Departures

THE LAST REUNION

This story sprang from the research that produced the novel The Guns of the South. Indeed, Captain Thorpe briefly appears in the novel. He truly was captain of Company A of the Forty-seventh North Carolina and did write its regimental history. He was, in fact, still alive in the 1920s, when he did more historical work on the regiment He may even have attended the Confederate reunion at Richmond in 1932.

The train pulled to a stop. “Richmond!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Richmond!” The man in the long gray coat with the brass buttons slowly got to his feet, made his way down the aisle. A porter walked behind him with his bags. People waited respectfully until he had passed, then began filing out after him.

The conductor touched a finger to the brim of his cap in salute. “Watch your step as you get out, General. Let me give you a hand, suh.”

John Houston Thorpe waved away the offered assistance. “If I can’t manage a couple of steps, young fellow, you may as well bury me. And I’m no general. I’m proud I was a captain, and I’ve never claimed anything more.”

Taking some of his weight on his stick, he descended from the passenger car without difficulty. Richmond in June was warm and muggy, but so was Rocky Mount, North Carolina, from which he’d come. The weather was not what made his shoulders sag for a moment; it was the weight of the past.

He’d come through Richmond in 1863 with the rest of the Forty-seventh North Carolina, hot and eager to join Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia in the great invasion of the North that would set the Confederacy free forever. He’d been dapper and handsome, with slicked-down black hair and a thin little mustache of which he’d been inordinately proud.

Now-how had sixty-nine years slid by? Inside, he felt like a dashing youth still. The body that moved only slowly, the thick spectacles, the gnarled hand he often cupped behind one ear-

were they truly his? Surely it was the world that had changed, not himself.

A flashbulb exploded in front of his face, filling his vision with purple spots. No flashbulbs when he’d been here before; in those days, having a photograph taken meant standing solemn and statue-still until the long exposure ended. He nodded. Yes, it was the world that had changed.

“Welcome to Richmond, General!” the fellow behind the flash camera shouted. “Have you come here other times since the end of the war?”

“Never once,” Thorpe answered with a sort of pride. “But now, I thought, if I don’t come now-when shall I have another chance?”

“What do you think of the city, General?” the man asked.

As his eyes cleared, Thorpe saw the fellow had a press tag tucked into his hatband-a reporter, then. “I’m no general,” he repeated, a bit testily: a reporter was supposed to know such things. “What do I think of Richmond? I’ve not seen much yet, but it strikes me as a big city. Of course, it did that a while ago, too.”

The laugh that once rang musically was now a rusty croak, but he loosed it all the same. When he’d first come north to Richmond, not a town in North Carolina had held as many as five thousand inhabitants; no wonder the Confederate capital, then near forty thousand, seemed to him a metropolis swollen past belief. These days Rocky Mount was on its way to being a city of the size Richmond had been then. He wondered why he failed to find it large. Perhaps because he and Rocky Mount had grown together. But his town had grown up, while he… somehow he had just grown old.

From behind him, the porter said, “You come on with me, suh. I’ll take you to the cab stand.” The colored man picked up his suitcases again and raised his voice: “Make way fo’ the general here! Make way, folks!”

And people did clear a path. Following in the porter’s wake, Thorpe reflected that the illegitimate promotion people insisted on foisting on him was worth something, at any rate, if it got him through the crowded train station so easily. He laughed again.

“What’s funny, suh?” the porter asked. “When I was a soldier here, I doubt the people would have moved aside so readily for any real general, save maybe Robert E. Lee, as they do now for me. I led no great armies, only a ragtag company. My only claim to notice is my span of years.”

“There’s worse ones than that, suh,” the porter observed. Thorpe slowly nodded; judging by what he’d seen in the second half of his long life, there were many such worse claims, most of them trumpeted uncommonly loud.

The Negro dropped Thorpe’s bags for a moment to stick his fingers in his mouth and give forth with a piercing whistle. A taxi driver waved to show he’d heard. The porter grabbed the suitcases again and headed for the boxy Chevrolet. Behind him, Thorpe made the best speed he could.

Pretty girls paused to stare wide-eyed at him as he went by. He remembered that from his soldier days, too. Then he wouldn’t have minded getting some of those girls alone. He fondly remembered a couple of leaves spent in the city’s seamier districts. The most respectable girls nowadays showed more rounded flesh than any shameless woman had in his youth, but desire was only a memory, too.

Between them, the porter and the taxi driver tossed his bags into the back seat of the cab. Thorpe dug in his pocket, and pulled out a quarter. The porter beamed; a quarter was worth far more in these hard times in 1932 than it had been in the inflation-raddled Richmond of the War between the States: “God bless you, suh!”

“God bless you, too,” Thorpe said. Back in the old days, he would have tipped a slave who served as well as this porter had. Negroes had been free now long enough for a man to go from birth to old age in that span of years-not old age like his own, of course, but age old enough. It hadn’t worked out as dreadfully as long-ago fire-eaters feared it would, so perhaps Abe Lincoln was right all along. Right or not, Lincoln prevailed. The proof of it was that Thorpe couldn’t even recall the last time he’d wondered about the justice of emancipation.

“Where to, General?” the taxi driver asked.

“Camp De Saussure, wherever that may be,” Thorpe answered. He didn’t bother correcting the man. Apparently he was to be a general for the duration, whether he liked it or not. If that was so, he decided he might as well like it. He’d grown used to far worse things over the years.

“That’s what they’re calling the Lee Camp Soldiers’ Home for the reunion,” the driver said as he held the car door open for Thorpe. “In honor of General De Saussure of the United Confederate Veterans, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.” Thorpe slowly, carefully bent to sit down in the taxi. C.A. De Saussure actually called himself a general because he headed the veterans’ organization. Thorpe did not think much of that. All the real generals who’d worn gray (and those who’d worn blue as well) were dead.

The taxi pulled away from the curb. Soon it was tooling along at an effortless thirty-five miles an hour. The John Houston Thorpe who had visited Richmond not far past the midpoint of a vanished century would never have believed such a thing. His great-grandchildren took it utterly for granted: to them, a horseback ride was an hour’s amusement at a fair, not the only way to go from one place to another. Thorpe himself rarely thought about automobiles these days. This afternoon, though, he was seeing new things in an old mirror.

The driver had his window open to bring in the breeze. Thorpe was half-dozing until a loud roar overhead jerked him back to full awareness. “Damned airplanes,” the taxi man said. “They fly so low sometimes, one of ‘em’ll come right down in the middle of traffic one fine day, mark my words.”

Thorpe didn’t answer. The taxi driver was young; men had probably been flying his whole life. To Thorpe, cars were wonderful and useful-but easy enough to take in stride. At airplanes he would never cease to marvel if he lived another ninety-odd years. He knew quiet pride that the very first one had left the ground less than a hundred miles from where he lived.

As the reporter had, the driver asked him whether he’d been in Richmond since the States War. When he answered no, the fellow said, “Bet it’s changed a fair bit since then.”

“That it has,” Thorpe said. “In those days there wasn’t a paved road in Richmond, the town was either full of mud or full of dust, the flies swarmed fit to drive a man mad, and everything smelled of horse manure.” He chuckled to watch the taxi driver’s jaw drop. “Every town, South and North, was like that then, though I don’t suppose it gets into the history books. They didn’t have flush toilets in those days, either. You’re lucky to be a young man in such a marvelous time.”

The Chevrolet was far from a new automobile; its springs had seen better days. Nevertheless, on the asphalted highway it rode smoother than any carriage over dirt. Thorpe tried to imagine what a carriage would have felt like had he whipped a two-horse team up anywhere close to the speed he was making now. Pointless effort-a carriage at full tilt would have overturned the second it hit a stone or a pothole.

“But the glory then-” the driver began.

Thorpe broke in: “No glory to dying in camp of smallpox or measles or scarlet fever. No glory to typhoid, either, or to perishing of fever after your wound went bad-and it would, for we had no medicines. No glory to having your arm cut off and tossed on a pile outside a tent or under a tree while the surgeon shouted ‘Next!’ No, sir, don’t speak to me of glory.”

The taxi driver chewed on that for the next couple of minutes, as if it were a piece of meat stuck between his teeth. At last he said, hesitantly now, “General, if that’s how you feel, why did you come?”

“To see the men who went through it with me one last time before I die,” Thorpe said. “No one who didn’t can possibly imagine what it was like.” It was true enough, as far as it went, but Thorpe wondered if it went far enough. Take away the remembered dirt and pain and hunger and terror and something remained behind, something that had drawn him from Rocky Mount after all these years. He scorned the idea of glory, as most men did who had seen war face to face. But something was there, even if he didn’t care to try to name it for a taxi driver.

The taxi stopped in front of the Soldiers’ Home: low cottages on greensward, with a few bigger buildings among them: a hospital, a dining hall, a chapel. The driver got out, opened Thorpe’s door for him, and hauled his bags off the back seat.

“What is the fare?” Thorpe asked.

“Thirty-five cents, General, anywhere inside Richmond city limits.”

“When I was here last, young man, this was far to the west of the city limits.” The first coin that came into Thorpe’s hands was a half dollar. “Here you are. I have no need for change.”

“Thank you, General!” Smiling, the taxi driver carried the suitcases toward a cottage with a large sign in front of it: WELCOME, CONFEDERATE VETERANS.

A colored man standing by the door hurried forward. “Here, I’ll take charge of those, suh,” he told the driver, who relinquished the bags, nodded to Thorpe, and hurried back toward his automobile. The colored man held the cottage door open. “You go right on in, General, so as they can get your name and figure out which cottage you belong in. We’ll make you right comfortable here, I promise you that.”

“I’m certain of it,” Thorpe said. Through the door, he saw several old men (several other old men, he reminded himself) in gray suits talking with some younger folks who sat behind tables and shuffled through file boxes. He got in line behind one of the veterans.

The fellow turned around. His beard was bushy and white, but his eyebrows had somehow stayed black as coal. He chuckled rheumily. “Might as well be waitin’ my turn at mess call. Makes me think I really am back in the army, after all.”

“Yes, I remember that,” Thorpe said. The four words were plenty to push him back in time, to make him smell the cook fires, hear the chatter of men around him, even to taste the hot corn-bread that had been so much of what he ate for so long.

He got to the head of this line sooner than he usually had at mess call-but then, so many fewer men were here now. One of the young men asked his name, went through a box marked T-Z, and pulled out a badge. “You’ll be in Cottage C, General Thorpe. Pick any vacant bed there. I hope you enjoy your stay. Do you need help pinning that on, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Thorpe proceeded to prove it. “The rheumatism doesn’t have hold of me too badly. Cottage C, you said?”

“That’s right, General. It’s also on your badge below your name, in case-” The young fellow thought twice. “Well, just in case.”

In case you forget, he’d started to say. Thorpe declined to take offense. So many men his age had wits that began to wander. His, though, so far as he knew, were still sound. He’d written the history of his regiment back around the turn of the century, and only a handful of years had passed since he’d compiled a roster of men from Nash and Edgecombe counties who’d served in the Forty-seventh North Carolina. Now he thought he was the only soldier of his regiment left alive.

The colored man-one of the helpers at the Soldiers’ Home, no doubt-was still waiting when Thorpe came back outside. “Cottage C, is it?” he said, reading the badge. “You just follow me, General. It’s not far.”

Thorpe followed. In the old days, teaching a Negro to read had been against the law. Some had thought blacks too stupid to learn, anyhow. Obviously, they hadn’t known everything there was to know.

The beds in the cottage proved to be steel-framed army cots with scratchy woolen blankets and stiffly starched sheets and pillowcases. Thorpe chose one by the window, to get the benefit of whatever breeze there might be. “Sorry we can’t put you folks up in higher style, General,” the attendant said as he set down the suitcases. “Most of the time, though, there’s just a dozen or so old soldiers in the home, and we got seven, eight hundred of you all comin’ to visit.”

“Don’t worry,” Thorpe said. “Every man of us here will have known worse accommodations than these, I promise you.” He looked at his army cot. In his army days no such creature existed. He’d slept on pine boughs piled in a frame, rolled in his blanket (a far more ragged and threadbare specimen than the one on the cot), or just on bare ground. And even a pillow! Back then, such had been undreamed-of luxury.

The colored man declined a tip-”This here’s my job, suh”- and hurried away to help some other newly arrived veteran settle in. Thorpe left the clapboard cottage, too, and walked slowly over to the dining hall. It wasn’t yet supper time, but several veterans were in there passing time with a deck of cards. A couple of them paused between hands to squirt jets of tobacco juice at a spattered spittoon.

Looking at the white beards, the bald heads, the gnarled fingers, Thorpe wondered why he’d come. Wasn’t it better to remember the men who’d fought under the Stars and Bars as young and dashing and brave rather than seeing what time had done to them-and to him? Then someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, stranger. You look like you could do with a nip of something better’n water.”

Thorpe turned. Of course the man behind him was wrinkled and old. Everyone here was wrinkled and old. But the fellow looked alert and cheerful; in fact, behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes held a gleam that said he’d probably been a prime forager when he wore the gray in earnest.

“A nip, eh?” Thorpe said. “I have been wondering where I might find one, not being from these parts.” Prohibition didn’t stop drinking, but made it harder to get started in a town where you didn’t know somebody.

The other veteran set a finger alongside his nose, then produced a silver flask from a waistcoat pocket. “Help yourself, but leave enough for me, too.”

The whisky wasn’t very good, but Thorpe had drunk whisky that wasn’t very good for a great many years. He squinted at the other man’s badge. “I am in your debt, Mr., uh, Ledbetter. What unit, if I may ask?”

“Army of Northern Virginia, Eighth Alabama. Call me Jed.”

“I’m John, then. You fought in Hill’s corps, too? I was Forty-seven North Carolina, Henry Heth’s corps. You were in Mahone’s, am I right?”

“So I was, by God. Your memory still works, John. So does mine, even if my pecker don’t. Yeah, I was there for all of it… ah, hell, not quite; the Yankees caught me two days before Appomattox.”

“I stayed with it till the end,” Thorpe said. Then he fell silent. Even after a span of years close to the biblical threescore and ten, some memories remained sharp enough to wound.

Ledbetter let him be, as any of the veterans would have. After a while he said, “Well, it ain’t what we wanted it to be back then, but it ain’t too bad, neither.” Thorpe nodded gratefully; that much was true. Ledbetter changed the subject a little: “I got in here last night, and they feed you royal, that they do. If we’d had rations like these when we were in the field, we’dve won that goddamn war, no doubt about it.”

“I was thinking the same thing about the beds,” Thorpe said.

Ledbetter’s laughter was not a croak, but the hearty cackle of a laying hen. “John, you have that one dead on, and I’m not jokin’. Why, I remember the time I had to sleep in a tree four nights runnin’. That weren’t the worst of it, neither. I-” The story went on for some time. Thorpe believed not a word of it.

He suspected most of the old men here had stories like that. Several of the poker players wore coats studded with badges from so many past reunions that they looked like field marshals from some Balkan army better at bragging than fighting. Their yarns would have grown in the telling every time they were trotted out, too. By now few would resemble anything that had actually happened.

Jed Ledbetter shuffled off toward the bathroom. Thorpe stood around for a while, watching the men playing cards. Sure enough, they had stories by the trainful. As the shadows lengthened, one of them got up and turned on the electric lights. In the old days, Thorpe thought, it would have been an oil lamp or a candle, and endless eyestrain. No one else seemed to notice the change from then to now.

Again he’d wondered why he’d come, what he had in common with these garrulous oldsters. The only answer he could find was that the war had defined their lives, as it had his. He’d been with them at their beginnings; seeing them at the end of things seemed fitting, too.

“Generals, please,” a woman in nurse’s whites called over and over till she had the veterans’ attention. “We need you to go out for a little while so we can set the room up for supper.”

Thorpe left without complaint. The poker players followed more slowly, grumbling all the way. He smiled. That took him back across the years. Some of the men in his company had left their cards back in camp when they went into battle, so as not to have to explain the devil’s pasteboards to St. Peter if they got killed. But others, like these old fellows, would sooner have played than eaten.

As six o’clock drew near, more and more veterans gathered on the grass outside the dining hall. Quite a few of them had flasks, which they weren’t shy in sharing. After three or four had gone by, Thorpe began to feel merry. He joined in the cheer-not quite a real Rebel yell, but close-when the doors opened. As if at one of those long-ago mess calls, the men formed a single line as they filed in.

Since he didn’t know anyone here, Thorpe took a seat at random. He found himself across the table from Jed Ledbetter. The Alabamian grinned at him, displaying tobacco-stained false teeth. “Was I right, John, or what? Ain’t this fine-lookin’ grub?”

“That it is, Jed.” Thorpe meant it-platters of ham and chicken alternated with bowls full of green salad, peas, and mashed potatoes and gravy. Along with the unofficial liquids lurking in hip flasks, there were milk and Coca-Cola and ice water. He filled his plate full. He was eating better here than he had lately down in Rocky Mount. Times were no less hard there than anywhere else in the country.

He heard so much talk of Pickett’s Charge and what might have been at Gettysburg that he couldn’t help himself. “Don’t you forget Pettigrew’s boys,” he said at last. “We went up the hill on Pickett’s left, and a whole great lot of us never came down again.”

Maybe he’d touched glory then. He wasn’t quite sure. He did remember being too excited to be afraid, even when the Federal guns on the flank tore great bleeding holes in the tight gray ranks.

Somebody said, “Reckon they call it Pickett’s charge on account of his fellas got to the top o’ the hill and in amongst the Yankees, and Pettigrew’s didn’t.”

“One of the reasons they got to the top is that we shielded them most of the way with our bodies,” Thorpe retorted hotly. Then he stopped, amazed at the anger he could still feel sixty-nine years after the fact. He managed a laugh. “It’s water under the bridge now, that’s for certain.”

“So it is,” the other veteran answered, “and bodies under the ground, too.” The whole table fell silent for a moment then. That shot had landed too close for comfort. Almost all the bodies were under the ground by now, and the ones that weren’t-those at this reunion, for instance-would be soon.

Though tired, Thorpe found he wasn’t sleepy. Along with dozens of other veterans, he sat in the dining hall for hours after supper was done, drinking coffee (some of it spiked), smoking, and listening to and telling tales. As his regiment’s historian, he knew a lot of them. The ordinary passing of day and night seemed far away.

“It’s always like this at these things,” a graybeard with a chestful of reunion badges said. “When you’re with your own kind, you want to spend all the time you can on doin’ and talkin’. Your bed’ll always be there.”

And you won’t, Thorpe thought. Now that he was here, he wished he’d started coming to reunions long ago. Well, that was water under the bridge, too.

A few at a time, the old men slipped out of the hall and made for their cottages. A little past midnight, someone made a horrifying discovery in his program book. He clambered up onto a chair and, teetering dangerously, waved his arms and waited for quiet. When he got it, he said loudly, “There’s gonna be a Goddamned band playin’ us God-damned reveille at seven o’clock in the God-damned morn in’ tomorrow. They must think we’re still in the God-damned army.”

Assisted by two of his comrades, he descended from his perch. The dining hall emptied quickly after that. Thorpe’s ears were not what they had been, but he didn’t think he could sleep through a band’s worth of reveille.

Sure enough, at seven sharp the music blared out. Along with the rest of the men in Cottage C, Thorpe dressed and returned to the dining hall. This time, he made a point of finding Jed Ledbetter. The Alabamian looked up, grinned his yellowed grin, then resumed his attack on a plate of bacon and eggs.

Thorpe had been reading his own program book. He said, “I don’t mind getting up early today, because the morning’s event is the United Confederate Veterans’ business meeting.”

Ledbetter grinned again, evilly. “An’ you reckon you’ll just doze right through it, you mean.”

“It has to be easier than sleeping in a tree, don’t you think?” Thorpe asked, deadpan.

“Remind me to watch out for you, John,” Ledbetter said. “You may be a quiet one, but you got yourself a devil hidin’ there inside.”

The two veterans sat side by side on the bus that took them to the Mosque Auditorium at Sixth and Laurel. Confederate battle flags flew everywhere in Richmond. A forest of them waved in front of the Mosque; an enormous one was stretched behind the speaker’s platform. The building’s ceiling fans stirred the thick air but did little to cool it.

The introductions of aged UC V dignitaries by other aged UC V dignitaries went on and on. Some of them seemed hardly more lively than Stonewall Jackson’s horse Old Sorrel, whose stuffed carcass was on display back at the Soldiers’ Home. As he’d thought he might, Thorpe dozed through the speeches. Every so often his head would fall forward onto his chest and wake him; in those moments, he saw he was far from the only old soldier having trouble staying awake.

After lunch, the Confederate veterans filed onto the buses that took them across town for the dedication of the Richmond Battlefield Parks. They rolled east along the section of Franklin Street called Monument Avenue, past the memorials to Matthew Fontaine Maury, to Jackson, to Jefferson Davis, to Lee, and to Jeb Smart. Thorpe hadn’t been with the Army of Northern Virginia for the Seven Days Campaign, whose sites took up much of the Battlefield 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 evening much more than I thought I would.”

“So have I, Miss Marjorie,” he said. “Oh, I’m tired, I’ll not deny, but I don’t grudge a minute of it.”

But when, a little past midnight, he got into a nightshirt and pulled back the covers on his steel cot, he felt a dull pain in the left side of his ribcage. He curled his lip in mild scorn at the weakness of his flesh. Though he hadn’t done so much in years, he was sure he’d be fine come morning. He lay down, prayed briefly, and fell asleep.

He awoke in darkness, amid old men’s snores. The pain was back, and suddenly seemed big as the world. He sat up, started to get out of bed…

Thorpe looked down at the cuff of his gray coat. It bore the double twist of braid that showed captain’s rank. He looked at the hand protruding from the cuff. The flesh was smooth and unspotted, the tendons no longer upraised like old tree roots pushing through thin soil.

He had no time for surprise. He and the rest of the men in gray and butternut and occasional looted Yankee blue hurried through the cover afforded by a stand of old pine woods. The trees thinned ahead. He could see the line of the Weldon Railroad, the burned ruins of what had been Reams Station south of Petersburg, the low parapet the Federals had thrown up twenty or thirty yards east of the train tracks.

“Keep your ranks, boys,” he called to the men of Company A. The troopers of the Chicora Guards just grinned and nodded. They’d been through enough fights to know what to do without being told.

The Federals held their fire, no doubt waiting for their foes to reach a point from which they would be unable to get away cheaply. Suddenly, from not far behind Thorpe, Brigadier General William McRae shouted, “Don’t fire a gun now, but dash for the enemy.”

The soldiers in gray traded grim looks. If McRae’s ploy failed, they were the ones who would pay the butcher’s bill. No choice, though, but to obey. Drawing his Army Colt, Thorpe cried “Forward!” and ran to the attack at the head of his company.

The Rebels burst out of the pine woods yelling like fiends. The Northern soldiers yelled, too, in surprise and alarm. Muzzle flashes stabbed outward from the parapet; thick clouds of black-powder smoke rose above it.

A Mini? ball cracked past Thorpe’s head. Confederate soldiers fell, screaming and writhing in pain. But the charge was across only a couple of hundred yards of ground. Since the Rebels did not pause to fire and reload their rifle muskets- always deadly dangerous out in the open-they drew near the parapet before too many of them fell.

Thorpe tripped on a cross-tie as he ran across the railroad track. He stumbled, almost fell, caught himself just in time. Then he was at the low Federal earthwork. A man in blue scrambled up to meet him, thrust with a bayoneted Springfield. Thorpe fired the Colt pistol at point-blank range. The Federal wailed and reeled backward, clutching his belly.

Other southern men were up on the Union works now, too, some fighting hand to hand, others shooting down into the trenches behind the parapet. Some bluecoats fired back, but more threw down their guns and threw up their hands in token of surrender.

The cheering Confederates swarmed forward. A ragged private seized a flag from a color bearer who seemed too stunned to stop him. A glum Federal who wore a major’s shoulder straps on the plain blue blouse of a private turned to Thorpe and said, “Captain, your men fight well; that was a magnificent charge.”

“Thank you, sir,” Thorpe said, nodding to his courteous captive.

The Rebels began hustling more prisoners off to the rear. They must have bagged a couple of thousand Yankees, Thorpe thought proudly. But the cost was not light. Men of the Chicora Guards who’d seemed to have charmed lives all through the company’s hard fighting were down now, dead or wounded. No doubt the story was the same all through the Forty-seventh North Carolina. The surgeons would be busy tonight.

Thorpe peered east. The Federals not hit or captured were abandoning their works and retreating in that direction. They wouldn’t tear up any more of the Weldon Railroad here, not for a good while to come; Confederate cavalry-Wade Hampton’s boys-galloped up from the south to speed the Yankees on their way.

The rattle of gunfire slowed to a lethargic pop-pop-pop and finally petered out. Thorpe glanced back over his shoulder. The sun was almost down. Hard to believe the fighting had lasted most of the day. In the middle of the action from the moment it began, he’d had no time to think… about what he was doing here at Reams Station, about how he’d returned to August 1864, to his youth, again.

“That’s over,” he said to no one in particular. “All over.”

“So it is,” agreed the Union major, who he somehow hadn’t gone back with the rest of the prisoners. “So it is-in a way. Welcome, John. We’ve been waiting for you a long time; you’re one of the last to join the ranks.”

Under the orange light of the setting sun, dead and injured men of both sides, their wounds suddenly vanished, sprang to their feet and went around slapping one another on the back. “That was a good shot you nailed me with, Eb.” “Just luck, Willie, just luck. Fact is, I was aiming for Joseph there next to you.”

Proud, bullet-torn battle flags from North and South fluttered together in the evening breeze. Under them, the men of both sides gathered, all sound and well as they had been before the battle started. “I got me some good coffee here,” a Yankee announced. “Who’ll swap me some baccy for it?” A Rebel stepped forward, smiling, to make the trade.

Thorpe stared, not fully understanding, not yet. The northern major touched him on the forearm. “Did it not seem real, John?” he asked quietly. “Was it not as in the old days?”

Then Thorpe knew beyond any doubt. “Yes, by God, it was,” he said.

He woke next morning in a shelter tent he shared with Benjamin Bunn and George Westray. The lieutenants were already up, and bent over a chessboard. They set the game aside to go out with him and take morning roll for the company. He smiled as he walked in front of the drawn-up men. So many faces he hadn’t seen in so many years!

After the roll was taken, the Chicora Guards lined up for mess call, and then for drill. Before they could begin their evolutions, though, the drummer began the monotonous patter that summoned soldiers gray and blue to battle. “Dismissed to get your war gear!” Thorpe called. Cheering, the men trotted back to their tents and bedrolls, snatched up rifles and cartridge boxes.

Thorpe followed a little more slowly. He wondered which fight it would be today.

“Poor old John,” Jed Ledbetter said as the hearse pulled away from the Soldiers’ Home. He took off his hat and held it over his heart. “Poor old John. He went and missed the grand parade.”