Dunker Church
written by: Robert Walton
In May of 1882, my father went to Philadelphia on business and died there. After the funeral, I perched on a reading chair, wrapped in close silence broken only by the ticking of the hall clock, the parlor walls pressing on me like uninvited hands. When I could stand their invisible touch no longer, I walked again to the Elizabethtown Cemetery.
I stopped at the florist’s shop on High Street, purchasing white gladiolus to put beneath his marker. Bearing my meager armful of blossoms, I wandered toward his resting place but came first to an open grave. Red earth crumbled from its ragged edge like blood dripping from an untreated wound. I dropped my flowers and ran.
I couldn’t sleep that night, the open grave looming in my thoughts. A north wind moaned in the eaves and a branch tap-tapped, tap-tapped against my window. I arose at three, pulled out my carpetbag, and packed.
***
Company C of the 28th Pennsylvania advanced between fallen stalks of corn harvested by bullets. A slow drumbeat — dull in the morning’s heavy, moist, air — kept the boys steady beneath the mindless gibber of shells passing overhead. Thump, thump — steady as a heartbeat.
Lieutenant Tyndall drew his sword. “Deploy them, Sergeant Flynn.”
The sergeant saluted. “Sir.” Still pacing forward, he called out “Company, halt!”
The blue-coated soldiers took two more steps, halting on the second.
“Front!”
The soldiers turned to their right, forming a firing line two deep. At its end stood a drummer-boy, drumsticks crossed. The sergeant walked close to him. “William?”
The boy’s wide, terrified eyes looked up. “Yes, sergeant.”
“Don’t need your drum in all this noise, son. Head back to the stretcher-bearers. We’ll be by directly.”
“Yes, sergeant.”
***
I boarded an early train to Sharpsburg, at last compelled to visit a place I avoided for twenty years. Seated on a hard horsehair seat, the carriage rattling rhythmically beneath me as we passed over switches, I tried to watch the passing scenery. Pain sliced through my belly. I took a sip of laudanum and prayed for the journey to end.
***
The men of Company C sprawled among shattered cornstalks with their heads down as canister balls howled by close overhead. The drummer-boy lay on his back with his arms outflung, still holding his drumsticks, his chest soaked in heart-blood.
“I told you to go back, William,” Flynn whispered to himself.
Lieutenant Ramsden appeared out of gray smoke. “Get them up, sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.”
Ramsden’s eyes darted left and right. “A charge is coming after the cannon fire.” He leaned close. “They’ll follow this canister, Jacob, and there’ll be hell to pay.”
Jacob looked down at William. “Hell’s already been paid.”
***
I pace down the Smoketown Road to the Dunker Church, walking where the soldiers walked, trying to understand what happened here. The cornfield is only that again, green stalks and leaves proud in a late summer evening. Jacob volunteered for the 28th Pennsylvania on the morning we were betrothed. We kissed and he boarded a train for Washington. Eventually, the 28th marched to Sharpsburg, to Antietam Creek, to the cornfield.
Bill Weldon, our school classmate, fought here alongside my Jacob. He parted company with his left arm in this cornfield and considered himself lucky. He told me the bullets were so thick he couldn’t have held a finger up for a minute before it got shot off. When the firing paused, a rebel yell ululated through bitter smoke. Company C’s boys rose to meet the final Confederate advance.
The Dunker Church is unpretentious — white and square and simple — a vision of simplicity and peace. Twilight holds us both in velvet arms. I wait for prayer to come, but I am empty as last spring’s eggshells.
My Jacob died beside this church with the other young men, their lives crumbling together like so much red earth. Death strode here, his footsteps shell bursts, his breath powder smoke, his million fingers bullets. Now Death sits wrapped in shadows beneath nearby oaks and mocks my sorrow, mocks my hope that these lives weren’t taken for nothing. How am I not to take his enmity personally? How was I to know that Jacob’s bullet was mine too?
I was a dutiful daughter through the long war and after. I cooked my father’s meals, cleaned his house, and cared for him in his dotage. I’m not sure when the dutiful daughter became an old maid, but it was long before father died. I am alone.
I am alone and it does not matter. The doctors say I have a cancer. The pain in my belly where a baby might have swelled confirms their judgment. I came here to see if I could find solace in this world. What a fool I was and am.
A drum sounds in the near distance, its beats muffled, louder than a branch tapping on my window, but not so loud as the rattle of a train crossing switches.
My pain is immense, but I carry on. I am summoned still.
***
Two men, one carrying a shovel and the other a pickaxe, walked past the Dunker Church before dawn. The church’s whitewashed walls glowed in growing light.
The older man asked, “You sharpen the spade?”
The younger man answered, “Every night, Henry.”
Henry chuckled. “Just keeping you sharp, too,”
“Where we going?”
“To the right, near the lane.”
Caleb stopped dead. “Look!” He pointed with an unsteady hand.
A boy, no more than thirteen, stood facing slightly away from them, looking down. A drum hung by a canvas strap from his slender shoulders.
Caleb’s voice fell to a whisper. “He’s standing where that lady died.”
Henry nodded. “It’s the drummer boy. I’ve seen him before. He likely brought her here.”
Caleb said nothing but turned fear-wide eyes upon his partner.
“Easy, son.” Henry murmured. “He’s just making sure we put her next to Sergeant Flynn.”
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