The Winter Family

by Clifford Jackman

  “What do we do?” the Negro asked.

  Bill, Tom tried to say.

  But Bill only shrugged.

  “Ask Winter,” he said.

  27

  Jan Müller led his men from the mill out into the fresh air, feeling physically and morally tired, wiping sweat and soot out of his eyes. They had thoroughly wrecked both the mill and the factory. Then he saw the blackened skeleton jutting out of the water. It took him a moment to realize that it was all that remained of the bridge.

  They made their way to the center of the village, where they found Quentin and the rest of the Union foragers crouched on their heels in the town square. Many houses burned, while others had been smashed and looted. Angry blacks ran back and forth, hurling flaming torches and shouting in triumph.

  “Lieutenant Ross, what is happening?” Jan asked.

  “Why hello, Sergeant Müller,” Quentin replied.

  “Why didn’t you tell us the bridge was gone?”

  “Well, Sergeant,” Quentin said, “I made the decision that it was necessary to inflict some punitive damages on this village. After all, General Sherman made it perfectly clear that the Union Army’s right to forage was clear and uncontroversial and attacks on his foragers would not be tolerated. The level of resistance we have encountered in this village has been nothing short of astonishing. Therefore, it was necessary, in the good general’s own words, ‘to order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless.’ ”

  Jan looked concerned, but he didn’t say anything more.

  “Look!” Reggie cried.

  Winter, Johnson, and Bread were coming up from the riverbank. Bread and Johnson were carrying a wounded man between them.

  “Lieutenant,” Winter said.

  “Where have you been?” Quentin asked.

  “We took on the Confederates,” Winter said. “This here is their captain. He’s still alive.”

  Bread and Johnson dropped Captain Tom Jackson onto the ground, and the Union soldiers gathered around him and gawked.

  Tom closed his eyes and turned his head away from them.

  “Well done, Winter,” Quentin cried. “I’ll see you commended for this!”

  “Who is this Negro?” Jan said.

  “He saved my life,” Winter said.

  “Well then, he deserves our thanks,” Quentin said.

  “No,” Jan said. “He is the one who killed his master. He is the slave Freddy.”

  “I didn’t do nothing,” Johnson said.

  “I know you,” Jan said.

  “He saved my life,” Winter repeated flatly.

  “Sergeant Müller, a word, please,” Quentin said.

  Quentin took Jan by the elbow and led him a little away.

  “But sir,” Jan said.

  “Now, Sergeant, those rebels took Reggie and Winter and this Negro saved them both. His only crime is the killing of his cruel master. Surely you don’t expect me to kill him, or to turn him over to the army.”

  “We have to, sir,” Jan said.

  “You trust me, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well then, leave it in my hands for now,” Quentin said. “We can discuss it later. Perhaps we will be able to apply for clemency on his behalf.”

  “Very well, sir,” Jan said. His sensitive eyes, disapproving, met Johnson’s defiant gaze. For a while neither of them looked away.

  “Well, we should be moving out soon,” Quentin said. “Are we all here? Where’s Duncan?”

  “He’s dead,” Winter said.

  “Dead?” Charlie Empire cried.

  “The Confederates killed him too,” Winter said. “Duncan crossed the river and a little half-breed jumped him. He’s dead.”

  Winter’s tone was unemotional.

  “What do you mean he’s dead?” Charlie cried again, starting to his feet. “How could he be dead? Why would he have gone to the other side of the river, away from the town?”

  Charlie’s voice was shocked and wildly angry. Johnny was on his feet too. But Winter only shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Charlie,” Winter said. “I don’t know why people do the things they do.”

  “Sergeant Müller,” Quentin said. “Take them across the river and secure their brother’s remains. Take a boat if you can find one; there must be one around here somewhere. The rest of you, we are to finish our duties in this town and continue moving east.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait here?” Jan asked. “And make our report?”

  “Not yet,” Quentin said. His eyes were lit up and dancing. “Not yet. I want to keep moving. Not yet. I … perhaps at Milledgeville. Yes. Perhaps then. Just not yet.”

  28

  When the body of the Union Army arrived at the ruins of Planter’s Factory they marveled at the destruction. They were astonished to hear that Union foragers had incited the slaves to violent rebellion. Astonished, and skeptical. It was exactly the sort of story most likely to inflame southern sensibilities, and nothing similar had happened elsewhere during the entire war.

  One thing that did not worry them was the destruction of the bridge. Less than an hour after their arrival, the engineers were hard at work, unloading flat, light pontoon frames off the wagons and dragging them to the water. The frames were then attached to one another with canvas sides and anchored six feet apart, all the way across the river. Next the men laid beams across the pontoons, then planks across the beams. The new bridge was ready by dawn, and the right flank of Sherman’s army marched across it that very same day, chasing Quentin Ross and his men across Georgia.

  For a time, Quentin’s lies to his superiors were believed because he told them with such impassioned conviction, and because they were more plausible than the truth. The Confederates had every reason to exaggerate the crimes of Union foragers; Quentin had no reason at all to do the things he did. But by the time they reached the sea in mid-December, it was over. Quentin had begged off two appointments with the brigade commander, claiming exigent circumstances. He was informed that if he missed a third he would be shot as a deserter.

  Very few of Quentin’s men had seen the sea. It made an impression upon them, all that endless blue, so vast beyond imagination. Perhaps it affected their behavior; perhaps it showed them that none of them had been the men they had believed themselves to be. For when Quentin told them they were outlaws because they had sheltered a slave who had killed his master, and that if they did not wish to surrender him then they would have to desert, they all deserted as one.

  Sergeant Müller had advocated strongly in favor of abandoning Fred Johnson, but Quentin was loyal to Johnson, as were Winter and many of the other men. Some were concerned that having aided and abetted Johnson for so long, a pardon was not certain. But there was also something more. Something that had stirred in them, gestating, feeding and growing and coiling over itself, waiting to spill out, to be born. A swath of smoke and carnage and destruction had followed them to the sea, to the blue edge of infinity, to the end of the world. To turn back then? To surrender themselves to hypocrites who claimed rules governed what they’d seen? What they’d done? To have come this far, only to be hanged?

  They turned north instead, staying well ahead of the army, passing themselves off as foragers. In the chaos and destruction visited upon the Carolinas, ten times as furious as the march through Georgia, their depredations were scarcely noticed. When the army turned east toward Wilmington, Quentin and his band headed west. In the disorder of the new peace, with the roads choked and flooded with the dispossessed, it was easy for them to travel to the City of Kansas. Sleeping in barns during the day and riding at night, they took a savage part in the endless skirmishes and settling of scores that marked that ill-named peace. A lesson in human brutality taught to a people and to a land that could not have needed it less.

  They lived well enough, paid in coin by vengeful Unionists. Their group attracted Union veterans, former slaves, and young troublemakers. Their central meeting place in the City of Kansas
was the home of one Molly Shakespeare, a whore with three young sons who fancied herself a thespian.

  But it was a directionless life, without hope and purpose, the men always looking out for vengeful Confederates and the forces of the law. There did not seem, at first, to be any sort of path forward. However, events were in motion in the South, where the antebellum way of life had been destroyed. The blacks were free and they sought to better themselves, to learn and to lead. Former Confederates had been stripped of the vote and barred from public life, so blacks and Republicans were elected to many southern offices. Northerners purchased land for pennies. And in December of 1865, something happened that changed their lives forever. In Pulaski, Tennessee, six well-educated Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan.

  Robed and hooded men riding at night by torchlight. They burned churches and schools, they tarred and feathered carpetbaggers and scalawags, but above all, they murdered black leaders: schoolteachers and politicians and any who sought to vote.

  Word of the talents of Quentin and his men made their way south. Union veterans were already forming unofficial bands to fight the Klan, and the newly wealthy Unionist landlords sought to protect their power and holdings from vigilantes. By then, the landowners of Kansas were only too happy to see Quentin depart; despite his effectiveness, he had worn out his welcome.

  So they rode south, to continue the war they had left behind them only a year ago. With the South in rebellion, they could work out in the open, their past misdeeds public knowledge. For years they hired themselves out as mercenaries to one carpetbagger after another, but despite every victory, the violence only accelerated. Captain Tom Jackson, recovered from his injuries and burning for vengeance, now led a group of Klansmen who hid in swampy forests and conducted midnight raids on the freedmen and northern blacks who were felling the timber in the Mississippi Delta.

  Quentin and his men were powerless to stop them until Augustus Winter learned the location of Jackson’s next attack. Jackson’s men were butchered from behind and Quentin’s men were celebrated as heroes. Until photographs circulated, in newspapers all over the country, of the men, women, and children killed in a barn in Aberdeen, and it became clear how, precisely, Augustus Winter had learned where Jackson was planning to strike.

  Quentin and his men had always had problems with their superiors and employers. In Georgia, Kansas, the Deep South. Orders slightly exceeded. Unnecessary force. Petty, profitless crime. Now it was all remembered and they became despised across the nation. The men fell out, disbanded, and spread across the country.

  But then, in 1871, a fire burned in Chicago for two days and destroyed three square miles of the city. In the wake of the destruction, the Democrats (who had been banished from politics since the end of the War Between the States) were included in a unity government and grew rich by skimming city contracts and powerful by appointing flunkies to the judiciary and the police. A mayoral election was scheduled for the fall of 1872, and in Washington fears grew of a Democratic political machine in Illinois to match the one in New York. It was whispered that the fate of not only the state, but the country, hung in the balance. And with the stakes so high anything became possible.

  29

  A train began to move in Rome, Georgia. Thick black plumes pumped out of the smokestack and the whistle trilled. The wheels accelerated infinitesimally but inevitably, and soon the train was out of the station, heading west toward Alabama.

  The train came upon the barricade ten miles out of town. At first, to the engineer, it looked as if a group of men were trying to move something across the tracks. It was broad daylight, and a robbery was the furthest thing from his mind. He pulled on the whistle, and the piercing shriek of it rang out through the trees, over the hills, and across the narrow river. The men by the tracks did not move. As the train drew closer the engineer saw the white sheets draped over the men’s heads, the rifles they were holding, and the heavy trees and boulders blocking the track.

  “God damn it,” the engineer swore.

  The fireman looked up from his dime novel.

  The engineer considered attempting to barrel through the barricade. But the thought prompted a horrible vision of the train derailing and the passengers being hurled against the ceiling or through the windows, glass breaking, screaming. So he cursed again and yanked on the brakes, hard, so the fireman was thrown forward off his chair.

  “What’s happening?” the fireman cried.

  Shouts came from the passenger car behind the locomotive.

  The engineer lifted a shotgun from the rack above the window.

  “Robbers?” the fireman said. “How many of them?”

  “Looks like they’re from the Klan,” the engineer said. He was a little man, missing his left leg below the knee, neat in his dress, with a bushy mustache. “I’ll be goddamned if I let them get into the express car.”

  “You really want to die for the Brink’s Company?” the fireman asked, but he lifted his shovel, ready to use it as a weapon.

  The train had stopped and the Klansmen were running at them. The engineer leaned out of the window to take a shot, but someone jumped up from the ground and grabbed the barrel of the shotgun with one hand and the collar of his jacket with the other. The man braced his legs against the steel side of the train and hauled the engineer through the window.

  “Jesus!” the fireman cried.

  He dropped his shovel and held his hands in the air.

  “Open the door!” someone barked.

  Down on the ground, the acrobatic Klansman was kneeling on the engineer’s back and jamming a pistol against his head. The other Klansmen, dressed in everyday clothes except for the white hoods, clambered up the ladder into the locomotive and pushed into the passenger cars.

  “Hands up!” they barked. “Get them up where we can see them!”

  Gunshots barked in quick succession. Screams from the passengers.

  “That’ll be the conductor,” the Klansman said as he bound the engineer’s wrists behind his back with wire. “You’re a salty bunch, ain’t you?”

  “What’s your accent?” the engineer said. “You ain’t from around here.”

  The Klansman jerked the engineer to his feet.

  “Are you boys even in the Klan?” the engineer demanded.

  The Klansman let out a low chuckle and said, “As far as you’re concerned, I’m the grand wizard.”

  The engineer clenched his teeth and allowed the Klansman to propel him up the ladder into the train.

  Inside the Klansmen were moving through the first passenger car, pointing their weapons at the passengers, collecting wallets, watches, and jewelry. A smear of blood was on the rear wall. Underneath it the conductor sat in a crumpled heap, not moving.

  “You goddamn murderers,” the engineer said.

  “You all want to act like heroes,” the grand wizard said. “Well, in my experience, this is what heroes get.”

  “We can’t get into the express car,” a Klansman said to the grand wizard.

  “Yes we can,” the grand wizard replied.

  “The door’s made of iron,” the Klansman said, “and they bolted it from the other side.”

  “Well then,” the grand wizard said. “We’re gonna have to get them to open it.”

  The engineer let out a short laugh.

  “Think that’s funny, do you?” the grand wizard asked.

  “I think you’re all a joke,” the engineer said as he limped through the passenger car. “I think you’re all a disgrace to southern manhood. I think you’re a disgrace to the Confederate States of America, which I gave my leg fighting for. The Klan’s supposed to fight for white rights. Here you are robbing honest southern folk trying to make an honest living.”

  “You’re full of opinions,” the grand wizard said, leading the engineer through another car filled with passengers, all of their hands in the air, no one moving. At the end of the car was the promised steel door, locked shut. As they approached it, the grand
wizard ducked behind the engineer to avoid being shot through the eye slot.

  “Don’t listen to anything they say!” the engineer shouted.

  “Who’d they shoot?” an expressman called through the door.

  “They got Bedford,” the engineer said. “They snuck up on me and Ronnie. Don’t worry about us none, we deserve whatever we get.”

  The grand wizard struck the engineer in the back of the head, hard but not too hard, just to shut him up.

  “I’ll make this short,” the grand wizard said. “This is a robbery. You open that door, you open the safe, and we will be on our way. If you don’t do what I say, so help me God, I will personally kill every man, woman, and child on this train. I’ll save you for last, and what I do to you won’t take long, but I’ll fit a goddamn eternity into it.”

  “You’re bluffing,” an expressman said.

  “No,” the grand wizard said. “I ain’t. And I’ll prove it to you.”

  “You can’t prove something like that.”

  “Sure I can. This little old engineer has got plenty of salt and pepper, don’t he?”

  “If you lay one hand on him …”

  The grand wizard grabbed the engineer’s shoulder and spun him around. The engineer braced for a blow, or a shot, but nothing came. He noticed that the other Klansmen had fallen quiet. They were looking at their shoes. They seemed almost abashed.

  “Look into my eyes,” the grand wizard said.

  The engineer did, and what he saw took his breath away. He opened his mouth but no words came out.

  “Donald?” the expressman said through the door. His voice was unsure. “Donald, what’s he doing to you?”

  “My god,” the engineer said.

  His bladder released. The sound of urine hitting the floor was unmistakable.

  “Donald?” the expressman said. “Donald?”

  “Open the door,” the engineer said. “Open the door.”

  And the magic word was being whispered back and forth, moving through the passenger cars like waves chopping across the surface of an unruly sea: Winter, Winter, Winter.