Chickamauga Dreaming: A Novel on the Civil War's Enduring Impact

By William Mathis

After the Civil War battles at Chickamauga and Chattanooga in 1863, Weston family members are either dead, in retreat, estranged or trying to cope with widespread devastation. By 1963, the family is still struggling with the war’s aftermath, starting to fracture over issues that arose a century before, and destined to experience turmoil from deceit and shocking revelations.

Set primarily in Chattanooga and in Atlanta, the novel showcases the region’s rich historical sites and links the modern-day with the long-ago war that still resonates in the lives of many people, sometimes in hidden or mysterious ways.

At the heart of the story is a Chickamauga Battlefield event that scars a series of Weston men in ways none of them understand. Finally, Rob Weston, five generations removed from the war, is forced to confront the event’s role in his life and the impact on his family.

Rob spends much of his life resisting anything to do with the Weston heritage and the smothering influence of his great-great-grandfather, Wilkie, a youngster during the war who never stopped passionately arguing that the South would have prevailed except for unforgivable leadership mistakes at the Battle of Chattanooga.

Rob’s father, Ronayne, fanatically and theatrically emulates Wilkie, adopting his Confederate perspectives, obsession with the war and – at times – his persona. Like Wilkie, Ronayne is convinced that if Major General Patrick Cleburne had been given the command he deserved, the Confederacy would have survived and avoided Yankee cultural pollution. Ronayne stands apart even from those with passion for the war and the Confederacy’s role in it, an apparent living relic from the century past and a source of extreme embarrassment for Rob.

When Ronayne decrees that his youngest son must learn Wilkie’s ways and carry on the Weston tradition, Rob rebels. But in telling his family story Rob uses Wilkie’s writings to illustrate how the war has affected his life and contributed to the conflict with his father.

The father-son anguish is complicated by the sweep of the Civil Rights Movement through the South. Rob openly supports black aspirations, much to Ronayne’s frustration. But the problems run even deeper. While attending college in Atlanta, Rob alienates his father with the discovery of a jolting family secret. And despite his staunch segregationist upbringing, Rob develops a deep relationship with a black family. Rob defies his father in many ways, but not without an emotional price.

Several women enrich, guide and sometimes bedevil Rob’s life. His mother, Beth, aspires to be a country music singer and seethes silently at Ronayne’s moralizing resistance, all the while playing a supporting role in his Civil War theatrics. Klari, Rob’s secret mentor and kindred spirit, provides support and encouragement but also a stark and frustrating contrast to the bizarre drama of Weston family life. Rob’s soul mate, Beverly, a black poet and firebrand, challenges his ideas, actions and cultural conditioning. Rob adores his unconventional wife, who creates havoc within the Weston family without even trying, but he profoundly deceives her without heed for the consequences.

Traveling an emotional odyssey from adolescence through middle age, Rob gains and loses a series of important friends while also coping with family dynamics that keep his life in turmoil. Ronayne helps to drive his son away from the South, but he is instrumental in forcing Rob to confront the Civil War’s complicated impact on his life.

Drawn reluctantly back to the Chickamauga Battlefield, adjacent to where his life began in the Weston home, Rob distills the experiences that have brought both confusion and enlightenment. A shattering personal tragedy plunges him into an emotional abyss, and Rob, caught in the Civil War’s unyielding grasp, can only emerge if he deals with the implications of an event that happened on the battlefield long ago.<

• Language: English
• Publisher: William Mathis
• Release date: Apr 6, 2011
• ISBN: 9781458027795

William Mathis

William Mathis was born in Chattanooga and grew up near the two major battlefields featured in Chickamauga Dreaming: A Novel on the Civil War's Enduring Impact. Although he moved to British Columbia after marrying a Canadian, the author's continuing fascination with the complex historical and geographical character of Chattanooga resonates in his novel. The numerous monuments and markers that visibly reflect the Chattanooga area's heritage inspired Mathis to probe the psychological and emotional connections between the modern South and the Civil War. His second novel, Baseball Card War, is a mystery also set in Chattanooga. The new novel features some of the same characters that appear in Chickamauga Dreaming. They are years older and still under the influence of the Civil War, but taking on a new challenge to help solve a serial murder case in modern-day Chattanooga. Most of the stories in the Love and Deceit collection are also set in the South, reflecting the author's attachment to people and places there.

Book preview

Chapter 1: The Weston-Civil War Unit

I'm a Chickamauga Battlefield Weston. Battlefield born. Battlefield bred. My psychic hide has Civil War stamped all over it. I have traveled an emotional odyssey into middle age trying to resist these simple facts.

Finally, I recognize that my life's story, for better or worse, encompasses the internal as well as the external experience of my father and my Civil War ancestors.

My story incubated in my father’s peculiar universe, in which the dominance of an event from a distant century left little room for other forms of life.

Explaining my father to others has never been easy, perhaps because I have tended to understate the case. My best friends have failed to understand.

Even Beverly Randolph, perhaps the most intelligent of my friends, couldn't grasp the grand scope of his character. Based on my description, she once told her mother that my father was basically an outrageous, bizarre, Confederate clone.

Oh, no, Beverly, I said. You're minimizing and generalizing.

Okay. Then he's a cartoonish, clownish, outlandish specimen of Southern culture. A stereotype on steroids.

No. You don't understand. He's beyond all of that. He's not a souped up lawnmower with racing stripes. He's a rocket ship.

Like any good rocket, my father's trajectory was always precisely clear. He lived for the Weston way, the only way I was allowed to know as a youngster.

Westons do this. Westons never, ever do that. Westons must refer to fathers as Pa.

For a while, in my early teens, I tried saying Dad, just as all my friends did with their fathers. But Pa wouldn't answer to it, wouldn't acknowledge my existence when I used it.

The lingo was just part of the Weston way that survived the Nineteenth Century's demise. Four generations became preoccupied, to varying degrees, with retelling the battle stories and reliving the hardships. In the process they transferred the essence of a war, a historical period, and an anachronistic personality into modern times.

For Pa's development of his Civil War obsession and his excessive strangeness, we must thank, in part at least, James Jackson (Jimmy Jack) Weston. The force of his personality, valor, and genes helped to meld his family with a cataclysmic historic event.

Jimmy Jack died defending his homeland and his home, falling near where he and his parents had planted corn and beans. Pa, and all the Weston men enraptured with Jimmy Jack, loved that romantically patriotic connection.

For the Westons, the sacred spot where Jimmy Jack was believed to have died became the site of an invisible monument, the one that the family thought the State of Georgia should have erected in his honor, but never did. The Westons acted in all respects as if the monument existed. Even I, hardly a devout worshiper at the family shrine, came to refer to the site simply as the monument, because everyone who had Weston affiliation knew what the term meant.

My father and his forebears regularly placed fresh flowers at the monument and at the graves of Jimmy Jack's parents and brothers, located on the old Weston homestead site nearby.

Only a road separated Pa's home from Chickamauga Battlefield. Jimmy Jack’s monument is accessible on foot by crossing the road and traveling a shady trail. It takes less than thirty minutes, walking briskly.

I was born in the family home on Sept. 20, 1946, eighty-three years to the day that Jimmy Jack gave birth to a family legend by dying. In naming there is knowing, so my father believed. He named me Robert James, after the South's great commander, General Robert E. Lee, and after my ancestor who died heroically for the Confederate cause,

For my father, the date and place of my birth constituted an umbilical link to Jimmy Jack. Although my brother Patrick had arrived three years earlier, I became the heir apparent to a Civil War legacy of intimidating dimensions. It would take more than a dozen years for my father to suspect that something was amiss, that the heir was not so apparent.

I've done many things to pain my father, but none so hurtful as refusing to take my prescribed place in the Weston-Civil War unit.

You don't care about your family heritage, he would complain. What could be more important?

I care about my family and my heritage, Pa, but I can't breathe life into something so patently dead. I don't have the energy or the strength or the inclination. And I don't see the point.

The point! The point! You mean to tell me I've raised a son who don't understand the point of what his ancestors fought for? Suffered for? Died for?

You know I understand it, Pa. And you know I don't agree with some of it. Let's not start on this again.

The problem with you is too much education and not enough learnin'. I should've kept you home from school and taught you from my own books.

At one point, in elementary school, I had asked to be kept home. The students' teasing about my father hurt too much. They called him The War Ghost, or more often simply The Ghost.

Saw you with The Ghost yesterday, Rob, they would say. What's it like living with a ghost?

That's when I first learned that he was different. Other fathers didn't talk incessantly about the Civil War. They didn't walk nonchalantly down city streets in Confederate uniform, doing modern errands in ancient disguise.

Pa didn’t wear the uniform because he was a war re-enactor, a participant in mock battles that replay history. He wore it occasionally because his body and soul were unalterably attuned to a Confederate cause that could not be allowed to die with a war defeat. But whether he was in or out of uniform, Pa’s world revolved around the Civil War – to the exclusion of almost everything else.

He stood out as an oddity even among those with a passion for the war. His body was located in the modern era, but his mind, heart, and spirit were so focused on the war that he appeared to be a living, breathing relic. The way people reacted to Pa, with wide-eyed bewilderment or ill-concealed amusement, told me all I needed to know about their perceptions of him.

My friends certainly saw him as freakish, or worse. But Pa didn't care about what anyone thought or said. Patrick didn't care much either. He was big enough and mean enough to respond to teasing with his fists. Mom tried to help.

Let me tell you, son. Those other kids might be jealous because their fathers don't have a solid purpose in life. Your pa is famous for his knowledge and commitment to the Southern heritage. Now, some may say he's crazy, but many others respect him. Nobody else, and I mean nobody except maybe a brilliant college professor, knows more about the Civil War.

Scholars occasionally visited Pa to discuss the Civil War era, and he gloried in their attention. They had to sift through the encyclopedic information he gave them for the nuggets. Much of what he offered had been gleaned from the dozens of books he consumed. But some of his knowledge, what they really wanted as leads for further research, had come straight down the family line. His Weston story was authentic – almost all of it.

Chapter 2: Pistol Reunion

Between Pa and me were twenty years and three thousand miles. On learning of his serious illness, I spanned the physical gap in less than a day. The emotional mileage would take longer.

My first stop after arriving in northwest Georgia was at Hutcheson Medical Center. I watched Pa from the hospital room door, his eyes closed and hands crossed on his stomach. The elevated bed propped his body up, almost to a half-sitting position.

The hair and beard, once as red as Georgia clay, had become silver streaked. The beard nudged his chest. The hair still flowed to Civil War length, neatly combed over the ears as always. The face was barely lined. He appeared to be a youthful sixty-seven, kept that way perhaps by his zest for the ages past.

I found it ironic to see him here at the hospital, hardly an echo away from his home but a world away from his lifestyle. He had always been the most vigorous, healthiest person I knew. Never sick a day in my childhood.

As I watched Pa, I remembered what he had taught me about the hill on which the hospital sits. While the Battle of Chickamauga raged to its conclusion, soldiers guarded the Union left flank here until darkness came.

Wilkie's dyin', Rob.

Pa's huge brown eyes were open, boring in on me.

What? I whispered in surprise.

You heard me. Wilkie's dyin' and you don't care.

Wilkie's dead.

No. Wilkie's dyin'. And you and Patrick stand around as if there ain't no crisis. You could help me save him, but you won't. You're tryin' to kill him, ain't you?

Please, Pa. Let's not start it. I've come to be with you.

After all this time. 'Cause you think I might die. Well, don't worry about me. Worry about Wilkie. If I go, what's the big loss? It's Wilkie we have to save, not me.

I had hoped this conversation wouldn't happen, all the while knowing that it would. It was unreasonable to expect that the heart attack had somehow bled his brain of any information relating to Wilkie Weston, my great-great-grandfather and youngest son of Jimmy Jack. Now, I didn't respond to his remarks about Wilkie, foolishly thinking he would give up and change the subject.

Wilkie came out of that little cabin when the shootin' stopped, nostrils burnin' from gunpowder driftin' like fog through the woods and across the fields.

Pa looked away toward the window, as if he were visualizing that long ago battlefield scene.

He continued: Wilkie survived a battle and war. I've kept him livin' the best I could. But he's dyin' now. And you don't care. You of all people.

I knew what Pa meant. Besides being born on Jimmy Jack's death day, I have the thick eyebrows that are obvious in Wilkie's photographs. And when I once grew a beard, it was bushy like Wilkie's. Although Pa saw this physical resemblance as an important connection to my ancestor, I thought my blue eyes, angular face and light brown hair gave me stronger links to my Mom's clan.

I can't take on Wilkie for you, Pa. You know that.

Don't know no such a thing. Wilkie is a part of you, if you would only recognize it.

There's a piece of Wilkie in all of us Westons. We're not Wilkie, but we continue his genes.

Not good enough. I know so much about Wilkie that his knowledge comes out of my pores every day, like sweat.

Since you're being feisty, you must be recovering nicely.

Pa smiled briefly, then his eyes narrowed. She come with you?

No. Fighting one battle at a time is all I can handle.

For you the battle is over.

Over?

He just looked at me, hard. I noticed a thin smile lurking behind the beard. Then I saw it. Escaping the morning clouds, the sun paid a visit to Pa and sent a sharp reflective flash toward me.

Where did you get that? Put that down.

He laughed.

Bet you thought you were just comin' here to see a sick old man. A crazy, sick old man who might be dyin'.

He laughed harder.

Well, if I'm dyin', Rob, and Wilkie's dyin', then you're dyin', too.

I looked toward the door. Though closed now, I was sure it had been open while we talked before. All of my earlier uncertainty about whether my father was crazy or just immeasurably eccentric came storming through my head.

He aimed the weapon, his ancient .38, straight at me. Bedroom heart attack victims typically don't pack pistols to the hospital. Who brought it? Did Patrick set me up? Who?

If I bolted for the door, or if I yelled for help, would he shoot? His own son? My throat muscles tensed.

What's this all about, Pa?

You should know by now, son. If you ain't learned nothin' else from me, you should know this is about Wilkie.

Yes, I should have known. Everything had always been about Wilkie and the war.

And what about Wilkie?

Either we're goin' to save him, or we're both goin' to die with him.

Pa had me convinced that this scene was a lot more serious than I wanted it to be. There was nothing to do but talk.

What exactly do you mean?

Pa smiled again, so pleased with himself.

I mean that either you agree to save Wilkie, or I'm goin' to shoot you. And then I'm goin' to shoot me.

I tried to humor him.

Well, at least you've picked the right place. There's lots of good medical help here to patch up the bullet holes.

We won't need no doctors, 'cause I ain't missed a bull's-eye from this range since I was in diapers.

Pa looked approvingly at the pistol, held in a businesslike grip. Turning back to me, he spoke with a tone of sincerity, concern, and courtesy.

I reckon the proper place for this to happen would have been over yonder at Lane's Funeral Home, so the family saved some dollars on transportin' the bodies. Forgive me for bein' so thoughtless about the location of our discussion.

He's crazy for sure, I thought. And serious.

Well, let's hop in my car and drive over to Lane's. No use placing a financial burden on Mom.

Pa laughed aloud.

No, son. We ain't goin' no place from here 'cept heaven or hell – unless you agree to save Wilkie.

I sighed. Saving Wilkie had always meant absorbing his knowledge and emulating his beliefs, the same as taking a poison pill for me.

I can't save Wilkie.

Pa was silent, appearing to reflect on the situation while he looked away from me. Then he sighed and met my eyes.

I reckon I know, deep down, that you can't do what I've wanted since the day you first caught a breath. I once thought you could do it. Would do it. But I expected too much.

Then what's this all about?

We've got Wilkie's writin's, but that’s just a piece of the story. If you can't be the man Wilkie was, then you can at least get his story down on paper.

I took a deep breath.

On paper?

Yep. You're a writer. You can record what Wilkie has passed down to me.

His tone took on a hint of friendliness and accommodation.

You can keep him alive through the words in a book. It ain't nearly the same as carryin' on the Wilkie ways, but it's better than losin' the treasure.

Another deep breath. I felt a little safer now. He was talking almost rationally. But I wasn't thinking so rationally. I should have just agreed and left. But I blurted:

What if I agree to write Wilkie's story then renege later, once the gun is no longer a threat?

You won't. Or at least I don't think you will. The Rob I used to know was honest, sometimes too honest. I doubt you've changed. If you have, I'll hunt you down and finish what I've started.

Honest or not, this commitment is being made under duress.

Yeah. But I want you to make the commitment to do somethin' for your pa, instead of the pistol. I want this real bad, Rob.

Pa relaxed the grip on the pistol and gently placed it on the bed. He studied it for a moment then eyed me squarely.

You think I like holdin' a pistol on my own son? One I ain't seen for twenty years? It makes me look crazy, when I ain't. I'm just in need, son. I'm hurtin' inside, real bad.

I had no idea what to say. We were both silent, eyes locked on each other. I searched for words to match the situation, to somehow respond to Pa's rare baring of feelings, but he spoke first.

If it's dyin' that I've got to do, it would be easy 'cept for takin' Wilkie with me. That would be the hardest, awfullest thing I've ever done. It would be a hateful act to the Westons, to the South. I'll do whatever it takes to avoid it.

I understand, Pa.

If you understand, and if you care at all about me, then you'll do what I ask, without the pistol. You'll put Wilkie down on paper.

Okay, Pa. I'll put Wilkie on paper for you. But you didn't need a pistol to convince me.

He smiled.

Well, I figured I might need some help, since I ain't never managed to convince you of much.

There's something else I've got to do, Pa. I realized it as soon as my plane landed. I've got to tell my story. There's a book waiting to come out of me. Okay?

The whole story?

All of it.

He looked out the window. An ambulance rounded the curve on the hill, heading toward the emergency room.

Okay. He patted the pistol on the bed. Wilkie's got nothin' to be ashamed of. And I ain't neither. I've done what I done for plenty of good reason. Just be fair, you hear?

I knew I could be fair, and the arrangement appeared to be fair. But in time Pa's pistol would seem perhaps the better option.

Chapter 3: Crazy Like a Genius

On the road by his mailbox Pa had erected a handsome wooden sign: Ronayne Lee Weston - Carpenter. As a child I had kept the sign in good repair, sanding and varnishing it every year or so. But after leaving the hospital, I saw that the sign was now weather worn. Pa, it seemed, wasn't doing much carpentry anyway.

Pa built his home with his hands, as his ancestors had done, partly from fieldstones surrendered by the Georgia earth. A four-room house at first, the building gained a room with each birth and maturation of the two sons. Patrick and I, in our turn, hauled the stones to help create the foundations for our own bedrooms.

Jimmy Jack never got nothin' for nothin', said Pa. And you won't neither.

From the outside, the house seemed the same as I remembered it. Set back from the road a hundred feet, it nestled in oak shade trees that flanked the covered porch running the length of the front. The trees and the rockwork extending a third of the height of the house projected a feeling of coolness, even on the hottest days.

Mom's miracle touch with plants continued to produce a colorful palette. Blossoming white dogwoods lined the driveway on both sides, and underneath the thin branches flowers in their multi-hued springtime costumes waltzed with the wind.

Inside, I knew, would be the same antique furniture that Pa had collected to go along with family heirlooms, trying to approximate a post-Civil War era look as a fitting residence for Wilkie. Outside, I expected some change, some inkling of the passage of time, but saw none at first inspection.

Then I noticed. The twenty-five-foot flagpole on the south side of the house stood barren. The Confederate battle flag that had flown there every day during my presence at the house was missing. With Pa in the hospital, I suspected, no one was bothering to maintain the tradition.

On the covered porch stood the same ancient oak rocking chairs, and the same swing hung by chain from the rafters. Mom would sit with me in the swing and sing country songs for hours, plucking the guitar and pounding her feet on the planks.

I became her audience, confidante, and critic. She wanted to be a country music star, the north Georgia version of Patsy Cline.

Don't you think I sing as good as Patsy Cline, Rob? Tell me the gosh honest truth, now. Would I be much out of place singin' at the Grand Ole Opry?

I didn't lie to her, because I really didn't know for sure. To me, she sounded terrific, as good as anybody I had heard on the Opry radio show. And she was always the best singer at the Homecoming Singings we went to at the area churches.

Yes, I always told her, she could match Patsy. But Pa said there would be no trying.

It ain't fittin', Beth, he would say. Just ain't dignified.

It was fitting for Mom to sing in church, he said. And at any church Homecoming she cared to attend. And it was okay for her to go hear the professionals at the Gospel Singings at Memorial Auditorium in Chattanooga, a few miles up the road. But she couldn't sing country music in public. And she couldn't visit the mecca of country music in Nashville, just a three-hour drive.

Any public association with country music, with songs that sometimes featured drinking, deception, and divorce, wasn't fitting. It didn't match his conception of how a Weston woman, a Christian woman, should behave.

So we made the porch our Opry, and she sang me songs by Patsy Cline and Kitty Wells, as well as her own material. She'd introduce her latest song the same way every time, as if she were appearing before an adoring throng.

This is a little song I wrote recently, and I'm singin' it in public for the first time today. I sure hope y'all enjoy it.

One of her songs, Half-Crazy, repeated so many times after debuting when I was six or so, had been entrenched in my head since childhood, and it came easily to mind as I stepped onto the porch.

The days dawn bluer than blue,

the nights are long and black

all lights are dim and hazy

and I've been half-crazy

since the day I lost you

Half-crazy, half-crazy

since losing you

I'd worry about my future

if I could, but I'm too

absent-minded and lazy

'cause I've been half-crazy

since the day I lost you

Half-crazy, half-crazy

since losing you

I hardly know what to do

or say, I couldn't tell

a red rose from a daisy

'cause I've been half-crazy

since the day I lost you

Half-crazy, half-crazy

since losing you

The room keeps spinning

round and round and my

head is feeling woozy

'cause I've been half-crazy

since the day I lost you

Half-crazy, half-crazy

since losing you.

Inside, the living room appeared the same as I remembered. Maple floor, antique maple rocking chair, ancient high-backed sofa. The Weston family photos still dominated the walls: Jimmy Jack in uniform, Wilkie, their progeny, and most of the wives. I stared hard at Wilkie's photo. The thick eyebrows were prominent, but his large nose and a thin mouth almost hidden by the beard assured me once again that my resemblance to him was minor.

The photograph of my great-grandmother Sarah stopped me for a long minute. I knew I was unlikely to see a more important photograph in my lifetime. Sarah’s eyes were full of her history, and my own. I wished then that Sarah could know how the saga she started and I finished had turned out. But thinking the saga was over would prove to be foolish.

Equally prominent on the walls, as always, were photos of Patrick Ronayne Cleburne and Robert E. Lee, the generals who shared names with a string of Weston men. As well, the battlefield maps remained, framed and taking places of honor with the photos.

The antique clock, a Civil War era relic that had never functioned in my childhood, sat in the same place. I checked the time. Still 11:55. I felt as if I had entered a museum. I also felt at home.

Peeking into the kitchen, I saw Mom at the counter. Pa had made her kitchen workspace a little lower than standard to match her small stature. The hair that had trailed down her back in my childhood now rested in a twirl on her head, still full and thick if not as brown. Her thin frame still projected a sense of bodily grace and athleticism, with arms and legs that moved with the sureness of a ballet dancer.

She was baking. The smells, locked in my memory, caressed my senses and pulled me back to the time that we baked buttermilk biscuits together. She made the dough and I cut out the biscuits.

When Mom saw me her arms also caressed me, as did her voice. She did more than communicate with her speech. Her broad phrasing, her slow and measured cadence, and the casual but clear tone of her voice, turned any room into a concert hall. She spoke music.

Rob, you've been gone from this house so long I hardly know what to say. You saw Pa?

Yes. His one-track mind is still headed in the same direction.

Wilkie?

Yes.

Instinctively, I tried to assess any hint of collusion with Pa on the pistol, though I was certain she knew nothing.

Well, he's worried. The heart attack scared him. He thinks about death a lot, although I think he’s advancin’ the calendar much too fast.

I know. I talked to the doctor.

Did you come alone?

Yes. Was I wise?

I'm not the one to answer that. Patrick is waitin' for you on the back porch. I've got him shellin' me some nuts for a pecan pie. Just for you.

Patrick had phoned me about Pa's illness – our first conversation in twenty years. Through the screen door I saw the big shoulders and thick neck. The hair was short as always, almost a crew cut. He leaned his long body, tucked into tight jeans and white T-shirt, over a table while his large hands delicately extracted pecans from the shell.

Poor Patrick. With me away, he became the focus of Pa's relentless attempt to save Wilkie. Apparently he couldn't stand the pressure.

No use playing a guessing game.

You know, Patrick, it's amazing how dangerous hospitals have become. Even heart attack patients are packing pistols now.

Patrick didn't flinch. He put down his nutcracker and grinned.

Took you by surprise, huh?

Surprise is hardly an adequate description.

I'm sorry, Rob. He just about harassed me to death over that pistol. But I promise you, it wasn't loaded.

No? Well, he put on a terrific act. I thought he might've shot me.

Well, he might've, depending on what you said – and if he had bullets. He demanded bullets, but I gave him blanks.

Well thank you for that consideration. I was only in danger of being frightened to death instead of having my innards splattered on the wall.

I knew you'd handle it okay, or I wouldn't have done it. And something had to be resolved about Wilkie, or I might've shot the old boy or let him shoot me. He has never let it alone, not in all the time you've been gone.

Patrick started to shell the pecans again, then stopped and looked at me with unfamiliar emotion in his eyes.

You can't imagine the torment it has been for me. But I can't do it, Rob. Even if I had the obsession, which I don't, I'm not smart enough. Do you realize how smart Pa is? People get fooled by the way he acts, but I think he may be a genius, a walking Civil War library.

Genius. That's a term I never had thought to apply to Pa. In adolescence, I would not have been at all surprised if men in white uniforms had appeared at our door and hustled Pa away in a strait jacket. It seemed to me that if not insane, he stood at the precipice waiting for a slight breeze to blow him over.

But from what source do unrelenting passion and one hundred percent obsession spring? Can it be either genius or insanity? Is there an interface between the two? In the insane asylums of the land, I suspect, are many men and women of genius: misunderstood and misdiagnosed.

Pa was no Einstein or Mozart, but in regards to Wilkie Weston he had to be either genius or lunatic. I have come to prefer genius.

Wilkinson David Weston was born May 10, 1853 in the family home some two miles west of West Chickamauga Creek, to Jimmy Jack and Velma Lou Weston. He was the last of three sons.

We don't have to guess at much about Wilkie. The Westons know Wilkie's life in great detail, plus much of what he knew about Jimmy Jack. The family put some of the information in writing, while carefully preserving Wilkie's record of his Civil War experience and research. But three successive generations of Weston males carried much of the knowledge in their heads and communicated it orally.

Six years after the war, Wilkie married Virginia Carolina Cooke, a preacher's daughter from Rossville, a few miles north of Chickamauga Battlefield. She bore Wilkie only one son, Jackson Horace. But one proved to be enough to initiate the perpetuation of Wilkie's Civil War.

Jackson readily absorbed his father's ideas and general knowledge. For his grandson, Jackson also imitated Wilkie's voice and manner as a means of creating a vivid family link. Those imitations unwittingly created the embryo that Pa nurtured to the maximum.

Before Wilkie died in December 1920, a week before my father's birth, the Weston heritage had been passed on to Lee Cleburne, my grandfather.

A keen student of the war, Wilkie read everything possible, and he also latched onto every veteran soldier he could find to glean historical data. He created a body of unquestioned knowledge for the Westons, but some of his habits also affected every succeeding generation.

To my chagrin, Wilkie initiated the Weston practice of traveling to other battlefields. Pa never took us on a vacation that did not include a visit to a national battlefield. I believe we visited most of them in the South and even got to Gettysburg in Pennsylvania.

At all of the battlefields Pa would say at the end of the tour, with a kind of reverent pride and arguable accuracy, It was bloody, but none was bloodier than Chickamauga.

Patrick and I eventually came to expect that pronouncement and offered our version in the safety of whispered privacy: It was boring, but none was more boring than Chickamauga.

The battlefield visits, the myriad details about the war, and the decidedly Confederate worldview slid unimpeded down the Weston family line from Wilkie to Pa, thanks to Jackson and Lee. But at the end of the line, Jackson's somewhat rational vision mutated.

He had hoped the family heritage of knowledge would be preserved and honored through successive generations. I doubt though that either of the elder Westons could have anticipated what Pa would do with that heritage.

I don't recall much about my grandfather, who died when I was six. But Mom said Grandpa, although clearly committed to the Weston tradition, did not appear to be consumed by it. I asked an old-timer who knew Pa, Grandpa, and Great-Grandpa, to draw a comparison. He just smiled and said the elder Westons were a lot quieter than Pa.

The further the limb grew from the root, the stronger it became. Pa carried Jackson's deep interest in Southern traditions, the war, and his ancestors' role in it to the greatest extremes – to the point that he may have even convinced himself that Wilkie lived through him.

While Jackson and Lee could demonstrate how Wilkie talked, and I believe they only occasionally did so, Pa desired Wilkie's persona to share his life.

Ronayne was certainly the predominant personality, but Wilkie appeared often, his speech and manner clearly distinct from his heir's. At the very least, Pa saw Wilkie as being alive in the sense that the Civil War survivor's ideas and beliefs were communicated in his own words and style.

Pa had enough self-awareness to know that he was one of a kind and his many-faceted emulation of Wilkie couldn't be cloned. But he expected that Wilkie's knowledge, beliefs, and manner of speaking would be communicated to and survive in every succeeding Weston generation. When Patrick and I came along, however, that stout limb suddenly withered. We were unwilling to play the game.

Indeed, we were speeding in the opposite direction to Pa and destined for a collision with him. I had no desire to keep Wilkie alive, in the sense that Pa wanted. Wilkie's influence in my life was unappreciated, his interference unwelcome, his impromptu appearances unnerving.

I much preferred to kill him.

Chapter 4: The Nightmares

Sounds and images defined my childhood as much as people and events. Perceived incongruities and eccentricities in the Weston family framed my experience as starkly as the boyhood staples of friendships and adventures. Always, the elements of strangeness and unconventionality floated into my youthful awareness without provoking any sense of surprise.

I didn't know for sure about the nightmares until I was seven. For years I had heard the noise occasionally when it woke me. I thought Pa was being silly, deliberately, though I didn't inquire why and I knew it was out of character. But he was strange enough, anyway, so one more thing didn't seem to matter.

The sounds were almost animal like, a series of snorts, coughs, and choking sounds.

Patrick, a sound sleeper, said he never heard anything at night. When I finally asked Mom, she told me.

He's havin’ nightmares about the war.

I thought she meant the Second World War, in which Pa fought before being sent home with a slow-healing chest wound.

Pa can't get over being shot?

Shot? Shot? Oh, no, Rob. You've got the wrong war. Pa's nightmares are about the Civil War.

My seven-year-old mind couldn't understand that, but it could accept it. She didn't explain further until five years later, when I asked again because the nocturnal sounds were disturbing me.

Why does Pa have nightmares about the Civil War? I know he lives and breathes it, but he wasn't in it.

Mom smiled.

No, but Wilkie was there at Chickamauga. And Wilkie had nightmares about it. And so does your pa. I don't expect you to understand that, because I sure don't. If I wasn't married to Ronayne I probably wouldn't believe that, but it's true.

Mom looked up at the ceiling, as she would do after saying something that she felt the listener needed to absorb. And I sure needed time to think about this. It was a whole new layer on the Wilkie cake. Finally, I asked what Pa dreamed about.

He won't talk much about it. He just says it’s powerful and frightenin', relivin' – if that's the right word for your pa – an unforgettable event at the Battle of Chickamauga.

Is it always the same dream? The sounds he makes are always the same.

I don't know that for sure. He won't discuss it, even though it seems to have become a part of him.

You mean he wants to keep it?

No, Rob. I'm sure your pa would like to let this go, if he could.

Mom said that after initially finding the nightmares sleep disturbing, she learned to block them out. Since they never bothered Patrick, it seemed that I alone heard them.

When I awoke to the snorting and choking sounds, after my talk with Mom, I would lie in bed and wonder what they meant. How could his nightmares possibly relate to Wilkie's battlefield experience?

After that conversation with Mom, more than a quarter century passed before I knew the event that created nightmares for Wilkie and Pa. And when Pa finally told me, I wished he hadn't.

More than anything else, I wished he hadn't.

Chapter 5: Wilkie's Record

During my youth, Pa often encouraged me to read Wilkie's record of his war experiences and research. My interest in it then was non-existent, however, so until my return to the South I never read a page.

Now it's clear to me that my own story is inseparable from Wilkie's. Because Wilkie's experiences are stitched into the fabric of my life, I have woven much of his Civil War record into this book.

Wilkie, a career dry goods merchant in Ringgold, Ga., read widely and learned to write reasonably well with direct language and clear penmanship. He was thirty-one when he dated the first page of his record on May 21, 1884. But no dates appear after that, so it’s unclear how long he labored with the material. Wilkie seems to have written for family heritage purposes rather than publication. He bound his pages in a brown leather cover with a hand-written title.

My intent has been to preserve the essence of the record, but I have made additions and deletions. I have omitted most of his detailed battle descriptions, because readers who desire such information can find a wealth of it elsewhere.

In some instances, I have made additions from Pa's knowledge of Wilkie to provide details that seemed to be important to give the story proper context. Spelling corrections and rearrangement for clarity seemed essential.

The original material in most respects does not match Wilkie's speaking style. The grammar is much better, and the folksy figures of speech are largely missing. So I have edited and added to convey some of his personality and manner as emulated by Pa, and to make the record read more like Wilkie's spoken word.

The result is a Wilkie story that I think Pa would not disagree with, because it captures the character in a way that the words flowing from my great-great-grandfather's pen could not.

Wilkie apparently did not intend to reveal himself. I think he simply wanted to ensure that the Westons' Civil War experience would not be forgotten. My intent is to show how that experience, and Wilkie's nature, has affected my life.

Record of the Weston Family

During the War of Northern Aggression, 1861-65

By Wilkinson Weston

The area around what came to be called Chickamauga Battlefield was at first just a hope without a name for my grandpa. He came over from Ireland in 1815, when he was only eighteen years old, orphaned and so poor he was always dreamin' about the food he wanted but couldn't have. He settled around Savannah and did some farmin' in the lowlands, but he wasn't happy there, and not too prosperous neither.

Grandpa made his way up to North Carolina, and tried his hand at some more farmin' on a little place that he rented. Then he heard about the Indian land lottery in Georgia and decided the time was right to move west. He was like a lot of pioneers, I reckon, who had a hankerin' to move from settlements into wilder territory. Grandpa was lookin' for a change, but he said he didn't want to take no profit from the misery of the Indians.

He told my Pa, The government was movin' the Cherokee Indians out of north Georgia. No matter what I did, that was a fact.

The Cherokees got moved to the Indian Territory out west in 1838, then Georgia took their land and put it up for lottery in 1840.

Grandpa said he didn't agree with none of that.

I want to make it plain that the government was as wrong as plantin' a crop in a bed of rocks. But stoppin' it would be the same work for me as changin' the weather, so I figured I might as well do the best I could with it.

Grandpa moved the family to Georgia in 1841 in hopes of buyin' some land that lottery winners didn't want, and he got his wish. Still, he was powerfully upset when he arrived.

Folks hereabouts said the Cherokees was herded up into stockades like animals before bein' taken away. But thousands of them Cherokees didn't get nowhere near their new home. The weak and the old ones died, and that's why the trip came to be called the Trail of Tears.

Grandpa wondered right hard if he wanted to be workin' the land that had been taken from Cherokees in such a way.

I decided there wasn't no way to make amends, except to be thankful for what we had and to always remember where the land came from.

I always get riled when I think about it, because if ever any Indians knowed how to be civilized and how to farm and make a livin' like the white man, it was the Cherokees.