Thanksgiving and General Lee

It’s Thanksgiving week and our house is full of grown kids, wee grandkids, and happy dogs. Walking space on the floors is iffey, what with the litter of toys, sprawled dogs, crawling Jackson, and two little girls who are only still in sleep. Maybe that’s why I’m writing this at four a.m., hoping I can get’r done before the bedlam begins again. But I wouldn’t trade it.

I spent last weekend at a Civil War reenactment as a book-selling vendor in the mornings and a soldier reenactor in the afternoons. The reenactment was near Hempstead, Texas, just north of Houston, and has occurred annually since 1999 on the site of an 1850’s home called Plantation Liendo, that is now a cattle ranch.

During the real war, the cotton plantation first became a Confederate army training camp which transitioned to being a prisoner of war camp for Yankee soldiers captured during the battles in Louisiana and Galveston. During reconstruction, the ill-fated General Custer lived there for a while during his stint as Texas’s military overseer. We didn’t like Goldilocks any more than the Sioux did, but they handled him better.

This past weekend the old home became a stand-in for the McLean farmhouse in Appomattox, Virginia. That’s where General Lee finally met General Grant to surrender the shattered remnant of his army. The photo below was taken in the parlor of the house at Plantation Liendo during the one-time-only reenactment of the surrender. 

Those eight local Texas reenactors in the photo took great effort to portray the men who were present, including Lee and Grant. Meanwhile, a few hundred of us stood outside on the lawn in blue and gray, respectfully waiting for our turn to replicate the final stacking of arms by the proud Confederate veterans.

I think Keith Mitchell, the photographer, did a terrific job in capturing the solemn mood of the day. Even if the real event happened in April, 1865, not November, our recreated Texas surrender seems a proper conclusion to the four-year series of events that have commemorated the Civil War’s 150th anniversary.  

On to book writing, I’ve switched from calling the final Captain McBee novel “McBee 3” to what I think today will be the title: Defiant Honor. The  story will not include the surrender at Appomattox, but will reach into 1865 to bundle together loose plot strands that have unwound in three books set over the four years of Captain McBee’s service as a Confederate officer.

In that regard, I’m knee-deep in carrying McBee and Levi through the Battle of the Wilderness, the bloody fight in May 1864 that was truly the beginning of the end for the South. Historically, the Texas Brigade played a key role at the Wilderness, their last-minute arrival giving me the chance to include General Lee as a character who makes a vital cameo appearance in a critical juncture.

Robert E. Lee is one of the historical figures who smart authors handle with great care. If any one American has personified the admirable qualities of leadership while under great strain for a long time, it’s General Lee.

To many people, Lee still IS the South, even 150 years later. So much so, I suspect that how I present Lee as a character, even if just on a couple of pages, will go a long way in shaping readers’ judgments of my writing ability and whether they will recommend my books to others.

After all, a Civil War novelist who doesn’t get General Lee right, just ain’t no writer a’tall. So I’m sweating the details this time, because that old man is everybody’s grandpa down here where sweet tea is liquid gold.

Come Thursday, I'm going to eat lots of turkey, cheese grits (with bacon crumbs), and pecan pie. Then I'll try to stay awake to watch the Cowboys try to win a football game. Hope you can do likewise. 

On Friday, I'll be out in front of our local Wal-Mart for an hour or two standing by the Salvation Army Red Kettle wearing a red apron and ringing a little handbell while thanking people for dropping a few bills or coins into the pot. Hope you'll do that too when you're out during the holidays. Dollars go further than dimes, but every bit helps someone else.

Henry's and Winchesters and Me and Jackson

Yesterday was “Constitution Amendments Election Day” here in Texas. All seven proposed amendments passed, including a very redundant one that guarantees Texans the now “constitutional” right to hunt and fish. Duh. Yea, it caused a lot of people to wonder just what we’ve been doing for the past 200 years.

The white tails and bass tried to launch a “Vote No” campaign, sort of like the cows that promote the Chick Filet fast food joints, but it never got much traction. I mean, who listens to ghost-like deer and invisible bass who only surface when caught? And Texans don’t much go in for whiners, even those with fins and hooves. If the antlered ones and the big-mouth fishies can’t take care of themselves, then maybe they deserve to get the hook or the arrowhead or a chunk of lead between their shoulder blades.

Is there a link here to my Civil War novels? Of course, even if tenuous.  The photo is me in November of 1964 with my first, and biggest, deer trophy, hunted on my granddaddy’s (who we called Daddy Todd) deer lease near the Trinity River bottoms in East Texas.

It was 51 years ago this month, but I can still vividly remember that a running doe broke into the clearing where my tree stand covered the game trails that crisscrossed the clearing, a rare open space surrounded by thick woods. Sensing the doe had a good reason to be running, I aimed my rifle where she had left the trees. Sure enough, just a few seconds later, here came this big-rack buck hot after her. I shot. I missed. I cussed in my best 15-year-old manner. I levered a new shell into the barrel and put the rifle on half-cock and waited.  I probably was shaking like a leaf in the wind.

Half an hour later, a contented looking doe wandered at a slow grazing pace into the clearing. Again, being the brilliant teenage hunter, and at 15, was learning how stupid, horny males of any species can be, I cocked and aimed behind her again. By damn if a big-rack buck didn’t mosey into the clearing.  I waited for him to stand still, and then I put the sight on his upper shoulder and squeezed off the shot. Bingo.  

I was one proud puppy when Daddy Todd walked up an hour later, after a fruitless morning in his deer stand. I led him to where my trophy had fallen, and he said something profound like, “Damn, Phil, not bad.”  We dragged the warm carcass to the closest place he could get his Dodge four-door sedan. We somehow levered it into the trunk, and hauled it to the deer camp where we hung and field dressed it. That was bloody business, but heck, I was floating, and if I was up to my elbows in blood and gore, so much the better.

The ten-point rack was mounted by my other granddad, and it’s still on a shelf in my garage.

I was using Daddy Todd’s new Winchester 30-30, Model 94, with open sights, the same rifle I’m holding in the picture. 

The Civil War link is that the old Winchester lever action was the child of the Henry repeating rifles used by some lucky Union regiments during the Civil War. First came single-shot breech loading rifles and carbines that could be loaded quickly without standing. They were bad enough for the Rebs to face. But, repeaters were the bane of the Confederacy. Luckily for the Rebs, only 3,200 of the 17-shot Henry repeaters were made before the war ended.

I’ve not hunted for nearly thirty years now. I still have a good deer rifle, not the Winchester, though. I guess my uncle got that when Daddy Todd passed on. I never took my two sons deer hunting. Between the cost involved in guns, gear, and deer leases, and their involvement in fall sports and Boy Scouts, it just didn’t happen. I regret that. But, both grown sons have shot the Civil War muskets at targets, and know the feel of a long-arm’s kick, the smell of burning gunpowder, and the thrill of seeing a hole near the center of paper target. That’s OK, too.

Nonetheless, in just fourteen years, little Jackson will be old enough to handle a rifle. If I can just stay on the green side of the grass, his Granddaddy Phil will be a spry eighty. That seems just the right age to put a teenage boy in a deer stand and leave him alone with a Winchester, patience, and dreams of a trophy buck. Who knows, he might get lucky. It's happened before.