The stone falls in the pool…

The stone falls in the pool, the ripples spread. The colt in the Long Meadow kicked up his heels. “That was a fly,” he thought, “It’s early for flies.” But being alive, in April, was too fine For flies or anything else to bother a colt. He kicked up his heels again, this time in pure joy, And started to run a race with the wind and his shadow. After the stable stuffiness, the sun. After the straw-littered boards, the squelch of the turf. His little hoofs felt lighter than dancing-shoes, He scared himself with a blue-jay, his heart was a leaf. He was pure joy in action, he was the unvexed Delight of all moving lightness and swift-footed pace, The pride of the flesh, the young Spring neighing and rearing.

Sally Dupré called to him from the fence. He came like a charge in a spatter of clean-cut clods, Ears back, eyes wide and wild with folly and youth. He drew up snorting. She laughed and brushed at her skirt Where the mud had splashed it. “There, Star—there, silly boy! Why won’t you ever learn sense?” But her eyes were hot, Her hands were shaking as she offered the sugar —Long-fingered, appleblossom-shadow hands— Star blew at the sugar once, then mumbled it up. She patted the pink nose. “There, silly Star! That’s for Fort Sumter, Star!” How hot her eyes were! “Star, do you know you’re a Confederate horse? Do you know I’m going to call you Beauregard?”

Star whinnied, and asked for more sugar. She put her hand On his neck for a moment that matched the new green leaves And sticky buds of April. You would have said They were grace in quietness, seen so, woman and horse. …

The widened ripple breaks against a stone The heavy noon walks over Chancellorsville On brazen shoes, but where the squadron rode Into the ambush, the blue flies are coming To blow on the dead meat.

Carter, the telegraph-operator, sighed And propped his eyes awake again. He was tired. Dog-tired, stone-tired, body and mind burnt up With too much poker last night and too little sleep. He hated the Sunday trick. It was Riley’s turn To take it, but Riley’s wife was having a child. He cursed the child and the wife and Sunday and Riley. Nothing ever happened at Stroudsburg Siding And yet he had to be here and keep awake With the flat, stale taste of too little sleep in his mouth And wait for nothing to happen. His bulky body Lusted for sleep with every muscle and nerve. He’d rather have sleep than a woman or whiskey or money. He’d give up the next three women that might occur For ten minutes’ sleep, he’d never play poker again, He’d—battered face beginning to droop on his hands— Sleep—women—whiskey—eyelids too heavy to lift— “Yes, Ma, I said, ‘Now I lay me.’ ”— The sounder chattered And his head snapped back with a sharp, neck-breaking jerk. By God, he’d nearly—chat—chitter-chatter-chat-chat— For a moment he took it in without understanding And then the vein in his forehead began to swell And his eyes bulged wide awake. “By Jesus!” he said, And stared at the sounder as if it had turned to a snake. “By Jesus!” he said, “By Jesus, they’ve done it!” he said.

The cruelty of cold trumpets wounds the air. The ponderous princes draw their gauntlets on. The captains fit their coal-black armor on.

Judah P. Benjamin, the dapper Jew, Seal-sleek, black-eyed, lawyer and epicure, Able, well-hated, face alive with life, Looked round the council-chamber with the slight Perpetual smile he held before himself Continually like a silk-ribbed fan. Behind the fan, his quick, shrewd, fluid mind Weighed Gentiles in an old balance. There they were. Toombs, the tall, laughing, restless Georgian, As fine to look at as a yearling bull, As hard to manage. Stephens, sickly and pale, Sweet-voiced, weak-bodied, ailingly austere, The mind’s thin steel wearing the body out, The racked intelligence, the crippled charm. Mallory—Reagan—Walker—at the head Davis. The mind behind the silk-ribbed fan Was a dark prince, clothed in an Eastern stuff, Whose brown hands cupped about a crystal egg That filmed with colored cloud. The eyes stared, searching.

“I am the Jew. What am I doing here? The Jew is in my blood and in my hands, The lonely, bitter and quicksilver drop, The stain of myrrh that dyes no Gentile mind With tinctures out of the East and the sad blare Of the curled ramshorn on Atonement Day. A river runs between these men and me, A river of blood and time and liquid gold, —Oh white rivers of Canaan, running the night!— And we are colleagues. And we speak to each other Across the roar of that river, but no more. I hide myself behind a smiling fan. They hide themselves behind a Gentile mask And, if they fall, they will be lifted up, Being the people, but if I once fall I fall forever, like the rejected stone. That is the Jew of it, my Gentile friends, To see too far ahead and yet go on And I can smile at it behind my fan With a drowned mirth that you would find uncouth. For here we are, the makeshift Cabinet Of a new nation, gravely setting down Rules, precedents and cautions, never once Admitting aloud the cold, plain Franklin sense That if we do not hang together now We shall undoubtedly hang separately. It is the Jew, to see too far ahead—

I wonder what they’re doing in the North, And how their Cabinet shapes, and how they take Their railsplitter, and if they waste their time As we waste ours and Mr. Davis’s.

Jefferson Davis, pride of Mississippi, First President of the Confederate States, What are you thinking now? Your eyes look tired. Your face looks more and more like John Calhoun. And that is just, because you are his son In everything but blood, the austere child Of his ideas, the flower of states-rights. I will not gird against you, Jefferson Davis. I sent you a challenge once, but that’s forgotten, And though your blood runs differently from mine, The Jew salutes you from behind his fan, Because you are the South he fell in love with When that young black-haired girl with the Gentile-eyes, Proud, and a Catholic, and with honey-lips, First dinted her French heels upon his heart. … We have changed since, but the remembered Spring Can change no more, even in the Autumn smokes. We cannot help that havoc of the heart But my changed mind remembers half the Spring And shall till winter falls. No, Jefferson Davis, You are not she—you are not the warm night On the bayou, or the New Orleans lamps, The white-wine bubbles in the crystal cup, The almond blossoms, sleepy with the sun: But, nevertheless, you are the South in word, Deed, thought and temper, the cut cameo Brittle but durable, refined but fine, The hands well-shaped, not subtle, but not weak, The mind set in tradition but not unjust, The generous slaveholder, the gentleman Who neither forces his gentility Nor lets it be held lightly— and yet, and yet I think you look too much like John Calhoun, I think your temper is too brittly-poised, I think your hands too scholar-sensitive, And though they say you mingle in your voice The trumpet and the harp, I think it lacks That gift of warming men which coarser voices Draw from the common dirt you tread upon But do not take in your hands. I think you are All things except success, all honesty Except the ultimate honesty of the earth, All talents but the genius of the sun. And yet I would not have you otherwise, Although I see too clearly what you are.

Except—except—oh honeydropping Spring, Oh black-haired woman with the Gentile eyes! Tell me, you Gentiles, when your Gentile wives Pray in the church for you and for the South, How do they pray?—not in that lulling voice Where some drowned bell of France makes undertones To the warm river washing the levee. You do not have so good a prayer as mine. You cannot have so good a prayer as mine.”

Lincoln, six feet one in his stocking feet, The lank man, knotty and tough as a hickory rail, Whose hands were always too big for white-kid gloves, Whose wit was a coonskin sack of dry, tall tales, Whose weathered face was homely as a plowed field— Abraham Lincoln, who padded up and down The sacred White House in nightshirt and carpet-slippers, And yet could strike young hero-worshipping Hay As dignified past any neat, balanced, fine Plutarchan sentences carved in a Latin bronze; The low clown out of the prairies, the ape-buffoon, The small-town lawyer, the crude small-time politician, State-character but comparative failure at forty In spite of ambition enough for twenty Caesars, Honesty rare as a man without self-pity, Kindness as large and plain as a prairie wind, And a self-confidence like an iron bar: This Lincoln, President now by the grace of luck, Disunion, politics, Douglas and a few speeches Which make the monumental booming of Webster Sound empty as the belly of a burst drum, Lincoln shambled in to the Cabinet meeting And sat, ungainly and awkward. Seated so He did not seem so tall nor quite so strange Though he was strange enough. His new broadcloth suit Felt tight and formal across his big shoulders still And his new shiny top-hat was not yet battered To the bulging shape of the old familiar hat He’d worn at Springfield, stuffed with its hoard of papers. He was pretty tired. All week the office-seekers Had plagued him as the flies in fly-time plague A gaunt-headed, patient horse. The children weren’t well And Mollie was worried about them so sharp with her tongue. But he knew Mollie and tried to let it go by. Men tracked dirt in the house and women liked carpets. Each had a piece of the right, that was all most people could stand.

Look at his Cabinet here. There were Seward and Chase, Both of them good men, couldn’t afford to lose them, But Chase hates Seward like poison and Seward hates Chase And both of ’em think they ought to be President Instead of me. When Seward wrote me that letter The other day, he practically told me so. I suppose a man who was touchy about his pride Would send them both to the dickens when he found out, But I can’t do that as long as they do their work. The Union’s too big a horse to keep changing the saddle Each time it pinches you. As long as you’re sure The saddle fits, you’re bound to put up with the pinches And not keep fussing the horse. When I was a boy I remember figuring out when I went to town That if I had just one pumpkin to bump in a sack It was hard to carry, but once you could get two pumpkins, One in each end of the sack, it balanced things up. Seward and Chase’ll do for my pair of pumpkins. And as for me—if anyone else comes by Who shows me that he can manage this job of mine Better than I can—well, he can have the job. It’s harder sweating than driving six cross mules, But I haven’t run into that other fellow yet And till or supposing I meet him, the job’s my job And nobody else’s. Seward and Chase don’t know that. They’ll learn it, in time. Wonder how Jefferson Davis Feels, down there in Montgomery, about Sumter. He must be thinking pretty hard and fast, For he’s an able man, no doubt of that. We were born less than forty miles apart, Less than a year apart—he got the start Of me in age, and raising too, I guess, In fact, from all you hear about the man, If you set out to pick one of us two For President, by birth and folks and schooling, General raising, training up in office, I guess you’d pick him, nine times out of ten And yet, somehow, I’ve got to last him out.

These thoughts passed through the mind in a moment’s flash, Then that mind turned to business. It was the calling Of seventy-five thousand volunteers.

Shake out the long line of verse like a lanyard of woven steel And let us praise while we can what things no praise can deface, The corn that hurried so fast to be ground in an iron wheel The obdurate, bloody dream that slept before it grew base.

Not the silk flag and the shouts, the catchword patrioteers, The screaming noise of the press, the preachers who howled for blood, But a certain and stubborn pith in the hearts of the cannoneers Who hardly knew their guns before they died in the mud.

They came like a run of salmon where the ice-fed Kennebec flings Its death at the arrow-silver of the packed and mounting host, They came like the young deer trooping to the ford by Eutaw Springs, Their new horns fuzzy with velvet, their coats still rough with the frost.

North and South they assembled, one cry and the other cry, And both are ghosts to us now, old drums hung up on a wall, But they were the first hot wave of youth too-ready to die, And they went to war with an air, as if they went to a ball.

Dress-uniform boys who rubbed their buttons brighter than gold, And gave them to girls for flowers and raspberry-lemonade, Unused to the sick fatigue, the route-march made in the cold, The stink of the fever camps, the tarnish rotting the blade.

We in our time have seen that impulse going to war And how that impulse is dealt with. We have seen the circle complete. The ripe wheat wasted like trash between the fool and the whore. We cannot praise again that anger of the ripe wheat.

This we have seen as well, distorted and half-forgotten In what came before and after, where the blind went leading the blind, The first swift rising of youth before the symbols were rotten, The price too much to pay, the payment haughty in kind.

So with these men and then. They were much like the men you know, Under the beards and the strangeness of clothes with a different fit. They wrote mush-notes to their girls and wondered how it would go, Half-scared, half-fierce at the thought, but none yet ready to quit.

Georgia, New York, Virginia, Rhode Island, Florida, Maine, Piney-woods squirrel-hunter and clerk with the brand-new gun, Thus they were marshalled and drilled, while Spring turned Summer again, Until they could stumble toward death at gartersnake-crooked Bull Run.

Wingate sat in his room at night Between the moon and the candlelight, Reading his Byron with knitted brows, While his mind drank in the peace of his house, It was long past twelve, and the night was deep With moonlight and silence and wind and sleep, And the small, dim noises, thousand-fold, That all old houses and forests hold. The boards that creak for nothing at all, The leaf that rustles, the bough that sighs, The nibble of mice in the wainscot-wall, And the slow clock ticking the time that dies All distilled in a single sound Like a giant breathing underground, A sound more sleepy than sleep itself. Wingate put his book on the shelf And went to the window. It was good To walk in the ghost through a silver wood And set one’s mettle against the far Bayonet-point of the fixed North Star. He stood there a moment, wondering. North Star, wasp with the silver sting Blue-nosed star on the Yankee banners, We are coming against you to teach you manners! With crumbs of thunder and wreaths of myrtle And cannon that dance to a Dixie chorus, With a song that bites like a snapping-turtle And the tiger-lily of Summer before us, To pull you down like a torn bandana, And drown you deeper than the Savannah!

And still, while his arrogance made its cry, He shivered a little, wondering why.

There was his uniform, grey as ash, The boots that shone like a well-rubbed table, The tassels of silk on the colored sash And sleek Black Whistle down in the stable, The housewife, stitched from a beauty’s fan, The pocket-Bible with Mother’s writing, The sabre never yet fleshed in man, And all the crisp new toys of fighting. He gloated at them with a boyish pride, But still he wondered, Monmouth-eyed. The Black Horse Troop was a cavalier And gallant name for a lady’s ear. He liked the sound and the ringing brag And the girls who stitched on the county flag, The smell of horses and saddle-leather And the feel of the squadron riding together, From the loose-reined canter of colts at large, To the crammed, tense second before the charge: He liked it all with the young, keen zest Of a hound unleashed and a hawk unjessed.

And yet—what happened to men in war Why were they all going out to war?

He brooded a moment. It wasn’t slavery, That stale red-herring of Yankee knavery Nor even states-rights, at least not solely, But something so dim that it must be holy. A voice, a fragrance, a taste of wine, A face half-seen in old candleshine, A yellow river, a blowing dust, Something beyond you that you must trust, Something so shrouded it must be great, The dead men building the living State From ’simmon-seed on a sandy bottom, The woman South in her rivers laving That body whiter than new-blown cotton And savage and sweet as wild-orange-blossom, The dark hair streams on the barbarous bosom, If there ever has been a land worth saving— In Dixie land, I’ll take my stand, And live and die for Dixie! …

And yet—and yet—in some cold Northern room, Does anyone else stare out the obdurate moon With doubtful passion, seeing his toys of fighting Scribbled all over with such silver writing From such a heart of peace, they seem the stale Cast properties of a dead and childish tale? And does he see, too soon, Over the horse, over the horse and rider, The grey, soft swathing shadowness of the spider, Spinning his quiet loom?

No—no other man is cursed With such doubleness of eye, They can hunger, they can thirst, But they know for what and why.

I can drink the midnight out, And rise empty, having dined. For my courage and my doubt Are a double strand of mind, And too subtly intertwined. They are my flesh, they are my bone, My shame and my foundation-stone. I was born alone, to live alone.

Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré, Eyes that are neither black nor grey, Why do you haunt me, night and day?

Sea-changing eyes, with the deep, drowned glimmer Of bar-gold crumbling from sunken ships, Where the sea-dwarfs creep through the streaked, green shimmer To press the gold to their glass-cold lips. They sculpture the gold for a precious ring, In the caverns under the under-skies, They would marry the son to a sailor-king! You have taken my heart from me, sea-born eyes. You have taken it, yes, but I do not know. There are too many roads where I must go. There are too many beds where I have slept For a night unweeping, to quit unwept, And it needs a king to marry the sea.

Why have you taken my heart from me? I am not justice nor loyalty. I am the shape of the weathercock, That all winds come to and all winds mock. You are the image of sea-carved stone, The silent thing that can suffer alone, The little women are easier, The easy women make lighter love, I will not take your face to the war, I will not carry your cast-off glove.

Sally Dupré, Sally Dupré, Heart and body like sea-blown spray, I cannot forget you, night or day.

So Wingate pondered in Wingate Hall, And hated and loved in a single breath, As he tried to unriddle the doubtful scrawl Of war and courage and love and death, And then was suddenly nothing but sleep— And tomorrow they marched—to a two-months chasing Of Yankees running away like sheep And peace in time for the Macon racing.

He got in his bed. Where the moonlight poured, It lay like frost on a sleeping sword.

It was stuffy at night in the cabins, stuffy but warm. And smells are a matter of habit. So, if the air Was thick as black butter with the commingled smells Of greens and fried fat and field-sweat and heavy sleep, The walls were well-chinked, the low roof kept out the rain. Not like the tumble-down cabins at Zachary’s place Where the field-hands lived all year on hominy-grits And a piece of spoiled pork at Christmas. But Zachary Was a mean man out of the Bottoms, no quality to him. Wingate was quality. Wingate cared for its own. A Wingate cabin was better than most such cabins, You might have called it a sty, had they set you there; A Middle Age serf might have envied the well-chinked walls. While as for its tenants then, being folk unversed In any law but the law of the Wingate name, They were glad to have it, glad for Fire on the hearth, A roof from the dark-veined wind. Their bellies were warm And full of food. They were heavy in love with each other. They liked their cabin and lying next to each other, Long nights of winter when the slow-burning pine-knots Danced ghosts and witches over the low, near ceiling, Short nights of summer, after the work of the fields, When the hot body aches with the ripened sweetness And the children and the new tunes are begotten together.

“What you so wakeful for, black boy?” “Thinkin’, woman.” “You got no call to be thinkin’, little black boy, Thinkin’s a trouble, a h’ant lookin’ over de shoulder, Set yo’ head on my breas’ and forget about thinkin’.”

“I got my head on yo’ breas’, and it’s sof’ dere, woman, Sof’ and sweet as a mournin’ out of de Scriptures, Sof’ as two Solomon doves. But I can’t help thinkin’.”

“Ain’t I good enough for you no more, black boy? Don’ you love me no more dat you mus’ keep thinkin’?”

“You’s better’n good to me and I loves you, woman, Till I feels like Meshuck down in de fiery furnace, Till I feels like God’s own chile. But I keeps on thinkin’, Wonderin’ what I’d feel like if I was free.”

“Hush, black boy, hush for de Lord’s sake!” “But listen, woman—”

“Hush yo’self, black boy, lean yo’self on my breas’, Talk like that and paterollers’ll git you, Swinge you all to bits with a blacksnake whip, Squinch-owl carry yo’ talk to de paterollers, It ain’t safe to talk like that.” “I got to, woman, I got a feelin’ in my heart.” “Den you set on dat feelin’! Never heard you talk so in all my born days! Ain’t we got a good cabin here?” “Sho’, we got a good cabin.” “Ain’t we got good vittles, ain’t old Mistis kind to us?” “Sho’ we got good vittles, and ole Mistis she’s kind. I’se mighty fond of ole Mistis.” “Den what you talkin’, You brash fool-nigger?” “I just got a feelin’, woman. Ole Marse Billy, he’s goin’ away tomorrow, Marse Clay, he’s goin’ with him to fight de Yankees, All of ’em goin’, yes suh.” “And what if dey is?”

“Well, sposin’ de Yankees beats?” “Ain’t you got no sense, nigger? Like to see any ole Yankees lick ole Marse Billy And young Marse Clay!” “Hi, woman, ain’t dat de trufe!” “Well, den—” “But I sees ’em all, jus’ goin’ and goin’, Goin’ to war like Joshua, goin’ like David, And it makes me want to be free. Ain’t you never thought At all about bein’ free?” “Sho’, co’se I thought of it. I always reckoned when ole Marse Billy died, Old Mistis mebbe gwine to set some of us free, Mebbe she will.” “But we-uns gwine to be old den, We won’t be young and have the use of our hands, We won’t see our young ’uns growin’ up free around us, We won’t have the strength to hoe our own co’n ourselves, I want to be free, like me, while I got my strength.”

“You might be a lot worse off and not be free, What’d you do if ole man Zachary owned us?”

“Kill him, I reckon.” “Hush, black boy, for God’s sake hush!”

“I can’t help it, woman. Dey ain’t so many like him But what dey is is too pizen-mean to live. Can’t you hear dat feelin’ I got, woman? I ain’t scared Of talk and de paterollers, and I ain’t mean. I’se mighty fond of ole Mistis and ole Marse Billy, I’se mighty fond of ’em all at de Big House, I wouldn’t be nobody else’s nigger for nothin’. But I hears ’em goin’ away, all goin’ away, With horses and guns and things, all stompin’ and wavin’, And I hears de chariot-wheels and de Jordan River, Rollin’ and Rollin’ and Rollin’ thu’ my sleep, And I wants to be free. I wants to see my chillun Growin’ up free, and all bust out of Egypt! I wants to be free like an eagle in de air, Like an eagle in de air.”

Iron-filings scattered over a dusty Map of crook-cornered States in yellow and blue. Little, grouped male and female iron-filings, Scattered over a patchwork-quilt whose patches Are the red-earth stuff of Georgia, the pine-bough green of Vermont. Here you are clustered as thick as a clump of bees In swarming time. The clumps make cities and towns. Here you are strewn at random, like single seeds Lost out of the wind’s pocket. But now, but now, The thunderstone has fallen on your map And all the iron-filings shiver and move Under the grippings of that blinded force, The cold pull of the ash-and-cinder star.

The map is vexed with the long battle-worms Of filings, clustered and moving. If it is An enemy of the sun who has so stolen Power from a burnt star to do this work, Let the bleak essence of the utter cold Beyond the last gleam of the most outpost light Freeze in his veins forever. But if it is A fault in the very metal of the heart, We and our children must acquit that fault With the old bloody wastage, or give up Playing the father to it. O vexed and strange, Salt-bitter, apple-sweet, strong-handed life! Your million lovers cast themselves like sea Against your mountainy breast, with a clashing noise And a proud clamor—and like sea recoil, Sucked down beneath the forefoot of the new Advancing surf. They feed the battle-worms, Not only War’s, but in the second’s pause Between the assaulting and the broken wave, The voices of the lovers can be heard, The sea-gull cry.

Jake Diefer, the barrel-chested Pennsylvanian, Hand like a ham and arms that could wrestle a bull, A roast of a man, all solid meat and good fat, A slow-thought-chewing Clydesdale horse of a man, Roused out of his wife’s arms. The dawn outside Was ruddy as his big cheeks. He yawned and stretched Gigantically, hawking and clearing his throat. His wife, hair tousled around her like tousled corn, Stared at him with sleep-blind eyes. “Jake, it ain’t come morning, Already yet?” He nodded and started to dress. She burrowed deeper into the bed for a minute And then threw off the covers. They didn’t say much Then, or at breakfast. Eating was something serious. But he looked around the big kitchen once or twice In a puzzled way, as if trying hard to remember it. She too, when she was busy with the first batch Of pancakes, burnt one or two, because she was staring At the “salt” on the salt-box, for no particular reason. The boy ate with them and didn’t say a word, Being too sleepy. Afterwards, when the team Was hitched up and waiting, with the boy on the seat, Holding the reins till Jake was ready to take them, Jake didn’t take them at once. The sun was up now, The spilt-milk-mist of first morning lay on the farm, Jake looked at it all with those same mildly-puzzled eyes, The red barn, the fat rich fields just done with the winter, Just beginning the work of another year. The boy would have to do the rest of the planting.

He blew on his hands and stared at his wife dumbly. He cleared his throat. “Well, good-by, Minnie,” he said, “Don’t you hire any feller for harvest without you write me, And if any more of those lightning-rodders come around, We don’t want no more dum lightning-rods.” He tried To think if there was anything else, but there wasn’t. She suddenly threw her big, red arms around his neck, He kissed her with clumsy force. Then he got on the wagon And clucked to the horses as she started to cry.

Up in the mountains where the hogs are thin And razorbacked, wild Indians of hogs, The laurel’s green in April—and if the nights Are cold as the cold cloud of watersmoke Above a mountain-spring, the midday sun Has heat enough in it to make you sweat.

They are a curious and most native stock, The lanky men, the lost, forgotten seeds Spilled from the first great wave-march toward the West And set to sprout by chance in the deep cracks Of that hill-billy world of laurel-bells. They keep the beechwood-fiddle and the salt Old-fashioned ballad-English of our first Rowdy, corn-liquor-drinking, ignorant youth; Also the rifle and the frying-pan, The old feud-temper and the old feud-way Of thinking strangers better shot on sight But treating strangers that one leaves unshot With border-hospitality. The girls Have the brief-blooming, rhododendron-youth Of pioneer women, and the black-toothed age. And if you yearn to meet your pioneers, You’ll find them there, the same men, inbred sons Of inbred sires perhaps, but still the same; A pioneer-island in a world that has No use for pioneers—the unsplit rock Of Fundamentalism, calomel, Clan-virtues, clannish vices, fiddle-tunes And a hard God. They are our last frontier. They shot the railway-train when it first came, And when the Fords first came, they shot the Fords. It could not save them. They are dying now Of being educated, which is the same. One need not weep romantic tears for them, But when the last moonshiner buys his radio, And the last, lost, wild-rabbit of a girl Is civilized with a mail-order dress, Something will pass that was American And all the movies will not bring it back.

They are misfit and strange in our new day, In Sixty-One they were not quite so strange, Before the Fords, before the day of the Fords …

Luke Breckinridge, his rifle on his shoulder, Slipped through green forest alleys toward the town, A gawky boy with smoldering eyes, whose feet Whispered the crooked paths like moccasins. He wasn’t looking for trouble, going down, But he was on guard, as always. When he stopped To scoop some water in the palm of his hand From a sweet trickle between moss-grown rocks, You might have thought him careless for a minute, But when the snapped stick cracked six feet behind him He was all sudden rifle and hard eyes. The pause endured a long death-quiet instant, Then he knew who it was. “Hi, Jim,” he said, Lowering his rifle. The green laurel-screen Hardly had moved, but Jim was there beside him. The cousins looked at each other. Their rifles seemed To look as well, with much the same taut silentness.

“Goin’ to town, Luke?” “Uh-huh, goin’ to town, You goin’?” “Looks as if I was goin’.” “Looks As if you was after squirrels.” “I might be. You goin’ after squirrels?” “I might be, too.” “Not so many squirrels near town.” “No, reckon there’s not.”

Jim hesitated. His gaunt hands caressed The smooth guard of his rifle. His eyes were sharp. “Might go along a piece together,” he said. Luke didn’t move. Their eyes clashed for a moment, Then Luke spoke, casually. “I hear the Kelceys Air goin’ to fight in this here war,” he said. Jim nodded slowly, “Yuh, I heerd that too.” He watched Luke’s trigger-hand. “I might be goin’ Myself sometime,” he said reflectively Sliding his own hand down. Luke saw the movement. “We-uns don’t like the Kelceys much,” he said With his eyes down to pinpoints. Then Jim smiled. “We-uns neither,” he said. His hand slid back.

They went along together after that But neither of them spoke for half-a-mile, Then finally, Jim said, half-diffidently, “You know who we air goin’ to fight outside? I heard it was the British. Air that so?” “Hell, no,” said Luke, with scorn. He puckered his brows. “Dunno’s I rightly know just who they air.” He admitted finally, “But ’tain’t the British. It’s some trash-lot of furriners, that’s shore. They call ’em Yankees near as I kin make it, But they ain’t Injuns neither.” “Well,” said Jim Soothingly, “Reckon it don’t rightly matter Long as the Kelceys take the other side.”

It was noon when the company marched to the railroad-station. The town was ready for them. The streets were packed. There were flags and streamers and pictures of Lincoln and Hamlin. The bad little boys climbed up on the trees and yelled, The good little boys had clean paper-collars on, And swung big-eyed on white-painted wicket-gates, Wanting to yell, and feeling like Fourth of July. Somebody fastened a tin can full of firecrackers To a yellow dog’s tail and sent him howling and racketing The length of the street. “There goes Jeff Davis!” said somebody. And everybody laughed, and the little boys Punched each other and squealed between fits of laughing “There goes Jeff Davis—lookit ole yellow Jeff Davis!” And then the laugh died and rose again in a strange Half-shrill, half-strangled unexpected shout As they heard the Hillsboro’ Silver Cornet Band Swinging “John Brown’s Body” ahead of the soldiers. I have heard that soul of crowd go out in the queer Groan between laughter and tears that baffles the wise. I have heard that whanging band.

“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree.” Double-roll on the snare-drums, double squeal of the fife, “We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!” Clash of the cymbals zinging, throaty blare of cornets, “We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!” “On to Richmond! On to Richmond! On to Richmond!” “Yeah! There they come! Yeah! Yeah!” And they came, the bearskin drum-major leading the band, Twirling his silver-balled baton with turkey-cock pomp, The cornet-blowers, the ranks. The drum-major was fine, But the little boys thought the captain was even finer, He looked just like a captain out of a book With his sword and his shoulderstraps and his discipline-face. He wasn’t just Henry Fairfield, he was a captain, —Henry Fairfield worried about his sword, Hoping to God that he wouldn’t drop his sword, And wondering hotly whether his discipline-face Really looked disciplined or only peevish— “Yeah! There they come! There’s Jack! There’s Charlie! Yeah! Yeah!” The color-guard with the stiff, new flapping flag, And the ranks and the ranks and the ranks, the amateur Blue, wavering ranks, in their ill-fitting tight coats, Shoulders galled already by their new guns, —They were three-months’ men, they had drilled in civilian clothes Till a week ago—“There’s Charlie! There’s Hank, yeah, yeah!” “On to Richmond, boys! Three cheers for Abe Lincoln! Three cheers for the boys! Three groans for old Jeff Davis And the dirty Rebs!” “We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour-apple tree!”

Jack Ellyat, marching, saw between blue shoulders A blur of faces. They all were faces he knew, Old Mrs. Cobb with her wart and her Paisley shawl, Little George Freeman, the slim Tucker girls, All of them cheering and shouting—and all of them strange Suddenly, different, faces he’d never seen. Faces somehow turned into one crowd-face. His legs went marching along all right but they felt Like somebody else’s legs, his mind was sucked dry. It was real, they were going away, the town was cheering them. Henry Fairfield was marching ahead with his sword. Just as he’d thought about it a thousand times, These months—but it wasn’t the way that he’d thought about it. “On to Richmond! On to Richmond! On to Richmond!”

There were Mother and Father and Jane and the house. Jane was waving a flag. He laughed and called to them. But his voice was stiff in his throat, not like his real voice. This, everything, it was too quick, too crowded, not Phaëton Charging his snarling horses at a black sea, But a numb, hurried minute with legs that marched Mechanically, feeling nothing at all. The white crowd-face—the sweat on the red seamed neck Of the man ahead—“On to Richmond!”—blue shoulders bobbing— Flags—cheering—somebody kissed him—Ellen Baker— She was crying—wet mouth of tears—didn’t want her to kiss him— Why did she want to—the station—halt—Mother and Jane. The engineer were a flag in his coat-lapel. The engine had “On to Richmond!” chalked all over it. Nothing to say now—Mother looks tired to death— I wish I weren’t going—no, I’m glad that I am— The damn band’s playing “John Brown’s Body” again, I wish they’d stop it!—I wish to God we could start— There—close up, men!—oh my God, they’ve let Ned out! I told them for God’s sake to lock him up in the cellar, But they’ve let him out—maybe he got out by himself— He’s got too much sense—“No, down, Ned! Down, good dog! Down, I tell you!—” “Goodbye, boys! Goodbye! We’ll hang Jeff Davis!”

The engine squealed, the packed train started to move. Ned wanted to come, but they wouldn’t let him come. They had to kick him away, he couldn’t see why.

In another column, footsore Curly Hatton Groaned at the thought of marching any more. His legs weren’t built for marching and they knew it, Butterball-legs under a butterball-body. The plump good-tempered face with its round eyes Blue and astonished as a china-doll’s, Stared at the road ahead and hated it Because there was so much of it ahead And all of it so dry. He didn’t mind The rest so much. He didn’t even mind Being the one sure necessary joke Of the whole regiment. He’d always been A necessary joke—fat people were. Fat babies always were supposed to laugh. Fat little boys had fingers poked at them. And, even with the road, and being fat, You had a good time in this funny war, Considering everything, and one thing most.

His mind slipped back two months. He saw himself In the cool room at Weatherby’s Retreat Where all the girls were sewing the new star In the new flag for the first volunteers. He hadn’t thought of fighting much before, He was too easy-going. If Virginia Wanted secession, that was her affair. It seemed too bad to break the Union up After some seventy years of housekeeping. But he could understand the way you’d feel If you were thin and angry at the Yanks. He knew a lot of Yankees that he liked, But then he liked most people, on the whole Although most girls and women made him shy. He loved the look of them and the way they walked, He loved their voices and their little sweet mouths, But something always seemed to hold him back, When he was near them. He was too fat, too friendly, Too comfortable for dreams, too easy-shy. The porcelain dolls stood on the mantelpiece, Waiting such slim and arrant cavaliers As porcelain dolls must have to make them proud, They had no mercy for fat Cupidons, Not even Lucy, all the years before, And Lucy was the porcelain belle of the world! And so when she said. And he couldn’t believe At first. But she was silver and fire and steel That day of the new stars and the new flag, Fire and bright steel for the invading horde And silver for the men who drove them off, And so she sewed him in her flag and heart: Though even now, he couldn’t believe she had In spite of all the letters and the socks And kissing him before he went away. But it was so—the necessary joke Made into a man at last, a man in love And loved by the most porcelain belle of the world. And he was ready to march to the world’s end And fight ten million Yanks to keep it so.

“Oh God, after we’re married—the cool night Over the garden—and Lucy sitting there In her blue dress while the big stars come out.”

His face was funny with love and footsore pride, The man beside him saw it, gave a laugh, “Curly’s thinking it’s time for a julep, boys! Hot work for fat men, Curly!”

The crows fly over the Henry House, through the red sky of evening, cawing, Judith Henry, bedridden, watches them through the clouded glass of old sight. (July is hot in Virginia—a parched, sun-leathered farmer sawing Dry sticks with a cicada-saw that creaks all the lukewarm night.)

But Judith Henry’s hands are cool in spite of all midsummer’s burning, Cool, muted and frail with age like the smoothness of old yellow linen, the cool touch of old, dulled rings. Her years go past her in bed like falling waters and the waters of a millwheel turning, And she is not ill content to lie there, dozing and calm, remembering youth, to the gushing of those watersprings.

She has known Time like the cock of red dawn and Time like a tired clock slowing; She has seen so many faces and bodies, young and then old, so much life, so many patterns of death and birth. She knows that she must leave them soon. She is not afraid to flow with that river’s flowing. But the wrinkled earth still hangs at her sufficed breast like a weary child, she is unwilling to go while she still has milk for the earth.

She will go in her sleep, most likely, she has the sunk death-sleep of the old already, (War-bugles by the Potomac, you cannot reach her ears with your brass lyric, piercing the crowded dark.) It does not matter, the farm will go on, the farm and the children bury her in her best dress, the plow cut its furrow, steady, (War-horses of the Shenandoah, why should you hurry so fast to tramp the last ashy fire from so feeble and retired a spark?)

There is nothing here but a creek and a house called the Henry House, a farm and a bedridden woman and people with country faces. There is nothing for you here. And La Haye Sainte was a quiet farm and the mile by it a quiet mile. And Lexington was a place to work in like any one of a dozen dull, little places. And they raised good crops at Blenheim till the soldiers came and spoiled the crops for a while.

The red evening fades into twilight, the crows have gone to their trees, the slow, hot stars are emerging. It is cooler now on the hill—and in the camps it is cooler, where the untried soldiers find their bivouac hard. Where, from North and South, the blind wrestlers of armies converge on the forgotten house like the double pincers of an iron claw converging. And Johnston hurries his tired brigades from the Valley, to bring them up in time before McDowell can fall on Beauregard.

The congressmen came out to see Bull Run, The congressmen who like free shows and spectacles. They brought their wives and carriages along, They brought their speeches and their picnic-lunch, Their black constituent-hats and their devotion: Some even brought a little whiskey, too, (A little whiskey is a comforting thing For congressmen in the sun, in the heat of the sun.) The bearded congressmen with orator’s mouths, The fine, clean-shaved, Websterian congressmen, Come out to see the gladiator’s show Like Iliad gods, wrapped in the sacred cloud Of Florida-water, wisdom and bay-rum, Of free cigars, democracy and votes, That lends such portliness to congressmen. (The gates fly wide, the bronze troop marches out Into the stripped and deadly circus-ring, “Ave, Caesar!” the cry goes up, and shakes The purple awning over Caesar’s seat) “Ave, Caesar! Ave, O Congressmen, We who are about to die, Salute you, congressmen! Eleven States, New York, Rhode Island, Maine, Connecticut, Michigan and the gathered West, Salute you, congressmen! The red-fezzed Fire-Zouaves, flamingo-bright, Salute you, congressmen! The raw boys still in their civilian clothes, Salute you, congressmen! The second Wisconsin in its homespun grey, Salutes you, congressmen! The Garibaldi Guards in cocksfeather hats, Salute you, congressmen! The Second Ohio with their Bedouin-caps, Salutes you, congressmen! Sherman’s brigade, grey-headed Heintzlemann, Ricketts’ and Griffin’s doomed and valiant guns, The tough, hard-bitten regulars of Sykes Who covered the retreat with the Marines, Burnside and Porter, Willcox and McDowell, All the vast, unprepared, militia-mass Of boys in red and yellow Zouave pants, Who carried peach-preserves inside their kits And dreamt of being generals overnight; The straggling companies where every man Was a sovereign and a voter—the slack regiments Where every company marched a different step; The clumsy and unwieldy-new brigades Not yet distempered into battle-worms; The whole, huge, innocent army, ready to fight But only half-taught in the tricks of fighting, Ready to die like picture-postcard boys While fighting still had banners and a sword And just as ready to run in blind mob-panic, Salutes you with a vast and thunderous cry, Ave, Caesar, ave, O congressmen, Ave, O Iliad gods who forced the fight! You bring your carriages and your picnic-lunch To cheer us in our need. You come with speeches, Your togas smell of heroism and bay-rum. You are the people and the voice of the people And, when the fight is done, your carriages Will bear you safely, through the streaming rout Of broken troops, throwing their guns away. You come to see the gladiator’s show, But from a high place, as befits the wise: You will not see the long windrows of men Strewn like dead pears before the Henry House Or the stone-wall of Jackson breathe its parched Devouring breath upon the failing charge, Ave, Caesar, ave, O congressmen, Cigar-smoke wraps you in a godlike cloud, And if you are not to depart from us As easily and divinely as you came, It hardly matters. Fighting Joe Hooker once Said with that tart, unbridled tongue of his That made so many needless enemies, “Who ever saw a dead cavalryman?” The phrase Stings with a needle sharpness, just or not, But even he was never heard to say, “Who ever saw a dead congressman?” And yet, he was a man with a sharp tongue.

The day broke, hot and calm. In the little farm-houses That are scattered here and there in that rolling country Of oak and rail-fence, crooked creeks and second-growth pine, The early-risers stand looking out of the door At the long dawn-shadows for a minute or two —Shadows are always cool—but the blue-glass sky Is fusing with heat even now, heat that prickles the hairs On the back of your hand. They sigh and turn back to the house. “Looks like a scorcher today, boys!” They think already Of the cool jug of vinegar-water down by the hedge.

Judith Henry wakened with the first light, She had the short sleep of age, and the long patience. She waited for breakfast in vague, half-drowsy wonderment At various things. Yesterday some men had gone by And stopped for a drink of water. She’d heard they were soldiers. She couldn’t be sure. It had seemed to worry the folks But it took more than soldiers and such to worry her now. Young people always worried a lot too much. No soldiers that had any sense would fight around here. She’d had a good night. Today would be a good day.

A mile and a half away, before the Stone Bridge, A Union gun opened fire.

Six miles away, McDowell had planned his battle And planned it well, as far as such things can be planned— A feint at one point, a flanking march at another To circle Beauregard’s left and crumple it up. There were Johnston’s eight thousand men to be reckoned with But Patterson should be holding them, miles away, And even if they slipped loose from Patterson’s fingers The thing might still be done. If you take a flat map And move wooden blocks upon it strategically, The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should. The science of war is moving live men like blocks. And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment. But it takes time to mold your men into blocks And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush, They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries, And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them. —A string of blocks curling smoothly around the left Of another string of blocks and crunching it up— It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind, But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow To move, when they start they take too long on the way— The General loses his stars and the block-men die In unstrategic defiance of martial law Because still used to just being men, not block-parts. McDowell was neither a fool nor a fighting fool; He knew his dice, he knew both armies unready, But congressmen and nation wanted a battle And he felt their hands on his shoulders, forcing his play. He knew well enough when he played that he played for his head As Beauregard and Johnston were playing for theirs, So he played with the skill he had—and does not lie Under a cupolaed gloom on Riverside Drive. Put Grant in his place that day and with those same dice, Grant might have done little better. Wherefore, now, Irvin McDowell, half-forgotten general, Who tried the game and found no luck in the game And never got the chance to try it again But did not backbite the gamblers who found more luck in it Then or later in double-edged reminiscences; If any laurel can grow in the sad-colored fields Between Bull Run and Cub Run and Cat Hairpin Bend You should have a share of it for your hardworking ghost Because you played as you could with your cold, forced dice And neither wasted your men like the fighting fools Nor posed as an injured Napoleon twenty years later. Meanwhile, McDowell watched his long flanking column File by, on the Warrentown pike, in the first dawn-freshness. “Gentlemen, that’s a big force,” he said to his staff.