by John Jakes
To this very day, the South was a stubborn pupil, rejecting the lesson even after the teacher’s stick beat the pupil until he bled from mortal wounds. What would bring the Confederacy to an inglorious end was the same thing that had so foolishly created it a rigidity of thought, a clinging to old ways, a refusal to adapt and change.
That was it, Orry saw with a little frisson of revelation. The fatal flaw. Minds of stone—pugnaciously proud of the condition.
Examples abounded. The South needed soldiers in the most desperate way, yet those who urged the enlistment of blacks were still called lunatics.
Were not the rights of states supreme? Of course they were Thus the governor of Georgia needed no other grounds to exempt three thousand militia officers from army service and five thousand government workers besides. Using the same justification the governor of North Carolina stockpiled thousands of uniforms, blankets, and rifles under the banner of state defense. Such right-thinking, principled men were more destructive than Sam Grant.
Orry wasn’t a strong strategic thinker, but in sorting through probable causes of the inevitable defeat, he thought he had found another important one in newspaper dispatches describing the opposing presidents. At the start of the war, both Davis and Lincoln had personally directed military policy. Lincoln had even told McClellan the precise day on which he had to march to the peninsula.
Bloody losses had somehow taught Lincoln to revise his opinion of himself as a strategist and infallible judge of the capabilities of generals. On Capitol Square, it was widely held that at some point earlier this year, Lincoln had acknowledged his limitations by transferring control of the war engine to a man who ran it his own way: Grant.
Davis, by contrast, had never learned to recognize personal shortcomings, admit mistakes, adapt to new circumstances, change. The wheel revolved to Cooper again. When had Orry first heard him argue scornfully with their father that the South’s greatest peril was its inflexibility? Longer ago than he could precisely remember.
Still, Orry reflected as the swaying wagon bore him toward Chaffin’s Bluff, he mustn’t be too hard on his own kind. Minds of stone were numerous not only inside Dixie but outside, too. There were plenty in the Yankee Congress; even one or two in the Hazard family, the foremost being Virgilia’s.
But it was becoming clear to Orry that after the war ended, a new, entirely different world would arise. In that world there would be but one way for the South to survive and rebuild. That way was to accept what had happened. Accept that no black man would ever again labor unwillingly for a white man’s profit. In sum—accept change.
He doubted whether most Southerners could do it. Many would undoubtedly go on hating, resisting, insisting they had been morally right, which Orry no longer believed. But again, he supposed just as many Yankees were willingly entrapped in the old modes of enmity and a yearning for reprisals. It was not, perhaps, merely the Southerner who failed to learn lessons, but every man in every epoch.
Trouble was, when you refused to learn, the result was what surrounded the rumbling wagon: soured earth; abandoned homes; imperiled lives.
Ruin.
Ruin and sadness like that on George Pickett’s face when the general accepted Orry’s salute and welcomed him to division headquarters.
“How good to see you at last.”
“It’s good to be here, sir.”
A melancholy smile. “I hope you’ll say that after you’ve spent a few weeks in close proximity to our old acquaintance from West Point. We have met a man this time who either doesn’t know when he’s whipped or doesn’t care if he loses his whole army to whip us. There is no way effectively to oppose that kind of man for very long.”
There is one, Orry thought. But he wasn’t foolish enough to bring up the issue of black recruits and spoil the reunion and his first moments in the war zone.
113
THREE WOMEN DINING.
Constance called for candles instead of gaslight, believing it might warm the atmosphere for supper. It did, but that hardly mattered after her first effort to make conversation.
“Well, here we are—” she raised her claret to toast the guests seated on her right and left at the long table “—three war widows.”
“I wish you wouldn’t say such a thing,” Brett exclaimed.
“Oh, my dear, I’m sorry. It was a clumsy attempt to make a light remark. I apologize.”
“It’s too serious to joke about,” Brett said as Bridgit and a second kitchen girl marched in with china tureens of steaming mock turtle soup.
“I understand what you meant,” Madeline said to Constance, “but I agree with Brett.” She wore a clean, dark dress, and her hair was neatly arranged, but she hadn’t lost the haggard air acquired on her long journey. She plied her spoon and tried to comfort Constance with a smile. “This is absolutely delicious.”
Straining equally: “Thank you.”
Presently, Constance steered the conversation to a safer track. She laughed and spoke ruefully about her continuing weight problem, hoping that jokes at her own expense would enable them to forgive and forget her misplaced flippancy. She saw little sign of success.
She answered Madeline’s questions about her father, Patrick Flynn. He was in the pueblo of Los Angeles and busy improving his Spanish so he could serve native-born clients in addition to the settler community.
“And Virgilia?”
“We never hear from her. I presume she’s still with the nurse corps.”
“I would think she’d be a little more grateful for the shelter and guidance you gave her,” Brett said. “Simple politeness would dictate an occasional letter, if nothing else.”
Constance reached for the glinting knife on the cutting board. Smiling, she began to slice the hot, fresh loaf. “Alas, I don’t think we can count gratitude among my sister-in-law’s virtues.”
“Does she have any at all?” Brett countered, and with that fell grimly silent, eating her soup.
Dear Lord, Constance thought, did my blunder cause all this? The answer appeared to be yes. The more she considered the dark possibilities wrapped up in her brief, careless remark, the more it depressed her.
Madeline sensed the tension. She said to Brett, “Tell me about this school for black waifs, won’t you?”
“If you’d like, I’ll take you up there tomorrow.”
“Oh, yes, please.”
Brett, too, was feeling ashamed of her outburst. Anxiety was the chief cause. The Ledger-Union was reporting many lives lost along the Petersburg siege lines. The word widow was one she hated to think about in connection with herself.
But she had to be honest; there was another irritant. Madeline’s revelation in the rooming house. It had stunned Brett, but more than that, it had loosed an unexpected emotional reaction. As a presumed white woman, Madeline had earned Brett’s wholehearted respect and affection. Now—well, she couldn’t help it—she regarded Orry’s wife differently.
It was a reaction bred into her from childhood. That was an explanation, not an excuse. The reaction shamed her, and yet she seemed powerless to banish it or keep it from affecting her behavior.
Madeline was aware of the new reserve on Brett’s part ever since that pivotal moment in Washington. Whenever she felt incensed, she reminded herself that Orry’s sister was under great strain, had been living far from her native state for more than three years, had had her husband captured, imprisoned, wounded. That was an immense load for any wife to bear.
Brett’s response to the revelation was a curious and ironic contrast to her involvement with the colored orphanage, Madeline thought. Her concern for the welfare of the black children was evident from the passion and frequency with which she spoke of them. At least that was a change, and a remarkable one for a young woman bred in the frequently arrogant traditions of the Carolina low country. The war was changing everyone and everything in some fashion; a pity it couldn’t alter old attitudes about black blood.
She hoped Brett would event
ually be capable of overlooking what she now clearly regarded as a taint. If not—well, it would certainly alter family relationships. It sometimes seemed to Madeline that God had put Americans to a cruel, perhaps impossible test when He permitted the Dutch to land that first shipload of slaves on the Virginia coast so long ago. The black man out of Africa had repeatedly exposed the white man’s weaknesses. It was, perhaps, fitting revenge for the moment when the leg irons clinked shut.
There had been unpleasant notes sounded at this table tonight. Three war widows. She understood the attempt at lightness but found it disturbing. Thank heaven Orry had done nothing about joining Pickett’s staff. He should be relatively safe in Richmond until the city fell. Afterward, he might be interned awhile—even mistreated—but he would survive that; he was a strong, brave man.
Trying to restart conversation, Madeline once more addressed Brett. “This friend of yours—the one who operates the orphanage—will I have a chance to meet him?”
“I think so. I expect he’ll pay at least one more visit before he goes into the army. I certainly hope he will.” Brett smiled. “You’ll like him, I know.”
And you like him very much indeed, Madeline said to herself. You seem able to accept him for what he is, but not me. Is that because you thought I was something you have always been told was better?
Sensing the onset of more bad feelings, Madeline blocked them by turning back to Constance, this time with a frivolous question about current fashions. The candles burned down, and conversation limped on, but something had gone out of Constance in the past few minutes. Her answers were forced, her efforts at banter unsuccessful. As they were finishing their lemon ices and coconut macaroons, she said abruptly, “I believe I’ll go down to town for in hour.”
Madeline asked, “Would you like company?”
“Thank you, no. I’m going to church.”
It wasn’t necessary to tell them she felt the need. Her face made it evident.
She drove the carriage herself down the twisting road in the light glare from Hazard’s. Under Wotherspoon’s guidance, the entire complex continued to operate twenty-four hours a day—and had never been so profitable.
Reaching the streets of the lower town, Constance felt the night wind rising, blowing dust. Lamps burned late in the army recruiting office. As she drove by, she noticed a sturdy Negro boy, the son of a worker at Hazard’s, standing some distance from the entrance. Between the boy and the doorway, Lute Fessenden’s cousin and some equally loutish crony whispered and joked.
When a few of the town’s black men had attempted to visit the recruiter, there had been incidents of harassment. To prevent another, she slowed the carriage and prepared to speak to the substitute broker. Before she could, the black boy turned and disappeared in a dark alley. The significance of the two men loitering outside the office hadn’t been lost on him.
Disgusted, she drove on to the small Catholic chapel that had been named, in a burst of poetic piety, St. Margaret’s-in-the-Vale. The river valley, where flying soot and bits of cinder constantly blackened everything, could never live up to the literary connotations of vale, but it was a word very much liked by Lehigh Station’s small Catholic community.
Because of the heat of the evening, the front doors of St. Margaret’s stood open. Constance tied the horse to a wrought-iron post—Hazard’s had donated and installed a row of eight—and slipped in, hoping meditation and prayer might lift the formless anxiety that had settled on her during supper. Inside the entrance, she genuflected, then slipped in to the second pew on the left.
Kneeling, she noticed a heavy, middle-aged woman across the aisle. The woman was poorly dressed, a shawl around her shoulders. Her forehead rested on her clasped hands as she prayed. Constance knew her. Mrs. Waleski’s only boy had died in a Cold Harbor medical tent.
Hot wind gusting up the aisle fluttered the votive candles. The seven-foot Christ, painted and gilded, looked down from His cross with pity. Softly, Constance began praying.
Her mind was strangely divided, one part of it on her murmured plea for intercession, another on the great weight crushing her. She knew who had put the weight there. A stupid, thoughtless woman—
Here we are. Three war widows.
Ever since making that remark, she had been possessed by a premonition. For one of the three women at the table, the words would come true.
She was so sure of it, she was consumed with a fear no prayers could allay. Another fierce wind gust blew out half a dozen of the votive lights in their little glass cups red as blood.
114
CHARLES SUFFERED A RAVAGING intestinal ailment during the first ten days of July. Still weak, still belonging in bed, he got up on the eleventh morning, obtained a pass, and set off on a dangerous ride around the west of Richmond, then northeast to Fredericksburg. His only guarantees of safe passage were his revolver and shotgun.
It would be his last trip to Barclay’s Farm. He had decided that while lying with his knees drawn up against his pain-pierced gut. In bed, he’d had plenty of time to straighten out his thinking. The South would go down fighting, and he would go down with it. That was his sole duty now.
He couldn’t deny he loved Gus, but she deserved a man with better prospects. Each day the odds against avoiding a fatal bullet increased. In the short run, he would hurt her. But when she found, as she surely would, a better man—someone whose head had not been oddly twisted by his war experiences—she would thank him.
He reached the farm at the end of a rain shower. The sun was out again, occasionally hidden by the clouds that flew over fields and woods at great speed, exchanging light for shadow, shadow for light. It was half past five in the evening. The clouds, the quality of sunlight at that hour, and the sparkling clarity of the land after the rain helped restore some of the farm’s earlier beauty.
“Major Charles!” Washington, mending harness on the back stoop, jumped to his feet as Charles rode up. “Lord save us—old Sport looks about as starved as you do. Didn’t expect we’d see you for a while. Wait till I tell Miz Augusta—”
“I’ll tell her myself.” Unsmiling, Charles yanked the back door open without knocking. “Gus?” He stepped into the kitchen, oblivious to the pained look on the aging freedman’s face.
The kitchen was empty. Soup stock containing one large bone simmered on the stove. He shouted, “Gus, where the hell are you?”
She came dashing down the hall, hairbrush in hand. At the sight of him, her face glowed. She flung her arms around his neck. “Sweetheart!”
He pressed his bearded cheek to hers but broke the embrace when she started to kiss him. He flung a shabby butternut trouser leg over a low-backed chair and sat. He fumbled in his shirt for matches and a half-smoked cigar. His lack of emotion worried her.
At the stove, she swirled the long wooden spoon three times around the simmering pot. Then she laid the spoon aside and reluctantly confronted him.
“Darling, you don’t look well.”
“I caught the intestinal complaint again. I don’t know which is worse, lying on a cot wishing my gut would fall out or riding over half of Virginia with General Hampton.”
“It’s been that bad—?”
“We’ve lost more men and horses than you’d believe. At least three whole troops of the South Carolina Sixth are in the deadline camp, without remounts.”
She glanced out the window. “You still have Sport.”
“Barely.” He knocked his knuckles on the table twice.
She brushed at a strand of loose blond hair. “It breaks my heart to see you so thin and white. And discouraged.”
“What else can you expect these days?” He found his nervousness increasing. Originally, he had considered staying the night—making love one last time—but he found he didn’t have the brass to do that to her. Or the strength to endure it himself. Abruptly, he decided on a quick end.
He bit into the cigar stub, scraped a match on the chair bottom, waved it toward the windows as sul
furous fumes filled the room. “The farm’s a wreck.”
“Thank the Yankees. Hardly a day goes by without Boz or Washington firing a warning shot at some deserter sneaking around.”
“You shouldn’t have stayed here. You shouldn’t be here now. How can you raise anything? How can you and the niggers survive?”
“Charles, you know I don’t like to hear that word. Especially in reference to my freedmen.”
He shrugged. “I forgot. Sorry.” He didn’t sound it.
She tugged at the tight waist of her dress. Charles’s head was bent, his eye on the match applied to the cigar. Blue smoke whirled around his beard as he blew the match out.
Frightened, Gus said: “You sound as though you don’t really want me to answer the questions you asked. You sound as though you’re trying to pick a fight.”
He plucked the cigar from his teeth. “Now listen. It was a damned long ride up here—”
“May I remind you that no one begged you to make it?” The old defenses were going up again; the tartness, the wry mouth. They hurt him. But he had known for months that pain was necessary if he were to do what was right.
He smoked and stared, saw angry bewilderment in her blue eyes. He nearly relented. Then Ab Woolner came to mind, and Sharpsburg, and a great many other events and changes—so many, it hardly seemed possible that three years could contain them all. Or that any man could withstand them. Yet he had. But he was not unscathed.
More softly: “How long are you able to stay?”
“I have to start back when it’s dark.”
“Would you like—?” The unfinished question and her slight turn toward the door leading to the sleeping rooms had an adolescent awkwardness not typical of her. Red appeared in her cheeks.
“I need to water Sport and let him rest,” he said, aching to carry her in to bed. She heard the unspoken refusal.
“I’ll give you supper when you’re finished.”