by John Jakes
“I’ll beat the hell out of you if I find out you’re lying.” Crane took a puff of his cigarette. “He rang my room just before he checked out at ten minutes past three in the morning. The next afternoon he called again and I forwarded his bags. I watch the bulletin board for him. Telegraph messages, instructions, little murmurs of affection from his wife. It’s professional courtesy. I’m sure he’d do the same for—”
“Please. Where is he?”
Their eyes locked. Crane’s hard gaze made Paul squirm.
“Some flea pit in Ybor City. I’ll slip you the address. Freddy? A piece of paper. And another beer. Make it snappy.”
89
The General
JOE MET HIS IMMEDIATE superior an hour after he stepped from a Plant line Pullman at the hotel. A note waiting at the registration desk informed him of the meeting. It would be held not at the headquarters of the Cavalry Division, about a mile away, but in a hotel parlor. He threw his belongings into his small two-room suite on the third floor, splashed water on his face, and went downstairs via the main staircase. He was in full uniform; heavy blue frock coat with a brigadier’s star on the shoulder strap; dress sword buckled on.
The opulence of the hotel continued to astonish him. In the busy rotunda, near a bronze of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, he asked a bellman for directions to the parlor. It was located in the long hall leading to the east entrance.
At the telegraph office he quickly wrote a message to Ilsa, saying he’d arrived safely. Then he hurried down the corridor. Outside the parlor he nervously passed a hand over his hair, then his imperial. He knocked; a soft voice bade him come in.
Even in this small room, Mr. Plant had spent a great deal of money. There was an intricately carved fireplace mantel; a lacquered Japanese cabinet inlaid with pearl flowers and butterflies; a reading stand with a mammoth atlas. At a large table covered with a green cloth sat Major General Joseph Wheeler.
Joe was startled when General Wheeler jumped up to greet him. A superior officer usually stayed seated. Joe presumed Wheeler was demonstrating Southern courtesy. He had a reputation as a fine gentleman; unpretentious.
“General Crown. I am so glad you’re here. I saw your orders several days ago. I have been so anxious to meet you.”
“And I, General Wheeler.” They shook hands.
Wheeler was a small and sprightly man, shorter than Joe. He weighed no more than a hundred pounds, and was in his early sixties. His mustaches were neatly pointed; his white beard would have suited Rip van Winkle. His blue coat with the two stars seemed too large. It bagged, and Joe noticed many papers stuffed in the pockets. A black slouch hat, not regulation, rested on the green tablecloth.
“Please, sit down,” Wheeler said. “I can’t offer you anything stronger than water. At least it’s the bottled kind.”
“Thank you, sir, I’m not thirsty.”
They sat opposite each other at one corner of the table. A window was open to the front veranda. Soft music drifted in; a concert band was playing “La Paloma.” Couples passed back and forth under the colored lights. Both the men’s voices and those of the women were pitched low, and there was intermittent husky laughter. Laughter that hinted at secrets; intimacies behind locked doors. Joe could understand. In him, too, something roused in the sweet hot dark of the May night. A certain tension, excitement, spiced by the danger of impending war …
He asked permission to light one of his long Havana cigars. Wheeler graciously said, “Of course.” What a deceptive man, Joe thought as he struck a match. “Fighting Joe” resembled a retired planter, or perhaps a schoolmaster living comfortably on an inheritance. He certainly did not look like a man who’d been a vigorous combatant in the Congress for nearly twenty years. Every other year he was reelected in his Alabama district with virtually no opposition.
“I’m happy to have you with the Cavalry Division,” Wheeler said. “As you know, your command is the 2d Brigade, consisting of the 1st and 10th regulars and Colonel Leonard Wood’s peculiar assortment of volunteers. Think you can handle regular troops?”
“I did so in the late unpleasantness, General. At least they were regulars by the time it was over.”
“Indeed, wasn’t it so on both sides?” Wheeler said with a melancholy smile of remembrance. “My question was mostly rhetorical. You wouldn’t be sitting here in that uniform—or at least you wouldn’t be in my command—if I didn’t think you were up to it. You have an outstanding war record.”
“Thank you, sir. But I have to return the compliment. Yours is legendary.” Wheeler chuckled, and waved in a deprecating way. But his cheeks were pinker.
“Fifth Ohio Cavalry,” he said. “I commanded the 19th Alabama Infantry.”
Joe nodded. “I know, sir. We may have met at Shiloh, but we were never introduced.”
“No, no we weren’t, were we.” Wheeler laughed hard this time. “Our side might have claimed the victory if we’d held on to the advantage we gained the first day. My poor lads fought four separate engagements before dark. They had grit, but they weren’t cut from granite. The worst fight was at the Hornet’s Nest. Advancing against Prentiss’s infantry, Hickenlooper’s artillery … those who survived were utterly spent. They had the heart to fight on, but not the strength. And the next day you Yanks brought up your reinforcements. Crittenden, Nelson, Lew Wallace … a day after that, our retreat turned into a rout. We damned near ran back to Corinth, Mississippi.”
Joe was suddenly and eerily transported. He heard old drums tapping; old bugles calling. Saw shot-pierced guidons tumble, to be lifted again by another hand … “I had some adventures in Mississippi myself,” he said. “Some misadventures.”
“Ah, but wasn’t it a high time, General Crown? A high time, and an unparalleled experience.”
“War is a better experience in memory than in fact, I’ve decided. But you’re right, nothing in my life has ever matched it.”
The distant band played “Marching Through Georgia.” Wheeler went to the window and quietly closed it. “I hated the end. Jeff Davis clapped in irons, and abused. I was thrown in that damned Fort Delaware, smack in the river, in a cell five feet below water level. Wet all the time. We ate kitchen scraps and garbage. Only twenty men at a time were allowed to the sinks, and only at night. Sometimes five hundred waited in line. Inhuman.”
“As bad as Libby and Andersonville, I imagine,” Joe said. Wheeler flashed him a sharp look. “And our own prison camps in the North.”
“I was lucky, I was paroled after only two months. July of ’sixty-five. I had made up my mind to survive as long as necessary. Attitude helps a man, and mine helped me. I feel I pulled through because I was God damned, excuse me, if I was going to be laid in my grave by rotten Yankee food, Yankee vermin, and Yankee discourtesy.”
“I was never imprisoned, but I tried to have the same attitude. It helped me then, and it’s helped me in civilian life.” Joe paused. “May I have leave to ask a question? I suppose you’re tired of hearing it, but I’d like to know how it feels to be back in Federal blue again. Strange?”
“No, Joe—may I call you Joe?”
“By all means.”
His eyes were merry as a boy’s. “You know, it feels like I’ve hardly been away. Like I went on a three-week furlough and just came back to my own colors, refreshed and ready. I’m proud to be serving here. After I was freed from prison, and the sting of loss began to abate, I realized we had to reconstruct the country from both sides. I’ve worked for that in Congress. Telling Dixie to quit waving its old shot-up flags and mouthing its surly slogans and get to work building its railways and factories. Many opposed me, some cursed me, one or two even took shots at me, but I was right. I have a son in this corps, Captain Joe Wheeler Junior. I’m proud he’s with me, with us, under the old flag. Just as I’m proud you’re here. Blue and gray together—maybe we can make some sense out of the mess Alger and his clerks have handed us. Well, sir. I’ve kept you too long. If there is nothing more—”
&nbs
p; “One thing, sir. As soon as possible, I’d like to know the brigade’s resources, in detail. Numbers of men, wagons, horses, mules. An inventory of weapons, ammunition, food. Exact numbers.”
“You shall have it all, by tomorrow afternoon. I like a man who’s precise.”
“I don’t know any other way to live, General. Or any other way to succeed, regardless of the enterprise.”
Wheeler liked that too. Joe rose and gave a smart salute. Wheeler returned it, more casually. Joe held the door for his superior. Wheeler left the parlor at a lope, jamming his black fedora on his head as he vanished down the hall.
Joe found the rathskeller and ordered a local beer. His presence seemed to change the atmosphere in the long, darkly paneled room. Laughter stopped. Conversations grew muted. While he sipped from his stein, he noted the rank of the officers present. No one higher than captain.
So that was it. The top brass stayed out of this place. It was all right with him; the beer was pale thin stuff. He left three quarters of it in the stein and, upstairs, washed out the taste with a glass of iced tea from a table where the pitchers were continually refilled. He liked iced tea. He drank gallons of it on his trips to South Carolina.
He strolled outside to listen to the last of the concert, which was taking place near the west end of the front veranda. A second lieutenant told him the band was that of the 33d Michigan Volunteers.
Joe’s eye fell on one of the listeners, an attractive Cuban woman who was shamefully young for the attentions of a man his age. He assumed she was a refugee with money; no other class of Cuban could stay at Plant’s hotel.
The young woman was stocky; some would say plump. She wore a tight white dress with a red dust ruffle, and a white shawl with long fringe. Her bosom was large and round, reminding him of Ilsa’s in her youth. A tall comb with mother-of-pearl inlays was tucked into her shining dark hair, which she’d gathered in a bun at the back.
The young woman must have sensed him watching. She turned around suddenly. Blushing, Joe smiled. She smiled too, then looked away. When the concert ended, she went into the hotel by way of the west veranda, on the arm of a slender man in the uniform of the Cuban refugee forces. It pleased Joe that the young woman had acknowledged his interest without anger or visible contempt for his age.
Joe went up to bed, feeling good, anticipating a sound sleep. He liked Fighting Joe Wheeler; they would get along. As the President had remarked in Washington last month, perhaps the Civil War was finally over.
In lieu of reveille in the hotel, orderlies knocked on doors at 5 A.M. For the first few days Joe thought the early rising would kill him, considering the long hours he immediately began to put in, meeting the officers in his command, attending conferences with Shafter, Wheeler, and the other generals, familiarizing himself with paperwork and procedures at Division Headquarters, studying and memorizing the inventories of men and materiel he’d requested. But soon he began to feel more alert and vigorous than he had for a long time.
He continued to be amazed by the hotel, which he heard referred to as Plant’s Folly. Why had H. B. Plant, known to be a canny businessman, put such an opulent establishment in such an unlikely location? Joe supposed he’d gambled that people wintering in Florida would flock to his place from older resorts on the East Coast, ignoring the drabness of Tampa itself. Apparently Plant’s guess had been right. In any case, Joe developed a liking for the strange Moorish barn. It gave an odd festive tone to a war that would inevitably turn nasty, as wars always did. It provided a spacious and convenient base for the Fifth Army Corps. And at night it was more cheerful than any other camp or headquarters in his memory.
He was uncomfortable in the hot parlor and bedroom of his suite, but he liked the bustle of the rotunda and enjoyed relaxing and smoking on the verandas. He liked the band music, and the presence of such notables as Richard Harding Davis, world famous for his reporting and for his stories of Gallegher and Van Bibber. The Harper’s artist Frederic Remington conducted a daily salon in the hotel, and there were constant rumors that the great Hearst was about to arrive on a chartered yacht, though he never did.
Of greatest interest to Joe was the young genius Crane, whose Civil War novel he so admired. He was eager to meet Crane and compliment him. One evening he chanced to encounter the author coming along the corridor from the rotunda. Joe stepped up and said hello, and instantly smelled whiskey.
Pallid and slovenly, Crane weaved on his feet and looked beyond Joe’s shoulder while Joe was praising him. At the end Crane mumbled something unintelligible and staggered on. Joe was affronted and disappointed. Great talent didn’t come in attractive packages, it seemed.
At the first convenient moment, Joe tucked a bundle under his arm and slipped away from the hotel between meetings. It was steamy and scorching outside, temperature in the upper eighties. He broiled like a lobster in his uniform.
A desk clerk had written directions for him. He went part way by trolley, then trudged through sandy streets in West Tampa until he came to a large white tent with a wooden sign in front.
REFUGEE THRIFT SHOP
—All Welcome—
The tent was empty; no one was prowling its crude racks of secondhand clothing, shoes, utensils. A stout woman with beautiful olive skin and a harelip greeted him in broken English. He slipped the brown paper package onto the plank counter.
“I’m donating these. Seven suits of gents’ summer underwear. Balbriggan, very fine goods. Never worn.”
Joe found some of his fellow officers congenial, others obtuse or enslaved to regulations; a very few were actively unpleasant. It had been much the same thirty-five years ago. The aide assigned to him from the senior staff, Lieutenant Tyree Bates, was quiet and intelligent. A nine-year veteran. Joe wryly assumed Bates’s chief responsibility was to compensate, if possible, for the inadequacies or ignorance of a politically appointed general.
Nothing in Bates’s behavior suggested this, however. He observed proper military courtesy at all times. When Joe asked a question, Bates either knew the answer or had it in minutes, without the faintest hint that Joe should have known it already.
The most interesting study, perhaps, was the commanding officer, General William Rufus Shafter.
Though he was Wheeler’s age, he had none of Wheeler’s vigor. He rolled and wheezed when he walked. His hair was a gray mop, seemingly resistant to any comb. His walrus mustache always needed a trim. He was clumsy, slovenly, and wholly unconcerned about the niceties of social behavior. Perhaps he’d spent too many years in barracks in the lonely Southwestern deserts.
The general’s bulk presented practical problems. He needed a special oversize chair for staff conferences, for instance. Joe was skeptical of Shafter’s ability to withstand the rigors of battle in the tropics.
On the positive size, Shafter was a strong-minded, not to say opinionated, leader. Few subordinates argued with him or even expressed a slight disagreement. Shafter’s receding chin could be characterized as weak and flabby, but there was nothing weak about the flame in his blue eyes. It could boil a man down to nothing in seconds. When he was frustrated, which was often, he resorted to a frontier vocabulary.
Joe discovered this when he and Lieutenant Bates accompanied Shafter and the other generals, their aides, and a couple of the attachés on an inspection tour of the lamentable facilities at Port Tampa. They rode nine miles in a dingy day coach drawn by a Plant switch engine, then proceeded from the yards on foot.
Plant had originally dredged only a shallow channel suited to small coasting vessels. In the bay, riding on greasy gray swells amid clouds of gulls hunting garbage, Joe counted twenty-two merchant vessels, some very large. The government owned no transports; all the ships had been rented from private lines whose owners had gutted them, installed bunks and horse stalls on the lower decks, and stripped the upper decks of most of the passenger amenities.
On the twin piers, noisy work gangs were laying extra tracks beside the original four, but it wou
ld be of little help. The piers had no cranes or hoists for loading cargo. The engineers had previously concluded that each pier would accommodate no more than two large transports at one time, and the dredged channel no more than six or seven. Everyone feared the confusion at embarkation.
A number of civilian tents were scattered along the piers; deafalls, ready to relieve the departing soldiers of a few extra dollars. The whole dismal scene, including the bay crowded with Navy cutters and torpedo boats, local fishing vessels and private yachts adding to the traffic, quickly sent Shafter into a stormy funk. He grew short of breath and had to sit on a packing case and fan himself.
“God damn Henry Plant, what was the stupid son of a bitch thinking when he laid his tracks in the center of the piers instead of next to the water? The God damn stevedores will have to haul every last item an extra fifty feet to load the ships. Extra work, wasted time—gentlemen, sometimes I think we should dynamite the fucking War Department to blast it into the real world.”
“General, please don’t excite yourself,” one of his aides whispered.
“Let me be, I’m fine, just help me up. Let’s retreat, gentlemen, I can’t stand the sight of this fucking place one more minute.”
Standing next to Joe, the German military attaché rolled his eyes. Since their introduction a few days before, Captain von Rike had sought Joe out at every opportunity, wanting to speak German with a Landsmann, a countryman, or show off his excellent English. The attaché was a Prussian, of medium height, perhaps twenty-five years younger than Joe. He was trim, with widely spaced gray eyes and light freckles on both cheeks. A hook-shaped scar disfigured the left side of his face. He’d gotten it during a student duel, he had informed Joe proudly. Joe couldn’t decide whether he liked him.
The following night the attaché showed up on the veranda where Joe was smoking a cigar and listening to the music. The band this evening came from a regular regiment, the 11th Infantry. Its demonstrative bandmaster flourished his baton like a saber. He was apparently well known in the Army—his name was LaGuardia—and his band was much better rehearsed than were bands from the volunteers.