LILY
The whole day had been a bit surreal and dreamy, and it was getting more surreal by the minute, because now Gabe and I seemed to be walking back in time. As a Savannahian, I was no stranger to men in homemade rebel uniforms. But as Gabe and I walked into camp, both of us with backpacks full of equipment, I realized that these weren’t the ordinary, garden-variety actors who wandered around Forsyth Square with their plastic muskets and spray-painted gold buttons. These weren’t the guys who traipsed into the Living History Museum, tipping their hats to us as they drank their caramel macchiatos. These weren’t the guys who filled up the strip mall urgent care with toe injuries from dropped replica cannon balls. These guys were the real deal, from their battered uniforms to their waxed cotton tents, right down to their homemade boots and their gunpowder-blackened hands.
Except up ahead of us stood a woman who was decidedly not part of our time traveling back to the 1860s. She was a strikingly statuesque lady, wearing lots of flowing, elegant linen. As we got closer, I saw she had fabulously oversize earrings and a chic close-cropped white haircut. Around her neck was what looked at first like an antique amulet but was—on closer inspection—a stylized Ghostbusters insignia, made of brass, coral, and mother of pearl. She had this way about her. This sort of glorious postmenopausal I’ve got this handled attitude. May we all be so lucky.
She reached out her hand to me. “Elaine Corynn,” she said, giving me a warm and welcoming smile. I recognized her immediately from Daisy’s ghost shows. This lady was definitely somebody in the ghost world. She shook my hand, but she didn’t let it go, and as she held it she looked from me to Gabe and back to me again. “Well, aren’t you two a lovely couple. Better stand back, though, when we get down to business. The love waves are coming off you like signals from Sputnik.”
I glanced up at Gabe, and he smiled at me. Love waves! Automatically my hand went to my new locket. “Don’t worry. We know. I can go wait in the van.”
But Elaine wasn’t having it. She shook her head, pursing her lips and studying us. “Nope. Both of you are going to need to clear the area. I’ve got a job to do, kids, and I’m not going to muck through your lovestruck auras to do it.”
Then from out of the dusky darkness emerged a face from another time. Thanks to my sister’s insistence on watching literally every Civil War documentary ever made, I recognized him right away.
“General Robert E. Lee,” he said as he tipped his hat at me. “Pleasure.”
Whoa, Nelly. No wonder he had a dedicated email. It was uncanny! “Oh my God,” I gasped, peering at him in the dim light. “That’s amazing!”
General Lee gave me a wink.
Under his arm, I noticed a book that was about the same size as my grandma’s large-print Bible. On closer inspection, I saw it was Ron Chernow’s biography on Grant. The last time I’d checked, I was twentieth on the wait list for it at the library.
I tapped on the spine. “Is that why we’re here? Making contact with You-Know-Who?”
General Lee scoffed. Or maybe that was a guffaw. “Good God, no. I know all I need to know about my old enemy. I must say, Chernow has a very accurate, thorough, and interdisciplinary historical approach,” General Lee said thoughtfully. “My friend Grant was a truly complex man. I admire his struggles, both personal and professional. Shows a mighty fine level of character. How I do envy his horsemanship.” He looked somewhat glumly at the portrait on the cover. He sighed and tucked it back under his arm. “Pardon me, my friends. I’m going to have a brief consult with my lieutenants about our battle plan for this evening. I bid you a fond adieu,” he said with a slight bow.
And he ambled off with his saber rattling.
I turned to Elaine. “I mean . . .”
She snorted. “His real name is Jerry Slattery, and he sells real estate.”
Gabe sniffed next to me, scratching his forehead. “So what exactly are we doing here?” he asked.
“As I understand it,” she said, adjusting her earrings, “these guys are historically accurate down to how much coffee they put in their pan over the camp stove. But there is one important thing that nobody in this strange business of theirs really knows. It’s called the Rebel Yell.”
Thanks to Daisy, I had developed a knack for willfully forgetting historical trivia; the sheer volume that she berated me with meant I had to pick and choose. But this, at least, I knew I didn’t know. Because nobody did. “It’s a mystery, isn’t it? Nobody really knows what it sounds like?”
She lifted an expertly pencil-shaded eyebrow at me. “Correct. There’s a few short clips of it from some Civil War veterans’ picnic when film was new and the veterans were old, but it’s not enough to really hear it. These guys are telling me that when they come out here, to this battlefield, they have heard it.” Elaine dropped her shoulders and lifted her chin, as if she were moving into a yoga pose. “We’re here to try to see if we can make contact to hear the sound. You all are here to record it.”
“Fantastic,” Gabe said, smiling. He let his backpack slide to the ground and pulled out his low-light camera. “We’ll get some shots around the camp. We’ll set up the audio and visual. Then where do you want us?”
Elaine looked at the two of us, spinning her wedding ring on her finger. “As far away from me as possible, lovebirds,” she said and twirled away, linen flapping.
As far away as possible put Gabe and me between the parking area and the so-called provisions tent, which I’d found to be stocked with enough danishes, sweet tea, coffee, and doughnuts to feed, literally, an army. Elaine, as the medium, was sitting on the other side of camp in the captain’s tent, and we’d set up cameras to film her séance from every angle. Not even once had Gabe grumbled that our love waves had exiled us to the edge of camp, and now we sat together on a cooler behind the provisions tent in the cool summer darkness, listening to the drills and the shouted commands. A patch of light streamed out from a lantern inside the infirmary tent, and inside I watched a lady dressed up as a battlefield nurse wipe a glop of jelly off her crisp white apron.
Gunfire punctured the sound of the willows blowing in the breeze, and shouts and calls of Fall in line and Hep-two-three-four cut through the air.
“We’re one violin solo away from being inside a Ken Burns documentary,” I whispered.
Gabe snickered beside me. He leaned into me and put a kiss to my cheek.
I slipped my hand underneath his and gave it a squeeze. “OK. So forgive me for being such a noob, but if we don’t know what it sounds like . . .” I trailed off, looking at Gabe.
He answered me with a knowing expression. “Then how the hell are we going to know it when we hear it?”
I nodded. “Ding-ding-ding!”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” Gabe slipped his phone from his pocket, and I glanced around to make sure we were in the clear. Nobody had specifically told us phones weren’t allowed, but getting the Glare from Daisy had taught me a thing or two about behaving appropriately in a rigorously accurate historical setting. Cell phones were tied with corn syrup on the list of no-no’s.
Gabe boldly held his phone out in front of the two of us. I like a man who knows how to take risks! “Let’s see what we can find.” He pulled his earbuds from his bag and plugged them in. He gave me one to put in my ear, and he did the same with his. I watched him type “rebel yell” into his browser, and up popped the usual array of stuff that I’d expect with any vaguely historical internet search. Lord knew I was no stranger to those. Only the week before Daisy had tasked me with finding out “How did they get rid of ants in the 1800s?” Answer: they didn’t.
On the screen was the usual array of hits—Wikipedia, history.com. But the third link was something from the Smithsonian that looked very interesting.
“Very promising.” I tapped the edge of the screen.
Gabe clicked on the link, and up came an article explaining what the Rebel Yell was and what it sounded like, but none of the descriptions were particularly helpful. Colorful, yes! Helpful, no. “‘The battle cry to rally the troops before a fight, the Rebel Yell is believed to be influenced by the war cry traditions of Native American and Scottish warriors. It is sometimes described as a cross between a rabbit’s scream and a whoop, or wolf’s howl and a cougar’s scream.’”
It sounded just dreadful. Rabbits screaming? I felt like Clarice Starling trying to forget the sound of the crying lambs. Pass! “What does that even mean?”
“I’ve heard the wolf and the cougar, but the rabbit is beyond me. Look at this.” Gabe highlighted a sentence to draw my attention to it. He read aloud, “‘There are no audio recordings of the yell from the Civil War period. Archivists have, however, recently unearthed audio clips from the 1930s of veterans performing the yell at a Civil War reunion.’”
There, embedded in the middle, was a video from the Library of Congress. It had to be what Elaine mentioned earlier. The thumbnail was black-and-white and showed a positively ancient man in a uniform that was identical to the ones that the troops in the encampment wore. Gabe hit play on a very, very old digitized film. One Civil War veteran acted as a sort of impromptu emcee, standing in front of a microphone and introducing various other veterans, who each gave the Rebel Yell a try. The first one was hardly more than a single hoot—it was over in an instant. The second one was a little longer but certainly wasn’t enough to get a sense of what the sound really was. It was clear to me that the old veterans, and their old lungs, weren’t strong enough to sustain much of anything, and so in each case the yell was barely a second or two before they ran out of air.
Onto the stage hobbled a slightly more spry old fellow, thin and gangly. He stood in front of the microphone and gave it his best. This time it wasn’t a matter of mere seconds. It was just enough to make me realize I had heard that sound before. “Gabe!” I gasped.
Gabe turned to me. “Holy shit. Is that . . . Lily, that’s . . .”
All those years of bellowing about Vicksburg, all those shushes and bribes, all those endless fibs about the Union in surrender. It all made sense. It all finally made sense. Hallelujah! I clapped my hands on Gabe’s shoulders and gave him a shake. “That’s the Noise! The General’s Noise!”