North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Out of the bright north, three men approached on foot. All three wore filthy remnants of butternut uniforms. One, a towhead of eighteen or nineteen, hobbled on a handmade crutch. His right leg ended in a stump three inches above the road.

  He was the one who greeted Charles with a wave and a smile. “Howdy. You’re one of our boys, aren’t you?”

  Charles took the cigar out of his mouth. “I’m not one of anybody’s boys anymore.”

  Giving him surly stares, the soldiers muttered among themselves, swung to the other side of the road, and continued on south. To homes that probably don’t exist any longer, Charles thought.

  Down the road, he heard noises suggesting a vehicle. He turned on his left elbow, squinted, saw the soldiers pass a group coming the other way. The soldiers went by without speaking. The group consisted of four people: a man, a woman, and two small girls, Black.

  When they came closer, he saw their clothes were clean but threadbare. The cart, which carried the girls and some possessions bundled in croker sacks, had solid wheels but otherwise looked flimsy, obviously built by someone not trained as a wheelwright.

  Nor did the family own an animal. The father pulled the cart. The mother walked barefoot beside him.

  Yet neither parent seemed unhappy. They smiled and sang right along with their children. The mother and two girls clapped the beat. Charles stared at them as they started to go by. The sight of him reclining in the grass made them tense. The singing softened. He could hear no words except one: “Jubilo.”

  A grimace twisted his mouth. The father took note of that and of Charles’s gray shirt. He took a firmer grip on the handles of the cart, pulling it as quickly as he could through the crossroads and away down the northern road. The children looked back at Charles, but not the adults.

  Too tired and despondent to move, he tethered the mule to a tree branch. He wriggled back against the trunk, intending to doze a few minutes. There was no hurry about anything. She was gone for good.

  He woke with a start. The slant of the light told him it was late afternoon. Something hanging above him tickled his face.

  Half the tether, still tied to a branch. It had been chewed apart. The mule was gone, saddle gear and all. Luckily he still had his army Colt in the holster.

  From the crossroads, he walked about half a mile in each of four directions. The road to the west faded away around a bend; the western landscape blended into the backdrop of the Blue Ridge. He stared at the mountains a moment, recalling his fondness for Texas.

  He trudged back to the crossroads. No sign of the mule anywhere. Damn.

  The sun slanted lower, casting spears of light between thick trees at the southwest corner of the crossroads. Charles started suddenly. Out toward the Shenandoah, past the woodlands, he heard a wailing rebel yell—

  He shook his head. It was only the whistle of a train speeding through the countryside. A Yankee-operated train, more than likely. They had so many of them. And so many guns. And so many men who had come out of mills and stockyards and barns and offices and saloons to make war as nobody had ever made war before.

  He walked into the center of the empty crossroads and surveyed it, and then the dead, empty land. For one strange moment, he felt as if all of the might of the Union had been directed against him personally.

  It had beaten him, too.

  He stood at the crossroads in the lowering dusk, tired desperation in his eyes. He just wanted to lie down. Stop. For good.

  But pictures kept intruding. The Bible salesman he had met in Goldsboro who said they wanted cavalrymen on the plains. He had the right experience. It would be a way to survive. Start over. Maybe find a scrap of hope someday.

  Hope in a world like this? Stupid idea. He’d do better to lie down in the roadside grass and never get up.

  But more pictures came. Men with whom he had served. Ab Woolner. Calbraith Butler. Wade Hampton. Lee—imagine how he must have felt, once the superintendent of West Point and the country’s finest soldier, forced to ask a fellow Academy graduate for terms. They said Old Marse Bob had conducted himself with dignity, rebuffing a few hotheads who wanted to continue guerrilla war from the hills and woodlands.

  Although the men Charles remembered had, in his opinion, fought for the wrong reasons, they weren’t quitters. Gus wasn’t a quitter either. He dwelled on her memory awhile. It summoned a detail he had forgotten. A name.

  Brigadier Duncan.

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. Gus had unmistakably signaled that their love affair was over, but he could at least satisfy himself as to her whereabouts and her well-being. Duncan might be able to help, if Charles could locate him.

  Only one place to start. Not the safest place, either. But he didn’t worry too much, because suddenly recalling Duncan infused him with the kind of energy he hadn’t felt in a long time. His head started to clear, and his chin came up. Still a lot of daylight left. He had time to walk awhile. He picked up the gypsy robe and left the crossroads, northbound.

  In half an hour he caught up with the black family, resting at the roadside. The moment the adults recognized him, they looked alarmed. Stopping in the center of the road, Charles took off his hat and tried to smile. It came hard. It had nothing to do with who or what they were. It just came hard.

  “Evening.”

  “Evening,” the father said.

  Less suspicious than her husband, the woman said, “Are you going north?”

  “Washington.”

  “That’s where we’re going. Would you like to sit down and rest?”

  “Yes, I would, thank you.” He did. One of the girls giggled and smiled at him. “I lost my mule. I’m pretty tired.”

  At last the father smiled. “I was born tired, but lately I’ve been feeling better.”

  Charles wished he could say the same. “If you’re willing, I’ll be glad to help you pull that cart.”

  “You’re a soldier.” He didn’t mean a Union soldier.

  “Was,” Charles said. “Was.”

  143

  BRIGADIER JACK DUNCAN, A stocky officer with crinkly gray hair, a drink-mottled nose, and a jaw like a short horizontal line, strode into the War Department, shoulders back, left hand resting on the hilt of his gleaming dress sword. When he emerged half an hour later, he was beaming.

  He had enjoyed a brief but highly satisfactory chat with Mr. Stanton, who commended him for his performance of Washington staff work throughout the war and for his patience when repeated requests for field duty were denied because General Halleck wanted his administrative skills. Now, with the war concluded, his wish could be honored. Duncan had new orders and travel vouchers in his pocket.

  He was being posted to the plains cavalry, where experienced men were needed to confront and overcome the Indian threat. He was to depart immediately, and would not even see the grand parade of Grant’s army, scheduled for a few days hence. Special reviewing platforms and miles of patriotic bunting were already in place for the event.

  Musing on how it would feel to ride regularly again—for the past couple of years, he had managed only an occasional Sunday canter along Rock Creek on some livery-stable plug—the brigadier prepared to cross crowded, noisy Pennsylvania Avenue. He noticed a slender, tough-looking fellow with a long beard, cadet gray shirt, and holstered army Colt. Obviously nervous, the man chewed a cigar and studied the building Duncan had just left.

  The stride—better, the swagger—suggested the man might be a cavalryman. A reb, to judge from his shirt and threadbare appearance. Union boys were keeping themselves trim and neat in preparation for the grand review.

  There seemed to be hundreds of ex-Confederates swarming around town, though if that wild-looking specimen had indeed fought on the other side, he was risking a lot carrying a side arm. Stepping off the walk, Duncan nimbly dodged a dray, then an omnibus, and forgot about the man. There was really just one reb with whom he was concerned: a brevetted major named Main.

  Would he ever hear
from the fellow? He was beginning to doubt it. He had written three letters, paid exorbitantly to have each smuggled to Richmond, and received no answer to any of them. It seemed likely that Main was dead.

  In a guilty way, the brigadier was grateful for the silence. Of course Main deserved to have his son with him. But Duncan was enjoying the responsibility of caring for young Charles. He had his housekeeper and more recently had hired a fine Irish girl to wet-nurse the infant and take care of certain other odious duties.

  She was expert at her job. The housekeeper must be given notice and a month’s wages—no, two, he decided—but Duncan had obtained the Irish girl’s promise that she would accompany him to any new post where duty took him. She might well refuse to go out among the Indians, however.

  If she did, he would find someone else. He was determined to take the child with him. Being a great-uncle and de facto parent had added an unexpectedly rich dimension to Duncan’s lifelong bachelorhood. The one girl he had adored as a young man had died of consumption before they could be married, and none other had ever been fine or sweet enough to replace her. Now the void where love belonged was filled again.

  He soon reached the small rented house a few blocks from the avenue. Jaunty as a boy, he took the steps two at a time and roared through the door into the dim lower hall.

  “Maureen? Where’s my grandnephew? Bring him here. I have splendid news. We’re leaving town tonight.”

  Few things in life had ever intimidated Charles. For a day or two, the newness of West Point had. Sharpsburg had. Washington did now. So many damn Yankees. Whether soldier or civilian, most were hostile as reptiles when he asked a polite question in his distinctly Southern voice. The bunting everywhere depressed him further by reminding him of defeat. He felt like some scruffy animal just out of the woods and surrounded by hunters.

  With an air of confidence he didn’t feel, he walked through President’s Park and up the steps of the War Department. He had left his gypsy cloak at the squalid island rooming house and fastened the throat button of his faded cadet gray shirt for neatness, though the effect was lost because of his chest-length beard. Nothing could do much to improve his wolfish appearance, and he knew it.

  Nervously fiddling with a fresh cigar, he entered the ground-floor lobby and walked through the first open doors he saw. In a large room, he found a great many noncommissioned soldiers and civilian clerks shuffling piles of paper at desks on the other side of a counter. This was worse than setting yourself up for battle.

  But he had to go through with it. Any humiliation or scrap was worth it, if only he could find Duncan and satisfy himself about Gus.

  One of the clerks in blue, bald as the knob of a cane although he barely looked thirty, approached the counter after making Charles wait three minutes. The clerk stroked his huge oiled mustaches, first the right, then the left, as he scrutinized the lean visitor.

  The clerk took note of Charles’s patched shirt of cadet gray. He eyed the army Colt and the cigar held between wind-browned thumb and forefinger almost as if it were a second weapon. He found the visitor vaguely menacing and barely worth the time of an offhand “Yes?”

  “I’m trying to locate an army officer. Is this the right place for—”

  “Haven’t you got the wrong city?” the clerk broke in. He had reacted visibly before Charles finished his first sentence. “The United States War Department maintains no files on rebels. And in case no one’s told you, if you were paroled, you’re carrying that gun illegally.” He turned away.

  “Excuse me,” Charles said. “The officer belongs to your army.” As the words came out, he knew it was a bad slip, caused by nerves. He had confirmed his former loyalty. Tense, he continued, “His name is—”

  “I am afraid we can’t help you. We aren’t in business to look up records for every paroled traitor who walks in the door.”

  “Private,” Charles said, seething, “I am asking you as politely as I know how. I need help. It’s urgent that I find this man. If you’ll just tell me which office—”

  “No one in this building can help you,” the clerk retorted loudly. The raised heads, suspended pens, sharp stares said he spoke for all those in the room. “Why don’t you go ask Jeff Davis? They locked him up in Fort Monroe this morning.”

  “I’m not interested in the whereabouts of Jeff—” Again the clerk turned away.

  Charles dropped his cigar, shot his hand across the counter and grabbed the clerk’s collar. “Listen to me, damn you.”

  Consternation. Men running. Shouts—Charles’s the loudest. “You can at least do me the courtesy of—”

  Voices:

  “He has a gun.”

  “Take it away from him.”

  “Watch out, he might—”

  In the confusion, hands seized him from behind. Two other noncoms, one formidably large, had dashed around the end of the counter. “You’d better get out of here, boy,” the big man said while the clerk puffed out his cheeks in a series of gasps, to demonstrate his outrage. He fingered his collar as if it had been permanently soiled. “Start trouble and you’ll have your lunch in Old Capitol Prison. Maybe your Christmas dinner, too.”

  Charles wrenched free of their hands, glaring. They weren’t hostile—at least the big one wasn’t—but they were determined. His impulse was to start throwing punches. Behind him, in the lobby, spectators had gathered. He heard the questions and muttering as the big noncom gripped his arm.

  “Come on, reb. Be sensible. Hightail it before—”

  “What the devil is going on here?”

  The barked words sent the noncoms to attention. They released Charles, who turned to see a stern, middle-aged officer with white hair and three fingers of his right hand missing. One shoulder of his dark blue coat-cloak was thrown back far enough to show an epaulet with an eagle of silver embroidery.

  “Colonel,” the clerk began, “this reb marched in here and made insulting demands. He wouldn’t accept a polite refusal. Instead, he tried—”

  The words went whirling away through Charles’s mind, unheard as he stared at the Union officer and saw a farm in northern Virginia, in another year, in another lifetime.

  “What is it exactly that he demanded?” the officer said with an angry glance at Charles, then a second, swift and astonished, one. My God, Charles thought, he isn’t an old man at all. He only looks it.

  His voice unexpectedly hoarse, he said, “Prevo?”

  “That’s right. I remember you. Hampton’s cavalry. West Point before that.”

  Someone in the office mumbled, “Oh, we’re to have an Academy reunion, are we?”

  Prevo’s glance silenced the speaker. Then, more temperately, he said to Charles, “What’s the trouble here?”

  “I came to ask for help. I desperately need to locate a Brigadier Duncan in the Union Army.”

  “Nothing so hard about that,” Prevo said, his eye and his testiness directed toward the flushed clerk. “However, you shouldn’t walk around with that revolver. Especially in this building. Take it off and give it to me, and we’ll see what we can do.”

  Calming, Charles unfastened his gun belt. Prevo buckled it and hung it over his shoulder. To the bald clerk he said, “I want your name, soldier. Why didn’t you do the decent thing and direct this man to the personnel clerks in the adjutant general’s office?” To Charles: “They would have the brigadier’s current address. I don’t know him.”

  “Sir,” the clerk stammered, “I explained—This man’s a reb. Look at him. Arrogant, dirty—”

  “Shut your mouth,” Prevo said. “The war’s over. It’s time to quit fighting. Generals Grant and Lee seem to have assimilated that fact, even if you can’t.”

  The humiliated clerk stared at the floor. To the big noncom, Colonel Prevo said, “I want his name on my desk in an hour.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come on, Main. I remember your name now, too. I’ll show you to the right office.” As they started out, he paused and poin
ted to the counter. “I think you dropped your cigar.”

  The lobby crowd dispersed, though Charles continued to draw stares as he and Prevo walked up to the next floor. “Thank you, Prevo,” Charles said. “I recognized you right away. Georgetown Mounted Dragoons—”

  “And several other units since. Every one was decimated in Virginia, so they finally retired me to duty here. I’ll be out in a couple of months. Here we go—turn right. We’ll soon know the whereabouts of this General Duncan.”

  “I’m immensely grateful, Prevo. I really do need to see him about a serious matter.”

  “Professional?”

  “Personal.”

  Prevo paused at a closed door. “Well, here’s the office. Let’s see what we can do.” All of the wrinkles in his exhausted face moved when he tried to smile. “Even though I only lasted my plebe year, I have fond memories of the Academy. And the Academy does take care of its own. By the way—are you in a rush?”

  “No. Finding Duncan is important, but there’s no hurry.”

  “Excellent. I’ll buy you a drink afterward. And,” he added, lowering his voice, “return your gun.” He opened the door as effortlessly as if he had all his fingers instead of one and a thumb.

  144

  MAUREEN, THE PLUMP, POTATO-plain young woman, brought the baby from the kitchen in response to Duncan’s shout. The infant had been resting on a blanket in a patch of sunshine while Maureen opened pea pods for the evening meal. He had dark hair and a merry round face and wore a tiny shirt, trousers, and snug slippers, all of navy blue flannel. Maureen had sewn the garments herself.

  “You say tonight, sir? Where are we going?”

  The infant recognized his great-uncle and cooed when the brigadier swung him expertly into the curve of his left arm. “To the frontier—to see red Indians.” Anxiously: “Will you still come along?”

  “Indeed I will, General. I have read about the West. There is great opportunity there—and not nearly so much crowding as here in the East.”