Across Five Aprils

by

Irene Hunt

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Jethro Creighton Character Analysis

Jethro Creighton is the youngest of Matt and Ellen’s children. He grows up on his family’s farm surrounded by his siblings John, Bill, Tom, Mary, and Jenny and his cousin Eb. When his brothers leave for the war (and later, after his father suffers a heart attack), Jethro takes on increased responsibilities on the farm without complaint. Jethro also possesses a keen intelligence and hunger for learning. which his beloved schoolteacher (and eventual brother-in-law) Shadrach Yale encourages and feeds. During the war, Jethro and his sister Jenny read and discuss newspaper accounts of the battles both to keep themselves current on military developments but also to improve their reading skills. Jethro suffers a crisis of conscience when his favorite brother, Bill, joins the Confederate Army rather than siding with the Union cause like the rest of his brothers. Yet, despite disagreeing with Bill on which side holds the moral high ground, Jethro learns to accept his brother’s choice as an honest expression of his conscience. Then, when locals like Guy Wortman criticize Bill in his absence, Jethro follows the dictates of his own conscience and defends his brother, even when it exposes his family to other people’s hatred and potential violence. As he comes of age during the long years of the war, Jethro learns to keep his own counsel and stand up for what he believes to be right, even when that makes his path difficult or dangerous. This is what men he admires, like his father, Shad, Ross Milton, and even the distant figure of President Abraham Lincoln, do. After the end of the war, Jethro prepares to welcome his brothers home and work the farm for one final summer before leaving with Shad and Jenny to complete his education.

Jethro Creighton Quotes in Across Five Aprils

The Across Five Aprils quotes below are all either spoken by Jethro Creighton or refer to Jethro Creighton. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Coming of Age Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1  Quotes

War meant loud brass music and shining horses ridden by men wearing uniforms finer than any suit in the stores at Newton; it meant men riding like kings, looking neither to the right nor the left, while lesser men in perfect lines strode along with guns across their shoulders, their head held high like horses with short reigns. When the battle thundered and exploded on all sides—well, some men were killed, of course, but the stories of war that Jethro remembered were about the men who had managed to live through the thunder and explosion […]. Jethro […] never doubted that if Tom or Eb got their chance to go to war, they’d be back home when it was over, and that it would be shadowy men from distant parts who would die for the pages of future history books.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Eb Carron, Ellen Creighton, Tom Creighton
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

“Fer one thing I was wonderin’ why Abe Lincoln can’t make up his mind about war. I wonder—is he like Pa? Is he so against heven’ blood on people’s hands that he’s afeared to start a war?”

Ellen stopped her work and stood a moment without speaking, her rough brown hands resting on the handle of the hoe.

“He’s like a man standin’ where two roads meet, Jeth,” she said finally, “and one road is as dark and fearsome as the other; there ain’t a choice between the two, and yet a choice has to be made.” She shook her head. “May the Lord help him,” she whispered. “May the Lord guide his hand.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Ellen Creighton (speaker), Matthew Creighton, Abraham Lincoln
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:

Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was nor regarded highly, there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and not at all for drinking and rampaging about the county, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that […] He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which surely was a fool thing to do unless one as interested in “breakin’ up school.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Bill Creighton
Page Number: 17-18
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“I don’t know if anybody ever ‘wins’ a war, Jeth […] a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt” […]

“But the South started it, didn’t they, Bill?”

“The South and the North and the East and the West—we all started it. The old slavers of other days and the fact’ry owners of today that need high tariffs to help ’em git rich, and the cotton growers that need slave labor to help ’em git rich and the new territories and the wild talk […] I hate slavery, Jeth, but I hate another slavery of people workin’ their lives away in dirty fact’ries for a wage that kin scarse keep life in ‘em; I hate secession, but at the same time I can’t see how a whole region kin be able to live if their way of life is all of a sudden upset.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Bill Creighton (speaker)
Page Number: 39-40
Explanation and Analysis:

Jethro could not answer. He stared at the cut above Bill’s right eye, from which blood still trickled down his cheek. Somewhere […] a man shouted to his horses, and the shout died away in a cry that ran frightened over the brown water of the creek and into the darkening woods.

He had heard cries often that autumn, all through the countryside. They came at night, wakened him, and then lapsed into silence, leaving him in fear and perplexity. Sounds once familiar were no longer as they had seemed in other days—his father calling cattle in from the pasture, the sheep dog’s bark coming through the fog, the distant creak of the pulley as Ellen drew water for her chickens—all these once familiar sounds had taken on overtones of wailing, and he seemed to hear an echo of that wailing now. He shivered and looked away from his brother’s face.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Ellen Creighton, John Creighton
Related Symbols: Walnut Hill
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

The deep ruts in the road were frozen and glazed with ice; the wind had a clean sweep of across the prairies, a weep that sometimes seemed about to carry Jethro before it. Tears froze on his cheeks, and the cold pounded against his forehead as he trudged along, weighted by the heavy, oversized shoes and many layers of clothing. It was bitter, but not beyond the ordinary; suffering at the mercy of the elements was accepted by Jethro as being quite as natural as the hunger for green vegetables and fresh fruit that was always with him during the winter. When one found comfort, he was grateful, but he was never such a fool as to expect a great deal of it. The hardships one endured had a purpose; his mother had been careful to make him aware of that.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Ellen Creighton
Page Number: 53-54
Explanation and Analysis:

“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”

“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty of fifty years of my life and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”

“Do you hev to do it then?”

“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Shadrach Yale (speaker), Bill Creighton
Page Number: 56-57
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Ellen lay in her bed, limp with the agony of a headache. It always happened when the supply of coffee ran out. Given a cup of strong, hot coffee, the pain would leave her almost immediately; lacking it, her suffering mounted by the hour until the pain became almost unbearable. Schooled to believe that self-indulgence of any kind was morally unacceptable, Ellen was deeply ashamed of her dependency on coffee. She tried brewing drinks of roasted grain or roots, but her nervous system was not deceived by a beverage that resembled coffee only in appearance. She tried stretching out her supply by making a very weak drink, but she might as well have drunk nothing; the headaches were prevented only by coffee that was black with strength.

In late March of 1862, coffee had reached the unheard price of seventy cents a pound, and the papers predicted it would rise even higher.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Ellen Creighton
Related Symbols: Coffee
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

“If the editor of the county paper ain’t against freedom of speech, could I jest put one more question to this young ’un?” Without waiting for a reply, the man called Wortman turned again to Jethro. “What I want to ask you is this: is yore pa good and down on Bill? Does he teach you your brother is a skunk that deserves shootin’ for goin’ against his country?”

Jethro felt a great weakness. He had to steady himself against the counter for a second, and when he spoke the words were the first ones that occurred to him.

“My pa don’t teach me one way or the other. He knows that I think more of my brother than anybody else in the world—no matter where he is. And that’s all I’ve got to say to you.” He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Guy Wortman (speaker), Ross Milton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton
Page Number: 78-79
Explanation and Analysis:

“There be things that’s evil in these woods tonight. I seed evil apassin’ my place a while ago, comin’ in from the shortcut road to town and reelin’ in the saddle. I heered evil braggin’ in the saloon today about layin’ fer a young ’un on his way home.” He reached over and took the reigns from Jethro’s hands. “I’d best drive till we’re out of the brush,” he added. We’re gittin’ close to the place where some piz’nous snake might strike quick.”

The world was turning upside down for Jethro. He felt as if he were someone else […]. When he tried to speak, he found that […] his lips worked as they had often seemed to work in a bad dream to form the words that he wanted to say, but no sound passed them, and there was nothing to do but sit quietly while his mind floundered in the uncertainties that beset it.

Related Characters: Dave Burdow (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Mary Creighton, Travis Burdow, Guy Wortman
Page Number: 90-91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Jenny Creighton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Eb Carron, Ellen Creighton, John Creighton, Tom Creighton, Guy Wortman
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

Jethro heard someone shout his father’s name and Bill’s and the word Copperheads.

Matt fumbled his way to the front door. “Show yore faces,” he called. “Come up and give me a chance to talk.”

There was only raucous, drunken laughter at his words. A bundle of something was thrown at the gate, and then the riders galloped on.

Jethro scrambled down the ladder and ran out into the yard. At the gate there was a bundle of switches tied together with a cord, the symbol adopted by local ruffians as a warning of punishment to follow. He tore off the paper that was attached to the cord and carried it inside to the table, where Ellen had lighted a lamp. On the paper in large printed letters was the message: “Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Ellen Creighton, Guy Wortman
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I’m so scared, Jeth. Seems I hadn’t known what war was till Danny Lawrence come bringin’ us this awful word of Tom.” She closed the Bible and crossed her forearms on its faded cover. “I used to dream about the nice home Shad and me would have and how I’d keep it bright and pretty, how I’d wait of an evenin’ to see him comin’ down the road toward home. Nowadays I don’t make any plans; I just don’t dare to have any dreams for fear someday a soldier will come home and tell us that he was standin’ beside Shad, the way Danny was standin’ beside Tom—”

She got up abruptly and put the Bible back on the shelf among the books Shadrach had left. Together she and Jethro walked silently out into the barnlot and got their teams ready to go back to the fields.

Related Characters: Jenny Creighton (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Tom Creighton, Dan Lawrence
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

His eyes were wide and troubled with his thoughts. He had a high respect for education, for authority of men in high places, and yet the stories in the newspapers made him wonder. McClellan, the most promising young officer in his class at West Point, was now the general who either didn’t move at all or moved ineffectually; Halleck, the author of a book on military science, was now the author of boasts that somehow branded him as a little man, even to a country boy who was hungry for a hero. There were stories of generals jealously eyeing one another, caring more for personal prestige than for defeating the Confederates; there were Pope and Sheridan, who blustered; there was Grant and the persistent stories of his heavy drinking. Nowhere in the North was there a general who looked and acted the part as did the Confederates’ Lee and Jackson.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

It is unfortunate that congressmen and their ladies should have been deprived of this spectacle. There was drama here, I can tell them—thousands upon thousands of us crossing the Rappahannock with banners flying, drums rolling, and our instruments of death gleaming in the sunlight. They could have seen those thousands scrambling up the innocent-looking wooded hills and falling like toy soldiers brushed over by a child’s hand; thousands of young men whose dreams and hopes were snuffed out in a second and who will be remembered only as simple soldiers who fell in a cruel, futile battle directed by men who can hardly be called less than simple murderers.

Related Characters: Shadrach Yale (speaker), Jethro Creighton, George B. McClellan
Page Number: 137-138
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

The authority of the law loomed big in his mind; he remembered, “You and your family will be in serious trouble.” Loyalty to his brother Tom and the many thousands who had fought to the last ditch at Pittsburgh Landing, at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and all the other places that were adding length to the long list—how could loyalty to these men be true if one were going to harbor and give comfort to a man who simply said, “I quit.”

But on the other hand, how did one feel at night if he awoke and remembered, “I’m the one that sent my cousin to his death.” Eb was not a hero, certainly—not now, anyway. People scorned the likes of Eb; sure, so did Jethro, and yet—

“How do I know what I’d be like if I was sick and scared and hopeless; how does […] any man know that ain’t been there?”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Matthew Creighton, Eb Carron, Abraham Lincoln, Tom Creighton, Travis Burdow
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis:

“Looks like purty important mail you’re gettin’, Jethro,” Ed said quietly. His eyes were full of puzzled concern.

Jethro’s head sawm. This was the showdown; now, all the family, Ed Turner, and soon the whole neighborhood would know everything. In the few seconds that passed before he opened the envelope, he wished with all his heart that he had not meddled in the affairs of a country at war, that he had let Eb work out his own problems, that he, Jethro, were still a sheltered young boy who did the tasks his father set for him and shunned the idea that he dare think for himself. He looked at the faces around him, and they spun in a strange mist of color—black eyes and blue eyes, gray hair and gold and black, pink cheeks and pale ones and weather-beaten brown ones.

Related Characters: Ed Turner (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Eb Carron, Abraham Lincoln
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

Ed brought the boy’s letter down for Matt to read. In it the boy told of the burning of Columbia, of how the soldiers laughed as a great wind fanned the flames, of the loot carried off, of mirrors and pianos smashed, and of intimate family treasures scattered to the winds by men who seemed to have gone mad. […]

“What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at? […] these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin.’ Mary and me has had to guard against that way of his.

Related Characters: Ed Turner (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Ross Milton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:

“[…] Jeth, after the thirteenth amendment has become a part of our Constitution and for years afterward [...] there will be men and women with dark faces who will walk the length and width of this land in search of the bright promise the thirteenth amendment holds out to them. […] What’s going to happen to them, Jeth? What will become of men and women who have known nothing but servitude all the days of their lives? They are without experience, without education; they’ll be pawns in the hands of exploiters all over the nation. […] see if [Northern abolitionists] extend the hand of friendship to the uneducated, unskilled men who will come north looking to them as a savior. […] I tell you, all of us are getting a little quieter when the question comes up as to what we are to do about the products of slavery.

Related Characters: Ross Milton (speaker), Jethro Creighton
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis:

Daily the color of April grew brighter. The apple and peach orchards were in bloom again, and the redbud was almost ready to burst. The little leaves on the silver poplars quivered in green and silver lights with every passing breeze, and Jenny’s favorite lilacs bloomed in great thick clusters, deep purple and as fragrant as any beautiful thing on earth.

Then suddenly, because there were no longer any eyes to perceive it, the color was gone, and the fifth April had become, like her four older sisters, a time of grief and desolation.

[…] Jethro would remember a sunlit field and a sense of serenity and happiness such as he had not known since early childhood. He would remember […] Nancy running toward him […] He thought at first that something had happened to his father, or [John…]

Then Nancy said, “Jeth, it’s the President—they’ve killed the President.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Jenny Creighton, Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Tom Creighton, Nancy Creighton
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis:
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Jethro Creighton Quotes in Across Five Aprils

The Across Five Aprils quotes below are all either spoken by Jethro Creighton or refer to Jethro Creighton. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Coming of Age Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1  Quotes

War meant loud brass music and shining horses ridden by men wearing uniforms finer than any suit in the stores at Newton; it meant men riding like kings, looking neither to the right nor the left, while lesser men in perfect lines strode along with guns across their shoulders, their head held high like horses with short reigns. When the battle thundered and exploded on all sides—well, some men were killed, of course, but the stories of war that Jethro remembered were about the men who had managed to live through the thunder and explosion […]. Jethro […] never doubted that if Tom or Eb got their chance to go to war, they’d be back home when it was over, and that it would be shadowy men from distant parts who would die for the pages of future history books.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Eb Carron, Ellen Creighton, Tom Creighton
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

“Fer one thing I was wonderin’ why Abe Lincoln can’t make up his mind about war. I wonder—is he like Pa? Is he so against heven’ blood on people’s hands that he’s afeared to start a war?”

Ellen stopped her work and stood a moment without speaking, her rough brown hands resting on the handle of the hoe.

“He’s like a man standin’ where two roads meet, Jeth,” she said finally, “and one road is as dark and fearsome as the other; there ain’t a choice between the two, and yet a choice has to be made.” She shook her head. “May the Lord help him,” she whispered. “May the Lord guide his hand.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Ellen Creighton (speaker), Matthew Creighton, Abraham Lincoln
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:

Bill, his favorite, was a big, silent man who was considered “peculiar” in the neighborhood. In an environment where reading was nor regarded highly, there was something suspect about a young man who not only cared very little for hunting or wrestling and not at all for drinking and rampaging about the county, but who read every book he could lay his hands upon as if he prized a printed page more than the people around him. He wasn’t quite held in contempt, for he had great physical strength and was a hard worker, two attributes admired by the people around him; but he was odd, and there was no doubt of that […] He had even attended school the previous winter when work was slack, which surely was a fool thing to do unless one as interested in “breakin’ up school.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Bill Creighton
Page Number: 17-18
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

“I don’t know if anybody ever ‘wins’ a war, Jeth […] a blaze kin destroy him that makes it and him that the fire was set to hurt” […]

“But the South started it, didn’t they, Bill?”

“The South and the North and the East and the West—we all started it. The old slavers of other days and the fact’ry owners of today that need high tariffs to help ’em git rich, and the cotton growers that need slave labor to help ’em git rich and the new territories and the wild talk […] I hate slavery, Jeth, but I hate another slavery of people workin’ their lives away in dirty fact’ries for a wage that kin scarse keep life in ‘em; I hate secession, but at the same time I can’t see how a whole region kin be able to live if their way of life is all of a sudden upset.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Bill Creighton (speaker)
Page Number: 39-40
Explanation and Analysis:

Jethro could not answer. He stared at the cut above Bill’s right eye, from which blood still trickled down his cheek. Somewhere […] a man shouted to his horses, and the shout died away in a cry that ran frightened over the brown water of the creek and into the darkening woods.

He had heard cries often that autumn, all through the countryside. They came at night, wakened him, and then lapsed into silence, leaving him in fear and perplexity. Sounds once familiar were no longer as they had seemed in other days—his father calling cattle in from the pasture, the sheep dog’s bark coming through the fog, the distant creak of the pulley as Ellen drew water for her chickens—all these once familiar sounds had taken on overtones of wailing, and he seemed to hear an echo of that wailing now. He shivered and looked away from his brother’s face.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Ellen Creighton, John Creighton
Related Symbols: Walnut Hill
Page Number: 43
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

The deep ruts in the road were frozen and glazed with ice; the wind had a clean sweep of across the prairies, a weep that sometimes seemed about to carry Jethro before it. Tears froze on his cheeks, and the cold pounded against his forehead as he trudged along, weighted by the heavy, oversized shoes and many layers of clothing. It was bitter, but not beyond the ordinary; suffering at the mercy of the elements was accepted by Jethro as being quite as natural as the hunger for green vegetables and fresh fruit that was always with him during the winter. When one found comfort, he was grateful, but he was never such a fool as to expect a great deal of it. The hardships one endured had a purpose; his mother had been careful to make him aware of that.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Ellen Creighton
Page Number: 53-54
Explanation and Analysis:

“Seems like I can’t face up to yore goin’.”

“I’m not eager for it either, Jeth, not by a long way. I’ve got a lot of plans for the next forty of fifty years of my life and being a soldier is not a part of any single one of them.”

“Do you hev to do it then?”

“I guess I do. There’s been a long chain of events leading up to this time; the dreams of men in my generation are as insignificant as that—” he snapped his fingers sharply. “We were foolish enough to reach manhood just when the long fizzling turned into an explosion.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Shadrach Yale (speaker), Bill Creighton
Page Number: 56-57
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

Ellen lay in her bed, limp with the agony of a headache. It always happened when the supply of coffee ran out. Given a cup of strong, hot coffee, the pain would leave her almost immediately; lacking it, her suffering mounted by the hour until the pain became almost unbearable. Schooled to believe that self-indulgence of any kind was morally unacceptable, Ellen was deeply ashamed of her dependency on coffee. She tried brewing drinks of roasted grain or roots, but her nervous system was not deceived by a beverage that resembled coffee only in appearance. She tried stretching out her supply by making a very weak drink, but she might as well have drunk nothing; the headaches were prevented only by coffee that was black with strength.

In late March of 1862, coffee had reached the unheard price of seventy cents a pound, and the papers predicted it would rise even higher.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Ellen Creighton
Related Symbols: Coffee
Page Number: 67
Explanation and Analysis:

“If the editor of the county paper ain’t against freedom of speech, could I jest put one more question to this young ’un?” Without waiting for a reply, the man called Wortman turned again to Jethro. “What I want to ask you is this: is yore pa good and down on Bill? Does he teach you your brother is a skunk that deserves shootin’ for goin’ against his country?”

Jethro felt a great weakness. He had to steady himself against the counter for a second, and when he spoke the words were the first ones that occurred to him.

“My pa don’t teach me one way or the other. He knows that I think more of my brother than anybody else in the world—no matter where he is. And that’s all I’ve got to say to you.” He looked directly at the man with an anger that dissipated his weakness.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Guy Wortman (speaker), Ross Milton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton
Page Number: 78-79
Explanation and Analysis:

“There be things that’s evil in these woods tonight. I seed evil apassin’ my place a while ago, comin’ in from the shortcut road to town and reelin’ in the saddle. I heered evil braggin’ in the saloon today about layin’ fer a young ’un on his way home.” He reached over and took the reigns from Jethro’s hands. “I’d best drive till we’re out of the brush,” he added. We’re gittin’ close to the place where some piz’nous snake might strike quick.”

The world was turning upside down for Jethro. He felt as if he were someone else […]. When he tried to speak, he found that […] his lips worked as they had often seemed to work in a bad dream to form the words that he wanted to say, but no sound passed them, and there was nothing to do but sit quietly while his mind floundered in the uncertainties that beset it.

Related Characters: Dave Burdow (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Mary Creighton, Travis Burdow, Guy Wortman
Page Number: 90-91
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

If someone had asked Jethro to name a time when he left childhood behind him, he might have named that last week of March in 1862. He had learned a great deal about men and their unpredictable behavior the day he drove alone to Newton; now he was to learn what it meant to be the man of a family at ten. He had worked since he could remember, but his work had been done at the side of some older members of the family; when he had grown tired, he was encouraged to rest or sometimes he was dismissed from the task altogether. Now he was to know labor from dawn till sunset; he was to learn what it meant to scan the skies for rain while corn burned in the fields, or to see a heavy rainstorm lash grain from full, strong wheat stalks, or to know that hay, desperately needed for winter feeding, lay rotting in a wet quagmire of a field.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Jenny Creighton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Eb Carron, Ellen Creighton, John Creighton, Tom Creighton, Guy Wortman
Page Number: 97
Explanation and Analysis:

Jethro heard someone shout his father’s name and Bill’s and the word Copperheads.

Matt fumbled his way to the front door. “Show yore faces,” he called. “Come up and give me a chance to talk.”

There was only raucous, drunken laughter at his words. A bundle of something was thrown at the gate, and then the riders galloped on.

Jethro scrambled down the ladder and ran out into the yard. At the gate there was a bundle of switches tied together with a cord, the symbol adopted by local ruffians as a warning of punishment to follow. He tore off the paper that was attached to the cord and carried it inside to the table, where Ellen had lighted a lamp. On the paper in large printed letters was the message: “Theres trubel fer fokes that stands up fer there reb lovin sons.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Ellen Creighton, Guy Wortman
Page Number: 111
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I’m so scared, Jeth. Seems I hadn’t known what war was till Danny Lawrence come bringin’ us this awful word of Tom.” She closed the Bible and crossed her forearms on its faded cover. “I used to dream about the nice home Shad and me would have and how I’d keep it bright and pretty, how I’d wait of an evenin’ to see him comin’ down the road toward home. Nowadays I don’t make any plans; I just don’t dare to have any dreams for fear someday a soldier will come home and tell us that he was standin’ beside Shad, the way Danny was standin’ beside Tom—”

She got up abruptly and put the Bible back on the shelf among the books Shadrach had left. Together she and Jethro walked silently out into the barnlot and got their teams ready to go back to the fields.

Related Characters: Jenny Creighton (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Shadrach Yale , Tom Creighton, Dan Lawrence
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

His eyes were wide and troubled with his thoughts. He had a high respect for education, for authority of men in high places, and yet the stories in the newspapers made him wonder. McClellan, the most promising young officer in his class at West Point, was now the general who either didn’t move at all or moved ineffectually; Halleck, the author of a book on military science, was now the author of boasts that somehow branded him as a little man, even to a country boy who was hungry for a hero. There were stories of generals jealously eyeing one another, caring more for personal prestige than for defeating the Confederates; there were Pope and Sheridan, who blustered; there was Grant and the persistent stories of his heavy drinking. Nowhere in the North was there a general who looked and acted the part as did the Confederates’ Lee and Jackson.

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, George B. McClellan
Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

It is unfortunate that congressmen and their ladies should have been deprived of this spectacle. There was drama here, I can tell them—thousands upon thousands of us crossing the Rappahannock with banners flying, drums rolling, and our instruments of death gleaming in the sunlight. They could have seen those thousands scrambling up the innocent-looking wooded hills and falling like toy soldiers brushed over by a child’s hand; thousands of young men whose dreams and hopes were snuffed out in a second and who will be remembered only as simple soldiers who fell in a cruel, futile battle directed by men who can hardly be called less than simple murderers.

Related Characters: Shadrach Yale (speaker), Jethro Creighton, George B. McClellan
Page Number: 137-138
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

The authority of the law loomed big in his mind; he remembered, “You and your family will be in serious trouble.” Loyalty to his brother Tom and the many thousands who had fought to the last ditch at Pittsburgh Landing, at Antietam, Fredericksburg, and all the other places that were adding length to the long list—how could loyalty to these men be true if one were going to harbor and give comfort to a man who simply said, “I quit.”

But on the other hand, how did one feel at night if he awoke and remembered, “I’m the one that sent my cousin to his death.” Eb was not a hero, certainly—not now, anyway. People scorned the likes of Eb; sure, so did Jethro, and yet—

“How do I know what I’d be like if I was sick and scared and hopeless; how does […] any man know that ain’t been there?”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton (speaker), Matthew Creighton, Eb Carron, Abraham Lincoln, Tom Creighton, Travis Burdow
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis:

“Looks like purty important mail you’re gettin’, Jethro,” Ed said quietly. His eyes were full of puzzled concern.

Jethro’s head sawm. This was the showdown; now, all the family, Ed Turner, and soon the whole neighborhood would know everything. In the few seconds that passed before he opened the envelope, he wished with all his heart that he had not meddled in the affairs of a country at war, that he had let Eb work out his own problems, that he, Jethro, were still a sheltered young boy who did the tasks his father set for him and shunned the idea that he dare think for himself. He looked at the faces around him, and they spun in a strange mist of color—black eyes and blue eyes, gray hair and gold and black, pink cheeks and pale ones and weather-beaten brown ones.

Related Characters: Ed Turner (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Matthew Creighton, Eb Carron, Abraham Lincoln
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 12 Quotes

Ed brought the boy’s letter down for Matt to read. In it the boy told of the burning of Columbia, of how the soldiers laughed as a great wind fanned the flames, of the loot carried off, of mirrors and pianos smashed, and of intimate family treasures scattered to the winds by men who seemed to have gone mad. […]

“What is this goin’ to do to an eighteen-year-old boy, Matt? Kin a lad come through weeks of this kind of actions without becomin’ a hardened man? Is human life goin’ to be forever cheap to him and decency somethin’ to mock at? […] these boys air goin’ to believe that they be heroes for lootin’ and burnin’, fer laughin’ at distress, fer smashin’ the helpless without pity. In some ways Sammy is more of a child than yore Jeth here; he goes with the crowd without thinkin.’ Mary and me has had to guard against that way of his.

Related Characters: Ed Turner (speaker), Jethro Creighton, Ross Milton, Bill Creighton, Matthew Creighton
Page Number: 196
Explanation and Analysis:

“[…] Jeth, after the thirteenth amendment has become a part of our Constitution and for years afterward [...] there will be men and women with dark faces who will walk the length and width of this land in search of the bright promise the thirteenth amendment holds out to them. […] What’s going to happen to them, Jeth? What will become of men and women who have known nothing but servitude all the days of their lives? They are without experience, without education; they’ll be pawns in the hands of exploiters all over the nation. […] see if [Northern abolitionists] extend the hand of friendship to the uneducated, unskilled men who will come north looking to them as a savior. […] I tell you, all of us are getting a little quieter when the question comes up as to what we are to do about the products of slavery.

Related Characters: Ross Milton (speaker), Jethro Creighton
Page Number: 200
Explanation and Analysis:

Daily the color of April grew brighter. The apple and peach orchards were in bloom again, and the redbud was almost ready to burst. The little leaves on the silver poplars quivered in green and silver lights with every passing breeze, and Jenny’s favorite lilacs bloomed in great thick clusters, deep purple and as fragrant as any beautiful thing on earth.

Then suddenly, because there were no longer any eyes to perceive it, the color was gone, and the fifth April had become, like her four older sisters, a time of grief and desolation.

[…] Jethro would remember a sunlit field and a sense of serenity and happiness such as he had not known since early childhood. He would remember […] Nancy running toward him […] He thought at first that something had happened to his father, or [John…]

Then Nancy said, “Jeth, it’s the President—they’ve killed the President.”

Related Characters: Jethro Creighton, Jenny Creighton, Abraham Lincoln, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee, Tom Creighton, Nancy Creighton
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis: