North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Handlers flung the last valises in the boot and lashed down the tarpaulin. The dispatcher blew a final sour call on his dented trumpet. Lamar Powell linked his arm with Huntoon’s and waved with his lacquered stick.

  Ashton waved back merrily. From Powell’s jaunty air and confident smile, she knew she was absolutely right about the letter.

  On several occasions George had reason to step down into a rifle pit or enter a bombproof. Each time the muck and stench nearly made him sick. Along the lines he frequently saw ears plugged with wadding, protection against the noise of the siege guns. He saw illness, boredom, fear all stewed together, with the dirt of Virginia sprinkled on for garnish. If the filth and squalor were this bad on the Union side, what must conditions be like on Orry’s? And if this was Professor Mahan’s new style warfare, he pitied his son’s generation and those beyond.

  The siege wore away men’s sanity and decency. Occasionally he heard reports of acts of friendliness between those on opposing sides; some trading of coffee, tobacco, newspapers. But most of the time, only two things passed between the facing enemies: small-arms fire and vicious taunts. He was glad he had joined the Military Railroad Corps. He doubted he could have withstood a post on the line—the responsibility for ordering seventeen-year-olds to picket duty in the contested, shell-pocked strip between the rifle pits, there perhaps to die.

  A morning in January found him underneath a trestle spanning a gully on the City Point line. He was surveying repairs his crew had made on one of the trusses. Well satisfied, he suddenly noticed the icicles along the edge of the trestle. They were dripping.

  “So,” he muttered to himself. The winter was ending. Maybe the spring would bring a surrender. He prayed that would be the case. He had come to hate the regular letters from Wotherspoon, cheerfully reporting the enormous profits Hazard’s was still earning from war production. The bank was doing equally well.

  Above him, mauls rapped steadily. His head started to ache. He climbed the muddy side of the gully, shielding his eyes against the sunshine till he found the man he wanted.

  “Scow? I’m going over to that creek for a drink. Be right back.”

  “Good enough, Major,” the black said to George’s retreating back.

  George unhooked his tin cup from his belt, using his other hand to loosen the flap of his holster. The creek, out of sight of the rail line, meandered within a few hundred yards of the Confederate salient. But it was Sunday—early—so he didn’t anticipate any danger.

  Patches of snow were melting and shrinking on both sides of the creek. The water rushed with a frothy, springlike sound. George thought he heard a suspicious noise in thick woods on the far side, so he waited behind a big maple for a moment or two. Seeing nothing, he moved down the bank, there squatting to dip his cup. He had it at his mouth when a man stepped from behind a tree on the other side.

  George dropped the cup, spilling the water. His hand flew toward his side arm. The reb, in a kepi and torn butternut coat, swiftly raised his right hand, palm outward.

  “Hold on, Billy. All I want is a drink, like you.”

  Holding his breath, George remained crouched with his hand near his revolver. The reb was about his age, though considerably taller, with a sickly mien enhanced by raw sores on his close-shaven white cheeks. The reb held his rifle carelessly, the barrel pointed toward the sky.

  “Just a drink?” The reb nodded. “Here.” George picked up his cup and tossed it across the creek. The impulse was so sudden he didn’t quite understand it.

  “Thank you very much.” The reb walked, or, rather, limped, down to the water’s edge. Shooting one more swift glance at his enemy—the reb’s eyes were greenish, like a cat’s, George observed—he laid his rifle on the ground. He crouched, dipped the cup, whirled it around to rinse it, threw the contents out, and refilled it to the brim. George smiled a little.

  Loudly, greedily, the reb drank. The thudding mauls of the work crew seemed miles away. If this turned out to be some kind of ambush—more men lurking in the trees—George doubted he would survive it. Unexpectedly, that served to relax him. He pushed his forage cap back while trying to spot an insignia or any indication of rank on the reb’s uniform. He couldn’t. He assumed the man was a picket.

  Suddenly, flashing in the sun, the cup came sailing back. “Thank you once again, Billy.” George caught the cup, dipped it, and drank. The reb stood up and fastidiously wiped his lips with one finger. “Where is your home?”

  Rising, too, George hooked the cup on his belt again. “Pennsylvania.”

  “Oh. I was hoping it might be Indiana.”

  George thought he detected an accent, though it was an indefinable one, not heavily Southern. “Why’s that?”

  “My brother lives there. He moved from Charlottesville to a small farm outside Indianapolis eight years ago. He belongs to a volunteer infantry regiment; I do not know which one. I thought perhaps you might be acquainted with him. Hugo Hoffman, two f’s”

  “Afraid not. The Union Army’s pretty big.”

  Hoffman didn’t respond to George’s smile. “Much bigger than ours.”

  “It must be hard, having a brother on our side. But I know it isn’t uncommon. There are cousins fighting each other—and friends. My best friend in the whole world is a colonel in your army, as a matter of fact.”

  “What is his name?”

  “Oh, you wouldn’t know him. He’s in Richmond, at your War Department.”

  “What is his name?”

  Stubborn Dutchman, George thought. “Main, as in Main Street. His first name is Orry.”

  “But I do know him. That is, I have heard of him.” George was openmouthed. “I remember because it is not a common name. There was a Colonel Orry Main on General Pickett’s staff throughout most of last fall.”

  George could barely speak. “Was?”

  “He was ambushed and shot by a wounded man he was trying to succor—a cavalryman from your side.” Resentment crept in; Hoffman’s green eyes were less friendly. “The incident has been widely circulated as proof of the barbarity of General Grant’s troops.”

  “You say he was shot. You don’t mean he was—?”

  “Killed? Of course he was. Why else would anyone repeat the story? Well, Billy, the drink was refreshing, and I have enjoyed the conversation. I regret I am the one to inform you about your friend. I must go now. This business won’t last much longer, I think. I hope I am not hurt before it stops. I hope you are not either. I am sorry about your friend.” He tipped his grease-blackened kepi. “Good-bye.”

  George said good-bye, but so faintly the reb couldn’t possibly have heard him above the bubble of the stream. He turned slowly toward the railroad. Sunshine poured over his face, blinding him. Stick, he thought. Stick.

  He walked a less than straight course toward the sound of the hammering, stumbling twice. Just as the trestle came in sight, he had to turn back into the trees, where he hid and cried for five minutes, remembering his friend and the April fire.

  Work on the trestle was finished before noon. In the mess where George stopped for Sunday dinner, he sat apart, not bothering to introduce himself to other officers, as he usually did. The mess was located behind one of several redoubts he had passed on his way to get this food he found he didn’t want. The redoubts and adjoining trenches, packed with bored, yawning men, gave off increasingly noxious odors as the temperature climbed. He could smell the reek as he stared at his plate. It was the stench of ruin. Of a loss he could not yet accept or even believe.

  Dully, he raised his head in response to faint music from the siege lines. A fife or piccolo, soon joined by a cornet, then by an improvised drum—it sounded to George like a stick on a large tin can. The melody was “Dixie’s Land.”

  “There they go again,” a captain complained to others at his table.

  Out in the rifle pits, someone yelled: “Hey, Johnny, turn off that tune. Go home and beat your niggers if you have any left.”

  The resp
onse was a series of mocking rebel yells, more amusing than frightening today. George covered his face with both hands, then quickly dropped his hands to his lap when he realized others might be staring. They were. He didn’t look at any of them straight on. He was too miserable.

  “Here they come. Let the boys through with their instruments—”

  That, too, came from outside, as did a general commotion. Several officers hastily finished their meals, grabbed their hats, and hurried out. He wondered why as “Dixie” continued to ring merrily over the Union lines.

  Suddenly a second musical group, larger and including, from God knew where, a glockenspiel, began “John Brown’s Body.” Applause and cheers greeted the opening bars of the retaliation.

  Singly or in groups, more and more officers left, until George was the last man seated at the stained trestle tables. Wearily, he picked up his cap and trudged outside. Both bands played at maximum volume, each trying to drown out the other. George was astonished to see soldiers in shirt sleeves on the parapets of the redoubts. Others were leaning over the forward edges of the rifle pits, enjoying the sunshine or a puff on a cob pipe or some raillery exchanged with the other side.

  He walked slowly toward the stinking trenches. Looking beyond them, across the strip of scarred and trampled ground, he saw other soldiers, toy figures in gray and butternut, emerge from the fortifications; the lines were close here.

  The musical conflict quickly became mere noise, one melody canceling the other. Then, abruptly, George heard men repeating a word to one another. “Hush. Hush.” Someone else said, “Listen. “ Both bands fell silent.

  Raising his hand over his eyes again, he tried to see the source of the sweet, piercing cornet notes. At last he did. The player was a small, dim figure on the other side—a musician of very small stature or, more likely, quite young. He had climbed to the top of a half-destroyed redoubt, his tattered shirt fluttering at the elbows, his horn flashing like an exploding star whenever the sun struck the metal at a certain angle.

  George recognized the song before he heard the voices of the enemy soldiers who were climbing out of the rifle pits around the cornetist. It was the piece played and sung most frequently on both sides. Near George, an ugly top sergeant began to sing.

  “’Mid pleasures and palaces

  Though we may roam,

  Be it ever so humble,

  There’s no place like home.”

  A baritone joined in, a tenor added harmony. The voices swelled, on the Union side and the Confederate side, and reached out and fused to form a single, strong-throated chorus.

  “A charm from the skies

  Seems to hallow us there.

  Which, seek through the world

  Is ne’er met with elsewhere.”

  Johnny Reb and Billy Yank, they sat or stood in full view of those who, at other hours and other places, were devoted to killing them. One or two Union men waved to soldiers on the other side. Here and there the waves were returned. But mostly it was just singing—austere, sober, loud as a hymn from a fervent congregation—as though both groups of Americans charged with shooting down other Americans were saying there was a deep and private place in each of them where dwelled a resistance to that awful idea. They said it with the clichéd words of a sentimental ballad—and with tears, George saw suddenly. He counted at least a dozen men weeping while they sang.

  “Home, home,

  Sweet, sweet home.

  There’s no place like home,

  Oh, there’s no place like home.”

  The voices died away and then the last held note of the cornet. George donned his cap, giving it a smart tug. He felt a little more like himself again, conscious of his responsibilities. The song had reminded him of Belvedere. Madeline. He doubted she knew of her husband’s death.

  He loathed the thought of being the one to send the news. But it would be greater cruelty to refrain. No message from Richmond would ever reach her in Pennsylvania. He wasn’t even sure she would be informed if she were living in the South. He heard that all the amenities were breaking down on the other side. The task was his.

  As he set out to rejoin his men—they had taken their meal with one of the Negro regiments—he decided he must write immediately. He would send the letter to Constance, relying on her to know the best way to approach both Madeline and Brett.

  Laughing, joshing, the Union soldiers continued to sun themselves in the mild afternoon air. A shot rang out.

  “Damn you, Johnny,” someone shouted. “That’s a rotten thing to do.”

  Scrambling, men dropped out of sight with remarkable speed. The intermission was over. The concert of the guns was ready to resume.

  122

  FEBRUARY. IN THE DARK over Washington, a freak electrical storm boomed and blazed. The intermittent lightning lent an eerie glow to a large diamond pendant Jeannie Canary wore between her small pink-pointed breasts. She lay nude in the sweaty bed, happily playing with her new jewel.

  Stanley tied the sash of his dressing gown of royal blue velvet. Then he poured from the whiskey decanter. There was only a small amount left. In plush slippers, he walked to the pantry of the five-room flat in which he had installed his mistress. He returned with a fresh bottle of sour mash and topped off his glass.

  Miss Canary bounced the big stone in her palms; another lightning burst made it twinkle. “You’re drinking a lot tonight, loves.”

  “Oil for the machinery of the mind.” And defense against constant fear that all of this—the little dancer, the six million dollars that had accumulated in the profit column of Lashbrook’s, his power in Republican circles—would be snatched away because he was undeserving. He took a hefty swallow, a third of the glass.

  Miss Canary knew better than to be overly critical of the source of her security. She dropped the subject of drinking, substituting a familiar and, to Stanley, annoying complaint.

  “I do so wish you’d let me attend Mr. Lincoln’s inaugural with you.”

  “I’ve told you before, it’s impossible.” Isabel was returning from a long stay in Newport for the event. She had spent lavishly to convert Fairlawn into a year-round residence and had moved in without asking permission of anyone else in the family. The three brothers shared ownership of the property, but that fact was ignored when Isabel took it over last fall, just after she placed their incorrigible sons in a small Massachusetts boarding school. The school earned huge fees for catering to parents who wanted their offspring out of sight and mind. Aping their father, neither of the twins had any desire to don a uniform; resort to the school was unavoidable.

  Stanley and Miss Canary had argued several times about the inaugural, which was scheduled for the first Saturday in March. To compensate for his refusal to take her, Stanley had given her the pendant—paste, but she didn’t know the difference. Out of gratitude, she had an hour ago performed a certain act whose mere mention would have rendered Isabel catatonic.

  Now, however, he found the girl back on the subject again, whining.

  “But I have such a longing to see the President up close. I haven’t, ever.”

  “You’ve missed nothing, believe me.”

  “You talk to him often, don’t you?” Stanley nodded and drank more whiskey. He liked to maintain a slight blurring of his vision, a slight dulling of his senses, through all of the waking hours. “Is it true he doesn’t bathe?”

  “The statement’s highly exaggerated.”

  Miss Canary reached down to scratch herself. “But they say women avoid him because he smells.”

  “Some women avoid him because he tells an occasional off-color story. It’s the Western taste in humor. Farmerish,” he said with a disdainful shrug. “But the chief reason he’s avoided is his wife. Mary Lincoln is a jealous harpy. It prostrates her if her husband is alone with another woman for so much as five seconds.”

  “You don’t mean alone the way we’re alone?” Miss Canary giggled.

  What a pathetic mind she has, he thought. He
r last name suits her. “No, my dear.” He slipped out of the velvet gown and began to dress. “I was referring to speaking with women at presidential levees. Public functions.”

  “Oh, that reminds me. Last night at the theater, I heard a terrible thing about the President. I heard that some actors are planning to kidnap or kill him. They’re all supposed to be Southern sympathizers, but I didn’t hear any names.”

  Buttoning his shirt, Stanley belched softly. “My sweet, if I had penny for every such story circulating in this town, we’d soon mass enough money for a sea voyage to Egypt.”

  Miss Canary sat up, the diamond hobbling in her cleavage. Are you thinking of taking me to Egypt?”

  Stanley quickly raised a hand. “Merely an example.” The poor child really taxed his patience sometimes. But he always forgave her when she demonstrated her sexual precocity.

  “Must you go, loves?”

  “I must. I’m receiving a guest at half past nine.”

  “Speaking of receiving—the draft for this month’s rent hasn’t arrived.”

  “No? I’ll slap the wrist of my bookkeeper. You shall have it tomorrow, first thing.”

  She gave him a long, deep taste of her tongue to show her appreciation. After one more stiff drink of whiskey, he donned his overcoat and slipped out the door, his last impression a vivid picture of her on her knees on the bed, left hand caressing the diamond, right-hand fingers flexing in a tiny, childlike wave.

  His waiting carriage bore him through rainy streets to the large house on I Street. With Isabel gone, he spent little time there. Sometimes, alone in the emptiness, he even missed the twins. He lever let that foolish sentiment best him for long, though.

  Servants had the gas burning and had set out refreshments. But the guest didn’t arrive until quarter to eleven.

  Ben Wade flung off his wet cape. The butler retrieved it from he floor. Stanley gestured sharply. The man left, closing the door.

  Wade paced to the hearth to warm himself. “Sorry I’m late. I waited until the River Queen returned.” He rubbed his hands, clearly pleased. “Mr. Seward and our beloved leader received the Confederate commissioners at Hampton Roads, all right. However, I was told there will be no armistice.”