by John Jakes
Right after he’d ordered a second drink, a trio of noisy noncoms stumbled in. One was Corporal Hazen, wobbling. Evidently he’d been drinking for some time. He spied Charles at the end of the plank bar and made a remark about a foul smell.
Charles stared at him until he looked away and shrilly ordered a round for his friends. Charles was thankful Hazen didn’t feel like pushing it. He felt too good.
That lasted ten minutes.
Passing by on his way to the officers’ entrance, a small, slight man saw a familiar face among the enlisted men inside. He looked away, took three more steps, then halted, his mouth open. He about-faced and peered into the smoky tent—
There was no mistake.
Color rose in his face as he went in. The men noticed his look and stopped talking.
The officer walked toward the end of the bar with an aggressive swagger—probably to make up for standing only five feet six. His shoulders were pulled back with the stiffness of someone preoccupied with Army formality. Everything about him suggested fussiness: the waxy points of his mustache, the impeccable trim of his goatee.
Yellow facings and trouser stripes identified him as cavalry. A lieutenant colonel’s silver-embroidery oak leaf decorated his shoulder straps. He marched down the bar and, as he passed a burly, bearded civilian wearing a notched turkey feather in his hair and a buckskin coat decorated with porcupine quills and gaudy diamond-shaped pony beads, he accidentally bumped the man’s arm, spilling whiskey.
“Hey, you jackass,” the man said. As he turned, the beads on his coat shot darts of reflected light through the tent. A brindle dog at his feet responded to his tone and growled at the officer, who strode on without apology, tightly clutching the hilt of his dress sword.
“Cap’n Venable, sir,” Charles heard Hazen say as the officer reached the three noncoms. The silver oak leaf was from a wartime brevet, then.
“Hazen,” the man said, striding on. Charles watched him, and the back of his neck started to itch. He didn’t recognize the officer. Yet something about the man bothered him.
Venable halted two feet from Charles. “I saw you from the street, Private. What’s your name?”
Charles tried to place the accent. Not truly Southern, but similar. One of the border states? He said, “Charles May. Sir.”
“That’s a damn lie.” The officer snatched the whiskey glass from Charles’s hand and threw the contents in his face.
A sudden uproar of talk; then, just as suddenly, silence. Whiskey dripped from Charles’s chin and ran off the edge of the plank bar. Charles wanted to hit the little rooster but held back because he didn’t understand what was happening. He was certain there was some mistake.
“Captain—” he began.
“You’ll address me as colonel. And don’t bother to keep on lying. Your name isn’t May; it’s Charles Main. You graduated from West Point in 1857, two years before I did. You and that damn reb Fitz Lee were thick as this.” The officer held up two fingers. Instantly, the bearded face acquired a past that Charles remembered.
He bluffed. “Sir, you’re mistaken.”
“The hell. You remember me, and I remember you. Harry Venable. Kentucky. You put me on report four times for a messy room. Twenty skins each time. I damn near accumulated two hundred and took the Canterberry Road because of you.”
Even in a stupor, Hazen caught on. He wiped his nose and exclaimed to his friends, “Didn’t I tell you? Didn’t I spot it?” He stepped away from the bar, in case Charles tried a dash to the entrance.
Charles didn’t know how to extricate himself peacefully. More memories came back, including Venable’s cadet nickname. It was Handsome, usually spoken sarcastically. No one liked the little bastard. He was too correct, a fanatic perfectionist.
“You had to lie to get in the cavalry again,” Venable said. “West Point graduates are excluded from the amnesty.”
“Colonel, I have to earn a living. Soldiering’s all I know. I’d be in your debt if you could overlook—”
“Overlook treason? Let me tell you something. It was men from your side—John Hunt Morgan’s men—who overran my mother’s farm while I was serving on General Sherman’s staff. Those men ran off our stock, burned the house and outbuildings, cut my mother down with sabers, and committed—” he reddened and lowered his voice—“sexual atrocities on my twelve-year-old sister, God knows how many times. Then they killed her with three minié balls.”
“Colonel, I’m sorry, but I’m not responsible for every Confederate partisan, any more than you’re responsible for all of Sherman’s bummers. I am truly sorry about your family, but—”
Venable slammed Charles’s shoulder with the palm of his hand. “Stop saying sorry like some damn parrot. Sorry doesn’t begin to pay the bill.”
Charles wiped whiskey from his cheek. The tent was very still. “Don’t push me again.”
Venable quickly surveyed the crowd, saw Hazen and his friends ready to help. He flexed his fingers at his sides, closing them in a fist. ’I’ll push you whenever I please, you fucking traitor.” He gut-punched Charles.
Charles wasn’t expecting the blow. It doubled him. He grabbed his middle, choking. Venable pounded his jaw, spinning him sideways. Hazen and the other two noncoms jumped forward to seize Charles as he flailed, off balance.
Venable signaled toward the tent entrance. The noncoms dragged Charles the length of the bar and threw him outside. Still off balance, he landed in the mud.
Venable by then had removed his dress sword. He unfastened his brightly polished buttons and stripped off his dress coat. To the crowd he said, “Before that lying reb gets a bad-character discharge, he’s going to get a little something from me. Come help out if you want.”
Most of the soldiers and civilians grinned and clapped, although the burly man in the beaded coat said, “ ’Pears to me those odds are kind of unfair, Colonel.”
Venable turned on him. “If you don’t want to join in, keep quiet. Else you’ll get what he gets.”
The burly man stared and restrained his growling dog as Venable strode out.
In the light rain, Charles struggled to rise from the mud. Hazen darted past Venable, yanked Charles’s head up by the hair, and smashed his nose with his other hand. Blood spurted. Charles flopped on his back. Hazen stamped on his belly.
“I want him,” Venable said, pushing the corporal away. He gazed down at Charles, who was clutching his middle and trying to sit up. Venable’s mouth wrenched as he drew his right boot back. He kicked Charles in the ribs.
Charles cried out and fell on his side. Venable kicked him in the small of the back. Flushed, he said, “A couple of you get him up.”
Hazen and a companion grabbed Charles under his arms and pulled. Charles’s head rang. His ribs ached. Usually he could take care of himself, but, taken by surprise, he’d lost the advantage.
On his feet, he wrenched away from the noncoms hanging on him. He was slimy with mud. It glistened in the lamplight and dripped from his hair and mingled with the blood running from his nose. He swayed in the circle of rain-slicked faces, most of them laughing; few took this with the unsmiling ferocity Venable displayed. Charles knew his second chance in the Army was lost. All he could do now was extract some punishment. Like a bull, he lowered his head.
He charged Venable, who leaped back. Charles pivoted and caught the startled Hazen, as he’d planned. Teeth clenched, he pulled Hazen’s head down with both hands while raising his knee. Hazen’s jawbone cracked like a firecracker going off.
The corporal reeled away, shrieking. One of the other noncoms flung himself at Charles from behind, battering Charles’s neck with the side of his hand. Charles staggered. Venable punched his head twice, kicked his groin. Charles flew backward into the crowd. They pushed him forward again, laughing, jeering.
“What happened to that ol’ fighting spirit, reb?”
“Got no more rebel yells left, reb?”
“Pass him around the circle, boys. We’ll get
a yell out of him.”
So they began, one man holding him while the man on the right punched him. Then the holder passed him to the next man and became the one who punched. When Charles sagged, they pulled him back up. They were about to pass him to a fourth man when someone said, “Leave him be.”
Venable started to swear. Something hard and cool slipped across his throat and, from nowhere, a hand shot under his left arm and up to his neck. He was caught between a callused palm pushing on the back of his neck and a hand holding the cutting edge of a huge Bowie against his throat.
It was the man in the beaded coat. He smelled of wet buckskin and horses. A civilian snarled, “Another goddamn Southron.”
“No. And I don’t even know this fella. But you wouldn’t treat a four-legged cur that bad. Drop him.”
The men holding Charles watched Venable. With the knife at his throat, he blinked rapidly and whispered, “Do it.” The men released Charles. He toppled facedown, sending up splatters of mud. With a contemptuous shove, the bearded man let go of Venable, who started to swear again. The bearded man stopped him by laying the point of the Bowie against the tip of Venable’s nose.
“Anytime, little man. Just anytime, one to one, ’thout a platoon to help you.”
Venable shook his finger at Charles, sprawled in the mud. “That son of a bitch is through in the U.S. Army. Done!”
The bearded man twisted the knife. A little ruby of blood appeared on Venable’s nose. “Light outa here, you slime. I mean right now.”
Venable blinked and blinked and somehow managed a sneery smile. He turned and limped into the Egyptian Palace. “Follow me, lads. I’m buying this round.”
They gave him three cheers and a tiger, carried Hazen inside, and didn’t look back.
The rain fell harder. The man in the beaded coat sheathed his knife and watched Charles struggle to rise, fail, and flop back in the mud face first.
The man, who looked to be fifty or so, walked toward the lee of the tent. The dog, trotting after him, was good-sized, gray with white and black markings. A circle of black ringed its left eye, a piratical touch. It shook itself twice, showering water. Then it whined. Its owner merely said, “Shut up, Fen.”
Standing in the shadows by the tent was a large, fat boy of fifteen, pale and beardless. He wore an old wool coat and jeans pants, heavily mended. His limpid dark eyes had a slight slant, and above his eyebrows and ears his head was much larger, round and almost fiat on top, resembling a section of fence post.
The youngster looked frightened. The man laid a hand on his shoulder. “You’re all right, Boy. The fightin’s over. There won’t be no more. You don’t need to be scairt.”
The boy reached out with both hands and clasped the right hand of the older man, a pathetic look of gratitude on his face. The man reached over with his left hand and patted the boy’s, reassuringly. “I’m sorry I gave in to my thirst and made you wait out here. But you can stop bein’ scairt.”
The boy watched him, eager to understand. In the lane, Charles groaned and jammed his fists in the mud. He raised his head and chest two feet off the ground and wearily looked toward the speaker. The man in the pony-bead coat knew the soldier didn’t see him.
“Determined cuss,” he said. “Plenty of sand. And he sure can’t go back in the Army now. Maybe we found our man. If we didn’t, we can at least do the Christian thing and shelter him in our tipi.”
He pushed the youngster’s hands down and gently took hold of one, squeezing it. “Come on, Boy. Help me pick him up.” Hand in hand, they walked forward.
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
July, 1865. Three more freedmen hired, bringing the number to six. Palmetto Bank approved $900 for timber operation. Digging of first saw pit began yesterday. Andy S. supervises work till noon, then cuts in the big stand of cypress with two other men until four, then tills his own plot while daylight lasts. Each new worker receives five acres, his wage, and a small share of whatever crop or timber we eventually sell
Nemo’s wife, Cassandra, expected more than five acres. Weeping she showed me a bundle of stakes painted red, white, and blue in slapdash fashion. The poor guileless woman gave her last dollar for them. The white peddler who played the trick is long gone. Sad and astonishing how privation brings out the best in some, the worst in others…
“Painted stakes?” Johnson fumed.
“Yes, Mr. President. Sold to colored men in South Carolina for as much as two dollars.”
Andrew Johnson flung the ribbon-tied report on his desk. “Mr. Hazard, it’s disgraceful.”
The seventeenth president of the United States was a swarthy man of forty-eight. He was in a choleric mood. His visitor, Stanley Hazard, thought him canaille. What else could one expect of a backwoods tailor barely able to read or write until his wife taught him? Johnson wasn’t even a Republican. He’d run with Lincoln in ’64 as a National Union Party candidate, to create a bipartisan wartime ticket.
Canaille and a Democrat he might be, but Andrew Johnson still meant to have an explanation. His black eyes simmered as Stanley picked up the report with hands that trembled slightly. Stanley was one of Edwin Stanton’s several Assistant Secretaries at the War Department. His particular responsibility was liaison with the Freedmen’s Bureau, an administrative branch of the department.
“Yes, sir, it is disgraceful,” he said. “I can assure you the Bureau had no hand in it. Neither Secretary Stanton nor General Howard would tolerate such a cruel hoax.”
“What about the rumor that inspired the swindle? Every free nigra down there to be given a mule and forty acres by Christmas? Forty acres—his to stake out in patriotic colors. Who spread that story?”
Sweat shone on Stanley’s pale, jowly face. Why did Howard, chief of the Bureau, have to be away from Washington, leaving him to answer the summons to the President’s office? Why couldn’t he speak forcefully, or at least recall some of Howard’s religious platitudes? He wanted a drink.
“Well, Mr. Secretary?”
“Sir”—Stanley’s voice quavered—“General Saxton assured me that Bureau agents in South Carolina did nothing to inflame the Negroes, create false hope, or spread the rumor.”
“Then where did it come from?”
“So far as we know, sir, from a chance remark by—” He cleared his throat. He hated to criticize an important member of his own party, but he had to think of his job, much as he loathed it. “A remark by Congressman Stevens.”
That scored a point. Johnson sniffed as though smelling bad fish. Stanley went on. “He said something about confiscating and redistributing three hundred million acres of rebel land. Perhaps that is Mr. Stevens’s wish, but there is no such program at the Bureau, nor any intent to begin one.”
“Yet the story spread to South Carolina, didn’t it? And it enabled unprincipled sharps to sell those painted stakes far and wide, didn’t it? I don’t think you understand the extent of the mischief, Hazard. Not only is the rumor of forty acres and a mule a cruel deception of the Negroes, but it also affronts and alienates the very white people we must draw back as working partners. I dislike the planter class as much as you—” More, Stanley thought. Johnson’s hatred of aristocrats was legendary. “But the Constitution tells me they were never out of the Union, because the Constitution makes the very act of secession impossible.”
He leaned forward, like a truculent schoolmaster. “That is why my program for the South consists of three simple points only. The defeated states must repudiate the Confederate war debt. They must overturn their secession ordinances. And they must abolish slavery by ratifying the Thirteenth Amendment. They are not required to do more because the federal government cannot, constitutionally, ask more. General Sherman failed to understand that when he confiscated coastal and river lands with his illegal Field Order 15, now rescinded, thank the Almighty. Your Bureau doesn’t understand. You talk widely and blithely of the franchise, when qualifying a voter is a matter for the individual states. And no one at all seem
s to understand that if we threaten to give away their land, we will further harden the hearts of the very Southerners we want back in the fold. Do you blame me for being exercised? I am signing pardons at the rate of a hundred a day, and then I receive that report.”
“Mr. President, I must respectfully repeat, the Bureau is not in any way responsible for—”
“Who else spread the promise of forty acres? In lieu of any evident culprit, I hold the Bureau responsible. Kindly convey that to Mr. Stanton and General Howard. Now be so good as to excuse me.”
These days Stanley Hazard’s life was unremitting misery. To try to make it bearable, he regularly took his first drink before eight o’clock in the morning. He kept various wines and brandies locked in his desk in the old office building temporarily housing the Freedmen’s Bureau. If he drank too much during the day, and so misunderstood a question or stumbled or dropped something, he always muttered the same excuse, that he was feeling faint. But he fooled few.
Stanley did have reasons for being wretched. Years ago, his younger brother George had denied him any control of the family ironworks. Deep down, Stanley knew why. He was incompetent.
His wife, Isabel, two years older, was an ambitious harpy. She’d borne him twin sons, Laban and Levi, who were in trouble so often Stanley kept a special bank fund for bribing magistrates and jailers and paying off pregnant girls. The twins were eighteen, and Stanley was desperately shoveling bribe money—Isabel referred to it as “philanthropic donation”—to Yale and to Dartmouth, hoping to get the boys admitted and out of his house. He couldn’t stand them.
Nor, paradoxically, could he understand or deal with the enormous wealth generated by his shoe business during the war. The factory up in Lynn was now on the market. Isabel insisted they get out of the trade, because normal competition was returning. Stanley knew he didn’t deserve his success.
Then, too, his former mistress, a music-hall artiste named Jeannie Canary, had deserted him after Isabel discovered the relationship. Jeannie was bound to leave him anyway, Stanley had decided. Many other suitors had as much money as he did, and he was not a good lover; stress and whiskey made it impossible for him to get it up often enough to satisfy her. Miss Canary was rumored to be the mistress of some Republican politician, thus far nameless.