by John Jakes
“There’s an entire state in need of help,” Cooper said when she expressed her feeling. “You’ve seen all the people camped in the fields and along the roads—”
But she wasn’t persuaded. Everything was different and, except for her life with Billy, unhappily so.
George felt much the same way on the thirteenth of May. It was Saturday, the end of a week that saw Davis and his small party captured at a woodland bivouac near Irwinville, Georgia. George was shocked at the widespread ruin in Charleston, to which a coastal steamer from Philadelphia had brought him, with Constance. He was grieved by the sight of so many burned homes and buildings, and even more saddened by the great numbers of Negroes everywhere. Rather than happy, they seemed uneasy and occasionally sullen in their new state of freedom.
“It’s entirely fitting and right that they have it,” he said to Constance as they boarded the ancient sloop Osprey, which would take them up the Ashley. George wore a dark broadcloth suit; though not yet mustered out, he refused to wear his uniform. Nor did he need it to generate plenty of hostile stares and rude treatment.
“But there are practical problems,” he went on. “How is freedom going to feed them? Clothe them? Educate them?” Even if practical answers could be found, would Northerners allow them to be implemented now that the military victory was won? Some would, of course; his sister, Virgilia, for example. But he believed such people were in a minority. The majority’s turn of mind was illustrated by the telegraphic flimsy still folded in his pocket.
The message from Wotherspoon had been delivered to the pier in Philadelphia an hour before the coastal steamer weighed anchor: SIX MEN QUITTING TO PROTEST HIRING TWO COLORED.
He had immediately wired back: LET THE SIX GO. HAZARD. But that didn’t alter the larger picture, and he knew it. His attitude was an atypical drop in the Yankee ocean.
Answering his questions of a moment ago, Constance said, “That’s the purpose of the Freedmen’s Bureau, isn’t it? General Howard is supposed to be a decent, capable man—”
“But look who wormed into the bureau as one of his assistants. Do you really believe Stanley did it for humanitarian reasons? There’s some secret agenda—political, probably. We’re in for a bad time for a few years, I’m afraid. It may last even longer if the wounds don’t heal. Aren’t permitted to heal—”
But the Ashley was smooth, and their short journey upriver on Osprey uneventful—until they had their first glimpse of the plantation. George exclaimed softly. Constance clutched the rail.
“My God,” he said. “Even the pier’s gone.”
“That’s right, sir,” the master of the sloop called from the wheel. There was a slyly exaggerated politeness to the last word, saying the captain didn’t really believe his passenger deserved the appellation. The overused, overblown sir was a common Southernism, George was discovering.
“You’ll have to cross a plank to shore,” the man added. His eyes indicated that he might be pleased if husband and wife fell in the muddy water.
They had sent no advance word of their visit. They piled their valises on the grassy bank, including one old satchel that George had not let out of his sight since leaving Lehigh Station. As the whistle blew and the sloop chugged away, an unfamiliar black man appeared from behind the ruins of the great house. While Constance waited, George walked up the lawn. The Negro hurried down to meet him, introducing himself as Andy.
“George Hazard.” They shook hands. Andy recognized the name and dashed off to carry the news to Cooper and the others, who were apparently at work in the rice fields.
George’s shock deepened as he again studied the ruins, seeing in imagination the glittering ball the Mains once gave in honor of the visiting Hazards. The hanging lanterns, the swelling music, the laughing gentlemen and soft-shouldered women.
And here came Cooper, bare-chested and sweaty, a look of exhaustion on his face. He was followed by Billy, Brett, and Madeline, all grubby as farmers and giving off strong odors in the afternoon heat.
George silently reproved himself for the negative reaction. The Mains had always been farmers, though of a very elegant and special kind. Now it appeared that they had—to twist it a little—no hands but their own. Billy’s were wet from the ooze of broken blisters, George noticed.
He wasn’t surprised to find his brother here. Constance had reported Billy’s departure with Brett and Madeline when George came home on furlough late in April. Once George had decided on this trip, he had shamelessly telegraphed Stanley and asked him to secure an extension of his leave.
Cooper and Judith, however, were astonished by the arrival of the visitors. They pretended elation, but their tiredness showed. So did an unmistakable reserve, a tension. George could scarcely believe he had ever heard the music at that lovely ball. The sight of the impoverished Mains left him full of despair. He hoped he had a partial remedy, brought up with the luggage and placed near his feet on the brilliant spring lawn.
Madeline and Judith led the visitors to the substitute porch—logs, boxes, and barrels arranged in front of the new pine house—then went inside to prepare some refreshments.
There was a half hour of halting exchanges of information about the two families. George expressed his sympathy to Madeline, then asked Cooper, “Where is Orry’s grave? I’d like to pay my respects.”
“I’ll show you the marker we erected. The grave itself is empty.”
“They didn’t send the body home?”
“Oh, yes, they put it on a train, finally. Somewhere in North Carolina there was an accident on our splendid transportation system. The train derailed. A terrible smash-up. Forty pine coffins burned. George Pickett wrote to say there was nothing left.”
George hurt as he seldom had in all his life. He heard April’s fire bells dinning in his mind. He struggled to get the words out. “I’d still—like to see the marker and spend some time there alone.”
“When would you like to do it?” Cooper asked.
“Now, if you don’t mind. But first I must get something from my luggage.”
Cooper described the route to the graveyard. Finding the marker, George drew from his pocket the letter he had kept in the satchel in his desk for four years. The letter to Orry. He knelt and dug a shallow hole in the sandy soil six inches in front of the marker. He folded the letter once and placed it in the hole, which he refilled, smoothing the sand afterward. Then, though never a deeply religious man, he clasped his hands and bowed his head. He stayed thirty minutes, making his farewell.
The afternoon was a trial. The Mains seemed a company of strangers. Or was that merely their plight distorting his own vision?
No, he decided, much had changed as a result of the destruction. It was most noticeable in Cooper, who had a certain forbidding politeness new to George. Orry’s brother said he was glad to have an excuse to leave the fields for half a day, but his exhausted, anxious eyes belied that. Much had changed; did that mean everything had changed?
Supper lifted his spirits a bit. Although the meal was scanty—chiefly rice—the conversation was slightly livelier, less strained, than before. The exception was Cooper. He said little. George’s anxiety deepened. Staring at Cooper was like trying to read a page of some Oriental language. Nothing could be deciphered.
When all of them had finished, they once again took places on the improvised furniture while the evening cooled and darkened around them. Madeline asked George about conditions in Charleston.
“Terrible,” he replied. “I felt guilty because I couldn’t hand a few dollars to each of the people on the streets.”
“Black people,” Jane said, not as a question.
“Whites, too. They all looked destitute—and hungry. On the docks, we saw dozens trying to catch fish with string. We saw scores tenting under blankets in vacant lots. What happened down here is dreadful.”
“So was slavery, Mr. Hazard.”
“Jane,” Andy said, but her eyes defied him. George was dismayed to see brief anger on
Cooper’s face. Judith observed it, too, her mouth drawing into a tight line.
George’s anxiety deepened. He had better say the rest, or he might never get it said.
“Of course you’re right, Jane. I believe no person of conscience would assert any other view. But this is also true: there’s been terrible damage to everyone. I don’t mean loss of property. I mean damage to feelings. What’s left, in the North as well as the South, is anger. Confusion. Bereavement—”
He and Madeline exchanged looks. Then he rose and walked a few steps down the lawn, locking hands at the small of his back as he struggled to focus his thoughts into the right words.
“The day Lincoln was shot, according to my brother Stanley, he told his cabinet about a dream he had the night before. He was in a boat rowing toward what he termed a dark, indefinite shore.”
He turned, facing the semicircle of listeners, white and black, in front of the pine house not yet whitewashed. In the distance, the wisteria on the great chimney splashed the dusk with color.
“A dark, indefinite shore,” he repeated. “It strikes me as an apt metaphor to describe our situation. Ours personally, and that of the country, too. It is one country again. Slavery’s gone, and I say thank God. It was evil, and it was also brandished as a club over Northern heads for a long time.”
“And when the club was finally put to use, it hurt us as much as you,” Brett said.
George noticed another sharp look from Cooper. Had he indeed become someone else? Had the loss of his boy on the voyage from Liverpool destroyed the passionate convictions—the humanity—of his earlier days? George hoped this prickly new defensiveness, a trait he had seen in other Southerners but never before in Orry’s brother, was a temporary aberration.
Self-conscious, George cleared his throat. “Anyway, we were friends, my family and yours, long before this terrible time.” Brett leaned against Billy, who was standing behind her left shoulder. “More than friends, in some cases,” he amended with a gentle smile.
Encouraged by a loving look from Constance, he went on, with a steadily strengthening voice. “We must remain so. Steadfastly. Four years ago, I believed we all faced a time of severe testing. Orry and I pledged to keep the bonds of friendship and affection between ourselves and our families intact despite a war—”
Then the fire came, and I feared we couldn’t.
“We did—” he turned more directly to Cooper “—at least in my estimation.”
Orry’s brother stayed silent. With effort, George resumed. “Now I fear something else. The shore ahead is new but darker and more indefinite than ever, I think we’re destined to pass through a second period of animosity and struggle which may, in its own way, be worse than war. How can we avoid it, with so much grief and loss on both sides? With a whole people newly freed but still justifiably enraged by the past? With venal men—I can name some, but I won’t—waiting to take advantage of any misstep or show of weakness? We must be ready to weather all that. We must once again—”
A simple lift of his right hand; a glance slowly moving from face to face. Then, quietly: “Keep the bonds strong.”
No one moved. No one spoke. God above, he had failed. He had failed personally, but, far worse, he had failed Orry. If only he knew how to speak properly, the way skilled politicians—
It was Brett who reacted first, reaching up and across to find and clasp Billy’s hand. It was Madeline, her eyes tear-filled, who gave a single strong nod of agreement. But it was Cooper who gravely spoke for them all.
“Yes.”
Almost dizzy from the sudden relief of his tension, George saw the Mains smiling, rising, starting forward. Hastily he held up both hands. “Just humor me a moment longer. One of the chief reasons I wanted to visit Mont Royal was to bring you a small token of my belief in what we have all reaffirmed.”
He walked back to his log stool and the small satchel on the ground beside it. He slid the polished toe of his right boot forward, nudging the satchel.
“Does anyone recognize this?”
With a faint, puzzled smile, Cooper scratched his chin. “Wasn’t it my brother’s?”
“Exactly. In this bag Orry brought money to repay the loan I made to help finance the Star of Carolina. Orry traveled all the way to Lehigh Station at a very perilous time in the spring of ’61, carrying over six hundred thousand dollars in cash—all he could raise of the sum I invested in your project. I never forgot that or—” again he cleared his throat “—or how much Orry himself meant to me. I came here to repay a debt of honor and friendship, just as he did. To put some of my resources into your hands, to help you rebuild.”
He picked up the satchel and handed it to Cooper. “Before leaving home, I wasn’t able to get reliable information about the banking situation in this state. I imagined it was still chaotic, however—”
Cooper nodded.
“Well, I am majority stockholder in the Bank of Lehigh Station, which I formed at the start of the war. Inside the satchel is a letter of credit drawn on my bank. The initial amount is forty thousand dollars”—Madeline gasped—“but there’s more available. As much as you need. Now—”
He reddened unexpectedly. “I wonder if I might have some of that delicious berry punch you served this afternoon? I find my throat very dry all at once.”
For a prolonged moment, nothing interrupted the twilight quiet but the rasp and hum of insects. Suddenly, with a swirl of sun-faded skirt, Madeline ran to him. She threw her arms around his neck. “I love you, George Hazard.” He felt her tears as she pressed her cheek to his and hugged him. “And don’t misconstrue the reason. If you were penniless, I would love you just as much.”
Then they were all moving forward, closing around the two visitors. Judith kissed each of them twice. Andy spoke a few words of admiration and gratitude. Jane said a soft thank you to both. Brett embraced them in turn. Last of all, Cooper shook George’s hand, so overcome he could barely speak.
“God bless you, George.”
Shamefully, George wished it were Orry standing there instead. He turned away so none of them would see his eyes.
138
SANTA FE WAS FLY-INFESTED and revoltingly Latin-Catholic. Ashton was sure the caverns of hell, if they existed, could be no hotter.
She had a clean but cramped second-floor room on a narrow street of yellow walls, just a few steps from a cantina and the cathedral square beyond. Three weeks of waiting, mostly in that room, made her feel old as a crone. The parched air created new wrinkles, especially around her eyes. At least twice daily she examined her wrecked face in a triangle of broken mirror hanging on the adobe wall beside the hard bed. Would Lamar be displeased by her dry, sun-reddened skin? The possibility agitated her every day and spoiled her rest every night. But no more than the waiting.
Even now she found it unbelievable that a woman of her background and breeding had endured all that was necessary to reach this benighted place. The unspeakably long, occasionally terrifying coach trip. Poor sleep. Foul food at filthy way stations. Crude Westerners for traveling companions. An escort of scruffy Yankee cavalry for a couple of hundred miles because of the Indian threat. Mercifully, there had been no incidents.
When she reached Santa Fe, she found Powell’s letter and thus expected his two wagons within a week. The week passed, and so did another, then a third. Her optimism began to dwindle along with her funds. Only a few dollars remained in her reticule—barely enough for another week’s lodging and the barbarically spicy food the owner’s wife brought up from the cantina.
On Saturday at the end of the third week, a commotion drew her to the spacious, sunlit plaza along with several dozen other people. A cavalry patrol had arrived, causing great excitement because the blue-clad troopers brought the body of a young man stabbed three times before he died.
“Picked him up at Winslow’s trading station, west of here on the Rio Puerco,” explained the Yankee lieutenant in response to the questions of a paunchy, self-important man Asht
on presumed to be some town official. Mighty pompous for a greaser, she thought as the lieutenant went on: “He crawled that far—two, three miles—with these wounds after the Jicarillas massacred the rest of his party.”
Ashton’s flesh froze. Above a great roaring in her ears, she heard the lieutenant’s voice continuing faintly.
“Winslow cleaned and dressed the stab wounds, but even so, the lad didn’t last twelve hours.” No, Ashton thought, queasy. Surely it couldn’t be Powell’s party.
She was wild to ask questions but feared the troopers would be suspicious of her accent. They were the sorriest, most villainous-looking soldiers she had ever seen, far worse than those who had escorted the stage. There was a private with only one thumb. A corporal wearing an eye patch. One bearded man sounded like an Irish comic from a variety hall, and two others jabbered in some foreign tongue—Hungarian, perhaps. On the coach trip, a passenger had told her the hard-pressed Union government was having trouble filling the ranks of its Western army, hence would take the physically handicapped, immigrants who knew little or no English—even Confederates.
Finally, unable to contain her curiosity, she approached the cleanest of the lot, a sergeant. She asked the question of greatest importance to her.
“Can you tell me whether there were wagons with this party?”
The sergeant was from Indiana, but he was courteous and helpful in spite of that. “Yes, ma’am, the trader did say the dead boy mentioned wagons. Two, burned and pushed into a gully where the massacre took place.”
She swayed, dizzy. The sergeant’s eyes narrowed. What did it matter if he were suspicious? The questions must be answered; she asked the second most important one.
“Was the leader of the party a man named Powell?”
“That’s right. Some reb.”
“And he’s—?”
A nod. Only then did Ashton think of her husband.
“The rest, too?”
“Every one. Did you know any of them?”
“Mr. Powell—by reputation, not personally.”