Distant Flame

July 22, 1914

July 22,1914 EAT BLISTERED THE STREETS, though it was not yet ten o'clock. Charlie Merrill, sixty-seven years old and feeling an ache in his groin, sat upright in the Buick. He said to his young friend Tyrone Awtry, "My idea being that I just want to see what the dais looks like and how far I will have to project and what have you." "Say again?" The motor seemed badly timed, firing oddly in a clanking arrhythmia. Awtry was thirty-six and wore his hair greased with a part sharp as a carpenter's line. He had been slender until his late twenties when he turned to fat like his father, and now he sweated through his white shirt, poured rivulets from his armpits down his side, puddling in the seat beneath him. "I want to see how far I will have to project my voice," Charlie shouted, smiling. He'd hired Awtry just out of school as an apprentice, and through stubborn pluck he'd learned to set type. His nails curved back black from ink, but otherwise he looked reasonably turned out. Charlie regarded him with mild amusement. They drove west on Main Street, which had been paved with concrete only two years before, and the Buick clattered along, passing one car after another. When cars had first come, men doffed their hats as they had always done from buggies or wagons when passing another driver on the road, but after a few H 84 PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS wrecks, the practice passed. One gas lamp remained in front of the Branton Graded School, which loomed above its clean-swept dirt yard like a castle. Electricity now powered the other street lamps, that White Way being Charlie's final civic push with his newspaper. Few people knew the white house next door to the Graded School had once held the Branton Female Academy, or that from its front yard the soldiers marched off in April 1861. Ancient history, Charlie thought: Greeks and Romans, Salamisand Marathon. Fifty years—half a century.In that time they'd passed in their dozens, and those left were relics of bloodshed that no one could quite believe, even now. Had they lined up and blown each other away with such cavalier disdain? Yes. A species of madness had infected the country, but, he mused, men always looked for that madness and coveted it fiercely. Few in the South said it was about the slaves; that was a side issue, a conjuringfrom a few abolitionists . But slavery was the issue, he knew. It was. We could not wait for that war, thought Charlie. My own brother could not wait for that war. Ezra Atkinson Park was at the western edge of the town, a green pasture with willows and water oaks and stands of pines whose needles spread their carpet in a brown shawl along the hot earth. Charlie smiled and remembered: good to walk on but hard to do it quietly. Here churches held picnics and boys stroked baseballs allsummer. "Look there," said Awtry. "Looks like they're expecting a crowd." About thirty men and women spruced the bunting, touched up its drape and shine. The platform was about thirty feet wide and ten feet deep, set up in left field of the Branton baseball diamond. The slow rich smoke from roasting pigs filled the air, and Awtry inhaled, smiling. "They won't fill to the third base," said Charlie. "People aren't that interested anymore in an old war." "In the Battle of Atlanta?" said Awtry in a high-pitched voice. He turned off the Buick and parked on a dusty side street, off the concrete and back on hard-packed dirt. "You telling me people have forgot the Battle of Atlanta? Hell, we didn't even lose to them goddam Yankees there, we just got outflankedby a number twice ours. General Sherman was a sure bastard." Awtry was quite exercised, and Charlie watched his ignorance with amusement. He wasprone to swear, and the newspaper business did that, anyway, made a mild man prone to swear with invention and passion. Awtry's face was red, but Charlie couldn't tell whether it was from the sun and the heat or the anger. People still bristled at the mention of Sherman's name, even though the general himself hadn't come through Branton. Thousands of his troops under a general [3.141.100.120] Project MUSE (2024-04-25 05:09...