Letters From A Civil War Soldier
 
 
      I was never a soldier but I helped one once. The how and the why of it I still do not understand.
     There was a church down the road from the farm on which I grew up. Membership therein had declined to the point where the few remaining churchgoers agreed to disband and go the other Presbyterian church nearby.  They voted to give the church ground and cemetery, consisting of two acres with a dilapidated hundred plus year old church and a likewise old manse to the township. This way the township would be responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the cemetery and not the disbanding members. The township agreed to do so provided however that the old church and manse were torn down first.
        That’s how I became involved in all this. Mr. McMinn, the richest church member had  graciously agreed to tear everything down for all the lumber that he could salvage and agreed to clean up the mess. He hired me, since I lived just down the road, to help him salvage all the “good sticks”  (the good lumber) therein and anything else of value.
     I sometimes worked by myself after school and weekends but Mr. McMinn would randomly stop and check on me telling me what to save, how and where to stack it, what not  to bother with, what to throw out, what to burn, and generally boss me around.
    He thought a lot of himself as he farmed a substantial amount of ground and a had a couple of small businesses on the side. Money was everything to him.
    He gave me precise instructions on how to remove the wainscoting in the house.
   “Antique people pay big money for old wainscoting,” he informed me.
  And that’s when it happened. As I removed some wainscoting I saw what appeared to be two
letters stuck to the wall that must have fallen in the a crack between the wall and the wainscoting years ago. They were very old looking, yellowed, wrinkled and appeared somewhat water stained. Just then I heard Mr. McMinn grind his old stick shift to a halt. Before he get out and to the manse I impulsively  jammed the letters in the inside pocket of my farmer’s jacket and quickly zipped it shut. I knew that if he saw them, he would demand that I hand them over to him and probably say, “People pay big money for old letters. Give them to me.”  I don’t know why I did what I had just done but somehow I felt those letters were meant for me, not him.
      “How’s it going?”
      “Oh fine.”
     “Looks like you’re doing a good job on this wainscoting. I should get big bucks for these pieces. Let’s load these in the truck and I’ll drop you off at home. It’s getting cold and late.”
     That night in the privacy of my own room and unbeknownst to anyone I examined the letters.
One had been opened. The letter was inside. The envelope was addressed to Mary McQuaid, Orion, Illinois. The return address was unreadable, but it looked like it might be an army address
of some kind. A penny postage had been cancelled and a date of 1860 something was stamped
through it. I gently removed the letter as though it were an ancient sacred document of some unknown origin waiting to be discovered and interpreted. The ink had run and faded but it was readable in that elaborate cursive style of the 1800’s. The paper, yellowed and wrinkled, made those little crinkling noises as I ever so carefully straightened it out. I remembered that there’s a Mary McQuaid and a George McQuaid buried right here in the cemetery and that there’s still McQuaids in the area. In fact the Frank McQuaid family had lived in the old manse right up to a couple of weeks before we started tearing it down. They moved to Sherrard a few miles from here. I wondered if I should give it to them. But I decided no and began to read.
 
 
     Dearest Mother,
 
I know that you didn’t want me to join the army. I know that you think this war is senseless and stupid and a waste of life. I know that you grew up in Kentucky, that your family owned slaves and saw nothing wrong with slavery.  But after Pa died you married Reverend George, surely you knew you would have to leave Kentucky and go north with him to his people and church in
Illinois. You knew he was a man of God and an abolitionist. I’m sorry if I agree with him and not you but this is a wrong that must be righted. Slavery is an abomination, a crime against one’s fellow man. It can not be permitted.
 
    Mother I’m a man now but I realize to you that I will always be your little boy. After Tommy died I’m all you have left and I know that you don’t want to lose me, that you couldn’t bear the loss of your only remaining child, but if you could find it in your heart to forgive me it would bring me great comfort and relief for we will be going into battle soon and I want all to be patched up and made right between us if I should meet with a terrible fate.
 
   I stopped. I was starting to cry. A couple of my tears now dotted the letter and mingled with the tear spots of his mother. I read on.
 
I have made a new friend, Henry Fielding from Ohio. We have made a pact. If either of us should die in battle, the other is to write the survivor’s family and relate how we died a brave heroic death for the cause of freedom for all. We march, we stop, we muster, we fall in, we fall out. I don’t even know where we are. We just follow orders and wait. I’ll be so glad when the fighting starts and we can get our first battle under our belts. I so desperately need to test myself.
Please mother I beg of you. You don’t have to agree with me but would you please acknowledge my right to make my own decisions. I am not your little boy anymore but your young man.
Please let all be forgiven between us.
                                                               Your loving son, David.
 
 
     I wiped my tears and thought to myself, I should not have read this. It’s personal, very personal. I had no business intruding into this family’s life no matter how old the letter.
 
     The other letter laid before me. It was unopened. It was addressed to Pvt. David Brown, obviously her son. A smeared address appeared with numbers of an army unit and some post
office box in Washington D.C., the stamp was on it but it was never mailed. No way would I open this. Her unknown response was sealed forever. But why didn’t she mail it?  What if it was
 her letter of forgiveness? The letter that would have made everything right. I had to make up for
 my intrusion, my transgression somehow. I would mail it even though I knew it would accomplish nothing except for me to redeem myself and remove the temptation to open it.
 
   Of course I couldn’t put this letter in our RFD mailbox for Mr. Burgess our mailman to pick up.
He would want to know what this was all about. I would mail it tomorrow from Orion in a communal box when I went to the library on a school project. And I did.
   Then a about a week later on a Saturday morning I was working alone at the manse. I saw
Mr. Burgess pull up to the McQuaid mailbox that was still there. He honked and signaled me
over.
     “Do you know where the McQuaids moved?  I’ve got this really old looking letter for a Mary
McQuaid. At least that’s what it looks like it's says,”  he said as he handed me the letter for my
perusal.  It looked old and exactly in the same condition as the first two that I had found. Is this a
third letter? Another letter from son to mother?
    “They moved to Sherrard.”
     “Well I’ll have to forward it. Take another week to get there.”
     “I should see the McQuaids at Beulah Church tomorrow. I could give it to them,” I stammered. I wanted that letter.
     Mr. Burgess hesitated and then said. “ Well alright, I know that I shouldn’t do this but you deliver it, what the heck, after all  you’re a Boy Scout and scout is trustworthy,”
     Mr.Burgess was my scoutmaster and I was almost an eagle.
     But I wasn’t trustworthy. I couldn’t resist. Why give it to the McQuaids, even if these Civil War McQuaids were the ancestors of the now Sherrard McQuaids. They  wouldn’t understand what
was going on. They wouldn’t care about this like I did.They’d probably want to know more and I
didn’t want to explain. They’d probably just throw it away anyway. This was my doing. I started it. I was entitled to finish it. This letter was meant for me I rationalized, not them. So I, the trustworthy scout, opened it that night and read it.
 
 
Dearest Mother:   Got your letter yesterday! What a relief! It means so much to me that we have
patched up all our differences and that all is forgiven between us, and especially so now that we  have gone into battle today for the first time. Perhaps you’ve noticed by now that this is not my
handwriting. I am dictating to Henry for you see today I have fallen in battle. I have been shot in a couple of places and poked through to the hollow with a bayonet. Do not bring my body home for burial as part of this battlefield is to be dedicated as a national cemetery and I wish to rest here with my fallen comrades. I love you so much mother. I could not have had a better mother.
Thank you for your blessing and forgiveness. Tell George I love him, to keep up his work and that I have not died in vain. Give my meager worldly possessions to the church.  I …..
 
Mrs. McQuaid it's me Henry. Your son has just passed. You raised a fine young man. He was so proud of you and always spoke highly of you. You should be proud to have a son who was willing to stand up and fight for and die for his principles. I know that I am honored and proud to have had him as my best friend. Today he saved my life, twice. I will see that he is buried in this
hallowed ground and send you his few possessions. You have my deepest sympathies.
 
 
                                                                                                           Henry Fielding
 
 
    I looked down at the letter. Like the first one now the last one was also tear stained.
    Like I said the how and why of it I do not understand. 
 
 
 
    

                     

                The Ghost of Baron Von Something R. Other
 

​      “Yep there use to be a coal mine back there on my property. You boys have seen the filled in shaft holes in the ground, those depressions five or six feet deep, and the coal slag piles back there when you’ve been mushroom hunting haven’t you?”
    The two twelve year old boys nodded their heads yes in unison.
    “There also use to be a road back to it from where you cross the Coal Creek bridge. It went about a half mile or so back to the mine. ‘Course the road isn’t there any more. Been plowed over and farmed for seventy some years now. Mine been closed longer than that.  Only the name remains, The Baron’s Mine.”
     Newt Bailey knew the boys were hooked from the look on their faces. That they would beg him now for the rest of the story. “Yep only the name. Oh yeah and of course the Baron’s ghost still remains out there,” he added with a twinkling smile. “Don’t want to forget him now do we?
     Say you boys aren’t thinking about going back there this Friday the thirteenth on Halloween are you?”
     “Yeah we’re kind of thinking about it some. But we want to hear the story about the Baron’s ghost that’s suppose to live back there before we decide,” answered one of the boys.
     The boys sat there enthralled, dieing to hear old Newt Bailey tell the local tale about the ghost of the dead Prussian Baron. The Bailey family had been one of the first settlers in the township and old Newt Bailey had lived and farmed here all his life. He knew all the local lore and legends.
     “Okay here goes guys,” he said settling back in his rocker, the boys sitting directly in front of him, leaning forward, hanging on to his every word. “The mine was owned by one Baron Von Something R. Other. He was called that because no one can remember how to pronounce his long German name. He never came to this country but he’s the one who set up the coal mining operation back in the 1890’s or so. He was from Prussia which is in the northern part of Germany, the area around Berlin I believe.
      Well the story goes that one day one of his descendants, who inherited the land, came over from the old country to see what his relative had left him. He was a Baron Von Something R. Other too. This was back in 1915 or so when World  War I was going on full blast in Europe. There was strong anti-German feelings something fierce in this country at that time because of all the so called atrocities the Germans were believed to have committed when they invaded Belgium.
     Well there was this miner who worked at the mine back then, a Belgian by the name of Camiel Dhooge, who had family over in Belgium. He believed that the Germans had in fact committed atrocities because he kept getting all these terrible letters from his family about all the tragedies and hardships they were enduring. One day he got one that said his brother had been killed by the Germans. Well this sent him over the top and some say drove him mad.
      So the Baron comes to this country while the war is going on and goes out to view his mine wearing his fancy Prussian gold buttoned, medal decorated, spiffy military uniform and one of those Prussian helmets on his head with a spike on top of it. You boys know what I mean don’t you? You’ve seen pictures of them haven’t you?”
     The boys nodded yes.
     Well the Baron goes out to see his mine and Camiel sees him and finds out who he is. So he gets the Baron off by himself and starts to give him a piece of his mind as to what he thinks about Germans. Then before you know it, the two of them get into an argument and start fighting. Next thing you know the Baron is dead, a hole in his head. Camiel had driven his pick axe right through that hard helmet and into his brain. Claimed it was self defense as the Baron was trying to butt him in the belly with the spike on his helmet. The State’s Attorney didn’t believe him though and charged him with murder because everyone knew that Camiel hated Germans. Well his attorney got him off. Got the jury packed with Belgians. But that wasn’t the end of it. Oh no, not as far as the Baron’s ghost was concerned. Every so often he’s seen back there in the woods, wandering around the mine area, looking for revenge.”
     “We heard that he comes back around Halloween,” said one of the boys. “Is that true?”
     “That he does son. The Baron was killed in October sometime, know one remembers the exact date but it was during the Oktoberfest that the local Germans held back then and the Baron was known to tilt back a few steins of beer. He was probably drunk when he went out there and got himself killed.
     My father bought the land from his estate and closed the mine. It was pretty much played out anyway. It was no big mining operation by any means. They only tunneled in as far as the light and air held out. No deep intricate hive of tunnels or anything like that. My father used the mining grounds as pasture land for his stock cow herd and I’ve used it the same way too ever since.”
      One of the twelve year old boys couldn’t wait any longer and interrupted Mr.Bailey. “Tell us Mr.Bailey about when you were kids and the ghost of the Baron tried to kill you and your friend.”
      Newt Bailey smiled, tooth sucked in some air and said, “Well okay but it’s kind of a scary story fellas so be forewarned.”
     “We’re don’t scare anymore. Tell us,” demanded the same boy.
     “We were about your age then,” continued Newt.  “And one Halloween my best friend, Bill Schroeder, dared me to go looking for the Baron with him on Halloween night to see if all those rumors we had heard were true or not. Bill claimed that the ghost wouldn’t harm us because he was German and wouldn’t harm me because I was his friend. It was darker than pitch that night, no moon, no stars, just blackness. Well I had to go since he dared me. So we go to walking around back there in the mine area that night and Bill keeps hollering out in German, ‘Baron woher sind sie?’ Laughing and joking the whole time. His father had taught him a little German. That means, Baron where are you, in German. Well sure enough before too long we hear some noise off in the dark come crashing through the brush toward us, and Bill, to the day he died, swore that he heard the Baron answer, ‘Ich bin hier Wilhelm.’ That means I am here Bill.
      What I heard though was a lot of noise, snorting, gasping sounds, and some stomping. I didn’t hear any German words. The sounds kept coming closer and sounded like something big was advancing toward us. Well of course being dumb kids we panicked and took off running and screaming and ran right into one of those big old deep shaft holes that I just told you about. We fell about six feet to the bottom, then the bottom gave way, scared the B’Jesus out of us. We thought that we were sliding down an old coal mine shaft right into the bowels of Hell but we only dropped about another four or five feet. After we brushed off all the debris, we looked up. There ten feet above us, against the moonless, starless, pitch black night was the Baron’s ghost bobbing up and down. We took to praying and our prayers must have been answered because he finally went away. But we were still trapped. The sides were too steep and slippery for us to climb our way out.
      Well after a couple of hours we heard some barking dogs getting closer. Bill said that the Baron was now sicking the hounds of Hell on us. Probably big fanged humongous German Shepherds or Doberman Pinschers he said. Pretty soon they were right above us, barking and howling their lungs out. I recognized the dogs from their howling. So I hollered back up at them, Baron, Dhooge stop it! My father had a sick sense of humor when he it came to naming our dogs. We were saved. Hallelujah! My father had ‘scent’ the dogs out to find us. And thank God they did.
      Next thing we know there’s flash lights blinding our eyes and our fathers are chewing us out something terrible. They pulled us out, drug us home, and tanned our hides but good. I guess the Baron had a good laugh on us that night. I wouldn’t recommend going out there this Halloween boys, unless you want to meet the Baron of course. He’s still out there.”
     “Is that really a true story Mr.Bailey?” questioned one boy in disbelief.
     “Well son, it’s truly a story that’s for sure,” answered Mr. Bailey hoping to keep the legend alive and thinking that there’s no sense in telling these boys that the ‘ghost’ he saw that night was really the white face of his father’s Hereford bull against the pitch black sky, bobbing and waving his head up and down, for if he did, then it wouldn’t truly be a story, it would be fact.