Confederates in the Attic (22 page)

“That’s right. Wanna come?”

“Hell yeah. Let’s do the first ten miles barefoot!”

Rob smiled approvingly. “Super hardcore,” he said.

This was a side of Rob I hadn’t appreciated before. His reputation and odd magnetism made him a missionary or guru, drawing acolytes to the hardcore faith. “If you can turn just one guy, he can bring his whole unit around,” Rob explained.

Rob planned to spend the day searching for fresh talent to recruit. He slipped on a red armband marked “ambulance corps” and issued a spare one to me. As nineteenth-century medics, we could wander the battlefield without taking part in combat. Rob even had a flask of
gin in case we needed to administer anesthesia to the wounded. “Gives you the best seat in the house,” Rob said, perching atop an embankment.

The second day’s script called for a reenactment of the Mule Shoe at Spotsylvania, a bloodbath soon after the Wilderness during which Union and Confederate troops fought hand-to-hand. As the Army of Northern Virginia took up positions in the trenchworks, Rob cast a discerning eye at each unit’s impression. He wasn’t impressed.

“Look at that guy with the derby hat. Ridiculous. It’s 1880s Butch Cassidy stuff.”

“See the big officer over there? Great uniform, but the weight’s way out of line. And who’s the guy behind him with the red pants? He looks like a circus clown.”

“Ouch, way too much red trim on those artillery uniforms. They look like Shriners.”

I spotted the 32nd Virginia and pointed the unit out to Rob. “Those were my guys yesterday. What do you think?”

Rob frowned. “Poor cut. Wrong trouser color. And way too much blubber. The whole unit needs liposuction.”

I pointed hopefully at Captain Mullen, the dashing officer who had struck me the day before as possessing that Confederate
je ne sais quoi
. Rob
savait exactement quoi. “Très
farb,” he said. “A real Confederate would eventually have cut that hair to keep the lice under control. And what’s with the hat? It’s all wrong—the Boer War maybe, not this one.”

Rob scouted for another hour, gradually sinking into despair. But as the battle got under way, he finally spotted a prospect. Pointing at a mud-caked rebel, he said, “Garment’s hung fine and the bedroll’s just right.” Then the youth took a hit and sprawled backwards, thrashing wildly and ripping his shirt open to get at the imaginary wound.

“Wow, you see him get popped? He’s a natural. C’mon.” We rushed over to the wounded youth. I checked his pulse while Rob cradled his head. “Great hit,” Rob said, sloshing gin down his throat. “I liked the bouncing around. Looked like a nerve wound. You ever heard of the Southern Guard?”

As Rob evangelized, there was a pause in the fighting. A Union
officer sprinted into the rebel trench “Stop shooting,” he shouted. “This is unscripted! We’re supposed to do hand-to-hand.” He conferred with a rebel officer and retreated to his position. Then the Confederate officer climbed atop the breastwork and waved his saber. On cue, the Yankees poured across twenty yards of open ground and into the trench. The blue and gray tangled in a melee of swinging rifle butts and mock bayonet thrusts. Several men abandoned their weapons and began groping on the ground. I was reminded of fake wrestling matches I’d watched on TV as a child.

After half an hour, Taps played. The battle was over and so was the weekend’s reenactment. But as the dead resurrected and shook hands, I noticed a dozen men still sprawled on the ground. One clutched his arm, another writhed and moaned. Their impressions looked remarkably good and I searched for Rob to see if we should recruit them. Instead, an officer ran up and asked of my armband, “Are you doing nineteenth-century medical or twentieth?”

“Nineteenth.”

“Damn. Some guys got really carried away.”

A moment later, modern medics appeared in an ambulance. They bandaged a broken nose, toted off a man with broken ribs, and stuck an oxygen mask on an older man struggling for breath. I later learned that fifty-seven people were hurt in the weekend’s reenactment, and two required hospitalization. At some events, casualties were mortal: several men had expired from heart attacks and one froze to death during an unseasonably cold night in Tennessee.

Rob had vanished with his new recruit, so I wandered off the field alone as reenactors and spectators streamed toward the parking lots. One woman lingered on the grass long after the others had left. Slim and delicate-featured, she wore a black hooped skirt, a tight black bodice and held a black parasol over her lace-covered head. I bowed slightly and asked what had brought her to the Wilderness.

“A reb shot my husband at Gettysburg,” she said. “I came here to remember him.”

Playing along, I offered the view that the rebel who killed her husband was simply following orders. “But I’m very sorry just the same, m’am.”

“That’s very kind of you, soldier,” she said, wiping away what looked to be a real tear. I asked what she did on the home front now that her gallant husband was gone.

“Empty bedpans and take blood,” she said; “I’m a registered nurse in Tonawanda, New York.”

She smiled, signaling that we were now “out of character,” and reached out a black lace glove so I could pull her from the grass. “This getup weighs ten pounds,” she complained. “I can’t wear it two days in a row because it starts to smell.”

As we strolled toward the parking lot, Karen Meinhold told me how she’d become a Union widow. Six years before, while visiting the chocolate factory in Hershey, Pennsylvania, she’d stopped off at Gettysburg and been stunned by all the graves. Knowing little about the War, she began reading and gradually became obsessed. Now, she often drove twelve hours after work on Fridays to reach Virginia in time for the opening shots of reenactments.

But she didn’t want to play any of the usual female roles, least of all nurse. “After all, that’s what I do in real life,” she said. Thirty-four and single, she’d settled on widowhood, hand-sewing her seven-layer outfit: pantalets, chemise, corset, corset cover, hoop, petticoat and dress. “At Gettysburg last year it was 108 degrees. I almost fainted.”

Her distress must have been fetching; she’d fielded eleven proposals of marriage during the battle and suspected not all were in jest. But Karen brushed off the overtures, intent on remaining a widow. “It may sound silly,” she said, “but I really do mourn the Union dead.”

We’d reached the hot dog stand that divided our two nations; one sign pointed to a parking area marked “Union,” another to a pasture labeled “C.S.A.” A traffic jam had already formed, heading back to the twentieth century.

“After these battles, all the soldiers just get up and walk away,” Karen said, as though she wished the drama ended otherwise. “But in real life, it didn’t happen that way. Glory had a cost. I’m here so people will remember that.”

Footsore and dirt-encrusted, I climbed in my car and crawled toward the highway behind hundreds of other Confederates. I turned
on the radio, then quickly turned it off. There was something to what the others had said. Despite the weekend’s discomforts and phony moments, it had provided a pleasant taste of the enforced leisure and sociability of nineteenth-century life: chatting with the women as we peeled carrots, lazing beside Rob as he slow-cooked his breakfast, ambling down the mile-long country lane between the Union and Confederate camps, a distance that a car would have covered in a minute. Modern life rarely allowed for these simple, unhurried pleasures.

Reaching the highway, I stopped for coffee at a 7-Eleven. The store was crowded with black shoppers. Several of them stared quizzically—and, I sensed, with some hostility—at my Confederate uniform. Clunking self-consciously to the counter in my hobnailed boots and gray trousers, I felt like blurting out, “I’m just playacting,” or “It’s only a game.”

Instead, I returned to my car feeling confused and ashamed. This, too, was an aspect of the twentieth century that reenactors were fleeing: a heterogeneous society still raw with historic wounds and racial sensitivities. In principle, remembrance of the War could be a way to probe these scars, many of which trailed back to the 1860s. But reenactments did precisely the opposite, blandly reconciling North and South in a grand spectacle that glorified battlefield valor and the stoicism of civilians.

Driving back north across the Rappahannock and the Rapidan, I felt like a farb of the heart. Flags and muskets and uniforms weren’t just toys for adult boys to play with, nor could their symbolism be shed like so much dirty clothing. When I arrived home, a grungy Confederate foot soldier, even the dog didn’t recognize me. Peeling off my socks and boots and gray wool trousers, I resolved that next time I’d be true to my views and wear blue.

S
oon after the Wilderness battle, I headed south again to keep an engagement of a different sort. From the start of my journey, I’d thought about contacting Shelby Foote. This proved surprisingly easy to do. His number was listed in the phonebook. But after picking up the phone a few times, I decided to type a long letter instead, requesting an interview. He responded with a succinct message, handwritten on delicate white notepaper. “I’ll be glad to talk with you if we can find the time.”

I took this as a summons to Memphis. Foote lived in a 1930s Tudor ringed by blossoming plum, dogwood and magnolia trees. A maid showed me into a handsomely appointed den with a pitched timber ceiling, dark wood flooring and liquor bottles set on a trolley. The setting wasn’t quite what I’d expected: suburban baronial, more Henry the Eighth than William Faulkner.

The figure who strode briskly into the room a moment later also surprised me. Wearing trim gray trousers and a polo shirt, the silver-haired sage of Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary looked as though he might have played a few sets of tennis before breakfast.

He also seemed more aloof than the grandfatherly figure on television. Without so much as a handshake or hello, Foote led me into a study with a throw rug at the door that said, “Go Away.”

A bed occupied most of the study and Foote pointed me to a chair on one side of it. He took a seat across the bed, as far away as he could get. Angled with his back half-turned to me, he reached for one of a dozen pipes scattered across the desk behind him, tamped tobacco into the bowl, and said by way of small talk, “What can I do for you?”

I wasn’t exactly sure. Foote’s mellifluous drawl and folksy stories on television had captivated me, as had his three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, still a hot-selling classic twenty years after its publication. The seventy-eight-year-old writer had become a curious phenomenon—a Civil War celebrity—and I’d somehow imagined that my cathode-tube acquaintance with him would make it easy to just chat about my travels, and to get his views on some of the impressions I’d formed.

Instead, I found myself groping for one of a dozen Big Theme questions I’d rehearsed just in case on the taxi ride over. When I finally lobbed one across the bed—why was memory of the War so enduring?—Foote smashed it straight back. “Because it’s the big one. It measures what we are, good and bad. If you look at American history as the life span of a man, the Civil War represents the great trauma of our adolescence. It’s the sort of experience we never forget.”

Foote lit his pipe. I lobbed another one: Why did the South in particular cling to remembrance of the War? “It was fought in our own backyard,” he immediately replied, “or front yard if you will, and you’re not apt to forget something that happened on your own property. I was raised up in a rough-and-tumble society. I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”

How did the experience of defeat define the post-War South?

“It gave us a sense of tragedy, which the rest of the nation lacks. In the movie
Patton
the general talks about how ‘We Americans have never lost a war.’ Well, Patton’s own grandfather was in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He damn well lost a war.”

We went on like this for half an hour, each question prompting a
perfect sound bite of the sort Foote had mouthed for interviewers a hundred times before. I felt as though we were working our way through a responsive liturgy. I also felt like a jerk for wasting his time. It was a relief when the telephone rang.

“You’re speaking to him,” Foote gruffly told the caller, who, like me, must have been surprised to reach the Great Man so easily. As Foote answered a question about rebels in Missouri, I looked around his study. The room appeared as though it hadn’t changed much in the thirty years since Foote began writing there. The phone had a rotary dial. There was no computer, printer or modem. I’d read that Foote wrote longhand, using an antiquated pen dipped in ink. He regarded even the fountain pen as a “mechanical intrusion” and a concession to a modern era of which he didn’t wholly approve.

Foote hung up the phone. “It’s a nightmare, ever since that Burns thing,” he grumbled. “I’m trying to write a novel but mostly I work at answering that phone.”