MacPherson's Lament

Edith looked at the paper. Then she looked at Bill. And back at the paper. “Uh… well…”

“Did you or did you not witness these signatures?”

“What did he say?” Edith hedged.

“It’s all right, Edith,” sighed Bill. “I’ll tell them. I forgot to take Edith with me when I went out to have the paper signed. We had only about twelve hours’ notice about the closing, and she was very busy typing up all the documents we needed. By the time I realized that it wasn’t notarized, one of the women had gone for the evening, and we had a ton of work to do, so she took my word for it.”

“Of course we will be reporting this to the state bar association, as well as to the proper legal authorities,” said Byrd in a self-righteous pout.

“Wait,” said Bill. “Flora Dabney can clear this up. Just call her and ask her about the bank account and the newspaper ad-and all the rest of it.” He reached for the telephone book. “They said they were going to be moving to the Oakmont Nursing Home. They even invited me to come and have tea with them. Ah, here’s the number. We’ll soon straighten this out.”

Bill looked at the ceiling while he listened to the phone ring. What incredible bad luck, he was thinking. Everything going wrong, all on the same case. He’d catch hell for that notary business, and A. P. Hill would be thoroughly pissed about this snafu in the new firm, no matter how brief a mixup it proved to be. The ringing stopped.

“Hello,” said Bill eagerly. “Oakmont Nursing Home? May I speak to Miss Flora Dabney, please? She’s a new resident. She and the other former residents of the Home for Confederate Women just moved to your facility-oh, about a week ago… What? Are you sure? Could you check? Maybe somebody else?… Oh, you do.” Bill’s voice became progressively muted as the conversation continued. Finally he muttered a lifeless thank-you and hung up.

“I don’t understand,” he said. “They’re not there. The director of Oakmont says that she’s never heard of them. Oakmont-I’m sure that’s what Flora Dabney said.”

“Maybe they changed their minds,” Edith suggested. “You know how old ladies are. Try the other retirement communities.”

“Did you ever actually see any of these women?” Custis Byrd wanted to know.

“Well… no,” said Edith after a moment’s thought. “But I’ve heard so much about them. Miss Dabney came by the office on my day off.” She turned to Bill. “Was Powell here? Did she meet them?”

Bill shook his head. “I don’t know where she was. A meeting, I think. But Miss Dabney sent me a photograph of herself.” He reached in the desk drawer and pulled out the sepia portrait of the Edwardian girl.

Huff and Byrd were not impressed. “You can buy a hundred photos like that in any antique shop,” said Custis Byrd. “Instant ancestors for a dollar apiece. I’d hardly call that picture evidence.”

“Try the other nursing homes,” Edith said again. “Miss Dabney can clear all this up in two minutes.”

“If there is a Miss Dabney,” Byrd snickered.

Ten minutes later, Bill had completed four more phone calls, each following the pattern of the first. There were no more retirement communities to try. Then he called directory assistance in search of a telephone listing for Flora Dabney and for each of the other ladies. Nothing.

“But it just doesn’t make sense,” Bill kept saying. “Where could they be? They couldn’t just vanish into thin air!”

John Huff and Custis Byrd looked at each other. Huff stood up. “Well, I think that’s all,” he said, motioning for Byrd to follow him. “We’ll be going now.”

“Going?” echoed Bill, standing up as if he wanted to run after them.

“Yes,” said Huff. “We’ll let the authorities take it from here. You can explain this to the police. And I’m sure they’ll want to know what you did with the bodies of the eight defenseless old ladies who lived in the Home. You didn’t bury them in the basement, did you?”

* * *

Jimmy Stewart stood up and embraced the young boy with the crutch. The congregation burst into song as the credits rolled.

The Confederate soldier switched off the video. On the tiny rug that constituted A. P. Hill’s living room, two other uniformed men scribbled furiously in spiral notebooks, while on the two sofas more contemporarily dressed gentlemen and A. P. Hill herself were similarly engaged in composition. Aside from sporadic muttering over an answer, no one spoke. Only the whir of the rewinding cassette recorder broke the silence.

Even in a less prosaic setting, no knowledgeable observer would have mistaken the uniformed men for Confederate ghosts. Their gray wool coats were clean and undamaged, and they all wore leather boots. Besides, they were at least ten years too old and forty pounds too heavy to have been the boys who really fought that distant war. These were the sunshine soldiers who fought the war summers and weekends, without grapeshot, dysentery, gangrene, malnutrition, or conspicuous personal inconvenience. They were the reenactors.

Tonight, though, they were not on duty, even in their mythic Confederacy. They were in uniform just for the fun of it, attending a meeting of the local Civil War Roundtable Discussion Group, which was assembled at the home of A. P. Hill, descendant and namesake of the general. The evening’s entertainment had been a showing of Shenandoah, a Civil War-set film of the 1960s starring James Stewart. It was a sad and stirring saga of the war in Virginia, but in this audience wet handkerchiefs were conspicuously absent.

A. P. Hill went to the kitchen and brought back coffee and plates of cake and cookies. When the rations had been distributed to the troops, she said, “All right, is everybody ready? Put your pens on the table now, so no one can be accused of modifying his comments. Who wants to go first?”

An elderly man in a black suit raised his hand. “I got eight,” he announced. “Shall I read them out?”

“Go on, Dr. Howe. The rest of us will check off any of our responses that duplicate yours.”

“First, the scenery was wrong. Does that count? It certainly was not Virginia.”

“They filmed it in Oregon,” said Powell Hill. “I don’t think we can fault them for that, though. Movies almost never get produced in a logical setting. Go on to the next one.”

“According to the film, the year was 1864, and Jimmy Stewart still had six grown sons living at home on his farm in the middle of a war zone. No way. The Confederacy introduced conscription in 1861. Those boys would all have been drafted. So would their dad, more than likely.”

Everyone in the room nodded. Most retrieved their pens and made check marks on their note pads.

“It might have worked if you’d changed the location,” Ken Filban suggested. He was a bank executive from East Tennessee. “According to the movie, they were on a five-hundred-acre farm near Harrisonburg.”

“Which should have been crawling with hired help,” said Confederate corporal Scott Chambers, otherwise a driver for UPS. “In the days before mechanized farming, you couldn’t cultivate five hundred acres with five men and two young women to run the house. They weren’t ranchers; they were farmers.”

“Like I said, change the location and it might have been plausible,” Ken Filban said. “Make the Anderson farm a fifty-acre place tucked into a hollow in the North Carolina or Tennessee mountains, and chances are they could have got away with ignoring the war. Family legend had it that all my great-great-uncles spent the war dodging both armies-and never served a day.”

Dr. Howe cleared his throat. “It’s still my turn. Number two: the rifles were wrong.” Unanimous check marks.

“They even got the rifles wrong in Glory,” said A. P. Hill. “They had the soldiers checking serial numbers. It was more accurate than this movie, though.”

“Number three: they had a black Union soldier serving in a white regiment. That didn’t happen.”

“How about when Jimmy Stewart’s family stopped the Union train and the Federals didn’t shoot them? Six guys stopping a train! And what did the Federals have, five guys guarding a couple of hundred prisoners on that train?” Ken Filban was laughing at the naivete of moviemakers.

Powell Hill shrugged. “That’s Hollywood. Still, the film had some good qualities. The main characters were Southerners who weren’t made to sound like idiots. And the rural people weren’t portrayed as hicks.”

“It seemed like a Western to me. Didn’t it look like a Western to you?”

“The director’s next job was the television series Bonanza,” said Dr. Howe.