II
Next day was Memorial Day. And Memorial Day in Friendship Village is something grand.
First the G. A. R. conducts the service in the Court House yard, with benches put up special, and a speech from out of town and paid for.
Right away afterward everybody marches or drives, according to the state of their pocket-book, out to the Cemetery, to lay flowers on the soldiers' graves; and it's quite an event, because everybody that's got anybody buried out there and that is still alive themselves, they all whisk out the day before and decorate up their graves, so's everybody can see for themselves how intimate their dead is held in remembrance. And everybody walks around to see if so-and-so has thought to send anything from Seattle, or wherenot, this year. And if they didn't, it's something to tell about.
Then all the Ladies' Aid Societies serve dinners in the empty store buildings down town, and make what they can. And in the afternoon everybody lounges round and cuts the grass and tinkers with the screens and buys ice cream off the donkey-cart man.
I dressed Bennie up, clean and miserable, in the morning, and went down to the exercises. I couldn't see much, because the woman in front of me couldn't either, and she stood up; and I couldn't hear much, because the paid-for speaker addressed only one-half of his audience, and as usual I wasn't in the right half. But the point is that neither of them limitations mattered. I didn't have to see and I didn't have to hear. All that I had to do was to feel. And I felt. For I was alive at the time of the Civil War, and all you have to do to me is to touch that spring in me, and I'm back there: Getting the first news, reading about Sumter, sensing the call for 75,000 volunteers, hearing that this one and this one and this one had enlisted, peeking through the fence at Camp Randall where my two brothers were waiting to go; and then living the long four years through, when every morning meant news, and no news meant news, and every night meant more to hear. For years I couldn't open a newspaper without feeling I must look first for the list of the dead....
I set there on the bench in the spring sunshine, without anything to lean against, seeing the back breadths of Mis' Curtsey's gray flowered delaine, and living it all over again, with Bennie hanging on my knee. And it made it a thousand times worse, now that these Memorial Days were passing, with what was going on in Europe still going on.
And I thought: "Oh, I dunno how we can keep up feeling memorial for just our own soldiers, when the whole world's soldiers are lying dead, new every night...."
And getting a little more used to the paid speaker's voice, I could hear some of what he was saying. I could get the names,—Vicksburg, Gettysburg, Shenandoah, Missionary Ridge, all these, over and over. And my heart ached with every one. But it had a new ache, for names that the whole world will echo with for years to come. And sitting there, with nobody knowing, I says to myself:
"And, O Lord, I memorial all the rest of them—the soldiers of fifty years ago no more than the soldiers of now—the soldiers of Here no more than the soldiers of Over There. O Lord, I memorial them all, and I pray for them that survive over there—put all Your strength on them, Lord, as far as I am concerned, for us survivors here, we don't need You as much as they do—them that's new bereaved and new desolated. For Christ's sake. Amen."
On my way home, I saw Luke Norris sitting out by the door of his office again. He never went to any exercises because his wind-pipe was liable to shut up on him, and it broke up the program some, getting his breath through to him.
"Calliope," he says, "we want you should go on to the Committee for opening the new Town Hall, in about two months from now. We want the jim-dandiest, swell-upest celebration this town has ever had. Twenty years of unexampled prosperity—"
I stood still and stared down on him.
"Honest," I says, "do you want me to help in a prosperity celebration this Summer?"
"Sure," he says, "women are in on it."
"Luke," I says. "I dunno how you'll feel about that when you come to think it over. But I feel—"
Bennie, fussing round on the side-walk, came over, tugging a chunk of wood. I thought at first he was carrying a brick.
I sat down in a handy chair, just inside Luke's door.
"Luke," I says, "Luke! That ain't the kind of a celebration this town had ought to have. You listen here to me...."