by Tom Murphy
“You devil! Nobody told me! I knew you’d enlisted, but this…How’s everyone? Mother? The old gent? And your Caroline? Quick, tell me everything, old sot, I want all of it! How’s the bank? I can’t believe you. My little brother. Here. Sit. Have you eaten, not that it’ll be fit to eat, but we can roust up something.”
“Whoa, there, Neddy. One item at a time. Don’t forget, you’re dealing with a raw recruit. I’m hoping you’ll be the one to tell me things.”
It felt good to sit down. It felt even better to see Neddy smiling again, laughing even. It made Brooks think his first impression of a new and strained-taut Neddy had been a false one.
“We’ll tell each other. God, but it’s good to see you, Brooks.”
They sat for nearly an hour, a stolen hour, Brooks was quick to learn, snatched from frenzy, embezzled from the all-consuming effort of the Grand Army of the Potomac to regroup, and rest, and gather their energies for a massive and hopefully fatal blow against Lee’s Virginia Army now holed up at Sharpsburg, just across a little creek named Antietam.
Brooks soon learned the chaos that lurked very close to the surface of this campaign, and all of the other Union campaigns Neddy told him about.
“The famous victories, so-called, are pure dumb luck, Brooks, and often as not we lose as many as we kill. It’s a losing game for both sides, and even when we win—and we will win—we lose.”
“What about Little Mac? The old gent said—”
“Shhh!” Ned’s face showed fear for the first time Brooks could remember.
“Canvas,” Ned murmured nonchalantly, too late to cover his apprehension, “is not the most solid building material you’re likely to find, old bean, it has a nasty tendency to carry sound.”
“I thought—”
“That’s one of the more popular rumors, and a persistent one. One day it’ll be true, I think. In the meantime, the gentleman in question is a man, Brooks, like all of us. He’s not been known to walk on water, but on the other hand, nor is he all that bad. War makes legends, destroys reputations. Lee’s a saint already, even though I view that with a certain skepticism. We need our myths, little brother, and unfortunately, at the moment this side of the fence is suffering under the wrong kind of a myth. Take Pope. Pope was going to be our savior, loudmouth bully that he is. Well, General Long-street disabused us of that happy notion in one hell of a hurry. And suddenly Pope is off in exile in the West somewhere, doubtless shooting up the passenger pigeons and chasing the odd Indian through the woods. War is a most delicious concert of tiny, exquisite ironies, Brooks. It could be very amusing if there weren’t all that blood.”
Brooks felt his head swimming. His delight at seeing Neddy mixed with concern for the way Neddy looked and the new, unwelcome cynicism in Neddy’s voice. This isn’t the real Ned Chaffee, he’s just playing at being a soldier, he can’t really have become this hard, this unfeeling, in just six months. But Brooks watched his brother closely, and saw the cold awareness glittering in Neddy’s eyes with the arctic brilliance of some distant, unreachable star, and he wondered. He wondered, too, at the rush of names and rumors, for here was Neddy, his Neddy, on first-name terms with famous generals whose deeds Brooks knew only from the press, or from soldiers’ gossip.
Brooks paused for a moment after his brother’s torrent of information had stilled, and when he spoke, it was softly, and in the hope that what he said might somehow become true just by the bare physical fact of being spoken.
“But surely our cause is a just one.” The sound of his brother’s laughter cut Brooks Chaffee like a knife.
“You are perfect, Brooks, you always were. Do your tired old brother a favor, my boy, and don’t change, not ever.”
Ned turned toward the tent flap, hyper-alert, as if he’d heard some enemy approaching. Then he turned back, and smiled a thin and bitter smile, a mockery of the happy face Brooks held in his memory like a talisman against evil.
“Oh, indeed ours is a just cause. One-half of all the murders in the history of the world have been done in some just cause. One often forgets precisely what the cause is, or was, but most assuredly it is a just one. We die to free the souls of all those poor black wretches we dragged screaming from their jungles a hundred or more years ago, is that it? Sometimes I forget. Or is it a fine legal point we’re defending, whether this or that number of angels can dance upon the head of a pin, and for how long…how long?”
His voice trailed off, and Ned brought both hands up to his eyes and rubbed them vigorously. “Ah, then, to hell with it. I’m sorry, Brooks, don’t think I mock you. It’s just that I’m so very tired.”
Brooks looked at his brother and felt as though they’d both just stepped off the edge of the earth, falling in limitless darkness. “Can’t you take a few days, and get away?”
“No. That’s just it. None of us can. Not even a few minutes. I’ve hours of work left tonight, and the information’s not always reliable, we make plans based on guesses, and so does Lee. It boils down to who’s the best guesser. Now there’s a new plan.”
Ned looked around the little tent as though it might be filling up with unseen Confederate informers.
“There’s this Professor such-and-so, forget his name, doesn’t matter, and guess what he does?”
“He has a crystal ball?”
“Nearly that. He has one of those Montgolfier balloons, Brooks, and up he goes with his spyglass, high in the sky, spying away to beat the band, and also—here’s the wonder of it—he has a telegraph up there with him, so the news comes flashing into headquarters on wings of lightning. It is the very latest thing, sure to put the fear of God into the wicked foe.”
“Does it work?”
“Nobody knows yet. It works on paper. It works in Little Mac’s dreams, and that’s enough for the moment. I’m sorry, brother mine, but I really must get back to all this…” He indicated the maps, the papers, the daybook that littered the table.
“I’m sorry too, but at the least of it, we’re together. When’s the strike?”
“Don’t know. No one knows. It’s a question of luck, and guessing, and the damnable rain stopping.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”
“You bet, Lieutenant Chaffee. It’s very good to see you, Brooks.”
Brooks walked the few steps to where Ned was already sitting at the table rustling through the heaps of paper. Brooks put his hand on that familiar, too-thin shoulder, and spoke quietly. “It’ll take more than some war to keep us apart, old bean.”
He was going to add “…or some woman, either,” but could not. He turned and walked out of the tent into the constant drizzling rain.
34
Lily looked at Fred Baker and frowned. “You truly think it’s necessary?”
“You know I wouldn’t ask you if I didn’t.” That was irrefutable, but it didn’t cure Lily’s lifelong distaste for firearms, for loud noises or violence of any kind.
Lily owned a gun, the revolver Stanford had given her after that terrible incident with the razor-wielding religious fanatic at Sophie’s. But she had never practiced enough to truly master the thing. Lily was capable of feeling fear, but her fears were all emotional ones: guilt and shame were frequent visitors to Lily’s mind, and she often wondered if the time would ever come when she could walk down a city street without dreading the scorn of respectable men and women. But physical fear was all but unknown to her.
Fred was worried about bandits, and while Lily’s keen mind told her there might be something in his fears, her heart refused to accept the possibility. She had come too far, and at too great a cost, to be put off by the distant scent of danger.
Nevertheless, here they stood, she and Fred and an even more reluctant Mary Baker, at the edge of a new-plowed field, trying to master both their misgivings and the heavy blued-steel Colt repeating pistols Fred was insisting each woman keep at hand, each in her own house.
“There’s times I’ll be away, or so far out in the grazing land
s I might as well be in China. And you never know. Not only bandits might come snooping around, there’s rattlers too, and maybe a bear or a mountain lion.”
“God help us, then, if it would depend on my shooting.”
Lily said it lightly, laughing, but these were real dangers. The land was wild still, wilder than she cared to admit. The wildness was one reason she loved this place, for wild meant quiet, being alone with only the enormous sky overhead, and the wandering wind, and hearing no sound at all but the birds making plans in the pine groves. Three weeks she’d been living on the ranch now, and had returned to town only once, and then just to see Fergy, for she worried about her brother, and Fergy never visited the ranch.
Young Stephen Baker, thirteen, was mad for bandits and wildlife of all sorts, and it was from Stephen that Lily heard the most bloodcurdling tales of bandit adventures.
“…and they say Joaquin Murietta still lives in the high Sierra, him and his white horse, and the whole troop, and there was Three-Fingered Jack and Rattlesnake Dick, and Tiberio, Lily, who was born right in this house…”
Lily looked at the boy and smiled, although in fact she would have preferred some other line of talk. But the pleasure it gave Stephen was obvious, and, the good Lord knew the pleasures were few enough for a boy his age in this isolated ranch. She took a tray of fresh-baked cookies out of the big wood-burning stove and deftly scooped them onto a wire rack to cool.
“Yes,” she said lightly, “he was very naughty, wasn’t he? Would you like another cookie, Stephen?”
“Thank you, yes. Oh, he may be the worst yet, Tiberio may, for wouldn’t he slit you from head to toe just for looking at him the wrong way, and wouldn’t he be laughing all the time. They say his laugh would peel the bark right off a eucalyptus, Lily, and didn’t he have a gang when he was only my age, or nearly?”
“Darling, let’s not talk about Tiberio, please? Tell me about the new chicken house instead.”
The conversation drifted on, and Kate came scampering in for cookies and milk, perfectly oblivious of the fact that Tiberio Velasquez was not a legend like the other bandits who roamed through Stephen Baker’s lurid imagination. Tiberio was very much alive, at large, and sworn to avenge himself on the woman who had, he insisted, stolen his birthright.
Brooks woke in the night and instantly wondered why. God knew he was tired enough to sleep for a week.
There was something about the quality of the noise. The lack of noise. Then he knew. The rain had stopped. The rain he had been praying would go away had finally got his message.
He lay still on his cot drinking in the silence with his fears. Nothing about McClellan’s army was as he’d imagined it, not even Neddy.
Especially not Neddy. This was Neddy changed, grown suddenly bitter, a Ned Chaffee visibly plagued with doubts and questions and a kind of cynical resignation to his fate that wasn’t like him at all.
And if Neddy could change so, then anything could change. Anything at all. In the sudden quiet of the great camp, in the blackness of his tent and the even greater blackness that seemed to be filling up his heart, Brooks felt his world shivering, slipping, changing. It was as though all the solid granite structures of his boyhood had suddenly been revealed as cardboard cleverly painted, a stage setting for a not particularly entertaining play. His own fear surprised him, for he had never been afraid.
Somewhere down the creek, just a few miles away, forty-some thousand Confederate troops had gathered for their first invasion of the North.
And Little Mac McClellan had nearly double that, seventy-five thousand prime soldiers waiting to crush them.
The fact that they waited in confusion and disorder among conflicting rumors and orders that often seemed impossible hardly altered the fact of their immense superiority of numbers.
But it was not death that frightened Brooks Chaffee. It was rather another, subtler kind of destruction, the moral blight that seemed to have taken hold of Neddy, that could therefore as easily take hold in his own heart and spirit. Even before hearing one shot from a rebel gun, Brooks knew the true and ultimate horror of war: it seethed in his dark tent, coiled and ready to strike, evil, poisonous; inescapable: the possibility that it was all for nothing, that none of it really mattered.
He had no idea how long he lay thus, eyes closed, thinking thoughts more black than the night.
Finally the normal sounds of a huge camp awakening seeped into his tent with the first gray shards of dawn. One day soon, maybe even today, little Antietam Creek was going to run with blood, and some of it might well be his.
It had been one of the best days Lily could remember, a blazing October day almost warm enough for summer, but still with a welcome crispness to it, the promise of apples ripening and, at sunset, the cozy need for gathering around a crackling fire.
Fred was away, hot on the scent of an unimaginable treasure: twelve prime milk cows, if the reports could be believed. Even the news from the far-off war was encouraging, coming by telegraph from St. Louis now, in hours instead of days, on the pony express. There had been a great Union victory somewhere in Maryland, Antietam, they called it, Lee defeated and fled, the reports said, his invasion of the North stopped cold. The war would be over in a few weeks, they were saying.
She wished, not for the first time, that she cared more.
But what Lily cared for in this world was here, in the ranch, here in the hills of San Rafael, three thousand miles in distance and removed even further than that emotionally, from the terrors of Union versus rebel that were spilling blood all over the East.
For what did she know of politics? Or care?
Lily looked about the great kitchen, where she and Kate sat by the fire, Lily with her tea, Kate with milk and cookies, Lily trying to teach the child some of the fine needlework the good nuns at St. Paddy’s had taught her an eternity ago in New York. They worked quietly, companionably, each with her embroidery hoop and needle, Kate struggling with clumsy determination and goodwill. Soon, Lily thought, it’ll be like this always, Kate with me all the time, my daughter in her rightful role, in her rightful place, by my side, and happy. Soon, but not yet. Lily was still timid with the girl, courting her like an unattainable lover. But Kate seemed to like her, Kate always came when invited, Kate smiled and got on well with the Baker children and the other people in her small world here on the ranch.
Lily thought of the Baker house, far on the other side of the stables, and how well her arrangement with Fred Baker was working out, better even than she’d expected. He’d been gone for two days now, which was a good sign. If the cows had been sickly or otherwise undesirable, he and the three hands he’d taken with him would have been back today. As it was, they must be driving the herd with them, a two-day job at best. And twelve new cows plus the seven they already owned would mean a goodly amount of milk to sell, to make cheese from, and cows to breed. In a few years, with the birthing and buying new stock, they’d have a fair herd for sure.
She looked around the big old kitchen, bright as it was with new whitewash and gleaming Mexican tiles and polished wood. A cook was what she needed, one of the many details yet to be attended to. The girl who came in to clean was only just adequate; a live-in maid would have to be found, too. The novelty of being alone in the big manor house was wearing thin for Lily. At first it had been a blessed relief after the bustle and tinsel of the Fleur de Lis and her life there. Then had come the days of high-pitched working just after she’d moved in, with so much to be done that there was never a moment to think about luxuries like servants. But now, yes, there was no doubt about it: a cook and a maid to live in. And a nursemaid for Kate, when the time came.
Lily looked at her daughter, and saw how gently the glow from the fire caught the little girl’s red-gold hair. Suddenly, impulsively, she bent and kissed Kate on the cheek. The girl giggled and squirmed away.
It was then that Lily heard the hoofbeats. And the gunshots.
For one heartbeat that seemed to last for hour
s, Lily froze. These were not friends, and she was very much alone. She thought of the faraway war. And she thought of bandits.
There was a sudden thundering, the sound of many horses, galloping horses. Not, definitely not, the horses of Fred Baker and his men. And there were gunshots, roaring, a scream, and high-pitched madmen’s yells cutting the evening air like so many knives.
Instantly, without thinking, Lily stood and hustled Kate into the little pantry that was almost completely hidden behind the big fireplace.
“Quick, Katie, hide. Hide in here, and don’t come out until I say so. This isn’t a game, Kate. You must make never a sound. Do you understand? Not a peep!”
The girl nodded dumbly, her pink cheeks going white with apprehension.
Lily wondered where she’d put the damned pistol. Of course. In her bedroom. She reached for a cleaver, then put it down again. They might mean no harm, after all, it might simply be some noisy strangers passing by, or even some of Fergy’s drunken friends. It wouldn’t do to greet your guests waving a kitchen knife. The shots had stopped now. There came a pounding at the door.
Lily walked slowly down the great hall, feeling more alone than she ever had.
She paused before the big door, wondering what it would take to break it down, wondering how long she could hold them off, armed with a pistol and very few bullets, armed with a kitchen knife and her own dark fears for Kate’s safety.
The door trembled, quivered on its old iron hinges, the big iron ring knocker jangling insistently.
With no plan and no weapon, Lily drew back the bolt and opened the door. The smell hit her first, sweat and brimstone, unclean stables, garlic and death.
The monster stood in front of her, laughing a madman’s laugh.
Tiberio Velasquez was known to Lily only in legend; she had never seen a picture of the bandit nor heard him described. But somehow she would have known him anywhere.