“As for Abe Lincoln,” declared Major Fitch, an ancient confederate, “if it hadn’t been for 11 him Gawd knows what we’d ’a’ had to talk about in these dry days. I tell you, sah, we ought to be eternally grateful to Abe Lincoln. I for one am. I was a clerk in a country store when the war broke out and I’d ’a’ been there yet if it wasn’t for the war. I’m here to say it made me and made my fam’ly. We were bawn fighters—my fo’ brothers and I—and up to the sixties we were always in trouble for brawling. The war came along and made a virtue of our vices. My mother used to be mighty ’shamed when she heard we were called the ‘Fighting Fitches.’ That was befo’ the war, and one or the other of us boys was always up befo’ the co’t for wild carrying on. But, bless Bob, when we were called ‘Fighting Fitches’ for whipping the Yankees the old lady was as pleased as Punch.”
“What did they call ye fer not bein’ able to whup us?” asked a grinning old giant from the mountains.
“Nothin’—’cause we were able. All we needed was mo’ men and mo’ food and mo’ guns. We’d ’a’ licked the spots off of you Yanks if we had had a chance. You wouldn’t stand still long enough to get whipped.”
So the talk went on, day in and day out. Battles were fought over and over but never finished. They always ended with a draw and 12 could be resumed the next morning with added zest and new incidents. One old man, Pete Barnes, who had the distinction of being the only private who frequented the porch at Rye House, always claimed to have been present at every battle mentioned—even Bunker Hill and the battle of New Orleans.
“Yes sirree, I was there; nothin’ but a youngster, but I was there!” he would assert. “There wasn’t a single battle the Fo’th Kentucky Volunteers didn’t get in on an’ the Johnny Rebs would run like hell when they heard we were comin’. I tell you when we got them a goin’ was at Fredericksburg in ’62—must have been ’bout the middle of December. We beat ’em even worse than we did at Chickamauga the following year.”
“Aw dry up, Pete. You know perfectly well the Yanks got licked at both of those battles,” a jovial opponent would declare, but Pete Barnes was as sure his side had won as he was that he had been present at the surrender of Cornwallis and there was no use in trying to persuade him otherwise.
The Rye House faced on Main Street and nothing happened on that thoroughfare that escaped the oldsters on the porch. If anything was going on all they had to do was move their 13 chairs from the side porch to the front, whether it was a circus parade or a funeral, or just Miss Ann Peyton’s rickety coach bearing her to Buck Hill, which was the first large farm the other side of the creek, the dividing line between Ryeville and the country. There were several small places but Buck Hill the only one of importance.
On a morning in June the old men sat on the porch as usual, with feet on railing and chairs tilted to the right angle for aged backbones. Nothing much had happened all morning. The sun was about the only thing that was moving in Ryeville and that had finally got around to the side porch and was shining full on Colonel Crutcher’s outstretched legs.
“I reckon we’d better move,” he said wearily. “Th’ain’t much peace and quiet these days, what with the sun.”
“Heat’s something awful,” agreed Pete Barnes, “but it ain’t a patchin’ on what it was at Cowpens.”