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’dve knowed y’all had done give up, we wouldn’tve 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.”
Marjorie’s laugh displayed small, even white teeth. “All right, General, since you put it that way, let’s cut us a rag!”
Thorpe was one of the last veterans still dancing when the band played “Dixie.” The armory echoed with shouts and cheers and old men’s voices cracking as they tried to turn loose Rebel yells. Thorpe yelled with the best of them, pumping his fist in the air.
Marjorie stared, wide-eyed, not just at him but at all the old soldiers; maybe, just for a moment, she too saw them as they’d been so long ago. Emboldened by that thought, Thorpe leaned forward and pecked her on the cheek. She smiled and squeezed his hands between hers. “Thank you, General,” she said. “I’ve enjoyed this
