To Sail Beyond the Sunset (11 page)

Now look carefully at what I said. I said that I know that these things are asserted. I did not say that they are true.

It is unquestionably true that the United States, acting officially, was rude to the Spanish government concerning Spain’s oppression of the Cuban people. It is also true that William Randolph Hearst used his newspapers to say any number of unpleasant things about the Spanish government. But Hearst was not the United States and he had no guns and no ships and no authority. What he did have was a loud voice and no respect for tyrants. Tyrants hate people like that.

Somehow those masochistic revisionists have turned the War of 1898 into a case of imperialistic aggression by the United States. How an imperialist war could result in the freeing of Cuba and of the Philippines is never made clear. But revisionism always starts with the assumption that the United States is the villain. Once the revisionist historian proves this assumption (usually by circular logic) he is granted his Ph.D. and is well on his way to a Nobel peace prize.

In April 1898 to us benighted country people certain simple facts were true. Our battleship
Maine
had been destroyed, with great loss of life. Spain had declared war on us. The president had asked for volunteers.

The next day, Monday the twenty-fifth of April, came the president’s call asking the state militias to furnish 125,000 volunteers to augment our almost-nonexistent army. That morning Tom had ridden over to Butler Academy as usual. The news reached him there and he came trotting back at noon, his roan gelding Beau Brummel in a lather. He asked Frank to wipe Beau down for him and hurried into the house, there to disappear into the clinic with Father.

They came out in about ten minutes. Father told Mother, “Madam, our son Tom is about to enlist in the service of his country. He and I will be leaving for Springfield at once. I must go with him in order to swear that he is eighteen years old and has parental approval.”

“But he is not eighteen!”

“That is why I must go with him. Where is Frank? I want him to hitch Loafer.”

“I’ll hitch him, Father,” I put in. “Frank just now left for school, in a rush. He was a bit late.” (Tending Beau had made Frank late, but it wasn’t necessary to say so.)

Father looked worried. I insisted, “Loafer knows me, sir; he would never hurt me.”

I had just returned to the house when I saw Father standing at the new telephone instrument, which hung in the hallway we used as a waiting room for patients. Father was saying, “Yes…yes, I understand… Good luck, sir, and God speed. I will tell her. Good-bye.” He took the receiver away from his ear, stared at it, then remembered to hang it up.

He looked at me. “That was for you, Maureen.”

“For me?” I had never had a telephone call.

“Yes. Your young man, Brian Smith. He asks you to forgive him but he will not be able to call on you next Sunday. He is catching a train for St. Louis at once in order to return to Cincinnati, where he will be enlisting in the Ohio State Militia. He asks to be permitted to call on you again as soon as the war is over. Acting for you, I agreed to that.”

“Oh.” I felt an aching tight place under my wishbone and I had trouble breathing. “Thank you, Father. Uh…could you show me how to call him, call Rolla I suppose I mean, and speak to Mr. Smith myself?”

Mother interrupted. “Maureen!”

I turned to face her. “Mother, I am not being forward, or unladylike. This is a very special circumstance. Mr. Smith is going off to fight for us. I simply wish to tell him that I will pray for him every night while he is gone.”

Mother looked at me, then said gently, “Yes, Maureen. If you are able to speak to him, please tell him that I shall pray for him, too. Every night.”

Father cleared his throat, loudly. “Ladies—”

“Yes, Doctor?” Mother answered.

“The matter is academic. Mr. Smith told me that he could talk only a few moments because there was a long line of students waiting to use the telephone. Similar messages, I assume. So there is no use in trying to reach him; the telephone wire will be in use…and he will be gone. Which in no way keeps you two ladies from praying for his safety. Maureen, you can tell him so in a letter.”

“But I don’t know how to write to him!”

“Use your head, daughter. You know at least three ways.”

“Doctor Johnson, please.” Mother then said gently, to me, “Judge Sperling will know.”

“‘Judge Sperling.’ Oh!”

“Yes, dear. Judge Sperling always knows where each of us is.”

A few minutes later we all kissed Tom good-bye, and Father also while we were about it although he was coming back…and, so he assured us, it was extremely likely that Tom would be back…sworn in, then told what day to return for duty, as it was most unlikely that the state militia could accept a thousand or more new bodies all on the same day.

They drove off. Beth was crying quietly. Lucille was not—I don’t think she understood any of it—but was solemn and round-eyed. Mother did not cry and neither did I…not then. But Mother went upstairs and closed her door…and so did I. I now had a room to myself, ever since Agnes married, so I threw the latch and lay down and let myself cry.

I tried to tell myself that I was crying over my brother, Thomas. But I knew better; it was Mr. Smith who was causing that ache in my heart.

I wished, with all my soul, that I had not caused him to use a French purse in making love to me a week earlier. I had been tempted—I knew, I was certain, that it would be ever so much nicer just to forget that rubber sheath and be bare to him, inside and out.

But I had told Father solemnly that I would always use a sheath…until the day when, after sober discussion with the man concerned, I omitted it for the purpose of becoming pregnant…under a mutual firm intention of marrying if we succeeded.

And now he was going off to war…and I might never see him again.

I dried my eyes and got up and took down a little volume of verse, Professor Palgrave’s
Golden Treasury
. Mother had given it to me on my twelfth birthday, and it had been given to her on her twelfth birthday, in 1866.

Professor Palgrave had found 288 lyrics which were fine enough, in his exquisite taste, for his treasury; that day I wanted just one: Richard Lovelace’s “To Lucasta, Going to the Warres.”

“I could not love thee (Deare) so much,

“Lov’d I not Honour more.”

Then I cried some more, and after a while I slept. When I woke up, I got up and did not let myself cry again. Instead I slipped a note under Mother’s door, telling her that I would get supper for all of us by myself…and she could have supper in bed if it pleased her to do so.

She let me cook supper but she came down and presided and, for the first time, Frank seated Mother and sat opposite her. She looked at me. “Maureen, will you return thanks?”

“Yes, Mother. Dear Lord, we thank Thee for that which we are about to partake. Please bless this food to our use and bless all our brothers and sisters in Jesus everywhere, both known to us and unknown.” I gulped and added, “And on this day we ask a special blessing for our beloved brother, Thomas Jefferson, and for all other young men who have gone to serve our beloved country.”
(Et je prie que le bon Dieu garde bien mon ami!)
“In Jesus’ Name. Amen.”

“Amen,” Mother said firmly. “Franklin, will you carve?”

Father and Tom returned the next day, late in the afternoon. Beth and Lucille threw themselves on Tom and Father, and I wanted to, but could not, as I was carrying George and he had picked that moment to wet a diaper. But I just held him and let him wait, so that I wouldn’t miss any news—a spare diaper under him; I knew George. That baby peed more than all the rest put together.

Beth demanded, “Did you do it, Tommy, did you do it, did you do it, did you?”

“Of course he did,” Father answered. “He’s Private Johnson now; next week he’ll be a general.”

“He will?”

“Well, maybe not that fast.” Father stopped to kiss Lucille and Beth. “But they do promote them fast in wartime. Take me, for example. I’m a captain.”

“Doctor Johnson!”

Father straightened up. “Captain Johnson, Madam. Both of us enlisted. I am now Acting Surgeon, Medical Detachment, Second Missouri Regiment, with assigned rank of captain.”

At this point I ought to say something about the families of my parents especially Father’s brothers and sisters, as what happened that week in April 1898 in Thebes had its roots a century earlier.

Father’s grandparents were:

George Edward Johnson (1795-1897) and Amanda Lou Fredericks Johnson ( 1798-1899)

Terence McFee (1796-1900) and Rose Wilhelmina Brandt McFee (1798-1899)

Both George Johnson and Terence McFee served in the War of 1812.

Father’s parents were:

Asa Edward Johnson (1813-1918) and Rose Altheda McFee Johnson (1814-1918)

Asa Johnson served in the War with Mexico, a sergeant in the Illinois militia.

Mother’s grandparents were:

Robert Pfeiffer (1809-1909) and Heidi Schmidt Pfeiffer (1810-1912)

Ole Larsen (1805-1907) and Anna Kristina Hansen Larsen (1810-1912)

and her parents were

Richard Pfeiffer (1830-1932) and Kristina Larsen Pfeiffer (1834-1940)

Father was born on his grandfather Johnson’s farm in Minnesota, in Freeborn County, near Albert, on Monday, August second, 1852, the youngest of four boys and three girls. His grandfather George Edward Johnson (my great-grandfather) was born in 1795, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He died in a nursing home in Minneapolis in December 1897, and the newspapers made a to-do over the fact that George Washington was still alive when he was born. (We had nothing to do with this publicity. While I was not aware of the policy until I was married, even at that time Howard Foundation families avoided public mention of ages.)

George Edward Johnson married Amanda Lou Fredericks (1798-1899) in 1813 and took her to Illinois, where she had her first child, Asa Edward Johnson, my grandfather, that same year. It seems likely that Grampaw Acey was the same sort of “premature” baby as was my oldest brother, Edward. After the War with Mexico the Johnson family migrated west and homesteaded in Minnesota.

There was no Howard Foundation in those days, but all of my ancestors appear to have started breeding young, had lots of children, were healthy despite the uncontrolled diseases of those times, and lived long lives, mostly to a hundred and more.

Asa Edward Johnson (1813-1918) married Rose Altheda McFee (1814-1918) in 1831. They had seven children:

1. Samantha Jane Johnson, 1831-1915 (died from injuries suffered while breaking a horse)

2. James Ewing Johnson, 1833-1884 (killed attempting to ford the Osage during spring flood. I barely remember him. He married Aunt Carole Pelletier of New Orleans.)

3. Walter Raleigh Johnson, 1838-1862 (killed at Shiloh)

4. Alice Irene Johnson, 1840-? (I don’t know what became of Aunt Alice. She married back east.)

5. Edward McFee Johnson, 1844-1884 (killed in a train wreck)

6. Aurora Johnson 1850-? (last heard of in California ca. 1930) (married several times)

7. Ira Johnson, August 2, 1852-1941 (reported missing in the Battle of Britain)

When Fort Sumter fell in April 1861, Mr. Lincoln asked for volunteers from the militias of the several states (just as Mr. McKinley would do in a later April). On the Johnson farm in Freeborn County, Minnesota, the call was answered by Ewing (twenty-eight), Walter (twenty-three), Edward (seventeen)—and Grampaw Acey, at that time forty-eight years old, thus producing a situation that utterly humiliated Ira Johnson, nine years old and a grown man in his own estimation. He was going to be left home to do chores, while all the other men went to war. His sister Samantha (whose husband had volunteered) and his mother would run the farm.

Small comfort to him that his father returned home almost at once, turned down for something, I do not know what.

Father endured this humiliation for three long years…and at twelve ran away from home to enlist as a drummer boy.

He found his way down the Mississippi on a barge, managed to locate the encampment of the Second Minnesota before it joined Sherman’s drive to the sea. His cousin Jules vouched for him and he was tentatively accepted (subject to training; he knew nothing of drums, or of bugles) and was assigned quarters and rations with headquarters company.

Then his father showed up and fetched him home.

So Father’s service in the War was about three weeks and he was never in combat. He was not credited even with those three weeks…as he learned to his dismay when he attempted to join the Union veterans’ organization, the Grand Army of the Republic.

There was no record of his service, as the regimental adjutant had “discharged” him and let Grampaw Acey take him home simply by destroying the paper work.

I think it is necessary to assume that Father was marked for life.

During the nine days that Father and Tom waited at home before they could be inducted into army life I saw no indication that Mother disapproved (other than her first expression of surprise). But she never smiled. One could feel the tension between our parents…but they did not let it be seen.

Father did say something to me that, I think, had some bearing on this tension. We were in his clinic and I was helping him to thin out and update his patients’ records so that he could turn them over to Dr. Chadwick for the duration of the war. He said to me, “Why no smiles, Turkey Egg? Worried about your young man?”

“No,” I lied. “He had to go; I know that. But I wish you weren’t going. Selfish, I guess. But I’ll miss you,
cher papa
.”

“I’ll miss you, too. All of you.” He was silent for several minutes, then he added, “Maureen, someday you may be faced—will be faced, I think—with the same thing: your husband going off to war. Some people say—I’ve heard talk—that married men should not go. Because of their families.

“But this involves a contradiction, a fatal one. The family man dare not hang back and expect the bachelor to do his fighting for him. It is manifestly unfair for me to expect a bachelor to die for my children if I am unwilling to die for them myself. Enough of that attitude on the part of married men and the bachelor will refuse to fight if the married man stays safe at home…and the Republic is doomed. The barbarian will walk in unopposed.”