Love and War

by John Jakes

  “I’ll go immediately to the President,” the secretary said. He was by now largely recovered from the shock of Orry’s news. “All cabinet members will be warned. Meanwhile, Colonel Main, yours is the privilege of casting the net for the biggest fish.”

  “I’ll do it with pleasure, sir.”

  A few minutes past ten, a curtained van raced to Church Hill and wheeled into Franklin Street. Orry jumped out and led an armed squad up the front steps. A second squad, dropped off a block away, had already deployed in the garden. Orry quickly found himself reacting as Seddon had when he first heard the story.

  The front door offered no resistance. Dumbfounded, he said to his men, “It’s been left unlocked.”

  Inside, the household furnishings remained, but no clothes or personal belongings.

  Lamar Powell had disappeared.

  That evening, a second shock. It came in Winder’s sanctum, delivered by the man with the long nose, weedy black clothes, and vaguely clerical air.

  “I found nothing. No signs of habitation. And, most especially, no trace of those crated weapons you reported, Colonel. In my opinion, no one’s been at that farm for months. The neighbors I questioned agree.”

  Orry jumped up. “That can’t be.”

  Antagonized, the other man said, “Is that so? Well, then—” a gesture to the door, derisive “—question the two operatives I took with me. You’ve heard my report, and I stand by it. If you don’t like it, ride back there and make your own.”

  “By God, I will,” Orry said, as Israel Quincy stepped to the window and gazed at the sunset.

  Evening’s dark red glinted on the river, lighting Orry’s stricken face. He had searched the implement building and found what Quincy and his colleagues predicted: nothing. He had left the building a moment ago, closing its door on the dirt floor, straw-littered and unmarked by any boot prints save those of men. Some were his. Some surely belonged to Winders operatives—and Powell’s crowd. Or did they? Orry hadn’t discovered a single imprint of a woman’s shoe.

  He felt angry, humiliated, baffled. He walked away from the bluff and searched the farmhouse. He found only dust and nesting rats. He searched the barn and chicken coop. Again nothing. By then night had come. He mounted and took a shortcut toward the main road, walking his horse across the same field he had crossed last night. The black of the plowed earth matched his mood exactly.

  His meager supper of rice and corn bread untasted, Orry said to Madeline, “Quincy’s been bought. Winder, too, for all I know. Mrs. Halloran inadvertently stumbled on a conspiracy that must reach very high. I intend to find out just how high.”

  “But the President is safe now, isn’t he? He’s been warned—”

  “Yes, but I still have to know! At this moment, I wouldn’t be surprised if Seddon and his wife were speculating on my mental condition. Am I a drunkard? Do I take opium? Did I see visions at the farm? I swear to you”—he went to her around the table—“I did not.”

  “I believe you, dearest. But what can you do? It appears they’ve opened and closed the case all in the same day.”

  “I haven’t. And I know someone who was at the farm. She’s still in Richmond—I verified that before I came home tonight. I intend to start some detective work on my sister first thing tomorrow.”

  But his vow went unfulfilled. In life’s strange way of piling one crisis on another when it was least needed, the street bell rang at half past ten. Orry ran downstairs. It had to be for him; the landlady never received callers this late.

  Covered with dirt, his head a mountain peak above clouds of cigar smoke, there stood Charles.

  “Your letter took a detour to Atlee’s Station, but I finally got it. I’m here to do something about Billy.”

  100

  STEPHEN MALLORY ARRIVED IN Charleston that same night, after a hard trip in one of the dirty, unheated cars of the decaying Southern rail system. A telegraph message from Lucius Chickering had summoned him.

  Cooper didn’t know that. Following the incident on Meeting Street, soldiers of the local provost had borne him home, none too gently, and since then he had been in bed, not moving, not speaking, not touching any of the food Judith brought. The pattern with the trays was unvarying: each was left an hour, then removed.

  Cooper did rouse a little—turn his head toward the door—when Judith opened it after knocking softly.

  “Darling? You have a visitor. Your friend Stephen. The secretary.”

  He said nothing. He lay beneath blankets layered too deeply for the mild weather. Everything within the dark, sweat-tainted room had a blurred quality. So did sounds from outside—birds in the garden, home guards quickstepping along Tradd Street to the accompaniment of a fife and a snare drum beating time.

  “Might I see him alone for a moment, Judith?”

  She glanced at her husband. His eyes were round and vacant. As they were every day. She was careful to hide her pain from the visitor.

  “Of course. If you need me, there’s a small hand bell on that table. Can you see it?”

  Mallory nodded and pulled a chair to the bedside. Judith glanced sadly at the bell, which Cooper hadn’t used once since being carried home. Mallory sat down. Judith shut the door.

  The secretary stared at his assistant. Cooper’s eyes fixed on the ceiling. Mallory spoke with the abruptness of a gunshot.

  “They say your nerves are gone. Is it true?”

  His voice lacked the treacle of conventional sickroom conversation. Cooper acknowledged that by blinking once. But he didn’t move or reply.

  “See here, Cooper. If you can hear me, have the courtesy to look me in the eye. I didn’t ride the train all the way from Richmond to converse with a corpse.”

  Slowly, Cooper’s head tilted over toward the visitor, cheek resting on the feather pillow, graying hair spread above, fine and thin. But the eyes remained empty.

  Mallory persisted. “That was a scandalous thing you did. Scandalous—no other word for it. The enemy already considers us a nation of barbarians—regrettably, not without some justification. But for a government official to behave like a demented prison warden, and in public—” He shook his head. “There may be a few brutish Southerners who would condone your behavior, but not many. I’ll not pretend, Cooper. You damaged our cause, and you damaged yourself, gravely.”

  Those words finally produced reaction of a sort: rapid movement of Cooper’s eyelids and a compression of his lips. Mallory’s face looked nearly as gray as that of the man in bed.

  “I couldn’t sleep on that wretched train, so I sat up trying to devise some polite way to request your immediate resignation. There is none. Therefore—”

  “They killed my son.”

  The sudden words jerked Mallory like a puppet. “What’s that? The prisoners you attacked and fought? Nonsense.”

  Cooper’s hands twitched on the counterpane, aimless white spiders without webs to spin. He blinked rapidly again, said in a hoarse voice, “The profiteers killed my son. The war killed him.”

  “And it was grievous and tragic; I’ll not deny that. But in these times, if you except Judah’s extreme youth, neither was it special.”

  Cooper’s head lifted. Anger flooded the holes of his eyes. Mallory pushed him down gently.

  “Not special to any but you and your family. Do you know nothing of the figures? How many sons lost to how many fathers? It runs into the hundreds of thousands, all over the South. All over the North, too, for that matter. After a suitable period of mourning, most of those fathers manage to function again. They don’t lie abed and weep.”

  The secretary sagged a little then. The effort was a strain and, worse, unsuccessful. He pulled a handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped his cheeks. He smelled a chamber pot under the bed. One last try.

  “You’ve served the Navy Department more than competently, Cooper. You have served imaginatively and, in the case of Hunley, with great bravery. If you’re the same man who endured foul air and fear of death at the b
ottom of Charleston harbor for two and a half hours, I still need your services. We are not yet done with this war. The soldiers and sailors are still fighting, and so am I. Therefore I’d be inclined to substitute a letter of censure for resignation. But, of course, in order to come back to work—” stern as a parent, he stood up “—you would have to get out of bed. Kindly send me word of your decision within seventy-two hours.”

  He took pains to shut the door more loudly than necessary.

  Downstairs with Judith, he mopped his sweating face again. “That is the hardest thing I’ve ever done—concealing my sympathy for that poor man. It breaks my heart to see him so lost.”

  “It’s been coming for a long time, Stephen. An accumulation of fatigue, frustration, grief—I have no way to bring him out of it. Kind words won’t do it; nor will angry ones. I decided some different kind of shock was needed. That’s why I begged you to speak as you did.”

  “I wasn’t entirely playacting. I have had demands for his resignation. Strong ones, from important men.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that.”

  “Our resources are depleted, our armies on the brink of starvation—” She wanted to say the civilian population soon would be, but she didn’t. “We have little left us but our honor, so a man who behaves as Cooper did isn’t easily forgiven.” Toying with the hat he picked up from a taboret, he added, “But I’ll happily shoulder the criticism and ignore the outcries if I can get him back to work.”

  She squeezed his hand in silent appreciation. “Would you like something to eat? A cup of coffee? I hit on a way to parch acorns, then roast them in a little bacon fat. It makes a passable substitute.”

  “Thank you, but I’d rather go back to the hotel and sleep an hour or so.”

  “I’m the one who owes thanks.” She kissed his cheek. Mallory blushed.

  “What I said was brutal—at least for me,” he said as he walked to the door. “I only hope it may do some good.”

  When he was gone, Judith looked toward the stairs, then realized she was famished. There was nothing in the house except leftover artificial oysters, fried up from a sticky batter made of grated green corn, one precious egg, and a few other scarce ingredients. But they were less scarce than the oysters themselves, which the Yankees gathered or the greedy oystermen sold directly to civilian customers who would pay an exorbitant price. You couldn’t find oysters in the markets any longer. You couldn’t find much of anything.

  In the kitchen, she discovered her daughter listlessly trying to repair a plate she had broken while helping with the dishes. All they had for glue was a concoction of rice flour simmered in water. As Marie-Louise spread some on one of the broken edges, she gave her mother a dolorous look, as though protesting a sentence of hard labor. Judith’s reply was crisp and firm.

  “You’ve begun well. Please finish the same way, clean up, then go to your studies.”

  “All right, Mama.”

  Thank heaven their daughter caused them no serious problems, Judith thought, walking through the downstairs with a headache beginning to push at her temples. Cooper in bed day and night, depressed, silent—that was enough.

  She wrote a letter to Mont Royal, requesting some rice flour if it could be spared, and a note of congratulations to a cousin in Cheraw who had delivered her first baby last month. On the Mont Royal letter she put a ten-cent rose-colored stamp; on the second, a blue five and one of the older green ones. How tired she was of the face of the President on stamps of every denomination.

  She sat down at the pianoforte, her sense of failure deepening as she bent over the keyboard. A few white strands showed in her blond curls. Slowly, expertly, she began to play “The Vacant Chair.” Like so many of the war songs published in the North, it was popular on both sides. The lyric suited her mood. Soon she was singing in her fine soprano voice:

  “We shall meet, but we shall miss him,

  There will be one vacant chair—

  We shall linger to caress him,

  While we breathe our evening prayer.”

  A sound startled her. She played the wrong keys, jangly discord, and looked toward the ceiling. Had she imagined—?

  No. Faint but unmistakable, the little bell rang again.

  Weeping with hope, she ran up the stairs, flung open the door of the stale room. She couldn’t see him in the dark, but she heard him clearly.

  “Judith, would you mind opening the draperies to let in some light?”

  The salt wind reached Tradd Street from the sea, flowing in to cleanse the bedroom. Late that afternoon, Cooper consumed half a bowl of turkey broth and a cup of Judith’s imitation coffee. Then he rested with his head turned toward the tall windows, open to show the great live oak just outside and the rooftop of his neighbor’s house.

  He felt weak, as if he had just thrown off a prolonged high fever.

  “But my head’s clear. I don’t feel—how should I put it?—I don’t feel the way I did before Stephen called. I don’t feel so angry.”

  She sat against the headboard and pulled him gently to her small bosom, left arm cradling his shoulders. “Something in you burst like a boil when you attacked that prisoner. You despised slavery and where it was leading the South for so very long, but when you took your stand three years ago, you did it with all the fervor you’d once directed the other way. That was commendable, but I think it started terrible forces warring inside you. Judah’s death made it worse. So did long hours at the department, trying to accomplish too much with too little.” She hugged him. “What ever the reason, I thank God you’re better. If I were Catholic, I’d ask them to canonize Stephen.”

  “I hope I’m sane again. I know I’m mightily ashamed. What of that sergeant I attacked?”

  “A concussion. But he’ll recover.”

  A relieved sigh. “You’re right about the struggle inside. It’s still there. I know the war’s lost, but I suppose I should go back to work if the department wants me. Where is Stephen, by the way?”

  “He’s resting at the Mills House. As for working again—I’d think a while. My feelings about the war haven’t changed. At the time Sumter fell, they were your feelings, too.” His eyes shifted away from her, to the neighbor’s rooftop.

  “This war’s wrong, Cooper. Not only because all war is wrong, but also because it’s being fought for an immoral cause—no, please let me finish. I know all the rhetoric and apologetics by heart. So do you. It isn’t the tariff or states’ rights or Northern arrogance that brought all this suffering. It’s what we did—Southerners—either directly or through the complicity of our silence. We stole the liberty of other human beings, we built fortunes from that theft, and we even proclaimed from our pulpits that God approved.”

  He took her hand, his voice like that of a bewildered child. “I know you’re right. But I don’t know what to do next.”

  “Survive the war. Work for Stephen if you must. Whatever you decide, it will be all right. Your head’s clear now. But promise yourself—and promise me—that when the South falls, you’ll work just as hard for peace. You know how it will be when the shooting stops. Animosity will persist on both sides, but the losers will feel it most. You know that because you went through it. You know what hatred does to a man.”

  “It feeds on itself. Multiplies. Begets more hate and more pain, and that begets still more—”

  Overcome, she let the tears fall, hugging him harder. “Oh, Cooper, how I love you. The man I married—went away for a while—but I think—I found him again—”

  He held her while she cried joyously.

  Presently she asked if he wanted to talk to Mallory when he returned. Cooper said yes, he thought so. He would put on a fresh nightshirt and dressing gown and join them for supper. She clapped her hands and ran to find Marie-Louise.

  Feeling buoyant, free of pain—composed—he returned his gaze to the garden. Above his neighbor’s roof he saw a rectangle of clear, brilliant sky; his beloved Carolina sky. He had lost sight of how greatly that
kind of simple perception cheered and exalted a man.

  Lost sight of a great many other things, too. Including his own nature.

  Judith was right: grief for his son had precipitated the worst. That grief would never leave him, just as his loathing for Ashton would not, or the unbecoming wish that she be punished for her greed. But the emotions building and building within him for so long had been purged in that explosion on Meeting Street, purged by his rain of cane strokes on the luckless Yankee.

  The aftermath had left him wanting to die—or at least sleep a long time. Was it possible that the emotional desolation was the actual start of healing? He recalled another passage from the pen of the man he most revered, Edmund Burke. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about.

  Weakened but not destroyed. Mending; that was his condition. He was no longer the same man who had attacked the sergeant. He could again examine past behavior with objectivity, if not exactly with pride.

  He had veered for a time into absolute patriotism—unquestioning acceptance of all things Southern. Before Sumter fell, he knew what was fine and worthy in his homeland. He loved that part, rejecting the rest. But then he had changed, gradually became willing to fight for and accept all of it. Including what was represented by the whitewashed huts three-quarters of a mile from Mont Royal’s great house. The attitude was wrong before, and it was wrong now. It was one of the first things he would set right.

  He examined his feelings about the war itself. He knew the storm had passed him because he once more felt as he had in the fateful spring of ’61. The war was misbegotten because it couldn’t be won. The war was an abomination because it pitted American against American. How shameful to grasp now that he had, for a while, become one with those who had pushed the nation into the war. One with the James Huntoons and Virgilia Hazards. One with those who could not or would not find a means to prevent the holocaust.

  All right, the war was evil. What then?

  He thought it through. He would no longer lend himself to wars except the one of which Judith had spoken, the inevitable one against the political barbarians, whose names he knew well. Wade. Davis. Butler. Stevens. The South would need men to stand against their onslaught. It would be a fierce battle, full of unexpected dangers. Burke, as always, had words to frame the challenge: The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us.