Elizabeth MacPherson 07 - MacPherson’s Lament

by Sharyn McCrumb

  As Bill drove the sunny country road from Danville to the MacPherson home in Franklin County, he was hounded by a succession of infelicitous images of the evening to come. Pork Chop Hill: he is caught between his parents in a ruthless food fight. Medea: Mother decides that poison is much tidier than legal proceedings and spikes the pot roast with strychnine; they all die together. Get the Guest: they hold an inquest on their marriage and decide that their incompatibility is all his fault; his grades and his table manners are mentioned.

  Bill groaned aloud. This was not how he imagined his first months of law practice. Attorneys were supposed to have seamy and depressing legal cases while their private lives were happy and carefree. But with him—just the reverse! He had a cheery little practice answering Jeopardy questions and helping little old ladies while his private life was shot to hell.

  He should have asked A. P. Hill to take his parents’ case. Okay, he should have begged harder. But when they first agreed to go into practice together, Powell had declared that she would rather starve than take divorce cases, and Bill had agreed that he’d handle those should the occasion arise. So there he was, stuck with the family civil war, while Powell enjoyed herself at the courthouse, hobnobbing with car thieves and burglars, leaving him to do the dirty work.

  When he noticed that the landmarks were becoming familiar, he came out of his reverie with a heavy heart. Only a few miles left to go before he entered the war zone. Over the bridge, up the hill past the Hudson’s Christmas tree farm, and then he’d see the stone pillars that led into Chancellorsville Estates. His parents’ colonial brick home was on Mead Lane, a winding blacktop that spiraled up the wooded ridge studded with large homes, all carefully different and even more carefully landscaped to blend into the hillside. Bill wished he could blend into the hillside. Odd how relationships are embarrassing in any generation but one’s own. He was too uncomfortable to contemplate this bit of philosophy, however. Tonight was still going to last about eight months, as far as Bill was concerned. He pulled into the concrete driveway, resisting the temptation to hit a nearby tree, just for the sake of a diversion.

  Bill’s father came strolling out of the garage, wearing a pained smile that he usually reserved for bad puns and funerals. (Good God! She hadn’t locked him out, had she?) Other than that, he looked all right. He seemed a little scruffy in his old blue cardigan and paint-stained khakis, but he didn’t look haggard or distraught or anything else that would have sent Bill screaming into the shrubbery.

  Bill hauled himself out of the car, feeling like a leper who has found work as a bill collector. “Hullo, Dad,” he mumbled, fiddling with his car keys. “How’s it going?”

  “I can’t complain, son.” The pained smile reappeared. “It might be expensive.”

  Bill winced. “Couldn’t we call a truce for the evening?”

  Doug MacPherson sighed wearily. “I didn’t start this, Bill. You’d better clear your ceasefire with her.” He nodded toward the silent house. “She’s probably watching us from behind the living room curtains, so be careful what you do. Don’t laugh or anything, or she’ll be after you, too.”

  “I wish someone would tell me what’s going on,” Bill muttered. “From Mother I get sound bites. I’ve heard politicians who were more forthcoming.”

  “Don’t expect me to make sense of it. Your mother says that now that you kids are grown, she wants to find herself. Says she’s not being fulfilled. Wants to live her own life. Whose life has she been living up to now? I asked her. That didn’t sit well, either.”

  “Can’t she find herself without getting a divorce?” asked Bill. He felt a guilty twinge, knowing that he was discussing his client with the opposing side, but he ignored his lawyerly conscience, telling himself that the parental relationship superseded the legal one. “Can’t she just take a course in oil painting at the community college?”

  “Apparently not. I suggested something of the sort and she shied one of her tole-painted candlesticks in my direction.”

  “I’ll have a word with her,” Bill promised. “I still seem to be in her good graces.”

  Bill picked up his overnight case and walked toward the front door. As he reached for the doorknob, his mother appeared, eyes blazing. “Having a father-son chat, are we? It’s disgusting how you men stick together.”

  Bill attempted a deprecating laugh. “Oh, no, we were just saying hello, Mother.”

  Margaret MacPherson’s expression did not change. “And did he tell you about his girlfriend?”

  Bill MacPherson felt his appetite shrivel away to nothingness. This evening was going to last longer than the Seven Days’ Battle.

  In a stately white-columned house on a country road near Danville, tea was being served. In a formal dining room gleaming with silver and well-polished mahogany, the residents of the Home for Confederate Women were listening to Flora Dabney, punctuating her remarks with the discreet clink of spoons on bone china cups. So intent were they upon her report that when Julia Hotchkiss reached for the last slice of date bread, no one contested it.

  “I think we’ve found our lawyer, ladies,” Flora Dabney was saying. “I think he’ll do quite well by us.” She took a tentative sip of her tea, then added another dollop of milk.

  “Has he agreed to sell the house?” asked Ellen Morrison. She seemed even more nervous than usual, and she almost whispered her question, as if she feared Union spies behind the velvet draperies.

  Flora’s eyes twinkled. “Well, he was a bit reluctant at first, because the transaction sounded so complicated, what with eight owners and all—but I persuaded him that it was a simple transaction, and he has consented to take it on.”

  “Oh, Flora! Are you sure this is wise?” Mary Lee Pendleton had an expression of such sweetness and serenity that she still looked beautiful at eighty-one. She loved to wear her fur coat to the shopping mall in hopes of being mistaken for Helen Hayes.

  “I’m sure we haven’t any choice,” Flora Dabney replied. “And as to the wisdom of it, Lydia is supposed to have made sure that all goes well. Does anyone have an alternate suggestion?”

  No one did. The others exchanged glances and worried frowns, but no one spoke up. Julia Hotchkiss slurped her tea in the silence, edging her wheelchair closer to the plate of oatmeal cookies when she thought that no one was looking.

  “Right. Then I take it we’re all in favor of the transaction as it stands?”

  “Did you tell him … everything?” asked Ellen, glancing nervously about her.

  “No, of course I didn’t, dear. I simply told him that we wanted to sell our house as expediently as possible. That should be sufficient, I think. He was very sweet, and quite charmed to be helping a dithery old lady like myself.”

  “And you’re sure about this lawyer?” asked Mary.

  Flora Dabney smiled. “Oh, yes, dear! He’s perfect. An absolute nincompoop. More tea, anyone?”

  Here we go, here we go,

  The last parade of the circus-show,

  Longstreet’s orphans, Lee’s everlastin’s

  Half cast-iron and half corn-pone,

  And if gettin’ to heaven means prayer and fastin’s

  We ought to get there on the fasts alone.

  —STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT,

  John Brown’s Body, Book 8

  RICHMOND—APRIL 3, 1865

  IT HAD SEEMED like a sensible idea at the time: march the sailors to the railroad depot—and escape from the approaching federal forces by the fastest and most invincible means of transport: the iron horse. A southbound train could take them to Danville in a matter of hours, while the pursuing army would be on the march six days traveling the same distance.

  There was but one difficulty with this sterling plan …

  “It would seem that the Confederacy can add yet another item to its list of shortages,” drawled Bridgeford. “We appear to be somewhat lacking in trains, though not, perhaps, in fellow passengers.”

  The depot was crowded with fleeing civ
ilians and with wounded soldiers who had tottered out of the hospital, bandages and all, to escape the burning capital. The remnants of the Confederate navy clustered together, hemmed in by frightened men and women and crying children. But there were no trains. Only a few unhitched passenger cars into which more refugees had packed themselves, waiting for someone in authority to appear and preside over their deliverance. Admiral Semmes took some of his officers and began to search the train yards. No one challenged their authority. All the railroad workers had run off the previous day, when the last of the trains had departed.

  “Where are the trains?” asked Gabriel. He knew the Confederacy had a good supply of railroad cars. Many’s the time Stonewall’s troops had circled an evening campfire and told the story of Stonewall Jackson and the B&O Railroad. In May 1861, Thomas J. Jackson—then a colonel—and his troops had occupied Harpers Ferry, with more than a hundred miles of Baltimore & Ohio railroad track within the territory he controlled. The B&O was a lifeline for the Union, conveying soldiers and supplies back and forth between Baltimore and the Ohio Valley. Day and night those trains ran, carrying coal and grain to supply the Union and fortify it during the hostilities ahead. Under orders from Richmond, Jackson put up with the incessant trains as long as there was a chance of Maryland seceding to join the Confederacy, but when that hope faded, Jackson was free to take on the B&O. The colonel complained to railroad president John W. Garrett about the endless procession of noisy trains steaming through the narrow river valley, disturbing the nightly slumber of his troops. Mr. Garrett, anxious to keep peace with the occupying army, canceled the night trains so that they would not disturb Colonel Jackson’s sleeping soldiers. A few days later, Jackson persuaded the B&O president to reschedule the day trains so as not to interfere with troop maneuvers. Finally all the trains were running through Harpers Ferry between the hours of eleven A.M. and one P.M. Was Colonel Thomas J. Jackson satisfied with that? Indeed he was. He promptly sealed off both ends of the valley at Point of Rocks and at Martinsburg, and appropriated fifty-six locomotives and nearly four hundred railroad cars for the Confederacy. His men loved to tell that story around the watch fires. The laughter dulled their hunger.

  But where were Stonewall’s trains now, in their hour of need?

  “Where are the trains?” echoed a steam engineer from the Fredericksburg. “Why, I reckon the government’s took ’em when they lit out! Hustled away from here yesterday like rats down an anchor chain, and left the rest of us high and dry to face the fire and the Federals.”

  “He’s right!” called out an approaching officer, just back from inspecting the contents of the railroad yard. “There’s nothing out there now but a heap of spare parts. And there’s one small locomotive, but there’s no fire in her, and no railroad men to run her.”

  “They’ve left us a locomotive?” roared the steam engineer. “Why, who needs railroad men if they’ve left us a working engine? I reckon I can run her. Haven’t I kept the Fredericksburg afloat and sailing all these months? A steam engine is a steam engine, even on land. I say we fire up the damned thing, attach these railroad cars, and make off with it. Who’s with me?”

  “But what’ll we use for fuel?” someone called out. “There’s none of that!”

  The steam engineer looked around. “I don’t reckon the railroad will be needing that there picket fence,” he roared. “I say hack her down and throw her in the furnace.”

  The pall of smoke overhead and the rumble of distant cannons left very little room for argument among the stranded sailors. Anything was better than staying in Richmond. Any gamble was worth taking. As the men surged forward to follow the ship’s engineer, they were beset on all sides by the frightened townspeople, begging not to be left behind, but Admiral Semmes ordered them all turned out of the railroad cars.

  “It’s better for unarmed civilians to fall into the hands of the enemy than for armed soldiers to be left to face them,” the admiral told them.

  “If our engine will bear the load, we’ll takeall of you that will fit aboard,” an officer promised a sobbing woman. “Once our troops are loaded.”

  The other commanders were shouting, “Draw the cars together! Couple the cars!”

  Gabriel Hawks wondered how long it would take a gang of sailors to assemble a train, and whether it would run if they did succeed in coupling the cars together. Would they be better off slipping away from the station one by one and trying to make it home? Surely the duration of the war could be counted in days. And it was planting time up home in Giles County. It might take him two weeks to walk it, but once he was west of Richmond, he was almost assured of a safe journey back to the mountains. He had been wounded. He had been both a soldier and a sailor. Surely, Gabe thought, he had done all that any government could ask of a man not yet twenty years old. But he looked at the anxious faces of the women, clutching their crying children and regarding the gaggle of sailors with such faith in their own deliverance. He looked at the gaunt cripples from the hospital, hobbling along to help assemble the train. Gabriel cursed himself for a fool, but he followed the throng down to the railroad yard. He knew he couldn’t face his family if he ran out on these people now. Besides, his old commander Stonewall was dead; Jeb Stuart was dead; A. P. Hill was dead. Even the ironclad Virginia was dead. Who was he to outlive the war?

  Tuesday, probably

  Dear Bill,

  What do you mean, you’re drawing up lists of property and assets? Are you out of your mind? Our baby pictures! The green leather chair in the den that we used to fight each other over. How can you hold these possessions hostage in some emotional chess game?

  Shouldn’t you be trying to talk Mother and Daddy into getting counseling, for heaven’s sake? They’ve been married forever, you know. You can’t just help them to throw all that away. And yet, from what I’m hearing, you’re docilely filling out your little legal forms and making motions as if these were two total strangers.

  Don’t you care? Surely you’re not so hard up for business that you’re going through with this just to keep yourself working! How much are you charging Mother for this, anyhow? And isn’t Daddy furious? He did, after all, pay to put you through law school, only to find you used against him in court as a weapon, like an ungrateful trained shark.

  None of this makes any sense. But I cannot come over right now. Not that I’m doing all that well with my job interviews. I’m so worried about the family soap opera that I can barely concentrate on the questions. I tried talking about this with Cameron’s mother, but she professes to know nothing of such matters. “Fortunately I was widowed,” she said. Whatever that means.

  Has there ever been a divorce in the family before? I think not! A murderer, yes, but never a divorce.

  Please try to be more forthcoming in your future correspondence. It is bad enough to be stuck over here without feeling that things are being kept from me as well.

  As well as can be expected,

  Elizabeth

  “He is tramping out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.”

  —JULIA WARD HOWE,

  “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”

  CHAPTER 3

  ON MONDAY MORNING Bill stumbled into the office well after nine o’clock, looking like the plaintiff in a hit-and-run case. Edith, ensconced at her receptionist’s desk with the morning crossword, studied him silently as he tottered in the doorway.

  “You ought to reconsider ambulance chasing,” she remarked. “You look like you could stand to catch one.” Edith’s awe of attorneys had dwindled steadily in the days since she had been hired, a result of close proximity to actual lawyers, who were markedly less omnipotent than she had hitherto supposed. In fact, she would have bet money that she could have beaten both of them in Trivial Pursuit. So much for their fancy university educations.

  “I just come to the office to rest,” groaned Bill. “My weekend was a nightmare. Have we got any aspirin?”

  “Hangover?” asked Edith, looking him o
ver with a practiced eye. Her daddy had been a great one for the bottle and she knew the signs. In Bill’s case, though, they seemed to be absent.

  “No, but it’s only a matter of time,” the sufferer assured her. “I spent the weekend in my parents’ war zone. Besides, I have a sore back and every muscle in my leg feels like a stretched rubber band. I was helping my dad move the rest of his things out. Same as last weekend. And I think I carried all the heavy stuff.”

  “Still no chance of a reconciliation?”

  “Not on my account. The only thing they seem to agree on is my utter uselessness. Dad won’t confide in me because I’m Mother’s attorney, and Mother seems convinced that men are in some worldwide conspiracy against women.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed it myself,” said Edith with a trace of a smile.

  “So while I wanted to spend the weekend calming them down and infusing some reason into the situation, they insisted on spending two days bickering over the furniture. Mother refused to let Dad take a purple and gold tea service that his great-aunt Elinor left them. Mother says she ought to have it because she drinks tea and Dad doesn’t.”

  “That seems reasonable.”

  “No, it doesn’t. In the twenty-odd years that they’ve owned that tea set, they have never used it, and I know for a fact that Mother hates it. She refuses to admit that now, of course. And I thought we were going to have to call in the U.N. to decide who got the TV with the remote control. I offered to go out and buy another clicker, but they ignored me and kept on arguing in that well-bred icy way of theirs. Snide.” He mimicked his mother’s voice. “ ‘Of course it’s none of my business, Doug, but do you really think you need half the pots and pans, when all you know how to do is microwave TV dinners?’ ” Bill lowered himself into a chair with a weary groan. “I can’t take much more of this. Where’s Powell?”