 | CHAPTER II Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] |  |
2. CHAPTER II
The childhood climaxed by this adventure had opened
thirteen years earlier in the rural peace of pre-war Virginia.
Since Walter Reed's whole life was destined to be more or less
nomadic, with scarcely four consecutive years spent in the same
place, it was quite appropriate that he should have been born in
a temporary shelter.
Shortly before Walter's birth his father, a Methodist
circuit rider, was sent from Murfreesboro, North Carolina, to Bel-
roi in Gloucester County, Virginia, to travel and preach among the
churches in that neighborhood. In those days the arrival of a new
minister in a country community was an event comparable onlt to
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ment. The neighborhood hummed. Would the new preacher frown on
dancing? What kind of sermons would he deliver? What would his
wife be like? How old were his children? Would he like his new
parish, would they be happy in their new home?
Suddenly and horrifyingly, it appeared that an emphatic NO
must be the answer to the last question. The parsonage burnt down.
How could a family be happy without a roof over their heads, espec-
ially a family of four children, with another expected any day? The
parishoners were in consternation. Their new minister was even then
traveling to them, they could not possibly erect a house for him by
the time he arrived, and where were he and his expanding brood to
lay their heads?
An answer was quickly found by Mr. Stubbs, owner of the Bel-
roi plantation. He hastily transferred his overseer to other quar-
ters and offered the frame cabin thus vacated for the use of the min-
ister and his family. It was a sturdy little building, small but sub-
stantially built, with two rooms downstairs, each with an immense
fireplace, and an attic above. A pretty little elm tree by one cor-
ner made the gesture of sheltering it, although it was so small and
slender that the gesture was a mere promise, not fulfilled for many
years. The neighborhood men got together and cleaned the yard and
repaired the steps and whitewashed the walls, while the women swept
and scrubbed inside. In short order the overseer's cabin was pre-
pared for the role of Walter Reed's birthplace, a role the distinc-
tion of which none of the kind neighbors, of course, could foresee.
Traveling by coach and boat, the Reeds journeyed from North
Carolina to their new home. Walter, in due course, was born there.
He was a good-natured baby, with straight fair hair and blue eyes,
and the undistinguished chubbiness of a healthy infant. The youngest
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always is until displaced by a new baby. This was a catastrophe
which did not overtake Walter: he remained the baby for many years.
By the time that his father, after his mother's death, remarried,
and there was a baby half-sister, Walter was a responsible young
man of sixteen,, entered as a student at the University of Virginia.
Naturally, Walter remembered nothing of his first home,
since the family lived there only a short time, but the older mem-
bers never forgot their few months in the crowded little cabin. It
was, however, snug and weather-proof, and Mrs. Reed, whose talent
for making a strange house into a home was well developed by life
as the wife of a circuit rider, soon made this one comfortable and
pleasant. It was a relief, though, to them all, except
perhaps the indifferent baby, when they were able to move into the
new parsonage, with its spacious upper story and detached kitchen and
servants' quarters, and leave Walter's congested birthplace to its
next tenants, and, later, the favorable notice of posterity.
* * *
The first Reed to arrive in America was Christian, who
came to Carolima in 1640 to see how he liked the new world. He liked
it well enough to live in, but not to die in, so returned to England
when he grew old. He left his son Christopher, however, one of
the Councillors of the Lords Proprietors who goverened the colony
from the safe and irresponsible distance of England, comfortably
settled at Durant's Neck, a piece of land jutting down into the north
side of Albemarle Sound between the Little and the Perquimans Rivers.
In good time, Christopher died and was buried near the
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sound. Pious hands rescued the tombstone and placed it under a gum
tree near the water, far from the scattered bones it had once covered.
Later, hands somewhat less pious broke off the slab for the doorstep
of a new house. Christopher's son and son's sons lived on at Du-
rant's Neck, and planted and prospered. One of them, Joseph, mar-
ried a grand-daughter of George Durant, founder of the settlement.
George Durant, irked by the restraints of England's tight
little island, had been drawn to the new continent in 1632 by its
spaciousness and freedom. A brief pause in Virginia had convinced
him that that colony was too like the land he had left for his taste.
He wandered into Carolina, exploring the eastern shore and the rivers,
and finally settled on the peninsula on which he conferred his name.
He preferred to buy his land from the Indians, and be friends with
them, rather than steal it like many other settlers and win their en-
mity, and he came into possession of the first land title in what
is now North Carolina. The old record shows that, on the first day
of March, 1661, George Durant bought from Kilcocanen, Chief of the
Yeopin Indians, “a parcel of land lying on Roanoke Sound and a river
by the name of Perquimans.”
Other settlers, among them Christian and Christopher Reed,
came to the fertile peninsula, and a substantial community of farmers
and planters soon grew up. George Durant held a dominant position
there. When harsh laws were imposed and an unpopular governor was
appointed by the absentee Lords Proprietors, it was Durant who led
the opposition and raised an armed rebellion. In the quieter years
of his later life his activities were less stirring: as Justice of
the Peace he applied himself to the suppression of witchcraft, sor-
cery and other doings frowned upon by the local gentry. But the
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grand-daughter who married Joseph Reed, and it flowed on, sometimes
more and sometimes less silently, in the veins of their descendants,
to crop out again undiluted in Walter Reed.
Walter's mother, Pharaba White Reed, was, like his father, a
North Carolinian of English descent. Small, witty and vivacious,
she was also a woman of character and intelligence.
In those days, the wife of a Methodist circuit rider needed
such qualities. A preacher's salary was small, and his reward con-
sisted largely of the consciousness of duty sincerely done and of
the respect and liking of his neighbors. He could afford no luxur-
ies. Lemuel Reed did not own slaves; a good slave might cost as
much as fifteen hundred dollars. As he pointed out to Walter,
“What would a minister of the Gospel want with a slave? He
cultivates souls, not the soil, and he must do it entirely by his
own labor.”
Mr. Reed traveled the circuit in all weathers, sometimes on
horseback and sometimes in a light carriage, preaching at his churches,
baptizing babies, visiting the sick, carrying news about the country-
side, performing all the dozens of extra duties that fell to the
lot of a country parson. At home his wife attended to the children,
supervised their lessons, managed the household and waited for his
return.
Every two years, just as they would get settled and feel
really at home, the Methodist conference regularly appointed him to
a new circuit in another part of the state. Mrs. Reed and the two
younger boys, with a few bags, would get into the cars and
and ride to their destination behind the woodburning locomotive
that chugged along breathtakingly about thirty miles an hour and
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Reed and his two older boys and their sister would pile their house-
hold goods -chairs, lamps, bedding, some smoked meat in the back,
and Pa's Bible on the seat beside him, where he could consult it
while he thought about his sermon -into the wagon and make the ted-
ious trip to a new home.
The two years at Belroi were followed by two in Princess Anne
County, two in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, and two in Prince Ed-
ward County. Here, at Farmville, the village on the banks of the
Appomattox that was eight years later to be in the path of Lee's
final retreat, the Reed's lived opposite the Presbyterian church, in
a story and a half brick house large enough for five healthy, lively
children and their studious father, too.
Mrs. Reed, who loved flowers, laid out beds along the walk
all the way to the front gate and planted them with roses, cornflow-
ers, larkspur and other plants that grew well in the rich red soil.
Walter, who shared his mother's love of gardening even as a little
boy, would follow her around, digging, planting, pruning, cutting,
in vigorous imitation. Sometimes his dog, Taffy, whom Nature had
sketched freehand in a moment of reckless experimentation, would do
a little planting himself, and dig a hole in a flower bed to bury his
bone. Walter, who though Taffy the finest dog in the world, would
reproach him, but not hard enough to hurt his feelings. He was
always sensitive to other people's feelings, and Taffy, in his opin-
ion, had the same standing in the family, and title to gentle treat-
ment, as any other member of it.
It was at Farmville, when he was six years old, that Walter
Reed performed his first experiment. It was not his own idea, but
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after the first few puffs on the homemade “cigar,” made of tobacco
leaves which he and Chris and a couple of their friends had picked
up at a neighboring warehouse and rolled in newspaper. Convulsed with
nausea, he thought he was surely dying. His frightened friends shared
his alarm.
“Please, please don't die, Walter,” implored the scared
little boy who had suggested smoking. “Promise you won't tell who
you were with when this happened? Pa'd 'most kill me if he knew it
was my fault.”
“I promise. I won't tell. It wasn't your fault.” Walter
managed a feeble smile. “Get me home, Chris. I feel so awful. I'm
'most dead now! I want Ma, quick!”
The next day Walter, still feeble but no longer in fear of
death, had an interview with his father. The minister, pulling on
his full mustache, covered a smile with his hand.
“So you promised not to tell who got you into this scrape,
Walter? Well, then you mustn't tell. You were foolish, not naughty,
and I'm not going to punish you. I think you've learned your lesson.”
“Yes I have, Pa. I'll never touch the stuff again,” Walter
promised earnestly.
Mr. Reed smiled at his son and ruffled his sun-bleached hair.
“As a matter of fact, you probably won't,” he told him. “The
same thing happened to your Pa thirty years ago. To this day I can't
touch tobacco.”
Walter never smoked again.
* * *
Life for a small boy in rural Virginia in the 1850's was
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and a big sister, Laura, to play with. They made up all sorts of
exciting games. As wild Indians they would lurk behind the big
wood pile, a feature of every country home in those days, and fall
with terrifying whoops on their parents, who always made very sat-
isfactory victims, giving a convincing display of surprise and terror.
Or they would be highwaymen and hold up the stage, or Indian scouts
and crawl on their stomachs through the corn and tobacco, cautiously
reconnoitering the movements of the wily redskins, and taking care
not to put themselves in the way of punishment by flattening the
stalks. When they played at being a pioneer family, Walter, to his
disgust, had to be the baby. When he protested that he was a big
boy now, almost big enough to go to school, Tom settled the matter
by saying with authority,
“All pioneer families have babies. You're the youngest,
so you've got to be the baby if you want to play with us.”
There was no answer to that, obviously, so Walter got his
nose wiped and his face washed, and was scalped, lugged around and
spanked a great deal. He took it with good-nature, since he
had a happy disposition, but promised himself that when he got a
little older he wasn't going to play any old baby any more.
Laura, as the oldest and the only girl in a family of boys,
was in a privileged position. She always got to play mother, and
did so with great zest, scolding and protecting her family, cooking
for them when they returned from the plains with a bison, and mourn-
ing their untimely demise when the Indians murdered them. She took
care, too, not to let the older boys “baby” their youngest brother
with too much realism.
When they were tired of games they could ramble around the
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watching the farmers strip the tobacco from its stems in the great,
well-ventilated barns in the late fall and winter.
Probably the best fun, though, was the wrestling game with
Pa.
“Let's see if you fellows are strong enough to hold down your
aged, feeble Pa,” Mr. Reed would challenge them. The boys would fall
on him with a shout. Pa would get down on his back on the floor,
creakingly and with many groans, and Jim, the oldest boy, would issue
orders.
“Walter, you hold his left arm. Tom, take his right -hold
them out, straight out! Get on his legs, Chris. Wait, I'll
help you. No fair starting yet, Pa. All right, now! Let's see you
get away this time, Pa!”
The ensuing struggles were terrific. Pa and the boys rolled
and scrambled and shouted with laughter, while Ma and Laura fluttered
on the outskirts of the mêlée and moved furniture out of the way.
Heads, elbows and shins occasionally got banged, but nobody minded.
The game always ended the same way: the boys, exhausted and laughing,
lay scattered about the room, while Pa rose agilely to his feet and
dusted himself off, saying triumphantly,
“There! Maybe the next time you'll think twice before you
get rough with your poor old Pa.”
“Really, Pa,” Mrs. Reed smilingly protested, “one would think
you were ten yourself, the way you act.”
“Keeps me young, my dear,” he answered, slipping one arm around
her and the other around Laura. “Aren't they fine fellows, though,”
he exclaimed proudly, smiling at his four boys as they picked them-
selves up from the floor.
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* * *
“Ma, when can I go to school?” Walter demanded of his mother
soon after their arrival at Farmville. “I'm six, and I can read and
spell and do sums almost as well as Chris.”
Mrs. Reed glanced at him startled. How quickly they grew!
Her youngest almost six! She put aside the bolt of cotton cloth from
which she was cutting shirts for the boys and their father -the
spinning wheel and loom had fallen into disuse in most of the homes
of Virginia since cotton goods could be manufactured so cheaply in
the north -and examined her youngest son. His hair, tow-colored from
the hot Virginia sun, was darkening a little as he grew older. The
brightblue eyes showed his father's frank intelligence. Behind the
youthful softness of the alert face, with its straight nose and
slightly outthrust lower lip, the maternal eye recognized character
and determination.
“When, Ma?” the little boy persisted, leaning against her.
“I think you can go this next term, son,” she answered slowly.
“I'll ask your Pa to speak to Mrs. Booker about it as soon as he
gets back.”
Mrs. Reed's scissors lay idle on the table as she stared out
the window. How fast, how terribly fast time went! Was it possibly
six years since that night in the overseer's tiny cabin when Walter,
red and wrinkled and weakly squalling, first confronted his family
and the world? Pa had been a deacon then; he was an elder now. It
was hard to believe that this fall their bbybaby would go to school with
Chris, and under the efficient ministration of Mrs. Booker learn
reading and moral tales from Professor McGuffy's readers, Latin from
Professor Gildersleeve's grammar, and mathematics and geography from
the appropriate texts. Then he would go to Mr. Jefferson's Univer-
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stage of life as a man of sound education, he would become -a min-
ister like his father? a doctor? a soldier? a lawyer? In any case,
a worthy gentleman and, God willing, a man of distinction.
Walter, unconscious of the high hopes centered on him, was
at that moment telling his brother Tom where to get off. He had
found Jim and Tom chopping a fallen apple tree into firespaceplace lengths,
and lost no time in making his announcement.
“Ma says I can go to school next term, Tom, and I'm not going
to play baby any more.”
“Good for you, Walter,” Tom said mildly. “That's fine news.
I'll give you my little pen knife, so you can keep your pencils sharp.”
Jim smiled. “I guess you're a big fellow now, all right,” he
admitted. Well past the age of make-believe games himself, he still
remembered with amused sympathy Walter's fruitless protests at the
indignity of his role in the family dramas.
* * *
Attendance at the one room village school was an exciting
novelty at first, then settled into a routine which Walter never found
monotonous. The students, about twenty boys and girls, some of them
sixteen and seventeen years old, sat in rows at desks, and Mrs.
Booker faced them from her own on a raised platform, a blackboard
behind her and a large globe beside her. She had never been known
to use the ruler, suggestive of discipline and smarting palms,
which lay in front of her, for anything except pointing.
In the country about Farmville there were a number of gold
mines, which had been extensively worked before the rush to Califor-
nia in 1849. One of them, Booker's Mine, cast an atmosphere of gla-
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found out whether it was hers or not. They used to discuss the ques-
tion lengthily, until practical Chris settled it finally to his own
satisfaction.
“Of course she doesn't own a gold mine. Why would she work for
a living teaching school if she did?” he wanted to know.
That seemed like good sense to Walter, but it was a disappoint-
ment. It was exciting to think that your teacher could get all the
gold she wanted just by taking it out of her own mine -it was almost
as exciting as if she had owned a candy store. The son of the poor
country minister was dazzled by the mere idea of such resources.
While one class recited, the other prepared its lessons. Walter
kept his nose buried in McGuffy's tale of the honest little chimney
sweep who was to occupy the next recitation period, but read, fascin-
ated, the big flat book he had cautiously opened on his knees. The
Rocky Mountains, the Colorado River, the buffalo and the Indians, the
wild, adventurous west -how exciting it seemed by contrast to the
well-ordered domestic scene! Some day, when he was big, he would go
there himself -maybe on one of the new railroads that were even then
slowly, certainly probing their way across the wide continent, span-
ning rivers, crawling across plains, connecting remote villages with
the outside world, binding east to west, north to south, with
tough steel bonds.
The cool, crisp voice caught him off-guard. “Walter Reed,
bring me the book you are hiding under your desk.”
It was before the age of dime novels, but the popularity among
her pupils of lurid adventure yarns about the gold rush, cattle
thieves and other western topics, was well known to Mrs. Booker.
Blushing, Walter stood up. Every eye in the room fastened on him.
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behind him, a small, tow-headed figure in neat cotton shirt and
pants. A subdued expression of humor, Mrs. Booker noted, belied
the penitent droop of his bearing. He stood meekly before her,
his eye on the ruler. His teacher extended her hand for the of-
fending book.
“What is this book, Walter?” she demanded with a sternness
that covered up a faint misgiving. The boy was almost smiling!
“Just my geography, ma'am,” he answered.
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| CHAPTER II Manuscript Draft: Walter Reed: Doctor in Uniform, by Laura Wood, [19—] | |