The boy stood still in the moonlight watching the riders approach. The chill of the night air had shaken the last bit of sleep-stupor from him, and he shivered, feeling the wind on his legs and the sensation of his bare feet touching the rough boards of the porch, and knowing that he was not dreaming. He had stumbled outside to make his way to the privy, but now something-not a sound, more like a feeling-made him stop a few feet from the door, and for long minutes as he stood there he would forget the push in his bladder that had sent him out into the cold darkness of an October night.

Night riders.

Horses were not an everyday sight in the mountains nowadays, as they had been in his daddy's time. Now that the Great War had ended in Europe, the world had changed. People talked about aeroplanes and automobiles and store-bought clothes. Every year brought more Model A's into the county, and those folks that didn't run an automobile could take the train into Johnson City or Asheville if they needed to go. You sent money to the mail-order catalogue, and the postman would bring you the goods, all parceled up in brown paper, whatever you'd asked for. They called it "the wish book." But nobody ever wished for the old days, not in these mountains. They all wanted the future to get here double quick.

But tonight was an echo of the old days ... there were horsemen at the edge of the woods.

The boy wondered who these riders were, out on the ridge past midnight, far from a road and miles from the next farm. He could make out three of them just this side of the trees beyond the smokehouse, but in the faint light of the crescent moon their features were indistinguishable. They carried no lantern, and they rode in silence. It took the boy three heartbeats longer to register the fact that the horses made no sound either. He heard no rustle of grass, no snapping of twigs beneath their hoofs.

One of the riders detached himself from the group by the woods and trotted toward the porch where the boy stood. He was a tall, gaunt man in a long greatcoat and scuffed leather boots, and he had a calculating way of looking through narrowed eyes that froze the boy to the spot like a snake-charmed bird. The rider looked to be in his twenties, with dark hair and black whiskers outlining his chin, as if he were growing a beard by default and not by design. The boy stared at the face, a pale oval in the moonlight, and he forgot to move or cry out. The man smiled down at him as if he had trouble remembering how. "Evenin', boy," he said in a soft mountain drawl. "What's your name then?"

"Rat-they called me Rattler, mister." It took him two tries to get the sound to come out of his throat.

The rider grinned. "Rattler, huh? Mean as a snake, are you, boy?"

The boy lifted his chin. Even if he was shivering in his nightshirt, he was on his own porch and he would not cower before a stranger. "I don't reckon I'm mean," he said. "But I give salt for salt."

"Fair enough." The dark man looked amused. "I guess I do the same." He glanced back at the woods where his companions waited, motionless, shadows in moonlight. "And you'd be-what? About twelve?"

"About," said the boy. He would be eleven in January.

"Well, snake-boy, what do you say? You want to ride with us?"

The boy shrugged. "Got no horse."

"Reckon we could rustle you up one." The smile again, cold as a moonbeam.

The boy hesitated. "You never said who you are, mister."

"I figured you knew. You've got good eyes on you, boy. And you don't scare easy, do you? So, what do you say? About riding with us, I mean."

"I-" The boy took a step backward until he stood in the doorway, under the iron horseshoe his grandaddy had nailed up over the front door. "Mister, I reckon my momma would skin me alive if I was to go off at night without telling somebody. And if I was to ask, I reckon the answer'd be no, anyhow."

"Well, women are mostly like that," said the rider, smiling again. He looked over his shoulder again at the shadows beyond the smokehouse. "Not all of them are, though. But most. Good evening to you, boy." With that he turned his horse and trotted back to the edge of the woods.

The boy could hear the oak branches scraping against the tin roof of the house, and he heard the rustle of the wind in the bushes that flanked the porch, but even though he stood stock still and strained to listen, he did not hear the sound of hoofbeats in the dirt. A moment later, the mewing of his mother's cat startled him, and he turned to see where it was. The cat hissed at him and puffed up its fur until it looked like a dandelion. When he looked out again across the yard the riders were gone.

He told no one about this midnight encounter, and it was years before he realized who he had seen on that October night. He started keeping a mason jar beside his bed so he wouldn't have to go outside to the privy during the night.

You would have thought that losing the war one time would be enough for them. You certainly would have thought that, wouldn't you?

As much sorrow and ruin and hatred among neighbors as was brought to these here hills by that sorry war, you would have thought they'd all be glad they missed out on it by being born a hundred years or so after the fact. They ought to be shut of it by now, ready to let the past bury its dead, and get on with the business of making a less terrible future. But no.

Oh, no.

They will not turn loose of that war.

Nearly every sunny weekend that God sends will find these hills swarming with summer soldiers and sunshine patriots ready to take up arms and take aim at some other tomfool lunatic on account of his uniform being a different color from theirs. They're shootin' blanks this time, of course. I reckon that's an improvement.

When the weather gets warm, there's usually a crowd of re-enactors up to something in my neck of the woods. They drive up in their Chevy pick-ups or their fancy SUVs, stash their cell phones under the driver's seat, and haul out their bedrolls and pitch their tents to make camp so that they can spend the weekend shooting their Springfield rifles at defenseless trees.

I go out there right often to pass the time with the fellows camping out, if I don't have anything better to do. I don't participate in the hostilities, you understand. I just go for the company. I've been living out in these woods for many long years now, and every now and again I get a craving to be sociable. I get right much company, you understand, but that's more work than visiting.

People around here know that I have the Sight, and that I know a thing or two about healing on account of my Cherokee blood, so they come to me right along for poultices and tonics, or advice-with young people it's love and with older folks it's money. I even get folks from as far away as Asheville and Knoxville these days. Earth-shoe people, I call 'em. They want to know if my potions are macrobiotic or holistic or whatever the new buzzword is at the time. I just smile. City people used to look down on the old ways, putting all their faith in the doctoring tribe at the medical center, but lately they've begun to wonder what we know that doctors don't, and they come. One of 'em told me that living in a shack with no indoor plumbing "added to my rustic charm." That fellow didn't need a laxative, but I gave him one anyhow.

Helping people in trouble is my calling, but by and large troubled folk are not good company, so every now and again I go sit a spell with regular folks just for the novelty of society. Most of the time I prefer the deer and the possums who are my neighbors, but a change is as good as a rest, they say, and I give it a try every now and again. When the re-enactors take to the woods come spring, I go and visit them of an evening.

I generally know when they are coming, and as much noise as those jokers make, it would be hard for me not to know when they had arrived.

We sit and chew the fat for a spell about the current events as of eighteen sixty-something, which they call "getting into character." I don't generally say much since I haven't studied up on the fine print of history like they have, but they're all too busy showing off to notice. I reckon an audience is just as important as an actor, anyhow.

When dinnertime rolls around, they put my name in the pot, and I accept the invitation to sit supper, because I am not one to turn down a free meal as long as it's offered as hospitality and not for charity. Sometimes I bring along a sack of mushrooms or some field greens and ramps so as not to feel too beholden to them. That always delights them more than the food they spent good money for. They claim my wild plants put them in the spirit of the old days, because it is just the sort of food that the real soldiers would have eaten. Their own grub isn't too bad, on account of they can afford to buy good cuts of meat to start with, which is more than I can say, but at least I don't spend my weekends pretending to be poor and dirty. And I am not fool enough to tell them that if they want the flavor of soldiers' rations there ought to be maggots in the meat. No, I'm just as happy with Grade-A fresh beef, thank you all the same. Well, the re-enactors like me. They say I am au-then-tic.

"Rattler, it might as well be 1862 for you," one of the pretend officers told me once. "You live out in the woods in a- uh-"

"Shack," I said. "I know it's a shack, boy. But it's paid for."

He winced at that. He's a lawyer. I reckon his house payments would make your nose bleed. "Well, a shack, then," he said. "You have no electricity or running water anyhow. It's no stretch at all for you to get into character as a citizen of the nineteenth century. You're practically there already."

I just smiled at him to let him know he hadn't hurt my feelings, but I did not tell him how right he was. And how sometimes for me that war is a lot closer than those play-actors think. They got a glimpse of it once, though. One time they did.

* * *

He was the most authentic-looking re-enactor those fools had ever seen. All of them agreed on that. He showed up around dusk on the first day of the encampment for the Battle of Zollicoffer.

In the real war Zollicoffer hadn't amounted to much. They fought it here in east Tennessee in 1862 and managed to get a Confederate general killed, but hardly anybody has ever heard of him. General Zollicoffer, as a matter of fact. See? I told you.

The battle-scholars call it "Mineral Springs" when they bother to mention it-hardly rates a sentence in a general account of the Civil War, they tell me, but since there hadn't been many battles fought in Appalachia, and since this one had been the first real Union victory of the war, the local re-enactors seized upon it as an excuse to stage a sham battle in east Tennessee. They didn't have many other options, because "the mountainous terrain was not conducive to large scale warfare," as one of 'em told me.

It was, however, conducive to ambushes and guerrilla warfare. Nobody had to tell me that. The bad feelings lingered on right up through my childhood, so I knew about that part, all right. In the Civil War the armies of both sides stayed out of these mountains as much as they could, leaving the latter-day re-enactors only a few skirmishes to choose from to display their skills in simulated warfare. Maybe a battle wasn't really representative of how the war played out in the mountain South, but it was what people expected to see and it's what re-enactors do. If you re-enacted what really happened in the Smokey Mountains during the Civil War, I expect they'd call you a terrorist.

Plenty of the folks around these parts perished in the war, but either they got conscripted and marched off to Virginia to do their dying, or else they stayed home on small farms and starved in private. Some of them died close to home in an ambush or a shoot-out, but those battles were so personal and parochial that it's hard to tell if the potentates on either side ever knew or cared what transpired. The local people knew, of course, about the war as an excuse for murder and the feuds that grew out of such goings-on. It took most of a hundred years for folks around here to forget it. Nobody would thank the re- enactors for reopening those old wounds. People want their wars and their history clean and neat, like it is in the movies. So they do little battles-not feuds and ambushes.

Every year as a way to celebrate-and simplify-local history, some of the local war-gamers refought the battle of Zollicoffer in a well-choreographed and widely publicized weekend event, preceded by an exhibition encampment popular with local school groups. The real battle took place in January 1862, but winter is hardly the time for pageantry. Few spectators and no tourists would be there to observe the ritual, and so, for everyone's convenience, they elected to reschedule the battle in a more temperate month. Later on in the summer, a couple of the more dedicated and affluent local re-enactors would make the long drive up I-81 through Virginia to join the uniformed hordes at Antietam and Gettysburg, and perhaps even appear as extras in a movie, but this little local set-to was a yearly tradition, the season-opener for the sunshine soldiers.

Several thousand troops had participated in the real battle-the Second Minnesota, the Fifteenth Mississippi, and a host of local Tennesseans defending home turf-but the twenty-first-century version of the engagement was carried out by fewer than one hundred men, roughly divided between Union and Confederate forces. If the sides were too unbalanced, some re-enactors had to change sides to even things up. Many a soldier kept an extra uniform in the trunk of his car just in case he had to change sides for the weekend. (Now that's close to an authentic representation of the war in these mountains.) The Union army had won the original battle, which was a good thing these days, since political correctness has replaced witch trials and communist hearings as the preferred way to torment our fellow countrymen.

The opposing forces pitched their tents about a mile from one other along a winding dirt road that alternated between fields and forest. I was visiting on the Confederate side that weekend, mainly because Jeff McCullough was a better cook than his Union counterpart at the other camp. Sometimes Jeff is a Yankee. He says he doesn't much care which army he's assigned to, because he had ancestors on both sides, same as I did.

"By re-enacting I'm not trying to get even or to change the outcome of that far-off war," he told me once. "I just want to understand it from the inside out. I think that by sweating in a wool jacket of butternut-gray and firing a muzzle-loader until the barrel burns my hand, I can somehow crawl inside the skin of a long-lost soldier so that his thoughts will somehow become mine."

Continues...

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Excerpted from Ghost Riders by Sharyn McCrumb Copyright © 2003 by Sharyn McCrumb. Excerpted by permission.
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