by John Jakes
At twilight the track was cleared and the train chugged on. Soon they stopped at a station in a small piedmont town. The ticket agent was gesturing and shouting in the dusk.
“Sumter’s fallen. Anderson pulled out. Word just flashed over the telegraph.”
Cheering filled the coach. The vendor hawking day-old newspapers in the aisle gave Orry a suspicious stare when he didn’t join in. Orry stared right back and the vendor moved on. It seemed there was no escape from the suspicion and enmity swirling through the land.
Next morning, in Petersburg, he left the train for a meal in the depot. He took the money satchel with him and placed it carefully between his feet under the table. The flyblown dining room raised echoes of a similar stop in Baltimore two years ago. This time, however, Orry encountered no hostility; people were too busy discussing yesterday’s events in South Carolina. Several times he heard the word victory. Most of the customers agreed that Virginia’s departure from the Union was inevitable now that a blow had been struck.
Shaking his head, he quickly finished his beef hash and corn grits. Then he bought a paper. When the train left Petersburg, a paunchy, well-dressed man sat down next to him. Orry paid no attention. He was immersed in the telegraphic dispatches on the front page. The day before, Sunday, Anderson had formally surrendered the fort in Charleston harbor. Ironically, it was during preparations for the ceremony that the first life had been lost.
According to estimates in the paper, four to five thousand rounds had been exchanged during the bombardment. There had been no casualties, but the shelling had started fires throughout the fort. Some had still been smoldering yesterday. Flying sparks had ignited a pile of cannon cartridges. The explosion had instantly killed one of Anderson’s artillerists and wounded five others.
First blood, Orry said to himself. He was convinced there would be more, much more.
The Federal commander had been allowed to salute his flag before striking it and leading his men to waiting longboats. The boats carried the soldiers out past the bar to a Federal relief flotilla that had proved to be something more than a rumor—the ships had arrived offshore during the bombardment. Soon the chartered liner Baltic and her accompanying warships were steaming northward, in defeat. Orry doubted it would be long before the Lincoln government reacted.
When he finished reading, he fell into conversation with the fat man, who introduced himself as Mr. Cobb of Petersburg, a commercial traveler.
“British needles and the finest sewing threads,” Cobb explained in his soft Virginia voice. “Distributed only to the best mercantile establishments. Heaven knows what will become of my trade with all this trouble. I take it you are also a Southerner?”
Orry nodded. “From South Carolina.”
“How far are you going?”
“Into Pennsylvania.”
“Permit me to offer a word of advice. I was in Philadelphia last week, and I had a difficult time. I might go so far as to say it was extremely difficult. Southerners are too easily identified by their speech. At one point I felt my life might be in jeopardy. I am not traveling beyond Washington on this trip, but even so I have taken precautions.”
His plump finger ticked against his lapel, where Orry saw a rosette of red, white, and blue ribbon.
“I suggest you do the same, sir. Any store carrying notions can supply you with the materials for a Union rosette.”
“Thanks for the suggestion,” Orry said, although he had already rejected it. He did not believe wholeheartedly in the cause of the South. But neither would he wear the colors of the other side.
The only part of Washington he saw was a railway terminal. Army officers and civilian families thronged the platforms and waiting rooms. Most of the officers were arriving; most of the families were leaving. Southerners, he presumed, homeward-bound after resignation from a post with the government or the military.
That Monday evening, by the smoky light of depot lamps, he watched the country take its next lurching step toward widespread war. A sweating man in shirt-sleeves chalked news bulletins on a blackboard. One said President Lincoln had declared the existence of an insurrection and called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to bear arms for three months.
Applause swept the small crowd standing in front of the board. Orry turned to go to his train. The crowd pressed forward, shouting approval of the President and cursing the South. He found he couldn’t move.
“Excuse me.”
No one budged. Three men close by gave him hard scrutiny. He wished he’d brought a pistol on the trip.
“What did you say, mister?” one man asked.
Orry knew he should speak as few words as possible. But he resented that restriction, and so ignored it.
“I said I’d like to get through, if you have no objection.”
“Why, this here’s a Southron gent,” a second man growled. Immediately, onlookers pressed Orry from all sides; most, it seemed to him, were sweaty men with stubbled faces and hostile eyes. They blocked him in front and on both flanks. Beside his back, he could hear ugly-sounding whispers spreading. His mouth went dry.
The crowd jostled him. There was barely room for him to slip the money satchel up beneath his right arm and clamp it there. Hands plucked at the satchel. Voices overlapped.
“What you got in that bag, reb?”
“Val’ables, I bet.”
“Let’s see.”
Immediately the cry was taken up. “Let’s see. Let’s see!”
Panic started a ringing in his ears. He felt the satchel start to slip. He deliberately reached across the front of his coat. The man whose hand was on the satchel gasped at the sudden move.
“If simple courtesy won’t persuade you to let me through, gentlemen, I’ll have to resort to other means.”
Orry slid his fingers under his left lapel. The man holding the satchel let go. “Watch it, lads. He’s armed.”
Those close by abruptly lost their enthusiasm for baiting him. He kept his hand beneath his lapel as one man, then others, shuffled backward to open an aisle. It wasn’t easy to carry the bag with only the pressure of his upper arm, but he managed. He walked quickly along the aisle, feeling his furious heartbeat against the palm of his hand.
Free of the crowd, he hurried away. A couple of men shouted obscenities. He didn’t look back.
He tried to sleep on the train but he was too shaken. He sat with the money satchel clamped between his feet. Next morning in Philadelphia, he located a large dry-goods store and purchased a small pair of scissors, needle, thread, and pieces of ribbon in three colors. From the ribbon, with patience and the aid of a ruddy woman behind the serving counter of a restaurant, he fashioned a rosette.
The woman seemed happy, even proud to help him. “You from Virginia?” she asked in recognition of his accent. “Lot of anti-slavery feeling in certain parts of the state, they say.”
He merely smiled. Any suspicion she felt disappeared as she fastened the rosette to his lapel.
Orry reached Lehigh Station late on Tuesday, April 16. The town had grown larger; a new borough, consisting of a few dozen hovels and cheap houses, South Station, sprawled along the opposite bank of the river. In the depot, a man with a paste brush was posting a bill on the wall by the yellow light of a lantern. Orry saw that it was a recruiting notice, urging men to join a volunteer regiment being organized in response to President Lincoln’s call.
He passed out of the light, but not before he was noticed by several loungers in front of the Station House. How could they help but notice a tall, bony man with dusty clothes, two bags, and only one hand to take care of them? Orry hoped the rosette was visible.
As he walked by the hotel, he heard one lounger say, “Queer duck. Anybody know him?”
The others said no. One remarked, “Looks a little like old Abe, don’t he?”
“Could be his brother.” The speaker left the hotel porch and ran after Orry. “Want a hack, mister? Only ten cents to any point in town.”
Orry raised his eyebrows in a questioning way, at the same time nodding at the lights of Belvedere on the hilltop.
“The Hazard place?” The townsman fingered his chin; anyone visiting the only millionaire in Lehigh Station must be well off himself. “That’s a nickel more.”
Orry agreed with a nod. The open buggy ascended the steep hill. Suddenly a thin, fiery-white line appeared in the black sky above Belvedere. The streak of light fell toward the earth at an angle close to perpendicular. It vanished a moment after Orry realized it was a shooting star.
Scents of the warm springtime were quickly diluted by the fumes of the mill. Hazard Iron’s three furnaces cast a deep red light over nearby hillsides. Smoke billowed from each furnace, and the breeze bore the pounding rhythm of steam engines. A menacing sound, somehow.
Panic seized Orry as the driver deposited him in front of the mansion. He hadn’t thought to telegraph ahead. What if George had gone off somewhere?
An eager boy, breathless from running, answered the door. He was taller than his father and less stocky, but the resemblance was unmistakable.
“William, don’t you recognize me?” Orry removed his hat and smiled. The appearance of that smile in the middle of his tangled beard gave him a less forbidding look. William’s wariness vanished. He whirled around.
“Pa? Pa, come here. Wait’ll you see who’s at the door.” He stepped aside. “Come in, Mr. Main.”
“Thank you, William.” Orry entered and William took his bags. “You’re tall as a tree. How old are you now?”
“Thirteen.” Then he added, “Almost.”
Orry shook his head and walked into the dazzle of the lower hall. He heard a door open, then close on the second-floor landing. He didn’t bother to look up there because George was striding out of the dining room, his shirt-sleeves rolled above his elbows and his ever-present cigar in hand.
“Stick? Godamighty, I don’t believe this.”
He rushed forward. Constance came from the kitchen, equally astonished. George bobbed up and down on his toes, delighted as a little boy. “What the devil are you doing in Pennsylvania? And what’s that?”
Orry glanced down at his lapel. “I had to wear it to get through the enemy lines.”
George and Constance smiled at the little joke, but memories of larger events soon returned with crushing force. That showed when Constance hugged him and said:
“It’s so wonderful to see you. Isn’t the news from Sumter simply terrible?”
“Terrible,” he agreed. “George, I came about a matter of business.”
Once more George looked surprised. “I shouldn’t think there’s much business being done anywhere right now. I keep wondering how secession will affect mundane things: Bank transactions. Postal deliveries—ah, but we needn’t stand here discussing that. Are you hungry? We just finished supper. A couple of fine roast ducklings. There’s plenty left.”
“A little food would be welcome.”
“Then come along. My God, I can’t believe you’re here. It’s like old times.”
Constance put her arm around her tall son. She smiled again as the men walked toward the dining room. Orry did wish it could be like old times, but all he had seen on his journey told him the wish was an idle one. Never again would there be a day like that in 1842 when the two of them had stood at the rail of the Hudson River steamer with their hopes and illusions still intact.
They were old men now. Gray men. George’s hair was streaked generously with it. And they had somehow let their world be pushed into the chasm of war. The knowledge robbed the reunion of joy. Grim-faced, he followed George and his cigar to the dining room.
While Orry ate, they exchanged items of news. Billy had reached Washington safely with his new wife. “And with a slight wound,” George added. “Billy didn’t go into details, but I gather there was an altercation with a former suitor of Brett’s.”
“Yes.” Orry said no more.
“He’s been promised a few days’ leave. I’m expecting the two of them here at any time.”
“I’d like to see them, but I can’t wait. Things are chaotic at home.”
“Chaotic everywhere,” Constance said with a sigh.
George nodded glumly. “They say Virginia will secede tomorrow or the next day. She’ll pull most of the fence-sitters with her. All the border states may go. Feelings are running high”—he pointed his cigar at the rosette—”as you must have discovered.”
Orry finished his coffee, less weary now. But he had experienced no lifting of his spirits. He was glad to be with his old friend, yet he continued to feel this might be their last meeting for a long time.
After a silence, Constance spoke with obvious reluctance:
“Virgilia has come home.”
Orry almost dropped his cup. “From where?”
“That,” George growled, “we do not ask.”
“Is she here this evening?”
George nodded, and Orry recalled the sound of a door’s opening and closing upstairs as he arrived. Had Virgilia seen him?
Well, it didn’t matter. Even though he had taken some elementary precautions down in the town, he really hadn’t planned to make this visit a secret one.
“The poor creature’s destitute—” Constance began.
“It’s her own doing,” George snapped. “I don’t want to talk about it.” His wife looked away. To Orry he said, “Now, what kind of business could be important enough to bring you all the way up here? Don’t tell me Cooper’s ready to launch the big ship.”
“I wish that were the case. I don’t think she’ll ever leave the ways. That’s why I came and why I brought the satchel I left in the hall. It contains six hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I’m sorry there isn’t more, but I could only raise that much.”
“Raise? Raise how?”
“Never mind. I didn’t want your investment capital tied up in the South and subject to confiscation. You didn’t loan it to us for that purpose.”
George frowned, glanced at his wife and then back to his friend. “Perhaps we should discuss this in the library.”
“Come, Billy,” Constance said, patting her son as she rose.
“Billy.” Orry smiled. “You call him that?”
She nodded. “When George’s brother is home, he’s Big Billy and this is Little Billy. It’s confusing sometimes, but we like it.”
William pulled a face. “Not all of us like it.”
“He’s right,” Constance said, teasing her son by keeping a straight face. “Stanley claims it’s undignified.”
“That is why we like it,” George said as he stood up. Orry laughed, spontaneously and hard. For a moment he could almost imagine the old times had returned.
“You say Billy’s wound is healing satisfactorily?” Orry asked as George shut the doors and turned up the light.
“So I’m informed. He and Brett are happy even if the country isn’t.” He rummaged for glasses and a decanter. “I think we need some whiskey.”
He poured two stiff drinks without asking whether Orry cared for one. Same old Stump, Orry thought. In charge of every situation.
“No, it isn’t at all happy,” Orry agreed as he took the whiskey. He drank half of it in three gulps. The warmth exploded in his stomach, soothing him a little. He fished for the key and unlocked the satchel he had brought from the hall. He opened it to show the large-denomination bills. “As I told you—that’s the reason I brought this.”
George picked up one banded bundle, struck speechless for a moment. Then he said softly:
“It’s a very honorable act, Orry.”
“The money’s yours. I think you deserve it more than the Montgomery government. Which, by the way, has been established with men of solid and conservative bent in charge.”
“So I noticed. Jeff Davis. Alec Stephens of Georgia—”
“The South Carolina crowd, including our mutual friend Young Hotspur”—at Orry’s reference to Huntoon, George grimaced—“was vi
rtually ignored. They aren’t pleased.”
“Why were they left out?”
“I’m not sure. I would suspect the conservatives thought them too extreme. Feared they’d detract from the respectability of the new government. In any case, I didn’t think you’d want your money confiscated by men whose principles aren’t exactly compatible with yours.”
George threw him a quizzical look. “Are they compatible with yours?”
“I’m goddamned if I know anymore, Stump.”
He slumped into a chair. His friend snapped the satchel shut, then seated himself next to the library table where the meteorite still rested. Almost without thought, George picked up the dark brown cone as he said, “Well, my assertion stands. You did an exceptionally honorable thing.”
Embarrassed, Orry saluted his friend with his glass. Then his melancholy smile faded, and he pointed to the rough-textured object in George’s hand.
“Is that the same one you found in the hills above the Academy?”
“Yes.”
“I thought so. I remember some of what you said about it. Something about star iron having the power to destroy families, wealth, governments—the whole established order of things. I do believe we’re about to see that opinion tested. You spoke of honor. There’s damned little of it among individuals and even less”—his voice was low now, sardonic—“a flash or two every century?—among nations and political parties and groups crusading for their holy causes. But if war gets started soon, factories like yours will be responsible for eradicating even the little bit of honor that’s left. Cooper’s known it for a long time. He tried to make us listen. We refused. If there’s to be a war, and it appears there is, it’ll be the kind of new, total war Mahan predicted. Annihilating not just troops of the line but everything.”
He shook his head. His exhaustion, and the whiskey consumed so quickly, produced an odd, light-headed state in which thoughts flowed freely, as did the words to express them. “And what are the South’s resources for that kind of struggle? A vision of the future which is beginning to look pathetically outdated. Our rhetoric. Our slogans. And our soldiers.”