Meet Me In Gettysburg — II

I've read a great deal of poetry through the doldrums of my life. While in law school or on rainy weekends when I hadn't felt up to leaving my apartment, whichever apartment that was at the time. I've read sad poems and joyful ones. Ones for dying and others for living. For love and for hate. But one one thing I can say with certainty is that poetry is best lived than read. And reading and being a voyeur is not for me.

Those words seem to return to me when the applicable time calls for them to return, as though they are stowed away until then. And presently in my mind, the words of WB Yeats call to me. "The world is full of magic things patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper."

This is the only way that I can explain what happened to me on the battlefield this afternoon. I have come to know that my senses have indeed grown sharper and that the voice, that was only recently merely a ghostly whisper, a whistle through a cracked window of a cab, or the lyrical hum of an idling engine, was much more than just that. And I was correct in following that instinctive and overhwhelming desire I had to follow it. And the more that I follow, the more she makes herself known. I am justified to search for her ghost who I hoped was also searching for mine. For what is a game of hide and seek if one doesn't know they are to seek, and the other that they are being sought?

Sgt. Higgins stabbed my chest with his rifle. I was lying on the grass and blinded by the sun. Bugs floated skyward from the goldenrod and the weeds that engulfed me, and my eyeballs were speckled with those floating stars. My mouth was dry and my head ached as though I had a hangover. My eyes fluttered open to his smoke-colored wiry beard and his bucktoothed smile. He pointed the gun at my head and pulled the trigger. I jumped at the crack of the rifle.

"And sometimes when a soldier was mortally wounded," he called out to a flock of awestruck tourists around us, "they would have to shoot'em. To put them out of their damn misery."

He smiled at me and offered me his gritty calloused hand as onlookers applauded.

"You are one hell of an actor, kid!" he raved. "You study at Juliard or somewhere like that?" Everyone was standing around talking to each other and to amused people who were in blue jeans and sandles. I was the only one still lying there so I took his hand, got up, and dusted myself off. The battle was over. The drummer boy and a makeshift band with flutes and fifes played together on a hill and everyone watched them play predictable song after song. All the Civil War songs. Then Stephen Foster's greatest hits.

We had drinks in a tavern afterward and I was lost in how the reenactment had become so real to me. I talked to men who had been doing so for thirty or forty years and, without asking directly, asked them if ever anything similar has happened to them. If ever they thought for a moment that it was real. I got laughter and incredulous gazes. Looks that seemed to question my sanity, which I indeed questioned myself. I cleaned up in the bathroom, realizing my face had gotten a little sunburned by the relief of the cool water which I pooled on the copper sink and splashed in a bowl of my palms, hoping it would suddenly make sense. But I was genuinely grateful for the fact that I was alive, as though I had somehow miraculously survived that phantom mortal wound. Perhaps the sun made me hallucinate and this all was a fantastic and theatrical delusion. Or maybe I was still in New York, dreaming.

The evening waned and I slowed my drinking. A private named Gillis, who was an auto mechanic from Schenectady, asked where I was staying. Until then, I hadn't given it any thought.

"You probably aren't going to have much luck finding a room," he told me.

I nodded. It didn't matter to me. A room was the least of my thoughts. I could buy a tent and camp. I could sleep in the rental car. Or in a bush. He told me it was coming up on the anniversary weekend. "Usually they are booked out a month or so in advance," he said.

I was distracted by a kid playing a fife in the bar. His father was a reenactor and he was strumming a banjo alongside him. He was playing popular songs and seeing who could guess them. It was all in good fun and the boy was quite good. Everyone was laughing along and clapping their hands. There were a few happy waitresses and I couldn't help but to look at them and wonder if they were she. I wondered if Amy was among them, but although two of three were atttactive, I found no comfort in their faces. No familiarity with the contures of their features which reminded me of my darling who I had only seen so briefly and so veiled by mystery and time. I could see her laughing, holding on to that kite string.

I figured I would end up sleeping in the rental car for a few days before I returned it, hoping I solved this quickly. Everyone cleared out around nine and I said goodbye and gave Jim back the uniform after changing in the bathroom and he invited me to join again tomorrow if I was going to be around. I declined, but thanked him for the offer. He seemed a little miffed, but the experience I had was too intense for me.

"I'm afraid I'm not reenactor material, I excused. Not a true thespian." When he seemed to doubt my response I told him the sun got the better of me, which he understood.

So he said if I changed my mind, I'd know where to find him. He recommended I drive a little ways out of town to another hotel. But I had come so far to get here, there was no way I was leaving Gettysburg now. We shook and he walked on. His boots made a comforting sound on the sidewalk and I watched him slowly disappear into the purple evening.

"Oh," he turned and said with a grin. "Watch out for the ghosts. They roam around town. They are especially prevalent when you've been drinking."

I smiled and he was satisfied in that, his lasting impression, a parting joke. I waved and thought once more that he was one of those I may never see again. Those who play a bit role in life and then exit the stage if only to make way for someone else's part. Although small a role he played, perhaps it was a role of great importance for without him, without being invited to take part in the reenactment, I would not have realized that I had been in what I assume was a former life, in the war. Specifically in this battle 161 years ago, where I was shot and killed and unable to return home. I scribbled a desperate love letter to a young lady named Amy McKenzie, vowing my love, and begging her to come to me so that I might see her once more before I died. Did I hope she would meet me as ghosts meet, impossible as it was. Was I gifted some clairvoyance so close to death that I was able to peer across to the other side and make sense of the afterlife? Or did I suffer a mad delusion caused by my love for her and by my imminent death?

Ghosts. I've never seen a ghost, nor spoken to anyone who I had no doubt had. But I milled about the town with no place to go but back to the car hoping that I would encounter something. Something or someone that could help me understand why it was that I came. My head was full of snippets of Amy McKenzie and her name played upon my tongue. The smell of her hair rich in my nose. I recalled what I saw from the battlefield. What I had written and what she read in the sunlight of a still room. Her face was unclear to me, it was composed of streaks of sunlight and particles floating in the air, vapors, and blurs of soft pale color. Warm color. Tender features, delicate curves. Yet, as beautiful as I was sure she was if only for the feelings she evoked, I could not describe her exactly. I could not identify her or provide enough detail so that one might imagine her. I could not attest to the color of her eyes exactly, just my belief that they were brown, only that they were a beautiful shape. I could not say that her nose was petite, only that it was perfect as it was. Her ears, her lips, her chin, they were all that upon which my ideal of beauty must have been sculpted and carried on for a century and a half. I knew she was a person in my life. I knew she was speaking to me through time. Looking for me as I looked her her. And I knew I belonged here and would remain here, waiting for her.

I walked past a gorgeous brick home with lights in the window pouring out onto the dark of night. A sign said it was called Swope Manor and looking inviting, I went inside and spoke to the innkeeper who seemed to be in conspiracy against something, and very agitated. He was on a telephone call and he politley smiled and pretended that the phone call was a good spirited exchange, that which it certainly was not. He hung up the phone and asked how he may help me as though I might give him trouble like the caller had.

"By chance, sir, is there a room available?"

He looked at me a bit astonished and said yes, the call he had been on was a cancelation. A rather late cancelation. He asked if I was agreeable to assume their reservation, which was for the week, and I accepted without hearing what room it was or how much it was. It didn't really matter to me. It was a room.

"They will certainly be happy to get their deposit back, which I told them I could not do without someone else renting the room."

"Then it all works out." I smiled at him. He was rather old. His cheeks looked like two dumplings. Pinks bags hung below his watery eyes. He looked tired. I assumed he was tired of working. His name was Ben, which made me think of those Ben Franklin's I had encountered on the lawn of Independence Hall in Philadelphia flying kites and giving sage advice to tourists. He was frail and had a kind face. His wrinkles made him look distinguished.

I took the room and moved myself in, realizing I didn't have anything but one bag to move in. I didn't even have a toothbrush. The room was beautiful as I had imagined it would be. There was a four post bed and wallpapered walls. The woodwork was nice and if I was a mouse or a bug of some sort, this was the sort of place I would live for often I think that way — as though I'm a bug. But I couldn't stay her forever. This wasn't home and the expense of the room would eventually deplete my funds, though I was in no danger of that currently, or for the next year or so. I sat in the bed with my cell phone in hand and thought to turn it on. To tell everyone I was okay. Not to worry. Then I thought better of it. Then an hour later I decided to do so, if only to prevent anyone from searching for me. Having some private investigator show up at an inopportune moment.

Julianna had sent me seventeen messages, each one a little more frantic than the last. There were two dozen missed calls and my voicemail was full. I cringed at the attention I had solicited in my purposeful departure. The law firm was worried. They said they would hire a private investigator to find me as they expected foul play, likely work-related, if I didn't respond within 48 hours. It felt like a threat. No one would voluntarily leave a job like this they said in so many words. My mother called and sent numerous messages concerned about my mental health, though I never had mental health issues. My brother in Colorado reached out. My sister in Palm Beach, Florida, too. It was one of two messages: Henry, what have you done? Or Henry where have you gone?

A point of clarification. My name is Hendrix, but I go by Henry because that is what I've always gone by since I was too young to recall. Usually people think I was named after Jimmy Hendrix and they say something about Purple Haze, but I wasn't. My father went to Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas and he was very fond of his alma matter. He was from Arkansas and moved to New York fresh out of college where he worked for IBM. He was a dreamer like me until he took the job at IBM.

Every day he wore a blue suit and ate the same bowl of Kellogg's cereal with black coffee in the same cup every day. He had an ordinary heart attack and died in New York City at 69. That coffee cup survived him. There was little variation in his life and he was the most predictable man I've ever known. I thought of him for some reason. I admonished him because he was boring. He would hate what I was doing, I thought. But he named me Hendrix. It is a wonder he hadn't named me Joe, or Jim, or John. John Bailey. But when he was young he was not boring. He died a death before his death when he went to work at IBM. He comes and goes in my thoughts. For whatever reason that I do, I wish I had that coffee cup still.

I sent a message to each of them that messaged or called me. I told them I had gone and I wasn't coming back. I didn't say to where. I apologized to Julianna for our marriage ending this way, but told her she could keep the apartment as a consolation prize. She could sell my belongings or do whatever with them. Burn them if she'd like. It would have been much easier if she was terrible or had done something treasonous to our marriage, but she hadn't. Although it didn't feel like love and felt as though we were settled into roles we agreed to play, she was a good person and I regretted any harm I might have caused her.

I told my boss I quit and then I turned the phone off and threw it in the trash so that I would never turn it on again. There isn't anything worthwhile on a phone for me. I knew then that I would never again own a cellphone. It was the only thing tying me to a modern world in which I didn't belong.

The next day I walked around the park trying to wrap my mind around the whole thing. Thinking periodically of different people. My father. My mother. My wife. Amy MacKenzie. This ghost who was somewhere out there in the world, inhabiting another body. I would have to get divorced. I would have to sign paperwork and appear in court where I would have to explain why I left. I am in love with someone from a former life. Does that satisfy the court? Does that fall under irreconcilable differences or something else? I would sound crazy explaining this to anyone. Half the time when I think of it, I think I am crazy. It was quite bizarre. As much as I expected it, as much as I knew I was right, believed and was faithful to it, it was still unbelievable to me that I was in tune with something that I've never heard of anyone declaring before. I've never read, even in the most abstract of fiction, of anyone who was in love with someone they knew in a former life. But surely, I couldn't be the only one.

But then the feeling overcame me, the dread that perhaps I alone felt this way. And that she, my dearest beautiful lady, was not in love so much with me that it carried to another time and place as it had for me. And that those ghostly calls were not her, but they were only me. Hopeful appellations of my own I heard rather than anything actually from her. It was a terrible feeling so I snuffed it and I took pleasure in getting to know the innkeeper, Ben, who said his name was actually Gus, but he didn't like the name Gus so he decided to be Ben.

Ben and I drank together. There was no bar at Swope Manor so we sat in his office which was his makeshift bar and he got out a bottle of vanilla brandy or whatever liquor happened to be in his drawer and we drank and talked for hours until the bottle was empty. Each night a different bottle and somewhere in the evening he would confess to me that he alwasy wanted to be a bartender as though he hadn't ever said it before. As though, it was some deep dark secret. This went on for a week and he jokingly asked when I was checking out because he didn't think his liver could take much more of me.

I felt obligated to tell him the story and he listened. It took a lot longer to tell it than I thought it would, but Ben was a patient man and patient men make for good listeners. And when I was all done and thinking he must have thought I was crazy, he looked at me and smiled. And then he told me what I expected not to hear.

"She's been here. And I've met her."