Distant Flame

July 22, 1914

July 22,1914 YRONE AWTRY DROPPED CHARLIE off at Grace House, and Charlie kept thinking of Merguns Flensvan and wondering who he might be. Someone who clearly didn't live in Branton—a mistake no doubt. Harris at the post office would send it off somewhere else. Mrs. Knight had not yet started cooking his noontime meal, so he went into his library and sat at his desk, Belle behind him. Mrs. Knight despaired when he let the dog wander in the house, but he didn't care. Belle flopped near Charlie's globe, sneezed once, and fell asleep on the cool floor. The anniversary program would be held at seven in the evening at Ezra Atkinson Park, and Charlie thought he should begin to work on his remarks. Thinking about the Battle of Atlanta was not an agony— that sensation had worn off years before. But it twisted him inside, and he wanted to saysomething important about it. Thus far,three months after foolishly agreeing to speak, nothing had come to him. He could speak of the Battle for Atlanta, but he was unsure he could approach the Battle of Atlanta. The former was process; the latter was horror. He took paper from a desk drawer and then got his steel-nibbed pen and sat comfortably and dipped it in the inkpot. He wrote the date in the upper-left-hand corner of the paper and then stopped. He thought: Cleburne. How could he possibly speak of General Patrick Cleburne, T A Distant Flame 117 the best man he had met during the war? Cleburne, who was amagnificent chess player and a man desperately in love for the first time in his life, who spoke with his soft Irish accent of the River Bride and his homeland, of the Mississippi River and his beloved Arkansas? How could Charlie reconcile that man with the fierce fighter? Solittle about that war made sense half a century on. Illiterate fools like Nathan Bedford Forrest had been brilliant soldiers. Intelligent, cautious men like Longstreet had somehow become villains and dupes. The nation was united, and perhaps it could not have been done without war. But the cost was staggering. Few alive knew that cost other than numbers on paper. Cleburne grew a beard to try and hide his facial wounds, but it didn't help much. He'd also been wounded in the streets of Helena, Arkansas, while defending a friend. There was an implacable ferocity about such acts and yet a wistful gentleness about him, too, as if he knew that he would not escape the war alive. He had been at Shiloh and the Kentucky campaign. He survived the rout from Dalton to Jonesborough. So much waste. And he was so wrong about the Confederacy . Charlie laid the pen down and found himself beginning to choke back emotion. He should never have sold the Branton Eagle to Barrington Avery, for the Eagle had been his sinecure, his very public hiding place. His columns, which he kept in a cedar box along with the best letters he had received, included one he had never forgotten: Concord April 21,1873 My dear Mr. Merrill, I have to hand your essay entitled "Sacrifice," which I have read in its entirety in the New York Sun. I would like to congratulate you on a splendidly conceived and executed example of clear thinking and fine writing. It is among the better things I have read in some time, and I can only conclude that you are a man of sensitive demeanor and exceptional talents. It is a great pleasure to give these sentiments from Yours most sincerely, Ralph Waldo Emerson 118 PHILIP LEE WILLIAMS When Mrs. Whitsun, president of the War Memorial League, had asked if he would give the main address on the anniversary, and he had asked why him, she had smiled, genuinely perplexed, and said, "Who else is there?" Since he sold the paper, Charlie had wandered through memory as if it were a mansion, dreaming back the days of his childhood before war came, before Tom left them for the war, before all else. Even now, he knew he could not approach that sacrifice, and he knew no matter what he did, he would soon vanish into the shadows of stone like all the family and all the soldiers before him. Charlie put the pen down and sighed heavily and...