The Deserter (31 page)

Nervously, the mouldering drummer boy tapped the table and said, “Humph.” He seemed to be only half listening to their descriptions and explanations and arguments.

Then Homer produced the new trump card. “And here, sir,” he said smoothly, laying it on the table and setting the others down beside it, “are three images of Otis Pike.”

“The soldier who died at Gettysburg?” The antediluvian percussionist glared at Homer with a fierce and doubting eye. “The one whose name you wish me to erase from the roll of honor in Memorial Hall?”

“Exactly.” Homer could not resist going too far. “Well, of course, as you will see, sir, Otis Pike was present a few years later at the great roll call in the sky, but no, he did not die in the Battle of Gettysburg.”

Mary jumped in quickly. “This photocopy,” she said, handing it to the old gentleman, “is a photograph of Otis Pike in the album for the graduating class of 1860.”

“Found in the Harvard Archives,” added Homer, feeling sure that this highly respectable source would impress the old fossil.

“And this”—Mary picked up the photograph of the man in the top hat—“is obviously the same man a few years later. In other words, it's another picture of Otis Pike.”

The doddering drummer boy's gnarled old hands rattled a double tattoo on the table, and he said, “So what?”

Patiently Mary explained the third image, the 1866 newspaper engraving they had summoned electronically from the library in Oshawa, Ontario.

“Well, all right,” said the old man testily, “it's the same man, I can see that.”

“But you see, sir,” said Homer, “his name is different. Here he's called Seth Morgan.”

“Why, mercy me, so he is.”

Once again they repeated the information from Gobright's report. They recited Seth Morgan's splendid regimental history of service at Antietam and Chancellorsville, and Homer explained his theory about the behavior of Private Otis Pike on the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg.

But it was the three images of Otis that captured the attention of the old drummer boy. He kept looking at them, turning his shaggy head to peer at one after another.

In the end he agreed that the really serious matter was not the removal of a name from one of the tablets in Memorial Hall but the denial to another of its rightful place. The mistake, he said, must be rectified at once. Sitting down with a thump, the old man drummed a call-to-arms on the table and croaked that he would see what he could do.

“Of course he didn't promise anything,” said Mary, as they walked away across the Yard. “He still has to consult the other members of the Corporation.”

“And he's so old,” worried Homer. “I hope he talks to them soon, before it's his turn to answer the great roll call in the sky.”

FRESH AND BLEEDING

A
lmost everything falls away. Slyly, the entire past falls away. Vanishing is what it does best, leaving little trace—a picture, a letter, a garbled rumor. Children get the story wrong and pass it along. And of course some things are mistaken from the beginning.

Ida Morgan never knew that the beloved husband she had searched for on the battlefield of Gettysburg and in the cities of Baltimore and Washington was not a deserter.

And Mary and Homer Kelly never understood that Seth was a murder victim, rather than a casualty of the battle.

But at least they had uncovered his innocence. They had persuaded the important person in charge of the historic tablets in Memorial Hall that Seth's name should replace that of the actual deserter. And the gristly old drummer boy had convinced his distinguished colleagues. Therefore there was to be a ceremony in honor of the new tablet.

“I may be late,” said Mary, rushing off to teach a class. But Homer was early. When he pulled open the south door of the corridor, the caterers were just setting up a table. The clattering of dishes and the tinkling of glassware echoed from the marble floor and the wooden vaults. Homer stood in the middle of the lofty hall, gazing up, staring at everything, seeing the building in a new way.

For more than a century it had been just another useful part of the university. But at the time of its construction, the galling sores left by the human losses in all those innumerable battles were still fresh and bleeding, the pious words on the walls still passionate with meaning, and the names on the tablets inseparable from the faces of remembered men.

For Homer, as he rambled around the great spaces of Memorial Hall, the building began to turn into the Civil War. Men were stepping down from the tablets to fight again the battles in which they had been killed. As his imagination took fire, he could almost see Colonel Mudge burst through the south door crying, “It's an order,” then fall in a hail of bullets from the phone booth at the other end of the hall. High above the door in the west wall, the small gallery had become a boulder on Little Round Top, and there stood Strong Vincent, colonel of a Pennsylvania regiment, pointing and shouting and toppling over the railing, struck down by a sharpshooter on the staircase across the corridor.

Boom, boom
, where was the gunfire? Homer found his way into the dining hall and looked up at the balcony. Drawn up among the chairs, the twelve-pounder Napoleons were roaring in concert, firing down at the students munching their sloppy joes at the tables on the floor below. He watched in horror as one of the guns misfired and killed poor Henry Ropes of the Twentieth Massachusetts.

And tremendous things were going on downstairs. Lined up in military order against the wall, the white busts of generals were taking command, opening their marble mouths to shout orders, and Homer was astonished to see Major General Frank Barlow, class of 1855, leap down from his memorial window in a shower of stained glass.

But, oh God, what to do with the bodies? Bloated and repulsive, they were mounded all over the floor around the tables. They were a problem, they were in the way, because the dining hall was full of first-year men and women, a thousand of them, all hungrily eating lunch and pretending not to notice. Well, it was too bad—Homer shook his head in sorrow—but there was nothing he could do but heave the putrid corpses up on the tables among the chicken fingers and the cans of diet Coke, while the poor kids recoiled in disgust and scraped back their chairs and scuttled away.

Puffed up with importance, Homer strolled back into the corridor, the general of all he surveyed, and headed for Sanders Theatre. Surely Sanders might serve some useful purpose. Standing in the glowing ambience of the wooden chamber, he looked up at the stage and saw at once that it was the perfect place for a field hospital. The surgeons could amputate up there in perfect comfort, piling up the sawed-off arms and legs around the marble gown of President Josiah Quincy.

But people were gathering in the corridor. Homer swept away his imaginary Civil War, with all its detritus of swords and rifles and battle flags and careening Parrott guns and caissons, and joined the celebration. But he couldn't help wishing for a mock skirmish or two, right here in Memorial Hall. One or two reenacted battles might wake up the kids as they sat at the tables among the marble busts and painted soldiers. It might persuade them to stand up and take a look at Charles Russell Lowell, who fell at Cedar Creek, and James Savage, killed at Cedar Mountain, and Wilder Dwight, mortally wounded at Antietam, and Robert Gould Shaw, who died at Fort Wagner among the black enlisted men of his Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Volunteers.

But above all, Homer wanted everyone who entered the building to read the tablets in the corridor and grasp the terrible meaning of their inscriptions—
Shiloh, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor
.

Surely that would be a good thing?

THE FLOWER OF
THE NATION

T
hey should have been listening as the venerable drummer boy stood beside the gleaming new tablet, explaining the substitution of the name of Seth Morgan for that of Otis Pike, but the old man was maundering on at great length.

Only a few people had been invited to gather around him in the memorial corridor. Hamilton Dow, the president of the university, was there as an old friend of Homer and Mary Kelly. Gwen and Tom had been invited of course, along with their children—John and his wife Virginia, Annie and Joe, Fred and Linda, Amanda and her new boyfriend. Even Benny had condescended to witness the restoration to honorable memory of his great-great-great-grandfather. Benny's hair was emerald green.

Cousin Ebenezer had not been informed.

Mary shifted her weight from leg to leg. She was tired of standing, and she was also suffering from a depression of spirits. The return of Seth Morgan's name to the roll of honor did not make her as glad as she might have expected. In spite of everything, she was saddened by the fact that his classmate, poor old Otis Pike, had been dumped in history's rubbish heap. He had died gallantly after all, out there in Oshawa, Ontario.

“The tablets that rise around us on these walls,” droned the old man, “represent the flower of the nation. Just as the playing fields of Eton sent their best and finest to die in the trenches of the First World War, so the cream of an entire generation, students at this university, enlisted eagerly in the Union army. Here are recorded the names of those who died, one hundred and thirty-five young men of shining promise who lost their lives in heroic battle, their destinies as future leaders of the nation tragically unfulfilled.”

Homer almost piped up to point out that the life of an Illinois farm boy had also been full of promise, but he refrained.

Afterward there was a polite gathering around the refreshment table. The relatives clustered and gossiped, the superannuated drummer boy beat “Parade Rest” on the pockets of his pants and excused himself to take a nap and Homer wandered off with Ham Dow, walking south along the corridor.

“How many names did he say there were?” said Ham.

“A hundred and thirty-five, I think,” said Homer.

The tablets beside the south door recorded the names of Law School graduates who had died in the Civil War. Ham looked up at them dreamily and said, “Suppose a hundred men out of that total of one hundred and thirty-five might have married and had offspring if they hadn't died. How many children would have been born in the next generation?”

Homer caught Ham's drift. “Well, if you make a conservative estimate, say two kids apiece, it would be two hundred. Two hundred unborn and nonexistent citizens, children who failed to be born around the year 1870.”

“Good,” said Ham. They turned and strolled past the tablets on the other side. “Then suppose,” Ham went on, “that four hundred more children were born to those two hundred—or rather, not born.”

“Right,” said Homer. “Roughly speaking, they would have failed to appear around 1895.”

“And the third generation? Children who would never have seen the light around the year 1920?”

“Eight hundred more?” Homer was enjoying the game. “And sixteen hundred in 1945?”

“That means thirty-two hundred in 1970.”

“And sixty-four hundred in 1995.”

“So if we stop there, how many have we got?”

They paused beside the north door, mumbling and counting on their fingers, then said it together, “Twelve thousand six hundred.”

With the same impulse, they turned to gaze back along the corridor at the dim white panels recording the names of men who had attended the college in the middle of the nineteenth century, who had paid a bond of four hundred dollars to the President and Fellows to have the privilege of shivering in cold rooms or buying coal from the registrar, who had attended morning prayers and lectures by the likes of Lowell and Longfellow, Sparks and Channing, who had clowned in Hasty Pudding and delivered earnest orations at commencement. Or perhaps for some of them, it had not been like that at all. Perhaps they had merely endured four friendless college years before going off to die on a hundred distant battlegrounds.

Homer was more fantastical by nature than Hamilton Dow. He grinned at Ham. “Why don't we invite all those unborn guys and gals to a celebration?” Flinging himself at the doors opening on Kirkland Street, he shouted into the empty air, “Come on in, y'all! The party's on us.”

As usual, he was making himself conspicuous. The clusters of friends and relatives stopped talking and stared. Ham laughed and said he had a meeting. The others shook hands, hugged each other and said good-bye.

But later on, as Mary took the wheel and drove home along Route 2, Homer closed his eyes and expanded the vision in his head.

There they would be outside, nearly thirteen thousand unborn descendants, waiting in a great throng, and they would pour into the building and crowd into the dining hall and sit down at the tables, and there would be wine and song and a six-course banquet, followed by toasts and speeches of thanksgiving. And then all the proud achievers among them—including one or two saviors of the human race—would be asked to stand up, and there would be thunderous applause
.