I yelled at the towering statue silently standing atop his granite pedestal. “These are the same people who told those hoodlums to pull you down last night. Remember how that felt? That rope around your neck? Hello? Is anybody awake in there?” Maybe there was only so much excess life force to go around Central Park tonight. Enough to animate a panther, a falcon, a falconer, and a crazed Christopher Columbus, but not this statue. He just stood there, eyes fixed, back stiff, rifle at rest—staring blankly toward the east. Yes, I was talking to the mute monument memorializing the soldiers of New York’s Seventh Regiment who died in the Civil War. The heroic-size replica of a Union Army soldier posed as an outpost sentry was unveiled in this hillside grove near the Sheep Meadow way back in 1874. “They’re rebels!” I shouted. “Just like that bunch you tangled with at Antietam and Fredericksburg!” The soldier blinked. “Where be these Johnny Rebs?” he asked in a voice scraped raw from screaming too many battle cries.
