Confederates Don't Wear Couture (13 page)

“You're closer!”

“FINE!” I couldn't take it anymore. The noise was driving me insane. Modesty be damned. I stuck my head out of the tent. “WHAT?!”

Randall was standing outside our tent, puffing on a little brass bugle, red in the face. He broke off abruptly. “Meeting in fifteen at the schoolhouse for the whole unit. Captain Cauldwell says that includes you two.”

He started bugling again. Dev, groggy, staggered in behind me, stuck his arm out of the tent, and covered the end of the horn with his hand.

“Yeah, no,” Dev said. “We're done here. On your way, little boy.”

Looking slightly defeated, Randall dragged himself back to the camp.

“Fifteen? As in fifteen minutes?” I asked. Dev was already back in bed. “No, no, no sleeping.” I pulled him out by the ankles. “We have to go.”

“I . . . don't . . . wanna.” He clung to his pillow stubbornly, but I managed to wrestle him out of his cot. There wasn't a lot to hold on to, it being a tent and all.

Grudgingly, Dev pulled on a pair of purplish plaid plain-cut summer trousers, fastened his suspenders over a white bib-front shirt, and tied on a large floppy floral neckerchief at a rakish angle, sort of like a Pink Lady from
Grease.
By the time I'd been wrangled into a puff-sleeved, boat-necked lavender gingham and pink-flowered number, we were nearly late. Even with a time crunch, we looked fabulous. Also, I noted with some dismay, we matched. Before we scrambled out of the tent, I grabbed my Dixie Acres brochure. Just in case.

Everyone else was already seated in the schoolhouse when we crept into the back, trying to be unobtrusive, which was not so easy to do in lavender. The room did a collective double take at our pastel synchronicity before turning their attention back to Captain Cauldwell, who was standing by a chalkboard at the front of the room.

“Ahem.” Captain Cauldwell cleared his throat, his mustache bristling.

“Sorry!” Dev whispered loudly as we slid into the last row of benches in the one-room schoolhouse. Beau turned around from the front row and winked.

It was a very small schoolhouse, with only four rows of benches three deep, and room for only two people on each. However, there were only fifteen enlisted men in the Fifteenth Alabama—it always felt like more, because we were usually in the midst of masses of Confederate camps, but on our own, there were fifteen soldiers, six Boy Scouts, and two pastel-plaid civilians.

“I had hoped not to make an issue out of this,” Captain Cauldwell said, frowning. “However . . .” He cleared his throat again and closed his eyes. “Lieutenant, if you would.”

A man in the front row stood up, a stack of newspapers under his arm. He dropped the first one on the wooden lectern at the front of the room.

“Tuscaloosa News,”
Captain Cauldwell announced.
“Mobile Press-Register.”
Another hit the lectern.
“Huntsville Times.”
Another.
“Birmingham News.”
Another. “The four biggest papers in Alabama. And here's the real kicker, the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
” All of the papers were stacked on the table. “Biggest newspaper south of D.C. And we weren't even in Georgia!” He scratched his head. “We weren't even in Georgia,” he repeated, bewildered. “Somebody mind tellin' me how that happened?”

“How what happened, Captain?” one of the men asked.

“How every single one of these papers has an article on that damn ghost stalking our boys,” he muttered blackly. A low murmur started gathering steam around the room. “How I've got mothers callin' me on my emergency cell—which I ain't even supposed to be usin'—frantic, askin' me what kind of operation I'm runnin' here, askin' me if this is my idea of a joke, askin' me if I think this is funny.” The murmurings increased. “Quiet!” Captain Cauldwell barked, and the room went instantly silent.

“Now, this ain't my idea of a joke,” Captain Cauldwell continued, “but if one of you boys pulled a prank that got a little out of hand, I'd sure appreciate it if you spoke up, before things get even more out of hand.”

“What kind of sick crazy bastard murders an innocent chicken for a prank?!” I whispered to Dev.

“You think that chicken was murdered?” Dev whispered back. “You suspect . . . fowl play?”

“Well, yeah. Chickens don't bleed to death from natural causes.”

“A murder most . . . fowl?” He giggled. “Get it? Fowl? Foul?”

“Har-har-har,” I said sarcastically. “Puns are not your strong suit.”

“SHHH!” Randall turned around and shushed us from the front of the room. Sheesh. We weren't being
that
loud.

Captain Cauldwell was still talking. “The brave young soldiers of Boy Scout Troop 72 are just as much a part of this unit as any of you enlisted men, and I don't like to lose a single soldier. And if this ghost nonsense keeps up, I don't know how many men we'll lose. We lost two good men yesterday, and we'll be down another today, as Private Hennessy's mama just informed me she ain't lettin' him stay here.”

“I can stay. I ain't scared,” one of the Boy Scouts, presumably Private Hennessy, piped up.

“I know, son, but your mama said pack, and that's an order.” Captain Cauldwell sighed with resignation. The Boy Scouts really were dropping out at an alarming rate. “She'll be here to pick you up before nightfall. And in addition, we all look pretty damn near ridiculous in these papers, and I hate lookin' like a fool. So I'm gonna ask, one more time, with total amnesty for the perpetrators if y'all come clean right now: Were any of you behind this?”

Silence.

“I think it's the Yanks, tryin' to rattle us!” one of the men eventually suggested.

“Or the Fourteenth Alabama Hilliby True Blues! They're always tryin' to get our goat,” another one said.

“Naw, definitely Yanks! Prob'ly those bastards from Ohio!” said another.

“Anyone from Pennsylvania! They're always angry!”

“Don't count out the Fifth Iowa Cavalry!”

“I think it's bad voodoo! Like in
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
!” Dev chimed in. I tried to shush him. “Or a dark lady! Like the Cher song! ‘Dark Lady played black magic till the clock struck on the twelve'—urgh!” I elbowed him in the ribs.

“It's the ghost of Anne Mitchell, out to wreak vengeance on Corporal Anderson!” Cody shouted. “She's real, and she's real angry! We all saw what was written on that sheet!”

“Private, you keep your voice down,” Captain Cauldwell warned him. “Don't go spoutin' off that ridiculous nonsense. That's just a dumb story used to scare kids from Kentucky to Alabama. There's no such thing as ghosts, and there's nothin' wreakin' vengeance on Corporal Anderson or anybody else in this unit.”

“You explain that to Jackson,” Cody said, folding his arms defiantly. “Oh, wait, you can't. He's gone.”

The men murmured among themselves, but no one seemed to have any pertinent information to volunteer.

“Anyone else?” Captain Cauldwell asked.

Almost surprising myself, I rose to my feet. Dev looked about as astonished as I felt. Every head in the room swiveled toward me.

“It's, um, not ghost related.” I cleared my throat. “Has anyone heard of Dixie Acres? It's this housing development company, and they want to build gated communities on Civil War battlefields! On historic sites!”

“That sounds like a real shame, but if the battlefields are not federally protected, there's not a whole lot we can do,” Captain Cauldwell said, shaking his head sadly.

“We have to try to do
something,
” I pressed on. “If it's not too late. Has anyone here heard of any battlefields being bought privately? For development?”

“I haven't,” said Bill with the round glasses, and the rest of the men seemed to agree.

“So it's probably not too late!” I exclaimed. “Someone here would know if they'd bought the land—you can't keep something like that quiet. So we have to figure out how to stop them: maybe a petition, or raise money for a private trust, or try to get all of the battlefields listed on the National Register—”

“Libby,” Captain Cauldwell interrupted me gently. “I understand that you're upset, but you also have to realize that you're new here and don't quite know the way things work. We're not a federal power, and we don't have the clout to protect every battlefield. And even if we did, the kind of action you're talkin' about would take years. Sounds like these Dixie Acres folks have stuff lined up already. We lose a little bit of land every year, and it's a damned shame, but that's just the way it is. I'm sorry, but I don't think there's anything we can do about it.”

I slumped down dejectedly. Why wasn't anyone as upset about this as I was? Dev patted my hoop skirt comfortingly as Captain Cauldwell dismissed his men, and the meeting was adjourned.

We passed a quiet week at Nash Farm. The fighting didn't start until Friday, so it was only us and a handful of other hard-core reenacting regiments kicking around the sprawling property. Without any access to caffeine, Dev slept nearly twenty hours a day, much like a cat. Beau and I spent hours wandering around the farm, talking about history, and exploring the fields, and Beau attempted to teach me how to waltz. But that may have been a mission impossible. Dev woke up long enough every day to critique my technique and suggest that Beau would be much better off with him as a partner.

Once Friday rolled around, however, “quiet” was the last word to describe Nash Farm. Twelve hundred reenactors sounded like a lot, but once they were all actually here—running around, cleaning guns, lighting fires, tending pots, and making small explosions—they were more than I'd even imagined. The place was swarming with soldiers and echoing with chatter and laughter. All of this translated to even greater profits for Confederate Couture once the gates opened to the public at ten. We were busy moving merch straight through the Ninety-Seventh Regimental String Band's pre-battle prelude. Dev snoozed through the first day of the Battle of Jonesborough, his head lolling gently against my shoulder as Confederate Lieutenant General Hardee attacked Sherman's Union troops, who pushed him back easily, resulting in a Confederate retreat until the next day. It sort of took some of the suspense out of it when you already knew that this was the battle that would lead to the Confederate evacuation and the Union occupation of Atlanta, even if we wouldn't reach that conclusion until the end of the weekend. I mean, it was called “the last defense of Atlanta” right on the schedule. It was sort of like going to see
Titanic
and knowing that the ship was going to sink.

Dev disappeared right after the battle, leaving me to itemize the receipts, because I was “so much better at it.” And Beau had survived the battle but had marched off with the rest of the men to the Confederate camp, way far away, so I was alone and sort of bored on Sutlers' Row. The sun set as I packed and stacked, until, under cover of darkness, Dev reappeared, sneaking stealthily among the shadows.

“Um, hello.” I closed the account book, setting it by the lockbox. “What are you doing? Casing the joint?”

“Come here,” Dev muttered. “I've got something to show you.” He darted a nervous glance around. “In private.”

“What, like a rash?” I asked nervously. “I would really appreciate it if this time you just went straight to the medical facilities and didn't ask me what I thought it was—”

“No, not a rash!” he yelled, then quieted instantly. “I can't tell you. Have to show you. In private.”

“Okay, here, come on inside the sleeping tent. I was headed there, anyway.”

“NO!” he objected. “No,” he added in a whisper, clutching his jacket close. “We need to go away. Hide the valuables, and meet me outside the tent.”

“Um, okay.” This was weird behavior, even for Dev. Had he acquired an unsavory drug habit or perhaps become an international art thief? What was he hiding under that coat? As I hid the lockbox safely in the tent, theories—each more improbable than the last—chased each other around my brain.

Dev was waiting outside, still clutching his jacket tightly together. He looked down the lane, to the left, then to the right. “We walk,” he announced.

Silently, swiftly, he led me into the woods, running parallel to the Confederate camp but farther out, in a copse of trees beyond Babbs Mill Road. “Just a little more,” he muttered at intervals as we went along. “Just a little farther. Until we're really safe.”

“Where are we going to be safe? Florida?” I complained. “Seriously, how far are we going?”

“This'll work.” Dev stopped abruptly, in a very dark cluster of woods. “Don't ask me where I got this”—he shook his head—“but look.” He opened up his jacket to reveal a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup hidden in his inside pocket.

“What!” I gasped. “How did you—? Where did you—?”

“I said don't ask!” he insisted. “I don't wanna tell you what I had to do to get this.” He shuddered. “But one of these is yours, if you want it.”

“Oh, Dev, that's so nice of you, but I don't know, eating modern candy—I feel sort of bad. There's only hard-core reenactors here this week; we haven't eaten anything that wasn't roasted on the fire pit—”

“Come on, goody two-shoes.” He pulled the Reese's out of his pocket, waggling it temptingly in my face. I had to admit, it did look a whole lot better than the salt pork and flavorless biscuits we'd been subsisting on. I was starting to count down the days until I could get to a gas station and buy some Twizzlers. “It seems like eons since we've had chocolate. We've seen hide nor hair of it. Think of the smell. The melting sweetness. The chocolaty, peanut-buttery goodness.” He pressed the wrapper under my nose. Mostly it just smelled like plastic. “Come on, just give it a try. I know you want it. Just one little peanut butter cup.” He pulled the Reese's back toward himself. “One little cup won't kill you.”