Gettysburg Read online

  Also by Kevin Morris

  White Man’s Problems

  All Joe Knight

  GETTYSBURG

  A NOVEL

  KEVIN

  MORRIS

  Copyright © 2019 by Kevin Morris

  Cover art and design by Nick Misani

  “West” Words and Music by Lucinda Williams © 2007 WARNER-TAMERLANE

  PUBLISHING CORP. All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission of ALFRED PUBLISHING, LLC;

  “Ingrid Bergman.” Words by Woody Guthrie. Music by Billy Bragg © 1998, 1999 WOODY GUTHRIE PUBLICATIONS, INC./Admin. by BUG MUSIC and CHRYSALIS MUSIC/Admin. by BMG RIGHTS MANAGEMENT (US) LLC. All Rights Reserved. Used by Permission. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC;

  “All About That Bass.” Words and Music by Kevin Kadish and Meghan Trainor Copyright © 2014 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Over-Thought Under-Appreciated Songs, Year Of The Dog Music and MTrain Music. All Rights on behalf of Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Over-Thought Under-Appreciated Songs Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. All Rights on behalf of Year Of The Dog Music and MTrain Music Administered by Downtown Music Publishing LLC. International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC;

  “Buffalo Soldier.” Words and Music by Noel Williams and Bob Marley. Copyright © 1983 EMI Longitude Music and Music Sales Corporation. All Rights on behalf of EMI Longitude Music Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 37219. International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  FIRST EDITION

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: July 2019

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

  ISBN 978-0-8021-4738-7

  eISBN 978-0-8021-4739-4

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  19 20 21 22 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Rocky, Dulcie, and Gaby

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Also by Kevin Morris

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Day 1

  Chapter 1: Man of Action

  Chapter 2: Breakfast with Norman

  Chapter 3: A Report from Bella

  Chapter 4: Reality

  Chapter 5: A Report from Bella

  Chapter 6: On the Road to War

  Chapter 7: Introducing Stella

  Chapter 8: Norman and Carol

  Chapter 9: Starting to Wonder

  Chapter 10: The North Came from the South, and the South Came from the North

  Day 2

  Chapter 11: Did We Do Anything?

  Chapter 12: GPS

  Chapter 13: The Battle of Little Round Top

  Chapter 14: Lunch and a Big Secret

  Chapter 15: Bella and Heather

  Chapter 16: A Report from Bella

  Chapter 17: Belles

  Chapter 18: Reynolds and the Boys after Little Round Top

  Chapter 19: A Note from Bella

  Chapter 20: Monkeying Around

  Chapter 21: Father’s Son

  Chapter 22: The Battle of the Wheatfield

  Chapter 23: I Thought You Hated This

  Chapter 24: Between the Battle and the Cotillion

  Chapter 25: Readying

  Chapter 26: Soldier Boys

  Chapter 27: Relief Work

  Chapter 28: The North Came from the Shuttle Buses, and So Did the South

  Chapter 29: White Rasta

  Day 3

  Chapter 30: On the Road

  Chapter 31: Sleeping Bags

  Chapter 32: General Pickett

  Chapter 33: Stopped

  Chapter 34: McPherson’s Ridge

  Chapter 35: The Charge

  Chapter 36: Speechless

  Chapter 37: Man of Action, Part 2

  Acknowledgments

  Back Cover

  DAY 1

  CHAPTER 1

  Man of Action

  In his dream, John Reynolds Stanhope held the fine and fabulous gun, the giver and taker of America. He held it sideways and ran his hand from the very butt of the stock, over the comb, past the percussion action, along the forty-inch barrel with ramrod underneath, to the tip of the bayonet. It seemed so rudimentary and beautiful now, the same way the soldiers and the generals seem when you look at the gone-to-yellow daguerreotypes. When he closed his eyes, he was with them; they were not of a different world. They were of this world, but they were long gone. In that small difference everything lay. They were not as foreign as they seemed, they were just here long ago. Before we knew the things we know now because of what they went through.

  He was semiconscious. It was the flip side of magic hour, the time between day and night when the movie directors say they get the best light. Scenes filmed in that light crackle with life. He peeked with one eye at the television at the foot at the bed and saw his reflection in the flat screen. He had not surrendered to the idea that he couldn’t sleep, so he put his head back on the pillow.

  He knew the time between night and morning had a magic hour as well. Night or day, he knew what the directors were talking about. He thought of the films he loved, of British Olympians sprinting along the beach, of gangsters stopping to buy oranges. He wondered if they’d been shot at night or in the morning. It didn’t matter to him. Not as someone caught up in the narrative flow of a story: a viewer, a filmgoer. Or did it matter? Would it cheapen things if you learned that a romantic scene set in the early evening was filmed at five in the morning? He could lie around like this for hours, mind half-alive, somewhere between sleep and consciousness, thinking about fact and fiction.

  He opened his eyes. The master bedroom with just him in it. The girls were gone. He looked out the glass doors to his left, to the east, a vast yard—rare in Malibu to have such a yard—surrounded by a canyon creating a rocky amphitheater around the property. It was dry here, even with the beach less than a mile away. He rubbed his forehead and then felt his beard, two months old and thick.

  Reynolds found the remote, and the TV came to life. His reflection was overpowered by high-definition graphics. He had entered one of the Lifestyle channel’s six-minute commercial breaks. He squinted. The commercial that was on had a rendering of a male human torso depicted in profile against a graph with the torso’s spine along the x axis. The torso turned slowly to face the viewer as the narrator said, “Do you suffer from abdominal fat?” With that, the stomach grew in the same slow steady pace at which the polar ice cap melts over the earth in films warning of global warming, resulting in a neck-down, waist-up view of a pre-cardiac-arr
est man. A quick graphic of the lifetime evolution of Boris Yeltsin’s body.

  He walked past the entrance to his wife Stella’s bathroom to his own, smaller bathroom in the back. He looked in the mirror at his own abdomen and saw the resemblance. He stared at his image, as he did every day. He didn’t like waking up any more than sleeping. He had learned to accept this state as well, but some days were worse than others, and with the insomnia this figured to be a bad day. He looked at the bags under his eyes. He surveyed the beard. It was beginning to resemble a patchy coat. Most of his attempts at facial hair had been harebrained schemes, and this one was looking to be more of the same. He tried to decide if it was different this time, whether he could grow it beyond the comfort zone of a well-insured man. He heard lyrics.

  Come out West.

  It was from a Lucinda Williams song he couldn’t get out of his head, and like many songs, it was having an effect on him long after the last time he’d heard it. He had come west almost without thinking about it. And he had stayed. And here he was. Twenty-five years gone by, a small fortune made, a family built. A wife for his best friend, many good people in his life, a daughter for whom his devotion towered.

  It was Friday. Bella was off with her friend Heather, and Stella was on an overnight set visit in Vancouver. They were both coming home today. They expected him to be on a golf weekend in the desert. It was all going as he’d planned. He just didn’t know whether he had the balls to do it. His mind clouded again, before he snapped into purpose.

  He headed to the garage. It was overflowing with the necessities of their Malibu life: luggage, beach chairs, surfboards, a horseback-riding helmet, boogie boards, old golf clubs, a croquet set, lacrosse sticks, a softball helmet with a face mask—he could never get used to the softball mask. He mounted a stepladder and reached to the back of the upper shelf and pulled out the hidden long black case. He sat cross-legged on the garage floor to open the bag, removed its contents, and stood up. The first thing that someone watching surveillance video would notice would be the rifle’s length. Standing on its end in front of him it reached his chin. It smelled like high school metal shop. Next, he fixed the bayonet. Reynolds knew a lot about this gun. It weighed nine pounds, and the most expert riflemen could reload and fire it three times in a minute. More than seven hundred thousand had been made at a time before there were paved roads, electricity, or light bulbs. The gun was real, not a cheap facsimile made for folks who didn’t have the money to get a real one. He had chased it for six months until a collector in Seattle had agreed to sell it. The man was in his seventies, and he said it had been his father’s. They had both kept it locked up except for an annual firing and cleaning.

  And now it was here in his garage in Malibu. The genuine article. A killing stick. He had no way of knowing where it had been, what action it had seen, but he could tell it was real. He’d seen enough of the rifles to know by the age of the wood, the imperfections of the trigger, the wear on the grooves of the barrel. He detached the bayonet and set it in the case, followed by the rifle. He popped the trunk of his Mercedes and put the long case in.

  Next came the wardrobe bag and a small suitcase on rollers. Both were innocuous; it looked like the luggage any middle-aged man would take on a weekend trip with the boys. Inside, though, was the most authentic reproduction of a Union general’s uniform money and Internet searches could yield. Quietly over the past year, he had been acquiring the elements, mainly through eBay, a few from vintage-clothing sites, businesses operated by interested-in-history types. He’d found First Corps tunic and trousers from a buff in Maine, a cap sold on a site based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The perfect riding boots, which he spit polished when no one was home, that he’d overpaid for on an eBay auction.

  Inside the house, the phone rang. They still had a landline. Four extensions in total: one each for Stella, Reynolds, Bella, and the housekeeper.

  “Hi.” It was Stella.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “How are you? Did you watch?”

  “The Globes? I did. I turned it off.”

  “Who thinks that English guy is funny?” Stella said. “Why do they do that?”

  It was January, and January was the worst of times in Hollywood: awards season.

  “He’s horrible.” The Golden Globes had been on this past Sunday, and they had recorded it on DVR.

  “I know. Why do I hate it so much?” she said.

  “Horrible people in a fake world making the rest of the world feel excluded,” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  “And we’re not there because we are too old to be relevant anymore?”

  She laughed. “OK, you’ve made me feel better.”

  “When are you getting back?” he said.

  “Leaving in an hour. Are you coming home first or driving straight from the office?”

  “From there. We can play nine if we get there by four thirty.”

  “OK. I talked to Bella. I’ll take them somewhere for dinner.”

  “Did they have fun?”

  “They were in Rosarito,” Stella said. “What do you think?”

  “OK,” he said. “I’m cringing and hanging up.”

  He put a robe on and walked to the front gate to get the papers. The delivery kid, or guy—whoever it was that threw newspapers out of a truck at five thirty in the morning—always tossed the papers same way. They lay right outside the gate at the base of the containing wall that circled the property. The kid must throw them hard and fast, he thought, because they hit the wall and go straight down to the ground. They were always right at the foot of the gate, at the base of the wall, as though placed there, like pitched pennies.

  He was a fat guy in the morning, like Tony Soprano. He looked the papers over as he made coffee. He took in the front page of the New York Times, noting the president’s shifting position on clean air and a subcommittee vote on net neutrality. More chaos in Syria. He followed with a story about Connecticut quadruplets admitted by Yale, then skimmed the op-eds, weary though he was of the daily drumbeat of the Times columnists. The LA Times was next: with nothing but a casual look at its front page, he moved on to its business section, which covered Hollywood.

  It was a lifelong instinct, this immediate and urgent desire, once he got lucid, to start consuming information. This was the influence of his father, who taught English and read three papers in the morning. Unlike most academics, his father was not into politics or finding news that fed self-righteous anger or kooky theories about politics. His dad read the papers for real estate prices, stock prices, local tax breaks, government auctions, foreclosure sales, and sways in the value of the dollar. He always had a new get-rich-quick strategy that would rocket the family beyond the limits of an English professor’s salary.

  They had lived in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the site of the great battlefield of the Civil War. Their house was right next to the battlefield. Everything in Gettysburg was right next to the battlefield. It dominated life there the way chocolate owned the town of Hershey or the Johnstown Flood dominated Johnstown. His mother was a graduate student when she met his father, Robert Reynolds, then a young professor. Both were single and in their twenties, so the affair was scandal-free. They became the much-loved husband-and-wife team of the Gettysburg College English Department. His dad was the big gun, teaching the survey course, 101, covering Shakespeare to Steinbeck. His mom tended to Jane Austen and ran the Film Club.

  English at Gettysburg College was like baseball at Ohio State: not what people came for. While giants in the field of American History came to the school for its proximity to the grounds and sense of place, for the possibility of finding a minié ball with every turning of soil, whether from plowing or touch football. Literature was off to the side, what the devastated turned to. His dad was a gifted teacher, preparing for lectures as if they were Broadway performances, practicing well into the night, his stage voice rumbling from the attic. But his wife and son suffered as Robert blew money on one idea afte
r another, often forcing them to put their plans for the summer or the semester break in abeyance to support him, like vassals to the king.

  The summer when he was fourteen, his dad had the idea to purchase a Dairy Queen franchise on Hagerstown Road. Robert depleted their savings account to the tune of ten thousand dollars and used it to buy the exclusive right to sell Dilly Bars in Gettysburg County. When Reynolds expressed his doubts to his mother, she said, “C’mon, it’ll be fun.” The small building was next to the Little Dutch Family Inn, an eighteen-room motel fronted by a big neon windmill. The [No] Vacancy sign was in a jarring red that stood out more as the night came, while the painted figures of the little Dutch boy and girl holding wooden buckets in green grass disappeared.

  Now, in Malibu, he shook his head, thinking about how his mother had washed the pots and blenders and ice-cream machine components every night after closing. She would drive Reynolds out to open around two, then returned home or to her office to grade papers for her summer-session courses. Business was completely drive-through, and he started each day with change for a twenty—a ten, two fives and a one—in the register. He read novels and waited for customers, worrying both about the lack of customers and his lack of change.

  He got hungry after an hour or so from boredom. All packaging for the hot food had the trademark Brazier emblazoned on it—one of the weirdnesses of the Dairy Queen milieu Reynolds never understood. The brochure from HQ said that DQs served only “Fine Brazier Foods.” Neither his father nor his mother could explain how Brazier fit into the Dairy Queen picture. He spent hours wondering how it worked, whether Brazier was part of the Dairy Queen family. For that matter, he wondered whether the Gettysburg-Hagerstown franchise and, ultimately, his family—Drs. Robert and Susan Stanhope and son, Reynolds—were themselves members of the Dairy Queen family, when it came right down to it.

  He loved popping Brazier frozen hamburger patties into the mini-oven. His dad hadn’t bought the standard grill that DQ franchise rules called for, which made Reynolds nervous. The rolls came in plastic bags with a slice of cheese inside, which you weren’t supposed to open before heating. When the timer went off, he took the meat patty and the plastic-wrapped bun out with metal DQ tongs. He tore the plastic open, doused each side of the bun with ketchup from one of the squeeze bottles his mother made him wash out and refill each day, separated the melted cheese from the wrapper, and put the whole combination together. The burger roll browned a bit at the corners and its sesame seeds toasted when he did it just right. He closed the sliding-screen service window, put his feet up, and watched the cars drift by, knowing in his gut they wouldn’t stop and worrying, there in the shadow of the windmill, that his father’s Don Quixote syndrome would doom them all. To make matters worse, he was eating up any pitiful profits, one frozen Brazier cheeseburger at time.