John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

You only had time for one shot if horsemen overran you, the object being to fire quickly and hope to dodge the saber. They heard hoofbeats, a small party approaching at a canter and he joined in the volley toward the looming silhouettes, muzzle flashes on both sides of him, then the cries and the terrible discovery that it was their own officers they had fired upon, with General Jackson unhorsed and sure to lose his arm. He looked into the great man’s eyes when they carried him to a tent — they were glossy with shock and he was moving his lips very slightly, whispering a prayer. There was no knowing if his own bullet had found its mark on any of the wounded, but no comfort in that ignorance. Jackson was stricken with the pneumonia just after his surgery, and died a week after. A few days before Gettysburg the Judge saw a photograph of the coffin, covered by the new Stainless Banner that he thought, with its massive white field, too much resembled the flag of surrender.

They arrive in Fayetteville shortly before noon, a fine mist of rain still in the air, and hurry without organization the few blocks to the Lafayette.

“Oh my,” says Sally, thrilled, “just look at all of us!”

Thousands choke the street. Every sunburned farmer in the county, with wife and tow-headed brood, has come for the festivities, a logjam of buggies and haywagons that needs breaking up before the procession can get under way. Sally and her friends duck into the hotel to freshen themselves, and the Judge finds himself waiting, watching the frantic last-moment pushing and prodding of the rally organizers who shout and wave over the throng, trying to shape the energy and good will present into concerted action.

A half-dozen bands tune their instruments at once, grunting and blatting, snare drums rattling, while wearers of uniforms struggle through the crush of bodies to find each other. The rain stops, which is a blessing, and the Judge manages to get his back up against the hotel and avoid being jostled by the crowd.

The battle flag has reappeared.

During the Occupation it was outlawed by statute, and even after the yankee troops marched out it was rare to see one. But today, from his own limited viewpoint, the Judge can count nearly a dozen. It is the old square cloth of the Southern Cross with thirteen white stars upon it, the flag that came from the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland that came from the crux saltire , the X-shaped cross the Romans had used to crucify the apostle. His father, years before the War, told him how St. Andrew had appeared in a dream to King Angus MacFergus the night before battle, how his Picts and Scots had looked above the battlefield to see a great white cross in the sky and were inspired to drive back the Northumbrians. There was no mistaking that banner, held high above the artillery smoke, no mistaking it for the enemy’s flag as with the Stars and Bars. It thrills him to see it again, rippling in the little breeze that has come up, and makes him anxious as well.

They must never be degraded.

He tried to call Jack Butler out. They were boyhood friends, fished and hunted together, their fathers partners in law and business. But the war of ink, each letter to the editor surpassing the last in vitriol, degenerated from my esteemed colleague to notorious scalawag and Secessionist assassin . Action was called for. His father was wounded in a duel as a young man, precipitated by a point of honor so complex he was never able to fully explain it to his sons. He described the confrontation, the deadly honor and solemnity of it, as the event that finally made him a man.

The Judge met his adversary by chance on the courthouse steps, Butler descending with a gang of the officeholders from that benighted time, himself with only poor tubercular Granville Pratt as a witness.

“Sir,” he said, blocking the other man’s way, regretting that the terrain put him at a disadvantage in stature, “I demand satisfaction.”

Butler smiled with condescension. “You won’t receive it from me.”

The carpetbaggers laughed then, as they had been laughing since Appo-mattox.

“You are no gentleman,” the Judge observed.

“That may be true,” Butler replied, and here held a finger in his face, “but neither am I a cutthroat and a terrorist.”

The Judge did not carry a cane then, or he’d have done more damage before they were separated.

It was so clear, in his father’s time, so personal. Insults were redressed face to face, with seconds and pistols, both parties often able to walk away with honor restored or maintained, unharmed.

“I was young and hot-headed and in the wrong,” his father said of his own ceremony. “But the time had passed for apologies. The gentleman grazed my ribs, then I fired into the air. He did not demand a second exchange.”

The Judge looks about at this as yet unfocused mass, this storm-sea of discontent, and thinks of the worst of the fighting. The days when, blackened with powder, he fired into smoke and hoped to hit flesh, days when he felt the indifferent calm of the butcher.

Or felt like the man who killed Stonewall Jackson.

The march begins the moment Sally reappears on the front step of the hotel, as if they have all been waiting only for her. The Cornet Band heads out playing The Carpetbaggers’ Lament and Sally beams and God Himself smiles on their activity, opening the clouds for the first time in days to bathe them all in gold. And then, cutting in from the side street where they must have been assembled and waiting all along, come the Red Shirts. There is a collective intake of breath as they appear, then applause and wild cheering from those lining the streets and leaning out their windows. There must be at least three hundred riders, four abreast as they flow past, smiling and waving their hats. The shirts are not uniform, ranging from silk to the roughest flannel, but together they make a river of color down Hay Street and once again the Judge’s heart is lifted.

“It’s so beautiful,” Sally exclaims, taking his arm. “Niles should be here.”

A passing horse lifts its tail and deposits a steaming load at their feet, but Sally, imbued with her departed mother’s gentility, will not recognize it.

“Our own cavaliers,” she says.

That many or most are mill hands up for the day from South Carolina is not worth mentioning. They were the mailed fist of the Redeemers in that state back in ’76, and their presence here, the Judge can only hope, will inspire a similar rising in the Old North State. It takes ten solid minutes for them to pass, and then, drawn by four mottled Percherons, comes the Purity Float. Twenty-two lovely Christian girls in white dresses, one from each district in the county, smile and wave as they pass on a decorated logging trailer. Sally presses her gloved hands together in delight.

“Oh, they’ve done such a wonderful job of it!” she cries. “Considering what they have to work with.”

The carriages come next, with the Mayor of Fayetteville, the editor of their Observer , the Democratic chairman, and Pitchfork Ben Tillman himself riding in the first. The Senator waves energetically, a solid man of fifty dressed like a middling farmer come to church, his one eye bright with the excitement of the occasion.

“If we had a firebrand like him,” the Judge shouts to his daughter over the tumult, “crisis would not be upon us.”

Mr. Bridgewater, father of Sally’s dearest friend Emilia, beckons them then, and they walk to the elegant landau he has rented for the day. The driver, an Irishman in a jacket a size too small, eases it into the procession once they are settled, the girls facing forward, waving delicately as if they are the true dignitaries and the Judge and Bridgewater facing the rear, with an excellent view of the Fayetteville White Government Union lads footing along on either side in homburgs and plugs and slouch hats, strutting to beat the band.