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.”