Imagine: They were still talking about the Confederate Battle Flag and
whether it belonged on state flags or flying at state Capitols. Once he
would have been outraged. He used to stand up when the band played Dixie.
He'd been able to refight every battle in The War from Bull Run to Five
Forks. If only Longstreet hadn't dawdled! If only. But history never turned out any different. The whole business had
grown tiresome.
Maybe they were right to forget the flag. What did the old boy who was with
Stonewall Jackson's famous foot cavalry say when it was all over, the
bloodletting and horror and stupidity of it all, the years of patriotic
gore? The general had found the old soldier stumbling along in the rear, and
asked if he was all right. All the straggler would say was, "Oh, I'm all
right, Gen'l - but I'll be damned if I ever love another country!"
He thought he knew how the old boy must have felt. Not that he meant any
disloyalty to the past, but it did hang around like a bum looking for a
handout.
Why have a flag at all? Symbols divide. Wasn't it time to let the past be
the past at last? Forget? Hell, Yes!
They - the ubiquitous, always brutish They - had turned the battle flag into
something else long ago, not an ode to the Confederate dead but something
with which to taunt the innocent living. They'd made it a bogeyman to scare
little boys and girls, something to make some folks afraid and others
swagger. And embitter everybody.
Why couldn't they just let things be? The War was over. Let it be over. Let
all wars be over.
Emptiness would be a relief. He was already thinking of retirement. He'd
gone driving along the Gulf Coast last summer, looking for the right spot.
He knew just what he wanted: A perfectly empty beach. So there would be
nothing to catch the eye, and then the emotions. That's how they trap you,
you know.
All he asked for was some hurricane-ravaged stretch of beach you would hurry
by in a car on the way to Mobile or Pensacola or Santa Rosa Island. A
no-place with no name. It would have nothing that you would get attached to,
or sacrifice for. It would be blank. He yearned for anonymity the way others
do for fame or power or talent.
He could picture it now: Just the tide and the sand. The kind of sand you
could shift with a garden rake and find nothing, nothing at all. No seaweed,
no driftwood, not a seashell. No view, no picnic tables, no palm trees. No
pink flamingos or painted starfish. Nothing distinctive.
The place he was looking for wouldn't have a name. It would be just another
bend in the road. You'd zoom past it at 75 mph and never see it. That was
the sine qua non for a retirement spot-that no one would notice it. That it
would have no distinguishing features. Because you could never tell what you
might get attached to.