Taps
Donald Hubbard
His neighbors expressed their joy to Jim Dorn, after he had survived the Civil War and returned home, though most of them thought bad thoughts, wishing he had died rather than walk around with a dead arm. They felt uncomfortable around him. Maybe he will die soon, some infection will overcome him in his weakened condition.
“Welcome home, Jim,” everyone all told him.
~ ~ ~
One year after the Civil War ended, the Connecticut legislature sawed off the southeast corner of Middletown to create a new town called Hale. The birthing ceremonies for Hale fittingly occurred on Independence Day, giving everyone the excuse to take that Wednesday off from work.
General Hawley, the new state governor, showed up to speak for a couple of hours and local hero, Sergeant Jim Dorn, closed out the ceremonies with brief remarks:
“Governor Hawley, Lieutenant Governor Winchester, Town
Selectmen, thank you for permitting me to speak on this
glorious first day for our new town.
I was privileged to serve with the Army of the Potomac
during the siege of Petersburg, when I received this wound to
my right arm, which is why I don’t go around shaking hands
with my friends or extending my hand to the ladies (nervous
laughter, scattered clapping from the audience). And while I am
not much use as a hand in the farm or running a mill, I feel
blessed that I was able to serve my country and now see the
place of my birth become its own town.
Many of my comrades did not have my luck, some are
resting in graves in the south, but like all of us, they too shall
rise one day, they too shall obtain paradise, they too built our
country, our state and now our new village.
As for me, as Nathan Hale might have said, ‘I only regret that
I have one arm to give to my country.’”
General Hawley did not know how to congratulate Dorn, after all the man just said that he could not lift his arm, so Hawley took a medal from his own uniform and pinned it on Dorn’s shirt lapel.
After the ceremony ended, the General’s buggy driver requested that Dorn return the medal.
Dorn fidgeted with it with his left hand, deliberately making the buggy driver squirm a bit.
“You want to take the medal from me?”
“No, you’re doing fine.”
Dorn unpinned the medal and handed it to the buggy driver.
“The General can have my right arm too if he wants it.”
The buggy driver grimaced and pocketed the medal.
~ ~ ~
“Did you ever see General Grant?”
“No, I never did see him. Saw Sheridan once, talking to some cavalrymen. Little guy, seemed to be in a hurry.”
Few people asked Jim Dorn about his Civil War service, they all felt sorry for him, flopping around his useless arm, rendered inert by a minie ball shot by someone in his own regiment.
The soldiers from Hale, Connecticut who died were mostly buried along battlefields in Virginia, so the townspeople did not have to think about them too much. A few returned in coffins, buried at the town cemetery, behind a grove of trees. The physically healthy returning soldiers picked up farming or working a machine.
Except for Crazy Tom, who hung out in the woods, but he was peculiar before the war started, so no one figured that he’d straighten out with combat.
And Jim Dorn who was regular except for the arm he couldn’t do anything with.
~ ~ ~
Town Selectmen Wasp Smithers rapped on Dorn’s parents’ home one day, told Dorn that the town needed a tax collector and offered him the job.
“Are you only doing this because I have a bum arm and cannot work?”
“No Jim, we appreciate our returning Union soldiers, and you were always good at sums. The work pays, better than soldiering did.”
“Levi Cartwright is better at sums than me. He does the accounting for a bank in Middletown.”
“Jim, I was just trying to be kind. Cartwright doesn’t need the money.”
“And I do?”
“Yes Jim. You do.”
~ ~ ~
By next summer, the town had erected a town hall and painted it white, two floors, making it the tallest structure in Hale. As tax collector, Dorn had an office and a roll top desk at his disposal and a spittoon to spit his chaw into all day.
They paid a buggy driver, Dugan the Catholic, to drive Dorn around to the homes of the people who refused to go to the town hall to pay their taxes. Gave Dorn a pistol to wave in peoples’ faces if he felt they needed encouragement to pay up. They generally did, it felt uncomfortable to have a one-armed man brandish a revolver at them.
“You must think that you are quite the man Jim, driving around with your Mick friend, collecting money from people who can actually work.”
“If you don’t pay me, I’ll only burn down your house and kill your live-stock.”
“Here’s your money Jim, don’t come around anymore.”
“Isn’t my money.”
~ ~ ~
During their rides, Dorn talked to Dugan, a man even more hated than Dorn.
“What is it that you Catholics believe?”
“Same as you Jim, Christ and the Ten Commandments and all that.”
“Isn’t it true that you have priests and you don’t let them screw?” “That’s right Jim, the priest and the nuns are married to God.”
“I’m divorced from God myself.”
~ ~ ~
Dorn remembered skinny-dipping in the pond past midnight with Betty Kline, before he accepted the bounty money and mustered in with the Union Army. She wouldn’t let him touch her, explaining that she was not that type.
One day back home, his father asked, “isn’t she the town tease?”
“I don’t think so, she lets me see her naked.”
After he returned from the war, Betty Kline told him that she was getting married to Cartwright.
“If it helps you Jim, I was going to marry him before you went off to war.”
“Before I became a one-armed tax collector?”
“No, that isn’t it Jim. He has a lot of money.”
“That makes it even worse. I love you.”
“I love you too Jim, much more than Cartwright. Bad arm and everything. But Cartwright was always going to have more money than you.”
~ ~ ~
After a particularly ugly day making rounds collecting taxes from deadbeats, Dugan told Dorn that they should ride into Middletown and get a few gins for themselves.
Once they got liquored up, they hitched the horse and buggy up in front of St. John’s Square because Dorn was drunk enough to want to see a Catholic Mass. It was a good day to do so, good to get out of the austerely gray day and in somewhere warm, plus it was a week day and the Fathers liked wrapping up services in a half hour.
Dorn got up to take Communion but Dugan held him back, Dorn not being Catholic.
After Dorn asked Dugan about that.
“We’re different from you Jim, we believe that the body of Christ is in the host.”
“Seems far-fetched to me.”
“Maybe so.”
“But I liked the sermon about purgatory. I would like to know more about it. Can you get me some literature about that from your priest.”
“I’m sure that I can Jim.”
“I’d appreciate that Dugan. Your religion is crazy, but they do death good.”
~ ~ ~
Dugan gave Dorn a worn out Catechism that his priest was throwing out, dog-earing those pages that dealt with purgatory:
Purgatory is the state in which those suffer for a time who die guilty of venial sins, or without having satisfied for the punishment due to their sins. This state is called Purgatory because in it the souls are purged or purified from all their stains. The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation
Dorn read this, wreathed in solemnity.
“I wish the Protestants talked more about this,” he said to Dugan.
“I don’t think you understand, Jim. Purgatory is not that great a place.”
Jim pointed to a passage in the catechism. “It says here that it isn’t the worst place to be, either.”
“Does that mean you want to become a Catholic, Jim?”
Dorn grinned. “No Dugan, incense doesn’t work for me.”
~ ~ ~
Dorn vacated his parents’ home and started living in his office at the Town Hall. It saved the town money, as the Selectmen fired the custodian and gave the job to Dorn. No increased salary, but free rent, so long as he kept the stove fired up during the winter and he bathed once a month.
Dorn reduced his office hours and when he wasn’t riding around with Dugan to pressure his neighbors to honor their tax obligations, he sat behind the grove at the cemetery, guarding the grave stones of his friends who died in the war. He talked to them sometimes and prayed for them more often, seeing that that was what he was supposed to do for souls in purgatory.
~ ~ ~
Dorn visited Betty during the Panic of 1884, right after Cartwright slashed his wrists as his money oozed away.
“Sorry about Cartwright. I liked him, he helped me balance the books at the Town Hall.”
“Thank you Jim, he never wanted to be without money.”
“What are you going to do Betty?”
“I am seeing Tom Bradley, he saved all of his money.”
“It seems pretty early to be seen with other men, Cartwright being stiff in the ground only a week now.”
“I need to consider my children. We don’t have any money left.”
“Do you love Bradley?”
“I love that he has money saved up and he was not foolish enough to invest it or deposit it into a bank. Pray for us Jim.”
“I don’t pray for the living.”
“I don’t understand. Why pray for the dead and not the living? The dead are dead.”
“It’s a thing that I learned from the Catholics. The dead can’t reject your prayers.”
~ ~ ~
Betty landed on her feet after spending a lot of time on her back with Tom Bradley. She felt sorry for Dorn, sitting out half the year in the cold by his Union Army buddies’ grave stones, so she donated money for an outdoor fire pit to be installed there so that Dorn might sit there in warmth. He appreciated the gesture, it connoted a cruel type of love.
~ ~ ~
Dorn accepted poverty though he never learned to love it, he was like Betty Kline in that way. Most of the people he knew in Hale resided on the margins and poverty impelled Dorn into intruding in the Civil War. He enlisted in the Army to receive a substantial bonus, which he gave to his parents, and to impress Betty Kline once she saw him in his new uniform. He felt like a hero, like he did every day when he visited the graveyard and prayed for his friends. You didn’t need two hands to talk to God.
~ ~ ~
His parents died as did Betty Kline and all his friends who survived the Civil War with him, and he visited all of their grave sites and prayed for them. In December 1904 some children sledding down the hills in the cemetery saw Jim Dorn hunched over Betty Kline’s grave stone and one of the braver boys took off his a mitten, tapping Dorn on the shoulder. Dorn looked up at the boy.
“Don’t worry, I’m not dead. I’m just visiting an old friend, someone who died in the Civil War.”
Dorn recognized how scary he must seem, so he gave the boy a silver dollar.
“Thank you for thinking about me. Save this dollar, save all of your money. You never want to be poor.”
The boy smiled and ran back to his friends.
“Look at what I have!”
Purgatory is the state in which those suffer for a time who die guilty of venial sins, or without having satisfied for the punishment due to their sins. This state is called Purgatory because in it the souls are purged or purified from all their stains; and it is not, therefore, a permanent or lasting state for the soul. The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation, and they will enter heaven as soon as they are completely purified and made worthy to enjoy that presence of God which is called the Beatific Vision.
Though God loves the souls in Purgatory, He punishes them because His holiness requires that nothing defiled may enter heaven and His justice requires that everyone be punished or rewarded according to what he deserves.
Donald Hubbard
His neighbors expressed their joy to Jim Dorn, after he had survived the Civil War and returned home, though most of them thought bad thoughts, wishing he had died rather than walk around with a dead arm. They felt uncomfortable around him. Maybe he will die soon, some infection will overcome him in his weakened condition.
“Welcome home, Jim,” everyone all told him.
~ ~ ~
One year after the Civil War ended, the Connecticut legislature sawed off the southeast corner of Middletown to create a new town called Hale. The birthing ceremonies for Hale fittingly occurred on Independence Day, giving everyone the excuse to take that Wednesday off from work.
General Hawley, the new state governor, showed up to speak for a couple of hours and local hero, Sergeant Jim Dorn, closed out the ceremonies with brief remarks:
“Governor Hawley, Lieutenant Governor Winchester, Town
Selectmen, thank you for permitting me to speak on this
glorious first day for our new town.
I was privileged to serve with the Army of the Potomac
during the siege of Petersburg, when I received this wound to
my right arm, which is why I don’t go around shaking hands
with my friends or extending my hand to the ladies (nervous
laughter, scattered clapping from the audience). And while I am
not much use as a hand in the farm or running a mill, I feel
blessed that I was able to serve my country and now see the
place of my birth become its own town.
Many of my comrades did not have my luck, some are
resting in graves in the south, but like all of us, they too shall
rise one day, they too shall obtain paradise, they too built our
country, our state and now our new village.
As for me, as Nathan Hale might have said, ‘I only regret that
I have one arm to give to my country.’”
General Hawley did not know how to congratulate Dorn, after all the man just said that he could not lift his arm, so Hawley took a medal from his own uniform and pinned it on Dorn’s shirt lapel.
After the ceremony ended, the General’s buggy driver requested that Dorn return the medal.
Dorn fidgeted with it with his left hand, deliberately making the buggy driver squirm a bit.
“You want to take the medal from me?”
“No, you’re doing fine.”
Dorn unpinned the medal and handed it to the buggy driver.
“The General can have my right arm too if he wants it.”
The buggy driver grimaced and pocketed the medal.
~ ~ ~
“Did you ever see General Grant?”
“No, I never did see him. Saw Sheridan once, talking to some cavalrymen. Little guy, seemed to be in a hurry.”
Few people asked Jim Dorn about his Civil War service, they all felt sorry for him, flopping around his useless arm, rendered inert by a minie ball shot by someone in his own regiment.
The soldiers from Hale, Connecticut who died were mostly buried along battlefields in Virginia, so the townspeople did not have to think about them too much. A few returned in coffins, buried at the town cemetery, behind a grove of trees. The physically healthy returning soldiers picked up farming or working a machine.
Except for Crazy Tom, who hung out in the woods, but he was peculiar before the war started, so no one figured that he’d straighten out with combat.
And Jim Dorn who was regular except for the arm he couldn’t do anything with.
~ ~ ~
Town Selectmen Wasp Smithers rapped on Dorn’s parents’ home one day, told Dorn that the town needed a tax collector and offered him the job.
“Are you only doing this because I have a bum arm and cannot work?”
“No Jim, we appreciate our returning Union soldiers, and you were always good at sums. The work pays, better than soldiering did.”
“Levi Cartwright is better at sums than me. He does the accounting for a bank in Middletown.”
“Jim, I was just trying to be kind. Cartwright doesn’t need the money.”
“And I do?”
“Yes Jim. You do.”
~ ~ ~
By next summer, the town had erected a town hall and painted it white, two floors, making it the tallest structure in Hale. As tax collector, Dorn had an office and a roll top desk at his disposal and a spittoon to spit his chaw into all day.
They paid a buggy driver, Dugan the Catholic, to drive Dorn around to the homes of the people who refused to go to the town hall to pay their taxes. Gave Dorn a pistol to wave in peoples’ faces if he felt they needed encouragement to pay up. They generally did, it felt uncomfortable to have a one-armed man brandish a revolver at them.
“You must think that you are quite the man Jim, driving around with your Mick friend, collecting money from people who can actually work.”
“If you don’t pay me, I’ll only burn down your house and kill your live-stock.”
“Here’s your money Jim, don’t come around anymore.”
“Isn’t my money.”
~ ~ ~
During their rides, Dorn talked to Dugan, a man even more hated than Dorn.
“What is it that you Catholics believe?”
“Same as you Jim, Christ and the Ten Commandments and all that.”
“Isn’t it true that you have priests and you don’t let them screw?” “That’s right Jim, the priest and the nuns are married to God.”
“I’m divorced from God myself.”
~ ~ ~
Dorn remembered skinny-dipping in the pond past midnight with Betty Kline, before he accepted the bounty money and mustered in with the Union Army. She wouldn’t let him touch her, explaining that she was not that type.
One day back home, his father asked, “isn’t she the town tease?”
“I don’t think so, she lets me see her naked.”
After he returned from the war, Betty Kline told him that she was getting married to Cartwright.
“If it helps you Jim, I was going to marry him before you went off to war.”
“Before I became a one-armed tax collector?”
“No, that isn’t it Jim. He has a lot of money.”
“That makes it even worse. I love you.”
“I love you too Jim, much more than Cartwright. Bad arm and everything. But Cartwright was always going to have more money than you.”
~ ~ ~
After a particularly ugly day making rounds collecting taxes from deadbeats, Dugan told Dorn that they should ride into Middletown and get a few gins for themselves.
Once they got liquored up, they hitched the horse and buggy up in front of St. John’s Square because Dorn was drunk enough to want to see a Catholic Mass. It was a good day to do so, good to get out of the austerely gray day and in somewhere warm, plus it was a week day and the Fathers liked wrapping up services in a half hour.
Dorn got up to take Communion but Dugan held him back, Dorn not being Catholic.
After Dorn asked Dugan about that.
“We’re different from you Jim, we believe that the body of Christ is in the host.”
“Seems far-fetched to me.”
“Maybe so.”
“But I liked the sermon about purgatory. I would like to know more about it. Can you get me some literature about that from your priest.”
“I’m sure that I can Jim.”
“I’d appreciate that Dugan. Your religion is crazy, but they do death good.”
~ ~ ~
Dugan gave Dorn a worn out Catechism that his priest was throwing out, dog-earing those pages that dealt with purgatory:
Purgatory is the state in which those suffer for a time who die guilty of venial sins, or without having satisfied for the punishment due to their sins. This state is called Purgatory because in it the souls are purged or purified from all their stains. The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation
Dorn read this, wreathed in solemnity.
“I wish the Protestants talked more about this,” he said to Dugan.
“I don’t think you understand, Jim. Purgatory is not that great a place.”
Jim pointed to a passage in the catechism. “It says here that it isn’t the worst place to be, either.”
“Does that mean you want to become a Catholic, Jim?”
Dorn grinned. “No Dugan, incense doesn’t work for me.”
~ ~ ~
Dorn vacated his parents’ home and started living in his office at the Town Hall. It saved the town money, as the Selectmen fired the custodian and gave the job to Dorn. No increased salary, but free rent, so long as he kept the stove fired up during the winter and he bathed once a month.
Dorn reduced his office hours and when he wasn’t riding around with Dugan to pressure his neighbors to honor their tax obligations, he sat behind the grove at the cemetery, guarding the grave stones of his friends who died in the war. He talked to them sometimes and prayed for them more often, seeing that that was what he was supposed to do for souls in purgatory.
~ ~ ~
Dorn visited Betty during the Panic of 1884, right after Cartwright slashed his wrists as his money oozed away.
“Sorry about Cartwright. I liked him, he helped me balance the books at the Town Hall.”
“Thank you Jim, he never wanted to be without money.”
“What are you going to do Betty?”
“I am seeing Tom Bradley, he saved all of his money.”
“It seems pretty early to be seen with other men, Cartwright being stiff in the ground only a week now.”
“I need to consider my children. We don’t have any money left.”
“Do you love Bradley?”
“I love that he has money saved up and he was not foolish enough to invest it or deposit it into a bank. Pray for us Jim.”
“I don’t pray for the living.”
“I don’t understand. Why pray for the dead and not the living? The dead are dead.”
“It’s a thing that I learned from the Catholics. The dead can’t reject your prayers.”
~ ~ ~
Betty landed on her feet after spending a lot of time on her back with Tom Bradley. She felt sorry for Dorn, sitting out half the year in the cold by his Union Army buddies’ grave stones, so she donated money for an outdoor fire pit to be installed there so that Dorn might sit there in warmth. He appreciated the gesture, it connoted a cruel type of love.
~ ~ ~
Dorn accepted poverty though he never learned to love it, he was like Betty Kline in that way. Most of the people he knew in Hale resided on the margins and poverty impelled Dorn into intruding in the Civil War. He enlisted in the Army to receive a substantial bonus, which he gave to his parents, and to impress Betty Kline once she saw him in his new uniform. He felt like a hero, like he did every day when he visited the graveyard and prayed for his friends. You didn’t need two hands to talk to God.
~ ~ ~
His parents died as did Betty Kline and all his friends who survived the Civil War with him, and he visited all of their grave sites and prayed for them. In December 1904 some children sledding down the hills in the cemetery saw Jim Dorn hunched over Betty Kline’s grave stone and one of the braver boys took off his a mitten, tapping Dorn on the shoulder. Dorn looked up at the boy.
“Don’t worry, I’m not dead. I’m just visiting an old friend, someone who died in the Civil War.”
Dorn recognized how scary he must seem, so he gave the boy a silver dollar.
“Thank you for thinking about me. Save this dollar, save all of your money. You never want to be poor.”
The boy smiled and ran back to his friends.
“Look at what I have!”
Purgatory is the state in which those suffer for a time who die guilty of venial sins, or without having satisfied for the punishment due to their sins. This state is called Purgatory because in it the souls are purged or purified from all their stains; and it is not, therefore, a permanent or lasting state for the soul. The souls in Purgatory are sure of their salvation, and they will enter heaven as soon as they are completely purified and made worthy to enjoy that presence of God which is called the Beatific Vision.
Though God loves the souls in Purgatory, He punishes them because His holiness requires that nothing defiled may enter heaven and His justice requires that everyone be punished or rewarded according to what he deserves.
