Been thinkin’ about…The minstrel oaks

The shadow of the afternoon sun's heat remained, covering the deep greens of the tightly mown fairgrounds, covering the land and sky itself and making the forest beyond the gravel road wave slightly, a shimmer as though of another time and place. Beyond the line of dark forest, the sun was setting, a memorable orange disc. The sun looked massive that evening, shrouded as it was in that dusty tangerine glow native to the middle of America. It was dusk in America's fairgrounds some 31 years ago, a soft, sensuous dusk where sheep and goats and pigs and cattle made their rustling, lowing, indignant sounds of nightfall and far off, a rain crow called and an old hoot owl answered.

Next to a grand white oak that was appropriately gnarled with age, rested a battery of 1860s' cannon, tended by men in blue wool uniforms. Someone had invited the Civil War re-enactors to set up. Nearby a small campfire burned. The silhouette of the oak was now black, a shimmering silvery green-black the striking color of the head of a deep grass pheasant. The leaves made soft noises in the twilight breeze. Something was stirring. Ahead, the lights of the farm buildings were bright, florescent. But beyond, in the coming dark, there was a dead past slowly coming alive.

The men's voices were low and the campfire flickered. The smell of wood smoke drifted on the breeze. Someone plucked lightly on an oval mandolin.

"The Minstrel-boy to the war is gone, In the ranks of death you'll find him; His father's sword he has girded on, And his wild harp slung behind him —"

Thomas Moore of Dublin, Ireland, would write those words in 1813, well before the American Civil War. The ghosts in my memory are strong tonight, even as flood waters rise and ragged clouds tear the sky. And perhaps the ghosts rise again tonight as well. Missouri was once a battleground in the tragic way that Civil War battlegrounds are — brother against brother, yes, but also family against family. Noble heroes and base villains existing side by side, working, hunting, killing. War here was personal and war is tragic, but also messy, complex. Only the simple believe in a black-and-white of war. Good and evil reside on both sides of a front line.

But in Missouri, there were rarely front lines at all. A complex series of skirmishes, too many to count, took place across the state. Atrocities were committed. Heroes were made. Missouri has to stay in the Union. Lincoln knew that. The raw materials, the natural resources, were too important to lose. If Missouri fell to the Confederacy, it is not impossible to speculate the war could have continued for much longer, perhaps even canceling the surrender of Appomattox. Surrender of Missouri could not be permitted by Washington, even as many here in the state had voted for neutrality.

The governor of Missouri met with General Lyon in St. Louis in spring of 1861 to discuss terms. The meeting did not go well. Lyon was a Connecticut abolitionist and a fiery one at that. It still surprises me that he let Governor Jackson and Jackson's entourage leave. The story of how the governor's train left St. Louis yet leaves me strangely emotional, a tale of America, of grit and melancholy and impending death of thousands. The governor's train stopped at the bridges along that long stretch of rail that runs parallel to the great and muddy Missouri River, today the haunt of nice vineyards and historic farms. They dynamited the bridges to slow the inexorable Federal Army's march on the capitol. A duly represented state government was now a government-in-exile. The American experiment was fracturing. In only a few short months, General Lyon would lie dead in the root cellar of the Phelps' farm in Springfield. The Confederate victory was short-lived.

"Land of song! said the warrior-bard, Though all the world betrays thee, One sword at least, thy rights shall guard, One faithful harp shall praise thee!"

Great stretches of our state are haunted, even as the records remain unfaithful. The skirmishes were so numerous, the record keeping haphazard. Certain battlefields take precedence — Wilson's Creek, Pea Ridge. But the battlefields that shiver in the back of my mind are the forgotten ones, lending a strange and permanent but often unseen folklore to the region. And also stories of ghosts in strange places.

"The Minstrel fell!— but the foeman's chain Could not bring his proud soul under; The harp he loved ne'er spoke again, For he tore its cords asunder; And said, 'No chains shall gully thee, Thou soul of love and bravery!"

Not everyone believes in ghosts but I do. Our forebears did too, even as they knelt their heads in prayer, many of them devout Protestants of good Scotch-Irish stock. The old ways die hard but so many years have passed we often mistake materialism for piety, forgetting the rhythms of the land and sea and sky, the gentle acceptance of the unknown, or the ghosts found on the very pages of our most holy book.

Such thoughts are unsettling, of course, the idea that we may one day be ghosts ourselves, haunting a strange land changed by the course of time. Such thoughts could drive us mad, or drive us to humility. In the end the choice is ours, as it was theirs. And even now, phantoms of young men clad in gray and in blue — still yet wandering in a bloody and scarred wilderness that is still and yet crisscrossed with highways and trailer parks and expensive subdivisions — cross my mind. Even now as the rains come down, the dangerous flood waters rise, the sky is dark and split with eternal lightning. And tonight I light a single candle to remember the cold and lonesome dead.

"Thy songs were made for the brave and free, They shall never sound in slavery."