Dan Simmons - Iversons Pits

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Iverson's Pits

by Dan Simmons

Introduction

We Americans have a knack for turning our most be-loved national shrines into

something tacky and vulgar. Perhaps it's because we're too young to have a real

sense of history; perhaps it's because our nation—not counting the

Confederacy—has never been bombed or occupied or even invaded by a foreign

power (no, I don't count the British when they burned Washington City ... few

Amer-icans noticed and fewer cared), and there is little real sense of sacrifice to our

shrines.

There are, of course, a few shrines that defy our efforts to tackify them. It's hard to

stand in front of the Lincoln Memorial at night without beginning to feel like Mr.

Smith just come to Washington. I had a Jimmy Stewart stammer for three days after

my first midnight visit there.

But if you stand there long enough, you can almost hear the bureaucrats conferring

with the Disney Imagineers behind the marble walls; come back six months later and

Old Abe will probably stand, recite his Second Inaugural in Hal Holbrook's voice,

wade the Re-flecting Pool, and tapdance down Constitution Avenue.

All in good taste, of course.

But then there are the Civil War battlefields.

You've probably visited Gettysburg. Despite the best efforts of sincere people to

preserve it, the place has been littered with statues and dusted with memorials. The

Park Service erected a phallic monstrosity of a tower at the highest point so that

there is no escaping the intrusion of 20th Century ugliness. Computerized dioramas

blink lights in the museum and you can buy souvenir t-shirts in the local shops.

It doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter.

As with a score of less famous Civil War battlefields, Gettysburg has an almost

overpowering sense of tightness about it: an almost physical effect on the visitor and

a psychic impact that must be felt to be believed. It is a haunt-ing place in every

sense of the word. No castle in Scotland, no druidic circle of stones, no crypt

beneath a Pharaoh's pyramid could be eerier or could channel more voices of the

dead to the ears of the living.

And few places could be more moving or peaceful.

For what it's worth, this tale grew—literally—from a footnote, but every supporting

detail in "Iverson's Pits" is as accurate as I could make it. The burial pits were real.

One account in Glenn Tucker's classic High Tide at Get-tysburg records:

The unhappy spirits of the slaughtered North Caro-lina soldiers were reputed to

abide in this section of the battlefield. Lieutenant Montgomery returned in 1898,

thirty-five years after the battle, and learned from John S. Forney that a superstitious

ter-ror had long hung over the area. Farm laborers would not work there after night

began to settle.

My Colonel Iverson is a fictional construct, of course. The real Colonel Alfred

Iverson, Jr., did send his regiment to slaughter and was relieved after his men—his

few surviv-ing men—refused to follow him, but there is no evidence that the real

Iverson was anything other than a politically appointed military incompetent. Also, a

fellow named Jessup Sheads did build a house on the site where the 97th New York

had faced the 12th North Carolina. Local historians confirm that Sheads offered

wine to visitors—wine from the arbors which grew so luxuriantly above Iverson's

Pits. * * *

As a young boy, I was not afraid of the dark. As an old man, I am wiser. But it was

as a boy of ten in that distant summer of 1913 that I was forced to partake of

commu-nion with that darkness which now looms so close. I re-member the taste of

it. Even now, three-quarters of a century later, I am unable to turn over black soil in

the garden or to stand alone in the grassy silence of my grand-son's backyard after

the sun has set without a hint of cold fingers on the back of my neck.

The past is, as they say, dead and buried. But even the most buried things have their

connections to the present, gnarled old roots rising to the surface, and I am one of

these. Yet there is no one to connect to, no one to tell. My daughter is grown and

gone, dead of cancer in 1953. My middle-aged grandson is a product of those

Eisenhower years, that period of endless gestation when all the world seemed fat and

confident and looking to the future. Paul has taught science at the local high school

for twenty-three years and were I to tell him now about the events of that hot first

day and night of July, 1913, he would think me mad. Or senile.

My great-grandchildren, a boy and a girl in an age that finds little reason to pay

attention to such petty distinctions as gender, could not conceive of a past as ancient

and irretrievable as my own childhood before the Great War, much less the

blood-and-leather reality of the Civil War era from which I carry my dark message.

My great-grandchildren are as colorful and mindless as the guppies Paul keeps in his

expensive aquarium, free from the terrors and tides of the ocean of history, smug in

their almost total ignorance of everything that came before themselves, Big Macs,

and MTV.

So I sit alone on the patio in Paul's backyard (why was it, I try to recall, that we

turned our focus away from the front porch attention to the communal streets and

side-walks into the fenced isolation of our own backyards?) and I study the old

photograph of a serious ten-year-old in his Boy Scout uniform.

The boy is dressed far too warmly for such a hot sum-mer day—his small form is

almost lost under the heavy, woolen Boy Scout tunic, broad-brimmed campaign hat,

baggy wool trousers, and awkward puttees laced almost to the knees. He is not

smiling—a solemn, miniature dough-boy four years before the term doughboy had

passed into the common vocabulary. The boy is me, of course, stand-ing in front of

Mr. Everett's ice wagon on that day in June when I was about to leave on a trip much

longer in time and to places much more unimaginably distant than any of us might

have dreamed.

I look at the photograph knowing that ice wagons exist now only as fading memories

in aging skulls, that the house in the background has long since been torn down to be

replaced by an apartment building which in turn was re-placed by a shopping mall,

that the wool and leather and cotton of the Boy Scout uniform have rotted away,

leaving only the brass buttons and the boy himself to be lost some-where, and

that—as Paul would explain—every cell in that unsmiling ten-year-old's body has

been replaced several times. For the worse, I suspect. Paul would say that the DNA

is the same, and then give an explanation which makes it sound as if the only

continuity between me now and me then is some little parasite-architect, blindly

sitting and smirking in each otherwise unrelated cell of the then-me and the now-me.

Cow manure.

I look at that thin face, those thin lips, the eyes nar-rowed and squinting in the light

of a sun seventy-five years younger (and hotter, I know, despite the assurances of

reason and the verities of Paul's high school science) and I feel the thread of

sameness which unites that unsus-pecting boy of ten—so confident for one so

young, so unafraid—with the old man who has learned to be afraid of the dark.

I wish I could warn him.

The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising

to the surface when one least expects them to.

In the summer of 1913 the Commonwealth of Pennsyl-vania made ready for the

largest invasion of military vet-erans the nation had ever seen. Invitations had been

sent out from the War Department for a Great Reunion of Civil War veterans to

commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the three-day battle at Gettysburg.

All that spring our Philadelphia newspapers were filled with details of the anticipated

event. Up to 40,000 veterans were expected. By mid-May, the figure had risen to

54,000 and the General Assembly had to vote additional monies to supplement the

Army's budget. My mother's cousin Celia wrote from Atlanta to say that the

Daughters of the Confederacy and other groups affiliated with the United

Confederate Veterans were doing everything in their power to send their old men

North for a final invasion.

My father was not a veteran. Before I was born, he had called the trouble with Spain

"Mr. Hearst's War" and five years after the Gettysburg Reunion he would call the

trou-ble in Europe "Mr. Wilson's War." By then I would be in high school, with my

classmates chafing to enlist and show the Hun a thing or two, but by then I shared

my fa-ther's sentiments; I had seen enough of war's legacy.

But in the late spring and early summer of 1913 I would have given anything to join

those veterans in Get-tysburg, to hear the speeches and see the battle flags and

crouch in the Devil's Den and watch those old men reenact Pickett's Charge one last

time.

And then the opportunity arrived.

Since my birthday in February I had been a Boy Scout. The Scouts were a relatively

new idea then—the first groups in the United States had been formed only three

years earlier—but in the spring of 1913 every boy I knew was either a Boy Scout or

waiting to become one.

The Reverend Hodges had formed the first Troop in Chestnut Hill, our little town

outside of Philadelphia, now a suburb. The Reverend allowed only boys of good

char-acter and strong moral fiber to join: Presbyterian boys. I had sung in the Fourth

Avenue Presbyterian Boys' Choir for three years and, in spite of my frailness and

total in-ability to tie a knot, I was allowed to become a Boy Scout three days after

my tenth birthday.

My father was not totally pleased. Our Scout uniforms might have been castoffs

from the returning Roughriders' army. From hobnailed boots to puttees to campaign

hats we were little troopers, drowning in yards of khaki and great draughts of military

virtue. The Reverend Hodges had us on the high school football field each Tuesday

and Thursday afternoon from four to six and every Saturday morning from seven

until ten, practicing close-order drill and applying field dressings to one another until

our Troop resembled nothing so much as a band of mummies with swatches of

khaki showing through our bandages. On Wednesday evening we met in the church

basement to learn Morse Code—what the Reverend called General Service

Code—and to practice our semaphore signals.

My father asked me if we were training to fight the Boer War over again. I ignored

his irony, sweated into my khaki woolens through those warming weeks of May, and

loved every minute of it.

When the Reverend Hodges came by our house in early June to inform my parents

that the Commonwealth had requested all Boy Scout Troops in Pennsylvania to send

representatives to Gettysburg to help with the Great Reunion, I knew that it had been

Divine Intervention which would allow me to join the Reverend, thirteen-year-old

Billy Stargill (who would later die in the Argonne), and a pimply-faced overweight

boy whose name I cannot recall on the five-day visit to Gettysburg.

My father was noncommittal but my mother agreed at once that it was a unique

honor, so on the morning of June 30 I posed in front of Mr. Everett's ice wagon for

a photograph taken by Dr. Lowell, Chestnut Hill's undertaker and official

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Dan Simmons - Iversons Pits

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