MacPherson's Lament

help to you in figuring out your parents’ situation.”

“They’re behaving so strangely. It’s so hard to know how to fix it.”

Edith Creech said gently, “Well, Bill, they didn’t hire you to fix it.”

Margaret MacPherson was not thinking about her husband, Doug. She definitely was not. After five-thirty, the time when he would have been coming home from work, she had expended a considerable amount of energy ensuring that she would be much too occupied to remember his existence. She had watered the plants, vacuumed the spotless carpet, and reread the mail, even the bills and catalogues. In the background the television blared away for background noise, but she did not look at it. It was only a question of habits, she told herself; and one must be patient and give oneself time to change habits.

It would all take some getting used to. The rooms looked strange-with odds and ends of furniture missing from their accustomed places and none of Doug’s usual clutter on the end tables. It was nice not to have to fix a complete meal every night, the meat and two vegetables that Doug insisted on. Now she could have a salad or a bowl of soup if she pleased, or just skip dinner altogether. Maybe she could lose a few pounds now that she was on her own. She looked at herself in the mirror above the fireplace. She might lighten her hair as well; it looked so mousy these days. Before, there hadn’t seemed to be much reason to bother. It wasn’t as if Doug ever noticed. She could have set it on fire and he wouldn’t have remarked on it. Now, though, she thought she might try styling it. This was a time for trying things.

It was her turn now. The children were grown and launched into respectable careers. Her mind hovered over the word respectable in Elizabeth’s case-all those cadavers-but at least she was married, and that’s what counted. A stricken face stared back at her from the mirror as she listened to those sentiments. At least she was married, and that’s what counted. Had she really thought such a thing? Her generation had been raised to believe that, and it was hard to outgrow that early indoctrination, even when you knew what a lie it was. That wasn’t what counted at all. It mattered very much who you were, and what you did with your talents, because marriage these days was not a haven from the world. It was not the safety net; it was the tightrope.

Margaret MacPherson’s gaze fell upon the family portrait, framed and hanging over the sofa. That could go in the attic, she thought. She could put another picture there reflecting the status of her new life-just as soon as she figured out what that was. She was brooding again. Time to get busy. Do the dishes, then, to keep occupied. She walked into the kitchen to tackle the day’s dishes, only to find that she had already done them.

On the way to Appomattox, the ghost of an army

Staggers a muddy road for a week or so

Through fights and weather, dwindling away each day.

– STEPHEN VINCENT BENET,

John Brown’s Body, Book 8

DANVILLE-APRIL 9, 1865

COMPARED TO THE fair city of Richmond, Danville was a piddling town, Gabriel Hawks reckoned. Perhaps the place was a mite bewildered to be suddenly elevated to the capital of the Confederate States of America and simultaneously flooded with refugees from the former capital. Its citizens had scurried to find suitably grand accommodations for the sudden rush of Confederate dignitaries who had taken up residence in the little Dan River mill town now that Richmond was a smoldering ruin. President Davis and two of his cabinet officers were guests in the home of Colonel W. T. Sutherlin, but there were too many refugees for Danville to accommodate, so some of the lesser folk were quartered in railroad cars switched off on a side track, where they subsisted on what commissary rations could be spared for them.

It seemed that most of the navy had fetched up in Danville. Gabriel had never seen so many captains, commanders, surgeons, and engineers, all milling around with nothing to do. They mostly congregated at the naval store set up by Paymaster Semple. There they’d pass the time sitting on bread barrels, tying fancy sailor’s knots, and swapping sea yarns about past glories. But they were fish out of water. How could they still be in the war high and dry miles from the sea, their ships destroyed, their ports captured? But they simply had to wait it out, like the rest of Danville.

Tom Bridgeford had said that it was madness to have put the capital in Richmond to begin with, with all the vast territories of the Confederacy to choose from. Why not the grand port cities of New Orleans or Charleston? Why put the heart of your country a hundred and ten miles from the enemy’s seat of government? One of the Richmond boys tried to explain to him that if the navy gunboats could have held off the Union fleet upriver, then the Allegheny Mountains would have forced any invading army down a hundred-mile corridor that would be made a death trap by the defending Army of Northern Virginia. The swamps and the forests ought to have swallowed them up, and indeed they did for three long years, but the trouble was the Union never ran out of soldiers. They just kept coming. No matter where you put the capital, they’d have just kept coming.

But Bridgeford wouldn’t talk sense. It was all those damned Virginians’ doing, he insisted. The Confederacy was top-heavy with them: Robert E. Lee, Thomas J. Jackson, A. P. Hill, J. E. B. Stuart-at least a hundred generals out of the four hundred altogether. And a raft of the government officials, all from the Old Dominion. President Davis was a Mississippian, but no doubt he was outvoted by all those Virginia gentlemen who demanded the honor of the seat of government for their precious Richmond-and common sense be damned. Well, look where it had got them, Bridgeford railed. After spending most of the war fending off the Federals from an endless succession of attacks on Richmond, they’d finally lost her and been forced to flee to this backwater place, whose only virtue, according to Bridgeford, was its proximity to the North Carolina line. Pride goeth before a fall.

Gabriel tried not to think about politics. Or losing the war. None of it made much sense to him, especially when you looked at the havoc that came of it all. But he thought that he might someday be old enough to tell the story of their retreat from Richmond for the comedy of errors that it was. He could laugh at it now if he hadn’t been living it. “So there we was,” he’d be telling his grand-younguns, “a- throwing pieces of that picket fence into the firebox on that locomotive and trying to get her a-going, and all the time we could hear them Yankees coming. Well, she finally built up a head of steam, and us sailors and a raft of the townsfolk clambered aboard, and off we chugged till we got to the first bit of a hill right outside the station near the riverbank, and she ground to a halt. That little locomotive wasn’t equal to the task of hauling that great bulk of humanity any great distance, and there we sat, with a right smart view of the city of Richmond. We could see lines of Union cavalry and artillery snaking along toward State House Square, and we reckoned any minute they’d look up and see us, and that would be the end of us. But if the Lord wasn’t on our side, then I reckon He sat that one out, ’cause they never paid us no mind, and besides, the bridges were all afire by then.

“By and by the steam engineer went running up to the admiral, and he must’ve told him about finding another locomotive hid away in the shops, because directly they went and hauled that engine out and hooked it on in front, and we were able to proceed at a crawl to the first decent woodpile. We lit out and grabbed the better fuel, and then we really fired up and got the hell out of Richmond.”

The farther they got from the scene of destruction, the easier they breathed, and even now he could find things to laugh about on the run to Danville. It seemed like they couldn’t go more than a mile without having to pick up a straggler-a stray colonel, even generals-left stranded by the recent turn of events. Then there were the railroad people. The admiral didn’t appear overly amused by the sight of those conductors and engineers bustling out from their stations and trying to take over the operation of the train now that the navy had assembled it and got it going.