***
While we two were wandering around lost in Kansas, my father told me a great many things, partly to pass the time, I suppose, and partly to explain as he could why he thought his father had come back there, and partly to explain why we needed to find him, that is to say his grave. My father said that in those days after he came back from the war, he used to go off and sit with the Quakers on the Sabbath. He said his father’s church was half empty, and most of the people there were widows and orphans and mothers who had lost their sons. Some of the men brought sickness home from the camps ”camp fever,” they called it — and their families went down with it. Some of the men had been in Andersonville and came back almost beyond saving. He said half the graves in the churchyard were new. And there was his father, preaching every Sunday on the divine righteousness manifested in it all. That would set the old women to weeping, he said, and then the children would start in. He couldn’t bear it.
Now, I’ve tried to imagine myself in my grandfather’s place. I don’t know what else he could have said, what else he could have taken to be true. He did preach those young men into the war. And his church was hit terribly hard. They joined up first thing and stayed till it was over, so the Confederates got off a good many shots at them. He went with them, too, even though he’d have been well into his forties. And he lost that eye, and came back finally with it as healed as it was going to be. He was already so used to the loss of it that he seemed to have forgotten to send word to his family about it. It was commonplace, though, to have an injury or a scar of some kind after that war. So many amputations. When I was a boy, there were lots of old fellows around who were missing arms or legs. At least they seemed old to me then.
It was an honorable thing that my grandfather came back to his congregation and stayed with it, to look after those widows and orphans. The Methodists were gathering a church; they’d bought a piece of land just down the road, so his flock need not have stayed with him. And some did leave. I know this from one of those sermons my father buried and took out of the ground again. It remarked on the great attractiveness of Methodist preaching, and the youthfulness of the new minister, who had seen brief but honorable service in the Union cause. I’ve read that sermon a good many times. The ink ran on most of the others.
The new people and the young people were turning to the Methodists, who were holding outdoor meetings by the river, hundreds of them from all over the countryside, fishing and cooking and washing out their clothes and visiting with one another until about evening. Then there’d be torchlight and preaching and hymn singing into the night. My grandfather went down there, too, and he enjoyed it all very much. On Sundays he would open the doors and windows so that his people could hear the singing that came up from the river. He respected the Methodists because they had borne a great part of the burden of the war. He didn’t believe they were the kind of people who would consent to put up with bishops for very much longer.
I suspect he knew he couldn’t preach life back into a church that had lost as much as his had. He was hiring himself out as a sort of man of all work, repairing roofs and stoops, tutoring children, butchering hogs — everything you can think of, because what was left of his congregation couldn’t pay him anything. Most people couldn’t pay him more than a stewing hen or a few potatoes for the choring he did, either. Most of the time he did work just because it needed doing. He’d be splitting kindling at one house, chopping weeds at the next, “relieving the fatherless and widow,” my father said (that’s Psalm 146). And he wrote any number of letters to the War Department, trying to get the veterans and the widows their bounties and pensions, which came never or slowly. There was an irony in this, because, my father said, he and his sisters were, in a manner of speaking, left fatherless during this time, which was a great hardship because it was clear that their mother would not live long.
He was a grown man by then, in his early twenties, and two of his sisters would have been nearly grown. They would have managed well enough if it hadn’t been for their mother’s poor health and her considerable suffering. I believe she must have had cancer of some kind. They’d had a doctor in that town, but he went off with the army and never came back. Whether he was killed or not no one knew,
