Confederates in the Attic (40 page)

“You shoulda seen Frank the day that statue was unveiled,” Olgers said. “He was so proud his head was bigger than a washtub.”

I handed Frank his teeth and asked Olgers about an enormous cotton garment dangling from the rafters behind Lee’s head. “Largest pair of bloomers in the world, worn by Bertha Magoo, a 749-pound lady,” Olgers said. Before I could inquire further about Bertha, Olgers plunged deeper into the room to show us an old ham boiler, a whale vertebra, a section of tree limb labeled “largest pine in the world,” a colonial suit and horsehair wig belonging to a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and a photograph of an extremely hideous woman.

“Juanita, my first wife,” Olgers said. “She was crazy about collards, which cause gas, you know. She ate a whole pot one day. I heard the explosion in the field, but by the time I got to the house it was too late. Nothing left.” He shook his head. “God I miss that woman.”

Olgers started his collection as a boy, first with arrowheads and minié balls he dug up himself, then with stray items that neighbors brought by the shop. So when the store closed in 1988, Olgers turned it into a display case for all the junk he’d gathered over the years. Now, every inch of floor, wall and ceiling was festooned with bric-a-brac. “I was born here the night Hitler sent a thousand bombers against London, and slept for many a year in that corner,” Olgers said, pointing at a pile of rusted tools and a bone I couldn’t identify. “Jawbone of an ass,” he said, moving to an adjoining room, cluttered with old lunchboxes. “Mom and Dad slept here,” he said.

Olgers’s parents had recently died, a month apart. “When they ran this place, it was the hub of the community,” he said softly. “My momma was a doctor, not one that had gone to medical school but
one that people brought sick babies to. Folks back then didn’t go to a doctor unless they were really sick. My daddy pulled teeth—I pulled a few, too. And my mother would write letters for people who couldn’t write themselves.”

The store had also been general in the true sense of the word, living up to its advertising sign outside: “You Name It! We Got It!” A stain on the floor marked where a fifty-gallon barrel of molasses had sat for years, beside drums of kerosene-lamp oil, tins of lard, and tubs of hogs’ feet and heads. Hog parts also had hung from the walls: hog shoulders, hog jowls, hog ears.

The house specialty was souse, a concoction of congealed pig’s ear and foot, shaped into a loaf and sliced like bread. “Nearest thing to God’s manna on earth,” Olgers said, smacking his lips. His mother also made chitlins (pork entrails, battered and fried), scrapple (a fried mush of hog scraps I’d gagged on once at a backroads diner), and a nameless mix of pigs’ digits and other bits: cooked, rolled in flour, and fried with sweet marjoram.

“Whoooo Lord, it makes me squeal just to think of it,” Olgers said. “The new generation, they don’t know real eating, just hamburgers and pizzas.” They didn’t know real shopping, either. “Wal-Mart, Kmart, whatever-Mart. They and the car killed the country store. People would come here and sit and talk like they always did, but they didn’t buy anything.” Finally, after his family had operated the store for eighty years, Olgers was forced to shut the place down and go work at a funeral home. “The day that store closed,” he said, “a whole way of life went with it.”

We sat on the porch, spitting watermelon seeds and watching traffic pass on the busy new highway bypassing town. I told Olgers about my journey and asked why Southerners like himself revered the past. “Child, that’s an easy question,” he said. “A Southerner—a true Southerner, of which there aren’t many left—is more related to the land, to the home place. Northerners just don’t have that attachment. Maybe that means they don’t have as much depth.” He paused, then added, “I feel sorry for folks from the North, or anyone who hasn’t had that bond with the land. You can’t miss something you never had and if you never had it, you don’t know what it’s all about.”

I’d heard Southerners say this sort of thing a hundred times before, usually without irony while driving a Jeep Cherokee through traffic-choked suburban streets or watching TV in a ranch-style home that could be Anywhere, America. But Olgers had lived the life he praised. He’d rarely strayed more than a few miles from Sutherland until going off to college at William and Mary, an hour’s drive east, and then only for three months. “I was so homesick I couldn’t bear it,” he said. “The food was worse than awful, the professors were atheists, and my roomate was an animal.”

“What do you mean?” Rob asked, obviously intrigued.

“He took me to a Viking Party. There were men wearing hats with horns, throwing women in sheets over their shoulders. They brought a girl in to sacrifice, and by the time they were done with her she wished she had been.” Olgers shook his head. “This wasn’t any panty raid, child.” Soon after, Olgers retreated to Sutherland. “I feel honored because I wasn’t stained by college. Education isn’t everything, at least not the formal kind.”

In the thirty-five years since, Olgers had left Sutherland only twice: to honeymoon in Washington, D.C., and to see the ocean in North Carolina. “I’m a homebody, a home soul,” he said. “Olgers Store has been my domain.”

Reaching for his walking stick—a ski pole—he led us through the 95-degree heat to what he called the “home place,” a stagecoach inn across the road where some part of his family had lived for umpteen generations. Then, leaning against the ski pole, he gave his own rendition of the fight that occurred in the inn’s front yard in April 1865. “Only four thousand Confederates faced twenty-three thousand Yankees, but Lee told them to hold the railroad line at all costs. So they dug in along a line of giant cedars that stood just so, and the North charged three times, at nine in the morning, at one in the afternoon and at five. The last time they broke through. One of those cedars had a cannonball in it for a hundred years.”

At the turn of the century, Olgers’s grandfather replaced the inn’s heart-pine siding. “When he pulled it off, minié balls just came rolling out, there were that many of them.” Leading us inside, past a deaf eighty-year-old aunt who sat bottling pickles in the kitchen,
Olgers pulled back the living-room carpet to reveal a splotch on the wood beneath. “Southern blood,” he said. “They dragged the wounded in here.” One of Olgers’s ancestors had fought near the inn and died of his wounds a few days before the War’s end.

To me, it seemed sad and pointless for men to have fought and died at that late date, rather than surrender. But Olgers didn’t see it that way. He thought the South’s leaders were wrong—“if they’d won, we would have been a divided country and had slavery for a few decades more”—but he identified with the individual soldier’s allegiance to home. “A man has to make a stand in his life, at least once,” he said. “That’s what happened here. They knew they’d lose but they were going down defiant, right here on the land where they lived.”

He walked us to a family graveyard and strolled between the headstones. The cemetery held enough Gothic characters to fill a Flannery O’Connor story, at least the way Olgers described them. There was a great-grandfather shot through the wrist in the War who was later hospitalized “for itch,” Olgers claimed. “The hole in his arm was so big that my daddy used to stick his finger in it as a child.” Another veteran swore that he’d never shave again if the South lost the War. “When I was a kid, he had a beard hanging like Spanish moss all the way down to his knees.” Olgers also pointed out the graves of a dozen aunts and great-aunts, all of them spinsters. “So many of the boys were dead in the War that for a while there was no one to marry,” he said. “Then it sort of became a family habit.”

Olgers showed us his own plot, beside his parents, and said he had only one fear about meeting his maker. He was the first in a long line of yellow-dog Democrats to vote for the party of Lincoln. “When I meet up with my grandpappy at the Pearly Gates, I hope he doesn’t find out.” But in other respects Olgers remained true to his rebel forebears. He refused to travel the rest of the retreat route, and had never visited Appomattox, just a short drive down the road. “That way,” he explained, “it can always be early April in 1865 and we haven’t yet lost the War.”

We wandered back to the store. Olgers had to close up and go to work at the funeral parlor. But he offered us a parting gift: a Mason jar filled with murky turtle soup he’d cooked the day before. “I’ve
got to get all the Yankees my grandpappy missed,” he said, slapping the back of my Federal uniform. Then, heading for his car, he broke into song:

Olgers waved and drove off, leaving us with our turtle soup and a bushel of homespun wisdom to digest. We peered through the store window and snapped a last mental snapshot. “That’s the epitome of the Gasm,” Rob said, shaking his head. “So much stuff that you can’t possibly take it all in, and you don’t know what to do with it anyway. So you just let it wash over you.”

T
HE SAME WAS TRUE
of Lee’s retreat route. We wound west from Sutherland Station, over narrow bridges and past forgotten towns where the Confederates skirmished with pursuing Federals. We paused at a wood-frame church with a floor still bloodstained from bodies laid out there 130 years before; at a tiny museum with a silver tray on which a local slave served lunch to Robert E. Lee; at the Amelia County courthouse, where the Confederate monument read, “O comrades, wheresoe’er ye rest apart, Amelia shrines you here within her heart.” The rest was a blur of rolling farmland and deserted railroad spurs with names like Deatonville, Jeterville, Farmville, Rice’s Depot.

This was “Southside” Virginia, a rural enclave between the state’s flat Tidewater and the rolling hills of the Piedmont. Like Jimmy Olgers’s domain, Southside seemed to have largely escaped the modern era. Amelia County, through which we traveled for most of the day, had half its 1865 population. One of the retreat route’s stops was an extinct village called Jamestown, of which our guidebook said, “The town died around 1920.”

This pastoral, unprosperous landscape came as a shock after all the sprawl we’d passed through elsewhere in Virginia. The scenery also formed an appropriately wistful backdrop to the narrative unfolding on our car radio. Marching day and night for a week, Lee’s
scarecrow army was stalked as much by hunger as by Union cavalry, and the rebels spent precious hours foraging for food or waiting at railroad junctions for rations that never came.

By the end, Lee’s men quaffed creek water and ate parched corn intended for their horses; 500 of the rebel mounts died of starvation during the army’s last three days in the field. And all the while, Phil Sheridan’s and George Custer’s well-fed cavalry kept closing in, hunting down the Confederates as they would the Plains Indians after the Civil War. But there would be no Little Bighorn here, only a rearguard battle at Sayler’s Creek at which five Southern generals and almost a quarter of Lee’s soldiers surrendered, prompting Lee to exclaim, “My God! Has the army been dissolved?”

One of the tour stops near Sayler’s Creek occupied the parking lot of another general store. Unlike Olgers’s, this shop was still in business and displayed oddly paired signs in the window: “Game Checking Station: Bear—Deer—Turkey” and “Current Jackpot 3 Million.” Inside, we found the store deserted, except for a young black man shooting pool by himself at a ragged, ill-lit table. He wore sunglasses, a Simpsons’ T-shirt and an Atlanta Braves baseball cap. “You all must be doing that reenact thing,” he said, looking up at us with a bemused grin.

Rob sighed and explained for the fiftieth time what the Civil Wargasm was all about. The man listened patiently, put down his pool stick and said, “I been waiting for somebody like you to answer a question about that War.”

“Fire away,” Rob said.

“Let’s roll the clock back. It’s 1861. You two be first cousins, really. You both white, right? One North, one South, but it’s just a mind thing. Why you got to kill six hundred thousand cousins? Can’t you work it out?”

Rob looked at me. I looked back at him. The man walked to the window and pointed down the road. “I grew up down that way, feeding cattle by Sayler’s Creek,” he said. “Six thousand dudes got hurt or killed, three days before the War be finished. For what?”

As the Gasm’s Union representative, I felt obliged to speak up. “At least some Northerners,” I offered, “thought they were fighting to free the slaves.”

The man lowered his sunglasses and looked me straight in the eye. “You shittin’ me, right? I fought in the Gulf War. Nobody be getting their butt shot off for no freedom thing.” Then he rolled the clock back again. Pointing at Rob, he said to me, “Say your mothers sister’s son, he’s got slaves. You gonna say to him, ‘Let’s fight over it’? C’mon now, no way. What you really gonna say is this.” He paused for a moment, then continued in a perfect-pitch parody of redneck dialect: “Hey, Billy Joe, whatever you want to do with those niggers is okay by me. Keep ’em in chains, what the fuck. Your momma is my momma’s sister.”

He returned to his normal voice. “It’s a big lie, this slave war thing. It don’t matter really, except that whites today still like to say, ‘Damn, my ancestors died for those niggers, they should be thankful.’ What I seen in the Gulf War, it made me realize war is useless. The main man, Saddam, he still be there. It was politics and greed. Same as in your war. Seems to me y’all could’a worked it out.” With that, he slapped a dollar on the counter, took a lottery ticket from beside the cash register and stalked out the door, leaving us alone in the deserted shop.

A
N HOUR LATER
we reached Appomattox Court House, where North and South did finally work it out, in the parlor of Wilmer McLean’s farmhouse. There was a classical symmetry to Lee’s surrender, as there was to so much about the War. The Army of Northern Virginia stacked its arms four years to the day after the South fired the War’s first shot on Fort Sumter. And the surrender was signed in the home of a woebegone farmer who had moved to Appomattox after fleeing his former house at Manassas, site of the War’s first land battle. “I was the alpha and omega of this contest,” McLean told a Northern visitor a few months after the surrender.