“Yes,” said Huff. “We’ll let the authorities take it from here. You can explain this to the police. And I’m sure they’ll want to know what you did with the bodies of the eight defenseless old ladies who lived in the Home. You didn’t bury them in the basement, did you?”
Jimmy Stewart stood up and embraced the young boy with the crutch. The congregation burst into song as the credits rolled.
The Confederate soldier switched off the video. On the tiny rug that constituted A. P. Hill’s living room, two other uniformed men scribbled furiously in spiral notebooks, while on the two sofas more contemporarily dressed gentlemen and A. P. Hill herself were similarly engaged in composition. Aside from sporadic muttering over an answer, no one spoke. Only the whir of the rewinding cassette recorder broke the silence.
Even in a less prosaic setting, no knowledgeable observer would have mistaken the uniformed men for Confederate ghosts. Their gray wool coats were clean and undamaged, and they all wore leather boots. Besides, they were at least ten years too old and forty pounds too heavy to have been the boys who really fought that distant war. These were the sunshine soldiers who fought the war summers and weekends, without grapeshot, dysentery, gangrene, malnutrition, or conspicuous personal inconvenience. They were the reenactors.
Tonight, though, they were not on duty, even in their mythic Confederacy. They were in uniform just for the fun of it, attending a meeting of the local Civil War Roundtable Discussion Group, which was assembled at the home of A. P. Hill, descendant and namesake of the general. The evening’s entertainment had been a showing of Shenandoah, a Civil War-set film of the 1960s starring James Stewart. It was a sad and stirring saga of the war in Virginia, but in this audience wet handkerchiefs were conspicuously absent.
A. P. Hill went to the kitchen and brought back coffee and plates of cake and cookies. When the rations had been distributed to the troops, she said, “All right, is everybody ready? Put your pens on the table now, so no one can be accused of modifying his comments. Who wants to go first?”
An elderly man in a black suit raised his hand. “I got eight,” he announced. “Shall I read them out?”
“Go on, Dr. Howe. The rest of us will check off any of our responses that duplicate yours.”
“First, the scenery was wrong. Does that count? It certainly was not Virginia.”
“They filmed it in Oregon,” said Powell Hill. “I don’t think we can fault them for that, though. Movies almost never get produced in a logical setting. Go on to the next one.”
“According to the film, the year was 1864, and Jimmy Stewart still had six grown sons living at home on his farm in the middle of a war zone. No way. The Confederacy introduced conscription in 1861. Those boys would all have been drafted. So would their dad, more than likely.”
Everyone in the room nodded. Most retrieved their pens and made check marks on their note pads.
“It might have worked if you’d changed the location,” Ken Filban suggested. He was a bank executive from East Tennessee. “According to the movie, they were on a five-hundred-acre farm near Harrisonburg.”
“Which should have been crawling with hired help,” said Confederate corporal Scott Chambers, otherwise a driver for UPS. “In the days before mechanized farming, you couldn’t cultivate five hundred acres with five men and two young women to run the house. They weren’t ranchers; they were farmers.”
“Like I said, change the location and it might have been plausible,” Ken Filban said. “Make the Anderson farm a fifty-acre place tucked into a hollow in the North Carolina or Tennessee mountains, and chances are they could have got away with ignoring the war. Family legend had it that all my great-great-uncles spent the war dodging both armies-and never served a day.”
Dr. Howe cleared his throat. “It’s still my turn. Number two: the rifles were wrong.” Unanimous check marks.
“They even got the rifles wrong in Glory,” said A. P. Hill. “They had the soldiers checking serial numbers. It was more accurate than this movie, though.”
“Number three: they had a black Union soldier serving in a white regiment. That didn’t happen.”
“How about when Jimmy Stewart’s family stopped the Union train and the Federals didn’t shoot them? Six guys stopping a train! And what did the Federals have, five guys guarding a couple of hundred prisoners on that train?” Ken Filban was laughing at the naïveté of moviemakers.
Powell Hill shrugged. “That’s Hollywood. Still, the film had some good qualities. The main characters were Southerners who weren’t made to sound like idiots. And the rural people weren’t portrayed as hicks.”
“It seemed like a Western to me. Didn’t it look like a Western to you?”
“The director’s next job was the television series Bonanza,” said Dr. Howe.
“Yeah, but maybe that wasn’t inaccurate,” said Scott Chambers thoughtfully. “Only thirty years earlier, some of Virginia was Indian country. I think we were the West in those days.”
“Costumes!” said Dr. Howe, still trying to finish his list. “It was 1864 and we were seeing Confederate soldiers who weren’t in rags. And they had shoes.”
“Everybody was too well dressed,” Powell agreed. “After four years of war, even the civilians should have been thin and shabby, wearing mended old clothes.”
“Well, that covers my list!” said the history professor, crossing off the last objection on his pad. “That was fun. What shall we do next? Gone With the Wind?”
A. P. Hill shook her head. “None of us can write that fast,” she said.
“Those Hollywood people should try reenacting,” said Ken Filban. “You learn a lot about war from tramping around in the heat in a wool outfit loaded down with heavy equipment.”
Scott Chambers nodded. “It’s a funny feeling, walking in a straight line toward a bunch of guys holding bayonets. Even when you know they’re acting.”
“Same time next week?” asked Dr. Howe. “My place.”
“I won’t be able to come,” said A. P. Hill. “I have a trial coming up out of town, starting Monday.”
“Will you be-” Ken Filban glanced apprehensively at the elderly Dr. Howe. “Will you be coming out this weekend?”
Confederate corporal A. P. Hill gave him a trace of a smile. They were careful not to talk about her reenactment activities in front of any possible Silverbacks. “See you there,” she said.
“I’ll tie back my hair; men’s clothing I’ll put on,
And I’ll pass as your comrade as we march along.
I’ll pass as your comrade. No one will ever know…
Won’t you let me go with you?”-“No, my love, no.”
– “The Cruel War”
A. P. HILL PARKED HER car in the out-of-the-way lot reserved for those taking part in the battle and made her way along the dirt path to the place of assembly. She was already in full regalia for the day’s event: hair tucked under her kepi cap, rimless glasses in place, and her uniform and brogans carefully adjusted to envelop her in anonymity. She looked like a very young Confederate soldier-one of the most authentic looking present because of her small stature and slender build. She sometimes wondered at the illogic of the men who controlled the hobby, who frowned upon any woman taking part, but would happily open their ranks to 250-pound men in their fifties. Accuracy, she decided, was a state of mind.
It was just past nine o’clock, and already the sun was blazing. There would be people passing out today in their wool uniforms. It was a day that you could smell the enemy from across the field. Some of the purists refused to have their uniforms cleaned ever, which was all very accurate, but it was hard on their fellow soldiers. Powell was careful to keep her uniform believably dirty, but she drew the line at actual stench.