Читать книгу Shaman's Dream: The Modoc War - Lu Boone's Mattson - Страница 64

Here, inside the Middleton, Connecticut, Methodist Church, after the last sounds of the Mendelssohn Quintette had drifted away, Master Darius Baker delivered himself of the Salutory Address -- in Latin. “If… dog… rabbit,” Major General Edward Sprigg Canby said to himself as he listened.

Outside, above the bunting, the pennants snapped at the azure summer sky. The procession had marched along Court Street to Main and thence to the church, the thirty-six young men of Wesleyan University, the faculty of six, the platform party, all in their academic regalia. Now they sat, the dignitaries gazing out over the scrubbed and hopeful up-tipped faces of the graduates. Beyond them, the ladies and gentlemen in their pearl-grey suits, their hats and gloves, listened raptly, each word a reward to them for their sons’ successes in enduring.

“If…,” he thought. “If the dog had not stopped to lift its leg, the dog would have caught the rabbit. But the dog had stopped….” He stopped, too, struck by the fact that from his place of honor here on this platform really only about one hundred miles separated him from the place of his real beginning thirty-one years ago. West Point. Class of ‘39. A circuitous coming it had been. The program notes about him, he was relieved to observe, said nothing about his standing that long-ago June day: thirtieth in a class of thirty-three. There had been little or nothing then to suggest he would sit here waiting to have the honorary doctor of law’s hood slipped over his head, after the last speaker had charged the graduates to seize the day.

No, the program notes talked instead about the contingencies of his fifty-three years. Reviewing the program to help pass the time, he had remembered the brief parable of the dog and the rabbit: If he had not succeeded in moving his batch of Seminoles without losing them -- as others had been lost between Tennessee and the Indian Territory -- he would not have been commissioned to Mexico. If he had failed there to take the battery on the right flank of the hill at Cerro Gordo, he would not have been detailed to California in time to watch his deserting men convert from soldiers to gold-miners. Had he not brought them back in, he would not have been chosen for posting eventually to Utah -- via Kearney, Laramie, Bridger, the string of forts that would lead him to confront the Mormons, peaceably. And thereby would eventually have missed out on New Mexico’s Glorieta Pass and Sibley’s rebels, the New York draft riots, Fort Morgan with Farragut, being shot in the ass aboard the gunboat Cricket. And last of all, “The Reconstruction.” Commander of the Military Division of West Mississippi, Commander of the District of the Gulf, Commander of the Department of Washington, of the 5th Military District (Texas), the 1st Military District (Virginia), the 2nd Military District (Carolinas).

He could, he realized, have missed this. If things had been different.

But they weren’t and he hadn’t. So today, under the sober but optimistic New England sun, he was sitting here, exhausted or perhaps merely tired of it all, while the crowd of spectators craned its necks and adjusted itself so each could bear witness. It was time, all right, for the change that was coming. He could see Louisa at the farthest end of a pew, as she would be. When he had finished his remarks and the hood had been spread on his shoulders, they would be gone from this eastern world. Not a moment too soon for either of them. Time to shake the Insurrection’s dust from their feet. Time to leave this Eastern Establishment to its own devisings.

“A pleasant trip to you,” Sherman had said benignly in his letter.

That was what he wished for, too. For himself, but especially for Louisa. Patient, enduring Louisa, who still ‘walked with reed-like grace of movement.’ The last two or three years -- ever since their arrival in New Orleans -- had been hard for her. Harder, even, than the starving months of the winter of ‘57, when they lived in a tent as he built up Fort Bridger. Later, the recriminations, the attacks in the various newspapers of the ‘occupied’ territories, had been for him an understandable part of the job of reconstruction. Who could expect a defeated people to welcome the commander of the army of occupation, especially when he would mix so intimately into the political rearrangements taking place? He knew better than to take it personally and had simply persisted, as he was wont to do. But the words and slights had wounded Louisa on his behalf. He knew it, although she mentioned nothing about it.

Now here was the valedictory at last, this by Leon Chester Field of Boston, so the program stated.

They were ready, he thought, for the settled damp of Portland. There they would have time again to read and socialize -- and repair themselves. Perhaps that place would be far enough away to let the abrasions heal. He had volunteered for it as soon as Crook left for Arizona to chase Apaches. It would be good to give up the East and return to the field.

He rose up with the rest as the Mendelssohn Quintette sounded the notes of the recessional. Out of the church they marched, to McDonough Hall, they and upward of two hundred persons, for dinner. Thence to the reception at the president’s house, Louisa and he:

Commander of the District of the Columbia, in the Military Division of the Pacific. The Territories of Washington, Idaho, and Alaska. The State of Oregon.

Where life was shorter on chicanery. And inevitably simpler.