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 [.