MacPherson's Lament

RADFORD, VIRGINIA

THERE WERE ONLY six gray-clad soldiers in a makeshift camp near the house. The redbrick mansion sat on a hill overlooking the New River; it had belonged to a colonel in the Revolutionary War. Now its sprawling green lawn was dotted again with tents and tethered horses.

On the hill all was quiet. Beneath a tarp stretched across four poles, one grizzled sergeant spread out a makeshift dinner of hardtack, apples, and potatoes. On a log in front of the tent, a lanky bearded soldier was cleaning a rifle and passing the time of day with a raw-boned mountain boy, who was whittling on a stick of applewood. The smallest Rebel, a baby-faced corporal with wire-rimmed spectacles, was sitting on the edge of the hill beside the small cannon. The corporal was making ammunition cartridges by pouring gunpowder into paper tubes to be fired at some forthcoming battle. At the bottom of the hill, a private in a makeshift uniform was walking the perimeter, pacing back and forth with his rifle on his shoulder, solemn and silent. The group’s commanding officer, a stocky red-bearded man who in civilian life was a country lawyer, sat with his back against an oak tree, making notes in a small leather book.

The homemade flag flapping in the breeze read THE WYTHE GRAYS and in smaller block letters beneath it: 68th VIRGINIA INFANTRY. The flagstaff was a six-foot tree limb, trimmed of its branches, but gnarled, and still bearing gray bark. It was propped against a cheval-de-frise, a log pierced by sharp sticks used as a defensive barricade. Beside the regimental flag flew the Southern Battle Flag, a red field crossed by two blue stripes emblazoned with stars. It was the only Confederate flag that most people ever saw, but it was not the flag of the nation; the Southern equivalent of the U.S. Stars and Stripes was the Stars and Bars, a circle of seven stars on a square of blue, with two broad red strips separated by a band of white. It was not particularly distinctive, and like President Jefferson Davis, it would be all but forgotten after the war, while Robert E. Lee and his star-crossed battle flag lived on in song and story.

“Do you need any help, Corporal?” The grizzled sergeant had finished laying out the food and wandered over to observe the cartridge-making.

“Nice of you to ask, now that I’m about finished. Think we’ll need more than that?”

“Depends on what transpires this afternoon. If nobody shows up, one of us may have to galvanize. Unless you want to sit around all afternoon and bake in that wool uniform.”

“How about galvanizing Randy? He’s been on guard duty for a good while. He deserves a little excitement.”

“Okay. We’ll see. It’s early yet. Might as well wait a while.”

“Are you expecting any action, Sergeant Jennings?”

“Maybe. The 15th U.S. knows we’re here.” From the edge of the hill, he looked out across the little town of Radford, where all was quiet on the summer afternoon.

Suddenly the sentry shouted, “Company coming!” and they all looked down toward the bottom of the hill, where a white Ford Tempo was pulling into the municipal parking lot.

“Places everybody!” yelled the red-bearded officer. “Civilians on the way!”

The civilians, a yuppie family with two small children, got out and made their way up the hill. The little boy, a sturdy blond who looked about four, ran over to inspect the cannon from a cautious distance, while his parents and older sister looked at the food display under the tarpaulin. “But Arby’s is just across the street,” said the little girl, a prim nine-year-old firmly in the bossy stage of childhood.

“Arby’s?” echoed Sergeant Jennings in tones of complete bewilderment. “What’s that, little lady?”

The child pointed to the fast-food place beyond the parking lot and across the street. “That restaurant. We just had lunch there.”

“All I see are some houses,” said the sergeant peering out in the direction of her pointing. “And if one of them is owned by a Mr. Arby, we’d sure be happy if he’d bring us some grub, but we haven’t heard tell of him.”

“They have to stay in character, Megan,” said the little girl’s mother. “Remember it’s supposed to be 1862 for them.”

“1864, ma’am,” Jennings replied.

The little girl looked at the sergeant’s uniform and wrinkled her freckled nose. “There’s a dry cleaner’s over there across the road, too, mister.”

After a few moments of silence the little boy ventured to speak to the corporal, who was still sitting near the cannon. “Hey, is that thing real?”

“Sure is,” the corporal replied. “We might fire in a couple of minutes, in case you’re interested. What’s your name?”

“Josh. You gonna shoot anything?”

“Not with cannon balls, but it’ll make a loud booming noise. You’ll like it.”

Josh considered this for a moment, and then turned his attention to the corporal. “Those are funny shoes.”

“They’re Jefferson brogans. That’s what you wear if you’re a Confederate soldier.”

“Is that a real gun?”

“It sure is. It’s an 1841 Springfield smoothbore musket. I was just making cartridges for it. See?”

“Did you ever kill anybody?”

“Umm. In a battle it’s hard to tell,” said the corporal, and the little boy wandered away.

After a few more minutes of inspection and explanation, followed by the firing of the small cannon, a Yankee sniper (Randy, the sentry, now wearing a blue uniform) appeared. He fired blanks at the Rebel encampment and was chased around the old house for a tree-to-tree shoot-out. Finally, the young corporal took aim and brought down the sniper, who died dramatically and at great length near the visitors.

That little boy said, “Can I have his hat?”

Two of the soldiers carried the body behind the house, to change clothes and return to sentry duty, and the family left. The lanky soldier who had been cleaning his gun walked over to talk to the corporal.

“That little girl was tough,” he laughed. “She kept trying to trip us up by asking about current events. Captain Nance handled her pretty well, though. I like talking to kids. The ones I hate are the know-it-alls.” He assumed a pompous facial expression and mimicked such a civilian. “Soldier, that is a navy Colt pistol that you are wearing, not an army one!”

“I can usually come up with a plausible story,” said the corporal. “There was all kinds of scrounging going on during the war. Hardly anybody was regulation past ’63. The ones I hate are the people who assume that because we’re Confederate reenactors we’re redneck racists.”

“Just remind them that it was Philip Sheridan, the Union general, who said, ‘The only good Indian is a dead Indian,’ when the army sent him out West after the war.”

“I’m not supposed to know that,” said the corporal. “It hasn’t happened yet!”

“Oh, that’s right. Well, you could go into a long explanation about states’ rights and representative voting by population and import tariffs, but people have never found those explanations very glamorous. That’s why the North always claimed the war was a crusade, even though the Emancipation Proclamation wasn’t issued until halfway through the war. People like easy, flashy answers to complicated issues.”

“I know, Ken. Usually, I just say I’m a corporal from the mountains, and that I don’t know anything about politics.”

Ken shook his head. “You’re a corporal. Boy, is that ironic.”

“You think I should be playing my own great-grandfather like you’re doing, right? Well, I can’t do that. I would be way too conspicuous. And the Silverbacks would never stand for it.”

“The what?”

“The good old boys who run things. They may not be racists, but they sure as hell can be chauvinists. That’s why I keep a low profile. And that’s why you can’t tell anybody who I am.”

“But you’re a good reenactor,” said Ken Filban. “Do you really think they’d mind?”

“Mind?” said A. P. Hill. “They’d go ballistic.”