“Jesus,” Judith said.
“It’s the only way,” I said.
We came rolling up towards Richard Street. I made the turn at twenty, let the speed climb a little more, and then we were going up the grade into the center of town and I kept the engine speed constant while the wheel speed fell off. We coasted to a stop at the traffic light, and there I had to make my first decision. There were two ways to go: east, out towards the Narrows and then turning south on state highway 326, through Charlesville and Beegleton and Rainsburg; or due south into Cumberland Valley, through Burning Bush to Patience and then east from there to Rainsburg. The first route was likely to be unplowed; the second would be clear as far as Patience, but then I would have to climb Evitts Mountain on a road that might be plowed and might not. I thought about it for a minute, sitting at the traffic light wishing I were on foot. The mountains angled away to the northeast. The wind had not yet kicked around to come out of the west. The western slopes should be fairly free of drifts, and warmer, so less icy. It wasn’t much of a theory, but otherwise the decision was a toss-up, so when the light changed I took us south, up the long incline on Richard Street and down into the valley beside Shobers Run. The road was twisting for a mile or more, but the turns were gentle, the rises and falls small.
“It’s lovely,” she said.
It was. There was no wind in that valley; it was protected by a curious configuration of the mountains: they pinched down into a narrow pass, creating almost a box, really. And so the air was still and clear. The headlights reached out and tapped the snow and sent back golden sparkles that added to the silver thrown up by the moonlight. But far above us the clouds were fleeing north across the sky, propelled by a wind so strong it tore them apart as much as it pushed them, and I knew that half a mile farther on, where we would come out of the lee of the mountain, the wind would be driving up the cove.
“Yeah,” I said. I looked over at her.
She had turned her head back and was staring out the windshield. Her face was calm, composed, and contented, her profile sharp and distinct against the background of the moonlit snow.
Her face changed then, but not into a smile: her eyes widened in fear, and I realized that I should have been watching the road. I spun back. We had been coming down an incline towards a turn, and I had let the speed get away from me, and ahead of us loomed the outline of a square solid building, its near corner only a few feet from the edge of the road. It wasn’t as dangerous as it looked; I just shifted back to second and steered the car around it.
“That’s a dumb place to put a building,” she said.
“Actually, it’s a dumb place to put a road; the building was there first. On the other hand, there wasn’t any other place to put the road; all that over there was water.”
“What…?”
“It’s an old mill,” I said. “Built by”—I let the cards flip in my mind—“Dr. John Anderson, around the turn of the century. All that out there was the mill pond.”
She shook her head. “I know you said this place was backward, but they were using water power in 1900?”
“Sure,” I said. “But I meant the turn of the nineteenth century.”
“It’s still standing?”
“They built to last. There were mills all over the place, and a lot of them still stand. Or parts of them do.”
“Still…” she said. But I couldn’t listen to her; another turn was coming up, the first of the bad ones, close above the creek and cambered wrong, which is what happens when you try to build a highway over a route best suited to horses. I got the speed down with some careful braking, and came around it with enough speed to straighten out. I heard Judith gasp, but it wouldn’t be the road this time.
“The Springs Hotel,” I said. I turned and looked. It was a sight. A long, creamy edifice, with a columned, two-storied central section and long, pavilioned wings reaching out on either side. The snow on the lawn was smooth and unblemished, and the moonlight danced on the facade.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“And old,” I said. “A hundred and seventy years or so. Built by Dr. Anderson”—I stopped to think, letting the cards flip—“in 1806. Just a few years after Vincenz Priessnitz invented the sponge bath, the wet sheet pack, and the douche, and started cleaning up in Austria with mineral water spas. The fashion came across the Atlantic. Along about 1804, a mechanic… nobody knows his name, so maybe it’s just a story, but anyway, he was fishing right over here and started drinking the water, and before long his rheumatism was cured and the sores on his legs were gone. So Anderson built his hotel, and a couple of years later he bought more land, with three more springs on it, and the word got around. For a while this was the most prestigious resort in America, the vacation spot of millionaires and Presidents. Local people made plenty, and they stopped complaining about hard water.”
A right angle was coming then, and I got the speed up and started to bring us around the turn.
“I don’t—” she said, but the wind hit us then, and pushed us into a little skid. I started to correct, but then I saw what was going to happen, and I let the rear end come around until the wind caught the left side of the car and slammed it back into line. I relaxed then; from there on until the climb over the pass into Cumberland Valley it was going to be easy. Judith twisted around in her seat, looking back to get a last glimpse of the Springs. “Quite a sight,” she said. “When did it close down?”
“It didn’t,” I said. “It’s just shut for the winter. Opens the end of April.”
I felt her tense. “I see,” she said. “Just one of those little things about this place you didn’t tell me, right?”
“It’s just an old hotel,” I said. “How am I supposed to know you’d be interested in an old hotel?”
“One that looks like that? I… Oh, never mind. Tell me now. What’s it like inside?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been inside.”
I heard her twisting around again, and I knew she was staring at me.
“I’ve never been inside,” I said again. “I wouldn’t set foot in the damned place.”
We were up the incline now, and I made the turn that put the Springs out of sight. The road ran straight then, at a slight upgrade, across the face of the mountain. The trees were tall on either side, their branches arching over us, blocking out the moon. I shifted back up into third gear and let the speed climb.
“John,” she said. There was an edge on her voice.
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“Good,” she said. “It’ll keep my mind off your driving.”
I thought about it, not wanting to, hoping the facts would elude me, but they didn’t, they came springing into my mind, names and dates as clear and sharp as india ink on red card stock. “Buchanan,” I said. “James. Born 1791. Graduated Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1809. Elected to Congress 1821. Appointed minister to Russia 1832. Elected senator—this was back in the days when the senators were elected by the state legislature—1834. Stayed in the Senate for eleven years, and then went to work as secretary of state under Polk. Buchanan messed up foreign relations for a few years, hewing to the expansionist line. He presided over the acquisition of Oregon and the annexation of Texas, which got us into the Mexican War, much to the delight of the Southerners, who had visions of turning the entire Southwest into slave territory. They won the war but lost the political battle, because Zachary Taylor became a hero in the Mexican War and ran for the Presidency as a Whig, and won, which put Buchanan out on his ear. But Taylor died of typhoid fever. Millard Fillmore couldn’t hold the Whigs together, and lost out in 1852, but the Democrats managed to compromise on Franklin Pierce, who was a war hero and soft on slavery, and he was elected. He made Jefferson Davis secretary of war, and he made Buchanan minister to Great Britain. At the same time, the minister to France was a man named John Young Mason, a Virginian, and the minister to Spain was a French-born immigrant who had gotten to
be a big-time Louisiana Democrat, a man named Pierre Soulé. Now, the way it worked out, the Southerners were hamstrung by laws that controlled the expansion of slavery into the North and West, but nobody had ever said much of anything about the South. They thought they were going to make out well after the Mexican War, but all they got was Texas. So they set their sights on Cuba. The first thing they did was to try and steal it, and they sent seven hundred and fifty Mexican War veterans under a man named Narciso Lopez on a little expedition. That was in”—I had to think for a while—“1848. That didn’t work. It didn’t work when they tried it again in 1850. When they tried it again in 1851, they came close; they actually got a foothold on the island. But Lopez was captured and killed. So they got Pierce to make noises about annexing Cuba in his inaugural address, trying to stir up favorable public opinion, and tried to promote a war over a customs hassle involving a cargo ship called the Black Warrior, which had violated some regulation and was being held in Havana harbor. But the North refused to go to war over a six-thousand-dollar fine. So then they got Pierce to get Soulé to try and buy Cuba. But Soulé had really screwed up pushing the Black Warrior thing, had actually issued an ultimatum on behalf of the U.S. government that nobody in the State Department had authorized, and the Spanish wouldn’t listen; they didn’t want to sell Cuba, anyway. So Pierce told Soulé to get together with Mason and Buchanan, and they held a conference in Ostend, Belgium, and came up with a document called the Ostend Manifesto, which was a pretty obvious suggestion that if Spain wouldn’t sell Cuba, the U.S. government ought to go and take it. That got nowhere; the secretary of state was no great liberal but at least he wasn’t a fool, and he repudiated the document as soon as the news leaked out. But it didn’t hurt Buchanan any; it kept him in good with his Southern buddies, and with their help, and the help of some of his Northern buddies who were just as bad—in between ‘My Old Kentucky Home’ and ‘Dixie,’ Stephen Foster wrote Buchanan’s campaign song—he got the Democratic nomination for President, and because the liberals couldn’t decide between Fremont and Fillmore, and because of some shenanigans about the Dred Scott Decision, which his Southern buddies on the Supreme Court held up announcing until after the election because they were afraid if they did it beforehand half the country would vote Republican, he managed to get elected President. First Pennsylvanian ever elected President. And the last one, too; people do learn from their mistakes, if the mistakes are bad enough. And Buchanan was bad enough. If you went looking for a worse President you could find one, I suppose, but you’d look awful hard to do it. Maybe Nixon. But then, Nixon never really came close to destroying the country, and he had six years; Buchanan just about did destroy it, and he managed in four. He started out by appointing a crony to every job he could find. He made a man named Bowman, who had been the editor of one of the local papers, the Gazette, for a long time—”
“Local…you mean here?”
“That’s right. He was a Democrat, and his idea of journalism was to print darky jokes and run accounts of slaves slaughtering white people and then eating them, so Buchanan made him the public printer in Washington, and after four years Bowman ended up with a hundred thousand dollars, which wasn’t bad for those days. Of course, others did even better. Buchanan had another buddy, a Virginian named John Buchanan Floyd—I never could find out if they were related—who started out as a cotton planter in Arkansas and went broke, but he helped Buchanan get nominated, so Buchanan made him secretary of war and he managed to ‘lose’ $870,000. Those guys did okay, but everybody else was going broke; there was an economic panic so bad that the farmers in Illinois decided it was cheaper to burn their corn than to send it to market. Buchanan didn’t do much about that; he was too busy trying to make his Southern buddies happy by getting Kansas admitted to the Union with a constitution that would have made it more of a slave state than Alabama, a thing called the Lecompton Constitution. The Kansans were against it about four or five to one, but Buchanan arranged it that when they went to vote, the only choices they had about slavery were limited slavery or unlimited slavery, so the people who were against slavery didn’t vote. Buchanan brought it up before Congress, but the deal stank so bad that even guys like Stephen Douglas, who wasn’t exactly what you could call an enemy of the South, couldn’t stomach it. And that set the stage for the Civil War, because the Southerners were mad at Douglas, so when he was nominated in 1860 they bolted the Democratic party and nominated Breckinridge and split the vote, and Lincoln sneaked in between. So Buchanan ended up destroying his own party; the Democrats didn’t elect a President again for twenty-four years. But that wasn’t enough for Buchanan. By 1860 everybody knew there was going to be war—William H. Seward had been talking about the ‘irrepressible conflict’ for two whole years—so Buchanan let his Southern buddy Secretary Floyd send a hundred and fifteen stands of arms to Southern arsenals for safekeeping, and order Anderson not to defend Fort Sumter….”
“John,” she said, “will you please tell me what this has to do with that lovely old hotel?”
“That was the bastard’s headquarters. After he was elected he made it the Summer White House, but he’d been coming here for years, long enough to have kids named after him and make twenty-buck contributions to the local Episcopal church. He would hang out down there, being the big man with his local lackeys, like Bowman and a man from the West County, a guy named Jeremiah S. Black, who was smart enough to get to the State Supreme Court but not smart enough not to become Buchanan’s attorney general and end up getting blamed for mismanaging the South Carolina secession. But I guess it was a thrill for a lowly state judge to hang out with Buchanan’s other buddies, that compromising idiot Henry Clay and that damned sellout Daniel Webster and Associate Justice Robert Grier, who was a Polk appointee, even though he was from Pennsylvania. Of course, he wasn’t the only Supreme Court Justice down there. They were all down there. They spent the summers down there. That’s where they hatched out the dirty deal over the Dred Scott Decision. Buchanan didn’t make a single campaign trip, but he came here to talk with his buddies, Mr. Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, from Maryland, and Mr. Associate Justice James Wayne Moore from Georgia, and Mr. Associate Justice Peter Vivian Daniel from Virginia…”
“John…”
“…sitting down there with their own personal slaves waiting on them hand and foot, just like back home, bringing magnesia water to cure old Massa’s rheumatism, and then they’d send the niggers out to the quarters, just like they did back home in Dixie, and they’d switch over to iron water and go to work deciding exactly when they were going to tell the poor dumb darkies that they weren’t citizens, and weren’t ever going to be citizens, even if they managed to get free, and that they didn’t have any right to property, or to appeal in a court of law, and that the ‘status of slavery is perpetual and self-perpetuating,’ so they couldn’t be free and their kids couldn’t be free…”
I realized that my voice was too loud, that my fingers were aching from gripping the steering wheel, that my foot had somehow come to press the accelerator nearly to the floor, that we were flying over the highway at nearly sixty miles an hour. I felt a flush of adrenaline in my belly, and eased off on the accelerator gently, feeling sweat running down my spine. I let the car roll to a stop and sat there in my sweat. I took my hands off the wheel but I couldn’t hold them up; they were shaking. I put them in my lap, and felt them trembling on my legs. When my hands had stopped shaking enough I reached into my coat pocket and got out the flask. I took only a small sip, but I took it slowly, and I knew Judith was watching me. When I was finished I took the flask away from my mouth and put the top back on and got the car going.
From there it was easy. The road went downhill fairly steeply, but my guess had been right: the western slope of the mountain was free of drifts. Down in Cumberland Valley the wind was throwing up minor tornadoes of snow, but the plows had been through recently, to clear the drifts from the road. I knew the road well—I hated the valley, but I
knew it—and I put the speed up to forty-five and we made good time, rolling south through Burning Bush and on into Patience. The climb to the top of Evitts Mountain was quick and easy; they had plowed the back roads too, for some reason.
At the top of the mountain I let the car roll to a stop and looked over at Judith. She had said nothing at all during the long, easy run, and I thought maybe she was asleep, but she wasn’t; I could see her eyes glinting in the light from the instrument panel. I started to call her name but changed my mind. I just took a sip from the flask and sat for a minute, looking down into the valley. I reached out to adjust the heater, but it was on full. “Must be windy up here,” I said.
She didn’t say anything. I shrugged and got us moving again, down into the valley towards Rainsburg. The road was clear; it was going to be easy. I risked taking my hands off the wheel, one at a time, and blowing on them. Judith looked at me. “Are you cold?” she said.
“Just my hands,” I said.
“It feels warm to me,” she said. “It’s the whiskey that’s making you feel cold.”
“The whiskey’s the only thing making me feel warm,” I said.
We came to the bottom of the mountain then, and I dropped down into second gear to negotiate a long curve. Then we were on the valley floor, rolling easily into Rainsburg. The road was still clear; we were still in the lee of a mountain, and the wind wasn’t pushing the snow across the road at all. But there was wind; I could feel it.
Chaneysville Incident Page 40