a house divided

Dearest Iqbal-

I've suddenly realized that you know nearly nothing about my childhood spent growing up on the ruins of Civil War battlefields. My parents coveted the space because it was in most cases protected by the state and buildings had what they called with "character." Both of their childhood homes had long been demolished or had "additions" which made them entirely unrecognizable and incongruous with their precious memories. They wanted nothing so jarring for me. Many a night, as I drifted off to sleep in rooms where great Generals made mistakes and history, I was assured that the state of Virginia or the state of Pennsylvania would keep this house standing long after I was, and that my children would be able to come and see what I saw.

I grew up in General A.P. Hill's headquarters for the second Battle of Bull Run, the hospital in which General James Longstreet was taken after being tragically wounded at the Battle of the Wilderness, and they have kept General Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson's dying place as a "summer home."

While the irony is not lost of them they are decidedly unglib about the whole experience. "This is our home, right now. It is a lovely home. Not many people are lucky enough to live near decent sized towns but also have big open spaces all around them. You can smell the apple blossoms."

And you could.

To live in Fredericksburg is to live in the shadow of something that likely holds no interest. Historians pilgrimage there, they cross the river, they sit on the ground, and then they go back to Cincinnati, or Cheyboygan, or Lake Champlain. Fredericksburgers cross the river to get to work and some of them even still live off the fruit of that ground.

We were of course not of Southern stock. Technically we could be called "carpetbaggers" but that distinction only seems to stick if you let it, and my parents did not. And the strange, ignoble position of most of our homes deflected most of the standard commentary.

I met a girl named Hannah when we were living in Fredericksburg. She was from real southern Stock, further down the coast, but we met in the middle. Her locker was several down from mine at the public school where the Rape of Carthage was described with more life and verity than any more local narrative. We smiled and lingered, like we were wont to do, before saying "Hello" sometime in my second year.

We previously had sat together in a history class.

"In exchange for sparing the city and allowing it to remain free of Roman rule, the Carthagians sent 300 'well born' Cathagianian children as hostage to Rome, for purposes of sex and imperial humilitation. Carthage assented, the children were sent, but Rome was still unsatisfied. The siege was brutal. A dam was built cutting off the harbor from supplies. The Romans burned the Cathagian fleet with the entire city just staring. Starvation was rampant, and when the military collapse finally came, 15 days of burning followed."

A map was pulled down, showing the Mediterranean flush with earth tones.

"Before the military left they salted the ground so that nothing could grow there. Many historians have subsequently found that to be apocryphal, made up sometime during the 19th century, but like any good rumor people need to believe it for it to be spread and people do believe it."

"Where do you live?" asked Hannah.

"Off Caroline St. Towards the water."

"Are you serious? That's the battlefield, isn't it?"

"Yeah, we live in a protected house. You go through the parking lot for the soccer field and there's a dirt road that leads to my house."

"Is it haunted? Or old and creepy?"

"I don't think it's haunted."

She did eventually come over, I think a few months later, and by then the fact had receded out of what she considered interesting and the only thing that was mentioned was how old and pretty the house was.

"Oh, yes. Luckily it's protected," intoned my mother from the kitchen.

The only other time the issue came up was when Hannah asked where we lived previously. The answer was Gettysburg. And before that? Chancelorsville.

In Gettysburg we lived in what had been an abandoned farmhouse for much of the 20th century. A developer named Edmon Peatons, an associate of my maternal grandfather, purchased the barn and painstakingly refinished it from the inside, leaving the bullet ridden facade untouched. The house was given as a wedding gift to my grandfather and had remained in the family until my parents sold it in 2002.

Beside the house was an apple orchard. That was the one my father often talked of when he'd stand up at his window, which had once been elevated barn doors, letting the breeze blow strait through the house filling it with the odor of apple blossoms.

This house may have been haunted. We never stopped hearing creaks and groans, some quite formed and articulate, and my mother claimed that no home built by the Edmon Peatons and Lindsay Rowland (my grandfather) could ever need to shift that much. We reminded her that though they did the refinishing the house stood long before.

"And will goddamn stand long after."

Unlike Fredericksburg which hides its looming past behind a thin curtain of normalcy, Gettysburg was born again after the events of three days more than 150 years ago. During the day I kept my head down. On the way to school and back I avoided looking at the lookers, those who came with binoculars and cameras and tramped the ground, with each step pushing the dead deeper under ground.

They stand around and some fool in a top hat recites Lincoln's Gettysburg address. But dammit does a single one listen? "In a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground." Of course you can't, because I live here and you are trespassers on my life, not vice-versa.

But at night things changed. The tourists withdrew to the over-priced restaurants and the indoor pools of their hotels. Sometimes I'd go out and hallow the ground.

In middle school, my best friend was named Samantha. We'd occasionally meet in the apple orchard beside my house in the middle of the night. The great benefit of my house being haunted was that no one paid very much attention to creaks and the sound of hinges slipping against itself.

I seem to remember the ground being wet beneath my feet, and running barefoot through the orchard smelling the candied breeze. I'd look back to make sure the house was still dark and we'd sit in the branches of an old twisted apple tree. We had plenty of privacy to do illicit things and we were of the age, but we never did. I don't it ever crossed our minds. We'd whisper. Why? There was no reason. We were hundreds of feet from a road, more than half a mile from either of our houses. But we'd whisper.

We didn't talk much about the history. Unlike me, she had been born and raised there, but we felt different out there alone. It may just have been because we knew that all around us were people who were enthralled and excited to be there, who had travelled to our home to see it. It made sense and felt right that they would. We were excited and enthralled to be in that tree.

I have been back to none of the sites in the past few years, but a careful review of google maps has revealed that each stands exactly as I remember.

-Robert de Saint-Loup