Next day was Memorial Day. And Memorial Day in Friendship Village is
something grand.
First the G. A. R. conducts the service in the Court House yard, with
benches put up special, and a speech from out of town and paid for.
Right away afterward everybody marches or drives, according to the state
of their pocket-book, out to the Cemetery, to lay flowers on the
soldiers' graves; and it's quite an event, because everybody that's got
anybody buried out there and that is still alive themselves, they all
whisk out the day before and decorate up their graves, so's everybody
can see for themselves how intimate their dead is held in remembrance.
And everybody walks around to see if so-and-so has thought to send
anything from Seattle, or wherenot, _this_ year. And if they didn't,
it's something to tell about.
Then all the Ladies' Aid Societies serve dinners in the empty store
buildings down town, and make what they can. And in the afternoon
everybody lounges round and cuts the grass and tinkers with the screens
and buys ice cream off the donkey-cart man.
I dressed Bennie up, clean and miserable, in the morning, and went down
to the exercises. I couldn't see much, because the woman in front of me
couldn't either, and she stood up; and I couldn't hear much, because the
paid-for speaker addressed only one-half of his audience, and as usual I
wasn't in the right half. But the point is that neither of them
limitations mattered. I didn't have to see and I didn't have to hear.
All that I had to do was to feel. And I felt. For I was alive at the
time of the Civil War, and all you have to do to me is to touch that
spring in me, and I'm back there: Getting the first news, reading about
Sumter, sensing the call for 75,000 volunteers, hearing that this one
and this one and this one had enlisted, peeking through the fence at
Camp Randall where my two brothers were waiting to go; and then living
the long four years through, when every morning meant news, and no news
meant news, and every night meant more to hear. For years I couldn't
open a newspaper without feeling I must look first for the list of the
dead....
I set there on the bench in the spring sunshine, without anything to
lean against, seeing the back breadths of Mis' Curtsey's gray flowered
delaine, and living it all over again, with Bennie hanging on my knee.
And it made it a thousand times worse, now that these Memorial Days were
passing, with what was going on in Europe still going on.
And I thought: "Oh, I dunno how we can keep up feeling memorial for just
our own soldiers, when the whole world's soldiers are lying dead, new
every night...."
And getting a little more used to the paid speaker's voice, I could hear
some of what he was saying. I could get the names,--Vicksburg,
Gettysburg, Shenandoah, Missionary Ridge, all these, over and over. And
my heart ached with every one. But it had a new ache, for names that the
whole world will echo with for years to come. And sitting there, with
nobody knowing, I says to myself:
"And, O Lord, I memorial all the rest of them--the soldiers of fifty
years ago no more than the soldiers of now--the soldiers of Here no more
than the soldiers of Over There. O Lord, I memorial them all, and I pray
for them that survive over there--put all Your strength on them, Lord,
as far as I am concerned, for us survivors here, we don't need You as
much as they do--them that's new bereaved and new desolated. For
Christ's sake. Amen."
On my way home, I saw Luke Norris sitting out by the door of his office
again. He never went to any exercises because his wind-pipe was liable
to shut up on him, and it broke up the program some, getting his breath
through to him.
"Calliope," he says, "we want you should go on to the Committee for
opening the new Town Hall, in about two months from now. We want the
jim-dandiest, swell-upest celebration this town has ever had. Twenty
years of unexampled prosperity--"