Unforced Error (4 page)

“What in the world did I come up with?”

“You said I should stop wallowing in what made me feel lousy and spend a minute thinking about something that made me feel good,” Melissa said.

“Heavy, dudette,” Linda said as she fastened buttons up Melissa's back. “If I'd copyrighted that one I'd be collecting royalties from Dr. Phil today.”

“I did exactly what you said. The last good feeling I'd had was when I'd finally admitted to myself that finessing Grammy Seton's oath was wrong.
Okay, I've got me: I was a jerk
. I'd felt this incredible release of tension, almost an elation, that I'd stopped fighting what I knew was right. And I realized that was the key to deciding whether to come clean with Grammy Seton: not kidding myself about why I'd be doing it, or for whom, or whether it would do any good.”

“I'd say you contributed a lot more to the process than my little bit of psychobabble did,” Linda said. “But what did the answer turn out to be?”

“That if I told her I'd be doing it for myself instead of her. I'd be paying for my catharsis with her disillusionment. The harder choice was bearing the burden myself. I wasn't a slut, but I wasn't chaste, either, the way she thought of chastity. So I'd live with the knowledge that I wasn't as wonderful as Grammy Seton thought I was.”

“So you're saying I shouldn't tell Peter? Base my marriage on deceit?”

“Your call, best friend, not mine,” Melissa said as tenderly as she could. “Deceit poisons marriage, but so does full disclosure. In Psych 101, most of the class would give the same answer Siebern did, and I'd be in the majority. But this isn't a class, it's your life, and Peter's. You've gotta know. Just remember that whatever choice you make, I'm on your side.”

“That means a lot more to me than Reverend Siebern's Power Points,” Linda said. “Now, why don't you go down and see how the repair job is going while I get myself dressed?”

“Are you sure I can't stay up here and help you?”

“No, thanks. You've already helped me plenty.”

Melissa nodded and withdrew. She edged her way gingerly down the stairs, feeling clumsy and uncertain in the long, itchy, unfamiliar dress. Jesse Davidovich was just coaxing a misshapen bolt segment off the bit of a compact, hand-held drill that Rep would have recognized as a Dremel tool. She noticed that Davidovich had moved the stack of typescript carefully to the coffee table and arranged a drop-cloth around the base of the stairs.

“I'll be a while yet,” Davidovich said with only the briefest glance up from her work. “Hey, neat dress.”

“Thanks,” Melissa said, strolling over and impulsively grabbing a fistful of pages. “I'll go out to the deck and stay out of your way.”

“That thing is a future book, isn't it?” Davidovich said as she inserted a different bit, with sandpaper on the end, into the Dremel tool.

“It wants to be one,” Melissa said.

“It hit me when I moved it out of the way. I thought, oh wow, I'm looking at, what, like a thousand hours of a writer's life just sitting here. Like, that miter box over there? My dad made it for me when I passed my apprenticeship exam. Took him two days, and every time I get ready to cut a perfect angle on a piece of quarter-round with it, it's like part of dad himself is right there, helping me. Just like a piece of the writer is here, ready to tell us a story.”

Davidovich noisily sanded the base of the newel capital for ten seconds, then blew sawdust away from the wood. She offered a bashful smile to Melissa, whose expression suggested the surprised delight of revelation.

“Sorry about running off at the mouth like that. I just got on a roll and started riffing. Your eyes must be glazing over.”

“Not at all. I went months at a time in graduate school without hearing a metaphor as elegant as that one.”

“Zoom,” Davidovich laughed, passing her right hand over her head.

As Melissa headed through the dining room toward the French doors and the deck beyond them, she caught herself actually sashaying in the period clothing. She was intrigued to note that seating herself at the redwood table on the deck required a rather formal bit of body language. She smiled and started to read Luther Battle's opus.

It didn't start out like Melissa's idea of a Civil War romance. No wasp-waisted belles tearing their crinoline into bandages while they bravely waited for news from the front. It began instead with a southern officer returning home through a bleak landscape in January, 1865, the war not yet over, his empty left sleeve silent proof of courage under fire at Cold Harbor. As he approaches his ruined plantation, he stumbles over a mob about to lynch a low-born local girl who'd turned to harlotry under the exigencies of war and had stooped to entertaining not just Yankees but “colored troops.”

“Well, if we're going to hang her,” Luther Battle had the maimed hero drawl, “we're going to have to find someone who can make a proper noose.” So-and-so couldn't do it, he went on, because he was busy running a pharmacy out of his farmhouse under a convenient draft exemption while brave men were dying at Lookout Mountain and Yellow Tavern. And such-and-such couldn't either, because his son had deserted Pickett's division and he'd helped the boy skedaddle to he wouldn't swing for it; and thus-and-so had refused to sell oats and beans to the Confederate supply agents unless they came up with hard money, so he didn't look like noose-making material either. And so on, with each tough in turn skulking away until the despairing whore found herself with no accuser but the one-armed officer himself.

“I don't hold with what you done,” he had informed her evenly, according to the manuscript. “But you know what you are, and you just have to live with that for the rest of your life. Just like I have to live with this empty sleeve. Your family was good people, so git back to your young 'uns and maybe some of the good in your blood will come out in them.”

A bit derivative
, Melissa thought, then instantly reproached herself for the academic snideness. This was a story, not a PMLA article. She leaned back and let the gently lowering Kansas City sun warm her eyelids. Could you find God in a slaveholder? Could an arm left on some blood-soaked, godforsaken battlefield atone for one man's share in the monstrous crime of human slavery? Could a man who'd fought and killed defending slavery redeem himself by standing Christ-like between a harlot and a mob? From the depths of her reverie, Melissa heard approaching steps and Linda's voice.

“The newel capital looks great. How much longer for the glue to dry?”

“About an hour,” Davidovich said, “but I only have to hang around another fifteen minutes or so to make sure the set has taken and there isn't any bleeding through the seal.”

“Perfect,” Linda said. “We don't have to leave for another twenty minutes anyway. I'll fix a salad to tide us over while we wait.”

Melissa's eyes snapped open.

“Abbey Northanger,” she said.

“Excuse me?” Linda said.

“Your primly plucky heroine. Her name. It just came to me.”

“Of course!” Linda said. “It's perfect.”

“Zoom,” Davidovich said.

“Tell you what,” Melissa said as she stood up and tendered the first chapter of Luther Battle's text to Linda. “I'll fix the salad. You read this.”

“Recess?” Linda asked, smiling uncertainly.

“Penance.”

Chapter 7

“Hey trooper, where's your mule?”

“Halfway to Lawrence by now. I had to dismount and it turned out he could run faster than I could.”

The half-dozen blue-clad men squatting around a small campfire chuckled at Rep's answer. The one who'd asked the question rose and offered his hand. Muskets leaning against each other to form a teepee nearby confirmed even to Rep's uneducated eyes that the man and his friends were infantry. Rep and Peter had already stowed their gear and grabbed a meal, and Peter had been showing Rep around for over an hour since. Peter, who seemed to know everyone at the encampment, introduced Rep around the circle.

“How long have you been in your unit?” one of the others asked.

“About ten minutes,” Rep said, glancing at his bare left wrist before he remembered that Civil War cavalry privates didn't wear Seikos.

“Who'd your wife vote for in the last presidential election, if you don't mind my asking?” a third infantryman demanded.

Rep spotted the trick a nanosecond too late to keep “Abraham Lincoln” from slipping out of his mouth. The others guffawed as the questioner removed his hat and shook his head at the thought of a woman voting. The approach of an emphatically contemporary couple saved Rep from further commentary.

“Excuse me,” the female half of the couple asked the group, “may we take your picture?”

“Fact is,” the man who'd asked about Melissa's voting habits said, “the only picture I have here is a pencil sketch of my wife that her sister drew for me to take along when I signed up. I am partial to it, and would be much obliged if you did
not
take it.”

“I'm sorry,” the woman said after Peter whispered to her. “I didn't mean ‘take your picture.' May we make your image?”

“Oh, most certainly,” the man said with an oddly quaint bow.

All six members of the group promptly assumed studied poses around the stacked muskets while the woman cheerfully snapped off four shots.

“We'll see you at retreat,” Peter told the group as the photo op wrapped up. “We have to get our recruit here a little more kit.”

Peter strode off and Rep followed him. The encampment was spread over four acres of rolling pasture well north of downtown but still within Kansas City's ample borders. Some men sat at campsites, playing checkers or reading Bibles. Others, in groups of six or eight, marched and drilled. Counting blue and gray troops together, Rep thought there were nearly a hundred re-enactors here already. Most of those he saw were infantry, but he noticed a smattering of cavalry and one artillery unit on each side as well.

As they trudged, Peter pointed to an open area perhaps a hundred yards square. A row of hay bales stood at one end, while four men in a medley of uniforms stood at the other, firing revolvers at targets on the bales.

“Firing range,” Peter explained. “There'll be a black powder shooting competition on Friday afternoon.”

“You mean those things fire real bullets?” Rep asked.

“Very real,” Peter said, grinning at the naïve question. “Fifty-four caliber, some of them. The reason I'm pointing it out to you, though, is that if you go down the hill directly behind those bales and then hike about eighty feet, you'll find some Port-a-Potties. A lot of the guys actually use regulation latrines, but I figured you might not want to get that realistic.”

“You got that right,” Rep said.

Another two-hundred strides brought them to the sutlers' tent. Sixty feet long and thirty wide and with its canvas rolled up on one of the long sides, it sheltered merchants hawking everything from Civil War songbooks to Enfield rifled muskets and period handguns. Racks and coat-trees groaned under the weight of complete uniforms for all branches of both armies. Replicas of eyeglasses and pocket watches from the era, cartridge boxes, and canteens covered tables. The sutlers all wore convincing nineteenth-century civilian dress, but Rep noticed that the prices on their wares were right up to date.

At the far end of the tent, Rep saw a sutler and a guy in a gray uniform, standing about three feet apart and ostentatiously ignoring each other. Before he could speculate too far on what that might be about, Peter led him to a different merchant with a bristling, black beard.

“Evening to you, trooper Damon,” the man said.

“Evening, Mr. Jameson,” Peter said. “Private Pennyworth here thinks he might be in the market for a saber.”

“Well, I don't have anything quite as elegant as that model 1840 heavy cavalry dragoon saber you're wearing with its half-basket handguard and leather-wrapped grip, but we might be able to fill the bill.”

He turned to a rack behind him and retrieved a saber in a brass scabbard. After pulling out about six inches of blade, he extended the hilt to Rep, letting the dull gold braid on the plain, half-moon handguard hang free.

“Model 1856 light cavalry, widely used by enlisted men,” he said. “That wrap on the hilt is very fine brass wire, not gold thread. The braid and tassel aren't just for parade. You can tie that to your wrist in a scrap and it'll keep you from dropping it. Three-fifty.”

Rep hefted the weapon, careful not to stain the blade with fingerprints or body oils. It was heavier than he'd expected, which pleased him. It made the saber seem like a serious piece of military hardware instead of a toy.

“Do you have anything a bit more basic?” Rep asked.

Leaving the first saber with Rep, Jameson fetched a second model from the rack behind him. The scabbard for this one was also brass, but looked a little beaten up in places and had a few black tarnishes. The guard was narrower, and its lanyard was ordinary white cord-rope instead of braid.

“That's also standard issue light cavalry,” he said. “Same weight and length of blade. No scroll-work on the blade. Two-sixty-five.”

“You'll need a belt fitted out with a scabbard harness as well,” Peter warned Rep.

“I'll throw that in for twenty-five,” Jameson said.

Rep hesitated. Three-hundred dollars-plus, after sales tax, for something he's probably never use again after this weekend. It seemed absurd. And yet, entertaining a potential six-figure client, Rep would drop three-hundred dollars for dinner and wine or basketball tickets without blinking.

“Sold,” he said. “At least if you take American Express.”

“Welcome to the Grand Army of the Republic,” Jameson said.

While Rep was waiting out the paperwork the sutler who'd been ignoring the guy in gray called to him.

“How about a piece to go with your new saber, private?” he said. “I have a Starr Arms Company 1857 model six-shooter right here, and if you'd rather have a Colt I can fix you up with one of those, too.”

“He can also sell you a genuine Barlow knife over a hundred-fifty-years old,” the man in gray said quite loudly, in what a Missourian would have recognized as a bootheel drawl. “But before you pay him a thousand dollars for it, you might want to know that he bought it from my grandmother for six bucks one weekend when I wasn't home.”

Rep glanced over. The sutler had turned his back on the reb and was holding two long-barreled revolvers out butt-first in Rep's direction. Rep didn't have the slightest intention of dropping several hundred dollars on a firearm, but he couldn't hide the interest that glinted suddenly in his eyes at the sight of the handguns. He was, after all, an American male.

“Jedidiah Trevelyan, at your service,” the gun dealer said, scurrying out from behind his table and hustling over to Rep. “Just feel the balance on that Colt. Try the action once. That's a Navy Colt, but a lot of cavalry carried Navy Colts. It was thirty-six caliber instead of forty-four, so it was lighter.”

“Not right now,” Rep said. “I'm only here for a few days. I'd have to leave before the waiting period is over anyway.”

“No, sir,” Trevelyan said emphatically with a vigorous shake of his head as a shocked expression distorted his features. “No. Sir. This isn't Russia. These are not ordinary firearms. These revolvers are legally recognized as historical collectibles. There is no waiting period, no registration, no license. We can complete this transaction in three minutes.” In what Rep assumed was a transport of evangelical fervor, Trevelyan had pressed close enough to Rep to count nose hairs while communicating this astonishing information.

“You mean to tell me,” Rep demanded, “that I could hand you a few hundred dollars, without giving you my name or address, and walk out of here with a pistol capable of putting thirty-six caliber sized holes in people?”

“Ab-so-lute-ly. That is just what I mean. This is still a free country—leastwise last time I checked.”

“I'll give it some thought,” Rep said as he began backing away.

“Keep me in mind, private,” Trevelyan said as he worked an ornately calligraphied business card into Rep's shell jacket.

There's no doubt about that
, Rep thought, turning away so that Peter could help him get his new saber and sword-belt in place.

“We can make it to retreat with a few minutes to spare if we go straight there,” Peter said.

“Lead on.”

The sun was just touching the western horizon ten minutes later when other re-enactors, in Union and Confederate uniforms alike, began joining Peter and Rep near the flagpole at the center of the encampment. They came individually and in twos and threes, then without orders formed into small units in a modest square around the flagpole.

In the demeanors and bearing of the men—and, Rep noticed, a couple of women—there was an intangible something, a
gravitas
, that Rep hadn't expected. They weren't playacting. They weren't just camping out or having a lark. They were honoring history. They were trying to understand, understand what it must have been like to drill and eat and rest at a camp like this the day before you'd charge up the daunting hill toward Maryse Heights or try your luck attacking the bloody angle at Chickamauga.

A sergeant and a private marched stiffly from the ranks to the flagpole. No radio or television noises reached them. No cell-phones beeped. No air conditioners panted, and no traffic noise intruded.

The sergeant barked a command that Rep couldn't make out, and the private prepared to lower the flag. Rep didn't have a military bone in his body, but he straightened his back and squared his shoulders in a semblance of coming to attention. Peter raised the bugle to his lips.

The flag began to come down as the haunting notes of Taps blared from the bugle. Jedidiah Trevelyan suddenly seemed very far away. And, Rep realized with a bit of surprise, so did John Paul Lawrence.