THE DRUMMER BOY ON INDEPENDENCE DAY

This story was written in the mid-nineteen-fifties, after E. L. Doctorow, then in his twenties, had completed his military service in Germany.

- E. L. DOCTOROW

It was found by the biographer Bruce Weber with Doctorow’s papers at the Fales Library and Special Collections, at New York University.

In our town, as in most, we celebrated the Fourth of July with a parade around the square and a few speeches from the steps of City Hall. An indispensable part of the ceremony, of course, was the Civil War veteran, and at the time I’m telling about we still had one—a Confederate, naturally, an old man of bone and leather named John Sewetti. John had been a drummer boy with T. J. Jackson and was thought to have seen most of what happened in the Shenandoah Valley. But he never spoke about his experiences, and he must have been a hundred and two years old before he finally agreed to lead an Independence Day parade.

The year he accepted the invitation, the Parade Committee, which had offered it to him by custom, nearly swallowed its collective cigar. John usually turned callers from his door, and, by his own custom, he had refused for decades to have anything to do with the holiday. The fact is, he wasn’t an easy subject for town pride: in the first place, when, on each birthday, he was asked to what he attributed his long life, he always said his genes; in the second, he was known to hate children; and, in the third, he was so old that his wrinkles had smoothed out again and he had the face of a beautiful, toothless girl.