The Quickening | Page 8

was not wanting, nor patriotism, as he defined it,
to make him the first of the Paradise folk to write his name on the

muster-roll of the South. And it was his good fortune, rather than any
lack of battle hazards, that brought him through the four fighting years
to the Appomattox end of that last running fight on the Petersburg and
Lynchburg road in which, with his own hands, he had helped to destroy
the guns of his battery.
Being alive and not dead on the memorable April Sunday when his
commander-in-chief signed the articles of capitulation in Wilmer
McLean's parlor in Appomattox town, this soldier Gordon was one
among the haggard thousands who shared the enemy's rations to bridge
over the hunger gap; and it was the sane, equable Gordon blood that
enabled him to eat his portion of the bread of defeat manfully and
without bitterness.
Later it was the steadfast Gordon courage that helped him to mount the
crippled battery horse which had been his own contribution to the lost
cause; to mount and ride painfully to the distant Southern valley, facing
the weary journey, and the uncertain future in a land despoiled, as only
a brave man might.
His homing was to the old furnace and the still older house at the foot
of Lebanon. The tale of the years succeeding may be briefed in a bare
sentence or two. It was said of him that he reached Paradise and the old
homestead late one evening, and that the next day he was making ready
for a run of iron in the antiquated blast-furnace. This may be only
neighborhood tradition, but it depicts the man: sturdy, tenacious,
dogged; a man to knot up the thread of life broken by untoward events,
following it thereafter much as if nothing had happened.
Such men are your true conservatives. When his son was born, nine
years after the great struggle had passed into history, Caleb, the soldier,
was still using charcoal for fuel and blowing his cupola fire with the
wooden air-pump whose staves had been hooped together by the hands
of his father, and whose motive power was a huge overshot wheel
swinging rhythmically below the stone dam in the creek.
The primitive air-blast being still in commission, it may itself say that
the South, in spite of the war upheaval and the far more seismic

convulsion of the reconstruction period, was still the Old South when
Caleb married Martha Crafts.
It was as much a love match as middle-age marriages are wont to be,
and following it there was Paradise gossip to assert that Caleb's wife
brought gracious womanly reforms to the cheerless bachelor house at
the furnace. Be this as it may, she certainly brought one innovation--an
atmosphere of wholesome, if somewhat austere, piety hitherto
unbreathed by the master or any of his dusky vassals.
Such moderate prosperity as the steadily pulsating iron-furnace could
bring was Martha Gordon's portion from the beginning. Yet there was a
fly in her pot of precious ointment; an obstacle to her complete
happiness which Caleb Gordon never understood, nor could be made to
understand. Like other zealous members of her communion, she took
the Bible in its entirety for her creed, striving, as frail humanity may, to
live up to it. But among the many admonitions which, for her, were no
less than divine commands, was one which she had wilfully
disregarded: _Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers._
Caleb respected her religion; stood a little in awe of it, if the truth were
known, and was careful to put no straw of hindrance in the thorny
upward way. But there are times when neutrality bites deeper than open
antagonism. In the slippery middle ground of tolerance there is no
foothold for one who would push or pull another into the kingdom of
Heaven.
Under such conditions Thomas Jefferson was sure to be the child of
many prayers on the mother's part; and perhaps of some naturally
prideful hopes on Caleb's. When a man touches forty before his
firstborn is put into his arms, he is likely to take the event seriously.
Martha Gordon would have named her son after the great apostle of her
faith, but Caleb asserted himself here and would have a manlier
name-father for the boy. So Thomas Jefferson was named, not for an
apostle, nor yet for the statesman--save by way of an intermediary. For
Caleb's "Thomas Jefferson" was the stout old schoolmaster-warrior,
Stonewall Jackson; the soldier iron-master's general while he lived, and
his deified hero ever afterward.

When the mother was able to sit up in bed she wrote a letter to her
brother Silas, the South Tredegar preacher. On the margin of the paper
she tried the name, writing it "Reverend Thomas Jefferson Gordon."