Last of the Dixie Heroes Read online

  Now they were directly in front of him, the man and woman sweating under their burdens, the child’s eyes wide with fear.

  Afraid of me? I wouldn’t hurt you.

  The man’s gaze met Roy’s. “Water, massah? For your thirst?”

  The torn clothes, the meekness, the weariness, the abjection: Roy almost didn’t recognize him. It was Curtis. Roy shook his head, even violently. Curtis’s eyelid fluttered. They both looked away. The slaves moved on.

  A gun boomed, off to Roy’s left. The generals-there were four in gray, and a few more than that on the other side-raised their swords.

  “Ready.”

  “What’s the scenario?” said someone in the ranks. “I got stuck in traffic.”

  Sonny Junior glanced at Roy. “What the fuck kind of army is this?”

  “Language, please,” said someone else. “This is a family event.”

  “Aim.”

  The generals brought down their swords, not quite in unison, but each with a nice flourish. The front rows fired. Some shouted command was lost in the deafening crash. The two armies started marching on each other, reloading, firing, reloading, and firing again. The Irregulars held their guns in the aim position, advancing with the others but not shooting. Some men fell around them, died spectacularly; others were immortal. Smoke hung in the still air, grew thicker and thicker. The smell went right to Roy’s brain, the drug for him.

  A wave of rebels flowed in from Roy’s right, some maneuver he didn’t understand. It drove him to the left, toward the cannon that had fired to start the battle, a cannon now surrounded by Yankees. Beyond it, Roy could see the green H flag flying over the infirmary tents. Between the tents, he glimpsed a tall figure, a very tall figure, dressed in a black frock coat and wearing a stovepipe hat. The tall figure was leaning down and possibly speaking to a much smaller figure standing before him. This small figure wore gray.

  Roy broke ranks and ran, tried to run, toward that small figure, but his way was blocked by a column of his own men marching across his path. Roy pushed through them, elbowing, maybe knocking one or two of them down. Someone swore at him. A musket went off near his ear. A red-faced sergeant with a shaving cut on his chin appeared, screamed at him, the cords standing out on his neck, but Roy didn’t hear a word, not even a sound from his mouth. He shoved the sergeant aside, kept going.

  The Yankees around the cannon saw him coming, raised their muskets, fired a volley. Roy charged. A Yankee officer pointed a pistol at him, fired.

  “Hey, hero, you’re dead.”

  Roy ran on. More Yankees came up, took aim.

  “Cease fire. He’s inside the limit.”

  Roy went past them.

  “You’re the kind that ruins it for all the others.”

  Past the cannon, Lee suddenly beside him now, and Sonny pulling ahead, his face savage; bowling through a slow-motion mob of blue and gray in gentle hand-to-hand combat; into a cloud of musket fire and out; past the infirmary tents; and there on a promontory stood a sort of stockade, little more than knee high. Yankees were herding Confederates inside, unarmed rebels with their hands held high. The tall man in the stovepipe hat spoke to the prisoners, offered his hand to each one. He turned to say something to the people sitting on lawn chairs just outside the stockade, and there, right behind him, was Rhett. Rhett saw Roy coming, ran to the fence, a fence he could easily leap but did not.

  “Help me, Dad.” He was just a little boy.

  Vandam stepped out of a mass of blue uniforms, grabbed Rhett, pulled him back, yelled something to his men. The Irregulars kept coming, sprinting now. Peterschmidt and the rest of his squad stepped over the fence, raised their muskets, aimed, fired. Noise and a big puff of smoke, of course, but nothing happened-except what was that? A bloody chunk, torn from Sonny’s shoulder? And where was Lee? No longer at Roy’s side, but lying on the ground, a red stain spreading down one leg of her butternut trousers.

  “These guys are good.”

  “How do they do that, the blood part?”

  Roy’s little boy, and Roy had put him where he was. The gene took over. Roy was almost unaware of what happened next, of slowing down, not quite stopping, but slowing down enough to hold the carbine steady, see Peterschmidt hyperclear in the V, even notice a small mole on his upper lip, and then squeeze the trigger.

  The wonderful gun bucked against his shoulder. A red hole appeared in Peterschmidt’s forehead. Peterschmidt’s eyes went blank, just like that. His men gazed at him as he fell, then dropped their weapons as one, turned, and ran.

  Applause.

  Roy crashed through the fence, Sonny right behind him, making a wild growling noise in his throat. The whole stockade came down. Vandam was backing out the other side, onto the promontory. He held Rhett with one hand, had a pistol in the other. Vandam’s son, drum around his neck, said, “Don’t hurt me.”

  The man in the stovepipe hat stepped in their way.

  “Maybe you guys should tone it down a little. You’re scaring the kids.”

  Sonny looked up at him, blinked a couple of times. Then understanding dawned on his face. He raised his musket, aimed point-blank at the man in the stovepipe hat.

  “What are you doing?” Roy said.

  “Gonna win it this time, cuz,” said Sonny.

  Roy knocked the musket aside just as it went off. The explosion almost smothered the sound of Vandam’s pistol, so that at first Roy thought Sonny fell for no reason. But then he saw that Sonny had a red hole in his forehead too.

  Roy dropped his empty weapon, went for Vandam. Vandam aimed the pistol at him, but Roy knew there hadn’t been time to reload. Vandam pulled the trigger anyway, and the pistol surprised Roy by going off. Pistol, not a rifle: of course, they had six-shooters, he knew that. Knew it for sure because of the sharp pain in his chest.

  Roy dove at Vandam as he fired again, the bullet passing so close to Roy that he felt its tiny breeze on his cheek. Roy, Vandam, Rhett, fell together, rolling on the hard rock of the promontory. Roy got hold of Vandam’s arm, the one he had around Rhett, bent it back and back until Vandam cried out and let the boy go.

  Roy and Vandam kept rolling, locked together, each with a hand on the pistol jammed between them, trying to pull it free. Roy hung on, but Vandam was powerful and Roy’s great strength was suddenly gone. With one last twist, Vandam wrenched the pistol out of Roy’s grasp. Roy didn’t even have enough left to hold on to him, to keep him too close to point the gun. Vandam rolled free, started to rise, the pistol coming up. Started to rise, but one of his feet was already over the edge of the promontory, and Vandam stepped down on air. He tipped and fell backward off Lookout Mountain; falling, falling, turning gold, then vanishing in the cloud.

  Roy sat up, tried to. He put his hand to his chest. Blood was coming through the hole in his jacket, the hole he’d inherited. Blood, but not pouring, or even flowing, more like seeping.

  “Water, Roy?”

  Roy looked up, saw Curtis in his rags, holding out the tin dipper.

  Roy drank. “Thank you.”

  Curtis nodded.

  Roy stood up. Curtis helped him off with his jacket, the two of them moving as one. Roy dropped the jacket over the edge. It disappeared too, in that golden mist.

  Roy gathered Rhett to him, held him close.

  “Honest Abe thought I was pretending,” Rhett said. “He gave me some candy.”

  Roy patted his back. The muscles along Rhett’s spine relaxed. Roy felt another one of those moments of perfect peace, but this one was in the now.

  In the now came flashing lights and police cars, one after another. Uniformed men of the present age, with automatic weapons and flak jackets, ran onto the promontory, Marcia and Jesse, his arm in a sling, in their midst.

  “I fought good up at the Mountain House, didn’t I, Dad?” Rhett said, his mouth against Roy’s chest, the question vibrating through Roy’s body.

  Roy looked down, saw his own blood, just a little of it, reddening that tuft of
hair. “You fought good and I’m proud of you,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  Maybe Roy had no business making that last remark, but for once he got lucky.

  First, it was pure luck that he didn’t die before he even had a chance to utter it. For some reason, perhaps Roy turning at the last moment, the bullet entered his chest at a sharp angle, shattering a rib, the pieces of which had to come out, but failing to reach anything vital. He spent a week in the hospital.

  Then he was lucky he didn’t go to jail. The Sons of the Confederacy raised enough money to hire the best lawyers, but Roy turned them down, went with a public defender. In the end, prosecutors in two states couldn’t see their way past the kidnapping and self-defense issues. No bullet was ever found up at the National Weather Service station, and its destruction was put down to a lightning strike. Roy pleaded guilty to one count of disturbing the peace, a misdemeanor, and paid a $250 fine, money he didn’t have at the time; the bank had already taken the blackened remains of his house in Atlanta. Lee, not long out of the hospital, lent him the money.

  Dibrell served three months for a parole violation, specifically for leaving the state without the permission of his officer. His original conviction had been for shoplifting, although how that related to his fear of DNA evidence wasn’t clear. Roy found all that out in an awkward phone conversation with Gordo, their last.

  The investigation of the weather station fire did uncover Ezekiel’s marijuana patch, which was razed to the ground. Ezekiel got fifteen years.

  Sonny Junior left no will. As his closest living relative, Roy inherited the old farm with that cantilevered barn of the kind still found in east Tennessee. He sold it to a New York publishing executive and her husband who were getting into fly-fishing. Roy used what remained after paying off the mortgage to hire a good lawyer for Ezekiel’s appeal. Partly because he didn’t like the contrast between fifteen years for marijuana cultivation and a $250 fine for killing two men. But mostly because he and Ezekiel were family, and family was what mattered: Sonny Junior had been right about that.

  Globax spun off several small divisions, as Curtis had foretold. Curtis became CEO of one of them, a small company with an office in New Jersey and a patent for a device Roy didn’t understand, but would be shipped by the millions if everything went right. Curtis offered Roy a job as head of shipping, paying more than twice what Roy had ever earned. It meant moving to New Jersey.

  Roy took Lee on long walks to help with her rehab. On hot days, she wore a dress. They didn’t talk much, perhaps didn’t have a whole lot to say. Once they came upon a Confederate graveyard. Little battle flags flew here and there; Roy didn’t feel a thing.

  “I’m not pregnant,” Lee told him.

  Roy didn’t say anything, didn’t know where this was going.

  “I actually can’t get pregnant, Roy, meaning it’s not possible.” They were holding hands. She let go. “Are you going to take that job?”

  “I want you to come with me,” Roy said.

  “To New Jersey?”

  “We don’t have to live in New Jersey. New York and Connecticut are close by.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Roy ended up going alone. Marcia had seen to it that Roy lost all but supervised visitation rights. That was good enough for now. On the very first one, Marcia happened to mention how good Roy looked. The supervision part began to drop away in practice.

  In the fall, Rhett signed up for Pop Warner and Roy volunteered as an assistant coach. Rhett was growing now, getting bigger and stronger. He played without fear, with no regard for his body, led the team in tackles and made the all-stars.

  After the games, they always went to a barbecue place Roy had found. The head cheerleader started coming along, Roy surprised at first that Rhett didn’t discourage her, which just showed that he still had a long way to go when it came to understanding things quick. She thought Rhett’s little tuft of hair was dorky. It was gone the next time Roy saw him.

  Lee came for a visit, stayed three extra days. “I need to get used to you,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You. This present you.”

  “It’s the only one,” Roy said.

  She booked another visit for Thanksgiving. By that time, Roy had already gotten his first raise. It was a good company, with a friendly atmosphere, flexible hours, and a generous health plan. Roy’s inhalers were free.

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