by John Jakes
Running, stumbling often, Collins drove himself until pain and shortness of breath forced him to slow down. His chest felt close to bursting. After a brief rest he pushed on until he found a place where he thought he could descend. Hand over bloodied hand, he went down the rock wall. He misjudged one hold and fell the last twenty feet, knocked nearly unconscious.
Dust-covered, his hands and face red from cuts and scrapes, he rested again, then lurched to the edge of the stream, which he crossed with a minimum of noise. Not that the Apaches would hear the splashes. They were whooping and yelling to celebrate.
Collins knew they would take the horses to ride awhile, then butcher. They would also break open the gun crates and take the Spencers. He wanted to learn the fate of the two heavy wagons, the object of the late Mr. Powell’s attention. The moment Collins saw the Apaches at the fire he knew they had disposed of his half-crazy employer and that worm of a lawyer. Neither man mattered to him, nor any of the teamsters. The teamsters were the tail of the glass snake.
What mattered was his own skin and, secondarily, the wagons. When he reached the shallows on the other side, he headed upstream until he located a good observation point in some twisted junipers. He was almost directly opposite the mouth of the deep gully near the campsite. The Apaches had added fresh wood to the fire. He saw flames leap above the tall rocks occasionally.
He was wrong about the source of the fire, he quickly discovered. It came from one of the wagons, which appeared between the rocks, pushed by fifteen or twenty angry Indians. The whole forward third of the wagon was burning. The front wheels blazed brightly.
The Apaches pushed it to the gully rim and with grunts and exclamations tipped it over. The emptied wagon—if indeed it was completely empty, which Collins doubted—stood perpendicular a moment, tailgate toward the moon. Then it dropped, the front end decorated with two swiftly spinning disks of fire, like the Catherine wheels he remembered dimly from a childhood visit to his pa’s home city of Glasgow.
Wood splintered. The fire separated into several gaudy sections, each of which hit a different place on the bottom. The Apaches disappeared, returning soon with the second burning wagon, which they also sent into the gully. Then they howled and shook their clubs and lances.
To Collins they sounded angry. Maybe they had expected some greater prize from the wagons than rifles and provisions. Maybe, he speculated, fingering an oozing gash in his left cheek, they didn’t know where to look. The heaviness of both wagons in relation to their appearance had long ago convinced him of the existence of false floors.
He would investigate, though he certainly wouldn’t remain here through the night to do so. He wanted no contact with the Jicarillas. It wasn’t wise to buck the odds. A man won a pot with a pair only once in a while.
Merely by surviving the night, he would win plenty. He would win the chance to come back to the gully. He doubted these particular Apaches would ever come back to it, and they would be gone by daylight. The debris in the gully was safe for a while; this was not a heavily traveled route. He could return weeks, even months later, and be confident of finding whatever the burned wagons had concealed. Especially if it were gold.
Banquo Collins didn’t know a lot about metallurgy, but he knew some. Gold could change its form. Mingle with other elements in the earth—that was gold ore. But it couldn’t be destroyed. So long as no one chanced on the gully or examined the ashes, any gold that was there would remain there, his for the claiming.
Feeling good, he slipped away from the junipers by the stream. The red light down in the gully faded as he limped east beneath the huge full moon, wetting his lips occasionally as he imagined himself a wealthy tourist swallowing raw oysters and bouncing a San Francisco whore on each knee.
136
HOMEBOUND SOLDIERS STOPPED OCCASIONALLY at Mont Royal, bringing the Mains vivid word pictures of the ruin in the state. These they traded for water from the well. Cooper had no food to offer the travelers.
Although no partisan of the South, especially of the reasons it had waged war, Judith broke down and cried when she heard descriptions of the huge swathes of burned forest, trampled fields, looted homes that marked the passage of Sherman’s juggernaut.
Columbia was scorched earth, whole blocks gone except for a fragment of wall or an isolated chimney standing amid acres of rubble. The new statehouse, roofless and unfinished, had been spared, though its west wall had been marked forever by four Union cannonballs fired during a bombardment from Lexington Hills, across the Congaree.
Bands of blacks clogged the roads, the visitors said, free but generally baffled by their new status and, for the most part, starving. There was no food available for white or black, and many village storekeepers had closed and boarded up their places. Altogether, the picture was one of desolation.
Since the danger of crop damage from the spring rice birds was past, Cooper decided to plant three squares for a June crop, something his father always did in case the earlier planting was ruined by the birds or by a storm-summoned infusion of salty water. To help him prepare the ground with a few rusty, unbroken implements remaining, he had only Andy, Cicero—too old for the work—Jane, and his daughter. Judith helped when she wasn’t cooking or tending the small house built of raw pine.
Unused to physical labor, Cooper stumbled back to the house every night insect-bitten and hurting from his ankles to his neck. He would eat whatever tiny portion of food was offered, saying little, and go straight to his pallet. Often he moaned or exclaimed in his sleep.
Questions without answers tormented him during his waking hours. Could they raise enough rice to sell off a little, retaining the rest to help them survive the coming winter? Would the South be occupied by hostile troops for years now that the North was reportedly set on harsh reprisal because of Lincoln’s murder? How would he ever learn what had happened to Orry’s body since Richmond had been burned and, presumably, many army records destroyed? One soldier who had stopped described the mass graves around Petersburg, hundreds of corpses dumped in each with little regard for identification.
Questions hammered at his head till it ached as much as his body while he scratched the Carolina soil in the steaming sun. He was bent at the task one afternoon when Andy called his name sharply. He raised his head, wiped his sweaty eyelids to clear his vision, saw Judith dashing along the embankments separating the squares.
From her haste and her reddened face, he could tell something was wrong. He ran to meet her.
“Cooper, it’s your mother. I went in during her nap, as I usually do, and found her. If I can judge from her expression, her passing was peaceful. Perhaps painless. I’m so sorry, darling—”
She stopped, cocking her head, puzzled and a little frightened by his queer half-smile. He didn’t explain the momentary recollection that produced the strange reaction. Memories of Clarissa airily wandering about in the midst of the guerrilla attack. She had walked where guns were firing and never been scratched.
The odd smile disappeared; practical matters intruded. “Do you suppose we can find any ice at all for the body?”
“I doubt it. We’d better bury her right away.”
“Yes, I think you’re right.” He slipped a throbbing arm around her, tears filling his eyes. They returned to the yellow-pine house for the rest of the day.
Cooper had discovered long ago that life had a perverse way of surprising you with the unexpected when you least needed it. He was sweating with Andy in the dusk, hammering together a coffin for Clarissa, when Jane appeared.
“We have three visitors.”
Cooper swabbed his wet brow with his forearm. “More soldiers?”
She shook her head. “They came by railroad as far as they could—they say it’s been reopened part of the way. Then they managed to buy an old mule and a wagon, both about done for—”
Testy, he said, “Well, whoever they are, you know what to tell them. They’re welcome to camp and use the well. But we have no food.”
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“You’ll have to feed these people,” Jane said. “It’s your sister and her husband and Miss Madeline.”
When he thought it reasonably safe, Jasper Dills went down to occupied Richmond.
He was appalled at the destruction that had accompanied the collapse and flight of the Confederate government. A Union officer told him that while the fires raged, small-arms ammunition and more than eight hundred thousand shells had detonated over a period of several hours. A few substantially fireproofed buildings remained standing, but there were blocks and blocks destroyed. It was the heart of springtime, and the air should have smelled of flowers and new greenery. In Richmond it smelled of smoke.
The rutted streets were dumps for broken and abandoned furnishings, clothing, rags, bottles, books, personal papers. Even more distasteful to the little attorney was the human litter. Destitute white families roaming. Confederate veterans, many as young as fourteen, sitting in the sun with starved faces and vacant eyes. Crowds of Negroes, some strutting outrageously. And everywhere—on foot, astride saddle horses, driving wagons—soldiers in the blue of the conqueror. They were the only whites in the city who smiled, Dills noticed.
He was in a high state of nerves when he reached the sutlers’ tents set up, complete with outdoor tables and cheap chairs, on the lawns of Capitol Square. At one such establishment, identified by its canvas banner as Hugo Delancy’s, he met his contact, a former operative of Lafayette Baker’s whom Dills had hired at a high price, dispatching him to Virginia to attempt to pick up a trail that was, perhaps, nonexistent.
The operative, a burly fellow with a cocked eye, took Dills to an outdoor table at Delancy’s. He swilled lager while Dills drank a pitiful watery concoction passed off as lemonade.
“Well, what do you have to report?”
“Didn’t think I’d have a blessed thing till six days ago. Tramped up and down the James almost three weeks before I turned up something. And it still isn’t much.”
The operative signaled a waiter to bring another beer. “Early in July last year a farmer saw a body floating in the James. Civilian clothes. The body was too far from shore to be retrieved, but the description—an obese man; dark-haired—roughly matches the one you provided for Captain Dayton.”
“Last July, you say—?” Dills licked his lips. The stipend had continued during the intervening months. “Where did this happen?”
“The farmer was on the east bank of the river, about half a mile above the Broadway Landing pontoon bridge the army built later in the autumn. I spent another three days in the neighborhood, asking questions, but I didn’t turn up anything else. So I’ll take my money.”
“Your report’s inconclusive. Unsatisfactory.”
The operative seized the lawyer’s frail wrist. “I did the job. I want the pay.”
Dills’s strategy to save some money failed. He surrendered the bank draft from inside his jacket. The operative gave it a moment’s suspicious scrutiny to embarrass him, then pocketed it, gulped the rest of his beer, and departed, leaving Dills between two tables of noisy whores, not far from the magnificent statue of George Washington.
Had Starkwether’s son deserted to the enemy after Baker discharged him? If he had been killed, was it the result of a military mission or something more sinister? Was the body in the river actually Bent’s? He had to know. If his periodic reports stopped, so would the stipend. He thumped his fist on the table.
“What happened?”
Two of the sluts to his right heard the loud expression of turmoil and made remarks. Dills composed himself. The trail had run out. Starkwether’s son was dead, merely another casualty of the long, distasteful, and ultimately purposeless war.
On reflection, the lawyer decided that an inconclusive report was better than none at all. Was valuable, in fact, if interpreted correctly. Since it said nothing to the contrary, it allowed him to continue writing the periodic memoranda, confidently asserting that Bent was still alive. It permitted him to continue to generate income indefinitely with those little pieces of paper—a huge return on a minuscule investment.
Less upset, he relaxed in the sunshine, ignored the odors of smoke and cheap perfume, and ordered a second glass of lemonade.
137
THEY BURIED CLARISSA GAULT Main in the half-acre of fenced ground that had received Mont Royal’s dead, white and black, for three generations. Jane cried longest and loudest of any of the small band of mourners. She had developed a great affection for the gentle little woman whose aging mind had long ago freed her of ordinary human burdens. Jane had always taken special pains to see to Clarissa’s needs, as she would those of a child. Aunt Belle Nin had once told her that for many people the process of growing old was one of reversal, a return to the state of the child, who needed a special kind of care, patience, love.
Andy stood at Jane’s side and wept with her. Brett and Madeline were more controlled in their grief. Their greatest shock and emotional catharsis had come immediately after Billy escorted them up the lane, when Madeline saw that Orry’s home was gone, and they learned about Clarissa.
Cooper showed the least emotion. He felt it his duty to remain steady, an example in a difficult time. Before the burial, he read verses from the New Testament—Christ’s dialogue with Nicodemus on everlasting life from the gospel of John. Following the reading, Andy and Billy lowered the coffin into the ground, and each mourner tossed in a handful of sandy soil. For the closing prayer Cooper deferred to Andy, who praised Clarissa as a kind and generous woman, and movingly commended her to God’s care.
A moment of silence followed the murmured amens. Then Andy said, “I’ll finish the rest. You all needn’t stay.” Billy put his arm around Brett and walked out through the gate in the badly rusted fence. Wrought iron, he noted. Hazard’s iron would have lasted longer. He was momentarily embarrassed by the thought.
Cooper and the others trudged after the young couple. Suddenly Brett stopped, gazing through the live oaks to the black ash heaps where the house had stood. Tears came again, but only briefly. She shook her head and turned to Billy.
“Mother’s passing just now—it’s a kind of watershed, isn’t it? The end of something. That house, this plantation—it never was quite what it seemed to be. But whatever it seemed to be is gone forever.”
Madeline overheard and nodded melancholy agreement. It was Cooper who replied, quietly but with a fervor surprising to his younger sister.
“We have let the worst go, but we’ll rebuild the best. And fight for it with every breath.”
Who is he? Brett asked herself in wonderment. I hardly know him. The old Cooper wouldn’t have said such a thing. I am not the only one the war changed.
Three days later, following the arrival of a soiled letter misdelivered to the nearest neighbor, Charles reappeared in the lane riding his mule. Brett ran to greet and embrace him. He pressed his bearded cheek against hers, but it was perfunctory. She found him sullen and withdrawn; alarmingly so. When she tried to ask him about his experiences with Hampton’s cavalry, he brushed the questions aside with terse, empty answers.
Before the evening meal, Madeline found an opportunity to speak to him. “How is Augusta Barclay?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in some time.”
“Is she still in Fredericksburg?”
“I hope so. I’m going there in a few days to find out.”
After dark, he and Cooper strolled the riverbank near the site of the ruined dock, at Charles’s request. Before they got down to their talk, Cooper reported a piece of news.
“We’ve received specific information about Orry. It came day before yesterday, in a letter from General Pickett, much delayed. Orry’s body was not put in a mass grave. It was shipped south together with a number of others when it became possible to locate enough draft horses to portage the coffins around a break in some rail line below Petersburg.”
“The Weldon,” Charles said with a nod.
“That took place many we
eks ago. Unfortunately, there was an accident.”
“What kind of accident?” Cooper told him. “Jesus.” Charles shook his head. “Jesus Christ.”
They walked on in silence for five minutes. Charles collected himself and informed his cousin that he wanted to leave for Virginia as soon as he felt those on the plantation were safe from danger.
“Oh, we’re safe enough,” Cooper said with an empty laugh. “Starving, perhaps, but safe. May I ask what takes you back to Virginia?”
“Something personal.”
How closed and somber he’s become, Cooper thought. “Will you be returning here?”
“I hope not. The trip involves a lady.”
“Charles—I had no idea—that’s wonderful. Who is she?”
“I’d rather not discuss it, if you don’t mind.”
Mystified and a little hurt by the rebuff from the cold stranger Charles had become, Cooper bobbed his head to signal acceptance, then fell silent.
It was their season for callers, it seemed. The following Monday, as Charles prepared to leave, Wade Hampton arrived on horseback. He was bound for Charleston but stopped off because he had heard of the burning of Mont Royal and Clarissa’s death. Though never close, the Hampton and Main families had known each other for three generations. Most of the great planters of the piedmont and low country had at least a nodding acquaintance, but in this case it was Charles who had strengthened the ties.
Besides visiting Clarissa’s grave alone and expressing his sympathy to the family, he had another reason for calling, he said. He hoped to hear something about one of his best scouts. To his surprise, they met face-to-face. Hampton was visibly appalled to find Charles in such a scruffy state, and so dour.
No longer in uniform and grayer than Charles remembered, Hampton wore a holstered side arm beneath his coat. His favorite, Charles observed. The revolver with ivory handle grips.
