Love and War

by John Jakes

  “They say not. It was late. Dark. Those who took him must have worked quietly.”

  “Goddamn us all for what we do in the name of patriotism. They did a job on him, all right. Something a lot worse than beating with fists, though I still can’t figure out the method.”

  “Can’t Billy tell us? Give us the names or at least the descriptions of those responsible?”

  Billy thrashed, arched his back, cried out softly. His left nostril began to ooze blood. The doctor bent to wipe it, giving Tim bleak look.

  “If he lives,” he said.

  Sunset. Sea birds circling. The air was calm and cold, though in the north massive cloud banks were building rapidly. Over on the Battery, windows glowed and the last daylight touched roof peak and steeples. Bundled in his caped greatcoat, Cooper noticed mist forming on the water.

  George Dixon finished his survey of the harbor and pushed the sections of his brass telescope together. “The mist will help. We have an ebb tide to assist us when we’re ready to start back. It’s our best opportunity thus far. I think we’ll go.”

  He pivoted and called to the mate. “Mr. Fawkes? Rig the torpedo boom, if you please. I want to get under way promptly.”

  “Aye, aye, Captain,” said the former Alabama soldier. All of the landsmen had learned nautical ways with speed and relish. Having survived the underwater test, they took pride in behaving like experienced tars.

  “Which of the ships will be your target?” Cooper asked.

  “I think it’s best to determine that once we’re past the harbor bar.”

  “I intend to row over to Sumter to watch.” He held out his hand. “Godspeed, George. I’ll expect you back by midnight.”

  “By all means,” replied the young skipper with a brief smile “I’m very proud to be taking her out. You should be proud, too. If we succeed, this night will live in history.”

  “You’ll succeed,” Lucius said, hovering behind his superior.

  “Well—good-bye, then,” Dixon said, striding down the pier as confidently as any master who had first gone into the tops as a boy. “Careful with that powder, lads. It’s meant to sink a Yankee, not us.”

  A shiver chased down Cooper’s back—a reaction not at all connected with the plunging temperature. This moment made all the peril, the worry, the pleading with Beauregard—even the coldness of his wife, who simply didn’t understand him or the importance of his work—worthwhile.

  Lucius climbed into the boat first. Through thickening mist, they rowed hard for the landing stage of the shell-blasted fort, halfway there, Lucius pointed over Cooper’s shoulder. “She’s leading out.” Cooper twisted clumsily on the thwart, barely in time to glimpse a red-orange glitter on the iron hull. Then the dark clouds closed. The slight bulge on the surface of the water disappeared.

  From the seaward side of Fort Sumter, they watched darkness and mist rapidly hide the blockade fleet. Only a few signal lanterns showed where the vessels lurked. The night remained very quiet, very cold. Cooper grew nervous. He had just checked his watch once again—8:47 P.M.—when fire and noise erupted in the offshore mist.

  Cooper caught his breath. “Which ship is it?”

  “Housatonic,” said the major from the fort who had come up to watch with them. He passed his telescope, which Cooper peered through just as a sheet of flame carried pieces of timber and rigging skyward. The roar came rolling in over the harbor bar.

  “She’s hulled on the starboard side,” Cooper crowed. “Just forward of the mainmast, I think. I can see men scrambling up the main and mizzen—oh—she’s listing already!” He fairly hurled the telescope at his assistant. “Look while you can, Lucius. She’s going down.”

  New lanterns were quickly lit on other ships in the enemy squadron. They heard faint yells through speaking trumpets. The steam warship nearest the sinking vessel put down lifeboats while men from the Sumter garrison rushed out of their quarters, clamoring to know what Confederate battery had fired and mortally wounded the steam sloop.

  “None,” said Cooper. “She was sunk by our submersible boat, Hunley.”

  “You mean that coffin ship from Sullivan’s Island?”

  “She no longer deserves that reputation. Lieutenant Dixon and his crew will be decorated as heroes.”

  But they were slow to return. At eleven o’clock, Cooper and Lucius rowed back to the pier and kept a vigil that grew colder and grimmer by the hour. At six in the morning, Cooper said, “Let’s go back to Charleston.”

  A haunted man, he trudged up Tradd Street and let himself into the house. No one in the city knew anything about the sinking of Housatonic, only that an explosion had occurred on one of the blockade vessels. Of the submersible there was no trace.

  A few days later, following the capture of a Union picket boat, Cooper was able to confirm for General Beauregard that Housatonic had indeed gone down. He was disappointed to learn she had lost only five hands, thanks to the quick arrival of rescue boats.

  “Two less than the number aboard Hunley,” he said to Lucius.

  In the next few days, Cooper drank large amounts of whiskey and gin, hoping to induce heavy sleep. It refused to come. Every night he roamed the house or sat in a high-backed white-painted wicker chair, staring through the window at the garden drenched by winter rain. Of the garden he saw nothing. He saw instead his drowning son. Dixon’s brave face just before Hunley sailed at sunset. Strangest of all, he saw the darkness that had surrounded him inside the fish-ship during the test. He saw it, smelled it, tasted it, too, knowing fully, painfully, how Dixon and the rest felt as they died. During these reveries he heard the great bells from the steeple of St. Michael’s Church, though the ringing never seemed to coincide with the quarter-hours. All the clocks in the house were set wrong, he decided.

  One night, nearly as exhausted as her husband by now, Judith brought a lamp to the room with the white wicker chair.

  “Cooper, this can’t continue—sitting up, never resting.”

  “Why should I go to bed? I can’t sleep. The night of the seventeenth of February was a milestone in naval warfare. I try to find peace in that thought, and I can’t.”

  “Because you—” She stopped.

  “I know what you started to say. I am responsible for that milestone. I wanted it so badly I killed seven men.”

  She turned her back, unable to withstand his glare. He was right, though. She whispered to herself as much as to him, “You should have left her to rust. But you didn’t, and I wouldn’t have wished harm on any of those poor boys, but I’m glad Hunley’s gone. God forgive me. I’m glad. Perhaps it will finally purge some of the madness that torments you—”

  His head jerked up. “What a peculiar choice of words—madness. I performed my duties to the best of my ability, that’s all. I did my work. And there’s more, much more, waiting. I will do it in the same way.”

  “Then nothing’s changed. I had hoped—”

  “What could possibly change?”

  She raised her voice. “Won’t you even let me finish a sentence?”

  “To what purpose? I ask you again, Judith. What could possibly change?”

  “You’re so full of this awful rage—”

  “More than ever. Poor Dixon’s life must be paid for, and the life of every man who went down with him.” His lips turned white. “Paid for ten times over.”

  The shudder of her arm rattled the lamp in her hand. “Cooper, when will you understand? The South can’t win this war. It cannot.”

  “I refuse to debate the—”

  “Listen to me! This—dedication to slaughter—it’s destroying you. It’s destroying us.”

  He turned his head, stiff and silent.

  “Cooper?”

  No movement. Nothing.

  She shook her head and carried her lamp away, leaving him glaring at the rainy garden, the fury on his face digging lines so deep they were becoming permanent.

  Passing the head of the stairs, Tim Wann noticed the motionless fig
ure on the landing below. Tim looked a second time to be sure.

  “Billy?”

  The emaciated prisoner raised his head. Tim saw new streaks of white in the untrimmed hair. “Billy!” With a whoop and a slap of his leg, he bounded down to his friend, who supported himself with a padded crutch under his arm. “You’re all right!”

  “Well enough to come back to our splendid quarters. There are still some ribs healing, and I’m not steady on my feet—you talk too loudly, you’re liable to blow me over. I’m a little slow getting around. It’s taken me ten minutes to come from the ground floor.”

  “Someone should have helped you.”

  “I guess Turner doesn’t believe in coddling his guests. You can help me the rest of the way if you want.”

  Tim slid his arm around Billy, who put his across the shoulders of the young soldier. Thus they reached their room, where Billy was greeted by exclamations of surprise and shouts of welcome. Even one of the daytime guards said he was happy Billy had pulled through.

  A lieutenant thoughtlessly slapped Billy on the back. Billy made a desperate stab with his crutch and prevented a fall. “Jesus, Hazard—I’m sorry,” the lieutenant said.

  “’S all right.” Sweat showed in Billy’s beard suddenly. “I need to sit down. Someone give me a hand—?”

  Tim did. Others crowded around. Billy asked, “Is it still February? I lost track downstairs.”

  “It’s the first of March,” a man said. “They’ve doubled the guard force outside. There’s a column of our cavalry north of Richmond—practically on the doorsill. Three or four thousand horse. The rebs fear they’ve come to free us and raze the city.”

  “Do you know about the escape?” someone else asked. Billy shook his head, and heard about it. More than forty of the prisoners involved had been recaptured; but the rest, presumably, were on their way back to federal lines or already across. He learned next that Vesey, demoted to private, had been transferred to less comfortable duty outside one of the main doors.

  They asked questions about his treatment downstairs, how he had gotten hurt. He answered each question with silence or a shake of his head. When he said he needed to visit the lavatory, Tim and another soldier lent a hand.

  After Billy gained his feet, Tim said: “It was Vesey, wasn’t it? Vesey tortured you and that’s why he was demoted and tossed outside. That’s right, isn’t it?”

  Billy’s silence was already a matter of pride with him. “Never mind,” he said. “I know who did it, and if I get a chance, I’ll settle with him.”

  He wobbled on the crutch, pale and too feeble to settle much of anything. Tim and the other man exchanged looks.

  Tim had kept Billy’s improvised journal safe. That night, while distant cannon fire reverberated through Libby, Billy wrote with the pencil stub.

  Mar. 1—Two remarkable circumstances. I am alive when Dr. Arnold, the old toper in the surgery, expected I’d die. Also—the reb who took it as his duty to injure me taught me a lesson so monumental I do not wholly grasp it yet. In here, forced to obey any order, no matter how humiliating or destructive, I at last understand how the enslaved negro feels. I have dwelt a while in the soul of a shackled black man and taken a little of it into my own, forever.

  94

  STANLEY FOUND IT INCREASINGLY hard to accept and deal with all the changes in his life. Pennyford continued to send monthly reports of the enormous profits earned by Lashbrook’s. Stanley read each with disbelief. The figures could not possibly be real. If they were, no man deserved such wealth. Certainly he didn’t. He found it hard to cope with the swift flow of public events as well. Weariness with the war now infected the entire North, the President having hastened the process with his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, announced last December. Lincoln proposed to pardon all rebels except the highest government officials and former army and navy officers who had defected.

  The plan was not harsh enough to suit Wade and Stevens and their crowd, therefore not harsh enough for Stanley either. But what other kind of plan could one expect from a negrophile half mad from perpetual sleeplessness and depression? Instead of thinking rigorously about the enemy and the postwar period, Lincoln busied himself with trivialities, pious orations at cemetery dedications and the like. At Gettysburg last November he had delivered himself of one such anthology of homilies, to the monumental boredom of the crowd.

  Because of his increasingly pro-Negro position and his failure to bring the war to a successful end, Lincoln was a detested man. The capital seethed with rumors of plots to kidnap or murder him. Stanley heard a new one approximately once a week.

  Further, influential Republicans believed the President had done the party great harm by insisting on a new draft of half a million men on the first of February. There would be a call for an additional one or two hundred thousand by mid-March, Stanton had confided. Humans were being ground up like sausage meat in a butcher shop because the generals couldn’t win. Thomas had held fast at Chickamauga last autumn—the Rock, the rabble quickly named him—but the engagement itself had been disastrous, redeemed only slightly when Bragg’s army was driven from Chattanooga into Georgia in November. Now, flogged to almost insane desperation, Congress had reactivated the grade of lieutenant general and bestowed it on a man Lincoln had chosen—that drunkard, Unconditional Surrender Grant. As general-in-chief, he would soon take charge in the Eastern theater; Old Brains had been demoted to chief of staff.

  None of that would save the President, Stanley felt. Lincoln would lose the fall election—no cause for grief there. But the number of Republicans he could drag along to defeat frightened Stanley and his friends.

  Increasingly, Stanley felt a desire to leave Washington. He still relished the power that went with his job. But he wasn’t comfortable with the philosophies and programs of those with whom he had allied himself in order to survive the Cameron purge. In January, the Senate had proposed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery—in Stanley’s view, far too radical a step, taken too hastily. Too many Negroes were already free and out of hand. Everywhere you looked in the city, black soldiers and freedmen postured and paraded, swollen with new self-importance.

  One morning Stanley was summoned by the secretary only moments after arriving at his desk. Stanley’s cravat was askew, his hair rumpled, his appearance wild-eyed. Stanton noticed.

  “What the devil’s biting you?” he asked, brushing the underside of his scented beard. Before leaving home, Stanley had taken some swallows of whiskey on the sly. They loosened his tongue.

  “Walking here on the avenue, I had an unbelievable experience. Unbelievable—disgusting—I scarcely know the proper word, it shook me so. I came face to face with seven freedmen who forced me to step into the street to get around them. They would not give me room on the walk!”

  The whiskey lent him courage to ignore Stanton’s sudden scowl. “I realize they have been downtrodden people, sir. But now they presume too much. They strut about with all the boldness of white men.”

  Through the little round spectacles, Stanton peered at his assistant. The patient air of the teacher replaced the anger of the zealot. “You must get used to it, Stanley. Like it or not, that’s the way it will be henceforth. As Saint Paul wrote to the Corinthians, ‘For the trumpet shall sound—and we shall be changed.’”

  Not I, Stanley thought, still seething when he and the secretary concluded their business and he left. Not I, Mr. Stanton.

  Yet he knew he swam against a flooding tide. When his part of the office was temporarily deserted, he unlocked a bottom drawer and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. He had slipped the first bottle into the drawer on the first business day of the new year; this was the third replacement.

  A swift look at his surroundings. Safe. Moted sunlight flashed from the bottle as he tilted it. The loudly ticking clock showed twenty before ten.

  The thunder blow—“Missing in action”—had fallen on the Hazards late last year. In mid-February, George finally le
arned something definite about Billy’s fate, and with mingled relief and reluctance telegraphed Lehigh Station: YOUR HUSBAND SHOWN ON LATEST ROSTER LIBBY PRISON RICHMOND.

  Brett packed the instant she got the news and took the first available train for Washington. When she arrived at the house in Georgetown—thinner now; nervous from months of anxiety—her first question was “What can we do?”

  “Officially, the answer is very little,” George said. “The mills of the exchange system have nearly ceased to grind. Too much bad feeling on both sides. Each receives reports of the other starving and mistreating prisoners. The War Department’s furious because the rebs won’t follow protocol when they capture men from Negro regiments. They treat them as runaways and ship them back to slavery. White officers commanding Negro units are threatened with flogging or hanging. It’s all gotten very nasty.”

  Brett flared. “You’re right, that isn’t much of an answer.”

  “Did you hear me precede it with the word officially?” George retorted. “I do have another suggestion.”

  Constance stepped behind his chair, reached down, and gently kneaded his shoulders. He was sleeping poorly these days, worrying about his brother and about his transfer to military railroads. It had not come through.

  Brett was waiting. He cleared his throat. “In his post in the Richmond War Department, Orry may be able to help us. Old Winder has direct responsibility for Libby and Belle Isle and the rest of those—” he caught himself before saying hellholes “—places. But Seddon oversees Winder. And Orry works for Seddon.”

  Constance, eagerly: “You think Orry might be able to arrange Billy’s release?”

  “He’s in the central government, and I’m sure he took an oath to serve loyally. I wouldn’t ask him to break it. Even more important than that, he’s my best friend. I would never risk endangering him by asking him to intervene directly.”

  Brett struck her skirt with her fist. “Billy’s your own brother!”

  “And Orry’s yours. Be so kind as to let me finish, will you?” George jerked away from his wife’s hand, rose, and paced from the breakfast table. “I can ask Orry to find out all he can about Billy’s condition, and exactly where he is in Libby.”