When the battle is over, a lone bugler rides through the smoke. He pulls up amid the wounded, dying, and the dead to play taps. The dead rise, fat hairy boys who, when they are not fighting to preserve or destroy the Union, are lawyers or mechanics or the owners of pool-cleaning services. They rise, stretch limbs made stiff by death, give each other pats and hugs and ass slaps. “That was damn fine!” My brothers and my father come back to catch me up in the traditional post-battle group hug. We raise our father up on our shoulders and bounce him like a child. I find myself looking back to Joan of Arc, who ignores the men squeezing her shoulder and thumping her back. She is staring hatefully toward the enemy line. The Rebs are sauntering over from their line through the low-hanging smoke and the red sunset light, their hands stuck out before them for shaking.
My great-great-grandfather was a hero of Chickamauga. He gave his life to save a hapless drummer boy. Like him, I am a soldier in the Ninth Ohio, though I am not one of those people who think that antecedents make you a blue-blood reenactor. I have no patience with the Sons of Confederate Veterans or Grand Army of the Republic snobs. At dances the only medal I wear is my Boy Scouts Civil War Hiking Trail medal, which I earned with my own two feet.
Rebel-hating, not medals, was handed down in my family, but I’m not fanatical. The disdain was heavily diluted by the time it reached me. My great-great-grandfather ended every letter he ever wrote with “Jeff Davis drives the goat,” but my father moved from Ohio to Florida. He set up a dermatology practice in Orlando. At family reunions in Ohio, I was the Rebel cousin. “You’re from the South now!” said my cousin Libby, pushing away my hand when I tried to feel her up during a basement make-out session. The fact was, Orlando was not the South. And the South that my cousin, in the family tradition, was brought up to hate, was not anywhere anymore.
I don’t like to be at these things. I don’t like pretending. I don’t like guns, or the noise they make. I don’t like wool — it itches, and when I get rained on I smell like a dog. My boots fit poorly. But if I did not come out to play like this, I would risk a dishonorable discharge from my own family. It’s their passion, my two older brothers’, and my father’s and my mother’s. Clay, my little brother, hated it. We could complain to each other once, but he is not here at the reenactment celebrating the 135th anniversary of the slaughter at Chickamauga Creek. Death has delivered him from his obligations.
“I told you I’d get you!” says Joan. I blink stupidly at her, rubbing at my neck. I’d assumed, when she said she would get me, that she would do something sneaky, march behind me and spit in the tin drinking cup I’ve got hung on my backpack, or steal my gun and pound a cork down the barrel. But she took her revenge direct. She made a claw of her thumb and forefinger and pinched me so hard I screamed.
I’m glad for the pinch, though it hurt like hell, because I wanted to talk to her. I want to be near her in the way that I do sometimes with certain people. I try not to indulge this instinct, not to make myself a pest to strangers, even when I feel, like I did with Joan, an immediate affinity, a craving that only intimate acquaintance will satisfy. My father, who has delved too deeply into the nineteenth century for his own good, calls that immediate affinity “omniphily,” and has told me before how M. Fourier (one of his heroes) wrote that such affinities should be cherished and exploited, and how when they blossomed between every man and woman on earth, they would prove to be the salvation of humankind. But I remember an affliction named Susan Greer, who bothered me with her devotion through the whole of second grade, who followed me with a jar of paste until I consented to sit with her behind a palm tree and partake of it as a lover’s meal. We were married by that paste. Cross-eyed Susie, whose tongue was a little too big for her mouth, was my unwanted loving companion until she moved away to Tallahassee. I remember her and think that a body ought not to press itself on a body, because it’s not such a long trip from “How do you do” to “Partake thou of my paste.”
All this means I am very careful not to initiate pressingly upon people I like for no good reason. So I was happy when Joan sprang out and pinched me, and I am happier still when she asks me to dinner.
“I’m making coffee and beef stew,” she says. “Want to mess with me?”
“Are you going to pinch me again?”
“Are you going to make me angry again?”
“I hope not.”
“Well, that’s fine, then.” She takes a few steps and I follow after, but we haven’t gone ten feet before she stops. “One more thing, though. I need you to tell me something. You’re not from around here, are you?” She sweeps out her arms, as if indicating this little parcel of Georgia, but something about her expression tells me she is indicating the whole of the depraved, sore-losing South.
“No,” I say.
“I mean, you’re a Yankee, aren’t you?”
I point at the brass infantry horn on my kepi. “Looks that way.”
“No,” she says, reaching toward me, so I think she’s about to pinch again, but she only puts her arm flat against my chest, over my heart. No one has ever put their hand there, just like that, and it feels very pleasant. “I mean, are you a real Yankee?”
“Sure,” I say. And because it seems like I ought to, I say, “Of course. Absolutely. I’m no Reb, if that’s what you mean.”
“That’s fine, then,” she says. “That’s fine.” As we are walking we pass near the place where my family has pitched its tents. My oldest brother is polishing our father’s saddle. He looks up and sees me. I put my finger to my lips, but he shouts anyway. “Where are you going?” I don’t answer.
“Who’s that?” asks Joan.
“I have no idea,” I say.
“Have you seen the pictures?” she asks me while we’re waiting for the stew to cook. “Nobody smiles in them.” She has an old stereopticon and a collection of stereographs. She puts pictures in the viewer and I put my eyes to the lenses. The pictures are fuzzy at first, but then the boys jump out at me in startling 3-D. A grimfaced Yankee sitting for a portrait: Maybe it’s for his mama, or his sweetheart. His shoulders are round and small, but his neck is so thick I doubt I could get my two hands around it.
“I was a View-Master junkie when I was little,” I tell her. I would flip through the pictures with such wild abandon that I tore out the advancing lever. Then I would steal Clay’s and break it, too. He was pretty forgiving as a child, reacting to slights with sadness instead of anger.
Joan switches pictures, and shows me a Rebel cavalryman with immensely serious eyes. His saber is held in salute.
“What are they looking at?” she asks me. “What do you suppose?”
“The camera,” I say. But really I think they were looking at the future, suddenly made quite real to them by the prospect of their death. There was something about that in Clay’s diary, of which I became the secret keeper after he died. It was under his mattress, an obvious place, but, then, he was very trusting. I was cleaning up the room on the night he died, because that seemed like something bearable, something I could do. But I didn’t clean. I sat on his bed, on the sheets and old unwashed blanket that absolutely reeked of him, and read. The future is shapeless and unreal, he wrote on the first page, except when I am there, when I am close, and then it has the shape of death, and the reality of death. Why is that comforting?