A Good Man

by Guy Vanderhaeghe

  Under Pudge’s orchestration, ever so gradually we insinuated ourselves into the Southern gentlemen’s favour. The toast had given Pudge his toehold, and whenever we trooped into the saloon, he would give them a friendly nod or wave of the hand, pass some amiable remark on the weather. At last one night all his efforts were rewarded: they invited us to join their table for a drink. Pudge replied that that was most hospitable of them but we could agree only if they would accept a bumper of champagne from us. And they deigned to do so. And I paid for it because that was the duty of the son of the Lumber Baron, to scatter his father’s coin.

  The Lilies were the only patrons of the Queen’s ever invited to sit with the Dixie boys and we were all flattered by the great privilege extended to us. We hung on their table talk. The war or politics were seldom mentioned; most of the time the secession men debated the finer points of dogs, horses, and women. Once, an entire evening was devoted to the Southerners’ anecdotes about famous duels and the gallant men who had fought them: Andrew Jackson versus Charles Dickinson, Secretary of State Henry Clay versus Senator John Randolph, Congressman William Graves versus Congressman Jonathan Cilley. Hard on the heels of that, Pudge obtained a copy of the Irish Code Duello, the catechism of duelling, which he read obsessively. Pudge liked to imagine himself spilling blood and garnering applause for the stylish, punctilious way he did it. He frequently interrogated the Southerners on the finer points of the code of conduct in an affair of honour. But in dull, unchivalrous Toronto, duelling was illegal, and blowing another man’s brains out or running him through with a sabre would earn you a trip to the scaffold. Which was why Pudge could indulge in bloody fantasies with no fear of being called upon to act them out. Luckily for him. His ample girth would have made him a target hard to miss.

  Most evenings we spent with the Southerners the conversation ran light and free. I still find it hard to reconcile my memory of these charming, cultivated fellows with what I learned they had done. The long-jawed, hooded-eyed Virginian, John Yates Beall, was the epitome of the refined and cultivated gentleman. He tried to take the Union warship Michigan on Lake Erie, free Confederate prisoners held on Johnson’s Island, and burn Detroit to the ground. Later, he turned to derailing trains around Buffalo and got hanged for his sabotage.

  The avuncular Dr. Luke Pryor Blackburn carried himself with the quiet distinction of a man who had received a commendation from the Queen for his selfless, charitable work during the yellow fever epidemic in Bermuda. What would the Widow of Windsor have thought of the good doctor if she had known he had brought the bedding and clothing of the Bermudan fever victims to Canada and was dispatching it all over New England, hoping to spread an outbreak of yellow jack among the Yankees? Or that he had sent a fine suit contaminated with the bodily secretions of a fever victim to President Lincoln as a gift?

  And then there was the happy-go-lucky Robert Martin and the inveterate punster John William Headley, who went down to New York and set fifteen hotels and Barnum’s American Museum ablaze with Greek fire.

  Their hatred gave them all a serene conscience, a conscience that I saw troubled only once, and that was out of regard for a lady’s feelings, the beautiful widow of one of their former comrades. Madame Francine Boisclair Stewart had made her way from New Orleans to Toronto to nurse her husband, an escapee from a Union prison camp who had contracted a mysterious wasting illness there. Despite all her efforts, she was unable to save his life. Even after his death she remained in residence at the Queen’s, where we often saw her seated in the lobby drinking tea, watching people come and go, earnestly searching the newspapers for the latest reports from the front. One afternoon, Giles Postlethwaite, who was clearly the most influential and respected of the secession men and their informal leader, introduced the Lilies to this flower of Southern womanhood. From that day forward, all the Lilies paused to offer her our compliments whenever we crossed the lobby. On one of these occasions Pudge brashly asked her why she did not return to her home in New Orleans – what was keeping her in dreary Toronto? Although her English was impeccable, she chose to answer in French. With a faint, sad smile, she whispered, “Parce que je suis tombée amoureuse de Monsieur Stewart.” Her reply was not really an answer but it was so mysteriously romantic that from that instant on we all fell a little in love with her. No one tumbled harder than I. Could any naive young man of twenty-one have resisted her? A woman so devoted to her husband’s memory, so loyal to her love, that she could not bear to leave the seedy hotel where he had drawn his last breath?

  But as I was to learn, Madame Boisclair Stewart’s devotion to Mr. Stewart and her ardent support of the Cause came to be a source of consternation and embarrassment to her husband’s friends. In those newspapers she so earnestly searched for war news, she came across troubling accounts of the atrocities committed by Southern forces at Fort Pillow. Naturally she turned to Mr. Giles Postlethwaite to ask whether these reports could possibly be true or were they simply foul Yankee lies? He was only too happy to asse her they were most certainly fabrications, but the more she read about what had transpired at Fort Pillow, the more Madame Boisclair Stewart brooded. Repeatedly, she badgered Mr. Postlethwaite with the same questions. Could General Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops have possibly executed both white and coloured troops under a flag of surrender? Could it be true what the Northern papers said, that the nigras had been nailed to logs, the logs soaked in kerosene and put to the match, the poor devils roasted alive?

  In the presence of the Lilies, Mr. Postlethwaite seldom spoke of the war, but Madame Boisclair Stewart’s constant pestering threw him into so great a state of agitation that he could not hold his tongue. “I told her a lady should not contemplate such things. In her present delicate, grieving state she will undermine her health if she doesn’t let it go. But she won’t let it go. Is it true? Is it true? When I maintain it is nothing but damn Yankee mendacity, she wants to know how I can be certain it is a falsehood. Can I prove it?” He looked around the table at us as if he half expected someone to pull a proof out of his hat that he could take to the sorrowing widow. When no one said a word, he tilted his chair back and stared up at the ceiling. “She said that if these things happened, her husband’s suffering and death for the South has no meaning. I’d like to be able to set that little lady straight on that point but it can’t be done given her rocky state of mind. I’d like to say to her that whatever happened at Fort Pillow, Tom Stewart would have approved of it and taken a hand in it if he were there. He would have had no doubts that if Nathan Bedford Forrest gave those orders, they were right and fitting. The General has been selling slaves and running nigger yards all his life, and there isn’t a man living who knows more about nigger nature and how to deal with it than he does. Maybe the General reckoned a lesson needed to be taught to runaway slaves that throw in with the North. That a lesson needed to be learned. And the way to do it was to burn some black bastards and shoot down a few nigger-loving Yankees waving a white flag.” He shrugged. “But you can’t explain that to a widow suffering from the hypo, a woman so cast down and melancholy she can’t produce a sensible thought in her head.”

  Postlethwaite fell moodily silent, and Pudge, sensing an evening of gloom threatening, suddenly pointed out a man at a table near one of the windows. “Madame Boisclair Stewart does not know the meaning of the word melancholy,” he said. “I give you the very picture of despondency, gentlemen. There he sits, broken and bereft. It’s a sight to melt your heart.”

  All heads turned towards a fellow who had been haunting the bar for weeks. A beard began at his Adam’s apple and crawled up his cheeks to his eyes, which were an oddly pale shade of blue; he wore a pea jacket, and a seaman’s cap tugged so low its visor shadowed most of his face. He was staring blankly into a tankard of ale that he turned slowly round and round in his fingers. If the rest of us had hardly taken note of him, Pudge certainly had. He believed sailors and dockworkers had no business frequenting the saloon bar distinguished by the presence of
cavaliers such as Postlethwaite and company, and that the man needed to be taught his place.

  “My friends,” said Pudge, turning his voice sombre and resonant, speaking loudly enough to make sure the sailor by the window could hear, “look upon misery incarnate, known to seafarers everywhere by the sad appellation the Lugubrious Helmsman01D; The Helmsman’s eyes slowly lifted to Pudge, then just as slowly fell back down to his drink. “I have heard,” said Pudge, “that years ago, after long and anxious expectation, the Lugubrious Helmsman finally achieved his heart’s desire, the captainship of a coal boat fresh from the shipyards, the noble Clinker. This long-awaited promotion finally provided him with the means to marry his robust, strapping sweetheart and even to buy her her first pair of shoes, which she so proudly sported the day of their wedding, as enamoured of her footwear as she was of her groom. Now,” Pudge continued, “although you wouldn’t think it to look at him in his present state, in those happy days the Helmsman was a man of a poetical, metaphorical turn of mind. He thought it only fit to board The Clinker and his virgin wife at one and the same time. He was determined to have her maidenhead on the maiden voyage of his vessel. It was his plan for the fond couple to pass their first night of connubial bliss upon the Helmsman’s beloved coal packet.

  “So they set sail, but before the Lugubrious Helmsman could clamber into his hammock to slap bellies with Mrs. Helmsman, a great storm, a most terrifying blow, put The Clinker in peril. The Lugubrious Helmsman was a scientific seaman, well versed in the navigational arts, familiar with trigonometry, algebra, and even arithmetic. As his craft floundered about in heavy seas, he took a stub of pencil, made rapid calculations on the back of an envelope, and discovered The Clinker was carrying a cargo exactly two hundred and fifty-five pounds beyond her capacity. If that precise weight were not immediately jettisoned, the noble Clinker would go to the bottom.

  “He turned his eyes on his wife. By a tragic coincidence this was exactly the weight of his new bride. The Lugubrious Helmsman was a man of warm human sentiments, but he knew his duty to his owner – to deliver the cargo and protect his ship at all costs. Three sacks of coal overboard, or the love of his life? He was torn, gentlemen, you cannot imagine how he was torn. But in the end he did the right thing, tenderly placed his wife in a lifeboat, set her adrift, and called out a teary, heartfelt promise to return and collect her when the tempest abated.

  “But despite his wife’s putting her mighty back into it, pulling at the oars for all she was worth, sometime in the night her lifeboat went down. When dawn arrived all the Lugubrious Helmsman found of her was one very large wedding shoe bobbing on the waves – which from a distance he had mistaken for her lifeboat.

  “And there,” cried Pudge, with an exaggerated quaver in his voice, “he sits! Tortured by remorse, a shadow of his former nautical self, gazing into the fathomless depths of his nut-brown ale where his bride’s face can be seen as in a glass darkly, crying out her plaintive recriminations, overwhelming him with waves of regret mightier than those mighty breakers against which she strove that night and which consigned her to Davy Jones’s locker!”

  Pudge could be so very tiresome.

  I got up and walked out. They were all laughing; I do not believe anyone noted my departure except for Pudge, who always studied his audience to gauge its appreciation of his extempore performances. That was the moment I should have expressed my disgust by making a show of going to the Helmsman and apologizing for my friend, but I did not. Madame Boisclair Stewart occupied my mind. It was h I sought. I found her in the lobby, turning newspaper pages with her slender white fingers. I went up to her, intending to tell her the truth, to say that those bodies spiked to charred logs that smoked in her mind were real. But at the last moment, I saw that uncertainty would be less cruel than the truth, that she needed some scrap of belief in her husband and what he had given his life for. I only said, “Mrs. Stewart, may I offer you tea and cakes?”

  “Why, Mr. Case, how lovely,” she said. “Do sit down.”

  That was, I suppose, the moment I resigned from the Lilies. There was no formal break between Pudge and the others and me. With Pudge in particular that would have been impossible. With both of us serving in the same militia company we could not help but cross paths. But from that day on, our relations were marked by a guarded politeness. Although I stopped frequenting the bar of the Queen’s, I did not quit visiting the hotel. Almost daily Madame Boisclair Stewart and I met in the lobby for small talk, tea, sugar buns and petits fours. I would have liked to have done the unspeakable, to fervently declare to her, “Mrs. Stewart, how very completely I agree with you that murder committed under a white flag, by Greek fire, or diseased bedclothing dishonours your gallant husband’s memory. That is not war, Mrs. Stewart.” And how wrong I would have been because that is exactly what war is, Greek fire, infected clothing; desperate, mindless ferocity. The facts, as Father would say, are bars to beat your wings against.

  It was about the time Madame Boisclair Stewart informed me that she was going to leave Toronto to live with a female cousin in Missouri that I last laid eyes on the Lugubrious Helmsman. Forlorn and heartsick at the prospect of her departure, I was pacing the lobby waiting for her to appear when I glimpsed the Helmsman buttonholing a little man with a Macassared kiss-curl pasted to his brow, a long scarf draped over his shoulder, and a violin case tucked under his arm. A picture of Bohemian poverty, shabby overcoat sprinkled with melting snow, trouser cuffs soggy with slush, shoes soaked, and miserably shivering.

  But then I realized he wasn’t shivering; he was trembling with fear. The Helmsman was menacingly pressed up against him, had driven the little violinist backwards until his shoulder blades bumped hard against the wall, and was berating him in an urgent, scolding whisper. Suddenly he took him by the collar, turned him towards the saloon, and gave him a fierce shove. The musician stumbled, hesitated, glanced back over his shoulder at the Helmsman, and scooted into the bar. For a moment, the man in cap and pea jacket stood watching the door; then he swung round on his heels, strode past me, and shot out of the hotel.

  Inquisitiveness led me to follow the man with the fiddle into the saloon. He had already posed himself near the counter, violin tucked under his chin, an embarrassed, self-conscious smile stuck to his face as he lightly ran his bow over the strings while he tuned his instrument. People seated close to him cast amused and puzzled looks. I lifted my eyes to the secessionists’ table at the very back of the room where a handful of regulars were in deep conversation. None of the Lilies was about.

  The violinist struck up a tune that brought the Southerners’ heads up with a sudden jerk. The room went still. The fiddler mistook these reactions as signs of musical appreciation. The tip of his pink tongue licked his lips; his head began to weave from side to side; his kiss-curl gled and radiated oily confidence. He began to sing in a high, nasal voice as piercing as the noise his violin was making, and my eyes slunk off him, fastening on those wet trouser cuffs that draped his thin ankles. “John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, / John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave, / But his soul goes marching on.”

  I could not look at him. Then there came a sharp bang and clatter that swung me round to search its source. Postlethwaite was on his feet behind the trestle table, one hand clenching the lapel of his jacket in an orator’s pose, head flung back, eyes startled and staring. Overturned on the floor behind him lay his chair. His colleagues were slowly rising, dressing a line against the plaster wall. A ripple of uneasiness ran the length of the room; people shifted in their chairs, craned their necks, darted glances from the Confederates to the fiddler, who sensed something was wrong but could not divine what it was. Feeling himself losing his audience, he sang louder, sawed his fiddle harder, and grinned a wobbly, ingratiating smile. Postlethwaite was leading his men out in protest. With their canes held slanted across their chests, with the utmost gravitas they were moving through the other patrons, murmuring apologies whenever someone
had to shift a chair to clear a path for them, dignifying their displeasure with the utmost courtesy. As they approached the door near which I was standing, I stepped aside to let them pass. At that very instant, I heard the violinist singing, “The stars above in Heaven now are looking kindly down.”

  Perhaps Postlethwaite remembered what he could not bring himself to say to Madame Boisclair Stewart – his speech about the necessity of teaching the enemy a lesson. He veered away from the door. The other three shifted their shoulders and followed him, making for the fiddler, whose voice went even shriller with every step they made towards him. I suppose sheer terror kept him doing what he was doing, just as the mouse will keep nibbling on a seed as the snake glides towards it.

  Only when the Confederates halted face to face with him did he finally stop, lift his bow from the strings, and timidly say, “Gentlemen?”

  “You damned dirty dog,” said Postlethwaite quietly, and slashed his cane down on the little fellow’s collarbone. Then the others went at the man; walking sticks rose and fell, chopping him to his knees with meaty thuds and sharp cracks. Between the legs of his attackers, I glimpsed the musician’s lips, moving in a soundless, plaintive protest. A ring of bowed backs hid him from my sight and the beating went on. A walking stick snapped; the gold knob flew off, skittered across the floor, sizzling in the gas lamplight. I shouted something to them. Something about they must stop or they would kill him. As I did there came a shrieking of whistles, and nightstick-brandishing constables swept into the room.