Departures (26 page)

“What’s funny, suh?” the porter asked.

“When I was a soldier here, I doubt the people would have moved aside so readily for any
real
general, save maybe Robert E.
Lee, as they do now for me. I led no great armies, only a ragtag company. My only claim to notice is my span of years.”

“There’s worse ones than that, suh,” the porter observed. Thorpe slowly nodded; judging by what he’d seen in the second half of his long life, there were many such worse claims, most of them trumpeted uncommonly loud.

The Negro dropped Thorpe’s bags for a moment to stick his fingers in his mouth and give forth with a piercing whistle. A taxi driver waved to show he’d heard. The porter grabbed the suitcases again and headed for the boxy Chevrolet. Behind him, Thorpe made the best speed he could.

Pretty girls paused to stare wide-eyed at him as he went by. He remembered that from his soldier days, too. Then he wouldn’t have minded getting some of those girls alone. He fondly remembered a couple of leaves spent in the city’s seamier districts. The most respectable girls nowadays showed more rounded flesh than any shameless woman had in his youth, but desire was only a memory, too.

Between them, the porter and the taxi driver tossed his bags into the back seat of the cab. Thorpe dug in his pocket, and pulled out a quarter. The porter beamed; a quarter was worth far more in these hard times in 1932 than it had been in the inflation-raddled Richmond of the War between the States: “God bless you, suh!”

“God bless you, too,” Thorpe said. Back in the old days, he would have tipped a slave who served as well as this porter had. Negroes had been free now long enough for a man to go from birth to old age in that span of years—not old age like his own, of course, but age old enough. It hadn’t worked out as dreadfully as long-ago fire-eaters feared it would, so perhaps Abe Lincoln was right all along. Right or not, Lincoln prevailed. The proof of it was that Thorpe couldn’t even recall the last time he’d wondered about the justice of emancipation.

“Where to, General?” the taxi driver asked.

“Camp De Saussure, wherever that may be,” Thorpe answered. He didn’t bother correcting the man. Apparently he was to be a general for the duration, whether he liked it or not. If that was so, he decided he might as well like it. He’d grown used to far worse things over the years.

“That’s what they’re calling the Lee Camp Soldiers’ Home for the reunion,” the driver said as he held the car door open for Thorpe. “In honor of General De Saussure of the United Confederate Veterans, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.” Thorpe slowly, carefully bent to sit down in the taxi. C.A. De Saussure actually called himself a general because he headed the veterans’ organization. Thorpe did not think much of that. All the real generals who’d worn gray (and those who’d worn blue as well) were dead.

The taxi pulled away from the curb. Soon it was tooling along at an effortless thirty-five miles an hour. The John Houston Thorpe who had visited Richmond not far past the midpoint of a vanished century would never have believed such a thing. His great-grandchildren took it utterly for granted: to them, a horseback ride was an hour’s amusement at a fair, not the only way to go from one place to another. Thorpe himself rarely thought about automobiles these days. This afternoon, though, he was seeing new things in an old mirror.

The driver had his window open to bring in the breeze. Thorpe was half-dozing until a loud roar overhead jerked him back to full awareness. “Damned airplanes,” the taxi man said. “They fly so low sometimes, one of ’em’ll come right down in the middle of traffic one fine day, mark my words.”

Thorpe didn’t answer. The taxi driver was young; men had probably been flying his whole life. To Thorpe, cars were wonderful and useful-but easy enough to take in stride. At airplanes he would never cease to marvel if he lived another ninety-odd years. He knew quiet pride that the very first one had left the ground less than a hundred miles from where he lived.

As the reporter had, the driver asked him whether he’d been in Richmond since the States War. When he answered no, the fellow said, “Bet it’s changed a fair bit since then.”

“That it has,” Thorpe said. “In those days there wasn’t a paved road in Richmond, the town was either full of mud or full of dust, the flies swarmed fit to drive a man mad, and everything smelled of horse manure.” He chuckled to watch the taxi driver’s jaw drop. “Every town, South and North, was like that then, though I don’t suppose it gets into the history books. They didn’t have flush toilets in those days, either. You’re lucky to be a young man in such a marvelous time.”

The Chevrolet was far from a new automobile; its springs had seen better days. Nevertheless, on the asphalted highway it rode smoother than any carriage over dirt. Thorpe tried to imagine what a carriage would have felt like had he whipped a two-horse team up anywhere close to the speed he was making now. Pointless effort—a carriage at full tilt would have overturned the second it hit a stone or a pothole.

“But the glory then—” the driver began.

Thorpe broke in: “No glory to dying in camp of smallpox or measles or scarlet fever. No glory to typhoid, either, or to perishing of fever after your wound went bad—and it would, for we had no medicines. No glory to having your arm cut off and tossed on a pile outside a tent or under a tree while the surgeon shouted ‘Next!’ No, sir, don’t speak to me of glory.”

The taxi driver chewed on that for the next couple of minutes, as if it were a piece of meat stuck between his teeth. At last he said, hesitantly now, “General, if that’s how you feel, why did you come?”

“To see the men who went through it with me one last time before I die,” Thorpe said. “No one who didn’t can possibly imagine what it was like.” It was true enough, as far as it went, but Thorpe wondered if it went far enough. Take away the remembered dirt and pain and hunger and terror and something remained behind, something that had drawn him from Rocky Mount after all these years. He scorned the idea of glory, as most men did who had seen war face to face. But something was there, even if he didn’t care to try to name it for a taxi driver.

The taxi stopped in front of the Soldiers’ Home: low cottages on greensward, with a few bigger buildings among them: a hospital, a dining hall, a chapel. The driver got out, opened Thorpe’s door for him, and hauled his bags off the back seat.

“What is the fare?” Thorpe asked.

“Thirty-five cents, General, anywhere inside Richmond city limits.”

“When I was here last, young man, this was far to the west of the city limits.” The first coin that came into Thorpe’s hands was a half dollar. “Here you are. I have no need for change.”

“Thank you, General!” Smiling, the taxi driver carried the suitcases toward a cottage with a large sign in front of it:
WELCOME, CONFEDERATE VETERANS
.

A colored man standing by the door hurried forward. “Here, I’ll take charge of those, suh,” he told the driver, who relinquished the bags, nodded to Thorpe, and hurried back toward his automobile. The colored man held the cottage door open. “You go right on in, General, so as they can get your name and figure out which cottage you belong in. We’ll make you right comfortable here, I promise you that.”

“I’m certain of it,” Thorpe said. Through the door, he saw several old men (several
other
old men, he reminded himself)
in gray suits talking with some younger folks who sat behind tables and shuffled through file boxes. He got in line behind one of the veterans.

The fellow turned around. His beard was bushy and white, but his eyebrows had somehow stayed black as coal. He chuckled rheumily. “Might as well be waitin’ my turn at mess call. Makes me think I really am back in the army, after all.”

“Yes, I remember that,” Thorpe said. The four words were plenty to push him back in time, to make him smell the cook fires, hear the chatter of men around him, even to taste the hot corn-bread that had been so much of what he ate for so long.

He got to the head of this line sooner than he usually had at mess call—but then, so many fewer men were here now. One of the young men asked his name, went through a box marked T–Z, and pulled out a badge. “You’ll be in Cottage C, General Thorpe. Pick any vacant bed there. I hope you enjoy your stay. Do you need help pinning that on, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Thorpe proceeded to prove it. “The rheumatism doesn’t have hold of me too badly. Cottage C, you said?”

“That’s right, General. It’s also on your badge below your name, in case—” The young fellow thought twice. “Well, just in case.”

In case you forget
, he’d started to say. Thorpe declined to take offense. So many men his age had wits that began to wander. His, though, so far as he knew, were still sound. He’d written the history of his regiment back around the turn of the century, and only a handful of years had passed since he’d compiled a roster of men from Nash and Edgecombe counties who’d served in the Forty-seventh North Carolina. Now he thought he was the only soldier of his regiment left alive.

The colored man—one of the helpers at the Soldiers’ Home, no doubt—was still waiting when Thorpe came back outside. “Cottage C, is it?” he said, reading the badge. “You just follow me, General. It’s not far.”

Thorpe followed. In the old days, teaching a Negro to read had been against the law. Some had thought blacks too stupid to learn, anyhow. Obviously, they hadn’t known everything there was to know.

The beds in the cottage proved to be steel-framed army cots with scratchy woolen blankets and stiffly starched sheets and pillowcases. Thorpe chose one by the window, to get the benefit of whatever breeze there might be. “Sorry we can’t put you folks up in higher style, General,” the attendant said as he set
down the suitcases. “Most of the time, though, there’s just a dozen or so old soldiers in the home, and we got seven, eight hundred of you all comin’ to visit.”

“Don’t worry,” Thorpe said. “Every man of us here will have known worse accommodations than these, I promise you.” He looked at his army cot. In his army days no such creature existed. He’d slept on pine boughs piled in a frame, rolled in his blanket (a far more ragged and threadbare specimen than the one on the cot), or just on bare ground. And even a pillow! Back then, such had been undreamed-of luxury.

The colored man declined a tip—“This here’s my job, suh”—and hurried away to help some other newly arrived veteran settle in. Thorpe left the clapboard cottage, too, and walked slowly over to the dining hall. It wasn’t yet supper time, but several veterans were in there passing time with a deck of cards. A couple of them paused between hands to squirt jets of tobacco juice at a spattered spittoon.

Looking at the white beards, the bald heads, the gnarled fingers, Thorpe wondered why he’d come. Wasn’t it better to remember the men who’d fought under the Stars and Bars as young and dashing and brave rather than seeing what time had done to them—and to him? Then someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, stranger. You look like you could do with a nip of something better’n water.”

Thorpe turned. Of course the man behind him was wrinkled and old. Everyone here was wrinkled and old. But the fellow looked alert and cheerful; in fact, behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes held a gleam that said he’d probably been a prime forager when he wore the gray in earnest.

“A nip, eh?” Thorpe said. “I have been wondering where I might find one, not being from these parts.” Prohibition didn’t stop drinking, but made it harder to get started in a town where you didn’t know somebody.

The other veteran set a finger alongside his nose, then produced a silver flask from a waistcoat pocket. “Help yourself, but leave enough for me, too.”

The whisky wasn’t very good, but Thorpe had drunk whisky that wasn’t very good for a great many years. He squinted at the other man’s badge. “I am in your debt, Mr., uh, Ledbetter. What unit, if I may ask?”

“Army of Northern Virginia, Eighth Alabama. Call me Jed.”

“I’m John, then. You fought in Hill’s corps, too? I was Forty
seven North Carolina, Henry Heth’s corps. You were in Ma-hone’s, am I right?”

“So I was, by God. Your memory still works, John. So does mine, even if my pecker don’t. Yeah, I was there for all of it … ah, hell, not quite; the Yankees caught me two days before Appomattox.”

“I stayed with it till the end,” Thorpe said. Then he fell silent. Even after a span of years close to the biblical threescore and ten, some memories remained sharp enough to wound.

Ledbetter let him be, as any of the veterans would have. After a while he said, “Well, it ain’t what we wanted it to be back then, but it ain’t too bad, neither.” Thorpe nodded gratefully; that much was true. Ledbetter changed the subject a little: “I got in here last night, and they feed you royal, that they do. If we’d had rations like these when we were in the field, we’d’ve
won
that goddamn war, no doubt about it.”

“I was thinking the same thing about the beds,” Thorpe said.

Ledbetter’s laughter was not a croak, but the hearty cackle of a laying hen. “John, you have that one dead on, and I’m not jokin’. Why, I remember the time I had to sleep in a tree four nights runnin’. That weren’t the worst of it, neither. I—” The story went on for some time. Thorpe believed not a word of it.

He suspected most of the old men here had stories like that. Several of the poker players wore coats studded with badges from so many past reunions that they looked like field marshals from some Balkan army better at bragging than fighting. Their yarns would have grown in the telling every time they were trotted out, too. By now few would resemble anything that had actually happened.

Jed Ledbetter shuffled off toward the bathroom. Thorpe stood around for a while, watching the men playing cards. Sure enough, they had stories by the trainful. As the shadows lengthened, one of them got up and turned on the electric lights. In the old days, Thorpe thought, it would have been an oil lamp or a candle, and endless eyestrain. No one else seemed to notice the change from then to now.

Again he’d wondered why he’d come, what he had in common with these garrulous oldsters. The only answer he could find was that the war had defined their lives, as it had his. He’d been with them at their beginnings; seeing them at the end of things seemed fitting, too.