Merry went scooting to the grocer’s, carrying currency which the young men had given him to buy a pound of tobacco fine cut for the pipe. With this package he hurried home. Mr. Rothrup’s horse was still tied outside, still the people were settling Merry’s fate. He entered through the back door, hunted out a basket, filled it with what food supplies he could assemble quickly. He observed how cold and dark the oven looked; he wondered who, if anyone, would be baking there again. Merry put the covered basket on the bench behind the woodshed. He emptied jingling contents of the ginger jar into his own pocket, and uncrumpled a few wads of paper currency. His mother had been saving against the mortgage interest. He was lucky to be facing the world with a few dollars, rather than with empty purse.

Merry presented himself in the hot parlor, where all tried to treat him kindly.

The minister put his arm around the boy’s shoulder. Merry, lad. We have now decided that you shall go to the McMurchies. That would be better than the Poor House, wouldn’t it? Ah yes—far, far better. And twould be so sad and lonely for you to stay here in the night again, so Mr. Rothrup will drive you out to the farm directly, if you’ll but get your things together.

Merry bowed his head as if in assent. He could not trust himself to speak. Suddenly he felt impatient with himself for scheming to trick these well-intentioned people, yet trick them he must.

He went upstairs and made a bundle. There wasn’t much which he needed to take, there was not much which he could take. He gathered a few keepsakes from the dresser . . . silhouettes of his mother and father when they were young. He took Grandpa Briggs’s watch, which the widow would not consider selling in direst season. He slid his fife down into those inner loops of his jacket which Merry’s mother had sewn according to specifications. Softly he tore the mosquito-bar from a window above the kitchen roof and went across the roof and down the apple tree—a route he had traveled often since he was six or thereabouts. With basket and bundle he thought of himself as the traditional fugitive of caricature. He thought that he should have had a stick over his shoulder, and the bundle swinging from the end. He climbed across a stone fence and circled through the weedy orchard behind the Striver house. He met only Rudy Banton, who carried a string of suckers; and Rudy Banton was peculiar in the head—he cared only about hunting or fishing, and could not talk plain: it made little difference, meeting him. Once on the river road, Merry hurried to Darwin’s Bend, which he had indicated when he spoke with those strangers at the landing. Sure enough there was the barge, anchored off shore—one young man sitting in it, the other concealed in his skiff among drooping willows. A few minutes later Merry was aboard the larger craft; they drifted down the Susquehanna, shadows of hills covered them.

The cousins were named Norton, and they came from Towanda, where their fathers were in partnership, owning a forge. . . . Our line is iron. Born to it. They showed Merry some of the materials included in their cargo: grilles and hinges and such. These they would sell in Harrisburg—part would satisfy certain orders, the rest would have to go on the open market. Merry nodded as if he knew as much about hand-wrought iron as he did about the home baking business.

We’re Paul and Silas, the cousins told him. Everybody knows the Nortons, up Towanda way. Born in the same week.

No, said Silas. Nine days apart. Remember that, Paul: I’m still your elder.

And went to the same church and same school, and our fathers are brothers, and what’s more than that, our mothers are first cousins. How do you like that, hey? Thicker than thieves, aren’t we, Si?

Thicker than fleas, Paul. Yes sir, Mr. Meriwether Kinsman: they don’t come any thicker than we two. Just like two fingers on your hand. . . . Why, what are you a-fingering of? What you got there? . . . Well, I swan, it’s a fife. Can you play it? . . .

There were obstructions, rapids to be encountered and traveled past. Some of it was heavy work—loading and unloading the barge, beating paths through weeds, lugging ironware. The light tiny skiff was an eggshell: Paul Norton could hike it up on one wide shoulder and carry the thing. But they had a set of rollers on which the barge must be hauled when it was necessary to land it; and Merry’s job was to lift out the rear roller as soon as it was exposed by the boat’s progression, then carry the thing to the front and insert it there, and repeat successively. There were nights when his body, unaccustomed to such concentrated exertion, ached steadily like a sore tooth. He thought his arms and legs would fall off. But the Cousins Norton praised him for his willingness and, later, aptitude. Merry loved this. Scarcely had he ever been praised by anyone—except Uncle Bijah, when at last Merry mastered the rapid intricacies of a freakish tune called Hell On The Wabash. . . . There were long days, comfortable and lazy, when they dropped smoothly in wide easy current, with only a pole to be thrust down now and then. It was fun to trail a fish-line over the side. Soon they had more fish than they could eat, but the Nortons said, Keep fishing, Merry; we can trade for garden truck. The cousins smoked great pipes with curved stems, smoked them perpetually. They said they had cut their pipes from the same block of cherry root, had sent away to the city for proper amber stems, and naturally the two pipes were just alike. Paul and Silas squabbled good-humoredly sometimes; one claimed that the other had taken his pipe—he could tell by the taste of the spit therein.

What’s this place? they’d call to a man on shore.

Shickshinny.

And what do you call that, over there?

Mocanaqua.

...Drifting down, down the gentle river. Oh, Mister, what lies over beyond there?

That, friends, is the great and aggressive city of Wapwallopen. . . . Farther, farther against the sun: Hey, stranger, what’s this place?

Berwick to be sure.

And yonder?

Oh, acrost and up the road you’d come to Nescopeck.

It seemed sometimes as if Indians were all around them in canoes. That week there rode a moon, comforting, serene. Merry watched the great silver whiteness as it freed its surface from eastern hills and pushed higher, higher in clarity . . . half asleep on a blanket he contemplated the moon. Maybe Paradise was up there. Now his mother was there . . . Uncle Bijah played his fife on the moon . . . that was where the gathering of linsey-woolsey Americans was taking place . . . tufts of willow shadowed on a sandbar ahead. Ah, red Indians, Merry thought, advancing in their birch-bark boats. A night bird cried in the sky.

They cooked on the barge; they had a box which they would fill with sand, they could build their small fire. It was fun to cook on a boat. Tender fish would curl and sizzle, salt fat perfume of frying would drift. There were other adventures: Silas Norton encountered a cross bull when he was cutting through a pasture to trade for eggs at a farmhouse. And all three of the voyagers—the broad-shouldered brown-haired cousins, and the skinny blond Merry—were chased out of an orchard by a watchful farmer, when they thought to appropriate a few apples of the Early Harvest variety.

Hey, boy, what’s this river flowing in, here on the right?

The Juniata, Mister.

Then they could sing and put their hearts in it . . .
Wild roved an Indian girl, bright Alfarata . . . where sweep the waters of the blue Juniata. . . .
Spires of Harrisburg rose before them, there must be a parting. It would take the Nortons some days to dispose of their wares, before they would be ready to enlist. Merry Kinsman could not afford to sit idly; he felt that he dared not spend money at a tavern, because he had so little money with him, so little in the world. Actually he did not care about money, because it seemed now that the mapled world of America belonged to him completely, and the Susquehanna as well, and the fabled fabric of the Juniata. Generously the Nortons offered him a share in proceeds, if he would help them with their delivering and haggling. But Merry said No. He knew that they did this purely out of kindness, and he would be cutting into their profits; he would not really be able to assist, he would have to be shown and told what to do. His strong slender hand disappeared repeatedly in the huge grip of the Nortons. He was presented with a gift to remember them by (as if he needed reminder!): a pipe which the cousins bought for Merry on arriving at Harrisburg. He had admired their manner of smoking pipes, had enjoyed the scent of tobacco, said bashfully that he might wish to try, himself. He felt grown and manly with this untried pipe and a paper of tobacco in his shirt pocket.

After leaving the Nortons he inquired of a few bearded soldiers, asking where he might find the recruiters.

What for? Does your Pa want to join? and there was laughter.

They told him: they said that the best thing for Merry to do was to go out to Camp Curtin. That was a long hot walk but eventually Merry found himself standing under a tent fly. A sergeant with a red face and sunburn peeling all over it— The sergeant said, What might your name be?

Meriwether Kinsman.

Good enough name, but I reckon the ranks of the Boys’ Brigade are full up. Again that laughter from the idle and clustering. How old might you be, Meriwether?

Fourteen.

That would be a trick! Is your family hot after you—or maybe the uncle you ran away from?

Sergeant Glisson, ordered a vigorous young captain who had just come stooping under the fly, don’t you go to signing up any children! Just mean trouble for us later on. He frowned at Merry accusingly.

Sir, said Merry. Here’s the point: there ain’t no one chasing me. There ain’t nobody
to
chase me, there ain’t no one knows where I’ve gone; I’ve got no one. He told how he had left the village the very afternoon of his mother’s funeral, and who was there now to transport him back up the Susquehanna? Who would want to, anyway, and why? It was so obvious that he was telling the truth that the young captain relented, he put his hand on Merry’s sleeve. Glisson, he said, could be that they have need of another drummer in the tiger band. Can you rattle a drumstick, bub?

No, sir, I can do better than that.

Out came the fife. Merry Kinsman played Jefferson and Liberty as he had never played it before; he played it as Abijah Parker might have played it when homespun columns were approaching the Saranac River. Before he finished, the captain was smiling and twisting his thick black mustache with approval. His black eyes danced; and two boys behind the sergeant were beating out a drum accompaniment on cracker boxes.

Oh, go and get our Principal Musician! cried Sergeant Glisson in delight. Go long, one of you, and fetch him. What’s his name, what’s that new chief musician—Cassidy? Tell him we’ve got a fine addition to his Sheepskin Battery!

That day Merry Kinsman was sworn in. His age was put down on the rolls as eighteen; that was the practice. Later he encountered a good many boys two or three years older than he; but Merry was said to be the youngest in the regiment, and he was the smallest of all the fifers. In no time at all, after he had learned the strains for regimental and camp duties, he was accounted also the best. Shortly before they prepared to depart for Cockeysville, Maryland, a new company came moving up to take its place alongside Merry Kinsman’s company, and there rose a combined roar of recognition. There stood Paul and Silas Norton, side by side in a rank. It was a stout friendship, a valuable one, but all too short. The cousins went out of life together as they had entered life and faced it. Both were killed at Chancellorsville, next May.