MacPherson's Lament

by Sharyn McCrumb

  “Oh, boy! I hope it isn’t termites. Did he say what he wanted?”

  “No, but judging from his expression, I’d say he wants to use your scalp for pom-poms.”

  “Hmm,” said Bill. “That doesn’t sound good. Is Powell here? No, of course not. She’s in Richmond, isn’t she? Well, let them in, and I’ll try to straighten this out.”

  “Okay,” said Edith. “I just thought I’d warn you.” She mustered a wan smile and went out to face the visitors. Seconds later, Bill’s door burst open again, and John Huff stormed in, followed by an officious-looking young man with a clipboard.

  “Hello, Mr. Huff,” said Bill, coming out from behind his desk with an outstretched hand. “What can I do for you?”

  Huff ignored the friendly greeting and turned to his companion. “That’s him.”

  Randolph Custis Byrd bustled forward and introduced himself in condescending tones. “Am I to understand that you sold the Home for Confederate Women to this gentleman last month for more than one million dollars?”

  “I represented the sellers,” said Bill. “Why? What’s the matter?”

  “You represented the sellers,” echoed Byrd with a tight little smile. “And who were the sellers, may one ask?”

  “Well… the Confederate widows. Daughters, actually, I think. There were eight of them. Miss Dabney, Miss Pendleton… I could look up the names.”

  “I never saw them,” said John Huff. “You ran the ad in the newspaper.”

  “Well, yes,” Bill admitted. “They instructed me to. They’re very elderly, and they didn’t want to be bothered with telephone calls.”

  “And when I flew down to Danville, you drove me out to the house and showed me around, but there was no one else there.”

  “They went out to tea,” stammered Bill. “They were a little upset about… uh… selling their home.”

  “But you didn’t see them at all, Mr. Huff?” asked Byrd.

  “I did not.”

  “And then you decided to purchase the house,” Byrd continued, staring at Bill as he spoke. “You signed the papers here, I believe?”

  “That’s right,” said Huff grimly. “And he signed on behalf of the sellers. Said he had their power of attorney. We transferred the money from my bank to an account in his name.”

  Bill’s head was reeling, and for a moment he thought he was back in one of his bar exam nightmares. “I can explain all that,” he stammered. “The old ladies didn’t want to come down to the office because one of them had a doctor’s appointment. It was short notice, you remember.”

  “What doctor?” said Byrd quickly.

  “How should I know?” snapped Bill. “I can’t even remember which old lady. We could ask them, I suppose. Now, will one of you tell me what this is all about?”

  Huff ignored the question. “What did you do with the money, MacPherson?”

  Bill blushed. “It’s going to sound crazy,” he said with a little laugh. “But the old ladies claimed they didn’t trust American banks. They asked me to deposit the money in a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. Can you imagine?”

  Nobody laughed with him.

  John Huff looked like a thundercloud. “A numbered account in the Cayman Islands! I’m surprised you had enough savvy to come up with that.”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Bill. “The old ladies did. I don’t know how they came up with the notion.”

  “Banks in the Cayman Islands won’t give out any information about their accounts,” said Huff. “They won’t say how much money the account holds, and they won’t tell you whose account it is, either. Of course you knew that.”

  Bill looked from Huff to Byrd and back again in disbelief. “You don’t think I did it?” he gasped. “You think I opened that account and kept the money?”

  “It seems obvious to me,” said Huff, stone-faced.

  “But the fraud goes well beyond that,” Byrd pointed out. “That house is state property. We had filed a writ of eminent domain, claiming the property for use as an art museum for southwest Virginia. No one had any authority to sell it.”

  “We did a title search,” Bill protested. “We got a clear title! Mr. Huff’s lawyer must have double-checked that.”

  “I intend to find out,” said Huff grimly. “And if he didn’t, I’ll have his job at Fremont, Shields & Banks!”

  “If the acquisition notice is not on file in the courthouse, that adds to the seriousness of the fraud,” said Byrd. “Tampering with legal documents for the purpose of fraud.”

  “But I didn’t!” wailed Bill. “At least I didn’t do the title search. But Edith wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  “Get her in here,” said Huff.

  Edith Creech appeared in the doorway. Huff, his eyes glittering like a snake’s, waved the title in front of her, and said, “MacPherson claims that you did this title search. Is that correct?”

  “I went to the courthouse and found it,” said Edith warily. “Why?”

  “Did you leave out anything? A document with a state seal on it, for example?” asked Custis Byrd.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “And you witnessed this power of attorney, signed by the eight residents of the Home for Confederate Women.”

  Edith looked at the paper. Then she looked at Bill. And back at the paper. “Uh… well…”

  “Did you or did you not witness these signatures?”

  “What did he say?” Edith hedged.

  “It’s all right, Edith,” sighed Bill. “I’ll tell them. I forgot to take Edith with me when I went out to have the paper signed. We had only about twelve hours’ notice about the closing, and she was very busy typing up all the documents we needed. By the time I realized that it wasn’t notarized, one of the women had gone for the evening, and we had a ton of work to do, so she took my word for it.”

  “Of course we will be reporting this to the state bar association, as well as to the proper legal authorities,” said Byrd in a self-righteous pout.

  “Wait,” said Bill. “Flora Dabney can clear this up. Just call her and ask her about the bank account and the newspaper ad-and all the rest of it.” He reached for the telephone book. “They said they were going to be moving to the Oakmont Nursing Home. They even invited me to come and have tea with them. Ah, here’s the number. We’ll soon straighten this out.”

  Bill looked at the ceiling while he listened to the phone ring. What incredible bad luck, he was thinking. Everything going wrong, all on the same case. He’d catch hell for that notary business, and A. P. Hill would be thoroughly pissed about this snafu in the new firm, no matter how brief a mixup it proved to be. The ringing stopped.

  “Hello,” said Bill eagerly. “Oakmont Nursing Home? May I speak to Miss Flora Dabney, please? She’s a new resident. She and the other former residents of the Home for Confederate Women just moved to your facility-oh, about a week ago… What? Are you sure? Could you check? Maybe somebody else?… Oh, you do.” Bill’s voice became progressively muted as the conversation continued. Finally he muttered a lifeless thank-you and hung up.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “They’re not there. The director of Oakmont says that she’s never heard of them. Oakmont-I’m sure that’s what Flora Dabney said.”

  “Maybe they changed their minds,” Edith suggested. “You know how old ladies are. Try the other retirement communities.”

  “Did you ever actually see any of these women?” Custis Byrd wanted to know.

  “Well… no,” said Edith after a moment’s thought. “But I’ve heard so much about them. Miss Dabney came by the office on my day off.” She turned to Bill. “Was Powell here? Did she meet them?”

  Bill shook his head. “I don’t know where she was. A meeting, I think. But Miss Dabney sent me a photograph of herself.” He reached in the desk drawer and pulled out the sepia portrait of the Edwardian girl.

  Huff and Byrd were not impressed. “You can buy a hundred photos like that in any antique shop,” said Custis
Byrd. “Instant ancestors for a dollar apiece. I’d hardly call that picture evidence.”

  “Try the other nursing homes,” Edith said again. “Miss Dabney can clear all this up in two minutes.”

  “If there is a Miss Dabney,” Byrd snickered.

  Ten minutes later, Bill had completed four more phone calls, each following the pattern of the first. There were no more retirement communities to try. Then he called directory assistance in search of a telephone listing for Flora Dabney and for each of the other ladies. Nothing.

  “But it just doesn’t make sense,” Bill kept saying. “Where could they be? They couldn’t just vanish into thin air!”

  John Huff and Custis Byrd looked at each other. Huff stood up. “Well, I think that’s all,” he said, motioning for Byrd to follow him. “We’ll be going now.”

  “Going?” echoed Bill, standing up as if he wanted to run after them.

  “Yes,” said Huff. “We’ll let the authorities take it from here. You can explain this to the police. And I’m sure they’ll want to know what you did with the bodies of the eight defenseless old ladies who lived in the Home. You didn’t bury them in the basement, did you?”

  * * *

  Jimmy Stewart stood up and embraced the young boy with the crutch. The congregation burst into song as the credits rolled.

  The Confederate soldier switched off the video. On the tiny rug that constituted A. P. Hill’s living room, two other uniformed men scribbled furiously in spiral notebooks, while on the two sofas more contemporarily dressed gentlemen and A. P. Hill herself were similarly engaged in composition. Aside from sporadic muttering over an answer, no one spoke. Only the whir of the rewinding cassette recorder broke the silence.

  Even in a less prosaic setting, no knowledgeable observer would have mistaken the uniformed men for Confederate ghosts. Their gray wool coats were clean and undamaged, and they all wore leather boots. Besides, they were at least ten years too old and forty pounds too heavy to have been the boys who really fought that distant war. These were the sunshine soldiers who fought the war summers and weekends, without grapeshot, dysentery, gangrene, malnutrition, or conspicuous personal inconvenience. They were the reenactors.

  Tonight, though, they were not on duty, even in their mythic Confederacy. They were in uniform just for the fun of it, attending a meeting of the local Civil War Roundtable Discussion Group, which was assembled at the home of A. P. Hill, descendant and namesake of the general. The evening’s entertainment had been a showing of Shenandoah, a Civil War-set film of the 1960s starring James Stewart. It was a sad and stirring saga of the war in Virginia, but in this audience wet handkerchiefs were conspicuously absent.

  A. P. Hill went to the kitchen and brought back coffee and plates of cake and cookies. When the rations had been distributed to the troops, she said, “All right, is everybody ready? Put your pens on the table now, so no one can be accused of modifying his comments. Who wants to go first?”

  An elderly man in a black suit raised his hand. “I got eight,” he announced. “Shall I read them out?”

  “Go on, Dr. Howe. The rest of us will check off any of our responses that duplicate yours.”

  “First, the scenery was wrong. Does that count? It certainly was not Virginia.”

  “They filmed it in Oregon,” said Powell Hill. “I don’t think we can fault them for that, though. Movies almost never get produced in a logical setting. Go on to the next one.”

  “According to the film, the year was 1864, and Jimmy Stewart still had six grown sons living at home on his farm in the middle of a war zone. No way. The Confederacy introduced conscription in 1861. Those boys would all have been drafted. So would their dad, more than likely.”

  Everyone in the room nodded. Most retrieved their pens and made check marks on their note pads.

  “It might have worked if you’d changed the location,” Ken Filban suggested. He was a bank executive from East Tennessee. “According to the movie, they were on a five-hundred-acre farm near Harrisonburg.”

  “Which should have been crawling with hired help,” said Confederate corporal Scott Chambers, otherwise a driver for UPS. “In the days before mechanized farming, you couldn’t cultivate five hundred acres with five men and two young women to run the house. They weren’t ranchers; they were farmers.”

  “Like I said, change the location and it might have been plausible,” Ken Filban said. “Make the Anderson farm a fifty-acre place tucked into a hollow in the North Carolina or Tennessee mountains, and chances are they could have got away with ignoring the war. Family legend had it that all my great-great-uncles spent the war dodging both armies-and never served a day.”

  Dr. Howe cleared his throat. “It’s still my turn. Number two: the rifles were wrong.” Unanimous check marks.

  “They even got the rifles wrong in Glory,” said A. P. Hill. “They had the soldiers checking serial numbers. It was more accurate than this movie, though.”

  “Number three: they had a black Union soldier serving in a white regiment. That didn’t happen.”

  “How about when Jimmy Stewart’s family stopped the Union train and the Federals didn’t shoot them? Six guys stopping a train! And what did the Federals have, five guys guarding a couple of hundred prisoners on that train?” Ken Filban was laughing at the naïveté of moviemakers.

  Powell Hill shrugged. “That’s Hollywood. Still, the film had some good qualities. The main characters were Southerners who weren’t made to sound like idiots. And the rural people weren’t portrayed as hicks.”

  “It seemed like a Western to me. Didn’t it look like a Western to you?”

  “The director’s next job was the television series Bonanza,” said Dr. Howe.

  “Yeah, but maybe that wasn’t inaccurate,” said Scott Chambers thoughtfully. “Only thirty years earlier, some of Virginia was Indian country. I think we were the West in those days.”

  “Costumes!” said Dr. Howe, still trying to finish his list. “It was 1864 and we were seeing Confederate soldiers who weren’t in rags. And they had shoes.”

  “Everybody was too well dressed,” Powell agreed. “After four years of war, even the civilians should have been thin and shabby, wearing mended old clothes.”

  “Well, that covers my list!” said the history professor, crossing off the last objection on his pad. “That was fun. What shall we do next? Gone With the Wind?”

  A. P. Hill shook her head. “None of us can write that fast,” she said.

  “Those Hollywood people should try reenacting,” said Ken Filban. “You learn a lot about war from tramping around in the heat in a wool outfit loaded down with heavy equipment.”

  Scott Chambers nodded. “It’s a funny feeling, walking in a straight line toward a bunch of guys holding bayonets. Even when you know they’re acting.”

  “Same time next week?” asked Dr. Howe. “My place.”

  “I won’t be able to come,” said A. P. Hill. “I have a trial coming up out of town, starting Monday.”

  “Will you be-” Ken Filban glanced apprehensively at the elderly Dr. Howe. “Will you be coming out this weekend?”

  Confederate corporal A. P. Hill gave him a trace of a smile. They were careful not to talk about her reenactment activities in front of any possible Silverbacks. “See you there,” she said.

  “I’ll tie back my hair; men’s clothing I’ll put on,

  And I’ll pass as your comrade as we march along.

  I’ll pass as your comrade. No one will ever know…

  Won’t you let me go with you?”-“No, my love, no.”

  – “The Cruel War”

  A. P. HILL PARKED HER car in the out-of-the-way lot reserved for those taking part in the battle and made her way along the dirt path to the place of assembly. She was already in full regalia for the day’s event: hair tucked under her kepi cap, rimless glasses in place, and her uniform and brogans carefully adjusted to envelop her in anonymity. She looked like a very young Confederate soldier-one of
the most authentic looking present because of her small stature and slender build. She sometimes wondered at the illogic of the men who controlled the hobby, who frowned upon any woman taking part, but would happily open their ranks to 250-pound men in their fifties. Accuracy, she decided, was a state of mind.

  It was just past nine o’clock, and already the sun was blazing. There would be people passing out today in their wool uniforms. It was a day that you could smell the enemy from across the field. Some of the purists refused to have their uniforms cleaned ever, which was all very accurate, but it was hard on their fellow soldiers. Powell was careful to keep her uniform believably dirty, but she drew the line at actual stench.

  Today’s reenactment was a large, staged battle on land that was now a national park in Virginia. The park service had seen to it that the event was well publicized, so the reenactors could expect a substantial crowd to turn up to observe the battle. That was not particularly anachronistic, either, she reflected. During the real war, at the first battle of Bull Run, sightseers from Washington had driven out to the battlefield in buckboards to picnic on the hillsides and watch the confrontation. The afternoon hadn’t quite gone as planned, though, and the spectators soon found themselves caught in the congestion of a retreating Union army, stampeding back to Washington, while the Confederate generals pleaded with President Davis to let them follow and seize the enemy’s capital.

  What if they had?

  Historians had toyed with that riddle for a hundred years and more. Powell herself had argued the point more than once at meetings of the Civil War Roundtable. What difference would it have made? In the long run-not much, in the opinion of A. P. Hill. Slavery was already a dying institution, thanks to new philosophies of humanitarianism and technological advancements like the cotton gin. The practice had died out in South America in the 1880s without a civil war to enforce the measure, and she thought that something similar might have happened in the Confederacy, if it had survived. Slavery would have been legislated out of existence in the South, just as the North had finally put an end to its own form of slavery: the urban sweatshops that imprisoned child workers and paid the poor pennies a day for sixteen hours of toil. The two countries would have existed separately for a while-maybe even for half a century-but she had always argued that before World War I, the two halves of the union would have come together again. After all, they would not have the bitterness that characterized sectional feeling even to this day. The two nations would have reunited for economic and political reasons. Or failing that, they would cooperate in much the same way that the United States now works with Canada, without exhibiting any particular inclination to march in and claim the northern territories for annexation.