Quilt

Over the last several Memorial Days, I've posted a poem on Facebook, usually one of my favorite World War I British poets, occasionally a little Shakespeare, once the Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, reminding me of my grandfather flying five miles over Germany in a fuselage full of the dead and dying.

I never quite know what to make of this holiday. We lost no one in my squadron during the Gulf War, none except a couple weird illnesses and deaths years after we came home. And what were we fighting for, exactly? Not freedom. Not our values or our way of life, except to the extent our way of live is inextricably intertwined with the oil being pumped from the Aramco fields in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia. We in the this country have a bad habit of fighting discretionary wars, and those we leave behind forever in those hot, unforgiving spaces for all eternity simply died in what has become our nation's family business. All a waste and a tragedy.

What does fighting and dying look like when that young soldier is out there because he doesn't see any other way to protect his home and his family?

My grandmother, Mamaw, Leither Vada Dickey, loved my mother, her daughter-in-law, although they couldn't be more different. Mamaw grew up with an alcoholic father who had trouble keeping a job, saw her profoundly handicapped and hunchbacked older sister committed to a sanitorium for life, lost her baby brother at around age four when he fell in front of a wagon and was decapitated in front of her. She then married Marvin, fresh out of the Army after the Great War, and had nine children, of whom eight survived to adulthood. She was kind to a fault but tough, a great cook who doted over her grandkids, but she'd probably never been more than fifty miles from Water Valley since she moved there as a little girl.

Mom was a colonel's daughter, smart and direct and ambitious, on her way to a doctorate and a life teaching and writing books. She lived through some hard times, and was in the midst of such a patch during her marriage to my dad, but her view of her place in the world, and that of women in general, was two generations removed from that of her mother-in-law.

During one of their visits, Mamaw shuffled over to a trunk in her old tarpaper-sided house and pulled out something she wanted my mother to see.

It was a quilt, obviously very old but also amazingly well-preserved. It was finished on three sides, with binding that enclosed the stuffing that was hanging out of the fourth, unstitched side of the quilt. At that point, she was the custodian of this artifact of a national tragedy, this unfinished piece of bedding that had sat in this trunk since the spring of 1862.

It was then that my great-great grandfather, a Perry I'm told, had enlisted in the Water Valley Rifles, a volunteer infantry regiment drawn from the north end of Yalobusha County, where our family farm stood right up into my youth. Shortly after mustering in, the young men marched up to Corinth, where the Army of Mississippi was in winter quarters. Most of the boys they met in camp had never seen a shot fired in anger, much less a battle between two great armies.

My great-great grandmother knew her husband would be cold up there in camp along the Tennessee line, and began stitching him a quilt to keep him warm on those cold early spring nights.

I doubt she knew that as she worked on that quilt, the Confederates marched north out of camp in early April, most carrying whatever weapons they brought from home and wearing their farm clothes. The destination was a little cluster of buildings called Pittsburgh Landing, along the Tennessee River. A large, well-equipped Union army had encamped with its back to the river, leaving exposed a dangling flank that Albert Sidney Johnston, perhaps the greatest American general of whom you've never heard, saw as an opportunity to smash the federals before they made it to Mississippi.

On April 6, 1862, the two armies clashed in what became known as the Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest two days in the history of this country. The Confederates damn near drove the Yankees into the river that first day, only to fall back in the face of a fierce counterattack the second day. Johnston never saw how it all turned out--shot in the back of the leg, he suffered a severed artery and bled to death in the saddle before anyone realized the gravity of his wound.

I don't know what happened to my great-great grandfather, except that he never returned from that battle and was presumed dead. Thirty-five hundred men would suffer the same fate there, the Confederates buried in long mass graves that still stand as mute testimony to the loss of life to this day.

But that's just a number. To understand the loss, if it's even possible to understand, we have to consider the 3500 stories that were forever altered that day. One took place in my ancestors' household there outside of Water Valley, on their little farm where word came that a husband, son, and father, my great-great grandfather, was dead.

His wife quit working on the quilt, tucked it in a trunk and probably never laid eyes on it again. A widow with small children, living on a farm with an invading army now less than a week's march to the north. They would arrive soon enough, the destruction of my ancestral hometown glorified in John Wayne's The Horse Soldiers.

I wish I knew what happened next. Did she remarry? Did those kids remember their father, or were they too young? What must it have felt like to live in a conquered territory, with a generation of men missing and no idea what might happen next?

It is all beyond me. And there's nothing glorious in the pile of dead boys and young men left on the field at Shiloh. What did my ancestor die for, exactly? Not to preserve slavery--we were poor farmers in the rocky, hilly part of the state where mass cotton cultivation was less common than growing vegetables and raising livestock to feed a big family and maybe make a little money if the harvest was abundant. States' rights? I doubt he cared much about that, either. No, those guys marched north into their first, fatal encounter with the enemy, their fellow countrymen, because an invading army had massed a few days from their homes and their families. And the folks who stood to benefit from slavery and all that talk about states' rights and nullification and the sacrosanct nature of property, even human property, manipulated the situation to make that happen, caused the very invasion that led to so much death and destruction. The planter class has blood on its hands for that one.

Maybe there was a bond in all this, between my mother and my grandmother. Maybe the reason Mamaw wanted Mom to see that quilt, and hear that story, was because Mamaw knew from their talks that Mom's father fought in both Europe and the Pacific in some of the worst combat in World War II, and her grandfather had survived a kamikaze strike on his ship off Okinawa late in that conflict. Mom's people had survived all that, but there is among women of every generation, going back to Lysistrata and before, a bond of grief at watching men go to war, a knowledge that the men (mostly men, even now) may go fight the wars and perhaps even die in the exercise, but it's the women who get to bear the consequences, individually and as the glue that holds their communities together. My Confederate ancestor had a moment of shock and pain followed by an eternity of blackness; his widow had to live the aftermath of that moment for the rest of her life.

And that is the sacrifice we never acknowledge on Memorial Day, that of the families shattered by war and loss. It was the women, after all, who created Memorial Day, both north and south, as a means of remembering and re-casting the narrative in a way that gave meaning to the grief and tragedy they'd endured. It was the Daughters of the Confederacy who are mostly to blame for the "Lost Cause" myth on which my generation and before were raised. And we engage in that exercise right down to this day, talking about preserving freedom and the American way of life through blood sacrifice that's always just been about taking care of the folks at the top. And it'll probably continue right up until we grow up and out of those myths, and start seeing war for what it is.

Enjoy your long weekend. Truly.