by John Jakes
Because of his high military rank, Hampton had been denied the amnesty given the majority of Confederate soldiers after the surrender. The general carried this burden openly. Bitterness was particularly apparent when he stalked all around the rubble that had once been the great house.
“As bad as Millwood,” he said, shaking his head. “We should take a photograph and mail it to Grant. Perhaps it might teach him the real meaning of what he calls ‘enlightened war.’”
Later, in the hot May dusk, the men sat on crates and small casks on the grass in front of the pine house; it had no piazza. Hampton had brought a bottle of peach brandy in his saddlebag. They shared it, using a collection of unmatched cups and glasses.
Hampton questioned Charles about his last days in the cavalry. Charles had little to say. Hampton told them briefly of his own experiences. He had indeed wanted to continue the fight west of the Mississippi. “What they did to my son and my brother and my home persuaded me that I was not morally bound by the surrender.” So he had ridden on in pursuit of the fleeing President and his party.
“I would have escorted Mr. Davis all the way to Texas. Even Mexico. I had a small company of loyal men, or so I thought. But they dropped away, gave up, one by one. Finally I was alone. At Yorkville, I chanced to meet my wife, Mary. She and Joe Wheeler—General Wheeler—persuaded me that trying to find the President was futile. I was tired. Ready to be persuaded, I suppose. So I stopped.”
Cooper asked, “Do you know where Davis is now?”
“No. I suppose he’s in jail somewhere—perhaps even hanged. What a disgraceful end to the whole business.” He tossed off the last of his brandy, which seemed to calm him.
Hampton went on to say he was living in a house belonging to a former overseer. “My daughter Sally’s to be married in June. I have that happy event to anticipate, along with the work of rebuilding this poor, wracked state. I’m glad you’re on Mont Royal again, Cooper. I remember where you stood at the time of the secession convention. We’re going to need men like you. Men of sanity and good will. Patience, strength—I think the Yankees will press us hard. Try us—punish us—severely. Booth did us incredible harm.”
“Has there been any word of him?” Billy said.
“Oh, yes. He was caught and shot to death a couple of weeks ago on a farm near the Rappahannock.”
“Well, gentlemen—” Charles stood up and set the fruit jar from which he had been drinking on the log that had been his chair “—I’ll excuse myself with your permission. I have business in Virginia, and I want to be on the road by daylight. I leave you to your high ideals and the reconstruction of our glorious state.”
Billy was baffled by this sourness. His old friend stood out in memory as lighthearted, quick to laugh. This shabby, bearded skeleton wasn’t Bison Main, but someone much older, of much darker temperament.
“Someone must champion the South,” Cooper declared. “We must defend her with every peaceful means, or there’ll be nothing left for generations but burned earth and despair.”
Charles stared at him. “That isn’t what you used to say, Cousin.”
“Nevertheless, he’s right,” Hampton said, some of the old authority in his voice. “The state will need many good men. Including you, Charles.”
With a bow toward the visitor, Charles smiled. “No, thank you, General. I did my job. Killed God knows how many fellow human beings—fellow Americans—on behalf of the high-minded principles of the high-minded Mr. Davis and his high-minded colleagues. Don’t ask me to do anything else for the South or its misbegotten cause.”
Hampton leaped to his feet, his stocky frame silhouetted against fading light in the west. “It is your land, too, sir. Your cause—”
“Correction, sir. It was. I obeyed orders until the surrender. But not a moment longer. Good evening, gentlemen.”
Charles left before dawn, while Billy and Brett were still asleep with their arms around each other, squeezed onto the rickety cot provided for them. Billy had gone to bed saddened because his best friend had said so little to him. Charles had withheld something of great personal importance and had walked away every time Billy tried to mention his heroic behavior during the Libby escape. He had ridden off without a word of farewell, as Billy discovered soon after he awoke.
Smelling imitation coffee brewing, he gently touched Brett’s middle—it was now certain that she was pregnant—kissed her warm throat, and slipped off the creaky cot. He lifted the cloth partition and found Andy at the stove. Andy confirmed that Charles had gone.
“Strange fella,” he said. “Was he always so moody and glum?”
“No. Something happened to him in Virginia. Something other than the war. He was courting a woman. A widow. He cared for her very much—”
“Never heard a thing about any woman.”
“He didn’t tell me, either. Madeline did.”
“Maybe that’s it,” Andy said, nodding. “If he thinks he lost her, that could account for it. A woman can tear up a man almost as much as goin’ to war, I guess.”
He smiled, but Billy didn’t.
The passing days showed Brett how radically conditions and relationships had changed in four short years. Cooper toiled in the rice fields like one of their father’s people. Madeline, who had been the chatelaine for a time, tied up her skirts, wrapped her black hair in a bandanna, and sweated right alongside him. Despite Billy’s protests, Brett did, too. She insisted it would be a few months yet before she was unable to do her share.
Despite the joy of the new life growing within her, Mont Royal disappointed Brett because there were no blacks who wanted or needed her help. The kind of teaching Jane had done for a while, for example.
“There’s an entire state in need of help,” Cooper said when she expressed her feeling. “You’ve seen all the people camped in the fields and along the roads—”
But she wasn’t persuaded. Everything was different and, except for her life with Billy, unhappily so.
George felt much the same way on the thirteenth of May. It was Saturday, the end of a week that saw Davis and his small party captured at a woodland bivouac near Irwinville, Georgia. George was shocked at the widespread ruin in Charleston, to which a coastal steamer from Philadelphia had brought him, with Constance. He was grieved by the sight of so many burned homes and buildings, and even more saddened by the great numbers of Negroes everywhere. Rather than happy, they seemed uneasy and occasionally sullen in their new state of freedom.
“It’s entirely fitting and right that they have it,” he said to Constance as they boarded the ancient sloop Osprey, which would take them up the Ashley. George wore a dark broadcloth suit; though not yet mustered out, he refused to wear his uniform. Nor did he need it to generate plenty of hostile stares and rude treatment.
“But there are practical problems,” he went on. “How is freedom going to feed them? Clothe them? Educate them?” Even if practical answers could be found, would Northerners allow them to be implemented now that the military victory was won? Some would, of course; his sister, Virgilia, for example. But he believed such people were in a minority. The majority’s turn of mind was illustrated by the telegraphic flimsy still folded in his pocket.
The message from Wotherspoon had been delivered to the pier in Philadelphia an hour before the coastal steamer weighed anchor: SIX MEN QUITTING TO PROTEST HIRING TWO COLORED.
He had immediately wired back: LET THE SIX GO. HAZARD. But that didn’t alter the larger picture, and he knew it. His attitude was an atypical drop in the Yankee ocean.
Answering his questions of a moment ago, Constance said, “That’s the purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau, isn’t it? General Howard is supposed to be a decent, capable man—”
“But look who wormed into the bureau as one of his assistants. Do you really believe Stanley did it for humanitarian reasons? There’s some secret agenda—political, probably. We’re in for a bad time for a few years, I’m afraid. It may last even longer if the wounds don’t
heal. Aren’t permitted to heal—”
But the Ashley was smooth, and their short journey upriver on Osprey uneventful—until they had their first glimpse of the plantation. George exclaimed softly. Constance clutched the rail.
“My God,” he said. “Even the pier’s gone.”
“That’s right, sir,” the master of the sloop called from the wheel. There was a slyly exaggerated politeness to the last word, saying the captain didn’t really believe his passenger deserved the appellation. The overused, overblown sir was a common Southernism, George was discovering.
“You’ll have to cross a plank to shore,” the man added. His eyes indicated that he might be pleased if husband and wife fell in the muddy water.
They had sent no advance word of their visit. They piled their valises on the grassy bank, including one old satchel that George had not let out of his sight since leaving Lehigh Station. As the whistle blew and the sloop chugged away, an unfamiliar black man appeared from behind the ruins of the great house. While Constance waited, George walked up the lawn. The Negro hurried down to meet him, introducing himself as Andy.
“George Hazard.” They shook hands. Andy recognized the name and dashed off to carry the news to Cooper and the others, who were apparently at work in the rice fields.
George’s shock deepened as he again studied the ruins, seeing in imagination the glittering ball the Mains once gave in honor of the visiting Hazards. The hanging lanterns, the swelling music, the laughing gentlemen and soft-shouldered women.
And here came Cooper, bare-chested and sweaty, a look of exhaustion on his face. He was followed by Billy, Brett, and Madeline, all grubby as farmers and giving off strong odors in the afternoon heat.
George silently reproved himself for the negative reaction. The Mains had always been farmers, though of a very elegant and special kind. Now it appeared that they had—to twist it a little—no hands but their own. Billy’s were wet from the ooze of broken blisters, George noticed.
He wasn’t surprised to find his brother here. Constance had reported Billy’s departure with Brett and Madeline when George came home on furlough late in April. Once George had decided on this trip, he had shamelessly telegraphed Stanley and asked him to secure an extension of his leave.
Cooper and Judith, however, were astonished by the arrival of the visitors. They pretended elation, but their tiredness showed. So did an unmistakable reserve, a tension. George could scarcely believe he had ever heard the music at that lovely ball. The sight of the impoverished Mains left him full of despair. He hoped he had a partial remedy, brought up with the luggage and placed near his feet on the brilliant spring lawn.
Madeline and Judith led the visitors to the substitute porch—logs, boxes, and barrels arranged in front of the new pine house—then went inside to prepare some refreshments.
There was a half hour of halting exchanges of information about the two families. George expressed his sympathy to Madeline, then asked Cooper, “Where is Orry’s grave? I’d like to pay my respects.”
“I’ll show you the marker we erected. The grave itself is empty.”
“They didn’t send the body home?”
“Oh, yes, they put it on a train, finally. Somewhere in North Carolina there was an accident on our splendid transportation system. The train derailed. A terrible smash-up. Forty pine coffins burned. George Pickett wrote to say there was nothing left.”
George hurt as he seldom had in all his life. He heard April’s fire bells dinning in his mind. He struggled to get the words out. “I’d still—like to see the marker and spend some time there alone.”
“When would you like to do it?” Cooper asked.
“Now, if you don’t mind. But first I must get something from my luggage.”
Cooper described the route to the graveyard. Finding the marker, George drew from his pocket the letter he had kept in the satchel in his desk for four years. The letter to Orry. He knelt and dug a shallow hole in the sandy soil six inches in front of the marker. He folded the letter once and placed it in the hole, which he refilled, smoothing the sand afterward. Then, though never a deeply religious man, he clasped his hands and bowed his head. He stayed thirty minutes, making his farewell.
The afternoon was a trial. The Mains seemed a company of strangers. Or was that merely their plight distorting his own vision?
No, he decided, much had changed as a result of the destruction. It was most noticeable in Cooper, who had a certain forbidding politeness new to George. Orry’s brother said he was glad to have an excuse to leave the fields for half a day, but his exhausted, anxious eyes belied that. Much had changed; did that mean everything had changed?
Supper lifted his spirits a bit. Although the meal was scanty—chiefly rice—the conversation was slightly livelier, less strained, than before. The exception was Cooper. He said little. George’s anxiety deepened. Staring at Cooper was like trying to read a page of some Oriental language. Nothing could be deciphered.
When all of them had finished, they once again took places on the improvised furniture while the evening cooled and darkened around them. Madeline asked George about conditions in Charleston.
“Terrible,” he replied. “I felt guilty because I couldn’t hand a few dollars to each of the people on the streets.”
“Black people,” Jane said, not as a question.
“Whites, too. They all looked destitute—and hungry. On the docks, we saw dozens trying to catch fish with string. We saw scores tenting under blankets in vacant lots. What happened down here is dreadful.”
“So was slavery, Mr. Hazard.”
“Jane,” Andy said, but her eyes defied him. George was dismayed to see brief anger on Cooper’s face. Judith observed it, too, her mouth drawing into a tight line.
George’s anxiety deepened. He had better say the rest, or he might never get it said.
“Of course you’re right, Jane. I believe no person of conscience would assert any other view. But this is also true: there’s been terrible damage to everyone. I don’t mean loss of property. I mean damage to feelings. What’s left, in the North as well as the South, is anger. Confusion. Bereavement—”
He and Madeline exchanged looks. Then he rose and walked a few steps down the lawn, locking hands at the small of his back as he struggled to focus his thoughts into the right words.
“The day Lincoln was shot, according to my brother Stanley, he told his cabinet about a dream he had the night before. He was in a boat rowing toward what he termed a dark, indefinite shore.”
He turned, facing the semicircle of listeners, white and black, in front of the pine house not yet whitewashed. In the distance, the wisteria on the great chimney splashed the dusk with color.
“A dark, indefinite shore,” he repeated. “It strikes me as an apt metaphor to describe our situation. Ours personally, and that of the country, too. It is one country again. Slavery’s gone, and I say thank God. It was evil, and it was also brandished as a club over Northern heads for a long time.”
“And when the club was finally put to use, it hurt us as much as you,” Brett said.
George noticed another sharp look from Cooper. Had he indeed become someone else? Had the loss of his boy on the voyage from Liverpool destroyed the passionate convictions—the humanity—of his earlier days? George hoped this prickly new defensiveness, a trait he had seen in other Southerners but never before in Orry’s brother, was a temporary aberration.
Self-conscious, George cleared his throat. “Anyway, we were friends, my family and yours, long before this terrible time.” Brett leaned against Billy, who was standing behind her left shoulder. “More than friends, in some cases,” he amended with a gentle smile.
Encouraged by a loving look from Constance, he went on, with a steadily strengthening voice. “We must remain so. Steadfastly. Four years ago, I believed we all faced a time of severe testing. Orry and I pledged to keep the bonds of friendship and affection between ourselves and our families intact despite a war�
�”
Then the fire came, and I feared we couldn’t.
“We did—” he turned more directly to Cooper “—at least in my estimation.”
Orry’s brother stayed silent. With effort, George resumed. “Now I fear something else. The shore ahead is new but darker and more indefinite than ever, I think we’re destined to pass through a second period of animosity and struggle which may, in its own way, be worse than war. How can we avoid it, with so much grief and loss on both sides? With a whole people newly freed but still justifiably enraged by the past? With venal men—I can name some, but I won’t—waiting to take advantage of any misstep or show of weakness? We must be ready to weather all that. We must once again—”
A simple lift of his right hand; a glance slowly moving from face to face. Then, quietly: “Keep the bonds strong.”
No one moved. No one spoke. God above, he had failed. He had failed personally, but, far worse, he had failed Orry. If only he knew how to speak properly, the way skilled politicians—
It was Brett who reacted first, reaching up and across to find and clasp Billy’s hand. It was Madeline, her eyes tear-filled, who gave a single strong nod of agreement. But it was Cooper who gravely spoke for them all.
“Yes.”
Almost dizzy from the sudden relief of his tension, George saw the Mains smiling, rising, starting forward. Hastily he held up both hands. “Just humor me a moment longer. One of the chief reasons I wanted to visit Mont Royal was to bring you a small token of my belief in what we have all reaffirmed.”
He walked back to his log stool and the small satchel on the ground beside it. He slid the polished toe of his right boot forward, nudging the satchel.
“Does anyone recognize this?”
With a faint, puzzled smile, Cooper scratched his chin. “Wasn’t it my brother’s?”
“Exactly. In this bag Orry brought money to repay the loan I made to help finance the Star of Carolina. Orry traveled all the way to Lehigh Station at a very perilous time in the spring of ’61, carrying over six hundred thousand dollars in cash—all he could raise of the sum I invested in your project. I never forgot that or—” again he cleared his throat “—or how much Orry himself meant to me. I came here to repay a debt of honor and friendship, just as he did. To put some of my resources into your hands, to help you rebuild.”