MacPherson's Lament

BETWEEN ATLANTA AND THE SEA…

AT HER ADVANCED age Flora Dabney felt that she was really too old to command an expedition of this sort, but there didn’t seem to be much choice in the matter. The state had forced them out of their rightful home-and really, what could you expect of those carpetbagging Northern Virginians? Not really Southern at all. So now they were fugitives. But Robert E. Lee had lost his citizenship, too. She kept reminding the others that it wasn’t what the government thought of you that mattered; it was whether you fought with honor for your Cause.

In truth, their exile wasn’t too onerous. Not like poor President Davis’s incarceration at Fortress Monroe in Virginia, with leg irons and all. Mary Lee Pendleton had managed to get some of the money from the house sale wired back from the Cayman Islands, whereupon they had purchased a nice large car-and fled. Flora suspected that they might have been able to get a better price on the Chrysler if they hadn’t arrived at the Lynchburg dealer’s showroom by taxi, but they had decided that haste was worth the few thousand extra they’d paid.

Of course, all eight of them wouldn’t fit into anything the dealer had to offer, but that was all right, because Jenny Wade Allan and Julia Hotchkiss weren’t in any condition to ride in a getaway car. After the taxi dropped them off at the car dealer, it had sped away again, taking Jenny and Julia to the Roanoke airport, with Anna Douglas along to look after them. (It was fortunate that the taxi driver had agreed to a daily rate, or else they’d have owed him a king’s ransom.) Anna had some of the money, and instructions to hire a car and go on ahead to their destination. She had also taken Beauregard, the Home’s Confederate cat, in a mesh pet carrier, to be checked on board as “living luggage.” The separation had been Dolly Smith’s idea. She had insisted that the group split up to travel so that they would be more difficult to trace. All those years of watching gangster movies on The Late Show had stood her in good stead as a budding fugitive.

With the two invalids and Anna safely sent away to plague USAir, the remaining five rebels purchased an automobile, paid in cash, and departed before the dealer had time to consider the peculiarity of it all. (He was heard to mutter several times that afternoon, “But they couldn’t be drug dealers!”)

Thank heaven Flora’s eyesight was still good, and there weren’t any gears to shift anymore in these newfangled cars. She’d never quite gotten the hang of that. But she was a better driver than Ellen Morrison, who tended to get flustered in traffic. Flora did most of the driving, but on interstates, she’d let Ellen take a turn at the wheel. Timid Ellen would pull cautiously into the slow lane and putt along at a painstaking forty-five miles an hour while more daring motorists blitzed past them, sneering. Ellen would flash them an apologetic smile and cautiously accelerate to forty-seven for a mile or two.

At that rate, it had taken them a good deal longer to get to Georgia than might be inferred from a road map of the southeastern states, but when there were no trucks to intimidate them, the drive had been pleasant enough. Dolly had kept up a running commentary on the landscaping of the various homes they passed. She did not approve of potted geraniums as an alternative to hard work in one’s garden.

Flora, Lydia, and Mary Lee had spent many hours arguing over their best course of action. Flora wanted to go directly to the rendezvous point in case Anna should have trouble coping with the invalids, Jenny and Julia, but Lydia and Mary Lee were enjoying their first outing in years, and they insisted on sightseeing along the way. Finally Flora gave in and agreed to a few stops: the outlet mall south of Charlotte; some antique shop in Columbia, South Carolina; and a night at Unicoi State Park near Helen, Georgia. (Mary Lee would pick up every advertising brochure in the rack at the interstate rest stops!) Flora suspected that there were more direct ways to reach their destination, but since her eyes couldn’t manage the fine print on the map, she had to accept Lydia’s suggestions for the best routes.

She’d finally balked at Mary Lee’s request to see Stone Mountain. “It’s south of Atlanta!” Flora said, accidentally pressing the horn in her agitation. “You can’t tell me that’s on the way to anywhere!”

“Well, not exactly,” Mary Lee admitted. “But I have always wanted to see it. I remember when they dedicated the mountain back in 1925. My father went along for the dedication and brought back one of the commemorative half-dollars made to honor the occasion.” She held up the silver coin, which had been set into a ring of silver and made into a necklace. On the shiny face of the U.S. half-dollar were the images of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson side by side on horseback, and above them a semicircle of stars.

“I wonder how many of those half-dollars the government minted,” mused Dolly. “And isn’t it amazing that they did it at all? Strike a coin commemorating an old enemy, I mean.”

“I’ve always wanted to see the carvings of the Confederacy on Stone Mountain,” said Lydia Bridgeford. “You know, my dear father was a prominent naval officer during the War Between the States.”

“So you keep telling us,” murmured Mary Lee.

“But it isn’t on our route,” Flora said.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” said Dolly.

Afterward, Ellen Morrison said that she hadn’t liked to disappoint poor Lydia and Mary Lee, which is why she had cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the detour. Flora continued to grumble about the mutiny, but she grudgingly followed her navigator’s directions until they could see the bare stone mountain gleaming on the horizon. It rose up out of the flat Georgia plain like a natural skyscraper, solitary and splendid. “We can stay an hour,” Flora warned them. “Then we have to head east again.”

Even that had been too long, she decided later. Trust Mary Lee to strike up a conversation with some nice-looking young man in the parking lot, and before you could say “Chickamauga,” she was telling him that they were from Danville and they were playing “Do you know so-and-so?” Flora came upon them in the middle of this conversation, and to her horror she discovered that they did seem to have a common acquaintance. They were nodding and smiling to a degree that gave her palpitations. And of course he asked where they were going, at which point Flora gave Mary Lee a sharp jab in the ribs, so she amended her answer to “an island to see our friend Major Edward Anderson.” Mary Lee was a dreadful liar. She couldn’t even make up a name without accidentally quoting something she’d read.

“Loose lips sink ships!” Flora had hissed at Mary Lee as she hustled her off to the Chrysler. “Do you want to end up in an old folks’ home back in Danville?”

“But I didn’t tell him who we are,” Mary Lee protested, trying to look sweet and helpless.

“Just as well I got to you in time,” snapped Flora. “You were about to exchange visiting cards with that whippersnapper. How do you know he’s not a policeman?”

“Oh, no, dear. He told me that he’s an actor.”

“So was John Wilkes Booth,” muttered Flora.

“Perhaps we should move along,” said Dolly as the rest of them climbed into the car. “I’ll feel much better when we’ve found the gold. Won’t you, Flora?”

“If we find it,” muttered Flora.