As Sam McClure sat there in the church, waiting for the wedding service to begin, his thoughts strayed to a most unexpected subject. In his mind was the war—the terrible war between the states, the war he’d sneaked away and enlisted for when he was 13. It had been the great cataclysm of his life. He’d lost brothers and his grandfather; the social order of the South was overturned; so much had been destroyed.
It was no wonder, he thought, that the South embraced the Lost Cause, a cause he’d had no interest in. He was too busy providing for his extended family and repairing the destruction to worry about the good old days.
And it was the war that had led him to his great love and wife of 28 years. She’d now been gone almost as long as they’d been married, and he still felt the loss in his heart. How she would have loved to see this wedding on this fine, cool spring morning in Boston, Massachusetts, in the Year of Our Lord 1916.
Sam looked around the interior of the Central Congregational Church—wood paneling, windows designed by Tiffany himself, and tiled accents on the walls, columns, and beams. The exterior was equally impressive; the church’s gothic tower could be seen for miles as it stood sentry over Back Bay. This was a church of wealth and position, and it was the home church of the Putnam family, and specifically the bride-to-be, Elizabeth, who would shortly become Mrs. Samuel David McClure III.
This young woman was more, far more, than his soon-to-be granddaughter-in-law. She’d been a reporter for the New York World, assigned to track down the Confederate legend known as the Gray Wisp. And she’d been successful in doing so, finding her way from New York to St. Louis, then to Memphis and to Oxford, Mississippi, and finally to Brookhaven, where she’d landed on the doorstep of the Gray Wisp.
And now she was about to become the wife of the Gray Wisp’s grandson.
The war, he thought, that terrible war. The screams of men having arms and legs amputated in the hospital tents. The constant companionship of possible death and injury. The horrible fire at the Battle of the Wilderness, when Union artillery shells ignited the dry brush, and wounded men often shot themselves before they burned to death. And on his way home, traveling through the destruction of Sherman’s March to the Sea. Just the thought of what he had seen, what he had experienced, made Sam shiver.
Sam’s family was something of a jumble. His two daughters were married and raising their families in Louisiana and Texas, respectively. He glanced at the rows behind him. They and their husbands and children were talking quietly but animatedly; attending a family wedding in Boston of all places had been a major journey and one they were fully enjoying. Seated next to Sam himself was Amy, his daughter-in-law—mother of the groom, and the strong-willed woman who not only had married Sam’s troubled son David and bore his three sons but also had worked with her husband to the point where he could function as a brilliant professor of mathematics, a husband, and a father.
David had been largely raised by his grandmother, Sam’s mother. The reason, Sam admitted, was that David’s mother was unable to cope with him. They’d known from the time he was three that something was wrong; unkind people said the boy was an idiot. David had been a difficult, almost impossible child, with tantrums, outbursts, and such strange behavior that his mother wanted him institutionalized. Fortunately, that hadn’t happened.
Instead, Sam’s mother took him home with her to Gettysburg, consulting with medical doctors there and in Philadelphia. The ultimate diagnosis was monomania or stereotypy, perhaps both: “The patient exhibits obsessive fixation, behavioral repetition, and aphasia voluntaria, or choosing not to speak.”
David seemed to do well with his grandmother, but the boy had been estranged from his parents and the rest of the family for a long time. He hadn’t even attended his mother’s funeral.
David had had a difficult time when his own first son was born, the young man known as Young Sam and today’s bridegroom. When Young Sam, with his brilliant legal mind and first in his class, had chosen to forgo several advantageous offers from well-known legal firms and instead settle in Brookhaven, his father had reacted as if it were a rejection of him personally. He’d cut his son off from his mother and brothers. That estrangement had lasted more than two years, until a certain young reporter landed on the doorstep of the Gray Wisp the previous October. And the entire family’s world changed in only a few days.
Young Sam had served as Elizabeth’s escort, tour guide, dance partner, chauffeur, and horseback riding instructor. His grandfather had seen the young man falling hard for the reporter. It had taken a bit longer, but then he saw the young reporter falling just as hard for his grandson. When she returned to New York eight days later, they were already talking about spending the rest of their lives together. A few weeks later at Thanksgiving, Young Sam had traveled to Boston, where Elizabeth’s parents lived, to ask her father for her hand in marriage. And here they all were, six months later, waiting for the wedding ceremony to begin.
When Elizabeth had returned to New York, she’d made a brief side trip to Gettysburg, where she had met and talked with David and Amy. And from that meeting had come David’s reconciliation with his son, and then David’s reconciliation with his own father.
When Young Sam had returned to Brookhaven after Thanksgiving, he’d stopped in Gettysburg. He’d asked his father to be his best man. Amy later wrote to Sam that it was the first time she’d ever seen her husband with tears in his eyes.
A side door near the altar opened, and the groom’s side of the wedding party emerged. Young Sam and David looked so much alike that it often astonished people. And both looked like their grandfather and father. Five other groomsmen, Elizabeth’s two brothers and three law school classmates of Young Sam, stood next to David. Young Sam’s two teenaged brothers, Stephen and Michael, were dressed in the tuxedos of the wedding party and escorting guests to their seats. Sam turned and saw Michael with his final escort, Elizabeth’s mother Dora Putnam.
The organist, stationed in the balcony loft, began to play the Wedding March. Sam stood with the rest of the guests and turned to see the radiant bride, dressed in white and a veiled flower garland crowning her head, walk down the aisle with her father Charles. When they reached the minister, Charles took Young Sam’s hand and matched it to Elizabeth’s.
Yes, Sam’s Octavia Jane would have loved to have seen this. Perhaps he’d allow himself to be a bit sentimental and imagine she was watching. “You old fool,” he thought, but it comforted him, nonetheless.
He remembered the day that the young woman now walking down the aisle arrived at his home to interview the Gray Wisp. And now she was becoming part of his family, a part of the story of the Gray Wisp.
He had never believed that anything good ever could have come from that horrible war. And yet something had. His own beautiful wife. Their children and grandchildren. This wedding in this beautiful old church. So many blessings had flowed from that destructive storm unleashed upon the land and upon men.
The sense of gratitude welled in Sam’s heart.
Editor’s note: Find more about Sam McClure and the story of The Gray Wisp in Glynn Young’s newest novel, Brookhaven.
The featured image is courtesy of Julie Jablonski and used with her kind permission for Cultivating.
Glynn Young wrote his first story when he was 10 – a really bad mystery having something to do with a door behind a grandfather clock and a secret cave. At 14, he discovered Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, but he secretly wanted to write James Bond stories. At 21, he became a Christian, and the verse he was given, Philippians 1:6, became the theme of his life.
Glynn received a B.A. in Journalism from LSU and a Masters in Liberal Arts from Washington University in St. Louis. He spent his professional career in corporate public relations, and mostly executive speechwriting. Since 2009, he’s been an editor for Tweetspeak Poetry, writing a weekly column. Since 2011, he has published five novels in the Dancing Priest Series, the nonfiction book Poetry at Work, and the historical novel Brookhaven.
He and his wife Janet live in suburban St. Louis.
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