by John Jakes
Some rioters ran into a restaurant and reappeared with two Negro waiters. A roar went up. A couple of policemen fired futile shots from the next corner, but that did nothing to deter the crowd. Some produced ropes. Others were shinnying up telegraph poles. Within two minutes, both waiters hung from crossarms, turning, turning slowly in the smoke.
The sight brought a smile to Jones’s round face. He had been in New York only ten days, drifting there as he had drifted to so many other places after that damned Orry Main had discharged him. He had found a hovel in Mackerelville where he could sleep for nothing, and in grubby Second Avenue saloons he had listened to angry men thrown out of work by a recent dock strike. One of the most effective, a longshoreman by day and a mackerel with three girls working for him at night, had bellowed his grievances at a crowd that included Salem Jones.
All they wanted on the docks was a raise to twenty-five cents an hour for the nine-hour day. Was that too much to ask? The listeners screamed, “No!” and thumped their tin pails on tables and chairs. But what did the bosses do? Locked out the white men and brought in vans of niggers. Was that right? “No!”
The following Monday, the draft was to begin dragging these same whites into the army as cannon fodder—hard-working men who couldn’t pay three hundred dollars to exempt themselves or hire a substitute. “We have to go to war for the coons, while they stay here and take our jobs, and bust into our houses, and molest our women. Are we going to let the draft people and the coons get away with that?”
“NO! NO! NO!”
Listening to the screaming, Jones could have told the witless police there would be hell to pay on this Monday morning. He had decided to join the fun.
The longshoreman who had exhorted the saloon crowd was one of the organizers of a mammoth parade, which had started early. Carrying banners and placards proclaiming NO DRAFT!, some ten thousand protestors marched up Sixth Avenue to Central Park. There, speeches had incited the mob to less restrained forms of protest. One of the orators, Jones noted, had a pronounced Southern accent. An agent sent to stir things up?
After the rally, the great crowd had divided into smaller ones. Jones ran with rioters who threw glass jars of sulphurous-smelling Greek fire through the windows of mansions on Lexington. He next joined a band that invaded an office where draft names were supposed to be drawn. They found nothing except furniture to wreck; the officials were conveniently absent. Then he was swept into the crowd at the Orphan Asylum, which was now burning briskly. From Broadway, he could glimpse the flames above the intervening buildings.
Around him Jones saw few evidences of anger. After the breastworks were stormed and the waiters hanged, the mob turned sportive. Celebrants swigged from all kinds of bottles. A drunken man snagged the hand of an unkempt woman, equally tipsy, pushed her into the doorway of an abandoned pawnshop, unbuttoned his pants and displayed his stiff member while spectators, including the woman, applauded and whistled. Soon the man was down on her, bouncing busily. The onlookers stayed a short time, but grew bored and went hunting other diversions.
Never much of a drinker, Jones needed no alcohol to stimulate him. He ran with the crowd down Broadway, then toward the East River. A group of them dashed into a tea shop to overturn chairs and tables, hurl cups and pots at the walls, and generally terrify the customers. On the way out he broke a front window with the stolen truncheon.
Near the river, under black smoke-clouds roiling through the hazy white sky, they collided with a herd of milling cows, pushed on through it and discovered the two cowherds, black boys, cowering on a patch of grass down by the water. The boys were fourteen or fifteen. Jones helped lift one and fling him in the river. Others threw in the second one.
“Hep us, hep us! We can’t swim—”
Laughter answered the plea, laughter and rocks thrown by the whites. Jones threw one, reached for a second, imagining he was hurling them at that damned, arrogant Orry Main, who had discovered so-called irregularities in the Mont Royal accounts and retaliated by discharging him. Born in New England, Jones had always favored the South because he loathed colored people. But the snobs along the Ashley, and especially the Mains, had given him another target for his hate.
Jones threw another rock, watched with pleasure as it struck one of the gasping cowherds square in the forehead. A minute later the boy sank beneath the water, followed shortly by the second. Laughing, the people around Jones complained that the fun hadn’t lasted long enough.
An hour later, he found himself in another saloon in Mackerelville, listening to still another scruffy fellow harangue a crowd.
“We hain’t gone where we really should go—over to the Eighth Ward. Over to Sullivan an’ Clarkson an’ Thompson streets. Over there we can tree some coons right where they live.”
Fortified by free beer the owner was serving—his way of demonstrating dislike of the draft—Jones thrust his locust stick in his belt and joined the marchers, who defiantly sang “Dixie” at the top of their lungs as they tramped west.
Arms linked with strangers on either side of him, Jones reflected that he personally liked the conscription law—a sentiment he wouldn’t have expressed here, naturally. He liked it because certain states were already paying handsome bounties to men who would enlist and help fill draft quotas. Though he was beyond the age for service, Jones nevertheless believed he could dye his fringe of white hair, lie about the date of his birth, and earn some of that bonus money. Something to think about, anyway—but not till this party was over.
The mob, grown to around one hundred and fifty, brushed with a squad of soldiers, many of whom wore head or arm bandages; the city had even turned out the Invalid Corps for the emergency. The mob easily scattered the invalids and marched on through the glass glitter. The day darkened more rapidly than usual. Heavy smoke, lurid red from all the fires, pressed down on the rooftops. Fire bells tolled from every quarter as the crowd surged into Clarkson Street, a lane of tenements and shacks built from packing boxes.
“Where are they? Where are the niggers?” people shouted. Except for two little girls playing beside an immense garbage heap where fat rats scampered, no human beings could be seen. Jones scanned the tenements. Broken windows, open windows—all were empty.
Some of the rioters vanished behind the packing-box shanties and. began tipping outhouses. Most of the whites wanted better sport; they converged on the garbage heap. The rats and the little girls fled. Suddenly Jones spied a head in a third-floor window. “There’s one!”
The head vanished. Jones led a party of ten up through the fetid building, kicking open doors in the search. They discovered a young Negro couple and an infant lying on a pallet. A smiling white woman picked up the child, rocked it back and forth a few times, then stepped to the open window, leaned out, and dropped it.
The mother screamed. Jones bashed her head with the truncheon. Outside, in the reddening light of the burning city, they carried the husband and wife to a stunted tree near the garbage heap. Ropes went up, and the two were quickly tied so they hung by their wrists. A shrieking white woman rushed forward with a butcher knife, but a man held her back.
“Don’t use that. I found some kerosene.”
He doused it on both Negroes; kerosene dripped on the hard-packed ground. Jones shivered, pleasurably imagining the buck was Orry Main. The husband pleaded for the mob to spare his dazed, bleeding wife. That only generated more jeers and jokes. Someone struck a match, tossed it, jumped back—
The fireball erupted with a roar. A smile spread over Jones’s cherubic face as he watched the victims burn.
Horsemen. That was the sound he heard. Horsemen cantering through the pines beside the rail line. Hands on top of his head, Billy opened his eyes.
Six men, two in uniform, reined up around the others. The one to whom Black Suit and the rest immediately deferred was a slight, slender officer with sandy yellow hair showing under a hat with an ostrich plume. The man’s gray cape, tossed back over both shoulders, displayed a
bright red lining. The officer was about thirty. His clean-shaven face looked stern but not unkind. He seemed more interested in Black Suit than in Billy.
“What is happening here?”
“We pulled this Yank off’n a work train that went by a while ago, sir. We were preparing—” Black Suit swallowed, nervously eyeing his comrades.
“To execute the prisoner?” the officer prompted, quieting his dancing horse with a few quick pats.
Black Suit flushed, said faintly, “Yes, sir.”
“That is against the rules of civilized warfare, and you know it. No matter what calumnies the Yankee newspapers print about us, we do not engage in murder. You will pay a penalty for this.”
Frightened now, Black Suit hastily holstered his dragoon pistol. Billy’s heartbeat slowed. “Lower your hands,” the officer said to him. Billy obeyed. “Give me your name and unit, please.”
“Captain William Hazard, Battalion of Engineers, Army of the Potomac.”
“Well, Captain, you are the prisoner of the Partisan Rangers.”
Billy caught his breath. “Are you—?”
Gauntlet touched hat brim. “Major John Mosby. At your service.” He suppressed a smile. “Pulled you off a train, did they? Well, at least you’re in one piece. I will make arrangements to have you transported to the Richmond prison for Union officers.”
Mosby’s unexpected arrival had left Billy elated and befuddled—so thankful he hadn’t stopped to think of the consequences of a reprieve. Prison was better than death, but not much; paroles were becoming fewer as the bitterness of the war intensified.
He should have recognized Mosby at once; after Stuart’s, his plume was the most famous in the Confederacy. Mosby addressed the other man in uniform, a sergeant. “See that he’s fed and not mistreated. We must move on to—”
“Major?”
Annoyed, Mosby glanced at Billy. “What is it?”
“One of my men was shot to death just before I was captured. He’s lying up there in the weeds. Might I ask that he be given a Christian burial?”
“Why, yes, certainly.” A hard look at Black Suit. “You’re in charge. See that you do it properly.”
There was no complaint from Black Suit, not even a flicker of resentment in his eyes as Mosby and his party resumed their canter through the woods. One of their number had been left behind to take charge of the prisoner. While that trooper was loosening the saddle girth to rest his horse, Black Suit managed to whisper to Billy.
“You’re going to Libby Prison. When you see how they treat Yankee boys there, you’ll wish to God I’d pulled that trigger. You’ll wish I’d killed you. Just wait.”
87
AUGUST INFECTED RICHMOND WITH soaring temperatures and humidity, with dusty leaves and still air awaiting a great relieving storm that muttered northwest of the Potomac but never seemed to march farther, and with a pervading despair that followed two realizations: the Mississippi was lost; and Gettysburg had not been the quasi-triumph the high command at first pretended it was. One clear signal was the state of the trade in illegal currency. A Yankee greenback dollar, of which there were thousands in circulation, cost two Confederate dollars before the debacle in Pennsylvania. Now it cost four.
Vicksburg spilled thousands of new captives into the already overcrowded camps and warehouse prisons. Gettysburg sent thousands of new wounded to the overtaxed hospitals. Huntoon absorbed this marginally as he scratched away at work he no longer cared about. Memminger had assigned him the odious task of preparing lists of those business establishments, nearly numberless, engaged in printing and distributing illegal shinplasters.
The Confederacy had no silver for small coins, so the Treasury had authorized states, cities, and selected railroads to issue paper, in denominations from five to fifty cents, for change-making. But hundreds of other businesses took up the idea, and the Confederacy was now suffering a plague of shinplasters more numerous than Biblical frogs and locusts. Huntoon wrote list after list—grogshops, greengrocers, taprooms, short-line railroads. This morning he was copying out names provided by Treasury informants in Florida and Mississippi—hateful work onto which his sweat fell as he hunched over it, blotting it like tears.
What this government did no longer mattered to him. But a new Confederacy—that was tantalizing, that mesmerized him. He lay awake nights thinking about it. Spent long periods daydreaming about it at his desk, until some superior reprimanded him. Finally, one hot noontime, he startled his drone colleagues by seizing his hat and dashing from the office, a kind of crazed exaltation on his face.
He had already made inquiries in saloons. Most barkeeps were well acquainted with Powell, and Huntoon soon learned the Georgian’s address. He refused to ask Ashton, for fear she would reveal that she knew it.
Huntoon wanted to put some additional questions to Powell. He needed more details, yet at the same time didn’t want to risk offending. So he had delayed a while. Finally, however, his agitated state drove him out of the office that broiling noonday and into a hack.
“Church Hill,” he called through the roof slot, rapping with his stick for emphasis. “Corner of Twenty-fourth and Franklin.”
Leaves coated with dust hung motionless over the brick wall. Excited, Huntoon lumbered up the steps and knocked. A minute later he knocked again. At last, the door opened.
“Powell, I’ve decided—”
“What in hell are you doing here?” Powell demanded, giving a yank to tighten the belt of his emerald velvet dressing gown. The vee of flesh showing between his lapels was glittery with sweat.
St. John’s Church began to ring the half-hour. Queasy, Huntoon felt that the bell was sounding a knell for his opportunity. “I didn’t mean to interrupt—”
“But you have. I’m extremely busy.”
Huntoon blinked, overcome with fright. “Please accept my apology. I came only because you said you wanted my decision promptly. I made it this morning.” A swift look down the street. Then he thought he heard some unseen person stirring behind the door.
“All right, tell me.”
“I—I want to join, if you’ll have me.”
Some of the wrath left Powell’s face. “Of course. That’s excellent news.”
“May we talk about particulars of when and how—?”
“Not now. I’ll be in touch.” Then, seeing Huntoon react unfavorably to his curtness, Powell smiled. “Very soon. I would be pleased to do it today, but unfortunately I have many other affairs that demand attention. I’m very glad you’re with us, James. We need a man of courage and vision in the new Treasury. You’ll hear from me in a day or two, I promise.”
He closed the door. Huntoon was left in the heat, his heavy coat binding his fat body and his feelings hurt. Of course he had called without an appointment, and Southerners resented such discourtesies. He had no right to harbor resentment, though he did wonder what private matter required Powell to wear a dressing gown in the middle of the day. Huntoon had a suspicion too painful to entertain for very long.
As he went in search of a hack to return him to Capitol Square, he did an emotional turnabout. Powell became the injured party, he the offending one. His mind executed the reversal because he needed to feel himself genuinely a part of Lamar Powell’s plan.
And what he wanted most of all was to tell his wife of his brave decision.
“Near thing,” Powell said in the foyer, slipping out of the hot velvet robe and hooking it over his shoulder by one finger. It was the closest he had come in many a year to being surprised by a cuckolded husband, and it showed in the tightness of his features. Huntoon waddled away up the sidewalk, and Ashton, buck naked, uncovered her mouth and succumbed to the laughter she had struggled to control while she was hidden behind the door.
“You nearly gave us away.”
“But—I had to listen, Lamar.” She laughed so hard tears came. “It was—so delicious—my husband on one side of the door—my lover on the other—” She held her sides; her breasts s
hook.
“I didn’t hear you sneak down here while I was answering the door. Seeing you damn near gave me a seizure.” He clamped her chin in his left hand and lifted it swiftly, roughly. “Don’t ever do such a thing again.”
Smile fading: “No, no—I’m sorry—I won’t. But I’m elated that he said yes. He’s been pondering the decision for days. He hasn’t said a word to me, but I could tell it’s been on his mind.” She took hold of his arm. “You’re pleased, aren’t you? Now we have him where we can watch him.”
“And we don’t want him to change his mind. So you must allay any lingering doubts he may have. Make him very proud of his decision by rewarding him.” He squeezed her chin; a spasm at the corners of her mouth showed there was pain. “Do you understand, my dear?”
“Yes. Yes. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“As always.” He let go of her. The imprint of his fingers faded. Smiling, he gave her cheek a brief, paternal kiss. “That’s why I love you.”
That evening, after dismissing the servants and closing the dining-room doors, Huntoon cleared his throat in a way that signaled a pronouncement. Except for a slight scarring of the wallpaper, the room showed no evidence of Cooper’s visit. New legs had been installed on the table; new jasperware filled the repaired cabinet.
She felt she must be simpering as she said, “James, what is it? You’re so excited—”
“With good reason. Recently I’ve had some—private conversations with Mr. Lamar Powell—” He pushed aside the tureen of steaming fish bisque, jumped up. “Oh, I can’t sit—” He rushed to her end of the table. “He approached me with the most astonishing scheme, Ashton—a proposal I have accepted because I feel it’s my patriotic duty, because I believe it’s morally right, and also because I think it will work to our very great benefit.”
