The following is a piece of fiction inspired by the previous post on the cane of John Yarbrough and the farm of Abraham Plank. (Recall, too, that Abraham Plank is the uncle of John Edward Plank whose farm saw a large number of Confederate burials.) Yarbrough genealogy is very well researched, but details around Private John Ripley Yarbrough are painfully scarce. In cases where a person has nearly disappeared from existence, I can’t help but imagine back stories or how their stories might continue. This is an experiment in that refrain. John R. Yarbrough is real. Simon Plank is not, nor are most of the other characters. Yarbrough’s death, though, is described as accurately as the record indicates. I hope you enjoy this. If people receive it well, I will post similar work to accompany other cases.

There is no doubt that Private John R. Yarbrough was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. To be precise, he was a member of the 8th Alabama and part of the famous Barksdale Charge into the Union gap at Gettysburg, July 2. He was killed in the final moments of the clash with the 1st Minnesota. His body was left on the field, he was buried in an unmarked grave, and later, his remains were moved to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond where he was mingled with the other unnamed dead from the battle. I am entirely clear on these facts because I am, in fact, John R. Yarbrough.

I was recently thrilled to be brought to Cub Scout Day Camp by the young squire, Simon Abraham Plank.

Cub Scout Day Camp opened with campers being placed into groups of kids they didn’t know, which of course rattled and unnerved young Simon. He was a shy soul, glasses and dark hair, pasty white skin, knee high white socks with a red and a blue stripe at the top. The other boys got to know each other quickly, easily joked with each other. Simon laid me across his knees and clutched me tightly, and I thought, “That’s right, son. I’m your only friend.” And of course, I immediately rebuked myself and said, “I’m not your only friend. But I’m a little wooden friend.”

Real wood, dear reader. Not some obscenity you might have just thought. And really, I’m not actually his friend.

Speaking of wood, the camp leaders sent the campers to classes, and Simon’s first class was to learn to build a birdhouse. Make two, young Simon! Make the second a little birdhouse in your soul!

These were birdhouse kits—put boards together, hammer them into place. They were not constructed like I was, carved out of fallen oak by hand and personally fashioned by yours truly. These were cheap manufacturing designed to entertain today’s soft-handed boy for about an hour and give him something to show his parents as though he had actually built something.

Simon’s birdhouse was, sigh, lightly sanded, poorly painted, and hammered together with uneven edges. Oh well.

The next class was more useful—wilderness survival taught by Mrs. Villanueva in her den mother uniform. She told the boys to call her “Mrs. V.” Because of course it is too hard for boys these days to say hard things, much less do them. Mrs. V instructed the boys on how to find water if lost in the woods, how to build a simple shelter with sticks, how to leave signs of where you are for searchers.

Then she said, “You should also make an object your friend. Give it a name. Maybe a tree or a rock.”

“Or a cane,” said Simon holding me up.

“Yes, that is a very good friend,” she said. “Someone you can talk to. Does your friend have a name? You should give it a name.”

“How about Martin?” said Simon, pushing his glasses back on his face. “Marty for short.”

“That’s great,” said Mrs. V.

This was not great. My name is John and I personally carved it on myself a hundred plus years ago.

“Can I hold your pole?” said David, and the rest of the boys laughed.

Simon pulled back, his face fell. It’s okay, Simon. I am, after all, your only friend.

**

How to explain this in a way you can understand? When you think of yourself, you do not separate your body from your mind or spirit. If your spirit binds with an object, let’s say a hand-carved cane, you become the cane and it becomes you. If your spirit was in flesh before, the flesh was also you. A story you all know well involves a wizard boy and his nemesis—this antagonist is dead but reformulates himself using pieces of his soul that he had attached to objects through murder and dark magic. The best I can say is that some version of that seems to have happened to my soul. I had survived more than an hour of hard marching and fighting. When it seemed that we had broken the spirit of the enemy, we saw a tiny regiment marching toward us and not away like the rest. I saw the shot that got me. I was looking down the barrel of my rifle at a young man whose eyes were trained on me. He fired before I did. I saw the muzzle flash, then felt a brief explosion, and suddenly my consciousness was no longer on the field but back at the farm of Mr. Abraham Plank, where I had spent the night before. He was an elderly man, and I helped him with a few household tasks. It became apparent that I left myself there, or rather, I left on his property my hand-carved cane when we headed to battle the next day. It took me quite a while to realize my consciousness had, in fact, been fused to the cane.

Some of you will no doubt say that I could have only done this through murder. I used your magic story to explain what happened because there is no reference to reincarnation in the Bible nor is there any mention of a soul attaching itself to an inanimate object. The closest we get to that is Jesus casting devils into pigs. True, some of you refer to the seven books and eight movies as “canon,” and various of you have formed a religion around said canon. Honestly, come on. I am not going to equate your silly story to the Bible. But some of you will insist that my soul is attached to a cane because I am evil and in need of repentance. You may well cite my family roots as planters in Georgia and Alabama, the enslaved we held, and so forth. You may claim that I did, in fact, divide my soul through murder. I can assure you that I have sat inanimate through decades and decades of history and am now very woke and repentant.

***

My inanimate march through time to become Simon’s friend began with one of Mr. A Plank’s grandsons. Imagine my fate—I marched in formation across these fields, well drilled, battle hardened, taking lives for our cause, and I landed in the hands of a boy who used me to pretend to march over these same fields in formation, as though he were battle hardened. I was his gun when he was infantry and his saber when he rode an imaginary horse in the Yankee cavalry. Yes, Yankee. He made me into a Yankee Springfield and a Yankee saber. He knew nothing of loading me properly yet could somehow shoot upwards of thirty rounds per minute with ammunition that never ran out. He committed a veritable holocaust upon us Southerners—he must have killed ten times the number of us that actually died at the battle. Worse, when he would walk the fields, he always looked for detritus from the battle. He used me to uncover all sorts of items—shrapnel, horse stirrups, rusty bayonets, bullet fragments, and, once, the rib cage of one of my comrades. The horror!

He grew up and grew out of these imaginary and real embarrassments. Eventually, I was his hiking cane, then, in his later years, his walking cane. He was in town when the reunions happened. He pulled me out and showed me to some of my old comrades, telling them that one of theirs had left me on his grandparents’ farm and never returned for me, but he could not be sure who had left it. This was, of course, ridiculous because I personally carved my name into myself before the battle. How he missed this for sixty years is beyond me.

I was then handed down as an heirloom for generations, hardly ever put to use until Simon’s generation. Simon does not possess many manly virtues. He was sickly as a baby, and his parents let him sleep in their bed till he was four. He was scared of the dark and had a vivid imagination that consistently brought monsters and ghosts to his room. So finally, his grandfather gave me to him, telling him, “This was handmade by a very brave man who died in battle. Keep it with you and it will help you to be brave.”

“Whose was it?” Simon asked.

“A man from Alabama. We don’t know his name, but he spent the night of July 1 on Great-Great Grandpa Plank’s farm and helped him with some farm chores. We think he probably died in battle the next day because he never came back to retrieve his cane.”

“Wow,” said Simon.

“Objects can have an imprint of who owned them,” said Grandpa Plank. “It can rub off on you. So you keep that with you, and you can get the bravery of the man who made it.”

Obviously, almost everything Grandpa said was nonsense. They should have known my name since I carved it into the nook just below my head. And I did obviously come back for my cane, but who could tell that now? And I know of no instance where anyone got anything from holding someone’s old gun or pillow or cane. But we adults lie to kids all the time so they don’t wake up to how awful things really are.

Simon dutifully took me everywhere. I went to bed with him, and when he heard bumps or got scared, he stopped getting up to tell his parents—he talked to me instead. His parents had enrolled him in karate when he was six, so I started going to karate. He learned some basic bo staff skills, and he practiced them with me at home. When his class had a talent show, he did a bo staff demonstration using me—he explained to the class that I was an artifact from the Civil War. One of the boys asked if he also had nunchuck skills, but I did not leave at the Plank farm any Okinawan weaponry, so no, we did not have nunchuck skills. While I did have the heart, I did not have the mouth to tell Simon that the boy was calling him Napoleon Dynamite. All for the best, I suppose. Simon was pleased with his performance and the reception he got.

The last class at Cub Scout Day Camp was archeology. Right up Simon’s alley—he was a big Indiana Jones fan while somehow being far more like Marcus Brody. The Cub leader for this class was Mr. Daniels, a gray-haired man with a large belly who wore army green Boy Scout shorts and a National Jamboree shirt. He had a bunch of Indian arrowheads that he buried loosely in the soil before each class; then he taught the kids how to dig them up, mark their spot in a grid, and record information about them. In his enthusiasm, Simon dug up most of the arrowheads and logged them well ahead of class ending, so Mr. Daniels began grousing about what else to do. Then Simon observed, “Marty here is an artifact.”

“Marty?” said Mr. Daniels.

“His stick,” said Kevin, one of the boys. “He named it in wilderness survival class.”

“It’s a cane,” said Simon. “It’s from a Civil War soldier. My grandpa gave it to me.”

“Really?” said Mr. Daniels.

“Yeah,” said Simon. “But we don’t know who. A guy left it on great great Grandpa’s farm then got killed.”

“May I see it?” said Mr. Daniels.

Simon nodded and gave it to him. Daniels looked it over and said, “It’s well made. Let’s use our last ten minutes to examine it closely. Maybe we can learn about the soldier who left it.”

Daniels placed me on the picnic table. “We have seven boys, and this is about sixty-five inches. So every boy gets about nine inches to study. Spread out around the table, boys, and get out your pencils and pads. For five minutes, you study your part of the cane and write down everything you notice—color, grain, thickness, anything and everything. Simon, you choose what part you get.”

“I’ll take the knob at the top.”

“Very well,” said Daniels. “I’m starting my phone timer now.”

The boys fell quiet as they all groped and stroked me, making funny faces at each other, but not making noise as Daniels circled the table.

Simon studied as though his life’s work had reached its peak. He pushed his glasses tight against his face, used a magnifying glass from his blue Cub Scout backpack, and studied all over the knob. He ran his fingers over and under the head, then finally stopped when his fingers hit the etching. He used his magnifying glass and leaned so close I could smell the purple kool aid from lunch on his breath. He pulled back, grabbed the pencil, and scribbled letters on his pad. Then he leaned in, looked some more, then wrote more letters. He repeated this until he had gotten all of it. He set the pencil down.

“It’s not Marty,” said Simon firmly.

“What’s that?” said Daniels.

“It’s John. The cane. The cane is John. It’s carved into the neck just below the head.”

Daniels came around, took the magnifying glass, and leaned in. “You’re right,” he said, pulling back. “John R. Yarbrough. 8 AL. That’s 8th Alabama.” He shook his head. “Look how small that is. He must have carved that with, I don’t know … a very tiny, very sharp blade.”

He patted Simon on the back. “You have made a real discovery today. When we go back to the mess hall where there’s cell service, we’ll get on my phone and see if we can learn about him.”

And that, dear readers, is how Simon the Magnificent, a truly inspired and insightful young man who is a credit to his country and family, discovered my body. My present body, I mean. Or the place where my soul and consciousness have gone to rest.

And rest I shall. It has been a long, long time. But I know I am in great hands with Simon. He is, after all, my only friend.