by John Jakes
“Why, we’d just follow the same arrangement we agreed on previously. Maureen and I will keep Gus until you’re through with training and posted somewhere. With luck—if you’re at Fort Leavenworth or Fort Riley, for instance—you can hire a noncom’s wife to nursemaid him. If not, he can stay on with us indefinitely. I love that boy. I’d shoot any man who looked cross-eyed at him.”
“So would I.” Charles pondered further. “Not much of a choice, is it? Muster with the regulars or go home, live on Cousin Madeline’s charity, and sit on a cracker barrel telling war stories for the rest of my life.” He chewed the cigar again, fiercely. Casting a quizzical look at Duncan, he asked, “You sure they’d have me in the regulars?”
“Charlie, hundreds of former reb—ah, Confederates are entering the Army. You just have to do what they do.”
“What’s that?”
“When you enlist, lie like hell.”
“Next,” said the recruiting sergeant.
Charles walked to the stained table, which had a reeking spittoon underneath. Next door, a man screamed as a barber yanked his tooth.
The noncom smelled of gin, looked twenty years past retirement age, and did everything slowly. Charles had already sat for an hour while the sergeant processed two wild-eyed young men, neither of whom spoke English. One answered every question by thumping his chest and exclaiming, “Budapest, Budapest.” The other thumped his chest and exclaimed, “United States Merica.” God save the Plains Army.
The sergeant pinched his veined nose. “ ’fore we go on, do me a favor. Take that God-awful collection of rags or whatever it is and drop it outside. It looks disgusting and it smells like sheep shit.”
Simmering, Charles folded the gypsy robe and put it neatly on the plank walk outside the door. Back at the table, he watched the sergeant ink his pen.
“You know the enlistment’s five years—”
Charles nodded.
“Infantry or cavalry?”
“Cavalry.”
That one word gave him away. Hostile, the sergeant said, “Southron?”
“South Carolina.”
The sergeant reached for a pile of sheets held together by a metal ring. “Name?”
Charles had thought about that carefully. He wanted a name close to his real one, so he’d react naturally when addressed. “Charles May.”
“May, May—” The sergeant leafed through the sheets, finally set them aside. In response to Charles’s quizzical stare, he said, “Roster of West Point graduates. Division headquarters got it up.” He eyed Charles’s shabby clothes. “You don’t have to worry about being mistook for one of those boys, I guess. Now, any former military service?”
“Wade Hampton Mounted Legion. Later—”
“Wade Hampton is enough.” The sergeant wrote. “Highest rank?”
Taking Duncan’s advice made him uncomfortable, but he did it. “Corporal.”
“Can you prove that?”
“I can’t prove anything. My records burned in Richmond.”
The sergeant sniffed. “That’s damned convenient for you rebs. Well, we can’t be choosy. Ever since Chivington settled up with Black Kettle’s Cheyennes last year, the damn plains tribes have gone wild.”
The sergeant’s “settled up” didn’t fit the facts as Charles knew them. Near Denver, an emigrant party had been slain by Indians. An ex-preacher, Colonel J. M Chivington, had mustered Colorado volunteer troops to retaliate against a Cheyenne village at Sand Creek, though there was no evidence that the village chief, Black Kettle, or his people were responsible for the killings. Of the three hundred or so that Chivington’s men slew at Sand Creek, all but about seventy-five were women and children. The raid had outraged many people in the country, but the sergeant wasn’t one of them.
The dentist’s patient shrieked again. “No, sir,” the sergeant mused, his pen scratching, “we can’t be choosy at all. Got to take pretty near whoever shows up.” Another glance at Charles. “Traitors included.”
Charles struggled with his anger. He supposed that if he went ahead—and he had to go ahead; what else did he know besides soldiering?—he’d hear plenty of variations on the tune of traitor. He’d better get used to listening without complaint.
“Can you read or write?”
“Both.”
The recruiter actually smiled. “That’s good, though it don’t make a damn bit of difference. You got the essentials. Minimum of one arm, one leg, and you’re breathing. Sign here.”
The locomotive’s bell rang. Maureen dithered. “Sir—Brigadier—all passengers on board.”
In the steam blowing along the platform, Charles hugged his bundled-up son. Little Gus, six months old now, wriggled and fretted with a case of colic. Maureen was still wet-nursing the baby, and this was his first bad reaction.
“I don’t want him to forget me, Jack.”
“That’s why I had you sit for that daguerreotype. When he’s a little older, I’ll start showing it to him and saying Pa.”
Gently, Charles transferred his son to the arms of the housekeeper, who was also, he suspected, the older man’s wife-without-marriage-certificate. “Take good care of that youngster.”
“It’s almost an insult that you think we might not,” Maureen said, rocking the child.
Duncan clasped Charles’s hand. “Godspeed—and remember to hold your tongue and your temper. You have some hard months ahead of you.”
“I’ll make it, Jack. I can soldier for anyone, even Yankees.”
The whistle blew. From the rear car, the conductor signaled and shouted to the engineer. “Go ahead! Go ahead!” Charles jumped up to the steps of the second-class car and waved as the train lurched forward. He was glad for the steam rising around him, so they couldn’t see his eyes as the train pulled out.
Charles slouched in his seat. No one had sat next to him, because of his sinister appearance: worn straw hat pulled down to his eyebrows, the gypsy robe beside him. On his knee, unread, lay a National Police Gazette.
Dark rain-streaks crawled diagonally down the window. The storm and the night hid everything beyond. He chewed on a stale roll he’d bought from a vendor working the aisles, and felt the old forlorn emptiness.
He turned the pages of a New York Times left by a passenger who’d gotten off at the last stop. The advertising columns caught his eye: fantastic claims for eyeglasses, corsets, the comforts of coastal steamers. One item offered a tonic for suffering. He tossed the paper away. Damn shame it wasn’t that easy.
Unconsciously, he began to whistle a little tune that had come into his head a few weeks ago and refused to leave. The whistling roused a stout woman across the aisle. Her pudgy daughter rested her head in her mother’s lap. The woman overcame her hesitation and spoke to Charles.
“Sir, that’s a lovely melody. Is it perchance one of Miss Jenny Lind’s numbers?”
Charles pushed his hat back. “No. Just something I made up.”
“Oh, I thought it might be hers. We collect her famous numbers in sheet music. Ursula plays them beautifully.”
“I’m sure she does.” Despite good intentions, it sounded curt.
“Sir, if you will permit me to say so”—she indicated the Gazette on his knee—“what you are reading is not Christian literature. Please, take this. You’ll find it more uplifting.”
She handed him a small pamphlet of a kind he recognized from wartime camps. One of the little religious exhortations published by the American Tract Society.
“Thank you,” he said, and started to read:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending …
Bitter, Charles faced the window again. He saw no angels, no heaven, nothing but the boundless dark of the Illinois prairie, and the rain—probably a harbinger of a future as bleak as the past. Duncan was undoubtedly right about hard times ahead. He sank farther down on the seat, resting on the bony base of his spine and watching the darkness pass by.
&nbs
p; Softly, he began to hum the little tune, which conjured lovely pastel images of Mont Royal—cleaner, prettier, larger than it had ever been before it burned. The little tune sang to him of that lost home, and his lost love, and everything lost in the four bloody years of the Confederacy’s purple dream. It sang of emotions and a happiness that he was sure he would never know again.
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MADELINE’S JOURNAL
June, 1865. My dearest Orry, I begin this account in an old copybook because I need to talk to you. To say I am adrift without you, that I live with pain, does not begin to convey my state. I will strive to keep self-pity from these pages but I know I will not be entirely successful.
One tiny part of me rejoices that you are not here to see the ruin of your beloved homeland. The extent of the ruin is only emerging slowly. South Carolina offered some 70,000 men to the misbegotten war and over a quarter were killed, the highest of any state, it’s said.
Freed Negroes to the number of 200,000 now roam at large. This is half the state’s population, or more. On the river road last week I met Maum Ruth, who formerly belonged to the late Francis LaMotte. She clutched an old flour sack so protectively, I was moved to ask what it contained. “Got the freedom in here, and I won’t let it go.” I walked away full of sadness and anger. How wrong we were not to educate our blacks. They are helpless in the new world into which this strange peace has hurled them.
“Our” blacks—I have paused over that chance wording. It is condescending and I am forgetful I am one of them—in Carolina one-eighth black is all black.
What your sister Ashton spitefully revealed about me in Richmond is now known all over the district. No mention has been made of it in recent weeks. For that, I have you to thank. You are held in high esteem, and mourned …
We planted four rice squares. We should have a good small crop to sell if there is anyone to buy. Andy, Jane, and I work the squares each day.
A pastor of the African Methodist Church married Andy and Jane last month. They took a new last name. Andy wanted Lincoln, but Jane refused; too many former slaves choose it Instead, they are the Shermans, a selection not exactly certain to endear them to the white population! But they are free people. It is their right to have any name they want.
The pine house, built to replace the great house burned by Cuffey and Jones and their rabble, has a new coat of whitewash. Jane comes up in the evening while Andy works on the tabby walls of their new cottage; we talk or mend the rags that substitute for decent clothing—and sometimes we dip into our “library.” It consists of one Godey’s Lady’s Book from 1863, and the last ten pages of a Southern Literary Messenger.
Jane speaks often of starting a school, even of asking the new Freedmen’s Bureau to help us locate a teacher. I went to do it—I think I must, in spite of the bad feeling it will surely generate. In the bitterness of defeat, few white people are inclined to help those liberated by Lincoln’s pen and Sherman’s sword.
Before thinking of a school, however, we must think of survival. The rice will not be enough to support us. I know dear George Hazard would grant us unlimited credit, but I perceive it as a weakness to ask him. In that regard I surely am a Southerner—full of stiff-necked pride.
We may be able to sell off lumber from the stands of pine and cypress so abundant on Mont Royal. I know nothing of operating a sawmill, but I can learn. We would need equipment, which would mean another mortgage. The banks in Charleston may soon open again—both Geo. Williams and Leverett Dawkins, our old Whig friend, speculated in British sterling during the war, kept it in a foreign bank, and will now use it to start the commercial blood of the Low Country flowing again. If Leverett’s bank does open, I will apply to him.
Shall also have to hire workers, and wonder if I can. There is wide concern that the Negroes prefer to revel in their freedom rather than labor for their old owners, however benevolent. A vexing problem for all the South.
But, my sweetest Orry, I must tell you of my most unlikely dream—and the one I have promised myself to realize above all others. It was born some days ago, out of my love for you, and my longing, and my eternal pride in being your wife. …
After midnight of that day, unable to sleep, Madeline left the whitewashed house that now had a wing with two bedrooms. Nearing forty, Orry Main’s widow was still as full-bosomed and small-waisted as she had been the day he rescued her on the river road, although age and stress were beginning to mark and roughen her face.
She’d been crying for an hour, ashamed of it, yet powerless to stop. Now she rushed down the broad lawn under a moon that shone, blinding white, above the trees bordering the Ashley River. At the bank where the pier once jutted out, she disturbed a great white heron. The bird rose and sailed past the full moon.
She turned and gazed back up the lawn at the house among the live oaks bearded with Spanish moss. A vision filled her mind, a vision of the great house in which she and Orry had lived as man and wife. She saw its graceful pillars, lighted windows. She saw carriages drawn up, gentlemen and ladies visiting, laughing.
The idea came then. It made her heart beat so fast it almost hurt. Where the poor whitewashed place stood now, she would build another Mont Royal. A fine great house to endure forever as a memorial to her husband and his goodness, and all that was good about the Main family and its collective past.
In a rush of thought, it came to her that the house must not be an exact replica of the burned mansion. That beauty had represented—hidden—too much that was evil. Although the Mains had been kind to their slaves, they had indisputably kept them as property, thereby endorsing a system that embraced shackles and floggings and death or castration for those rash enough to run away. By war’s end, Orry had all but disavowed the system; Cooper, in his younger days, had condemned it openly. Even so, the new Mont Royal must be truly new, for it was a new time. A new age.
Tears welled. Madeline clasped her hands and raised them in the moonlight. “I’ll do it somehow. In your honor—”
She saw it clearly, standing again, the phoenix risen from the ashes. Like some pagan priestess, she lifted her head and hands to whatever gods watched from the starry arch of the Carolina night She spoke to her husband there amid the far stars.
“I swear before heaven, Orry. I will build it, for you.”
A surprise visitor today. Gen. Wade Hampton, on his way home from Charleston. Because of his rank, and his ferocity as a soldier, they say it will be years before any amnesty reaches high enough to include him.
His strength and good disposition astound me. He lost so much—his brother Frank and his son Preston dead in battle, 3,000 slaves gone, and both Millwood and Sand Hills burned by the enemy. He is living in an overseer’s shack at Sand Hills, and cannot escape the accusation that he, not Sherman, burned Columbia by firing cotton bales to keep them from the Yankee looters.
Yet he showed no dismay, over any of this, expressing, instead, concern for others …
Outside the pine house, Wade Hampton sat on an upright log that served as a chair. Lee’s oldest cavalry commander, forty-seven now, carried himself with a certain stiffness. He’d been wounded in battle five times. Since coming home, he’d shaved his huge beard, leaving only a tuft beneath his mouth, though he still wore his great curving mustaches and side whiskers. Under an old broadcloth coat, he carried an ivory-handled revolver in a holster.
“Laced coffee, General,” Madeline said as she emerged into the dappled sunlight with two steaming tin cups. “Sugar and a little corn whiskey—though I’m afraid the coffee is just a brew from parched a
corns.”
“Welcome all the same.” Smiling, Hampton took his cup. Madeline sat down on a crate near a cluster of the trumpet-shaped yellow jasmine she loved.
“I came to inquire about your welfare,” he said to her. “Mont Royal is yours now—”
“In a sense, yes. I don’t own it.”
Hampton raised an eyebrow, and she explained that Tillet Main had left the plantation to his sons, Orry and Cooper, jointly. He had done so despite his long-standing quarrel with Cooper over slavery; at the end, blood ties and tradition had proved stronger in Tillet than anger or ideology. Like a majority of men of his age and time, Tillet looked to his sons because he prized his property and had a less than generous view of the business and financial abilities of women. When he wrote his will, he didn’t worry about anything more than a token bequest of cash to each of his daughters, Ashton and Brett, presuming they would be provided for by their spouses. The will further stipulated that when one son predeceased the other, that son’s title in the estate passed directly to the surviving brother.
“So Cooper is the sole owner of record now. But he’s generously allowed me to stay on here out of regard for Orry. I have the management of the plantation, and the income from it, for as long as he remains the owner, and so long as I pay the mortgage debt. I’m responsible for all of the operating expenses too, but those conditions are certainly reasonable.”
“You’re secure in this arrangement? I mean to say, it’s legal and binding?”
“Completely. Only weeks after we got word of Orry’s death, Cooper formalized the arrangement in writing. The document makes it irrevocable.”
“Well, knowing how Carolinians value family ties and family property, I should think Mont Royal would stay with the Mains forever, then.”
“Yes, I’m confident of that.” It was her single firm hold on security. “Unfortunately, there’s no income at all right now, and no great prospect of any. About the best I can say in answer to your question about our welfare is that we’re managing.”
“I suppose that’s the best any of us can expect at present. My daughter Sally’s marrying Colonel Johnny Haskell later this month. That lightens the clouds a little.” He sipped from the cup. “Delicious. What do you hear from Charles?”
