covered by a hat that matched his suit—
Mama would have bought him that and made him
wear it in the sun. He must have thought
she would see him buried in that suit, and now
sudden disbelief showed in his gaunt face.
Some of my sisters stayed at William’s ranch
and let their children ride the horses. Papa
wanted me at the house in town, and said
he’d like to hear me read to him again,
which of course I did: Whitman on the war,
Longfellow and Lowell and Trumbull Stickney—
he liked that line of Stickney’s on the rain.
Weather for a burial could not be found
at Pomeroy in summer: dusty blue
rose over the steeple and the grassy buttes.
“We brought nothing into this world, and it
is certain we can carry nothing out.”
The minister was old, and his voice faint:
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills . . .”
The rustle of children filled the wooden pews,
and I heard their shoes on the floor, tapping
and scraping the Lord’s floorboards, and I thought,
This is life going on, this is the form
of memory, the way our voices will remain.
I have avoided life too many years.
I have wanted to disappear, and now
at last I am ready for my life to come.
Rat Hell
Lt. Mitchell:
The winter of 1863 and ’4
was hard on all the men in Libby Prison.
Men from Gettysburg and Chickamauga
huddled on the upper floors, but when
we cooked or had our dead to carry down
the Rebs let us tarry on the ground floor.
By Christmas we were planning our escape.
Maybe you’ve heard of Colonel Rose’s tunnel.
I was one of the fifteen men who dug,
sworn to an oath we would not tell the others
for fear the word would spread. If officers
escaped we might release the thirty thousand
private soldiers on Belle Isle, and then march
any way we could for the Union lines.
It was almost more than I could do to wait.
I knew a Sergeant Brown of the 25th
Virginia, came on duty at midnight, who
gave us tobacco and a morning paper.
A few years ago in Wallace, Idaho,
I met a lady in a bank who said,
“Lieutenant Mitchell, my father’s an old soldier.
I want you two old veterans to meet.”
I was in Wallace visiting a daughter.
One night this lady brung her father by
and I thought him familiar by his bearing,
and he said, “Yes, Lieutenant Mitchell, I
have given you tobacco many a time.
I was near court-martialed once for giving
a flask of whiskey to one of your wounded men.”
If it wasn’t Sergeant Brown! I visited
his home, and several old Confederates
come by, and we had a wonderful time.
We had a Southern meal in Idaho,
then cigars, and Sergeant Brown’s daughter played
old songs we all knew on the piano,
as if no war had ever come between us.
There was a basement in the Libby Prison
called “Rat Hell,” which was where we tunneled from.
In the Chickamauga Room we loosened floorboards,
slipped into the first-floor kitchen at night
and made a hidden hole behind a cook stove.
One of the men had rope and fixed a ladder,
sailor-fashion, for us to climb down on.
We dug out from the east wall of Rat Hell,
hoping to make it past a vacant lot
to a shed attached to a towing company,
our one tool the knife I’d hid in my boot,
a knife that still remains in my possession,
broken and mended, worn toothpick thin.
A hundred men depended on it once.
While digging, we could hear the guard above
in the lot call, “Three o’clock and all is well,”
and had to keep from laughing, though the work
was rough and the men who dug were all half sick
from the stink of the box sewer next to us.
By day we kept a watchman concealed in ricks
the Rebs had stacked below, and all day long
and gnaw his flesh. One fellow used my knife
to kill a rat and baked it nice and brown
and said he never tasted sweeter meat,
it was just as good as squirrel.
Once the tunnel
broke a small hole into the vacant lot,
so I crawled in to see what could be done.
I’m telling you, to crawl under the earth,
smelling a stink that nearly made you sick,
inching yourself along by pulling roots
and wriggling like a worm inside a grave,
you can’t lie still to think of smothering
but let your mind go blank and concentrate
on the job, like it’s a piece of carpentry.
When I poked through to moonlight in the lot,
wearing a burlap sack we used for work
to spare our uniforms, I knew at once
I had to hide that hole. I scraped some mud
from the ground above and packed it with my blade,
making the airshaft look like a rat burrow—
so I hoped. Anyway, they never found us.
But I come out all mud from head to foot,
knowing I had caught a chill. Captain Clark
and Major Hamilton helped clean me up.
I donned my uniform and climbed upstairs;
by the time I found my blanket I was sick,
my skin all clammy and my forehead hot,
and knew that I had been that sick for days.
I had bad dreams (and I am not a man
who dreams) of water boiling up from down
below, a shaft of moonlight turning it
to blood. I dreamed of cannon fire. One. Two.
The guns pounded like that. One. Two. Three. Four.
I saw my first-born buried on the farm
and prayed that I would live to see my wife.
I started coughing blood out of my lungs.
The rebel doctor said I had pneumonia.
When I heard that I thought I was a goner,
tried to sleep and stop the dreams from coming,
but when your fever’s high like that, the mind
plays tricks on you. My breath came in great heaves
and the strangest dreams kept floating in my head.
The night they finished digging I recall
a dream of Mrs. Mitchell. As you know
she liked to keep things neat, and in my dream
she said I looked a mess. “Now Mitch,” she said,
“you straighten out or I won’t marry you.”
I tell you, the woman never looked so fierce.
She frightened me so much I had to live.
“Now Mitch.” It was the voice of Colonel Rose,
the night of February 9th. The boys
had thrown their blankets over me, he said.
“Now Mitch, this is goodbye. I hate to leave
a man behind, but you know we can’t wait.”
He looked a kindly bear with his great beard,
and I said I was glad to see them go.
More than a hundred men escaped that night.
The Rebs arrested their own guards, and would
have shot the bunch of them, but someone found
the tunnel, made a Neg
ro boy crawl through
and saw where he come out inside the shed.
When they assembled all the men to count,
I was carried down cocooned in blankets,
and carried back, still moaning in my dreams.
The Children’s Hour
Mrs. Gresham:
This morning on the radio I heard
a robbery on Rosecrans Avenue
in Hawthorne got some old gentleman killed,
all for fifty dollars. And then I thought,
“Rosecrans Avenue,” and it all came back,
how my Papa had fought in Rosecrans’ army
at Chickamauga in 1863.
And when I was a girl I used to sneak
into the grown-ups’ room, invisible
behind a chair, and listen to his stories.
Before he died a fellow wrote them down.
I have them in a box somewhere, with all
the letters Howard sent when we were courting
in Santa Rosa after Mama died.
No one ever wrote down Mama’s stories.
And here we are in 1954.
I’m the last of the Mohicans, just about.
Ida died not long after Papa did.
Beatrice died in 1922.
Williams was killed by a horse in 1930.
Agnes died in a car wreck in Seattle.
Olive’s living still in Pomeroy
and likes to call me on the telephone
to ask about the weather. She came down
to visit not long after Howard died
and went to see the houses of the stars.
My nieces and nephews are all grown up
and like to see Aunt Maggie in LA.
They say to grow old without children is
a curse, and sometimes I believe it’s true—
to have so much to say and no one here
to say it to. I have a niece who comes
and takes me for a drive out by the sea
and shows me how the city’s spreading out
clear to the mountains.
When we first came here
the place seemed almost as wild as Big Sur.
Howard had the store in Bakersfield
till 1928 when he retired
and we moved to Inglewood. All those years
we saw our chances for a family
go by until there was no chance at all.
Our baby didn’t live beyond four months.
I tried to summon up my old belief
or find some verse that would relieve the pain,
but life won’t always come when it is called.
We heard about the store in Bakersfield
and Howard saw the move would do us good
and I said, “Yes, my people always move
when staying in one place is killing them.”
In Inglewood we used to have a shop
where we sold flowers, and I remember watching
young men stammer over roses for their girls
and thinking maybe I had let it all
go by too quickly. I had some regrets,
wondering if old age would be as dry
and dusty as the hills.
Depression, war, rations and hard times.
Howard wouldn’t let me dwell in the dark.
That’s what we had work and laughter for,
he said, to pull us out and land us on
our feet, and keep our dead from sinking us.
He was like Papa in that way, knowing
always how to plant his feet on the ground.
The other day my niece, Alyssa, brought
her two young girls along and we had dinner
near Pacific Avenue, then drove out
to the beach where the girls could have a swim.
They were such lovely things, with their long hair
and much more freedom than I ever knew,
the way they flirted with the boys out there.
Alyssa rambled on about her job
selling real estate after her divorce,
and while I listened, all at once I heard
the hoofbeats of the surf come pounding in.
I thought it was the voice of memory
crashing and flowing down across the earth,
and underneath, like roots that probe for water,
and I was moved by everything that moved.
Eighty Acres
Lt. Mitchell:
In 1866 my son was born,
William Thomas, partly named for the Rock
of Chickamauga. My father, getting old,
wanted me to stay on and care for him,
so I built a good frame house next to his
and worked our eighty acres in Edgar County,
and raised my children up with Mrs. Mitchell.
We’d cattle and fowl, corn and timothy.
The children walked two miles to school, and had
a fine teacher who taught them proper speech.
I like people, as you know. Anyone
passing by was invited in to dinner.
One time a walleyed man and his daughter passed
and stayed for three years, helping on the farm.
The daughter taught my girls to sing folk songs:
“Froggie Went A-Courtin’,” “Little Brown Jug.”
In 1876 my uncles come
to see my father once before he died.
He was ninety then, but when they arrived
he rose from bed he was so glad to see them.
My father died in 1878.
Mother had passed on twenty years before.
I was damn near fifty myself, and saw
it might be my last chance to move out West.
This country’s always on the move. Sometimes
if you don’t want to carry a great weight
you drop it and walk away. America’s
made up by those who want to change themselves—
my father did the same when he come out
from Boone County, Kentucky, years before.
Now my wife was thirty-nine, but healthy.
we sold the farm with all our furniture
at auction, tools I sometimes wish I’d kept,
loaded up our five daughters and one son
and took the train from Paris, Illinois.
That was the last my wife saw of her folks.
They kept me seven months in Libby Prison,
part of the time so sick I thought I’d die,
the rest malnourished, hardly able to walk.
The Rebs recaptured nearly half the men
who crawled out through the tunnel. Some they kept
below in cages where they fed on rats.
The whole business was a bit discouraging.
The more the war went on the meaner it got,
and we were glad to hear the Union guns
start in on Richmond. One day a Reb guard
come upstairs where we were sitting, and said,
“What are you boys doing?” He looked half crazed.
I told him that as far as I could tell
we were prisoners of war. He was new,
just a kid, looking at us lying there:
“You fellas ever get anything to eat?”
I said we had a ration every day
and it was pretty good but not enough.
There was a bucket of beans and some cornbread
brought up, and the boy look at it and said,
“Is that the kind of stuff you have in here?”
He said he wouldn’t touch it for it was full
of worms. I told him, “I don’t see no worms.”
I ate my ration, but the rebel boy
wouldn’t eat. Next day I guess he was hungry
and he said he couldn’t see no worms either.
The Confederates there ate the same rations
we did, just like they were prisoners too.
A whole mess of new pr
isoners arrived,
but Richmond was done for. They lined us up
outside, where I stood a while in the shade.
A chaplain come up and said, “Lieutenant Mitchell,
why don’t you fall in line?” I said the ground
was too rough for me to walk upon. “Why,”
he says, “it’s level as a floor out here.”
But to me the whole city seemed to wobble.
They shipped us first to Macon, Georgia, then
to the jail yard in Charleston, South Carolina,
where we saw Union batteries lobbing shells
into the burning city; so they pulled us out,
giving us rice and cabbage leaves to eat,
to a place called Camp Sorghum, near Columbia.
I don’t mind telling you conditions there was bad.
More sick and crippled men I’d never seen,
and many died. Some days I felt oppressed.
It seemed that if we stayed there we would die.
When I think back to all those muddy graves,
sometimes I recall a line of poetry
my daughter read to me: “O how can it be
that the ground does not sicken?”
The world was sick and winter on its way.
Maybe the Rebs were just too tired to watch us.
One night half a dozen of us bolted,
struck out across a field that once had been
full of cotton, for you could see the rows,
and into trees that scattered water on us.
It was damn foggy and we ran all night
only to find we’d circled back to camp!
So we started the opposite way and come
to a house with a lady out fetching water.
One of the men had a gray suit and went
to her and said he was Confederate,
and she said, “I will divide what I have
with a Confederate soldier,” and gave
him biscuits which he carried back to us.
While he was in the house a sow come by
with four or five pigs. I was accurate
with a rock, but I threw and threw at those pigs
and never hit a one. I couldn’t see
distinctly anymore from months of hunger.
We walked at night without a star for guide
till we saw there was someone on the trail: