South of Shiloh (2 page)

1

Thursday
STILLWATER, MINNESOTA

“JENNY, ANY LUCK?” PAUL EDIN CALLED OUT AS
he stooped over the duffel bag he’d just torn apart by the front door and pawed through a pile of blue wool clothing. He set aside a tangle of leather belts and pouches. A silver bayonet in a black scabbard clattered on the floor.

At the other end of the house, in the mud porch off the kitchen, Jennifer Edin turned her head in a slow toss that was old habit from when her hair was longer. Thirty-five last October, she had learned to put little faith in luck as an eleventh-hour solution. “When’s the last time you remember seeing them?” she called back.

“I don’t know.”

“Them” referred to his reenactor spectacles without which he could not embark on his Mississippi Civil War adventure. When Jenny narrowed her eyes, the sprinkle of cinnamon freckles across the bridge of her straight nose and wide cheeks tightened. Her fifth-grade students understood that this quiet, alert look signaled a prelude to intense scrutiny.

A blue-eyed brunette, hair in a tidy bob, she stood five seven and kept the needle on the bathroom scale planted dead on one twenty-four. Willowy and athletic, she stayed a few calculated pounds shy of curvaceous.

Something held in check there.

Methodically, she began to sort through the mound of workday debris her husband and daughter regularly tossed on the long table on the porch: books, magazines, clothing, newspapers, a bicycle pump. The mud porch was her triage station, where she stemmed the casual chaos of his garage from invading the order of her house.

“Mom?” Molly Edin appeared in the kitchen doorway with a cordless phone in her hand. “Rachel wants to know if I can come over.”

They’d rushed home from school to see Paul off, so Jenny gave her daughter the Look, followed by the Voice; a no-nonsense tone she had perfected teaching special ed to inner-city kids in St. Paul. “Not now, you will help me look for Dad’s glasses.”

“He’s
wearing
his glasses.” Molly, just turned eleven, with her first pimple on her chin, was indignant at being ignored. She waved the phone, insisting. The sweet malleable Gumby years of nine and ten were gone forever. Molly was becoming a prepubescent “me.”

“His
reenactor
glasses, you know; the old ones,” Jenny said. “Now hang up the phone and check the kitchen counters.”

“Nobody says hang up the phone anymore,” Molly said, then she retreated from the doorway and was replaced by her father.

“They won’t let me in without those glasses, says right on the printout. Kirby Creek is a semi-immersion event. No modern eyewear of any kind allowed,” Paul said.

Jenny took a deep breath and concentrated, raising her hands, arms floating out like wands of a divining rod. She closed her eyes and recalled seeing the glasses…turning, moving…to the shelves next to the table, and opened a fishing tackle box that was full of old buttons, bits of cloth, and various old brass insignias.

“There you are.” Jenny plucked up the battered gray case containing the errant spectacles.

Paul exhaled and gratefully squeezed her arm. Then he took the glasses case and hurried off through the kitchen to repack his bag. Jenny turned briefly to the flotsam covering the table. Automatically, her hands reached out to sort the mess. Then she paused, seeing the newspaper section on top of the recycling pile.

The Metro section of yesterday’s
St. Paul Pioneer Press
was folded to an inside page, where a news brief announced: “
Pioneer Press
Photographer Suspended.” She glanced out into the empty kitchen, faintly heard the boops and chimes of Molly logging on to Club Penguin in the den; the scuffs of Paul sorting his gear. She read the short paragraph that she and her husband had discussed last night.

Pioneer Press photographer John Rane was suspended for two weeks yesterday, following a complaint from St. Paul Police Chief, Oscar Talbot. Chief Talbot charged that Rane violated a SWAT team cordon and endangered officers and civilians during a tense standoff last week in West St. Paul…

But people were still talking about it.
“Did’ya see the picture that guy took…?”

“Hey Jenny,” Paul yelled, “we gotta go.”

“Coming,” Jenny said, dropping the paper back on the pile. Paul was in the den, saying good-bye to Molly. After giving her dad two kisses and a hug, Molly sighed dramatically: “Have
fun
in the
war
, Dad.”

“We all set?” Jenny asked, following him to the foyer, where he’d repacked his gear.

“Yep.”

“You sure?”

Paul nodded and rattled off the checklist: “Forage cap, sack coat, flannel shirt, wool trousers with straps, brogans, wool socks, muslin underwear, gloves, gum blanket, wool blanket, greatcoat, field pack and canteen.” He paused to take a breath. “Combo knife fork and spoon, mucket cup.” He held up a square black bag with a strap and stuffed it in the duffel. “Haversack.”

“What about food?”

“Davey’s in charge of the hardtack and slab bacon. Coffee, veggies, stuff like that.”

Jenny made a face. “Rifle?”

Paul hefted the 1861 Springfield rifled musket in a canvas case. Then he shoved in a tangle of black leather: belt and straps to which his cartridge box, cap box, and bayonet and scabbard were fastened.

“Cartridges?” Jenny asked, remembering the time her dad went deer hunting without his bullets.

“Eighty,” Paul grinned. He’d spent three days in the basement, rolling paper cylinders off a pattern with a half-inch wooden dowel, tying them off with kite string, insisting on explaining the process to her. The way he put in a wad of Kleenex as a substitute for a .58-caliber lead minié bullet. Then he filled the paper tubes with fifty-eight grains of carefully measured black powder and methodically creased and folded the open end with a distinctive flourish, like nineteenth-century origami. Jenny didn’t approve of keeping the can of black powder in the house after she’d heard that the stuff could ignite around plastic. Something about friction. She made him keep it in an olive-drab surplus steel box in the utility shed in the backyard.

“Glasses,” he finished up, tapping the glasses case stuck in his jeans front pocket. The optometrist had refitted lenses from an old prescription into the cramped period-accurate frames.

“I’ll put this stuff in the car,” he said, dragging the large duffel and the rifle out the front door. As he walked back in, first his, then her cell rang. They attended to the calls; Paul talking to Davey Manning, who was already waiting in the parking lot of historic Fort Snelling in St. Paul. She took a call from her mother, Lois, who was running late on her way to look after Molly.

“Okay,” Jenny said, ducking into the den. “Gram’s coming in ten minutes. Don’t answer the door till she gets here. After I drop Dad off I’m going to do some shopping and stop at the club…”

“Rachel—” Molly began.

“No Rachel tonight. And I want you to get in half an hour on the piano. And go over your spelling sorts before any television. Clear?”

“Claro.”
Molly nodded and never moved her eyes off the video screen.

“I mean it,” Jenny said.

“Jenny, honey…” Paul said.

Jenny backed the Subaru Forester out of the drive and got underway. Paul was on his cell again, talking to his insurance office, scheduling a client for next Wednesday. He ended the call and perused the row of houses on their street. As they passed the
FOR SALE
sign at the end of the block, he mumbled: “Two months, nobody’s biting.”

“Sally said they came down in price,” Jenny said.

“Hmmm.”

Jenny ran her eyes over the ranks of new roofs that crowded the horizon as she threaded her way out the Croix Ridge Development. No trees yet to break up the regimented dollhouse cul-de-sacs. She had wanted an old Stillwater house on the north hill, so Molly could walk to school. Paul, who evaluated homes in his business, worried about booby-trap repairs that lurked in nineteenth-century Victorians. The new house in the new development would appreciate before they’d have to spend anything on maintenance; or so he thought two years ago, when they’d moved from St. Paul. That was before the stucco fiasco, when most of the houses in Croix Ridge came down with terminal mold infestations.

“Is Molly wearing a bra?” he asked suddenly.

Jenny smiled and wondered if she should tell him she had noticed Molly’s first pubic hair. “Just a bra top,” she said.

“We’re going to have to talk to her about it, before she’s a teenager,” he said in the resigned voice of a man who kept moving an item from one to-do list to another.

“It,” Jenny said. Not a reference to the birds and bees. He meant the newspaper brief. He meant John Rane.

“We’ll talk about it, first thing when I get back,” Paul said.

Jenny changed the subject. “You guys still going to drive all night?”

Paul shrugged. “Three of us, we’ll trade off.” He looked out the window at the obstinate grime of late March: yellow, frost-stunted lawns, bare gray branches. “It’ll be greener in Mississippi.”

“You’ll be careful,” Jenny said.

“Jenny, honey, I go the speed limit. I don’t run stop signs. I sell insurance, for Christ’s sake.” Paul grinned.

They traveled in silence and Jenny was thinking how her husband was a risk-assessment machine. He watched his diet and stayed trim and fit; he’d never smoked and seldom drank. And now his passion for accurate detail had found an outlet in his historical focus on being a Civil War reenactor. The unit he joined was based at Fort Snelling, their destination on this cool early-spring afternoon. Paul was on his way with two “pards” to a battle event in Mississippi. Over the last year he had scrupulously researched and accumulated a full set of equipment off the Internet. He had attended the bimonthly drills, learning to march with and fire his Springfield musket. During a three-day encampment in southern Minnesota he’d honed his skills at marching in the arcane formations and firing blanks from the clunky rifle. Now he was ready to test himself in the fine print of an authentic battle so he could pass “muster” and be judged a field-worthy member of Company A of the First Minnesota Volunteers.

Jenny worked the road grid toward the city, taking Highway 36 to 694, then turning west on 94 and jumping off to catch 61, then Warner Road that turned into Sheppard Road. The sweep of the city where she’d grown up was getting less familiar; the capital, the cathedral, the high bridge, the new waterfront along the river. Ten minutes later, she negotiated the tricky freeway interchanges and finally pulled into the parking lot at the old fort that overlooked the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers.

A red Toyota 4Runner waited in the parking lot with bags lashed to the roof rack. Two men, Tom Dalton and Davey Manning, greeted them. Dalton was travel-casual in jeans and cross trainers. Manning was in character, wearing a battered blue forage cap, a blue tie-dyed T-shirt, pale wool trousers, and scuffed brogans. Pigtailed, mustachioed, and goateed, his pale face was eerily reminiscent to Jenny of an old tintype of John Wilkes Booth.

Jenny got out and took a closer look at Manning’s shirt, which had a Civil War vintage photo printed on the front. It was the famous picture of a member of the real First Minnesota, Pvt. Marshall Sherman, standing next to the Twenty-eighth Virginia Regiment’s Rebel battle flag he’d captured during the high watermark of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. The flag, the object of a long-standing tug-of-war between the state of Virginia and the state of Minnesota, now resided in a vault in the Minnesota Historical Society. The caption under the picture proclaimed:
I SURVIVED THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS CRUMMY FLAG
.

“Jesus, Davey. That’s like a skinhead walking into a black bar and yelling the N-word. If you’re going to wear that Down South I’m putting Paul back in the car,” Jenny said with a discernible edge in her voice.

Manning twirled his mustache, struck a pose, and furrowed his brow. Dalton cleared his throat. Paul, the new guy, stared straight ahead.

Jenny persisted, raising one eyebrow. “My fifth-grade boys have more sense.”

Now Manning cleared his throat. “I’ll wear it as far south as Cairo, Illinois, and reevaluate.”

“Fair,” Jenny said. “No sense in getting killed at a truck stop before you get to the battle, eh?”

“We should take her with,” Dalton said diplomatically, “she’d be worth a platoon of skirmishers.”

Jenny grinned and threw up her hands. “The Lost Boys, I swear…”

They continued kidding as they transferred Paul’s gear to Davey’s 4Runner.

“You got everything?” Manning asked Paul.

Paul and Manning went through the duffel, ticking off the inventory. Satisfied that Paul was properly equipped, they prepared to leave. Jenny and Paul embraced and she elicited another promise that he’d be careful. Then they kissed and she left him to the excitement of his extended weekend adventure. She wheeled the Forester out of the parking lot and raised an arm out the window in languid farewell. He’d be gone five days.

As she retraced her route, she slowed to a stop at Randolph Avenue. Easing up to the light, she coasted into the left-turn lane with her arms extended on the wheel, tingling a little, tugging her into a left turn. As she backtracked on Randolph, then turned north on Lexington and drove past blocks of tidy houses, she started the bargaining.

After dropping Paul off, she was just taking a shortcut up to I-94. Besides, if they were going to deal with IT, might be a good idea to see if he was still there.

Not like she was going to get out of the car. Her workout bag was in the backseat. She
was
on her way to the club. Shopping, she told Molly. A teeny lie.

The pressure in her extended arms guided the car off Lexington onto Laurel Street. This was Summit University, near Central High. Now she saw fewer moms pushing strollers and more black kids on the streets, some of them slouching in baggy carpenter jeans riding low over their boxer shorts. Paul would say, lock the doors. A few subtle, lidded stares came her way.