by John Jakes
“Cody. Will F. Cody.”
On horseback with their pack mules in single file, the Jackson Trading Company rode over the autumn prairie, bound for the land beyond the hazy blue horizon to the south. They rode beside the same trampled buffalo trail they’d followed to Indian Territory the year before. In the northwest, dark gray clouds raced toward the apex of the sky. Every half minute or so the clouds lit up, white within.
Above the traders a hawk rode the air currents. Red-tailed and dusky gray of body, she sank and soared in great spirals, her heavy wings spread to their full fifty inches.
Charles alternately watched the hawk and the storm clouds. Wooden Foot said the hawk was looking for mice and gophers, either of which she could see from high above. Suddenly the hawk turned, flexed her wings hard and flew straight away into the rough air beginning to blow out of the north. Charles wondered if something had alarmed her.
The land here undulated, so that the prospect ahead was that of a series of continual rises, none higher than six feet. It was late afternoon. At about the same hour two days ago, they’d crossed the Smoky Hill Road, on which wagons still creaked west with as much speed as their drivers could manage, smelling winter in the crisp September air. At Fort Riley, an officer had told Charles that something like a hundred thousand emigrant wagons had traveled through during the summer.
You wouldn’t know it here. They’d ridden past an isolated farm at sunset yesterday. Two youngsters had waved at them from the feed lot, and Boy had laughed and gurgled long after the children were left behind. They’d seen no human beings since. In an old Harper’s Weekly picked up at Riley, Charles had read an amazing article about the great mountain chain of Asia, the Himalayas. “Special from New Delhi by Our Roving Correspondent.” He was fascinated by the description of that remote region, which surely couldn’t be emptier than this prairie under the brow of the approaching storm.
The wind picked up. High as Satan’s knees, the dry, brittle grama grass seethed. It struck Charles that the piebald was nervous. The other animals were too including Fen. The border collie kept running in circles ahead of them, barking.
The dog loped away down the other side of the next rise and disappeared. Only the disturbed motion of the grass marked his trail. Charles studied the sky again. “I wonder why that hawk all of a sudden—”
He stopped, noticing more agitation in the grass. It rippled as though an invisible man was rushing toward them, creating a path but remaining unseen.
“It’s Fen,” Wooden Foot said above the whistling wind. “Wonder what the devil’s biting him?” He reached for his rifle scabbard. “Boy, stick close.”
Boy nudged his horse toward the trader’s. “I’ll have a look,” Charles said, touching Satan with his boot heels.
The piebald trotted about fifty feet to the summit of the rise. Grit and bits of windblown grass flew into Charles’s eyes. He squinted and shielded his eyes with his hand as he topped the rise.
At the bottom, a line of nine men sat on ponies, waiting.
From the center of the line Scar gazed up at him. He and the others wore leggings painted with red stripes, and red paint on their faces, arms, and bare chests. Each wore the Dog Society cap, with a narrow beaded band and feathers from a golden eagle and a raven; the feathers were gathered and tied so they stood up straight. Each man had an eagle-bone whistle on a thong around his neck and carried bow and arrow plus a trade rifle or musket. It was full war regalia.
Scar saw that register on Charles’s face. He grinned and pumped his rifle up and down. The others barked and howled.
Wooden Foot and Boy came riding up behind Charles. “Oh my God, Charlie, this is it. This ain’t no accident. I shouldn’t of tore that clout off him. He’s been waitin’ all summer. He knew we’d prob’ly come back this way.”
Charles started to ask whether they should signal for a parley. The fiery spurt and bang of an Indian rifle made the very idea foolish.
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THE PRESIDENT’S TOUR.
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On the Way from Buffalo to Cleveland.
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A Joyful Good-Speed by the Buffalonians.
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Enthusiastic Demonstrations at Silver Creek and Erie.
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A Party Among the Western Reserve Radicals
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Special dispatch to the New York Times
CLEVELAND, OHIO, Monday, Sept. 3
The enthusiasm of the people increases as the Presidential party progresses on its tour. …
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
September, 1865. Sim’s boy Pride brought me another of those foul-smelling rocks, this one from his own land. Told him I did not know what they were. Must ask Cooper if he ever deigns to visit again …
Judith and Marie-Louise here today. How dear M-L blooms and blossoms! She is already more ample than her mother. Judith says she is smitten with some Charleston boy, but C. deems her too young, won’t permit the boy to call or send small gifts. When M-L is a bit older, and assertive, she and C. may fall out over the issue of suitors.
Judith said C. is praising the President ever since he decided to retaliate for his legislative defeats by taking his case to the people. Johnson presently making what he calls “a swing around the circle,” with Grant and other generals and dignitaries in tow.
Andrew Johnson and his entourage invaded Ohio, the home state of Ben Wade, Stanley’s powerful friend and sometime benefactor. At Cleveland, a major stop, a large and friendly crowd greeted the presidential party at the depot. Outside, a special decorative arch over the street expressed support for the visit. THE CONSTITUTION, it said. WASHINGTON ESTABLISHED IT. LINCOLN DEFENDED IT. JOHNSON WILL PRESERVE IT.
Johnson was pleased. From that point, matters began to deteriorate.
At dusk, the Boy General strode down the corridor of Cleveland’s Kennard Hotel with Secretary of State Seward. The Secretary’s neck still bore red scars from the knife attack of one of John Wilkes Booth’s fellow conspirators, who had struck at Seward on the same night that Lincoln was shot.
The Boy General was nervous. This was Ben Wade’s fiefdom; Radical country. The President had taken to the rails for the avowed purpose of laying the cornerstone of a Stephen Douglas memorial in Chicago. Actually he was stopping along the way to attack the Republicans.
The strategy might have worked had not a large press contingent, including Mr. Gobright of the Associated Press, decided to accompany the President. The reporters wanted to file a new dispatch at every stop, so it was impossible for Johnson to deliver one prepared speech time after time. He was forced to do what he did so badly—extemporize.
The Boy General’s tension was reflected in his bouncing stride and darting blue eyes. Lean, with an aura of high energy, George Armstrong Custer wore a trim civilian suit that showed his slimness to advantage. Small gold spurs jingled on his polished boots. Libbie urged him to wear spurs to remind people of his war exploits.
For a while, because of those exploits, he’d been the talk of the country—an audacious cavalry general with a remarkable talent for victory. Custer’s luck, someone had christened it. Like some magic dust, it had covered him all during the war, bringing him success in the field and fame in the press.
Then came peace, the shrinking Army, and obscurity again. When he mustered out in Texas some months ago, he’d held the rank of captain.
Now he was beginning a slow and deliberate journey back to prominence. In a crucial meeting with Secretary of War Stanton he’d secured a captaincy for his loyal brother Tom, and for himself a lieutenant colonelcy in one of the new Plains regiments. He would soon return to active duty with the Seventh Cavalry.
He considered it a fine opportunity because the Seventh’s commander, General Andrew Jackson Smith, was a thirty-year veteran—an old, tired, and exceedingly vain man. Smith also had responsibility for the entire district of the Upper Arkansas, so Custer assumed that day-to-day command of the Seventh would fall to hi
m. That was ideal for making the regiment his own, in spirit if not in fact.
He didn’t regard the Seventh as a final stopping point, however. Politicians were already promoting Grant as a candidate for President, and Libbie Custer had focused her husband’s eye on that same high office. He was fascinated, but he and Libbie agreed that he needed some spectacular military achievement to propel him to eminence again. Meantime, he could polish his reputation by making this swing with Johnson. Or so he’d thought at the beginning; now the trip was turning out quite badly.
Custer’s long wavy curls bounced on his shoulders and his glance leaped ahead to the open doors of a parlor. He spied Secretary Welles, Admiral Farragut, and other dignitaries. Grant had hurried on to Detroit, pleading indisposition. Privately, Custer believed the indisposition came from a bottle—or possibly from rumors of trouble in Cleveland.
The twenty-seven-year-old soldier hoped the rumors were false. Ohio was his native state, and he’d gotten behind Johnson because he always liked Southerners, even when he fought them. He’d flatly refused a command in one of the new colored regiments, the Ninth, and he believed that if the Republican Party could thrive only with the votes of ex-slaves, it should die.
Nearing the parlor doors, Custer said to Seward, “Do you think the President should be cautioned again, Mr. Secretary? Reminded of Senator Doolittle’s warning?” In a confidential memo, Doolittle had said that Johnson’s enemies never gained advantage from his written opinions, only from his spontaneous answers to questions or heckling.
“I do, George. I’ll take care of it,” Seward said.
They entered the parlor. Fashionably dressed men and women surrounded the President and a young woman who resembled him—Mrs. Martha Patterson, his daughter. She traveled as Johnson’s hostess because his wife, Eliza, was an invalid.
While Seward slipped in close to the President, Custer circled to the French windows. He studied the crowd below. About three hundred and growing, he estimated. He listened to its communal voice. Noisy, but not particularly cheerful. People at the depot had laughed a lot.
He stepped into the center of the balcony doorway. As he expected, it got a reaction.
“There’s Custer!”
That produced some whistles and applause. He started to wave, but checked when he heard booing. His normally ruddy face darkened and he quickly stepped back into the parlor. Perhaps he ought to leave town, as Grant had.
Libbie swooped into the room, drawing attention as she always did. What a lovely creature he’d married, he thought, going to her. Vivid dark eyes, full bosom, the kind of tiny waist other women envied.
She took his arm and whispered, “How is the crowd, Autie?”
“Not friendly. If he does anything more than thank them, he’s a fool.”
Smiling, he led his wife to the large group. “Mr. President,” he said, with warmth. “Good evening.”
The crowd in St. Clair Street was growing impatient. Chinese lanterns across the front of the Kennard Hotel cast a sickly pale light on the upturned faces. Ugly faces, many of them, revealing the ugly tempers beneath.
A man at the back of the crowd observed the people carefully. He wore a shabby overcoat and a Union campaign hat with the crossed metal cannon of the artillery. Another man slipped up beside him. “Everyone’s in place,” the second man said.
“Good. I trust they know what to do.”
“I went over it ’fore I paid them.”
Secretary Seward appeared on the balcony and introduced the President. The stocky, swarthy Andrew Johnson walked out and raised his hands to acknowledge the scanty applause.
“My friends and constituents, thank you for your generous welcome to Cleveland. It is not my intention to make a speech—”
The man in the campaign hat smirked. The idiot nearly always said that, throwing his audiences an obvious cue. One of the hired men took it. “Then don’t.”
Laughter. Clapping. Johnson gripped the balcony rail. “You hecklers seem to follow me everywhere. At least have the courtesy—”
“Where’s Grant?”
“I regret that General Grant is unable to appear with me. He—” Groans covered the rest.
“Why don’t you want colored men to vote in Dixie?” someone yelled.
Seward touched Johnson’s sleeve to caution him. The President pulled his arm away. “Cast the mote from your own eye before you worry about your neighbor’s,” he cried. “Let your own Negroes vote here in Ohio before you campaign to extend the franchise down South.”
The voices began a crescendo from various points in the crowd:
“You’re spineless.”
“Prison’s too good for Jeff Davis!”
“Hang him. Hang him!”
Johnson exploded. “Why don’t you hang Ben Wade?” Loud booing, which only goaded the President. “Why don’t you hang Wendell Phillips and Thad Stevens while you’re at it? I tell you this. I have been fighting traitors in the South and I am prepared to fight them in the North.”
“You’re the traitor,” someone cried over the booing and hissing. “You and your National Union Party. Traitors!”
The taunt enraged the President. He shook a finger at the mob. “Show yourself, whoever said that. No, of course you won’t. If ever you shoot someone, you’ll do it in the dark, from behind.”
A tumult of oaths and boos greeted that. Johnson roared over it, his temper irrevocably lost:
“The Congress has done this. The Congress has poisoned your minds against me while failing to do anything of its own to restore the Union. Instead, they divide the American people, conqueror against conquered, Republican against Democrat, white against black. Had Abraham Lincoln lived, he too would be suffering the vicious enmity of the power-crazed Radical clique—” Frantic, Seward kept trying to pull him inside. “—the merchants of hatred who now control our House and Senate, and seek to intimidate and control me.”
“Liar!” someone screamed. Johnson’s jaw worked, but no one could hear him over the mounting roar. He shook a fist. “Liar, liar,” the chant began, louder at each utterance.
At the back of the crowd, the man in the Union campaign hat, who had hired and planted people on instructions from an intermediary, allowed himself a smile. The plan had worked perfectly. Johnson was in a fury, and the reporters would have every word of the debacle on the telegraph wire by midnight. Johnson foolishly thought he could attack Wade with impunity. The man in the campaign hat was sure the senator had arranged and paid for the disruption, though of course there was no provable link. That was the reason for intermediaries.
“Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!”
The roar was a sweet sound. It meant a generous bonus. The man in the campaign hat walked rapidly away from the chanting mob. At the telegraph window of the railway station, he picked up a blank and a stubby pencil and began to block out the message announcing his success to the intermediary who had hired him. On the first line he printed MR. S. HAZARD, WASHINGTON, D.C.
… It appears Mr. Johnson’s “swing around the circle” is ending in disaster. How sad and strange that this prostrate land is being fought over, savagely, as a great prize. One war has only yielded to another.
… Another attempt on the school last night. In bad weather its windows are covered by shutters. We cannot afford glass. Whoever did the deed was careless about noise while tearing shutters off. The evening was still, and the sound carried to Andy’s cottage. He ran there and laid hands on the malefactor in the dark. The man felled him with hard blows and fled. Andy never saw his face.
Do not know who to suspect. The white-trash squatters near Summerton? Mr. Gettys, the man of genteel poverty? That dancing master who fancies himself an aristocrat? Among possible suspects, we seem to have all the white classes represented …
From the pines of South Carolina came turpentine, shipped out of Charleston in kegs. Most of the black stevedores carried but one at a time up the plank to whatever steamer they were loading. Des LaMotte, redu
ced to their level because there were still no fine families to employ him, carried two.
He worked in gentleman’s linen breeches, soiled and torn. He balanced a keg on each shoulder. When he first tried it, the rims left red welts that later bled. Now a ridge of scar tissue had toughened both shoulders.
He detested the work, and all those nameless, faceless Negrophiles in the North who had forced him into it. Yet he took a certain crazed pride in doing more, carrying more, than the strongest buck. He soon became a figure of note on the Charleston docks, an immense white man with bulging arm muscles and the neatly tended chin beard of a rich planter.
He refused to speak to any of the black stevedores unless some circumstance of the job required it. On his second day, he’d almost knocked down a darky who approached him about joining a new Longshoremen’s Protective Association. The man opened his appeal with remarks about a burial aid fund, so much contributed each week to guarantee that funeral expenses would be met when necessary.
When Des heard that, his mind flashed white. He quelled his murderous impulses but couldn’t banish them. How could the ignorant African understand the depth and subtlety of Des’s affection for his wife, Sally Sue, or his commander, Ferris Brixham? Those were the only funerals Des cared about, funerals enshrined in memory.
The incident left him shaken, because he’d come close to killing the stevedore. How long until he really turned on one of them? He realized that by working among freed Negroes, he was playing a dangerous game with his own life. Somehow he didn’t care.
In the hot sunshine of a Carolina autumn that was more like summer, he sweated rivers of salt sweat as he labored up the plank of the coastal steamer Sequoiah again and yet again, muscles twisting like ropes under his raw-burned skin. He allowed none of his pain to show on his face.
More than pain and the tiny Low Country gnats deviled him this morning. He’d received a note from Gettys. It said that Captain Jolly, the trash they planned to employ to pull the trigger on Madeline Main, had filled himself with stolen corn whiskey, then gone off to try to wreck the school.
Idiot, Des thought, simmering. He heaved a keg to his right shoulder, and then another to his left. His knees buckled a little as he absorbed the weight.