Old Soldiers
Old soldiers never die, they just fade away. – Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Address to Congress, 1951.
Jasper Hayden Whitlock was born in 1843, in a mansion in the antebellum South. He remembers it perfectly, the dogwoods and the towering oaks on either side of the manicured drive. The wraparound porch where his mother used to sew, rooms with high ceilings, filled with his little sister's bright laughter. The buzzing of the cicadas, and the thick, sweet scent of magnolia hanging heavy in the air.
If you ask him, he'll tell you he forgot it long ago. "It's like Belle Reve," he'll say, a strange mix of sorrow and anger crossing his face.
Cotton was King back then. His father owned acres and acres of cotton, and slaves. Gullah on their tongues and lashes on their backs, they stand out in his memory, shadowed figures with accusing eyes.
They haunt him now, the little girl who screamed when her brother was sold, the man who walked with a limp, hunched over from too much fieldwork. Mothers with light-skinned children.
He remembers the whispers, "children of the plantation." His father sired seven children. Jasper had but one sibling.
Three daughters and two sons, light but not light enough. He does not remember their names.
What he does remember is the war.
The call went out after Fort Sumter, for the sons of the South to rise up in defense of their native land, to go and fight in the name of the Lord. Jeremiah Whitlock told his son to enlist, and so he did.
He donned Confederate gray, slung a musket over his shoulder, went to war. Hardtack, and salt pork if he was lucky, he met hunger during the war, the first of many acquaintances.
Desperation.
His regiment was there at Shiloh, in '62, when Grant beat back the Confederate line. Right then and there, he knew the war was lost.
It didn't matter, though, because he was a soldier. And soldiers fight on.
So he did.
The ground at Antietam ran red, and he slogged through a sea of bodies and blood, the cries of the wounded and dying piercing the shell-shocked haze of his mind. He cried then, and when he ran out of tears he kept sobbing, harsh and dry and unrelenting. Later, much later, after Alice, it is with a bitter kind of pride that he finds even D-Day did not leave so many young men dead.
June 6th, 1944 was a terrible day. He knows that September 17th, 1862 was worse.
It brings him no comfort.
Edward looks at him with sympathy in his eyes. He is naïve, young and foolish for all that he claims to be world-weary. He does not know to hold his tongue at first, but he learns. Edward could never understand, why he grieves for men long gone, for men he never met. They lie in foreign fields, in overgrown jungles, under loamy Virginia soil, silent and still beneath their crosses of white. They are far away, and Edward could never understand.
After all, he has never been a soldier.
And Carlisle, for all that he is the oldest, has never seen war. Only its aftermath, in the battle-wounds of its survivors and the corpses of its victims.
Carlisle carries his own pain, but it is a different sort of grief, one born within the walls of a hospital, not on the desperate madness of a battlefield, where men are blown to pieces, the guts of your friends are spattered hot across your face, and you have to keep on fighting.
So it is Alice he turns to for comfort. She reaches out and traces his scars, her cold fingertips gentle as any touch he has ever known. She does not offer platitudes, or the pain of her own history. Instead, she sings to him, her voice pitched low, soft and sweet on the lullabies his mother used to sing. He does not sleep now, but in her arms he finds rest.
Perhaps that is all he can ask for. As it is, he does not ask for more.
He does not ask for Victoria to explode into Forks in a blur of red hair and old memories. He has long since given up atoning for past sins; he knows that there are some things one can never atone for, no matter how many lifetimes lie ahead. No penance will ever be great enough, and he knows this. All he wants now is to forget.
But when Alice, his Alice, a study in chiaroscuro, sees death before them, he cannot help but remember. Alice sees death, and he sees Maria. Her voice rings in his ears, haughty and harsh like Chinese silk over broken glass. It didn't used to be that way. He remembers thinking once that her voice was like aged bourbon, smoothness over fire. The sound stirs other memories, of red eyes and red blood, and the scars on his stone body ache and throb with a steadiness he can only liken to a heartbeat.
The newborns were such a strange combination of fragile and indestructible. Their eyes still brilliant with the last vestiges of life, their skin hard and teeth sharp, but so predictable. So easy to rip them apart, to teach them fear as it was taught to him, when he was young.
Sometimes he couldn't restrain himself; Maria would come home to find her army in pieces. She would cluck at him, perhaps laugh a little at the regret etched clearly on his face, and gather him up in her embrace and croon to him. "Shhh, there now, soldier, you've done your job."
He cannot remember if he ever found rest in her arms. He does not find comfort even in the memory of her tenderness, these days. He hasn't for a long time. Perhaps he only accepted her then because she saved him from something worse.
Maria, mother of his redemption.
It was after Chickamauga, in '63. The last great victory for the Confederacy. He still cannot justify the price. He lost brothers in the sticky heat of those summer days, brothers not blood-born but baptized in it all the same. Eighteen who survived Antietam died in the woods along that brackish river. He hears later, from whom he can't remember, that Chickamauga means "river of death" in some Cherokee dialect. He does not contest the name.
After that, they sent the remainder of his command to Texas. Four survivors, in total. An apology of sorts, because no one should have to live through what they'd lived through. He's still not entirely sure he survived. The terror of war still grips him. He can still hear the report of cannons, the dull wet thud of a minie ball hitting flesh. He cannot sleep, but he knows that if he did, he would have nightmares.
He had nightmares in Texas, under the hot press of a vast blue sky. He remembers thrashing until he woke, his throat raw from screaming.
The war found him, even in Texas, in the skirmish at the pass, and his nightmares. Always in his nightmares.
And then came Maria. She walked into the aftermath of Sabine Pass, her skirts leaving lacy trails in the dust. Maria, Maria, her eyes red and her skin pale, raising him from perdition and shepherding him into another.
Jasper wore Johnny Reb gray for three years. His little sister's idol, his mother's precious son, his father's legacy. Son of the South, a soldier defending his home, all of it swept away in a haze of bloodlust.
Gone.
By the time news reached Texas of Sherman's march to the sea, Jasper Hayden Whitlock was too far gone in blood to care.
Later, after he left Maria, when the death knells of his victims drove him from her and the respite she had once offered, he went back, tracing the steps of the march, back home once more.
The oaks still towered over the drive, and the dogwoods still covered the lawns with white down. The scent of magnolia still hung heavy in the air. But the wraparound porch where his mother used to sew was collapsed and rotting, the house swallowed by creeping vines. The acres of cotton behind the manor were gone, scorched earth and salted fields marking the brief presence of the Union Army.
The oaks still towered over the drive, and the dogwoods still covered the lawns with white down, but they were not the trees of his childhood, and their shade was no longer friendly. The scent of magnolia still hung heavy in the air, but it was thick and cloying in his lungs. Perhaps it was a good thing he had no need of breath.
"It's like Belle Reve," he'll tell you, and he's right. Fallen to time and disrepair, condemned to live on only in his memory, the manor is nothing more than a dream, now.
Alice can see what may come to pass, but her true talent, unspoken, is her ability to soothe away the hurts of the past. He does not know if it comes from having no past of her own, he is only grateful that she deigns to share it with him.
She stretched out her hand to him, and said "I've been waiting a long time for you."
And he replied, Southern gentleman despite it all, "I'm sorry to have kept you waiting, ma'am."
She gripped him tight, and raised him from perdition. Not into another hell, but back into the world. Jasper is not his brother, to say that he has found heaven.
The bloodlust still consumes him, washes him over in waves, pulling away from all that he has found since the war. He will never have the control of those who call him family. He fought, and bled, and killed during a war of the worst kind, brother against brother. Maria found him and forged him in blood.
Are they so surprised that the blood calls to him still, siren sweet, drawing him like a thirsty man to water, like sailors to the song? He was born in blood, more so than any of the others.
Esme says that he is a good man. She is wrong on both counts. He lost sight of good somewhere during the war, and he has long since given up his humanity.
Emmett, though, has always known what took Edward years to learn. He is quiet, and does not pretend to understand that which he will never know. Rosalie, born in blood of a different kind, looks at him with hard eyes, and he can feel ache of her pain, overlaid with an iron determination to live. Through the many guises they have worn, sister and brother-in-law, they have helped to keep him strong.
With Alice, they are enough to keep him anchored, amber in his eyes instead of red.
And then came Bella, and all her trouble. She brings disaster, easy as breathing. She brings change, brings James and werewolves. He wonders if Alice saw Bella bring death.
She brings Victoria, and war.
He does not have his uniform anymore, the coarse gray cotton he wore at the beginning of it all, but he is still a soldier.
Old soldiers never die, they just fade away.
Jasper Hayden Whitlock is a soldier, and he has a war to fight.
Reviews and concrit are love!
Fic notes:
I'm pretending Jasper was born in South Carolina, because I didn't realize he was born in Texas until after I wrote this.
Battle of Shiloh – Also known as Battle of Pittsburgh Landing, the battle took place April 6-7, 1862 along the Tennessee River in southwestern part of the state. Jefferson Davis would later lament the Battle of Shiloh as "the turning point of the war." Estimates are that 13,000 Union, and 11,000 Confederate soldiers died at the Battle of Shiloh, making it at the time the bloodiest battle in American history.
Battle of Antietam – Also known as the Battle of Sharpsburg, the battle took place September 16-18, 1863 at Sharpsburg, Maryland. Neither side won a decisive victory, but the that battle was significant in that it halted the northern advance of the Confederate Army, which had it continued would have drastically altered the course of the war. Additionally, it was also one of the battles that prompted Lincoln to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. Finally, Antietam has been recognized as the single bloodiest battle the United States has ever engaged in. In a single day, nearly 12,500 Union soldiers died while the Confederates lost nearly 11,000 men. Historians have placed the estimated total casualty count for September 17, 1862 at over 23,000 men.
Battle of Chickamauga – The battle took place September 18-20, 1863 along the Chattanooga and Chickamauga Creeks in Georgia. The last great Confederate victory, the cost was incredibly high. Over 16,000 Union and nearly 18,500 soldiers died at Chickamauga, resulting in nearly 35,000 total casualties. Though historians dispute the exact origin of the word, the name Chickamauga has indeed been translated as "river of death" in several regional Cherokee dialects.
A great resource for more information about the battles I stuck Jasper in, or just about the Civil War in general is
Minie ball – The minie ball, or Minié ball was a revolutionary bullet design that stabilized spin, helping the bullet travel farther, straighter, and translate more force upon impact. Named after its inventor Claude Etienne Minié, it was introduced in America during the Civil War and quickly became known for the devastating effects it had on the human body as opposed to the less severe wounds of traditional musket balls.
Photograph of a human femur after being hit by a minie ball.
Gullah – A creole language spoken by the Gullah people, an African American population of slave descent living in the Sea Islands and coastal regions of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. The language is based off English and was strongly influenced by many West and Central African languages