South of Shiloh

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Thursday
Stillwater, Minnesota

"Jenny, any luck?" Paul Edin called out as he stooped over the duffel bag he'd just torn apart by the front door and pawed through a pile of blue wool clothing. He set aside a tangle of leather belts and pouches. A silver bayonet in a black scabbard clattered on the floor.

At the other end of the house, in the mud porch off the kitchen, Jennifer Edin turned her head in a slow toss that was old habit from when her hair was longer. Thirty-five last October, she had learned to put little faith in luck as an eleventh-hour solution. "When's the last time you remember seeing them?" she called back.

"I don't know."

"Them" referred to his reenactor spectacles without which he could not embark on his Mississippi Civil War adventure. When Jenny narrowed her eyes, the sprinkle of cinnamon freckles across the bridge of her straight nose and wide cheeks tightened. Her fifth-grade students understood that this quiet, alert look signaled a prelude to intense scrutiny.

A blue-eyed brunette, hair in a tidy bob, she stood five seven and kept the needle on the bathroom scale planted dead on one twenty-four. Willowy and athletic, she stayed a few calculated pounds shy of curvaceous.

Something held in check there.

Methodically, she began to sort through the mound of workday debris her husband and daughter regularly tossed on the long table on the porch: books, magazines, clothing, newspapers, a bicycle pump. The mud porch was her triage station, where she stemmed the casual chaos of his garage from invading the order of her house.

"Mom?" Molly Edin appeared in the kitchen doorway with a cordless phone in her hand. "Rachel wants to know if I can come over."

They'd rushed home from school to see Paul off, so Jenny gave her daughter the Look, followed by the Voice; a no-nonsense tone she had perfected teaching special ed to inner-city kids in St. Paul. "Not now, you will help me look for Dad's glasses."

"He's wearing his glasses." Molly, just turned eleven, with her first pimple on her chin, was indignant at being ignored. She waved the phone, insisting. The sweet malleable Gumby years of nine and ten were gone forever. Molly was becoming a prepubescent "me."

"His reenactor glasses, you know; the old ones," Jenny said. "Now hang up the phone and check the kitchen counters."

"Nobody says hang up the phone anymore," Molly said, then she retreated from the doorway and was replaced by her father.

"They won't let me in without those glasses, says right on the printout. Kirby Creek is a semi-immersion event. No modern eyewear of any kind allowed," Paul said.

Jenny took a deep breath and concentrated, raising her hands, arms floating out like wands of a divining rod. She closed her eyes and recalled seeing the glasses . . . turning, moving . . . to the shelves next to the table, and opened a fishing tackle box that was full of old buttons, bits of cloth, and various old brass insignias.

"There you are." Jenny plucked up the battered gray case containing the errant spectacles.

Paul exhaled and gratefully squeezed her arm. Then he took the glasses case and hurried off through the kitchen to repack his bag. Jenny turned briefly to the flotsam covering the table. Automatically, her hands reached out to sort the mess. Then she paused, seeing the newspaper section on top of the recycling pile.

The Metro section of yesterday's St. Paul Pioneer Press was folded to an inside page, where a news brief announced: "Pioneer Press Photographer Suspended." She glanced out into the empty kitchen, faintly heard the boops and chimes of Molly logging on to Club Penguin in the den; the scuffs of Paul sorting his gear. She read the short paragraph that she and her husband had discussed last night.

Pioneer Press photographer John Rane was suspended for two weeks yesterday, following a complaint from St. Paul Police Chief, Oscar Talbot. Chief Talbot charged that Rane violated a SWAT team cordon and endangered officers and civilians during a tense standoff last week in West St. Paul . . .

But people were still talking about it. "Did'ya see the picture that guy took . . . ?"

"Hey Jenny," Paul yelled, "we gotta go."

"Coming," Jenny said, dropping the paper back on the pile. Paul was in the den, saying good-bye to Molly. After giving her dad two kisses and a hug, Molly sighed dramatically: "Have fun in the war, Dad."

"We all set?" Jenny asked, following him to the foyer, where he'd repacked his gear.

"Yep."

"You sure?"

Paul nodded and rattled off the checklist: "Forage cap, sack coat, flannel shirt, wool trousers with straps, brogans, wool socks, muslin underwear, gloves, gum blanket, wool blanket, greatcoat, field pack and canteen." He paused to take a breath. "Combo knife fork and spoon, mucket cup." He held up a square black bag with a strap and stuffed it in the duffel. "Haversack."

"What about food?"

"Davey's in charge of the hardtack and slab bacon. Coffee, veggies, stuff like that."

Jenny made a face. "Rifle?"

Paul hefted the 1861 Springfield rifled musket in a canvas case. Then he shoved in a tangle of black leather: belt and straps to which his cartridge box, cap box, and bayonet and scabbard were fastened.

"Cartridges?" Jenny asked, remembering the time her dad went deer hunting without his bullets.

"Eighty," Paul grinned. He'd spent three days in the basement, rolling paper cylinders off a pattern with a half-inch wooden dowel, tying them off with kite string, insisting on explaining the process to her. The way he put in a wad of Kleenex as a substitute for a .58-caliber lead minié bullet. Then he filled the paper tubes with fifty-eight grains of carefully measured black powder and methodically creased and folded the open end with a distinctive flourish, like nineteenth-century origami. Jenny didn't approve of keeping the can of black powder in the house after she'd heard that the stuff could ignite around plastic. Something about friction. She made him keep it in an olive-drab surplus steel box in the utility shed in the backyard.