Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Alex Manly said, “We’ll see.”

  By one o’clock, Sam handed Clawson a story about Alex Manly’s return. The headline read, “Back in Business at Free Love Hall.” Clawson read it quickly, then telephoned Walker Taylor at his office.

  There is a black vampire hovering over our beloved North Carolina.

  Rebecca Stroud of Kinston, North Carolina, addressing a white supremacy rally

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Sunday, August 21

  THE CHURCH BELLS WOKE HIM. The sunrise carillon at St. James Episcopal, scarcely three blocks away down Market. He’d married three different women in that church. Hands folded across his chest, Alfred Moore Waddell lay with his eyes closed against the early, dim light filtering through the lace curtains and limning the drawn shade of the Gibb door, lighting it in a sharp rectangle.

  This was the best part of the morning. He opened his eyes a crack and listened, as if squinting would help him hear better. His hearing was not sharp, as in the old cavalry days. Then, he could hear a horse high-stepping across a gravel ford half a mile away and tell the regiment of the rider.

  The mosquito netting draped on frames over his four-poster reminded him of sleeping under a tent during the War. He must remember to take his quinine capsule—it had been a wet summer, and malarial fever was breaking out all up and down the river. They hadn’t had quinine in the army.

  In the adjoining bedroom, nothing stirred. Gabrielle must still be sleeping. What if he were to wake up one morning and find her here, curled in bed beside him?—but the longing passed in an instant.

  Gabrielle was an odd, quiet girl, he thought. She had that faraway look in her eye, as if, wherever they were together, everything that mattered in the world were happening someplace else.

  He stared at the Gibb door, that ingenious device that slipped upward inside its frame and disappeared into the wall upstairs. Gabrielle had insisted on Gibb doors in all the second-story rooms. In the summer, they could be raised for cross-ventilation without the awkwardness of propped doors. One of them opened onto the oyster porch above the kitchen, from which Gabrielle could call out to the vendors in the alley, who would then leave their goods on the back stoop and chalk her account on their slates.

  Let her have her whims. He’d already put two wives in their graves—sisters, Julia and Ellen Savage.

  Julia was dead now these past twenty-two years. He had two children out in the world, a son named after him and a daughter, Elizabeth Savage Waddell—Miss Lizzie—both by Julia, who got him through the War.

  Ellen, the younger sister, had passed away just three years ago come October. The sisters rested under a common headstone at Oakdale Cemetery. Make them to be remembered with Thy saints, read the inscription under the granite cross.

  He’d never expected to marry again. But he had—just a little over a year after Ellen’s death. The local wags had a good time over that one. Let them. It was good to have a woman to run the household and handle the servants. A man had other work. It was a fine piece of luck that she’d come with a new house, so he could move out of that firetrap on Third Street.

  He shifted on his down mattress and untangled the nightshirt that had somehow gotten wrapped around his legs, constricting his circulation. The church bells rang a last note and then stopped, leaving the round, whole tone hanging in the air.

  He would attend the late service.

  Legs, that was his dream. And a horse, a strong, wild horse under him, rearing and plunging through water. He smiled, remembering the horse. Thrashing through sand, mud, swampy thicket. Then falling against a hill, pinning his legs. When he’d opened his eyes in the dream, the horse had become a locomotive, crushing his legs. Women screamed all around him, but he could see no one. He dragged himself out from under the locomotive, now become a horse again, and staggered to the top of a hill. His legs pained him so badly he could hardly stand. They swelled and throbbed. All around him, in the misty dark below, he could hear wailing voices. But he could see nothing. Some of the voices were calling his name. He stood on the hill, doused in moonlight, baffled, his legs going numb, threatening to buckle any second.

  He poured himself a glass of water from the pitcher on his night table. Later, he would go down to the kitchen and drink a full quart of cold well water, fast, as he did every morning of his life. It cleared a man’s bowels.

  Waddell was a rational man. He understood that all dreams come from knowledge. In the night, his legs had gone stiff, he had tossed about and wrapped his nightshirt around them. His imagination had processed the information as a dream of crushed legs.

  And the horse? Waddell sighed, enjoying his own company in the quiet of the cool room. Cavalry days. The time, on the Petersburg Pike, advancing on Richmond, when he had nearly been thrown during a sudden thunderstorm. Lightning had forked out of a purple anvil in the hot, turbulent sky. An oak tree split and burst into flame, scattering the column like an artillery barrage. Horses and riders reared and plunged, men hollered and cursed, raindrops big as pennies stung their necks and puffed dust in the road like ricocheting minié balls. It was as if they’d been ambushed, that was the feeling—the icy needle in the heart, lungs suddenly breathless, eyes instantly sharp as field glasses, ears blooming with sound.

  Waddell’s horse, Black Major, had careered off the road and up the high cutbank, out of control. He sawed back on the reins, and the horse wheeled, nearly toppling. Black Major flung his head backward, champing at his rider’s knee, then rolled a wild brown eye. He was a big, spirited animal.

  At the top of the hill, they had spun around in the rain, horse and rider. The world dissolved into a wet blur—the rain fell in a hard, gray screen, and he was blind. He just kept sawing the reins, and Black Major kept spinning, head down, panic shivering along his spine, his flanks. He could feel the muscles tuning like wires even through the stiff cavalry saddle.

  Then at last, the thunder had moved away, the rain had calmed to a slow patter, and the horse had stilled, bowing his head and snorting. Waddell had been so dizzy he could hardly keep his seat. He sipped his water, put down the glass, then slid out of bed and used the chamber pot. This new house had an indoor privy complete with plumbing, but he preferred the pot first thing out of bed. Black Major hadn’t lasted the summer. Eighteen sixty-four, they lost the best of their horses that summer, rode them right into the ground. Lost them to artillery and Gatling guns. The Yankees fought like thugs, no respect for the forms. Horses stumbled and died and wound up in the bellies of marching men.

  And now Black Major—one horse among all the mounts he had ridden during that campaign of quick advances and long retreats—had come back in a dream. Waddell hadn’t sat a warhorse in years, except in parades.

  Waddell did not dream often. Whenever he dreamed so exotically, he woke refreshed and certain that something important was about to happen.

  He enjoyed watching his mind work. It was almost as if he could step outside of it and look in through a window at his own process of reasoning. The horse saddened him, old Black Major. He knew it was sentimental, but the death of horses had always affected him more profoundly than the death of men.

  He was back in bed now, lying on top of the sheets. The day was already starting to warm up. In a little while, Aunt Bessie would arrive downstairs and begin closing up the house to keep in the cool night air.

  The locomotive was an easy riddle: the train wreck on the way to Charleston. And the screaming? Two young ladies in the seat behind him, crushed to death—an awful thing. He had been pinned by luggage and the overturned seat but had managed to drag himself to safety. He’d always had a fool’s luck. He had even pulled other injured passengers from the wreckage—only then did he seek first aid.

  Arbitrary, how it all worked, he reflected. Things happened at random—where was the Almighty’s plan? It was beyond him. Some died horribly, while others, even scoundrels, were spared. His legs ached this morning. He must get up, walk around, get some blood circulating i
n the cramped muscles.

  Damned legs. In August of ’64, his legs had gotten him out of the cavalry. A cavalry soldier wasn’t supposed to need his legs the way a foot soldier did. But riding all day crooked the bones, splayed the joints, atrophied the muscles. How many cavalry soldiers had stunted, spindly legs? Even Bob Lee had short legs and walked with a permanent stiff limp.

  Some days, Waddell had to have a boy rub his legs for an hour just to get the blood moving. And that was when he was a young man—God!

  And then the strange fever had gotten into him. Swelled his legs until the flesh of his thighs burst apart like seams splitting, the tissue gone all buttery, oozing clear juice and smelling like sour milk. Nothing had ever terrified him so. It was as if his flesh were rotting before his eyes.

  His dreams in those days were full of funeral biers and catafalques—he learned later that Abraham Lincoln had similar dreams before the actor from Baltimore put an end to him.

  The surgeon wanted to amputate, but Waddell pulled rank. Only one in six was surviving the amputations anyway. Colonel Waddell kept his fine boots.

  For weeks on end, Waddell lay delirious under the white shade of the hospital tent. Through tears in the rotten fabric, shards of blue shone through. He suffered nightmares of black, shapeless beasts feeding on his flesh—shadowy animals, rangy as wolves, gnawing the bones of his legs, sucking their marrow. In lucid moments between deliriums, he had come to think of them as the Dark Ones. Minions of the devil come to claim his soul by eating away his body.

  Somewhere below his window, a horse and gig clattered along Fifth Street. He stroked his goatee and finger-combed his thinning hair.

  It was hard to know who he was anymore. A man was defined by his place in the order of things. By his standing in the community. Alfred Moore Waddell was a minor lawyer in a city full of better ones. Like that Rountree—there was a man heading for a judge’s seat. Waddell was a first-rate mind with a third-rate clientele. A voice men would follow, if he only had a podium. An ex-officer who had missed glory. A former congressman who could not pay the note on his own house without help from his wife.

  He let his fingers knead the ridges of his skull.

  He’d had his colonel’s commission exactly a year to the day when he gave it up.

  When it looked as if he might survive after all, he had been discharged from the makeshift hospital. The surgeon said, “I don’t know what ails your legs—there’s no medical name for it.”

  “But surely, in other cases of this kind—”

  “There are no other cases of this kind—not in four years. You are a special piece of work.”

  “And yet you cured me.”

  The surgeon said, “Colonel, there are mysteries.”

  With his legs bound in bandages stripped from ladies’ petticoats, Waddell took the train to Wilmington to wait out the rest of the war or die. The autumn of ’64, he rode a carriage to a fishing shack on the ocean and bathed in salt water every day, taking the pain of the salt on raw flesh as a penance from the Almighty. If the legs killed him, at least he would die with the evil burned out of his soul.

  The legs turned white and then red and then scabbed over nearly black. When the scabs shed, the flesh underneath was white as marble, with hairline scars and thin blue veins. It was beautiful. Then the legs had healed.

  He groaned and stretched his left leg, then his right. He wiggled his toes. What would it feel like to have a good horse under him again, to be forging into battle? Just imagining it quickened his heart.

  He wished he had been in a real cavalry charge—just once. Not one more indecisive skirmish in the woods, but an honest-to-God, full-bore, galloping, saber-clashing spectacle. In the crucible of frontal combat, a man might test himself. He might discover if other men would follow him. He might feel the rapture of the saber arcing in clenched fist, steel against steel, might shudder with the shock of meeting the enemy’s line and turning it.

  But a man might, instead, be found wanting.

  Or a man might have his legs infected and lose heart. Something might go out of him that could never be put back.

  That summer of healing, standing to his waist in the surf, leaning on a brace of canes, he had been visited by a premonition. It troubled him all the more because he didn’t believe in premonitions—all that hillbilly voodoo was for the private soldiers, ignorant farm boys, sharecroppers and river rats and simple hired men. Waddell had studied law at the university in Chapel Hill under the best men of his age—Judge Battle and Samuel F. Phillips. He’d taken his first legal fee back in ’55, on his twenty-first birthday—a four-dollar note issued by the Bank of Cape Fear. He was a man of reason and faculties.

  But there was no denying the power of the vision. He balanced on wobbly, shivering legs, legs that felt like wooden stilts, and squinted toward the horizon, not believing his own eyes. There were ships out there—Yankee ships ranked in spiny silhouette against the rising sun, steaming south toward the river channel to take the fort that guarded the city.

  If he watched long enough, they faded into the blear of the horizon. Illusion, he told himself. A trick of pain and medicine and shock. He was not a well man. He saw things that had not happened yet. Even the Yankees knew Fort Fisher was invincible. Later, he walked the beach, feeling the flesh harden and tone in his legs. Even on cold, raw days, he waded into the frothing sea and remained there as long as he could stand it, gritting his teeth against the cold and the pain. A man’s will could overcome anything. But when he looked out to sea, there was the line of ships, a vision stubborn as bad weather.

  Finally, on Christmas 1864, real dreadnoughts darkened the sea. The Yankees swarmed ashore toward the Confederate lines. Every church bell in town tolled the news. Waddell buttoned on his dress grays and brushed them out.

  Then a nor’easter blew the fleet back to Virginia, and he put away his uniform.

  But three weeks later, the armada returned to finish the job, as he knew it would.

  The bells always brought it back.

  Fort Fisher, the Sevastopol of the Confederacy, Lee’s last hope.

  For a day and a night, the Yankees bombarded it. The vision was clear even now. Even now, the concussions rang in his ears.

  He had been upriver from the fort with the other civilians, attending services that Sunday morning at St. James Church. Only a few men were in the congregation—too old, too young, or maimed. The rest were women and children. Widows and soon-to-be widows, sweethearts without hope, sisters and mothers of the Confederate dead and doomed.

  At dawn, the naval guns went strangely silent. The fort was unbreached. No Yankees appeared on the beach. By eleven o’clock, the great church was full. The minister prayed, “From battle and murder and from sudden death …”

  In a strangely female common voice, the congregation answered, “Good Lord, deliver us.”

  And at that moment, the cannons boomed again. There was no mistaking the relentless regularity. They had the range, firing broadside, firing fast and with discipline. Waddell couldn’t help thinking that out there in the fleet was a fire-control officer who knew his business. They were battering down the fort. The litany went on.

  He should go to the fort, he thought. It had vexed his mind all night. He had prayed about it to a God who answered with pure silence. He should commandeer a horse and ride to their aid—surely, they would need officers. It would not change the outcome. It was only a matter of honor.

  In his heart, fear grappled with duty. Before the war, he’d been an ardent Unionist. Secession, he had written in the Daily Herald—which he owned and published—would invite invasion. In the carnival at Charleston, as the cannons fired across the harbor toward Sumter and the ladies applauded under parasols on the grass, they had laughed him off. Now, he was a prophet.

  He no longer held a commission, he told himself. But his legs were healed. He was no invalid. He was a gentleman of quality, and he knew his duty. He could hardly bear the way the women looked at hi
m, lolling in his pew, alive and well, holding a cane he scarcely needed anymore but always kept with him for appearances, while their own men stood in harm’s way. He wore his uniform in church, as if he had a right to it.

  He slumped in his pew at the end of the service, still praying. Then he walked stiffly home, loaded his dragoon revolver, buckled on his cavalry saber, and listened. He must go. He would go, he assured himself. Several times, he limped to the porch, the long saber rattling against his left knee, the pain in his legs growing sharper by the hour. He never left the house all day.

  It would make no difference, he told himself.

  He should have gone. But he only listened as the bombardment ceased, the signal that the killing had begun in earnest. Men swarming up the redoubts, fighting hand to hand in the traverses, swarming the firing pits, men so jammed together they had to hand their muskets forward to be fired by other men in the front line, so crowded that the dead were held upright by the ranks of the living—he could see it all in his mind’s eye with the clarity of second sight. He no longer cared whether it was rational—the whole battle was erupting inside his head. He could smell gunpowder on the sea breeze, hear the death cry of men tearing like paper.

  He could taste their fear. Their souls darkened the sky. In the afternoon, feverish, he went to bed.

  The whole town was quiet. Colored boys were sent back and forth with news of the battle. Then for a while, there was no more news.

  By nightfall, the fort had fallen.

  The Yankees had the river and the last open port of the Confederacy. Even a fool could see it was all over now. No point in more dying. The Yankees took their time. Five weeks later, dressed in a clawhammer coat and sipping brandy, he watched them march into town. In the vanguard were colored troops.

  So there was nothing mystical about the dream, after all. It was an emblem of all he had suffered—all his body had learned of pain and fear.

  Only one part still troubled him: who were the ones wailing from down in the mist, and why were they calling his name?