something i'm working out...
If there’s one thing you can say about folks from on down by the river, it’s that they know how to hold a grudge better than anybody else in the State. The Becks got a place right on that river, couple miles out of town. Old Louise Beck hardly spoke to her husband for ten years since she threatened him she’d stop talking if he didn’t start doing some answering when she asked him a question. Poor old guy just thought he got lucky those ten years, didn’t have the faintest damn idea his wife could barely stand him.
And nobody’s held a grudge longer than the oldest and only living Confederate soldier. Each and every year some Yankee college kid goes into those woods - drink beer, smoke weed, maybe get some - and he never comes out again and that sweet little sorority girl he took in there with him is all covered in his blood and she’s screaming her sweet shiny blonde head off about the old old soldier with an old old gun that shot her boyfriend down dead dead dead. They take her home wrapped up in a blanket stinking like the sulfury river water and beer and jizz, and she’s bawling stuff that don’t even make whole thoughts and for weeks everybody feels so sorry for that poor little girl that went nuts when her boyfriend got drunk and accidentally drowned himself in that mucky old river. They must have a whole ward in the nut house that’s brimming full of those formerly sweet blonde sorority girls that swear there’s still some old Johnny Reb in the woods shooting up their boyfriends. Nobody can ever find the bodies of those boys, though. But they can’t find a shred of evidence that the girls did it either. There was one time that a frat boy was wearing a T-shirt with the Stars and Bars on it when he disappeared and weeks later, after they shut up his still-squalling girlfriend, they found his Wal-Mart Stars and Bars T-shirt flying high up over the woods. They never found who was flying Old Dixie.
He doesn’t mean nothing by it.
He just thinks the war is still on.
Those re-enactors don’t help. Every weekend all spring, summer, and fall, he can hear the big parrot guns blasting gun powder and flour and the retirees marching around and smell their bacon frying and practically taste the whiskey they scent their canteen water with. His heart quakes with compassion for each and every time another soldier “loses” a leg in a medical demonstration - fellow sure don’t get much culture hiding out in the woods for a hundred-forty years, how’s he supposed to tell the difference between an amateur actor and some poor boy who’s gotta go home and waste away, never push a plow or dance a Virginia Reel or go hunting again ‘cause some damn Billy Blue Bastard took his leg. Pretty soon his blood is boiling for that poor boy and each and every good family man from Dixie laying face first in the hot dirt, nobody out of that whole crowd going to help him.
And nobody’s held a grudge longer than the oldest and only living Confederate soldier. Each and every year some Yankee college kid goes into those woods - drink beer, smoke weed, maybe get some - and he never comes out again and that sweet little sorority girl he took in there with him is all covered in his blood and she’s screaming her sweet shiny blonde head off about the old old soldier with an old old gun that shot her boyfriend down dead dead dead. They take her home wrapped up in a blanket stinking like the sulfury river water and beer and jizz, and she’s bawling stuff that don’t even make whole thoughts and for weeks everybody feels so sorry for that poor little girl that went nuts when her boyfriend got drunk and accidentally drowned himself in that mucky old river. They must have a whole ward in the nut house that’s brimming full of those formerly sweet blonde sorority girls that swear there’s still some old Johnny Reb in the woods shooting up their boyfriends. Nobody can ever find the bodies of those boys, though. But they can’t find a shred of evidence that the girls did it either. There was one time that a frat boy was wearing a T-shirt with the Stars and Bars on it when he disappeared and weeks later, after they shut up his still-squalling girlfriend, they found his Wal-Mart Stars and Bars T-shirt flying high up over the woods. They never found who was flying Old Dixie.
He doesn’t mean nothing by it.
He just thinks the war is still on.
Those re-enactors don’t help. Every weekend all spring, summer, and fall, he can hear the big parrot guns blasting gun powder and flour and the retirees marching around and smell their bacon frying and practically taste the whiskey they scent their canteen water with. His heart quakes with compassion for each and every time another soldier “loses” a leg in a medical demonstration - fellow sure don’t get much culture hiding out in the woods for a hundred-forty years, how’s he supposed to tell the difference between an amateur actor and some poor boy who’s gotta go home and waste away, never push a plow or dance a Virginia Reel or go hunting again ‘cause some damn Billy Blue Bastard took his leg. Pretty soon his blood is boiling for that poor boy and each and every good family man from Dixie laying face first in the hot dirt, nobody out of that whole crowd going to help him.