Love and War: The North and South Trilogy (Book Two)

by John Jakes

  During the past year, Cuffey had discovered within himself a certain instinctive ability to lead men, whatever their color. He was assertive, foxy, and implacable because of his years in slavery. He took special delight in stuffing himself with the food of the local white people. For that reason he was always hunting for new clothes. His stomach had grown huge, his face round as a cheese wheel.

  In the short, cool days of early February, he scanned the skies with increasing impatience. He knew that Sherman, the general whose style and reputation he worshiped, had passed through Beaufort and Pocataligo and was now marching northward, his ultimate destination presumed to be Columbia. Soon, Cuffey reasoned the Confederate general in Charleston would have to rush most of his troops to the defense of the capital. When he did, the whole Ashley River district would lie open, unprotected—awaiting Cuffey’s pleasure.

  One night in the second week of the month, he lolled by his fire, roasting a dove on a stick and recollecting the pale thrashing legs of the woman from whom he had taken pleasure an hour ago. The band had recruited two white slatterns, both over forty, and a pair of younger mulatto girls to look after that aspect of the men’s needs. Cuffey was fingering himself, wondering if the wench carried vermin, when shouts arose in the dark beneath some live oaks on the far side of the encampment.

  He threw the impaled dove on the ground and jumped up. “Wha’s all that racket over there?”

  “Prisoner,” called a yellow-bearded Georgia boy in a gray jacket. “Caught him on the road.” The Georgia boy was one of Cuffey’s best, a deserter with a fine love of killing. Hands on his paunch, Cuffey watched the boy and two blacks drag a small, bald, frightened man from the shadows.

  “Bring him over here, Sunshine,” he ordered, with the authority he had learned to invoke through voice and gesture. Something about the stumbling captive in grimy clothing struck him as peculiar. The boy nicknamed Sunshine gave the prisoner a prod with a bayonet he carried like a knife. At that moment, Cuffey’s jaw went slack.

  “Lord God—Mr. Jones.”

  “Is it—? Why, I think—” Salem Jones could hardly believe his good fortune. “Cuffey? Cuffey!” He almost slobbered with glee. At another fire, half a dozen men started singing the refrain Sherman’s host had chanted all the way from Savannah:

  “Hail, Columbia, happy land—

  If I don’t burn you, I’ll be damned.”

  “Yes, sir, it’s me,” Cuffey replied, with a grin intended to lull his prisoner. Suddenly his hand shot out. He twisted Jones’s right ear savagely. “The nigger boy you used to cuss and beat and work half to death. I’m the boss now. Boss of this whole damn bunch. I like you t’show me some respeck.”

  One more twist and Jones dropped to his knees, howling. The singing stopped. Jones rubbed his reddened ear; blood oozed from the lobe. Cuffey snickered, retrieved the dove on the stick, and with some difficulty, resulting from his girth, squatted to resume the cooking.

  “What you doin’ away down here in South Carolina, Mist’ Jones? I figured you ran off to jine up with the Yankees.”

  “He ran away from them, too,” Sunshine said, with a giggle and a queer glitter in his blue eyes. With the tip of the bayonet, he touched the dark red D that disfigured Jones’s right cheek. “I know what this yere brand means. D fer deserter.”

  “I heard there was a band like yours somewhere in these marshes,” Jones said, gasping between almost every word. “I was hunting for it, but I never imagined I’d find you in charge.”

  Again Cuffey smiled. “No, sir. Bet you didn’t.” He rotated the bird in the fire. “Well, Mist’ Jones, you cast your lot with a mighty fine group. We livin’ off the fat of the land here—yes, sir, the fat of the land. Tell you somethin’ else you might like to know. Soon as Gen’ral Hardee leave Charleston, we gonna have a real festivity down along the river.” His smile dazzled. “Gonna visit a plantation name of Mont Royal. You ’member that place, don’t you? You white son of a bitch.” He whipped the stick around and touched Jones’s neck with the smoking-hot dove. Jones screamed and fell over sideways.

  Cuffey chuckled and put the bird back in the fire. He was jolly again. “I been savin’ Mont Royal till we could pay a call an’ not worry about reb sojers. Gonna be soon now. Gonna be a grand visit. Mr. Cooper’s there—an’ his wife an’ little girl an’ a stuck-up free nigger wench name Jane. I got a whole bunch of randy boys gonna like meetin’ up with them. Meantime—”

  Cuffey ran his tongue over his rotting upper teeth. “We got you to fool with, Mist’ Jones. Ain’ that right, Sunshine?”

  The Georgia boy giggled again. “Sure is, boss.”

  Suddenly, frantically, Jones flung himself at Cuffey’s legs and clasped them. Only his pleading cry kept Sunshine from running the bayonet through his back.

  “Please don’t hurt me. Let me join up.”

  “What’s that? Wha’d you say?” Cuffey lumbered to his feet with the white man dragging on him.

  “I hate those people, Cuffey. Hate that whole family as much as you do. I hate Cooper Main like poison. His brother disgraced me—discharged me—Look, I know I mistreated you. God, how I know that. But times have changed. Things are all turned around anymore—”

  “Damn if they ain’t,” Cuffey agreed. “Bottom rail’s on top.”

  “Let me join up,” Jones pleaded. “I’m good with a gun. I’ll follow orders, I swear. Please—let me.”

  Cuffey gazed at the man clutching his leg. He smiled a lazy, quizzical smile and glanced at Sunshine, who touched three fingers to his wet lips and shrugged, giggling. One of the mulatto wenches ran through the encampment, shrieking with laughter. Two men chased her; one had his pants open. Out in the marsh, a salt crow called.

  “Well—” Cuffey greatly prolonged the word, tormenting his prisoner “—I might. But you gonna have to beg me some more, Mist’ Jones. You gonna have to beg me a mighty lot before I say yes.”

  He knew he would, though. The prospect of marching on Mont Royal, razing it, obliterating it forever with the former overseer in his little army was just too fine to pass up.

  123

  NEXT MORNING, ABOUT TEN, Charles arrived at the place where the river road intersected the moss-hung lane leading to the great house. His rag robe, infernally hot, weighed heavily on him. His little bit of cigar—the last he had—went out while he stared up the lane at the familiar roof line, the upper and lower piazzas, the thick wisteria vines climbing the chimney.

  Smoke rose from the kitchen building. He saw a Negro girl leave it and hurry to the main house. A crow went swooping across in front of him, and if he had been less tired, he would have laughed. He was home.

  Not in a good season, though. Evening before last, he had passed near the route of march of General Sherman’s vast army and seen fire in the heavens—Kilpatrick’s horse leading the way and signaling its position to the infantry in the rear, a frightened farmer told him. Little Kil’s riders were advancing toward Columbia through an avenue of burning pines. It was that conflagration filling the night sky with a furnace glow and that of the day with plumes of resinous smoke.

  “I heard what them boys is sayin’,” the frightened farmer declared as Charles drank from his well. “They say they’re gonna wipe this hellhole of secession off the earth. The say here’s where treason began and here’s where it’s gonna end.”

  “I wouldn’t take that lightly,” Charles advised. “I’d watch your womenfolk and expect the worst. This war’s turned mean. Many thanks for the water.”

  It now appeared that Sherman, who had vowed to make Georgia howl, then done it, had kept on going due north, bypassing the Ashley district. Charles walked slowly up the lane with a weary wonder in his eyes; the place appeared untouched by the war. Then he began to change his mind. He saw noticeable wear on the buildings and a marked absence of slaves. How many of them had run away?

  The signs increased as he drew closer. Tall weeds grew where lawn had spread before. A wagon without front wheels
and axle lay abandoned near the office. He went all the way to the house, a dirty, bearded, ragged specter with a revolver on his hip, and no one opened a door or raised a window.

  A few azalea bushes around the wisteria-clad chimney showed early buds; the weather had been unusually warm. He passed the chimney and continued along the half-oval of the hard-packed drive, spying a woman previously hidden by a pillar. She rose from her chair with a vague smile as he approached.

  He stopped, thankful that he could soon pull off his boots and bathe his blisters. To the small, stout woman on the piazza he said politely, “Hello, Aunt Clarissa.”

  She frowned, studied him—especially the revolver and the wrapped sword under his arm—a few seconds more. Then she raised her palms to her cheeks and screamed in mortal fright to announce his homecoming.

  “That brought people all right. Two of the house servants ran out to take charge of Clarissa. How grizzled and stooped they looked, Charles thought as he waited to be recognized. It took them a minute—they were hovering around his aunt, who struggled—and during the interval he wondered whether none but the old, tired blacks had stayed.

  “Charles? Charles Main?”

  He tilted his hat back but couldn’t manage a smile, even though he was nearly as astonished as Clarissa had been. “Yes, Judith, it’s me. What are you doing here?”

  “I’m dying to ask the same of you.” She rushed to embrace him; felt his arms and torso stiffen at her touch. His garments were filthy. They reeked.

  The two servants, one so old he hobbled, helped Clarissa inside. The hobbling Negro gave Charles a curious stare but no greeting. Charles knew the man recognized him. In the old days, a stern master would have laid on the cane to punish such disrespect. Things had surely changed.

  To answer Judith, he said, “I lost my horse up at Petersburg. I came all the way down here hunting a remount.”

  “Are the trains running?”

  “Some. Mostly I walked. When I left North Carolina, I figured I’d find a horse—or a mule, anyway—before I got this far. Guessed wrong,” he finished soberly, as Orry’s older brother stepped onto the piazza. In shirt sleeves, a ledger under one arm, Cooper recognized Charles and let out his name with a whoop. Husband and wife shepherded the new arrival into the well-loved, well-remembered house, but Charles hardly saw it. One thought obsessed him. Do they know about Orry?

  On the curve of the drive opposite the one where Charles had approached, motion stirred a tall, thick row of untended ileagnus. The motion suggested birds squabbling in the dense foliage. In the excitement of Charles’s arrival, no one noticed.

  On the other side of the shrubbery, after the front door closed, a narrow-faced young man with a smooth beige complexion crawled away through the weeds. He was barefoot, and his old jeans pants had a yellowing star on the rump. When the seat of his pants had worn through, his mother, who later died, had patched the hole with white flannel and imagination. The star was the North Star—the freedom star—and when his mama had sewn it on, he had still been property.

  He had been sent to Mont Royal to estimate the number of men still present on the plantation. He had been born there and spent most of his life in the slave community. Now he had some real news to report.

  Charles bathed in a big zinc tub in Cooper and Judith’s bedroom—the same spacious chamber that once had belonged to Tillet and Clarissa and then, he presumed, to Orry and Madeline.

  He had forgotten how it felt to have his long hair so clean it squeaked when he rubbed his palms over it. He put on a shirt and pair of pants borrowed from Cooper and went downstairs. His arrival had caused a great stir. There were nigras swarming all over the house—damn near as if they were Cooper and Judith’s equals, he thought without animosity, just recognition of another remarkable change. He met a muscular, well-proportioned driver named Andy and a handsome black woman named Jane, who shook his hand in a grave way as she said, “I’ve heard of you.”

  Her steady stare, not hostile but not friendly either, conveyed meaning with perfect clarity. What it said was, I’ve heard you’re in the army that’s fighting to keep my people shackled.

  Maybe he was being too thin-skinned, but he thought that was what she meant. Despite her attitude and her reserve, she still impressed him in a positive way.

  Philemon Meek, the new and elderly overseer, shuffled in to join them for the midday meal—the most bounteous they could provide, Judith said with embarrassment. Each plate held a bit of saffroned rice, a few field peas, a one-inch square of corn bread, and two strips of chicken cooked for the second or third time.

  “Don’t apologize,” Charles said. “Compared to the fare up North, this is a feast.”

  The dining room, its rich woods gleaming, was both familiar and comforting. He started eating rapidly. Meek watched him over his half-glasses, and it was from-the overseer that Charles presently heard of the guerrilla band operating in the neighborhood. Runaway slaves and army deserters, they were like the bummers traveling on the fringes of Sherman’s army.

  “But this bunch has stayed put in the low country,” Meek said. “I’m told the leader is an old chum of yours—nigra named Cuffey.”

  Mildly startled, Charles finished the field peas and started to wipe his mouth with the back of his hand. He noticed Marie-Louise, grown now and quite pretty, staring at him. The skin above his beard turned pink as he snatched his napkin from his lap.

  “Cuffey,” he repeated. “Imagine that. Think Mont Royal might be in for some trouble?”

  “We’ve been preparing for that eventuality,” Meek said.

  “It appears to me you don’t have many men left on the plantation. Except for your driver, those I’ve seen are gray as the moss outside that window.”

  “We’re down to thirty-seven people,” Cooper admitted. “Barely enough to run the place. I thought of closing the rice mill entirely for a while, but how would we survive? I don’t mean just Judith and Marie-Louise and Mother; I mean everyone. Especially the older nigras. They’re too worn out and frightened to run away.”

  “Which is what the rest did, I presume?”

  Cooper nodded. “Liberty’s a magnet for human beings. One of the strongest in creation. That’s a point I frequently made to my father, to no avail. For a while I also forgot it myself, I’m ashamed to say. Ah, well. Why rake up the past? I want to hear the news from Virginia. Have you been in Richmond at all? Seen Orry or Madeline?”

  To Charles’s left, Clarissa sat with her meager meal untouched. Hands folded under the table, she studied him with the eyes of a threatened child. She had been doing so ever since they sat down. Those eyes held the kind of awe and fright with which long-ago European folk must have watched the pony-mounted Mongols storm out of Asia.

  The thrice-boiled chicken pieces, so flavorful a moment earlier, suddenly had the taste of chewed paper. Well, he thought as he returned Clarissa’s sad, alarmed stare, there’s at least one blessing in a broken mind. She won’t understand.

  Cooper was awaiting an answer. Slowly, Charles placed his napkin to the left of his plate.

  “I didn’t expect to be the bearer of the bad news.”

  Judith leaned forward. “Oh, dear—is one of them ill? It is Madeline?”

  Silence. Memories flashed by, including one from the time when Orry had been educating him for the West Point examinations. The hired German tutor had forced Charles to read Scripture for its literary value as well as its religious content. He remembered a passage he had never fully appreciated before: the moment during the Crucifixion when Christ asked His Father to let a cup pass.

  “Charles?” Cooper said, almost inaudibly.

  But of course it wouldn’t pass, and he told them.

  On his knees, Salem Jones heard the commotion beyond the blanket hung on a length of wisteria vine to afford a little privacy. He withdrew from the grimy, drunken white woman, who rolled her head from side to side and whimpered for him to start again. He was already buttoning his pants.

>   Picking up his shirt, he stepped around the great live oak to which he had spiked one end of the vine. The usual evening fires sent smoke and sparks toward the winter stars. He spied Cuffey seated on the stump he liked to occupy—as if he were some damn nigger chief in Africa, Jones thought with a flash of resentment. He put the bad feeling aside in order to learn the reason for all the excitement.

  Men crowded around Cuffey while two tried to talk at the same time. One was Sunshine, who had been away scouting around Charleston. The other was a light tan Negro whose name Jones didn’t know.

  Hurrying to the group, Jones heard Sunshine say, “Hardee marched out. I seen it. By now the troops are all gone from the city.”

  “There ain’ but a few protectin’ my old home place,” Cuffey mused, smiling. “Now they’s no sojers to come help, either. That’s what I been waitin’ on. Hey there, Jones—you hear?”

  A vigorous nod. “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, that ain’ the only good part. Lon—” he poked a thumb at the beige boy with the flannel star on his pants “—he spied an old friend at Mont Royal this mornin’. Cousin Charles.”

  “Invalided home from Hampton’s cavalry?”

  Cuffey prompted Lon with a look. The boy shook his head. “Didn’t see any sign of him bein’ hurt. But he was walkin’, not ridin’.”

  Jones nodded. “That’s enough to bring him home.”

  A meditative look spread over Cuffey’s face. “Cousin Charles an’ me useta be friends. Useta fish together. Wrestle, too.”

  He spat in the flames. Men smirked and nudged each other, sensing the end of boring inactivity. Cuffey arose and hooked his thumbs over the bulging waist of his trousers. Like a king, he paraded around the huge sparkling fire. Jones loathed the ignorant oaf, but Cuffey had spared him and allowed him to join the band in anticipation of their next big raid. He had to be grateful for that, he supposed, reaching up to scratch the itching D.

  “We wait one more day—maybe two,” Cuffey announced. “Till we sure the sojers are gone.” He peered past the leaping flames at Salem Jones. “Then we go to Mont Royal an’ take it clean down to the ground. Kill every living thing.”