After the War by Richard Marius

Author:Richard Marius [Marius, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-82893-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-12-12T00:00:00+00:00

94

HUB DELANEY died a week later, a night filled with the smell of flowers around his house and the forest alive with singing insects and the sky filled with stars. He slipped away while Jim Ed, Clyde, Brian Ledbetter, and I kept watch, sitting in the little room with him, the windows open on the gentle evening. Jim Ed and I played hymns as he sank away, Jim Ed singing quietly, Hub opening his milky eyes, looking at us, dying with his eyes open.

Brian, holding Hub’s hand, realized that he was dead. He gently shut the eyes of his old comrade and pulled the blanket over Hub’s face and walked outside to weep softly in the peaceful dark. Jim Ed drove down into Bourbonville to fetch Caleb, and in an hour Caleb came with his new hearse and took the body away.

Brian wanted to bury Hub in the woods behind Hub’s cabin. “You can’t do that to a man like Hub, Stepdaddy,” Caleb said. “Hub deserves a real funeral. And hey, I want to show this town what I can do, don’t you know? I won’t charge a nickel, and I’ll give him the best damned funeral you ever seen, Stepdaddy.”

“I guess Virgil can come home for the funeral, then,” Brian said. “Can you keep him till Virgil gets back?”

“I’ll embalsam him and put him in my icebox. You didn’t know I had an icebox, did you now, Stepdaddy? Hell, ever mortician worth his certificate has an icebox nowadays. I can tuck a corpse in there and keep it two weeks fresh as a side of beef. Virgil can get here in four days by train. I’ll send the telegram myself.”

Hub died on a Sunday night, and Ted Devlin was able to put a story about him on the front page of the Bourbonville News on Monday afternoon. “Civil War Veteran Succumbs,” the headline said. In Ted Devlin’s paper, people never died; they succumbed.

It was a good story. I learned that Hub’s real name was Hubert Gresham Delaney and that he had been born in Bourbon County and that he had stayed there all his life except while he had been away during the Civil War. He had fought at Antietam and at Fredericksburg and at Chancellorsville and at Gettysburg and in the Wilderness and at Petersburg—misty names as unfamiliar to me as the battles of Senacherib. He had been in the army outside a house owned by a family named McLean in Virginia when Robert E. Lee rode up on horseback to surrender what was left of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant. Never once was he wounded.

Brian Ledbetter—he who had lost a leg at Cold Harbor—was amazed by Hub’s luck. “He always said the Lord God was saving him to go west. The man was a fool about the West. Back then he figured you could go west and stake out a million acres of land and fight off the Indians and buy some cows and get rich and be free.

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