I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (33 page)

With my feet plumped up by two pairs of fisherman's socks, I shuffled along behind Gerry as he set off towards the Confederates clustered in the nearby trees. The rain had eased slightly, and a few were ambitiously trying to restart the failed fire; a charred fist-sized hunk of wet gristle sat in a blackened pan atop it. Other than a general theme of light grey and dirty cream, there was little sartorial consistency on display: a mix-and-match jumble of caps and hats, a random assortment of canteens, pouches and knapsacks slung across all manner of jackets and tunics. Uniforms that were anything but uniform. At earlier events I'd have attributed such disparities to inadequate research or funding; how gratifying, this time, to be entirely certain that how they looked was how it was.

Confirmation that I had arrived at the outer limits of large-scale re-enactment came when their soiled and spattered faces emerged into focus. Yellowy smiles all round – they were loving this. No whiners, no shirkers, no weaklings. The abysmal conditions had cranked the authentimeter right up.

How uncommonly satisfying, then, to find these hardcore filth-wallowers reduced to a nudging, deferential hush by Gerry's arrival. 'Sharp wagon you have there, sir,' was all anyone dared say. Every 'after action report' I would read later paid lavish tribute to Gerry, sometimes by name, more often as the humbly mystical Ox Guy, trundling through the forests, trailing a dusty cloud of historical verisimilitude.

Gerry mumbled something to a pastor, a man with the look of Crocodile Dundee dressed in Lee van Cleef's
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
wardrobe. He jogged away and returned a while later with a black rubberised sheet the size of a picnic blanket. 'Vulcanised pro-tection for you, sir,' he puffed, briskly lashing two corners of it round my neck. 'Thank you . . . father,' I said, with no appreciation of how whimperingly grateful I would come to be for this kindness, both to him and to Thomas Hancock, the English scientist who had patented the relevant process twenty-one short years previously.

The civilian camp was a few miles north, and Gerry agreed to walk me there: his appointed wagoner's task was to deliver water (supplied, as an unfortunate health-and-safety prerequisite, in turquoise plastic jerrycans) to both armies and the non-combatants. As we waved the Confederate army farewell, he theatrically cracked his big whip three times, a trio of thwacking snaps that filled the forest around: it was the only time I ever saw him show off.

The rain had settled into a heavy, dispiriting drizzle that my woollen clothing eagerly blotted up; I discovered the ample, concave brim of my black-felt head-roof made a useful gutter, but only as long as you remembered to drain it every so often. For a long, wet while we were on tarmac, bordered by trim and benign pine woods that recalled my many off-fairway adventures in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07. Every so often a pickup carrying one of the BGR organisers would shoot past with a genteel wave or a hollering Rebel yell; the only foot soldiers we passed were a couple of sallow ganglers who identified themselves – in nasally Midland tones – as part of the Lazy Jack contingent. All they wanted to know from Gerry was how bad the snakes were: 'There's a ninety-pound rule with these things,' he said, leaning back against a steaming ox flank. 'If you weigh over that, a snake bite won't kill you.' They nodded uncertainly, then went on their way, bickering over the maths.

A couple of hours on the skies began to clear, and soon after Gerry hupped and hawed us off the main road, on to a sticky, orange-soiled track, and into a very different world. An evidently recent forest fire had reduced the surrounding woodland to a blasted, black-stumped wasteland that hemmed us in on both sides, grimly redolent of war and death. After a mile of this the sound of drawled chatter filtered through the post-apocalyptic silence, and soon we were trundling out of the scorched-earth dead zone, into a clearing ringed by half a dozen ramshackle marquees. Beaming pigtailed girls in smocked dresses ran up through lines of off-white laundry, two very old dogs stood their ground and barked, five or six white hens clucked and scuttled amongst the churns and cauldrons and piles of wood, and broad, homely women wearing bonnets and pebble spectacles squeezed the full skirts of their grey Florence Nightingale dresses out through the canvas tent-flaps to cheer and wave. It was the closest I will ever come to feeling part of a liberating army.

'Gentlemen, we are truly delighted to see you here,' shouted the nearest of the women, stuffing stray strands of a very complicated bun back into her headwear. 'Those Walker boys have been in the tavern, worryin' us all with their shady dealings.'

'Tavern?' I asked much too quickly, scanning the canvas awnings in urgent expectation. When my gaze returned, her dimpled face had fallen slightly; I realised that this establishment, and its associated dealings, existed only as part of the scenario.

As we unloaded the water, and a few sacks of rice, flour and salt, Gerry gave me a discreet low-down: the six civilian families here were refugees, about twenty people in all, driven out of their homes by the hated Union army. One by one the men of the camp strolled amiably up to help us, their flamboyant beards and moustaches confirming the impression I'd formed back at the Confederate muster point that the 1860s was very much an anything-goes era for facial-hair enthusiasts. All wore plain, faded shirts and trousers held aloft with braces, and all but a couple of stringy-limbed beanpoles filled their ample clothes in a manner that made ironing superfluous. It was the one weakness – along with the laminated public-information sheets staple-gunned to a US Forest Service noticeboard – in an otherwise profoundly evocative scene. I'd read on the plane that by 1864, with the war three years old, nutrition near the front lines was a hand-to-mouth affair. Soldiers pillaged what they could from the fields, and were often obliged to live on desiccated corncobs and related animal fodder; starvation was commonplace. But whatever else I might endure in this camp, going hungry clearly wouldn't be a problem.

With Gerry and his boys magnetically attracting all the attention I was free to wander unmolested through the surrounding woods, rehearsing my back story. Well, ma'am/sir, I arrived in New York – hawk, spit – aboard the
Persia
, the first iron-hulled Cunarder, which as you know eight years ago claimed the Blue Riband with a record transatlantic time of . . . oh, buttocks. Five weeks? Four days? Perhaps gloss over that. Just pad it out with stuff that rammed home
The Times
's stoutly pro-South line, in language these simple country folk would understand. Like, I dunno, a fight I had – and won – in the first-class saloon, with a drunken liberal . . . no, a crying vegetarian . . . no, an effeminate Union colonel, wearing a pink Abe Lincoln stovepipe hat, with a Pekinese in his lap.

I didn't realise how far into the muddy pine needles I'd wandered until a distant clanking trundle stopped me in my tracks. When I scrambled back it was too late: Gerry and his lethargic pacemakers had gone. 'Mr Barker told us you might like to eat somethin', sir,' said a young boy in a Casey Jones cap, and with a feeling of deep foreboding I followed him into the largest tent.

'That was wonderful, ma'am.' I relieved the pewter dish of its last scrapings, and clinked it down on the tiny table before me; a round-faced young woman blushed slightly, curtsied, and half-ran out through the tent's open rear into the dimming forest. As the veteran of a thousand years of porridge with a hint of leek, I could now eat large quantities of almost anything, and in the previous hour had dispatched several challenging slabs of puckeringly saline pork, and two plate-denting ladles of hominy grits – a fêted rustic foodstuff that owes its existence to a moment of culinary happenchance involving congealed semolina and a sack of gravel. But there was a pickle jar, and the homemade lemonade was excellent; though once my second tin cup was drained I'd been politely steered on to water, dispensed from a barrel that still bore the Jim Beam distillery's branded imprint, and was tainted to match.

I creaked back in my chair – a tiny thing, whose design and dimensions suggested a Goldilocks-model end lay in wait for it – and looked around the tent. This astonishing construction was divided into two areas, both fully boarded-out and laid with faded Turkish rugs; I was in the bijou kitchen-diner, a caravan-sized area hung with old cookware and hand tools, and stacked on one side with tinned provisions bearing precise facsimiles of period labels: THIS CORN IS PACKED ACCORDING TO ACT OF CONGRESS IN THE YEAR 1863. Crammed in with the dolls'-house furniture was a small cast-iron, wood-fired range, permanently (and hazardously) on the go. This area opened into the much larger front parlour, a prim and trim social area ringed with dressers and side-tables, upon which rested oil lamps and candlesticks, old books and framed religious lithographs.

It was to this room, at the shy behest of another pebble-spectacled young mother, that I now repaired. Outside, amongst the chickens, a sweet little girl in an
Anne of Green Gables
pinafore dress picked up a length of rope and began skipping; I sat in a spindle-backed farmhouse chair, steam still rising off my sodden trousers, and exchanged awkward smiles with my nervously looming hostess. Presently two more children, a boy of about five and a red-faced girl I took as his slightly older sister, shuffled silently into the parlour, and sat down on a wooden chest. The woman nodded approvingly, then picked out a very, very old book with a weathered black-cloth binding and opened it at a marked page. Settling into an earnest monotone, she began to read.

'My father at last fixed upon the kettler's trade . . .'

After two paragraphs of this I could feel myself sliding into glazed stasis, yet through sagging eyelids I watched the two children seated to attention, straight-backed and fidgetless. A heavy yellow page was turned, then another, and another . . . after a while I sensed from their reactions that they weren't actually listening, just doing as they were told. At some point the skipping girl began accompanying herself with a playground chant about steamboats, but when this segued into one that namechecked the creations of Walt Disney the censorious response from the fathers gathered around a nearby fledgling campfire was immediate. 'I don't think that game's been invented yet, honey!' Looking crestfallen and confused, she shuffled away, trailing her rope behind her.

It was all but dark when a cluster of new voices approached the tent. In a moment the parlour was teeming with Custer-moustached Confederate officers with a lot of buttons and chevrons on their grubby cuffs and collars; conspicuous amongst them in his all-black outfit was the pastor. Their ongoing conversation, loud and heavy on cackling bonhomie, was centred on an absent party by the name of Old Man Johnson, who'd apparently been a hog-rustler before the war, and now – har-de-yee-har! – rounded up deserters. With ratcheting unease I waited to be noticed.

Soon the men and ladies of the camp were wedging themselves inside, obliging me to vacate my chair and inch gratefully back into a corner, between two sideboards. Candles and hurricane lamps were lit and trays of food and refreshments were brought forth from the rear kitchen: boiled potatoes, beef jerky, a pat of butter shaped into a little sack. I somehow managed to serve myself and ingest a hefty plateful, standing up, without attracting conversational attention. Then, squeezing between the haystack skirts en route to the newly arrived pickle jar, I found myself baulked by a dirty great colonel.

'How many brides have you buried, sir?'

Well, that was one I hadn't revised for. Was this some darkly comic riddle? The absence of a twinkle in those mud-rimed eyes suggested not.

'Just, um . . . just the one. Sir.'

He sneered at me over his blond, butter-speckled lip bush. 'One of our British friends?' There followed a genuine harrumph, enunciated as that precise word. 'I've married and lost his aunt, his mother and her sister.' And I followed his plump and grubby finger on its journey through the throng.

With the dining complete the womenfolk retired to wash up, leaving me alone with a pastor, three Confederate officers, four horny-handed refugee fathers and not even half a clogful of Dutch courage to face them. For a while they talked amongst themselves about mail deliveries, hog breeding and the War of 1812, whatever that was. If I failed to pick up on the enhanced level of prickliness that seemed to characterise the evening thereafter, it's because I've only just discovered – some four minutes ago – that this was fought between Britain and the United States. Even now nobody can agree if any side won, except to say that if anyone did, it wasn't the Americans.

'And what is your British guest's business here in Louisiana?'

As the fleshy, open faces of my refugee hosts puckered in doubt, I realised the extraordinary truth: these people had accepted me into their community untroubled by any understanding of who I was or what had brought me to their encampment at an ox wagoner's side. After the best part of a day spent in their company, eating their grits and muddying their rugs, I had yet to be asked a single pertinent query. For a few moments I watched the camp's menfolk exchange I-thought-you-invited-him looks. Then, with an air of deepest foreboding, I revealed that I was a war correspondent from the
London Times
.

'Sir, did you ever hear the story of David and Goliath?'

I told the pastor I had; he rested his hands on his black thighs, leaned forward in his seat, and slowly told me it again, tweaked as a parable for the current state of the war. The debate that followed began well when someone mentioned the Trent Affair, a British/Union maritime episode I'd encountered in my Wikipedia print-outs, and was therefore able to discuss, if only to confirm that an incident thus named had indeed occurred. Thereafter, however, my contribution lapsed into occasional protestations of my employer's sympathetic editorial stance. When these were ignored I settled into nods and hums, which grew ever tinier as the pastor's anti-Federal rhetoric blossomed into a passionate tirade. 'This war is about money and cotton and greed!' he half-shouted, his craggy features ominous in the hurricane lamp's flickery uplighting. 'Put that in your newspaper, sir!'