Look at them, he thought, trading homilies like anglers trading worms. Ann Beecher, plain, slightly plump and watery-eyed, as pious as a bishop and four times duller. His son, Henry, endowed with all Sam’s shortcomings and none of his strengths, was as portly, if not more so than his father, with a doughy face and thick-lensed spectacles that made his eyes look almost oriental.
Henry had once written to Abby that he would never set foot in this house while Louise lived in it. Look at him now, fawning over her! Louise had taken care of all the arrangements for Abby’s funeral and had written to Henry breaking the news of his mother’s death. Sam did not know what had passed between them, but whatever it was, it was clear they had formed some kind of bond. It was as if Louise had a hold over Henry, which was a ridiculous thought.
‘You read from the Scriptures so beautifully, Louise,’ Ann Beecher said in her lowing voice. ‘I find myself very moved by it.’
“‘My soul doth magnify the Lord”,’ Louise said. “‘For He hath regarded the low estate of his handmaiden”.’
‘Amen, amen,’ Henry muttered, in the voice of someone anxious to please. ‘Will you not read something else, sister-in-law?’
‘Gladly, dear Henry, but perhaps a little later,’ Louise said. ‘First, I think, we should devote a little time to discussing the matter of your marriage to dearest Ann.’ She laid a hand on Ann Beecher’s bony knuckles. ‘I cannot tell you, my dear, how happy I am that Henry has found someone whose heart is full of love of the Lord our God. Does it not say in the Bible that a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband?’
‘Proverbs,’ Henry said, beaming at Louise like a bright pupil with a favorite teacher.
A man hath no better thing under the sun, Sam thought biliously, than to eat and to drink and to be merry. Also Proverbs. That was the trouble with Bible-bangers. They omitted to mention any of the bits that contradicted their theory that God was on the side of the people with thin lips, tight purses and closed minds. ‘Have you fixed a date yet?’ he said, hoping to get the conversation started and therefore finished sooner., If he didn’t get a damned drink soon, he was going to howl at the ceiling like a hunting wolf.
‘We had thought perhaps in April,’ Ann said.
‘A Saturday,’ Henry added. He looked at Ann and she nodded. He nodded too. By God, they don’t look afire to get at each other, Sam thought, remembering Abby. And how he’d carried her to his bed that first time and taken her, blinded by lust, and afterwards, she chuckled softly and slid her hand down his belly and said ‘I’ll bet you couldn’t do that again.’ Well, she lost her bet. Somehow he found it very hard indeed to imagine these two naked in a bed together, much less enjoying it. Probably stop every few minutes to ask God to forgive them, he thought, watching them hunting through the Almanac.
‘Well, the first of the month is a Saturday,’ Henry said. ‘I don’t think, dearest, that I would like to be married on All Fool’s Day,’ Ann Beecher said. ‘That is, of course, unless you feel—’
‘No, no, of course not, my dear,’ Henry assented. ‘I quite agree with you. It is not a day for so solemn an occasion as the taking of marital vows.’
Why the Hell can’t he just say getting married, like everyone else does? Sam wondered. Fancy phrases; all that damned high-flown painting and reading, all they did was turn a man pompous.
‘The following weekend is Easter,’ Louise said. ‘Would that not be the perfect choice of days?’
‘It would, indeed,’ Ann said. ‘But I must be at home with Father at that time. It is one of the busiest of the ecclesiastical seasons, you know. Papa relies heavily on me, since Mama …’ She let the matter of what was wrong with her mother remain unspoken. Whatever it was, Louise and Henry obviously knew, for both readily agreed that, of course, dear Ann could not think of being away from Cincinnati at such a time.
‘Then it shall be the weekend following Easter!’ Louise said, ‘April fifteenth?’ She clasped her hands together, eyes shining, and waited as Henry and Ann looked at each other. He nodded; she nodded. They turned to Louise and nodded in unison.
‘So be it,’ said Louise. ‘Now, there will be a thousand things to do! The invitations, the flowers, the church. My goodness, we shall have little enough time to prepare for such an auspicious occasion!’
‘Where you planning to have the wedding, Henry?’ Sam asked, feeling he could do with one solid fact in this babble of gallimaufry. ‘Cincinnati? Or perhaps here in New York?’
‘No!’ Henry said, a shade too quickly and too sharply. ‘Not in New York!’ Ann frowned slightly, obviously as puzzled by Henry’s vehemence as was Sam. Louise, however, seemed to understand it perfectly.
‘Of course, dear Henry,’ she cooed. ‘Whatever you wish. ‘
‘I’d thought … perhaps in Culpeper,’ Henry said slowly. ‘At Washington Farm.’
‘But the farm’s been gutted!’ Sam said. ‘Andrew wrote that everything had been looted and smashed up.’
‘But he said he was going to rebuild, didn’t he?’
‘I doubt he’ll have done much,’ Sam said. ‘He’s still down there at Petersburg with Grant, far as I know.’
‘Even if it isn’t,’ Henry said. ‘I think it would be the right place for us to be married.’ What he did not say was that he was frightened to marry in either New York or Cincinnati. Too many people in both cities, who knew about his ‘other’ life, would read about the wedding in the papers. Henry had always taken the most stringent precautions to keep his identity secret from the hateful creatures with whom he debauched himself. Let ‘Kitty Cambric’ or ‘Pretty Harriet’ or ‘Black-eyed Leonora’ learn his name and rank in life and he would spend the rest of it paying blackmail to filthy little coal merchants’ clerks and butchers’ errand-boys and shoe salesmen. Culpeper was as far from their prying, knowing eyes as the moon. Yes, Culpeper it should be.
‘Very well, then!’ Louise said. ‘I shall “Write to dear Andrew tonight and ask. his blessing. Now, we must make a list of guests, my dears.’
‘It’s all settled, then?’ Sam said. ‘April fifteenth, at Culpeper.’
‘That’s right,’ Henry said, his expression showing he was surprised that Sam had spoken. ‘If God spares us all.’
‘Can’t think why the Hell he shouldn’t,’ Sam said, getting up, adding automatically, ‘Sorry, Louise!’
‘And where are you going?’ she asked icily.
‘Just going to take a turn around the block,’ Sam said. ‘Walk off my supper.’
‘Hmph!’ Louise said. She folded her arms across her chesty her mien and her stance rigid with disapproval. ‘Bound for a saloon, more likely! Well, don’t you come back to this house reeking of whiskey on the Lord’s day, Sam Strong!’
‘Of course I won’t,’ Sam said. It was like a ritual. She said what she was supposed to say and he said what he was supposed to say. Then he went and did it anyway, and when he came back, she said the same things she always said when he came back with a skinful, and he said the same contrite things and made the same promises he always made. And so the world went round.
He walked down Clover Hill and looked at the lights of Manhattan glittering in the brittle chill of the December night. Silent night, holy night, he thought, with a sour look back at the lighted windows of his house. Well, I suppose what you do is just be thankful for the good times you’ve had, and when the bad times come, hold on. He went into the saloon like a man who had just discovered a waterhole in the desert.
Thirty – The Story of Jedediah Strong
January 1865
He came out of the northwest on a bitterly cold day in January 1865, a sturdy, bearded man made gaunt by hunger and pain, leading a pack-horse carrying three panniers, the basket kind woven by Mexican peasants. He rode up Portrero Street and swung down from the saddle outside the provost-marshal’s office. When he went inside, he found the same short, square-jawed officer he’d met before sitting at the duty desk.
‘Captain Kerr, wasn’t i
t?’
‘And your name is Strong.’
‘Right,’ Jed said, taking a greasy, crumpled piece of paper out of his pocket and spreading it on Kerr’s desk. It was the reward poster for Edward Maxwell. Kerr looked at it, and then at Jed.
‘So?’
Jed jerked his head at the tethered pack-horse by the hitching rail. Kerr saw the panniers and his eyes widened. He swallowed loudly.
‘Uh … what?’
‘Says on the dodger that proof of identity would be required,’ Jed said. ‘So I brought the heads.’
‘Heads?’ Kerr said weakly.
‘Old Man Maxwell and his two sons. You did want them taken out of circulation, didn’t you, captain?’
‘I … uh… I’d better report this,’ Kerr said. ‘Sergeant!’ He sent the sergeant running across to the headquarters building, then leaned back in his chair, looking at Jed the way a man might look at a horse he is planning to buy. He got a cheroot out of his pocket and struck a match.
‘You don’t, do you?’ he said.
‘Those things can kill you,’ Jed replied.
Kerr opened his mouth as if to say something, but before he could get it out, the sergeant was back, shouting ‘Ten-shun!’ Kerr snapped to the salute as a thin, elderly-looking colonel in Confederate gray came in through the door.
‘All right, Captain,’ he said. ‘What’s all this about the Maxwell gang?’
‘I killed them,’ Jed said conversationally. ‘Their heads are in those baskets.’
‘You?’ the colonel said, his eyes flicking to the pinned sleeve of Jed’s coat. ‘You killed the Maxwells?’
‘They sure as Hell didn’t commit suicide!’ Jed said, not letting his annoyance get hold of him. He had long since figured out it was no use getting steamed up when somebody implied that a man with only one arm couldn’t be any damned use for anything. He had a whole lifetime of that ahead of him. If he got angry every time it happened, he’d never have any peace.
‘Where did you find them?’
‘They were in the San Sabas,’ Jed said. ‘Living good. There’s a lot of wild cattle in the brakes up there. They got hungry, they’d just butcher another. They were eating steak three times a day.’
‘How many of them were there?’
‘About twenty, maybe one or two more.’
‘You trying to tell me that you killed Old Man Maxwell when he had twenty men around him?’
‘I’m not trying to tell you anything, Colonel,’ Jed answered patiently. ‘Only that he’s dead. Him and his sons.’
‘I don’t believe it!’
‘You ever seen Old Man Maxwell, colonel?’ Jed asked, sitting on his temper. ‘Would you know him if you saw him?’
‘Yes,’ the soldier assented. ‘I’d know that old bastard.’
Jed nodded. He went out to the pack-horse and opened one of the panniers. He reached in, and lifted out the head of Edward Maxwell and held it high where the soldier could see it.
‘Ah … uh … yes,’ he murmured, staring with a suddenly sickly expression at the thing in Jed’s hand. ‘You want to see the others?’
‘No. No, thank you, Mr. …?’
‘Strong. Jedediah Strong.’
‘Yes. Well.’ There was a long pause. ‘You are claiming the bounty?’
‘It’s there,’ Jed shrugged.
‘Then I’ll need to make a report. My name is Leavitt, by the way.’
‘Colonel Leavitt. Where do we make this report?’
‘The sergeant will bring you. Perhaps you’d like to … get rid of those things?’
‘All right,’ Jed said. ‘If they bother you.’
He took the pack-horse down towards the fringe of the town. There was a stinking trash pile there, the province of mangy cats and prairie scavengers. Jed unshipped the entrenching shovel strapped to the saddle. Closing his nostrils to the stench of the garbage, he dug a hole in the ground at the edge of it. One by one he took the heads of Edward Maxwell and his sons, Paul and David, and dropped them into the hole. The face of Paul Maxwell stared sightlessly up at him. Death will find you soon enough he thought, and began to shovel the earth back into the hole. When he was done, he scraped the piles of garbage down to cover the fresh-turned earth. Then he walked away leading the horse, his face like stone.
‘You came back,’ she said.
‘Yes. I have done what I came to do.’
‘I heard,’ Maria said. ‘Colonel Leavitt has spoken to my father. He said he still cannot believe that a man alone could go into the mountains and kill Edward Maxwell.’
‘A man on his own often has a better chance than an army,’ he said. ‘They knew how to fight an army. They were helpless when it came to fighting only me, for I fought by no rules, and without the compunction soldiers have.’
‘Yet you were a soldier,’ she said. ‘Once.’
‘But that was in another country,’ he replied. ‘Do you like poetry?’
‘Yes,’ she said surprised. ‘Was that from a poem?’
‘I thought of you a great deal,’ he said. ‘While I was … out there.’
‘Why?’
‘I think you have always been in my mind. Or somewhere in my heart. Since that first time I saw you, all those years ago.’
‘That seems,’ she smiled, ‘improbable.’
‘You’re right. Better to say, that when I saw you again, I remembered my boyish jealousy of that man, Lopez y Hoya. And knew, as I knew then, the reason for it.’ She frowned. ‘I think you speak in riddles, señor.’
‘You are not … spoken for?’
‘No,’ she said, her dark eyes wary, wondering.
‘If I were to stay … in San Antonio. Would you permit me to call on you?’
‘That would not be … it would be very difficult. We are of different races, you and I. A Spanish woman who is seen with an Anglo, becomes … something else. Her own people spit on her. They use a word that burns the soul.’
‘I know the word,’ said.
‘Then you know why what you ask cannot be.’
‘Up over the border, past Mesilla, I found a place,’ he said. ‘High, high in the mountains, where the air is like wine. There are dark forests down the flanks of the hills, and above the tree line you ride through lupins as high as a horse’s shoulder. You can hunt wild turkey, or deer. Once in a while you see a black bear moving between the trees. You can sit in a meadow and see fifty miles in any direction. It’s wild, dangerous, beautiful country, Maria, and I’ve fallen in love with it. I want to spend the rest of my life there.’
‘You will not go back to your people in the East?’
‘I’ll do that first,’ he said. ‘There are … family matters, that must be sorted out, when the war is over.’
‘Have you a big family?’
‘Big enough.’ He looked at her and touched her shoulder with his hand, as if to be sure he had her attention. ‘I was full of bitterness, Maria,’ he said. ‘For a long time. It’s gone out of me, now.’
‘That is good,’ she said, her eyes still unsure. ‘Why have you told me all this?’
‘You said … we are of different races. That would not matter ... in New Mexico ... as much as in some other places.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘But the thing would still be there. It never goes away completely.’
‘Would you care, Maria?’ he said. ‘I mean ... if you loved someone?’
‘No,’ she said very softly. ‘Not if I loved … someone.’
Something had been said. Both of them knew it. Maria felt a faint sensation at the furthest edges of herself, no more than the touch of a feather falling to the ground. Yet it seemed to tell her yes. It was something so strange and yet so powerful that she felt as if there was no breath in her body. Then, as mysteriously as it had come, it was gone.
‘Come,’ she said. ‘My father is waiting to meet you.’
He nodded. It was as if, in that moment they had shared, he had read her affirmation as she had read his. He foll
owed her into a stone-floored room, and then into another with bright Indian blankets hanging on the white adobe walls, and colorful rugs on the floor beneath heavy oaken furniture, chairs with leather seats and backs, a roll-top desk with an oil lamp standing on it, the smell of cigarettes.
‘General Gonzales,’ Jed said. ‘I’m honored to meet you.’
Maria’s father was, a tall, spare man with a fine forehead and the same frank, dark eyes as his daughter. He wore a woolen coat, a white shirt, riding breeches. His hair was as white as Maria’s was black. A small scar split the curve of his right eyebrow. He gestured to a seat and Jed sat down.
‘So you are the one,’ he said.
Maria smiled and turned silently, leaving them alone. Jed watched her go and the old man saw the way he looked at her. He did not say anything for a while.
‘I would like to hear about it,’ he said. ‘How you caught that cabrón.’
‘Perhaps, general, you will understand me if I tell you that I would prefer not to speak of it. It was something that I … had to do.’
‘A personal matter?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘We have a saying in Spanish. “No revenge is more honorable than the one not taken”.’
‘It was not revenge, sir,’ Jed said. ‘Merely retribution.’
The old man smiled. ‘A fine distinction,’ he said. ‘Well, you and I have been in other battles. We will talk of those instead. Will you take a glass of wine, señor?’
‘Gladly.’
They talked of battles and of soldiers. The names they spoke were the martial sound of three great wars. General Gonzales had seen the butchery at the Alamo, and what was that but another version of the butchery of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg? Young officers he had faced across the fortifications at Churubusco now led armies in Tennessee and Virginia. What one had learned in the siege of Vera Cruz, the other had discovered before the fortifications of Yorktown.
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