“Blue or gray?” Jamie asked, seeking the object of my attention but apparently seeing nothing. “Where is he?”
“It’s a little dark to tell,” I scolded. But he shifted as he approached, and I saw the glint of a Confederate States logo on a low-riding buckle. He squatted down a few feet in front of the bench where I sat, meeting my eye level. “He’s a Confederate.”
Following my lead, Benny aimed the recorder in the direction of my gaze. “Hello and welcome.” His words cracked around the edges, and his fingers shook around the recorder’s buttons, but he held it together all the same.
The ghost nodded as if he understood.
“What’s going on?” Jamie demanded, and the soldier tried to answer.
His mouth moved but I could detect no sound, and it was too dark to lip-read with any real success.
“This isn’t going to work, is it?” I asked.
He straightened to his full height, then shook his head.
Jamie poked at my ribs. “Ask yes-or-no questions.”
“Good point,” I conceded.
The ghost looked up and over my shoulder, stretching out his neck to see around the tower.
I chased that gaze into the field behind us and saw that another two or three trails were whisking and parting their way through the knee-high grass. Our guest did not appear concerned, so I decided not to worry about it…but I couldn’t help but feel a sense of urgency as the others closed in. We were getting the attention we wanted, but before long we might also glean some attention that we didn’t.
I asked the first thing that popped to mind. “Green Eyes is gone, isn’t he?”
Benny thrust the recorder forward even farther, nearly under the nose of our visitor.
The ghost seemed surprised that I knew this. He mouthed a few words and heartily bobbed his head in the affirmative.
“He says yes,” I translated for my companions.
“Why would Green Eyes leave?” Jamie wondered aloud, echoing our earlier conversation on the subject.
The ghost heard the question and tried to answer it, but again I could hear nothing. I hoped Benny’s voice recorder was picking up something I wasn’t.
“Yes or no, Jamie. Yes or no,” I reminded him. “Are you upset that Green Eyes is gone?”
Yes. A definite yes.
“And you want him to come back?”
Another yes.
“Do you know where he’s gone?”
No.
“If you did know, could you go and get him?”
Uncertain. Then no.
I felt a small gust, like someone had blown across my ear, and when I turned around there were two more ghosts behind us. One of them was nearly in Jamie’s lap, but I decided not to mention this to him. He was playing it cool—cooler than Benny, anyway—but I didn’t know how far he could be trusted not to lose it.
“Two more,” I said quietly.
Both boys swiveled their heads back and forth.
“You still don’t see them?”
“No.” Benny was shaking, but he wasn’t running yet. “But the grass over in the field. It’s moving around like someone’s walking this way. And I think…” He put out his hand, and it passed through the shoulder of one of the newcomers, “I think I can feel them. I feel something.”
“Remember the recorder,” I said, hoping it would get him to focus on something else, and figuring there was no need to tell him that the “something” he felt was the inside of a dead man.
“Oh, yeah.” He held it up again, having allowed it to droop forgotten down to his knee. He didn’t know where to aim it anymore, so he waved it back and forth, then settled on his original subject.
One of the other soldiers seemed to want my attention. I kept feeling his chilly breath on the back of my neck. I turned on the bench and faced him. “Do you agree with this guy?” I waved a thumb back at the first soldier.
He nodded. So did his companion.
Both of them were wearing more elaborate uniforms than the first. I thought they must be officers; and when I looked more closely I was almost certain that one had fought for the Union and the other for the South. I was somehow reassured to see that the war colors had come to mean so little.
“So Green Eyes is gone, and now you’re all awake.”
Yes, yes, yes.
And suddenly, all three heads snapped to attention and stared hard at something beyond the edge of our vision. The three of them looked back and forth between each other and then to me.
You.
It was a small-enough word that I understood the shape of the ghost’s lips. He pointed at me, his hand coming so close to my face that he might have touched me—and I wondered if I would feel it the way Benny had.
I knew then that they understood the others could not see them.
He said another word, and I think it was “go.”
I acted on that assumption. “Where?”
All three lifted one arm and pointed in the same direction. It didn’t help. It could have been east, west, or simply “behind you.” I couldn’t tell. I didn’t know well enough where I was to say more than that they were all in agreement.
I would have asked them for clarification, but that’s when the gunshot sounded.
We three living jumped as if we were the ones who’d been hit. We reached for each other in that primal way, reacting to that instinctive electricity that seizes your nervous system when you’re still too afraid to speak, but past the point where you can only hold still.
Our spectral companions vanished, and we wished we could do likewise.
We stood and fell over ourselves; I banged my leg against the bench with a fervor that promised a bruise, and Benny tripped and joined me. “Calm down!” I hissed. “Everybody calm down. We don’t know what—” And I was cut off by another shockingly loud round.
I wasn’t sure what the battlefield did to acoustics, but I sure couldn’t tell where the commotion was coming from, and I doubted either of the guys could, either.
“Out. Everybody. Out of here.”
“What are the ghosts doing?” Jamie asked as he started to run.
“I don’t know; they’re gone. Benny?”
“Right behind you.”
“Where’s the light? I can’t see for shit.”
The red circle clicked on and waggled wildly on the ground at our feet as we ran, back over the railroad tracks and back down the street towards the warmly glowing bonfire behind the mobile home. Behind us I could have sworn I heard another shot, and an indistinct commotion came fast on its heels.
“Are we being chased?” Jamie panted.
I checked over my shoulder and saw nothing at all. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t run, then.” He stumbled to a slower jog, and Benny and I both outpaced him within seconds.
“You’re on crack,” Benny swore.
We tore around the dirt driveway and skidded back to Ted’s place. If anyone noticed we’d been missing for twenty minutes, no one said anything, but the gunshots had been heard over the festivities, and there was much discussion.
“Hunters?” Very Drunk Mike suggested, but no one bothered to agree. Not on federal property, and not in suburbia.
“Maybe we should call it a night,” someone else suggested, and many heads nodded.
“Somebody help me put out this fire, then.” Ted walked over to an outdoor faucet and turned it on. He grabbed the end of a hose as it began to sputter, and pointed out a pair of shovels leaning against the building. “Anyone want to take those and start throwing dirt?”
Burly Brian and Chris from the Pickle Barrel volunteered, and together the three of them began an assault on the enormous fire.
In the distance we heard sirens. The prospect of police prompted a few of the drinkers to slink out while the slinking was good. I knew at least two of them weren’t of age, so I couldn’t say I blamed them, but I hoped they weren’t driving.
Things seemed to be breaking up, despite the early hour for a weekend. I thought we ought to do the same. The guys agreed, so after thanking Ted for hosting us, we split.
9
Brother Against…
SAND MOUNTAIN, ALABAMA, SEVEN WEEKS EARLIER
“It was supposed to be a legacy, and an insurance policy. It was supposed to help and protect those of us who had been most loyal and most trustworthy. Jefferson Davis gave us more than a mission—it was a trust.”
Rudy began to pace back and forth. He never paced unless he was talking about something important, and since he rarely bothered discussing anything more important than sports scores or the rising price of cigarettes, Pete had never seen it before.
Back and forth he went, from the kitchen door to the table past the television and back again. He rubbed the back of his head, thumbing the thinning hair against his collar. He punctuated his sentences with pauses and twists of his bony hips that brought him to face his nephew.
Pete was transfixed.
“People make fun of our name now, because of what they’ve seen on TV and how they think we talk and what they think we’re like. But Buford is a damn fine name, and it’s one to be proud of. You’ve heard that before. But maybe you didn’t know it. Not really. Not if no one ever told you, and if your mother didn’t and I haven’t up till now, then I guess nobody ever did.”
“Go on, then,” Pete said, more for conversational contribution than out of impatience.
“Well, I will. Back in the war, two of the Bufords—brothers, not cousins—were promoted high for good service. And one of them, Andrew, was a bank man. He worked with money somehow. He was good with numbers that way. Went to school somewhere out east and north, but I don’t know where.
“Anyway, Andrew and his brother William were recruited by the Confederacy, and they both worked as spies. It was easiest for Andrew, since he’d gone to school up north; so William went west.”
“Why?” Pete asked. “What was going on out west?”
Rudy flapped his hand dismissively. “All kinds of things, but that’s not what the story’s about. Where our part of the story really picks up is, unfortunately, when the South began to go down.” He stopped by the television and leaned on it with one hand, causing the bench it sat on to creak.