A Recent Confederate Victory
A Little Dream-Boy
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
And wake up a little man lying forlorn,
Asleep where his life wanders out of the morn.
Little Boy Blue, blow a merry, sweet note,
Over the pool where the white lilies float,—
Fill out the sails of a little toy boat.
Blow on my dream of a little boy there,—
Blow thro’ his little bark-whistle, and snare
Your breath in a tangle of curly brown hair.
Blow and O blow from your fairy land far,
Blow while my little boy wears a tin star,
And rides a stick-horse to a little boy’s war.
Blow for the brave man my dream-boy would be,
Blow back his tears when he wakes up to see
His knight errant gone and instead—only me.
Little Boy Blue, come blow your horn,
Blow for a little boy lying forlorn,
Asleep where his life wanders out of the morn.
In a small town, every man who has been in the community long enough to become thoroughly known to the townsmen has a place in the human mosaic; that place seldom changes. Occasionally a man is a year in finding his place. The town of Willow Creek located Calhoun Perkins in two days. Wednesday he arrived in town with his son, whom he called “Bud;” Thursday night it was reported that he had been fishing the second time. That settled it. After that the boasting of Perkins about his family in Tennessee and his assertion that he expected to go into business only made the men laugh when Perkins left a group of them. They were not interested in Perkins by the following Saturday; and Monday every man in the town felt that his judgment of a man who would go fishing every day had been handsomely vindicated, when it was learned that Perkins had served in the Confederate army. When Perkins had been in the town three years, the anecdotes illustrating his shiftlessness multiplied, and his name was a synonym for that trait of character known in the vernacular as “no-’count.” In the third spring, after a winter’s tussle with rheumatism, Perkins died. His funeral was of so little importance that none of the corpulent old ladies in black alpaca, holding their handkerchiefs carefully folded in their hands, came panting across the town to attend it. No women came at all. And the Perkins boy stood by stolidly while the dry clods were rumbling upon the pine box in the grave. The boy wished to be alone, and he would not sit on the seat with the driver. He wiped a little moisture from his eyes, and rode to town with his feet hanging out of the back of the wagon that had held the coffin.
When the wagon came to the thick of the town, Bud Perkins quietly slid to the ground, and joined a group of afternoon idlers who were playing marbles on the south side of a livery barn. Here and there in the group a boy said: “H’lo, Bud,” when the Perkins boy joined the coterie, but many of the youngsters, being unfamiliar with the etiquette of mourning, were silent, and played on at their game. When the opportunity came the Perkins boy put a marble in the ring without saying a word. He went back to “taws,” and “lagged for goes,” with the others. He spoke only when he was addressed. A black sense of desolation lowered over him, and he could not join in the ejaculations and responses of the game. His luck was bad, and he lost marble after marble. In an hour, when the sun was still in the south, he withdrew from the game and sat alone against the barn, drawing figures on the earth with a broken piece of hoop-iron. The boy could not fight off the thought of the empty home waiting for him down by the river. He saw, as he sat there, all the furniture, his father’s clothes hanging at the foot of the bed, the stove in disorder; and then he realized that in the whole town not one hand was held out to him. He was a child, yet the heartlessness of it all cut him to the quick. This thought overwhelmed him, again and again, each time with more agonizing force, like an increasing wave, and as one flood washed over him with fiercer passion than the others, the boy rose hurriedly, ran around the barn, and flung himself upon a pile of hay. There he gave way to a storm of sobs. One of the group, who had been watching him more closely than the others, soon withdrew from the game, and going in the opposite direction from that taken by Bud Perkins, came tiptoeing around the haystack.
The paroxysm of sobs had ceased, and Bud was lying face downward as if asleep. He heard the step, but pretended not to hear it. He felt some one pressing the hay beside him. He knew who it was, and the two boys lay upon the hay without speaking. The Perkins boy turned his head away from the new-comer; but try as he would, Bud could not keep from sniffling. In a few moments the other boy tried to roll the Perkins boy over. It was a vain attempt. Then the sobbing began anew. But it was a short attack, and, at length, the other boy said: “Bu-ud?” Again he said, “Bu-ud?” There came no response. “O, Bud—I got somethin’ to tell you!” The sniffling continued, and the other boy kept on pleading. “Ah, Bud, come on; I got somethin’ real good,” he said. Silence answered. The teasing went on: “Say, Bud, I won back all your marbles.” That was repeated twice. Then a hand went over toward the other boy. He filled it with marbles, and it went back. Another silence was followed by a rustle of hay, and a dirty face turned over, and a voice said through a pathetic, apologetic smile: “This old nicked glassey ain’t mine.” The two heads nestled together, and four eyes gazed at the blue sky and the white clouds for a long time. It was the Perkins boy who spoke: “Say, Piggy, I bet you’d cry, too, if you was me.”
Piggy wormed his arm under the hay around the Perkins boy’s neck, as he asked, “What you goin’ to do to-night, Bud?”
“I dunno. Why?” replied Bud.
“Well, I’m comin’ out to stay all night. They’re goin’ to have a party at our house, and ma said I could.”
Bud drew himself up slowly; then threw himself with a quick spring on top of Piggy, and the two began to wrestle like kittens in the hay.
Even while Piggy Pennington and Bud Perkins were sitting at dusk on the back-porch steps of the Pennington house, eating turkey-wings which Mrs. Pennington had given to them, and devouring ham sandwiches which Piggy had taken from the big platterful in the pantry, looking the hired girl boldly in the face as he did it, even then the preparations for the Pennington entertainment were progressing indoors. The parlor, the sitting-room, and the dining-room, which had been decorated during the warm afternoon with borrowed palms and with roses from the neighbor’s vines, were being ventilated. Windows were rising, and doors opening. The velvety air of May was fluttering everywhere. And there was so much life in it, that when Mrs. Pennington saw the two boys pass out of the alley gate, she saw the Perkins boy grab her son’s hat and run away whooping, while Piggy followed, throwing clods at his companion’s legs and feet. She thought, as she turned to her turkey-slicing, that the Perkins child was not taking his father’s death “very hard.” But she did not know that the boyish whoop was the only thing that saved him from sobbing, as he left the home where he saw such a contrast to his own. How could a woman carrying the responsibilities of the social honor of the Methodist church in Willow Creek have time to use her second sight?
The guests at the Pennington house that evening divided the honors equally between the new preacher, for whom the party was made, and Miss Morgan, whose last niece had married and left her but two days before. Most of the guests had met the new preacher; but none of them—save one or two of her intimate friends—could know how the lonely little old woman was faring in the cottage whence one by one her adopted birds had flown. They called her “little Miss Morgan” in the town, and the story of her life of devotion to her brothers’ and sisters’ children was familiar to every one about her. For ten years she had lived in Willow Creek caring for her brothers’ orphans. She came to the community from the East, and found what she brought—culture, friends, and kindness at every turn. The children whom she had cared for had grown up, filed through the town’s real estate college, and then mating had left the little spinster alone.
At the Penningtons’ that evening she was cheerful enough—so cheerful, indeed, in her little bird-like way, that many of those who talked with her fancied that the resourceful little body was beyond the reach of petty grief. The modest, almost girlish smile beamed through the wrinkles of fifty autumns as brightly that evening at the Penningtons’ as the town had ever seen it. From her place in a high-backed chair in the corner, Miss Morgan, in her shy, self-deprecatory way, shed her faint benediction about her as she had done for a decade. There was a sweetness in Miss Morgan’s manner that made the old men gallant to her in a boyish way; and the wives, who loved her, were proud of their husbands’ chivalry. During the evening at the Penningtons’ the conversation found much of its inspiration in the Memorial Day services on the morrow and in anecdotes about the thriftlessness of Calhoun Perkins. Memorial Day was one of the holidays which Miss Morgan kept in her heart. Then she decorated each year a lover’s grave—a grave she had never seen. The day had been sacred in her heart to the memory of a spring night, and the moon and the lilacs and the blue uniform of a soldier. Upon other days she waved this memory away with a gay little sigh, and would have none of it. But on Memorial Day she bade the vision come into her heart and bide a while.
But she did not open the door there at the party. They said to one another, going home that night: “Well, I don’t see’s she minds it a bit. Isn’t that pluck for you—not lonesome, not grumpy—just the same little body she was when we first saw her. Well—I know one thing—I couldn’t do it.”
As for Miss Morgan, while she was walking home that night, she was thinking of the women of her age whom she had just left; the romance seemed to be gone completely from their lives, their faces seemed a trifle hard to her, and she was wondering if life would have gone so with her if there had been no Shiloh.
The town clock in the schoolhouse was tolling eleven, as Miss Morgan turned the key in the front door. The night was starry and inviting, and as her house stood among the trees, somewhat back from the street, Miss Morgan did not feel afraid to sit in a porch chair, refreshing herself, before going indoors. The wind brought the odor of the lilacs from the bush at the house corner, and the woman sat drinking in the fragrance. She saw a pair of lovers strolling by, who did not observe her. She could hear the murmur of their voices; she did not try to catch their words. She sat silently dreaming and wondering. Again and again her eyes went to the stars in a vain questioning, and her lips moved. Maybe she was asking “where,” maybe she was asking “why.” As the moments slipped by, the years fell away from her. She had carried her little romance in her heart unsullied by reality. To-night the talk of Memorial Day had brought it all back, and the thrill of other days returned with the odor of the lilacs. She yielded to a vague, crazy notion, and in an impulsive, girlish run she went to the corner of the porch and broke a sprig from the lilac-tree.
Then with a short sigh, that had just the hint of a smile in it, she took the lilac sprig into the house. Perhaps she fancied that no one would see the flowers but she. Maybe the oppressive stillness of the empty house burdened her. Certainly something was heavy upon her, for there was no smile in the sigh that came deeply from her heart, as she locked the door. It must have seemed lonely for Miss Morgan, coming from the crowded parlor, and the questions that her friends asked about her plans may have followed her. Perhaps it was the answer to these questions that kept her awake. She sat by her window and went over and over again the question, what should she do. The wedding that had so recently livened the cottage kept coming to the little old woman’s mind, and with it came the bride. When the other children had gone away, Miss Morgan let them go with her blessing, and was glad of their good fortunes. But this last child to go had been Miss Morgan’s pet. As the lonely spinster sat there she recalled how the child had been moulded by her; how she had fancied the child’s heart was hers, cherishing in it the ideals, the sentiment, the tendernesses that the older heart had held sacred for a lifetime. Miss Morgan recalled how she and the girl had mingled their tears over the first long dress that their hands made, knowing, each of them, that it meant the coming of the parting. As she looked into the awful vistas of the stars, the woman knew that she was one of God’s creatures, all alone—without one soul that she might even signal to.
The word “alone” came to her so strangely that she repeated it in a whisper. Its sound touched some string within her bosom, and she put her head upon the open window sill and wept, sobbing the word “alone” until sleep soothed her.
The morning sunlight helped Miss Morgan to put aside the problems of the night; she hummed an old war tune as she went about her work, but it did not lift the silence from the house. The rooms that a few days before had been vocal with life, were so dead that the clock ticking in the parlor might be heard in the kitchen. The canary’s cheerful song echoed shrilly through the silent place. Miss Morgan said to him, “Dickey, Dickey, for gracious sake, keep still—you’ll drive me wild.” But her voice only increased the bird’s vehemence, and the throbbing in her ears brought on a headache. When she put a paper over the cage, the clock annoyed her. She was irritated by a passing boy whistling “The Girl I Left Behind Me” with all his might, but sadly off the key. She went to the window and saw Bud Perkins.
She did not know that the child had just arisen from a cheering breakfast at the Penningtons’—even if she knew how much a hearty breakfast cheers up any boy. But the spectacle of the orphan facing the world so bravely moved Miss Morgan. She felt a sudden wave of pity, and with it came the conviction of guilt—that she had been selfish while the boy was suffering. She had heard at the Penningtons’ that the county would probably take charge of him; but she recalled what she had heard in its full meaning to the child only when she saw him turn the corner, going toward the centre of the town. There was a feeling of keen joy in her heart as she realized that she was not useless in the world, and she went about her morning’s work with the lightest heart in all Willow Creek beating in her breast.
Bud Perkins had seen but two Memorial Days in Kansas—and upon each of these days he and his father had gone fishing. The boy knew it was a soldiers’ holiday, and from Piggy Pennington Bud had found out what were the purposes of the day. He knew that his father had been a soldier—a soldier on the wrong side. But he did not know that graves of Confederate soldiers were not included in the day’s sacrament.
“Mornin’, Captain,” said Bud to a slight, gray-haired old man, stooping over a basket of flowers in a vacant store-room in the main street of the town.
When the man replied kindly the boy took heart to say: “You must be kind o’ runnin’ things here, I guess.”
“I’m in charge of the flowers, Bud, just for to-day,” replied Captain Meyers, who did not wish to seem as vain-glorious as he was.
“Goin’ to put flowers on all the soldiers’ graves—are you?” queried Bud. The elder replied that the Post aimed to do so.
“Did you know my dad was a soldier?” was the boy’s next question.
The captain’s heart was pricked when he saw what was in Bud’s mind. The captain knew what the next query would be. He was a gentle man and kind. So, looking about to see if any comrades of a sterner sect than he were in hearing before replying, he said: “You mustn’t feel bad now, Buddie, but it’s only them on the Union side—whose graves we decorate to-day. I wouldn’t mind, if I was you.” Captain Meyers was not a diplomat, and he said the words poorly.
In an instant the boy’s eyes filled with tears. They dried in anger before they reached his flushed cheek. He clinched his hands, turned, and walked hotly out of the room. In the door he paused, whirled around, and cried,—
“Yank! Yank! Rick-stick-stank!
High ball, low ball, dirty-faced Yank!”
Then he ran wildly down the street to escape the infuriated mob which he believed would pursue him. The knowledge that he was cut off from the day’s festivities made him wince with pain as he ran. Not until he came out upon the road across the prairie did he stop—breathless, worn out, crying. During the next two hours the boy wandered on the prairie and in the woods gathering wild flowers. By the time the exercises in the Willow Creek opera house were finished and the procession was formed, Bud Perkins had a heaping armful of field blossoms. He was coming over the hill to the cemetery when he heard the band strike up the “Dead March” down in the village. His impulse was to run away. He checked himself and walked across the place, past the shafts and monuments, toward his father’s grave under the hill furthest from the town. In the middle of the cemetery the boy stopped. His eyes were caught by a marble lamb over a child’s grave. The inscription he read was “Mary Pennington, aged two years, three months, and ten days.” The date line upon the stone, told of a year that had passed before the Perkins boy was born. He gazed at it a moment, and put there a handful of his choicest flowers. Looking up he saw some early visitor to the silent place stepping from behind a monument. Bud had scattered his flowers before he saw that he was being watched; so he pretended to hunt for stones to throw. He gathered several, and peppered them at shafts and at birds.
Bud Perkins walked to the freshly-made mound where his father lay, and scattered his posies over it. The village “cornet band” was coming nearer and nearer to the hill. The boy curbed a temptation to leave. He walked lazily about the grave until the Memorial Day procession had entered the big iron gate a hundred yards away. Calhoun Perkins’s grave could not be seen from the plot where the townspeople had gathered. The boy sat down with his back to the crowd. He did not know how near the people were to him. He felt that they were staring down, perhaps laughing, at him. So he tried to assume a careless air. He picked up clods and tossed them at adjacent objects. Tiring of this, he chewed the grass stems, and sucked the nectar from the corolla of wild honeysuckles. But this did not keep the lump out of his throat, and it did not subdue the turmoil of sorrow in his heart at the thought that his father was scorned in the town. Once his small frame shook with a strangled sob, but immediately afterward he threw an unusually big clod at a post near by. He had been hearing voices and footsteps on the brow of the hill for several minutes. Occasionally he picked out a familiar voice, and once he heard Mealy Jones call his name. He did not answer, but a woman standing a little further up the hill asked Mealy, “Who is it, Harold?” “Bud,” said the youngster.
“Bud who?” asked the woman’s voice.
The Perkins boy heard the dialogue. He was sitting down, throwing clods into the air, and catching them as they fell, and this appeared to be an engrossing task.
“Bud Perkins. He’s settin’ down by his pa’s grave,” replied the boy on the hill. The child by the fresh mound pictured himself as the other boy saw him, and his eyes brimmed over with tears. He seemed so desolate.
“Why don’t you go to him?” insisted the woman, coming nearer.
“Oh, Miss Morgan,” said the boy whom she addressed, lowering his voice, but not lowering it sufficiently, “Miss Morgan, you don’t know him”
Just then Bud was startled by a footstep at his side. He looked up and saw Piggy Pennington, who had a big bunch of roses in his hands, and who, seeing the stained face of his friend, said in embarrassed confusion: “Ma sent ’em.” Piggy put the roses by the new pine head-board, and lay down—lying across his companion’s feet.
“Get off me,” said Bud, when he had treated himself to a long, trembling sniff, after a painful silence. “I ain’t no sidewalk.”
When Piggy went to get his flying hat, he said under his breath to Bud, “Wipe your face, quick; some one’s comin’.” Then he stood awkwardly at Bud’s back and shielded him. Piggy spoke first to the little woman, now only a few paces away.
“H’lo, Miss Morgan; lookin’ for old Tom? He’s buried off to the right yonder.”
“No, my dear. I want to speak to Henry Perkins,” replied the woman, beaming the kindest of smiles into the guardsman’s face. He stepped from the line between Miss Morgan and the Perkins boy, not sure that the intruder would find a welcome. Bud was glaring steadfastly at the earth, between his hands and knees. Piggy said, “Bu-ud?”
“Whut,” was the response.
“Miss Morgan wants to talk with you,” replied Piggy.
“What’s she want?” inquired the Perkins boy, with his head still between his knees.
Miss Morgan had been coming nearer and nearer to him as the dialogue had progressed. She was standing in front of Bud when he added, “I ain’t done nothin’.”
Miss Morgan bent down and touched his head with her hands. Piggy was shaking his head warningly at her with much earnestness. He feared that such a feminine proceeding would anger his comrade. When Miss Morgan sat upon the ground beside Bud and took one of his hands, stroking it without the boy’s resisting, Piggy Pennington was dumb with wonder. He could not hear the gentle breaking of the agonizing lump in the child’s throat. Even little Miss Morgan could not see the tears that had burst over the brims of the orphan’s eyes. His face was averted. She stroked his hand, and snuggled closer to him. Then she heard a faint whimper, and her heart could stand the strain no longer; she leaned upon the child’s shoulder, and mourned with him. The Pennington boy did not comprehend it all; but as he looked politely away from his friends, he felt the moisture in his eyes. He wiped it away quickly, glancing to see if his weakness had been detected. The woman recovered in a few moments, and arose with the boy’s hand gripping hers warmly. He had felt her tears through his thin clothing, and was conquered.
“Come on, Henry; we’re going now,” said Miss Morgan, and drew the lad up with her hand.
“Whur to?” asked Bud, who knew the answer instinctively.
“Home,” replied the little woman, who knew that the boy knew, and who was sure that he had consented. “Our home—yours and mine.”
The boy arose, still holding her hand, and looked toward the grave with the flowers strewn over it. He gripped her hand tightly—so tightly that it pained her—and sobbed, as he faced away from her: “O pop!”
Then they walked on in silence, till they came up with Piggy, who had gone a few steps ahead. It was Bud who spoke first. He said: “You don’t live far from Piggy’s, do you, Miss Morgan?”
And Piggy Pennington pointed his finger at Bud’s dripping eyes and grinned, while Miss Morgan smiled happily at the clouds.