MacPherson's Lament

been no children to keep him company in his old age, and keep the family land. He supposed he was free now, and about as old as he was likely to get. Surely he would soon be joining Mary in the sweet hereafter. Until then he could have his heart’s desire, if he wished it, or at least what there was of it that money could buy. What are you waiting for, Gabe? said a voice in his head. It sounded like young Tom’s voice, urging him on.

He stared into the fireplace and thought about those far-off days in Georgia when the world had about gone to hell around them. There he was, waving farewell to Tom Bridgeford and cantering off down a dusty road with a fortune in gold in a saddlebag. Bridgeford-State Senator Bridgeford-must have made it back with his, and from the sound of his prosperous life, he had put it to good use. Old Tom would probably laugh to learn that his old shipmate was still a poor mountain farmer in the Blue Ridge. “You could have made something of yourself, Hawks,” he’d say, if he knew. But Gabriel hadn’t wanted to try. He missed the farm and he was more than a little afraid that bushwhackers would get him if he tried to head home with the gold. And how would he explain the gold to the folks back in Giles without sounding like a vulture picking at the bones of the Confederacy? There was hardly a family in the valley that hadn’t lost someone to the cause. How could he profit from the sorrow and still look them in the eyes?

But he couldn’t give it back, either. He didn’t see that the new government would put it to good use. Likely as not, they’d try to hang him for having taken it in the first place. Besides, the day might come when he would need the money-to pay taxes or buy new livestock after a bitter winter, or for the children he thought would come. He’d wandered down to the coast with some notion of trying to work his way out of the country by ship, but that wouldn’t have been safe either. Not with a knapsack full of gold. Near Brunswick, he’d made his way to a little island that was mostly marshland and sand dunes, and there he had buried his gold bars. He marked the spot, fixing it in his mind with landmarks. He reasoned that he could always go back to get them if the need ever arose.

That had been thirty-six years ago. Many’s the time Hawks had toyed with the idea of going back for the gold. He dreamed of building a fine house for Mary or buying a new herd of dairy cows, but each time he thought of making the long journey south again, he always abandoned the project. His need was not great enough to offset the perils of the journey and the fear of discovery.

Now he was old, and Mary was sleeping under a headstone in the churchyard. It was too late in life for riches now. There was no place he wanted to go and nothing he wanted other than what he had. It seemed a shame, though, for the gold to be left in the sands of Georgia. It put him in mind of the parable about the servant who buried his talents and was scolded by the Master for not making use of them. He looked again at the newspaper article about the prosperous Senator Bridgeford. Tom was always the smart one; he had always known what they should do. Gabriel would write his old comrade and tell him where the gold was. Surely a man so prosperous and wise would know what best to do with it.

He pressed his face close to a sheet of writing paper and began to spell out the words: Dear Tom Bridgeford-I take pen in hand to write you this missive…

“ Many are the hearts that are weary tonight, wishing for the war to cease…”

– “Tenting Tonight,” CIVIL WAR SONG SUNG BY BOTH ARMIES

CHAPTER 9

THE FASTEST WAY to Georgia is Interstate 95, which is an extremely boring road-a more or less straight line of asphalt running down the coastal plain, hemmed in by an endless stretch of pine barrens and sandy soil. There is nothing in the way of scenery to keep you alert unless your reading taste runs to garish billboards or lists of fast- food joints at forthcoming exit ramps. I figured that the drive from southeast Virginia to southeast Georgia would be six hours of unbroken monotony, but much as I dreaded it, I will admit that there are routes I am even more reluctant to travel, roads that are anything but boring. These roads are mostly north of Danville.

I have an old school friend who lives in western Maryland, and the drive up I-81 to her house is always an anxious journey for me. To get to Frederick, I must pass through the heartland of the War. First comes Lexington, where Stonewall Jackson taught artillery at Virginia Military Institute before he went forth in 1861 to practice it. An hour or so north is New Market, where the young boys of VMI still in their school uniforms went up against the Union Army and were butchered. Just seeing the road sign NEW MARKET makes me uneasy, and I picture schoolboys dying in the long grass of the valley. Farther up are exits for Charles Town, West Virginia, which means horse racing to most people nowadays, but to me, it conjures up an image of John Brown, waiting for the rope to be placed around his neck and predicting the coming war with his dying words. I-81 is a modern four-lane highway, but it follows the old route along the valley, where the armies traveled under Sheridan and Jackson, and I feel their presence, even over the roar of the eighteen-wheelers whizzing past me.

Near the Maryland border I cross Antietam Creek, and the chills start. Antietam… I know that there are streets in Maryland named that now, probably grade schools and dry cleaners even. But to me Antietam is bodies piled in a roadway, one on top of the other, making a mound twelve feet high, stretching on and on through the dust of that winding road. It is the stench of powder and blood and death that can’t still linger after a hundred years and more, but still I smell it.

They are just words on road signs, that’s all, I tell myself. And between Norfolk and Richmond, on I-64, is an exit sign for Cold Harbor. Cold Harbor… The swampy terrain made it almost impossible to attack the well-entrenched Confederate Army. To charge in such a marsh against the enemy’s guns was suicide, and the Union soldiers knew it. Cold Harbor. On the shirts of their uniforms, they pinned pieces of paper bearing their names and their hometowns. That way when their bodies were pulled out of the swamp, they could be sent home for burial. One soldier wrote: June 3, 1864. I was killed.

I go out of my way not to drive past Cold Harbor.

In the South we haven’t really forgotten the War. Many of us knew people who knew people who fought in it. It hasn’t quite passed into history yet. It’s still more feelings than facts, and likely to remain so for a good while. I know this because I’ve been with my Scottish husband to an older battlefield-Culloden Moor, west of Inverness-and watched his face grow pale and solemn as he looked at the field where his kinsmen died. On that field, the Scots met death, defeat, and the end of their country as an independent nation. That was 1746, and it still stirs them, so I figure we have a ways to go before the emotion fades away, before words like Antietam and Cold Harbor pass without raising chills and dark memories.

I hadn’t thought about the War in a long time. It was Bill and his damned Confederate ladies who brought it all back. Even on I-95, where the most ominous sign is an ad for Gatorland, the gray ghosts rode along, making me remember them. In Virginia, the Civil War isn’t something you learn in school; it’s a Presence. Always there. I can remember an ancient great-aunt telling Bill and me about our great-great-grandfather David MacPherson, a sixteen-year-old private in the 68th Infantry under General Bragg. In 1865 the 68th had marched from Virginia to Fort Fisher in the snow, he’d told her. They had no shoes by that time, just shreds of leather or rags wrapped around cracked and callused feet. It was winter and they followed the railroad tracks south. They left bloody footprints in the snow.

That’s the war to me: a starving sixteen-year-old leaving footprints in the snow in his own blood. And the women I was tracking were the daughters of those young soldiers-the last link with them. So what was I supposed to do? Coax those old ladies into a nursing home so the state could take their house?

I wished there was something to look at on I-95 besides a million damned pine trees. I didn’t want to have to think anymore.

A month in a county jail had not improved Tug Mosier in any way. The lack of sunlight and starchy jail food had made him even paler and more flabby. His hair shone with grease, and a stubble of beard completed a look that