by John Jakes
The house had a dark, abandoned appearance. Every drapery closed. No lights showing in the spring dusk. Panicky, he bounded up the steps to the door, knocking hard.
“Hello? Anyone in there?” What if he’s moved? What if I can’t find him? “Hello?”
More pounding, attracting the unfriendly notice of a couple rocking on their porch across the street. Behind the house, he heard sounds. Wheels and traces, a horse. He ran to the end of the porch just as a buggy passed, driven by a stout middle-aged woman with a portmanteau on the seat beside her.
“Ma’am? May I speak to you?” A glance had told him the buggy had come from the shed in back of the house.
She turned her head, eyes widening at the sight of the bearded, threatening figure leaning over the porch rail. Mrs. Caldwell’s instinctive reaction was fright. She whipped up the horse.
“Wait! I have to ask you something—”
She turned into the street. Charles vaulted over the rail, landed in the side drive with a jolt, raced in pursuit of the buggy, which was gathering speed. The man and woman rose from their rockers, their expressions showing fear of the deranged-looking man chasing the vehicle.
Panting, Charles pumped his arms until he drew abreast of the buggy. “Please stop. It’s urgent that I locate—”
“Get away from me!” Mrs. Caldwell flailed at him with the buggy whip, stung his cheek. Charles’s instinct for defense took over. He shot his hand across to clamp and drag on her wrist.
“Stop! I don’t mean you any harm, but—”
Struggling with him, she was forced to rein the buggy to a halt. “The law,” she cried. “Someone call the law.”
“Damn it, woman, listen to me,” Charles said, breathing hard. “I need to find General Duncan.”
Releasing her, he stepped back. The whip in her right hand shook, but she acted less alarmed. “I didn’t mean to scare you—I apologize for grabbing you that way. But it’s extremely important that I locate the brigadier. That’s his house back there, isn’t it?”
Guardedly: “It was.”
“Was?”
“The general has left for a new military post.”
Charles’s stomach knotted. “When?”
“He is at the B & O station at this moment, departing at six. Now, sir, I insist on knowing who you are and the reason for this alleged urgency.”
“Six,” Charles repeated. “It must be almost that now—”
“Your name, sir, or I shall drive on immediately.”
“Charles Main.”
She acted as if he’d hit her. “Late of the Confederate Army?” He nodded, thinking. “Then you are the one—”
“Move over,” he said suddenly, climbing up and practically shoving her to the far side of the seat. “Better hold the rail. I’m going to catch that tram. Hah!”
He slapped the reins over the horse. Mrs. Caldwell screeched, clutching both her hat and the rail as the buggy shot forward like a bolt released from a crossbow.
Mrs. Caldwell was convinced she would die on the breakneck ride to the depot. The bearded man, the one Brigadier Duncan had sought so diligently, then given up for lost or dead, rammed the buggy through impossibly narrow spaces in evening traffic, causing pedestrians to scatter, hackney drivers to swear, dray horses to rear up and whinny. Rounding the corner into New Jersey, driver and passenger saw a water wagon looming ahead. Charles hauled on the reins, braked, veered, and stood the buggy on its left wheels for a moment. Mrs. Caldwell uttered a scream as the right ones came crashing down, the buggy missing the back end of the water wagon by inches.
Axles howling, wheel hubs smoking, the buggy jerked to a stop directly in front of the station, whose outdoor clock showed a minute after six. Leaping out, Charles flung the reins at the stunned woman, remembering to shout, “Thank you.” He plunged into the depot like a distance runner.
“Train for Baltimore?” he yelled at a uniformed man rolling an iron gate shut.
“Just left,” the man said, pointing down the platform toward an observation car receding behind billows of steam. Charles turned sideways to squeeze through the opening. “Here, you can’t—”
Almost at once, he had three station officials in pursuit. They were older and in poor condition; he was lean and desperate. Still, his lungs quickly began to hurt from the exertion. And he was losing the race. The train was already out of the roofed shed.
He saw the end of the passenger platform ahead. It was too late to brake his momentum. He jumped for the tracks.
He landed crookedly. His wounded leg twisted, hurling him onto the ties. “Get that man!” one of the pursuers howled.
Hurt and panting, Charles pushed up, gained his feet, and ran again, harder than he had ever run in his life. His beard flew over his shoulder. He thought of Sport. Sport could do it. Sport would have the stamina—
That drove him to greater effort. He came within a hand’s length of the rear car. Reached for the handrail of the steps. Missed his stride again and almost fell—The rail receded. Concentrating on a memory of Gus’s face, he put everything into a last long step.
He caught hold of the step rail with both hands. The train dragged him, his boots bouncing and bumping. He kicked upward with both legs, knowing that if he didn’t, his legs might be pulped under the train.
One boot slipped on the metal step. He nearly fell off. His wrists and forearms felt fiery, tortured by the strain. But he pulled—
Pulled—
Weak and gasping, he staggered upright on the rear platform, only to see the car door open and a broad-shouldered conductor step through, barring him. The trainman saw the pursuers staggering down the track, understood their shouts and gestures.
“Please,” Charles said, “let me go inside.”
“Get off this train.”
“You don’t understand. It’s an emergency. One of your passengers—”
“Get off or I’ll throw you off,” the conductor said, starting to push. Charles lurched backward, his left boot finding just empty air above the second step. Frantically, he grabbed the handrail and only in that way kept himself from tumbling into space.
“Get off!” the conductor yelled, raising his hands for a second, final, shove. Something hard rammed the center of his vest. He looked down and went rigid at the sight of Charles’s army Colt pressed into his stomach.
“You have ten seconds to stop this train.”
“I can’t possibly—”
Charles drew the hammer back to full cock.
“Ten seconds.”
With a flurry of signal flags and alarm whistles, the train stopped.
146
ONLY BRIGADIER DUNCAN’S INTERVENTION and influence prevented Charles’s immediate arrest and imprisonment. At half past ten that night, the two men sat in the parlor of the reopened house, their faces grim as those of opponents still at war. The Irish wet nurse was upstairs with the child Charles had looked at twice, the second time with feelings of confusion and even revulsion. After returning from the depot, Duncan had told him the whole story, and Charles wished he hadn’t.
The evening had grown sultry, with rumbles of an approaching storm in the northwest. His neck button still fastened, Charles sat in a plush chair, an untasted shot of whiskey on a small table to his right. His lamplit eyes looked dead. As dead as he felt inside.
Suddenly, with fury, he leaned forward. “Why didn’t she tell me?”
“Major Main,” the brigadier replied with icy correctness, “that is the third, possibly the fourth time you have asked the same question. She loved you very much—as I stated in the letters you never received. She grieved because the war had—damaged you, to use her phrase. Damaged you to the point where you mistakenly believed you could not continue your relationship with her. But my niece was a decent and honorable young woman.” Unmistakably, there was the suggestion that Charles had neither of those characteristics.
Duncan continued, “She refused to hold her—condition as a club over your head.
Now I shall not explain all that again. Indeed, I am beginning to regret you found me. I cannot understand your coldness toward your own flesh and blood.”
“The baby killed her.”
“There is indeed something wrong in your head, Main. Circumstance killed her. Her frailness killed her. She wanted the child. She wanted to bear your son—she named him after you. Do you seriously mean to tell me you want nothing to do with him?”
Anguished, Charles said, I don’t know.”
“Well, I have no intention of remaining in Washington while you undertake your bizarre deliberations on the matter. I thought that if I ever found you, the reunion would be a joyous moment. It is anything but that.”
“Give me just a little time—”
“Hardly worth my while, Major—having heard your remarks of a moment ago. I shall be on tomorrow evening’s six o’clock express for Baltimore and the West. If you do not want your son, I do.”
A dazed blink. “The West—?”
“Duty with the plains cavalry, if it’s any of your affair. Now, if you will excuse me, I find this conversation odious. I shall retire.” He stalked to the parlor door, where strained politeness made him pause and say, “There is an unused bedroom at the second floor rear. You may spend the night if you wish.” Duncan’s eyes flayed him. “Should your son cry out, you needn’t trouble yourself. Maureen and I will look after him.”
“Goddamn you, don’t take that tone with me,” Charles yelled, on his feet. “I loved her! I never loved anyone so much! I thought I should break things off for her sake, so I could do my job and she wouldn’t worry constantly. Now if that’s a crime in your estimation, the hell with you. When I stopped your train and found you inside, I didn’t know I had a son. All I wanted was to learn where she is—was—”
“She is buried in the private cemetery in Georgetown. There is a marker. I shall ask you tomorrow, Major, before my departure, to give me your decision about young Charles.”
“I can’t. I don’t know what it is.”
“God pity any man who must say words like those.”
The brigadier marched up the stairs. On the upper landing, he heard the front door slam, then a rumble of thunder, then silence. White light glittered through the house. Duncan raised his head as the hard pelting rain hit the roof. He heard no further sound from below.
With a shake of his head and a sudden sag of his shoulders, he continued to his room, a grieving and dismayed man.
Charles walked all the way to Georgetown in the lightning and thunder and rain. Knocking at a cottage, rousing the owners, he obtained directions to the private cemetery. The sleepy couple with the lamp were too frightened to deny him an answer. He was a hellish apparition on their wet porch, a nightmare man with furnace eyes and a soaked gray shirt and rain dripping from his beard and his holstered gun.
Hurrying on, he reached the cemetery in an interval of pitch darkness. He slipped in wet grass, falling forward and nearly impaling himself on the spikes of the low fence. On his knees next to it, he felt the metal. Wrought iron.
Was it Hazard’s? He uttered a crazed laugh. He was losing his mind. Everything was slipping, fusing, jumbling together. He wanted to scream. He wanted to die.
He kicked the gate open and lurched into the cemetery, searching by lightning flash. Granite angels spread granite arms and granite wings, imploring him to heaven with granite eyes. No thank you, I’m at my proper destination already.
In the dark he stumbled repeatedly over low headstones or crashed painfully into cold marble. Jagged lightning ran through the sky. He saw a towering obelisk against the glare and a name carved huge on the pedestal, STARKWETHER.
After a long period of wandering one way, then another, he found the grave. The headstone was small and rectangular, with a slightly sloping top upon which Duncan had put her name and the years of her birth and death, nothing more.
Charles sank to his knees, every inch of him soaked by the rain that still poured down. He didn’t feel it or the cold. Only the misery, the awful, mind-destroying misery. He knelt beside the grave, careful not to kneel on it, and without conscious volition closed his fists and began to beat them on his thighs.
He pounded harder. To hurt, to punish. The undersides of his fists ached, but he kept pounding. The thunder cannonaded like the guns at Sharpsburg. The lightning flashed again and again, revealing a spot of blood on the right leg of his pants. The rhythm of the pounding quickened.
What was he to do, now that he bore this guilt? What was he to do with the child for whom he was responsible, thereby making himself responsible for this headstone? What was he to do?
A short, strange cry came from his throat; animal grief. Then, deep inside, a force began to build, its outlet impossible to deny. He opened his throbbing fists. Raised his right hand to his wet face and felt beneath his eye. That was not rain.
He threw himself forward on the grave, wet body to wet earth, and for the first time since Sharpsburg, wept.
Charles kept vigil at Augusta Barclay’s grave until well past dawn, when the storm abated. Shivering, teeth chattering, he walked the long distance back to the central part of town, reaching the brigadier’s house about ten.
Exhausted from the physical and emotional strain of the night before, Duncan had slept late and was only just starting his breakfast when the unbelievably sorry sight named Charles Main appeared in the door of the dining room. From somewhere above came the bawling of Charles’s son and Maureen’s comforting voice in counterpoint.
Clenching his jaw, Duncan strove to control himself. It was difficult. Red-faced, he said, “Christ. What did you do, drink and wallow in some gutter all night long?”
It looked like it. Charles’s right pants leg showed a large blood spot. Dirt clung to his beard and every part of his soaked shirt.
“I spent the night at her grave. I spent the night thinking of my son. Trying to decide what to do.”
Slowly, Duncan straightened to his most erect posture, his back no longer touching the chair. His eyes were full of hostile challenge.
“Well?”
147
“NEXT STOP LEHIGH STATION. Lehigh Station will be the next stop—”
The conductor’s voice faded as he left the car. The local had pulled out of Bethlehem at half past six. That meant they should be stepping through Belvedere’s front door in less than an hour. George was thankful; he was spent. So was Constance, to judge from the way she leaned against him, silent.
He occupied the seat beside the window, watching twilight burnish the river and the blue-mantled slopes on the western side. He turned to say something to his wife but didn’t. Her eyes were closed, her head sagging forward, creating three rounded chins in place of one.
George’s tired face smoothed out as he lovingly studied her. Then his eye was caught by movement beyond the window on the other side of the aisle. As the train slowed down before a curve, he saw a cemetery and, in the foreground, three rows of five crosses, new and white. The movement drawing his attention was that of two elderly workers shoveling earth onto an unseen coffin in an open grave. A middle-aged man and woman stood beside the grave, the man with something red and white folded in his crossed arms. A flag.
The cemetery disappeared. Carefully, George put his arm around Constance so as not to wake her. But he wanted the comfort of touching her.
He felt an immense surge of love for the plump woman dozing beside him. Love for her and for his children, whose lives he must begin to supervise again, changing from soldier back to father. Love was really all that had pulled him through the past four years, he reflected. His eyes drifted across the river again, to the profusion of mountain laurel on the hillsides. Nothing else will pull us through the years just ahead, either.
“—gone too fast. With too many changes.”
“Oh, definitely. I’m sorry Lincoln was martyred, but he can certainly be faulted for his policies.”
George frowned, overhearing the travelers in the sea
t immediately behind. The first speaker sounded old, his voice full of the cranky negativism that inevitable state too often produced. The second speaker, female, sounded young. It was she who continued.
“The darkies deserve their liberty, I suppose. But at that point it should stop.”
“So far as I’m concerned, it does. Let any nigger try to step through my front door like a white man, and I’ll be there to deny him with my old horse pistol.”
The woman sighed. “Some of our politicians aren’t as courageous as you. They’re actually promoting the franchise for the colored.”
“Ridiculous. Why would anyone encourage such a change in the order of things? It’s insanity.”
Having endorsed each other’s convictions, they settled into a period of quiet, leaving George to meditate amid the smells of dusty upholstery and the overflowing spittoon at the head of the car. Now the western hills were higher, their summits intermittently blocking the direct rays of the low sun. Changing patterns of shadow and light flickered over his face as he pondered.
Changes indeed. He thought of the slain President, whose unbelievably stark photograph-—a recent one—they had seen in a black-draped shop window after they docked in Philadelphia. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s party had nominated him because he was the least-known, therefore least-offensive candidate available. A strong man with strong views might have stirred strong reactions, which was dangerous to any organized group in pursuit of votes.
But once in office—the furnace of war—Lincoln, like iron, had been heated and hammered, melted and molded and transformed into something wholly new. Out of the corn-country politician of unknown views, presumably safe views—or no views or insane views, depending on the speaker—there emerged with the aid of the pricking of conscience and the whipping of expedience a President who propounded a definition of freedom so new and sweeping the nation would be years finding and deciphering all its meanings.
Lincoln’s burdens of party leadership, governmental leadership, war leadership wrought radical physical changes as well. They cut gullies in the pain-eroded landscape of his face and drowned his eyes in lakes of perpetual shadow. The photographic portrait in the Philadelphia shop barely resembled those of a few years earlier.