North and South Trilogy

by John Jakes

  Singing lustily, jigging madly, he didn’t notice the sink in the dark behind him, though he had certainly whiffed it. Luckily he only sank to his knees, though that was bad enough.

  He cleaned up on the bank of the calm Appomattox River. Returning to the celebration, he noticed that other revelers didn’t come as close to him as they had earlier. Still, he managed to get a few more drinks and, thus fortified, could regard what had happened as a humorous cap on an already glorious night. A night men would forever recall to fellow veterans, wives, sweethearts, children, and grandchildren, in terms of where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news. George could not quite picture himself being truthful:

  “I was in Petersburg, gathering crossties and spikes to reopen a section of the military railroad.”

  “Were you happy when you heard the news, Grandpa?”

  “You can’t believe how happy.”

  “What did you do to celebrate?”

  “I started dancing and fell in a trench full of shit.”

  132

  PEACE HAD ITS OWN unique strains, Stanley realized late in the week. Washington streets mobbed with drunken celebrants extended a ten-minute trip to an hour—or made it impossible. Isabel said the patriotic illuminations glaring from the windows of most houses and public buildings gave her bad headaches, though why this should be so when she stayed home and saw very few of them, Stanley couldn’t explain.

  He was bothered by the loud reports of fireworks all night long, by the tolling bells, the endlessly parading bands, and the hoots and merrymaking of gangs of whites and blacks roaming at will, even in the best neighborhoods. Add to that Stanton’s tense air and repeated expressions of fear of plots to kill Grant or the President, and it added up to a miserable week for Stanley.

  Stanton wanted to see him to go over matters pertaining to his departure from the War Department to take up the new post Wade had arranged. Stanley was ready with his files at nine Friday morning, but Stanton was too busy. At eleven the secretary had to rush to the Executive Mansion for a cabinet meeting. It lasted several hours, during which time Stanley didn’t leave the department. He was hungry and out of sorts when, late in the day, he was finally summoned to Stanton’s office.

  Even then, the stout man with the scented whiskers and round spectacles was preoccupied with his fear of murder plots.

  “The Grants aren’t going to Ford’s, anyway. That’s half the battle won.”

  “Ford’s?” Stanley repeated, blank because of fatigue.

  Stanton was irritable. “What’s the matter with your memory? Ford’s on Tenth Street. The theater!”

  “Oh. The President is going to see Miss Keene—?”

  “Tonight. He seems to regard the appearance as some sort of patriotic obligation. He has completely disregarded my warnings. Grant listened. He was only too happy for an excuse to whisk his wife out of town on a train for New Jersey.”

  He stumped to the window, hands locked behind his back. “It’s been a queer day. In that long meeting, we spent nearly as much time discussing the President’s latest dream as we did on the pressing issue of practical steps to restore the Union.”

  Lincoln’s strange dreams were a subject frequently gossiped about in Washington. “Which one this time?” Stanley asked, since some of them were known to recur.

  “The boat,” Stanton replied, staring out the window. “The boat in which he sees himself drifting. He says the dream always comes on the eve of some great happening. Before Antietam he dreamed of the boat. Before Gettysburg, too. It’s curious that he can describe the boat vividly but not the destination. It’s merely a dark, indefinite shore. His words,” Stanton added, returning to his desk.

  “It seems to me there’s nothing indefinite about the future,” Stanley observed while the secretary settled himself. “The war’s over.” That was the consensus, even though General Johnston’s army remained in the field somewhere in the Carolinas. “What lies ahead is a period of intensive reconstruction—including, I trust, punishment for the rebels.”

  “Yes, definitely punishment,” Stanton said. Stanley smiled. It would be his pleasure to help mete it out to former slaveowners.

  They ran rapidly through the agenda Stanley had prepared. Stanton made notes—these records to be transferred here, those responsibilities assigned there. Stanley was thankful the secretary was overburdened and therefore impatient. It allowed Stanley to finish and leave the office two hours earlier than expected. He knew he should go home, but went instead, despite the traffic, to Jeannie Canary’s.

  It proved a bad decision. It was the wrong day for a carnal romp. And she was whiny.

  “Won’t you take me out this evening, loves? Surely we wouldn’t be bothered, with so many drunken people everywhere. I’d love to see the play at Ford’s.” She no longer performed at the Varieties. She much preferred lazing about and spending the allowance Stanley furnished.

  “They say the President and his wife are to appear in the state box,” she went on. “You know I’ve never seen Mrs. Lincoln. Is she as squat and beady-eyed as they say?”

  “Yes, dreadful,” he retorted, made cross himself by her inability to make love just now.

  “Couldn’t you get tickets?”

  “Not this late. Even if I could, we’d spent most of the time squeezed in crowds and wilting in the heat—on top of which, Tom Taylor’s play is old and creaky. It would be a very disagreeable evening. A thoroughly dull one, too.”

  It was as if a perverted Nature had brought forth a black spring. Crepe blossomed everywhere that Easter weekend: on coat sleeves, the President’s pew at the York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the marble façades of public buildings. Stores remained open extra hours to sell it by the yard and by the bolt.

  Booth had escaped. Stanton proclaimed that the whole South must be prosecuted. Even Grant spoke of retaliatory measures of extreme rigor. In preparation for the state funeral on Wednesday, dry-goods stores quickly fashioned black-wrapped batons, sable sashes, ebony rosettes. Portraits of the slain President appeared in windows. Groups of stunned, grieving Negroes appeared on street corners. Paroled Confederate prisoners turned their coats inside out or threw them away for fear of being lynched.

  Early on Tuesday, using a special pass provided by Sam Stout, Virgilia was able to cut into the double line of waiting mourners, as many diplomats and public officials were doing. Only in that way could she be assured of getting into the East Room of the mansion.

  The slow-shuffling lines were extremely long. A guard told her an estimated fifteen thousand waited outside. Most would be disappointed when night came. The President was to lie in state this day only.

  Carpenters had built a catafalque now covered in black silk. The silk matched the outside of the white-lined canopy high above the casket, which was embossed with silver stars and shamrocks and bedecked with silver ropes and tassels. A silver plate mounted on a shield read:

  Abraham Lincoln

  Sixteenth President of the United States

  Born Feb. 12, 1809

  Died April 15, 1865

  Black drapes, windings, covers, concealed nearly every touch of color normally visible in the room. White cloth hid the glass of every black-edged mirror. Waiting her turn on black-painted steps which led up to the right side of the casket, Virgilia tugged at one black mitten, then the other, and smoothed her mourning dress. Finally her turn came. She stepped past the army officer at rigid attention at the end of the coffin—another guarded the opposite end—and gazed down at Abraham Lincoln.

  Not even the techniques and cosmetics of the mortician could do much to improve his crude, wasted look. She had come here more out of curiosity than anything else, and she studied the corpse with half-lidded eyes. He had been too lenient and forgiving. Too much of a threat to the high purpose of men such as Sam and Thad Stevens.

  The newly sworn President, Andrew Johnson, would pose no similar threat. Sam dismissed him as a dull-witted bumpkin. Along with Ben
Wade and Congressman Dawes, Sam had already paid a courtesy call on Johnson. He reported to Virgilia that Wade, through pointed indirection, had left no doubt about what he and legislators of like mind expected of the new man.

  “Mr. Johnson, I thank God you’re here,” Wade had said. “Lincoln had too much of the milk of human kindness to deal with these damned rebels. Now they’ll be dealt with according to their deserts.”

  As the hunt for Wilkes Booth went on, even moderate politicians and newspapers throughout the North were blaming the entire South for the deed. Hinting at a Davis-inspired conspiracy. Demanding vengeance, Sam reported with glee. “By giving his life, Virgilia, our direst philosophical foe has been of infinite aid to our cause.”

  The conspiracy theory intrigued Virgilia. But she skewed her version slightly. Booth’s murder ring had included others; a hulk named Payne or Paine had broken into Secretary Seward’s house on the same night Lincoln was shot and would have stabbed Seward to death had not the secretary’s son and a male nurse intervened. Others were said to be involved as well. Was Booth the sole motivator of the group? Suppose some radical Republican had inspired and encouraged him, hoping to produce the very result that had now occurred—a renewed cry for Southern blood?

  It certainly wasn’t beyond the realm of possibility, though she supposed the truth of it would never be known. Still, the truth mattered less than what had happened these past couple of days. Ordinary citizens were demanding the same harsh measures men such as Sam had long advocated.

  “Madam? You will have to move on. Many others are waiting.”

  The usher spoke from the East Room floor, near some chairs hastily painted black and set out for the hacks from the press. The usher’s whisper focused attention on Virgilia, embarrassing her. She almost called him a name. But this was no place to create a scene.

  Besides, she felt good. The sight of the dead Chief Executive was not at all depressing. The program of Sam’s group could now be carried forward with less obstruction. The great majority, converted overnight by a bullet, wanted that program. Virgilia gave the usher a scathing look and walked decorously to the steps leading down. She glanced back once and fought to suppress a smile.

  Sam was right. In death, the ugly prairie lawyer served his country far better than he ever had in life. His murder was a blessing.

  133

  HUNTOON WANTED TO DIE. At least once daily, he was positive he would within the hour. He had lost something like twenty-five pounds and all his fervor. Would he never sleep in a regular bed again? Eat food cooked on a stove? Be able to relieve himself in privacy?

  Each section of the long road from St. Louis had had its own distinctive frights and travails. On the journey in the overland coach, they had been accompanied and guarded more than half the way by a Union cavalry detachment. The Plains Indians were raiding, they were told.

  Huntoon quaked when informed of that. Powell, on the other hand, seemed stimulated to broaden his performance as the loyal, fearless Kentuckian. Huntoon’s loathing grew.

  Virginia City, with its looming mountains, belching smokestacks, ruffian miners, was as strange and threatening as China or the steppes. He and Powell had to load the bullion at night at the refinery, laying the half-inch-thick tapered ingots in rows, according to a plan Powell had sketched. The ingots measured five by three inches. Each wagon bed carried ninety of them, for a total weight of around four hundred and fifty pounds. The worth at the prevailing price of twenty dollars and sixty-seven cents an ounce was just short of one hundred fifty thousand dollars. The arrangement and value of the gold loaded in the second wagon was identical.

  “This is but the first shipment,” Powell reminded him. “There’ll be more, though not right away. The lode’s rich, but most laymen don’t appreciate the time and the immense ore tonnage needed to produce this much bullion. I’ve been readying this one shipment for over a year. But I was working in secret, through couriers, over a long distance. It will go faster from now on.”

  Because of the added weight, the underside of each wagon had been reinforced with special braces. After wooden wedges were placed inside to keep the ingots from shifting, the two men nailed a false floor into each wagon, covering them with dirty blankets. On top of the blankets, boxes and barrels of provisions as well as some crates of Spencer rifles were loaded next day. A six-horse hitch was required to pull each wagon.

  Powell then hired his teamsters—two as regular drivers, a third as relief man. They were all thuggish, illiterate young fellows who spoke little and collectively carried a total of seven weapons. This trio constantly intimidated Huntoon with beetling stares and smirks. They would receive a hundred dollars apiece at the end of the trip. The guide, even cruder and more brutish, would be paid double that sum.

  The journey had its own horrors: insects, bad water, freezing nights as they climbed to the Sierra passes, then descended to hazy, empty valleys. Huntoon suffered sneezes and ague for a week.

  Bearing south through what the guide assured them was California, they were soon broiling and quarreling over the need to drink sparingly from the water casks while they crossed a frightful stretch of desert. Huntoon became so dizzy from the heat he was barely able to reply coherently when anyone spoke to him.

  Eventually they turned southeast, whereupon Powell’s hired men started to bedevil Huntoon with tales of Indian signs, which he, of course, could never see. Powell eavesdropped on some of these recitations with a straight face, suppressing amusement bordering on the hysterical. Huntoon took note of Powell’s grave expression and concluded that the warnings were true—which terrified him even more.

  He lost track of the days. Was it early May or the last of April? Was there really a Confederacy? A Richmond, a Charleston—an Ashton? He doubted it with increasing frequency as they pushed deeper into sinister mountains and arid, windblown valleys where strange, thorny vegetation grew.

  The guide had quickly sensed Huntoon’s weakness and joined in to exploit it for the sake of relieving the boredom. Banque Collins was about forty, a brawny Scot with mustaches he had let grow down long and pointed, like those of some of the Chinese on the Comstock. His first name had been bestowed by his father, an itinerant actor born in Glasgow, trained in London, and buried, penniless, in the pueblo of Los Angeles. Collins didn’t know his mother’s name.

  He did know he enjoyed making the bespectacled Southron squirm. Collins’s employer, Powell, was something of a hard case. Collins thought him demented but not to be trifled with. Huntoon, however, was born for bullying.

  Nearly every day, he would say pathetically, “Where are we?” To which Collins liked to reply, after a number of suitable obscenities to register his annoyance, “Aren’t you tired of asking that question, laddie? I am tired of answering it, for we’re exactly where we were yesterday and last week and two weeks previous. On the trail to bonny Santa Fe. And that’s that.”

  And away he would gallop, up alongside the lumbering wagons, leaving Huntoon on foot, swallowing dust.

  Bonny, did he say? Sweet Christ, there was nothing bonny about this part of America. Why had Powell chosen it? Why had the Confederacy tried to occupy it? It was as forlorn as the moon, and full of menace. The teamsters delighted in warning him to watch out for coral and giant bull snakes—they neglected to mention the latter were harmless—or tarantulas and the allegedly venomous vinegarroons. “What the greasers call sun spiders. Real poison, those suckers.” Another lie.

  Huntoon was uninterested in the occasional sight of hairy buffalo, prairie-dog towns, orioles and hummingbirds and swooping duck hawks, the taste of roasted piñon nuts or the fact that crushed yucca root made excellent suds for washing. “Thass why they call it soapweed down this way, reb.”

  He hated all the verbal jabbing, but he was even more frightened when, one day, it stopped. The teamsters kept their eyes on the jagged horizon. Collins began to deluge Huntoon with warnings about red Indians, and not entirely for sport. He wanted to exorcise some of his
own mounting worry.

  “We’re in the country of the Apaches now. Fiercest warriors God ever made—though some claim it was Satan who whelped them. Got no respect whatsoever for flesh, be it human or horse. The braves ride their animals till they get hungry, then they eat ’em. Makes no difference in their fighting—they always do that on foot. They like to sneak up, and it doesn’t endanger them all that much. In a pinch, many an Apache lad can outrun a mustang.”

  “Do—” Huntoon gulped “—do you think there are Apaches close by, Collins?”

  “Aye. A party from the Jicarilla tribe, if I read the sign properly. They’re out there somewhere right now, watching.”

  “But surely we have enough guns to frighten them off—?”

  “Nothing frightens off the Apaches, laddie. They go out of their way to plague white men and each other. Year or two ago, some of your Southron soldier boys rode into this country. The Apaches made a treaty of friendship at Fort Stanton, then endorsed it by ambushing and massacring a party of sixteen. They don’t take sides, though—altogether neutral, they are. In a Union settlement they killed forty-six, including youngsters.”

  “Stop telling me that kind of thing,” Huntoon protested. “What good does it do?”

  “It prepares you for what we may run into. If we have bad luck and the Jicarilla decide to do more than watch, you’ll have to fight like the rest of us.” He sniffed. “Doesn’t appear to me that you’ve ever done much fighting. But you’ll learn fast, laddie. Mighty fast if you like living.”

  Taunting Huntoon with a laugh more like a dog’s bark, he booted his horse forward toward the first six-horse hitch.

  After years in the Southwest, Collins had adopted many Indian ways and devices. He didn’t ride with a saddle, only a soft ornamented pad of supple hide stuffed with grass and buffalo hair. His pony had a war bridle: the rope of braided buffalo hair tied around the animal’s lower jaw was the bit, the ends of the rope the reins. Collins had lived with a squaw wife for a while. Despite all this, he hated red men, the lot of them, and now began to regret hiring on with this crowd.