At the next battle, Galvin didn’t feel like he was fighting for one side or another, against one side or another. He was just battling. The whole world was battling and raging against itself, and the noises never ceased. He could barely make out Rebel from Yank, in any case. He had brushed against some poison leaf the day before and by nightfall his eyes were almost completely shut; the men laughed at this because, while others had their eyes shot out and heads split open, Benjamin Galvin had fought like a tiger and didn’t get a scratch. One soldier, who was later put in an asylum, threatened to kill Galvin that day, pointing his rifle at Galvin’s breastbone and warning him that if he didn’t stop chewing that damned paper, he’d shoot him dead right then.
After Calvin’s first war wound, a bullet to the chest, he was sent to be a guard at Fort Warren off Boston Harbor, where Rebel prisoners were being kept, until he could fully recover. There, prisoners with money purchased nicer rooms and better food, regardless of their levels of culpability or of how many men they had killed unjustly.
Harriet begged Benjamin not to go back to war, but he knew the men needed him. When he anxiously rejoined Company C in Virginia, there had been so many openings in the regiment from death and desertion that he was commissioned a second lieutenant.
He understood from newer recruits that rich boys back home were paying three hundred dollars to exempt themselves from service. Galvin boiled over with anger. He felt heart-wrenchingly weak, and he did not sleep for more than a few minutes a night. But he had to move: to keep moving. During the next battle, he dropped among the dead bodies and fell asleep thinking of those rich boys. The Rebels, poking through the dead that night and finding him, picked him up and took him to Libby Prison in Richmond. They let all the privates go because they were not important, but Galvin was a second lieutenant, so he spent four months at Libby. Galvin remembered only blurry images and some sounds from his time as a prisoner of war. It was as though he continued to sleep and dream the whole time.
When he was released to Boston, Benjamin Galvin was mustered out with the rest of his regiment in a big ceremony on the State House steps. Their tattered company flag was folded and given to the governor. Only two hundred of the original one thousand were alive. Galvin could not understand how the war could be considered done. They had not come close to meeting their cause. Slaves were freed, but the enemy had not changed its ways—had not been punished. Galvin was not political, but he knew that the blacks would have no peace in the South, slavery or no slavery, and he knew also what those who had not fought the war did not know: that the enemy was all around them at all times and had not surrendered at all. And never, never for a moment had the enemy been only the Southerners.
Galvin felt he now spoke in a different language that civilians could not understand. They could not even hear. Only fellow soldiers, who had been blasted by cannon and shell, had that capacity. In Boston, Galvin began to travel in bands with them. They looked haggard and exhausted, like the groups of stragglers they had seen in the woods. But these veterans, many of whom had lost jobs and families and talked about how they should have died in the war—at least their wives would get a pension—were on the prowl for money or pretty girls, and to get drunk and to raise Pluto. They no longer remembered to watch for the enemy and were blind just like the rest.
While Galvin was walking through the streets, he would often begin to feel that someone was following him closely. He would stop suddenly and spin around with a frightful look in his wide eyes, but the enemy would vanish into a corner or a crowd. The Devil’s mad and I am glad…
He slept with an ax under his pillow most nights. During a thunderstorm, he woke up and threatened Harriet with a rifle, accusing her of being a Rebel spy. That same night, he stood in the yard in the rain in his full uniform, patrolling for hours. At other times, he would lock Harriet in a room and guard her, explaining that someone was trying to get her. She had to work for a launderer to pay their debts, and pressed him to see doctors. The doctor said he had “soldier’s heart”—fast palpitations caused by battle exposure. She managed to convince him to go to a soldiers’-aid home, which, she understood from other wives, helped tend to troubled soldiers. When Benjamin Galvin heard George Washington Greene give a sermon at the soldiers’-aid home, he felt the first ray of light he could remember in a long time.
Greene spoke about a man far away, a man who understood, a man named Dante Alighieri. He was a former soldier, too, who had fallen victim to a great divide between the parties of his sullied city and had been commanded to journey through the afterlife so that he might put all mankind right. What an incredible ordering to life and death was witnessed there! No bloodshed in Hell was incidental, each person was divinely deserving of a precise punishment created by the love of God. What perfection came with each contrapasso, as the Reverend Greene called the punishments, matched with every sin of every man and woman on earth evermore until final judgment day!
Galvin understood how angry Dante became that the men of his city, friend and foe alike, knew only the material and physical, pleasure and money, and did not see the judgments that were rapidly at their heels. Benjamin Galvin could not pay close enough attention to Reverend Greene’s weekly sermons and could not hear them half enough; could not get them out of his head. He felt two feet taller every time he walked out of that chapel.
The other soldiers seemed to enjoy the sermons as well, though he sensed they did not understand them the way he could. Galvin, lingering one afternoon after the sermon and staring at Reverend Greene, overheard a conversation between him and one of the soldiers.
“Mr. Greene, may I remark that I greatly liked your sermon today,” said Captain Dexter Blight, who had a hay-tinted handlebar mustache and a strong limp. “Might I ask, sir—would I be able to read more about Dante’s travels? Many of my nights are sleepless, and I have much time.”
The old minister inquired whether the soldier could read Italian. “Well,” said George Washington Greene after being answered in the negative, “you will find Dante’s journey in English, in all the detail you wish, quite soon enough, my dear lad! You see, Mr. Longfellow of Cambridge is completing a translation—no, a transformation–into English by meeting each week with something of a cabinet council, a Dante Club he has formed, of which I humbly count myself a member. Look for the book next year at your bookseller, my good man, from the incomparable presses of Ticknor and Fields!”
Longfellow. Longfellow was involved with Dante. How right that seemed to Galvin, who had heard all his poems from Harriet’s lips. Galvin said to a policeman in town, “Ticknor and Fields,” and was directed to an enormous mansion on Tremont Street and Hamilton Place. The showroom was eighty feet long and thirty feet wide, with gleaming woodwork and carved columns and counters of western fir that shone under giant chandeliers. An elaborate archway at the far end of the showroom encased the finest samples of Ticknor & Fields editions, with spines of blue and gold and chocolate brown, and behind the arch a compartment displayed the latest numbers of the publishing house’s periodicals. Galvin entered the showroom with a vague hope that Dante himself could be waiting for him. He stepped in reverentially, his hat doffed and his eyes closed.
The publishing house’s new offices had opened only a few days before Benjamin Galvin walked in.