You Are Here(28)

“Right,” Emma said, swinging her legs around the side of the car and climbing into the front seat. “I guess we should probably get going, then.”

Peter slid into the driver’s seat beside her and turned over the engine with the key, the blue rabbit’s foot still dangling from the chain. They drove past the field where they’d stood the night before and toward the visitors’ center, where they left the convertible in a lot with cars from a dozen different states, a rainbow of license plates and people with accents to match, all of them fanning out across the park with their cameras ready. Emma tried to coax the dog out of the car, but he was dozing comfortably in back, so they left the top down in case he changed his mind.

Everything looked different in the daylight. Without the early moon and the pale fog, the battlefields seemed to have shed their mystery, and something of last night’s magic had been lost. But still, as he led Emma over the wedges of grass that ran alongside the road, Peter felt elated at being here. He grabbed her hand—just for a moment—as they were shunted through a gated entrance, then let go again once they made it to the other side. If it bothered her, she didn’t say anything, and this was enough to make Peter feel like skipping the rest of the way.

Around them the stubbled land was marked off by plaques and signs that explained to visitors what had happened here on a long ago July day not unlike this one. But Peter already knew all they said and more. He looked around at the people with their noses tucked in brochures and guidebooks, and those trailing, sheeplike, after tour guides and park employees. He was used to feeling somewhat out of place most everywhere he went—at school or the barbershop, even at home—but here, where he knew everything, all the names and dates and facts, he somehow seemed to fit, and the knowledge of this welled up inside of him. It was like he’d been born a blue flower in a field full of red ones and had only now been plunked down in a meadow so blue it might as well have been the ocean.

“I used to have all these little army figurines when I was little,” he told Emma as they wound past a group of European tourists who seemed deeply unimpressed by the empty orchards and fields. “The carpet in my room always had a thousand little footprints in it, which drove my dad nuts.”

“What’d you do?” she asked absently, as they followed the signs toward where the reenactment would take place. “Play war?”

“Sort of,” he said, trying not to notice as she checked her watch. “I had all these books about the battles, and I’d line them up in all the famous formations, and have them hold down all the hills and sites.”

By the time they arrived at the Wheatfield, the reenactment had already started, and there were cannons going off like fireworks, setting shapeless clouds of smoke drifting through the burnt air. Emma rose onto her tiptoes and scanned the field.

“Blue’s on the left; gray’s on the right,” she said, and then tripped along after him as Peter headed left toward the Union side.

“So, do people actually do this for a living?” she asked, squinting to catch a glimpse of the angled muskets and improvised movements of the actors, who were dressed in what looked like the uniforms of the day, careworn and muddy.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe.”

“Don’t you think it’s kind of a weird job? For grown men to be playing war for a living?”

Peter didn’t bother answering. Around him there were kids cheering at the sharp crack of the guns, adults grimacing at the reminders of an ugly past, and Emma, shifting from one foot to the other, her interest clearly waning. The day was sticky and humid, and those who’d come here with the best of intentions now looked as if they’d much prefer a swimming pool to the unshaded remains of a former battlefield.

But as he stood and watched the lines shifting on the distant hills, the troops folding in and then back out of formations he knew by heart, it felt to Peter like remembering something he’d never really known in the first place. It was a part of each of them, this battle that had taken place for the soul of the country. The world was built upon fallen soldiers and ill-conceived wars, and this was one that had defined them all.

Unlike most people Peter didn’t look to the future for reassurance; he understood that the only thing certain in life is the past. History repeats itself again and again, and every story has been told before. It seemed to him that life could be terribly unoriginal in that way, and the only manner of certainty—the only way to know what might be ahead—was to look back on what had already happened. You could always count on someone else having lived through worse than you, and this particular story—the Civil War, the best and worst of a whole country—gave him a firm sense of hope that anything and everything could be repaired. Even the worst struggles could end in reunion.

Now he couldn’t help smiling as he watched the space between the two regiments on the battlefield, the tall blades of wheat leaning sideways, tickled by the wind.

“When they fought here,” he said, “the whirlpools from the breezes made it hard for the soldiers to see, because of all the tides and eddies in the fields.”

Emma was standing just beside him, and she lifted her chin in the first half of a nod. On the field the soldiers were now charging, barreling toward one another, brandishing guns and blades and flags, the horses of the higher ranking officers leaving clouds of dust in their wake.