The Yankee Widow

by Linda Lael Miller

  The two men greeted each other with a handshake.

  Rogan turned to assess the leaning hulk of the tavern and gave a low chuckle. Shook his head. “Damn,” he said. “Couldn’t you have chosen someplace a little harder to find? I must have ridden past this pile of boards half a dozen times before I saw that speck of light.”

  “I guess I figured a bonfire might start a party I didn’t care to attend,” Bridger replied, glad to see his friend again, and, at the same time, dreading the conversation to come.

  Rogan crossed the reins loosely over the gray’s neck and left the animal to graze in the deep grass. He took his hat off, lowered it to his side.

  “You went to a lot of trouble arranging this little gathering, Bridger,” he said quietly, “and I went to about twice as much trouble getting here. Go ahead and speak your piece.”

  Bridger sighed. He’d rehearsed this discussion in his head time and again, since he’d left Caroline’s farm the previous summer, skulking away before sunrise like a thief, clad in a Yankee uniform and riding a useless horse. But now, facing his best friend, he fell a little short of eloquence.

  “I’m in love with Caroline,” he said bluntly.

  Rogan thrust the splayed fingers of his left hand through his hair, looked away briefly. “I was afraid of that,” he said after a silence so long that Bridger had started to brace himself for a haymaker of a punch. Controlled fury blazed in Rogan’s eyes when their gazes met again. “How serious is this?”

  “On my side? Very. I’m not sure how Caroline feels.”

  Rogan cursed, visibly collected himself. “You’ve seen her? Since you left her farm after Gettysburg, I mean?”

  Bridger shook his head. “No, I haven’t. I managed to get a short note through to her, with some papers I sent Enoch, but for all I know, Caroline never saw it.” He paused. “Listen, Rogan, I—”

  Rogan put up his free hand. “Stop. Don’t say you didn’t mean for this to happen, because if you do, we’re going to have a war of our own, right here and now. I knew you were taken with her before I left. That’s why I told you how I felt about Caroline.”

  “I could really use a drink,” Bridger said.

  Unbelievably, Rogan laughed, the sound hoarse and short-lived. He turned, went back to his mount, rummaged through his saddlebags and brought out a silver flask, then tossed it to his friend.

  Bridger caught it handily, unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow. The stuff scorched all the way down to his belly, where it burst like a shell loaded with rocks and rusty nails. “Good God,” he sputtered, once he’d regained his breath. “What is this? Embalming fluid?”

  “You expected good Kentucky bourbon?”

  Bridger laughed, steadied himself and took a second drink. Gave back the flask. If Rogan wanted to skirt the subject of Caroline for a while, he’d go along with it. “Not really,” he said mildly, running the back of one hand across his mouth. “Would have been a pleasant surprise, though.”

  Rogan sighed. Gulped down some of the whiskey himself before putting the flask away. He walked over to Orion, ran a practiced hand of the stallion’s flank and crouched to examine his legs.

  “This is a Fairhaven horse,” he said.

  “Yes. And be careful. Uniform or none, Orion knows a Yankee when he smells one, and he’s likely to cave your skull in if you spook him.”

  Rogan lingered a few more minutes, at his ease with any horse. It had always puzzled Bridger how a man raised on the streets of New York City could acquire such an affinity; most really fine horsemen had been in the saddle before they were old enough to walk. Rogan hadn’t learned to ride until he’d started boarding school at fourteen.

  “You’ve been home since we last met,” he said, straightening, patting Orion’s ebony neck a couple of times before turning back to Bridger. “To Fairhaven, I mean.”

  “After I left Caroline’s place,” Bridger affirmed. “I had to see how Amalie was getting along. Handle some business.”

  “What kind of business?”

  “I did a little horse trading, turned loose the slaves who didn’t want to stay, spat on my father’s grave once or twice. With Amalie provided for, at least temporarily, I went back to my regiment.”

  “That’s how you got Orion, here? Horse trading?”

  “No. He was foaled at Fairhaven, the last of a long and illustrious line. I swapped his kid sister, as perfect a filly as I’ve ever seen, for a certain runaway slave.”

  “Jubie, I presume?”

  Bridger nodded.

  “And speaking of kid sisters,” Rogan said, “is Amalie well?”

  “She’s doing fine, considering,” Bridger answered, feeling a wrench at the thought of Sherman and his blue-bellies, ravaging Georgia. He’d begged Amalie to leave Fairhaven, take refuge in the North, but she’d refused, said she’d rather burn with the fields and the plantation house than set foot in Yankee territory.

  “She was always a beautiful young woman,” Rogan said quietly.

  “Believe me,” Bridger responded. “Amalie is still beautiful.” To prove it, he took a small photographic likeness from his kit, handed it over.

  Rogan went to stand in front of the window, examined the picture in the dying light of the candle on the other side of the filthy glass. He was silent for a long time, studying Amalie’s image. Then, after closing the case, he extended the photograph to Bridger and asked, “So she’s still at Fairhaven?”

  “Yes,” Bridger said grimly. He didn’t take the photograph.

  “You do realize that Sherman’s in Georgia, swearing he’ll leave the place in ruins?”

  Bridger nodded. The bad whiskey roiled in his gut, seared its way upward to scald the back of his throat. “Keep the picture,” he rasped. “I’m in no position to ask for any favors, but if I don’t make it home when this is over, will you see that she’s safe? You’re probably the one Yankee in all of Creation she would trust.”

  “You’re too damn mean to die,” Rogan said. “But if it turns out I’m wrong about that, I’ll head for Fairhaven, soon as I get word of your untimely and probably swashbuckling death.” He paused. “I intend to see Amalie in any case.”

  Bridger looked away, wondering as he had in the past what, if any, feelings still existed between those two. He suspected they did, particularly on her part. But when he’d tried to talk to his sister about it, she’d been vague. “Thank you.”

  “Anything for my best friend,” Rogan said, with a slight emphasis on the last two words.

  Bridger decided he’d had that gibe coming and ignored it. There were more important things to talk about. “What happens now?” he asked. “Besides both of us doing our best to survive this war?”

  Rogan took his time answering, rubbed the back of his neck, studied the sky, speckled with stars. Sighed. “We’re back to Caroline,” he said.

  “Yes,” Bridger agreed.

  Another silence followed.

  Rogan was the one to break it. “This isn’t a horserace or a chess match, Bridger, and we aren’t kids anymore, playing king-of-the-hill on the school grounds.”

  “So I’ve noticed,” Bridger said. “I’ve never had a better friend than you, Rogan. If we were talking about any woman besides Caroline, I swear to you, I would step aside. This is different.”

  Rogan smiled ruefully. “I know.”

  For the first time, Bridger consciously acknowledged a bitter truth. No matter how things turned out with Caroline, the loss of this friendship would leave him with a wound that might never heal, and wounds to the mind and spirit festered and spread their secret poison as surely as the physical kind rotted flesh.

  The end result was the same. Death of the body, or death of every good thing a man cherished in himself—courage, integrity, reason and, worst of all, the ability to love truly, without reservation.

  He closed
his eyes at the thought of what he could become. Some version of his father, perhaps, or his half brother.

  Mercifully, although he probably hadn’t intended it, Rogan jolted him out of his black thoughts. “Maybe we had the right idea when we were kids, both of us going for whatever—or whomever—we wanted, after a handshake. From then on, it was full steam ahead, no holds barred, devil take the hindmost. Remember?”

  Bridger’s voice was hoarse, and his eyes smarted. “I remember,” he replied. It had been the handshake that mattered most, the tacit agreement that, win or lose, the friendship would stand.

  Without another word, Rogan put out his hand and Bridger clasped it.

  Both men tightened their grip, held on, silently sealing the bargain, then letting go.

  Rogan turned away, headed for his horse, mounted. “Don’t catch any cannon balls,” he said in parting. With a wry salute, he wheeled the gray around and rode off in the direction from which he’d come.

  Bridger did not watch his friend out of sight. Though he’d never subscribed to superstition, he’d been immersed in it from an early age; his mother and all the house slaves had worried over small signs and portents—the dangers of placing a hat on a bed, of spilling salt, of opening an umbrella inside the house, of gazing after someone leaving until you couldn’t see that person anymore.

  He had deliberately flouted such rules, walking under ladders, courting the company of black cats, refusing to knock on wood at the mention of some dire possibility.

  Tonight, however, he was taking no chances.

  He stepped inside the wreck of O’Malley’s Tavern, snuffed out the candle and said goodbye to the ghosts. He left the door agape, in case any of those forlorn spirits longed to roam, swung up into Orion’s saddle and started back to his regiment, back to the blood and the hunger and the proud refusal to admit defeat.

  Even though it seemed inevitable.

  31

  Appomattox, Virginia,

  April 9, 1865

  Rogan

  General Robert E. Lee, clad in his splendid gray uniform with its dashing scarlet sash, cut a majestic figure as he rode up to the home of one Wilmer McLean, mounted on his great dapple-gray warhorse, Traveller. To look at him, no one would suspect there’d been a fierce battle that very morning at the Appomattox Court House, a Union victory, though there was still intermittent cannon fire as the fighting dwindled.

  Rogan watched the great enemy from the porch of the McLean House, a tangle of emotions in his throat—admiration, sympathy, relief, sorrow. As the general stepped down from the saddle, the ceremonial sword at his side glittered in the afternoon sunlight. He had to be the most dignified, self-contained man Rogan had ever seen, this legend, this Titan of strategic warfare; he was beaten, he had to know that, yet he stood tall. Handed off the reins to a young Federal soldier, who stood waiting in tremulous awe.

  It was still speculation, of course, that General Lee intended to surrender himself and his beloved Army of Northern Virginia to the highest Union authority save Lincoln himself, General Ulysses S. Grant.

  Rogan had been promoted to the rank of major during the endless siege of Petersburg and, by a fluke, he’d been assigned to Grant’s staff several months back, when the general had seen him lay out a cavalry lieutenant for whipping his horse.

  To Rogan’s utter surprise and, at first, alarm, Grant had approached him, stood at his side, a cigar clamped between his teeth, his eyes keen on the lieutenant sprawled at their feet. As usual, he had looked nothing like a general, a man of small stature and quiet intelligence, standing there in his mud-spattered boots and the garb of a lowly private.

  “I’m obliged, Major,” he’d said amiably. “You’ve saved me the trouble of taking a bullwhip to that fellow. Can’t abide cruelty to a dumb beast. It’s a sign of deviant character.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rogan had answered, somewhat bewildered. Until that day, he’d seen the general only from a distance, but he’d heard plenty about him, good and bad.

  He was purported to be a hopeless drunk, for one thing. Rogan had doubted that, even before his reassignment, when he’d come to know Grant as a man whose worst failings were probably his tendency to trust too readily and a simple but extreme case of homesickness. He sensed that Grant missed his wife and children sorely, and brooded over them in the rare quiet hours the war allotted him.

  His gifts, being more obvious, were his fierce determination to finish the war and restore the Union, his extraordinary horsemanship and, in stark contrast to his predecessors, the capacity to dog Lee’s army relentlessly, like a hungry hound in pursuit of a rabbit. He seemed to understand, as McClellan and Hooker and even Meade had not, that Lee and his wily cohort, notably Jeb Stuart and the late Stonewall Jackson, elusive as they were, had to be chased until they were caught, even if it meant following them right down into their holes. To Grant, they were not superhuman, as Northerners feared, but mortal men, tired and hungry and beleaguered on all sides.

  They could be brought to heel; it was a matter of wearing them down, cutting off their supply and telegraph lines, destroying their bridges and railroads and, finally, cornering them, once and for all, as he’d done at Petersburg in Virginia. That siege had lasted the better part of a year—292 days to be exact. By the end, a little more than two weeks ago, it had cost about 70,000 deaths.

  Yet Grant’s objective was not one of vengeance, but of resolution and, eventually, reconciliation. In order to reach those objectives, however, he granted no quarter. He would settle for nothing less than complete victory; hence his nickname: Unconditional Surrender Grant.

  Now, Rogan thought, here it was, within his grasp.

  He had to know that Lee was at the McLean place, ready to discuss terms.

  So where the hell was he?

  Lee was approaching the front steps, and his solemn gaze met Rogan’s. He gave an almost imperceptible nod of greeting or acknowledgment, but his expression was bleak.

  Rogan removed his campaign hat, nodded in return. He respected this man, even admired him, though he had fought to the full extent of his abilities to see him vanquished, would have done so all over again, and stuck with the enterprise until victory was assured, regardless of the terrible cost.

  Once General Lee had gone inside the McLean House, escorted by several Union officers but not under formal guard, Rogan replaced his hat and scanned the small crowd gathered in the dooryard.

  All were Federals of varying ranks, standing in small groups, talking among themselves, quietly and earnestly. Rogan knew, without listening to their words, that they were speculating, wondering what, if anything, Lee’s visit might mean. Some would be convinced that the worst of the war, if not the war itself, was finally over.

  Wishful thinking probably played a part in their reasoning; battle weary and yearning to put soldiering behind them for good, they wanted to go home.

  Others, however, were almost certainly arguing that a man like Lee would never surrender, and their position had its merits, given the general’s many successful campaigns.

  Mentally, Rogan reviewed the situation, trying to think objectively. Although Lee himself had proposed this meeting with Grant, after losing more than half his broken, footsore and starving army in the course of a single week, and with events culminating that same morning in a decisive Union victory right there at the village of Appomattox Court House, the head of the Confederate forces hadn’t actually agreed to surrender.

  He and his army were caught, like so many Sunday-supper chickens wrestled into burlap sacks, destined for the chopping block. Rogan knew that there would be no escape; Lee’s one hope, that of joining forces with General Joe Johnston, currently in North Carolina, regrouping and then carrying bravely on, was finished.

  If Lee had not believed this, he wouldn’t be here.

  The proud South had, at long last, been brought to its knees, but
Rogan took no satisfaction in that. To him, the South was more than the setting for books like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, more than cruel overseers, spoiled aristocrats, cotton fields and slaves. It was Bridger’s home, and Amalie’s.

  He had seen his share of derelict towns, shabbiness and poverty, both in the South and the North.

  The South had shacks and sharecroppers, yes, but it had no corner on poverty. He himself knew that firsthand, orphan that he was. Besides, there were small farms as well as hardscrabble patches of rocky dirt, Southern farms worth the time and grit it would take to make them productive again. There were factories and shops, cities and towns, churches and schools and cemeteries.

  And there were grand—or once grand—houses, such as Fairhaven. It had changed him, that mansion, from the moment he’d stepped down from the carriage that first long-ago summer, right behind Bridger. There were larger homes on Park Avenue, where he’d once shared an airless attic room with his mother before she decided to be quit of him, but none of them equaled Fairhaven, with its vast grounds, its flourishing gardens and many shade trees, its barns and paddocks and pastures of sweet grass.

  For all Rogan knew, Sherman had reduced that glorious, sweltering Eden to timbers and ash.

  If so, what had become of Amalie since that letter he’d received two years ago? She’d grown into a beauty, he knew that from the likeness of her Bridger had given him the last time they met; he carried the photograph with him everywhere he went, looked at it often.

  Amalie had been a bright, pretty tomboy those memorable summers, with her black hair in pigtails. She’d follow Bridger and Rogan wherever they went, constantly up to mischief—stealing their breeches from the banks of the pond when they went swimming, hiding herself under their beds or inside their wardrobes and giving her presence away with giggles.

  He remembered that last morning of the third summer they’d been there, just before he and Bridger were to return to school. She’d caught hold of Rogan’s hand, and tugged until he’d leaned down. “When I grow up, I’m going to marry you, Rogan McBride,” she’d whispered in his ear.