The Two Thousand Dollar Man

Two thousand dollars in the Chatham probate ink,
Written down in tidy figures by a clerk who didn't think,
Two thousand for the millwright, for the gears I'd learned by hand,
For the dam I knew by soundness and the timber on the land.
They split my house like cordwood when the winter debts came due,
Sent Lucy down to Macon, and my Jonas — no one knew.
There's no column for the sorrow, so the sorrow wasn't shown,
Just two thousand in the margin, and the balance of a loan.

Across the Ogeechee in Bryan lived a boy without a team,
Working rented sandy acres on a tenant's thinning dream.
When the drums came from Savannah with the ribbons and the band,
He took a rifle for a Cause that never gave him land.
Eleven dollars every month to stand where shells are thrown,
To guard the planter's parlor while the weeds took all his own.

Who writes the price upon a man in ink or crimson mud?
Who weighs a chain against a wage, a ledger against blood?
For both of us were weighed against another man's estate:
One kept inside the ledger book, one spent outside the gate.

He wrote his mother from Virginia that the shoes had left his feet,
That a rich man's war in parlor talk is a poor man's winding sheet.
In December on the river I heard Sherman's guns come down,
When McAllister was taken and the smoke rolled toward the town.
One of us was worth two thousand if he stayed inside the chain,
One of us was worth eleven dollars, dying in the rain.

Who writes the price upon a man in ink or crimson mud?
Who weighs a chain against a wage, a ledger against blood?
For both of us were weighed against another man's estate:
One kept inside the ledger book, one spent outside the gate.

Don't tell me we were brothers, don't tell me it was the same:
He went to war a poor man, but he went there in his name.
And I stood upon the ledger where my name was barely penned,
Between the mule and the millstones, with a number at the end.

The boy came home in a letter in a sergeant's careful hand,
And the weeds had all his acres, and the planter all his land.
I walked to Macon in the spring with no pass to show the guard,
Asked for Lucy at the churches, asked for Jonas in the yards.
Now I stand beside the river, holding back the water's weight,
No price upon my shoulders and no master at the gate,
But the only page that bears my name is the page that bore my price.

Lucy's on line eleven...
Jonas isn't on the page.