The Bold Frontier
Page 34
Bees were buzzing. Up toward the Chambersburg Pike, cannon began to bang away, a big battle. I thought I’d wash away, so much fearful sweat was rolling down inside my shirt.
“Woman—woman, if—if you—” Pa was shaking. He loved my mother too much to accuse her of lying. But he knew how to discover the truth:
“Lisbeth? Daughter?”
Lisbeth’s eyes got huge with tears; she couldn’t lie to Pa. Knowing I might go to hell for it, I put my hand over her mouth and clamped her to my side and said, “She went back to the house, Pa, she’s a scairdy cat.”
My father held still a minute, then put his head back and gazed at the unseen sun and cried out, “Toby … Toby.”
He walked away into the weeds with his rifle, weeping; ashamed of being unmanned.
I never saw the Reb again. My mother insisted on tending him by herself, keeping him warm and well fed in a little lean-to she made from a blanket and sticks. In the morning he was gone.
“Oddest thing,” my mother said to me then. “His last name was Tobin. Toby—Tobin—isn’t that odd?”
The battle of Gettysburg ravaged the town and the land roundabout for three days. We mostly hid in the root cellar. After General Pickett’s doomed charge, thousands of men and boys mowed down as they marched through an open field, right into the Union guns, General Bob Lee retreated south and never came back. Many said he lost the war that July in Pennsylvania.
My father died two years later, never having received the payment he thought he was owed.
In 18 and 66, my mother got a letter from a Leverett Tobin of Wytheville, Virginia. He had survived the war, married his sweetheart after the surrender, and recently opened a hardware store. He praised my mother’s compassion that July day.
My mother gazed at the letter laid in her lap. Her face showed no joy; there isn’t any in war, or memories of war.
“Daniel,” she said, “I pray that when I come to judgment, God can forgive my untruths.”
“Mine too, Mama. But I think He will.” I put my hand over hers in a clumsy way. “Yes, I’m sure He will.”
Credits
“The Western; and How We Got It.” Copyright © 1982 by John Jakes. First published in slightly different form in The Arbor House Treasury of Great Western Stories.
“Shootout at White Pass.” Copyright © 1991 by John Jakes.
“The Woman at Apache Wells.” Copyright © 1952 by New Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1980 by John Jakes. First published in Max Brand’s Western Magazine as “Lobo Loot.”
“Hell on the High Iron.” Copyright © 1952 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1980 by John Jakes. First published in Big-Book Western Magazine as “The High-Iron Killer.”
“A Duel of Magicians.” Excerpt from Heaven and Hell (The North and South Trilogy, Volume III). Copyright © 1987 by John Jakes. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
“Death Rides Here!” Copyright © 1953 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1981 by John Jakes. First published in 10-Story Western Magazine.
“The Winning of Poker Alice.” Copyright © 1952 by Stadium Publishing Corp. Copyright renewed © 1980 by John Jakes. First published in Complete Western Book.
“To the Last Bullet.” Copyright © 1953 by Popular Publications, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1981 by John Jakes. First published in New Western.
“Little Phil and the Daughter of Joy.” Copyright © 1989 by John Lee Gray. First published in New Frontiers #1 under the pseudonym John Lee Gray.
“The Tinhorn Fills His Hand.” Copyright © 1953 by Recreational Reading, Inc. Copyright renewed © 1981 by John Jakes. First published in 10-Story Western Magazine.
“The Naked Gun.” Copyright © 1957 by Codel Publishing Co. Copyright renewed © 1985 by John Jakes. First published in Short Stories.
“Dutchman.” Copyright © 1991 by John Jakes.
“Carolina Warpath.” Copyright © 1993 by John Jakes. First appeared in In the Big Country.
“Snakehead.” Copyright © 1990 by John Lee Gray. First published in New Frontiers #2 under the pseudonym John Lee Gray.
“Manitow and Ironhand.” Copyright © 1984 by John Jakes. Reprinted by permission of the author.
“Mercy at Gettysburg.” Copyright © 1994 by John Jakes. First published in the July 1, 1994, issue of USA Today Weekend.
A Biography of John Jakes
John Jakes is a bestselling author of historical fiction, science fiction, children’s books, and nonfiction. He is best known for his highly acclaimed eight-volume Kent Family Chronicles series, an American family saga that reaches from the Revolutionary War to 1890, and the North and South Trilogy, which follows two families from different regions during the American Civil War. His commitment to historical accuracy and evocative storytelling earned him the title “godfather of historical novelists” from the Los Angeles Times and led to his streak of sixteen consecutive New York Times bestsellers.
Born in Chicago in 1932, Jakes originally studied to be an actor, but he turned to writing professionally after selling his first short story for twenty-five dollars during his freshman year at Northwestern University. That check, Jakes later said, “changed the whole direction of my life.” He enrolled in DePauw University’s creative writing program shortly thereafter and graduated in 1953. The following year, he received his master’s degree in American literature from Ohio State University.
While at DePauw, Jakes met Rachel Ann Payne, whom he married in 1951. After finishing his studies, Jakes worked as a copywriter for a large pharmaceutical company before transitioning to advertising, writing copy for several large firms, including Madison Avenue’s Dancer Fitzgerald Sample. At night, he continued to write fiction, publishing two hundred short stories and numerous mystery, western, and science fiction books. He turned to historical fiction, long an interest of his, in 1973 when he started work on The Bastard, the first novel of the Kent Family Chronicles. Jakes’s masterful hand at historical fiction catapulted The Bastard (1974) onto the bestseller list—with each subsequent book in the series matching The Bastard’s commercial success. Upon publication of the next three books in the series—The Rebels (1975), The Seekers (1975), and The Furies (1976)—Jakes became the first-ever writer to have three books on the New York Times bestseller list in a single year. The series has maintained its popularity, and there are currently more than fifty-five million copies of the Kent Family Chronicles in print worldwide.
Jakes followed the success of his first series with the North and South Trilogy, set before, during, and after the Civil War. The first volume, North and South, was published in 1982 and reaffirmed Jakes’s standing as a “master of the ancient art of story telling” (The New York Times Book Review). Following the lead of North and South, the other two books in the series, Love and War (1984) and Heaven and Hell (1987), were chart-topping bestsellers. The trilogy was also made into an ABC miniseries—a total of thirty hours of programming—starring Patrick Swayze. Produced by David L. Wolper for Warner Brothers North and South remains one of the highest-rated miniseries in television history.
The first three Kent Family Chronicles were also made into a television miniseries, produced by Universal Studios and aired on the Operation Prime Time network. Andrew Stevens starred as the patriarch of the fictional family. In one scene, Jakes himself appears as a scheming attorney sent to an untimely end by villain George Hamilton.
In addition to historical fiction, Jakes penned many works of science fiction, including the Brak the Barbarian series, published between 1968 and 1980. Following his success with the Kent Family Chronicles and the North and South Trilogy, Jakes continued writing historical fiction with the stand-alone novel California Gold and the Crown Family Saga (Homeland and its sequel, American Dreams).
Jakes remains active in the theater as an actor, director, and playwright. His adaptation of A Christmas Carol is widely produced by university and regional theaters, including the prestigious Alabama S
hakespeare Festival and theaters as far away as Christchurch, New Zealand. He holds five honorary doctorates, the most recent of which is from his alma mater Ohio State University. He has filmed and recorded public service announcements for the American Library Association and hasreceived many other awards, including a dual Celebrity and Citizen’s Award from the White House Conference on Libraries and Information and the Cooper Medal from the Thomas Cooper Library at the University of South Carolina. Jakes is a member of the Authors Guild, the Dramatists Guild, the PEN American Center, and Writers Guild of America East. He also serves on the board of the Authors Guild Foundation.
Jakes and his wife have four children and eleven grandchildren. After living for thirty-two years on a South Carolina barrier island, they now reside in Sarasota, Florida, where Jakes has resumed his volunteer work on behalf of theaters and libraries while he continues writing.
Jakes in 1936, on his fourth birthday.
Jakes and his comedy partner, Ron Tomme (at right), won first prize for their comedy act on Rubin’s Stars of Tomorrow, a talent show aired on WGN-TV, in Chicago, 1949. Tomme went on to star as the leading man on the CBS soap opera Love of Life.
Jakes with his daughter, Andrea, in the mid-1950s, in front of his home on North Walnut Street, Waukegan, Illinois.
Jakes received his fourth honorary doctorate, this one from DePauw University, in 1985 in Greencastle, Indiana. Jakes and his wife are both DePauw graduates. At left is Dr. Richard Rosser, then-president of the university.
Jakes with his wife, Rachel, at a boat party for sixty friends to celebrate the couple’s fiftieth anniversary in 2001 at Calibogue Sound, Hilton Head Island, South Carolina.
Jakes’s 2006 publicity photo for The Gods of Newport, taken on the Cliff Walk at Newport, Rhode Island.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 2001 by John Jakes
introduction copyright © 1993 by Dale Walker
cover design by Mimi Bark
978-1-4532-5603-9
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