Departures (27 page)

“Generals, please,” a woman in nurse’s whites called over
and over till she had the veterans’ attention. “We need you to go out for a little while so we can set the room up for supper.”

Thorpe left without complaint. The poker players followed more slowly, grumbling all the way. He smiled. That took him back across the years. Some of the men in his company had left their cards back in camp when they went into battle, so as not to have to explain the devil’s pasteboards to St. Peter if they got killed. But others, like these old fellows, would sooner have played than eaten.

As six o’clock drew near, more and more veterans gathered on the grass outside the dining hall. Quite a few of them had flasks, which they weren’t shy in sharing. After three or four had gone by, Thorpe began to feel merry. He joined in the cheer—not quite a real Rebel yell, but close—when the doors opened. As if at one of those long-ago mess calls, the men formed a single line as they filed in.

Since he didn’t know anyone here, Thorpe took a seat at random. He found himself across the table from Jed Ledbetter. The Alabamian grinned at him, displaying tobacco-stained false teeth. “Was I right, John, or what? Ain’t this fine-lookin’ grub?”

“That it is, Jed.” Thorpe meant it—platters of ham and chicken alternated with bowls full of green salad, peas, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Along with the unofficial liquids lurking in hip flasks, there were milk and Coca-Cola and ice water. He filled his plate full. He was eating better here than he had lately down in Rocky Mount. Times were no less hard there than anywhere else in the country.

He heard so much talk of Pickett’s Charge and what might have been at Gettysburg that he couldn’t help himself. “Don’t you forget Pettigrew’s boys,” he said at last. “We went up the hill on Pickett’s left, and a whole great lot of us never came down again.”

Maybe he’d touched glory then. He wasn’t quite sure. He did remember being too excited to be afraid, even when the Federal guns on the flank tore great bleeding holes in the tight gray ranks.

Somebody said, “Reckon they call it Pickett’s charge on account of his fellas got to the top o’ the hill and in amongst the Yankees, and Pettigrew’s didn’t.”

“One of the reasons they got to the top is that we shielded them most of the way with our bodies,” Thorpe retorted hotly. Then he stopped, amazed at the anger he could still feel sixty
nine years after the fact. He managed a laugh. “It’s water under the bridge now, that’s for certain.”

“So it is,” the other veteran answered, “and bodies under the ground, too.” The whole table fell silent for a moment then. That shot had landed too close for comfort. Almost all the bodies were under the ground by now, and the ones that weren’t—those at this reunion, for instance—would be soon.

Though tired, Thorpe found he wasn’t sleepy. Along with dozens of other veterans, he sat in the dining hall for hours after supper was done, drinking coffee (some of it spiked), smoking, and listening to and telling tales. As his regiment’s historian, he knew a lot of them. The ordinary passing of day and night seemed far away.

“It’s always like this at these things,” a graybeard with a chestful of reunion badges said. “When you’re with your own kind, you want to spend all the time you can on doin’ and talkin’. Your bed’ll always be there.”

And you won’t
, Thorpe thought. Now that he was here, he wished he’d started coming to reunions long ago. Well, that was water under the bridge, too.

A few at a time, the old men slipped out of the hall and made for their cottages. A little past midnight, someone made a horrifying discovery in his program book. He clambered up onto a chair and, teetering dangerously, waved his arms and waited for quiet. When he got it, he said loudly, “There’s gonna be a God-damned band playin’ us God-damned reveille at seven o’clock in the God-damned mornin’ tomorrow. They must think we’re still in the God-damned army.”

Assisted by two of his comrades, he descended from his perch. The dining hall emptied quickly after that. Thorpe’s ears were not what they had been, but he didn’t think he could sleep through a band’s worth of reveille.

Sure enough, at seven sharp the music blared out. Along with the rest of the men in Cottage C, Thorpe dressed and returned to the dining hall. This time, he made a point of finding Jed Ledbetter. The Alabamian looked up, grinned his yellowed grin, then resumed his attack on a plate of bacon and eggs.

Thorpe had been reading his own program book. He said, “I don’t mind getting up early today, because the morning’s event is the United Confederate Veterans’ business meeting.”

Ledbetter grinned again, evilly. “An’ you reckon you’ll just doze right through it, you mean.”

“It has to be easier than sleeping in a tree, don’t you think?” Thorpe asked, deadpan.

“Remind me to watch out for you, John,” Ledbetter said. “You may be a quiet one, but you got yourself a devil hidin’ there inside.”

The two veterans sat side by side on the bus that took them to the Mosque Auditorium at Sixth and Laurel. Confederate battle flags flew everywhere in Richmond. A forest of them waved in front of the Mosque; an enormous one was stretched behind the speaker’s platform. The building’s ceiling fans stirred the thick air but did little to cool it.

The introductions of aged UCV dignitaries by other aged UCV dignitaries went on and on. Some of them seemed hardly more lively than Stonewall Jackson’s horse Old Sorrel, whose stuffed carcass was on display back at the Soldiers’ Home. As he’d thought he might, Thorpe dozed through the speeches. Every so often his head would fall forward onto his chest and wake him; in those moments, he saw he was far from the only old soldier having trouble staying awake.

After lunch, the Confederate veterans filed onto the buses that took them across town for the dedication of the Richmond Battlefield Parks. They rolled east along the section of Franklin Street called Monument Avenue, past the memorials to Matthew Fontaine Maury, to Jackson, to Jefferson Davis, to Lee, and to Jeb Stuart. Thorpe hadn’t been with the Army of Northern Virginia for the Seven Days Campaign, whose sites took up much of the Battlefield Parks, but he’d fought at Cold Harbor two years later, holding Grant’s men away from the Confederate capital.

His bus was one of the first to arrive, so he got a spot near the speakers’ stand. A solidly built, dark-haired U.S. Army colonel was leaning down and shaking hands with a good number of veterans. “Who’s he?” Thorpe asked.

“Let’s have us a look.” Jed Ledbetter checked his program. Behind his thick reading glasses, his eyes widened. “God damn me if it ain’t U.S. Grant III.”

Thorpe waited to hear no more, but began trying to make his way through the crowd. It wasn’t easy; too many other ex-Rebels had the same idea. But at last he got to clasp hands with the Federal commander’s grandson and namesake. “Thank you for coming here, sir,” he said.

“I’m pleased to do it,” Colonel Grant answered. “I wasn’t sure what kind of reception I’d get, seeing what my name is, but everyone’s been very kind.”

“Your grandfather was doing the job he thought right, sir; so were the men who fought for him,” Thorpe answered. “We knew that then, and we know it now. Nothing could have shown it better than his kindness and theirs at Appomattox, when the Federals fed us and let us keep our horses and mules.”

“He always felt you southern men were doing the same, and doing it bravely,” Grant said. “We always were brothers, even when we fought.”

“Yes,” Thorpe said. By then, though, Colonel Grant had turned to another old soldier. Thorpe went back to his place without resentment. It was just the reverse: that a Grant would come here to pay tribute to his grandfather’s former foes said all that needed saying about reconciliation between North and South.

Perhaps not quite all; Jed Ledbetter played the part of the unreconstructed Rebel. “I won’t shake his hand,” he said when Thorpe had returned from the bunting-draped platform. “I wouldn’t have shook his grandpappy’s hand, neither. General? Ha! He just kept throwin’ bluecoats at us till he wore us to death, is all.”

“They were brave men, too,” Thorpe said. “When they came across the open country at us here at Cold Harbor, shooting them felt like murder.” He paused a moment in surprise and realization. “I expect they felt the same about us the third day at Gettysburg.”

“Didn’t stop ’em,” Ledbetter growled. Then he made a sour face. “All right, John, I see your point. God damn if I have to like it, though.”

As the afternoon’s speeches wore on, a couple of Confederate veterans passed out from the heat. But doctors and nurses were at the ready, and soon revived them. Thorpe noticed that Jed Ledbetter clapped as loud as anyone else after Colonel Grant spoke. In fact, the colonel got the loudest hand of the afternoon.

Ledbetter pulled out a pocket watch as the old soldiers re-boarded the buses. “We better be back by six,” he said. “Somebody’ll pay hell if I miss ‘Amos ‘n’ Andy’ on the radio.” He sounded much fiercer at that moment than he had when he was grumbling about General Grant. Several men echoed him, some profanely. But the organizing committee had taken into account the nearly universal passion for the show: no reunion events were scheduled while it was on.

Fortunately, the buses did return on time. Thorpe listened to “Amos ’n’ Andy” along with everyone else in his cottage, then
went to dinner, and then to the Mosque for a reception honoring the veterans. To his surprise, he actually got asked a sensible question there. A man in his middle thirties came up and said, “Sir, do you think what you went through was as hard as the fighting in France?”

“That’s a hard question to answer, young fellow. You were Over There?” Thorpe asked. The man nodded. Thorpe watched his eyes go distant and watchful; yes, he’d seen the elephant. The Confederate veteran said, “We weren’t up against the big cannon and the machine guns and the gas, as you boys were, but we didn’t have your supply train or your doctors, either. War’s hard any which way, I expect.”

“True enough.” The Great War soldier nodded again. “Thank you, General.”

Thorpe stayed away from the next day’s business meetings at the Mosque. Talking with the assembled veterans at the Soldiers’ Home was more enjoyable. When he let out that he’d been a captain, a lot of them gave him a hard time; most, in those days, had been youths with no rank to their name.

At one point that afternoon he asked Jed Ledbetter to move so he could get past him and go to the bathroom, Ledbetter sprang to his feet with alarming spryness. “Yes, sir, Captain, sir!” he cried, coming to a brace surely stiffer than any he’d used back in his soldier days.

Thorpe looked around at the grinning veterans. “If it’s all the same to you gents, I think I’d sooner be demoted back to General so I can be like everybody else,” he said. Amid raucous laughter, the rest of the Confederate soldiers gave him his wish.

Around four, Ledbetter got up and left the talk of old battles won and old battles lost. “I’m gonna take me a nap,” he announced when a couple of eyebrows went up. “I wanna be at my best fo’ the ball tonight, do some fancy steppin’ with the pretty young things.”

Thorpe looked forward to the dance, too, but the talk was even better, with names that echoed across the decades like far-off musketry. Some he’d been through: Gettysburg and the Wilderness, Cold Harbor and Appomattox. Some were from before the days when the Forty-seventh North Carolina had joined Lee’s army: Antietam, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville. And some came from the west: Shiloh, Stone’s Mountain, Vicksburg.

One white-haired Texan had fought at Palmito Ranch more than a month after the surrender at Appomattox. “Yeah, we
whupped the Yankees,” he said, “but if we’d’ve knowed y’all had done give up, we wouldn’t’ve bothered.”

Jed Ledbetter came back to the dining hall in time for supper. He made a point of sitting by Thorpe for the trip to the ball at the Grays’ Armory. As the bus rattled down the street, they exchanged addresses. “Sure I’ll write to you, John,” Ledbetter said. “What the hell else I got to do all day?” He cackled with laughter.

A flask came by. Thorpe sipped from it, passed it to his new friend. He said, “We can put all we’ve got into the dance tonight, seeing as we’ll be in cars for the grand parade tomorrow.”

“I heard tell about that,” Ledbetter said, nodding. “Don’t know as I like it much. I marched in plenty o’ these down through the years.” He paused and loosed that cackle of his again. “ ‘Course, I was younger then.”

The ballroom swept Thorpe back to the days when he’d been younger, much younger. Had the girls been in crinolines and hoop skirts that swept the floor, had the gallants been without gray beards and canes, the scene might have been one from his first stay in Richmond all those years before.

The moment the music started, he even forgot his comrades’ age. Most of them forgot it, too, swinging their partners through the Grand March as if they were going off to battle in the morning. Several of the young ladies exclaimed in pleasure; they might not have expected the old soldiers to have so much vim left.

No sooner had that idea crossed Thorpe’s mind than a girl behind him let out an indignant squeak and exclaimed, “Why, General, you forget yourself!”

“No, miss—I remember, by God!” the veteran retorted.

Fiddlers played tunes that went back to the War Between the States. Thorpe discovered his feet still knew how to jig. He was out of breath and his heart pounded heavily in his chest when the music stopped, but the applause from his partner, a very pretty little strawberry blonde about the age of his oldest great-granddaughter, resolved him to dance all night.

The American Legion band played square dance music. Thorpe felt lighter on his feet than he had in thirty years, maybe more. He knew he was cutting a sprightly figure. Some of the veterans wilted as the evening went on and retired to the sidelines, but he stayed out on the floor, just as he’d told himself he would.

“General, shouldn’t you take a rest?” asked the blond girl. (her name, he’d learned, was Marjorie).

He shook his head. “Miss, I haven’t so many nights of dancing left in me that I can afford to waste even part of one.”