“Missing.”
This was the bitterest word to hear, for it carried suspense and dreadful possibilities. Was he a captive to suffer the horrors of Southern prison camps where the jailers starved with the prisoners? Was he lying wounded and perishing slowly under some bush in the enemy’s lines, in the rain, at the mercy of ants, flies, wounds uncleansed? Was he shivering with mortal cold and no mother to draw a blanket over him? Was he among the unidentified slain? Had he run away in a disease of cowardice? Would he come home crippled? Insane?
Days and days dragged by before the papers answered their questions. Then it helped a little to know that, since their boy had died, he had died quickly, and had brought honor to the family in the manner of his taking-off.
In a series of bloody charges upon a line of high breastworks on a hilltop, three standard bearers had been shot down—each snatching the flag before it struck the earth. The dead were piled up with the writhing wounded and they were abandoned by the Union troops as they fell back and gave up the costly effort.
Under a flag of truce they pleaded for the privilege of burying their dead. Deep in the wall of Northern bodies, they found a boy with his blouse buttoned tight about him. A glimpse of bright color caught the eye of the burial party and his story told itself. Evidently Junior had been shot down with the flag he had tried to plant on the barrier. As he writhed and choked he had wrenched his bayonet free and sawed the colors from the staff, wrapped them around his body and buttoned his blouse over them to save them from falling into the hands of the enemy. Death found him with his thumb and finger frozen on the last button.
The hideousness of the boy’s last hour was somehow transformed to beauty by the thought of him swathed in the star-dotted blue and the red and white stripes. He had been thinking solemnly, frantically all his last moments of a flag.
Patty was not so jealous of this mystic rival as she might have been if he had been found with some girl’s picture in his hand. For the first time, indeed, the flag became holy to her. In her heart, her son’s blood sanctified it, rather than it him.
Her sorrow was hushed in awe for a long while and her eyes were uplifted in exaltation that was almost exultant. Then a wall of tears blinded them and she saw the glory no more, only the pity of her shattered boy unmothered in his death-agony.
She clutched her breasts with both hands, clawed them as if they suffered with her for the lips they had given suck to, the lips that they and she would never feel again.
She put on the deepest mourning, drew thick veils about her, and moved like a moving cenotaph draped in black. She became one of the increasing procession of mothers who had given their sons to the nation. They had pride, but they paid for it.