I Believe In Yesterday: My Adventures in Living History (34 page)

The ensuing thirty minutes, including as they did several strident repetitions of this command, were as trying as any I had yet endured in my historical wanderings. Perhaps ten had elapsed when one of the officers withdrew an opened envelope from somewhere about his considerable person and passed it to the parson. He extracted the letter within and rose to read it aloud, jaw quivering as his eyes ranged across the neat copperplate hand visible through the thin paper. 'My dearest mother,' he began, introducing a brief first-hand account of life on the Confederate front lines.

In all honesty it sounded no worse than undernourished and rather dull, and the final PS fell some way short as a rousingly Churchillian call to arms: 'Please tell James to plant more parsnips.' It was the parson's closing address, delivered through pursed and trembling lips after he'd finished and refolded the letter, that raised vengeance levels to an audible high.

'That young man's life,' he rasped, 'was snuffed out this morning in a cowardly Yankee ambush.'

In the grim silence that followed, all within those canvas walls understood that only one man was ultimately responsible for the hard life and brutal death of this fine young scion of the South, and that he was here amongst them right now, round-domed hat in dampened lap, eyes fixed wanly on his oversized tramp's shoes.

'Put that in your newspaper, sir,' croaked the colonel.

'What – the parsnips thing?' I might have said; instead, I nodded at the floor.

A terminal clatter of earthenware and pewter heralded the end of the washing-up, and the ladies began drifting back into the front parlour. With each new arrival it was as if another of the many buttons entombing me in my heavy outfit had been undone. The angry man-talk settled into bland ponderings on tomorrow's weather; a refugee father flicked a moth off his ear; somebody did the rounds with a tin ewer of coffee. Our pastor pulled a small black bible from a small black pocket, and read a psalm to a background of pious nods. A hymn was sung, then a few jollier folk numbers, the voices clear and strong. This was better: here we all were, making our own fun.

The last misgivings ebbed wearily away when one of the female elders hauled aloft from a side-table a venerable, gold-embossed volume the size of three encyclopaedias. Then surged violently back, pinning me into my small, hard chair, when she handed it to me with a gentle smile and these appalling words: 'Sir, I wonder if you would do us the honour of reading us a little William Shakespeare?'

In impotent horror I watched as the womenfolk gathered tightly about my chair; one held out a hurricane lamp and with small, prompting motions of her bonneted head brought me to my feet. I opened the giant book somewhere in the middle and in the flickering shadows saw two pages clustered with minuscule words.

Later I would regret not riffling through in search of
Henry V
, a play with an appropriately martial theme, and which, twenty-six years since I studied it at O level, remains the only Shakespeare work I have encountered in its original text. But at the time, standing there with a rivulet of sweat tickling my spine and a dozen grubby, expectant faces clustered about mine in the candlelight, I found myself in no mood for dramatic niceties.
Cymbeline
, said the largest word at the top of the page; I lowered my nose towards the microscopic text beneath and launched blindly into a soliloquy which mentioned a horse with wings, adultery and – rather unexpectedly – Milford Haven, delivered at a speed that combined all these, and their many tiny neighbours, into a single, quiet noise.

With the speech over I moistened my lips and raised my eyes; the faces seemed frozen, as if posing for a silver-plate photograph. A slight shuffle caused me to glance swiftly behind: gathered by the kitchen entrance stood five bleary children, clad neck to ankle in grey nightgowns and evidently brought from their beds to witness this performance. There was a cough, and a protracted creak of floorboards. A drop of rain flicked the canvas overhead, then another; I drew in what breath I could and started up again, muttering out the twixts and prithees and wondering distantly if I had been pushed into some hellish crack in the Kentwell/Louisiana continuum.

After fourteen years, the hurricane lamp began to shake in its holder's failing grasp; taking this as my cue I finished the line I was on, slammed the book shut and sat down as if in the latter stages of a very competitive round of musical chairs. 'Goodnight now, children,' said a voice a short while later, 'and don't forget your prayers.'

Morning, as ever in the olden days, came early. A few short hours before, a kindly lantern-carrying wife had led me out past the officers and gentlemen, across the sodden blackness and into my sleeping quarters. Frail with the nervous exhaustion of making my own fun I was asleep almost before we got there; only now, peering weakly about in the grey dawn light, did I appreciate the efforts made on my behalf. This was the storage tent, but bar a few barrels and sacks stacked at my feet the provisions and implements I'd seen piled up in it before had been cleared away, and in their place a bed laid out, with a huge and potently aromatic buffalo skin as the mattress. On a low side-table beside me lay a winsome still-life: a tin jug of water, a linen handtowel, a candle in an earthenware holder and the means to light it (courtesy of Gustaf Erik Pasch, who had patented the safety match twenty years previously). Still the rain thrummed its staccato beat on the canvas, and I thought of the 250 soldiers Gerry had estimated were out in the woods, sleeping rough and uncovered. Twenty-four hours on, might I hear the whine of a distant shirker?

When the rain moved on I got dressed – shoes, hat, done – and ducked out through the flap. A damp mist swirled through the thin pines, the chickens were out and about, and outside a distant tent a man in a blue flannel shirt and braces was stretching a welcome to the new day. It was all very becoming; not quite a period rush, but a stirring sense that living history was so much more than unshaven men with bad breath hitting each other.

A mood of happy fulfilment saw me through contact with the anachronisms that daylight revealed to my now practised eye – the chainsaw hidden under the logpile, the CHINA stamp on the back of the iron range – and even the most harrowing breakfast I had yet endured: cold grits topped with a dollop of unidentifiable grey purée. One by one the refugee families turned up to eat, tin utensils in sooty hands; afterwards, under a clearing sky, we sat around a small campfire, drinking coffee and shooting the old-time breeze.

Jesse, one of two strapping brothers, said he'd heard that Yankees were within five miles, with horses and cannon. 'Gentlemen,' said his wife, hands clasped primly in her ample grey lap, 'I believe I would give the last of my bread to feed our fighting men.' A short plump man they called Doc reminisced about the Mexican War of '46, and how a friend had just picked himself up a real pretty Mexican bride for $100. Feeling obliged to make some sort of contribution, I announced that the first underwater telegraph cable had been laid under the Atlantic in 1857. 'You know – seven years ago.'

A morning school had been set up in the main tent's parlour, and as I washed grey matter off my plate I looked up to see a child reading aloud from a black-bound period primer,
The Eclectic First Reader
: 'Bad boys lie, and swear, and steal,' he announced, steadily. 'The old man is a beggar. We do not give him money. We may give him old shoes.' Then a vibrant young woman marched up to me with an axe, handed it brusquely over and said: 'Running short of firewood. Logs are there.' Gone now, the 'sir' stuff – this was my effective inauguration into their community, one that would be marked later with a very modest blaze assembled from misshapen splinters.

I spent the rest of the morning harvesting broom grass – grass to make brooms – from the trailside verges. A friendly chap with Shaggy stubble and a hat like my 1775 number showed me the ropes, and when he glanced around and quietly told me his name was Roger I sensed we were in for a twenty-first-century chat. Having outed himself as a Bush-loathing exair force policeman – 'I guess this gives me a fix of that discipline and responsibility' – Roger described the extraordinary scale of the Civil War re-enactment scene; he'd been at that full-size rerun of Gettysburg, and still endured flashbacks of noise and panic.

For a serious re-enactor, the problem with such a popular period was having to share it with what Roger called 'the guys in Wal-Mart shirts' – the 'casuals', whose cringeworthy outfits and blaring historical ignorance reduced most events to fancy-dress embarrassments, and thus obliged the hardcore obsessives to organise strictly ring-fenced private events such as this. By the same token, the existence of these obsessives meant that his wife was now able to make a living by selling period shirts for $125. He fingered his own with a wink, then peered dubiously at my fistful of brown stalks. 'Uh, let me look after those for you,' he said, with a diplomatic smile.

For a couple of hours we all pottered about in twos and threes. One by one the real-life shutters went up: the associated conversations, as so often throughout my time travels, were a curious mix of the breezy and the brutal. Over a fireside coffee Doc revealed himself as another Vietnam vet – a medic – and described at length the mine explosion that had left him half-blind and obliged to treat the mutilated survivors by feel. A splendid young man whose sunny nature had earned him the name Happy told me how he'd got into 'all this' after finding his great-grandfather's axe in the garage at home – 800 miles away in Ohio. 'Got it right here with me now,' he said, smiling towards his canvas quarters. Many of his older fellow refugees, he told me, had been raised, like Butch, in homes without electricity; one or two had drawn their water from a well. If none of this seemed extreme to them, it was because they were simply re-enacting their own childhoods, not that of their distant forebears.

The sun came out through the lanky trees; I slapped at bits of wood with an axe and suppressed the gnawing realisation that I wasn't doing very much war reporting. At what felt about four o'clock the two brothers suggested a fishing trip, and soon a dozen of us were bumping down the hot trail in a big red pick-up, bamboo canes under our arms, feet dangling off the tailgate like hillbillies. After a few miles, smoke and the strains of a tin whistle wafted out of the trees: I turned just in time to see a few flashes of muddy dark blue, a chestnut flank or two and the barrel of a great big cannon. 'Union artillery,' called out Happy.

Distracted by this encounter, and the anti-bear bins and alligator warnings punctuating our way from the car park to the sandy banks of Kisatchie Bayou, I found it hard to apply myself to the fruitless rod-based entertainment that followed. For much of the time I just watched the five children who'd come along with us, marvelling at the blend of obedience and independence that underpinned their spirited but squabble-free conduct. 'No smiling!' called out a boy of nine when his father pulled out his digital camera, stuck it on sepia, and lined us all up for a group shot. If it sounded a little rehearsed when he later described re-enacting as 'way cooler than video games', his younger sister's delight in telling me how she'd won over her sniggering schoolmates was entirely genuine: 'I just wore my costume into school one day and showed everyone my layers.'

Gerry and his boys were back at our camp when we returned, sandy and fishless. Home as it was to Doc and a trio of former and current nurses, the refugee camp was the BGR M.A.S.H.; Gerry had come to request a medical visit for a Confederate infantryman who had 'bust up his knee'. One of our ladies drove away into the twilight as directed, and over fireside plates of salt pork and pickles Gerry detailed the day's rival casualties. 'Sorted the wheat from the chaff today,' he smiled ruefully, revealing that five soldiers had already been hospitalised – three with heatstroke, one with worryingly elevated blood pressure and the last, dumbfoundingly, airlifted out of the forest following a suspected heart attack. 'And all that in a five-mile march.' I listened in shocked silence, but the faces around me betrayed no more than careworn regret. 'A lot of these guys sit behind a desk all day drinking pop,' said Happy, flatly, 'and then wonder why they can't deal with this.' (Later I'd learn that the average American downs a gallon of sweetened soft drinks every week.)

An advert I'd seen on The Gentleman's Emporium, an online nineteenth-century costumier, spooled through my mind. 'How many years, beers, and nachos does a fellow need before the old tux won't button? Not to worry – we have solutions! There's Rhett, an elegant brocade vest hiding a fully boned corset, and Beau, a less duplicitous boned cummerbund.' It was certainly tempting to interpret the casualties as a parable for the state of modern America – a nation idling along in its bloated comfort zone, the lean and hungry pioneer spirit now distilled down to an overproof obsession with high-calibre self-defence. The get-up-and-go had got up and gone: if there was dirty work to do, you paid an immigrant to do it. You could turn up here with the most authentic, most expensive kit, and strap your gut in with a Gentleman's Emporium 'solution', but if anyone thought you could actually carry yourself and a reproduction muzzle-loading Springfield up and down a few hills they were whistling Dixie.

To avoid further medevac airlifts, the entire schedule had now been reworked: the forty-mile route was cut in half, and many set-piece events cancelled or rescheduled. I learned now that all the food Gerry and I had delivered the day before, and many other camp supplies, were here purely to be looted by passing armies. A refugee wife recapped for the late arrivals to the fireside: 'The Confederates are now taking our chickens tomorrow afternoon, and the morning after the Federals are coming by for the rice.'

The pastor drove up and summoned Gerry away to effect epoxy-hoof repairs on a lame horse, and for a long while after I sat in the kitchen with the brothers and their wives, stripping the veins off prawn necks in preparation for a late-evening gumbo feast. Having never encountered this dish outside the lyrics to the Carpenters' 'Jambalaya on the Bayou' this was a gastronomic encounter I was looking forward to. And still am: with the prawn-skillet already sizzling on the range, Gerry returned in almost breathless haste. 'You're missing the war,' he said, simply. 'Let's go.'