by John Jakes
“Don’t know who I am, do you? I’m an old friend.” He chuckled. A little rope of spit descended from his lip, broke, struck, and made a dark spot on the shoulder of her gown. “An old, old friend of your husband’s. Down in Mexico, he and his lickspittle crony Main, they called me Butcher. Butcher Bent.”
Under his hand, Constance screamed—or tried to. She knew the name. George thought Elkanah Bent had died, or at least disappeared. But there he was, in the glass, chortling as his right hand dipped into his soiled coat, which was missing all its buttons. He drew something into the light.
“Butchers kill cows. You’d better be careful.”
He shook the straight razor’s blade open. It glittered in the gaslight. Constance thought she’d faint. Her mind cried out: George! Children!
No. They weren’t here. They couldn’t help.
Slowly, tantalizingly, Bent lowered the razor past her eyes to her throat. Suddenly he jerked it inward.
Another muffled scream. Only then did Constance realize he’d turned the razor at the last moment. It was the dull top edge pressing her neck.
“Now I’m going to let you go, you dirty cow. I want to ask you some questions. If you yell, you’re finished. Do you understand about keeping quiet? Blink your eyes if you do.”
Her eyes reflected in the mirror, huge. She blinked four times instead of once. Gaslight flashed on the razor’s blade as he lifted it away and then, slowly, his foul-smelling hand.
Constance nearly collapsed. “Please, oh, God, please don’t hurt me.”
“Tell me what I want to know and I won’t.” He stepped back, almost affable. “I promise you I won’t.”
Ashamed of her fear, yet unable to overcome it, she turned on the padded seat to face him. “Can I—can I trust you?”
He giggled. “What choice do you have? But, yes, you can. I only want information. About the people who ruined me. About their families. Start with your husband’s bosom friend, Orry Main. Did he really die at Petersburg?”
“Yes.” Constance held her hands between her knees, digging nails into her palms. She neither felt the pain nor saw the small seep of blood onto her gown. “Yes, he did.”
“He had a wife—”
How could she endanger Madeline, or any of them? Struck silent by conscience, she stared at him, her mouth open. Bent yanked her hair. “We made a bargain. No answers”—he waggled the flashing razor inches from her eyes—“it’s all over.”
“All right, all right.”
He withdrew the razor. “Better. I really don’t want to harm an innocent woman. Tell me about Main’s widow. Where is she?”
“Mont Royal Plantation. Near Charleston.”
He grunted. “And your own husband?”
On the way up to Belvedere this moment, Constance remembered. She must hold Bent in conversation, detain him until George arrived. The train was in; it couldn’t take long. Oh, but what if he’d missed the train? Dear God, what if—?
“Mrs. Hazard, I don’t have infinite patience.” The man’s left shoulder hung below his right one, giving him a look of vulnerability. Strange, then, that she’d never seen a more commanding, terrifying figure.
“George—” She licked dry lips. “George is in Pittsburgh on business.”
“You have children.”
New, cold terror. She hadn’t imagined he would—
“Children,” he snarled.
“Away at school, both of them.”
“I think your husband had a brother.”
Which one did he mean? Better to name the most distant. “In California. With his wife and son.”
It worked. The man acted disappointed. He didn’t ask for specifics. “And there was a relative of Orry Main’s. A soldier I met in Texas. His names was Charles. Where is he?”
“So far as I know, he’s in the Army again, out in Kansas.” she was so frightened, so desperate to please him and save her life, she quite abandoned caution. “He went out there after the war, with his little boy.”
The man smiled suddenly. “Oh, he has a child, too. What branch of the Army is Charles serving with?”
“The U.S. Cavalry. I don’t know exactly where.”
“Kansas will do. So many children. I hadn’t thought of children. That’s interesting.”
Constance was again on the verge of uncontrollable trembling. Just then, to her amazement, the filthy, rain-soaked man stepped back. “Thank you. I believe you’ve told me all I need to know. You’ve been very helpful.”
She sagged, close to hysteria. “Thank you. Oh, God, thank you.”
“You may stand up if you like.”
“Thank you, thank you so very much.” She pushed both palms against the padded seat and swayed to her feet, the tears bursting forth, tears of relief that he was going to spare her life. He smiled and stepped forward.
“Here, careful. You’re unsteady.” His free hand grasped her elbow. Rotten breath gusted from his mouth. The smile on his face grew huge, and his eyes luminous, all in an instant.
“Cow bitch.” One cool, silver, feather-light stroke cut her throat.
He stood over her, watching the blood gout and clutching the immense hardness between his legs. He flung down the razor, spied the teardrop earring she’s dropped, plucked it up, dipped it in her blood, held it in front of his eyes, and smiled at the red on the gold. He finished his work in less than a minute and climbed out the way he’d come in.
George unlocked his front door. The hackney clattered away down the hill.
He climbed the great staircase two steps at a time, humming. His anticipation and a blissful euphoria made him hum louder as he strode along the upstairs hall, pooled by low-trimmed gaslights. Hard rain pelted the mansion. He turned the bedroom doorknob, saying as he stepped through, “Constance, I’m—”
The unbelievable sight silenced him. He dropped his carpetbag, running forward. He reached down to lift her, certain she was only unconscious. He couldn’t recognize the significance of the blood sopping the carpet, the great throat wound.
He saw the open dormer window, the rain driving in to soak the carpet. He saw one of the teardrop earrings he’d given her, but not the other.
The mirror caught his attention. He moved toward it, choking on the stench of the wet wool rug. On the mirror, in blood, were four letters.
B E N T
He looked from the mirror to the open window to his motionless wife. The bottom of the T on the mirror grew, swelled, blood accumulating in a fat drop that finally burst. The blood trickled down from the upright of the T, making it longer and longer.
“I thought he was dead,” George said, not aware that he was screaming.
Book Four
The Year Of The Locust
INTELLIGENCE, VIRTUE, AND PATRIOTISM are to give place, in all elections, to ignorance, stupidity, and vice. The superior race is to be made subservient to the inferior. … They who own no property are to levy taxes and make all appropriations. … The appropriations to support free schools for the education of the negro children, for the support of old negroes in the poor-houses, and the vicious in jails and penitentiary, together with a standing army of negro soldiers will be crushing and utterly ruinous. … The white people of our State will never quietly submit.
A South Carolina protest to Congress, 1868
ALL LOOKS WELL. THE CONSTITUTION WILL BE VINDICATED AND THE ARCH-APOSTATE PUT OUT OF THE WHITE HOUSE BEFORE THE END OF THE WEEK.
Telegram to the New Hampshire Republican Convention, 1868
39
THAT NIGHT THE RAIN changed to sleet. In the morning the temperature plummeted. Iron cold gripped the valley. Bleak skies hid the sun.
Jupiter Smith handled arrangements for the funeral; George was incapable. Even in the worst days of the war, he had never experienced anything like this. He had no appetite. When he tried a little broth he threw it up. He was stricken with continuous diarrhea, like that which killed so many men in the wartime camps on both sides.
&
nbsp; He swung back and forth between not believing that Constance was gone and outbursts of grief that became so noisy he had to lock himself in a bedroom—not the one they’d shared; he couldn’t stand to enter it—until the violent emotion worked itself out.
The homes and churches of Lehigh Station prepared to celebrate Christmas, though with less exuberance than usual because of the dreadful event at the mansion on the mountain. George thought the pieties of the season an abominable joke.
Christmas Day was somber and misty and, at Belvedere, joyless. Patricia played a carol on the great gleaming Steinway piano. William, ruddy and vigorous from a fall season of rowing at Yale, stood beside her and sang one verse of “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” in a strained baritone. He stopped singing when his father got up from the chair where he’d been sitting silently and walked out of the room.
Late in the afternoon, Jupe Smith called on them. He told George that all the telegraph messages had been sent to relatives and friends. He specifically mentioned Patrick Flynn, Constance’s father, who was up in years now. “In his case, I described the cause of death as heart seizure. I saw no point in telling an old man that his daughter was, ah—”
“Butchered?”
Jupe stared at the floor. George waved, condoning the falsehood, and with a listless air walked back to the sideboard. He rummaged among cut glass decanters, accidentally overturning one. He was trying to get drunk on bourbon. His stomach had rejected it all afternoon.
He righted the decanter, dripping sour mash on the polished floor. “Where did you send the message to Charles Main?”
“Care of General Duncan at Fort Leavenworth.”
“And Billy? Virgilia? Madeline? Did you—?”
“Yes. I warned every one of them, exactly as you instructed, George. I said that anyone in either family might be a target of this Bent, though I wonder if that’s really likely.”
“Likely or not, it’s possible. What about the earring?”
“I described it for each of them. Pearl, with a gold mount forming a teardrop. I don’t quite see why—”
“I want them to know everything. Bent’s description as I remember it—everything.”
“Well, I took care of it.”
George poured a drink. His linen stank, his speech was full of long pauses and unfinished thoughts, and his usually calm dark eyes had a wild glint. Jupe decided to leave.
“He’s sick, Mr. Smith,” Patricia whispered as she ushered the lawyer through the door. “I’ve never seen him act so strangely.”
George had recovered slightly by the day of the funeral, which was held two days before the New Year.
Madeline was present, all the way from South Carolina. She was self-conscious, oddly shy. She was forty-two now, her hair heavily streaked with gray, which she refused to touch up with coloring. Her coat and mourning dress of black silk were old and shabby. When George first saw her, he greeted her with forced warmth and held his damp cheek against hers a moment. She didn’t think he noticed her impoverished appearance. She was thankful.
Virgilia came from Washington. She was neatly though not expensively dressed. In her presence, George felt weak and small, very much the younger brother, even though there was only a year’s difference between them. Much of Virgilia’s old rage had been purged by her new life. She was able to embrace George with real feeling, and express her sorrow and mean it. The change confounded some of the townspeople who remembered the radical harridan of years past.
About three hundred men and women from Hazard’s and the town joined the family for the funeral mass at St. Margaret’s-in-the-Vale, then drove or walked in the freezing air to the hillside burying ground maintained by the church. Father Toone, Constance’s priest, intoned his Latin beside the open grave, then traced the sign of the cross. Gravediggers began to lower the ornate silvered coffin on its straps. On the other side, red-faced and uncomfortable, Stanley and Isabel stared everywhere but at the grieving husband. Fortunately for everyone’s peace of mind, they had not brought their obnoxious twins. Although it was not quite two in the afternoon, Stanley was noticeably drunk.
From behind George a gloved hand touched his arm. He reached across to take the hand without looking. Virgilia held tightly to her brother’s fingers. The crowd broke up.
The bitter wind whipped the hem of Father Toone’s surplice as he approached George and the two crying children. “I know this is a grievous day, George. Yet we must be confident in God. He has His purpose for the world and each of His creatures, no matter how hidden by clouds of evil that purpose may be.”
George stared at the priest. Pale and hollow-cheeked, he bore a strong resemblance to photographs of the demented Poe in the last months of his life, Madeline thought. Stonily he said, “Please excuse me, Father.”
It was the obligation of the Hazards to open the doors of Belvedere that afternoon and offer food and drink to the mourners. All of the rich breads and cakes, cloved hams and juicy beef rounds and oyster pies that normally would have been prepared for Christmas Day were served instead at the wake. Alcohol loosened tongues, and, before long, groups of guests were chatting noisily, even laughing, throughout the downstairs.
George couldn’t tolerate it. He hid himself in the library. He’d been there about twenty minutes when the doors rolled back and Virgilia and Madeline came in.
“Are you all right?” Virgilia asked, hurrying to him. Madeline closed the doors, then fiddled with a black handkerchief tucked into her sleeve. His cravat undone, George sat staring at the women.
“I don’t know, Jilly,” he said. Virgilia was startled; he hadn’t called her by that childish nickname since they were very small. Suddenly, he got to his feet. “What happened to her defies all reason. My God, it defies sanity.”
Virgilia sighed. She looked matronly, and neat and well groomed in contrast to Madeline’s obvious poverty. She said, “So does the world. Every day of our lives, I’ve discovered, we live with stupid mischance and clumsy melodrama, cupidity, greed, unnecessary suffering. We forget it, we mask it, we try to order it with our arts and philosophies, numb ourselves to it with diversions—or with drink, like poor Stanley. We try to explain and compensate for it with our religions. But it’s always there, very close, like some poor deformed beast hiding behind the thinnest of curtains. Once in a while the curtain is torn down and we’re forced to look. You know that. You went to war.”
“Twice. I thought I’d seen my share.”
“But life’s not so logical as that, George. Some never see the beast at all. Some see it again and again, and there seems no sense to any of it. But when we look, something happens. It happened to me with Grady, and it took me years to understand it. What happens is that childhood comes to an end. Parents call it growing up, and they use the phrase much too casually. Growing up is looking at the beast and knowing it’s immortal and you are not. It’s dealing with that.”
Head down, George stood by the library table. Near the fragment of star iron and a sprig of mountain laurel sat a soiled old beaver hat. It had been found on the lawn below the dormer Bent had entered. George’s hand swept out, knocking the hat off the table and, inadvertently, the laurel. He put his foot on the laurel and crushed it.
“I can’t deal with that, Jilly. I can’t do it.”
Madeline’s heart broke. She wanted to take him in her arms, draw him close, comfort him. She was surprised and a little embarrassed by the strength of her feeling for the man who was her late husband’s best friend. Color in her cheeks gave her away, but the others didn’t notice. She quickly brought the emotion under control by turning away and putting her handkerchief to her eyes.
“Jilly—” He was calmer now. “Would you or Madeline please ask Christopher Wotherspoon to step in? I’d like to start on the arrangements for my trip.”
Virgilia couldn’t believe it. “This afternoon?”
“Why not this afternoon? You don’t think I’m going out there and drink and crack jokes, do you?”
“Damn it, don’t lecture.” The brief communion, begun when he first called her Jilly, was over. “Wotherspoon has a lot to do to oversee Hazard’s in my absence. He and Jupe Smith must also start up the Pittsburgh plant.”
“I hadn’t heard you were going away,” Madeline said.
A listless nod. “I have business in Washington. After that—well, I’m not sure. I’ll go to Europe, perhaps.”
“What about the children?”
“They can finish the school year and join me.”
“Where?” Virgilia asked.
“Wherever I happen to be.”
Madeline and Virgilia exchanged anxious looks while George picked up the broken sprig of laurel. Contemptuously, he flung it in the cold hearth.
That night, very late, George woke. He felt like a child, frightened and angry. “Why did you do this to me, Constance?” he said in the dark. “Why did you leave me alone?”
He struck the pillow and kept striking it until he started to cry. He felt ashamed; ashamed and lost. He put his head down on the pillow. From the heavy starched cloth crept a scent, her scent, the imprint of someone who had shared the bed and the pillow for years. She was gone but she lingered. He tried to stop crying and couldn’t. He cried until the gray light broke.
Every sheriff and metropolitan detective in Pennsylvania searched for Elkanah Bent. When he wasn’t found by New Year’s Day, George suspected he would not be found soon, if at all.
On the second day of the new year, 1868, George called on Jupe Smith and instructed him to put the new rail car up for sale. He then packed one valise and bid the servants and Patricia and young William goodbye. The children felt cast adrift. Could this cold, empty-eyed man be their father? William put his arm around his sister. In a moment, he felt years older.