August 18, 1865
United States Registered Mail
The Dennetts
North River Side Drive and Saffarans Avenue
Memphis, Tennessee, U.S.A.
Dear James Dennett,
Please don't be alarmed about the U.S. registered mail. I use it as a precaution only.
Although the war has been over for months now, the 95th was mustered out just yesterday.
With this letter I am sending you and your mother two strands of black pearls Frank gave to me. Although I read Charles Darwin's book and he said nothing about them, I sure he would approve of black pearls. The oysters that make them must be darker than regular oysters. White pearls would stand out too much, and it would be too easy for the pearl fishers to take them. The dark oysters didn't change their colors. They changed the color of their pearls instead.
I like Charles Darwin's book. I reckon I understand what he means, that animals adapt over time, generations of gradual change. I don't believe animals decide to adapt, though.
People decide to adapt. They can change overnight if they really set their minds to it.
I'm also enclosing fifty-two United States dollars.
Maybe I'll visit you someday. Thank you for telling me about Frank. He was a good friend. He made this unbearable war bearable.
Sincerely,
Albert Cashier
Aboard the Molly Able
en route to St. Louis
I look over Robbie's shoulder as he writes. "What a good fist you've got, Robbie. I can see why the officers wanted you to write the meeting notes and dispatches. My writing looks like turkey scratch."
Robbie says nothing, bent over his work. Finally, he sits up and shakes his right hand about to loosen the muscles. "For you, no charge," he says with a grin. "Fifty-two dollars is a lot of money. Four months' pay."
"They need it and I can spare it. They did a better job taking care of Frank than we ever could."
"He gave you pearls?" he asks softly. "He stayed in a Reb household?"
"James was his chum from college," I say coldly. "Remember foraging the plantations on the Indianola Road? What have you got in your pockets,
Robbie?"
He turns red. "I'm going home to Belvidere. Are you?"
"No. Isaac Pepper is going to Saunemin. He's inherited some land there. He wants to start a tree nursery business and wants me for a partner."
"Where's Saunemin?"
"He says it's between Pontiac and Kankakee in Livingston County, Illinois."
"Oh. Downstate, then. Not a lot of Irish down-state. Well, good luck." Robbie tries a broader smile.
"Goodbye," I say, colder still. I pick up my letter and turn away.
Because of you, Robbie, Frank spent his last Christmas in the brig! We didn't speak for months because of you, and now he's gone forever. I'll never forgive you.
In St. Louis I give myself two months of doing nothing but indulging my idleness, as a present to myself. I have never had this much leisure time in my life. I sleep late and take my time over breakfast, sipping coffee. I walk along the Mississippi and Missouri riverbanks. I read books and newspapers. I take long naps in the middle of the day. I watch the sun tilt toward Australia, as the leaves in the cottonwood trees turn autumnal.
I'm invited again and again into the houses of townspeople for suppers and dinners. If I eat and drink in a tavern, the owner waves away my money. I chop wood for my landlady—a Union war widow—in lieu of rent. Her young sons want to hear my war stories again and again. I don't disappoint them.
By the middle of October I'm ready to work again, but first I want to pick up my bounty. It would never do to have the Clearys know I was in Belvidere. Even worse: that I was in town and didn't come out to the farm to visit them. I decide to draw my sixty dollars in Chicago.
The main office of the First Bank of Chicago is a grand affair: high copper ceilings, marble floors, carpets, Boston ferns, and statuary. Gilt-framed portraits of stern, prosperous-looking bankers glare at us from the walls.
A bank secretary approaches me. "May I help you, sir?"
"My name is Albert Cashier. The First Bank of Chicago, Belvidere Branch, has been holding a bounty for the soldiers of Boone County since August 1862. The 95th Illinois, Infantry; I've come to collect my bounty."
"Of course. The bank president, Mr. Talbot, likes to meet returning soldiers when they come in. I'll tell him you're here, Mr. Cashier."
In no time at all an older man comes out of an office, hand outstretched. It's been so long since I've seen expensive, tailored clothes. I drink in his banker's gray three-piece suit. His black shoes are mirror bright. I can't wait to get out of my threadbare Union blue and into fine clothes again.
He's sporting dundrearies—long, wide sideburns to the chin but with no beard.
"I'm sorry to say you'll have to wait, Mr. Cashier," he says smoothly. "It's going to take a few days for Belvidere to telegraph a bank draft."
"I don't mind. I'll stay in a boarding house or something. I've become addicted to reading the newspapers."
"Splendid." Mr. Talbot looks me over. "Tell me, are you looking for work?"
I stand up straight. "I'm always looking for work."
"You could help close Camp Douglas while you wait. The city of Chicago wants to close the camp quickly and is paying top dollar. The people here would like to put the prisoner-of-war camp behind us. I'm sure you understand."
"There aren't any prisoners left, then?"
"Oh, no. The last of them signed the loyalty oath to the United States and were sent home in August. The camp was not far from here, on the corner of Cottage Grove and Thirty-fifth Street. Out the front door, turn left. You can't miss it."
The bank president beams at me, surely an over-bright smile for a man in his position. "It used to be Senator Stephen Douglas's estate: Okenwald. Okenwald was just lovely. The rhododendrons were such a joy every May. It was the pride of Chicago's South Side. We'd like to restore it. Quickly."
"I'll look into it."
"Splendid. I'll just need to see your mustering-out papers as identification. I'll wire the Belvidere branch personally."
On the corner of Cottage Grove and 35th Street, men in tattered Union blue step out of a trench, pulling a sledge full of dirt behind them. They lift the sledge and tip it into a deep-sided wagon. Another veteran drives the wagon down Cottage Grove Avenue.
It's the end of October. Already snowflakes blow sideways, caught in a brisk wind off Lake Michigan. How I remember these long, cold winters!
I find the foreman. "Mr. Talbot from the First Bank of Chicago sent me."
The foreman is handing out shovels to more veterans. "Two dollars a day for as long as the work lasts," he barks in my direction.
"The digging is confined to that trench." He points to a trench about forty feet wide, maybe three hundred feet long, near the street. He glares at me. "Do you want to work or not?"
How hard can shoveling dirt be? And the ground is so soft already. The sod has been busted long since. The foreman reminds me of Sergeant Andrus. I'll just follow orders; I'm sure to hear the why of it sometime today.
I grab a shovel, sign onto the payroll, slide down the trench, and commence to dig. Bones.
I reel back in shock. I'm knee deep in bones. Human bones.
"The prisoners," I exclaim. "The skeletons of the prisoners!"
Despite the cold, the man next to me wipes his forehead with a handkerchief. I'd recognize that scrap of cloth anywhere. It's a Union washcloth, well used and threadbare.
"Aye, it's a bit of a jolt at first, lad. But you get used to it. I've been here from the start. We've been going at it for a month now."
"You're Irish?"
He grins at me. "So are you. Name's O'Neill. Patrick. County Limerick."
"Name's Cashier. Albert. Belfast."
"The foreman said more than twenty-six thousand prisoners were sent to Camp Douglas. Only two thousand were sent home in August. So where were you, Albert?"
I have come to realize this means where did I fight in the war.
"Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana. Vicksburg. Natchez. The Tombigbee River. Guntown. Dauphin Island. St. Louis."
"You were in Vicksburg? So was I. Wasn't that the grandest Fourth of July you'd ever seen? You know about the heat, then. Most of these Rebs had never seen frost before. It was the Chicago winters that killed them. That and the smallpox and dysentery."
O'Neill shovels up a pile of crisscrossed rib, arm, and jaw bones. He drops them onto a waiting sledge, where they clatter against more bones. Another man with a much bigger shovel than mine tosses four skulls into the sledge. They knock together like cannonballs.
In the freshening wind, tattered shreds of gray Confederate cloth shudder against bones. As it snows harder, it's impossible to see where the tangle of gray cloth, gray bones, and gray snow begins and ends.
There are no blankets, no trousers, shirts, socks, or gloves, not so much as an old boot in the trench. The living stripped the dead of everything they could use, in the hopes that they wouldn't end up in the trench as well.
"Thanks be to God for the snow, Albert. Before the cold weather came, we were breathing in their dust."
"I guarded these prisoners, Patrick," I tell him. "These were the very men we sent upriver from Vicksburg, from St. Louis, from Dauphin Island. We thought they were so lucky. They were going to see home before we did."
Patrick O'Neill grunts. "Their prison camps were far worse than ours. If their army was always hungry, how much food do you think they gave our boys? Serves them right, if you ask me."
"No one deserves this. We'll be sending these bones south, then?"
Patrick O'Neill stops digging long enough to laugh. "When pigs fly! Chicago's a rough town, lad. Always has been. These wagonloads are going to a deeper trench in Oak Woods Cemetery. These Rebs will be buried"—he chuckles—"in hasty reverence. Chicago is in no mood to be generous, not after one of theirs shot President Lincoln. Those that are intact will get coffins. Those that aren't will get another trench. That's all."
Patrick and I pull the sledge full of bones up to the surface.
On the other side of Cottage Grove Avenue are expansive homes with wide porticoes and carriage houses, rolling lawns, shade trees, orchards, and rose gardens. The gentry lived just across the street from Camp Douglas. These dying men could look over this fence and see Chicagoans of quality walking their dogs, gardening, taking their carriages out for Sunday drives. Christmas parties. Easter egg hunts. May baskets. Fourth of July picnics.
This must be where that bank president, Mr. Talbot, lives! No wonder he sent me to work here.
"So much hatred! On both sides!" I exclaim. "How will we ever be a nation again?"
Patrick O'Neill looks at me sharply. "You're looking for work, aren't you, lad? Once the ground freezes, the work will shut down till spring."
I drop my shovel on the ground. "I'm not looking for this. Thousands of skeletons! Thousands! The very men I sent here! I never want to look on the face of war again."