Just south of Alfordsville stands a lone pine on a hill as a sentinel from another age; a time our country was being torn apart by a war when brother fought brother and families were destroyed.
I sat in the midst of the battleground wonderin’ where to look next for my son’s grave. I hadn’t thought in my sixty years my life would come to searching for a grave at Shiloh.
When my son left for the war between the states it was in the heat of recruitment. I’d told him he shouldn’t go. His wife Mary’d begged him for the children’s sake not to leave ‘em, but Mike was full of ideals. Me and his ma had taught him too well what was right and what was wrong, he’d told us ‘fore leavin’ for his trainin’. His youngest, Mary Rose, weren’t no older than three then, and his oldest Samuel, named after me, was only ten. I recon it was the adventure he wanted; to come back a hero. If only he’d just come back alive was all me and his ma and Mary ever wanted.
When I got that letter sayin’ he was dead at Shiloh I had to come fetch him. I told his ma I’d bring him home if it was the last thing I did. But now, . . . I have to fight back the tears that well up in my eyes from what I’ve seen. It’s been ni’-on to a week since that battle was fought and there’s still bodies not buried.
I seen the battlefield where his regiment fought so brave and trounced them Rebs' attack. Mike would a been proud of ‘em. That’s where I seen some of them bodies. Some of ‘em movin’. My heart nearly jumped outta my chest and into the kerchief I wore over my nose and mouth. I got scared ’till I figured it was just maggots inside makin’ it look like them soldiers was breathin’.
The feller what’s in charge of the hospital says weren’t no time to make a casket. When the battle was over they took the belongin’s off the dead to send home and threw what they could in a trench, what they used to fight in and covered ‘em over. They couldn’t rightly tell me where he was. So I started diggin’ in them trenches. Them what was buried was all swelled up and blue.
The stink of the dead is all ‘round me now. There’s others here leavin’ with broken hearts and souls. And me, a grown man cryin’ for the livin’. We’re the one’s whats gotta go on. I can’t see no way I’ll ever find Mike with bodies buried three and four deep, but Lord I can’t go back with nothin‘.
Sam Allen pulled up to his three room cabin on the hill just south of Alfordsville eight weeks after he’d left to find his son’s body. He had no coffin in the back of the wagon. Instead he’d brought back seven pine seedlings. It was one tree for each week he’d searched the battlefield for his son’s body. He planted those seven pines on that hill as a monument to his son, Mike.
In 1921 Mary Rose watched with pride as her granddaughter, Pearl, was married under those pines.
In 2004 the last surviving pine tree was struck by lightening. It still stands as a scared monument to Mike Allen, a Civil War causality.
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