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the diaries of lucius s. nye (a work in progress)
synopsis (copyright m. nye)
"In April of 1865 Corporal Lucius Nye mustered out of the Third Regiment Vermont Infantry. Fevers, dysentery and chronic diarrhea had ruined his health.
Gnarled scar tissue covered the left side of his face; a withered arm-the result of a minie ball that had plowed upward through his left shoulder to
lodge alongside the jugular vein-dangled at his side. Twenty-seven years old and brutalized almost beyond recognition, Corporal Nye turned, at last,
for the Green Mountains.
Known for its rocky hills, thin soil, and harsh winters, the northernmost region of Vermont offered a remote and improbable haven.
Droughts and killing frosts destroyed crops, while winter temperatures often plunged to -30 degrees. Accidents-with horses, with guns, with
household utensils and farm tools-occurred regularly. Men disappeared in blizzards and crashed through lake ice. Women died in childbirth.
Rather than face such hardships, many healthy veterans took advantage of the Homestead Act and moved west-a revealing calculation in light of the
Indian Wars. The wounded returned home, drawn by their faith in family and community support. Few imagined the long-term impact of physical and
psychological trauma as they struggled to rebuild their lives.
Lucius would rely on a complex network of family, friends and veterans. In 1866, shortly after purchasing a hundred acre farm in Coventry,
he married Abigail Ross, a pretty 20-year old from Waterford. On January 1st, 1867, with the purchase of a small, leather-bound diary, Lucius
began the record of his life. In a loose, penciled script, he registered the day's events: chores, social calls, oyster suppers, visits with family,
friends, and veterans. But if he imagined leaving a rather typical (and mundane) log of farm concerns, financial transactions, and weather reports for
posterity, he was destined to experience the universal irony of human existence. Time would craft another tale - a tangled saga of joy, grief, and pain ..."
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1864
Prelude (excerpt)
"... Members of the ambulance corps stumbled from a smoke filled landscape of gnarled thickets and swampy bogs. The men sweat, not just from the
heat but from the terrible strain on their nerves. Groaning, blood-soaked things of horror, their cargo swayed in improvised stretchers.
Rescuers pushed through the woods, anxious to reach safety. At the field hospitals the shaken ambulance corps found neither rest nor reward.
Bayonets fixed, the Provost Guard pushed lingerers back into the battleground south of the Rapidan River, where the raging Union and Confederate
armies fought for control of the roads.
In that terrible relay, a small knot of frightened men carried an injured corporal to safety. Miraculously, the man still breathed.
A minie ball had drilled through the officer's cheekbone and exploded out the roof of his mouth. Unaware of the horror coursing through
his rescuers, Corporal Lucius Nye of the Third Vermont Regiment faced a new danger: strangulation from blood, bone, teeth, vomit and
cranial fluids that could clog his throat and block his nasal passageways.
The men left the young corporal by the dressing station, where the staff tried to keep up with an influx of wounded men. Their faces
blackened by cartridge powder and dirt, the soldiers resembled charred, spent matches. Some wept. Others, stunned by the awful novelty
of their wounds, waited in silence for help. In a crude form of triage, the medical staff administered liquor for shock and opiates
for pain and left the worst cases to their fates. Dying embers at the edge of a great fire, soldiers who'd received gunshot blasts
to the chest, head and abdomen lay on the ground, exposed to the hot afternoon sun and tormented by flies. Lucius could only wait in
mute horror; the minie ball had damaged the masseter muscles that form a sling around the jaw. His face swelled, sealing his eyes
shut and blocking his passageways with congealing, crusted gore. With such a wound it quickly becomes impossible to swallow opiates
or rum; at best Lucius was rolled onto his stomach, his jaw bandaged and a plug of linen tamped into the gaping hole in his cheek ... "
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abigail ross (1848-1973)
1867 (excerpt)
"... Abbie moved about the small farm house, her reflection rippling in the leaded glass of the windows as if she stood over a sluggish pond.
Outside, the light from her husband's lantern bobbed in the dark and winked out when he entered the barn. If Abbie closed her eyes she could
imagine the sounds and smells of the stable: how the horses, stirred to life by her husband's presence, whickered for food, how the cows,
stupidly impatient, stamped their feet and lowed. She pictured the sheep jostling each other, their breath making short puffs of steam
in the cold air. She smelled the straw and heard the potatoes tumble into the troughs. Almost all her life had been spent on a farm,
in the shadow of six older brothers and five older sisters; she could figure the man's labor, how he balanced heavy feed buckets on his
good side and swung his crippled arm up to work the latches on the pens and to check the drying udders of the cows.
It was her own role, barely six months a wife and mistress of a large farm, that might well have been a source of wonder. Mornings provided
ample time for the petite twenty-year old to take stock of the day's chores. Projects had a way of piling up: washing, ironing, mending,
sweeping, soap and candle-making. Clothes past repair went into a basket, to be incorporated later into rag rugs and country quilts.
But first she had to plan the meals, turning the dross of the farm into gold. Abbie baked breads and cakes from scratch and worked leftovers
into the day's meals. Recipe books taught her how to prepare giblet pies, acorn coffee, calf's feet jelly and fried tripe, how to turn stale
bread into queen's toast and a boiled pig head into hog's head cheese. The instructions rarely included baking times and temperatures,
leaving the young wife to experiment with a wood-fired oven. Cooking threatened to become a regular source of frustration - even more so
as she prepared meals for a man who could barely chew.
Abbie had less reason to worry about her housekeeping skills than she did about the terrible injuries to her husband's face and shoulder.
A ridge of scar had closed the hole in his cheek, the way snow sometimes covered fissures in lake ice. The true scope of the damage under
that fragile surface could only be guessed at. During spells of bad weather Lucius suffered from debilitating headaches and took to bed.
In a markedly pithy 1865 notation to the Pension Bureau, Dr. Jonathan Skinner of Barton had dismissed the facial wound as healed, stating it
"gives (Lucius) no trouble but leaves quite a scar, somewhat injuring his looks." Abbie might have forgiven Skinner his cavalier summary if
she had read the full report, which suggests that Skinner's comment fit into a broader strategy. The Bureau was far more likely to grant a
pension for the back wound, a ghastly memento that, according to Skinner, had left Lucius "entirely incapacitated for obtaining his subsistence
by manual labor." No one disputed the evidence. Abbie had only to touch the cicatrix on her husband's neck and shoulder to imagine the channel
bored through his flesh. When Lucius overtaxed the shoulder the fragile skin over the entrance wound burst open; carried on a stream of pus,
bits of bone rose to the surface, like the lumps of butter that rose in her churn ..."
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lucius (1838-1914)
a widower (excerpt)
"... Perhaps Lucius and Abbie had a small measure of undisturbed time together. If the young mother remained lucid, perhaps they spoke of their
children, the farm, their feelings, or their faith. Lucius knew his life with Abbie was drawing to an end. On Wednesday evening he wrote:
"Abbie is failing. Growing poorer and weaker every day." He mowed hay the next day, leaving the farm only to drive Rummina to the depot
"to go home" and to execute his pension voucher. Mrs. Dan Gray sat with Abbie Wednesday night. On Thursday Lucius stayed close to home while
his brother and Simon Putney helped with the work. Inside the farmhouse, Abbie's inexorable decline continued. "Abbie had a bad day is failing
very fast," Lucius wrote. "Nature is striving to retain her power. Mrs. Parker is to watch." On June 6th, the morning of their seventh wedding anniversary,
Abbie rallied briefly for the last time. That evening's entry implies that her husband sat at her side and held her hand: "(she) has been
comparatively comfortable till about 5 o'clock when her extremities began to grow cold and soon after her mind began to waiver."
Abbie died at two a.m. on Saturday, June 7, 1873, one day shy of her 27th birthday. Lucius wrote to friends in the night. Mother Ross,
Maggie and Mrs. Richards remained on hand to help. Abbie's remains were dressed and laid out for viewing while Lucius made funeral arrangements.
The day led to a simple entry that is most notable for Lucius' sense of Abbie's lingering, ghostly presence: "I am alone now. No not alone for
Abbies spirit is hovering over me."
By Monday the sense of hovering spirits had vanished and the devastating finality of his loss began to sink in. When he thought of his sons,
the future appeared almost as bleak as the present: "O what comfort is there in this world. O these are sad days for me and all of us. Carried
Mrs. Richards away. What a good brother and sister. They brought little Harry." Perhaps offering a tribute to his own mother, Lucius added:
"Poor boys, they will never know a mothe's love."
Grim tasks still remained. That same day Lucius drove to Newport to order a casket. The coffin arrived promptly, and not a minute too soon.
The warm weather had accelerated his wife's decay. Sentiment gave way to blunt practicality: "Abbie begins to change some. Salmons folks
here. Dan Gray and Penny Hancock going to sit up here tonight." Even as the vigil continued over Abbie's remains, Lucius did not neglect
the diary, apparently adding to it sporadically through a difficult day. Decisions and events rushed at him. The inner circle came to
a consensus and closed the casket: "Pleasant. We are to bury dear Abbie to day. The friends from below came on noon train. We think
best not to see the corps it is in bad condition..." The small diary did not provide room for details; the probable carriage, the headstone,
the service, the promise of resurrection and meeting again at the Lamb's great bridal feast. At the Coventry cemetery, ever true to their style
of worship, the mourners displayed a stunned restraint. "... Things went off quietly. We have lain the body in the ground. But the soul has gone
up higher," Lucius wrote after the service.
Abbie's friends and family left Wednesday morning. Salmon and Mattie took the boys back to their home. In the quiet farmhouse, the silence
disturbed only by the presence of Maggie and Mrs. Ross, Lucius resumed the ritual of his diary. "Pleasant. The most of the friends from Waterford
and St. Johnsbury stayed with us last night and have gone this morning. Mother is to stay here at present. Very kind in her. Sowed fodder corn.
It is so lonely tonight without Abbie."
The loneliness would only grow in the months to come ... "
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community
the northeast kingdom
Coventry sent ~115 men to war. Neighboring towns fared no better. The conflict touched everyone: men like Dr. Joseph Rutherford,
a surgeon from Newport who returned home with Ned Green, a brutalized 15-year old former slave; Edward Santy, a local cobbler who
carried artillery fragments in his hip; Henry Clay Nichols, a recipient of the Medal of Honor; the widow Bartlett, who had lost two sons;
Henry Fairbrother, who had also lost his sons, then his land. When the soldiers returned home, the families tried - sometimes desperately -
to resume their former lives. The veterans marched in parades and participated in politics. They traded, visited, fought,
married, bore children, and sometimes divorced. A few went to jail. Some died violently; others succumbed to their wounds. None of them forgot
the past. Repercussions of the war would haunt their lives.
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source materials
Materials drawn from records at the National Archives, Washington D.C., The Vermont Historical Society, the University of Vermont,
local and county records, and census data.
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