a fixture of the party. If you were, you’d know everything there was to know about Bertrand Walker. Nothing will ever touch him. The best I will ever be able to do would be to foil his schemes. What you are—or are becoming—is a career bureaucrat. There a hundred people in this town who could do the job you are struggling through better than you.” Before I could answer, she cut me off: “Don’t bother protesting. You know I’m right. Sure, you’re smart, which is fine, but the truth is, this isn’t exactly your cup of tea.”
“I’m doing all right.”
“Don’t get defensive.” Janice took a long drink, draining her glass, then carelessly dropped it onto the grass. “I’m just saying you’re not good enough.”
“At least I’m not out there destroying careers. Brought down any more governors lately?”
“Sorry. One a year is my limit.”
“Come on. Not even a little bit of scandal?”
“Always,” she said. “The kind of thing that wrecks careers, marriages, country club memberships.”
“Not showing a bit of conscience, are we? That doesn’t sound like you.”
“Believe me. I’d write about it if I thought anyone would buy it.”
“Sordid, I take it.”
“Graphic!” She beamed. “Amazing what a college student will do for a little money.”
“Perhaps that’s why our lonely legislators keep raising tuition.”
Janice raised an eyebrow. “You’d be shocked by what the desperate will say for a little bit of cash in hand.”
“To you, or to Johnny Senator?”
“Take your pick,” she said, gesturing toward the silhouetted crowd.
“Really?”
“Matty, Matty, Matty,” Janice tsked.
In the bright lights near the house, a brown haze had settled in, churning and blurred—gnats and mosquitoes and moths and other bugs drawn in by the lamps and the warm, alcoholic bodies in the evening air.
Then something suddenly dropped out of the sky into the midst of the gathered crowd. Soon another half-dozen, diving, spinning, tacking in a majestic display of aerial acrobatics. Bodies shuffled, gently laughing, the power brokers and politicians, the institutional philanthropists and their hangers on. We refilled our cocktails and reveled in a collective humor, gesturing wildly at the blur of wings streaking through the slaughter and cool night sky.
five
Once a year, nearly every year for the past one hundred and fifty, people gathered for a reenactment of the Battle of Blossom Ferry. These were the history buffs, the fifth-generation locals, the desperate and desolate still clinging to the cause. Without this, they could see what they had left. Though I’d lived in the county my entire life, I had never attended, and Hero decided that this oversight should be rectified.
“An honest to goodness redneck celebration?” She jumped on the foot of my bed in the morning, while I was trying to will myself back to sleep. “Who’d want to miss it?”
“Me,” I said. “I’d like to miss it.”
“But it’s a tradition around here.”
“That doesn’t make it mine.”
“I don’t see your point,” Hero said.
Hero had gone ahead and invited Janice, who in turn offered to drive the three of us. She was the only one of my friends whom Hero had met and liked. Though, as usual, there were caveats.
“She’s killer,” Hero said, as Janice pulled into our driveway. “Just don’t ever trust her.”
“She’s the most honest person I know.”
“Exactly my point.”
Blossom Ferry was nothing more than a footnote reference in any history of the Civil War I’d ever seen, of the ones that even bothered to mention it; but the way the throngs turned out to watch and participate, you’d think it was the pivotal battle in the entire war. Perhaps that was because it was the only major skirmish to occur within a hundred miles of the city. Or possibly because it was a Southern victory, at a time late in the war when so little was going the Confederacy’s way. In truth, though, it is only staged as a victory. Historians are quick to point out that it was more accurately a draw, and a messy one at that. It might even have been more precisely described as a strategic victory for the Union, since while the Confederate forces refused to give ground, their casualties were so great that the Northern troops simply marched through the same territory a few weeks later with hardly a scuffle.
At the site of the battle, Southland Enterprises was in the midst of construction on SouthWorld, a massive theme park and a sort of tribute to the Confederacy and the Antebellum South as a whole, as the billboards lining the drive in proclaimed. When completed, it would have “historically accurate” portrayals of “average pre-Civil War Southern life,” a claim most minority communities found borderline offensive and said so. In addition, there would be restaurants and craft shops and live performances and artisans, residential housing, executive accommodations, and nearly a dozen rides, including The Rebel Yell, “the largest roller-coaster this side of the Mason-Dixon.” Coming Next Summer!!
We arrived early to the battlefield. Plaques and paved paths directed visitors around the dense growth. What for the invading armies had been a treacherous and unknown wilderness was now a carefully laid out tourist attraction. Trees that might obstruct the path had been cut down and sawed into manageable sections. Janice pointed out that one of the primary difficulties during the war for the north was a lack of good maps. Were the war fought today, they could arrive at a trailhead and check out the etched and detailed map with its restrooms and major highways and obligatory red dot:
YOU ARE HERE.
The field of battle itself was mostly clear, and in the background, a row of condos. On one balcony, a party was raging, with people cheering and heavy music splitting the morning stillness. The re-enactors, the purists, were visibly perturbed, shuffling around in an uneasy silence while awaiting the start of the festivities. We waited along with two-dozen other onlookers. The rebel soldiers around were a motley bunch dressed in drab, mostly middle-aged, mostly white. Then a young man in a knock-off Colonel Sanders suit whistled for everyone’s attention and announced to the small crowd that the coordinator had been delayed, but that they would be starting anyway in a few minutes.
“They should be black,” I said. “That’s one of the few things I remember from history class, the irony. The Southern army defending the Confederacy was black and the Northerners were all white.”
“That’s baloney,” Janice said, taking up a position between me and Hero.
“No, it’s true,” I said. “They’d been promised freedom by the Confederacy. Once it became clear that the South was losing the war, the leaders had a choice: Either free the slaves or lose their own freedom. For some, that was when the South actually lost the war, even though they hung on for a while longer. It’s the moment when the aristocracy decided that they weren’t fighting for ideas any more. Just themselves.”
“Quite a sanitized narrative, isn’t it?” Janice said. “The idea that in some benevolent Southland, we weren’t fighting to maintain a corrupt system of enslavement. I think it makes the whole thing much more romantic, don’t you?”
“Can’t you let us hold on to some of our treasured history?”
“History knows no saints,” she said. “Who doesn’t love a good story? Black soldiers defending the South? Trust me. All fiction.”
“They say truth is stranger than fiction.”
“They also say lots of things that are bullshit. I’m a historian. I should know.”
“You’re