Читать книгу The Late Matthew Brown - Paul Ketzle - Страница 14

five

Once a year, nearly every year for the past one hundred and fifty, people gathered for a reenactment of the Battle of Blossom Ferry. These were the history buffs, the fifth-generation locals, the desperate and desolate still clinging to the cause. Without this, they could see what they had left. Though I’d lived in the county my entire life, I had never attended, and Hero decided that this oversight should be rectified.

“An honest to goodness redneck celebration?” She jumped on the foot of my bed in the morning, while I was trying to will myself back to sleep. “Who’d want to miss it?”

“Me,” I said. “I’d like to miss it.”

“But it’s a tradition around here.”

“That doesn’t make it mine.”

“I don’t see your point,” Hero said.

Hero had gone ahead and invited Janice, who in turn offered to drive the three of us. She was the only one of my friends whom Hero had met and liked. Though, as usual, there were caveats.

“She’s killer,” Hero said, as Janice pulled into our driveway. “Just don’t ever trust her.”

“She’s the most honest person I know.”

“Exactly my point.”

Blossom Ferry was nothing more than a footnote reference in any history of the Civil War I’d ever seen, of the ones that even bothered to mention it; but the way the throngs turned out to watch and participate, you’d think it was the pivotal battle in the entire war. Perhaps that was because it was the only major skirmish to occur within a hundred miles of the city. Or possibly because it was a Southern victory, at a time late in the war when so little was going the Confederacy’s way. In truth, though, it is only staged as a victory. Historians are quick to point out that it was more accurately a draw, and a messy one at that. It might even have been more precisely described as a strategic victory for the Union, since while the Confederate forces refused to give ground, their casualties were so great that the Northern troops simply marched through the same territory a few weeks later with hardly a scuffle.

At the site of the battle, Southland Enterprises was in the midst of construction on SouthWorld, a massive theme park and a sort of tribute to the Confederacy and the Antebellum South as a whole, as the billboards lining the drive in proclaimed. When completed, it would have “historically accurate” portrayals of “average pre-Civil War Southern life,” a claim most minority communities found borderline offensive and said so. In addition, there would be restaurants and craft shops and live performances and artisans, residential housing, executive accommodations, and nearly a dozen rides, including The Rebel Yell, “the largest roller-coaster this side of the Mason-Dixon.” Coming Next Summer!!

We arrived early to the battlefield. Plaques and paved paths directed visitors around the dense growth. What for the invading armies had been a treacherous and unknown wilderness was now a carefully laid out tourist attraction. Trees that might obstruct the path had been cut down and sawed into manageable sections. Janice pointed out that one of the primary difficulties during the war for the north was a lack of good maps. Were the war fought today, they could arrive at a trailhead and check out the etched and detailed map with its restrooms and major highways and obligatory red dot:

YOU ARE HERE.

The field of battle itself was mostly clear, and in the background, a row of condos. On one balcony, a party was raging, with people cheering and heavy music splitting the morning stillness. The re-enactors, the purists, were visibly perturbed, shuffling around in an uneasy silence while awaiting the start of the festivities. We waited along with two-dozen other onlookers. The rebel soldiers around were a motley bunch dressed in drab, mostly middle-aged, mostly white. Then a young man in a knock-off Colonel Sanders suit whistled for everyone’s attention and announced to the small crowd that the coordinator had been delayed, but that they would be starting anyway in a few minutes.

“They should be black,” I said. “That’s one of the few things I remember from history class, the irony. The Southern army defending the Confederacy was black and the Northerners were all white.”

“That’s baloney,” Janice said, taking up a position between me and Hero.

“No, it’s true,” I said. “They’d been promised freedom by the Confederacy. Once it became clear that the South was losing the war, the leaders had a choice: Either free the slaves or lose their own freedom. For some, that was when the South actually lost the war, even though they hung on for a while longer. It’s the moment when the aristocracy decided that they weren’t fighting for ideas any more. Just themselves.”

“Quite a sanitized narrative, isn’t it?” Janice said. “The idea that in some benevolent Southland, we weren’t fighting to maintain a corrupt system of enslavement. I think it makes the whole thing much more romantic, don’t you?”

“Can’t you let us hold on to some of our treasured history?”

“History knows no saints,” she said. “Who doesn’t love a good story? Black soldiers defending the South? Trust me. All fiction.”

“They say truth is stranger than fiction.”

“They also say lots of things that are bullshit. I’m a historian. I should know.”

“You’re a journalist. Who used to be an anthropologist.”

“People would know it’s B.S., too, if they bothered to read and didn’t just want to believe the story they liked best.”

The battle was starting. The blue coats had retreated across to the far side of the field, to the south, and the ragtag Confederates stepped behind a line of trees to wait.

“There wasn’t even a ferry,” Janice added.

A whistle sounded somewhere behind us.

“How do you remake history?” Janice was saying. “You can’t recapture the essence of a battle. The fear. The unknown. All you can get is choreography.”

“Maybe they’re frustrated dancers,” I said.

Hero stepped hard on my toe. “Do you two mind? I’m trying to watch a war.”

The Union troops were coming into view. They were running across the field, screaming at who knows what. The Southerners behind the trees were having trouble keeping from laughing. Soon, the pop of blanks exploded, and a half-dozen figures running across the field simultaneously clutched their chests, spun around and fell to the ground. A moment later, a few of those dead stood up, apparently loath to be dead so soon, and continued the charge.

Meanwhile, the Southern conscripts were obviously getting anxious waiting for their counterparts to arrive. One older soldier let out a hoarse yell and raced out of the trees to meet the oncoming troops. I saw three bluecoats take shots directly at him, and when he didn’t slow, they threw their arms up in disgust. When he reached the Union troops, he shot at a couple point blank. No one fell. In the middle of the battlefield, a brief debate began. A few errant blanks fired here and there, but the overall battle had come to a sputtering halt. Some just stood shaking their heads, leaning against the support of the rifles. The organizer in the white dandy suit had slipped through the trees and joined in the discussion.

The quiet conversation soon became more intense and evolved into an argument, with pointing and shouting and arms thrown up in frustration. Finally, one blue coat raised the butt of his rifle and smacked the lone Confederate in the face, knocking him to the ground.

The remaining line of Southerners charged out of the undergrowth in response, no longer firing shots, but hurling rocks and swinging their guns like clubs. The line of spectators took a step back as the playacting transformed into actual violence. One family rushed off toward the cars, the father with two kids saddling his shoulders. A band of Confederates separated from the melee and raced into the dense brush, immediately chased by four beefy Northern corporals. The lines were completely blurred now, as both sides became enmeshed in their individual fights. Large out-of-shape middle-agers wrestling around in the wet grass with energetic twenty-somethings.

We took cover behind a low hedge, nearer to the fighting, but clearly out of bounds.

“You know, this is a little bit more realistic than I’d expected,” Hero observed.

Janice pulled out a cigarette. “It’s human nature. In the pitch of battle, when things get really intense, who’s there to keep people in line? Once you’re up close, there’s very little to do but try to beat the crap out of someone else.”

By the time we’d had enough and were ready to leave, after nearly half an hour and innumerable counts of assault, the police had arrived, as well as the absent choreographer, who was still trying to salvage something of the original battle’s history by coaxing the Northern troops to retreat toward the east again, and convincing most of the remaining Southern troops to lie still upon the ground long enough to be reasonably considered dead.

“Don’t get the wrong idea about Southerners,” I said to Hero on the ride home. “We’re a laid-back people, mostly. We don’t like to rock the boat.”

She propped her elbows on my seat back. Our eyes met in the rearview mirror. “I thought this was the land of Rebels, stuff like that.”

“That’s propaganda,” Janice said, gunning the engine as the light turned green. “Honestly. We’re harmless.”

We drove past three billboards in close succession—two of them told us we should repent our sins; the other advertised discounts for laser corrective eye surgery.

“Didn’t you start a war or something?” Hero asked. “I think I read that somewhere.”

“What choice did we have?” I said. “They invaded us. You can look it up.”

“I also read somewhere that you might have deserved it. But really, I just want to know what it is with you people and living in the past. Can’t you just let it go and get on with things?”

“That’s the old South. This is the new one.”

Hero leaned back in her seat. “I’m still trying to figure out the difference.”