by Tom Murphy
The trunks were filled to bursting with finery Lily might never wear again. Maybe she was wrong even to bring the damned gowns and shoes and hats and feathers. But still and all, she would come into town now and then, once things were more settled on the ranch, once she had gotten the routine established. And she might even do some quiet entertaining in the big ranch house, eventually. God knew, there was room enough. And in any event the stuff could be cut down into little dresses for Kate, for the Baker girl.
But even as she looked at the luggage, Lily felt a small shudder of apprehension. The finery of San Francisco’s most famous whore had no place in her new life, none at all. In that instant Lily made a decision that went contrary to all her thrifty instincts. No daughter of hers was going to wear a whore’s cut-down ball gown! And if she herself were to visit town, it would be in different clothes altogether! Impulsively Lily called the maid who had just now finished helping her pack.
“All these,” she said, pointing to seven of the nine trunks, “go to the public orphanage, as the donation of Malone Produce, Incorporated.” The maid blushed and stammered, nodded and disappeared. And Lily smiled again. A weight had lifted from her heart. She walked out of the room and down the grand staircase of the Fleur de Lis, and gloried in the fact that she was doing this for the last time.
The landau was waiting.
She looked at the sleek little carriage, so much like Stanford’s green one, but pale blue, the blue of a winter sky. Lily loved the landau, but it was far too delicate for the ranch. She’d given it to Fergy, who loved fast driving nearly as much as he loved fast women.
On Stanford’s advice, Fergus Malone Junior had no voting stock in Malone Produce. He was accorded a salary, at the discretion of the board of directors, which consisted of Lily herself and Stanford and the lawyer.
The price for the Fleur de Lis had been paid in cash, and Lily had immediately settled half of the total on her brother. He’d be rich now, completely independent, a substantial member of the community. If he worked at it. For herself, Lily had the profits in the sale of her business discreetly invested in railroad bonds and bank stocks until such time as she could prudently add to her farming ventures.
She walked out the front door of the Fleur de Lis: another last, as the carriage ride to the harbor would be the last in this particular landau, as her restless sleep last night had been a farewell to the big carved bed that was too crowded with memories Lily would rather forget.
Her bed at the ranch was more than a place to sleep—and alone. It was symbolic of a new life, a new direction, with the past where it should be: buried. Lily stepped into the elegant little landau and softly told the driver to move on, looking straight ahead, a trace of a smile on her lips, head held high, oblivious of the small crowd that had gathered in silence on the paved walk outside of the fanciest parlor house in the West.
The exhilaration was intense, better than champagne, fresh and clean as some wildflower, more heady than the breeze dancing in off the ocean. Lily felt like singing aloud, felt like dancing a jig and letting out an Indian war whoop. How she had planned and sweated and prayed and wept for this moment! To be free! If ever a man touched her again, and she doubted that one would, it must be from the deepest devotion, the purest love. For in the Fleur de Lis, Lily knew, she had sold more than her body. She had traded her good name for gold, mortgaged her illusions and put her scruples at the very back of her safe-deposit vault at Wells Fargo. And if any of these things would come back to her, it could only be in time, and after a penance, and after working so hard for them that it would prove to all the world, and to herself, that she deserved hope, or love, or respectability. Yes, and they well may laugh and scorn me, but I’ll do it or die trying! It might be impossible, making a good new life, but Lily had seen many impossible things come to be in her twenty-five years. She owed it to Katie, and to herself, that she must try with all the strength and wit that was in her.
Lily drove away from the Fleur de Lis on this bright September morning, drove straight down Sacramento Street to the docks, and never looked back.
There had been no rain in Brooks Chaffee’s dream of glory. In his mind’s picture, the sun shone clear on well-scrubbed troops who marched in orderly phalanxes to sure victory over the rebels, for surely all the force of right was on their side.
For three days now Brooks and four-hundred-some relief troops had slogged through mud on country lanes and trackless pastures, enduring a cold and relentless rain that was never quite a downpour and never quite a mist.
The fine broadcloth of his uniform soaked up the rain with the voracity of a sponge, doubled its weight, and hung on him like an ancestral curse. Boots and saddles mildewed while he looked at them in disbelief, and the simplest walk became a nightmare of mud and confusion. Tempers eroded with the cart track they marched on, rifles rusted if they were left uncovered for five minutes, maps that were inadequate to begin with dissolved from the wetness into soggy indecipherable lumps, and cooking became impossible. Brooks cursed every god whose name he could remember and wondered if it rained on Johnny Reb with the same murderous persistency.
The rain followed them like an enemy scout. It crept into their thin tents when night came, ambushed them at dawn, marched with them all the way from Baltimore to this place no one had ever heard of but Lee and McClellan, this godforsaken corner of Maryland somewhere between Frederick and Harpers Ferry, Sharpsburg.
At least Neddy would be there. The thought of seeing Neddy again and the warm memory of Caroline were all Brooks had to sustain himself on the long wet march. The men squished and slid and stumbled, grumbling and short-tempered before they’d heard even a single shot fired in anger.
The food was terrible, and seemed worse, because for the most part these were green troops, lately from clean beds and happy hearthsides. There was no place to wash properly, and the only reason Brooks could sleep at all at night was simply because he was bone-tired, spent, exhausted beyond anything he could recall.
And they were supposed to be the fresh troops, the reviving influence on McClellan’s weary corps!
It was amazing, how fast a man’s spirit could melt in the rotten weather, how the juices could drain out of your very soul when you were hungry and cold and everything smelled of wet wool and mildewed leather and unwashed bodies.
Brooks had never really considered the question of physical comfort before; he had both time and reason to think deeply about it now. Was courage a matter of clean sheets and a hot joint of beef? He devoutly hoped not, yet this damnable march through the mud was raising that very question.
There had been no pessimists in Brooks’s dream of glory. Now, as the irresistible red-clay mud of Maryland seeped into every pore of his body, rumors of impending doom fell around him with the dampening persistence of the rain itself.
He could hear the men grumbling through the thin, clammy canvas of his tent, heard them on the march, heard them over the clatter of tin spoons on canteen bowls of barely edible slop-stew at mealtime.
“I’ll tell you, Sam Miller, the man’s a coward, pure and simple, got a yaller streak down ’is backside a mile wide.”
“Naw, you’ve got it wrong, Bill, man can’t noways be a coward when he’s dead, now, can he? That ol’ Mac, why he’s so slow, he just has to be dead, hear?”
And they laughed, but it was gallows laughter, and, like his men, Brooks half-believed the rumors. All armies, Brooks knew, were marching rumor machines. Yet the tales about McClellan were too many and too consistent to be entirely off the target. At first Brooks had tried to stop the grumbling, but these were fiercely independent soldiers and it was like trying to stop the rain. By the third day Brooks fell silent. Getting to the general’s camp would be enough, for getting to McClellan meant getting to Neddy. Neddy! That was worth the rain and the mud and the grub and the grumbling.
The march was spiked with rumors that went unconfirmed, with gossip about McClellan’s famous ability to hesitate his way out of
nearly any victory, his deeply ingrained knack for failure, his seemingly mad refusal to press the advantage when he had one. Robert E. Lee, on the other hand, was a mythical hero to these raw Union replacements.
Lee was invincible, gallant, a legend out of the court of King Arthur himself, shrewd yet just, braver than lions, elusive as smoke, a man to inspire courage in the lowliest toad of a coward.
Lee, in the tales and legends, was everything McClellan was not. And Lee was the enemy.
Brooks pitied Neddy, knowing the quickness of Neddy’s mind, the firmness of his convictions, the unalterably noble standards by which he lived every aspect of his life.
Neddy, wonderful Neddy, bright and burning to win this damned war single-handed, chained to a cowardly vacillating fool like McClellan!
Was there no justice whatsoever in this world?
Still, he’d be seeing Neddy, talking to his brother for the first time in nearly six months. It would be a chance, Brooks hoped, to get close to his brother again. Neddy had always been a kind of god to his younger brother, and with good reason. Yet, just these last few years, almost from the moment Brooks had fallen so deeply in love with Caroline, Neddy had seemed to drift out of his life. Maybe that was part of growing up. Maybe it was a reflection on Brooks’s all-consuming love for Caroline.
But whatever the reason, it would be better now. They’d talk, just like they used to, halfway through the night. What plans they’d planned! What impossible dreams had seemed right upon the edge of coming true!
Neddy had always been magical to Brooks. Neddy had hung the moon. Neddy could make the impossible happen, and quickly, and make it all look easy. And smile and be fun. And be the kind of brother you’d hand your life to, on a silver server, or your deepest fears and secrets. Neddy could probably even make the rain stop.
If anyone could win this war fast, it was Edward Hudner Chaffee. Brooks knew this as surely as he knew his name.
And he’d be seeing Neddy, soon, maybe tomorrow.
The joy of it made him forget the rain and the moldy biscuits and the raw blister that burned like fire with every sliding, stumbling step he took.
Many were the times when Brooks had tried to analyze the distance that had slowly come between Neddy and himself of late.
Brooks tried to do this, and failed. Surely, part of it must be Caroline. After all, a man could only give so much of himself to one person at a time, and in Brooks’s case he had given himself to Caroline so totally and irreversibly, more than one hundred percent of his heart and mind and body, that it might well be there simply wasn’t enough emotional energy left in him to sustain his friendship with Neddy on the level where it had been.
Maybe it was just that they’d both grown up these last few years, and, in growing up, they’d grown apart.
Somehow, his thoughts of Neddy always ended tangled up with thoughts of Caroline. That might be natural, since these were the two people in all the world that Brooks loved most; yet, natural as it might be, it was also confusing.
He marched and thought of Caroline.
Her smile danced in the dripping treetops. Her eyes shone darkly from otherwise undistinguished puddles at the roadside, and somewhere in the depths of those dark and liquid eyes was hidden all the sweet unfathomable mystery of a Southern girlhood.
He might kill some blood relative of hers; Brooks knew this, and trembled at the thought, at the smallness of the world and the terrible ironies it bred for all of them. Yet at least he wasn’t on opposite sides of the barricade from his brother, a not uncommon thing in this most heartrending of all wars. Hell, hadn’t Lee himself been the commandant at West Point until just lately? And didn’t Lee’s own white-pillared mansion gaze serenely down from the heights of Arlington, Virginia, onto the seething Union Capitol at Washington?
He marched and thought of Caroline, of her smile and her eyes and of other, more secret parts of her, and how a whole night could melt away on the deep, surging tide of his love for her. It wasn’t blood and gunfire at the end of this bitter march, but Caroline. For wasn’t she at the end of everything in his life, and the beginning, and always would be?
The rain fell indiscriminately on lovers and heroes and frightened men.
This, Lily thought, must be exactly how a prisoner feels the day they let her out.
The sense of release was a drug for her. The landau clattered down Sacramento Street and Lily cherished every bump, for every rotation of those costly slender wheels was taking her that much farther away from the Fleur de Lis, from her past, from the lurid fame of Lily Cigar.
Even the day itself seemed to join in her liberation. It was a bright blue day filled with sun and expectation. There was so much to do, and all of it challenging! Running the Fleur de Lis had made a planner of Lily. Details fascinated her, and well she knew that a smooth and glittering result was only the sum of many small things properly attended to, done right and on time. This, she vowed, would be the story at the ranch.
Oh, sure and there’d be trial and error, but the weather was reliable, and so was Fred Baker. Farming was so irregular in these parts, even now, that no one had formed a proper system for doing it on a large scale.
Malone Produce was going to change all that, and as fast as was practical. The climate here in San Francisco might be ideal for some things, but Lily had no intention of limiting herself to the immediate neighborhood. The talk of a great Union Pacific Railroad was shaping up into much more than talk. It would come, and when that happened, vast new areas would become available for every kind of farming. Down in southern California, near the Bay of Angels, tropical vegetables and fruits flourished uninhibitedly, whereas in the north they required special care. Fred Baker said he heard experiments were starting farther north, up Sonoma way, in the growing of wine grapes. Now, there was a thought. At the rate of wine consumption in the Fleur de Lis, anyone who came up with a decent local vintage would be rich overnight. And they were doing this back East, growing their own wine grapes high up in the Finger Lakes district of New York. Lily had never tasted the stuff they made, but it was being done—that she knew from one of her many farming journals.
There was the planting to consider, then the furnishing of the big ranch house. The restoration work was done now, and well done too, but the place was still largely as bare as she and Stanford had come to it the first time. This too would be a pleasure.
And best of all, there would be Kate. Kate near at hand, Kate to see every day. Kate to become a real mother to, at long last. What do I know about being a mother? How will I tell the child—and when? And suppose in the telling, she decides to hate me, not to forgive, not to understand? Lily did not consider herself anything like a coward, and yet the prospect of confronting a six-year-old with the hard facts of her parentage decimated her. Lily could face many things, and had. She had overcome huge obstacles, striven and buried the shame of her whoring, and pulled herself out of it by pure will and the raw force of her determination and her love for Kate. To be rejected now would present a reversal so frightening that Lily could not bring herself to think about it. Several times lately she had nearly worked up her courage to tell the girl, and always she had backed down, found some excuse to postpone the dreaded confrontation.
The trim blue landau pulled up at the dock and the driver handed Lily down. Her sloop was waiting.
The boat itself was a part of her dream, and as Lily walked lightly up its gangplank, the sense of freedom she had felt in leaving the Fleur de Lis doubled and tripled and made her almost dizzy with pleasure. The captain bowed and greeted her. She smiled and told him to set sail.
Set sail! Wasn’t there magic in those simple words? Yes, and it’s a new life I’m sailing to, newer even than the life I found when I left New York, for this is mine, my own doing, earned by my sweat and my shame, my own magic kingdom, Katie’s and mine, where the world cannot harm us. The sloop was not as big or as elaborate as Stanford’s, but it was a fine, jaunty boat all the same, dark green it was,
and with the name Katie in neat gold letters on the stern. Malone Produce owned the sloop, and that, too, added to Lily’s sense of pride as she sailed across the bay to her new home.
It hardly seemed over two years since she’d bought the ranch. Now, all of the hard work—all the delays in restoring the main house and outbuildings; the shortage of supplies; the sea-borne deliveries that were unaccountably late; the scant yield of their first little harvest—seemed to melt away like some half-forgotten dream. It was happening at last, and that was all Lily cared about!
It was all happening, just as she’d dreamed it! No conquistador of old ever sailed more proudly to his destiny than Lily Malone on this bright September day in 1862.
Ned Chaffee looked up from the map, blinked, squinted in the flickering light of a badly trimmed kerosene lantern. “Yes?”
Brooks stood dripping in the insistent rain, gaping in disbelief at the changes six months of combat had wrought on his brother’s handsome face. Neddy was thirty, two years older than Brooks. Now he looked fifty. Too thin he was, and all the muscles and cords in his face and neck stood out like rope stretched to the point of breaking, as if they were straining against each other in some demented effort to tear that familiar face apart. Still, it was Neddy, and in one piece.
Brooks walked into the little tent, crossing the barrier of his brother’s irritation at the unannounced interruption. “Lieutenant Chaffee reporting for duty, sir.”
Again the blink, the straining, the questioning, slightly feral expression on Ned’s face betrayed six months of tension, fatigue, suspicion. Brooks thought of Neddy’s smile, his easy laughter echoing down all the years of their shared boyhood.
Then George McClellan’s aide-de-camp recognized his visitor. Instantly Ned became another person. The grin came quick as ever, and quick as ever he was on his feet, around the trestle table, embracing Brooks, laughing, questioning, cheering all at once.