Soldier

two women cut up Yankee soldier marauding in their neighborhood, 
keep some parts dispose of others

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When my father died, I inherited the home place in Mocksville, near 
Winston Salem, North Carolina.  It was a nice two story frame house 
built in the late 1840s by my great great grandfather, Asa Davis.  
I work in Winston at the newspaper so my wife Mary and I decided to 
restore the old house and make it our home.  We did a lot of the 
work ourselves, refinishing the floors, stripping wallpaper, 
tearing out, but we hired professionals to do the plumbing, wiring 
and cabinet work in the kitchen and bathrooms.
	The house was in fairly good condition when I got it, but 
it hadn't been updated in about sixty years.  It was filled with 
family furniture and the attic was chocked full of stuff.  Before 
we could begin work we had to clear all that out and put it in 
storage.  We had fun going through all the stuff.  I didn't want to 
throw out a thing, my wife Mary, however, wanted to have a giant 
yard sale.  One day when we were cleaning out the attic I had just 
finished hauling out some old trunks filled with women's clothes 
from the late nineteenth century.  I noticed a board wall that 
closed off part of the attic over the rear portion of the house.  
We needed to access all of the attic because we were going to blow 
in insulation and do some wiring.  I took a crow bar and pried off 
one of the boards, then shined a flashlight in the space and could 
easily see the rafters over the rear ell which looked n good shape, 
when I shined it down I saw the space had flooring just like the 
rest of the attic, which was strange because it was completely 
blocked off from the rest of the attic.  Then the light shone on a 
small wooden trunk with leather straps across it and a big iron 
lock.  I thought it was strange that a trunk would be hidden behind 
a board wall, but I was naturally curious, so I took the rest of 
the boards off and saw that they had been added after the attic 
flooring was laid.  The flooring over the rear ell was an extension 
of the rest of the attic flooring, someone had walled off that part 
of the attic for a reason.
With the boards out of the way, I dragged the small trunk out of 
the space and took it downstairs with the other trunks I hauled out 
of the attic.  I would worry about what was in it later.  We stored 
all the trunks and stuff from the attic in a barn out back.
Months later as we were finishing up the restoration, at Mary's 
urging we used our spare time to go through the stuff we found in 
the attic and the house and decide what to keep, what needed to 
refinished or repaired, and we what could we get rid of.  Mary 
pulled out the little trunk I had found behind the wall in the 
attic.  It was locked and I had no idea which key, of the many I 
had found in drawers and jars in the house, would unlock it.  Mary 
tried as many of the keys as she could locate to no avail.  Finally 
I took a crowbar to it and forced open the iron lock.
Inside were bundles of letters tied with silk ribbons.  There was 
also a black crocheted purse with a leather bottom, a black 
Japanned box about twelve inches long, and three inches wide, and 
two inches deep which was locked, and a string of U.S.A. Civil war 
buttons on a pink ribbon with a key at the end of it.  I shook the 
box.  It sounded like a roll of paper, cardboard or leather was 
inside that rolled from side to side as I held it in my hands.   
Was it money, or old deeds?

Mary picked up one of the bundles of letters and saw the date 1862 
on a postal stamp.  She opened a letter and saw it was from my 
great-great grandfather writing home during the Civil War, he was a 
Captain in the Confederate Army.  There were also letters from his 
son Henry who was killed in Virginia, ambushed by Yankees who shot 
him in cold blood.  My great grand father, Asa’s, letters were 
there, he was an infantry man who enlisted late in the war when he 
was seventeen.  There were other letters, but the majority of them 
were from the Civil War period.  It was a treasure trove.  I 
couldn't believe it.
When we pulled all of the letters out of the trunk I could see it 
was lined with the same wallpaper the downstairs living room was 
papered with, a paper that dated from the 1880s.
The trunk did not seem to be deep enough, Mary noticed it first, it 
was like there was a false bottom in it.  I examined it and could 
find no solution, then I took my pocket knife out and scratched 
around a square outline at the bottom of the trunk that looked like 
it could have been a lower compartment.  When I did this the 
compartment came free and I lifted it out.  It had been papered 
over when the wallpaper from the living room was glued in the 
trunk.  I think the trunk dated from the time of the Civil War or 
earlier.  
I lifted the square compartment, about twenty inches square and 
about four inches deep out of the trunk, peeled back the wallpaper 
and lifted off the top.  Inside I found a worn document that was 
made from pieces of stationery sewn together with a hand made cloth 
binding, about two inches thick; it was a home made diary.
The diary was written by a great aunt who lived at the farm during 
the Civil War.  Mary started to read the letters from my great-
great grandfather, I read the diary.
My great great grandfather Edward Davis was a captain in the local 
militia and left for the war in 1862 when he was in his thirties.  
His wife had died some time earlier leaving my great grandfather 
Asa, his brother Henry and two daughters, Minnie and Francis.  
Henry joined the army when he was eighteen in 1862.  He was killed 
in Virginia in cold blood by marauding Yankees.  He and a friend 
had left their camp to get water.  They didn't have their weapons 
with them.  Two Yankees robbed them, told them to lay on the ground 
and shot them in the back of the head.  My great grandfather joined 
the army in 1864 when he was seventeen, leaving Minnie and Francis 
by themselves on the farm.  They had a few slaves, but not many, 
the slaves worked the fields, the girls took care of the house.
Minnie and Francis never married and lived in the house until they 
died in the 1920s.  Then my grandfather inherited it since he was 
an only child and both his parents had died during the influenza 
epidemic during World War I. My grandfather had moved to Winston 
Salem where he started a small tobacco company which was later 
bought by Reynolds.  This gave our family some money.  He kept the 
home place in Mocksville, let tenant farmers run the farm and he 
used the house as A weekend retreat.  When he died my father 
inherited it and he rented the land and the house to tenant 
farmers.  When he retired he and Mom moved to the old house and 
started to work on it.  He died of a heart attack before he could 
finish the work, Mom moved back to Winston so the house sat empty 
for several years.  I remember coming out to the farm when I was a 
teenager and riding my motorcycle through the woods.  I loved it 
and had always wanted to move there one day and restore the old 
house.
The diary was written by Frances Davis and started in the 1850s 
before the War.  She was 21 in 1861 when the War began.  Mary and I 
took the letters and diary with us back to Winston.  It was hard to 
put them down, they were so interesting.
	The diary detailed the hardships of living during the time 
of war, how it became more and more difficult to buy even the most 
basic goods, and how money became worthless.  Frances worried about 
her father and her brothers.  She wag very bitter about Henry's 
death.  She said he was murdered and hated the Yankees for it.  She 
tried to talk Asa out of enlisting, but to no avail.  By early 1865 
all but one of their slaves had run off, so the women were doing 
all the house and the farm work by themselves.  Then came the 
entries from March, April, and May 1865.

March 31,1865:
	“It is a glorious Spring, but it is difficult to enjoy it 
with so much darkness around us.  Each day brings more rumors.  
Minnie and I had heard the Yankees were coming east from over the 
mountains.  Then we heard they were headed towards Mocksville on 
their way to Salisbury.  The town is gripped with fear.  Everyone 
is hiding what they have, and moving their livestock to the woods.  
We have no idea when the Yankees will come through, but we know 
they are coming.  They are headed to Salisbury to burn the Prison 
and cut the main line of the railroad.  God help those souls in 
Salisbury when the Yankees get there and exact revenge for all the 
prisoners who died there this winter.  I have heard the death toll 
was terrible.  But no worse than that at Yankee prisons.  What do 
they expect when their secretary of war stops exchanging 
prisoners!  We don't have the food to feed them all.  I am sure 
they did the best they could in Salisbury.  But that will make no 
difference to the Yankees.  They are dogs, all of them.  I know 
they will want to burn the town and kill everyone in it.  After 
hearing about the wanton destruction and senseless killing in 
Columbia and Atlanta, no telling what they will do here.  When will 
this terrible war be over and Pa and Asa come home again.
Our last slave left today, old Sam, who had worked in the field 
beside Pappa since he was a boy.  I couldn't believe he left, but 
he did, just like the others.  Minnie and I decided to bury the 
silver in old shoes in the garden.  We took Pappa’s portrait out of 
the frame and I rolled it up and put it in a canister that I hid in 
a hollow tree in the woods. I also took the cow and the horse into 
the woods, to hide them.  All we can do is pray."

April 30,1865:
"What an awful month, so much has happened, the Yankees came and we 
have killed one of them.  He was a Yankee scout or marauder.  He 
came through April 4, a few days before the others, and was alone.  
That morning Minnie was in the smoke house taking down what was 
left of the hams to hide them in the woods, after Sam took the best 
ones.  I was in the kitchen gathering some canned goods in a wooden 
box to hide them. Then the Yankee came in the kitchen door, with 
his pistol drawn.  He wore a blue uniform, had black hair and a 
thick black mustache.  He was not a big man, but was short and 
wiry, looked to be in his late twenties.  He asked where our gold 
was.  I told him we didn't have any gold.  Then he asked for 
silver.  I told him we didn't have any of that either, but he 
didn't believe me, so he went into the dining room and started to 
open drawers, pulling them out and letting them crash to the floor, 
making a big mess.  When he didn't find anything there, he walked 
into the parlor and proceeded to ransack that room, pulling all the 
drawers out onto the floor, looking for gold or money or silver.  
From there he walked into Pa’s room, I followed him every step of 
the way, watching him.  After he pulled out the drawers in Pa’s 
room and found nothing, he turned with his gun pointing directly at 
me.
"Take your clothes off," he said.
I refused.
He then proceeded to tear my blouse off and pulled my dress down 
over my pantaloons.  He threw me onto Pa’s bed and pulled his pants 
down.  He would have raped me except for sister, Minnie, who 
slipped into the room while he was occupied.  She shot him in the 
temple with Pa’s pistol as he lay on top of me with his pants down 
around his ankles.
We knew where there was one Yankee there was bound to be others 
close behind.  We didn't know what to do with the body.  Surely the 
Yankees would kill us if they found we had killed one of their 
fellows.  I thought of burying him in the garden, but sister said 
what if they poke around the garden and dig up his body.  It was 
then that we decided on our plan.
It pains me to even tell the rest, but here it is.  We decided to 
butcher him like a hog.  We didn’t know what else to do with the 
body.  Old Sam had just butchered a hog outside.  He did it so he 
could steal the meat and run away, but all his tools were still 
there on the  butchering table outside the kitchen, beside the hog 
pen, near the garden.
Minnie and I each grabbed one leg and drug the dead Yankee 
outside.  I wrapped his blue coat around his head so he wouldn't 
bleed all over the house.  Once outside we hauled the body up on 
the slaughtering table.  We pulled his clothes off and burned them 
in a fire we started under the old iron kettle.  Minnie then got 
the meat cleaver and the butcher knives.  The table was already 
bloody from the hog slaughter.  Minnie put water from the well in 
the iron kettle and put more wood under it.
The soldier looked pale as ivory as he lay there naked on the 
table.  Only his face, neck and hands were tan from the sun.  He 
didn’t look as menacing as he had looked before, laying there in 
his altogether.  His private part stood at attention like a little 
soldier, just as stiff as when he tried to force it inside me on 
Pappa’s bed.  After making slits at the arm pits and the groin to 
help drain the blood, Minnie cut his head off with a meat cleaver 
and put it on a stump.  She said she didn't like him staring at her 
while she worked.  Then she cut the hands and feet off and threw 
them in the kettle where the water was boiling.  She took a butcher 
knife and cut him open from crotch to sternum, then reached in and 
started pulling out his insides, scraping em out with a knife.  I 
picked up the bloody mess as she pulled it out and put it on a 
another table nearby.  She told me to chop it up in little pieces 
with a butcher knife which I did.  Then I put it into the big stew 
pot.  When I finished, I threw the contents of the stew pot into 
the hog pen and called the hogs.  They promptly devoured it as they 
would any other slop.
Minnie then used the cleaver to remove the arms and put them on the 
other table where I worked using a cleaver to separate the upper 
from the lower arms.  She then cut out the sternum and cut the ribs 
away from the spine and shoulder bones and divided them into two 
slabs, stripping the skin off of them and put them on the other 
table.  She cut out the heart and lungs and put them on my table 
where I again cut them up and put them in the stew pot for the 
hogs.  She then separated the flank meat from the pelvis, divided 
it into to pieces, stripped the skin off and laid them aside.  She 
told me to wash the flanks and ribs and salt them down, then hang 
them in the smoke house.  
"This is my present to the Yankees.  When they come through and 
clean out our smoke house, they'll get a surprise.”  All butchered 
up you couldn't tell the ribs and flanks weren't from a hog or a 
cow.
She then chopped up the shoulder bones, clavicle and spine and 
threw them into the boiling kettle.
Only the lower part of the body was left to deal with.  His private 
part still stood at attention looking odd with only half a body.  I 
decided I wanted it.  After what he had tried to do to me in Pa’s 
bedroom, I figured I deserved it, earned it.  I told sister and she 
had no objection as long I hid it well.  I stirred two tablespoons 
of alum into a big pickle jar that I had filled with warm water, 
until it dissolved.  Then I took a kitchen knife and neatly cut out 
the scrotum.  I had an idea about what to use that for later.  I 
put the wrinkled patch of skin in the alum water, then I cut out 
the testicles, washed them, and put them in a jar filled with 
vinegar and pickled pigs feet that we kept in the kitchen.  I could 
see the root of the penis clearly, glistening white behind where 
the scrotum had been.  I wanted all of it, so I cut the tendon that 
connected it to the public bone, and cut out the whole thing, root 
and all.  It was still stiff and considerably longer that way.   At 
the end of it the root started to divide into two parts.  After I 
removed it, I washed it real good, then put the whole thing in the 
alum water with the scrotum skin in the pickle jar to soak.
Sister and I used the meat cleaver to cut the hams above the knee, 
then cut them away from the pelvic bone.  We cut the rump meat away 
from the pelvis, divided the pelvis and threw it into the boiling 
pot, putting the rump meat aside for the moment.  We separated the 
knees from the lower legs and threw them into the boiling pot, then 
we put the rump meat and lower legs on the table with the arm 
pieces.
Minnie stripped the hams of skin, soaked and salted them just like 
Sam did, then hung them up in the smoke house beside the ribs and 
flanks.  We then steaked the arms and calves with the cleaver, 
wrapped the pieces in cheese cloth and put them in a wooden barrel 
filled with salt water brine in the smoke house.  The rump meat we 
washed and rolled up into a nice roast, tied it with a string, 
salted it, wrapped it in cheese cloth, and put it in the smoke 
house.
Minnie picked the head up off the ground by the hair and put it on 
the table.  She then opened the mouth and pulled out the tongue as 
far she could, and cut it off at the root.  She put this in the jar 
in the kitchen with the pig’s feet and testicles.  She said she 
didn't want no ghosts talking to her in the night.  I then dug a 
deep hole in the garden and put the head in it.  Minnie put a big 
rock on top of it and we covered it with dirt.  After the water had 
boiled for some time in the kettle we put the fire out and poured 
out its contents into a stew pot.  I fed the meat to the hogs and 
we piled the bones on the table.  We took the cleaver to the bones 
and cut them up into splinters, put them in a pan, and scattered 
them there under the boxwoods in the front of the house.
After we were finished we washed the blood off the table.  I 
gathered the brass buttons from his uniform out of the embers in 
the fire, put them in my pocket and took them inside.  Inside we 
cleaned up the mess in the bedroom and burned the sheets and covers 
from Pappa's bed.
After soaking his privates in the pickle jar filled with alum water 
for a few days I took the penis and hung it up to dry in the attic 
among the hydrangea and other dried flowers, being sure it was hid 
real good.
I then took the scrotum skin and scrubbed it good with lye soap and 
put it in a jar with a mixture of lime and arsenic sulphide.  I 
decided to make myself a purse tanning it like kid leather.  After 
letting it sit in the lime solution for a few days I mixed up a 
paste of alum, salt, flour, egg yolks, and a little vegetable oil, 
then took a mortar and pounded the skin in the paste for a while, 
washed it and pinned it to a board to let it dry.  When it dried I 
scraped it with the blade of a knife several times to smooth it out 
and de-hair it.  I then wet it again and stretched it out, pinned 
to a board.  I worked it good with the mortar, soaked and stretched 
it a few more times until it became  soft and leathery.  Then I 
crocheted a top to it, the skin being the bottom of the bag, and I 
dyed the whole thing black.
Sure enough the morning of April 10, our farm was overrun by a 
whole army of Yankees.  At least they had the good sense to wait 
several days after their first companion came through.  They took 
the hogs and what livestock we had left, and cleaned out the smoke 
house and the kitchen.  I saw one of them carry off the jar with 
the pickled pigs feet in it, sit under a tree and eat it all in one 
sitting.  They told us they were looking for one of their scouts 
who had been through earlier and asked if we had seen him.  We 
said, no, of course. One of the soldiers poked around the garden, 
which was freshly dug, probing into the soft dirt with a iron rod.  
He ran into a rock or two but nothing suspicious.  That night they 
camped not far from our place and feasted on the meat they had 
taken from our smokehouse and those of our neighbors.
Sister and I swore we would never tell anybody about our Yankee 
soldier, not even Pa and Brother if they ever returned home from 
the war.  It was our own little secret.

May 12,1865 
The war is over, Lee surrendered, Pa and brother will be returning 
to us soon we hope and pray.  I keep my diary in the secret 
compartment of the chest under my bed.  I took down my little 
soldier from the attic, where it dried nicely and put it in a 
Japanned box along with his brass buttons.  I keep my little 
soldier under lock and key in the trunk, taking him out for my 
amusement from time to time to remind me of that day in April when 
my sister and I reduced a man to his component parts, keeping what 
was essential, and throwing out the rest.  People admire my new 
black crochet bag with the leather bottom.  The only problem was 
that the bottom didn't keep its shape very well and tended to 
shrivel up from time to time with use, so I sewed a round piece of 
cardboard into it and now it keeps its shape nicely.

	The diary continued into the 1880s when it stopped.  Minnie 
and Francis continued to live in the house until the 1920s.  We 
couldn't find any other diaries.
I looked at the crochet bag with a new respect and was not sure I 
really wanted to see the contents of the japanned box.



						End