Yankee Deserters in a Confederate World

Yankee Deserters in a Confederate World

Stepping back to survey the scene, my best friend, Misty, my older brother, Joshua, and I, Jolina, wiped the sweat trickling down our faces with itchy forearms and smiled. Above us, the sun pierced the canopy of kudzu, spraying the now cleared forest floor with a palette of pastels. Dad’s machete and Mom’s kitchen knives were leaned against a white oak; the juice from the leaves we’d cut dribbling down the blades. Slanted in Joshua’s Red Flyer wagon — along with a single, unmarked gravestone — was a load of chipped and broken gravestones intricately carved with a single name: Polk.

Fanning herself with a Micky Mouse cap, 12-year-old Misty panted, “We really did it!”

“Told ya we could,” the one year older and so much wiser Joshua said. “Now, we just gotta clean up those headstones.”

Younger than them both and therefore without much say, I groaned but complied as we lugged the wagon to the fort hidden in our neighbor Jim Gentry’s tobacco barn. All summer we’d tried cleaning up the remnants of the Polk graveyard: the enchanted world we’d stumbled upon while exploring the 365 acres of farmland we called stomping grounds. After asking Jim Gentry about it, he told us the graveyard and farm had once belonged to Ezekiel Polk, none other than President James K. Polk’s grandfather. In addition to this, during the Civil War when a Yankee deserter attempted to loot the Polk’s white plantation home, Ekekiel had shot him on the steps with his Revolutionary War musket, and the soldier tumbled down, dying in a puddle of his own blood.

Jim Gentry, current master of that white plantation home, showed us the scarlet stain on the wooden landing outside the bedroom he shared with his wife, Lydia. Joshua, Misty, and I tried to act interested in this piece of visible history, but inside we were secretly appalled our Yankee parents had taken us to live in an angry Confederate world; for now we knew who’d been buried beneath the single, unmarked gravestone, and why it had not been intricately carved like the rest. And although he’d been both a deserter and a looter, we felt the loss of his Northern blood in this Southern soil as keenly as if it had been our own.

In the fort a week later, we crowded around the wobbly table and drew diagrams of the graveyard as it was and as it would be once our work was completed: the hallowed ground threaded with trails; a gold fish pond framed with smooth river stones; blossoms bursting from behind freshly scoured graves; and at the front and center, a new gravestone for the murdered Yankee soldier.

For hours on end, we hacked into the brambles with Dad’s machete and the kitchen knives Joshua had “borrowed” from home. We toted the heaps of foliage to the back of the plot and hurled them over the barbed wire fence. Once the trails were honed, we gathered the headstones and gently placed them into the wagon as if they weren’t already broken. In the fort, we set them one at a time on the tabletop, took out our old toothbrushes and some Dial liquid soap, and scrubbed and scrubbed until our hands and brushes were coated in green slime. Once they were cleaned as much as possible, we took them back and propped the Polk family stones in a circle, but the soldier’s blank stone we placed on the other side of the graveyard, beneath the sprawling branches of a maple tree.

It only took a month for the weeds to reclaim the graveyard, but years until my family’s dreams for the 365 acres of plush farmland they wanted to turn into a community were destroyed.

A few weeks before we were forced from our home on Jim Gentry’s land, I visited this garden of cultural prejudices and violent death. I knelt before the single, unmarked gravestone and clawed at the weeds attempting to curl around its base. I traced my fingertips over the smooth surface and felt I had failed this nameless soldier somehow; that I had allowed him to be taken into the earth once again, forgotten by all those who surely loved him, despite his desertion, and had longed for his return.