North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Clarissa was particularly displeased by the need to stay in the field most of the day. Shortly after noon, she had to relieve herself and cried because there was no privacy. Jane bent close to her ear, whispered, then gently helped her all the way across the square and over the next embankment. She waited on the near side until the elderly woman reappeared.

  Clarissa’s familiar cheery smile had returned. When Jane brought her back, she said, “How sweet the air smells. Spring’s coming. Isn’t that lovely?”

  “Yes,” said Judith, putting an arm around her mother-in-law and patting her. “Yes, it is.” Andy gave Jane a swift, almost chaste kiss on the cheek. Charles thought he heard the black man whisper, “Thank you.”

  Charles drowsed awhile during the afternoon. Eyes half closed, he visualized bits of the writhing struggle with Cuffey. His eyes flew open and he shuddered, reminded of another day, at the slave cabins, when they had both been only six or seven. Friends, they had wrestled for possession of a fishing rod. This time it had been two enemies contesting one life. My God, how far the wheel had turned.

  Toward sunset, Cooper again declared that he wanted to go back to inspect the property. No shots had been heard for more than four hours, or any unusual sound at all. The smoke kept drifting, thinner but still strong-smelling. Why Clarissa no longer noticed, Charles couldn’t imagine, unless it was because she dwelled so much of the time in the safer, softer landscape of her own mind and had retreated there again. She was a lucky woman in some respects.

  “I don’t believe anybody should go up there alone,” Andy said. “I’m goin’ with whoever decides to do it.”

  “I suggest the three of us go,” Cooper said. Charles was by now too tired to continue the argument. He gave in with a shrug.

  Unarmed, they trudged along the bank of the Ashley. The water shone red-gold in the lowering light. They passed the last rice square and advanced cautiously through the belt of big trees separating the fields from the formal garden and riverside lawn. From their angle of approach, the first visible damage was the broken planking and debris on the bank. The dock no longer existed.

  Pale, Cooper wiped his lips and walked out of the garden. Following him, Charles saw pieces of two gold-edged platters on the grass and a ripped dress with a mound of excrement on it. Human, he presumed.

  Cooper’s attention was on the house. He whispered, “Oh, God above.” Even Andy appeared stricken. Charles didn’t want to look, but he did.

  Mont Royal had been burned to its tabby foundation. Nothing stood in the ashes and rubble except a few canted black beams and the great chimney, soot-marked but with all of its thick wisteria vines intact. Charles supposed the vines were dead.

  “How could they?” Cooper said, wrath in his voice. “How could they, the damned ignorant barbarians—”

  Softly, Charles said, “You used to tell me South Carolinians were fools because they were inviting war. They were eager for one. We just got what you predicted. The war paid us a call.”

  He touched his cousin’s trembling shoulder to console him, then began to limp up the grassy incline. When he was still a good distance away, he felt the oven heat of the rubble. Here and there coals gleamed like imp’s eyes. Slowly, wonderingly, he circled around the great chimney.

  Cooper and Andy approached more slowly. Charles disappeared beyond the chimney. Suddenly Cooper and Andy exchanged alarmed looks. They heard Charles laughing like a crazy man.

  “Hurry up,” Cooper said, already running.

  They dashed around the chimney to the darkening, tree-lined driveway. A few limbs near the house still smoked. Some others had burned away completely. Charles stood near the corpse of the blond boy, pointing and howling like a lunatic. The object of his mirth stood further down the drive: a flop-eared mule with rope halter and rein.

  “Cuffey’s mule,” Charles gulped between bursts of laughter. “Mont Royal is wiped off the earth, but I’ve got a remount. Praise God and Jeff Davis! The war can go on and on and—”

  The crazed voice broke off. He gave them a shamed glance and stalked away to the nearest live oak. He braced his forearm against it and hid his face.

  128

  THAT SUNDAY MORNING, THE second of April, Mr. Lonzo Perdue and his wife and daughters were kneeling in prayer when the messenger rushed up the aisle of St. Paul’s to whisper to the President. Mr. Perdue watched the Chief Executive, white-haired now, leave the church with an unsteady step. Mr. Perdue leaned close to his wife’s ear.

  “The defenses have broken. Did you see his face? It can’t be anything else. We must pack and get on a train.”

  After the service, they wasted no time conversing with friends. They went straight home, packed three portmanteaus, and set out for the depot. They found all outbound trains were being held, though no official would explain why. During the afternoon the crowds grew steadily larger and more unruly, milling, pushing, overflowing the platforms and waiting room. Ultimately Mr. Perdue and his family found themselves encamped just outside the station entrance.

  They heard glass smashing in nearby streets. Mr. Perdue trembled. “Looting.”

  “It must be the niggers,” said his wife.

  By dusk, the streets surrounding the depot were packed with more people than Mr. Perdue had seen for months. As night came, rumors flew. Lee had pulled out of the Petersburg and Richmond defense lines. He was in wild and confused retreat to the west.

  Tempers shortened. There were incidents of pushing, fistfighting, rough treatment of the civilians when squads of soldiers had to quick-march into the mob to restore order. Then came the first explosion.

  “Oh, Papa,” cried Mr. Perdue’s daughter Clytemnestra, cringing against her equally terrified father. “What are they doing?”

  “Demolishing buildings. I think that was the Tredegar Works.”

  His daughter Marcelline began to shriek and babble as if taking leave of her senses. Without hesitation, Mr. Perdue slapped her several times. That took care of that.

  By eleven, the city was an asylum lit by spreading fires. Davis arrived in a carriage surrounded by heavily armed soldiers. In the smoky lamplight, Mr. Perdue watched him pass into the depot. A train for Danville was waiting, someone said.

  Mr. Perdue began to smell betrayal as he glimpsed certain other persons entering the station, each escorted by at least one soldier. He saw the scoundrel Mallory, who had wasted so many precious dollars on his worthless naval schemes. Trenholm, who had replaced Memminger at Treasury, arrived in an ambulance. Then came the damned Jew, Benjamin, sleek and cheery as ever. The privileged were to be carried to safety, away from the steady detonations of gunpowder, the brightening light of fires, the threat of hooligans looting—

  “The boxcars of the special train will be opened,” a railroad official shouted from the depot steps. “I repeat, the boxcars will be opened, but no baggage will be allowed. None!”

  Screaming, shoving, the crowd surged forward. Not everyone could squeeze through the station doors at once. People began striking and clawing one another like enemy soldiers. Mr. Perdue saw a child fall, trampled, a short distance to his left. He didn’t try to assist the girl; he was busy dragging his wife relentlessly toward the platform.

  “Oh, but Lonzo—no baggage? I can’t leave these few precious things—”

  “Then you’ll stay here without me. Girls, kick those women if they won’t move.” Thus the family won a place on the 11:00 P.M. out of Richmond.

  As the train started up slowly, chugging and jerking, desperate laggards trampled and pushed one another, still trying to climb into boxcars already filled to capacity. In his car, Mr. Perdue and several other men. manned the open door and protected their families by booting the faces and stamping on the hands of those attempting to board.

  Marcelline tugged her father’s coattail and pointed to a waving, yelling group on the platform. “Papa, it’s Mr. Salvarini and his family.”

  “Yes, too bad,” said Mr. Perdue as he reached down to a sof
t hand with two wedding rings on the fourth finger. Like some tenacious deep-sea creature, the hand had emerged from the mob to fasten on his trouser leg. He gripped the middle finger and bent it backward. As the hand released, he heard a bone pop. A stout woman sank from sight.

  The tangle of bodies fell away at a faster rate; the train gathered speed and moved onto the trestle. Mr. Perdue’s coat and cravat were in shreds. He was exhausted but happy—very satisfied and pleased by his untypical display of heroism in the face of danger.

  Upriver, great light pylons showed where other James River bridges had been set afire. Perhaps I should have gone into the army after all, Mr. Perdue thought as the train bore him away into the night.

  The soldiers, chiefly wounded veterans, had organized a rear guard to sweep through the government warehouses on Thirteenth and Fourteenth, putting matches to the cartons and crates of official records. One grizzled man, who was twenty-five but looked forty, pried open a wooden box and exclaimed, “Here’s something new—undelivered mail.”

  “Burn it,” said his sergeant, whose pant legs, like those of his men, were soaked with whiskey. They had waded through gutters filled with it. The looters were breaking open everything.

  The soldier stuck in his match. When a few letters caught, he plucked them from the box and used them to fire a second one, then a third and fourth. With the blaze roaring nicely, he dropped the original packet of letters on the plank floor, already hot, and hurried away to safety.

  129

  OUTSIDE THE LEDGER-UNION, an office boy hung up a summary of a new telegraphic dispatch almost hourly. Each piece of information from the distant Petersburg-Richmond line was greeted with cheers from a crowd becoming steadily larger.

  By midday on Monday, the third of April, the excitement brought work to a standstill at Hazard’s and swept through Belvedere like fire in a dry spell. Madeline was the only one who retreated from it, going to her suite of rooms and shutting the door.

  She was thankful the end seemed near. The dispatches did not say positively that General Lee had abandoned his hopeless position in front of Petersburg and the Richmond lines as well, but that presumption was being accepted throughout the mansion—and the ironworks and the town. Everyone felt the Confederate capital would soon fall. If all of this meant the bloodletting would stop, she was grateful.

  Yet the news raised a less welcome consideration. After a surrender, she would have no excuse for not returning to Mont Royal.

  She hated the thought. The place would only remind her of Orry. Yet she knew she had an obligation to go back as soon as it was possible to travel to South Carolina. There was a great deal of Washington talk about confiscating all the property of the largest slaveholders. She must be home to fight against that if it happened. If the love she and Orry shared had any monument at all, it was Mont Royal, tainted by black slavery though it was. So her duty was unavoidable. She must remember and take courage from her father’s words. We are all dying of life. She must make the journey and stand in Orry’s stead, maintaining the home they had occupied together such a short time. Assuming, of course, that the plantation still existed. Northern journalists wrote long articles about the advance of General Sherman’s army and the activities of his foragers operating on the flanks. So lurid and gleeful were these pieces, it was possible to imagine half of the state of South Carolina put to the torch, exactly like the city of Columbia.

  But she wouldn’t know Mont Royal’s fate until she got there, and she couldn’t get there without preparation. She was tired of imagining scenes of destruction. One antidote was physical activity.

  From the closet where she had stored it, she brought a small trunk, in which she had carried her things from Richmond. She opened it and savored the aroma of a few cedar chips in the bottom. From the wardrobe, she took two dresses she seldom wore. One by one, she folded them and laid them in the trunk.

  When it was about half full of items seldom used or worn since her arrival, her gaze fell on the half-dozen slender books on her bedside table. She picked out the third from the top, opened it at the ribbon marker, and gazed at the poem without seeing a word.

  Don’t, a silent voice warned. She shut the book, clasping it tight to her breast. Tears ran down her cheeks as she stared through the window at the hillsides of sunlit mountain laurel.

  “It was many and many a year ago—in a kingdom—by the sea—that a maiden there lived whom you may know—by the name of—”

  Shuddering, she bowed her head.

  “By the name of—”

  She couldn’t say the rest. The poem had meant too much to both of them. She leaned over the trunk and laid the volume of Poe on a neatly folded shawl, then closed the trunk lid with a small, final click. It was all the packing she could manage at the moment.

  When the conquerors marched into Richmond that day, Mrs. Burdetta Halloran was ready. She had spent nearly all her remaining money on one of the old flags, which cost dearly because the speculator selling them said many people wanted them. She burned her Confederate national flag in her fireplace.

  In the morning the Yankees paraded past her home, led by the black horsemen of the Fifth Massachusetts Colored Cavalry—incredible sight. She concealed her sick scorn and cheered and waved her handkerchief beneath the Stars and Stripes she had hung above her front veranda. Many of her neighbors openly wept, but not all. She didn’t give a damn for what the weepers thought of her behavior.

  By the hundreds the conquerors came, fifing, drumming, grinning, celebrating beneath a sky painted by fires that still burned. On the flanks of the riding and marching men, Negroes skipped and danced and taunted the whites watching from porches and upper windows.

  She saw a white officer notice her and cheered all the louder. Perhaps such a man would be taken with her appearance, stop, introduce himself. She had to survive somehow. She would.

  “Oh, thank God, thank God,” she cried beneath the grand old flag, waving her hanky so hard her arm ached. Her acting was so fine, tears coursed down her cheeks. Presently a chubby colonel reined his horse out of column and slowly approached the picket fence, to which she rushed and was waiting to speak as he smiled and removed his hat.

  “No more slavery—and soon no more war, doesn’t it seem so, Captain?”

  “Yes, there’s every indication that Lee is on the run,” Billy agreed. Pinckney Herbert’s small, bright eyes rejoiced as he tied a bit of string around the rolled-up razor strop. Billy had let his beard grow since coming home, but he kept the upper edges trimmed, and his old strop was worn out.

  It was about an hour after Madeline had shut herself in her room—a mild bright Monday afternoon. Billy was mending. The wound frequently filled the upper half of his body with a diffuse but severe pain, though he always managed to overcome it when he and Brett snuggled in bed together. She said he had never been so passionate in all the relatively short times they had been together during four years of marriage. She told him that with great pleasure. He liked to reply, “Been living on army rations a mighty long time. You know—coffee, corn bread, and continence.”

  He thanked Herbert, took his change and the strop, and left the dim, dust-moted store with its wonderful homey smells of cloth, crackers, and onion sets. Though his chest was starting to ache again, he felt a renewed and joyful sense of life returning to normal. In recognition of it, he no longer wore his side arm.

  The storekeeper was right, certainly. It was a new day for the whole land. The Thirteenth Amendment had gone to the individual states for ratification, and Illinois had been the first to do so. Even the pathetic Confederate President had acknowledged a need for change, though in his case Billy assumed the motive to be desperation, not principle. Davis, who would probably be hanged when the war ended—if he were caught, that is; any sensible man would flee the country—had in mid-March signed a law admitting blacks to the Confederate Army. Billy found it a gesture both sad and contemptible.

  Doing his best to ignore the mounting chest pa
in, he strolled toward the Ledger-Union office to see whether there was more late news. His route took him past a lager beer saloon crowded with men who would soon trudge up the hill to start the afternoon shift at Hazard’s. Beyond that, he approached a corner where bunting decorated the front of the recruiting office.

  Three doors this side of the office, he stopped, studying an odd little scene in progress. A trio of loutish men hovered around the hitch rail, between the recruiting office entrance and a broad-shouldered Negro boy in the street. One of the whites wore a soiled army uniform. Billy recognized Fessenden, the man who had once harassed Brett. The black youth had an apprehensive expression.

  “Scat, coon,” one of the men said. He picked up a good-sized pebble. Laughing, he lobbed it at the boy’s old shoes. The stone landed an inch in front of a cracked leather toe. The soft plop was exaggerated by the silence.

  “Yeh, get on back up to the mill and go to work,” Fessenden said, equally amused. He relaxed and leaned back, resting his elbows on the rail and cocking one leg over the other like a standing stork. “Bob Lee’s on the run. War’s nearly over. We don’t want colored boys fighting for us.”

  Billy stood quietly beside the brick wall of the café, which closed up during this part of the afternoon. The sloping wooden covering built over the sidewalk placed him in heavy shadow, but the Negro boy, facing the buildings, saw him. Fessenden and his cronies didn’t. Watching the shabbily dressed boy, Billy began rubbing his thumb back and forth over the oiled strop leather.

  The boy was clearly frightened, yet he swallowed hard and said, “I don’t want trouble. I just want to join up while there’s time.” He stepped forward.

  The young, pimply white man to Fessenden’s left jerked something from a pocket in his checked pants. A snap—a flash—the boy held perfectly still at the sight of the long blade of the clasp knife.