by John Jakes
His eyes admitted it before he could deny it. She clapped her hands. “Sure he was. Both of them were. And you guided them from Virginia City.”
She dragged the shoulder straps down to show off her breasts, red and firm already. Lord, she was all worked up over the mere thought of the gold. “Do you know where those wagons are, Collins?”
He just smirked.
“You do. I know what was in them. What’s more, I know where it came from—and how to get hundreds, why maybe a thousand times, more of the same.”
She detected a gleam of interest and pushed the advantage. “I’m talking about the mine in Virginia City. It belongs to me, because one of the men who died, Mr. Powell, owned it, and I’m related to him.”
“You mean you can prove it’s yours?”
Without hesitation or change of expression she said, “Absolutely. You share what’s in those wagons, then help me get to Nevada, and I’ll split an even bigger fortune with you.”
“Sure—an even bigger fortune. And there’s seven cities of gold waiting to be found round here, too—never mind that nobody’s turned them up since the Spanish started searching hundreds of years ago.”
“Collins, don’t sneer at me. I’m telling the truth. We need to pool our information. If we do, we’ll be so rich you’ll get dizzy. We can go all over the world together. Wouldn’t that be exciting, lover?” Her tongue gave a moist demonstration of her excitement.
Seconds passed without a response. Her fear crept back.
Suddenly he laughed. “By the Lord, you’re a canny lass. Canny as you are hot.”
“Say we’re partners and I’ll treat you to some special loving. Things I won’t do for anybody else, no matter how much they pay.” She whispered salacious words in his ear.
He laughed again. “All right. Partners.”
“Here I come,” she cried, dropping her dress and pantaloons and falling on him on the bed.
She kept her word, but after ten minutes his age and his drinking caught up with him, and he began to snore.
Ashton pulled up the covers, toweled herself and slipped in next to him, her heart thumping. Finally, patience had been rewarded. No more whoring. She had the man who had the gold.
Imagination painted pictures of a new Worth gown. The grandest hotel suite in New York City. Madeline cringing while Ashton slashed her across the face with a fan.
Delicious visions. They’d soon be real. She fell asleep.
She woke murmuring his name. She heard no answer. Daylight showed through slits in the shutter. She felt the bed beside her.
Empty. Cold.
“Collins?”
He’d left a penciled note on the old bureau.
Dear Little Miss Yellow Shoes,
Keep shining up the story of the V. City “mine.” Maybe somebody will swallow it. Meantime I already know what was in the wagons because I’ve got it and I don’t figure to share it. But thanks for the special stuff anyway.
Goodbye,
BC
Ashton screamed. She screamed until she woke the whole place—Rosa, the third whore, the señora, who stormed in and shouted at her. Ashton spit in her face. The señora slapped her. She kept on sobbing and screaming.
Two days later, she found the button that had popped from Banquo Collins’s pants. After examining it, and crying all over again, she put it in her box.
Hellish heat settled on Santa Fe. People moved as little as possible. Every evening she sat on the hard chair, not knowing what to do, how to escape.
She didn’t smile. No customers wanted her. Señora Vasquez-Reilly began to complain and threaten her with eviction. She didn’t care.
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
July, 1865. To the city yesterday. Shermans insisted Andy drive the wagon, to protect me. Strange to ride that way, like a white mistress with her slave. For a few moments on the trip it was easy to imagine nothing had changed.
Impossible to imagine that in Charleston. Cooper’s firm on Concord Street overlooks vast empty warehouses where turkey buzzards roost. He was absent, so left a message asking to see him later. Could not guess how he would receive the news. Little has been rebuilt from the great fire of ’61. The burned zone looks as though Gen’l Sherman visited it. Rats and wild dogs roam amid the ruined chimneys and weed-choked foundations. Many homes near the Battery show shell damage. The house of Mr. Leverett Dawkins on East Bay untouched, however…
If there was a fatter man than the old Whig Unionist Dawkins, Madeline had never met him. Fiftyish, with impeccable clothes specially tailored for him, Dawkins had thighs big as watermelons and a stomach round as that of an expectant mother of triplets. On the parlor wall behind him hung the inevitable array of ancestral portraits. When Madeline entered, Dawkins was already seated in his huge custom-made chair, gazing across the harbor at the rubble of Fort Sumter. He disliked having anyone see him walk or sit down.
She asked about the Mont Royal mortgages. There were two, totaling six hundred thousand dollars and held by Atlanta banks. Dawkins said his own Palmetto Bank would open soon, and he would ask his board to buy and consolidate the mortgages. “Mont Royal is fine collateral. I’d like to hold the paper on it.”
She described the sawmill idea. He was less encouraging.
“We won’t have much to lend on schemes like that. Perhaps the board can find a thousand or two for a shed, some saw pits, and a year’s wages for a gang of nigras. If you can find the nigras.”
“I had thought of installing steam machinery—”
“Out of the question if you must borrow to buy it. There are so many wanting to rebuild, begging for help. This is a wounded land, Madeline. Just look around the city.”
“Yes, I have. Well, you’re very generous to help with the mortgages, Leverett.”
“Please don’t consider it charity. The plantation is valuable—one of the finest in the district. The owner, your brother-in-law, is an esteemed member of the community. And you, as the manager, are an excellent risk as well. An eminently responsible citizen.”
He means, she thought sadly, I am not a troublemaker. How responsible would he think her if he knew the nature of her next call?
… So we will not proceed as fast as I hoped.
Took myself next to the Freedmen’s Bureau, on Meeting. A pugnacious little man with a harsh accent met me, calling himself Brevet Colonel Orpha C. Munro, of “Vuh-mont.” His official title—hardly less grand than “caliph” or “pasha”—is sub-assistant commissioner, Charleston District.
I made my request. He said he felt sure the bureau could obtain a teacher. He will notify me. I left with the feeling of having done some criminal deed.
Noting the time, I sent Andy off by himself and walked to Tradd Street to call on Judith before my meeting with Cooper. Judith surprised me by saying he was home, and had been since returning to dine at noon.
“Instead of going back to the company, I stayed here to work on these,” Cooper said. At his feet on the dry brown grass of the walled garden lay pencil sketches of a pier for the Carolina Shipping Company. From the house came a hesitant version of the central theme from Mozart’s Twenty-first Concerto, in C, played on a piano badly out of tune.
Cooper turned to his wife. “May we have some tea, or a reasonable substitute?” Judith smiled and retired. “Now, Madeline, what prompts this unexpected and pleasant visit?”
She sat down on a rusting bench of black-painted iron. “I want to start a school at Mont Royal.”
In the act of bending to gather the penciled sheets, Cooper jerked his head up and stared. His dark hair hung over his pale forehead. His sunken eyes were wary. “What kind of school, pray?”
“One to teach reading and arithmetic to anyone who wants to learn. The freed Negroes in the district desperately need a few basic skills if they’re to survive.”
“No.” Cooper crushed all the sketches and threw the ball under an azalea bush. His color was high. “No. I can’t allow you to do it.”
Equally emotional, she said, “I am not asking your permission, merely doing you the courtesy of telling you my intentions.”
A flat-bosomed young girl poked her head from a tall window on the piazza one story above. “Papa, why are you shouting? Why, Aunt Madeline, good afternoon.”
“Good afternoon, Marie-Louise.”
Cooper’s daughter was thirteen. She would never be a beauty, and indeed might be homely in maturity. She seemed aware of her deficiencies and worked hard to overcome them with tomboy energy and a great deal of smiling. People liked her; Madeline adored her.
“Go inside and keep practicing,” Cooper snapped.
Marie-Louise gulped and retreated. The Mozart began again, with nearly as many wrong notes as right ones.
“Madeline, allow me to remind you that feelings against the nigras, and anyone who champions them, are running high. It would be folly to exacerbate those feelings. You must not open a school.”
“Cooper, again, it isn’t your decision.” She tried to be gentle with him, but the message was unavoidably harsh. “You gave me management of the plantation, in writing. So I intend to go ahead. I will have a school.”
He paced, glowering. This was a new, distinctly unfriendly Cooper Main, a side of him she’d never seen. The silence lengthened. Madeline tried to patch over the difficulty. “I had hoped you’d be on my side. Education of black people is no longer against the law, after all.”
“But it’s unpopular …” He hesitated, then burst out, “If you goad people, they’ll no longer exercise any restraint.”
“Restraint in regard to what?”
“You! Everyone looks the other way now, pretending you’re not—Well, you understand. If you start a school, they won’t be so tolerant.”
Madeline’s face was white. She had expected someone, someday, to threaten her about her parentage, but she’d never expected it would be her brother-in-law.
“Here’s the tea.”
Curls bobbing, Judith brought a tray of chipped cups and saucers down the stairs. On the last iron step she halted, aware of the storm on her husband’s face.
“I’m afraid Madeline is leaving,” he said. “She only stopped by to tell me something about Mont Royal. Thank you for your courtesy, Madeline. For your own sake, I urge you to change your mind. Good day.”
He turned his back and hunted under the azalea for the crushed drawings. Judith remained on the step, stunned by the rudeness. Madeline, concealing her hurt, patted Judith’s arm, hurried up the noisy iron stairs, and ran from the house.
… There it rests for the moment. I fear I’ve made him my enemy. If so, my sweet Orry, then at least I have lost his friendship in a worthy cause.
A message came! And only two weeks after my visit to Col. Munro. The Freedmen’s Aid Society of the Methodist Episcopal church, Cincinnati, will send us a teacher. Her name is Prudence Chaffee.
Cooper silent. No sign of retaliation yet.
6
THE U.S. ARMY TRAINED cavalry recruits at Jefferson Barracks, Missouri. The camp of instruction was located on the west bank of the Mississippi, a few miles south of St. Louis.
When Charles arrived there, a contract surgeon examined him for false teeth, visible tumors, and signs of venereal disease and alcoholism. Pronounced fit, he was marched away, along with a former corset salesman from Hartford who said he craved adventure, a New York City roughneck who said little and probably was running away from a lot, an Indiana carpenter who said he’d awakened one morning to discover he hated his wife, a chatterbox boy who said he’d lied about his age, and a handsome man who said nothing. When the recruits reached a ramshackle barracks, the white-haired corporal pointed to the silent man.
“French Foreign Legion. Can’t hardly speak no English. Jesus an’ Mary, don’t we get ’em all? And for a rotten thirteen dollars a month.” He studied Charles. “I seen your papers. Reb, wasn’t you?”
Charles was edgy about that. He’d already drawn some sharp looks because of his accent, and had heard “Goddamn traitor” behind his back once. He wanted to snap at the corporal, but he remembered Jack Duncan’s caution and just said, “Yes.”
“Well, it don’t matter to me. My first cousin Fielding, he was a Reb, too. If you’re as good a soldier as him, you’ll be more use to Uncle Sam than the rest of this flotsam. Good luck.” He stepped back and yelled, “All right, you people. Through that door and find a bunk. Hurry it up! This ain’t a goddamn hotel you’re checkin’ into.”
Charles took the oath to support and defend the Constitution. He had no problem with that; he’d already taken it once, at West Point. And when the war ended, he’d made up his mind to raise his son as an American, not a Southerner.
It did seem strange to be issued so much blue again. The light blue kersey trousers with the yellow stripes and the dull gray fatigue shirts reminded him of the Second Cavalry. So did the barracks, with its poor ventilation, smoky lamps, narrow slot windows at each end, and sounds of scurrying rodents at night. So did his Army cot, an iron-framed torture device with wood slats and stringers and a mattress shell filled with smelly straw. So did the Army food, especially the hardtack and the beef served up in tough slices at noon mess, then submerged in a sludgy gravy for supper; the meat tasted better with the gravy, which masked the faint odor of spoilage.
Jefferson Barracks proved to be not so much a training center as a holding pen. Recruits were sent out as soon as a regiment’s required number of replacements could be gathered. So training could last two months or two days. That didn’t speak well for the postwar Army, Charles thought.
Most of the instructors were older noncoms putting in time until they retired. Charles worked hard to look inexperienced and awkward in front of them. During a bareback equitation class, he deliberately fell off his pathetic sway-backed training horse. He fumbled through the manual of arms, and at target practice never hit the bull, only the edge of the card. He got away with it until one trainer got sick and a new one took over, a runty corporal named Hans Hazen. He was a mean sort; one of the men said he’d been busted from top sergeant three times.
After a saber drill, Hazen drew Charles aside.
“Private May, I got a queer feeling you ain’t no Carolina militiaman. You try to look clumsy, but I saw some of your moves when you thought I was watchin’ somebody else.” He thrust his chin out and shouted. “Where were you trained? West Point?”
Charles looked down at him. “Wade Hampton Legion. Sir.”
Hazen shook a finger. “I catch you lyin’, it’ll go hard. I hate liars near as much as I hate snobs from the Point—or you Southron boys.”
“Yes, sir,” Charles said loudly. He kept staring. Hazen looked away first, which shamed him to anger.
“I want to see what you’re made of. A hundred laps of the riding ring, quick time. Right now. March!”
After that, Corporal Hazen stayed on him, yelling, criticizing, questioning him daily about his past and forcing him to lie. Despite Hazen—maybe, in a strange way, because of him; because Hazen recognized an experienced soldier—Charles felt happy to be back in the Army. He’d always liked the dependable routine of trumpet calls, assemblies, drills. He still felt a shiver up his backbone when the trumpeters blew “Boots and Saddles.”
He kept to himself and didn’t find a bunky, a partner. Most soldiers paired up to ease their work load and share their miseries, but he avoided it. He survived three weeks that way, although not without some sudden bouts of despondency. Thoughts of the past would return suddenly, the burned-out feeling would grip him, and he’d call himself a prize fool for donning Army blue again. He was in that kind of mood one Saturday night when he left the post and crossed the main approach road to the nameless town of tents and shanties on the other side.
Here a lot of noncoms lived with their wives, who took in post laundry to supplement Army pay. Here civilians hawked questionable whiskey in big tents, docile Osage Indians sold beans and squash from their farms nearby, and elegant gen
tlemen ran all-night poker and faro games. Charles had even seen a few earnestly stupid recruits betting on three-card monte or the pea and shells.
Other amenities were available in any tent with a red lantern hung in front. Charles called at one of these and spent a half hour with a homely young woman anxious to please. He walked out physically relieved but depressed by memories of Gus Barclay and a feeling that he’d dishonored her.
Two young boys ran after him as he walked through the tent town. They taunted him with a chant:
“Soldier, soldier, will you work?
No indeed, I’ll sell my shirt …”
The public certainly held the Army in high esteem. As soon as the war ended, soldiers had again become the unwashed, the unwanted. Nothing ever changed.
He’d been at Jefferson Barracks four weeks when orders came through: He and seven other recruits were given twelve hours to prepare to leave on a steamer bound up the Missouri River to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, all the way across the state of Missouri. Established in 1827 by Colonel Henry Leavenworth, the great cantonment on the right bank of the river was the most important post in the West. It was headquarters for the Department of the Missouri and the supply depot for all the forts between Kansas and the Continental Divide. At Leavenworth they would find transportation, they were told, to carry them to duty with the Sixth Cavalry, down on the northern Texas frontier. The prospect pleased Charles. He’d loved the natural beauty of Texas when he was stationed at Camp Cooper before the war.
While a thunderstorm flashed and roared above the barracks, he packed his carpetbag and a small wooden footlocker in which he kept his Army-issue clothing. He put on his blue blouse, which had a roll collar, and his kepi with the enlisted man’s version of the cavalry’s crossed sabers. The storm quickly diminished, and he walked through light rain to the tent town, whistling a jaunty march version of the little tune that reminded him of home.
The storm had toppled some of the smaller tents and muddied the dirt lanes. Charles headed for the largest and brightest of the drinking tents, the Egyptian Palace, whose owner came from Cairo, Illinois. The tent was shabby. A piece of canvas divided an area for officers from the one for enlisted men and civilians. The whiskey was cheap and raw, but Charles felt a rare contentment as he sipped it.