Cape Fear Rising

by Philip Gerard

  Waddell ate with gusto. He’d need a hearty meal today. Lately, his appetite was enormous. His muscles were stretching, unbending, craving exercise, like the muscles of a young man. His brain was humming like an electric coil. His voice was tuned and strong. Only his legs gave him pain—cramps, poor circulation, knees that grated. Nothing a good, brisk walk wouldn’t cure.

  In his mind, he counted off the men he would have to contend with. Hugh MacRae was the most formidable, but, for the time being, their interests coincided. And Hugh’s brother Donald did as Hugh told him.

  Next in order of prominence came the Taylor brothers.

  Colonel Walker Taylor, officially in charge of the State Guard, could be a problem. He seemed to want to run things. But he favored posture—intimidation and threat—over outright violence: stand up straight, shoulder to shoulder, and you won’t have to fire a shot. That was good. Walker Taylor had high-minded ideas about duty and honor. He would act with restraint. Still, if things got out of control, he was a brave man who would give orders to shoot to kill. Waddell must be careful when and how to use him.

  J. Allan Taylor, who held no official claim to anything, was the brother to watch. He had close ties to Hugh MacRae and lacked Walker’s patience and restraint. He would charge in and do the job, quick and dirty and mean. He wanted results. He didn’t much care about the legal niceties—he was used to fixing them up later. He was still bitter about how much his father had lost in the War, and he aimed to get it back any way he could. If you crossed him, he was the kind of man who would pull a pistol and shoot you between the eyes in front of a hundred witnesses, then go take his supper.

  George Rountree was the smartest of the bunch. Waddell liked him the least. In some ways, they thought alike—Rountree was always scouting out the board three moves ahead of everybody else. And they both served the law. But Rountree was a fanatic on the subject—he wouldn’t cross the street without the proper paperwork. He knew precedents and counter-precedents, ordinances and codes, right down to their subsections and footnotes.

  For Waddell, the law was a drama, the courtroom a theater exactly like the courthouse meeting. The broad sweep of justice ranged from tragedy to farce. Each trial had its own set of players, protagonist and antagonist, and a rising curve of suspense as they struggled toward the climax—that moment of decision after which nothing would ever be the same.

  At the center of each trial was the nut: one actor wanted something, and the other would stop at nothing to keep him from having it. A stage-managed combat by proxy. The consequences might be staggering—fines, hard labor, life imprisonment, even death.

  But for George Rountree, the drama was a nuisance. Human passions interfered with the law. The law lived in books. The law was the fiction everyone in the community had agreed upon so that their collective life might proceed with a semblance of order and decorum. The law was a kind of story told over and over again. From time to time, one needed to revise it—as he was already revising the role of Negroes and the ballot, Waddell knew.

  In the courtroom, Rountree was formidable. He could not match Waddell for fiery eloquence, for inflaming hearts and winning over an audience of nervous jurors. Instead, Rountree relied on the inexorable momentum of logic—fact following fact, figure proving figure, nothing overlooked, crushing his opponent by sheer weight of proof. Rountree won his cases in the law library.

  Rountree thrived on information, on knowing more than anybody else. The way to keep him off-balance, then, was to keep him in the dark. Already, at Waddell’s urging, Hugh MacRae had cut him out of some key meetings. It was time to cut him out of a few more.

  Waddell pulled out his gold watch—already after seven. Before he finished his plate, the men began to arrive. Within a few minutes, they filled up his parlor, dining room, and library, milling about, pouring coffee down their throats, all dressed up and talking in low tones, like a board of directors.

  Aunt Bessie disappeared. She did not even remove the breakfast dishes. Miz Gabby had not come down yet. What ailed her lately? No matter—women had no part in this morning’s business. And where was Samuel Jenks? He had sent word for Jenks to meet him here bright and early. For what they were about to do, he wanted his biographer close at hand.

  J. Allan Taylor stood in the entryway, thumbs hooked in the waistband of his trousers. He was nearly as tall as his brother but lacked Walker’s bulk. He was a man with no room for extras. Every few minutes, he yanked his watch out of his vest, snapped it open like he was knifing open an oyster, then dropped it back into the flannel pocket.

  Hugh MacRae said, “Expecting somebody?”

  Taylor said, “You don’t think the niggers will send word?”

  MacRae barely smiled. “As if that matters.”

  “But if they give in to everything—”

  MacRae clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Now listen, John. They can all sign over the deeds to their houses, it wouldn’t change what we have to do.”

  Taylor took his thumbs out of his waistband. “I’m just thinking of George. He’ll hold us to the paper. Like some goddamn contract or something.”

  MacRae had sent word to Rountree after yesterday’s meeting that the thing was settled: no call for drastic measures. “You let me handle George,” he said.

  MacRae’s eyes were flinty and bright, his face ruddy and smooth from good health and exercise. This morning, he moved in a kind of aura. His tweeds were crisp. His riding boots—which he rarely wore on a business day—were spit-shined to a rich chocolate brown. His thinning blond hair was slicked in a side part, and his ears were as pink as if he’d been standing in the cold for an hour. He fairly glowed.

  Beside him, Waddell seemed spectral, a black-and-white figure cut from the fabric of an earlier century: pale gray eyes sunk in deep, dark circles, silver hair and spiked goatee sheeny with oil, moustaches waxed to stiff points, high celluloid collar yellow against the white of his throat, black clawhammer coat both ridiculous and somber at this hour of the morning.

  With great ceremony, Waddell consulted his watch. Where was Jenks? No matter—he couldn’t wait any longer. “Gentlemen,” he said in a soft, deep voice, then snapped his watchcase shut as if it were loaded to fire. “Time.”

  MacRae donned his brown slouch hat, precisely blocked into a campaign crown, and led the Committee of Twenty-five across the porch and down the middle of Fifth Street to Market, where his saddled horse stood waiting at the armory. To J. Allan Taylor, he said, “Never doubt me, John.”

  Striding hard on his sore legs, Colonel Waddell passed the line of men and took his place at the head, beside MacRae and Taylor. In a few minutes, he would ride. He was walking so fast the breeze pushed at the broad front brim of his plumed chapeau, the same one he’d worn at Richmond and the Petersburg Pike. His hand reached reflexively to his left hip to pat the hilt of his cavalry saber—but in the rush, he had forgotten to buckle it on.

  Sam Jenks met them coming the other way. He greeted Waddell and his cousin and fell into step with them. He could tell by the look on MacRae’s face that these men were out to do serious business this morning. He could almost smell their nervous adrenaline, rank as sweat.

  The Light Infantry had been mustering at the armory since before dawn. Everything had been arranged. All the right people had been told. Every man had his assignment. When Waddell’s party arrived, Donald MacRae and Captain James were waiting. Several hundred men armed with Winchesters and Colt pistols were milling about in the yard by the steps. Some of them had spent the night guarding First Baptist Church or patrolling the neighborhoods, reporting at intervals to Colonel Roger Moore, grand marshal of the vigilantes. Moore had set up command a few blocks from Waddell’s house in the other direction, at Fifth and Chestnut.

  Moore had stopped by Waddell’s house as a courtesy the previous evening. During the War Between the States, he had served with Waddell in the Forty-first Regiment of the Third North Carolina Cavalry. Moore had been commissioned a major on the
same day Waddell had received his colonelcy. When Waddell had become ill, Moore had taken over command of the regiment.

  Waddell figured a command post was a good place for Colonel Moore this morning—one less chief to contend with. Let him wait there until they sent him his orders.

  When the assembled mob caught sight of Waddell, MacRae, and the other committee men, they cheered and pressed closer toward the armory, waiting for the word. The mob parted to let the leaders ascend the marble steps and enter the armory.

  Standing just inside the thick double doors, the MacRae brothers conferred briefly. Donald was still technically in command of the Light Infantry men who had volunteered for the Cuban campaign but never gotten there.

  “Form up your men,” Hugh MacRae said without any inflection. His voice resounded in the high space. Waddell and J. Allan Taylor stood to either side.

  Sam Jenks, loitering a step behind, said, “I don’t get it. You’re going to use force? But—”

  “Keep quiet,” MacRae said. “It’s time to make a point.”

  Donald MacRae hesitated and rubbed his sharp chin. “I still hold my commission in the U.S. Army, Hugh,” he said. “There may be ramifications.”

  J. Allan Taylor said, “He’s right, Hugh—they could court-martial him for this. It would give them a pretext to send the federals down.”

  “Goddamnit!” Hugh MacRae said. “Why didn’t you say something yesterday?”

  “It didn’t occur to me yesterday.”

  “Get Colonel Moore on the telephone.”

  The telephone hung on the wall in the meeting parlor just off the corridor. They clustered around it while MacRae rang Moore’s house. He wasn’t there. Of course he wasn’t there, Waddell reflected: MacRae must not know about the command post.

  Next, they rang Moore’s office, but of course he wasn’t there, either. Waddell knew that Colonel Moore was barely two blocks away, waiting by a telephone for this very call, but he didn’t say anything. MacRae hung up, looking baffled. His hair was mussed, and there was soot on the sleeve of his tweed coat where he’d rubbed against the fireplace mantel.

  “Get Walker on the telephone,” J. Allan Taylor suggested. “Christ, why isn’t he here already?”

  MacRae rang him at home. “Walk? We’ve got a situation here. Come on over and straighten us out. We need a good officer out front.” Then he listened, pressing the earpiece hard against his pink ear.

  “What’s he giving you?” J. Allan Taylor said. “Let’s get on with this.”

  “Goddamnit, haul your fat ass over here!” MacRae shouted into the trumpet. The composure was gone from his voice. As he cursed, his tenor went shrill and broke. His face went scarlet. He listened some more. “We need some leadership on this thing,” he said.

  “Let me talk to him,” J. Allan Taylor said. He reached for the earpiece, but MacRae held onto it with a white fist.

  Sam said, “I still don’t see why—”

  Waddell grabbed him, hard.

  “No, the city is not threatened, Walk, not directly,” Hugh MacRae said. “Christ Jesus—we’ve gone over all that! This thing is necessary. The long-term threat is there. We’ve got to do this thing. We talked about that.”

  Walker Taylor was shouting into the other end—they all could hear the shrill buzz of his voice rattling the earpiece.

  “We may not need you later!” Hugh MacRae said. “Later may be too late.”

  “Let me go get him,” Donald MacRae offered. “He’s only a block away.”

  Hugh ignored him and stared at the wall, still shouting. “We can’t stop it now—it’s too late, man!” He listened again, stamping his foot. “The Pinkertons’ report? We talked to the Pinkertons!” He listened. “I don’t give a good hoot in hell if you’ve changed your mind!”

  Donald MacRae shook his head and stared at the Italian marble floor.

  J. Allan Taylor stood by, wringing his hands, imagining what his grandfather would do at this moment if he were standing beside them here, in the family house he had built. They were all letting Hugh down. It was all a matter of technicalities. Rountree must have been talking to Walker—it had his stamp all over it. Legalities, that’s all it was. Paper laws.

  Hugh MacRae clapped the earpiece into the cradle so hard he nearly tore the wooden telephone box off the wall. He didn’t have to explain—they’d all caught the gist.

  Sam had never seen Hugh so worked up—almost too angry to speak.

  “Do it yourself,” J. Allan said.

  MacRae shook his head violently. “That’s not my place. It’s a military operation, that’s how we planned the goddamn thing.” He chopped the air with his hands. “We want action taken by the proper authorities.” He swore again. “I thought I had some goddamn soldiers I could count on.”

  His brother Donald said, “Tom James can do it. He’s out on the steps.”

  MacRae flung open the big doors and marched out, boots clicking, onto the marble steps. The mob cheered. At the fringes, Red Shirts collected in knots and pumped their rifles over their heads. “Let’s go get the niggers!” one of them cried, and the rest broke out in a chorus of cheering and hurrahs. They pressed closer.

  Sam was scared in his stomach. This mob had an air of premeditation—it was no spontaneous lynching party. These men had waited all night for this moment. Some had been waiting weeks. The inflammatory articles in the newspapers, the rousing hate speeches, the bogus election—everything had been moving toward this. And Sam’s job was to write the story.

  The infantrymen and several squads of Naval Reserves stood in loose formation in the side yard, checking their weapons.

  Hugh MacRae said, “Captain James, if you please.”

  Captain James turned on his heel, looking puzzled.

  “Captain MacRae requests you take command of this operation.”

  Captain James backed up a step, glanced sidelong at the mob, looked to Donald MacRae for some explanation. Donald MacRae stood with his brother and said nothing. “What, me lead that mob?” Captain James said.

  The MacRaes nodded. The blood rose in Captain James’s face. Automatically, he braced himself at attention. “I am a soldier,” he said. “I won’t lead a mob.”

  Sam scribbled James’s reply in his notebook—he wanted to get it right. He understood it immediately to be a defining moment, a vivid declaration of character. He wished he himself were capable of such a moment.

  Donald MacRae said, “Somebody has to do it.”

  Captain James said, “Not me—never. I won’t.”

  Hugh MacRae swore.

  Donald MacRae turned up his palms. “Be reasonable, Tom.”

  Waddell stood beside them, beaming, then took one calculated step toward the crowd.

  “Waddell!” Solomon Fishblate shouted from the front of the crowd, and others took up the chant: “Waddell! Waddell! Waddell!” He stood at the top step and let them cheer. He waved. He bowed deeply from the waist, sweeping his plumed hat across his body in a graceful flourish.

  Two of the Red Shirts grabbed him bodily and hauled him through the parting crowd, then hoisted him onto a horse. The stirrups were too long, but never mind that, he thought. He took the reins in one hand and, in a gesture he had not used in thirty-five years, lifted the other easily, naturally, palm open. He waited till the men had turned their attention from the armory steps to him. He sat above the crowd, feeding on their upturned faces, hand still raised. “We tried to reason with the niggers,” he said, “but they have defied us. Alex Manly is still at large, free to slander the good name of our women. I say this nonsense has gone on long enough!”

  The men hurrahed.

  “Today, we march on the nigger newspaper and seize Manly—are you with me?”

  The din rattled the windows of the armory. With all eyes fastened on him, Waddell casually let his arm drop forward, as if he were tossing a baseball, and their cheers started his horse forward up Market Street.

  Hugh MacRae stood momentarily paralyzed.
It was too late to stop Waddell. He had picked his moment with perfection, had outflanked him again. Colonel Moore, Walker Taylor, Tom James, even his own brother Donald—all had failed him at the crucial moment. He swore a string of oaths.

  J. Allan Taylor grabbed MacRae’s arm and led him around back to their stabled horses. “Come on, Hugh—we can catch ahold of this thing yet.”

  Sam Jenks sprinted down the steps and followed the mob.

  On the bone-white marble steps of the armory, Captain James watched them go. When the infantrymen formed up in ranks and started marching out of the yard, he leaped off the steps to stop them. “If you follow that mob, leave your tunics here!” he shouted. The men milled about uncertainly.

  Lieutenant White, the drillmaster, who wore wire-rimmed spectacles and styled himself after Colonel Roosevelt, said to Donald MacRae, “Captain, are we not to do our part?”

  “I’m in command here,” Captain James said. “If the city is threatened, we will move to keep the peace.”

  Donald MacRae swore, threw up a helpless hand, and retired inside the building.

  The men remained standing in ranks, muttering. The tail of the mob was almost out of sight now, and a group of men and boys who had arrived late were sprinting through the pall of lime dust to catch up to it.

  “At ease,” Captain James said. “Stack your weapons. Go on about your business. But don’t leave the compound.”

  The men shifted from foot to foot, talked briefly among themselves, swatted their gray, white-plumed hats against their thighs, and, with an exaggerated air of disappointment, began falling out. There were coffee and biscuits inside—they could smell the wood smoke from the old iron cookstove in the basement club rooms.

  Colonel Alfred Moore Waddell walked his horse so that the men behind him could keep up. Mounted Red Shirts took up positions as outriders, Winchesters cocked on thighs. By the time Waddell reached the turn onto Seventh, the mob stretched two blocks behind him, all the way back to the Wilmington Light Infantry Armory.

  Waddell made the turn onto Seventh Street with five hundred men trailing him. MacRae rode somewhere behind him—he didn’t look back to see. An army could have only one leader. Mike Dowling jogged along the flank on his skittish sorrel, his red shirt freshly laundered for the occasion. Among the marchers on foot were Solomon Fishblate and the Reverend Peyton Hoge, both carrying Winchesters.