The Last Veteran

The bubbly aide didn’t bother knocking. She barged in shouting, “Rise and shine, Colonel!”

She didn’t need to shout – Wilbur Bell’s hearing was just fine. And she didn’t need to wake him. It was already 7:30, and he’d been up for hours. He was always up before dawn. On this day especially, he hardly slept a wink.

“My now, look at you!”

Bell had used the toilet and dressed himself. Two of the remaining indignities the Old Soldiers’ Home had not foisted upon him, though they tried. There was the plastic urinal next to his lamp, the bedpan the aide urged him to use – in her presence – and the constant beratement when he got up on his own and walked, even if with a cane. They wanted him in that wheelchair that hurt his back. Or trailing behind the clumsy walker that some boy had fitted with tennis balls for his Eagle project.

“Don’t want it, don’t need it, and don’t play tennis,” Bell said. The scout was hurt, but the nurse laughed away.

“He’s such a card is our Colonel. Such a card.”

Bell wasn’t a colonel. Never had been. The records said he had been a sergeant, but demoted due to some minor infraction. He claimed he’d punched an officer – a Harvard fellow, dumb as a post, who killed more of his troops than the Yankees ever did. Still, he didn’t dispute the rank as it got him a better pension from his state though not nearly as good as a Union sergeant would have gotten. “Should have joined them,” he groused multiple times in his dotage. It got laughs he wasn’t seeking.

The aide went to the armoire – the Old Soldiers Home was built before closets – and removed a worn grey uniform. She waved away its musty smell and checked the pocket for mothballs that had long since evaporated. A cloud of dust came off when she slapped it. “It’s been a while since you’ve worn this, eh Colonel,” she said. “Is it really from the war?”

“The war?” he said. He was going to talk about what they wore during the war, repeat stories he’d told so many times he was bored and couldn’t remember if he made some of it up to entertain his audience. What we wore melted in the rain, froze in the winter, and fell apart as soon as they gave it to us. No, I didn’t wear a uniform very long. I wore pants and shoes I took off a Yankee – he was dead by the way – and a jacket. Don’t remember where I got that, but it was brown. Sewed on the stripes myself.

“No ma’am, it ain’t from any war. It’s UCV, United Confederate Veterans. Bought it around the turn of the century though for the life of me don’t recall where,” he said.

“You’ll look right smart in it, I’m sure,” she said admiring the coat. “I’ll polish up those stars a bit.”

The stars marked him as a Colonel. He’d have claimed even that too if it meant a larger pension, but this time the lie hadn’t been his. It was honorary, awarded when he became the last man standing from his UCV unit. Twenty years ago now? Maybe. He couldn’t remember and couldn’t much care. He’d have sold the bloody thing if he could – bribed one of the aides, maybe Amos, that big colored fellow who kindly snuck him cigars, to fetch him some whiskey.

Bell missed those vices.

He missed the dinners, the toasts, the applause, the clumsy salutes. It embarrassed him – shameful, really – but far be it from him to refuse. If he ever tried to tell them he didn’t deserve it, they’d have only laughed and poured another drink.

That was a proven fact.

At one dinner, a sweaty man running for Congress threw his arms wide, silencing Bell and the crowd. He dabbed theatrically at his eyes with a handkerchief though Bell could see it was just sweat dripping down. “Colonel suh, you are a true son of the South,” the man declared draping a heavy arm across Bell’s shoulder. “I am humbled to be able to stand in your shadow.”

More cheers. More applause. More whiskey. Bell had wanted to say the candidate was so large they all could stand in his shadow. He didn’t. He simply glared, which only made him look that much more like the battle-hardened veteran of the Lost Cause.

His stomach growled at the memories – of meals and the hunger Confederate veterans talked about far more than states’ rights. Bell knew hardship well: his hardscrabble farm, the lean years after the war, poverty flowing from season to season. Old soldiers, he learned, spoke longest about being cold and hungry and scared.

It’s a way with old soldiers. Once they started, they went on and on, adding drama here, borrowing a story there, until the telling mattered more than the truth. As their ranks thinned, their stories belonged to whoever was left to tell them.

“Do you mind standing up for a fitting, Colonel?” Annabelle -- or maybe Jezebel – held the coat open.

The frock coat hung on him like it belonged to another man entirely. Bell twisted his shoulders, trying to conform to it. It was no use. “I look like a child in his father’s clothes,” he griped. “I look like an old man.”

“Now, Colonel, you are a grand old man, no two ways about it – and handsome in that uniform. Why Bobby Lee himself would salute you! When they see you sitting in that car – it’s a Cadillac don’t you know. Oh my, how the people will cheer.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“Now don’t go on that way! Do you know what the paper said? It said because you’re the last, you know, soldier, that you won. Imagine that! You won for the whole South,” she said.

Bell muttered, “Humbug,” and brushed himself off. “Let’s get this damn thing over with.”

Despite his protests, they wheeled him out to the waiting car. It was indeed a Cadillac – a shining new convertible – with a smiling group of strangers standing by the path like a gauntlet. Amos helped him into the backseat. “There you go Colonel,” he said softly. Then he slipped a nip of whiskey onto Bell’s lap. “One for the road,” he whispered. “Drink it before they take it away – and don’t say where you got it.”

The car rolled slowly toward the parade route. They passed a statue of an unknown Johnny Reb in a slouch hat and blanket roll across his shoulders. The driver – an Army sergeant wearing sunglasses – pointed toward it. “I bet that reminds you of the old days,” he said.

“Just,” Bell said. “Only just.”

He downed the whiskey in one gulp. “Deelightful,” he murmured. Between the July Fourth heat and the whiskey’s bloom, Bell felt woozy. He could barely hear the cheering crowd or see the Boy Scouts’ salutes. He paid no attention to the 21-gun salute outside the VFW hall.

His mind drifted elsewhere. Sixty years back. When his farm was about to be taken by the bank. When his little Abbie was dying. When they had nothing left.

“Here,” his wife said, pressing an envelope into his hand.

Bell opened it. A yellowed sheet of paper. Blank – except for the fading signature of some long-forgotten major.

He hesitated.

“No one will be the wiser,” she whispered.

For a long moment, Bell stared at the empty space where his name could go. Then he picked up the pen.

And with that single stroke, Wilbur Bell, too young to serve in anybody’s army, joined the Confederacy. The pension was small to be sure. But it fed his family and kept the farm a little longer. It carried them through. He joined the right organizations. He made the right friends. Told the right lies. He knew it was wrong. And he knew hunger doesn’t much care about right and wrong.

What he never imagined – what no one could have – was that one day that record would show him as the last surviving veteran from either side of the Civil War.

Maybe it was the whiskey. Maybe the heat. Maybe it was the loss of his wife, his daughters, his dignity. He drew in a breath to speak – then thought better of it. But the tears falling down Wilbur Bell’s face were real.

And the people lining the parade route wept, too, for the hero they believed was passing before them.