by John Jakes
He pounded harder. To hurt, to punish. The undersides of his fists ached, but he kept pounding. The thunder cannonaded like the guns at Sharpsburg. The lightning flashed again and again, revealing a spot of blood on the right leg of his pants. The rhythm of the pounding quickened.
What was he to do, now that he bore this guilt? What was he to do with the child for whom he was responsible, thereby making himself responsible for this headstone? What was he to do?
A short, strange cry came from his throat; animal grief. Then, deep inside, a force began to build, its outlet impossible to deny. He opened his throbbing fists. Raised his right hand to his wet face and felt beneath his eye. That was not rain.
He threw himself forward on the grave, wet body to wet earth, and for the first time since Sharpsburg, wept.
Charles kept vigil at Augusta Barclay’s grave until well past dawn, when the storm abated. Shivering, teeth chattering, he walked the long distance back to the central part of town, reaching the brigadier’s house about ten.
Exhausted from the physical and emotional strain of the night before, Duncan had slept late and was only just starting his breakfast when the unbelievably sorry sight named Charles Main appeared in the door of the dining room. From somewhere above came the bawling of Charles’s son and Maureen’s comforting voice in counterpoint.
Clenching his jaw, Duncan strove to control himself. It was difficult. Red-faced, he said, “Christ. What did you do, drink and wallow in some gutter all night long?”
It looked like it. Charles’s right pants leg showed a large blood spot. Dirt clung to his beard and every part of his soaked shirt.
“I spent the night at her grave. I spent the night thinking of my son. Trying to decide what to do.”
Slowly, Duncan straightened to his most erect posture, his back no longer touching the chair. His eyes were full of hostile challenge.
“Well?”
147
“NEXT STOP LEHIGH STATION. Lehigh Station will be the next stop—”
The conductor’s voice faded as he left the car. The local had pulled out of Bethlehem at half past six. That meant they should be stepping through Belvedere’s front door in less than an hour. George was thankful; he was spent. So was Constance, to judge from the way she leaned against him, silent.
He occupied the seat beside the window, watching twilight burnish the river and the blue-mantled slopes on the western side. He turned to say something to his wife but didn’t. Her eyes were closed, her head sagging forward, creating three rounded chins in place of one.
George’s tired face smoothed out as he lovingly studied her. Then his eye was caught by movement beyond the window on the other side of the aisle. As the train slowed down before a curve, he saw a cemetery and, in the foreground, three rows of five crosses, new and white. The movement drawing his attention was that of two elderly workers shoveling earth onto an unseen coffin in an open grave. A middle-aged man and woman stood beside the grave, the man with something red and white folded in his crossed arms. A flag.
The cemetery disappeared. Carefully, George put his arm around Constance so as not to wake her. But he wanted the comfort of touching her.
He felt an immense surge of love for the plump woman dozing beside him. Love for her and for his children, whose lives he must begin to supervise again, changing from soldier back to father. Love was really all that had pulled him through the past four years, he reflected. His eyes drifted across the river again, to the profusion of mountain laurel on the hillsides. Nothing else will pull us through the years just ahead, either.
“—gone too fast. With too many changes.”
“Oh, definitely. I’m sorry Lincoln was martyred, but he can certainly be faulted for his policies.”
George frowned, overhearing the travelers in the seat immediately behind. The first speaker sounded old, his voice full of the cranky negativism that inevitable state too often produced. The second speaker, female, sounded young. It was she who continued.
“The darkies deserve their liberty, I suppose. But at that point it should stop.”
“So far as I’m concerned, it does. Let any nigger try to step through my front door like a white man, and I’ll be there to deny him with my old horse pistol.”
The woman sighed. “Some of our politicians aren’t as courageous as you. They’re actually promoting the franchise for the colored.”
“Ridiculous. Why would anyone encourage such a change in the order of things? It’s insanity.”
Having endorsed each other’s convictions, they settled into a period of quiet, leaving George to meditate amid the smells of dusty upholstery and the overflowing spittoon at the head of the car. Now the western hills were higher, their summits intermittently blocking the direct rays of the low sun. Changing patterns of shadow and light flickered over his face as he pondered.
Changes indeed. He thought of the slain President, whose unbelievably stark photograph-—a recent one—they had seen in a black-draped shop window after they docked in Philadelphia. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln’s party had nominated him because he was the least-known, therefore least-offensive candidate available. A strong man with strong views might have stirred strong reactions, which was dangerous to any organized group in pursuit of votes.
But once in office—the furnace of war—Lincoln, like iron, had been heated and hammered, melted and molded and transformed into something wholly new. Out of the corn-country politician of unknown views, presumably safe views—or no views or insane views, depending on the speaker—there emerged with the aid of the pricking of conscience and the whipping of expedience a President who propounded a definition of freedom so new and sweeping the nation would be years finding and deciphering all its meanings.
Lincoln’s burdens of party leadership, governmental leadership, war leadership wrought radical physical changes as well. They cut gullies in the pain-eroded landscape of his face and drowned his eyes in lakes of perpetual shadow. The photographic portrait in the Philadelphia shop barely resembled those of a few years earlier.
In the hearts of the black people of the nation, Lincoln had changed from a man to a god by means of his own pen stroke. But in one way, George reflected, the man had never changed at all. He remembered Executive Mansion aides gossiping that Lincoln often lost his patience and sometimes his good humor and on rare occasions his compassion for the enemy. But it seemed to George that the man had never lost sight of his own North Star. He loved humanity, Southern as well as Northern, with a great heart. But he loved the Union more.
To preserve it, he had sorrowfully led a people to war. He had suffered mental depression and haunted sleep, fought the demons of ineptitude and incompetence and innuendo, hectored and joked, preached and cajoled, dreamed and wept for it. And then he had been chosen as the last sacrifice at the site where its continuity had been assured: the blood altar.
At least Abraham Lincoln had known for five days that his North Star still shone bright and pure, above the cooling embers of fires first kindled in that long-lost spring George remembered vividly, frighteningly, to this hour. The Union stood—profoundly altered but fundamentally unchanged.
George recognized but couldn’t fully understand the paradox. It was simply there, mighty, majestic, and mysterious, like the murdered President himself. It was there—Lincoln was there—and would be forever, George suspected.
Closing his eyes, he rested a moment. Then he drew a circle of thought of much smaller diameter and meditated on the changes within that.
Orry dead—and his widow making no secret that she was, at least in the strictest view of Southerners, a Negress. He had heard it first from his brother Billy, but Madeline had candidly discussed it before the Hazards left Mont Royal.
And Charles. Everyone agreed Charles had been burned out by the war. Become a sullen, angry man. Brett, by contrast, was eagerly anticipating motherhood and, amazingly, often sounded more like Virgilia than a Southerner.
Cooper occasionally displayed a
new, almost reactionary streak, as if he had turned about and finally accepted the Southern inheritance his father had always wanted to bequeath to him, and he had scorned for such a long time. In Cooper’s case, anyway, George could identify the causes of the transformation. Cooper had lost his son, and he was growing older. Age brought a man more conservative thoughts and opinions. As George well knew.
Billy’s views about blacks had changed, too, although his plan for his life was one of the few things that hadn’t. Saying good-bye to George in South Carolina—he had two more weeks of leave and planned to spend it working for and with the Mains—he had stated his intention to remain with the Army Engineers. Unless, of course, something impeded his advancement, in which case there was always that railroad construction he and George had discussed. Trains were the coming thing. People had a nickname to certify it. The iron horse.
How intimately the process of change accelerated by the war had touched all of them, and the country. How deeply it had affected them and the country. No one was spared, neither those who accepted it nor those who denied it. Witness the pair on whom he had eavesdropped. The hardening of attitudes was in itself a change, in response to change.
Why did so many deny the universal constancy of the process, he wondered. Through some quirk of temperament or upbringing, George had embraced it early, within the framework of the family business. He had been open to innovation and had fought Stanley, who was not. Gradually, his perceptions had widened until he saw the benefit—or at least the inevitability—of change outside the gates of Hazard’s as well.
Why did people ignore the lessons of history and their own senses, deny a law of life immutable as the seasons, and erect twisted barriers against it in their minds? He didn’t know why, but they did. They wept for the goodness of half-imaginary yesterdays, yesterdays beyond altering, instead of anticipating and helping to shape the good of possible tomorrows. They found things to blame for the flow of events they wanted to stop and could not. They blamed God, their wives, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed men—sometimes even voices in their own heads. They lived tortured and unhappy lives, trying to dam Niagara with a teacup.
But he doubted anyone could change people of that stamp. They were the curse and burden of a race laboring forward up a mountain in half-darkness. They were—it brought a weary smile—constant as the very change they hated.
Which reminded him of a certain small but important change he wanted to make at Belvedere. Ever since finding the fragment of iron-rich meteorite in the hills above West Point, he had kept it on the library table as a symbol of the power and potency of the metal that had created the Hazard fortune. For many years he had been seduced by iron’s wide application in weaponry, and thus by its potential to change the fate of nations, the globe itself.
But in Virginia, he had begun to think that a certain adjustment or balance was required. During the last four years, Americans had fallen on other Americans like ravening animals. The full impact of the blood-letting—the ultimate shock when all the casualties, tangible and otherwise, were at last enumerated—lay in the future. When the shock set in, it would not soon pass, he was convinced. So it was wise to prepare, identify a balancing force.
When they reached Belvedere, he surprised Constance by what he did immediately after he spent a half hour hugging and talking with his son and daughter. He went out through the kitchen and up the hill, bringing back a green sprig of laurel, which he laid beside the piece of star-iron in the library.
“I should like a fresh sprig to be kept there at all times,” he said. “Where all of us can see it.”
That same night, on the 6:00 P.M. train bound for the transfer point at Baltimore, Brigadier Duncan and Charles sat opposite each other in a first-class car. Charles hardly looked as though he belonged there, smoking cigars and wearing that disreputable rag robe. Duncan insisted they take time on the trip west to obtain a decent suit until he was issued a new uniform.
Several times since Charles’s return from the cemetery, Duncan had tried to draw him out on the subject of his vigil, particularly the thoughts and emotions that had led to his decision. But it was impossible for Charles to describe or even be open about the various alternatives that had flowed through his mind during that long night of rain, uncertainty, guilt, despair.
There was the possibility of sailing for Egypt to serve in the khedive’s army, as he had heard in a Washington barroom that some Confederate officers were doing. There was the possibility of taking to the hills to continue guerrilla action against the Yankees. There was going home and wasting away in drink and idleness.
There was suicide.
There was also the West, where Duncan was bound. He had always loved the West, and Duncan reiterated the need for cavalrymen out there. Charles was trained for nothing else.
But all of that was peripheral to the central issue he confronted during the vigil: Gus’s death and his son’s life. They were not separate but one, inextricably interlocked.
It was Gus who had shown him the way. At the grave he had remembered their best times together. Remembered her strength, her will. No miraculous transformation had occurred while the rain fell on him in Georgetown and washed against his own flooding tears. He had never hurt so badly as he did then and now, and he knew the uncertainty and pain would persist for a long time. But he had learned, keeping vigil with the guilt and grief un-dammed at last, one truth above all: he still loved Augusta Barclay beyond life itself. So he must love the boy. He must live for the boy as well as for her, because they were one.
Seeing Charles’s somber expression as he stared out the window into the sunlit meadows of evening, Duncan frowned. He was not yet comfortable in the Confederate officer’s presence and wondered if he ever would be. Further, he wondered if Charles understood the ramifications of his decision. While the train was passing through one of the many small hamlets dotting the right of way in Maryland—Charles saw two demolished houses and a shell-blasted barn—Duncan cleared his throat.
“You know, my boy, this duty you plan to take on—serving in the regular army again—it won’t be easy for a man of your background.”
That drew blood. Charles chewed hard on his unlit cigar stub.
“I went through the Academy the same way you did, General. I’m a professional. I changed uniforms once. I can change a second time. It’s all one country again, isn’t it?”
“That’s true. Still, not everyone will treat you as we both would wish. I’m only trying to warn you against the inevitable. Discourtesies. Insults—”
In a hard voice, Charles said, “I’ll handle it.” A flash of sunlight between low hills illuminated his ravaged face, unsmiling.
Duncan looked up, gratefully. “Ah—here’s Maureen—”
The wet nurse appeared in the aisle, gently cradling the baby she had brought from her seat in second class. “He’s awake, General. I thought perhaps you might like—” She stopped, plainly uncertain about which man to address.
“Give him to me.” Then, catching himself, Charles said in a gentler way, “Thank you, Maureen.”
With extreme care, he took the bundled shape into his arms, while Duncan leaned across to raise the corner of blanket with which Maureen had covered the infant’s face while carrying him between cars. Duncan beamed, the picture of the proud great-uncle.
The pink-faced child regarded his father with wide eyes. Awed and fearful of somehow damaging him, Charles tried a tentative smile. The younger Charles grimaced and bawled. “Rock him, for God’s sake,” Duncan said.
That worked. Charles had never rocked a child, but he quickly caught on. The train passed through fields where a farmer walked behind his mule and plow in the dying daylight, turning new earth.
“Frankly, my boy,” Duncan said, “although I’m extremely pleased the three of us are here together and headed where we are, I continue to admit to some astonishment. I felt that if you took your son, you would undoubtedly want to return to Sout
h Carolina and raise him as a Southerner.”
The father stared at the older man. “Charles is an American. That’s how I’ll raise him.”
Duncan harrumphed to signify acceptance, if not understanding. “He has a middle name, by the way.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“It slipped my mind. This has hardly been an ordinary day. His full name is Charles Augustus. My niece chose it just before—”
He pressed a closed hand to his lips. Remembering was hard for him, too, Charles realized.
“Before her confinement. She said she had always loved the nickname Gus.”
Feeling tears, Charles blinked several times. He gazed down at his son, whose face had mysteriously reddened, and taken on a puzzling appearance of strain. Duncan peeked at the infant. “Oh, I think we shall need the assistance of Maureen. Excuse me while I fetch her.”
He stepped into the aisle. With great care, Charles touched his son’s chin. The baby reached out and grasped his index finger. He drew it into his mouth and gnawed vigorously.
Duncan had already lectured Charles about the need for cleanliness. So far today, he had scrubbed his hands three times—something of a record in his adult life. He wiggled his finger. Charles Augustus gurgled. Charles smiled. With all of his attention on his son, he didn’t see the rail fence that suddenly appeared beside the track or the feasting buzzards disturbed by the train and swirling upward, away from the rotting remains of a black horse.
The war has left a great gulf between what happened before it in our century and what has happened since… It does not seem to me as if I am living in the country in which I was born.
GEORGE TICKNOR of Harvard, 1869
AFTERWORD
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.
SO WROTE YEATS IN “EASTER 1916.” His nine words are the underpinning of this novel.
