SATURDAY'S NEAR-PITCHED BATTLE IN THE TOWN SQUARE mere hours before the annual celebration of Jesus' resurrection, in the shadow of the Presbyterian church no less, featuring representatives in both contingents from that congregation and every other one in town, had shaken Lexington to the ground. But no one's blood ran colder than Dr. Junkin's.
During the special after-church prayer and testimony session Easter Sunday, he persisted in trying to reconcile the drifting Southerners to the Union that seemed, to an increasing number of them, more and more like a menacing foreign power. “Remember what President Lincoln said in his inaugural address,” Junkin pleaded, “when he begged all Americans not to destroy ‘our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes. We are not enemies,’ he said, ‘but friends. We must not be enemies.’”
But Southerners were no longer friends of Lincoln. And many in Lexington were not to Junkin. The grand old patriarch pleaded, chided, and stormed to no avail. Conversations were growing shorter; expressions, icier. Anyone less beloved and formidable than Junkin who had persisted in such vehement Unionist talk would have been told by now to leave town.
No one else could have gotten away with shouting, “God Almighty can't do without this United States government in His work of evangelizing the world, and He won't let you break it up!”
Still, as he left the president's home at the sweet-scented dawn of April 18, 1861, he chastised himself for not having pressed his case harder through the years. These Southerners are so wrong-headed; if only somebody, if only I, could have properly explained to them God's sovereign purposes in the sustaining of the Union He created, they would most surely have turned from this madness and villainy.
He did not realize, stopping to drink deeply again of the intoxicating aroma of his home's verdant environs, that had he pushed his fellow Lexingtonians any harder through the years, he would not still have been president of Washington College.
“Dr. Junkin.”
Junkin's eyes focused on the lean tall frame of fifty-year-old William Nelson Pendleton, rector of Grace Episcopal Church, Lexington's second largest congregation; graduate of West Point; and lifelong Virginian. Junkin respected Pendleton, but did not find him a particularly likeable sort. The predilection was mutual. Today, though, Pendleton dismounted from his big bay and came to Junkin.
They shook hands, then Pendleton said, “The Virginia Convention has adopted an ordinance of secession from the Union.”
Junkin felt his knees go weak. He thought for a moment he might fall, but steadied himself. He had feared this, but nothing could have prepared him for reception of the news. His eyes filled with tears.
“We have had our differences, sir,” Pendleton said, “but I should like to pray alone with you for a bit if you could manage.”
Junkin could not speak, but he nodded and motioned Pendleton to follow him into the president's home.
Inside, Pendleton did most of the praying. For he and many others, the day, while regrettable, bore grand significance, honor, and purpose. Junkin went through the motions and appreciated his sometimes-adversary's reaching out the hand of fellowship and brotherhood, but his mind was stalled.
After Pendleton left, Junkin trudged slowly across the greening lawn toward his office. Then he saw it. Another flag had been raised atop General Washington's statue, this one the Bonnie Blue Flag with a single white star centered in a field of sky blue. He stopped dead in his tracks, thunderstruck. As he stared at the flag, however, an odd event transpired. From somewhere deep inside him, a rumbling fury began to rise. Now it all came quite clearly to him, as it had already done to many of his townsfolk. That despised banner has replaced the Union's, he thought. It would seek to remove the Union itself from the starry throne upon which God has placed her!
Dr. George Junkin moved more quickly than he had in years, straight toward the flag. Several students stood observing it, expressions of satisfaction evident on their smooth young faces. Junkin approached them, already pointing up toward the flag. His fierce countenance prompted the students all to take a step back.
“That,” he said, his voice coming from somewhere low and fearsome, “you shall remove that abomination now.”
The cluster of young men stirred nervously. But no one moved.
“I said remove it now!” Junkin boomed. Now the students turned and walked away, but not in the direction of the flag, and not out of sight. Soon, other students began to appear from doors and hallways and dormitories. Again Junkin pointed toward the flag. “I order you to bring down that banner of treason now!” His blazing eyes scoured the mounting numbers of students, even as a voice from somewhere far back in his head whispered to him that nowhere near this number of students should be assembled this early in the morning.
A murmur ran through the throng, which now faced Junkin on the lawn from all four sides, at distances of at least twenty yards. Still, no one moved to take down the flag. And now faculty began to appear on the edges of the crowd. His rage escalating, Junkin called to first one faculty member, then another, and another, to assist in the drawing down of the standard. No one replied.
Finally, Junkin stood still in the center of the yard. No one is going to take the flag down, he realized, his heart tremulous with anguish. No one is going to come forward, no one is going to go back. Just as none of us will now move forward to be counted of the Lord, and none of us can now go back to do what we should have done long ago.
Faces, he thought, turning slowly round, gazing at them all, looking urgently for a flicker of indication that some, any, were with him, faces of strangers, for I now reside in a land of strangers. A strange land of people I don't know, and who don't know me. Who no longer share my hopes, dreams, and destiny—if ever they did.
They all loved old “Doc” too much to deride him or to revel in any way in his anguish. Their features showed not gloating, happiness, or even satisfaction, but pity, sorrow, and compassion for their revered leader. Yet more they loved their homeland, and all it meant to them, its good and its bad, its sage ancient enlightenments and its dark brutal ignorances. For they were the issue of its green fruited loins. They were of the South, and could not be other.
Junkin's massive shoulders sagged and the flush went from his face. He looked once more around the pleasant arbors and bricks he had grown to love so well over the past thirteen years, the longest period of time he had ever lived in one place and served at one school.
Then, as the entire faculty and student body of Washington College watched without a word, he, being (though he should have died before admitting it) of a different tribe, began the long, long return to his own mortal home.
For weeks, Jackson had looked forward to the Lexington Presbytery's semiannual meeting. He relished the gathering of the area's Calvinist divines, and had seen to it that several of them stayed at his home, the better for personal audiences and exercise in the hobby he so relished: discussing theology with theologians.
But now the professor attended not one of the Presbytery meetings, and he barely saw even the theologians staying in his home. Preparations for war swamped him and all the other VMI faculty, even though regular classes had been dismissed for the year. The professors prepared the cadets for reporting to Richmond for active military duty. Jackson urged Preston (placed in charge of the institute by Smith, who had been called to Richmond) to expedite the casting of more cannonballs, the delivery of ammunition long since overdue. The newly-christened Rockbridge Rifles, the militia force that less than a week before had squared off against the cadets in order to defend the flag of the Union, now rushed down the Valley to fight against it.
It is all happening so fast, Maggie fretted at her writing desk the morning of the nineteenth. Today, her father and sister Julia would leave Virginia and return north to Pennsylvania. Maggie had not slept but perhaps an hour the whole night, and that the one just prior to dawn. Insomnia worsened her eyes, and this morning it felt as though her head was clamped inside a cold iron vice, a vice being gradually ratcheted tighter. She had planned to go north herself to visit the doctor who had aided Jackson with his eye problems, but that journey would not now take place.
She had begun to recognize that some of her best verse flowed in the maelstrom of her worst pain.
She fought to focus her beautiful flawed eyes on the flowing script she had penned a few hours before in the darkest midnight of her pain. For she knew that others besides her father would soon be leaving.
These words were inscribed not on writing paper, but on the flyleaf of the ancient Bible she had carried all her adult life and had had rebound three times. The words came to her as she wept through Psalm 91.
Lean not on Earth, t'will pierce
thee to the heart,
A broken reed at best, but oft a
spear
On whose sharp point peace
bleeds and hope expires.
And the others, written when in the depths of her despair God's comforting Spirit came to her, as He did not for His Son in either the garden or on the cross.
But oh! thou bounteous Giver of
all good
Thou art of all Thy gifts, Thyself
the crown.
Give what Thou canst; without
Thee we are poor
And with Thee rich, take what
Thou wilt away.
She offered another prayer, asking God for strength, then rose for the trek to the president's home at Washington College.
Dr. Junkin already had his new carriage packed when Maggie and Preston arrived out front of the white porticoed home. Julia was climbing aboard, garbed still in black mourning clothes from the loss of her beloved husband, Junius, two years before. In the past twenty-four hours, Junkin had sold his 250-acre farm and furniture, paid all his debts, and purchased the carriage.
Maggie's brothers William and Ebenezer, both now Presbyterian ministers, and their wives and children stood nearby. Maggie and Preston had arranged a happy good-bye party for their children and “PawPaw” the evening before, to preclude sad farewells today. William would himself leave in a few hours to join the gathering Confederate forces in Richmond. The Jacksons arrived just after the Prestons.
Even now, the sight of Tom Jackson always brought at once a touch of euphoria and melancholy to Maggie's heart.
When all was prepared, Junkin began hugging his children and their families. He could not speak, but he hugged each one as if it would be the last time he ever would, which was the case with several of them.
No one else spoke a word either. Only the old mocker on his perch up near the window of the bedroom once shared by Jackson and Ellie.
The Jacksons were next-to-last in the order of farewell. Junkin hugged Anna, then turned to Jackson. The younger man stood ramrod-straight, his eyes misty. When Junkin noticed the blue VMI uniform, a veil of sorrow passed over his face and a choke keened from deep in his throat. “My dear son,” he said, speaking for the first time, grief hiking his voice nearly an octave higher than normal. He enfolded Jackson in a massive impassioned embrace that lasted for many seconds. When he released him, Junkin swayed for a moment, and Jackson thought he would fall, but he did not. When the seventy-year-old man spoke again, directly to Jackson, his face was ashen, as if he were staring at a ghost.
“You will not survive this war.”
Jackson blinked and Anna gasped. Junkin's eyes filled again with tears and he shook his head slightly, then he turned to Maggie and Preston.
Maggie had started out brave, but now her fine porcelain chin quivered. When Junkin looked at her, he saw all the best of his life before him. Rush, Ellie, a large, loving family that had always followed him wherever he went, from college to college, state to state, and had always stood by him, whatever his disputes, contentions, and tirades. Until now. Why? What is it that causes the people of the South to stand against all that is cherished and loved, against even their own flesh and blood? he questioned, the incomprehension of it all contorting his face as he stared at his Maggie. My eldest child.
If Maggie hadn't burst sobbing into his arms, he would have. But instead he held the frail small daughter beside whose crib he and Rush had knelt praying for the first week of her life, thinking any breath could be her last. The daughter whose near-death and miraculous survival, after they had offered her back to God, had knit him and Rush more tightly together than they had to that point been. The daughter, his most brilliant, whom he himself had taught Hebrew, Greek, Latin, French, English—and the Scriptures. The daughter whose flashing aqua eyes, the only ones of all his nine children, were a continual reminder of his own mother, who possessed the same. The daughter whose flaming red hair he had so often stroked in love as he now did. When will I see her again, Lord? he pleaded silently, again unable to speak. When will I see any of them?
“But where will you go, Papa?” Maggie wept. “What will you do? You've given away all the possessions and money you ever owned to students and poor people. It's just not fair. You've done too much. And now you have nothing. Ohh—,” she wailed, beating on his strong wide back with her small fists.
He patted her softly, loving to be able to hold her again; in a way, loving having her cry in his arms as she had done as a child. After a full minute, they pulled back from one another, Maggie accepting a handkerchief from Preston with which to wipe her wet face. Junkin shook hands with Preston, then took one last look around his gathered beloveds. He would ever keep close to his heart, in winter and summer, comfort and pain, that image.
Then he climbed into the wagon and drove off with Julia. They would go to his attorney son George in Philadelphia. Maggie, William, Ebenezer, Jackson, and their families would remain in the South. His physician son John was in Trenton.
The hooves of a horse drummed up the hill from town. It was Wayne Marley.
“Wait, Dr. Junkin, sir,” Marley called.
“Why, Wayne,” said Jackson, noticing that the clean-shaven, fresh-scrubbed man's meager belongings seemed all to be on his back or strapped to his horse. “Where are you headed?”
Marley swallowed and eyed the group and Junkin, who had stopped the wagon some yards up the road. “Back North, Tom.”
Surprise and disappointment covered Jackson's face. “But Wayne, we love you here. And you're doing so well now, my brother.”
Now Marley's eyes watered. He looked down at the pommel of his saddle, which he clutched hard with both hands, and twisted his hips.
“Ah, well... I, uh... I have to go with my people, sir,” he said, eyes downcast.
“But we're your people—,” Jackson began. Anna reached gently for his arm. Jackson turned to her and caught her expression. Then he turned back to Marley, swallowed hard, and extended his hand up to him. “God go with you, Wayne. Read the Book. And know you're welcome back anytime.”
Marley bit down so hard on his lower lip as he shook Jackson's hand that he nearly drew blood. He needed to leave, now, quickly, or he would burst into tears in front of everyone.
“Good-bye, sir,” he choked, even as he kicked his horse into a gallop away from the group to follow after the Junkins, without looking back.
“It doesn't seem right, Anna, it just doesn't seem right.” Jackson spoke for them all.
The faces. Ever would Junkin remember the faces as he drove the carriage across the seven-thousand-person village toward the cemetery. Someone must have spread the word, for people seemed to have posted themselves at spots along his exit route to wait for him as he approached. Others, standing or walking, heard the murmurs and turned, then halted to eye him as he went past.
For the most part, Junkin kept his eyes straight ahead, though the faces still somehow showed themselves. Anger burned in his bosom for the “stupendous madness” of these, his neighbors of thirteen years. Periodically, someone would shout, “Good luck, Old Doc,” or “Wish you wouldn't leave, Doc.” He would wave back and bid them adieu. But most just watched. Anger simmered just beneath the surface with some of them. More than one felt Junkin a traitor—to his country and, worse, to his friends. Their damning accusatory expressions felt palpable to him.
Junkin could not help but notice a couple of glowering VMI cadets lounging near the carriage block of one of the general stores. He feared for a moment they might force a scene, but when Wayne Marley brushed back his duster to reveal a revolver, they reconsidered and stayed their ground.
Then Mrs. Pendleton, wife of the rector, bustled out into the street, toting a large, and evidently heavy, basket.
Huffing and puffing, her face appeared ready to dissolve into tears as Junkin halted the carriage.
“Oh, Dr. Junkin, sir,” she said, “is there nothing we can do to induce you to remain?”
The old warrior's vaunted dash and é lan had about played out on him. He stared straight ahead, then down. Dear Southern woman, whose own husband's church I have so often, at least in my heart, derided, he thought, ashamed. “Thank you, Mrs. Pendleton, but no, I must return North.”
“But—,” she began, before realizing she was forgetting herself. She handed the basket up to him. “Well, there ought to be enough food in there to see you all the way to Philadelphia, Dr. Junkin, sir.” Does this entire town know my plans? Junkin wondered to himself.
“I even baked you two of my famous blackberry cobblers, sir,” she revealed, leaning closer to him to secret this valuable information.
At this, he stared down at her and, in the full emotion-laden face, beheld anew the quixotic Southron soul that would baffle, anger, and beguile him until his dying day.
“Thank you, Mrs. Pendleton,” he said, his strong chin trembling, careful not even to touch her head, though he longed to offer a warmer display of affection and gratitude.
He drove on under the balming April sun. Some angry faces, some quizzical ones, many compassionate ones. “Traitor!” shouted by someone, then several instances of, “We love you, Dr. Junkin.”
Marley waited at the carriage with Julia as Junkin opened the squeaky old iron gate and stepped slowly into the Lexington cemetery.
“As I look upon these fair hills and soft meadows, Rush,” the old educator began, after doffing his hat, “my heart is overcome with the sudden belated awareness of how they have so subtly and craftily embroidered themselves around my heart with love, tenderness, and sanctuary. These years restored me, Rush. They were not filled with the clamor and rancor, like all our other stations of service, that you so regretted but which you kept silent so well from me in your bosom. And now it strikes me that my—our—happiest years were here.”
Junkin shook his massive head slowly from side to side, as if bewildered by stumbling onto the truth of an equation he had long factored incorrectly. “Only now, even as I am leaving this comely valley, do I realize it. And I wonder if, should we have come from this lovely land, I should have stayed and stood as these shall do, come fire, thunder, or the strongest army in the history of the world—all of which I shudder to say I believe shall eventually come.” His head dropped for a moment before he looked back up at the marker and nodded at it, speaking softly. “Yes, I believe I should have.
“But Rush, there is so much I need to tell you, so much yet that I need to ask you, and if I go away, if I go back North, and you here, well—” At this, the lion's voice broke and his chin went quivering to his chest. Tears streamed down the long cheeks to water the bright violets that had presented themselves unannounced to early crown Rush's resting place.
He lifted the great tired head with difficulty and sighed. “Oh, I know you're not really in there, never have been, but—but it just makes you seem closer somehow to come here and talk, and right now, with all that is happening, well, they can all turn against me, our sons, our daughters, our friends, but somehow, I just need to know that you—that you're still with me, Rush. If I, if I knew you were still with me, that you would stand with me, that I was right just in your eyes, then I could, well I think I could just about stand any—” Now the sobs came, for the first time in the seven years he had come to her graveside.
Julia and Marley saw the huge old frame silhouetted against the azure Virginia sky. She covered her mouth with the back of her hand. She wanted to go to him and hold him. But she did not know, her own pain still numbing at the loss of her beloved Junius, then their only child, her youth slipping away like the faded green of a Shenandoah autumn—she just did not know...
Junkin fought to collect himself, smearing tears away with the sleeve of his frock coat. “I guess it's been a long time now that Joseph, our first to go, has been here, and now he's with you, my dear.” His eldest son's tombstone, next to Rush's, bore the wear of the dozen years since his passing from typhus. The dark eyes moved to the next marker.
“And Junius Fishburne, you know him well by now. Such a fine, learned young man. Too bad it nearly broke Jul—” Again the tears choked him before he could continue. His eyes moved down the lengthening row of headstones. Julia's little baby, just over a year before—no, better not think about that one yet. Then his eyes stopped.
“And Ellie and her baby, well...” He bit down hard on his lip. “This—this is just a little bit harder than I had planned on it being, Rush. And much as it hurts about these who are with you now, at least I thank the Father they are living in bliss at the eternal wedding feast. It is those who remain, those who remain here in the South, for whom my heart most frets. What will become of them?”
He shook his head with great weariness and sadness. “Oh what will become of any of us?”
He stood for a moment with his eyes closed, steadying himself. Then he knelt down and placed the posy of jonquils he had brought by his wife's headstone. And he leaned over and gently kissed the marker.
He had first brought Julia Rush Miller a posy of jonquils fifty years before.
When Junkin stood, he drank in the perfumed redolence of his home in the Valley of Virginia one final time. And then the Lord strengthened him for what he must do, and he felt energy course again through his veins and limbs. He turned without looking any more at the graves and let himself out the squeaky old iron gate. Then he strode to the carriage, climbed aboard, and did not stop but to sleep until he had crossed the Potomac River into Maryland. There, he stepped down and made haste to shake the dust of Virginia from his boots.