Southern Fried Sushi (36 page)

Personally, I thought they were all Looney Tunes. But I was outnumbered four to one, so I kept my snarky comments to myself. And tried to ignore Randy’s too-friendly manner when he grinned at me, like a creepy old photo come to life.

“If we lose the Shenandoah Valley, we lose Virginia!” Tim waved an impassioned hand. “That’s what Stonewall Jackson said. And he got it right!”

“Stonewall who?” I lowered my sunglasses.

Utter silence descended, so quiet I heard a gnat hit the windshield. Tim pushed a button and squirted it off, still not closing his mouth.

“A Confederate general, Shiloh,” Adam intervened quickly. “One of the best either side ever saw.”

“She’s jokin’, ain’t she?” chuckled Randy, waiting for some sort of punch line. “Ain’t she?”

“Oh. There were a lot of them, so … they all sort of run together in my mind.” Frankly, I just didn’t care. And I had a sinking feeling I was wasting one of my few free Saturdays doing something that would make Kyoko have me committed.

“Look over there,” said Randy, putting his arm around my shoulders and scooting closer. “Them’s the Blue Ridge. Can yousee that mountain over there?”

I slid closer to the door and shoved his arm off. “I can see just fine. Thanks.”

“I can show ya all the battlefields ‘round these parts an’ teach ya all the hist’ry.” His smile showed big teeth. “Just me ‘n’ you.”

I sipped my coffee and paid great attention to the hillsides, a few trees slightly yellow along the tips. September whispered just around the corner.

“Really.” Randy winked at me and tried to slip his arm back. “Jest name the day. You’re a fine little woman, ya know? Yer just on the wrong side. I’ll teach ya right.”

“Cut it out, will you?” I snapped, putting his arm back in place.

“Hey, Randy,” Adam interrupted, gaze dark as I met his eyes. “Can you tell me why the Confederate tactics failed at the Battle of Antietam?”

And that kept Randy’s full attention for the next hour.

Cars clogged the grass at the enormous parking lot. People everywhere—some clad in period garb and others dressed in jeans like me. Confederate uniforms sprouted like gray mushrooms, polishing rifles and sabers, pulling on boots, straightening caps.

I stood there, caught between two eras. The Confederate gunner yakked on his cell phone, while on the other side of me, a gray-clad hospital steward with a Bluetooth in his ear snapped his car doors locked with a chirp, chirp.

“Where’s the blue side?” I shielded my eyes.

Tim, unloading his gear out of the trunk, gestured without looking up. “Over yonder.”

Sure enough, another field of cars glittered in the hazy sun, with spots of blue covering the green grass.

“Why are they separated?”

Tim shrugged. “They ain’t all. If you look around, you cansee some minglin’. But ya know.” He shot a big grin. “Can’t get too friendly with the enemy before the big battle.”

I couldn’t tell if he was joking.

Without a doubt, this took the proverbial cake—or hardtack, I should say—as one of the weirdest things I’d ever experienced. Even weirder than pouring Coke for the Harlem Globetrotters.

The battle would start at eleven o’clock sharp, so Tim and Randy gathered up their gear and strode through the parking lot to find Tim’s dad.

“Hey, son,” Tim Senior beamed, dropping the act long enough to slap his son’s back. Other officers smiled and shook hands, uniforms studded with bars and medals. “Ya made it! How’s the little squirt?”

At first I thought (in horror) he referred to Becky, but then Tim patted his wife’s belly lovingly. “‘Bout the size of a goldfish. Reckon it’ll be able to shoot in the next battle?” And they guffawed together.

Becky blushed and pretended to be scandalized, but Tim Senior hugged her like a long-lost daughter. Even kissed the top of her head.

“Let’s hope it takes after yer side,” he joked. “A cotton-pickin’ shame to have him look like this Tim fella. And who’s this lovely lady?” He touched his hat, and I saw Randy glance furtively at me.

“Yankee, sir, unfortunately … but a keeper.” Randy gave me another too-warm smile, trying to twine his fingers through mine. I pulled them away. “A definite keeper. Hope we can win ‘er over to our side.”

I took a step back, glaring, but nobody seemed to notice. Tim Senior shook my hand warmly, pressing my hand with the top of his. Despite his fierce countenance and imposing uniform with all his stars, stripes, and bars, he seemed gentle and humble.

“She’s a keeper all right,” he said kindly. “Welcome, Shiloh. Great name. Great battlefield.” I opened my mouth. “And evengreater city in the land of God’s people. And a reference to the Messiah Himself.”

“You knew!”

“It’s in the Good Book.” He winked at me. “Don’t get no better’n that.”

We made our way over to a hillside, where Becky spread a blanket out in a somewhat shady spot. Even the sunny patches were filling up with people, lawn chairs, umbrellas, and picnic blankets.

“Wish me luck,” said Randy, face close to mine. He lowered his voice. “I’ll look for ya up in the stands.”

He tried to kiss my hand again and then my cheek, but I made a beeline over to Tim, who had just finished loading up his gear. Pretended great interest in the rucksack he was strapping closed. Becky smiled up dreamily at her 1860s husband, oblivious to my plight.

We waved as Randy and Tim finally headed down to the huddled masses of troops gathered in the field below, weapons and buttons gleaming.

“Whew!” I fanned my face violently as the morning sun warmed up the hillside. “Glad they’re gone.”

“Ain’t it excitin’?” said Becky with a swoony sigh. “I just love Tim in that uniform.”

“I’d like to deck him,” grumbled Adam, looking moody. “I mean, not Tim, of course. That obnoxious Randy fellow.”

“Me, too.” I crossed my arms. “Does he have to ride home with us?”

“Huh?” Becky finally turned to me.

Hopeless. I rolled my forehead in my hand. “Which battle is it?” I asked, watching rows of troops assembling in the distance.

“The Battle a Winchester,” said Becky, not trying to be funny. “The Third Battle a Winchester, ta be specific. They call it the Battle a Opequon, too, after a river ‘round these parts.”

“Look! Horses!” There in the crowds of blue and graysoldiers, gradually assembling en masse across the giant field like brewing storm clouds, strode rows of officers mounted on horseback. Tails swishing, tall and gallant, sniffing the air in an excited frenzy. One jumped a little too nervously, and his Union officer reined him in.

An eerie spectacle stretched out below us.

The props were so real I could imagine, if I tuned out the noisy crowds and teenagers with white iPod buds stuck in their ears, more than a hundred years turning back like pages of a book.

A low ripple passed through the crowds. People sat down on their lawn chairs and grabbed their binoculars. Women dressed in period hoop skirts ushered children to their places. Laughter evaporated.

A tense silence hung over the field, and just as the crowd started to whisper again, a blue speck of an officer on horseback—barely visible—rode toward the middle. And a gray dot mounted on a chestnut galloped out to meet him.

We watched them: an entire war boiled down to two people, not so different from each other, there on horses with swishing tails. They talked, drew back, tried again, and then galloped off in opposite directions.

There would be no peace on that green field. There would be war, and soon.

Suddenly there came the thump of battle drums, shouts of soldiers, and the masses of blue and gray surged forward. Rifle shots. Puffs of smoke. The front lines running toward each other and mingling in a tangle of weapons and soldiers.

I watched in silence, seeing men in blue and gray fall and roll in the grass then lie motionless as troops poured over them. Battle standards waved in the breeze as rank after rank charged forward, meeting for a melee on the rolling grasses. Smoke from muskets and rifles made a haze over the fighting. Bugles blared.

It was impossible to find Tim or Randy—just face after smoke-obscured face.

“Tim lost two great-great-grandfathers in the war,” said Becky in low tones. “Both officers. And three great-great-uncles. A father and two sons. An’ loads a cousins. One of ‘em infiltrated enemy lines, got captured and sent to an internment camp, then escaped and helped the Rebs win the Battle of Harpers Ferry in West Virginia, all while he was sixteen years old. Fighters, my husband’s fam’ly! An’ mine, too. I lost three great-great-uncles. One from a bad amputation.”

“Stonewall Jackson led that battle in Harpers Ferry, didn’t he?” asked Adam, eyes drifting out over the smoke-filled valley. “And the First and Second Battles of Winchester, if I remember right.”

“Shore did. Greatest general to walk the earth ‘cept Robert E. Lee. And he won both o’ them battles here. Yessir, great man.” She shielded her eyes and winced at an artillery blast. “Most of Tim’s fightin’ family and most of the Rebs all together weren’t much. A bunch a farmer’s boys. They couldn’t read ‘r write. They were kids, mostly. Outnumbered, outsupplied, and outmatched in ev’ry area militarily. But they fought ta tha last drop a blood.”

“‘Lost Cause’ propaganda. I’ve heard this stuff before,” I muttered to Adam.

“Maybe so.” He shrugged. “But there’s some truth in it, too, I think.”

A picket line of bearded, rugged Confederates charged a Union cavalry, and I watched several of the men in gray crumple and fall. One struggled and charged again then fell clutching his side, staggering. I saw him draw himself up and take a final shot at a mounted soldier, causing him to tumble off his horse.

“Fighters,” said Becky again, looking as if she would cry. “They were all fighters. Everybody down there in gray.”

I remembered a children’s movie about the Civil War with the Confederates portrayed as buffoons—hairy and unshaven, burping and falling over their own cannons. But seeing Tim’s stately father and the mock Confederate General Jubal Early down

below, strong and steadfast, made me have second thoughts.

Second thoughts about everything. Even the way I’d always snapped, “The war ended—get over it.” It did end. But that war, that division, and their wounds affected people more deeply than I’d ever realized.

These were battles fought in people’s backyards. Fathers and husbands and brothers lost forever, leaving behind only letters, pictures, and legends. Memories based on which side of the border people stood or how they pronounced a vowel.

Even the South Carolina capitol building still shows its scars—cannonball blasts in the mortar—until this day. Virginia was irreconcilably divided into two states.

Time does not, in entirety, heal all wounds.

I had to remind myself the bugles and the picket lines and the bayonets weren’t real and that the men strewn across the ground in various expressions of agony would eventually get up and walk again. It was strange, too, omnisciently knowing the outcome—the South would surrender, Lincoln would play “Dixie,” and the two halves of the US would reunite.

“Who won this one?” I asked Adam.

“You really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“The North.”

I turned back to the battle, somehow disappointed. I knew the North won the war eventually, and I was glad, but it seemed sad somehow to watch these boys in gray fall over Virginia soil.

“The South gave a good fight though. Only twelve thousand troops to the North’s forty thousand. And heavy casualties for the North. They were fighters, just like Becky said.”

The sheer force of the numbers stunned me. I strained my eyes to see the gray coats, shouting and thrusting swords and bayonets with all their might. Going up to meet wave after wave of blue without faltering.

“Oh! Aunt Wilda!” said Becky abruptly, interrupting mythoughts. “There she is! Hold my place, y’all!” And she scampered off through the crowds.

Adam and I watched in silence, and then I turned to him. “Do you really wish the South had won the war? And seceded?”

“I never said that.”

I was taken aback. “No? But you’re … here!”

“So are you. And you’re not waving stars and bars.”

“Yeah, but that’s different. I was abducted.”

“Well, the Battle of Opequon’s history, Shiloh. Think what you want, but the Civil War really happened. My brother Todd found a Confederate button in our backyard.”

I gazed down at the field through my sunglasses. “I thought every Southerner believed ‘The South Will Rise Again’ and all that.”

Adam laughed. “Well, a lot of them do. But I’m not everybody else.”

“Right. If you disagreed, you’d get strung up the nearest tree.”

“Probably.”

“Well, that just proves it then.”

“Proves what?”

“That Southerners are bigoted and intolerant. Just like everybody says.”

Adam took off his baseball cap and scratched his head. “Well, I don’t really agree, Shiloh. That’s an awfully harsh judgment. If you went back to Brooklyn and told everybody the South should’ve won, you might get a similar reaction.”

I choked back a laugh. Come to think of it, yeah. Definitely. They’d brand me a racist, tell me to go back to my trailer in Alabama and shoot a squirrel, and make snarky comments about deep-frying and inbreeding.