North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  He hitched up his nightshirt and sat down to read awhile. Presently he reached a line that leaped out because it had been underscored with a pen. Three words, Amen and amen, had been inked on the margin beside it. The line read:

  “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever.”

  Jefferson, a Southerner and a slave owner, had been writing about slavery. What confounded Orry was the marginal notation. He had studied enough old plantation ledgers to recognize the handwriting. It was his father’s.

  The three words suggested that Tillet, so staunch a defender of slavery in public, had actually harbored doubts about it. Doubts he had kept hidden all his life. The old sinner, Orry thought with a surge of sympathy. Well, what decent man wouldn’t harbor doubts—especially now that the consequences were so cruelly apparent?

  Encountering Tillet’s doubts only enhanced his own, which were profound. They embraced both the history of the Mains and that of every man who lived by, and therefore tolerated, the peculiar institution. Ever after, Orry regretted that he had given in to the impulse to take that particular book off the shelf.

  A few minutes after sunrise one misty morning, Orry and Charles went riding on the plantation. Pale clouds stirred around them as they galloped, phantom men on phantom horses in a landscape of gray shot through with smoky orange. Beneath the layers of mist, the flooded fields shone like polished metal.

  A file of slaves trudging along a check bank loomed on the right. The driver turned to offer a laconic salute to the master. But even at a distance, Orry detected a certain mockery in the black man’s bearing, a certain resentment on his face.

  Soon a swirl of mist hid the spectral column of men. But other parties of workmen were out that morning, and Orry realized he had been riding among them without taking note of their presence. They simply existed, like trunk gates or the kitchen building. They were items of property.

  He thought again of Jefferson’s book. Items of property. That was it, wasn’t it? The reason the North, the world, perhaps even the Lord Himself, was calling the South to judgment—

  “Wade Hampton’s raising a mounted legion,” Charles called suddenly. “I’m reporting for duty in two weeks.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I was only notified yesterday. I’m tired of waiting and fretting. I want to do what I was trained to do.” He leaped his horse over a ditch. His hair, badly in need of barbering, bobbed and danced at the nape of his neck. “It should be a glorious fight.”

  The remark made Orry realize how great a gulf separated them. It was caused by more than a difference in their ages. Even after seeing action in Texas, Charles hadn’t lost his love of brawling.

  Orry didn’t want his silence interpreted as agreement. “Glorious?” he called back. “I think not. Not this time.”

  But Charles was already cropping his horse for greater speed, and he was laughing with such joy of life he never heard the dour voice behind him. Hair streaming, he went galloping toward the misty sunrise, the perfect picture of a cavalier.

  Next day Orry received a letter from the state government. He hid it until evening, when he could discuss it with Madeline in the warmth of their bed.

  “They asked me to consider a commission. Possibly a brigadier’s. Apparently the lack of an arm is no handicap at that rank, and they claim my former service makes me invaluable. Invaluable—imagine that.”

  He laughed, but there was scant humor in it. Then: “Do you know, Madeline, years ago John Calhoun said West Point men would lead great armies? I don’t suppose he imagined they would lead them against each other.”

  After a moment she said, “How do you feel about the proposal?”

  He lay back and stroked her hair. “It’s tempting, but I’d hate to leave you here alone.”

  “I’m not afraid of Justin.”

  “It isn’t Justin who worries me. Have you noticed how some of the plantation people are behaving? They’ve gotten lazy. A few have an almost arrogant glint in their eye. This very afternoon I caught Cuffey whispering with another house man. I heard the name ‘Linkum.’”

  She assured him she would be fine if he chose to leave. He thanked her, but he knew his decision would spring from something far more elemental. His land, Main land, was threatened now. Would he or would he not defend it?

  “I’ll show you the letter in the morning,” he said. “I do believe I’ll have to give them a favorable answer.”

  “I almost knew you’d do that when the call came.”

  The call. The words touched off bursts of memory, the strongest of them aural. The old, nearly forgotten drums were beating again, summoning him, demanding that he answer.

  “How would you feel if I accepted a commission?”

  She kissed his mouth. “I’d regret it.” Another kiss. “And be proud.” A third, still longer and sweeter. “And wait for you to come back to me at the first possible moment.”

  Her arms clasped him tightly. He didn’t think he’d ever been so happy. She whispered to him:

  “I love you too much to lose you, my darling. If you go away, I’ll pray such prayers God can’t help but send you back safe and sound.”

  Stanley’s crony, Boss Cameron, had secured a post for him in the capital. Washington was already showing signs of turning into a warren of profiteers, influence peddlers, and political hacks. But old, plodding Stanley was invigorated by the new challenge, and Isabel looked forward to an exciting social adventure. Stanley and his wife had already closed their house and enrolled their boys in a fashionable Washington school. At fourteen, the twins were undisciplined ruffians. Their absence would be welcomed by the entire town of Lehigh Station.

  Up in Rhode Island, a violent storm destroyed a large section of roof at Fairlawn. George received the news by telegraph and decided to leave by train the next day to assess the damage. Constance said she wanted to go with him. She needed a holiday; she was peeved at the world and inexcusably short-tempered with William and Patricia. Brett and Billy promised to look after the children, since Billy hoped to be at Belvedere a few more days before returning to duty.

  That night, after a lengthy meeting he had called in his office at Hazard’s, George found himself unable to sleep. By eleven-thirty he was in the library, a full tumbler of whiskey before him on the polished table, six inches to the right of the rough brown object he had treasured for so many years.

  He stared at the meteorite a long time, finding himself less proud of his trade, less certain of its worth, than in the past. He saw all the destructive uses to which star iron had been put throughout the centuries, and to which it would soon be put again. He finally drank the whiskey around three in the morning, and extinguished the lamp and climbed to his bedroom and the warmth of his wife’s slumbering form, but even then he failed to find rest.

  Newport had a dead, abandoned look under gray skies. George and Constance felt strange staying in the great house all by themselves. Yet at the same time they relished their unfamiliar privacy.

  On the afternoon of their first full day at Fairlawn, George met for an hour with the building contractor who would repair the roof. Then he and Constance went for a walk along the deserted beach. White combers were breaking. The sky had a vast, wintry look unsuited to springtime. She kept her arm in his, eager for the sense of contact.

  “You never told me the reason for the night meeting, George.”

  “Nothing secret about it. I called in all the foremen and told them we were placing the factory on a twenty-four-hour production schedule. We’re already receiving orders from the War Department. No doubt Stanley will see that we get many more. We’re liable to come out of this richer than ever.”

  “At the price of a certain number of dead bodies.”

  He frowned. “Yes, I suppose that’s true.”

  He stopped and turned toward her. He had to get something into the open. “Stanley says Washington wants all the Academy men it can find.�
��

  “For the Army?”

  “Or government posts.”

  She looked at him steadily. “Do you want to serve?”

  “Want isn’t quite the right word. Somewhere, in some fashion”—he took a breath; it was far from the happiest admission he had ever made, yet there was relief in saying it—“I feel I must.”

  She started to cry, but immediately fought back the tears and squared her shoulders. “It’s your decision, darling.” She took his arm again. “Could we go back to the house now? I feel a sudden and quite uncontrollable urge to make love.”

  Despite her smile, he still saw a glint of tears. He cast an eye at the scraggly underbrush visible behind large boulders up at the edge of the beach.

  “What’s the matter with right there?” He managed an impish smile, then kissed the tip of her nose. “Unless, of course, you deem yourself too conservative, Mrs. Hazard.”

  “George”—a pause, a teasing look—”did you ever do this sort of thing before we were married? At West Point, for instance? You seem to fall into it quite naturally.”

  “I have no comment.”

  She thought again. “What if we’re seen?”

  “By whom? There isn’t another soul for miles.”

  “It’s rather chilly.”

  “I’ll keep you warm.”

  “Do you really think we dare?”

  “Of course. Wartime has a disastrous effect on convention. People know they might not get a second chance.”

  She saw that his jest hid something somber. There was no humor in his eyes. She clasped his hand tightly. They turned their backs on the lifeless sky and ran toward the rocks.

  70

  AT BELVEDERE, BILLY AND Brett went in to supper together. Billy suggested they go walking afterward because the spring night was so fine. They both understood that there was a second, unstated reason; the passing hours had released an increasing poignancy. Late that afternoon he had received a telegraph message: orders to return to Washington the following morning. The thought of his imminent departure depressed Brett and ruined her appetite.

  Toward the end of the meal, there was a commotion. A sudden light suffused the twilight sky beyond the dining-room windows. As Billy, Brett, and two serving girls rushed to look outside, a distant shudder shook the house to its foundation. One of the girls gasped. A groom came running excitedly into the room, exclaiming that a shooting star had blazed bright as noon, then disappeared in the next valley.

  The meteor striking the earth would account for the concussion they had all felt. The unnerved man spoke of the many shooting stars seen above the valley of late. He trembled and whispered something about God’s fury coming to the land.

  Brett took those remarks with outward calm, yet the strange light and the tremor heightened her uneasy state as she and Billy set out for the hilltop overlooking the three brick furnaces of Hazard Iron. It was a splendid evening, cloudless and warm. Thousands of stars were visible, breathtakingly bright from horizon to zenith, except where their glow was muted by phosphorescent light veils.

  A peculiar acrid odor came drifting over the top of the hill they were climbing. The smell was borne on a thin, nearly invisible smoke. “What’s burning?” she asked as they reached the summit, both slightly out of breath. They stood surrounded by thick clumps of laurel, the blooms white in the darkness.

  Billy sniffed. “Don’t know but it doesn’t seem far away. Just down there. Wait here; I’ll go see.”

  He scrambled down through more of the laurel. The blowing smoke thickened somewhat, and the strange, scorched odor increased. He felt the crater before he saw it; the heat washed against his face. Finally, with the help of the starlight, he perceived it—a pit nearly twelve feet across, black in the side of the hill. He could not see the meteorite itself, but he knew it was there.

  “Nothing to fret about,” he said when he returned to the crest. “The shooting star, or a piece of it, struck the hill.”

  She sheltered in his arms, trying to conceal her anxiety and her sense of isolation. Of course George and Constance always did their best to make her feel at home. She enjoyed the company of their children, and caring for them gave her something to do. Yet she had not really adapted to life in Pennsylvania, to the valley, its people, or their ways. The psalmist said the Lord protected the stranger, but she wasn’t sure about that.

  And now she could no longer contain her feelings.

  “Billy, I’m frightened.”

  “Of the war?”

  “Yes, and frightened of your leaving. I’m frightened of not knowing where you are or whether you’re safe. I’m frightened of the townspeople and the way some of them look at me accusingly because I’m a Southerner. I’m frightened of everything. I’m so ashamed to admit that, but I can’t help it!”

  Her voice sounded faint, lacking the strength he always expected from her. Well, he was just as scared as she was. He had no idea where the Army would post him.

  He did have a fair idea of what sort of duty lay in store, though. Engineers tore down the trees, prepared the roads, and built the pontoon bridges on which great armies advanced. Engineers went ahead of all the regular troops and were usually first within range of enemy guns.

  “Everything’s so uncertain,” she was murmuring. “There’s so much hate, so much joy at the prospect of killing. Sometimes I hardly see how any of us can survive.”

  “If we love each other enough, we can survive anything. So can our families. So can the country.”

  “Do you honestly believe that?”

  “Yes, I do. Once when I was feeling low, George helped me by doing this.” He broke off a sprig of laurel and put it in her hand. “The laurel thrives where other plants die. Mother always believed our family’s like the laurel, and I expect yours is too. Strong enough, because there are a lot of us who love each other to live through anything.”

  She looked at the sprig with its small white flower, then tucked it into a pocket of her dress “Thank you.”

  When he bent to kiss her face, he tasted her tears; but her voice did sound stronger.

  “As soon as I know where I’ll be stationed, and if it’s possible to send for you, I will. We’ll get through this all right.”

  She turned, kissed him again. “Oh, I love you, Billy Hazard.”

  “I love you, Brett. That’s why we’ll get through.”

  After another long kiss, she turned once more and rested comfortably with her back against his chest. They watched the stars while the spring wind gusted across the summit of the hill. The laurel tossed and murmured. Billy had spoken his hope, not his certainty. He knew full well the hope was fragile.

  The darkness proved fragile, too. They faced away from the sprawl of Hazard Iron, but even so they soon grew conscious of its light all around them, a strengthening red glow that seemed to tinge the whole river valley. The lamps of the town grew dim behind it; some faded altogether.

  Billy didn’t want to look around or even acknowledge the existence of the factory, but it was unavoidable. The sanguinary glare from the three furnaces washed out the stars. He heard men shouting, working through the night in the smoke and the fire, to the earsplitting sound of steam engines strained to the limit.

  He shut his eyes a moment. It didn’t help. Scarlet light flowed over his wife’s hair and shoulders. The vagaries of the wind surrounded them with smoke and fumes from the mill. The valley and the world seemed to fill with the noise of the great machinery hammering on, turning out the first of tons of iron for armor, for the Union, for war. The wind blended the smoke from Hazard’s with that from the hillside where the meteorite had fallen, burning away the laurel as if it had never been.

  Slavery brings the judgment of

  heaven upon a country. As nations

  cannot be rewarded or punished in

  the next world, they must be in this:

  GEORGE MASON OF VIRGINIA

  1787

  Afterword

  NORTH AND SOUT
H IS the first of three projected novels about a group of Americans caught up in the storm of events before, during, and after the Civil War.

  Some would argue that the Old West is the essential American experience. It is probably the most romanticized. But for many others, the central experience of the still-unfolding story of our republic remains the War Between the States.

  As Richard Pindell of the State University of New York wrote in an article on Gone with the Wind, it is, first and foremost, “entirely our war.” Its causes reach back beyond Jefferson to the first white speculators who trod our shores. Its effects reverberate onward to the nineteen-fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties like a storm that refuses to surrender its fury.

  Out of the primary issues of slavery and secession there came glory, misery, and myth. Robert Penn Warren has said the war gave the North its treasury of righteousness and the South its great alibi. It also gave American blacks, if not freedom in fact, then at least the legal basis for freedom. To American families on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line it gave an estimated 600,000 dead.

  Historians say the war marks our national coming of age. A brief period of two decades taught us more about ourselves and American society than we had learned in all the years since the arrival of the first colonists. More, perhaps, than we cared to know.

  And yet we remain fascinated with the period. We refight its great battles in books and articles, classrooms and discussion groups. We ponder its cautionary lessons or ignore them, and see its central issues still spilling blood in our streets. It is this power, this sometimes tragic outreach of past events, that attracted me to the subject, as it has attracted so many other writers and scholars.

  Some interesting reactions have attended the preparation of this book. At a party not long after the subject was announced, a woman asked—and rather testily, I must say—”How can a Yankee presume to come down South and write about us?”

  The last word bothered me. I wanted to reply that I thought of myself as an American, not a tub thumper for a particular region or cause. But I tried to give her a better answer: “The same way any professional writes about any period he didn’t directly experience. By studying, walking the ground, trying to extend a storyteller’s imagination into the minds and hearts of characters.” So this may be a good place to comment on the book’s historical content.