Departures

A flashbulb exploded in front of his face, filling his vision with purple spots. No flashbulbs when he’d been here before; in those days, having a photograph taken meant standing solemn and statue-still until the long exposure ended. He nodded. Yes, it was the world that had changed.

“Welcome to Richmond, General!” the fellow behind the flash camera shouted. “Have you come here other times since the end of the war?”

“Never once,” Thorpe answered with a sort of pride. “But now, I thought, if I don’t come now-when shall I have another chance?”

“What do you think of the city, General?” the man asked.

As his eyes cleared, Thorpe saw the fellow had a press tag tucked into his hatband-a reporter, then. “I’m no general,” he repeated, a bit testily: a reporter was supposed to know such things. “What do I think of Richmond? I’ve not seen much yet, but it strikes me as a big city. Of course, it did that a while ago, too.”

The laugh that once rang musically was now a rusty croak, but he loosed it all the same. When he’d first come north to Richmond, not a town in North Carolina had held as many as five thousand inhabitants; no wonder the Confederate capital, then near forty thousand, seemed to him a metropolis swollen past belief. These days Rocky Mount was on its way to being a city of the size Richmond had been then. He wondered why he failed to find it large. Perhaps because he and Rocky Mount had grown together. But his town had grown up, while he… somehow he had just grown old.

From behind him, the porter said, “You come on with me, suh. I’ll take you to the cab stand.” The colored man picked up his suitcases again and raised his voice: “Make way fo’ the general here! Make way, folks!”

And people did clear a path. Following in the porter’s wake, Thorpe reflected that the illegitimate promotion people insisted on foisting on him was worth something, at any rate, if it got him through the crowded train station so easily. He laughed again.

“What’s funny, suh?” the porter asked. “When I was a soldier here, I doubt the people would have moved aside so readily for any real general, save maybe Robert E. Lee, as they do now for me. I led no great armies, only a ragtag company. My only claim to notice is my span of years.”

“There’s worse ones than that, suh,” the porter observed. Thorpe slowly nodded; judging by what he’d seen in the second half of his long life, there were many such worse claims, most of them trumpeted uncommonly loud.

The Negro dropped Thorpe’s bags for a moment to stick his fingers in his mouth and give forth with a piercing whistle. A taxi driver waved to show he’d heard. The porter grabbed the suitcases again and headed for the boxy Chevrolet. Behind him, Thorpe made the best speed he could.

Pretty girls paused to stare wide-eyed at him as he went by. He remembered that from his soldier days, too. Then he wouldn’t have minded getting some of those girls alone. He fondly remembered a couple of leaves spent in the city’s seamier districts. The most respectable girls nowadays showed more rounded flesh than any shameless woman had in his youth, but desire was only a memory, too.

Between them, the porter and the taxi driver tossed his bags into the back seat of the cab. Thorpe dug in his pocket, and pulled out a quarter. The porter beamed; a quarter was worth far more in these hard times in 1932 than it had been in the inflation-raddled Richmond of the War between the States: “God bless you, suh!”

“God bless you, too,” Thorpe said. Back in the old days, he would have tipped a slave who served as well as this porter had. Negroes had been free now long enough for a man to go from birth to old age in that span of years-not old age like his own, of course, but age old enough. It hadn’t worked out as dreadfully as long-ago fire-eaters feared it would, so perhaps Abe Lincoln was right all along. Right or not, Lincoln prevailed. The proof of it was that Thorpe couldn’t even recall the last time he’d wondered about the justice of emancipation.

“Where to, General?” the taxi driver asked.

“Camp De Saussure, wherever that may be,” Thorpe answered. He didn’t bother correcting the man. Apparently he was to be a general for the duration, whether he liked it or not. If that was so, he decided he might as well like it. He’d grown used to far worse things over the years.

“That’s what they’re calling the Lee Camp Soldiers’ Home for the reunion,” the driver said as he held the car door open for Thorpe. “In honor of General De Saussure of the United Confederate Veterans, isn’t it?”

“Yes, I think so.” Thorpe slowly, carefully bent to sit down in the taxi. C.A. De Saussure actually called himself a general because he headed the veterans’ organization. Thorpe did not think much of that. All the real generals who’d worn gray (and those who’d worn blue as well) were dead.