GUARD OF HONOR

GUARD OF HONOR⁠[4]

By BARRY BENEFIELD

(From The Pictorial Review)

Once in Asphodel they had called him Willie when he was a little boy, and then they called him Bill. There came a time when, upon his occasional trips back to his Arkansas home, his old friends ventured a little nervously to call him Will, and the Asphodel Argus printed him as “Mr. William P. Ott, sales-manager and treasurer of the Apollo Clothing Co., of Chicago.”

Somewhere somehow in the flat fields of northern France he lost his richest worldly treasure—that part of his marvelous memory that covered the period between his sixteenth and thirty-second years, that segment of his memory which had known not only all his war experiences up to that moment, but also every garment manufactured by his company down to the last button, every trade route sold by the Apollo travelers, every customer’s rating and idiosyncrasies, every weak and strong point of the goods and the salesmen of his company’s chief competitors.

And so, having come home by way of three or four Government hospitals, he was, after a brief period of lionizing that puzzled the pink-faced, snub-nosed, chubby little man, once again to his friends of Asphodel, and as always to his widowed mother, just Willie.

On that hot June morning Willie left his mother’s house and went down the red hill leading from the higher residential section to the six business streets, completing his habitual morning round by ten o’clock: to the post-office, where he received and read and shook his head over an eagerly solicitous letter from the president of the Apollo Clothing Co.; to Hampton’s Furniture Store and Mortuary Parlor, where he sat awhile in a cane-bottomed chair on the sidewalk, apparently listening to other men of leisure talk, though their words merely buzzed in his ears; to Embree’s Confectionery Store, where he bought a tinfoil package of cigarettes; and finally to his real goal for the morning, Zebedee Smith’s Barber Shop, where he silently submitted to shaving and shoe-shining, and then sat in front of the big plate-glass window, staring, round-eyed, out across the street, through an old brick building that had lost everything in a fire except its side walls, out across the depression in the earth, at the bottom of which Little Sandy River slipped southward on its unquestioning way toward the great gulf that would presently swallow it up.

As he stared and consciously saw nothing in detail, while his mind continued its eternal reaching down for something precious that it could almost but not quite touch, two figures in the street moved across his vision, and he sat up suddenly and studied them. As well as he knew any one he knew Goldie, once the owner of Asphodel’s only candy store and soda-water fountain, and Honey Boy, Asphodel’s best-known individual, the small town’s huge, red-headed, freckle-faced, obscenely dirty, half-witted son.

Goldie’s infinitesimal figure, frail and stooping, was covered with an old and spotted and worn Confederate uniform, the gray coat hanging in a confusion of folds and wrinkles from his narrow shoulders, the trousers turned up at least two inches at the bottom. His black slouch hat made his very thin, old face seem even thinner than it was.

Honey Boy had once owned a donkey, and it was one of the few memories that lived in his cloudy mind. He always carried a stout switch with which he belabored his imaginary mount, while he frequently jumped up and down as if he were being bounced by the donkey that was no more. Now as he pranced along behind Goldie, Honey Boy, between attacks upon his invisible donkey, mimicked as nearly as he could every movement of the little old man who marched along in front of him. Laughter was thrilling to Honey Boy; he was accustomed to that reward for his antics, and he kept opening his wide mouth, filled with yellow stumps of teeth, in a leering grin as he looked from right to left at chance passers-by for applause.

Goldie stopped in front of the red, square, brick county court-house, diagonally across the street from Smith’s Barber Shop. He removed his hat and stood at attention, listening. Southern Arkansas architecture sometimes shows the influence of New Orleans, especially in narrow balconies jutting out under second-story windows. Goldie remained looking up at the empty balcony of the court-house, from which speeches were often delivered. Now and then he clapped his hands, nodding his head approvingly over eloquence that came back across the years only to him.

Everybody called Levi Goldbaum Goldie, almost entirely in affection. For a long time he had kept his candy store open, with occasional closures due to bankruptcies without a taint of fraud. Even in the full flush of his middle-aged manhood he had been a frail, haggard, stooped, feeble-looking, little man, the husband of an abnormally healthy and handsome wife, the father of a brood of unusually vigorous boys and girls, who grew up, married, and moved away from Asphodel, leaving him and his wife alone in their old age.

When Goldie had attended Confederate reunions—and he attended every one he could—or had marched with the diminishing group of old soldiers on great occasions in Asphodel, many people, especially boys and girls wondered if he really could have been a soldier. But there was no doubt in the minds of the comrades who had been with him at Shiloh.

Goldie’s store having closed its doors five years before as the result of two new competitors and inevitably final bankruptcy proceedings, he had sadly retired. He was now over seventy, was considered a trifle queer, and spent most of his time pottering around at home. He owned his house, and his grown children sent him what little money he needed to pay the last penalties of existence.

After standing listening in front of the court-house for some thirty minutes Goldie, drawing himself as straight as he could, proceeded down Walnut Street, turned into Broadway, and marched up that main street, Honey Boy cavorting behind him. And there was that in Goldie’s bearing and in his stride that drew Willie after him, and presently the little soldier with the wounded memory got out in the street and walked along by the side of the little soldier with the wounded mind, keeping step, the dry dust dimming his newly shined shoes and rising in small, lazy clouds around his white-duck trousers.

Goldie’s mind had gone back to other days when Asphodel’s citizens had made much of June 3, Jefferson Davis’s birthday and Confederate Memorial Day, and now he was celebrating it in his town alone, for Asphodel, like many another Southern town, had neglected the day for many years.

To most of those who saw the unmartial figure of Goldie and Willie and Honey Boy marching slowly along the dusty street it did not occur that this was the South’s Memorial Day. Goldie’s wearing of his old uniform was not uncommon enough to be striking; many a time-beaten soldier, reduced in circumstances, at last falls back on his most-treasured suit for every-day wear.

But if those who saw Goldie had looked carefully they might have noticed that, however slowly he moved, he proceeded in a straight line, with regularly spaced steps, and they might have suspected that Goldie was at the corner of a company invisible to all except his fading, sunken, black eyes, marching to music unheard except by him. Most people, indeed, gave their attention to Honey Boy, trailing directly behind and mocking the little gray man who labored with difficulty through the deep white sand.

It was eleven o’clock when Goldie and Willie and Honey Boy passed Pinder’s Marble Yard and its group of waiting white angels with downcast eyes. Pinder’s is just beyond the business section of Asphodel, and after that the ground rises to the north and east. The street leading to Highland Cemetery begins there, a long, tedious hill. The sun was unclouded, the wind was still, and Goldie, his coat carefully buttoned to the throat, was panting hard and reeling as he made Pinder’s Marble Yard.

Wilted by the terrific heat and his violent exertions, and no longer encouraged by laughing spectators, Honey Boy now merely followed on behind the staggering figure marching toward Highland Cemetery, a mile away. And Willie stalked along by his side, seeing nothing, as if he were in a dream deeper even than Goldie’s. Now the Memorial Day Parade was coming to the edge of Asphodel, to the section of straggling houses. Belle Foscue, a negro washerwoman, ran to her paling fence and asked the three chance comrades to come in and rest awhile under the shade of her oak tree.

Goldie halted, bringing his feet together bravely. He was moving his lips, but no words that could be heard a foot away issued from them. Belle came out of the gate to the soldier who could not leave his company. She bent her head close to his lips, listened, and then ran to bring him water.

“Thank you,” he said in a whisper. “You’re a good girl.” He waited patiently until she could bring Honey Boy another dipper filled from the well. But when she offered the freshly filled dipper to Willie he seemed not to see, so she turned it upside down, rolled her eyes at him, and went back into her yard.

After a while Goldie braced himself and marched on up the red hill. At this point the red clay beneath the cemetery road shows through the white sand, and rains keep washed out deep and ever-deepening gullies on both sides of it. About half-way up the hill Goldie, stubbornly holding his position at the corner of the invisible company in spite of the fact that the road had narrowed considerably, found himself on the edge of a gully; and presently he lost his balance, and staggered over into it, and rolled down to the bottom of it. Honey Boy crowed and chortled and gurgled, and began frantically beating his unseen donkey with the switch. Willie stood still, staring ahead, waiting.

The fallen soldier, having made two or three desperate attempts to rise, sank back into a crumpled sitting posture, his head bent in shame. After a while Honey Boy got down on his hands and knees in the bed of the gully. “Ride Honey Boy,” he stuttered. “Ride up-hill. Honey Boy strong.”

And Goldie, trying to sit astride the big boy’s broad back, fell forward and clasped his arms around his steed’s red, sweaty neck. Honey Boy crawled out of the gully and slowly climbed the hill with his burden, occasionally bucking like a horse and throwing the little man off on the road. But then he would stand patiently until the fallen soldier could crawl up on his back again.

At the top of the hill Goldie got to his feet once more, and as the roadbed was now level as well as firm he walked awhile and then rode awhile on Honey Boy, and so, riding and walking, he finally marched, with Willie at his side, through the arched gateway of Highland Cemetery as the whistles were blowing for twelve o’clock. Old man Miller, the sexton in charge there, and his two helpers were in a far corner of the graveyard, so that none saw Asphodel’s Memorial Day parade enter to honor the men Lee had loved and led.

The parade proceeded across the graveyard to a clump of oak trees clustering about and almost hiding the grass-grown plot that is called in Asphodel “The Confederate Cemetery.” The town had been headquarters for a rather large body of Confederate troops during the Civil War, and there are in the palinged enclosure nearly two hundred graves of the men in gray who had come to their end far from their homes.

Opening the rotting gate of the paling fence, Goldie stepped inside, Honey Boy and Willie close behind him. Here again Goldie stood in rapt attention, his brown face shining, his head bared, and his eyes lifted, listening to the famous orators his imagination had brought there for this day from out of the endearing past. Honey Boy sprawled on a rickety old iron bench. Willie stood stiffly by Goldie’s side, looking straight ahead.

Honey Boy moved. “S-sh!” hissed Goldie in a whisper. “Senator Collamore is speaking. Oh, he is good! I have heard him speak twenty times before. He says this custom of setting aside a day especially to do honor to the soldier dead originated, in this country, in the South, though now every little town as well as every big city in the North celebrates its Memorial Day; and he says that as long as memory lives we of the South shall continue to pay this sincere tribute to our men encamped beneath the green grass awaiting the bugles of a better day.” Goldie nodded his head vigorously, softly patting his thin, little hands together in respectful applause—softly so that he should not disturb the speaker. “Yes, that’s good and true,” he whispered, “very true indeed.”

“Did you hear that?” he whispered again enthusiastically after a while, turning first toward Willie and then to Honey Boy. “That is Governor Marcus speaking now. ‘The South is loyal,’ he says, ‘and it never forgets.’ Ah, yes, that is so true, too.”

And so Goldie, as if some part of him sensed the fact that his two comrades were not getting all that he was getting, from time to time picked out and tossed to the tired and hungry boy and to his brother-in-arms whose mind was thousands of miles away some of the crumbs from the feast of oratory that only he could enjoy—gilded words and fancy phrases that the little soldier had hoarded lovingly in his memory for years.

Well, after a while the speeches were all made, but Goldie stayed on. In other times it had been a custom in Asphodel to guard the Confederate Cemetery the night of Memorial Day, and Goldie was certain that he had been ordered to do guard duty that night.

Weak and hungry though he was, Goldie had been heartened by what he had heard, and as he sat on the rusty-red old iron bench enthusiastically talking at Honey Boy and Willie his voice was almost loud.

“Look yonder!” he cried. “Every grave is a bank of flowers. And did you notice how many people were here? Every store and office in town must have closed up. It’s a grand day. I’m a proud man this Memorial Day, I can tell you. If President Davis could only see all this—and Lee! But, there, I must not speak that last name again. If I do I’m bound to cry, and I’m too old for that. Two words can always make me cry—‘mother’ and ‘Lee.’”

The mounds above most of the graves had been leveled by time, and over all of them was a rank growth of weeds and grass. Honey Boy stared hard at Goldie, then he began giggling. Suddenly his small gray eyes filled with tears; he twisted and wrung his hands, and began whimpering, “Honey Boy hungry. Honey Boy must go home right now.”

“Hungry?” said Goldie, in high scorn. “Why, you poor little fool, you don’t know what hunger is. A soldier often goes two or three days on a single meal. But wait; our ladies will presently bring a banquet for the guard of honor—chicken and cake, strawberries and cream, and coffee—oh, I don’t know what all, but it will be splendid. When the South does a thing it does it splendidly.”

But the hot, damp, still afternoon wore away and no feast appeared. The notion that he was to do guard duty that night finally drove Goldie to consider the wisdom of fortifying himself in advance with sleep.

“You know,” he explained to the unheeding ears of Willie and Honey Boy, “it is a serious offense to go to sleep on picket duty. In war-time it means courtmartial. There is no punishment here and now except a man’s conscience, but a conscience can be terrible sometimes. And do you boys know, ever since the war whenever I’ve been assigned to any duty at reunions or on Memorial Days I’ve had a feeling that if I didn’t do it right he would know—General Lee.”

Creeping off to a secluded, shady spot some distance from the Confederate Cemetery, Goldie took off his coat, rolled it into a sort of pillow, and lay down in the deep grass, now wilted by the shimmering, moist heat. “This is how a soldier often has to sleep,” he said proudly, looking from one to the other of his comrades.

Honey Boy, now completely subdued by hunger and thirst and fatigue, but held by fear and perhaps also by some boyish emotion of loyalty from deserting the little brown man in gray, sat staring at him a few moments, and then he too sank back on the grass and closed his eyes. Willie, his immaculate white suit of the morning wrinkled and soiled, dropped his straw hat to the ground at his feet and sat leaning against a stump, studying Goldie’s face intently. Except for picketing the graves that night, Asphodel’s Memorial Day exercises in honor of its soldier dead were over.

In the great sweet-gum tree above the three odd companions a pair of bluejays brought frequent instalments of food to their young and feasted them with much excitement and noisy importance. Out in the well-kept sections of the graveyard six or seven women appeared at various times during the afternoon, pulled a weed or a blade of grass from a grave, put down fresh flowers, pottered lovingly about it for a while, and then went home. But no one came to the Confederate Cemetery, and Goldie was as still as his comrades who slept beneath the tangles of grass and that weed called bitter. Honey Boy, waking up from time to time, looked around hopelessly, then weepingly lay back down. Willie continued staring at Goldie’s face, as calm as death and as sweet as life.

Late in the afternoon slim, dazzlingly white whips of lightning slashed about in the gray clouds that had been assembling above, thunder tumbled and mumbled and boomed, a quick shower of rain came sliding down the wind. It slipped under the waving branches of the tree above the sleepers and drenched them to the skin before they were fully awake. Willie now sat with his head leaning back against the stump, staring at the sky. He paid no attention to the rain or to his comrades.

Honey Boy began crying, his teeth chattering with cold, and he raised up and wrung his hands. “Oh, what is a little shower?” asked Goldie roughly, getting to his feet. “I have marched and slept a week in wet clothes.” Moving closer to the trunk of the sweet-gum tree, where it was almost dry, he laid his body down again and drifted away to sleep as sweetly as a child. Honey Boy beat his hands together and sobbed bitterly, but finally he crept close to Goldie, rolled himself into a ball, and was once more quiet.

And while two of them slept and one of them prowled desperately in the darkness of his mind for a lost thread a search-party that had been started by Mrs. Goldbaum came to the Confederate Cemetery, looked in, called loudly Goldie’s name, and went away.

When night, and it was a heavy, clouded night, came on, Goldie rose, put on his hat and coat, selected a fallen dead limb of a pine tree to serve as a gun, and proceeded to his post. Honey Boy stumbled along close behind him, now and then breaking out in a huge bellow of desperation. “Shut up!” hissed Goldie. “Have you no respect for the dead?”

But the frail, little, old soldier himself, reeling with weakness, often caught hold of the fence to steady his trembling legs. He was so tired that at the corners he sometimes stopped and rested his head against the flat-topped posts. But he had not been relieved of duty, so he kept on marching around the enclosure, often stumbling and falling in the dark, but always getting up and forcing himself along. Honey Boy flung himself into the deep grass near the paling fence and lay there moaning. Willie stood, a dozen yards away, against a tree intently studying Goldie.

Meanwhile searching parties were excitedly combing Asphodel and its environs for the missing men and Honey Boy; and some time after midnight a party made a second trip to the Confederate Cemetery. As the searchers approached, their lanterns and blazing pine-knots burning ragged yellow holes in the night, Goldie tried to shout and almost did shout, “Halt!”

“Is that you, Goldie?” some one called.

“This is Private Levi Goldbaum.”

“What are you doing out here, man? Your wife is crazy; she thinks you’re dead. Where have you been all day? You’re wet to the skin now, I’ll bet. You look like it, anyhow. What in the world are you doing here?”

“I took part in our Memorial Day exercises, of course. Now I am on picket duty, guarding the graves of my comrades. I should have been relieved at midnight, but I reckon something went wrong. Anyway, I couldn’t go until I was relieved, could I? Answer me that, Mr. Smarty. Don’t come any nearer. You can’t get through unless you’ve got the password. It’s a point of honor. I don’t care a rap who you are. Halt, there, you!”

Goldie stood up straight now, his bayonet pointing at the imprudent person who had come too near. The lights flickered over his frail figure, touching with yellow, beneath his slouch hat, the lower half of his cleanly shaven face, revealing the pale, thin, old lips drawn tightly across his false teeth.

The invaders gathered to talk among themselves, and as they whispered Goldie’s gun drooped slightly in his hands, dropped lower, and then the little old man moaned and crumpled stiffly to his knees.

He tried to rise and did, and fell again. He whispered, “Halt! You can’t pass here. It’s a point of honor, you see. If General Lee found out he would be—would be sorry for me.”

But the guard of honor had been relieved.

In his tracks stood another little soldier, this one clothed in white and shining with strength and fire and authority.

“Take him home, boys, but don’t step across the line he set. Don’t, don’t, I tell you! This is no joke. Lift him up gently now. He dropped just like my buddy over there—the picture, with the lights and everything, was just exactly the same. He has reminded me in a thousand ways all day of my buddy. But he’s only cold and hungry; my buddy was warm and dead. Take him home now, and when he comes to tell him not to worry; another soldier who remembers is covering his post. And General Lee will never know.”

FOOTNOTES: