THE BETTER PART OF VALOR. Morgan Mackinnon
Have I told you about hardtack?”
When she shook her head, he elaborated that hardtack was fashioned out of flour and water and then baked at least twice until it was hard as stone. It would last for months so long as it didn’t get wet. Biting into hardtack was like trying to chew rock, so most soldiers tried to soften it in water or coffee before putting it in their mouths and swallowing. She laughed when he told her hardtack also contained its share of protein in the form of bugs and worms, and the men joked when they tried to throw it away, it sometimes slithered back to them.
In addition to hardtack, there was beef jerky and bacon; outside occasional fresh beef and whatever they could hunt, meals were basic and designed simply to keep a soldier’s belly full and him on his feet.
“I was captured near Macon, Georgia, with General Stoneman. He was a fine General, and I respected him very much. We had been fighting and trying to destroy the Confederate rail lines near Macon, when we learned there were many Union prisoners being held at Macon and at Andersonville. General Stoneman said we would try to liberate them if we could. We were surprised by a large contingency of Confederates and trapped. The General said he would hold the line as long as he could and those companies who wanted to try and escape could make the attempt. Most of two brigades got away, but Stoneman was nearly done and I stayed with him. We fought until we could fight no more. The Confederates took five hundred Union soldiers captive as well as thirty officers including myself and the General. We were held in the same prison we had set off to liberate. The situation was dire. Very little in the way of rations, sometimes nothing. Scant food was available if one had the means to pay for it. Stoneman and I both had some money secreted in our clothing and while wanting to ease the suffering of the other men, agreed that as the leaders, we must try to keep ourselves alive so we ate a little first and then shared out the rest. I will not tell you about the contents of the rations. I estimated later we both had the pleasure to pay nearly eight dollars a day to keep on our feet. We were exchanged in two months after General Sherman made a bargain with General Hood. A few days later, our fortunes had increased so much we were having dinner with General Sherman in Atlanta.”
Keogh would remember these incidents and recite them to Cresta with that strange look in his eyes. That faraway look as if he could still smell the gunpowder and yet even now see the blood. She’d playfully sock him on the shoulder or touch his arm, and he’d return from whatever dream he was in, but everything he said, she carefully noted.
Myles did not ask Cresta to find him a Catholic church so he could attend mass, and she did not broach the subject. He would come to it on his own. Instead, on Sundays when the Washington Post came, they’d separate the sections and spend the day reading through various articles. Cresta would prepare brunch at around noon or one o’clock, which consisted of Eggs Benedict, pancakes, or omelets along with bacon or sausage, shredded fried potatoes, muffins or sweet rolls, orange juice, and coffee. Sometimes they ate at the kitchen table, and other times, they took their plates to the library rug and ate on the floor amongst newspaper pages. Keogh didn’t care for the sports or fashion pages, but he did enjoy reading US and world news. The comics he ignored because he didn’t understand the humor involved. Dogs called Snoopy on doghouses?
On one such day, he leaned back against the bottom of the sofa and asked Cresta about her name. “’Tis an unusual name. Is it common in the family?”
Cresta shook her head. “No. Mother wasn’t always as snarky as she is now. That means hurtful and sarcastic. The seventies were a time of free love, a time when few people really thought about using contraception. You needn’t blush. I know you had methods of contraception in your day as well. Anyway, Mother at that time was a sweet young rebel with long, wild blond hair, bell-bottom pants, midi tops, and couldn’t wait to finish high school so she could raise some hell. What? Oh, well I’ll show you what bell-bottoms and midis are later. She got married when she was nineteen to my father and got pregnant shortly thereafter, had me in nineteen seventy-one, and named me Cresta.
“See, the sixties and seventies were also the decades of protest. People, especially young people, were protesting the Vietnam War, which lasted twenty long, miserable years. It was very unpopular and ended in a stalemate in nineteen seventy-five. Protests were also held in the form of marches in southern towns like Selma, Alabama, over black segregation. The Ku Klux Klan were dead set against integration between whites and blacks and tensions ran high. I’ll let you learn all about that when we get to that point in your history reading. And yes, I do see the irony of you fighting to free the blacks and then hunting the Ku Klux Klan—when I was born in an era where the Klan as we called them, were still making horrible racist rants and killing innocent black people because of their so-called white supremist philosophy.
“You asked about my name. There was a movie…a…I haven’t introduced you to television yet, but let’s just say technology has advanced so that something like a Broadway play can be captured on film like a picture but with all the movement and color and costumes. We call these moving pictures, which are just that—pictures that move, or movies. Normally they are produced to be shown to audiences in a theater or can be offered on devices called videocassette tapes to be shown on your television screen. There was a movie filmed in nineteen seventy called Soldier Blue. It was supposed to depict the Sand Creek Massacre of eighteen sixty-four where a Colonel in the US Army named John Chivington led a several hundred-man troop of Colorado Volunteers into a Cheyenne and Arapahoe village and massacred mostly women and children. Most of the braves were away at the time. The…carnage according to history was…”
Keogh broke in. “Yes, Cresta, I know. I have heard of Sand Creek and of Chivington. At first, he was a hero and paraded the scalps of the women and children in Denver. It was also said some of the soldiers displayed the private parts of women on their hats and on their saddles. It did not take long for the army to denounce Chivington’s actions as cowardly and inhuman. I heard he had resigned from the army in eighteen sixty-five.”
She nodded. “Yeah. He escaped punishment but wasn’t successful in any enterprise for the rest of his life. He died around eighteen ninety-one or thereabouts. The movie though, is quite graphic and, to this day, is still known as one of the most violent western movies ever filmed. The heroine is a character named Cresta Maribel Lee and the army soldier she falls in love with is named Honus Gant. She calls him Soldier Blue.
“It’s a strange movie, one you either love or hate or perhaps both at the same time. Neither side was totally right but neither side was totally wrong. I think the Indians get more points than the soldiers. I believe what struck me so much was it begins with an Indian attack against white soldiers and ends with the soldiers massacring the Indians. In a juxtaposition between the two is a beautiful, haunting melody that just sticks in the mind forever. I was mesmerized. It’s been years since I watched the movie, but I can still hear that tune in my subconscious.
“My mother told me one time after too many cocktails that she and my father had made it like rabbits watching that movie over and over for hours on end. The movie came out in October of nineteen-seventy, and I was born at the end of July in the next year. She thought it would be fitting, since the family name was now Leigh, to name me after the heroine and cleverly add the name of a grandmother and an aunt. Cresta Mary Belle Leigh. You know, I think you are the first person to ask me where my odd name came from.”
Myles Keogh was listening intently. “This…movie. You say it can be watched on your vision device?”
“Television.”
“Television. Do you have this Soldier Blue?”
Cresta gazed at Keogh with concerned eyes. “Yes, I have it. If you think you’re ready for it. I’d much prefer you begin with My Fair Lady.” She wasn’t sure where to fit in Gone With the Wind. That was a movie she didn’t think Myles would appreciate.
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