The Guns of the South

by Harry Turtledove

  Forrest bowed to Lee. “We have been rivals; I reckon we’ll stay rivals. But we’ve both fought for this country. We can work together to keep it whole. That’s what I came to say, General Lee, and now I’ve said it. A good morning to you, sir.” He bowed again, swung up onto King Philip, and rode away.

  Lee plucked at his beard as he watched Forrest go. He felt as if a weight had come off his shoulders. Nathan Bedford Forrest was still a political foe, but seemed not to want to remain a personal enemy after all. That suited Lee; political foes, he was. learning, could be dealt with. The casual thought brought him up short—was he in fact turning into a politician in his old age? He stopped to consider the idea carefully. At last he shook his head. His inevitable slide into decay hadn’t yet progressed so far.

  Dressed in his Sunday best—which, save for being the newest of his four shirts and three pairs of trousers, was no different from what he wore the other six days of the week—Nate Caudell hurried into the Nashville Baptist church. Once inside, he took off his hat and slid into a place on one of the hard wooden pews. Several people—including the preacher, Ben Drake—sent disapproving looks his way; the service was about to begin. He avoided Drake’s eye as he sat.

  Yancey Glover strode importantly to the front of the hall, nodded to the preacher, and waited a few seconds to let everyone notice him standing there. Then the precentor launched into “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The congregation joined in. They had no hymnals; Glover’s big bass voice pulled them through the song. That voice was one of the reasons the church elder had the precentor’s job.

  “Rock of Ages” came next, with several more hymns right behind. The congregation warmed up, both physically—a chilly, nasty rain was falling outside—and spiritually. Yancey Glover marched back to his seat. Ben Drake pounded a fist down on the pulpit, once, twice, three times. The preacher was an impressive-looking man of about forty-five, with a full head of wavy gray hair; he’d served a few months as a lieutenant in the Castalia Invincibles, till chronic dysentery forced him to resign his commission.

  “‘I know thy works,’ “ says the Book of Revelation,” Drake began,” ‘that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth.’ That’s what God says, my friends—you cannot, you dare not, be lukewarm. Again, in the Book of Deuteronomy, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy might.

  “Not ‘with some of thy might,’ friends, not ‘with a little of thy might, when thou hast the time. “With all thy might,’ as hard as you can, all the time, while you’re eating or working or bathing or reading. You can’t be lukewarm, or the Lord will spew you out of His mouth, and you don’t want that, no indeed you don’t, for if the Lord spews you out of His mouth, who’s going to suck you right on in? You know who, my friends—Satan, that’s who. Paul says in his epistle to the Philippians, ‘Whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things.’ So what do you want to do? Do you want to fret yourselves about the things of this world, or about God, Who endures forever?”

  “God!” the congregation shouted with a single voice. Nate was as loud as anyone. He’d been sorry when Drake had to leave the regiment; people listened to him. He might have become captain instead of George Lewis when John Harrison resigned in October 1862. If he’d led on the battlefield half as well as he did from the pulpit, the Castalia Invincibles would have been in good hands.

  He went on glorifying God and casting scorn on Satan and the things of this world for the next couple of hours. By the time. he was done, he had his congregation up on their feet, urging him on. He made Caudell ashamed of the way he drank and swore and even of the way he smoked. As he had more than once before, he vowed to abandon his wicked habits. He’d never managed to keep any of those vows. That shamed him, too.

  Another round of hymns closed the service. Some people went up to the pulpit to talk with the preacher about his sermon. Others hung around in small groups inside the church. Some of them talked about the sermon, too; for others, tobacco or horses were of more pressing interest, even on Sunday. Young men took the chance to eye young ladies, and even, if they were bold enough, to say hello. Church was a town social center, a place where everyone gathered.

  Caudell, more social caterpillar than butterfly, was about to head out into the rain when a woman called, “Don’t go, Nate.” He turned around. The woman smiled at him. She was fairly tall, with gray eyes, black curls that fell past her shoulders, and a mouth that was too wide for perfect beauty—her smile emphasized that. He’d noticed her earlier, partly for her own sake but mostly because he hadn’t seen her in church before. She smiled again and repeated, “Don’t go.”

  She still didn’t look familiar, but that voice—”Mollie!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?” No wonder he hadn’t recognized her—he’d never seen her dressed as a woman till this instant.

  Raeford Liles, who was standing nearby, cackled like a laying hen, “So this here’s your sweetheart, eh, Nate? Let me meet her, why don’t you?”

  Caudell introduced them. He didn’t bother contradicting the storekeeper, not anymore. Liles fussed over Mollie Bean as if he were a planter and she a fine lady, not least to embarrass Nate. He was embarrassed, but not on account of that. Several other Castalia Invincibles, men who knew Mollie was no lady, were among those who stood around chatting in the church. Most of them, though, were with their wives; whatever they thought, they had to be discreet.

  He said, “What brings you to Nashville, Mollie?”

  Her smile blew out. “I got a problem, Nate.” Caudell gulped. Raeford Liles started to cackle again. Mollie fixed him with a gaze that would not have looked out of place over the sights of an AK-47. “I ain’t in a family way, mister, so you can just drag your mind out of the ditch,” she said quietly. Liles blushed all the way up to the top of his head, started coughing and couldn’t stop, and retired in disorder.

  “What’s the matter?” Caudell asked. He was relieved for a couple of reasons: first that she wasn’t pregnant—even if he’d had, nothing to do with it—and second that she hadn’t noticed him” worrying that she was.

  “It ain’t somethin’ I can explain in just words,” she said. “You got to see it, an’ even then it don’t make sense—or I ain’t beep able to make it make sense, anyways. You know a whole lot more’n me; it’s on account of you I’m able to read and write at all. So I reckoned if anybody I knew could cipher this out, it was you, an’ I brang it to you. I had to get out of Rivington anyhow.”

  Those few sentences raised enough questions in Caudell’s mind for any six school quizzes, but he contented himself with one that might lead to answers for the rest: “Where are you staying?”

  “In one of the rooms up above the Liberty Bell.” Mollie’s lip curled. “This town don’t have a proper hotel, let alone anything like the Notahilton. Come on over with me; I got the book you need to see there.”

  “Let’s go,” Caudell said. Wren Tisdale, who ran the saloon, had fought in the Chicora Guards, not the Castalia Invincibles. Even if Mollie had given him her whole proper name, it probably meant nothing to him. Caudell put his hat back on. Mollie opened the small, long-handled umbrella she was carrying.

  They splashed over to the Liberty Bell; Mollie used her free hand to hold her skirts out of the mud, Wren Tisdale nodded to them as they came in; he was a dark, dour man whose looks belied his name. This being Sunday, the bar was quiet and deserted. The saloonkeeper’s eyebrows rose slightly when they climbed the stairs together, but he kept his mouth shut. Caudell’s ears heated just the same.

  Mollie’s room was small and none too clean. It held only a bed, a stool, a pitcher, and a chamber pot. On the bed lay a couple of carpet bags. Mollie dug in one. Caudell averted his eyes as lacy feminine undergarments flew this way and that; being easy with her came harder now that
she was so unequivocally a woman. Finally she said, “Here, Nate, this here’s what you got to see.”

  As she’d said, it was a book. The paper cover, somewhat crinkled from rough treatment, showed a U.S. flag crossed with a Confederate battle flag. “The American Heritage Picture History of the Civil War,” Caudell read aloud.

  “Open it up anywheres,” Mollie said. “Here, come on, sit down beside me.”

  He sat, though at a greater distance than he’d used to back in the days when she wore uniform tunic and trousers. Then, as she’d suggested, he opened the big, heavy book at random. He found himself looking at a discussion of the Vicksburg Campaign, at a woodcut from Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, and at photographs of Generals Grant and Van Dorn. “I’ve never seen photographs just put into a book like that before, instead of being made into engravings first,” he breathed.” And look at that painting above the picture of Grant there.”

  “Once upon a time, you wrote me for a joke, asking if the Rivington men had books with colored pictures all through ‘em,” Mollie said. “Now you can see ‘em for yourself.”

  Caudell only half heard her; he had just read the caption under that colored picture. “It says this here is a photograph, too. But there’s no such thing as colored photographs. Everybody knows that.” Without his willing it, his voice rose in protest. He flipped through several pages, found color on about every other one: on maps, on reproductions of paintings, and on what, by their clarity, seemed to be more photographs. Scratching his head in befuddlement, he turned to Mollie. “Where did you get this?”

  “Rivington—I stole it from Benny Lang,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Sometimes, after we was done—well, hell, you know done with what—he’d go off an’ do other things, his own business, I mean, until he was ready for his second round. One of them times, I pulled this here book out of a case he kept by”‘“—by the bed. With that fine light he had in there, readin’ was easy. But this here book, it purely perplexed me. What year is it, Nate?”

  “What year?” He stared at her. “It’s 1868, of course—January 18, if you want to get picky.”

  She gestured impatiently. “I know that, I really do. But look in the front of the book.”

  He did; The date of printing did not appear on the title page, as it did in most books he knew. He turned the page. Sure enough, there was the information he needed, next to the table of contents. “Copyright—1960?” he said slowly. “And this edition was printed in—1996?” His voice trailed away, then firmed again. “That’s impossible.”

  “Is it? Look here.” She pointed to a section he hadn’t yet noticed, something called “Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data.” The author, someone named Bruce Catton, was listed as having been born in 1899. Richard M. Ketchum, who was called editor at the top of the page, seemed to have been born in 1922. And the book itself fell under “United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865.”

  “But the war ended in 1864,” Caudell said, as much to the book as to Mollie. If he’d been bewildered before, now he was completely at sea.

  Mollie went to the next page. “That ain’t what it says here, is it?”

  Caudell’s eyes grew wide as he read the first two sentences of the introduction, which talked about the South surrendering.” Of themselves, his eyes kept reading. By the time he got through that two-page introduction, he was ready to question his own sanity. Every calm, rational word spoke of a long-ago war the United States had won. If this Richard Ketchum was either a maniac or a prankster, he didn’t let on once.”

  Caudell started reading in earnest. Before long, he realized going through the whole book in detail would take too long. He skimmed over the astonishing pictures and maps, read their captions. After a while, he asked, “Does Benny Lang know this book is gone?”

  “Don’t reckon so,” Mollie answered. “I moved a skinny book from the shelf on top so as to fill up part of the space this one took, and fiddled with both shelves so the holes didn’t show. Then I hid this one with the, ah, dainties I used to fetch over to Benny’s place sometimes, and got it back to my room without him bein’ the wiser. Read it there some more, times I was by myself, an’ the more I read, the more I got confused, till I figured I had to come to you.”

  Till today, Caudell had seen Mollie only in ragged gray and butternut. Picturing her in “dainties” distracted him from the book for a little while. But soon the story of the war engrossed him again. The farther he got, the less he understood, and the more he came to wonder whether this Bruce Catton really was writing in some distant future time. He kept referring to what he called the Civil War as having happened well in the past.

  And he kept assuming the United States had won and the Confederate States lost. That was clear very early on, when he talked about the overwhelming material advantages the North enjoyed, and about the trouble the South had in creating a navy out of nothing, and about the Confederacy’s two-pronged offensive into Kentucky and Maryland in 1862 as a chance to win the war which failed.

  Catton also talked about slavery as something dead and long departed; the feeling underlying his words seemed to be revulsion that it had ever existed, Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, which the results of the war had rendered meaningless and which all the South heartily loathed in any case, was to Catton a harbinger of great things ahead. Not even the staunchest Yankee should have been able to consider it as having any great effect.

  Gettysburg…Caudell studied the paintings of the third day’s fight, then turned to a calm photograph of the battlefield after the fight was done. The weathered granite and bronze monument there looked as if it had stood for decades if not centuries, yet the fight was only four and a half years in the past. He looked up lit Mollie. “Does your scar still pain you?”

  “The one from Gettysburg, you mean? It twinges right smart sometimes.” She looked at the colored photograph, too; she understood what he was driving at. “Don’t reckon it’d trouble me a-tall if I waited till that was took.”

  He raised an eyebrow. Somewhere down deep, she believed the impossible dates of 1960 and 1996. He shivered, and not just because the room was chilly; he was starting to believe them himself. When he looked down to the Picture History of the Civil War once more, he discovered it was almost too dark to see: Evening had snuck up on him like a dismounted Yankee cavalryman in the Wilderness.

  He went downstairs, asked Wren Tisdale for some candles. Leering, the saloonkeeper supplied them. “You can go straight to hell, you and your filthy mind,” Caudell growled. “We’re up there reading a book, and if you don’t believe me, you come on up and watch us.” He lit one of the candles at the fireplace, hurried back to Mollie’s room.

  A few minutes later, he heard someone coming partway upstairs and then hastily going back down. He laughed, said to Mollie, “Tisdale, checking up on us.” She giggled, too.

  His awareness of the world around him diminished once more as he bent close to read by candlelight. After a while, he raised his head in complete mystification. “Everything from the Wilderness on is wrong,” he said. “Grant didn’t go south—we went north. And Johnston stopped Sherman.” A picture of one of the fierce, jaunty “bummers” who, the book claimed, had looted their way across Georgia, stared mutely up at him.

  “It don’t talk none about our repeaters, neither,” Mollie said.

  “By God, you’re right. It doesn’t.” Caudell flipped to the back of the book; he already discovered it had an excellent index. Nothing was listed about repeaters, nothing about AK-47s. “But they won the war for us. Without them—”

  “We’d maybe have lost,” Mollie put in. She pointed to the Picture History of the Civil War. “Like in there.”

  Caudell kept going through the book. He found a picture of the Tredegar Iron Works, said to have been taken after Richmond fell. He found the story of Lincoln’s reelection over George McClellan, who, he knew, had actually run fourth in the election of 1864, and no mention whatever of U.S. Presid
ent Seymour’s participation in the race. He found photographs of Richmond in ruins, and a painting of Lincoln going through the city in a carriage.

  His eyes filled with foolish tears (foolish, for why should he be moved at what had never happened?) as he found word of the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to overwhelming Federal forces and a final photograph of a grim-faced Robert E. Lee, said to have been made just after that surrender. At the very end of the book, he found a painting from 1890—a year that, to him, still felt far in the future—of Union veterans parading in Boston. Seeing the white beards of the officers marching in the first rank made gooseflesh prickle up on his arms.

  He found himself altogether confused. Either Bruce Cat ton had never heard of the world in which he lived, or the man was the most inspired hoaxer of all time—even 1960. After some hard thought, Caudell found he could not believe the Picture History of the Civil War a hoax. For one thing, it was too perfect, too detailed. For another, even if an obsessed man somehow spent a lifetime assembling everything that went into this book—a lifetime when? Caudell wondered; no printer in 1868 could have produced anything like it—why would anyone else have cared to view the product of his obsession?

  “What do you think, Nate?” Mollie asked when he finally closed the covers.

  “I think—” Caudell stopped, as if saying what he thought somehow made it more real. But no help for it: “I think this may truly be a book from—from the twentieth century.”

  She threw her arms around him and kissed him on the cheek. “Oh, sweet Jesus, thank you! I was thinkin’ the same thing, and thinkin’ I had to be out of my head.”

  “Believe me, I feel the same way.” But when he looked down at the volume that should have been impossible, his resolve firmed.” All the other choices seem even crazier, though.”

  “Seems like that to me, too. But if it’s real, Nate, it’s important. What are we going to do about it?”