MacPherson's Lament

by Sharyn McCrumb

  * * *

  A. P. Hill took another sip of cold coffee, and looked appraisingly at her client. He was paler now, after a few weeks in prison, but his white T-shirt still bulged with pasty fat. Apparently, he hadn’t found jail food inedible, but the fare wasn’t doing much for his health. His shaggy hair was now greasy and in need of cutting, and his chin was blue with beard stubble. Powell wished he looked more appealing; juries had qualms about convicting good-looking people. They’d put Tug Mosier away without batting an eye. He looked like the villain on a TV movie of the week.

  “Are you sure you want to do this, Tug?”

  He blinked at her as though it were a trick question. She was the first authority figure who had ever been on his side, and he couldn’t quite separate her from the bullying schoolteachers and pitiless bureaucrats who peopled his past. Sometimes he thought he might trust her, but even if she meant well, she might be too innocent and powerless to do him any good against the System. “Well, I reckon I ought to find out for sure one way or the other.” He hesitated. “But if it’s bad-what we find out-can we just keep it to ourselves?”

  “If it’s bad, neither you nor Dr. Timmons will be called upon to testify,” Powell promised him. “But in case it isn’t, we’re going to make a tape of the session. Okay?”

  “I guess y’all know best,” he said, shifting his manacled hands and giving them a wary smile. Tug Mosier didn’t trust anybody who’d admit to having gone to college. In the fat cats’ world he was a barn rat, and it was always open season.

  Dr. Timmons ushered the uniformed guard to the door of the treatment room. “You’ll have to wait outside,” he said. “The room isn’t soundproof. You won’t be able to hear the session, but if there’s any disturbance, it will come through the walls, and you may interrupt. Don’t expect any trouble, though. I’m going to sedate him right away.”

  The guard looked suspiciously at Tug Mosier’s hulking form. “I’m right outside,” he said.

  They had borrowed a room at the county hospital, and set up an evening session so as not to interfere with the normal routine of the clinic. It was a small windowless room, containing only a bare metal desk and three straight-backed metal chairs. On the desk, they had placed Powell Hill’s tape recorder, a yellow legal pad, and Timmons’s medical supplies. Dr. Timmons made his preparations, talking in a low reassuring voice to the manacled patient. “This won’t hurt, Mr. Mosier. It may not even work. But if it does, you’ll remember the night in question as if it were a movie that you were watching on television. Do you understand?”

  Tug Mosier shrugged. “I know how to watch televsion, if that’s what you mean, doc.”

  “That’s about all there is to it. When I put you under, you watch that movie screen in your head, and when I ask you to, you describe for us the things that you see taking place. It’s easy. Can you do that?”

  “I reckon.” People had been telling Tug Mosier how easy things were all his life. Making passing grades, holding down a job, staying sober. But nothing came easy to him.

  Timmons filled the hypodermic needle and held it up for his inspection. “Seven and a half grains of sodium amytal,” he said. “This ought to help you to remember. You’ll feel the pinprick of the needle, but that’s all. Are you ready?”

  Tug Mosier glanced at his attorney, who nodded almost imperceptibly. He held out his arm. “Go on and stick me, then.”

  While they waited for the drug to take effect, Powell Hill thought about the forthcoming trial. She wondered if she had insisted on this psychological evaluation for Tug Mosier’s sake, or for her own peace of mind. She was just beginning her career in law. She still wanted to know if things were true or false. Later, she’d heard, it all turned into a complex chess game. And only the skill of the moves mattered any longer.

  “He’s ready,” said Timmons softly.

  Tug Mosier seemed awake, but more subdued than before. He sat slack-jawed in his steel-frame chair, staring at the lime-green wall with a furrowed expression of concentration.

  “Can you hear me, Tug?”

  “Yeah.” The reply was a voiceless whisper.

  “We’re going back to the last time you saw Misti. I want you to watch yourself on that wall there. That’s where the movie’s showing. Do you see yourself out drinking with the boys?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You see it happening, Tug, but you won’t feel it this time. You’re not going to get high just from watching, understand?”

  Tug’s head jerked in what might have been a yes. He was still staring at the lime-colored wall, almost oblivious to their presence.

  “Tell me when you see yourself leaving the party, Tug. Can you fast-forward to that part now?”

  “Okay. Getting my jacket on. Heading for the door.”

  “You’re drunk, though, in the movie, aren’t you? Not walking very well?”

  “S’right.”

  “Does the gang say goodbye to you?”

  “Naw. Too busy partying. Nobody gives a-”

  “Does anybody go with you? Maybe you needed some help getting home.”

  “Yeah. Somebody’s holding on to me.”

  Timmons and Powell Hill looked at each other. After a moment of silence, the doctor went on in a carefully offhand tone. “Can you see who it is, Tug?”

  “Yeah. Red. Red Dowdy?”

  Powell Hill scribbled the name on the note pad and waited with pencil poised for her client to continue. “Get a description,” she mouthed silently to Timmons.

  “What does Red Dowdy look like, Tug?” asked Timmons with casual interest.

  “Tall drink of water. Stringy red hair. Gap-toothed. Boots.”

  “And have you reached your car yet, Tug?”

  “Yeah. Sitting in it. Head’s spinning too much to drive.”

  “Did Dowdy get in the car, too?”

  “He’s pushing me over. Thinks he can drive better.”

  “Do you let him?”

  “Yeah. Too dizzy to argue.”

  “What happens next, Tug?”

  “He’s shaking me. We’re in the driveway of the house.”

  “Your house? The place where Misti Lynn is waiting?”

  “Yeah. He’s pushing me out of the car. I feel like I’m gonna be sick.”

  “But you go inside. Does Red go in with you?”

  Tug Mosier’s eyes widened as he stared at the pale green wall, watching Misti Lynn Hale die again.

  John Huff knew that soon he would have to return to his business up north, but before he left, he intended to have matters well under way for a prosecution in the case of his house purchase. He didn’t suppose that MacPherson would get anything really satisfying, like the death penalty, even in a blood-and-guts state like Virginia. Even so, Huff was determined to see that the local authorities prosecuted the matter to the fullest possible extent. No one made a fool of John Huff and escaped unscathed.

  He was in the back parlor of the Home for Confederate Women, still fully clothed although it was well past midnight. A full moon shone through the uncurtained window, giving the room an air of romance, but Huff cared nothing for such sentimental twaddle. His attention was centered on the built-in oak bookshelf that stretched from floor to ceiling on either side of the marble fireplace. As he had stipulated, the old ladies had left behind the books-and a sorry lot they generally were, too. He didn’t suppose he could get a quarter apiece for most of them at a yard sale. They were a saccharine collection of book-club novels and cheap editions of second-rate poets and historians. Still, he had to examine all of them carefully. He didn’t have much time. Soon the state might succeed in getting its house back and he would be forced to leave. But the process would take a little time.

  Meanwhile, he had bullied Custis Byrd and his bureaucracy into letting him stay on in the mansion until matters were resolved. Another title search had been initiated immediately after the MacPherson fiasco came to light, and sure enough, there had been no paperwork filed with the deed indi
cating that the state intended to claim the house. Of course, that didn’t let MacPherson off the hook. In fact it got him in deeper, because Byrd was swearing up and down that the kid lawyer had destroyed the evidence of the state’s claim. But Huff was quick to point out that he had purchased the house in good faith, and that until the state could prove otherwise, the transaction looked legal. If they wanted the house, they would have to pay him purchase price plus ten percent. Moreover, he said, he intended to stay in his newly purchased house until somebody gave him his money back. He didn’t care who, or how long it took. That sent Byrd flitting away, mumbling to himself about consulting the attorney general, but John Huff didn’t care. He would let Fremont, Shields & Banks take care of that. Not, incidentally, Nathan Kimball, who was a reasonably competent errand boy, but not the legal chain saw Huff required for this sort of contretemps.

  For now Huff was marginally content. He had possession of the house, and he intended to take full advantage of the situation, even if it meant getting by on very little sleep. It was nearly two A.M. now and he was still stirring. He had searched most of the house by now, but not as thoroughly as he intended to in the days to come. He even planned to rip out the plaster walls if necessary. Failing that, he’d go over the grounds with a metal detector. If he thought he stood a reasonable chance of getting to keep the house, he would have been considerably more careful about the property, but since the state seemed likely to step in and confiscate it at any moment, he decided that he had nothing to lose by taking drastic measures.

  After all, the house had a very interesting and complex history. When the word Danville caught his eye in the newspaper ad, he began to investigate a hunch. Since then he had studied the house’s past in detail. He would have liked an opportunity to take a crowbar to the Summerlin House as well, but that was now a well-guarded local museum, so he had to pin his hopes on the Phillips house and pray that the temporary occupancy of Micajah Clark in April 1865 meant what he thought it did: several million dollars in Confederate gold concealed somewhere on the premises. If he could spirit that out of the state, he didn’t care who ended up with the house itself. If he still wanted to become a Virginia gentleman, he could build a dozen such houses with that kind of booty. John Huff’s hobby was treasure-hunting.

  “They couldn’t hit an elephant at this dist-”

  – LAST WORDS OF UNION MAJOR SEDGWICK,

  WHO WAS MISTAKEN

  BETWEEN ATLANTA AND THE SEA…

  AT HER ADVANCED age Flora Dabney felt that she was really too old to command an expedition of this sort, but there didn’t seem to be much choice in the matter. The state had forced them out of their rightful home-and really, what could you expect of those carpetbagging Northern Virginians? Not really Southern at all. So now they were fugitives. But Robert E. Lee had lost his citizenship, too. She kept reminding the others that it wasn’t what the government thought of you that mattered; it was whether you fought with honor for your Cause.

  In truth, their exile wasn’t too onerous. Not like poor President Davis’s incarceration at Fortress Monroe in Virginia, with leg irons and all. Mary Lee Pendleton had managed to get some of the money from the house sale wired back from the Cayman Islands, whereupon they had purchased a nice large car-and fled. Flora suspected that they might have been able to get a better price on the Chrysler if they hadn’t arrived at the Lynchburg dealer’s showroom by taxi, but they had decided that haste was worth the few thousand extra they’d paid.

  Of course, all eight of them wouldn’t fit into anything the dealer had to offer, but that was all right, because Jenny Wade Allan and Julia Hotchkiss weren’t in any condition to ride in a getaway car. After the taxi dropped them off at the car dealer, it had sped away again, taking Jenny and Julia to the Roanoke airport, with Anna Douglas along to look after them. (It was fortunate that the taxi driver had agreed to a daily rate, or else they’d have owed him a king’s ransom.) Anna had some of the money, and instructions to hire a car and go on ahead to their destination. She had also taken Beauregard, the Home’s Confederate cat, in a mesh pet carrier, to be checked on board as “living luggage.” The separation had been Dolly Smith’s idea. She had insisted that the group split up to travel so that they would be more difficult to trace. All those years of watching gangster movies on The Late Show had stood her in good stead as a budding fugitive.

  With the two invalids and Anna safely sent away to plague USAir, the remaining five rebels purchased an automobile, paid in cash, and departed before the dealer had time to consider the peculiarity of it all. (He was heard to mutter several times that afternoon, “But they couldn’t be drug dealers!”)

  Thank heaven Flora’s eyesight was still good, and there weren’t any gears to shift anymore in these newfangled cars. She’d never quite gotten the hang of that. But she was a better driver than Ellen Morrison, who tended to get flustered in traffic. Flora did most of the driving, but on interstates, she’d let Ellen take a turn at the wheel. Timid Ellen would pull cautiously into the slow lane and putt along at a painstaking forty-five miles an hour while more daring motorists blitzed past them, sneering. Ellen would flash them an apologetic smile and cautiously accelerate to forty-seven for a mile or two.

  At that rate, it had taken them a good deal longer to get to Georgia than might be inferred from a road map of the southeastern states, but when there were no trucks to intimidate them, the drive had been pleasant enough. Dolly had kept up a running commentary on the landscaping of the various homes they passed. She did not approve of potted geraniums as an alternative to hard work in one’s garden.

  Flora, Lydia, and Mary Lee had spent many hours arguing over their best course of action. Flora wanted to go directly to the rendezvous point in case Anna should have trouble coping with the invalids, Jenny and Julia, but Lydia and Mary Lee were enjoying their first outing in years, and they insisted on sightseeing along the way. Finally Flora gave in and agreed to a few stops: the outlet mall south of Charlotte; some antique shop in Columbia, South Carolina; and a night at Unicoi State Park near Helen, Georgia. (Mary Lee would pick up every advertising brochure in the rack at the interstate rest stops!) Flora suspected that there were more direct ways to reach their destination, but since her eyes couldn’t manage the fine print on the map, she had to accept Lydia’s suggestions for the best routes.

  She’d finally balked at Mary Lee’s request to see Stone Mountain. “It’s south of Atlanta!” Flora said, accidentally pressing the horn in her agitation. “You can’t tell me that’s on the way to anywhere!”

  “Well, not exactly,” Mary Lee admitted. “But I have always wanted to see it. I remember when they dedicated the mountain back in 1925. My father went along for the dedication and brought back one of the commemorative half-dollars made to honor the occasion.” She held up the silver coin, which had been set into a ring of silver and made into a necklace. On the shiny face of the U.S. half-dollar were the images of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson side by side on horseback, and above them a semicircle of stars.

  “I wonder how many of those half-dollars the government minted,” mused Dolly. “And isn’t it amazing that they did it at all? Strike a coin commemorating an old enemy, I mean.”

  “I’ve always wanted to see the carvings of the Confederacy on Stone Mountain,” said Lydia Bridgeford. “You know, my dear father was a prominent naval officer during the War Between the States.”

  “So you keep telling us,” murmured Mary Lee.

  “But it isn’t on our route,” Flora said.

  “Let’s put it to a vote,” said Dolly.

  Afterward, Ellen Morrison said that she hadn’t liked to disappoint poor Lydia and Mary Lee, which is why she had cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the detour. Flora continued to grumble about the mutiny, but she grudgingly followed her navigator’s directions until they could see the bare stone mountain gleaming on the horizon. It rose up out of the flat Georgia plain like a natural skyscraper, solitary and splendid. “We can stay
an hour,” Flora warned them. “Then we have to head east again.”

  Even that had been too long, she decided later. Trust Mary Lee to strike up a conversation with some nice-looking young man in the parking lot, and before you could say “Chickamauga,” she was telling him that they were from Danville and they were playing “Do you know so-and-so?” Flora came upon them in the middle of this conversation, and to her horror she discovered that they did seem to have a common acquaintance. They were nodding and smiling to a degree that gave her palpitations. And of course he asked where they were going, at which point Flora gave Mary Lee a sharp jab in the ribs, so she amended her answer to “an island to see our friend Major Edward Anderson.” Mary Lee was a dreadful liar. She couldn’t even make up a name without accidentally quoting something she’d read.

  “Loose lips sink ships!” Flora had hissed at Mary Lee as she hustled her off to the Chrysler. “Do you want to end up in an old folks’ home back in Danville?”

  “But I didn’t tell him who we are,” Mary Lee protested, trying to look sweet and helpless.

  “Just as well I got to you in time,” snapped Flora. “You were about to exchange visiting cards with that whippersnapper. How do you know he’s not a policeman?”

  “Oh, no, dear. He told me that he’s an actor.”

  “So was John Wilkes Booth,” muttered Flora.

  “Perhaps we should move along,” said Dolly as the rest of them climbed into the car. “I’ll feel much better when we’ve found the gold. Won’t you, Flora?”

  “If we find it,” muttered Flora.

  “While we were marching through Georgia”