by John Jakes
Charles lunged forward, next to Gus’s chair, and aimed at the man’s back. “You piece of Yankee shit.” He squeezed the trigger and simultaneously Gus pulled his arm.
The ball went low, hitting the sergeant’s left leg. With a yell he pitched through the door he had opened a moment earlier. He slid belly down across the porch and dropped off the edge, leaving a blood-swath on the ice.
“I’m going to kill the—”
“Charles.”
Pale, she gripped his arm and gazed at him, unable to countenance what she saw. The fever in his eyes, the death’s-head expression—
“Charles, I’m all right. Let him go.”
“But he may—”
They heard a horse whinny, weight on it suddenly. It went clattering toward the road. Boz and Washington shouted from the barn. Slowly, Charles released the hammer of the Colt and laid the gun on the table. He was shaking.
He grasped the shoulders of her plain dress, leaned down. “I’ve never shot a man in the back, but I’d have shot that one. You certain you’re all right?”
A small nod. “Are you?”
“Yes.” The madman’s glint was dimming; his facial muscles relaxed. He knelt and freed the ropes they had wound around her and the chair. Yes, she said, they were scouts, unable to resist a bit of foraging in a warm place.
“When you stormed through that door, I thought I’d taken leave of my senses.” She managed a broken laugh, standing, stretching. “I thought it was a vision. It’s been so long since I’ve seen you.”
“I sent letters.”
“I got them. I sent some, too. Half a dozen.”
“Did you?” The start of a smile.
“You received them, didn’t you?”
“Not a one. But that’s all right. I’d better go to the barn and untie your men. Sport’s down the road—my spurs, too. My gauntlets are in the attic. I came in by the roof. I’m strung out all over this farm.” His mood swinging wildly back to elation, he left the house across the bloody ice.
An hour later, down to his long underwear and bundled in three blankets, he rested by the great hearth. The Westphalia ham reposed on the chopping block. Gus had scrubbed the wall, and the boy’s corpse was gone; Washington and Boz had seen to that, after repeatedly shaking Charles’s hand and thanking him for saving their mistress and them.
Shivering, Charles stared at the fire, still astounded by his own behavior. He had shot a stripling without a qualm about the victim’s age. Then he had been ready, even eager, to kill the sergeant with a bullet in the back—and not on a battlefield, but in a kitchen. Those were extreme and alarming changes. What was happening in this damned war? What was happening to him?
He tried to puzzle it out. It was the duty of a soldier to destroy the enemy, but not with pleasure. Not without some human feeling other than rage. The boy with the scraggly mustache wasn’t a counter on a board or a figure in a report. There were parents, a home, innocent ambitions, perhaps a sweetheart—none of that had entered his head until this minute. All he had wanted to do was shoot, as casually as if the target were some game bird in an autumn field.
Gus returned to the kitchen, moving straight to his side. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
“You looked frightful when I walked in.”
“Cold, that’s all.”
“Can you spend Christmas?”
“If you want me to.”
“Want you to—oh, Charles,” she cried as the firelight shimmered on the walls, revealing one stain not quite wiped away. “I was so frightened during the fighting in town. I lay awake listening to the guns and wondering where you were.” She knelt in front of him, resting her forearms on his blanketed knees, her face soft, damp, no defenses in place. “What have you done to me, Charles Main? I love you—oh, my God, I can’t believe how much I love you,” she exclaimed, reaching up, pulling him down to a kiss.
With his arm around her, he led her along the hall, worried about his dirty underwear. Her room was cold. They tumbled into bed, groping for one another. “Gus, I need a bath before—”
“Later. Hold me, Charles. I want to forget how that poor boy died.”
“He was a damned evil boy.”
“He thought he was punishing the enemy.”
“There’s no manual prescribing the kind of punishment they wanted to inflict on you.”
“Well, it was horrible, but it’s over, so do stop debating and love me as hard as—what’s this?”
Her fingers had found the leather bag. She insisted on lighting a candle while he unbuttoned his underwear and, after some coaxing, slipped the thong over his head and handed her the bag.
Delight spread over her face as she opened it. “You’ve kept the book with you all this time?” The smile vanished. “The book was hit. You were hit. This is a bullet.”
“What’s left of it. Mr. Pope saved my life at Sharpsburg.”
She burst into tears, seized him, began raining kisses on him. They pulled each other’s clothes off. The coupling was quick, almost desperate, with a certain clumsiness because the shock of earlier events still lingered. In less than five minutes he fell away from her and fell asleep.
He woke an hour later to find her jogging his shoulder. “Hot water’s in the tub.” She had donned a robe, had better color. Her hair, undone, hung nearly to her waist. “I’ll wash your back, and we’ll go to bed again.”
This time, less numb and stunned, Charles lay with her in the cave of warmth beneath the comforter. She kissed his eyes and beard. His hand touched and played with each round breast, then strayed lower. She gripped his wrist and pressed.
Their breathing quickened. Yet there were warnings in his head on this night of shocks and changes.
“Are you sure we should go on? I’m a soldier—I can’t get here for months at a time—”
“I know what you are,” she said, caressing gently in the dark.
“Do you? I could ride away and never get back.”
“Don’t say such things.”
“Have to, Gus. I’ll get out of this bed this minute if you think I should.”
“Do you want that?”
“God, no.”
“I don’t either.” Kissing him. Touching him. Rousing him to such rigidity he hurt. “I know the times are fearful and dangerous. We must accept Pope’s advice—” Her mouth slipped across his bearded face, found his lips, opened. Tongues wet and loving touched a moment.
“What’s that?”
“‘Whatever is—is right.’” Another deep, long kiss. “Love me, Charles.”
He did, and toward the end, she hung her head back and breathed, “I want you always. Always, always.”
“I love you, Gus.”
“I love you, Charles.”
“—love you—”
“—love you—”
“—love—”
The word cycled up the scale like human music as he pushed to the center of her, and she rose and cried her joy in a voice that shook the room.
Still later, deep in the night, she slept against his shoulder, making occasional small sounds. They had shared themselves a third time, and she had closed her eyes afterward. He couldn’t seem to doze or even calm down. What he had done tonight, learned tonight, kept his eyes open and his heart beating much too fast for a man in the soft aftermath of love.
He was fearful because his feelings were no longer hidden. He knew he loved her when he stood by the house unable to force himself to action for a few moments because he cared so much.
Then his emotions rendered him mistake-prone. In the kitchen he looked at Gus first, instead of at the young Yank. In the army he had seen men rendered impotent as soldiers by worry over loved ones. The worst cases deserted. He held them in contempt. But after his own near-fatal error, how could he? How was he different?
Finally, and perhaps worst, he had been prepared to kill the coward’s way, with a ruthless joy, and to do it in a place supposedly safe from violen
ce and all of the other spreading poisons of the war.
You oughtn’t to be here. But how could he be anywhere else? He had been falling in love since he first saw her.
How was it possible to be so fulfilled and so torn? He saw the conflict in a homely little mind picture: two liquids from an apothecary’s shelf poured into a mortar and swirled with a pestle.
He loved Gus. She was passion, peace, merriment, contemplation, companionship. He admired her nature, he wanted her physically, she was everything he had ever desired in a woman without expecting to find it.
But there was Hampton, and the Yankees.
The pestle swirled. The hours went by. The apothecary’s hopes counted for nothing. The liquids would not mix.
Problem was, he couldn’t give up as easily as an apothecary could. Couldn’t give up Gus and couldn’t give up his duty. Love and war were opposite states, and he was inescapably caught in both. He had no choice except to go forward, wherever the disparate forces might carry him—and her.
Full of foreboding he slipped his arm under her warm shoulders and held her close.
Book Four
“Let Us Die To Make Men Free”
I would like to see the North win, but as to any interest in … supporting the Emancipation Proclamation I in common with every other officer and soldier in the army wash my hands of it. I came out to fight for the restoration of the Union … and not to free the niggers.
A UNION SOLDIER, 1863
64
“SOCIAL SUICIDE,” HE SAID when she proposed the idea. “Even for an abolitionist like you.”
“Do you think I care about that? It’s a fitting place to be tomorrow night.”
“I agree. I’ll take you.”
So here they were, George and his Roman Catholic wife, seated in one of the gold-trimmed pews of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church. Only a third of the candles in the chandeliers had been lit, for this was an hour of meditation, an hour to look backward and ahead. The choir hummed the “Battle Hymn” while the minister stood with head bowed, black hands gripping the marble of the pulpit. His short message to the worshipers, most of them members of the affluent Negro congregation—there were no more than a dozen whites present—had been drawn from Exodus 13: And Moses said unto the people, Remember this day, in which ye came out from Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
Midnight was near. Though not a religious man, George was moved by the experience of sitting here and seeing the dark faces upturned, many showing tears, and some with expressions approaching rapture. A shiver down his spine, he reached for his wife’s hand and clasped it tightly.
All across the North, similar watch-night services were being held to observe the coming of the new year. In the morning Lincoln would sign the proclamation. George felt tension grow as the final minute passed. The choir fell silent, and the entire church. Then, in the steeple, the first bell note.
The minister raised his head and hands. “O Lord our God, it has come. Thou hast delivered us. Jubilo at last.”
“Yes, jubilo.” “Amen!” “Praise God!” Throughout the church, men and women proclaimed their joy, and the sound of the bell seemed to swell. The shiver rippled down George’s back again. Constance had tears in her eyes.
The bell pealed, soon overlaid by a counterpoint of other bells in other churches ringing through the starry dark. The joyful exclamations grew louder. George felt like shouting too. Then suddenly, sickeningly, like a hailstorm, rocks struck the church. He heard epithets, obscenities.
Several men jumped up, George among them. He and two whites and half a dozen blacks stormed up the aisle. The hooligans were jeering shadows on the run by the time the men reached the steps.
George shoved his dress saber back in its scabbard, listening to the bells chime across the black arch of winter sky. The brief exaltation had passed. The rock-throwing brought him back to the realities of this first day of 1863.
Although the mood of the worship service had been broken, nothing could cancel the power of it. That was clear from the faces of the men and women scattering to the carriages left in the care of little black boys bundled against the cold. Rattling homeward to Georgetown through deserted streets, Constance snuggled close and said, “Are you happy we went?”
“Very much so.”
“You looked so grave toward the end of the service. Why?”
“I was speculating. I wonder if anyone, Lincoln included, knows precisely what this proclamation portends for the country.”
“I certainly don’t.”
“Nor I. But as I sat there, I had the oddest feeling about the war. I’m not certain the term war applies any longer.”
“If it isn’t a war, what is it?”
“A revolution.”
Silently, Constance clung to his arm as they absorbed the bite of the wind. George had preferred to drive tonight rather than ask one of their hired Negro freedmen to be absent from his family. The bells kept tolling, ringing their knell of changes across the city and the nation.
Washington had undergone drastic change in the months the Hazards had lived there. Business had seldom been better, but that was true everywhere in the North. Hazard’s was operating at capacity, and the Bank of Lehigh Station, opened in October, was enjoying great success.
Scores of European immigrants, attracted in spite of the conflict—or perhaps because of it; war brought boom times—added to the general overcrowding in Washington. The martial spirit of the early days was gone, washed away by bloodshed in the great battles lost by the Union. No elegant uniforms could be seen on parade on the mall; no military bands performed for the public. At book and novelty stores, people bought Confederate bank notes and kepis picked up by souvenir hunters after Second Bull Run. They paid with government promissory notes; with Treasury-issued fractional currency—green-backed bills in denominations under a dollar, derisively called shinplasterers; or with wartime coins minted by private firms and bearing their advertising. They accepted the presence of black waiters at Willard’s—all the white regulars had enlisted—and they accepted the presence of maimed veterans wandering everywhere.
At the start of the war, everyone had agreed that Washington was a Southern city. Only a few months ago, however, Richard Wallach, brother of the owner of the Star, had been elected mayor. Wallach was an Unconditional Union Democrat, who wanted the war prosecuted fully to the end, unlike those in the peace wing of his party. Copperheads, some called the peace Democrats; poisonous snakes.
Emancipation had come to the District last April. Stanley and Isabel were in the forefront of those promoting it, although at one of the rare and difficult suppers arranged by the two Hazard wives to maintain a pretense of family harmony, Isabel had stated that emancipation would turn the city into “a hell on earth for the white race.” It hadn’t exactly worked that way. Almost daily, white soldiers fell on some black contraband and beat or maimed him or her, without subsequent punishment. Negroes weren’t permitted to ride the new street railway cars shuttling along Pennsylvania Avenue between the Capitol and the State Department. Isabel deplored such bigoted behavior when paying court to her radical friends.
In the demoralized army, change was certain. Encamped on the Rappahannock, Burnside kept planning winter advances against all advice. He was wild to redeem his failure at Fredericksburg. On more than one occasion, George had heard senior officers say Burnside had lost his mind.
Fighting Joe Hooker was most frequently mentioned as Burnside’s replacement. Whoever took command faced a monumental job of reorganizing the army and restoring pride and discipline. Some regiments refused to march past the Executive Mansion, but would go out of their way to reach McClellan’s residence on H Street, where they would cheer as they went by or sing a popular song praising the general. There were some blacks in the army now. Like the contrabands, they were beaten frequently, and were paid three dollars less per month for the same duty than their white counterparts.
In the executive branch,
change was likewise a virtual certainty in this new year. The congressional elections had gone badly for the Republicans, and the melancholy President held office in an atmosphere of mounting disfavor. Lincoln was blamed for all the military defeats and called everything from a “country cretin” to a “fawning Negrophile.”
So change was in the air—needed, unwanted, immutable. Sometimes, as in the Presbyterian church, just imagining possible futures made George’s head ache.
When they reached home, Constance looked in on the sleeping children, then prepared hot cocoa for George. As she waited for water to boil, she reread her father’s letter. It had arrived yesterday.
Patrick Flynn had reached California in the autumn. He found a land of sunny somnolence, remote from the war. In ’61 there had been rumors of revolt and a Pacific Confederacy, but those had died out. Flynn reported that his new legal practice in Los Angeles brought him virtually no money, but he was happy. How he survived, he didn’t say, but his daughter’s fears about his safety were eased.
She carried the cocoa to George in the library. She was tired but he, wearing just his uniform trousers with braces and his shirt with sleeves rolled to the elbows, looked exhausted. He had turned the gas up full and spread sheets of paper in front of the inkstand. Some bore writing; some were blank.
She set the cocoa down. “Will you be long?”
“As long as it takes to finish this. I must show it to Senator Sherman tomorrow—that is, today—at the President’s reception.”
“Must we go? Those affairs are horrid. So many people, it’s impossible to move.”
“I know, but Sherman expects me. He’s promised me an introduction to Senator Wilson of Massachusetts. Wilson’s chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. An ally we very badly need.”
“How soon will the appropriations bill be introduced?”
“In the House, within two weeks. The real fight comes in the Senate. We don’t have much time.”
Bending over him where he had sunk into a chair, she touched his hair tenderly. “You’re a remarkable zealot for a man who never liked soldiering.”
