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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780618341535 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 08/12/2003 |
| Pages: | 208 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 0.53(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
In august of 1914, on the eve of World War I, Jim Moon, then sixty-eight
years old, stepped off the stern of a ferry in New York harbor just as the boat
passed under the Brooklyn Bridge. A schoolteacher on holiday who
happened to witness Moon's exit reported that he was reciting 'Song of
Myself': Born here of parents born here from parents the same . . .
Moon sank like a stone and failed to rise.
'That's impossible,' a policeman said.
Nevertheless, it was three days before the body surfaced, a full
day more before Jim Moon's remains were identified through the piecing
together of random clues discovered in his personal effects. No one knew him
except a girl in a hotel room near Second Avenue, the accidental executor of
Jim Moon's meager estate.
'He left these,' she told the policeman. 'Pictures.'
The girl produced a sizable stack of drawings, done in chalk on
brown parcel paper.
'So, your man was an artist.'
The girl shrugged.
They were architectural drawings, crudely rendered. Clearly,
whoever had made them lacked the benefits of formal artistic training. Yet, in
the sweep of the line, the selection of detail, the bold rendering of negative
space, the work showed a certain unmistakable native ability.
'Castles in Spain, he called them,' the girl said.
There were also several books, prominent among them a thick
green reference work called Harper's Chicago and the World's Fair, published
by a New York house in 1892. The Harper's was badly worn—shattered, a
rare-book dealer would say—the pages dog-eared and stained. The boards
were loose and held togetherlength of faded purple ribbon, and
tucked between the pages were a number of yellowed newspaper clippings,
along with assorted pamphlets and tracts and a lithograph of a stately,
impassive woman, holding aloft a scepter and a globe.
'What's this?' The policeman held up a sketch of a tree stump,
rendered precisely to scale on quadrille paper.
'That's his stone.'
The weight of Jim Moon's boots and linen trousers pulled him down. For the
first few seconds he held his breath. My respiration and inspiration, the
beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs . . .
The policeman studied the sketch of Moon's tombstone. 'So, he intended to
pull a Brodie.'
The sunlight faded above Moon's head. The river sealed over him and grew
increasingly cold. The turmoil on the docks subsided until he heard only the
intimate silence of water. Spiraling down, Moon saw nothing but darkness,
saw everything. Drifting, he nudged against a jagged angle of iron and caught.
His hair fanned out like a dirty halo. His arms, crooked at the elbow, lifted
and fell with the current, moving like wings.
Meanwhile, in Iowa, a burly stonecutter named Hubert Olsen was driving
toward a small town south of Winterset with a tombstone in his wagon.
Winslow Homer Moon was about to receive his inheritance.
The fact that the stone was delivered on the day of Jim Moon's
death was coincidental. Olsen had finished the work that morning and, being
eager to collect, decided to close up shop and deliver the stone that
afternoon. Stopping to inquire at Varner's dry-goods store—Olsen, of course,
was looking Moon—he was directed to Sweetbriar, a second-rate
boarding house just north of the square. There he wrestled the stone from the
wagon and set it up ceremoniously in the yard.
'I won't accept it,' Winslow said. Something about the stone
made Win uneasy.
'Where I come from,' Olsen told him, 'young men shoulder their
debts.'
Winslow explained that the stone was not his debt, not anything
to do with him, but Olsen was determined to collect. He produced a letter
that Moon had written him, in effect a purchase order, signed in Moon's own
hand, along with a rough design for the stone that Moon himself had
sketched on butcher paper.
'He is your father,' Olsen said, 'this James R. Moon?'
Hooked. A jagged scrap of rusty iron had hold of Moon's sleeve. He
undulated in purgatorial waters. A brawny gaff man on the surface fished for
Moon with a slender pole, swirling the hook in figure eights, but Moon was
agile and weightless. He danced away.
'Get a net,' somebody hollered. Voices, footsteps. Moon paid no
attention. I am satisfied—I see, dance, laugh . . . Disaffected, finished now
with beginnings and with endings, and not expecting his life to pass before
him—not, at least, in any orderly fashion—Moon welcomed instead a crude
kaleidoscope of fragments, shards of the old naive totality.
'Almost fifty-five dollars,' Mrs. Maythorpe gasped. 'How will you ever pay for
it, Mr. Moon?'
Mrs. Maythorpe—called Mother by her boarders—was the
proprietor of Sweetbriar, where Win Moon had been living since he graduated
from high school and took a job with the Re Rayburn as
handyman at the Open Bible Church.
'I simply cannot comprehend,' she said, 'what in the world your
father could have been thinking. A thing like that.'
The 'thing' was, in fact, a sort of pulpit, three feet eight inches
high, carved in cream-colored Iowa limestone to resemble a tree stump,
probably oak, twined with ivy. Calla lilies grew at the base, and on the top—
this was the part that Winslow found disturbing— lay an open stone book.
'The Book of Life,' Pastor Rayburn said, passing Mother
Maythorpe's yard and stopping to admire the monument. 'Wherein we may
read of our sins and our glory.'
Winslow had no sins and precious little glory, except perhaps for
Caroline, Mrs. Maythorpe's daughter, a stubborn girl of modest looks and
impeccable common sense, the perfect mate with whom to live an ordinary
life.
'He must of been crazy,' Caroline said.
Winslow loved this girl with an ardor that far exceeded her merits
and would have married her gladly if only he could resolve certain life
questions he had and acquire enough money to win over her practical nature.
Their future was compromised, however, by Win's poverty and by the
reputation for lunacy Jim Moon had gathered around his family, and now by
this unexpected debt, beneath which Winslow squirmed like a bug on a pin.
'Pastor can only pay me sixteen dollars a week,' Win said,
talking mostly to himself. 'And there's my education and my board.' Unable
to afford the seminary in Des Moines, Win was taking a correspondence
course from the Shipley Institute for Self-Improvement in Chicago.
'Well, Mother sa thing in the yard,' Caroline
said. 'People talk so.'
'I know.'
'Mother says people say . . . Well, you know what they say, and
they say that your father— Well, Win, he couldn't have loved you very much.
Not really.'
'I know.'
'Or he would have made a home for you, Mother says. That's
what people do.'
'Caroline, please.'
'People don't wander around the world for no good reason and
never come home like your father.' Caroline was relentless on the subject of
Jim Moon. 'Well, do they?'
It was late afternoon in Lower Manhattan, and something about the setting
sun through the latticework of the bridge—the black and the red—made
Moon's final choice seem obvious. He stood up and stretched, a tall man. He
drew a last deep breath of harbor air and savored it—fishy, rank, sun-shot,
copper-edged—and began to recite. I celebrate myself and sing myself . . .
When he reached a suitable stopping point, he stepped out of his life.
'A lunatic.' Caroline turned her back on the stone.
'And what does that make me, then?' Winslow said.
'The man was a seeker of truth in a timeless text.' Pastor
Rayburn ran a fingertip down a blank page of Jim Moon's limestone book as
though he were in search of a particularly relevant passage. 'And no man
dares reproach him.' He looked at Winslow.
Winslow did reproach his father, however—or at least he tried.
Egged on by Caroline, Win nodded sagely whenever old Moon's faults were
catalogued. 'Well, I guess he was sort of eccentric,' he said.
'Eccentric?' Caroline affected a wide, theatrical stare. 'Eccentric?
'It's stone.'
'He must have been boiled as an owl, three sheets to the wind.'
'Caroline.'
'Oh, Win. You know what they say.'
In fact, there was some truth to her assertion: Jim Moon had
commissioned the stone after a two-day binge of savage drinking. But even if
Win had known this fact, he would have tried to deny it. Yes, he was hurt and
angry, and yes, he agreed, in theory, that Jim Moon was a sorry excuse for a
man. But like most lonely children, Win had learned to comfort himself
through imagination, constructing, over the years, a private, blameless make-
believe father. This storybook Moon was handsome, wise, brave, a splendid
soldier. He was heroic, of course, but without conceit—a bold horseman, a
crackerjack shot. He was an irresistible ladies' man.
Win spent many idle moments filling in the details of this portrait
and eluding the factual snares that would have 'proven' what Moon really
was. This wasn't easy in a small town where 'what they say' became, with
sufficient repetition, the truth. The facts were hard, what few of them Win
knew: that, in October of 1893, Jim Moon, a middle-aged man by then, had
left his young wife, Mae— and Winslow, less than three months old—to visit
the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and that, for whatever reason,
he never came home. Win's mother disappeared the following summer
under 'mysterious circumstances,' and Winslow was taken in by a neighbor
lady, Mrs. Ross.
He became 'that Moon boy,' an isolated, melancholy creature
who lived with an invisible mark upon him. Pitie the town
as someone whose fate forever remained suspended, Win grew up the same
way bread dough swells, out of some ferment inside but without direction.
When Mrs. Ross passed on some twenty years later, Winslow Homer Moon
was still not 'settled.'
'Win told Hue Olsen just to take that crazy tombstone right on back,'
Caroline bragged at supper.
Win blanched. 'Caroline, I did not.'
'Win's got a level head on his shoulders,' Mother Maythorpe said.
Caroline heaped potatoes on her plate and splashed on the thick
beef gravy. 'Said Jim Moon was no concern of his.'
'Well, not in so many words,' Win said.
'Integrity,' Mother Maythorpe said, beaming at Win. She passed
him the succotash. 'Some people have it, and some people don't.'
'Course, in the end, he had to agree to take it on and pay. That's
the law.' Caroline hacked at her skirt steak. 'But, Mama, you should of seen
our Winnie standing up to that man.'
In point of fact, Win had done no such thing. As in most
confrontations, he had wilted after a brief show of reluctance, and Olsen had
bullied him into accepting the stone by scowling deeply and flexing his
muscles. Win folded like a paper fan and agreed to pay a dollar a week until
the debt was cleared.
It had not been a proud moment. Now, however, hearing Caroline's
version of the story, Win reconsidered and seemed to remember that perhaps
he had been somewhat decisive.
'Well, it was so unexpected,' he said.
Caroline smiled. 'I think you done exactly right,' she told him. She
buttered a slab of bread. 'And as for that old stone, why, you know what?'
'We're just gonna chop that up into
gravel.'
The policeman was young and ambitious, a thick, redheaded Irishman with
an eye to politics. This waterlogged old codger just could be the ticket. Word
on the street was, there was a runner missing, an old man like the stiff in
question with the same gray beard and bony physique, supposed to deliver a
very interesting bundle from New Jersey to certain higher-ups on the Lower
East Side. Only the thing was, the bundle had never arrived.
The policeman glanced at the girl.
'What?'
Naturally, these higher-ups were not pleased. They might be
grateful if, in the line of duty, a lowly foot patrolman like himself— helping to
identify some poor unfortunate and return his sorry remains to his grieving
family—were, by chance, to recover that selfsame bundle.
The policeman straddled a wooden chair and draped his arms over
the backrest. 'So who is this old duffer, anyhow?' he said. 'Your da?'
The girl wouldn't answer.
'Don't tell me he's your beau.'
The girl stood by the window. Morning sunlight cut across her
belly and hips and left her face in shadow.
'Of course, we know a bit about him already.' The policeman had
no qualms about lying if it persuaded the girl to open up. 'I'm not at liberty to
give you the full details, but . . . His involvement in the rackets, for instance.'
'Well, if you know so much, you don't need me.'
'I wouldn't say that.'
The two of them eyed each other, wary. 'It's a complicated
business,' he said.
She was scrawny, plain, with dirty brown hair that separated into
thin, hopeless str but with a melancholy that
the policeman thought he could use.
He stood up and stretched. 'You know,' he said, trying to scare
her, 'you just might be implicated here.'
Her eyes were red. Her dingy yellow silk wrapper was belted
loosely at the waist. Tired, sad. Could a street girl be mourning?
'Accomplice, accessory. People have been known to go to jail for
helping other folks do wrong.'
This seemed to get to her. 'He didn't do no wrong.'
The room was hot. The air was close and stuffy. The room was
dark, and it didn't help that the walls had been painted a spiritless olive
green. The floor was rough oak planking, dull and unpainted, worn by the ebb
and flow of hundreds of men. There was a braided oval rug in shades of brown
and an old brass wind-up clock on the floor beside the bed.
The girl stepped out of the light. 'What's your name?'
The policeman had begun to search the room. 'Never mind who I
am. It's the old man we're talking about.'
The door had been left open to catch what little breeze there was,
hiding Moon's old gabardine coat, hung on a wire hook on the back of the
door.
'I'd say it's John or Michael.' The girl hoped to distract him. 'A
saint or an angel.'
'It's Michael,' he said.
'Mike, Mickey, Mick.'
'Fine.' The policeman was losing his patience. 'Now who's this
man of yours and where's the money?'
She thought for a moment, weighing her options. 'I'm waiting on
my lawyer,' she told him.
The policeman smiled. He took off his cap and wiped his forehead,
grinning, and shook his head. 'Sure, that's a good one,' he said.
friends.'
He studied her face, trying to pierce the pale forehead, glimpse
the complex engine of her mind, its cunning arrangement of spinning wheels
and silver gears. The flash of thought. Probably wondering right now what to
tell him and how and how much and in what sequence. Calculating. The girl
ticked like a watch.
'I met him in a bar,' she said finally. 'Dugan's, I think it was.'
'And?'
'Nothing but an old man,' she said.
The policeman searched through the bureau. He opened the pine
wardrobe and peered in. 'How old would you say he was?'
'I don't know.'
He sorted through her clothing. 'Sixty? Seventy?'
'I guess.'
He pulled out a blue cotton dress and threw it on the bed, tossed
out petticoats and stockings, a tired black hat with a ragged veil. A flurry of
underwear followed, men's and women's. 'Where's the rest of the old man's
gear?'
'You're looking at it,' she said.
The policeman checked the shelf above the hanging rod. 'He must
have had some possessions.'
'Just what's there.'
The policeman wadded up the clothing and stuffed it back in the
wardrobe. 'And what way would a man with absolutely no possessions be
affording a hotel room?'
'He traveled light.'
The policeman thought of Moon's pale face, dripping river water.
Was it surprise he had read there, peace, delight, amazement, terror?
'Suicide's the unforgivable sin,' he said, musing.
The girl said nothing.
'Flying in the face of God, it is.'
She picked up the blue dress and shook it out, hung it back in the
wardrobe.
'It's a worse sin than murder,' fornication is.'
'I got a pretty good idea.'
Sunlight seeped across the floor, lapping at the legs of the plain
wooden table, the two straight-back chairs. It gleamed softly on the iron
fireplace but left the tossed double bed in shadow.
The policeman wheeled around. 'Question,' he said. 'What's a
pretty girl like you doing with a stew bum, and him old enough to be her
granddad?'
'Is there some kind of law against old men?'
'Did he give you money?'
'Sure. He was my honey man. Except when he got to drinking.'
'Drank, did he?'
'Like a fish.'
She sat down on the bed and watched him. 'He got sort of balmy
sometimes,' she said. 'Kept reading in this book, this poetry.'
'So, your man was a poet.'
The girl shrugged.
Destroying Jim Moon's tombstone proved more difficult than Caroline had
imagined. A crowbar, a hatchet, and a carpenter's hammer all proved
ineffectual.
'You need real stonecutter's tools,' Win said.
To her credit, she had done some damage: marred the pages of
the book a little and chipped off the points of the calla lilies. But at the rate
she was going, total destruction was likely to take her a lifetime.
Winslow sat on the porch steps, watching her work on the stone
and whittling. 'My father only ever sent me one letter,' he said.
'That's one too many, I'd say.'
'Came all the way from Alaska.'
'Win, do you have to do that?' Caroline hated for him to whittle —
a total waste of time, in her estimation.
Win folded his bone-handled pocketknife and tucked it back in his
pocket. 'It said, 'I have named yo that you will live the free and unencumbered life of an artist.''
Caroline stared at him.
'Well, it is a work of art,' he said, meaning the stone.
'It is a monstrosity,' she said, speaking slowly so as to leave no
room for misunderstanding. 'And the sooner it is rubble, the sooner we can
get on with your life.'
The policeman sat down at the table and settled in, stretching his legs out
and crossing them at the ankles. 'Well, I'm content,' he said. He laced his
fingers behind his head. 'I got all day.'
The girl started to pace. 'I told you. I met him in a bar. We came
back here.'
'This is his room, then.'
'He was letting me stay.'
The old man wasn't carrying any cash when they pulled him out of
the water, just the key to this room, but that proved nothing. He probably
stashed it first and then stepped off. Lost it, maybe, or he could have been
robbed.
Sure. The policeman considered. Some up-and-coming lushroller
might be strolling down Broadway right this very minute with Jersey loot in
his pocket. Either that or the girl had it, hidden here in the room.
'Come clean, missy.'
'I didn't know him,' she said.
The policeman raised a cynical eyebrow.
'He wasn't nothing to me.'
The policeman's eyes locked in on her. He had a certain way. A
liar couldn't stand his gaze.
'Oh, all right,' she said.
The girl crossed the room, produced a key from her bosom, and
unlocked a dark green carpetbag she pulled out from under the bed.
'He left this.' She tossed a worn, leather-bound diary on the
table. 'He used to read it to me, pages and pa can't read.'
The policeman was annoyed. The man had been in the river for
two or three days. He needed to be put under, quick, and the boys were
getting impatient. This damned girl was making things harder than things had
need to be. Besides which, it was murderous hot, a scorcher.
'Girl, I don't believe a word you say.'
She gave him a weak, contemptuous smile. 'Your beliefs ain't of
interest to me.'
He picked up the book and examined it. A hundred pages or more
in a slanted scrawl, interspersed with drawings—landscapes, portraits. He
opened it near the beginning and started to read:
April 22, 1862 – Keokuk
Dear Diary,
The Casualties are coming in from Shiloh. They have turned the
Estes House Hotel into a Union Hospital & on account of my age I am to
serve there as Orderly. Dr. Hughs—our Surgeon—does five & six
Amputations a day with as many buried. We go daily to the Docks for more.
Not to hear the cries of the Men, I stuff my ears with cotton wool & hum to
myself John Brown's Body and other such tunes. . . .
Heat. The sound of flies intent on feeding. The pile of limbs growing in the pit
behind the hotel, and Moon with a dirty kerchief tied over his face, swabbing
the bloodstained wooden floor of the ward.
'You, boy. Bandit!'
Moon looked up.
An old man lay on an iron bed. 'Give me water,' he said.
Moon had just turned sixteen when Colonel William Erasmus
Deal—Raw Deal—rode into town on a big white horse. Colonel Deal had gold
braid on his shoulders. Colonel Deal had a feather in his hat. He had long
au and to young Jim Moon, new to manhood,
he was a god.
Jim Moon's father had tried to argue with his son. Jim Moon's
mother, predictably, cried. But Moon had a boy's vision of smoke and
leather, a beautiful, terrible dream, and he was young. He was in love, and
nothing could have stopped him.
'Wanting to see the elephant,' his father had said, meaning Moon
hoped to witness something extraordinary, a marvel. 'Home place pretty
tame these days, I guess.'
It was spring. The scent of water was in the air. Moon's mother
sat in the sewing rocker by the window, a tangle of yarn forgotten in her lap.
No, no. Light spilled over her shoulders. There was no sound but the clock on
the mantel, the wind in the cottonwood trees.
'Well, then, I reckon,' the father had said.
Now Moon gave the old man on the bed a drink from a battered tin
pitcher.
''I am poured out like water.''
'Psalms,' Moon said.
'That's right.' The old man drank deeply. ''A dry and thirsty land.''
His eyes were pearly with cataracts. Sweat glistened on his
forehead.
Beside the bed a jacket hung over a chair. A double row of
tarnished brass buttons caught the last of the sun.
'I know what you're thinking,' the old man said.
'Sir?'
'Wanting to fight?'
'Yes, sir, I am,' Moon said.
The old man coughed up phlegm the color of roofing tar and spit it
into a rag. 'You're just a boy.'
'I'm near nineteen,' Moon told him. An obvious lie.
The man smiled and closed his ghostly eyes. 'Look around you,
son.'
Moon scanned the ballroom. Beautiful women in pastel silk had white as cream. Moon heard their hoop skirts whispering over the floor.
'What do you see?'
In fact, Moon saw a makeshift hospital ward, beds filled with
wounded men. He smelled the stench of death and heard the ceaseless
drone of flies. The men, for the most part, were empty-eyed and stared off
into nothing. Some were missing arms or legs, and these were the easy
cases, it seemed to Moon. Others had wounds so subtle and interior the
extent of the damage could not be ascertained.
'See death?'
Moon nodded.
'Despair?'
The old man sat up, leaned on one shaky elbow. 'You see all
that, and yet you're still wanting a transfer.'
Moon couldn't explain himself.
'Better give her another think, boy.'
'I'd be awful grateful.'
The old man cocked his head coyly, peering around the film of the
cataracts. 'Truly,' he said.
Moon nodded.
'Well, I am damned.'
Moon joined the Twenty-fourth Infantry, the 'Iowa Temperance
Regiment,' which he described in his diary as made up of men 'who touch
not, taste not, handle not spirituous or Malt Liquor, Wine or Cider.' He fought
well but without conviction, pitying men he should have despised and
excusing from his rifle sight those who charmed him in some physical detail—
the set of the jaw, a bright bandanna—those who, with some gesture
perhaps, reminded him of his own humanity.
Moon was green, with no lust for blood. But sometimes, when a
fight was unexpected or the battle turned suddenly and Moon saw the men
rush forward, himself among them, throwing their bodies he would see that kind of courage, not
from the farmboys and storekeepers he soldiered with and thought he knew,
and certainly not from himself. To die for your country. Moon was astonished.
To give your small, ordinary life for an ideal.
April 26, 1863
Dear Diary,
Camped. Mud to our knees. Seem like she's all Mud from
Missouri on down. The Slough of Despond. Most of the boys have the
Tennessee Two-Step & no sunlight nor hot food in 2 wks. Sgt. Rourke keeps
us cheered. He is as good as they come but old Raw Deal—he rides & we
walk & when the Fighting starts up he shows the White Feather. We see him
back in the treeline counting the dead.
P.S. Some say they feed these Secesh whiskey & gunpowder to
make them fight. I don't exactly believe it but they are hard Boys.
April 30, 1863
Dear Diary,
One of the boys from C company got to fooling this a.m.—pretend
to have a Cottonmouth which wasn't nothing more than a Whipsnake. I took
him down & talked some sense with my two fist & he seen Reason.
Many Colored on the road. Sons of Ham, Capt. calls them. One
old Man with a leg iron hip to ankle bone—a runner—that give his Gait a
sideways amble & we cut him loose of it. Traded looks & give him some
Tobac. Brown skin & eyes the color of dried Maple sap. Tried to draw him but
dark come on & had to quit.
May 8, 1863 – Hard Times Landing
Dear Diary,
Rains come last night & washed out a ravine nr camp. A Skull
come up out of the Mud & it grinning. Some of the boys dug him out & the rib
bones danc up but all there & the arm bones were
clean & white. Drawed him & got the curves in pretty much right. We think
He is one of ours.
May 16, 1863 – Champion Hill
Dear Diary,
At 15 minutes of 8 guns commenced. Weather extremely hot. We
come up & fed through other Companies headed for the rear. The Boys held
their bloody Hands up for us to see they were no Cowards. Many wounded.
At the line there was no advance & we loaded & killed steady for one hour in
the Sun.
June 3, 1863 – nr Vicksburg
Dear Diary,
Pushing on. 'God defend the Right and bring this unnatural war to
a close by the success of our Cause the Salvation of the Union.' Amen.
Capt. says the people of the South are 100 years behind the North in
Enterprise & Improvements & this on account of Slavery.
P.S. I have drawed the Brown Man again but still ain't got him
right.
Summer passed. Winter came on—Christmas in the mud— and
the year turned. Spring again, summer. Moon fought on. In the fall, Lincoln
was reelected over McClellan and the Peace Democrats. The boys in camp
whooped and hollered. Winter again.
And then, one chilly day in early spring, near a town that Moon
could not have named, he and a boy called Alvin Cobb, caught up in a
running skirmish, became separated from their unit and, without much
discussion, decided not to try to rejoin the fighting.
'Let's lay up in them woods,' Moon said. It seemed like a good
idea at the time.
They turned north and lost themselves in a tangled grove that
bordered a shallow river.
'You rec war?' Cobb said, trudging
through the brush.
Moon shrugged.
'They say we're winning, the boys.'
They came to a clearing and sat down to rest. Moon watched the
river slip in and out of the shadows.
Cobb opened his haversack. 'She's supposed to be winding down
by now.'
'Says who?'
Cobb laid out a pouch of tobacco, a long-stemmed clay pipe with
a carved bowl. He built a fire and boiled coffee, whistling while he worked. A
fair-haired boy from Prairie City, Cobb was slow, but earnest and
goodhearted. Moon couldn't help but like him.
'Seem like she's dragging on,' Cobb said.
Moon studied Cobb's face: the freckled nose, the jug ears, the
muddy, gray-green eyes, flat and expressionless. It was an innocent face,
the kind that Moon had noted often seemed marked for death. Moon had
seen whole regiments cut down in an afternoon, meadows where the grass
was slick with blood, and it seemed to him that the tall, lanky kind, his kind,
those who had grown wary and distant over time, were the ones who mostly
survived. He watched Cobb and tried to puzzle it out, why some men died
and others did not, and whether he himself would die, and, if not, how he
could ever go home again.
Moon was no scholar. Politics bored him. What he knew, he knew
by intuition, by the feel and sound and smell of things. He carried his diary
over his heart, where other boys carried a Bible, and wrote out his thoughts
with a stubby yellow carpenter's pencil, using a straightedge to keep the
lines from sinking on the right. He re- corded the weather, his health and
disposition, the birds he spotted —warblers, sw tanagers—and
phonetic reproductions of their songs. On occasion, he soared, pouring out
his heart in elaborate phrasings when some event had puzzled or angered or
moved him, and sometimes he sketched in the margins, trying to capture the
lay of the land or the twisted limbs of a burr oak, the curve of the mouth of the
old brown man he had seen along the road, his amber eyes. He wrote down
the sayings of men he met, recorded their stories. He rhapsodized on women
he only imagined, casting them in various roles—companion, wife, a sister he
never had.
'Well, we seen the elephant.' Cobb held out the tobacco pouch,
but Moon shook his head. 'Tell true, that old boy ain't all he's bragged up to
be.'
Cobb drank his coffee. 'When she does end, I'm going out west.'
Moon nodded. 'Sure.'
'I'm tired of soldiering,' he said.
Moon thought he was joking, but, glancing over, he saw that
Cobb's brow was deeply furrowed with unaccustomed thought.
'San Francisco,' Cobb said. 'Get me a store-bought suit of
clothes and a gold-headed walking stick.' He finished his coffee and
stretched out on the ground. He pulled his cap down over his eyes, and
within a minute or two he was sound asleep and breathing easy.
Moon studied him. Tired of war. Cobb's round belly rose and fell.
A peaceful snoring came from beneath his cap. Watching him, Moon longed
for the same kind of ease.
Tired. Moon started to figure. If he could walk just twenty miles a
day, in two months or less he might be home, back in the clapboard house
where he was born, the little bedroom with the plain pine walls and the
patched his jacket and traded off reading out loud with him from a book called
Pilgrim's Progress. Back with the black-and-white dog he had and the fishing
spot on the Cedar River, a steel-gray pool above Columbus Junction. The
water there was shadow-laced, overhung with trees, still and timeless, and
there, using a string and a crooked three-penny nail, Moon had hooked
glossy, mottled bullheads the color of dark winter ice and skinned them out
on the bank. Their fat, coiling guts turned the water the color of rusty iron,
leaving Moon with the pearl-white fillets going golden over a fire. Moon
remembered digging his toes into the cool mud of the riverbank, hungry and
waiting for supper, running some scrap of language through his mind: poetry
from one of his mother's little leather-bound books, Bunyan or Sir Walter
Scott or maybe the Bible, some hymn he had heard filtering out of the white
frame Baptist church.
Quietly Moon stood up and gathered his gear. The sun hung low,
but it was still possible, he believed, to cover two or three miles or more yet
that day. He left the fire burning. He thought about leaving a note but decided
against it. Unlike Moon, whose mother had taught him early from the
McGuffey, Alvin Cobb probably couldn't read, and anyway he was the kind of
boy who told everything he knew.
Moon left him sleeping and walked away. He followed the river,
angling northwest, first through a sparse cluster of loblolly pine, then into an
open field where the ground was a muddy red clay. A high white plantation
rose up in the distance, glowing, fretted with live oak trees, and Moon tried to
match that beauty to the wretchedness of the slaves. He thought about the
Negroes on the road, headed north like a strong brown river.
A mile or so on, he came to a grove where a brown thrasher,
hidden high in the trees, was singing for rain. Perhaps, Moon thought, he
should camp. Perhaps he should turn around and go back. He thought about
Alvin Cobb and hated him, despised the boyish eagerness that had been his,
too, just a few years before. Cobb was tired, maybe, but he'd keep fighting.
As for Moon, it was too many for him.
Moon sat down and took out his diary. Lately he had begun to
brace his own thoughts with lofty quotations, some copied from books and
newspapers and some out of the talk around the fire. 'I cannot believe that
Providence has allowed this great Nation to flourish,' he wrote out in one
place, 'only to see it destroyed & with it the Hope of millions for Freedom.' It
was a pretty run of words— Moon liked the way it rolled—but, copied out that
way, it lost its force.
To his knowledge, Moon had killed three men—killed in the sense
that they were close and he had seen the bewilderment in their eyes: one
who appeared suddenly in a woods; one, older, an officer who rushed him on
the ridge; and one, a boy about fifteen years old who got in the line of fire.
Unanticipated, all three, with no malice intended. Necessary, maybe. Still he
mourned. Moon had forgotten their faces, never knew their names,
remembered only the strange, twisted postures of their deaths. Cobb was
foolish, still a boy, but he was a comrade in arms, felt some sort of
duty to help him stay alive and get that walking stick.
Then, of course, there was the Union.
A slant of light cut through the trees. The sun would set in an
hour. Cobb would wake and head on back to the war, and Moon would have
to come in alone, finding his way through the dark. He looked north, south
again. He was hungry and cold. They would call him a skulker, say he had
played off, and, of course, he had. Already he missed the companionship of
camp, the men around the fire, the boys he knew, the row of white canvas
tents glowing with kerosene lamps, and the murmur of the horses tied along
the picket line. To his dismay, Moon had become a soldier.
Moon walked with the sun low on his right, following the river. An
hour back, at least, if he wasn't lost. Probably he had already missed
supper. And then, how to explain it. Cobb would have some story. Just got
lost, sir, Moon could hear himself saying.
A girl came out of the woods. She was tall, about Moon's age,
and wore a ragged wine-colored dress, muddy at the hem. 'Hey,' she called
out. 'You. Stringbean.'
Moon was startled out of his reverie.
'Where you headed for, soldier?' She came toward him,
smiling. 'Looking for me?'
Moon was too tired to speak.
'Ain't lost, are you?'
Moon denied it. 'No, ma'am. Tired is all.'
She smiled. 'I got just the thing.'
Moon hesitated.
She reached out and tugged on his ear, teasing. 'You can trust
me, captain.'
Moon followed her into a stand of pines. She sat down and patted
the ground beside her. 'Come to mama,' she said.
war,'
he said.
'It'll wait.'
She produced a bottle of bourbon. 'That's the thing about wars.
They're always there. Miss one, another'll come along.'
The girl wasn't dressed for the chilly evening. 'You're cold,' he
said. 'I can see the fuzz raised up on your arm.' He sat down and put his
coat around her.
'Fuzz, fuzz, fuzzy.' She liked the word.
'What's your name?'
'Puddin' and tane. Ask me again and I'll tell you the same.'
'Tell me.'
'You a Quaker?'
'No.'
'Talk like one.'
'How you mean?'
'I don't know. Kind of sad.'
The girl was dark and slender. Moon put his head in her lap and
drank in the wild scent of her body. She swept back the fine, curly dark hair
from his brow.
'I have a magic elixir hid under my apron,' she told him.
'Is that a fact?'
'Uh-huh.'
'Give me a taste.'
'Find it.'
Moon looked up and saw the frank expression in her eyes. 'I'm in
the Twenty-fourth,' he said, 'the Iowa Temperance Regiment.'
She kissed his mouth.
'Course, I'm not actually with my unit right now.'
The girl lay back on the ground and her hair fell loose, spilled out
like water. Moon raised himself on one elbow and stared down into her eyes.
She toyed with the buttons on his coat. 'Fighting for the coloreds?'
'I don't know.' Moon took her hand. 'I only ever seen a couple or
two before I joined up. And they was a long way off.'
'What are you fighting for, then?'
Moon touched her face, ran his hand along the curve of her
jaw. 'Doing it just to be doing it, I guess.'
'Liar.'
bourbon.
'Nope.'
'Well, that's just my luck then, ain't it?'
Moon didn't know what to say.
'Boys,' she said.
'I could trade you something.'
This intrigued her. 'What you got?'
Moon thought for a minute. 'Nothing,' he said.
The girl fished her hand into Moon's pocket. 'Not even a little old
two-bit piece?'
Moon giggled. 'I'm awful sorry,' he said.
She pretended to pout a little, then reached out and ruffled his
hair. 'Never mind, sweetheart. You ain't the worst I ever seen. Have a drink.'
Moon hesitated. Perhaps he knew it wouldn't take much. She
kissed him again, and his heart began to float.
'Take it easy now.'
She pulled him down between her knees, took a drink, and
handed over the bottle.
Moon took a sip, a swallow. Moon drank deep.
'There you go,' she said.
The whiskey glowed behind his forehead. Moon closed his eyes,
and the weight of the war slipped away. He broke into a smile.
'I told you,' she said.
Moon felt light, so easy in his body he seemed to float up over the
treetops, and from that vantage point he could see a patchwork of fields in
the distance, gentle hills layered in pearl gray. Beyond them, a scatter of
woods, the tall-grass prairie, the plains and the mountains, snowcapped,
gleaming, giving way on the far side to a valley, incredibly green. Moon saw
his way clear to the broad Pacific, which rolled in ancient rhythms, wave on
wave.
'What's that you got in them big blue eyes?' the girl said. 'Tears?'
Moon slept and dreamed of a long train, draped in black and
winding slowly through t throbbing revolutions, and a special car bore a coffin,
especially long.
He woke alone. The sky was empty. There was still frost on the
limbs of the trees. March or early April. The earth was bare, but, bending
down, looking close along the banks of the river, Moon detected the first fine
blades of grass.
Copyright © 2003 by Barbara Croft. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.