A Crueler Truth

I counted those weeks, as any wife would. When March passed and Richard failed to appear, I tried to reason with myself. Delays were common; soldiers were sent here and there. But after five or six weeks had gone by without one word from him, inquiries were made. The officers who had been with him during the winter knew only that they had left him at Vicksburg, ready—as he told them—to come North, or “home.”

I thought that death must have separated us.

Nothing definite could be learned.

I read all of his letters and poems again and again.

A hopeful spring gave way to a long and anxious summer. I suffered such grief. Was he dead? And if he was, where had he fallen? How had he died? A year had passed since I had last seen him, and it had been six months since he had mustered out of the army.

In mid-October, the New York Independent came as it always did, carrying the world into our small western town. On the second page, my eye was caught by an article on the Oneida Communists written by a gentleman who had recently visited them. I had heard of it, of course—that strange society in New York where men and women shared one another freely, and marriage was cast off as an outdated bond. They spoke of it as an experiment in perfectionism, where selfish love was to be replaced by universal affection, and children were raised by the collective rather than the mother.

I began to read, never expecting it to give me the answer I had long sought. Until that moment, I had thought Richard dead. It was a cruel belief, but it was less cruel than the truth.

. . . After dinner, the mail came and was opened. A very minute daily paper, called the “Daily Journal of Oneida Community,” was distributed through the family, and a copy was also given to me. The contents of the paper are items of private news, exclusively—for the most part the doings of the Community for the day previous, the visitors received, and the work done. Among the members of the Oneida family I saw the name of Richard Realf, who was somewhat noted at one time as secretary of state to John Brown’s Provisional Government^⁠[1]. . .

I saw his name.

He was not dead.

NOTES

¹ Excerpt from, “The Socialists at Wallingford, Conn.” by Joel Benton, The New York Independent, October 11, 1866 p. 2