Confederates in the Attic (34 page)

Unripe apples and corn caused diarrhea, draining the men still more. Many rebels also went barefoot. One Marylander described passing Confederates as a “ragged, lean and hungry set of wolves. Yet there was a dash about them that the Northern men lacked. They rode like circus riders.” Rob became even more animated than usual as he read these accounts, which described the exact image of the Confederacy he sought so hard to capture in his reenacting: threadbare, famished, lice-and dysentery-ridden, yet for all that romantic.

It was ten o’clock when we reached Sharpsburg, the small Maryland town where Lee’s northern push ended beside Antietam Creek, on September 17, the bloodiest day of the Civil War. Sharpsburg didn’t appear much bigger now than it had been in 1862. Modest storefronts and shallow-porched houses clung to the main street. The only sign of life was an old tavern called Pete’s, with a neon Coors sign flickering in the window and a Union and Confederate soldier posted on a placard by the door.

As soon as we stepped inside, I wondered if we’d made a mistake. The entire bar crowd turned to stare at us, and their gaze wasn’t altogether friendly. Most of the patrons were young men with unkempt beards, cut-off T-shirts, menacing tattoos, and eyes red from hours of assault drinking and smoking. One of the men looked up from the pool table and mumbled, “Looks like we’ve got some Civil War boys here.”

Ignoring their stares, I headed straight to the bar and studied a handwritten menu listing pickled eggs and something called a Jell-O Shooter. “What’s that?” I asked the barmaid.

“A Jell-O and vodka slush,” she said.

“Try one, Yank,” the man beside me said. “It’ll fuck you up good.”

I ordered beer instead and slipped, reflexively, into the gee-whiz reporter mode I often adopted in awkward spots. “What do folks do here in Sharpsburg?” I asked my neighbor.

“Drink,” he said.

“What else?”

“Fish.”

I turned to the man on my other side and asked the same question. He, too, was cross-eyed from alcohol. “We fish,” he said Wearily. “And drink. I drank my breakfast. Lunch, too.”

Rob stood a few feet away, listening to a long-haired man who wore leather chaps and a black T-shirt decorated with a skull and crossbones. The man spoke in a drunken stage whisper. “Well, Johnnie,” he told Rob,
“you
can stay, but your Yankee friend has got to go.” He sounded like he was teasing, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

“Round here,” another man barked, “we don’t like the Feds.”

Rob nodded approvingly. “If the government doesn’t stop telling people how to live,” he bellowed like a rebel of old, “there just might be another Civil War.”

“Damn right! The government isn’t going to take away my guns!”

“Nossir!” Rob said, slapping the man’s shoulder. “Once we lose those guns, no telling what goes next.”

At this point one of the bikers offered to buy us a round. Another man wanted to put us up for the night. We politely declined both offers, drained our beers, and slipped back into the Maryland night.

Relieved, I complimented Rob on his performance. He smiled and hummed “My Maryland,” the wartime song that began “The despot’s heel is on thy shore!” and ended “She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!” Maryland never did come—into the Confederacy, that is. But the sympathies of many of her citizens remained strongly Southern. It was a Marylander, John Wilkes Booth, who leapt onto the stage of Ford’s Theater shouting
“Sic semper tyrannis!”
after having put a bullet in Lincoln’s head. For the crowd at Pete’s Bar, at least, sentiments hadn’t changed all that much in the 130 years since.

As we drove to the edge of the battlefield park, Rob disclosed our plan of attack. We’d hike under cover of darkness to our camping spot in Bloody Lane, the sunken road where the South lost several thousand men in the space of three hours. It was a loony scheme, not to mention illegal. I knew from my visit to Shiloh that darkness didn’t protect us from park rangers trolling with night-vision goggles.
Anyway, sleeping in a ditch that had once brimmed with Confederate dead struck me as vaguely necrophiliac.

“Don’t worry, I went there with Joel,” Rob said, raising the ghost of Gasms past. “I bloated in the Lane and had my picture taken, but I felt bad about it and tore the picture up. This time we’ll just sleep there.” As for trespassing after dark, Rob said we were actually protecting the park. “If I ever catch a vandal touching a monument or cannon, they’ll wish for a ranger to come save their ass from me.”

So we suited up, with our haversacks and canteens and blankets rolled and tied like sausage and slung across our chests. Rob poured a last bottle of ale into a wicker jug. “It looks so much better that way,” he explained, leaving me to wonder who would appreciate this touch of authenticity as we crept through the dark.

As we set off down a road skirting the park, lightning began to flash, illuminating our path. There was also occasional traffic. Each time headlights approached, we sprinted off the road and flung ourselves in the tall wet grass, lest the passing car belonged to a park ranger or policeman or local citizen who might choose to report a Confederate and a Union soldier sneaking onto the battlefield at night. After ten minutes we were soaked and exhausted from this ludicrous exercise, which reminded me of a wretched high school football drill: running full tilt in pads and helmet and then sprawling on the fifty-yard line.

A half-mile down the road, we climbed awkwardly over a split-rail fence and bushwhacked in what Rob guessed was the direction of Bloody Lane. Night-blind, he led us straight into a tangle of brambles and barbed wire. Scratched and bleeding, we pushed on, through woods and fields and woods again. At one point, crunching through chest-high thorns and listening for Rob’s tramp in the dark ahead, I began to appreciate the utter misery of marching. In some memoirs, soldiers told of welcoming battle simply as an end to the agony and boredom of another day’s march. I also felt the reckless urge that soldiers so often succumbed to, shedding their gear and staggering on unburdened. And we’d only been walking an hour; in the summer of 1862, many of Lee’s men marched over 1,000 miles.

“At least we’re losing some weight,” Rob said, dripping with
sweat. “I need to drop five pounds if I’m going to look good at Gettysburg next weekend.”

We glimpsed the outline of a building that Rob recognized as Piper’s Farm, a bed-and-breakfast that had served as James Long-street’s headquarters during the battle. A light still glowed inside, so we slipped through the garden and into the cornfields beyond, hoping no one would hear us or decide to let fly a barrel of buckshot.

By then, the moon had risen. As we hiked between the tall rows of corn the view opened up, with mountains silhouetted on all sides. The moon was bright enough to read by. Loose clouds and distant flashes of lightning flitted across the night sky, matching the ground-level flicker of fireflies. Rob’s scarecrow frame formed a clear outline just ahead of me, with his slouch hat and pointed beard and bedroll humpbacked on his shoulder. He looked less like a Confederate than a freight-jumping hobo.

Swigging from his jug of ale, Rob turned and said, in a giddy stage whisper, “This sure as shit ain’t normal.” Meaning us, trespassing in the dark, searching for a corpse-haunted ditch to spend the night in. I felt the same surge of Dharma Bum glee I’d experienced that morning as we set off on the Gasm; as though I’d crawled out my bedroom window for a lark with some dissolute buddy my parents didn’t approve of.

Our spirits deflated a moment later when we spotted, at what seemed an impossible distance, the observation tower that marked one end of Bloody Lane. “We’ve been walking the wrong way for an hour,” Rob confessed. Using the tower as a guidon, we turned and marched through yet more fields and woods and over fences, stopping every few hundred yards to make sure we could still see the tower through the trees.

It was 2
A.M
. when we reached Bloody Lane. The sunken road was much deeper than Shiloh’s, a full man-height below ground level and fronted by a snake-rail fence. In 1862, this made it a natural trench from which the Confederates could repel wave after wave of Federal infantrymen charging across an adjoining field. Eventually, the Federals seized one end of the Lane, allowing the Northerners to fire down and along its length. “We were shooting them like sheep in a pen,” a New Yorker recalled. The bodies lay so thick, another soldier
wrote, that “they formed a line which one might have walked upon” without touching the ground.

This “ghastly flooring” was now covered in low grass and we unfurled our gum blankets, heavy tarps made of vulcanized rubber. I looked quizzically at Rob. “Charles Goodyear, patented 1844,” he assured me. Then, lighting candles, we read aloud from our final selection for the day: the memoir of John Brown Gordon, who commanded an Alabama regiment defending Bloody Lane.

“With all my lung power I shouted ‘Fire!’ Our rifles flamed and roared in the Federals’ faces like a blinding blaze of lightning. The effect was appalling. The entire front line, with few exceptions, went down.” Gordon was shot five times at Bloody Lane, with one bullet shattering his cheek. “Mars,” he later observed, “is not an aesthetic God.”

Rob closed the book and snuffed out the candles. We lay on our tarps, still soaked with sweat from our long hike. A breeze came up and the sweat turned cool. Ground moisture began to leach through our tarps. The damp—and our body funk—began to attract mosquitoes. Then, around 3
A.M
., came the coup de grâce: a low-lying fog from the nearby Potomac, rolling through the swales and valleys and into the Sunken Road. The temperature dropped precipitously, making it unseasonably cold, like San Francisco on a foggy summer’s day.

I tossed and turned in my sodden clothes, vainly searching for a position that might afford some warmth. Spooning seemed the only hope for sleep, except that Rob—wet, wretched and writhing—looked about as comforting to hug as a sick walrus.

“This kind of night will give you a good phlegm roll, like they had in the War,” he groaned.

“What’s that?” I asked, not really wanting to hear the answer.

“It’s when you’re so congested with phlegm that you can’t cough it out and it just sort of rolls around in your chest and throat. There’s a guy who writes in his diary that ‘when one hundred thousand men began to stir at reveille, the sound of their coughing would drown that of the beating drums.’”

Rob coughed a bit and went on, “There’s also stuff in the pension rolls about pneumonia and bronchitis that made these guys miserable
for the rest of their lives. And if your feet don’t dry well after a night like this, you’ll have horrible blisters. The wet skin just tears right off when you march.”

At least no one was shooting at us. “I was at the National Archives the other day,” Rob said, “reading about this guy who got popped in the balls and the bullet came out his sphincter. Had to wear diapers the rest of his life.”

Rob droned on in this vein until he talked himself to sleep. I lay awake, afflicted by the creeping paranoia known only to 4
A.M
. insomniacs—especially those camped illegally in a foggy ditch where the dead once lay in heaps. Something rustled on the grassy bank above our heads. A park ranger with infrared goggles? Why was my breath suddenly so raspy? And who was that huge white figure standing down the Lane, pointing straight at us?

I finally managed a shallow doze until dawn. Opening my eyes and peering through the still-dense fog, I realized that the specter eyeing me in the night was a tall stone soldier clutching a stone flag. Rob lay in a fetal curl and looked at me with what seemed a rare flash of hardcore self-doubt. “Sometimes I wonder how I ended up here,” he moaned. “I tend to blame that Blue and Gray set from Sears.”

Not wanting to compound our crime by starting a fire on the battlefield, we decided to seek breakfast in town. The fog covered our movements as we crept back to the road, which lay only a few hundred yards from Bloody Lane, a distance we’d stretched into five miles or so during our circuitous night hike. Finding a diner that opened at 6
A.M
., we perched at the counter and devoured our eggs and home-fried potatoes while studying a photographic book filled with pictures of the Antietam dead.

“These are some of the best shots you’ll ever see of bloated people,” Rob said. “See this guy with the puffy eyelids and the mouth all puckered? Classic bloating. The lips can’t close, so they swell outward, in an O. Or they can curl in. See, here’s an innie, there’s an outie.”

Rob soaked up some yolk with his toast and turned the page. “Look at the legs on that guy, real thick, no wrinkles in the fabric. And the pants are pinched around the groin. He wasn’t that thick in real life.” The man beside us glanced up from his sports page and
paid his bill. “I guess I’m intrigued by these pictures,” Rob went on, “because I haven’t seen corpses in real life.”

The photos also offered clinical evidence Rob could use to refine his Confederate impression, live as well as dead. “The pictures are close-ups and they aren’t staged, so you can study the belt buckles, the piping on their trousers, the bits of carpet that Confederates sometimes used as bedrolls. See that dead guy’s canteen with the corrugated tin? It’s captured Federal issue. That’s the sort of solid documentary evidence of what rebels wore that you can’t get anywhere else.”

Mathew Brady’s display of these pictures at his New York studio soon after the battle proved a pivotal event in the history of both war and photography. Visitors to Brady’s gallery confronted a reality they’d often seen represented in art and print but rarely if ever in photographs. “With the aid of the magnifying glass, the very features of the slain may be distinguished,” reported the
New York Times
, which likened Brady’s exhibit to “a few dripping bodies, fresh from the field, laid along the pavement.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., who had traveled to Antietam in search of his wounded son, glimpsed the pacifist message inherent in Brady’s stark portraits of the dead. “The sight of these pictures is a commentary on civilization such as the savage might well triumph to show its missionaries,” he wrote. For the first time, Holmes realized, mankind possessed images that stripped war of its romance and revealed combat for what it really was: “a repulsive, brutal, sickening hideous thing.”