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.”
six
The ground beneath our feet was collapsing. This was the summer of sinkholes, and they were ubiquitous, popping up everywhere unexpectedly and with a seemingly intentional flair for the dramatic. Despite the brief and torrential afternoon rains, the water tables were running low after years of below-average precipitation and our thin aquifer ceiling was brittle and crumbling. With the slightest weight or pressure, it could break. There was no telling where or when it would strike.
It began one afternoon when a section of the Augustus Highway caved in during the height of rush hour, taking out a semi at full stop and sending the trailer-load of pigs squealing into a twelve-foot-wide crater. Most of the pigs survived the fall, however, miraculously pulling their chubby bodies onto the highway—and right into the oncoming traffic. Cars everywhere braking, suddenly swerving, piling and compounding.
A few days later, a much larger disaster, also miraculously without fatality (human, at least). A trailer park, three homes sucked underground. Every last bit obliterated—trailer, lawn gnomes, plastro-turf, large-bulb outdoor Christmas lights. Neighbors hovered together around the pit, thanking God that no one had been at home, placing arms around the returned families grieving and staring blankly down into the disaster, the sudden loss beyond their comprehension. The assembled memorabilia, the private stashes, custom-groomed suburban front
