A Horseman in the Sky

The war exacts a terrible price on Druse. First, he separates himself from his parents in the final weeks of his mother’s life to join the Union army, becoming a “traitor” (according to his father) to his home state of Virginia. Second, he is forced to choose between killing his father, a Confederate, and endangering his fellow troops. Choosing to protect his comrades, he shoots at his father’s horse, leading to his father’s death, and must live with the pain and guilt of that loss. The ties of home, family, and community are torn asunder by the Civil War.

The motif of statuary, primarily developed through the father, at first signifies the virtues of resilience, firmness, and duty needed by a soldier, but the end of the story reveals the cost for Druse of embracing these ideals: It dehumanizes him. From the outset, the father is described as “leonine” (4), which evokes his authoritative, deliberate, and decisive character. After taking a moment of “silence” in response to his son’s decision to join the Union, he delivers a short speech that at once judges his son a traitor and exhorts him to pursue his “duty” (4), however his son conceives it. The figure the father cuts on horseback, as Druse awakes to see him perched on the cliff, is “straight and soldierly,” with the sureness and “repose of a Greek god carved in [...] marble” (5). At first, Druse mistakes him for a literal statue. But even as he falls to his death, as witnessed by the unnamed officer, the father appears to retain “a firm seat in the saddle” (7) and exhibits “grace and ease and intention” (8), as if still in control of his plummeting horse.

Such qualities of self-control, however, “masked a breaking heart” at his son’s departure from home (5). His emotional life is repressed, a fact evident also in his decision to keep Druse’s mother from knowing his decision to fight for the Union: Her emotions must not be disturbed. Having contemplated the rider as a statue, a figure or representation of a human being rather than a living one, Druse is ready to shoot without a second thought. Physical and figurative distance initially prevent the act from prompting a moral quandary. However, as soon as there is the suggestion of a human bond when the rider turns to look “into his eyes, into his brave, compassionate heart” (6), Druse loses the will to fire and becomes a tumult of emotion.

Eventually, he repeats to himself his father’s exhortation to follow duty (as if it “were a divine mandate” [7]) and regains control. The narrator says, “He was calm now. His teeth were firmly but not rigidly closed; his nerves were as tranquil as a sleeping babe’s” (7). Devotion to duty has rendered him innocent and resolute, an embodiment of the traits of his statuesque father. This state of peace does not last. After he pulls the trigger and sees the result, he does indeed remain motionless, but it is due to the paralysis of trauma, not the quiet of inner peace. He is pale like a Grecian marble, but the reference here evokes the lifelessness of statuary, rather than its capacity to glorify a military past.