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Hidden Springs, Delicate Wheels: Old Concord
Once again, the day's bright sun has made its transit across the vast, free nation--- from coast to coast its manifest destiny recovered from the senseless separation of soul from body and limb from limb, infected by the incessant suppuration of chattel slavery. Sighted across one humble, leaning headstone, the sun grows smaller and redder as the stars move eastward, and from the same site, sighted, gather across the stripes of late spring's mists, watching over the several states by night. I remember, as a boy employed here, caretaker of memories I did not then care for, a tall, gaunt man came here to visit, sometimes; accompanied by men of means and muscles who held back, by the fence, respectfully silent in the stark presence of grief that seemed to twist the tall, gaunt man's chiseled face. About to depart, after a little while, he paused to ask me, please, to keep the weeds and choking thorns away as best I could. "The separation of the soul from its body," he said, in his reedy voice, "ought to be mourned "by more than a carved slab with a name and date." and "Who shall strive, to the last, to stay the plague?" When he had gone, I crept back to that grave, and read the name carved on the stone's face, Ann Rutledge. I asked about her, in the town, later: the sole heart's friend of President Lincoln, from whose embrace the typhoid struck her down. Of soul and body, the awful separation, the compromised destiny of the young nation, infected by enslavement's suppuration, and who strived to the last to stay that plague?
