MacPherson's Lament

by Sharyn McCrumb

  She put away all thoughts of an alternate political future for the South. Today it was 1862, and Stonewall Jackson was going to win the battle in precisely the historical way, just as he must go on to lose the war in the foreseeable future. Now it was time to forget about the twentieth century. A. P. Hill felt that reenacting should be mental as well as physical. She tried to banish concerns about Tug Mosier’s trial and all the nagging reminders of modern existence as she concentrated on the field and the coming battle and the identity of a southwest Virginia corporal known to his unit as Andy Hill.

  She was about to go in search of Ken Filban when she passed a small brick building that reminded her of one small twentieth-century convenience that she needed to avail herself of before she slipped away into the past. Squatting in the weeds without toilet paper was no fun. She decided to solve the problem before she went off to battle. Besides, she could use one last look in a mirror to check her appearance.

  Three minutes later, with her hat newly adjusted and her face scrubbed clean of all lingering lipstick traces, Powell Hill emerged from the ladies’ rest room to find her way blocked by a burly man in a National Park Service uniform.

  He glowered at her as if she were a potato bug, looking at the sign marked LADIES and giving her a long once-over from cap to brogans. “What were you doing in there?”

  A. P. Hill scowled back. “What do you think?”

  The man rocked back on his heels with a satisfied expression that was a thousand miles from kindness. “If you brought your regular clothes, you can stay and watch the battle, little lady,” he said with a smirk. “Otherwise, you can go on back to your car and leave the park. You won’t be playing soldier today.”

  Against her better judgment, Powell decided to reason with him. “Look,” she said, “if you hadn’t caught me coming out of the ladies’ room, you would never have known that I’m female. Spectators fifty yards away sure can’t tell it, and my gear is a hundred percent authentic. I’ve been doing this for a couple of years now. What’s the harm in letting me take part?”

  “I’m not going to argue with you,” said the park official. “I’m taking you back to your car.”

  “You’re violating my civil rights,” said A. P. Hill with a mulish look in her eyes.

  “We want an authentic reenactment, miss. And women soldiers aren’t accurate.”

  “The hell they aren’t!” she said, a good deal more loudly than diplomacy would dictate. “That shows how damn little you know about the war! Have you ever heard of Sarah Edmonds Seelye? She fought in the Second Michigan Infantry under the name of Franklin Thompson! And so-called Albert Cashier of the 95th Illinois was female. So were about four hundred other women who disguised themselves as men and fought. At least one was killed at Antietam!”

  “Reenactments are supposed to portray the norm,” said the man with a stony gaze. “Women soldiers were not the norm. Now take off the uniform or leave.”

  “But there were female soldiers!”

  “Not in my park. Now get going before I have you arrested for trespassing.”

  An expression of holy joy lingered on Powell Hill’s face for a moment as she looked up at him, but then she remembered Tug Mosier’s trial, and she realized that she couldn’t indulge herself to fight this moron. With a look of utter defeat that was not entirely sincere, A. P. Hill allowed herself to be marched summarily back to her car. Before she drove away, she made a note of the park ranger’s name and description.

  Edinbugh

  In haste

  Dear Bill,

  I am taking the next plane over. Arriving Dulles via British Airways; Danville by puddlejumper. Don’t bother to meet me.

  Elizabeth

  “War is hell.”

  – GENERAL WILLIAM TECUMSEH SHERMAN

  CHAPTER 7

  “DO YOU HAVE anything to declare?” the customs man asked me as I shuffled past him with my one old suitcase.

  “Yes,” I said, stifling a yawn. “It’s past midnight.”

  He consulted his watch. “Seven-fifteen, ma’am.”

  “Not according to my body,” I told him wearily. Easy for him to proclaim this the shank of the evening. He hadn’t climbed aboard a plane in Scotland at two in the afternoon and winged his way across the Atlantic in a seat the size of a panty-hose egg to arrive hot and thirsty ten hours later, in what my body damn well knows is the middle of the night, only to have twenty minutes to hustle through customs to make my flight connection: an airborne Dixie Cup bound for sleepy little Danville. Things had been pretty peaceful in rural Virginia since the Late Unpleasantness in 1865, but my family seemed determined to make up for more than a century of uneventfulness.

  I ignored the whole situation for as long as I could. When Mother wrote me a cheery little letter bomb announcing that she and my father were thinking of “going their separate ways” (after nearly thirty years!), I hoped for the best, but decided that I should stay out of it, assuming that they could resolve their differences on their own. Surely, I thought, with a decades-old relationship at stake, they won’t do anything hasty. When I heard from my brother that Dad had a girlfriend (who is probably named Bambi, and whose IQ probably equals her bust size), I will admit that I became somewhat more concerned about the situation, but I coped. (No matter what my husband says, I feel that throwing chairs is an excellent way of channeling stress into physical exertion; the incident had nothing whatever to do with feelings of rage or frustration.) Which reminds me that while I am over here, I must see if the Thomasville Gallery is having anything in the way of a sale on new dining room chairs. Perhaps in oak, which has a reputation for being a very sturdy wood. Cameron can say what he likes, but throwing things is a better reaction to stress than eating, which is temporarily comforting, but only creates more stress in the long run, when one begins to break chairs simply by sitting in them.

  Despite the strain I remained firm in my resolve to stay out of the family crisis. Even Bambi or whatever her name is could not induce me to cross the Atlantic, leaving home and husband, though. Least said, soonest mended, they say. But I did check to make sure that my passport was up-to-date and that my luggage tags had the correct address in Edinburgh. Just as well that I did, because yesterday my brother contacted me with the news that he is suspected of mass murder and accused of stealing a fortune. That was too much.

  I decided that I’d better fly home before my demented relatives decided to take over an air force base and start the War all over again. Even Cameron had to admit that things seemed out of hand with the stateside branch of the family; so he didn’t try to talk me out of going. But he couldn’t take time off to come with me. I suppose it’s just as well that I haven’t yet found a job in Scotland; there was no telling how long I was going to have to stay in Virginia. With a funeral, you just attend, settle matters concerning the estate if you must, and then return to your regular life, but no one in my family had the decorum to die. I suppose I’ll feel very guilty for making that wisecrack, but I’m angry now-and my family is being particularly exasperating. They’re probably doing this just to drive me crazy and get the inheritance.

  I took the new scandalous royal biography with me on the plane for reading matter. It was comforting to be reminded that no family is immune from turmoil, but even the tale of a princess’s drinking problem couldn’t hold my attention. I kept thinking of Aunt Amanda’s reaction to my parents’ breakup, assuming that anybody had been fool enough to tell her. “I knew it wouldn’t last,” she’d sniff. “They eloped.”

  And then I’d think about poor old Bill, who seemed to have drifted into law school because a college degree wasn’t enough anymore for ambitious middle-class parents. It wasn’t enough for the modern job market, either. Fast-food restaurant managers had college degrees these days; everybody else needed an extra piece of paper to move upward.

  I remember my brother, Bill, as a towheaded kid captivated by magic acts on television. He’d use his allowance to buy simple tricks, and
then he’d inflict them on the family and the Scout troop at the slightest lull in conversation. Our enthusiasm hadn’t been exactly unbounded, and after a few years of saying, “Pick a card, any card,” to the backs of a stampeding audience, he gave it up and retreated into his schoolwork. He’d graduated Phi Beta Kappa from William and Mary, and had been accepted into law school without much difficulty. But I never saw him talk about law school with anything like the glow he used to have for his hokey magic tricks. Sometimes I wondered if his interminable stay in law school had been a postponement of his inevitable humdrum fate. That made me sad. For all the teasing I go through for my career (grave-robbing, as my cousin Geoffrey puts it), I genuinely enjoyed forensic anthropology, solving death’s little puzzles based on the clues left behind in the human body. I wished that I could be sure that Bill was as happy in his expensively acquired profession.

  One thing I was sure of, though: Bill MacPherson was not a crook. And there was absolutely no way that he could be a murderer. Even as a kid, he’d been a halfhearted squabbler, generally losing the last piece of cake or the new toy to me not because he was unselfish, but because he didn’t really care enough to make a fuss about things. I couldn’t imagine him beset with any of the aggressive sins, like avarice or larceny. I could, however, envision his being careless in detail or overly trusting of other people (when we were kids, he used to let me divide up the ice cream), but there is no way that my brother could have done what he stands accused of. No way.

  “Give me something with an air bag,” I told the car-rental people at the Danville airport. I’d been driving in Scotland for so long that I didn’t trust myself to make an uneventful transition back to the right side of the road, especially when I had so many other things to worry about.

  Bill would have picked me up at the airport, but I didn’t want to be dependent on him for transportation. I didn’t know Danville very well, but a city map came with the car, and Danville isn’t large enough to get lost in. It’s the kind of place where people read the newspaper to see who has been caught. I knew that my brother’s office and his apartment were in the same downtown building, so the chances of finding him at this hour seemed excellent. I wasn’t ready to go to my parents’ house yet. The thought gave me chills.

  I crossed the Dan River on the old bridge that led downtown and found a parking place just outside the law office building. The street was deserted and the sky had a haze of reflected light from the city, hiding the stars. I wondered if I should have picked up a pizza on my way in. When he’s worried, Bill forgets to eat. I never have that problem.

  I hurried up the stairs, knowing that if I stopped to think about what to say, I might turn around and run. The door to the office was closed, but the light was on. I looked at the frosted glass, emblazoned with the names MacPherson and Hill, wishing I’d come to visit in time to be proud of his achievement.

  He was sitting in his office, head in his hands, oblivious to the sound of the door opening and my footsteps in the outer office. I slipped in quietly and sat down in the chair beside his desk. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said softly. “Thought I’d stop in.”

  Bill looked up and tried to muster a smile, but he looked like a tired old horse. “Hello, Elizabeth. If you’ve come to take me home with you, don’t bother. I think we have an extradition agreement with Scotland.”

  “How about Beirut?” I said, smiling back. “It would seem peaceful after your experiences here. Anyhow, I didn’t come to help you escape, but I could buy you dinner. Then we could talk about getting you a lawyer.”

  Bill shrugged. “I am a lawyer. And I don’t think much of my case. As for dinner, I don’t seem to be hungry these days, either.”

  “Is it as serious as you made it sound in your telegram? I mean, has anything changed?”

  “No. The old ladies are gone, the money is still missing, and the Commonwealth of Virginia is still insisting that they had issued an order of eminent domain, claiming the property for the state. That about covers it, I think. Suspicion of murder, embezzlement, fraud. At least it hasn’t hit the papers yet. They’ve given me a couple of days to try to straighten things out-probably because I’m a lawyer. Even a lowly one apparently has some rank. But when the case goes to the grand jury, they’ll go public, and then I’m finished.”

  I glanced around his Goodwill-furnished office and saw what looked to be a stuffed groundhog in a black robe standing on a small table. “Have you thought about pleading insanity?” I asked.

  Bill made a face at me. “Since when do you object to having dead things around the office?”

  “I draw the line at dressing them up,” I told him. “He is kind of cute, though.” I was thinking how much fun it would be to hide him in Cousin Geoffrey’s bed.

  “His name is Flea Bailey,” said Bill. “You can take care of him when I go to the slammer.”

  “That won’t happen. Thanks to our late great-aunt Augusta, I have money, remember? We’ll hire you the best lawyer in the state.”

  Bill shook his head. “That’s just what I don’t want. Don’t you see? If any of the real lawyers around here find out how badly I’ve screwed up, I’ll never get into a decent firm! My only hope is to get out of this on my own before anybody finds out.”

  I had never seen him this depressed. Not even when he was failing calculus. “What does your law partner say about all this?” I asked.

  “I didn’t tell her,” he sighed. “She’s out of town, defending her first client in a murder trial. She doesn’t need to be worrying about me. I keep hoping I’ll get it straightened out before it’s necessary to tell her.”

  “I was hoping to meet her,” I said. Intelligent women in the vicinity of my brother are a novelty. “Well, maybe later. I plan to be around for a while. I want to hear exactly what happened with this real estate transaction that went sour. But could you tell me on the way to a restaurant?”

  By the time he finished the story of the Confederate women in all its intricate and puzzling detail, I was pouring Sweet’n Low into my fourth glass of iced tea. I missed iced tea in Scotland. I missed ice. Now, though, I was barely tasting the tea, so engrossed had I been in my brother’s account of the house sale. He had eaten most of a cheeseburger, and now he was pushing French fries around on his plate while he described the visit from John Huff and the assistant state director of art and antiquities.

  “I thought I was doing those old dears a favor,” he mumbled.

  “You would,” I told him. “It’s all that vestigial Southern chivalry in your veins. You think that old ladies are sweet and helpless, and that you are doing them a kindness by offering them the assistance of your competent little old self.”

  “But why would they want to get me in trouble?” moaned Bill. “They were so nice. Look, one of them even gave me a Confederate penny as a souvenir of my first case.” He pulled the shiny copper coin out of his pocket and held it up so that I could see.

  “Maybe that’s what they thought your services were worth,” I said, and instantly regretted it, because Bill got that hurt look that always used to make me give him back the last cookie. “I’m sorry I said that,” I mumbled.

  “I tried to do it right,” he said sadly. “And I didn’t do anything to make them mad at me. I’m too insignificant to have enemies.”

  “I expect you are, Bill. I don’t think you were the target at all. I think they just needed a lawyer. If you’ll pardon my saying so, they probably wanted the dumbest lawyer they could find.”

  Bill groaned. “They chose well. Fresh out of law school, wet behind the ears. I was the perfect fool all right. I suppose the real scam was selling the house before the state could evict them?”

  “That seems likely.” I yawned again. Three A.M. Edinburgh time.

  Bill glanced at his watch. “You must be comatose by now, kid. Where are you staying? With Mom?”

  “Not if I can help it,” I said quickly. “How are things going with them, anyway?”
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br />   “If I had time to worry about them, I would. They won’t talk to each other, and neither of them seems anxious to confide in me, either. Maybe you’ll have better luck.”

  “Do they know about the trouble you’re in?”

  He shook his head. “They’re not too much fun to have around right now, so I thought I’d try to get out of it on my own. Otherwise there might be a reverse custody battle of sorts: both of them fighting to see who has to claim me.”

  “But you told me about it.”

  “Oh, you,” said my brother. “What do you care? Trouble is your middle name. I thought you might actually enjoy it.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” I said, finishing off the last of my tea. “But I don’t intend to sit by and watch it happen. I think I’ll find the old ladies and see what they have to say.”

  “I’ve tried,” said Bill. “They aren’t in the retirement community they said they were going to. I can’t find them anywhere.”

  “How long have we got?”

  “Before the grand jury? About ten days.”

  “I’ll find them,” I told him. I should have commended Bill on his customary competence and said I’d just search for the old ladies because I had so much free time and because I might get lucky; but I was too jet-lagged for conversational acrobatics. Southern women spend a lifetime playing down their abilities as a form of politeness. I’ve done it all my life, but I didn’t have time for charades at that moment. I had only ten days to find eight old ladies who were also Southern and-Bill’s opinion notwithstanding-probably smarter than I was.