This story was written in the mid-nineteen-fifties, after E. L. Doctorow, then in his twenties, had completed his military service in Germany. It was found by the biographer Bruce Weber with Doctorow’s papers at the Fales Library and Special Collections, at New York University.
In our town, as in most, we celebrated the Fourth of July with a parade around the square and a few speeches from the steps of City Hall. An indispensable part of the ceremony, of course, was the Civil War veteran, and at the time I’m telling about we still had one—a Confederate, naturally, an old man of bone and leather named John Sewetti. John had been a drummer boy with T. J. Jackson and was thought to have seen most of what happened in the Shenandoah Valley. But he never spoke about his experiences, and he must have been a hundred and two years old before he finally agreed to lead an Independence Day parade.
The year he accepted the invitation, the Parade Committee, which had offered it to him by custom, nearly swallowed its collective cigar. John usually turned callers from his door, and, by his own custom, he had refused for decades to have anything to do with the holiday. The fact is, he wasn’t an easy subject for town pride: in the first place, when, on each birthday, he was asked to what he attributed his long life, he always said his genes; in the second, he was known to hate children; and, in the third, he was so old that his wrinkles had smoothed out again and he had the face of a beautiful, toothless girl.
Or maybe it was his clouded, angry eyes or his small head, tucked in the shadow of a humped shoulder, that made him inaccessible. The only person to whom he ever talked willingly was his daughter, a seventy-year-old maiden, who cared for him in a peeling wooden house near the center of town. In the early mornings, she used to sit him on the brown front porch, hung with a broken trellis and edged with weeds and wildflowers, so he could watch the sun the first half of the day; at noon, after his nap, she’d walk him around to the back and sit him down there. He’d wait for the sun to come over the roof, and then follow it down past the railroad yard and the ball-bearing factory until, finally, it disappeared. No one could tell the clock by him; no one could quote an epigram of his; no one could ever remember his being a friend of their daddy—or even their granddaddy.
I don’t know whether you’d remember the Civil War veterans in your own parades. They usually rode in an open car, didn’t they, gazing blankly from behind their hats and medals, like monkeys dressed up to look cute? I guess the old man knew the impression he wanted to make: he agreed to the parade only on the condition that he could walk, and only if he didn’t have to wear his uniform. There was some objection, of course—Lindsay Grayson, the head of our American Legion, swore he doubted that the old man was a veteran after all, since what veteran wouldn’t wear his uniform? There was even talk of importing someone from the other end of Caldwell County—a man was said to live there who had really fought, not just drummed, and who had a letter of commendation signed by Longstreet. But the talk died soon—we are a people sunk in propriety, however we struggle—and when the Fourth came around it was John Sewetti who led the parade. I’ll never forget the sight.
John was almost too old to stand up, let alone march. And his maiden daughter had to hold his elbow while he stepped slowly up the middle of the street, followed by the mayor, the Firemen’s Band, the Daughters of the Confederacy, and the rest. Nobody could march at that pace, and pretty soon the band couldn’t keep its beat while it shuffled so, so it stopped playing then, and before long the whole parade squashed together and became an embarrassed, overdressed clump of people herding along behind this old man, like disciples following a Greek philosopher. Lindsay Grayson was fit to be tied.
But old John had the parade, and the whole town, for that matter; he wouldn’t give it up even when he finally reached the City Hall steps. He didn’t climb the whitewashed speakers’ platform but stood off to the side and turned around, facing the embarrassed confusion in back of him. By then, things were so out of their arrangement that everyone just stopped; and with him looking, half-blind but stalwart, straight ahead of him, there was nothing for anyone to do but scuff a bit and grow quiet. The tuba player slipped his big bell off his shoulder and the honor guard leaned on their flagstaffs. In the back of the crowd, there were still some boys and girls laughing and skittish, but John began to talk, that way old people talk, without dreaming that anybody might not be prepared to listen.
I have often told the story of what happened that day, and each time, in the telling, I see John Sewetti standing in the middle of that trapped, crumpled parade of people, as if he should have been wearing a sheet and sandals, the way those walking saints of India do, or holding a staff and carrying two stone tablets under his arm. He didn’t belong in our town that hot morning—or, rather, he didn’t seem to belong there. It was almost a noon sun above us, and there was just a shiver of a breeze—not enough to stir the big flags on the empty speakers’ platform, just enough to flap the little Confederate flags attached to the fenders of cars parked around the square. Every store was closed but for the Walgreen’s next to Mayor Cole’s Buick agency, and, across the green, spectators were stooping under the wooden cordons and scurrying over to mingle with the marchers. John piped out his words on the breaths he took between phrases. I doubt if more than the first few in the crowd could hear John, or understand him, toothless as he was, but the whole town listened.
“At Manassas,” he said, “we waited reserve for six hours . . . and then we got called up to the line . . . and, marching up, we passed the field surgery. I drummed by a hill of arms and legs . . . cut off and piled higher than I was.”
Next to John, his daughter stood shyly, holding his elbow. She looked more like his mother than his daughter, slack-bosomed in a black dress and smiling apologetically at no one in particular—as if she had heard these words a thousand times in the dim damp must of their house and felt foolish about his bringing them out into the sun.
“Close on that,” he went on, “Zekial Shuford to the left of me spin and fall with a ball in his neck. . . . He blooded at the mouth . . . and I tried to close the hole with my hand or to pluck at the ball . . . but he died first. Right then I went down to a creek . . . and took my sticks and broke them and threw them in the creek . . . and I stepped in my drum and threw it in . . . and then I washed my hands of the blood. And then I walked on home. . . . Now, Jeb Stuart was a fool. . . . He believed we were in glory. Now, Mr. Lee . . . he didn’t make that mistake Jeb Stuart made, you all make. . . . He knew a man had to fight sometimes . . . but he knew it weren’t nothing to drum about.”
John smacked his lips a few times and looked as if he had more to say. But he lurched forward suddenly and his smiling, squinting daughter took a firmer hold on his arm and they moved into the crowd. Everyone fell back, and only when he passed them did people look at one another and begin to speak; and he was already at the sparse edge of the crowd before Lindsay Grayson, who was Parade Chairman, and the mayor conferred quickly and tried to save the day for tradition. A minute later, a police car pulled out from across the square and drove around alongside John. Ed Rainey, the police chief, tipped his hat and offered to drive the old man to his house; John shook his head but his daughter nodded, thinking probably her father looked flushed and overtired. So Ed and one of his patrolmen picked John up and put him in the car, and helped the daughter in. The doors closed and a moment later John Sewetti was gone from the square.
After that, Lindsay Grayson and the mayor and the high-school principal and Mrs. Cox, the head of the local United Daughters, got up on the speakers’ platform and the band fell in and the ceremonies got going. Things weren’t right, though: the microphone was troublesome and kicked back a hum; the sun was hot; and after the band played the anthem and “Dixie” a lot of cars pulled out of the square and kids wandered off down the streets. The counter boy at the Walgreen’s had to stop watching things, because people were already coming into the store for a cherry smash.
The afternoons of most holidays are depressing, and that July Fourth afternoon was as disquieting as any. The square was hot and littered and empty, and people stayed in their houses after the mealtime, napping or fanning themselves. Everyone in town must have heard one version or another of John Sewetti’s speech by lunchtime, but if there was any consensus of opinion it was slow forming. Only after six o’clock, when the sun’s edge had worn off and Joe Holler was able to open up his tavern by special county dispensation, were the town’s regulars able to get together gracefully and ask one another what their opinion should be.
By eight o’clock, the square was coming to life again; men taking their families out for a ride on the highway stopped in front of Joe’s, left their engines idling and their doors open, and went in for a quick beer to hear what was being said. By nine o’clock, a majority opinion had crystallized, and, by midnight, when Fred Warren, the freight dispatcher, went on shift down at the depot, he carried the opinion with him for the ear of any trainman who would pass through. Considering old John’s silence and solitude for so many decades, considering that he’d never given anyone much chance to make of him a parade doll, I suppose there was a certain appeal to the idea that his speech in the morning had been a confession of an eighty-year-old desertion.
Of course, not everybody got as self-righteous about it as Lindsay Grayson; beefy and red with beer, Lindsay harangued well into July 5th about how it was a long-standing mystery cleared up—why the old man never talked of the War Between the States or wore his grays. He even cornered me at my office late in the evening and told me to do an editorial on “The Shame of Our Town”—I got away from him only when Mrs. Grayson marched in and took him home. But if not everybody was as militant as Lindsay they still pretty well agreed with him: Reverend Harper, the Methodist preacher, spoke in church the next Sunday about charity and forgiveness and why we shouldn’t always judge a boy by a man’s standards.
I did what I could for what I thought was right; I printed John Sewetti’s speech just as I took it down when he made it. And, in the same issue, I ran an editorial on what I believed it signified. But if one man agreed with me he never let me know. I suppose I have yet to learn how to make my points in this county where I was born.
John himself never read a newspaper. And if he was aware at all of how he shifted a few sands under us that day, he never let on. Every morning through the summer, he came out on that small shade porch of his, and every noon, after his nap, he went around in back. Then, in October, he died, and that was the end of our drummer boy. A great-grandson of his came up from Charlotte and handled the details and then took John’s old daughter back with him to Charlotte. (There was nobody at the cemetery but the three of us, though I doubt that the old man would have cared.) The following July Fourth, the Parade Committee came up with that veteran from Caldwell County and they rode him, uniformed, in an open car with the mayor and Lindsay Grayson. I covered the parade, of course—I always like to report on Independence Day in our town. ♦