by John Jakes
Another vestryman stepped forward, Bible in hand; he read the timeless Christmas story from St. Luke. Sara’s eye kept straying to the wavy black hair of the organist. A rush of guilt prompted her to improvise a little prayer during the Scripture. Wherever Ladson might be, she implored him to understand and forgive the emotions of a woman too long alone.
The odors of tallow, feminine powders, male hair pomades, and close-packed bodies grew stronger as the minutes marched by. The service lasted less than an hour. When the postlude, “In Dulce Jubilo,” reverberated thrillingly, and worshippers readied themselves to go, Sara was among the first on her feet.
“I must speak to him. Wish him merry Christmas.”
“Must? Really?” Vee said with arched brows. By then Sara was struggling against the outflowing tide of Georgians refreshed and temporarily lifted from wartime despond by the Nativity’s message of peace on earth and goodwill to men regardless of whether they lived above or below Mason and Dixon’s line.
Nervous and fearful of stumbling, she reached the rear of the gallery. In front of the splendid pipe organ, Stephen Hopewell was gathering up his music. “Why, Mrs. Lester. What an unexpected pleasure.”
“I—you—that is—we were tremendously surprised to see you playing, Captain.”
“The regular organist fell ill. Someone got my name, and members of the vestry contacted me. I was happy to fill in. I love sacred music.”
“We—they—that is—you play beautifully.”
“Thank you indeed.” He gave her that broad smile that jellied her knees and intensified her tingling. “Not all of my amateur performances take place in Bowery deadfalls.”
“Did you miss the review?”
“Yes, I came here to rehearse. No loss—I had no companion to enjoy it with me, after all.” He gazed at her so warmly, she almost fainted. “Do you by chance need company for the walk home?”
Once again she wanted to cry Yes, yes! Then the old reaction repeated itself: a negative bob of her head, a flustered, “Kind of you, but my friend Miss Rohrschamp is with me.” She saw a reprise of earlier disappointment.
“Perhaps another time, before the army moves on.”
“I hope so, yes, I do hope so,” Sara exclaimed. “A merry Christmas to you, Captain.”
She fled downstairs. There she confronted the Drewgoods coming out by the center aisle. The judge, with Lulu in hand, fixed Sara with a malevolent stare. As he brushed by, he muttered words that had no place in a church.
Cherry followed her parents, squinty-eyed and dutifully hostile. Napoleon would have kicked Sara had she not showed her fist to forestall it. The boy’s attention switched to the gallery stairs, where old Adam had just come down with a number of others of his race. Napoleon yanked the tail of his father’s coat as the family marched out the main door into the December dark.
More than a little dazed, Sara started when Vee tapped her arm. “Are you feeling well?”
“Yes, perfectly,” Sara answered with a forced smile. Her vision was misted, blurry. Trying to clear it, she fixed on the sanctuary candles slowly dripping wax on their silver stands. Like them, she was burning. Burning and melting from the memory of the captain’s face.
Oh, dear. What was she to do?
The air, heavy with moisture, congealed into fog. It suited Jo Swett’s strategy of concealment followed by a surprise assault on Fortress Drewgood.
The day’s activity had wearied him, but inner excitement kept him from succumbing. Early that morning he’d set out for his old haunts on Tybee Island. After trudging a quarter mile on a sandy track overhung with dripping live oaks, he’d been lucky and hitched a ride in a parson’s shay. He found Ogie seated on the beach near his shack, mending a shrimp net. Ogie regarded him with a laconic eye.
“Shrimp season’s been bad, but I got to feed my family. I thought you was put away in Milledgeville penitentiary.”
“Looks like I’m not. Looks like I’m back.”
“Mighty dangerous, I’d think,” Ogie said.
Jo waved to Ogie’s twin boys romping barefoot in the surf, seemingly unaffected by the cold. Ever-hungry gulls cruised above the gray rollers that dissolved in white froth on shore. A brown pelican streaked down, plunged into the shallows, and took off again, stealing a meal from under the beaks of jabbering gulls.
“That’s true,” Tybee Jo agreed, “but the judge jobbed me into jail, and he isn’t going to get away with it. Does Marie’s brother still own a pony cart?”
“Coleman got the cart, yes.”
“And a horse?”
“That old nag, he’s on the road to the glue works an’ it’s a short road. Figure him to drop dead any time.”
“I need the cart and the horse tonight. I need them for, oh, maybe a week.”
“Why?”
“Tell you afterwards.”
“I got to trust you?”
“When we sailed out to fish, you always did.”
Ogie considered that. “Guess you right. We go over and see Coleman.”
“I need one more favor. I need a note delivered in town. Does Marie still trek to Savannah to do laundry for white folks?”
“Every day ‘cept Christmas. She’s already gone. You sendin’ something to the judge?”
“To someone in his house, and only that person. I can’t go myself, not in the daylight.”
Ogie felt the weight of friendship; he expressed it with a rueful sigh. He tossed the net on the sand and called to the barefoot twins laughing and kicking cold spray at each other. “You boys watch this here net. I be right back.”
He tramped off over the dune. Jo followed. Ogie’s shack was snug and tidy as ever. From a high shelf Ogie took a rusting tin can without a label; coins rattled.
“I loan you this ten-cent piece, I ‘spect to see it again, jus’ like Coleman’s cart.”
Tybee Jo pinched the coin between thumb and forefinger. “What am I supposed to do with this?”
“Hire a colored boy off the street to make your delivery. Plenty of hungry boys in Savannah. This’ll buy one of ’em a bit of rice if it can be found.”
Both friends peered at the coin. Guilt overcame Ogie. “Oh, here”—he plucked a second dime from the can—“it’s Christmas.”
“You’re a fine friend, Ogie.” Ogie didn’t disagree. “You’ll get everything back.”
“I better,” Ogie said. “Le’s go wake up Coleman.”
Tybee Jo hid Coleman’s cart and horse in an alley near Chippewa Square. He prayed the old plug would neither neigh and attract attention nor fall down and expire with much the same result before he finished his night’s work. Jo had seldom been afraid of any man or any thing, but the deed he planned to carry out was new, utterly foreign.
He wouldn’t turn back; still, he knew nothing of the real consequences of the step he contemplated. He did believe that much satisfaction lay in store if his nerve held out.
He stole along Perry Street in the coiling fog. He settled down to wait under an old magnolia, nervously watching soldiers passing in front of fires in the cemetery. A few minutes after eight, all the Drewgoods save for Merry returned from church in their depot wagon. One by one lamps were lit in various rooms. Soon all were dimmed to black except for two that were taken upstairs.
Tybee Jo crept into the front yard carrying a short stepladder. The ladder had been burgled from Bettelheim’s hardware store. Regrettably, he’d had to break the cheap hasp on the back door, but he had no intention of being jailed on a false charge a second time. After he found the ladder, he wrote on a blank page torn from an account book.
I PROMIS TO PAY THIS STORE FOR ONE (1)
STEP-LADDER WHICH I MUST HAVE TO-NIGHT.
THIS IS NO JOKE, YOU WILL GET YOUR MONY.
I WISH YOU ALL VERY HAPPY HOLIDAYS,
SINCERLY YRS JO. SWETT ESQ.
He dated the promissory note and left it in plain view.
Jo hoped all was quiet inside the Drewgood residence, but he had no way of
knowing. Hiring a waterfront waif to deliver his note had been easy, although he couldn’t be sure of reaction to the note or whether his intentions and instructions were fully understood. He could only hope.
He owned no watch, thus had no clear sense of time, but he knew that after 9 p.m. the streets would be patrolled by Geary’s provost guard. He was therefore inclined to haste. Hurrying, he tripped in wet weeds at the corner of the house. He lurched against the cypress siding, held his breath, waiting for a lamp—an alarm raised.
The moment of danger passed.
He crept along the side of the house to the chosen window. There he unfolded his ladder. Again his excitement betrayed him: The ladder slipped from his perspiring hand and fell against the house, this time making a noise that must have carried for blocks.
Actually it didn’t, but it carried as far as the two-person necessary in the backyard. Napoleon emerged shoeless from the rude little structure just as the ladder banged.
Napoleon smoothed the front of the flannel nightshirt that reached to his ankles. No one would dare break into the home of a man as influential as his father. He suspected a stray animal, or some drunken Yankee wandering in search of his camp. Napoleon squared his shoulders and marched to the rear of the house and down the grassy strip separating the Drewgoods’ from the neighbors. Fog hampered vision, but Napoleon had no trouble spying the silhouette of a man with his foot on a stepladder.
“Halt there.”
“Oh, perdition. Who’s that?”
Napoleon recognized the voice.
“Pa, Ma, anybody, wake up, help, Jo Swett’s trying to break in, we’ll all be murdered.”
Tybee Jo raised his fists. “Will you shut your clapper? I’m not going to murder—”
“—help, help, help,” Napoleon wailed, not hearing a syllable of the denial. In a mysterious fashion, the window a foot above the stepladder slid upward. A valise came flying out. Tybee Jo shouted, “Oh, blast blast blast,” sounding less angry than grief-stricken.
A door crashed open; another nightshirted figure appeared at the front of the house, leveling the pitted muzzle of a .36-caliber Leech & Rigdon, a revolver from a reliable Confederate armorer in North Carolina. The judge seldom fired it and never oiled it, so it tended to jam, which didn’t occur to him just then.
“Identify yourself or I’ll shoot.” The judge held his weapon in both hands without appreciably steadying it. A feminine head appeared in the window a foot above the ladder.
“Papa, don’t point that at Jo, it might go off.”
The judge’s barrel drooped. “I thought you were confined to bed with the vapors.”
Merry flung a leg over the sill, affording Jo a glimpse of clocked white stocking which he found impossibly titillating despite his high state of nerves.
“I had to fib or you’d have forced me to attend church. Napoleon, stop bellowing like a heifer.” With one foot on the ladder Merry struggled to wriggle out of the window backwards. She swayed, flailed in the air. Tybee Jo leaped forward.
“Hang on, I’m coming.”
“Stay away from my child,” the judge cried.
“Why should I when we’re going to be hitched?”
“Hitched?” the judge repeated. “Hitched?” The barrel drooped all the way down to his spindly shank. “You and my—? You can’t be serious. I thought you came to do murder.”
“Sure, you’d think the worst of me, wouldn’t you?” Tybee Jo gingerly grasped Merry’s waist, feeling electric thrills from the mere touch. “You’d be sure to think that’s why I ran all the way back from Milledgeville, to get even for being put away by your pack of lies. It makes me mad as hornets, you old buzzard, but I care more about Merry than I do about getting even. I came back to make this lovely person my bride. I sneaked a note to her stating my intentions.”
“You mean to elope with her?”
An upstairs window opened; Lulu’s head popped into the fog, thickly masked by a white cosmetic paste. She echoed her husband with an even louder, “Elope?” and then swooned over the sill.
Jo clasped Merry’s hand—her other clung to her little straw bonnet—and picked up her valise. He nearly threw his back out doing that. What had she packed, a cast-iron trousseau? “Come on, darlin’, we can make it,” he panted.
Together they ran past the judge, who uttered a plaintive, “Merry, why are you doing this? Why are you abandoning your family?”
“Because you’re not fit to be called family anymore, you’re a pack of greedy grasping cheats, and I’m in love. In love, in love,” Merry sang as Jo careened to the front gate, Merry clutching his hand and her little straw hat too. They ran into the fog, toward the hidden pony cart, their destination a justice of the peace Tybee Jo knew slightly, down near a defunct cotton gin at Pembroke.
The judge leaned against the house. He listened for sounds of the retreat of Jo Swett and his daughter. He could hear nothing over Napoleon’s blubbering. Then came a new sound from a previously opened window upstairs. The judge flourished his Leech & Rigdon in a paroxysm of rage.
“Cherry, stop snoring.”
The revolver went off.
Thus the lovers made their successful escape.
The raiding party consisted of Professor Marcus, Melancthon Spiker, Peter Pence, and a listless horse named General Longstreet.
As their open wagon creaked through Savannah’s fogbound alleys, Spiker complained: “What if it was Winks’s nigger who spied on us?”
Reins in hand, the professor replied grumpily, “You aren’t sure, are you?”
“No, I ain’t sure, but—”
“Because you were too obfuscated by drink. So we don’t know. So shut your face.”
Spiker wasn’t easily deterred. “It’s past nine o’clock.”
“Couldn’t get the wagon sooner. Things slow way down on Christmas Eve. Now look sharp, we turn here. We go in the back, haul the piano out the same way. Take some doing on those stairs but they’s three of us, we can manage.”
Hunkered in the dark on York Street opposite Miss Vee’s, Winks and Zip suffered and shivered, waiting. “Curfew rung ten minutes ago, Captain. S’pose they don’t come.”
Winks picked another pest out of his beard and bundled his carpet cape tighter around him. “They’ll come. Before I signed my enlistment in Indianapolis city, I didn’t know a thing about the criminal classes. This army’s been a real education. The professor definitely belongs to the criminal classes, and the criminal classes are long on greed but short on smarts. Just keep watching.”
General Longstreet responded to a tug on the reins, stopped, and gratefully hung his head. Professor Marcus climbed down the wheel, looped the reins and snugged them around the brake lever. The heavy air bore the none-too-pleasant scent of Dr. Rohrschamp’s necessary a few feet away. Peter Pence asked, “How do we unload the pianner once we take it?”
“I found a buyer already. Trawler captain beached here with a busted ankle. Lives up at Georgetown, wherever that is. His wife wants a piano pretty bad—she’s refined, he told me. He’s givin’ her a late Christmas present.”
“How’d you find him?”
“Worked the docks. We deliver the piano to him, he takes it the rest of the way when, as, and if he can. He pays seventy dollars, gold, we don’t accept Confederate.”
Pence scratched his head. “That don’t work out three ways even.”
“Why, yes it does. I get forty, you and Spiker get fifteen apiece. Who’s the brains here? If we’re all done with the quizzing, let’s get to it before the provost guard wonders why we’re havin’ a tea party in this alley. All ready, Spiker?”
Spiker showed his stolen Allen pepperbox pistol. “Ready.”
“Pence, you got the straps for the pianner?”
Pence showed the rubber articles in question.
Marcus slid a well-maintained Army Colt from the holster attached to his belt. He swivelled 180 degrees, watching until he was satisfied. Over in the square, men sang “O Come,
All Ye Faithful” in a manner that would never threaten a trained choir.
“Tempest fidget,” Marcus said. “Here we go.”
Professor Marcus’s plan didn’t call for subtlety. He smashed the kitchen door with his boot and tore the latch out of the jamb. He leaped into the kitchen palely washed by parlor light from the other end of the hall. Amelia sprang up as though launched by a catapult. She ran round and round, oinking. “Capture that porker,” Marcus cried. “This time we’ll have some barbecue.”
Peter Pence advanced, dangling the rubber straps. “Here pig, pig, pig.”
A shadow of more than usual size blocked the hall. Still dressed and awaiting the return of her boarders, Vee put her hand on her brow Indian fashion and peered. “Amelia? Why are you carrying on?”
“I have a pistol aimed at you, woman,” Marcus said. “Step back. Me and my boys are comin’ through.”
The professor advanced down the hall, then Spiker. Amelia shot between Pence’s feet, under the chopping block, and out the kitchen door. Pence uttered an oath and followed the others.
Four scented candles placed in saucers around the parlor cast a gentle umber glow. The tree with several small, crudely wrapped packages lying beneath it appeared less skimpy in the muted light. Bosom heaving, Vee raised her hands submissively.
“I accept my fate. Please remember I am a gentlewoman.”
“Oh, shut up, you old hippopotamus. We ain’t got time to mess with you.” Marcus waved his Colt at the Chickering upright. “There she is, boys, let’s get her out of here.”
“I see ’em in there, Zip. Here we go.”
Winks dashed across the street, his companion close on his heels. Winks’s top hat sailed off, but he didn’t stop or wait to test for a lock on the front door. He entered as Marcus had, using his boot.
He dived into the room, Deane & Adams .44 preceding him. The rapid intercession didn’t permit a lot of original thought; Winks exclaimed, “Caught in the act. Find some clothesline, Zip. Tie them up while I cover them.”