IV. A SEQUEL OF THE LOST CAUSE
Now, Dad McGuire was old, and bent of form,
Tanned by exposure to the sun and storm;
Of grizzled beard and seam-indented brow,
The furrows traced by Time's remorseless plough;
Hardy and gnarlèd as the mountain oak,
Bent by the hand of Time but still unbroke;
Bowed by the weight of years and labors done,
A man whose course had neared the setting sun;
His face a blending of the calm and sad,
Paternal-looking, so they called him "Dad."
This man, so near his journey's close,
With great deliberation rose,
Coughed once or twice and scratched his nose;
Then, as became a veteran,
Surveyed his hearers and began;
"Since Uncle Jim and Russian Pete
Declared the reasons why their feet
This rugged wilderness have trod,
And left for aye their native sod,
I, too, will recapitulate
That chapter, from my book of fate.
Where Rappahannock's silver stream
Reflects the moon's resplendent beam,
And sheds a mellow lustre o'er
The trees and shrubs that fringe the shore;
Where Nature's lavish hand bestows
The crystal dews and generous showers;
Where lily, hollyhock and rose,
And many-tinted herbs and flowers
Combining, form a floral scene
On background of eternal green;
Where through the solemn night is heard
The warbling plaint of feathered throats,
As whippoorwill and mockingbird
Pour forth their wealth of liquid notes,
While the accompanying breeze
Sighs through the underbrush and trees,
And rippling waters blend their tune,
In salutation to the moon;
Where singing insects, bugs and bees
Mingle their droning harmonies,
With croakings of loquacious frogs
In the adjacent swamps and bogs;
Where from the water, air and ground,
Rises a symphony of sound;
Mid nature's fond environment,
My boyhood's happy hours were spent.
But now, my narrative begins:
I had a brother, we were twins,
Sunburnt and freckled, light of heart,
Resembling each other so
That few could tell the two apart.
We grew, as two twin pines might grow,
Upon the isolated edge
Of some lone precipice or ledge,
That overlooks the vale below;
Remote from every wooded strip,
With but each other's fellowship,
In solitary station placed,
With branches locked and interlaced,
As sworn to cherish and defend
Each other, to the bitter end.
[ with swift and spoliating flow]
"With swift and spoliating flow,
Uprooting many a noble tree,
To strew the desert's waste below,
With scattered drift-wood and debris."
See page [22]
The course of uneventful life
Ran smoothly on, unmarred by strife,
Till childish fancy disappeared,
As manhood's sterner age was neared;
Then in a city's bustling mart,
The cords of fate drew us apart,
Through paths of accident and chance,
Environment and circumstance;
Within their complicated maze,
We reached that parting of the ways,
Where sentiment is nipped by frost,
Where ties of consanguinity
Disrupt, and often disagree,
Or, through indifference are lost.
We happened that eventful spring,
To hold a family gathering,
To reunite each severed tie
So soon to be dissolved for aye.
As famines, with their blight respond,
When some vile genius waves his wand,
And leave a ghastly aftermath
Of bleaching bones to mark their path;
Or demon hands, in foul offence,
Pour out the vials of pestilence,
To reap, with desolating breath,
A harvest of untimely death;
The throes of internecine war
Now rent the nation to its core,
And smote, with decimating hand
The best and bravest of the land,
Estranging, never to amend,
Father from son and friend from friend;
Dissolving many sacred cords
Of love in bitterest enmity.
Lips once replete with friendly words
Now challenged as an enemy;
We, who had never quarrelled before,
Parted in wrath, and met no more.
His firm convictions led him where
A banner floated in the air,
In silken corrugations curled,
The admiration of a world;
Beneath its constellated stars,
Its azure field and crimson bars,
Although no message ever came
To tell his fate, or spread his fame,
I know that 'mid the shot and shell
He served the cause he fought for, well.
For aught I know, his manly form
Went down before some leaden storm,
And lay with mangled flesh and bone
Among the numberless unknown,
Who filled the trenches where they died,
Uncoffined, unidentified.
The voice of duty led me where
The strains of Dixie filled the air,
Where curling smoke in graceful rings
Rose on the evening's silent wings,
And hovering o'er the mist and damp,
Betrayed the presence of the camp.
I pass the story of the war,—
The cause we lost, but struggled for
Through four long years, in southern fens,—
To wiser tongues and abler pens.
Through four long years of tragedy,
I fought, bled, marched and starved with Lee,
Till Appomattox's final day,
I, in a uniform of gray,
Before the cannon's yawning mouth,
Defended my beloved South.
The struggle ending, in complete,
Although most honorable defeat,
Footsore and hungry, broken, sad,
In ragged regimentals clad,
Towards Rappahannock's silver flood,
I plodded homeward through the mud,
To find a desolated home,
The final page in war's red tome.
That day, as I remember well,
The splashing rain in torrents fell;
The pregnant clouds discharged their debt
Of moist, apologetic tears,
As if in passionate regret
For rain withheld in famine years,
And from exuberance of grief
In drizzling penance found relief;
Or, as if tears from unseen eyes
Were wafted downward from the skies,
In tardy expiation for
The carnage of remorseless war:
The sorrow of the elements
For human woe and violence.
The roads which thread the country lanes,
Had turned to sheets of liquid mud,
As if to cover up the stains
Of civil war and human blood.
That evening, as a pall of cloud
Enveloped nature as a shroud,
Bedraggled and dispirited,
My footsteps to the old home led:
Again I stood before the door
I left in wrath, four years before:
But what a change! The vandal torch
Had long devoured the roof and porch:
The gray disintegrating walls
Still swayed and tottered in the air,
Or lay in heaps within its halls,
In melancholy ruin there:
The towering chimney, black and tall,
Stood, as if mourning o'er its fall:
And through the dismal mist and rain,
The windows, void of sash and pane,
Seemed staring at the gathering night,
In wild expression of affright.
The fields my infancy had known,
With briar and weed were overgrown;
The sunlight, heralding the morn,
No longer smiled on waving corn.
I wandered, aimlessly around,
Yet heard not one familiar sound,
No stamp of hoof nor flap of wing,
No low of cow, nor bleat of sheep,
Nor any tame domestic thing;
Silence, most horrible and deep.
No pony whinnied in its stall,
Nor neighed in answer to my call;
No purr of cat, nor bark of dog,
Naught but the croaking of the frog;
No voice of relative or kin,
No father paused and stroked his chin,
Then rushed with recognizing grasp
To hold his son within his clasp;
No mother, with her silvered hair,
Rocked in the same old rocking chair.
First at the ruins, then the ground,
I gazed in turn, mechanically,
Till, startled by a mournful sound,
A piteous and plaintive cry,
I turned, and peering through the storm,
Discerned the outlines of a form,
Bewailing o'er the ruins there
In accents of complete despair.
I knew her voice, and felt her woe,
She was my nurse, poor Aunty Chloe!
Between her sobs disconsolate,
This freed, but ever faithful slave,
Told of my agèd parents' fate,
Then led me to the double grave.
I, who through four long tragic years,
Had never yielded once to tears,
Clasping her hand, so kind and true,
Wept with the rain, and she wept too.
Ere daybreak, with increasing light,
Evolved from disappearing night
The morn, in radiant splendor dressed,
I, too, had started for the West."
Ere the conclusion of the narrative,
Through every crack and cranny of the door
The snow had sifted in, as through a sieve,
And piled in little cones upon the floor.
Without, the raging tempest still assailed;
Within, the fire to glowing coals had failed.
All smoked, and with their eyes on Dad McGuire,
Waited for some one else to build the fire.
Such close attention had his tale received,
It seemed as if 'twas partially believed;
Few of the tales which we enjoy the most
In verity, may that distinction boast.
The dying embers shed their mellow glow
Upon the agèd face of Dad McGuire,
As he swept out the little piles of snow
And laid a hemlock log upon the fire.
Then followed disconnected colloquies
And witticisms in the form of jest;
The joke is always where the miner is,
The form of levity he loves the best,
For cutting truths have thereby been conveyed,
Where delicacy all other forms forbade.
As some fierce gale that bows the gnarlèd oak,
Sinks till it scarcely sways the underbrush,
The laughter, incident to jest and joke,
Subsided to a calm and tranquil hush.
All husbanded their energy and strength
And smoked in silence for a moment's length.