Not ten minutes later Starbuck had to refuse an appointment to a scarred Austrian cavalry officer who claimed to have fought in a half-dozen hard battles in northern Italy. The man, hearing that only Virginians would be allowed to command in the Legion, sarcastically enquired how he could reach Washington. “Because if no one will have me here, then by Gott I shall fight for the North!”
The beginning of May brought the news that northern warships had begun a blockade of the Confederate coast. Jefferson Davis, the new president of the Provisional Government of the Confederate States of America, retaliated by signing a declaration of war against the United States, though the State of Virginia seemed of two minds about waging that war. State troops were withdrawn from Alexandria, a town just across the Potomac River from Washington, an act that Washington Faulconer scathingly condemned as typical of Letcher’s caviling timidity. “You know what the governor wants?” he asked Nate.
“To take the Legion from you, sir?”
“He wants the North to invade Virginia, because that’ll ease him off the political fence without tearing his britches. He’s never been fervent for secession. He’s a trimmer, Nate, that’s his trouble, a trimmer.” Yet the very next day brought news that Letcher, far from waiting supine while the North restored the Union, had ordered Virginian troops to occupy the town of Harper’s Ferry fifty miles upstream of Washington. The North had abandoned the town without a fight, leaving behind tons of gun-making equipment in the federal arsenal. Richmond celebrated the news, though Washington Faulconer seemed rueful. He had cherished his idea of an attack on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad whose track crossed the Potomac at Harper’s Ferry, but now, with the town and its bridge safe in southern hands, there no longer seemed any need to raid the line farther west. The news of the river town’s occupation also promoted a flurry of speculation that the Confederacy was about to make a preemptive attack across the Potomac, and Faulconer, fearing that his rapidly growing Legion might be denied its proper place in such a victorious invasion, decided his place was at Faulconer Court House, where he could hasten the Legion’s training. “I’ll bring you out to Faulconer County as soon as I can,” Faulconer promised Starbuck as he mounted his horse for the seventy-mile ride to his country estate. “Write to Adam for me, will you?”
“I will, sir, of course.”
“Tell him to come home.” Faulconer raised a gloved hand in farewell, then released his tall black horse to the road. “Tell him to come home!” he shouted as he went.
Starbuck dutifully wrote, addressing his letter to the church in Chicago that forwarded Adam’s mail. Adam, just like Starbuck, had abandoned his studies at Yale, but where Starbuck had done it for an obsession with a girl, Adam had gone to Chicago to join the Christian Peace Commission which, by prayer, tracts and witness had been trying to bring the two parts of America back into peaceful amity.
No answer came from Chicago, yet every post brought Starbuck new and urgent demands from Washington Faulconer. “How long will it take Shaffers to make officers’ uniforms?” “Do we have a determination of officers’ insignia? This is important, Nate! Enquire at Mitchell and Tylers,” “Visit Boyle and Gambles and ask about saber patterns,” “In my bureau, third drawer down, is a revolver made by Le Mat, send it back with Nelson.” Nelson was one of the two Negro servants who carried the letters between Richmond and Faulconer Court House. “The Colonel’s mighty anxious to collect his uniforms,” Nelson confided to Starbuck. “The Colonel” was Washington Faulconer, who had begun signing his letters “Colonel Faulconer,” and Starbuck took good care to address Faulconer with the self-bestowed rank. The Colonel had ordered notepaper printed with the legend “The Faulconer Legion, Campaign Headquarters, Colonel Washington Faulconer, State of Virginia, Commanding,” and Starbuck used the proof sheet to write the Colonel the happy news that his new uniforms were expected to be ready by Friday and promising he would have them sent out to Faulconer County immediately.
On that Friday morning Starbuck was sitting down to bring his account books up-to-date when the door to the music room banged open and a tall stranger glowered angrily from the threshold. He was a tall thin man, all bony elbows, long shanks and protruding knees. He looked to be in early middle age, had a black beard streaked with gray, a sharp nose, slanted cheekbones and tousled black hair, and was wearing a threadbare black suit over scuffed brown work boots; altogether a scarecrow figure whose sudden appearance had made Starbuck jump.
“You must be Starbuck, ah-ha?”
“I am, sir.”
“I heard your father preach once.” The curious man bustled into the room, looking for somewhere to drop his bag and umbrella and walking stick and coat and hat and book bag, and, finding no place suitable, clung to them. “He was impassioned, yes, but he tortured his logic. Does he always?”
“I’m not sure what you mean. You, sir, are?”
“It was in Cincinatti. At the old Presbyterian Hall, the one on Fourth Avenue, or was it Fifth? It was in ’56, anyway, or maybe it was ’55? The hall has since burned down, but is no loss to the architecture of what is left of the Republic. Not a fine building in my opinion. Of course none of the fools in the audience noted your father’s logic. They just wanted to cheer his every word. Down with the slavocracy! Up with our sable brethren! Hallelujah! Evil in our midst! Slur on a great nation! Bah!”
Starbuck, even though he disliked his father, felt pressed to defend him. “You made your opposition known to my father, sir? Or do you just start quarrels with his son?”
“Quarrels? Opposition? I hold no opposition to your father’s views! I agree with them, each and every one. Slavery, Starbuck, is a menace to our society. I simply disagree with your father’s contemptible logic! It is not enough to pray for an end to the peculiar institution, we have to propose practical arrangements for its abolition. Are the slaveholders to be recompensed for their pecuniary loss? And if so, by whom? By the federal government? By a sale of bonds? And what of the Negroes themselves? Are we to repatriate them to Africa? Settle them in South America? Or are we to breed the darkness out of them by forcible miscegenation, a process, I might say, which has been well begun by our slave owners. Your father made no mention of these matters, but merely had recourse to indignation and prayer, as if prayer has ever settled anything!”
“You do not believe in prayer, sir?”
“Believe in prayer!” The thin man was scandalized by the very thought of such a belief. “If prayer solved anything there’d be no unhappiness in this world, would there? All the moaning women would be smiling! There would be no more disease, no more hunger, no more appalling children picking their snot-filled nostrils in our schoolrooms, no more sniveling infants brought for my admiration. Why should I admire their mewling, puking, whimpering, filthy-faced offspring? I do not like children! I have been telling Washington Faulconer that simple fact for fourteen years now! Fourteen years! Yet my brother-in-law seems incapable of understanding the simplest sentence of plain-spoken English and insists I run his schoolroom. Yet I do not like children, I have never liked children and I hope that I never shall like children. Is that so very hard to understand?” The man still clung to his awkward burdens, even as he waited for Starbuck’s response.
Starbuck suddenly understood who this bad-tempered disorganized man was. This was the he-biddy, the poor relation, Faulconer’s brother-in-law. “You’re Mister Thaddeus Bird,” he said.
“Of course I’m Thaddeus Bird!” Bird seemed angry that his identity needed confirmation. He glared bright-eyed and bristling at Starbuck. “Have you heard a word I said?”
“You were telling me you do not like children.”
“Filthy little beasts. In the North, mark you, you raise children differently. There you are not afraid to discipline them. Or beat them, indeed! But here, in the South, we need differentiate our children from our slaves and so we beat the latter and destroy the former with kindness.”
“Mister Faulconer beats neither, I believe?”
Bird froze, staring at Starbuck as though the younger man had just uttered an extraordinary profanity. “My brother-in-law, I perceive, has been advertising his good qualities to you. His good qualities, Starbuck, are dollars. He buys affection, adulation and admiration. Without money he would be as empty as a Tuesday night pulpit. Besides he does not need to beat his servants or children because my sister can beat enough for twenty.”
Starbuck was offended by this ungrateful attack on his patron. “Mister Faulconer freed his slaves, did he not?”
“He freed twenty house slaves, six garden boys and his stable people. He never had field hands because he never needed them. The Faulconer fortune is not based on cotton or tobacco, but upon inheritance, railroads and investment, so it was a painless gesture, Starbuck, and principally done, I suspect, to spite my sister. It is, perhaps, the one good deed Faulconer ever did, and I refer to the exercise of spitefulness rather than to the act of manumission.” Bird, failing to find anywhere to put down his belongings, simply opened his arms and let them all drop untidily onto the music room’s parquet floor. “Faulconer wants you to deliver the uniforms.”
Starbuck was taken aback, but then realized the subject had abruptly been changed to the Colonel’s new finery. “He wants me to take them to Faulconer Court House?”
“Of course he does!” Bird almost screamed at Starbuck. “Must I state the obvious? If I say that Faulconer wishes you to deliver his uniforms, must I first define uniforms? And afterward identify Washington Faulconer? Or the Colonel, as we must all now learn to call him? Good God, Starbuck, and you were at Yale?”
“At the seminary.”
“Ah! That explains all. A mind that can credit the bleatings of theology professors can hardly be expected to understand plain English.” Thaddeus Bird evidently found this insult amusing, for he began to laugh and, at the same time, to jerk his head backward and forward in a motion so like a woodpecker that it was instantly obvious how his nickname had arisen. Yet if Starbuck himself had been asked to christen this thin, angular and unpleasant man with a nickname it would not have been Pecker, but Spider, for there was something about Thaddeus Bird that irresistibly reminded Starbuck of a long-legged, hairy, unpredictable and malevolent spider. “The Colonel has sent me to run some errands in Richmond, while you are to go to Faulconer Court House,” Pecker Bird went on, but in a plump, mocking voice such as he might use to a small and not very clever child. “Stop me if your Yale-educated mind finds any of these instructions difficult to understand. You will go to Faulconer Court House where the Colonel”—Bird paused to make a mocking salute—“wishes for your company, but only if the tailors have finished making his uniforms. You are to be the official conveyor of those uniforms, and of his daughter’s manifold petticoats. Your responsibilities are profound.”
“Petticoats?” Starbuck asked.
“Women’s undergarments,” Bird said maliciously, then sat at Washington Faulconer’s grand piano where he played a swift and remarkably impressive arpeggio before settling into the tune of “John Brown’s Body” to which, without regard to either scansion or tune, he chanted conversationally. “Why does Anna want so many petticoats? Especially as my niece already possesses more petticoats than a reasonable man might have thought necessary for a woman’s comfort, but reason and young ladies have never kept close company. But why does she want Ridley? I cannot answer that question either.” He stopped playing, frowning. “Though he is a remarkably talented artist.”
“Ethan Ridley?” Starbuck, trying to follow the tortuous changes in Bird’s conversation, asked in surprise.
“Remarkably talented,” Bird confirmed rather wistfully, as though he envied Ridley’s skill, “but lazy, of course. Natural talent going to waste, Starbuck. Just wasted! He won’t work at his talent. He prefers to marry money rather than make it.” He accentuated this judgment by playing a gloomy minor chord, then frowned. “He is a slave of nature,” he said, looking expectantly at Starbuck.
“And a son of hell?” The second half of the Shakespearean insult slipped gratifyingly into Starbuck’s mind.
“So you have read something other than your sacred texts.” Bird seemed disappointed, but then recovered his malevolence as he lowered his voice into a confiding hiss, saying, “But I shall tell you, Starbuck, that the slave of nature will marry the Colonel’s daughter! Why does that family contract such marriages? God knows, and he is not saying, though at present, mark my words, young Ridley is in bad odor with the Colonel. He has failed to recruit Truslow! Ah-ha!” Bird crashed a demonic and celebratory discord on the piano. “No Truslow! Ridley had better look to his laurels, had he not? The Colonel is not best pleased.”
“Who is Truslow?” Starbuck asked somewhat despairingly.
“Truslow!” Bird said portentously, then paused to play a foreboding couplet of bass notes. “Truslow, Starbuck, is our county’s murderer! Our outlaw! Our hardscrabble demon from the hills! Our beast, our creature of darkness, our fiend!” Bird cackled at this fine catalog of mischief, then twisted on the piano bench to face Starbuck. “Thomas Truslow is a rogue, and my brother-in-law the Colonel, who lacks common sense, wishes to recruit Truslow into the Legion because, he says, Truslow served as a soldier in Mexico. And so Truslow did, but the real reason, mark my words well, Starbuck, is that my brother-in-law believes that by recruiting him he can harness Truslow’s reputation to the greater glory of his ridiculous Legion. In brief, Starbuck, the great Washington Faulconer desires the murderer’s approval. The world is a strange place indeed. Shall we now go and buy petticoats?”
“You say Truslow’s a murderer?”
“I did indeed. He stole another man’s wife, and killed the man thus to obtain her. He then volunteered for the Mexican War to escape the constables, but after the war he took up where he left off. Truslow’s not a man to ignore his talents, you understand? He killed a man who insulted his wife, and cut the throat of another who tried to steal his horse, which is a rare jest, believe me, because Truslow must be the biggest horse thief this side of the Mississippi.” Bird took a thin and very dark cigar from one of his shabby pockets. He paused to bite the tip off the cigar, then spat the shred of tobacco across the room in the vague direction of a porcelain spittoon. “And he hates Yankees. Detests them! If he meets you in the Legion, Starbuck, he’ll probably hone his murdering talents still further!” Bird lit the cigar, puffed smoke and cackled amusement, his head nodding back and forth. “Have I satisfied your curiosity, Starbuck? Have we gossiped sufficiently? Good, then we shall go and see if the Colonel’s uniforms are truly ready and then we shall buy Anna her petticoats. To war, Starbuck, to war!”
Thaddeus Bird first strode across town to Boyle and Gambles’s huge warehouse where he placed an order for ammunition. “Minié bullets. The nascent Legion is firing them faster than the factories can make them. We need more, and still more. You can provide minié bullets?”
“Indeed we can, Mister Bird.”
“I am not Mister Bird!” Bird announced grandly, “but Major Bird of the Faulconer Legion.” He clicked his heels together and offered the elderly salesman a bow.
Starbuck gaped at Bird. Major Bird? This ludicrous man whom Washington Faulconer had declared would never be commissioned? A man, Faulconer claimed, not fit to be a cookhouse corporal? A man, if Starbuck remembered rightly, who would be commissioned only over Faulconer’s dead body? And Bird was to be made a major while professional European soldiers, veterans of real wars, were being turned down for mere lieutenancies?
“And we need still more percussion caps”—Bird was oblivious of Starbuck’s astonishment—“thousands of the little devils. Send them to the Faulconer Legion Encampment at Faulconer Court House in Faulconer County.” He signed the order with a flourish, Major Thaddeus Caractacus Evillard Bird. “Grandparents,” he curtly explained the grandiose names to Starbuck, “two Welsh, two French, all dead, let us go.” He led the way out of the warehouse and downhill toward Exchange Alley.
Starbuck matched strides with the long-pacing Bird and broached the difficult subject. “Allow me to congratulate you on your commission, Major Bird?”
“So your ears work, do they? That’s good news, Starbuck. A young man should possess all his faculties before age, liquor and stupidity erase them. Yes, indeed. My sister bestirred herself from her sickbed to prevail upon the Colonel to commission me a major in his Legion. I do not know upon what precise authority Colonel Brigadier General Captain Lieutenant Admiral the Lord High Executioner Faulconer makes such an appointment, but perhaps we do not need authority in these rebellious days. We are, after all, Robinson Crusoes marooned upon an authority-less island, and we must therefore fashion what we can out of what we find there, and my brother-in-law has discovered within himself the power to make me a major, so that is what I am.”
“You desired such an appointment?” Starbuck asked very politely, because he could not really imagine this extraordinary man wanting to be a soldier.
“Desired?” Pecker Bird came to an abrupt stop on the pavement, thus forcing a lady to make an exaggerated swerve about the obstacle he had so suddenly created. “Desired? That is a pertinent question, Starbuck, such as one might have expected from a Boston youth. Desired?” Bird tangled his beard in his fingers as he thought of his answer. “My sister desired it, that is certain, for she is stupid enough to believe that military rank is an automatic conferrer of respectability, which quality she feels I lack, but did I desire the appointment? Yes I did. I must confess I did, and why, you ask? Because firstly, Starbuck, wars are customarily conducted by fools and it thus behooves me to offer myself as an antidote to that sad reality.” The schoolmaster offered this appalling immodesty in all apparent sincerity and in a voice that had attracted the amused attention of several pedestrians. “And secondly it will take me away from the schoolroom. Do you know how I despise children? How I dislike them? How their very voices make me wish to scream in protest! Their mischief is cruel, their presence demeaning and their conversation tedious. Those are my chief reasons.” Suddenly, and as abruptly as he had stopped his forward progress, Major Thaddeus Caractacus Evillard Bird began striding downhill again with his long-ragged pace.
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