Chapter 53

Names In The Attic

Monday blazes with heat, another day of hoped-for breezes that don’t find us. Florence chooses to spend the morning in the porch rocking chair, fanning her face with Ladies’ Home Journal.

“It’ll get hotter,” Mrs. Grome says. “If you want to see the writing in the attic, morning is the time to do it.”

Chance’s eyes telegraph excitement to mine, as Mrs. Grome carries an oil lamp to lead us up the steep attic stairs into a closed-up, airless heat.

The sloped ceiling and smell of mothballs are akin to our attic back home, but our low-raftered hodge-podge of trunks and boxes is coated with cobwebs and dust. Mrs. Grome’s trunks neatly line the wall, with boxes leaning against the red-brick chimney. The floor is freshly swept, and the lone window recently washed.

Mrs. Grome leads us beyond the chimney, where light from the window barely reaches. Raising the lamp, she points to a wood rafter. Pvt. K.M. McKelvey, PA 150 is scratched into the wood. Cpl. Toby Michaels is etched into another rafter. More names are on rafters, and others are written on the wall with soot or coal. One name, Ben Jamison, is carved into a floorboard.

“Jamison was wounded, too weak to reach wall or rafter,” says Mrs. Grome. “His friends helped him write that. He was in a bad way, but he survived. At least while he was here. I don’t know what happened after.”

“How can you bear not knowing?” I ask.

“Did you check the cemetery to see if his name is on a tombstone?” Chance asks.

Mrs. Grome shakes her head. “My husband was killed in the war’s early days, and I didn’t want to think about death anymore. When Lincoln came to dedicate the cemetery, I didn’t even go.”

“I’m sorry about your husband,” Chance says.

“No need. It happened more than fifty years ago. In wartime. Widows were as commonplace as stray cats.”

“Is that another name?” Chance points to white flecks on chimney bricks. The name Wendell is hard to read, and time has turned the rest to dust.

I see more white paint further down, partly hidden behind a box. I ease the box aside to read the letters CSA. “I thought you hid Yankees. This stands for Confederate States of America.”

“In the third day’s fighting, the Union re-took Gettysburg, and my boys in blue could leave.” Mrs. Grome’s eyes look away, as though she’s running memories through her head. “That same day, I found two Rebel soldiers hiding in my shed. They were separated from their army before it retreated. I hid them same as the Union boys, kept them from being captured. Storms raised the river, and they waited for it to go down before they sneaked out to follow their army.”

“Two? Where’s the other name?” My hands fairly itch to pull the boxes away from the chimney. “Did it wear off completely?”

“As I recall, the other soldier wouldn’t write his name.” Mrs. Grome pulls a hankie from her sleeve to wipe perspiration from her face. “He thought it shameful to sully my attic.” 

“I know another Confederate like that.” I recollect how Grandpa wouldn’t let me carve my name in that covered bridge in West Virginia.

Back downstairs, Chance suggests we walk to the soldiers’ cemetery. “We can try to find out if that wounded soldier is buried there.”

“Yes,” I agree. “Mrs. Grome might not have wanted to look, but I’m downright curious.”

                     *    *    *

As we near the cemetery, the veterans’ Camp sits off in the distance, wrapped in a veil of haze. Shade is hard to come by, and the heat is unfriendly.

“Where was Jamison from?” I ask.

“Fourteenth Brooklyn. New York.”

Starting at opposite ends of the New York section, Chance and I snake up and down rows of graves. We read every New York name. No Ben Jamison.

“I reckon he survived after all,” I say.

“Maybe,” Chance says, “but maybe he died and was sent to New York for burial.”

“I’m going to believe he lived. Might be he’s even here at the Reunion.”

“Who’s at the Reunion?” a voice says. We turn to see Corporal Westy with a freckle-faced man. “This here’s Red Foster from the Stonewall Brigade,” Westy says.

The man takes off his hat and runs his hand through hair as white as an eagle’s crown. “Been a spell since the name fit.”

“Leastways ya still got hair.” Westy pulls off his own hat and pats his bald head. The two men laugh, and I reckon Red’s name still fits, only now it describes his face and ears.

“Have you seen my grandpa at the Reunion,” I ask, “the one called Shadow.”

The two men look at each other, and Westy says, “We ain’t seen so much as a shadow of ‘im.”

“And we’s done considerable lookin’,” Red adds. “One feller seen him a few days back, but he ain’t there now.”

Westy pats my shoulder. “Might be he’s keepin’ hisself scarce on purpose. Recollectin’ the battle might be unsettlin’.”

“You mean remembering Uncle Fred’s death?” I recall how Grandpa cried over the moldy, old tent he and Fred had shared.

“Might be, but might be other things, too,” Westy says, chewing his toothpick.

“What other things?”

He taps a gravestone with the toe of his shoe. “These. Lots’a Yankees was kilt here. Young Shadow was a crack shot. He might feel blameful fer lives he took.”

“It was wartime,” I say. “Killing the enemy was his job.”

Westy sighs. “True. But livin’ with it ain’t always easy.”

He and Red hurry back to Camp for an assembly, and I tell Chance what Grandpa said about earning money. “But I thought once the Reunion commenced, surely he’d be there.”

“Does he have desperate need for money?” Chance asks.

“He worries on train fare home.”

“You mean for you?”

“For both of us.”

“He doesn’t need train fare for himself. Most states paid for their veterans to get here and back.”

I stop walking. “Are you sure? Even Confederates?”

He nods. “If he paid it himself, West Virginia will reimburse him.” He takes my hand to head back to the boarding house, but it could be the hand of a bronze statue. My mind is elsewhere.