by John Jakes
He booted the roan still harder, the wind carrying those piercing howls to him twice more before he turned into the lane leading to Seth’s property.
Riding fast toward the curving front drive, he saw that his original estimate of the situation had been wrong. Slave cabins, not the main residence, were afire. But the front door of the great house stood open. He heard terrified wails from within.
He jumped from the saddle and sped across the veranda between the tall white pillars. He heard mounted men back along the lane. He paused in the doorway, saw another eight or ten galloping toward the house, swords swinging from their hips, muskets and pistols in their hands. In the distance, the bell still clanged.
Judson wiped his sweat-blurred eyes, entered the foyer and gagged.
Hacked by a field knife, Seth McLean lay on the parquet. An ear was missing. An arm. One foot. The sickening stench of blood filled the air.
Judson heard something stir in the darkened parlor. He aimed the horse pistol at the arch—
And watched two black girls in long dresses and kerchiefs come forward out of the gloom. Both were young—and weeping. House help.
“Upstairs,” one pleaded in a feeble voice. “Love o’ God, Mist’ Fletcher—upstairs.”
In the drive, the plantation men were dismounting. Judson swayed a moment, drunk again. But not from wine. From the slaughter; from the unavoidable truth:
This is what happens when one man chains another. God damn my father for not understanding—
Somewhere on the upper floor, a woman screamed.
Judson climbed the stairs three at a time, maddened almost beyond sense. His heart hammered so violently his chest hurt. The memory of Seth lying butchered brought bile back to his throat. But he kept running, toward the source of that scream keening down the long corridor where two chimneyed candles flickered, islands of yellow in the darkness—
At the hall’s end, a door on the left stood open. The screaming came from that room; mindless; mortally afraid. He shouted Peggy’s name as he plunged toward the rectangle of light on the carpet, skidded to a stop outside, hate welling when he looked in.
She lay on the floor. Half of her nightgown was in shreds, the rest completely gone. A young black bent over her, his trousers around his ankles. A field knife shone in one hand.
The slave turned at the sound of Judson’s footsteps. His other hand held scraps of pastel fabric. Behind him, Peggy thrashed and wailed, her legs spread. A moment’s distorted glance showed Judson the secret place he’d thought about so often; the curling dark hair against the pale skin. He saw her small, firm breasts as well. But there was no excitement in it; only horror. Seth’s wife shielded her face with her forearms as she screamed—
Desperately, the slave lunged with the field knife. His pants at his ankles made him stumble. Judson hammered the barrel of the horse pistol on the slave’s wrist. The knife clacked to the floor.
The black swayed forward, afraid now. Judson used his free hand to catch the sweaty chin, prop the slave up. The weight put great strain on his arm and shoulder. His right knee buckled. But he needed only a moment more—
The young slave saw what was coming. His mouth opened like some ivory-lined chasm. Judson shoved the muzzle of the horse pistol between the black’s teeth and pulled the trigger.
The black’s body seemed to leap upward, then landed half on top of Peggy McLean. She recoiled from the weight she couldn’t identify, tore at it with maniacal hands and kept on screaming. Judson tried not to look at the reddened gobbets of brain matter and bone the pistol ball had deposited on the rumpled bed and the wall behind.
He kicked the dead slave’s body aside, laid the still-smoking pistol on the carpet, bent over the flailing woman. He started to speak, noticed something else: a few glistening drops of milky fluid in the black tangle between her legs. And drying stains inside her thighs.
He closed his eyes, bent his head, jammed one palm over his face until he was able to control himself.
Then, as gently as possible, he touched her hair.
“Peggy?” he whispered. “Peggy, look here. It’s Judson.”
The backs of his fingers accidentally brushed her cheek. She shrieked again, trying to hitch her bare body away from whoever was touching her.
“Peggy, you’re all right. For God’s sake look at me,” Judson pleaded, unaware of the tears on his cheeks. He repeated it:
“Look at me!”
She opened her eyes; those beautiful, luminous dark eyes he’d coveted for so long. Her gaze was unfocused; opaque.
She lifted one hand, as if on the threshold of recognition. Then something quenched it. She recoiled, hand whipping over to shield her face as the screaming started again, louder and shriller than before. She bent her knees, hitched her hips away from the terror in her own mind—
Dry-eyed now, Judson ran downstairs and found the two shivering house girls. From behind the main building came the familiar crack of whips and discharging pistols.
“Go up to her,” Judson ordered. “Lock yourselves in with her and take care of her. Don’t open the door unless it’s someone you know personally. A white man. If anything happens to her, I’ll come back and kill you both.”
They obeyed without hesitation as Judson ran out into the darkness.
v
Some forty men answered the summons of Sermon Hill’s alarm bell that night. Mounted, they stormed through the tobacco fields, youths with torches in the van. They shot, sabered or whipped any black they found running loose. Judson traveled with one group and did his part, short of actually firing his pistol. He rode like a man half dead, only marginally conscious of details of what was going on.
Though not completely like the vividly remembered outbreaks of past years, the one that had ignited at Sermon Hill, McLean’s and one other plantation further downriver resembled earlier uprisings in at least one way. It was fueled and given momentum by rage more than reason. Poorly organized and planned, it began to weaken as soon as the planters took to the saddle with their superior weapons and jangling shackles. It crumbled further as whites rode in leading chained slaves in twos and threes. It dissolved completely about midnight, when another group arrived at Sermon Hill with the corpse of big, blue-muscled Larned dragging on the ground, pulled by a rope around one ankle.
Larned had been shot in the back with a musket ball while attempting to swim the Rappahannock. His noisy thrashing attracted a passing party of whites. Down on the river bank, they killed him.
“Poor dumb nigger,” remarked one of the party, without any real pity. “He was trying to swim across to the other side. Didn’t have one damn idea of the way to Williamsburg.”
Angus Fletcher ordered Larned’s head cut off and exhibited on a pole in front of the cottage belonging to the dead overseer.
More and more slaves were rounded up in the hours after midnight. Most wailed for mercy, claiming that they had only done what they thought was right: “S’posed to go fight with Gummer Dunmo.” To start the outbreak, Larned and a few co-conspirators had circulated word of Dunmore’s outrageous offer.
Judson listened to the fearful, unlettered pleas and shook his head sadly. At minimum, each runaway would receive a murderous lashing that might cripple him for life.
One pocket of resistance remained. Half a dozen slaves, male and female, hadn’t surrendered, yet hadn’t been quick enough to escape from Sermon Hill after the diversionary fire was discovered. The slaves had thoughtlessly holed up in the smokehouse. Angus Fletcher issued orders for brushwood to be piled around the building. He had been informed that Larned’s woman, Dicey, was one of those inside.
While Judson watched from horseback a few yards away, Angus lighted a torch. The old Scot turned his back on his son’s obvious disapproval and applied the torch to the brush. Within minutes, there was a stench of scorching flesh. Cries of human pain mingled with the fire’s crackling.
A charred door fell outward. Dicey appeared, soot-covered, pleading for m
ercy. Angus Fletcher ordered her shot. A planter with a freshly loaded musket put it to his shoulder and obliged.
Judson wheeled his roan away from the carnage, wanting the solace of alcohol. As much alcohol as he could consume, as quickly as he could consume it.
First, though, he made inquiries of the loyal house blacks. Yes, the situation at McLean’s was under control. Peggy’s mother and father had been summoned from the Ashford plantation.
Perhaps thirty blacks in all had been slain outright. Scores more would be maimed by their punishment. Still, that represented a smaller economic loss than if the rebellion had gone unchecked even for another few hours. Judson heard men laughing and congratulating each other as he headed upstairs.
He locked himself in his room and started to drink himself insensible. For some reason it proved difficult. Long after he should have fallen into a daze, he heard the last dreadful cries from the smokehouse.
Or were they only in his mind?
Judson’s chin sagged onto his chest. He speculated in a thick-witted way that the burning alive of six prime bucks and wenches would no doubt be considered a good investment by old Angus. An example to insure tranquility for months, even years to come—
Presently the rum did put him in a stupor. Yet even then, he heard the slaves’ screaming.
And Peggy’s.
vi
Seth McLean’s funeral was held at an immaculate white Presbyterian church six miles from Sermon Hill. The whole district attended—except for Seth’s widow. Three days earlier, her father had taken her away from the McLean house in a closed coach, so that she might recuperate—if that were possible—among her closest kin. In the interim, McLean’s overseer Williams was to operate the plantation.
Judson rode to the church ten minutes after Angus left Sermon Hill. He didn’t care to share the old man’s company.
When the pastor finished eulogizing Seth McLean and turned to speculating on Jehovah’s mysterious and unfathomable reasons for taking human life in its prime, Judson rose up in a back pew. He had been drinking since dawn. In fact he had taken his last pull at the doorway of the little country church. He created a disturbance by shouting at the pastor:
“Jehovah didn’t kill Seth. Or the nigras either. We did.”
Several of the church elders converged on Judson and hustled him from the sanctuary. He laughed in a crazy, embittered way as they hoisted him onto his horse and sent him away up the road. Then the elders went back inside, shaking their heads.
There, Judson supposed as he groped for another jug in his saddlebag, Angus Fletcher would be seated in the very front pew, his head bowed in abject prayer for the forgiveness of sins—
Patricularly those committed by his satanically inspired second son.
vii
A gray December morning, with rain tapping the glass. Judson let the curtain fall on the misted view of the wharf beside the Rappahannock.
The wharf was empty. A factor had been found, and the canoes had come at last. This year’s crop had brought a modest profit. Trade with the ports of England hadn’t ceased completely. But most of the planters considered that inevitable—just as they now regarded war as inevitable.
Judson rummaged through the odds and ends of clothing remaining to be packed. He discovered he’d miscounted the pairs of linen underdrawers. He added two more to the pile.
He just wasn’t thinking clearly. Images of Peggy McLean kept intruding. First the Peggy he’d courted, warm-eyed and laughing. Then the harrowing face of the screaming girl he’d discovered in the McLean bedroom—
Finishing his counting, he saw the second picture again. He began to shudder. Only one remedy for that. He relied on it almost constantly these days. Since he had to face his father shortly, that justified a second drink.
He set the jug aside and picked up the folded sheets of parchment. Carrying these, he lurched down the graceful curving staircase to his father’s cramped corner office behind the conservatory.
Judson rolled back the sliding door and walked in. Then he rolled the door shut with a loud bang.
Framed against a window overlooking the slave cabins and the raw lumber already nailed up for the framework of a new smokehouse and curing barn, Angus Fletcher took his old clay pipe out of his mouth and scowled. The room reeked of Sermon Hill’s own fragrant leaf.
“You know I don’t care to be disturbed when I’m working on the accounts, Judson.” The old man waved the pipe’s long stem at several open ledgers.
“Appears to me you’re smoking, not doing figures, Father.”
Angus sighed. “May God forgive you for your never-ending disrespect.”
“Oh, I think He’s too busy with more worthy folk to bother with the likes of me,” Judson grinned. He held up the parchment sheets. “I thought you’d want to know the contents of Donald’s letter. It came two days ago and you haven’t asked—”
Angus cut him off: “The activities in that nest of vipers are of no interest to me.”
“Well,” Judson announced with another muzzy smirk, “you needn’t count Donald among the vipers any longer.”
That caught the old man’s attention. With bitterness, Judson recognized concern breaking through the flint facade. There’ll never be such concern for me, he thought.
Angus asked, “What does Donald say, then?”
“That the gout is afflicting him severely. And the pleurisy. As soon as he can arrange transportation, he’ll be returning home.”
One veined hand darted out. “Let me see—”
“Sorry, there are parts of the letter that are personal.” Judson folded it and shoved it in his belt.
Angus Fletcher sucked on his pipe. “You delight in baiting me.”
“I guess I do,” Judson admitted in a moment of candor.
“It’s your pleasure, your sport. Along with drunkenness—”
“For Christ’s sake don’t start that.”
“How often must I tell you to refrain from blasphemy in my presence, Judson?”
“All right.” A weary shrug hid his sudden hurt.
Despite their differences—and the serious imperfections of each—Judson knew he should love this old man. And be loved in return. Sometimes the fact that both seemed incapable of it produced pain that was damn near unbearable.
Judson quickly regained control. His customary mask of smiling arrogance back in place, he continued:
“Truth is, you won’t have to suffer my blasphemies at all from now on.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m packing to go to Philadelphia. I’m to serve as Donald’s alternate in the Congress until he recovers.”
Angus Fletcher sat down in his hand-hewn pine chair, dumbfounded. But not for long:
“Apparently there is no limit to your waywardness.”
Weaving on his feet, Judson replied, “Why, I’d say I’ve been an exemplar of virtue since that unfortunate business at the chapel—”
“An example of debauchery,” the old man snorted. “Besotted every waking minute—”
“I told you, don’t start—”
“off at that slut Lottie Shaw’s most nights oh, yes, I know about that, too.” Reaching out as if he wanted to conceal something private of his own, the old man closed the ledgers one by one, then stacked them. “It’s time we had an accounting.”
“No accounting necessary, Father. I’m leaving, that’s all.”
“How will you travel?”
“On horseback.” The purpose of the question eluded him.
Angus rectified that: “I can’t spare a single nigger to accompany you. Not one, is that clear?”
“Oh, I see. Surely. I’ll hire some piece of white trash, then. Send him for the trunk—”
“You are an abomination in the eyes of the Lord,” Angus Fletcher declared. “A disgrace to your heritage, to your upbringing—”
“Dammit, I’ve had enough of your prating!” Judson exploded. “My politics are no different than Donald’s!�
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“Donald is a misguided innocent compared to you,” his father told him. “You shame me in front of the church congregation, you scandalize the Fletcher name with your concern for widow McLean’s welfare—no, don’t argue! I know how you’ve had someone from the house bustling over there almost daily to inquire about her! If she hadn’t been hurt the night of the rebellion, you’d never have ridden the fields to capture the niggers.”
“You’ve certainly outlined the charges well,” Judson said. If only the old man would speak to him kindly just once. Once! But that was a forlorn hope. And he recognized that effort was sorely lacking on his side as well. He went on:
“There’s not much I can add to your expert presentation of the evidence. I stand accused. Proudly, sir. Proudly—”
“When will you stop your insolence?” the old man fairly screamed. Judson smiled his most charming smile. “The day you’re rotting in hell, which I sincerely hope is your destination.”
Paling, Angus Fletcher blinked several times. Water appeared at the corners of his eyes. In a peculiar, strangled voice he asked:
“What is it that you have against me, Judson? Why is it that you hate me so?”
“I’ve often wondered the same about you, Father. Goodbye—”
As he started to leave, Angus’ voice regained its old harshness:
“One moment more.”
Judson turned back; recognized the familiar sternness of the lined face. That moment of hesitation and hurt in which they might have reached out symbolically to touch one another was gone. He felt overpoweringly thirsty.
In a level tone, Angus said, “You do not approve of my loyalties to the government which has made it possible for the Fletcher family to prosper. You do not approve of the system of labor that keeps this plantation operating profitably. You certainly never respond to my suggestions for improving your lax morals. It seems to me there is nothing more for you at Sermon Hill—”
He leaned over the desk, pressing his knuckles on the closed ledger on top of the stack:
“Am I plain enough? Nothing—not a farthing.”