Homeland

by John Jakes

  “It’s called a zoetrope. Child’s toy. Didn’t you ever have one?”

  “No, sir, not in Berlin.”

  “Well, enjoy it. Better blow the dust off.”

  Paul took it to the roof. There, in the chilly sunshine of a cool Sunday, he lay on his side with his head beside the spinning drum. The slits moved so fast, the drum seemed to vanish.

  While the magic horse ran …

  As the weeks passed, he learned more about his mentor. Wex indeed seemed to have no talent whatever for making or keeping money. But then, Paul decided, money wasn’t the reason you should love photography, or make it your career.

  Wex was a heavy drinker of whiskey, especially, though not always, at night. If he had no customers or commercial jobs, he’d drink in the daytime. Paul guessed he bought whiskey with money he should have spent for warm clothes or better food.

  The whiskey relaxed Wex’s tongue. Slurring his words, he would make reference to “my many flaws.” Or talk about “my ruling passion, which is utterly beyond my control, and which contributed to the demise of my happy home down in Carolina.” After those words, he gazed for a long time at the sepia-tinted portrait of his boy.

  Trying to cheer him up one night, Paul said he didn’t see evidence of too many bad habits. Wex gave him a sideways look from behind his glasses.

  “You will. Warm weather’s coming. Sporting weather. That’s a perilous time for me, Dutch.”

  Saying that, he poured himself another hooker.

  In the middle of February Paul found a new job. General helper at a low dive called the Lone Star Saloon and Palm Garden. It was located on Whiskey Row, the west side of State Street, down near Harrison, and catered to a seamy trade of white men, black men, and young toughs Paul suspected were professional pickpockets.

  The Lone Star’s proprietor was a small, coarse man named Mickey Finn. He said he was Irish and came from Peoria. He kept a bung starter in his belt. On Paul’s first day he threatened to use it on three quarrelsome customers. “I put out men’s eyes with this,” he told one. “I’ll do the same for you if you don’t shut your lip.”

  Finn was proud of a large brown bottle stored under the bar. The bottle contained a milky liquid with which he spiked the drinks of certain unwary customers. At midnight, the end of Paul’s second day, Paul waited nervously in the storeroom while his employer rifled the pockets of four men laid out on the filthy floor. Finn handled them roughly, turning them back and forth like meal sacks. Alarmed, Paul said, “Won’t they wake up?”

  “Not with them knockout drops in ’em. Finn’s Number Two Cocktail. Nothin’ like it. Soon as I’m done, you haul these bozos outside and drag ’em away from here. A block or two’s good enough. It’s your last job every day.”

  He noticed Paul’s expression. “What the hell’s wrong with you, kid? Can’t understand the king’s English? What I want you to do is—”

  “I heard, Mr. Finn. I don’t like this kind of work. I quit.”

  “Come here, you kraut bastard,” Mickey Finn screamed, tearing the bung starter from his belt. Paul was already out the alley door and gone. He was a long time falling asleep that night. Cousin Joe was right, a lot of his vision of America was turning out to be foolish fantasy.

  One day in late February he followed his routine of combing the classified advertisements in day-old papers he was allowed to pick up in the lobby of Wampler’s Hotel. Today he had a copy of the Inter-Ocean. He found no suitable jobs mentioned, so he leafed through the news and social pages. One item made his heart leap.

  Vanderhoffs Return

  From Grand Tour

  Farther down the three-inch story he read, The gracious and charming Miss Juliette Fishburne Vanderhoff remains abroad for an indefinite period.

  He crumpled the paper, threw it, and then kicked it. If she loved him, as she professed, wouldn’t she have come back as soon as possible?

  No, he was being unfair. He didn’t know the circumstances. Some emergency must be keeping her in Europe. Perhaps she was sick again and had to recuperate. But he wouldn’t find out for a while. He must wait.

  He would, no question. The waiting would be painful, but it would be worth it. Julie would come back to him. He was certain.

  58

  Joe Crown

  EARLIER IN THAT SAME winter, a morning in January, Joe Crown rode to the Atlantic Ocean from Chimneys, his great house a few miles from the South Carolina coast, astride a spirited gray. Gray had been a despised color for a horse in the Union cavalry. This gray, Old Stonewall, was a beauty.

  Joe had risen at four after a troubled sleep with many wakeful periods. He’d slept poorly for weeks, an experience he’d had before. Too much to think about. Too many problems. He felt old. Prey to every kind of sour and pessimistic thought about private and public matters.

  He had stolen downstairs, lit a lamp, and read for the second time an elaborate booklet describing the Habsburg School, a private academy for boys of German parentage. It promised a great deal. Heavy emphasis on deportment and social graces, a strong curriculum, of which science was an important part, and a program of team sports. It was located in Westchester County, New York, on the border with Connecticut.

  That was its principal drawback in Joe’s opinion. He had spent virtually all his life in America in the Middle West. He subscribed to its attitudes and shared its myths: the Middle West was more open, friendly, democratic, while the East was closed, haughty, a place where money manipulators hatched schemes to victimize the public and arrogant social cliques held themselves above common folk because of “old blood.” A few years ago a little popinjay named Ward McAllister, who pretended to lead and speak for New York City’s four hundred best people, had sneered at the idea of Chicago’s ever having a similar high society.

  Still, the East had undeniable advantages. The finest universities were located there, as were private academies such as the one he was considering for Carl. The Habsburg School promised consistent stern discipline for its pupils, a powerful appeal. Joe Junior and then Paul had come to disastrous ends in Chicago schools. He didn’t want his bumptious younger son to go the same way.

  Undecided about the school, he had left the booklet on his desk as day was breaking. He dressed upstairs; Ilsa had already left their bed, presumably to cook. In South Carolina the winter thus far had been warm, so he put on a loose white shirt of cotton with full sleeves tightly cuffed at the wrists, and twill trousers stuffed into riding boots.

  In the dining room he took coffee and a warm baking powder biscuit laid out on the sideboard by Delphine, the wife of Ford. They were the year-round house couple, blacks native to the state. Good, religious people, both able to read and cipher as well as any white person.

  Sunlight, and sounds, streamed in through the open dining-room windows. Birds warbling. The ring of iron on iron, in the distance. He remembered the lightning-blasted tree out by the road. Orpheus LaMotte, his tenant farmer, had felled the tree in the autumn and split fireplace logs from it every few days.

  Joe found he had no appetite for the biscuits and no desire for the strong coffee. Thoughts of Joe Junior were rushing in, filling him as they always did with a terrible anger and a terrible ache, hopelessly tangled. Often he awoke in the middle of the night with his son’s bright blue eyes shining in the dark of his mind. So wrathful; accusing …

  But who was to blame for what had happened? Joe Junior! And Paul, who had abetted his son’s flight. There was no question.

  In the stable he saddled Old Stonewall and trotted him into the looping drive of crushed oyster shell in front of Chimneys. The great house had two stories, finished in white oyster-shell tabby. A massive whitewashed chimney rose at either end. A wide piazza behind white columns spread across the entire front of the mansion. Joe waved goodbye to Ilsa, who had just emerged from the separate kitchen building behind the great house. He thought she looked tired and not a little despondent. She returned his wave.

  He booted the gray down t
he wide road beneath giant live oaks whose branches time and weather had shaped into a graceful arch over the road. He guided the gray with taps of his boot heels; he hadn’t ridden a horse with spurs since he took off Union blue.

  The ring of metal on metal grew louder. Near the end of the tunnel of trees, Orpheus LaMotte was at work with his maul and iron wedge, splitting foot-long rounds of the tree trunk. He wore his usual plow shoes, drill trousers, and a patched shirt of jeans cloth already sweated under the arms. Orpheus had been born in Carolina in 1855, ten years before the Union Army brought freedom’s Jubilee. After Appomattox, he had taken the last name of his master on an Ashley River plantation named Resolute; the master had been killed sometime during the war. Orpheus and his wife Lydie and three attractive daughters lived on the property in a house he had built room by room, with help from other blacks in the neighborhood.

  “Morning, Mist’ Crown,” he said as Joe reined up. Orpheus had a large, ugly nose and pitted cheeks, but perfect even teeth and a smile like sunshine.

  “Mist’ Carl, he was already at my house rompin’ with Prissy ’fore I come over here. That all right?”

  “Of course, if he doesn’t knock her down.”

  Priscilla LaMotte was Carl’s age, a tomboy. Slightly built, she could beat him in a footrace but couldn’t out-wrestle him. Carl loved playing with Prissy, and today his tutor wasn’t coming from Charleston. Mr. Ungar rode his swaybacked horse to Chimneys on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.

  Joe waved and trotted on. The road became a sandy track through palmettos and pines. He followed the salt wind eastward, toward the marshes, the sea oats, the sunrise.

  He wanted to be alone, to think. He left behind at Chimneys essentially the same insufferable mess that had driven him from Chicago. Joe Junior gone—his nephew gone too, as proper punishment for his defiance and ingratitude. Joe had moments of regret about ordering Paul to leave. The regret was hurtful, so he never permitted it to last long. A man made up his mind, then lived with the consequences.

  But other problems persisted. Fritzi wouldn’t stop nattering about her determination to have a career on the stage. Carl was rapidly growing taller, more mature. He’d be thirteen in the autumn. Could the rebellion of adolescence be far away?

  Ilsa smiled less. She said he had been too hard on all the young people—still was too hard on those left behind. Both Fritzi and Carl had been jerked away from their regular schools and hauled off to South Carolina for the winter, there to keep up with their studies as best they could with the help of Mr. Ungar, the young gentleman tutor from Charleston. Mr. Ungar was a German; his parents had come from some village near Munich. Ungar himself lacked the relaxed and easy disposition of most Bavarians. He was smart, but he was superior and sharp-tongued. Carl and Fritzi couldn’t stand him.

  Old Stonewall stepped smartly along the cart track between the dunes. Joe heard the ocean. Above the dune line, radiant light filled a cloudless sky. The air smelled salty and warm.

  He guided the gray between dunes to the white beach, which was hard, and wide, and gently laved by a purling surf. The beach was empty as far as he could see in either direction. A shrimper’s boat stood offshore with its nets down. Otherwise man and horse had all of creation to themselves.

  A pelican sailed over on light air currents. Another plunged into the sea, then floated on its belly, presumably digesting a fish. Clam holes in the sand squirted water as the gray trotted by. Tiny land crabs ran from the hoofs.

  Joe Crown loved the Low Country of Carolina. It had a beauty unlike any other place. He liked the South generally, and this was true despite his service in an army dedicated to killing its sons. A year ago he’d opened an agency in Atlanta, shipping barrels of beer from Chicago in his own refrigerator cars. Crown lager had done well in the city Sherman burned. Joe was now thinking of expanding in Charleston and developing, if he could, one or two tied houses there; he had three in Atlanta. A tied house was a saloon serving beer from only one brewery.

  He did experience a certain irksome discomfort when doing business in Charleston, or anywhere else in the state—this despite his strong positive feelings for Carolinians, whom he found some of the kindest and most gracious people he’d ever met. Many, like Ungar, had German forebears. The various German states and principalities had shipped boatloads of settlers to the colonies through the port of Charleston.

  Warm and courteous, Carolinians were at the same time insular; provincial in the extreme. They worshiped their ancestors to the point of enshrining them. He suspected they were even worse snobs than were the old families of the Northeast. It didn’t matter whether a Carolina dynasty was rich; in fact, most were dirt-poor thirty years after the war. It only mattered that it was old and bore a distinguished name.

  He dismounted to rest the gray. He tied the rein to a driftwood log, pulled off his boots and stockings, and walked barefoot in the cold surf. He must think about going back to Chicago soon. He could trust the brewery to run itself for a month or so, with frequent telegraph messages to and from the owner. But eventually his nature compelled him to return to make sure everything was up to standard. This time he didn’t look forward to it. He was growing disenchanted with Chicago, a political sewer increasingly controlled by a band of boodlers, the aldermen, who openly sold favors. Financed by silent partners, they set up dummy companies, then handed municipal traction and utility franchises to those companies for one purpose—to sell out for an exorbitant price when a legitimate group wanted a franchise in the same part of town. No one blinked. No one cared.

  Joe’s own First Ward was headquarters for the worst boodlers—Alderman Coughlin, a shanty Irish pol allied with Kenna, a saloon keeper. Of late the damned governor, Altgeld, was openly working with the Democratic organization controlled by Coughlin and Kenna. The purpose, it was said, was to conspire against the Eastern wing of the Democratic Party, whose leader was President Cleveland. Everyone knew why Altgeld was lined up with the crooks; Grover Cleveland had gone over his head and sent the troops to quell the Pullman strike. Altgeld wanted revenge.

  The governor and the Chicago boodlers were making noises about supporting the free silver radicals. Unlimited coinage of silver was an issue certain to split the Democratic Party. For the first time, Joe was thinking of doing something he’d never done before. Voting Republican.

  He was disgusted that he’d been forced to such an extreme position. Just another demonstration of the depths to which Chicago—America—was falling.

  Ah, but wasn’t he a fool to fret about chaos and disorder in Chicago, and the country, when the same conditions existed in his own household?

  He rode back to Chimneys two hours later. Only moments after he walked Old Stonewall into his stall, the stable door crashed open. There was Ilsa, in a state.

  “Joe, go to the cottage, quick. Prissy’s badly hurt.”

  “What happened?”

  “She and Carl were playing rough on the porch. Carl threw her too hard, she fell against the window, the broken glass slashed her.”

  Joe touched her briefly as he ran past, into the morning light and down the side road, a quarter of a mile to the whitewashed house of Orpheus and Lydia LaMotte.

  Orpheus saw him coming and hurried to meet him. On the porch, Lydie was bending over Prissy’s limp body. One of the sleeves of Prissy’s dress was torn away. Blood glistened on her arm and soaked the blanket on which she lay. Carl stood in the sand near the porch, eyeing his father with a frightened expression.

  “She’s cut bad, Mist’ Crown, but it weren’t Carl’s fault,” Lydie said as Joe ran up on the porch.

  “The devil,” he growled, kneeling. Prissy’s eyes had a foggy look; she was awake, though obviously in pain. The gash on her arm was six inches long, and deep. When he probed it gently, the girl cried out.

  “It needs to be sewn up. Calhoun Manigault at Green Pond is the nearest doctor. I’ve never dealt with him but I’m sure he can take care of this. Lydie, you keep her comfortable a
nd keep that wound clean while Orpheus and I hitch up the buggy.”

  Orpheus LaMotte’s sweating face grew anxious. “Sir, Dr. Calhoun—he don’t treat the colored.”

  “Let me worry about that.”

  Dr. Calhoun Manigault’s surgery was a room built on the side of his large cypress-wood house. Squat little chickadees bustling about near the stoop flew away as Joe tromped up the steps and knocked.

  Manigault was a handsome, paunchy man of middle years, with a mane of white hair that gave him a distinguished air. “Come in, please, sir, what may I do for you?”

  Joe pointed to the buggy. Prissy was sitting up, supporting herself with her unbandaged arm. “The girl had an accident, her arm needs stitching.”

  Manigault wiped his hands on a small towel he’d brought to the door. In a low voice, sharing a confidence, he said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t take Nigra patients. Seven miles north of here, you’ll find a—”

  “I’m not going seven more miles, Doctor. She’s bleeding badly.”

  Manigault squinted from behind his square wire spectacles. “You’re a Yankee.”

  “Yes, I own Chimneys.”

  “Ah. Crown. I’ve heard of you. Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Crown, I do not treat colored.”

  Joe stepped closer and gripped the bleached gray doorframe with his left hand. He was almost a head shorter than the doctor.

  “Understand me,” he said. “You’ll treat that girl or they’ll be treating you in a Charleston hospital. You may be laid up for weeks. How do you feel about that?”

  Manigault averted his gaze. With a wave of the towel, he said, “Bring her in.”

  On the ride back to Chimneys, Prissy sat beside Joe on the driver’s seat. Her head lolled onto his shoulder. She wasn’t quite asleep, but Manigault had given her a teaspoon of some opiate to relieve her pain. He’d done a decent job of cleaning and stitching the wound. And he had charged fifteen dollars; robbery. Joe paid without protest.