Love and War

by John Jakes

  “Demolishing buildings. I think that was the Tredegar Works.”

  His daughter Marcelline began to shriek and babble as if taking leave of her senses. Without hesitation, Mr. Perdue slapped her several times. That took care of that.

  By eleven, the city was an asylum lit by spreading fires. Davis arrived in a carriage surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. In the smoky lamplight, Mr. Perdue watched him pass into the depot. A train for Danville was waiting, someone said.

  Mr. Perdue began to smell betrayal as he glimpsed certain other persons entering the station, each escorted by at least one soldier. He saw the scoundrel Mallory, who had wasted so many precious dollars on his worthless naval schemes. Trenholm, who had replaced Memminger at Treasury, arrived in an ambulance. Then came the damned Jew, Benjamin, sleek and cheery as ever. The privileged were to be carried to safety, away from the steady detonations of gunpowder, the brightening light of fires, the threat of hooligans looting—

  “The boxcars of the special train will be opened,” a railroad official shouted from the depot steps. “I repeat, the boxcars will be opened, but no baggage will be allowed. None!”

  Screaming, shoving, the crowd surged forward. Not everyone could squeeze through the station doors at once. People began striking and clawing one another like enemy soldiers. Mr. Perdue saw a child fall, trampled, a short distance to his left. He didn’t try to assist the girl; he was busy dragging his wife relentlessly toward the platform.

  “Oh, but Lonzo—no baggage? I can’t leave these few precious things—”

  “Then you’ll stay here without me. Girls, kick those women if they won’t move.” Thus the family won a place on the 11:00 P.M. out of Richmond.

  As the train started up slowly, chugging and jerking, desperate laggards trampled and pushed one another, still trying to climb into boxcars already filled to capacity. In his car, Mr. Perdue and several other men. manned the open door and protected their families by booting the faces and stamping on the hands of those attempting to board.

  Marcelline tugged her father’s coattail and pointed to a waving, yelling group on the platform. “Papa, it’s Mr. Salvarini and his family.”

  “Yes, too bad,” said Mr. Perdue as he reached down to a soft hand with two wedding rings on the fourth finger. Like some tenacious deep-sea creature, the hand had emerged from the mob to fasten on his trouser leg. He gripped the middle finger and bent it backward. As the hand released, he heard a bone pop. A stout woman sank from sight.

  The tangle of bodies fell away at a faster rate; the train gathered speed and moved onto the trestle. Mr. Perdue’s coat and cravat were in shreds. He was exhausted but happy—very satisfied and pleased by his untypical display of heroism in the face of danger.

  Upriver, great light pylons showed where other James River bridges had been set afire. Perhaps I should have gone into the army after all, Mr. Perdue thought as the train bore him away into the night.

  The soldiers, chiefly wounded veterans, had organized a rear guard to sweep through the government warehouses on Thirteenth and Fourteenth, putting matches to the cartons and crates of official records. One grizzled man, who was twenty-five but looked forty, pried open a wooden box and exclaimed, “Here’s something new—undelivered mail.”

  “Burn it,” said his sergeant, whose pant legs, like those of his men, were soaked with whiskey. They had waded through gutters filled with it. The looters were breaking open everything.

  The soldier stuck in his match. When a few letters caught, he plucked them from the box and used them to fire a second one, then a third and fourth. With the blaze roaring nicely, he dropped the original packet of letters on the plank floor, already hot, and hurried away to safety.

  129

  OUTSIDE THE LEDGER-UNION, an office boy hung up a summary of a new telegraphic dispatch almost hourly. Each piece of information from the distant Petersburg-Richmond line was greeted with cheers from a crowd becoming steadily larger.

  By midday on Monday, the third of April, the excitement brought work to a standstill at Hazard’s and swept through Belvedere like fire in a dry spell. Madeline was the only one who retreated from it, going to her suite of rooms and shutting the door.

  She was thankful the end seemed near. The dispatches did not say positively that General Lee had abandoned his hopeless position in front of Petersburg and the Richmond lines as well, but that presumption was being accepted throughout the mansion—and the ironworks and the town. Everyone felt the Confederate capital would soon fall. If all of this meant the bloodletting would stop, she was grateful.

  Yet the news raised a less welcome consideration. After a surrender, she would have no excuse for not returning to Mont Royal.

  She hated the thought. The place would only remind her of Orry. Yet she knew she had an obligation to go back as soon as it was possible to travel to South Carolina. There was a great deal of Washington talk about confiscating all the property of the largest slaveholders. She must be home to fight against that if it happened. If the love she and Orry shared had any monument at all, it was Mont Royal, tainted by black slavery though it was. So her duty was unavoidable. She must remember and take courage from her father’s words. We are all dying of life. She must make the journey and stand in Orry’s stead, maintaining the home they had occupied together such a short time. Assuming, of course, that the plantation still existed. Northern journalists wrote long articles about the advance of General Sherman’s army and the activities of his foragers operating on the flanks. So lurid and gleeful were these pieces, it was possible to imagine half of the state of South Carolina put to the torch, exactly like the city of Columbia.

  But she wouldn’t know Mont Royal’s fate until she got there, and she couldn’t get there without preparation. She was tired of imagining scenes of destruction. One antidote was physical activity.

  From the closet where she had stored it, she brought a small trunk, in which she had carried her things from Richmond. She opened it and savored the aroma of a few cedar chips in the bottom. From the wardrobe, she took two dresses she seldom wore. One by one, she folded them and laid them in the trunk.

  When it was about half full of items seldom used or worn since her arrival, her gaze fell on the half-dozen slender books on her bedside table. She picked out the third from the top, opened it at the ribbon marker, and gazed at the poem without seeing a word.

  Don’t, a silent voice warned. She shut the book, clasping it tight to her breast. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared through the window at the hillsides of sunlit mountain laurel.

  “It was many and many a year ago—in a kingdom—by the sea—that a maiden there lived whom you may know—by the name of—”

  Shuddering, she bowed her head.

  “By the name of—”

  She couldn’t say the rest. The poem had meant too much to both of them. She leaned over the trunk and laid the volume of Poe on a neatly folded shawl, then closed the trunk lid with a small, final click. It was all the packing she could manage at the moment.

  When the conquerors marched into Richmond that day, Mrs. Burdetta Halloran was ready. She had spent nearly all her remaining money on one of the old flags, which cost dearly because the speculator selling them said many people wanted them. She burned her Confederate national flag in her fireplace.

  In the morning the Yankees paraded past her home, led by the black horsemen of the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry—incredible sight. She concealed her sick scorn and cheered and waved her handkerchief beneath the Stars and Stripes she had hung above her front veranda. Many of her neighbors openly wept, but not all. She didn’t give a damn for what the weepers thought of her behavior.

  By the hundreds the conquerors came, fifing, drumming, grinning, celebrating beneath a sky painted by fires that still burned. On the flanks of the riding and marching men, Negroes skipped and danced and taunted the whites watching from porches and upper windows.

  She saw a white officer notice her and cheered al
l the louder. Perhaps such a man would be taken with her appearance, stop, introduce himself. She had to survive somehow. She would.

  “Oh, thank God, thank God,” she cried beneath the grand old flag, waving her hanky so hard her arm ached. Her acting was so fine, tears coursed down her cheeks. Presently a chubby colonel reined his horse out of column and slowly approached the picket fence, to which she rushed and was waiting to speak as he smiled and removed his hat.

  “No more slavery—and soon no more war, doesn’t it seem so, Captain?”

  “Yes, there’s every indication that Lee is on the run,” Billy agreed. Pinckney Herbert’s small, bright eyes rejoiced as he tied a bit of string around the rolled-up razor strop. Billy had let his beard grow since coming home, but he kept the upper edges trimmed, and his old strop was worn out.

  It was about an hour after Madeline had shut herself in her room—a mild bright Monday afternoon. Billy was mending. The wound frequently filled the upper half of his body with a diffuse but severe pain, though he always managed to overcome it when he and Brett snuggled in bed together. She said he had never been so passionate in all the relatively short times they had been together during four years of marriage. She told him that with great pleasure. He liked to reply, “Been living on army rations a mighty long time. You know—coffee, corn bread, and continence.”

  He thanked Herbert, took his change and the strop, and left the dim, dust-moted store with its wonderful homey smells of cloth, crackers, and onion sets. Though his chest was starting to ache again, he felt a renewed and joyful sense of life returning to normal. In recognition of it, he no longer wore his side arm.

  The storekeeper was right, certainly. It was a new day for the whole land. The Thirteenth Amendment had gone to the individual states for ratification, and Illinois had been the first to do so. Even the pathetic Confederate President had acknowledged a need for change, though in his case Billy assumed the motive to be desperation, not principle. Davis, who would probably be hanged when the war ended—if he were caught, that is; any sensible man would flee the country—had in mid-March signed a law admitting blacks to the Confederate Army. Billy found it a gesture both sad and contemptible.

  Doing his best to ignore the mounting chest pain, he strolled toward the Ledger-Union office to see whether there was more late news. His route took him past a lager beer saloon crowded with men who would soon trudge up the hill to start the afternoon shift at Hazard’s. Beyond that, he approached a corner where bunting decorated the front of the recruiting office.

  Three doors this side of the office, he stopped, studying an odd little scene in progress. A trio of loutish men hovered around the hitch rail, between the recruiting office entrance and a broad-shouldered Negro boy in the street. One of the whites wore a soiled army uniform. Billy recognized Fessenden, the man who had once harassed Brett. The black youth had an apprehensive expression.

  “Scat, coon,” one of the men said. He picked up a good-sized pebble. Laughing, he lobbed it at the boy’s old shoes. The stone landed an inch in front of a cracked leather toe. The soft plop was exaggerated by the silence.

  “Yeh, get on back up to the mill and go to work,” Fessenden said, equally amused. He relaxed and leaned back, resting his elbows on the rail and cocking one leg over the other like a standing stork. “Bob Lee’s on the run. War’s nearly over. We don’t want colored boys fighting for us.”

  Billy stood quietly beside the brick wall of the café, which closed up during this part of the afternoon. The sloping wooden covering built over the sidewalk placed him in heavy shadow, but the Negro boy, facing the buildings, saw him. Fessenden and his cronies didn’t. Watching the shabbily dressed boy, Billy began rubbing his thumb back and forth over the oiled strop leather.

  The boy was clearly frightened, yet he swallowed hard and said, “I don’t want trouble. I just want to join up while there’s time.” He stepped forward.

  The young, pimply white man to Fessenden’s left jerked something from a pocket in his checked pants. A snap—a flash—the boy held perfectly still at the sight of the long blade of the clasp knife.

  “D’ja hear what the soldier said? No niggers from this town wanted in the You-nited States Army. Now you turn around and shuffle back to your shanty, boy, or they’ll be pickin’ pieces of your black balls outa this here dirt for weeks.” A pause. “Boy? You hear me? Don’t just stand there when a white man—”

  “Let him pass.”

  The voice out of blue shadow spun all three of them. Billy stepped to the sunlit walk, halting just short of the recruiting office door. He couldn’t see who was inside, but clearly they had no heart for intervening. Damn fool, Billy called himself, conscious of the absence of a side arm. A crawl of sweat reached his beard from under his left eye.

  Fessenden was the only member of the trio to recognize him. “This is no damn affair of yours, Hazard.”

  “He has a right to present himself for enlistment if he wants.”

  “A right?” The knife carrier guffawed. “Since when’s a coon got any—?”

  Billy overlapped him, louder. “So let him pass.”

  “Tell him to go fuck, Lute,” the third man said.

  Fessenden scratched his stubbly chin, mumbling, “Shit, I dunno, boys. He’s a wounded veteran like me.”

  “I’ve been told you were wounded in the tail,” Billy said “While you were running.”

  “You son of a bitch,” Fessenden yelled, but it was the pimply one with the knife who took action, loping at Billy. Hastily, Billy backed against the building, broke the string on the strop, unrolled the leather, and laid it full force across the attacker’s face

  “Oh, my God.” Shrieking, he dropped the knife. A purpling welt striped him from brow to chin. The leather had drawn blood as well.

  Under the heavy bandages, Billy’s wound throbbed. Dizziness assailed him suddenly. Bending and watching Billy at the same time, the pimply young man groped for his knife. Billy kicked it off the wooden walk into the dust. Fessenden gave him an outraged look, heaved an aggrieved sigh.

  “Shit,” he said again. “Next thing, you’ll be tellin’ us this nigger oughta vote—just like white men.”

  “If he’s allowed to die for the government, I guess he should be allowed to vote for it, wouldn’t you say, Lute?”

  Snickers of disbelief. “Jesus,” Fessenden said, shaking his head. “What’d they do to you in the army? You’ve turned into one of them goddamn radicals.”

  It was nearly as surprising to Billy as to them. He had spoken out of conviction, one that had been growing without full awareness on his part until this contretemps demanded the translation of conviction to deed. He rippled the strop against his leg.

  “Have I? Well—so be it.”

  He looked at the pimply lout and, summoning his best West Point upperclassman’s voice, bellowed, “Get the hell away from me, you garbage.” He raised the strop. “That’s an order.”

  The pimply young man ran like a deer, nearly knocking Pinckney Herbert from his observation place in front of his store.

  Billy glanced at the Negro boy. “You can go on inside.”

  The boy walked toward Lute Fessenden. He didn’t hurry, but neither did he waste time while he was within Fessenden’s reach. But Fessenden just watched him, turning as he passed, repeatedly shaking his head.

  Before the boy entered the office, he gave Billy a smile. He said, “Thank you, sir,” and was gone.

  Billy raised the strop, intending to roll it up again. The sudden motion made Fessenden’s other companion flinch visibly. Though Billy felt a mite guilty about it, he milked the moment, drawing the strop ever so slowly and provocatively across his open left palm. Fessenden’s companion drew back.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” Billy barked. The frightened man jumped, grabbing Fessenden’s arm.

  “Let go of me, for Chrissake.” Fessenden shook him off, and the two shamed whites quickly disappeared around the corner.

  Shameless, Bill
y said to himself. Absolutely shameless, that last part. It relieved his guilt to recall that the two were deserving.

  Pinckney Herbert ran down the sidewalk to shake his hand. Billy had all but forgotten about the painful wound. He felt fine: wickedly amused, unexpectedly proud, gloriously alive.

  130

  RAIN FELL ON THE low country that same afternoon. Charles sat at the foot of a great water oak, reasonably well protected from the drizzle as he read an old Baltimore paper that had somehow found its way to Summerville, the village where he and Andy had gone in search of food.

  Charles had stayed at Mont Royal much longer than he should have, and much longer than he had planned. But every hand was needed to put up a new house—little more than an oversized cabin—on the site once occupied by the plantation summerhouse, which had been smashed and leveled but not burned. All the lumber in the new place was either broken, scorched, or both. The result was a crazy-quilt structure, but at least it sheltered the survivors, black and white, in separately curtained areas.

  The food situation was desperate. Their neighbor Markham Bull had shared some hoarded flour and yeast. Thus they had bread and their own rice, but little else. Occasional visitors who appeared on the river road said the whole state was starving.

  The visit to Summerville confirmed it. Even if they had been carrying bags of gold, it would have done no good. There was nothing to buy. Just the paper left behind by some refugee in flight.

  Wishing for a cigar—he hadn’t enjoyed one since the day he came home—Charles finished reading the lengthy account of Abe Lincoln’s second inaugural. The war might last a while longer, but Charles assumed Lincoln would soon take charge of a conquered South. Therefore he ought to know what the man was thinking.

  Mr. Lincoln sounded forgiving—on the surface. There was much in his address about malice toward none and charity for all. He wanted to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow, and his orphan. He wanted to achieve a just and lasting peace.