Hand on the crank, Kenan swiveled the cool gun. Efficiency.
The rotating drum, ten barrels strapped into a wheel and geared to the hand crank, was the key to its efficiency: as the barrels revolved, one was loaded, another fired, and another ejected its spent shell. Each barrel fired only once in ten shots, so it never got hot enough to melt.
Grant had used the old six-barreled Gatling guns against massed Confederate infantry at Petersburg and Richmond. Kenan had heard their stuttering fire above the yells and musket volleys, above even the artillery. Plain slaughter, men charging into that.
Only 250 rounds per minute, those obsolete Gatlings.
At San Juan Hill, Teddy Roosevelt’s young lieutenants had turned the thing into an offensive weapon. They mounted the guns on light two-wheeled carriages and rushed them forward along with the general charge, stopping long enough to fire a magazine or two, then advancing again. He had talked to Rough Riders who had been there. The spigs had been blasted out of fortified trenches, killed behind wooden barricades thick as railroad ties. The Rough Riders said they’d never seen anything like it.
Kenan stood in the wagon feeling the sure, deadly weight of the gun, wondering if his dream would return tonight.
In the dream, he had been standing in this wagon exactly the way he was now. Two spirited horses were hitched in the doubletree, reins held tight by a groom in blue. Nobody else was in the wagon with him. It was parked in the middle of a street he didn’t recognize—run-down shiplap houses, unpainted shotgun shacks, board fences with gaps like missing teeth.
Up the street surged a din of voices, but he could see no one. The light was very bad—a cloudy light that dimmed and flared, as if fires were being struck and damped. He squinted into the gloom. The voices grew louder, sounded closer—the low, menacing groundswell of a mob. Still, he could see no one.
He leaned over his Gatling gun, wondering—in the dream—where the troops were: Walker Taylor, the State Guards, the Naval Reserves, the Light Infantry.
All at once, the mob was upon him. It rushed toward him in a breaking wave, swelling the street, scraping against fences, overrunning front stoops. He looked down—the people were so jammed together they seemed to have no bodies, only faces. Their faces stared up at him, howling, mouths open, spittle flying from their red tongues.
At first, they were all Negroes—hideous, living caricatures, grotesque African masks, noses flared, eyes white with rage. His hand started the crank. The gun warmed. The fast muzzle flashes blinded him. He swept the sea of faces, hosed the crowd away like the firemen hosed the rats out of Sprunts’ warehouse every spring. The faces burst, the bodies disintegrated, the crowd was washed away in a red and black smear.
But then, as he yanked out the empty hopper and slapped a full one into the receiver, the mob surged back. Again, he cranked the gun, spraying an arc of fire and lead into the faces.
And, in the dream, the faces were suddenly transformed into those of his children and Mary, blotted out before he could stop the crank. In the dream, his hand was riveted to the crank—there were literal rivets running through his knuckles into the brass handle. The crank was turning by itself now, as if driven by a strong motor, pulling his hand along with it, faster and faster, till he thought the bones would rip loose from his elbow, the sinew tear from his shoulder.
Into this killing field rushed the faces of his friends, his neighbors, men and women he had known for thirty years, boys he had grown up with, his comrades from the old regiment, his brothers, Tom and Jimmy. He could not stop. The crank turned so fast now it was just a bright blur. Ranks of faces thronged into view and then erupted, disappeared.
Last to storm the wagon was a rank of pumpkin heads—jack o’ lantern faces. They burst apart, and their straw bodies fluttered to the street, weightless as feathers.
In the dream, he closed his eyes, willing it away. The gun at last stopped firing. When he opened his eyes, he was standing alone, naked except for boots, in a dogwood-shaded alley of Oakdale Cemetery. The wagon, the gun, the horses, the groom, the carnage of the mob—all were gone. In his ears rang a pulsing stillness of night birds and cicadas.
Before him under a full moon rose a low, grassy hill, fenced in black iron spikes. Stone steps led to the top. He recognized the place. He walked slowly up the hill, feeling an immense gravity settling in his chest. His boots might have been filled with cement. Among the low sepulchers stood an obelisk—bone marble, tall as a mounted man.
He stepped forward into the gloom and read the inscription, chiseled sharp as a saber cut: William Rand Kenan 1845–1903. In the dream, he simply lay down at the foot of the obelisk, head to the warm stone, and stared at the moon while his body evaporated.
That was not even the end of the dream. As he lay there in the family plot, he could hear footsteps approaching, feel the shadows of people standing over him, hear their faint whispering.
But he was already gone, leaving behind on the hill only his name and the bare numbers of his lifetime.
He had awakened from the dream feeling curiously refreshed and calm, the muslin sheets cool against his naked body. He slept naked only when Mary was away. He could not call it a nightmare, not at the moment of waking. Sunlight was pouring through his window. For the first time in many years, he had overslept.
He had gotten up slowly, touching his legs, his arms, the muscles in his back, shoulders, chest. He had pulled on white athletic clothes and walked downstairs to lift dumbbells.
Now, Kenan climbed down from the wagon and secured the tailgate. His cigar had gone out, and he didn’t bother to relight it. Suddenly, he was afraid of being caught. He felt vaguely aware that it was wrong for him to be here. He couldn’t say for sure what code he was violating, but he breathed the wrongness of where he was like atmosphere.
Quickly and neatly, he hauled the tarpaulin over the gun and tied it down. Before he went out, he listened. Through the barn wall, he heard horses nickering in the stables. Outside, he heard the cluck of boot heels on brick paving, men’s voices, laughter. He held his breath until they passed.
It was clear to him: the gun had a soul. It wanted to be fired. It had a hunger for human targets.
A few minutes of brisk walking brought him home, where he spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the puppies, talking nonsense to his old dog, Dandy.
Early the next evening, Gray Ellen sat on the porch of their rented house with her landlady, Callie Register, a woman her own age who seemed more like a dowdy aunt. “My true name is Calliope,” she’d confided to Gray Ellen when she rented the house—pronouncing it to rhyme with cantaloupe, in the manner of circus people. “Can you imagine—naming your only daughter after a steam organ?” She had a hearty, shrill laugh. “My parents met in the cheap seats of Dan Castello’s Circus and Menagerie when it came to Kenansville. They sat through every show. When the circus left town, they left with it.” She said there were Registers all over the county, white and black, cousins and strangers.
Sam had gone off to a so-called gentlemen’s evening at Captain Kenan’s. The sky was smeared yellow and pink through the trees. From time to time, a buggy passed along the street. The women were wrapped in knitted shawls against the chill. In a few minutes, it would be too cold to sit out any longer, and Gray Ellen would face the decision of whether to invite Callie inside the house. She didn’t want to.
If Callie had been one of the girls she’d known in Philadelphia, somebody she could truly confide in, she might welcome the company. Callie was kind, obliging, generous. Nice. She encouraged Gray Ellen, cheered her up on bad days, brought her gossip and news. But she never knew when to leave.
Look how hard on people I’ve become, Gray Ellen reflected with a sudden small shame. It confused her to think she was no longer the kind of person she herself might seek out for company. These days, she had an edge. She was preoccupied, self-absorbed in a way that was strange to her nature. Even hateful at times. She couldn’t help it. She didn’t want t
o be, but she was. She was losing control.
Callie sat heavily in her chair, hands absently rubbing her swollen belly. “I wish Farley would get back,” she said. With the baby getting closer, she was fretting.
She was afraid, Gray Ellen understood. Callie’s last two babies had miscarried. In Callie’s company, Gray Ellen’s secret calamity always seemed diminished, and she resented it. She had a right to her special grief. Callie reminded her that the world just kept on spinning. Every woman had her own grief, and none was so very special. “Don’t fret. He’ll show up any day now.”
Callie’s husband, Farley, worked for the Atlantic Coast Line as a track boss. His crew was down in South Carolina clearing a wreck—half a mile of freight train piled into a river. He’d been gone a month already. On-site, he lived out of a boxcar that he shared with a dozen other hands, sleeping on bunks and cooking over a sooty potbelly stove. Men, Gray Ellen thought, how they loved being part of a gang. Even a work gang. Even sleeping in an unheated boxcar and laboring sixteen hours a day for wages that would wind up in a bottle or the company store. What was the magnetism of gangs?
“I used to like it he was gone so much. I liked it that the house got so quiet and peaceful, I could walk from room to room and just listen to the peace. Then after the boys came along, it wasn’t quiet anymore.” She had twins, nasty little gangsters who chased cats and trampled flower beds and who everybody said took after Farley. But Farley was a gangly hillbilly from Boone, and the boys, at the age of eight, were already fat and white as milk. Their muscles had no tone—the bloat sagged off their arms and legs like soft cheese. Because there were two of them, they were bullies. Callie had left them next door alone.
“You want a boy or girl?” Gray Ellen asked.
“Don’t matter. Whichever, this one’s gonna be the quits.”
“Pray for a girl. They’ve got more sense.”
Callie laughed. “Ain’t it the truth.”
The light was fading and the chill seeped through her shawl, but Gray Ellen wanted to stay outside as long as possible. She felt sorry for Callie, but at least Callie belonged here. At least she was home. Two months in this place, and Gray Ellen still felt locked out, except at school. Still, whenever she tried to explain that to Callie, the only advice she got was, “Give it time, honey. You’ll make your peace with this town.”
But Gray Ellen didn’t want to make her peace with any town. She wanted to be home, wherever that was. She wanted to love the place where she set down her roots. What was it Ivanhoe Grant had said that first time at Williston School, as she passed him on her way out after her interview?
You got to be where you live.
She lived here, but she wasn’t here. It could be so lovely, especially along the river at dawn, or on the beach at sundown, bathing in the sea breeze. So why couldn’t she love this place? She felt vaguely guilty about it. Whenever people asked her how she was settling in, she’d smile and say something pretty. But it didn’t feel pretty. It felt hard. It felt lonely. She wondered if there was something wrong with her.
She’d given up trying to bare her soul to Callie. Callie would have her baby and, whatever she pretended, probably another three or four after that. She’d sit on her porch pining for a husband who, as the years wore on, would come home less and less. Like the tugboat crews, the river pilots, the drummers, the guardsmen, the sailors, the railroad engineers, all the other traveling men, ingenious with excuses to stay away from home.
Like Sam taking that assignment to cover the war in Cuba. And now, already, Sam was working two nights a week at the office. Now he had a new buddy, one of the men who had taken him out on the river the other day—the captain from the train. What was he getting mixed up with all these military types for? He was starting to do things she couldn’t predict.
He was keeping company with Colonel Waddell, coming home with stories of the War. Whenever he spoke of Waddell, she could hear the adulation in his voice. And now he was toting a revolver.
He wasn’t drinking, he’d remind her. As if that made up for everything.
“I best be getting back—round up the boys and scrub ’em down for bed,” Callie said, and waddled across the lawn in the twilight, looking weary, moving slow.
She feels sorry for me, Gray Ellen thought. It made her want to weep.
At least that Negro preacher didn’t feel sorry for her. Sure, he’d tricked her, but it was a kind of game. Somehow, he must figure that she counted, that her opinion could sway others. Of all the men in this town, Ivanhoe Grant had singled her out for attention. Not just as the wife of the cousin of Hugh MacRae, but for herself. Something in her nettled him, and he was out to convert her.
Maybe I should have let him kiss me, she thought. She felt illicit just thinking about it. Maybe she should have called his bluff, felt what it was like to fall into another man’s arms right on a public street.
What would it have turned into later? A session of sweating sex in a run-down boardinghouse with a Negro man she half-despised, when she couldn’t even face her own husband’s tentative caresses? Was it wrong for her to want another man’s hands on her? Was it just to get back at Sam? Or was there something else she longed for that Sam couldn’t give her, some reckless passion she had never allowed herself?
She wasn’t thinking in words, or even ideas, but in pictures, smells, the imagined touch of flesh. It scared her worse than a ghost story—and thrilled her the same way.
Was it just because he was a Negro, the object of every taboo she had ever learned? She shouldn’t be thinking about this, she knew. Her heart beat faster just conjuring the fantasy. And what you envisioned for yourself—even as a remote fantasy—had a way of coming true. So her mother had warned.
Gray Ellen tucked her shawl tighter around her shoulders. She would sit out a little while longer, feel the night breeze blow silky on her cheek, imagine what people were doing at that moment in Chicago and Philadelphia and New York, out in the world.
At the door, Captain William Rand Kenan flung an arm around Sam and ushered him into the house. “Come on in, sport,” Kenan said. Sam was pleased to be included. He liked the feel of Kenan’s big arm draped across his back.
Colonel Walker Taylor stood, his back to the hall mirror, sipping red wine. Sam could see his bald spot reflected like a coin. He nodded in Sam’s direction.
“You know Walk?” Kenan asked.
“Of course,” Sam said.
Taylor quickstepped over and flung up his hand like a railroad semaphore. He made even Kenan look small. “You do nice work, Mr. Jenks.”
“Very good of you to say so.”
A clergyman holding a generous tumbler of bourbon got up from a chair. “Peyton Hoge,” he said without smiling.
“Pastor Hoge is at First Presbyterian,” Kenan said. “And here’s Tom James. Captain James.” A tall, well-built man of about forty shook Sam’s hand. “Tom commands the Wilmington Light Infantry.”
Captain James smiled ruefully at Sam, as if embarrassed. “Pretty tame stuff, compared to the action you saw in Cuba.”
“Well, you know. It was a lot of noise and confusion, mostly.” To change the subject, he said to Kenan, “Quite a show you put on, out there on the river.” He figured Kenan would be eager to talk about it.
Kenan said dismissively, “A fine piece of ordnance. Let me get you a drink.”
“Oh, just water will be fine.”
Kenan paused, squinted, then understood completely. There were plenty of men who didn’t have that kind of control. His estimation of Sam jumped a notch. Generally, newspapermen were physically timid, nuisances in the middle of action, men who’d never turn down somebody else’s whiskey. Except the best ones—Steve Crane, Dick Davis. He’d heard Jenks had been with Roosevelt’s army at San Juan Hill, and he wanted to hear about it. He had noted Sam’s reaction on the river—how his jaw set, how alertly he watched everything, how his eyes never blinked. He didn’t scurry to write it down. He wasn’t scared. He ju
st paid attention.
“How about root beer instead?”
“Even better.”
Kenan thrust a sweating glass of root beer into Sam’s hand. “Plenty of vittles on the sideboard,” Kenan said. “We tend to be rather informal.”
Other young men arrived. By the time they settled in to eat at the polished mahogany table in the dining room, there were a dozen guests. Though they had all arrived dressed in suits and ties, before long they took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves, and opened their collars. They drank liberally and ate with gusto. Seated at one end of the table, Sam noticed how erectly the men—except for Pastor Hoge—sat to their meal, practicing a kind of barracks discipline. They were rowdy and colorful in their language, cursing freely even in front of the reverend, but they never lost the bearing of soldiers. Sam liked them. He liked being here among them. They seemed to think he belonged.
Among these men, he could almost believe he was as brave as they thought he was.
Kenan sat at the head of the table, beaming. A stout colored woman named Hattie tended the sideboard, carrying out newly cooked dishes of quail, venison, and rabbit. Kenan joshed with her and she scolded him right back and they both laughed. She adored him, that was clear. Sam hadn’t felt this warm sense of exuberant well-being since the last time he’d drunk himself into jail.
“My boy writes me from Mexico,” Kenan said. “Building a hydro-electric dam down there, you know. Has the damnedest time finding reliable men.”
“Native labor,” somebody said.
Walker Taylor said, “Well, we routed the spigs from Cuba,” and winked at Sam. “We’re sweeping through the Philippines. I suppose we’ll be going into Guadalajara next.”
“About time.”
“Kipling had it right,” the Reverend Hoge said. “‘Take up the White Man’s Burden—and reap his old reward.’”
Cape Fear Rising Page 17