by John Jakes
Gettys made sure no one was close by and listening before he said, “Asia, we cannot simply march to Mont Royal in broad daylight and take action. The fire failed to frighten her. That mephitic school is open again. Of course we all want it abolished, and the slut punished. We don’t want to go to prison for it, though. Those damn Yankees from the Bureau are nosing about because of the murder.”
Asia LaMotte wasn’t persuaded. “You’re all cowards. It wants a man with courage.”
“Í beg your pardon. We have courage—and I speak for your cousin Des as well as myself. What it wants is a man with nothing to lose. We must find him, enlist him, and let him stand the risks. It only means a delay, not abandonment of the plan. Des is as fiery as ever about getting rid of Mrs. Main.”
“Then let him show the family by doing something,” Asia said with a sniff.
“I tell you, we need—”
He got no further. A white man had tied his horse near the road and was strolling toward the black spectators. He was a young man, with a ruffian’s air. He had a dark beard, which showed even though he was closely shaved, and a scar left by a forehead wound. He looked cocky but very poor in his gray homespun clothes, old cavalry boots, and a broad-brimmed campaign hat. In the waistband of his pants he carried a pair of Leech and Rigdon .36-caliber revolvers.
Smiling, he stopped in front of one of the blacks, Asia LaMotte’s driver, Poke. Old Poke wore a cloth cap on his gray head. The stranger drew his revolvers and pointed them at Poke.
“I surely do hate to see a nigger not respecting his betters. Take off that hat, boy.”
Others around Poke stepped back, leaving the old man isolated and frightened. The two new contestants restrained their horses, fascinated like everyone else by the little tableau.
Vastly amused, the stranger drew back both hammers. “I said take off the hat.”
Trembling, Poke obeyed.
“All right, now prove you’re genuinely respectful. Kneel down.”
“I am a free man—” Poke began.
The stranger touched one of the revolver muzzles to Poke’s forehead. “Yes, sir, free to go to hell after the count of five. One. Two. Three—”
By the time the stranger said four, Poke was on his knees.
The stranger laughed, put up his revolvers, patted Poke’s head, and acknowledged applause from a few of the spectators. He strolled toward a white-haired man in shabby clothes. Recognition and surprise popped Randall Gettys’s eyes as the young man engaged the older in conversation.
“I’ll bet that’s him,” Gettys whispered. “I’ll bet a hundred dollars.”
“Who?” said Asia, petulant.
“The roughneck Edward Woodville hired. Look, the two of them are thick as anything.” He was right; the stranger, chatting amiably, had one hand on the old farmer’s shoulder. Gettys said, “Everybody knew Tom wouldn’t sign on to work for Edward any more because the Bureau disapproved of Edward’s contract. So Edward swore he’d give fifty dollars to any white man who punished the nigger. I’ll be right back.” He hurried away. Asia looked befuddled.
Gettys mopped his forehead with the big white handkerchief from his breast pocket. Despite the mild temperature, he was dressed in heavy dark-green velvet. He approached Woodville and the stranger. The latter stopped talking, put his thumb near his right-hand revolver, and gave Gettys a stare that froze his gizzard.
Sweating, fawning, Gettys blurted, “Just wanted to say hello, sir. Welcome to the district. I’m Mr. Gettys. I keep the crossroads store and edit our little paper, The White Thunderbolt.”
“You can trust Randall,” Woodville said. “He’s a good boy.”
“I’ll take your word,” the stranger said. He shook hands, found Gettys’s soft and damp, and wiped his palm on his pants. “Captain Jack Jolly. Late of General Forrest’s cavalry battalion.”
The two mounted men started their horses toward the hanging rings. The crowd hurrahed, but Gettys had eyes only for the stranger. “General Nathan Bedford—?”
“Forrest. Are you hard of hearing or something?”
Gettys flinched away, raising his hands in apology.
Captain Jolly, twenty-four but obviously tough and experienced, chuckled. “That Devil Forrest, as the damnyankees called him. I killed niggers for him at Fort Pillow, and I went the rest of the war riding at his side. Finest soldier in the Confederacy. Joe Johnston said so. He said Forrest would have been number one in the army, except he lacked formal schooling,”
Gettys began to experience great excitement. “Do you have kinfolk in these parts, Captain Jolly?”
“No. There’s just my brothers and me, traveling and making a profit wherever we can.” He smiled at Woodville, who gazed at the ground. The farmer was smiling too.
“Well, this is a fine district,” Gettys exclaimed. “Rich in opportunity for men of courage and principle. Perhaps you’d take a drop of corn at my store after the tourney, and let me tell you more. We need residents of your caliber, to help stand off the damn soldiers and the damn Bureau and the damn scalawags among our own people who side with them.”
“If you know any of those scalawags,” Captain Jack Jolly said, “I’ll put them in my gun sights damn quick.”
Breathless, Randall Gettys rushed back to Asia LaMotte’s carriage. “I must write Des. You see that man with Edward? I’ve got to persuade him to stay. He’s capable of doing what we discussed.”
The fat old woman peered at Gettys as if he were speaking Russian. The trumpet blared again. “Don’t you understand?” he whispered. “We have the desire and he has the nerve. God has sent our instrument of deliverance.”
A telegraph message from George! Brought all the way from Charleston. In San Francisco, after a short confinement, Billy and Brett’s child was born, Dec 2. A son, named George William. It is a happy gift of the season.
Another is the peace that prevails in the district. We remain unmolested, indeed even unnoticed. Prudence now instructs two adult women and one man, along with six children. Those who hate the school must know we can summon Bureau soldiers at will.
I feel we are out of danger. I am thankful; I am tired and want to be left alone to pursue my dream …
___________
THE SALARY OF THE
PRESIDENT.
The Secretary of the Treasury to-day
signed a warrant in favor of Mrs.
LINCOLN for the sum of $25,000, less
the amount Mr. LINCOLN had drawn
for his salary in March last. …
News report eight months
after the assassination
18
JASPER DILLS, ESQUIRE, TURNED seventy-four on Friday, the twenty-second of December, four days after Secretary of State Seward announced that the Thirteenth Amendment had been ratified. Childless and a widower for fifteen years, Dills had no relatives with whom he could celebrate the birthday or the Christmas season. He didn’t care. Very little mattered to him any more except his law practice, his position as Washington representative of certain large New York financial interests, and the ceaseless, endlessly fascinating battle for power in the nation’s political cockpit.
In the autumn after Appomattox, however, he’d found his practice diminishing. Some of the New York clients shifted their work to younger men; other cases brought to his book-lined office on Seventh Street seemed of an increasingly trivial nature. Fortunately, to offset this, he continued to receive the Bent stipend. It helped pay for memberships in his clubs and the odd bottle of Mumm’s with his hotel suppers.
Dills had long ago stopped letting his conscience bother him about the stipend. Two or three times a year he wrote a letter assuring Elkanah Bent’s mother that her illegitimate son was alive. According to Dills’s latest epistolary fiction, Bent was prospering from cotton acreage in Texas.
The woman never asked Dills for proof of such statements. He’d built up a reservoir of trust since he saw her last, years ago, and he dipped into it now beca
use he simply didn’t know what had happened to Bent after Colonel Lafayette Baker, head of the government’s secret police force, dismissed Bent for excessive brutality in the course of an arrest. Bent had vanished into Virginia, presumably a deserter to the Southern side.
Should Bent’s mother discover that, or any other part of the truth, the stipend would end. The yearly total was substantial, so the mere thought of its loss alarmed the lawyer. At the same time, it didn’t grieve him one bit to be shed of dealing personally with Elkanah Bent. An obese malcontent with persecution fantasies, Bent always blamed his career failures on others. Hardly any surprise in that: Bent’s late father, a Washington lobbyist named Starkwether, had chosen an unstable woman for his brood mare. She came from a large border-state family that included several persons with histories of mental disorder. One of them had even carried the taint to Washington, although she had managed to control or hide it during years of public scrutiny and personal tragedy.
Bent’s mother had never acknowledged her son. He took his name from a farm couple who had raised him in Ohio. He’d gone from Ohio to West Point, and then to failure after failure. By now, his mother was ancient (in the way of the elderly, Dills still thought of himself as middle-aged), but the woman’s age didn’t matter. Nothing mattered so long as she accepted his lies and wrote bank drafts regularly.
To maintain his high living standard, Dills had recently taken on certain other work. He was a conduit through which five hundred or one thousand dollars could travel to this or that senator willing to use his influence to obtain an Army commission for the applicant. Dills skimmed a percentage for making it unnecessary for such a politician to meet personally and perhaps be seen with a former brevet colonel or brigadier desperately hunting reemployment. Dills fancied that he sanitized the bribe money as it passed from hand to hand.
Dills was also a pardon broker. All sorts of Washingtonians had rushed into that work, including women with no asset other than their sexual favors. A legal background had put Dills in the forefront of brokers. His connections with a few notable Democrats and many powerful Republicans helped too. At the moment he had thirty-nine pardon applications on his desk.
Earlier in the year he’d taken President Johnson an application from Charleston that bore an intriguing name: Main. That was the last name of one of the men Bent held responsible for his various difficulties, starting with his dismissal from West Point. Although the applicant’s first name was Cooper and that of Bent’s enemy was Orry, they were both South Carolinians, so Dills assumed a connection. He’d never been south of Richmond, but he envisioned the lower part of Dixie as one great heaving sea of cousins, all related and inbred by marriage.
Nature arranged a wet snowfall for Dills’s birthday, a further guarantee of an empty office. He locked up and walked three blocks to the hushed rooms of his favorite club, the Concourse. He wandered through the club until he found someone he knew fairly well, a Republican member of the House.
“Wadsworth. Good morning. Join me in a whiskey?”
“Bit early for me, Jasper. But do sit down.” Representative Wadsworth of Kentucky laid aside a copy of the Star and signaled a waiter to move a chair. Dills was a tiny man, with tiny hands and feet. Seated in the huge chair, he resembled a child.
The whiskey arrived. Dills saluted his fellow member before he sipped. “What kind of session do you think it will be?” His question referred to the Thirty-ninth Congress, reconvened early in the month.
“Stormy,” Wadsworth said. “Issues that go all the way back to Wade-Davis remain unresolved, and the leadership of our party is dedicated to settling them.” Wade-Davis, a bill drafted in response to Lincoln’s moderate plan for Reconstruction, set much tougher requirements for readmission of the Confederate states. Lincoln had let the bill die with a pocket veto, thereby goading Congressmen Wade and Davis to restate their case in their so-called Manifesto, a blistering document asserting the right of the Congress to control postwar reunification. The Manifesto, published in Greeley’s ferociously Republican New York Tribune, marked out the lines of the battle to which Wadsworth referred.
“Stormy, eh?” Dills mused. “Rather a dramatic word.” He was thinking melodramatic.
“But entirely appropriate,” the congressman said. “Look at the forces already in motion.” He ticked them on his fingers. “In both the House and the Senate we have successfully denied seats to the elected representatives from the traitor states. Compliance by those states with the President’s few requirements is not enough reparation for the crime of rebellion. Not nearly enough. Two, we have formed the Joint Committee on Reconstruction—”
“The Committee of Fifteen. A direct affront to Mr. Johnson. Really, though, do you construe it entirely as a radical apparatus? Most of the members are moderates or conservatives? Senator Fessenden, the chairman, is far from radical.”
“Oh, come, Jasper. With both Thad Stevens and Sam Stout on the committee, do you have any doubt of its direction? To continue”—he folded another finger down—“Lyman Trumbull is already drafting a Senate bill to extend the life of the Freedmen’s Bureau. If that doesn’t provoke His Accidency, I’m Marse Bob Lee.”
“I’ll grant you that one,” Dills said, nodding. Johnson’s opposition to the Bureau, on grounds that it interfered with the rights of the separate states, was one of the great running fights of his administration. Dills was reasonably familiar with the Bureau, because of a client, a rich political hack named Stanley Hazard. He was a member of the Pennsylvania family that included George Hazard, the second of Elkanah Bent’s declared enemies. Stanley had hired Dills for secret legal work involving ownership of some highly controversial property.
“A friend of mine,” Dills continued, “close to the Bureau says they’re hearing all sorts of horror stories from the South. Stories of Negroes tricked into signing work contracts that are virtually slave labor agreements.”
“Yes, precisely,” Wadsworth said. “Mississippi enacted its Black Codes in November. Among other things, they stipulate that a Negro can be arrested, even beaten, if he’s accused of vagrancy. Who’s to say what that is? Is it occupying the same sidewalk as a white man? Merely passing through a town? It now appears that each of the erring sisters will enact similar codes, to guarantee a docile work force. They’re fools down there, Jasper, arrogant fools. Apparently the war taught them nothing. Those of us in the Congress must take over their instruction.”
“Johnson will continue to resist.”
“Of course. And when you speak of him, you raise the great central issue to which all the others are related. Where does political sovereignty rest? Not with the President or his army, in my opinion. Military conquests made by the United States, whether foreign or domestic, can be policed only by the Congress. I believe that, Thad Stevens believes that, Ben Wade believes that. And we have a three to one majority in Congress to make our view prevail. Over the corpse of Mr. Johnson’s political future, if need be,” Wadsworth concluded with a smug smile.
“Perhaps your word stormy hardly covers it, then. Should we say cataclysmic?”
Wadsworth shrugged. “Label it however you wish. Andrew Johnson is headed for disaster.”
That subject exhausted, Wadsworth remarked that he had just returned from New York, where he’d seen Joe Jefferson starring in his own adaptation of Rip Van Winkle. “Friends saw it in September at the Adelphi in London. They said it was a huge hit, not to be missed. I concur. You must see it, Jasper.”
Dills replied that the theater didn’t interest him.
“Literature, then? Have you read that amusing story about the California jumping frog? It’s being reprinted everywhere. It’s by some young sprout of a writer named Clemens.”
Dills said he didn’t like fiction. He didn’t deem it immoral, as many clerics did; he only thought it inconsequential, unrelated to the real world.
Wadsworth rose and consulted his pocket watch. “My dear Jasper,” he said wryly, “does anything in the w
orld interest you?”
Seated in the plush chair, his tiny feet inches above the carpet, Dill said, “Power interests me. Who has it? Who is losing it? Who is scheming to regain it?”
“Then you’ve certainly spent your life in the right town. And you’ve got a damn good show ahead of you. If you’re a gambler, bet on my side—to win. Oh, by the way, I saw the announcement on the members’ board. Happy birthday, Jasper.”
Wadsworth left, his final words serving as the only celebration for Jasper Dills this year. No matter; Dills was content with his clubs, his whiskey, his stipend from Bent’s mother—and his choice seat for the coming struggle.
“Cataclysmic” might not be an exaggeration, he thought. As Wadsworth said, one merely had to consider the forces involved, and the stakes. They were enormous. Nothing less than political control of Southern legislatures and Southern votes, which in turn meant control of Southern land and Southern wealth. In the course of Dills’s recent work for Stanley Hazard, his oafish client had shown some figures that vividly illustrated just how rich the pickings were.
His imagination liberated by a second drink, Dills tried to foresee events. Certainly the issue of the Freedmen’s Bureau would touch off a new civil war. But the poor clod from Tennessee would be outgeneraled by a Stevens, a Wade, a Stout, a Sumner. Johnson merely wanted to be fair and constitutionally correct; they wanted to turn a minority party into the ruling party, with Negro votes tipping the balance. Johnson fought for principle, as did a few of the radicals. But the radicals as a group fought for a more inspiring cause: their own craving for power.
Suddenly, pleased and smiling, Dills murmured, “A circus. That’s a better metaphor than weather, or war.” He immediately refined it to a Roman circus. With Mr. Johnson the Christian surrounded by ravening lions.
There was no doubt how the contest would end. But it would certainly be worth watching. He must step up his pardon work, his influence peddling in connection with Army commissions, and even the number of letters perpetuating the fictions about Elkanah Bent. All of it would help him hold on to his box seat for the bloody spectacle soon to be enacted in the Washington arena.
