by John Jakes
“One side,” he whispered suddenly, crouching again. A shadow passed a narrow vertical panel of glass at the left side of the driveway door. He drew his army Colt. A fire-limned figure appeared in the matching panel on the right side. Charles put a bullet into it. The figure sank down amid the tinkling of glass.
“That’s one.”
Behind him, a bolt rattled. He heard a child crying as the parlor door opened. Judith called, “Cooper? How many are—”
“Too many,” Charles shouted. “Stay in there, goddamn it.” The door slammed. The bolt shot home again.
In a flat, unemotional voice, Cooper said, “I don’t think we’ll live through this.”
“Shut up with that kind of talk.” Charles ran to the door on his side; he had seen a mounted figure fly past the narrow window lights. Smoke was drifting into the house. A defiant voice startled him.
“Hey, Charles Main, you in there? This here’s one of your niggers come back to get you. Gonna burn you out, Mist’ Charles Main. Roast you alive an’ fuck your womenfolk.”
“Cuffey, you son of a bitch—” Charles rammed his right arm through the broken window and fired. “Come in here and try.”
Winged by the bullet, someone yelped. Charles heard the mule’s hoofs rattling out there in the smoke and glare.
Then Cuffey’s voice: “Pretty soon now. Pretty soon—”
Someone else had taken the bullet meant for him. Damn. It was a shot Charles could ill afford to waste.
“Over here,” Cooper cried, an instant before the bolted door on the river side split apart, pounded by the butt ends of garden implements the raiders had found. As Charles waited for the door to give completely, brighter light outside the dining room drew his attention. There, beyond the trees, the whole sky glared.
He uttered a low, despairing syllable. They had fired the slave cabins. The sick house and probably the little chapel, too. They were warring on their own; the color of their victims no longer mattered. They were scum. Before they finished him, he would send some more down to tell Old Nick he was coming.
The river door burst apart. Four men crowded in, one with a fatwood torch that lit two white faces and two black ones. Cooper was struggling to aim the Hawken. Charles shot and hit no one. Three of the men leaped to one side, but one of the whites, a dumpy fellow with a pitchfork, lost his balance and lurched on toward the center of the foyer. The fatwood torch, thrown down, revealed the intruder’s face, with a deserter’s brand on the right cheek. Charles thought his mind had snapped.
“Salem Jones?”
“Paying a call long overdue, you arrogant—” The rest was lost as Jones rushed him with the pitchfork.
Cooper fired. So did Charles, simultaneously throwing himself sideways to avoid the stabbing tines. Both shots missed. The momentum of Salem Jones’s lunge carried him all the way to the other side of the foyer. The pitchfork tore through the fine flocked wallpaper, buried to a depth of two inches.
Charles ran at the former overseer, confused impressions assaulting him as they did in every battle. In the dining room, torches sailed through smashed windows, spreading fire again. In the parlor, breaking glass, frightened screams. The women had kitchen knives and cleavers for defense. Two of the men who had destroyed the river door beat at the doors of the parlor and yanked the knobs. All of this and a general background of gunfire, yelling, celebration registered during the seconds in which Charles dashed at Jones, who ranted incoherently while trying to free the pitchfork from the wall.
Charles knew he should shoot Jones in the back but couldn’t. The men at the parlor doors succeeded in separating one door from the hardware of the bolt on the inside. Cooper’s Hawken boomed. One man fell as Charles looped his free hand around Jones’s waist and dragged him from the wall and the pitchfork. He saw a small, stout figure in the parlor doorway.
“Mother—Jesus Christ, get back in there,” Cooper cried at Clarissa, who was smiling in a puzzled way. Still pulling Jones, Charles failed to see the knife the panting man snatched from his belt. But he felt it when Jones slashed downward and back, stabbing his thigh.
Charles uttered a low cry, tears of pain momentarily blinding him. Without thinking, he pushed the former overseer away. Jones tore the pitchfork from the wall, and with his reach thus extended, ran back at Charles, who had shifted his Colt to his left hand so he could grip his bleeding leg.
The firelit tines flashed toward Charles’s eyes. “You first, then your high and mighty cousin,” Jones screamed. Charles had to try a shot with his left hand, though he had never been able to fire effectively that way. He was done—
A roar. Jones rose as if huge invisible hands had seized his middle. Legs and chest folded toward each other; then the vee reopened, and he came down, dead but still bleeding. The skittering of the pitchfork behind Charles told him it had sailed past his head.
As he turned to verify that, he saw several things: Cooper with the smoking Hawken, with which he had shot Jones after managing to reload; Jane at the open parlor door, urging Clarissa back into the room; one of the door-breakers fallen on his side, holding his face, which bled from a stroke of the red cleaver in Jane’s hand. The fourth man had fled.
With a nod toward the light and heat filling the dining room, Cooper gasped, “Got to get everyone out before the whole place goes.” Remembering, Charles yelped and dashed in there. He snatched the scabbarded sword from the smoldering tablecloth with his red-smeared right hand.
Back in the foyer, he leaned against the wall. Blood ran down his leg into his boot. He supposed he should have expected something this bad. He really hadn’t believed that all the Negroes he had armed with lengths of lumber or implements and posted around the house would stay and fight for Mont Royal. He wouldn’t have, in their position.
Something struck the door on the driveway side. A bullet? No, louder. A post wielded as a ram? Hastily, he limped toward his cousin, who was again reloading.
The door burst in. Charles pivoted too fast and fell on his face—which saved his life. Shots whined through the space where he had been standing. Recovering, he fired until the revolver was empty. The attackers withdrew.
Sweat glazed his face above his beard. He struggled to his feet, noticing the glistening blood his leg left on the inlaid squares of wood. “We have to get the women out,” Cooper said.
“All right, but you stay with them from now on.”
“We’re done for, aren’t we?”
“Not if—” Charles swallowed. Trying to reload, he found his fingers numb and thick-feeling. He couldn’t grasp the shells properly. He dropped two. Kneeling to hunt for them, he finished, “—not if I can find Cuffey.”
“You foun’ him, white man. He foun’ you, too.”
Charles looked up to the head of the staircase and for the second time thought his mind had given way. Swollen with weight, here stood Cuffey. He shimmered in a ball gown of bright yellow satin.
Charles remembered hearing that Sherman’s bummers and some of the freed slaves had donned women’s clothing snatched from the closets of homes in Georgia. Cuffey must have heard it, too. He acted drunk and was an even more bizarre sight because of what he held in his right hand—a wide-bladed knife for cutting brush. The blade was two feet long.
Charles stared and stared, searching for the boy hidden inside the man. The boy with whom he had wrestled, fished, talked about women, and done most all the other things boys did. He couldn’t find that lost friend, seeing only an apparition in yellow with a brush knife and insane eyes.
“You foun’ him, an’ he’s obliged to kill you,” Cuffey said, defending the stairs while Cooper and Charles watched with unloaded guns in their hands and the great house began to blaze on the second floor. Charles felt heat from the ceiling, saw curls of smoke like an evil halo near Cuffey’s head.
“Get the women out,” Charles whispered.
“I can’t leave you to—”
“Go, Cooper.”
“Yeh, go on,” Cu
ffey said, slurring it. “It’s Mist’ Charles I wan’ right now.” To men crowding the driveway piazza, he screamed, “You all stay out till I’m finished, hear me? Stay out!”
Slowly, Charles slid the Colt back in its holster. He wiped his red hand on his shirtfront to dry it, then picked up the scabbard from the small table where he had laid it. The dress sword was too fine and slim to be of great use. But he had no time to get the fallen pitchfork, and Cooper, darting out of sight in the parlor needed the Hawken.
Cuffey waddled on down the stairs, the yellow satin rustling He held the flat of the long knife tight against his side, grinning
“We useta be frens, din we?”
Taunting him, Cuffey slid the knife back and forth over the yellow satin, as if to burnish the metal. Charles stared at the blotched and bloated face touched with firelight.
“Used to. No more.”
Two men, one a giggling blond boy wearing a frock coat of Cooper’s and on top of that a petticoat, slipped through the door from the serving pantry, bringing a cloud of smoke with them. Both carried stacks of china plates topped by red-glinting heaps of silverware. Cuffey shrieked at them from the bottom of the stairs. They staggered outdoors, the giggling boy spilling silver pieces one after another, a continuous clatter.
A moment before they left, Charles saw a familiar figure pass in the driveway, walking in a slow, stately fashion, as if on a morning stroll.
“Aunt Clarissa!”
She was already out of sight.
The slight turn of Charles’s head gave Cuffey the advantage he wanted. He ran at Charles, both hands clasped on the brush knife. He brought it down from above, a whistling cut that would have cleaved Charles’s head if he hadn’t jerked aside.
Chop, the small table where the sword had rested split in half. Charles struggled to draw the saber but, God help him, it had somehow gotten stuck. Cuffey slashed horizontally, straight toward his neck. Charles staggered back out of the way. Cuffey’s blade hit an ornamental mirror, which exploded fragments of glass, all reflecting the fire a moment, hundreds of skyrocketing sparks—
His right leg muscles starting to spasm because of the wound, Charles at last managed to pull the too-fragile sword. Cuffey again raised arms over his head; huge sweat spots discolored the armpits of the dress. The brush knife jangled the pendants of the foyer chandelier.
Unreasonably enraged, Cuffey flailed at the chandelier, two great angry slashes. Pendants broke and the bits fell, a brief prismatic rain. Unable to think but one thought—at the Academy he had been graceless in fencing class—Charles lunged in, sword arm fully extended.
His boot skidded on a pendant. Cuffey kicked him in the groin, hard enough to make him grunt and lean forward sharply. His right leg gave out. He crashed down on that knee, an impact that hurt even more than the kick. The brush knife blurred down toward his exposed neck.
Charles brought the Solingen blade over and cut Cuffey’s right wrist on the inside. Blood spurted. Cuffey released the knife, which sailed past Charles’s ear, so close he felt metal touch the lobe.
Charles was still kneeling. Cuffey kicked his left arm. He tipped the other way and sprawled. With his heavy boot, Cuffey stomped on Charles’s outstretched right arm. His hand opened. He lost the wired hilt of the saber.
Grimacing—it couldn’t be termed a smile—Cuffey dropped on Charles’s chest with both knees. Charles grappled with him. They rolled in a litter of pendants, prisms, table splinters, mirror chips. Cuffey clawed for his eyeballs. Charles held him back, but it took too white hands on the bleeding black wrist. Charles could feel his strength draining fast.
“Gonna—kill—you—white man.” Panting, Cuffey wrenched his arm back. Slippery blood on Charles’s fingers enabled him to get loose. He fastened both hands on Charles’s neck. Charles felt the drip of Cuffey’s blood on his throat.
“You—all finished. Jus’ like—this place—”
And so it seemed. Charles was succumbing to shock and pain. His vision blurred. His right hand flopped out, scurrying desperately around the floor like a sightless white spider. He wanted a shard of mirror, a piece of prism to attack Cuffey’s face.
The hands choked tighter, steadily tighter. Charles’s red fingers touched and closed on something he couldn’t immediately identify because of its ridged texture—
The wired hilt.
From the corner of his eye Cuffey saw it coming. Charles jammed the light cavalry saber into Cuffey’s left side under his arm. Simultaneously, Cuffey let go of Charles’s bloodied throat and reared away from the sword. It had already pierced the yellow satin and now slid in two inches. Four. Six—
Charles felt the blade scrape bone and slide on. Twelve inches. Fifteen—
Cuffey shrieked then, leaping and writhing with the killing steel stuck through him. Charles held fast. Cuffey continued his violent contortions. The blade snapped below the hilt, three inches from the dress.
Still impaled on the part that was deep inside him, Cuffey plucked wildly at the stub of steel, teetering and twirling into the burning dining room. The belling yellow skirt caught. Flames encircled the hem, ran upward like a fringe going the wrong way. Turning, weaving, Cuffey completed the figure of his death waltz and dropped into the consuming fire.
Finding something to feast on, it rose higher. Charles saw no more of him.
The smoking ceiling creaked and sagged. Charles struggled to his feet, the remaining part of the sword—it resembled a metal cross—gripped in his right hand. Most of the engraved inscription was gone. All that remained was amily, 1861.
Blood soaked his right pants leg and squished in his boot when he walked. He spied his fallen Colt and retrieved it. He found the parlor as yet largely untouched by the fire. The windows had been knocked out, presumably so Cooper and the others could escape. He had to find them. The great house was lost.
He ripped down another drapery, cut it by stabbing and sawing with the stub end of the sword until he had a strip long enough to wind around his thigh several times. He snapped off the leg of a taboret, broke that in two, and used half to finish the tourniquet, hoping it would suffice.
His lungs hurt, an abrasive feeling throughout his chest. Smoke grew thicker every moment. He ducked through a window to the piazza, the empty revolver in his left hand, the broken sword in his right.
Daylight was coming. Cuffey’s followers had managed to find most everything of value before the fire claimed the house. The evidence littered the drive. They had emptied the wine and spirit racks, the wardrobes, the kitchen cabinets. He saw seedy, bearded men, white and black, slipping away in the smoke between the trees, arms laden with loot.
Not all of them had been equally successful. The blond boy wearing Cooper’s frock coat and the petticoat lay facedown amid silver and smashed plates. A bullet hole showed between his shoulder blades.
There was little shooting now. But all it took was one bullet, so Charles cautiously remained behind one of the white pillars as he shouted, “Cooper?”
Silence.
“Cooper!”
“Charles?”
The distant voice provided the guidance he needed. They were hiding in the mazy plantings of the formal garden by the river. He crept along the side of the house, careful to avoid touching it; the walls were hot. He turned the corner, passed the chimney, and scrutinized the lawn.
No one. He readied himself to make a dash, then remembered to announce something important with another shout.
“Cuffey’s dead, Cooper. Cuffey—is—dead. I killed him.”
The sounds of Mont Royal burning filled the stillness. But no voices. Yet he knew they had heard him. He drew air into his pained lungs, stepped away from the house, and ran as fast as he could on his injured leg down the grassy slope toward the Ashley.
Someone shot at him. He heard the bullet splat the dewy grass to his right, but no second report followed. In the garden he found himself surrounded by familiar faces. Without so much as a word to anyone, he fel
l forward in a faint.
They hid all day in one of the rice squares, resting with their backs against the dirt embankment that held back the river until the wood gates were opened to let it flow in. The band of survivors consisted of Cooper, his wife and daughter, Clarissa, Jane, Andy, a young kitchen wench named Sue and her two small boys, and Cicero, the elderly, arthritic slave with curly white hair. Cicero had managed to fill his two big coat pockets with rice. He passed it around as the sun approached noon. It was their only food.
Others, including Cooper, frequently spoke of wanting to go back to assess the damage. Clarissa was the most insistent. Charles was adamant.
“Not until dusk. Then I’ll go first, alone. No use risking any more lives.”
The tourniquet had helped. The thigh cut had clotted. He didn’t feel good, but he was able to stay awake. He did wish he had some bourbon for the pain.
Cooper seemed prone to argue with his last remark. Charles forestalled it. “Look at the sky. That tells you what’s happened.” Above the embankment and the live oaks and palmettos bordering the rice acreage, black smoke banners flew.
Cicero was visibly affected by it. After watching the smoke for a length of time, his tension evident in the set of his lips and the glint of his eye, he exploded. “What happened to those boys we put on guard?”
“They didn’t stay there,” Cooper replied. It was a statement, not an accusation. But it enraged the old Negro.
“Cowards. Wouldn’t fight for their home—”
Squatting and drawing patterns in the dirt with a stick, Andy said, “Wasn’t their home by choice, remember.”
Cicero glared. “Damn skunk-belly cowards, that’s what they are. Nigger trash.”
“Don’t be so hard on them,” Charles said. “They knew the South’s beaten—that they’ll have their liberty the minute it becomes official. Why should they stay here and die when all they had to do was run a mile or so and be free men right away? Tell you one thing. Thousands and thousands of fine, high-principled white Southern boys ran away from the army with a lot less reason.” He put two grains of rice in his mouth and chewed.
