He stopped her in front of a two-story frame house that rose out of the row of shotgun shacks like a rickety tower guarding the corner.
“Just what do you mean?” she said. “Who?”
He backed her against the house. The boards were sharp and warm against her spine. Across the street, a gang of idle men and boys watched. She could feel their eyes, hear their giggling laughter. For the first time, she feared for her physical safety—this man might do anything, and she was in the one place in the whole city where she could count on no help from anybody.
“Listen here, schoolteacher. This story has been a hundred years in the making. Two hundred. A millennium. Smoldering, burning from the inside out, gutting the foundations like a coal fire deep underground. About time it got some air. About time it burned in daylight.”
“My God, you want to put a match to it.”
He was a black shadow looming over her. “I want to burn the sin out of this wicked city.”
She was astonished. “People will die.”
“People will always die, praise the glory of Jesus!”
Gray Ellen felt a sudden sharp chill in her stomach. She held her breath. His eyes had gone cold as stars. Beads of perspiration jeweled his flawless yellow complexion. She could hear the quick beating of her own heart. She said, with all the control she could muster, “What do you want from me?”
“Come inside, teacher,” he whispered, taking her hands. She felt his cool fingers playing with hers. “Give me succor in the hour of my trial.”
She wrenched away and lurched along the clapboard wall, the boards cutting her back. The wall was the only thing keeping her up. “How dare you!” she wanted to shout, but what came out of her mouth was an inarticulate yelp. How had this happened? Had the whole point, from the schoolhouse until now, been only seduction? Were all the high-sounding words about social justice just a ruse to get her into bed?
As he stepped close again, she flailed at him with her balled fists. He backed off, palms out, to show he meant no harm. “Teacher, teacher, calm yourself. I just want to be your friend.”
“Get away! I don’t need friends like you!”
The men across the street were still watching. One of them was pointing. Nobody was laughing.
He smiled and clasped his hands in front of him, bowed his head, watched her. “Teacher, don’t tell me your heart is pure. Don’t tell me you do not lust, as I do.”
“Goddamn you,” she said. Her hair was a mess, all unraveled on her shoulders and neck.
“His prerogative,” Grant observed pleasantly. “But you were looking and talking like—”
“I was what?” Now, anger was overcoming fear. “Who do you think you are?”
“You heard me.”
“How dare you! How dare you talk to me like this! How dare you touch a white woman—” It was out before she knew it. Now, she was all mixed up, angry at herself, furious at him, feeling dirty and low and victimized all at once. She felt had. He had pushed her into this.
Ivanhoe Grant smiled fiercely. “So it comes down to that. Then the lesson wasn’t wasted, after all.”
“Goddamn your lesson. Goddamn you.”
“You’re awfully dark, for a white woman. Maybe we’ve got more in common than you’d care to admit.” He laughed.
“Don’t you dare laugh about this!”
“‘Even in laughter the heart is sorrowful.’”
“Don’t go spitting proverbs at me!”
His coolness infuriated her. His cool, plain arrogance, the arrogance only a man could have. She was angry that he had tried to seduce her, but just as angry that the seduction hadn’t been genuine—which was crazy, and she knew it. She hated herself for being tricked so easily. For being so predictably what she was. She hated this man. She hated all men. She hated all black men, hated all the coloreds, everywhere.
“Go ahead and say it. It’s on the tip of your tongue.”
She glared at him.
“Nigger,” he pronounced quietly. “Say it. Say it after me. You want to say it: nigger.” He was talking louder.
She cast her eyes uncertainly from side to side, looking for a way out.
“It’s easy, just repeat after me: N-I-G-G-E-R, nigger! See?”
“All right! Nigger! Nigger, nigger, nigger! Satisfied?”
“In the beginning was the Word, teacher.”
Some of the men were coming across the street. Grant didn’t seem to notice. Suddenly, they were all around her. Dear God, she prayed, don’t let them damage me, let me be able to have another baby someday.
“You all right, miss?” one of them said timidly, straw hat in hand.
The man next to him let his half-smoked cigarette drop from his lip. “Laws, she a white woman!” he said in amazement. “Look like she sick.”
“Go on out of here, Charley Potatoes,” one of them said to Grant. “You scaring the lady.”
“We walk with you to the streetcar, ma’am.”
Ivanhoe Grant lifted his hands toward heaven, fluttering his fingers. “In the beginning was the Word, teacher,” he said coolly. “The Word.” He dropped his arms, bowed his head, then disappeared into the house.
His rank smell lingered in the air. She could hardly stand the smell—the air stank of men.
On the streetcar home, she leaned out the window to blow it off her tangled dark hair, out of her dusty nose and throat.
Sam walked to the gate to meet her, cross from having waited for more than an hour. Something was wrong, he could tell. “Children acting up at school?” he said, taking her heavy cloth bag.
She smiled, but she was near tears. On the porch, he embraced her. He wanted her. He’d been waiting for her. She was his wife. He wanted to strip off her dress and kiss her shining black hair, her breasts, the insides of her thighs, feel her heat. He would do it gently. He would take hours.
She pulled away. “No,” she said. “I’m not—I’m not ready.”
Sam felt scolded. He stood on the porch as she went inside, expecting her to find the blue chrysanthemums he had brought her and rush back to him, linger in his arms, feel his love.
But instead, he heard her footsteps on the stairs, heavy and measured. Sweet Jesus, he wanted a drink. He went into the kitchen and ran a glass of water from the pump. The water was lukewarm and tasted of rust. He thought, the only place in town that doesn’t have cold water.
The Old North State, the Home of Beauty, Courage, Honor, Industry, Virtue, and Independence.
Toast of the Wilmington Light Infantry
CHAPTER EIGHT
Saturday, October 8
WILLIAM RAND KENAN STOOD in his shaded backyard on Nun Street a block and a half from the river and exercised with dumbbells. Arms straight down by the sides, lift slowly till the arms are perpendicular to the trunk, hold them there, feel the muscles burn, expel the breath, and down. Twenty repetitions, a thick towel scrubbed over the neck and face, then twenty overhead lifts. Next, Indian clubs. Swing in a gentle arc, loose as swatting a baseball—down, over, around. Again. Coordination. Grace. Control.
Then a quart of cold well water tasting of stone and iron.
The heat had broken at last. A cool breeze off the river rattled the high branches of the elms. The air smelled sweet, like the mountains. It carried the scent of storm and the first hint of burning leaves.
Kenan toweled off and threaded his thick arms through a white sweater. He patted his stomach—he hadn’t carried that belly in the War, retreating to the Petersburg trenches with Ewell’s tattered corps. He was a rail then, an eighteen-year-old recruit who’d left the University of North Carolina without a degree to follow his brothers, Thomas and James—colonel and captain—both wounded and captured at Gettysburg.
By nineteen, he had been promoted in the field to sergeant major. He wasn’t shot until the summer of ’64 at the Battle of Charleston. Then he made adjutant, and finished out the war an officer.
He’d survived. Couldn’t even feel the wou
nd anymore. He would sit in the big copper bathtub and try to find the scar where the minié ball had clipped off a chunk of flesh from his thigh, but it was gone. Like the War. A memory, a receding dream of blood, passion, and fear.
He grinned after the exertion—a prosperous man grown thick about the middle. But his middle was still hard. At fifty-four, he could still lift a grown man over his head, split half a cord of blackjack before breakfast, outshoot any man half his age.
He was alone today. His wife, Mary, was at Blowing Rock, in the mountains, with his three grown daughters. Usually, she went there only in summer, but this season, the heat had lasted so long. She’d be back within the week.
His boy, Bill Junior, was building a hydroelectric dam in Mexico. He’d passed through in June, back from a stint in Sault Sainte Marie. He was an alert boy, sharp as flint, good head for numbers. Engineer. Going to make his mark in this world. Hell, only twenty-six, and the boy had already been around the world—built a plant for Carbide Manufacturing in Sydney, Australia, then traveled home via Borneo, Sumatra, China, Japan, Ceylon, London, Berlin, Rome, Paris, and Niagara Falls.
Kenan used to sit up nights in his study, matching the postmarks of his son’s letters to the globe—his thick finger carefully tracing out the boy’s whereabouts, making it actual. It wasn’t real until he could feel it under his hands. Once he had his hands on a thing, he had it for sure.
The boy got his talent for numbers from the old man. Kenan had been on the Board of Audit and Finance till this Fusionist crowd got in down at city hall. Damned meddling Governor Russell. No matter—he had plenty to keep him busy. He wasn’t a wealthy man, but he had ample money in the bank. He had good credit and a good name, and, of the two, he valued the name more.
He walked between the kitchen—a separate outbuilding—and the main house, down the driveway to a woodshed crammed full of scrub oak sawed and split into stove-sized sticks. He’d left a little niche just inside the door. Dandy, the family Labrador retriever, had whelped nine pups night before last. Six had survived. He stepped into the shed and listened: they were chirruping like little birds. He grinned. God, he loved dogs. They were so uncomplicatedly loyal, so trusting. They craved affection so.
He hunkered over the wooden soapbox he had lined with castoff flannel shirts. Dandy lay on her side, fat with milk.
“How you doing today, little mother? Hey?” She licked his hand automatically. Her eyes were bright and her nose cold—she was doing just fine. The five black pups, fuzzy as bear cubs, jostled for places at the teats. They nestled in close, eyes closed, paws pressed on either side of a teat, suckling.
The sixth and smallest pup was brindled, black on gray, didn’t even look like he belonged in the litter. But a litter could have two different sires, Kenan knew. That old gray mongrel down the street must have jumped the fence one day when nobody was watching. “You going to be a jumper, too, boy?” he whispered. It was comical and sad, the way the runt mewled like a cat. Kenan slipped his hand under him gently and scooped him out of the nest. “What’s the matter, little barky?”
He sighed. Maybe this one wasn’t going to make it. Dandy was an old girl to be having pups, and not all of her teats were giving milk. “Got a cold belly, do you?” Kenan carried the runt into the kitchen in the crook of his arm and fed it from a baby bottle he had borrowed from Hattie, the cook, figuring he might need it. He’d been around dogs all his life, and not every pup had what it took to make it in this world. In his younger days, when he’d run a dozen field dogs, he might have let the runt die. But he didn’t keep sporting dogs anymore—Dandy was just the family pet. And the years had mellowed him. He shook his head—if the boys at the Light Infantry could see him now, perched on a kitchen stool in his athletic clothes, nipple-feeding a mongrel runt pup.
The hell with it, he figured, and laughed out loud. His voice filled the kitchen, and he laughed again just to hear it. What was the joy of being a strong man, if not reaching a hand out to the helpless?
He was an elder in the Presbyterian church now. He had learned such things. His life was settling into a deep goodness. He could see it in Mary’s smile as she played the piano in the evenings when it was just the two of them, home alone. Feel it in the shy way she touched his cheek, and the way she went breathless, after all these years, when he suddenly hooked her around the waist and drew her into his big embrace.
The puppy fell asleep feeding. He put it back with the litter, tucked into Dandy’s belly, and went into the house to change clothes.
The frame house—he’d built it almost thirty years ago—was bigger now, with the children grown. Time was, he’d felt crowded in that house, with Mary and the children—Mary Lily, Jessie, Sarah, and Bill Junior—and all their friends jostling and talking and playing underfoot. He used to retreat to the woods and fields, stay out for days, sometimes just watching, listening, walking, not shooting anything, until he was ready to come back into the city.
Summers, Mary would take the kids to the mountains, and he would go with the Guards. Back from training, he’d enjoy the peace and space for a few days. Then, missing the camaraderie of soldiers, he’d open the house to the young men of the Light Infantry.
For three years, he had been their commander. He had trained them properly, instilled in them discipline.
They’d start accumulating on his porch just before the dinner hour. Hattie would fix rabbit stew or stuffed quail, whatever game was on hand, and his table would buzz, lively with earnest conversation about tactics, maneuvers, politics, the future.
Now, the house seemed impossibly huge and empty. As he climbed the stairs to his bedroom, he was stung by a sudden melancholy. It was as if he were watching himself from outside the parlor window, a robust middle-aged man climbing stairs with a heavy tread, a man bereft of wife and family, rattling around in a chilly house all by himself.
He shook off the feeling. He was fine. Mary and the children were all fine. He had done well by them, better than he’d ever had any right to expect, starting out. He had always been certain he would die in battle. That he had lived through the War surprised him every morning of his life.
But he knew what had suddenly spooked him. It had come to him in a dream, and he almost never dreamed. Most nights, he slumbered like a child—he was quickly and restfully asleep, then, at first light, immediately and alertly awake. When he dreamed at all, they were heroic dreams—socking in the winning run, saving a child from a burning house, hitting the bull’s-eye of an impossibly distant target.
But night before last, the same night Dandy was birthing her pups and losing three of them, Bill Kenan had dreamed about the gun.
He wriggled out of his sweater and flannel undershirt, stripped off his leggings, and sat on the bed, listening to the house creak in the breeze. Got to get some people in, he thought. A house was a live thing. It needed voices to keep it alive. Hattie would be back from her errands soon. He would tell her to plan for company tomorrow evening. Soon as he was dressed, he’d see what was left in the smokehouse. Maybe he could persuade Hattie to bake a Lady Baltimore cake—all those layers of sugar and almonds. The young men always craved the sweet stuff. He’d tell her to buy the fixings at Rivenbark’s and make two—she could take the other one home to her family.
Kenan stood in the carriage barn behind the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory, smoking a Havana cigar. The barn had three bays, but only the center one was occupied. It held a sturdy quartermaster’s wagon: its chassis, box, and seat freshly painted French blue; its wheels, tongue, and doubletree painted cavalry yellow.
He unlaced the ropes holding the tarpaulin and yanked it down onto the sandy floor, then let down the tailgate and swung himself up into the box.
The Gatling gun’s steel tripod mount was bolted to the bed of the wagon, as it had been bolted to the deck of the tugboat. The gun was mobile and high enough to fire over the heads of friendly ranks. The wagon box could carry a crew of three, with two more on the seat. Plenty of room for e
xtra hoppers of ammunition.
The boxes of .30–.40 Krag rounds, each bullet longer than his index finger, were stored in the powder magazine under the armory’s front stairs—behind marble walls two feet thick. Safe enough there till the time came to haul them out.
Cigar clamped in his teeth, he took up his place behind the gun and swiveled it back and forth, raking the walls with imaginary fire. Four hundred and eighty pounds, but it swung silently on greased bearings with just a nudge from his hand. The brass receiver felt cool. Absently, he studied the engraving scrolled across the brass housing: Gatling Patented, Colt’s Mfg. Co., Hartford, Ct.
The brightwork gleamed—one of the boys must have been in to polish it this morning. He guessed they’d all be in here handling the gun every chance they got. He would, at that age. Hell, here he was now. But that was something else—or was it? Was it the dream scratching at his conscience, or was it just his old infatuation with the hard precision of firearms? He patted the brass. Already, Kenan could see his fingerprints coming up gray on the receiver. He scrubbed them off with his handkerchief.
“Lord, what a piece of ordnance,” he said out loud. He listened to his voice settle in the empty space, which smelled of horses, paint, grease, gun oil, and tobacco. Fired six hundred rounds per minute—per minute! During the War, it had been a novelty weapon. Confederate commanders couldn’t get it, and most Union commanders refused to use it. It violated their spirit of honor, of gentlemanly combat, their glorious frontal charges across fields glinting with bayonets, painted with staggered ranks of blue and gray troops, littered with the colorful dead.
Not U.S. Grant, though. Not the storekeeper. He had a head for numbers. He knew you could add up the numbers and the outcome would be plain as a baseball score. The numbers told a true story. And the War had become a war of numbers—how many dead and wounded, how many deserters, how many cases of yellow fever, how many muskets, cartridges, uniforms, horses. How many you had, how many the enemy had. How to reduce his numbers faster than he reduced yours. In the end, the only issue was efficiency.
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