THE BURIAL PARTY

But of course she would not find him. The change to Seth Morgan was of a very different kind.

As Ida lay asleep on the bed belonging to Lily LeBeau in the hotel beside the railroad in Baltimore, a burial detail on the battlefield of Gettysburg moved slowly among the bodies beside the Bushman barn. Stooping over the sad wreckages of once-living men, they tried with meticulous care to name them. Reaching into coat pockets, vest and trouser pockets, they removed the things to be sent home—a pipe, a watch, a pocketknife, a letter, a Bible. Sometimes a daguerreotype or a bloodstained photograph had to be tugged from the clutch of a dead hand.

When two members of the burial party came to the body of Seth Morgan they found no coat and therefore no pockets. There was only a note pinned to the shirt, “PVT. OTIS PIKE.”

The name was not on the embalming surgeon’s list of the officers and enlisted men whose bodies were to be preserved and sent elsewhere.

The burial party could not wait. They lowered Seth into a trench among the other men of the Second Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry who had been killed while trying to recapture the rebel works on the lower slope of Culp’s Hill.

Their bodies would lie there only a little while. Before long they would be exhumed, enclosed in wooden boxes and buried in the new cemetery set aside for the dead of the Battle of Gettysburg. At the time of its dedication, months from now, the two speakers would be illustrious.

If only on that day their voices might be shovels to burrow into the earth, picks to smash the box lids, augurs to drill open the deaf ears. Then the dead of Gettysburg might hear the eloquent phrases about a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to a certain noble proposition, they might then be sharply heedful of the stirring words about devotion and consecration and high resolve.

Would they then be resigned, proud to have fallen in the Battle of Gettysburg? Perhaps they would, perhaps they would not.