by John Jakes
When the applause subsided, George said, “Good for you, Mr. Secretary. There are too many extremists on both sides these days. We need more voices like yours.”
He lifted his glass. “To the Academy.”
Davis raised his own glass in response. “And the Union,” he said.
35
CHARLES TRAVELED NORTH WHILE Russia mobilized for war against Turkey and her allies on the other side of the world. The prospective cadet arrived at West Point wearing a wide-brimmed planter’s hat and an old coat of rust-colored velvet. His hair hung to his shoulders, and his bowie knife was tucked in his boot.
Billy and his friend and classmate, a jolly Virginian named Fitzhugh Lee, leaned out a window in the second floor of the barracks and watched Charles come trudging along the street below. They had been expecting him all afternoon. Presumably Charles had already turned in his appointment papers and signed the adjutant’s register and circumstances ledger. In the latter he had no doubt listed Orry’s financial status as “affluent” rather than “moderate.” Having deposited his cash with the treasurer, Charles was now coming to find his room.
“My Lord,” Fitz Lee said in amazement. “Just look at all that hair.”
Billy nodded. “I knew he had plenty, but I didn’t expect that much.” A gleeful look crept into his eye. Friendship hadn’t prevented him from organizing a reception for Charles.
“He’s shaggy as a bison.” The moment Fitz spoke, something clicked in Billy’s mind. Charles didn’t know it, but he had just received his Academy nickname. Billy was still searching for his.
Charles sensed someone watching and started to glance up. Billy pulled back hastily, dragging Fitz with him.
“Don’t let him see you. Is the room ready?”
“Far as I know,” Fitz said with a grin of unabashed wickedness. The young Virginian was the superintendent’s nephew, but Billy felt sure that wouldn’t save him from eventual dismissal. Fitz Lee habitually broke the rules, and did so with relish. “Beauty went up awhile ago to lay out his tools and slip into one of those smocks we stitched together. I’ll fetch mine. You keep the victim here till I come back.”
“All right, but hurry. We don’t have much time before parade.” Billy leaned out the window, waved. “Hey, Charles. Hello!”
Charles blinked, then returned the wave with enthusiasm. “Damn, it’s you! How are you, Billy?”
“Anxious to see you. Come on up.”
Again he retreated from the window and discovered Fitz still lingering at the door. “What’s wrong?”
“I forgot to tell you that Slocum invited himself to the party. You know Beauty—he’s so blasted cordial, he tells everybody everything.”
Billy scowled. “Well, Slocum had better not give the game away. Tell him I said he’s to keep his mouth shut.”
“Do you want me to say it that—ah—directly?”
“Yes. I’m not his plebe whipping boy any longer.”
“Right you are.” Fitz grinned and hurried out.
Moments later Charles bounded up the stairs, the swallowtails of his coat flapping. He and Billy whooped and embraced like long-lost brothers. Then Charles flung his hat and valise on one of the beds and pushed his long hair off his damp forehead.
“Godamighty, Billy, you look fine in that uniform. But I forgot that the North got so blasted hot.”
“It’ll get hotter for you before the summer’s over—even if the temperature dips. You’re going to be a plebe, remember? And I think I can make cadet corporal in camp.”
Charles frowned. “Does that mean we can’t be friends for a year?”
“We can be friends. We just can’t show it too much, or—”
“Cadet Main?”
The bellow from the hall sent Charles into a crouch. Billy had to grip his friend’s arm to keep him from pulling his knife.
Charles scowled at the stranger in the doorway. It was Fitz Lee, wearing a thigh-length smock of coarse gray cloth. “Who the hell are you?” Charles demanded.
Fitz matched his truculence. “Don’t raise your voice to me, sir! I am Mr. Fitz, one of the post barbers. It is the duty of Mr. Jeb and myself to attend to the tonsure of all incoming cadets.”
“The ton-what?”
“Your hair, sir. It is decidedly in need of attention. Should you refuse to cooperate, I shall be forced to report you to the superintendent.” Hands raised, Charles said, “No, wait. Billy, do they always do this when you get here?”
“Absolutely,” Billy answered with a straight face. “Mr. Fitz and Mr. Jeb gave me a trim the first hour I was on the post.”
“Damn if they look old enough to be barbers.”
“Oh, when they took care of me they were still apprentices.”
“Well—all right.”
Still suspicious, Charles nevertheless followed Fitz out the door and up the stairs to the trunk room, which had been cleaned and prepared for the occasion. Billy brought up the rear, barely able to suppress eruptions of giggling.
The trunk room felt like an inferno. Windowless, it was illuminated by a pair of oil lamps that added to the heat. On a cheap table lay a silver-framed mirror, combs, brushes, shears, and a razor. Next to a rickety chair stood Beauty Stuart. He wore a smock and radiated authority.
“Sit down, sir. Quickly, quickly! This cadet is waiting for a trim as soon as we finish with you.”
He pointed to Caleb Slocum, who was lounging by the wall. Billy and the Arkansas cadet exchanged nods but neither smiled. As soon as the first classmen had donned Army uniforms and departed, Slocum would be going home on leave. None too soon to suit Billy.
Charles sat down. With great panache, Stuart motioned and snapped his fingers. “Mr. Fitz? The cloth, if you please.”
Fitz Lee produced a filthy, tattered sheet which he proceeded to fasten around Charles’s neck. “That’s a damn dirty sheet,” Charles complained. “Looks like a whole flock of people bled on it. What kind of tonsorial parlor is—?”
“Quiet, sir, I cannot concentrate when you babble,” Stuart said, giving his customer a fierce look. He clicked the shears several times, then attacked Charles’s hair above his left ear. Billy tried to judge the time by sounds from downstairs. They had only until four o’clock.
“The mirror, if you please, Mr. Fitz.”
The assistant barber jumped forward, tilting the glass this way and that in response to Stuart’s exaggerated gestures. How could Charles not see it was all a sham? Yet no newcomer ever did; fear and unfamiliar surroundings made it work perfectly, year after year.
Presently Stuart cocked his head to the side, folded his right hand under his chin, and rested his right elbow on his left palm, studying his artistic creation. The entire left side of Charles’s head had been clipped to a length of half an inch, while to the right of a perfect dividing line across the top of his head the hair was as long and full as ever, untouched. Billy faced the wall and bit his lower lip while tears ran from his eyes.
“Half done,” Stuart announced. “Now for the other—”
Out on the Plain the bugle pealed. Perfect timing. Mr. Jeb dropped the shears. Mr. Fitz threw the mirror on the table, and Billy and Slocum cut for the door. “Wait,” Charles cried. “What’s going on?”
Stuart ripped off the smock. “We must assemble. Come along, sir.”
“We’ll finish the trim another time,” Fitz shouted from the landing below.
“Another time?” Bellowing, Charles pursued his tormentors. From the door of the trunk room he gave Billy a withering look—the look of a man betrayed—which Billy could barely see through his mirthful tears. “What other time?” Charles screamed. “How in hell am I going to explain the way I look?”
“I don’t know, sir,” Fitz caroled as he ran away down the stairs. “But explain it you shall—for I’m sure all the officers will be curious about it.”
“A damn trick!” Charles howled. He yanked his knife out of his boot and flung it.
Slocum had lagged be
hind. The bowie flashed past his ear and buried in a beam on the landing below. While the knife hummed, Charles launched into a profane tirade against West Point men and West Point perfidy.
When questioned, Charles would say only that he alone was responsible for his haircut. He stuck to the story despite threats from the tactical officers and some upperclassmen. His silence earned him the respect of most of the leaders of the cadet corps, including Beauty Stuart.
Charles soon came to idolize Stuart. This was true even though the two seemingly had little in common. Charles was handsome whereas Stuart was most decidedly the opposite; his stocky trunk contrasted oddly with his unusually long arms. What he lacked in appearance, however, he more than made up for with dash and charm. His blue eyes almost always brimmed with good humor. And he had an amazing record of success with young ladies who stayed at the hotel.
Stuart’s romantic prowess was not the only reason for Charles’s admiration. To him, the Virginian represented all the good qualities of Southerners. Courage. A high sense of personal honor. A zest for life. The ability to smile when trouble engulfed you; smile and endure.
Stuart was also passionately loyal to his friends. Early in Charles’s plebe year, Fitz Lee got drunk and was unlucky enough to be caught. He faced court-martial. Stuart organized Fitz’s classmates, who presented the superintendent with a pledge that, as a class, they would never be guilty of a similar offense.
By tradition, such a pledge from an entire class resulted in cancellation of charges against the offender. Colonel Lee could not otherwise have intervened in his nephew’s case. On the day after his receipt of the pledge, the superintendent was seen smiling frequently. He was probably pleased that his nephew had escaped dismissal, but no doubt more pleased that a band of brothers had lived up to its name.
Charles had no trouble with the military aspect of Academy training. Scholastically it was a different story. The fourth-class course in English grammar and geography was relatively simple, if boring. But in spite of the excellent preparation from Herr Nagel, the algebra course was an absolute mystery. Charles immediately joined the immortals and remained in their ranks through the January examinations, which he barely passed. Things got no better when he began his study of French in the second term.
“Why the devil do soldiers have to know French?” he asked Billy on one of the rare occasions when they could talk without being hampered by class rank. It was a Saturday afternoon during a February thaw. They had gone hiking in the hills above Fort Putnam. To the north they could see chunks of ice floating in the gray river. The air had the dry, astringent smell of winter. Occasional whiffs of wood smoke rose from the chimneys of the brick faculty houses below. Billy broke a twig in his mittened hands and tossed both halves away.
“Because, Mr. Bison, a lot of important military and scientific treatises are written in French. You might need to translate one someday.”
“Not me. I’m going into the dragoons and chase Indians.” He squinted at his friend. “You sure that’s the reason?”
“Why would I lie to you?”
“Because I’m a plebe, and you’re very good with buncombe. You proved that when you set me up for the haircut.”
“You’d better go back to your dictionary. Buncombe means lies and smooth talk from a politician.”
“Don’t tell me what it’s supposed to be; I already know—and you’re an expert at dispensing it.” With obvious delight, he rolled the word out again. “Buncombe. Mr. Buncombe, that’s you—” Sudden inspiration. Charles pointed like a prosecutor. “No. Bunk. Old Bunk. From now on.”
Billy snorted and complained, but secretly he was pleased. He had been embarrassed by his lack of a nickname. It seemed fitting that his best friend had finally bestowed it.
Toward the end of May 1854, the Senate passed the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. Senator Douglas had introduced it in January, once again heating up the simmering slavery controversy.
The bill organized two new territories. Douglas called it an expression of popular sovereignty. Anti-slavery men called it a betrayal, a repeal of the old Missouri Compromise that prohibited slavery north of 36 degrees 30 minutes of latitude. Secretary Davis reportedly influenced President Pierce to sign the bill. The anti-slavery forces said a new political party was obviously needed to combat sinister combinations at work in Washington.
Orry wrote Charles to say that judging from the rhetoric on both sides, Clay’s compromise of four years ago was in ruins. And Charles, without knowing or caring much about national issues, found himself on the defensive because of them. Upperclassmen occasionally put him on report for a glare or a swallowed retort, calling his behavior Southern insolence. Southerners such as Slocum reacted against that sort of thing by cruel hazing of Northern plebes. Lee continued to exhort the cadets to be a band of brothers, but Charles saw the corps quietly separating into two hostile camps.
Of course there were gradations of behavior within each camp. Slocum represented one end of the Southern spectrum, Beauty Stuart the other—when he was on his good behavior with his temper unruffled, that is. Stuart claimed he patterned himself after the Marble Model, the superintendent, but he was too fond of assignations on Flirtation Walk for the resemblance to be perfect. Charles took Stuart as one of his exemplars and Billy as another, because Billy kept himself aloof from political arguments and concentrated on good marks, which he seemed to achieve with little effort.
Still, given his upbringing and the nature of the times, Charles sometimes found it hard to keep his temper. While standing at attention during a reveille roll call in the spring, he was singled out for harassment by an obnoxious cadet sergeant from Vermont. The Yankee pulled three buttons off his uniform on the pretext of inspecting them.
“No wonder you never look trig, sir,” the Yankee snarled. “You don’t have your niggers to do for you.”
Under his breath, Charles said, “I polish my own brass. And fight my own fights.”
The Vermont cadet thrust his jaw forward. The sunrise flecked his eyes with points of light. “What did you say, sir?”
“I said—” Suddenly Charles recalled his demerit total. It stood at 190 with two weeks of the plebe year still remaining. “Nothing, sir.”
The cadet sergeant strutted on, looking smug. Perhaps he was relieved, too. Charles had established a reputation as an expert with knives and bare knuckles.
He hated to cave in under a Yankee’s insults. He did it only because he owed Orry a decent showing at the Academy, and the debt meant more to him than real or fancied insults to his honor.
For the moment, anyway.
Curiously, it was one of his own who first prodded Charles to think seriously about slavery. The culprit was Caleb Slocum, who had now advanced to cadet sergeant.
The Arkansas cadet had an excellent academic record. He was in the first section in most of his subjects. Billy said he got to the top by stealing examination questions ahead of time, and by various other forms of cheating. Although cheating wasn’t condoned by the officers and professors, it never received the attention given to other breaches of discipline such as drinking.
Thus Billy had one more reason to despise Slocum. He told Charles he intended to thrash the Arkansas cadet one of these days.
Slocum was a master at tormenting plebes. He hung out at Benny Haven’s—the proprietor was still alive, immortal, it seemed—and there learned about certain kinds of hazing that had been tried in the past and abandoned as too nasty.
They were not too nasty for Slocum. His targets remained the plebes from Northern states. When Charles observed the absolute power Slocum had over them, it struck him that the same power relationship existed back home between white master and black slave. The relationship had been present all along, of course; he had just never appreciated its potential for abuse and outright cruelty.
He felt disloyal about questioning the South even slightly. But he couldn’t help it. Ideas different from his own bombarded him every day. Like the nation
, the Academy was in ferment. One proof could be seen in the Dialectic Society. Cadets organized fewer debates on so-called soft topics. “Ought females to receive a first-class education?” They reasoned—argued, sometimes shouted—over hard issues. “Has a state the right to secede from the Union?” “Has Congress an obligation to protect the property of territorial settlers?”
Privately, Charles began to consider different aspects of the peculiar institution: the justice of it, the long-term practicality. He had trouble admitting the system was wholly wrong—he was a Southerner, after all—but with so many people opposed to it, there was surely something amiss. In terms of the animosity it produced, slavery seemed more of a burden to the South than a benefit. Sometimes Charles was almost ready to agree with that Illinois stump speaker and politician, Lincoln, who said gradual emancipation was the only answer.
Although his inner turmoil persisted, he was determined to avoid fights that were in any way related to the issue. On the night of June 1, that resolve was destroyed.
At half-past nine, Charles gathered up soap and towel and tramped downstairs to the barracks washroom. Since it was late, he hoped to have the place to himself. Cadets were required to bathe once a week but could not do so more often without special permission from Colonel Lee.
Oil lamps shed a dim light in the basement corridor; rumor said Secretary Davis hoped to install a gaslight system soon. Charles hurried past the entrance to the refreshment shop, not wanting to be noticed or hived. He was tired and sore from marching. He longed to lean back in the tub and drowse in warm water for ten or fifteen minutes before taps.
He started to whistle softly as he approached the double door of the washroom. Suddenly he stopped and listened. He frowned. On the other side of the doors he heard voices. Two were low-pitched, the other slightly louder—
Pleading.
He jerked the door open. Startled, Caleb Slocum and a skinny classmate from Louisiana spun toward him. Slocum had an open jar in one hand. From it, mingling with the smells of soap and dampness, rose the pungent odor of spirits of turpentine.