Devil’s Den
In honor of the Hillside Civil War Graves Project, and in memory of “my” Civil War veteran, John G. Phillips, 1st Lt. Company D, Eighty-first New York Regiment of Infantry. Born in 1837 in Oswego, New York. Died in 1883.
1
“Oh, no,” Ben said to Mom and me, as we were getting ready to leave the house. “I didn’t buy a flag.”
“I don’t think we’ll need one,” Mom replied. “I’m sure the committee put flags on all the veterans’ graves.”
“You’re right,” Ben said. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I didn’t buy one. It’s coming back to me now.”
“Joey, do you think these are enough flowers?” Mom asked me. She had half a lilac bush in her arms, as well as some tulips and daffodils.
“That’s more than enough, Mom,” I said to her.
“Why didn’t you take some of those fancy daffodils you like so much?” Ben asked her.
“I almost did,” Mom said. “And then I thought that kind of daffodil didn’t exist back then. So I went with the kinds of simple flowers Joshua Gibbs would have been familiar with.”
“Nice touch,” Ben said, and gave Mom a peck on the cheek. They’ve been married for over five years, and he still does that kind of thing. “Come on, gang. We want to get to this cemetery while there’s still daylight.”
“You mean so we’ll get back before the ball game,” Mom said. “And we have plenty of time for that. Joey, are you ready?”
Of course I was ready. We were only going a mile or so to the local cemetery. After that, we were going to have lunch out and then get back in time for the ball game. Ben’s a longtime Yankee fan, and he hasn’t been the same since they won the Series.
“You’ll have to take Mike to the cemetery soon,” Mom said to me as we got into the car. She dropped one of her tulips and bent down to pick it up. As though one less tulip was going to matter to Joshua Gibbs. He’d been dead for over a hundred years by now, and the way I pictured him, he’d never been one for flowers anyway.
But Mom had insisted. “When you go to a cemetery, you bring flowers,” she said. “And this is our way of welcoming Joshua into our family. Besides, he’s from here. He’d like it if we brought him flowers that grew in our backyard.”
The funny thing was, adopting Joshua Gibbs had been my idea. My teacher, Ms. Hartman, had been the one to mention it. Some local group had decided the Civil War veterans’ graves were being neglected. So they set up this program where you could adopt a veteran.
As soon as I heard about it, I wanted to do it. A couple of years ago, in fifth grade, we’d been studying local history, and I’d played an Orange Blossom in our class play. That’s what they were called, Orange Blossoms, the soldiers that came from around here. We live in Orange County, New York. I personally would have called myself something different, maybe the Orange Marauders or the Orange Wildcats, but times were different back in the Civil War, and they went with Orange Blossoms.
In spite of their name, they were really brave soldiers, and they fought all over the place in the Civil War, including Gettysburg. And they deserved to be remembered. So when I heard about this adoption business, I told Mom and Ben.
“It costs seventy-five dollars,” I said, which was the part I liked the least about it. “I have twenty saved if you’d be willing to put in the rest.”
“That’s a wonderful idea,” Mom had said. “Don’t you agree, Ben?”
“I certainly do,” Ben said. “I’m proud of you, Joey, for wanting to get involved.”
So we filled out some papers, and the next thing we knew, we were told the name of our veteran. Joshua Gibbs. Born in 1838. Died in 1870, five years after the Civil War ended. A private first class in the Orange Blossoms.
It was funny. I was the one who told Mom and Ben about it, but they really got into it. We all signed a paper saying we would adopt our veteran. We promised to learn about him, to visit his gravesite and honor his memory. For some reason, that really appealed to them.
I figured it was enough to adopt Joshua Gibbs and think about what things must have been like for him. He wasn’t very old in the Civil War, in his early twenties. I liked to imagine what he looked like, Brad Pitt, I thought, or maybe Tom Cruise, and what he must have been like. Very brave. Telling his parents that fighting to end slavery was the right thing to do. I didn’t know if he had a girlfriend, but if he did, she was all upset that he was going, but he knew he had to go. Maybe he had a really good friend, like Mike, and the two of them enlisted together.
And I knew Joshua Gibbs fought bravely. I could imagine the battles, smoke from the cannonballs, and the bullets whizzing by. Dead bodies all over the place, the stench of blood and guts making strong men sick. And Joshua Gibbs kept on fighting. He entered the war hardly more than a boy, but by the time the last soldier died, he was a man.
I even had the feeling that when the war ended, he couldn’t just come back to Orange County and farm or do whatever it was people did in those days. I kind of imagined he’d become a bank robber or held up trains, and that’s why he died in 1870. Sometimes I thought maybe he’d become a deputy, and he got killed trying to stop Billy the Kid or Jesse James, instead of becoming Billy the Kid or Jesse James himself. But either way, he died in a blaze of bullets. Not that I could really picture that happening anywhere near where I lived. What probably happened was he came back home and died of boredom. But I really preferred the bank robber idea.
I didn’t tell Mom and Ben any of that. Just because that was my idea of Joshua Gibbs didn’t mean it was theirs. As a matter of fact, Mom was convinced Joshua Gibbs was in love with some beautiful girl, and just when they had a chance at real happiness, he died. And Ben just said people died young in those days, and it was a shame that Joshua Gibbs made it all the way through the Civil War only to come home and die anyway.
Mike thought space aliens had got him. “They were around then,” Mike said. “Nobody knew it because nobody knew what they looked like. They probably kidnapped Joshua Gibbs and beamed him up to their spaceship. I bet there’s nobody in that grave.”
I wasn’t about to dig it up to find out. Mike was supposed to come with us to the cemetery, but he canceled at the last minute. Which was okay by me. Mike’s my best friend, but he hadn’t adopted Joshua Gibbs.
“Do you have the map?” Mom asked Ben as we parked the car by the cemetery gate. “I want to make sure we find Joshua Gibbs right away.”
“We will,” Ben said. “He’s the first Civil War veteran on this map. He shouldn’t be too far away.”
We walked up a short hill into the cemetery. I’d been there, for the funerals of some of my friends’ grandparents, but Mom’s family is from somewhere else, so I’m not related to anybody dead there. I guess because of that, I could see the cemetery was pretty nice. Lots of grass and trees, and the tombstones were all kind of old and dignified.
“There’s a flag,” Ben said, pointing to the left. “I bet that’s him.”
We walked over. Sure enough, there was a brand-new marker in the ground: “Joshua Gibbs, Dec. 12, 1838–Aug. 14, 1870.”
Mom put the flowers down gently on his marker. “Do you see any other Gibbses here?” she asked.
Ben and I looked at the nearby tombstones. “This is the Winslow gravesite,” Ben said. “He’s the only Gibbs here.”
“I wonder why he was buried here,” Mom said. “Maybe he was engaged to a Winslow girl.”
“I think I read they moved some of the Civil War veterans around, after they died,” Ben said. “They might just have had an empty spot here and dropped him in.”
“Ben,” Mom said, but I kind of liked the idea. I mean, if Joshua Gibbs had been a bank robber or something like that, then it was right he should be buried alone. Or even if he was a deputy. He was his own man. He lived alone, and he fought hard, and he died by his own rules. I saw that in an old western once. Ben likes westerns.
“It’s so quiet here,” Mom said. “So peaceful. Maybe we should have a moment of silence.”
“Good idea,” Ben said. So we stood still for a moment and stared down at Joshua Gibbs’s marker. I told him he was part of our family now, and we’d be sure to visit him regularly, and he’d never be alone again. That was the whole idea of his being adopted, after all, that he wouldn’t be alone anymore.
“The flowers are beautiful,” Ben said. “We’ll have to come back when the peonies are in bloom.”
Mom nodded. “I wish I had better luck with roses,” she said.
“Joshua wouldn’t recognize them anyway,” Ben said. “All the hybrids they keep inventing. He was used to the old-fashioned red roses with the heavy perfume.”
“Maybe he was wounded,” I said. “Like at Gettysburg. Maybe that’s why he died so young.”
“Could be,” Ben said. We started walking back to the car. “He might have been wounded and survived, but never regained his strength.”
“Could we find out something about him when we’re at Gettysburg?” Mom asked. “Do you think they have reference libraries with all that information?”
“Probably,” Ben said. “But we’re only going for an overnight stay. I think we’d do better researching Joshua Gibbs here and spending our time at the battlefield, not in a library.”
“Or in the gift shops,” Mom said, and we both laughed. “You laugh now,” she said. “But I just know there are going to be wonderful gift shops all over Gettysburg. And I’m going to do my Christmas shopping real early this year. Gettysburg will be a great place to start.”
“Mom, it’s May,” I said. “Early Christmas shopping is October.”
“Gettysburg is four hours away,” she said. “I’m not going back there in October just to do some more shopping.”
“Just don’t get me my Christmas presents yet, okay?” I said. “I’ll probably change my mind a few times between now and December.”
Ben drove us the few blocks into downtown and parked right in front of his favorite restaurant. “It’s a shame about the ball game,” Mom said. “Otherwise after lunch, you could walk over to the library and find out some more about Joshua Gibbs.”
“Some other time,” Ben said. “Unless you want to.”
“I have too much paperwork to catch up on,” Mom said. “Lunch, then papers, and then maybe some gardening. How about you, Joey? Want us to leave you at the library?”
“No, thanks,” I said. “Remember, I have a soccer game this afternoon.”
“Poor Joshua Gibbs,” Mom said. “He just got adopted by us, and already we’re neglecting him.”