Wasioja

 

We returned to our old alma mater weary and footsore but jubilant.  The War was won and the farms were fresh and green with new fields of Spring wheat.  Not all of us came back, but there were enough enrolled in classes at our seminary to rouse our elderly professors from the melancholy wrought by the long and terrible conflict. The world was poised to begin anew.

The assembly rooms and corridors of the Free Will Baptist College were spotless, swept free of the wintry dust that had accumulated in our absence.  The great windows flooded the classrooms with light and the banister on the noble stair to the upper level was polished to a brilliant sheen.  The high limestone walls of the Seminary caught the dawn’s radiance and shone like Sambian amber.  Hewn from our quarries, the stone was assembled in its matrix of cream-colored mortar, firmly set under mustard-colored cornices of heavy timber.  The village along the river was joyous, wood framed mills straddling spillways and the stone weir bubbling over upstream.  The houses scattered across the open prairie were well-made, roofs shingled against the tempests, and the farms stood amid the flowering fields where peace reigned like a lazy Oriental potentate.  

The professors of Greek and Hebrew greeted us upon our return to the classroom.  It was sweet to study scripture in our seminary and to drink deeply from the springs of our pure and ennobling doctrine.  Everything was in order, established in its proper place.  The words of the text were arrayed in splendor and the faces of our fellow-seminarians were bright and ruddy and, even, the colored porter, Mr. Boggs, shone with the radiance of the angels kneeling before the Great White Throne.  

Although only four years had passed, a great and mysterious abysm of time separated our present happiness from that day on which we had set forth to save the Union.  Then, we were gathered in the Seminary and studying the Gospel when the word arrived that a Federal recruiter had arrived in town.  The man had come by ox-cart draped along its frame with red, white, and blue banners and we were told that he had come to the law offices of Mr. George close to our college.  The Hebrew professor gathered us together in our assembly hall and delivered a very fine speech and, then, we marched in procession, each and every student, to the little shed of dressed stone where the lawyer stood on the tribune of the recruiter’s two-wheeled cart outside of his chambers.  Mr. George also exhorted us to patriotic action and, then, we enlisted in the Grand Army of the Republic, every one of us save a sour, disagreeable fellow who muttered that the surely the Prince of Peace would disapprove our actions and that we would suffer thereby.  Even Mr. Boggs was accepted into the ranks of the Grand Army, although it was unclear how a colored man could serve our Cause, and, later, someone knocked the dissenter over the head with his cane and tossed the nay-sayer into the cold waters impounded behind the weir.  

We were trained at Fort Snelling and went by steamboat down the Mississippi to the theater of war.  The Seminary boys made our own regiment under the command of Colonel George.  The country to which we were sent was warm, swarming with mosquitos, and intricate with streams and fens and bogs.  Men died from sickness and were buried in the mud. Then, there were cannonades and sorties and, at last, a great assault against a high stony ridge, an Olympian height that trembled with level sheets of red shot and shell, thinning our ranks in a most awful manner.  Cannon balls burst among us and the forests on that mountain height were shredded to a mess of gory leaves and wood splinters in which torn, faceless men writhed in their death agonies.  After our charge against the rebel citadel, the war blurred and, it seemed, that we were groping over grim battlefields in a fog of black powder smoke.  Then, it was all over and we had returned and the Seminary of our Faith as Free Will Baptists welcomed us again and, now, the only smoke obscuring the light was the perfume of wood burning in cabin hearths and the tobacco in which we indulged (having acquired the vice in the War) while walking in the green shadows of the woods behind the college building, always taking care to conceal this peccadillo from our professors.

On one fine day, a dozen weeks after our return from the War, our Professor of Systematic Theology repeated words spoken by the melancholy Dane: “Nothing is good nor bad but that thinking makes it so.”  The idea was announced only to be refuted, but the Professor pointed out that, contrary to our imaginings, the roof to the Seminary was long since fallen away and that the windows were now but naked openings in the bare, ruined walls of our college.  And, looking upward, we saw that what he said was true and that we were huddled under a cold sky in the shattered remnant of the building, just four walls remaining upright around a sort of pit where we found ourselves gathered on broken stones dropped from the crumbling, ruined parapets.  The great oblong windows hung overhead, but were superfluous under the expanse of grey sky pressing down upon us.  The Professor continued to teach, but the rain fell and, then, sometimes, flakes of snow drifted down into the blasted structure and we shuddered with cold.

Outside, we heard engines.  Metal chariots zoomed past, visible in bright flashes between the elm trees.  When we tried to leave the wreckage of the Seminary, some strange enchantment held us between the ruinous walls and we were unable to set foot outside of the wrecked structure.   A fence made of woven steel surrounded the premises and, sometimes, we glimpsed strangely dressed people who peered at us through the diamond-shaped grid of metal wire.  The Greek professor told us to pay no mind to the visitors who didn’t concern us.  He recited conjugations of Koine verbs.  Seasons passed.  There was no freedom among the Free Will Baptists.  

Some flags hung outside of the ruined seminary beyond the fence and inaccessible to us.  Houses in the village burned down, orange flames flaring in the night.  The charred structures were not rebuilt.  A polished obelisk appeared, carved with the figure of a soldier in War of the Rebellion.  On some paving stones set in the turf, we could read our names, dimly discerned as if through tears.  In the corner of the Seminary, Mr. Boggs swept the rubble with a frayed broom and that scratching sound set our teeth on edge.  Someone said that the fence was not to protect the ruins of our College from further collapse, but to keep us confined so that we would not haunt the remaining homes in the desolate village nor the farms with their fat, indolent pigs nor the bitumen roadway where our presence might frighten the people passing in their bright motorized carts.