by John Jakes
Weeping with hope, she ran up the stairs, flung open the door of the stale room. She couldn’t see him in the dark, but she heard him clearly.
“Judith, would you mind opening the draperies to let in some light?”
The salt wind reached Tradd Street from the sea, flowing in to cleanse the bedroom. Late that afternoon, Cooper consumed half a bowl of turkey broth and a cup of Judith’s imitation coffee. Then he rested with his head turned toward the tall windows, open to show the great live oak just outside and the rooftop of his neighbor’s house.
He felt weak, as if he had just thrown off a prolonged high fever.
“But my head’s clear. I don’t feel—how should I put it?—I don’t feel the way I did before Stephen called. I don’t feel so angry.”
She sat against the headboard and pulled him gently to her small bosom, left arm cradling his shoulders. “Something in you burst like a boil when you attacked that prisoner. You despised slavery and where it was leading the South for so very long, but when you took your stand three years ago, you did it with all the fervor you’d once directed the other way. That was commendable, but I think it started terrible forces warring inside you. Judah’s death made it worse. So did long hours at the department, trying to accomplish too much with too little.” She hugged him. “What ever the reason, I thank God you’re better. If I were Catholic, I’d ask them to canonize Stephen.”
“I hope I’m sane again. I know I’m mightily ashamed. What of that sergeant I attacked?”
“A concussion. But he’ll recover.”
A relieved sigh. “You’re right about the struggle inside. It’s still there. I know the war’s lost, but I suppose I should go back to work if the department wants me. Where is Stephen, by the way?”
“He’s resting at the Mills House. As for working again—I’d think a while. My feelings about the war haven’t changed. At the time Sumter fell, they were your feelings, too.” His eyes shifted away from her, to the neighbor’s rooftop.
“This war’s wrong, Cooper. Not only because all war is wrong, but also because it’s being fought for an immoral cause—no, please let me finish. I know all the rhetoric and apologetics by heart. So do you. It isn’t the tariff or states’ rights or Northern arrogance that brought all this suffering. It’s what we did—Southerners—either directly or through the complicity of our silence. We stole the liberty of other human beings, we built fortunes from that theft, and we even proclaimed from our pulpits that God approved.”
He took her hand, his voice like that of a bewildered child. “I know you’re right. But I don’t know what to do next.”
“Survive the war. Work for Stephen if you must. Whatever you decide, it will be all right. Your head’s clear now. But promise yourself—and promise me—that when the South falls, you’ll work just as hard for peace. You know how it will be when the shooting stops. Animosity will persist on both sides, but the losers will feel it most. You know that because you went through it. You know what hatred does to a man.”
“It feeds on itself. Multiplies. Begets more hate and more pain, and that begets still more—”
Overcome, she let the tears fall, hugging him harder. “Oh, Cooper, how I love you. The man I married—went away for a while—but I think—I found him again—”
He held her while she cried joyously.
Presently she asked if he wanted to talk to Mallory when he returned. Cooper said yes, he thought so. He would put on a fresh nightshirt and dressing gown and join them for supper. She clapped her hands and ran to find Marie-Louise.
Feeling buoyant, free of pain—composed—he returned his gaze to the garden. Above his neighbor’s roof he saw a rectangle of clear, brilliant sky; his beloved Carolina sky. He had lost sight of how greatly that kind of simple perception cheered and exalted a man.
Lost sight of a great many other things, too. Including his own nature.
Judith was right: grief for his son had precipitated the worst. That grief would never leave him, just as his loathing for Ashton would not, or the unbecoming wish that she be punished for her greed. But the emotions building and building within him for so long had been purged in that explosion on Meeting Street, purged by his rain of cane strokes on the luckless Yankee.
The aftermath had left him wanting to die—or at least sleep a long time. Was it possible that the emotional desolation was the actual start of healing? He recalled another passage from the pen of the man he most revered, Edmund Burke. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about.
Weakened but not destroyed. Mending; that was his condition. He was no longer the same man who had attacked the sergeant. He could again examine past behavior with objectivity, if not exactly with pride.
He had veered for a time into absolute patriotism—unquestioning acceptance of all things Southern. Before Sumter fell, he knew what was fine and worthy in his homeland. He loved that part, rejecting the rest. But then he had changed, gradually became willing to fight for and accept all of it. Including what was represented by the whitewashed huts three-quarters of a mile from Mont Royal’s great house. The attitude was wrong before, and it was wrong now. It was one of the first things he would set right.
He examined his feelings about the war itself. He knew the storm had passed him because he once more felt as he had in the fateful spring of ’61. The war was misbegotten because it couldn’t be won. The war was an abomination because it pitted American against American. How shameful to grasp now that he had, for a while, become one with those who had pushed the nation into the war. One with the James Huntoons and Virgilia Hazards. One with those who could not or would not find a means to prevent the holocaust.
All right, the war was evil. What then?
He thought it through. He would no longer lend himself to wars except the one of which Judith had spoken, the inevitable one against the political barbarians, whose names he knew well. Wade. Davis. Butler. Stevens. The South would need men to stand against their onslaught. It would be a fierce battle, full of unexpected dangers. Burke, as always, had words to frame the challenge: The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us.
Because our ancestors never lost a war on this continent, he thought with a meditative smile empty of humor. Our ancestors were never a conquered people, as we shall be.
He rested a while, and imagination assumed control. He saw himself passing in and out of a dark valley, quite long, which ran from Sumter through Liverpool and Nassau to Richmond and the fateful corner where the Union prisoners passed. In that valley lurked error and the madness of dogmatism. His experience there and the miraculous shock of the street attack that had driven him sane again—there was no other term for it—gave him some grasp of what Catholics must mean by suffering in purgatory.
He had returned from his own purgatory, but the nation was not so blessed. Even if the shooting stopped this instant, America, all of it, would be torn as never before. He knew the dimensions of the hatreds the war had loosed. Within his own heart and mind, one red-handed hater had lived and reigned three years.
So he must rest and prepare. When the formal fighting ended, he would be called to the fiercest fight of all.
Cooper’s meditation was interrupted by the firing of distant siege cannon. It shook the house and rattled windowpanes. He got out of bed, poured tepid water from a pitcher to a basin, chose a twig from several in a small glass, scrubbed his teeth with the only dental compound available any more: powdered charcoal.
He rinsed his mouth, winced at the emaciated man in the shaving glass, and wiped gritty black particles from the corners of his lips. His mouth tasted clean enough. A simple pleasure; a welcome one.
He changed nightshirts, put on an old gown, tied it around his shrunken waist, and hunted up slippers. He went downstairs.
Marie-Louise was speechless when she saw him: Then she cried and threw herself into his a
rms. Judith held Cooper’s hand when Mallory arrived and Cooper spoke to him.
“Stephen, I’ll be in your debt the rest of my life. Your visit today saved me. From many things, but most of all from my own bad side. You have my highest admiration—you always will. But I can’t work for you. I can’t build war machinery any longer. Something’s changed. I’ve changed. I want the war to end. I want the dying to stop. Henceforth, I plan to spend my time speaking and writing on behalf of an honorable negotiated peace coupled with emancipation for every Negro still enslaved in the South.”
Mallory’s open mouth showed a confusion of reactions: disbelief, mockery, anger. At last he muttered, “Oh?” His voice strengthened. “And where do you propose to conduct this new, high-minded crusade?”
“From Mont Royal. My family and I are going home.”
101
WHILE THE OIL IN the lamp burned away, Orry and Charles laid plans.
“I can write the order to get him out of Libby—”
“When you say write, you mean forge,” Charles interrupted, the cigar stub temporarily out of his mouth. He had taken off his boots and propped his smelly stockinged feet on the edge of the table Orry used for a desk.
“All right, forge. I suppose you’re technically right, since the release is illegal.”
“What else do we need?”
“A gray coat and trousers to replace his uniform. A horse—”
“I’ll arrange for the horse.”
Orry nodded. “Finally, he’ll need a pass. I can also take care of that. How he gets across the Rapidan is up to him. More whiskey?”
Charles drained his glass and pushed the empty toward his cousin, who was struck by the way time and war had altered their relationship. They were no longer man and boy, mentor and pupil, but adults, and equals. When Orry had poured the refill, and one for himself, he said, “I plan to accompany you to the prison. I won’t let you undertake the risk by yourself.”
Charles thumped his feet on the floor. “Oh, yes, you will, Cousin. You outrank me, but I’m going alone, and that’s that.”
“I can’t allow—”
“The hell you can’t,” Charles broke in, flinty. “I’m afraid you forget one pretty important detail. Through no fault of your own, it’s too damn easy for guards to remember and describe you later. I don’t want the authorities hunting me up a week after they’ve caught you. This has to be a solo performance.”
The notion of saying this had come to him on the ride to Richmond. He could think of no better way to spare Orry any dangers beyond the real ones he would incur by forging the documents. But Charles did his best to hide motives under a cold smile when he glanced at Orry’s pinned-up sleeve.
“On this point, Cousin, I insist on having my way.” Charles twisted in his chair. “What do you say, Madeline?”
From the sideboard, where she had been standing and listening, she said, “I think you’re right.”
“Blast,” Orry said. “Another conspiracy.”
Charles puffed his cigar again. “Another? What’s the first one?”
“Just a figure of speech,” Orry said, noting Madeline’s anxious glance. “We’re always hearing of imaginary plots against the government.” He had already decided to say nothing of Powell’s group or Ashton’s involvement. Charles despised Ashton, and rekindling his anger might divert him from the task ahead. For that task he needed every bit of intelligence, nerve, and concentration he possessed.
Only one detail remained to be settled. Charles named it.
“When?”
Orry said, “I can get the necessary forms and do the, ah, pen and ink work in the morning.”
“Then I’ll bring him out tomorrow night.”
Charles tied Sport to one of the iron posts on Twenty-first, around the corner from Libby’s main entrance. A fishy stench blew from the canal, driven by a stiff wind. He could see a picket standing guard down there. He knew there were others all around the building.
Charles stroked the gray. Without taking the cigar stub from his teeth, he said, “Rest while you can. You’ll have a double load to carry pretty soon.”
That was his hope, anyway. It was by no means certain, and various parts of him told him so, including his stomach. It had ached for the past hour.
He strode up the sloped walk to Cary, sweat breaking out in his beard. His old army Colt bumped his thigh, most of the holster hidden by the India-rubber poncho borrowed from Jim Pickles. The rubber blanket, which had a practical checkerboard painted on the inside, was hot as hell. But it was a focus, one detail for guards to remember about him, so they would forget everything else. That part, too, was still theoretical, his stomach reminded him.
The wind whirled dust clouds along Cary. Charles bent against it and climbed the prison steps past the armed guard, a red-faced youth with blond curls and china-blue eyes. The soldier gave him a keen stare.
Inside, Charles wrinkled his nose at the stench as he presented the forged order to the corporal on duty. “Prisoner Hazard. William Hazard.” He emphasized the name by poking the cold cigar butt at it. He dropped the stub into a spittoon full of brown water. “I’m to remove him to General Winder’s office for questioning.”
Without a second glance at the order, the corporal laid it on the paperbound book he had been reading with an avid expression. From the yellow front and back, Charles guessed it to be some of the pornography sold in the camps. The corporal picked up a stack of wrinkled pages, leafed through, searching the inked names. Other guards passed. One gave Charles a long look but didn’t stop.
“Hazard, Hazard—here ’tis. Y’all find him on the top floor. Ask at the guardroom. Head of the stairs.”
The corporal opened the desk drawer, started to put the release order away. Charles snapped his fingers. “Give me that. I don’t want to be stopped upstairs.”
The noncom reacted before thinking—exactly what Charles counted on. He thanked the corporal by raising the forged order in a kind of salute, then wheeled and mounted the first flight of creaky steps.
Libby Prison breathed and whispered like some haunted mansion. The dim gas fixtures, widely separated, heightened the effect. So did the sounds. Distant sobbing; laughter with a subterranean echo to it; a sustained low noise like the murmur of disembodied voices. On the outside of the old warehouse, something banged and banged in the fierce wind.
Forlorn prisoners stared at him silently from corridors to the right and left of the landings. He heard a melody on a mouth organ. Smelled unwashed clothes, festering wounds, overflowing latrines. He tugged his hat brim farther down, the better to hide his face, before he reached the top floor.
He stepped into the rectangle of light at the door of the guardroom. Once more he showed the order, repeated what he had said downstairs.
“Should of brung a litter with you,” the bored guard told him. “Hazard ain’t walkin’ so good these days.” He turned to the other private in the room. “Go find him, Sid.”
“Fuck that. Your turn.”
Grumbling, the first soldier stepped past Charles. “Pretty queer to drag him out for questioning at this time of night.”
“If you want to make your objection known to General Winder, I’ll be happy to convey it, soldier. Together with your name.” Charles said it harshly, relying on what long service had taught him: men usually responded automatically to intimidation. It had worked downstairs, and it worked again.
“Never mind, thanks anyway,” the guard said with a nervous snicker.
At the entrance to a large room in which hundreds of prisoners sat or lay with hardly an inch between them, the guard halted. “Hazard? Where’s William Hazard?”
“Billy,” someone said, prodding the prisoner next to him. Charles held his breath as a shrunken figure slowly rose to sitting position, then stood with the help of those closest to him.
A huge silhouette with the corridor light at his back, Charles waited and felt his heartbeat quicken. This was the first critical momen
t—when the prisoner hobbling on the padded crutch came close enough to recognize him.
A drop of sweat fell from Charles’s nose. His mouth felt like a cup of dust. Billy staggered. My God, how wan and weak he looked, all rags and beard. When he was within a few feet of the door, Charles spotted bruises and a healed cut on one ear. His friend had been beaten.
The guard raised a thumb toward Charles. “This yere officer’s takin’ you down to old Winder’s office a while. What did y’do this time?”
“Not a damn thing.” Eyes enlarged and darkened by the hollowness of his face, Billy looked at Charles, who was silently crying out, Don’t say anything.
Billy’s mouth hung open a moment. “Bison?” His face showed that he instantly recognized his mistake.
The guard was watching Charles, suspicious. “What’d he call you?”
“Nothing you’d want to repeat to your mother.” He grabbed Billy’s dirty sleeve. “Don’t you say one damn word, or I’ll deliver you to the provost in little pieces. I lost a brother at Malvern Hill to you Yankee scum.”
Reassured, the guard said, “Don’t know why we coddle ’em so. Ought to burn the whole place down—with them inside.”
“My sentiments, too.” Charles pushed Billy’s shoulder too hard. Billy almost fell. He propped himself up with the crutch and a hand against the wall, giving Charles a searching, wary stare. Good, Charles thought. He motioned the prisoner forward.
The guard lingered at the door of his room, watching Charles prod Billy down the first few steps. Billy was slow, much to Charles’s annoyance. He was unsteady, too, obviously needing the crutch. The descent to the ground floor would take a hell of a long time. The longer they stayed inside Libby, the greater the risk of discovery.
“Bison?” Billy whispered, leaning against the stained wall beneath a guttering gaslight. “Is it really—?”
“For God’s sake shut up,” Charles whispered. “If you want to get out of here, act like we don’t know each other.” Two guards appeared on the landing below, coming up. Charles nudged Billy, said loudly, “Keep moving, bluebelly.”
