Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Circulation tripled.

  Except for the Winchester piece, his own stories were mild reports of street improvements, sermons, the comings and goings of socialites. He compiled the national news off the wire and retyped illegible letters from citizens so the compositors could make sense out of them. There was news happening all around him, but he could not pin down specifics. It made him cross and jumpy.

  But he did not take a drink. Which was not easy.

  Alcohol was ubiquitous, at least among the men. They drank from flasks on Sunday morning and from decanters at business luncheons on Tuesday. They sipped sherry before dinner and cognac after. Workmen swilled beer every night of the week in the taverns on every corner. The worst of them were along the wharf in Patty’s Hollow, the red-light district. Prostitutes there could be had for three dollars, though the better class of customers frequented the brothels on Front Street, where a night of love cost twenty, including whiskey.

  “It’s not what I expected,” Sam confided one evening to Gray Ellen. She was teaching now, and that seemed to absorb her, though he couldn’t for the life of him imagine how she could spend all day with colored children.

  “You knew when we came down here that you were going to have to start at the bottom,” Gray Ellen said.

  They were beginning to make a life here. It was difficult, there were many days when she was ready to give up and buy a ticket on the next train to Philadelphia, but she was determined to stick to their plan.

  She made a point to visit the beach every Sunday—to drink in the open sky, the breezy quiet.

  They had moved out of the Orton and into a house on Third near Ann Street, only blocks from Williston School. The rooms were sunny and included an indoor privy with a bathtub. Mature locust trees shaded the yard. Gray Ellen had found the place, arranged the move, decorated the bedroom and sitting room. Their landlady was the fat woman Gray Ellen had spoken to outside the old Record office the day of the eviction. She lived next door. She was not just fat but also pregnant, due in November.

  “It’s just, I feel I’m being cut out,” Sam said. “Things are going on, and everybody’s pretending nothing’s happening. It’s maddening.” It was times like this when he could have used a drink. A bottle of beer, something to hold in his hands. A glass of whiskey and soda to dull the headaches he was getting more and more frequently in the oppressive heat.

  “What’s Harry say?” She was poring over her schoolbooks, devising lesson plans. She really wasn’t in the mood for his grousing. She was back in her old form at school. The children were ill-prepared but eager, and she liked them. She had a feeling she could do some good here. Norwood was impressed by her and left her alone. She felt trusted. Shy parents brought her gifts of potato pie and plates of cold chicken and greens for lunch.

  She spent as much time as possible with her schoolwork, to avoid facing the emptiness of the other times. Sam was moody lately, and she could have used a dose of his old humor.

  “Harry’s no help. They don’t tell him anything.”

  “Who do they tell?”

  “Good question.” Maybe Cousin Hugh? He’d been spending a lot of time in Raleigh these past weeks. He and that lawyer Rountree. “People down here talk in some sort of code, and I’ll be damned if I can catch onto it.”

  “We’ve been over this,” she said. “You think I like it any better than you?” She was still waiting for a dinner invitation to the MacRaes’. She had met Hugh and his wife only accidentally, on the street. She suspected it was a deliberate slight.

  “It’s worse than that,” he insisted. “The stakes are going up. Yesterday, I was looking for pencils. I started opening closets in the storeroom. Know what I found?”

  “Not pencils.”

  “Winchesters—brand new. And pump shotguns, the kind they call riot guns. Forty, fifty guns. Cases of ammunition. A whole arsenal.”

  Gray Ellen stopped writing out lessons. “At a newspaper office?”

  “Looks more like an armory now. I’m telling you, something is in the air. I mean, here I blow the whistle on one armed camp, and I wake up and find myself sitting smack in the middle of another one.”

  Gray Ellen stared out the window at the spreading branches of the locust trees and thought of the child she had lost. Sometimes, he came back to her like a little ghost, out of the blue, when she was feeling melancholy. She never knew what triggered the memory, but it always came sharp and all at once. She felt tears backing up behind her eyes. “I don’t give a damn what they do to each other,” she said, and went into the bedroom.

  “Gray? What’s wrong?” Before Chicago, he’d never seen her cry. She considered it a matter of pride to keep such emotional outpourings to herself. But lately, she burst into tears for no reason at all. He never seemed to know what was wrong. One part of him wanted to help, but the other part just felt left out, exactly the way he felt at the office.

  His instinct was to go after her, but that never worked, just made things worse. He would sit out here quietly, sipping tea and wishing it were scotch, staring out the window, listening to her cry, knowing that it was somehow about their lost baby and that somehow, as usual, he was to blame, wondering how her imagination had made the jump from rifles in the storeroom to a baby she had miscarried months ago, wondering how a life that had started out so promising had ended up in a rented house in a strange place where everybody was getting ready to kill everybody else and acting like it was a family secret, while the woman he loved most in the world was miserable.

  It was all supposed to have turned out different.

  By now, they were supposed to have a family, their own house, a circle of smart and interesting friends, a full and useful life—success.

  If only he knew what to say, how to make it right. It would have happened whether he was there or not, but he could have been a comfort. If only he hadn’t blown it in Philadelphia and then Chicago. If only he didn’t crave a slug of whiskey so bad he could actually feel the soothing buzz in his brain just from thinking about it. If only he were a better man in a better place. If only he had the words.

  The right words made something true, or not. The right words couldn’t be taken back later. “I love you,” he had told her long ago, and those words were out in the world now, alive all by themselves. He couldn’t call them back. She had said the same words out loud.

  He listened to his wife weeping in the next room. The anger left him. He felt an ache under his ribs. He went in and put his arms around her—gently, gently—and rocked her. It didn’t make her stop crying, but it was all he could do. He kept rocking her, staring out the bedroom window at the arms of the locust trees waving in a fitful breeze, light flickering off the leaves like sunlight shimmering on water.

  Next morning, Hugh MacRae was sitting on Sam’s desk when he arrived for work. “Burning daylight,” he said. “Thought the army would have taught you better.” He was wearing mud-speckled brown riding boots and a linen suit the color of sunflowers. When he slipped off the desk and tucked his thumbs into his waistband, the jacket flapped open, and Sam noticed he was wearing a shoulder rig with a horse pistol.

  He clapped Sam on the back. “Leave your hat on. We’re going on a little excursion, you and me.”

  “A story?”

  “Right, a story.”

  “Whatever you say.” Sam grabbed a fistful of pencils and stuck them into an inside pocket, then stuffed a notebook into his outside pocket. Hugh led him by the arm to the door before halting him at the top of the stairs. “Here,” he said, handing Sam an object wrapped in a linen handkerchief.

  “What’s this?” Sam said, feeling the outline and the weight, knowing exactly what it was.

  “You know how it works?”

  Sam nodded and unwrapped the handkerchief. The navy pocket revolver smelled of gun oil. By the weight, he guessed it was fully loaded. He didn’t know what else to do with it, so he stuck it into his jacket pocket.

  “Relax,” Hugh said. “Everyb
ody’s got to bring something to the party.”

  Sam followed Hugh’s lead. He breathed deliberately to try to get his pulse under control.

  Hugh led him at a brisk stride down to the wharf, where a steam tug was tied up, waiting. Clawson was already aboard, as were Walker Taylor—looking enormous in the uniform of the State Guard, complete with side arm—and George Rountree, the attorney. As Hugh and Sam stepped aboard, the three came forward, and everybody traded handshakes, then went into the pilothouse. At MacRae’s signal, the whiskered captain snapped the brim of his greasy fedora and gave orders to cast off.

  Sam steadied himself against the cabin wall as the stem dug in and the bow lifted, plowing a furrow in the outgoing tide as the boat steamed upriver. The river breeze rushed in at the open ports, cooling him so suddenly that he shivered.

  Inside the pilothouse, the din of the engine made it impossible to talk without shouting. Hugh MacRae lit a cigar and paced like a man waiting for a telegram. Clawson lit a cigar of his own.

  When they were well beyond the wharves, the railroad bridge, and the rafts of anchored ships, the boat lost way and the engine quieted to a low grumble. The captain nodded to MacRae, and they all followed him out onto the starboard deck, moving aft past the smokestack. Then they stood together at the rail, looking down onto the fantail.

  Sam recognized big Bill Kenan at once, standing with two other soldiers next to a bulky object draped with a heavy tarpaulin. The tugboat was a mile or more upriver from the city, drifting down on the tide. Sam recognized the point of land coming up on his right. What was it the man on the train had called it? Nigger Head Point.

  He heard murmuring and the shuffle of feet under the rear overhang of the cabin roof, but he could not see who was down there. Suddenly, Hugh MacRae took his cigar out of his mouth as if he were pulling a cork. “You men, come out from there. Let me see you.”

  Obediently, eight Negro men moved cautiously from under the overhang and stood blinking in the sun, looking up at MacRae.

  “Take off your hats so I can see your faces,” MacRae ordered, and the men complied. All were dressed in suits and ties—lawyers, merchants, undertakers. Sam recognized the man who had offered to take a message to Manly the night of the near-lynching, but he had never bothered to learn his name. And standing beside him, no mistake, was Frank Manly. He stared up at Sam, who wished he could suddenly vanish. He was acutely aware of the gun in his pocket—the bulge must be unmistakable to anybody staring as hard as Frank Manly.

  The eight black men stood there on the swaying deck, hats in hands, not moving except as the boat moved.

  “That’s better. Now, if you will all move aft. That means to the very back.”

  The men looked at one another. Sam could read the bewilderment on their faces. Walker Taylor clasped his hands behind his back and rocked back on his legs, chest puffed out. Clawson stood out of the way.

  Standing behind MacRae, George Rountree looked at his railroad watch and muttered gruffly, “Get on with it. This isn’t a stage play at the Thalian.”

  MacRae turned on him with a shining intensity in his eyes. “But that’s exactly what it is,” he told Rountree, his voice a loud whisper.

  “Just get on with it. I’ve got a full calendar this morning.”

  MacRae turned back and called to Kenan. “Captain. If you please.”

  In one hard pull, Kenan and his two men yanked off the tarpaulin. It was the first time Sam had seen a Gatling gun since Cuba. The sunlight glinted off the brass crank and receiver, gleamed dully off the ten blued revolving barrels. It was mounted on a steel tripod bolted to the deck. One of Kenan’s assistants reached into a crate beneath the tripod and extracted a black-and-brass sleeve as long as his arm. He clicked it upright into the receiver, and Kenan swiveled the muzzle 180 degrees, sweeping it past the eight Negroes. They ducked and cowered, shielded their faces with their arms. Their mouths dropped open, but, if they said anything, their words were blown away on the breeze.

  As Kenan steadied the muzzle over the starboard rail, they backed away from the gun, moving as far as they could toward the stern rail without going overboard. Sam stared off to starboard, where Nigger Head Point was coming abeam. What were those six posts near the water—a dock? As the boat drifted closer to the point, Sam realized what he was seeing: six large pumpkins impaled on poles.

  Without further preliminaries, Captain Kenan cranked the gun. With the sudden burst of concussions, the black men fell against the rail, and one had to be grabbed before he toppled overboard. Kenan cranked off a hundred rounds, two hundred, five hundred, raking the shoreline while he found the range. The din was incredible, interrupted only for a split second as Kenan’s crew changed magazines. They had practiced this.

  On the shore, willows whipped as if caught by hurricane gusts. Mud spouted up in geysers. Deadfall logs were whittled into sawdust. Trees were splintered in half, foliage shredded. The pumpkins burst in quick, bright splashes. The poles disintegrated.

  An old bull gator lifted his gray muzzle from the mud and disappeared in a spray of blood and hide.

  Kenan had been shooting for a whole minute.

  A thick fog of blue smoke drifted across the huddle of Negroes at the stern, floated up the river behind them on the breeze. Anybody watching from shore, Sam realized, would think the boat was on fire. He had forgotten that a Gatling gun made so much smoke. The Negroes were all doubled over, coughing.

  Walker Taylor stood imperious as a schoolmaster. Rountree consulted his watch again. Clawson rocked on his heels. Hugh MacRae waited. The boat drifted south on the current, under the railroad bridge. The pall of smoke floated farther and farther astern, hanging over the brown water. Kenan’s armed crew stood facing the black men, hands on pistol butts. Kenan slapped in a new magazine and looped his arm casually over the gun.

  MacRae flipped the tails of his coat back offhandedly, so that his pistol in its black leather shoulder rig was visible. He started speaking, but, at first, Sam couldn’t hear anything but the ringing in his ears.

  “This little beauty here,” Hugh MacRae said, pointing, “is an insurance policy.” Walker Taylor, the insurance man, smiled. “It insures against a whole host of evil things.” He waited, as if for someone to dare an interruption. “Nigrahs with Winchester rifles, for instance. Rabble-rousers and outside agitators. Civil disorder.”

  The Negroes stood silent, hats in hands, looking up. One of them had a growing dark stain at the crotch of his pants. He covered it with his hat.

  MacRae said, “We mean to have order—do you understand?”

  Slowly, reluctantly, the Negroes nodded. Sam wanted to protest, but he kept his mouth shut. Hugh had a look in his eyes that promised no mercy. He is a bully, Sam thought, but he is not bluffing. Then Sam was a bully, too, for doing nothing. For not objecting. For standing there with a loaded pistol in his pocket.

  They already blamed him for nearly getting Alex Manly lynched. He was also the one who had written the Winchester piece. Now, he was a part of this, too. They would remember his face. They already knew his name.

  But that was his job: watch, then write the story. What was the story? he thought. The man behind that gun is invincible. And the men behind the man behind that gun control this city. That was one story.

  The seventeen thousand Negroes they were afraid of, that was another.

  Kenan and his crew covered the gun with the tarpaulin. The city was coming up on the port bow. The captain ordered the engine put into gear. Rountree, Clawson, Walker Taylor, and Sam went back inside the pilothouse. Hugh MacRae remained where he was until the boat nudged the bumpers of the wharf and the crewmen looped lines over the bollards.

  As the Negro men filed silently ashore, MacRae called out to them, “Tell your people what you witnessed today, hear?”

  The eight black men vanished into the crowd of stevedores and sailors. MacRae flicked his cigar away into the river and dusted his hands against each other, as if they were soiled. He put
an arm around Sam. “Write it up, Sam. No names. You understand.”

  “Military personnel,” Sam said. “Or a company of militia officers.”

  MacRae smiled. “Exactly. I knew we could count on you. Being family and all.”

  “Of course you can count on me.” Sam knew it was probably true, and he wished it weren’t. He hated that Hugh was more sure of him than he was of himself.

  When he stepped onto solid ground, his legs were uncertain. He could feel the wharf swaying under him, and he lurched for a few steps like a drunken man. He wasn’t used to boats. If he’d thought about it at the time, he probably would have been sick. Now, he was thinking about it, and the adrenaline and the cordite stink and the bursting pumpkins backed up in his throat. He had tasted this at Las Guasimas.

  I finally got to see an alligator, he thought.

  He leaned into the gutter and heaved away his breakfast. Then he went back to the office to write up the story.

  If something is not done to put down the surly and rebellious attitude of the Negroes towards the whites, we will have a repetition of the Sepoy [India] Rebellion, which was ended only after the British authorities had shot some of the mutinous leaders out of the mouths of cannon.

  Walter MacRae, Hugh MacRae’s uncle, later mayor of Wilmington

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Friday, October 7

  THE RIVER RAN FILMY under dirty-shirt clouds this afternoon. Sam sat in Poison’s Saloon with Harry Calabash and watched the stevedores on the wharf work lethargically, like automatons. They seemed to be hauling the same crates back and forth. There was no joshing. The steamships on the river seemed painted in place. The river itself was slowly congealing. The air smelled watery. Sam breathed it into his lungs, and it tasted like rusty pipes. He could not get his breath.

  The government weather office predicted the heat would break any day now. It was unseasonable, the kind of breathless, oppressive calm that preceded a hurricane. But nobody down the coast was reporting any hurricanes. Everybody waited for a good nor’easter to blow away all the bad air.