Dear Friends,
I thought it would be soothing to you to have a few lines about the last days of your son, Henry Smith, of Company E of the 14th Missouri Volunteers. I write in haste, but I have no doubt anything about Hank will be welcome.
From the time he came into Armory Square Hospital until he died there was hardly a day but I was with him a portion of the time — if not in the day then at night — (I am merely a friend visiting the wounded and sick soldiers). From almost the first I feared somehow that Hank was in danger, or at least he was much worse than they supposed in the hospital. He had a grievous wound in his leg, and the typhoid, but as he made no complaint they thought him nothing so bad. He was a brave boy. I told the doctor of the ward over and over again he was a very sick boy, but he took it lightly and said he would certainly recover; he said, “I know more about these cases than you do — he looks very sick to you, but I shall bring him out all right.” Probably the doctor did his best — at any rate about a week before Hank died he got really alarmed, and after that all the doctors tried to help him but it was too late. Very possibly it would not have made any difference.
I believe he came here about January of ’63—I took to him. He was a quiet young man, behaved always so correct and decent. I used to sit on the side of his bed. We talked together. When he was bad with the typhoid I used to sit by the side of his bed generally silent, he was oppressed for breath and with the heat, and I would fan him — occasionally he would want a drink — some days he dozed a great deal — sometimes when I would come in he would reach out his hand and pat my hair and beard as I sat on the bed and leaned over him — it was painful to see the working of his throat to breathe.
Some nights I sat by his cot far into the night, the lights would be put out and I sat there silently hour after hour — he seemed to like to have me sit there. I shall never forget those nights in the dark hospital, it was a curious and solemn scene, the sick and the wounded lying around and this dear young man close by me, lying on what proved to be his death bed. I did not know his past life so much, but what I saw and know of he behaved like a noble boy — Farewell, deary boy, it was my opportunity to be with you in your last days, I had no chance to do much for you, nothing could be done, only you did not lie there among strangers without having one near who loved you dearly, and to whom you gave your dying kiss.
Mr. and Mrs. Smith, I have thus written rapidly whatever came up about Hank, and must now close. Though we are strangers and shall probably never see each other, I send you all Hank’s brothers and sister Olivia my love. I live when at home in Brooklyn, New York, in Portland Avenue, fourth floor, north of Myrtle.
Walt folded up the letter and put it in his shirt, then lay down on his side on the bed. In a while, a nurse came by with fresh sheets. He thought she might scold him and tell him to leave, but when she looked in his face she turned and hurried off. He watched the moon come up in the window, listening to the wounded and sick stirring in the beds around him. It seemed to him, as he watched the moon shine down on the Capitol, that the war would never end. He thought, In the morning I will rise and leave this place. And then he thought, I will never leave this place. He slept briefly and had a dream of reaching into Hank’s dark grave, hoping and fearing that somebody would take his groping hand.
He woke with the moon still shining in his face, and started to weep, deep racking sobs which he tried to muffle in the pillow that still smelled powerfully of Hank’s shining hair. Someone touched his shoulder, and when he looked up he saw Oliver Barley kneeling by the bed, haloed in moonlight from the window, with his hands, still wrapped in bandages, raised before him. He reached out again to touch Walt’s shoulder, but this time he struck him hard, a shove that must have made his wounds ache wildly. “Be quiet, you,” he said. “Just hush up.”
2
EVERY YEAR AFTER THE WAR ENDED, DREAMS OF THE LATE PRESident would arrive with the spring. Just before the weather changed, Mr. Lincoln would visit Walt in his sleep, stepping out of a bright mist, with lilacs clutched in his hands and the odor of lilacs on his person. That was always the first dream — the groundhog dream, Walt called it, the harbinger of winter’s end. Others followed: a dream of wrestling with a Lincoln graced with enormous black wings; a dream of building a bed for him and Mr. Lincoln to sleep in, a very long bed indeed; and a dream where Walt stood with the late President on a wooden platform overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue and watched a grand review.
The two men looked on as solid ranks of soldiers — twenty or twenty-five abreast — came marching steady down the avenue, one regiment after another. For an hour, there would be nothing but cavalry, walking slowly on exhausted gray horses with bleeding eyes — the cavalrymen swung their sabers around in salute to Mr. Lincoln and his companion. Then came batteries of ruined cannon, with gunners sitting up sharply on top of broken caissons. And then, the infantry again, Negro and white, Union and Confederate, turning their faces in a crisp motion to behold Lincoln and salute him. They marched as dusk gently fell on them, and a sign lit up on a building across from the stand. Someone had arranged a series of gaslights to spell out “How are you, Lee?” Walt peered into the gloom, trying to recognize his brother George among the marchers. But then he realized that George was not among them because this was a parade of the dead.
“Quite a spectacle,” said the late President.
“They are very many,” said Walt.
“Yes. It would crush me, I think, but death has eroded my cares a little.”
“I have friends among them,” Walt said. He went to the rail and leaned over it, looking hard at the faces as they passed by.
“Sweet Henry Smith,” said Lincoln.
“Do you know him?”
“I know them all. Aren’t they my boys, every one of them, just as they were yours? They want to come back. Listen to them — they are crying to come back.” Walt listened — he closed his eyes and realized that the parade was going by in perfect silence.
“I hear nothing,” he said.
Mr. Lincoln shook his head. “The dead are not silent,” he said, and turned his back on Walt, so Walt could see his wound, gaping just behind his ear. “Go on,” he said. “You may probe it, if you like.” It seemed suddenly to Walt that he must do just that. It was enormously necessary to put his finger in that hole. I have been waiting so long, Walt thought as he reached out his finger, to do this. His finger sank into the wound as if into a sucking mouth. There came a deafening roar from the soldiers. Walt felt a shock all over his body, as if he’d fallen from a tree onto hard ground, and woke in his bed with his limbs splayed out around him like a startled baby.
It was May of 1868. Walt was still in Washington, making a comfortable salary as a clerk in the office of the Attorney General. He lay in bed, panting because this dream always left him feeling exhausted, and listening to the noise of migrating birds outside his window. He liked the smell of this hour — he thought it must be around five in the morning — and he liked to lie and listen to the big song, and picture the immense flock. He listened carefully, trying to identify species. As he lay with his eyes closed, listening so hard, he heard Hank’s voice speaking softly into his ear. He always sounded so close — close enough to kiss. Walt had been hearing him, not since his death, but since Mr. Lincoln’s, since the first time he’d dreamed of the reviewing stand, since the first time he’d put his finger in the great wound and felt the exuberant, electric whack. At first, Walt had thought it was his brother Andrew speaking to him. He’d died of tuberculosis, just after Hank died, and Walt thought he’d come back to haunt him, to chide him for not attending his funeral, for grieving less for a brother than he did for Hank, or, indeed, for Mr. Lincoln. But the voice he heard was Hank speaking, in his sweet Missouri accent, a soft voice out of the boundless west that was made elegant and articulate by death. Bobolink, tanager, Wilson’s thrush, he said. White-crowned sparrow. It’s rare music, isn’t it, Walt?