“Rivington—I stole it from Benny Lang,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Sometimes, after we was done—well, hell, you know done with what—he’d go off an’ do other things, his own business, I mean, until he was ready for his second round. One of them times, I pulled this here book out of a case he kept by”‘“—by the bed. With that fine light he had in there, readin’ was easy. But this here book, it purely perplexed me. What year is it, Nate?”
“What year?” He stared at her. “It’s 1868, of course—January 18, if you want to get picky.”
She gestured impatiently. “I know that, I really do. But look in the front of the book.”
He did; The date of printing did not appear on the title page, as it did in most books he knew. He turned the page. Sure enough, there was the information he needed, next to the table of contents. “Copyright—1960?” he said slowly. “And this edition was printed in—1996?” His voice trailed away, then firmed again. “That’s impossible.”
“Is it? Look here.” She pointed to a section he hadn’t yet noticed, something called “Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data.” The author, someone named Bruce Catton, was listed as having been born in 1899. Richard M. Ketchum, who was called editor at the top of the page, seemed to have been born in 1922. And the book itself fell under “United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865.”
“But the war ended in 1864,” Caudell said, as much to the book as to Mollie. If he’d been bewildered before, now he was completely at sea.
Mollie went to the next page. “That ain’t what it says here, is it?”
Caudell’s eyes grew wide as he read the first two sentences of the introduction, which talked about the South surrendering.” Of themselves, his eyes kept reading. By the time he got through that two-page introduction, he was ready to question his own sanity. Every calm, rational word spoke of a long-ago war the United States had won. If this Richard Ketchum was either a maniac or a prankster, he didn’t let on once.”
Caudell started reading in earnest. Before long, he realized going through the whole book in detail would take too long. He skimmed over the astonishing pictures and maps, read their captions. After a while, he asked, “Does Benny Lang know this book is gone?”
“Don’t reckon so,” Mollie answered. “I moved a skinny book from the shelf on top so as to fill up part of the space this one took, and fiddled with both shelves so the holes didn’t show. Then I hid this one with the, ah, dainties I used to fetch over to Benny’s place sometimes, and got it back to my room without him bein’ the wiser. Read it there some more, times I was by myself, an’ the more I read, the more I got confused, till I figured I had to come to you.”
Till today, Caudell had seen Mollie only in ragged gray and butternut. Picturing her in “dainties” distracted him from the book for a little while. But soon the story of the war engrossed him again. The farther he got, the less he understood, and the more he came to wonder whether this Bruce Catton really was writing in some distant future time. He kept referring to what he called the Civil War as having happened well in the past.
And he kept assuming the United States had won and the Confederate States lost. That was clear very early on, when he talked about the overwhelming material advantages the North enjoyed, and about the trouble the South had in creating a navy out of nothing, and about the Confederacy’s two-pronged offensive into Kentucky and Maryland in 1862 as a chance to win the war which failed.
Catton also talked about slavery as something dead and long departed; the feeling underlying his words seemed to be revulsion that it had ever existed, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which the results of the war had rendered meaningless and which all the South heartily loathed in any case, was to Catton a harbinger of great things ahead. Not even the staunchest Yankee should have been able to consider it as having any great effect.
Gettysburg…Caudell studied the paintings of the third day’s fight, then turned to a calm photograph of the battlefield after the fight was done. The weathered granite and bronze monument there looked as if it had stood for decades if not centuries, yet the fight was only four and a half years in the past. He looked up lit Mollie. “Does your scar still pain you?”
“The one from Gettysburg, you mean? It twinges right smart sometimes.” She looked at the colored photograph, too; she understood what he was driving at. “Don’t reckon it’d trouble me a-tall if I waited till that was took.”
He raised an eyebrow. Somewhere down deep, she believed the impossible dates of 1960 and 1996. He shivered, and not just because the room was chilly; he was starting to believe them himself. When he looked down to the Picture History of the Civil War once more, he discovered it was almost too dark to see: Evening had snuck up on him like a dismounted Yankee cavalryman in the Wilderness.
He went downstairs, asked Wren Tisdale for some candles. Leering, the saloonkeeper supplied them. “You can go straight to hell, you and your filthy mind,” Caudell growled. “We’re up there reading a book, and if you don’t believe me, you come on up and watch us.” He lit one of the candles at the fireplace, hurried back to Mollie’s room.
A few minutes later, he heard someone coming partway upstairs and then hastily going back down. He laughed, said to Mollie, “Tisdale, checking up on us.” She giggled, too.
His awareness of the world around him diminished once more as he bent close to read by candlelight. After a while, he raised his head in complete mystification. “Everything from the Wilderness on is wrong,” he said. “Grant didn’t go south—we went north. And Johnston stopped Sherman.” A picture of one of the fierce, jaunty “bummers” who, the book claimed, had looted their way across Georgia, stared mutely up at him.
“It don’t talk none about our repeaters, neither,” Mollie said.
“By God, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Caudell flipped to the back of the book; he already discovered it had an excellent index. Nothing was listed about repeaters, nothing about AK-47s. “But they won the war for us. Without them—”
“We’d maybe have lost,” Mollie put in. She pointed to the Picture History of the Civil War. “Like in there.”
Caudell kept going through the book. He found a picture of the Tredegar Iron Works, said to have been taken after Richmond fell. He found the story of Lincoln’s reelection over George McClellan, who, he knew, had actually run fourth in the election of 1864, and no mention whatever of U.S. President Seymour’s participation in the race. He found photographs of Richmond in ruins, and a painting of Lincoln going through the city in a carriage.
His eyes filled with foolish tears (foolish, for why should he be moved at what had never happened?) as he found word of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to overwhelming Federal forces and a final photograph of a grim-faced Robert E. Lee, said to have been made just after that surrender. At the very end of the book, he found a painting from 1890—a year that, to him, still felt far in the future—of Union veterans parading in Boston. Seeing the white beards of the officers marching in the first rank made gooseflesh prickle up on his arms.
He found himself altogether confused. Either Bruce Cat ton had never heard of the world in which he lived, or the man was the most inspired hoaxer of all time—even 1960. After some hard thought, Caudell found he could not believe the Picture History of the Civil War a hoax. For one thing, it was too perfect, too detailed. For another, even if an obsessed man somehow spent a lifetime assembling everything that went into this book—a lifetime when? Caudell wondered; no printer in 1868 could have produced anything like it—why would anyone else have cared to view the product of his obsession?