Departures

“Yes, I remember that,” Thorpe said. The four words were plenty to push him back in time, to make him smell the cook fires, hear the chatter of men around him, even to taste the hot corn-bread that had been so much of what he ate for so long.

He got to the head of this line sooner than he usually had at mess call-but then, so many fewer men were here now. One of the young men asked his name, went through a box marked T-Z, and pulled out a badge. “You’ll be in Cottage C, General Thorpe. Pick any vacant bed there. I hope you enjoy your stay. Do you need help pinning that on, sir?”

“No, thank you,” Thorpe proceeded to prove it. “The rheumatism doesn’t have hold of me too badly. Cottage C, you said?”

“That’s right, General. It’s also on your badge below your name, in case-” The young fellow thought twice. “Well, just in case.”

In case you forget, he’d started to say. Thorpe declined to take offense. So many men his age had wits that began to wander. His, though, so far as he knew, were still sound. He’d written the history of his regiment back around the turn of the century, and only a handful of years had passed since he’d compiled a roster of men from Nash and Edgecombe counties who’d served in the Forty-seventh North Carolina. Now he thought he was the only soldier of his regiment left alive.

The colored man-one of the helpers at the Soldiers’ Home, no doubt-was still waiting when Thorpe came back outside. “Cottage C, is it?” he said, reading the badge. “You just follow me, General. It’s not far.”

Thorpe followed. In the old days, teaching a Negro to read had been against the law. Some had thought blacks too stupid to learn, anyhow. Obviously, they hadn’t known everything there was to know.

The beds in the cottage proved to be steel-framed army cots with scratchy woolen blankets and stiffly starched sheets and pillowcases. Thorpe chose one by the window, to get the benefit of whatever breeze there might be. “Sorry we can’t put you folks up in higher style, General,” the attendant said as he set down the suitcases. “Most of the time, though, there’s just a dozen or so old soldiers in the home, and we got seven, eight hundred of you all comin’ to visit.”

“Don’t worry,” Thorpe said. “Every man of us here will have known worse accommodations than these, I promise you.” He looked at his army cot. In his army days no such creature existed. He’d slept on pine boughs piled in a frame, rolled in his blanket (a far more ragged and threadbare specimen than the one on the cot), or just on bare ground. And even a pillow! Back then, such had been undreamed-of luxury.

The colored man declined a tip-”This here’s my job, suh”- and hurried away to help some other newly arrived veteran settle in. Thorpe left the clapboard cottage, too, and walked slowly over to the dining hall. It wasn’t yet supper time, but several veterans were in there passing time with a deck of cards. A couple of them paused between hands to squirt jets of tobacco juice at a spattered spittoon.

Looking at the white beards, the bald heads, the gnarled fingers, Thorpe wondered why he’d come. Wasn’t it better to remember the men who’d fought under the Stars and Bars as young and dashing and brave rather than seeing what time had done to them-and to him? Then someone tapped him on the shoulder. “Hello, stranger. You look like you could do with a nip of something better’n water.”

Thorpe turned. Of course the man behind him was wrinkled and old. Everyone here was wrinkled and old. But the fellow looked alert and cheerful; in fact, behind gold-rimmed spectacles, his eyes held a gleam that said he’d probably been a prime forager when he wore the gray in earnest.

“A nip, eh?” Thorpe said. “I have been wondering where I might find one, not being from these parts.” Prohibition didn’t stop drinking, but made it harder to get started in a town where you didn’t know somebody.

The other veteran set a finger alongside his nose, then produced a silver flask from a waistcoat pocket. “Help yourself, but leave enough for me, too.”

The whisky wasn’t very good, but Thorpe had drunk whisky that wasn’t very good for a great many years. He squinted at the other man’s badge. “I am in your debt, Mr., uh, Ledbetter. What unit, if I may ask?”

“Army of Northern Virginia, Eighth Alabama. Call me Jed.”

“I’m John, then. You fought in Hill’s corps, too? I was Forty-seven North Carolina, Henry Heth’s corps. You were in Mahone’s, am I right?”

“So I was, by God. Your memory still works, John. So does mine, even if my pecker don’t. Yeah, I was there for all of it… ah, hell, not quite; the Yankees caught me two days before Appomattox.”

“I stayed with it till the end,” Thorpe said. Then he fell silent. Even after a span of years close to the biblical threescore and ten, some memories remained sharp enough to wound.