THE BOY IN GREY AND THE BOY IN BLUE.
I have written of Dr. Hathern’s daughters, but have said nothing of his
son, our brother Charlie, who was four years our senior and little more
than a boy when the war broke out. Too young by far to join the army,
father and I said. But Fan thought differently, and when the clouds of
strife grew darker and denser and there were calls for more recruits she
urged him on until at last he enlisted and we saw him with others march
away on the Monday after the Easter of ’62. How handsome he was in his
new uniform, and how proud we were of him, he was so tall and straight,
with such a sunny smile on his boyish face and in his laughing blue
eyes.
“Bress de boy; he look like Sol’mon in all his best clos’,” Phyllis
said, regarding him admiringly when he put them on, “an’ though I spec’s
I’se a mighty bad un seein’ I’se a nigger and one of Linkum’s folks, I
hope he’ll beat ’em sho’.”
“Beat them! Of course we shall!” Fan said, putting her arms around
Charlie’s neck and laying a hand on the shoulder of Jack Fullerton, who
had also enlisted. “Of course we shall beat them. The Northerners are
all cowards. One or two battles will end the matter and you will come
marching home covered with glory.”
She was talking mostly to Jack, flashing upon him a look from her bright
eyes which would have made a less brave man face the cannon’s mouth.
Jack had been my hero since my earliest remembrance, although I knew
that he preferred Fan, who was tall and fair and comely, while I was
short and dark and homely. It was mainly owing to her influence that he
had enlisted, and he was to dine with us that Easter Day as his father
was dead and his mother, who was an invalid, was away at some springs.
How bright we made the house with the lilies Charlie was so fond of,
saying they made him think of his mother and the angels, and I never see
one now, nor inhale its perfume, that it does not bring Charlie back to
me as he was that last day at home when there were great bowls of them
on the mantels and stands and dinner table, which was loaded with every
delicacy Phyllis could devise. The rooms looked as if decked for a
bridal, but they seemed like a funeral, we were all so sad, except Fan.
She was in the wildest of spirits and talked of the next Easter when the
war would be over, and Charlie with us again, wearing shoulder straps
may be, or at all events covered with honor as a soldier who had done
his duty.
“You are not going to be shot, but to shoot somebody,” she said, patting
him on his back. “And we’ll trim the house up better than it is to-day,
and Phyllis shall make her best plum pudding, and I shall be so proud of
you,” she added, throwing her arms around his neck, and kissing him
lovingly.
The next morning he went away and we saw him marching by to the sound of
the fife and drum, while I cried as if my heart would break, but Fanny
stood upon the horse block by the gate and sent kisses after him until a
turn in the road hid him from our sight. We heard from him often during
the summer, for many men from our county were in the same regiment, and
so, from one and another and from himself word came to us that he was
well and had as yet seen no actual fighting, though very anxious to do
so. Then the tone of his letters changed a little and he was not quite
so ready to fight.
“I tell you what, Fan-and-Ann,” he wrote, “the boys in blue are not such
milksops as you think. I have seen quite a lot of ’em, and they are a
pretty good sort after all, and they gave me tobacco and hard tack and a
newspaper, and said they’d nothing against me personally, but they had
enlisted to lick just such upstarts and were going to do it. I’d smile
to see them.”
“And so would I,” Fan said, with the utmost scorn, “lick us indeed! I
wish I were a man!”
She was growing more bitter every day, and when one evening Phyllis came
to me privately and said there was a half-starved Federal soldier hiding
in the corn-field, I did not dare tell Fan, but went to him with Phyllis
after dark and carried him bread and milk and a blanket to cover him and
an umbrella to shield him from the rain. The third day he went away and
I never heard from him again until the war was over, when I received a
badly written letter, directed wrong side up and signed James Josh, who
thanked me for my kindness which he had never forgotten. I passed the
letter to Fan, who surprised me by saying, “Yes, I knew all about it; I
saw you steal off into the corn-field and saw you feeding that poor
wretch, and only a thought of Charlie and what I’d wish someone to do
for him kept me from giving notice that a Yankee was hiding in our
field. I knew when he went away and saw you and Phyllis coddle him up
with sandwiches and hoe-cake and father’s old coat, and you took me to
task for flirting in front of the house with Jack Fullerton, who was
home on a furlough, when I was really trying to keep him as long as
possible so as to let your James Josh get out of the way.”
Fanny was greatly softened at that time and not much like the fierce,
outspoken girl who kept us up to fever heat during the second year of
the war when the weeks and months dragged so slowly until at last it was
winter and news came of the terrible battle of Fredericksburg, when the
woods were filled with the dead and dying and the river ran red with
blood. Three days after the battle they brought Charlie to us dead, with
a bullet in his side and a look of perfect peace on his young face,
smooth yet and fair as a girl’s. Some of his friends had found him in
the woods, and rather than leave him there had at the risk of their own
lives managed to have him carried across the country until at the close
of the third day he lay in our best room where so many lilies had been
when he went away, but which now echoed to father’s sobs and mine as we
bent over our dead boy. Fan never shed a tear, but in a cold, hard voice
told the men where to put the body, and then with a start, exclaimed,
“What does this mean?” and she pointed to his uniform, which was not the
grey he had worn away, but the blue she so hated, and which was much too
small for him.
“Some thief exchanged with him, for see, there is no hole where the
bullet struck him,” she continued, looking at the coat which was stained
with blood, but whole. “Phyllis, come here,” she went on, while father
and I sat dumb and helpless, “take off that garb of a dog and put his
own clothes on him, his best ones, hanging in his room.”
Phyllis obeyed, and when the soiled and bloody garments lay upon the
floor, Fan said, “give me the tongs, I am going to burn them up.”
Then father arose and reaching out his shaking hands saved the blue
uniform from the flames.
“Wait, Fan,” he said; “there may be something in the pockets which will
tell us whose clothes they are. Remember there are more aching hearts
than ours.”
He was feeling in the trousers pockets where securely pinned in the
bottom of one was the half sheet of paper which we had fastened in the
top of Charlie’s cap because it was too large. The paper was written
over in a scrawly hand which was not Charlie’s, and Fan read it aloud
with the tears streaming down her cheeks, just as mine are falling now,
as I copy it verbatim:
“DEAR FATHER AND FAN-AND-ANN:
“I am dying under a tree in the woods with a bullet in me and a boy’s
cap stuffed into the wound to keep the blood back, while I tell him
what to write. Lucky Fan-and-Ann thought to put that paper in my cap.
The boy, who is a Yankee, found me and brought me some water and
covered me with his coat when I got cold and stuffed his cap into the
hole and cried over me, and I cried too, and we’ve talked it over and
are as sorry as we can be—about the war, I mean. I hope I didn’t kill
anybody and he hopes he didn’t, and his left hand is almost shot away
and hurts him awful, but he’s going to stick to me till I’m dead. Then
I’ve told him how to find his way to you and tell you about me, and
you must take care of him and not let them get him. He don’t want to
go to prison, and I don’t want to have him, and he’s going to change
clothes with me so as to look like a confederate. We’ve said the
Lord’s Prayer together, and Now I lay me, and the Creed, and dearly
beloved, and everything we could think of and he knows them just as I
do and I reckon I’m all right with God, only I’d like to die at home.
It’s getting dark and the boy is tired and I am faint. Kiss little
Katy for me. I wish I could see you all again.
“Good-bye, be kind to the boy. Give my respects to Phyllis.
“CHARLIE.”
This was the letter and I need not say that the blue uniform was not
burned; neither did I know what became of it until after the funeral was
over and I had courage to go into my brother’s room where I found it
hanging on the wall and over it the Stars and Stripes which Fan had
brought from their hiding place and put above the faded blue, from which
the blood stains could not be effaced, although Phyllis had washed it
two or three times. Every day Fan and I went in and looked at it and
cried over it and talked of _The Boy_ and wondered who he was and when,
if ever, he would come.
“What shall you do if he does?” I asked her once, but she only glared at
me like a tiger and I was glad to escape from the scornful gleam of her
eyes.
And thus the weeks glided into months and it was spring again and the
Virginia woods were lovely in their dress of green; the robins were
building their nests in the trees and the lilies we were to lay on
Charlie’s grave at Easter were just breaking into bloom. Father had gone
to visit a patient, Katy was at school, and Fan and I sat by the
dining-room fire when Phyllis came in, and, cautiously shutting the
door, said in a mysterious whisper, “He’s done come.”
“Who has come?” I asked, and Phyllis replied, “The Boy, to be sho’; him
you’re spectin’, honey, Mas’r Charles’s boy, and oh, de Lord, such a bag
of bones, and so scar’t for fear he’ll be took.”
“Where is he?” Fan asked, springing to her feet.
“In my cabin, in course. Whar should he be?” was Phyllis’s answer, and
in a moment Fan and I were on our way to the cabin, the door of which we
could not open.
“Go to the windy behine de cabin, honey,” Phyllis said, puffing after us
like an engine.
We went to the rear window, which was open, and through which Fan darted
like a cat, while I followed almost as quickly. Against the door a most
heterogenous mass of furniture was piled. A table, two wooden chairs, a
wash tub, iron kettle, stewpan, skillet and billet of wood, while a
large nail was driven over the latch.
“What upon earth is this for. I should think you were shutting out an
army,” Fan said, and Phyllis, who had managed to squeeze through the
window, replied, “An’ so I is, de Federate’s army, too. I’se not gwine
to have him took, an’ he beggin’ of me not to; I’ll spill my heart’s
blood first.”
She had seized a big rolling pin which she flourished energetically,
looking as if she might keep a whole regiment at bay.
“Move those things and open that door,” Fan said authoritatively, and
then we turned our attention to the boy, lying on Phyllis’s bed, a mere
skeleton, with masses of light curly hair and great sunken blue eyes
which looked up at us so pitifully as we bent over him.
“You won’t let ’em get me?” he whispered, with a faint smile, “I am so
sick and my head aches so, and my hand is so bad. He said you were good,
but I didn’t know there were two of you; which is Fan-an-Ann?”
Fan and I looked curiously at each other a moment; then, remembering
that Charlie always spoke of us as Fan-an-Ann, and that it was so
written in the letter, we understood his mistake. But it was Fan who
answered, for I could only stand and cry over this wreck of a boy, with
Charlie’s battered clothes upon him, too long and large every way, and
covered with soil and blood stains. What remained of his left hand was
bound in a dirty rag and quivered with pain as it lay on the coarse
blanket.
“What shall we do?” I asked at last, and Fan answered in her imperious
way, which always made one feel small.
“Do! Go to the house and get Charlie’s bed ready, and bring me his
dressing gown and a shirt and drawers from his trunk. This is no time to
cry.”
I knew then that Lee’s entire army could not wrest that boy from Fan,
who helped Phyllis remove his stiff garments and wash the aching limbs,
scarcely larger than sticks, and who herself undid the bandage from the
wounded hand which she bathed so carefully and bound up so skillfully in
the lint and linen which I brought her; then, when all was done, she
wrapped a blanket around him and took him in her own strong arms, not
daring to trust him to Phyllis, who weighed a hundred and eighty and was
apt to stumble. It was curious to see Fan, who had been so bitter
against the north, carrying that Yankee boy up to the house and laying
him on Charlie’s bed, at the foot of which, on the wall, his own uniform
was hanging. He saw it at once, for his eyes seemed to see everything,
and with a smile on his white face, he said, “Why, there’s my old
clothes. They were too small for him but I managed to get them on him as
he told me, and I pinned the letter in his pockets, thinking if he got
to you and I didn’t, you’d know; did you find it?”
“Yes,” Fan answered, “and now tell me why you were so long in coming?”
He was very weak and could only talk at intervals in whispers, as he
replied, “I lost the way and was sick in a negro’s cabin ever so long.
They took as good care of me as they could and hid me away when danger
was near,—sometimes under the bed, and once in the pounding barrel, and
once in the meal chest, where I was nearly smothered.”
“Hid you from what?” Fan asked, and he replied, with a gleam in his blue
eyes, “From the rebels, of course, don’t you know I’m a Yank?”
“Yes; go on and tell us of Charlie,” Fan said, a little sharply, and he
went on very slowly and stopping sometimes with closed eyes, as if he
were asleep.
“I was in the battle,—Fredericksburg, you know. It was awful. ’Twas the
first I had really been in, and I was so scar’t, and wanted to run away,
but couldn’t; when I got over it I guess I was crazy with the roar and
shouts and yells from horses and dying men. Did you ever hear a thousand
men scream in mortal pain?”
Fan shook her head and he continued: “It’s awful, but the horses are the
worst; I hear them now. I shall always hear them till I die.”
He stopped and there came a look upon his face which we feared was
death. But Fan bathed his forehead with eau-de-cologne and moistened his
lips with water until he revived, and said, “Where did I leave off. Oh,
yes, I know; till I die. I got over being scar’t and fought like a
bloodhound and wanted to kill them all. I am sorry now and hope I didn’t
kill any one. Do you think I did?”
Fan did not answer, and he continued: “When it was over, I got separated
from our army somehow and wandered in the woods and cried, my hand ached
so, and I was so cold and hungry. Then I heard somebody crying harder
than I, or groaning like, and I hunted till I found him under a tree,
all bloody and white. I knew he was a boy in grey, but I didn’t care,
nor he either; we was boys together, and I knelt down by him and told
him I was sorry and asked what I could do.”
“‘Write to Fan-an-Ann,’ he said, and I wrote it on a stone, and my hand
hurt me so; we said some prayers together, Our Father, and Now I lay me,
and some more that we made up about forgiving us and going to Heaven;
and he’s all right and was awfully sorry about the war, and so am I, and
when he got took in his head he talked of Easter and the lilies which
you have then, and said he could smell them, and he said a good deal
about Fan-an-Ann. And then I took his head in my lap and kissed him and
he kissed me for his father and for Fan-an-Ann, and he said I was to
tell her he was not afraid, for he was going to his mother, and then he
died—Oh, yes, he said something about little Katy and kissing her. Don’t
cry, it makes me feel so bad,” and opening his great blue eyes he looked
at Fan, down whose face the tears were running like rain, and who,
stooping down, pressed her lips to those of the boy who had kissed our
dying brother.
“Go on,” she said softly, and he went on: “I changed clothes as he told
me and prayed that his folks might find him and bring him to you and
that I might get here, too, and not be taken prisoner, and I have, but
the way was so long and hard and I am so tired and sick and sorry. You
won’t let them get me, sure?”
“Never!” and Fan made me think of some wild animal guarding its young,
as she drew the sheet over the boy, whose mind began to wander and from
whom we could extract but little more and that little was very
unsatisfactory.
It was Fan who talked most with him and who asked him his name.
“My real one, or the one I had with the boys?” he said, and she replied,
“your real one, so I can write to your mother.”
There was a look of cunning in his bright eyes, as he replied, “I hain’t
no mother, except Aunt Martha, and she won’t care, and I don’t want her
to know. I ran away from her and enlisted after a while. I was _Joe_
with the boys, but that ain’t the name they gave me in baptism. Do you
know the Apostles?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I am one of them. Now guess,” he said, and beginning with Matthew
and ending with Paul Fan went over the entire list, but the expression
of the boy’s face never changed in the least; nor did he give any sign
when she spoke his name, if she did speak it.
“Joe will do,” he said. “Aunt Martha has washed her hands of me a good
many times. She was always washing them. She don’t mind whether I am Joe
or an Apostle.”
“But where is your home? Where does Aunt Martha live?” Fan asked, and he
replied, “She don’t live there now.”
Evidently he did not care to talk of his home, which could not have been
a very happy one, judging from what he did say. He called me
_Ann-an-Fan_, while Fan was _Fan-an-Ann_, and his eyes brightened when
she came near him, and he smiled upon her in a way which always brought
the tears.
“You are just as good as northern folks,” he said to her once, “and I am
sorry I came down to lick you; I wish I had something to give you. Where
are my trousers?” Phyllis had washed and ironed the ragged greys and put
back in the pocket everything she found there—a jews-harp, a ball of
twine, some nails, and a pearl handled knife with three blades, two of
which were broken; this with the jews-harp he gave to Fan to remember
him by, he said.
“Carlyle gave me the knife one Christmas, and I gave him a lead pencil.
I couldn’t get anything more, for I hadn’t any money. I’d been bad; I
was always bad, and Aunt Martha wouldn’t give me any,” he said, and when
Fan asked him who Carlyle was, he answered, “Oh, a boy I used to know
and like. If you see him tell him so, and that I have never told that he
took the cake, and wouldn’t if I lived to be a hundred. Aunt Martha
whaled me for it, and my, didn’t she put it on; I was too big to be
thrashed, and I ran away not long after that, and went to a grocery and
then to the war, and she thinks now that I stole the cake!”
This was all we could possibly get from him, and we did not know how
much reliance to put upon it, he was delirious so much of the time.
At first father thought to amputate his hand but finally gave that up.
It was useless to torture him, he said, as he could not last long, and
he did not. It was Monday evening when he came to us and he lingered for
three days, sometimes sleeping quietly and sometimes raving about the
war and Charlie and the long weary road he had traveled to reach us and
Fan-an-Ann and Ann-an-Fan, clinging most to Fan, who watched him day and
night as tenderly as if it had been Charlie instead of one of the race
she had affected to hate. Once he seemed to be at his old home, and in
fear of punishment, for he begged piteously of Aunt Martha to spare him
from something, we could not tell what, and he asked us twice not to let
her find him, saying he would not go back to her. Again he spoke of a
little out of the way town in Maine which Fan wrote down for future
reference. Everything about him was wrapped in mystery except the fact
that he was there with us, the boy who had cared for our dying brother
and for whom we cared to the last. When the morning of Good Friday
dawned he sank into a stupor from which we thought he would never
awaken, but when the church bell rang for service he started up and
opening his eyes said to Fan, “What’s that? Is it Sunday and must I go
to Sunday School? I hain’t my lesson.”
“It is Good Friday,” Fan replied, and he continued: “Oh, yes; Good
Friday, and Easter; I know. We had ’em down in Maine, and the lilies,
too, that he told me about in the woods, and I once spoke a piece. Do
you want to hear it?”
Fan nodded, and raising himself in bed, he began:
Softly now the Easter sunlight
Falls on Judea’s wooded hills,
Shining redly through the tree tops,
Lighting up the running rills.
While all things in earth and heaven
Sing aloud with one acclaim
Glory in the highest, Glory,
Glory be to Jesus’ name.
“There was a lot more, but I can’t remember how it goes. Carlyle spoke a
piece, too, and did first rate for a little shaver. I taught it to him,
but ’twas hard work, as he’d rather play with Don,—that’s the dog. Tell
him good-bye, and good-bye Fan-an-Ann, and Ann-an-Fan. Queer that
there’s two of you. I don’t believe he knew, but I’ll tell him, and that
they were good to me and didn’t let ’em catch me. Now say ‘Our Father,’
for I am getting sleepy, and it is growing dark.”
It was Fan who said it; I could not speak, for I saw the death pallor
gather on the face of the boy, who repeated with Fan the familiar words.
“That makes it about square with me and Jesus, and I guess that he won’t
turn off a poor boy like me,” he said, and then for a time he was back
again at Fredericksburg, fighting like a little bear; then with Charlie
in the woods singing a low lullaby such as mothers sing to their
restless infants; then in the meal chest and under the bed and in the
pounding barrel, shivering with fear, and at last with Fan-an-Ann, who
he said was a _brick_. Then he seemed to listen intently, and whispered,
“Hark. Don’t you hear the guns? how they bang away; and how red the
river runs; and how fast the men go down! Oh, God, have pity on us all.”
For a moment he lay quiet; then, rousing again, called out triumphantly,
“The war is over; the victory is won; Hurrah for——.” He meant to say
“The boys in blue.” He had said it often in his delirium, but something
in Fan’s eyes checked him, and after looking steadily at her an instant
he raised his right arm in the air and called out in a clear, shrill
voice, “Hurrah for Fan-an-Ann; three cheers and a tiger, too!” then the
hand dropped upon his breast and The Boy was dead.
The neighbors for miles around had heard of him and many had come to us
bringing delicacies and flowers and offering assistance, if it were
needed. The aid Fan declined, but took the flowers and fruit to the boy,
telling him who sent them.
“They are very kind,” he said. “I guess I’m some reconstructed, though I
am a Yank yet and stick to the flag. _Yes, sir!_”
Neither Fan nor I could repress a smile at the energy with which he
asserted his loyalty to his cause, and neither liked him the less for
it. Fan, too, must have been “some reconstructed,” for she cared for him
to the last as tenderly as if he had been her brother, and when he was
dead, she with Phyllis made him ready for the grave, crying over him as
she had not cried when Charlie died. Then her tears would not come, but
now they fell in torrents as she brushed his wavy hair, which had grown
rather long and lay in soft rings about his forehead, giving him the
look of a young girl, rather than a boy, whose age we could not guess.
We cut off two or three of his curls and put them, with the letter he
had written for Charlie, into the pocket of the blue uniform which, with
the grey, we left hanging on the wall in Charlie’s room.
We buried him on Easter day, and he had the largest funeral ever seen in
the neighborhood, for everybody came, and his coffin, over which we hung
the Federal flag, was heaped with lilies, which were afterwards dropped
into his grave. Then we tried to find his friends, but with only Aunt
Martha and Carlyle and the little town in Maine to guide us, it proved a
fruitless task.
Fan wrote to the postmaster of the town in Maine, giving all the
particulars, and after two months or more she received an answer from
the postmaster’s wife, who said that during the first year of the war a
company had gone from an adjoining town and in it was a boy, who gave
his name as Joseph Wilde. He was a comparative stranger in town and had
been for a short time in the employ of a grocer, who spoke very highly
of him. But where he came from no one knew, or if he had any friends.
And that was all we could learn of “The Boy,” whom we buried on the
hillside beside our brother. At the head of his grave is a plain marble
slab, and on it “The Boy, who died Good Friday, 1863.” This was Fan’s
idea, and every Decoration Day after the war was over she used to hang
the Stars and Bars over Charlie’s grave and the Stars and Stripes over
the grave of The Boy, who has slept there now for many a year and will
sleep there until from the North and the South, the East and the West,
the boys in blue and the boys in grey will come together, a vast army,
and what was crooked to them here will be made plain and we, who now see
through a glass darkly, will then see face to face in the light of the
Resurrection morning.