Original Sin

Just as sin entered the world through one person, and death through sin, death came to all people, because all sinned.
--Paul's Epistle to the Romans, 5:12-21

Captain Orcas B. Wilder stands amongst four hundred eighty ghostly survivors in blue uniforms. There were once one thousand, but that was before the Slaughter Pen and bloody Fredericksburg. The Captain’s bright blue eyes belie the crumpled Union Kepi cap raked across his forehead and the wretched beard sweeping over his waist. Pacing the scrap of land they must hold, he calls out with playful seriousness against the hot breeze, “Dig for your lives you fools, dig for your lives!”
Sweaty red necks chafing against wool collars under a scorching sun, they try as they sing, “Glory Glory Hallelujah.” But the tectonic massif, farmer Raffensberger’s Hill, won’t yield to their government-issued wood shovels. Jonathan Goodspeed places his on the edge of a two-foot stone and pries it up, lifts with both hands, waddles to the crest of the ridge, and drops the stone. He does this a second and a third time as the others stop to watch, arms crossed over their chests. Now they begin to pry, lift, and stack rocks. Ordered, placed, fitted, and shimmed, the rocks become a wall at the crest of what, in twenty-four hours, will become Cemetery Ridge.
The Captain stands by Jonathan, last in the line. Hand nonchalantly placed on Jonathan’s shoulder, he says, “Another regiment will be here soon to cover our left flank.”
Jonathan skeptically looks across the field of grass and shimmering heat at the growing grey mob of apparitions. He mutters, “Better get here soon.”
They come from the Mad River Valley. A place torn from the dead center of Vermont by the retreating Laurentide glacier. As a child, Jonathan dug with rusted tin sugaring buckets in the ancient cook fire remains of the Abenaki, the French, the New Yorkers, and his Vermont ancestors. Their ghosts sang to him of sins each committed upon the ones that came before.
Second of five, Jonathan would have been happy there forever, but there’s no such thing as forever. Oldest brother Stephen would inherit the forty-two acre farm. Jonathan, second son, would journey to find his inheritance elsewhere, perhaps in the West.
Abraham Lincoln had already begun a journey. He’d always believed slavery unjust but didn’t initially see the slaves as an intrinsic part of America. In 1854, debating with Stephen Douglas, he described them as an alien group, uprooted from their society, unjustly brought across the ocean. He proposed they be sent back to Africa. By 1862, president of half a country, deep in a civil war with the other half, he called for two-hundred thousand volunteers to end slavery. Citizens, slaves, anyone willing to fight. Orcas B. Wilder heard his call and enlisted in the Vermont 13th Infantry Regiment. Commissioned Captain of Company B, he asked Jonathan and all the other second and third Valley sons to follow. They knew nothing of slavery, never seen a slave. But it was an offer of a place to go, a chance for adventure, and a $300 signing bonus.
The boys had always followed the Captain, for on fierce winter mornings, he filled the firewood sledge and pulled it to the door of the one-room schoolhouse at the four corners intersection of East Warren and Roxbury roads. He’d always finished his lessons first, then helped the other children with theirs. He’d led them to Warren Falls on summer Sabbath days to climb the narrow canyon walls. Marking the right spot at the cliff’s edge, the Captain had jumped and they’d all followed, falling one-by-one through the thick muggy air into the roiling water below.
Jonathan, fifteen, was too young to enlist without his father Saul’s consent, which was not given. But the Captain intervened, promised to look out for the boy, and Jonathan was adamant, “I’ll be going somewhere soon one way or another.” So, Saul relented. As Jonathan’s mother and his three younger sisters wept a chorus of tears, Saul reached deep into the pocket of his overalls, removed an 1809 Silver Railway Timekeeper pocket watch, and placed it in Jonathan’s hand. Jonathan ran his thumb over the watch’s smooth metal cover, flipped it open, and watched the second hand spin. On the other inside face, a portrait of his family looked back at him, forever gunpowder flash frozen in a daguerreotype photo. Saul said quietly, “Write us every day you can. Follow the Captain. It’s not your fight. Don’t be a hero.”
That summer, Company B trained the manual of arms, target practice, and basic maneuvers. In the fall, they mustered at Bennington. In the winter, they headed to Washington. One moonless night, Jonathan stood at a picket station in a tall dark grove of pine, chestnut, and gum trees that stretched for miles into Maryland as he watched ghostly shapes move about in the pitch-black. Uncertain if they were enemy scouts, or simply pilgrims grimly marching north he nervously shouted, “Halt! Who goes there?”
“Nobody but poor colored folks.” A mother holding a small infant and her four girls advanced into the torchlight. The two oldest led their sisters by the hand.
“Are you cold?” Jonathan said, then noticed they were all shivering.
“Indeed, the two smallest are so cold they can’t hardly walk. Manda,” motioning to the smallest girl, “is beat and lame.”
Beat, the word went by without impact as Jonathan led them into the guard house and made them some coffee. But by the firelight he saw the scars on the mother’s face. Her forehead was purple and mashed. The children’s faces and noses were skinned and bruised. Jonathan chattered on, “How long you been coming?”
“Two nights.”
“What made you run away?”
“They beat us so. T’was allus hard, but since the war broke out and my husband lef’, they beat us slaves harder than ever.”
“What is this little one whipped so for?”
“She couldn’t lift a bucket of water. We hid in the pine forest two days, then traveled eighteen miles. I carried the babe all the way, expecting to be followed by the Master. We pushed hard all night to get to the Union Lines.” She looked about nervously. “Can my Master come and get us?”
“No.” Jonathan said firmly as he eyed the fifteen rifles stacked close by.
Spring came and the 13th Infantry Regiment joined the First Corps, Army of the Potomac, searching for Robert E. Lee’s Army of Virginia. Lee, one of the most capable officers in the United States Army, had been offered its command by Abraham Lincoln. He declined, even though he knew that slavery, “is a political and moral evil,” choosing instead to “leave the final abolition of slavery in God’s hands,” for he would not fight his neighbors. July 1st, 1863, the two armies collided at the Gettysburg crossroads one-hundred forty-one miles west of Philadelphia. In the confusion that followed, Lee, clear eyed in war only, collected his units first and sent them to flank the Union First Corps which retreated to high ground—Raffensberger’s Hill. The First Corp commander hastily formed them into a fish hook-shaped defensive line, placed the Vermont 13th in the dead center, and ordered them to dig in.
Now, in the afternoon heat of July 2nd, the thunder of cannons and the crackle of musket fire roll in from the distance as Company B builds its wall. Lee’s army tests the ends of the Union position at picturesque points that historical park guides someday will refer to as the Valley of Death, and the Devil’s Den.
That evening at the campfire, Jonathan takes the pen and stationery he bought off the back of a victualer’s wagon and stares at the envelope engraved with a camp scene. He writes his family. “The food is plentiful, and awful. My uniform jacket is too tight. Its bursting buttons and poorly spun wool makes me look like a circus clown.” He looks for a moment at the rocky soil which reminds him of home, and continues, “In battle, the most fault I can find is the unpleasant sound of various human bodies thrown through the air with great velocity.” And recounts that, “A minie ball cut my hair just above my right ear but did not hurt.” He finishes, “Your devoted son, Jonathan,” seals the envelope, and writes the words, “Soldier’s Letter” next to the address, so he can mail it at no charge. He slides the letter into his right boot.
One o’clock, July 3rd, 1863. Lee orders a frontal assault on Cemetery Ridge. Confederate artillery, one-hundred fifty infuriate cannon demons, come to life. Their smokey sulfur-laden breath rolls over the ground amongst the artillerymen who frenzy about feeding dusky black globes down smoothbore barrels, set and ignite fuses, then cover their ears as iron hail is vomited up through the heat of the day. The air whirrs, shrieks, and hisses with sounds of solid shot. Shells burst, thunderously splitting the darkened sky. They are remote, near, deafening, ear piercing, astounding. Arms, heads, blankets, guns, and knapsacks are tossed up and fall back onto the trembling ground around Jonathan.
At two-thirty the world comes to a stop in a swirling smoke. Now a bugle shrieks the order, “Charge.” The grey mob of twelve thousand apparitions march five-hundred yards across the field towards Raffensberger’s Hill. In the shade of a peach orchard to one side of the field, British, French, Austro-Hungarian, and Prussian officer cadets picnic in camp chairs and take notes in preparation for the wars of the next century.
Jonathan stubbornly grips his Springfield Model 1861 rifled musket, flips up the two leaf sites, shoulders the weapon, and shivers as he leans forward against the south side of his wall, steadying himself on a large boulder. He imagines that little colored girl trying to lift buckets of water as he aims at an officer riding horseback, barely noticing the white feather waving gaily from the man’s Hardee hat. At four-hundred yards the second hand of his watch deep in his left pocket swings past twelve. Jonathan closes his eyes, pulls the trigger, and a black powder cloud erupts. When he opens them, the white feather is gone. Jonathan reaches into his belt, grabs another cartridge, gnaws off the paper wrapper, pours its contents, black powder and a musket ball, down the barrel, then uses the ramrod and the paper wrapper to tamp the package tight. He flips down the far leaf sight, cocks the hammer, and lets the remaining sight hover on another man, now much closer, waving a Confederate flag. The secondhand of the Railway Timekeeper sweeps past the six as Jonathan, this time without a thought, squeezes the trigger again. The flag tumbles to the ground, and just as quickly rises again.
Jonathan hurriedly loads his rifle one final time. They are close, no need to aim. He fires from his hip into the advancing grey blur, reaches round the back of his belt, unhooks an 18-inch steel ring bayonet, slides it over the muzzle of his rifle, and locks it into place just as a tangled wave of arms and legs crest the wall. A dam of Union rifles and bayonets holds the wave back at the point of impact, but the wave rolls relentlessly left and pours into the still-uncovered flank just beyond.
Jonathan is pushed forward from behind and into the gray mass. Acrid black powder fog chokes his eyes, nose, and mouth. Something explodes inside him, terrified, angry, berserker, stabbing his bayonet with a trance-like fury into the swirling blue-grey smoke. The bayonet detaches from his rifle, embedding in the soft flesh of an advancing soldier. Grabbing the stock of his rifle with both hands he bludgeons a path through the melee, then slips and falls onto a blood-slicked carpet of bodies. Pushing up to his knees, he finds his rifle perpendicularly crossed and locked against the rifle of a grey-jacketed giant who looms over him.
The Confederate soldier and gravity force Jonathan and his rifle back to earth. Placing a knee on Jonathan’s rifle as he pivots his rifle and slides the bayonet down towards Jonathan’s chest. Jonathan grasps at the blade, hands prayer pressed against each other. The blade slides through his coat, past his watch, and into the left side of his chest. Its cold finger of steel touches things never before touched, ribs, lungs, heart. The second hand of the Silver Railway Timer passes the six, ninety seconds in all, as the Confederate soldier leans in on the butt of his rifle. Jonathan hears the giant’s comforting, “Shhh,” watches his own legs jerk, then relax, and looks with awe into the face of sudden unexpected death. He thinks, Why? as his heart stops beating. In answer, the center of his temporal lobe releases the collective memories with which we are all born, but willfully forget. Jonathan’s pocket watch begins to spin, backwards, in a moment of blackness and quiet.
Something pushes into Jonathan’s back. A voice barks, "Up on your feet!” A ferryman stands astride the thwarts of a small skiff as Jonathan rises off its inner ribbing and re-beholds the stars. Each stroke of the long oars pushes them through the Pillars of Hercules. Beyond, a mountain rises from the sea. A road spirals upward, a pulsing mass of pilgrims marches higher and higher, disappearing into the cloud covered peak.
The ferryman beaches the skiff and commands, “Prepare to march.”
Jonathan steps towards a shimmering portal, driven by desire to leave worldly sin and enter a state of grace. On the other side he sees Hammurabi, sixth king of Babylon, stroking his beard tresses. A scribe sits nearby at a table with a small brass lamp. The king commands, “Tell them that I am the Law Giver.”
The scribe’s wedge-tipped stylus presses cuneiform shapes into a tablet. “The people whose mountains are distant and whose languages are obscure, I give them this Code of Laws, to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak.”
“Where did we leave off?”
“Sixteenth law.” The scribe stares down.
“Laws for the conquered peoples then.”
“Slave.” The scribe writes the word, for the first time, ever. “If anyone receives into his house a runaway slave and does not bring it out upon public proclamation, they shall be put to death.”
“And a reward?”
“If anyone finds runaway slaves in open country and brings them to their masters, the master shall pay him five shekels of silver.”
“Two shekels.”
Pressing thumb to soft clay, the scribe erases the five, replacing it with a two-stroke symbol, the first price set on a human being.
The portal now gently pulls Hammurabi towards Jonathan. His two heavy leather sandals land on the path and he looks back through the portal at his life on the other side. Tears of understanding slide down Hammurabi’s long cheeks. He falls in and the two march up the path. Dark clouds just below the peak flicker to the crackle of static.
Jonanthan’s killer, the Confederate soldier, appears ahead. He doesn’t own any slaves. Most of the other Confederates don’t either. Their march across the field won’t save the South. Instead, it will begin a new age with railroads and factories and electricity and ticker tape—none of which they will own either. The soldier looks through the portal and sees Jonathan. He awkwardly stops and neatens Jonathan’s body, placing Jonathan’s cold hands across his chest. Picking up his own rifle, taking care to step over Jonathan’s blood mocked uniform, he’s pulled through the portal. Jonathan hugs the soldier tightly in a forgiving embrace and the soldier falls in with the group.
A herd of goats mingle on a rocky cliff with flickering images of Persian war chariots rolling down the boulevards of conquered Babylon pulled by Hammurabi’s soldiers, now slaves under the lash. Persians become Macedonians, then Romans, then Muslims, then Portuguese, all singing songs of their sins, each committed upon the ones that came before. The crowd of pilgrims grows as they all join the march to the summit.
Round a bend, harsh sun shines on a whitewashed fortress perched atop a cliff. Portuguese Prince Henry, the Navigator, stands at the rampart holding his expansive black chaperon against the stiff sea breeze. In the harbor, a light-footed merchant ship beats into the wind where Antam Gonçalves, face not yet full of beard, directs the crew to reset the lateen sails as they complete their West African voyage. In the hold, a dozen kidnapped Africans squat in chains.
The Prince turns to the small man with a long face and hawk-like nose standing next to him. He exclaims his joy is, “not so much for the number of captives taken, but for prospect of the countless other captives that will be taken.” The small man pulls his gold embroidered papal cape about his shoulders tightly against the breeze. He does not imagine the African slaves as poor innocent souls, but as the heathen bastards that just sacked Constantinople. Turning to his scribe, he dictates a Papal decree that grants Portugal the right, “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery, so long as they are converted to Christianity.” Now they notice the sea of faces watching from the other side of the portal. The two royals remove their hats, disrobe and step out naked into the grey crowd that follows Jonathan on the path up the mountain.
Up ahead, John Jope, sold into indentured slavery to work off his family’s debt, is face down at the local alehouse. His slobbering lips mouth out the words of an old Scottish tune “Glory Glory Hallelujah.” Sir Walter Raleigh’s press gang enters. They flip the bartender a coin and with wicked smiles lift the listless man from his place and snatch him away.
Jope masters the privateering trade and is rewarded with a warship, the White Lion. In 1619, the White Lion rocks gently at berth in the fetid August air of Point Comfort, Virginia. Jope hums “Glory, Glory, Hallelujah” as he peers through an iron grate into the dark hold of his rotting ship and counts 20 starving Ndongolese slaves captured from a Portuguese slaver. He and his crew are starving too, so he sells his prize to the Governor of Virginia, planting the seed of slavery in America.
Meanwhile, Raffensberger’s Hill is smeared with human carnage as the battle desperately continues. A blue blur, the promised reinforcements belatedly led by Captain Wilder, arrives. The shock of their impact pushes the grey-jacketed soldiers back up over the wall, the beginning of the end of the Confederacy.
The Captain’s eyes fill with tears as he kneels before Jonathan’s lifeless body. The Captain looks apprehensively through the portal at Jonathan for a sign. Jonathan sadly shakes his head no, not yet.
Jonathan points first to the right boot of his corpse, then to his coat pocket. The Captain retrieves the letter and the pocket watch, second hand still spinning backwards. Standing atop the ridge, war at the Captain’s feet, blood metallic in his nostrils, a vision appears to him on the battlefield. It’s a line of shackled humans of all shapes and sizes and colors stretched across a field. Some are dressed in strange clothes. Some are naked.
They leave the Captain behind, coming upon the one man who had a chance to save the ghosts, and the Pilgrims, and the Captain, and Jonathan, and the fifty-one thousand who die between July 1 and July 3, 1863. In the summer of 1776, Thomas Jefferson scratches out the words, “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness, Inalienable rights.” It’s an early draft of the Declaration of Independence which says that the slave trade is “an execrable commerce,” and a “cruel war against human nature itself.” Jefferson removes those words as part of the bargain struck with the slave holding Founding Fathers. As a part of that bargain, slaves will be counted as two-thirds a free man.
Jefferson beseeches Jonathan, “I really had no choice.” Jonathan stands expressionless and silent in his bloody, mud caked uniform. Jefferson falls in beside Hammurabi.
Near the top now, Jonathan watches as the Captain and the men of the Vermont 13th take care not to let their fallen brothers in arms rot on Cemetery Ridge. They cannot wash the blood from their uniforms, so they wrap the dead in their government-issued blankets and bury them, taking care to leave named markers.
The soldiers all fear anonymous death, for there are no government issued dog tags. They’ve taken to writing their names on scraps of paper, pinning them to their clothing or carving their names on pieces of wood worn on strings round their necks. Half the dead are listed as simply unknown, but all now have a place in the crowd of pilgrims heading up the mountainside.
Jonathan’s body is sent home to Vermont. After Appomattox, the Captain returns to the Mad River Valley to fulfill some part of his original promise. He stands before Jonathan’s father Saul, returns the watch and the letter. The letter’s postscript reads, “I feel that this fever of war is about to peak. When it breaks and my adventure ends, I will gladly return home, just don’t make me dig up any more of those damn rocks.” Saul pushes the watch back at the Captain, thinking, He can sit with it. Though the Captain lives eleven years into the next century and is remembered by all as a pillar of the community, he never speaks to Saul or his family ever again. Fair enough punishment for the Captain’s sin.
Jonathan now sees the end of his journey ahead. There, millions of previously arrived pilgrims stand on Jonathan’s side of a towering gate shut tight. On the other side of the bars, the black woman he once met, her four children, the kidnapped Africans, the Abenaki, and millions of others all smile and wave encouragingly. Behind Jonathan, millions more arrive, forming a growing line. To one side, Jonathan sees the Goodspeeds bury his body in a small graveyard on the East Warren road, two-thousand feet above the valley below. His body faces west towards the spine of the Green Mountains. They always thought his future lay to the west. He thinks to himself, "when all the pilgrims arrive, I know the gate will open and we will cross over, for reconciliation, freedom, and the future lie on the other side."