by John Jakes
Sourly, Charles said, “You mean my bobtail.”
“No, sir. They talk about how you whipped those colored men into some of the best cavalry in the Army. They don’t call your old troop Barnes’s Troop, they call it Main’s Troop—your real name—and the old man says amen.”
“That a fact.” Charles gripped his aching leg. “Here, give me a hand. I know I can get up.”
He did, but he fell right back down, tumbling across the cot. “Damn. I wish you’d come one day sooner, Griffenstein.”
“So do I. Well, next time. The way the red men are scalping and burning, there’ll be a number of next times. You can join up then.”
“Count on it,” Charles said.
“How will I find you?”
“Telegraph Brigadier Jack Duncan. He’s with the Departmental paymaster at Fort Leavenworth.”
“A relative, is he?”
The convenient lie: “Father-in-law.”
“Nobody said you were married.”
“Not any more. She died.”
And you killed every iota of feeling in the only other woman you ever loved as much.
The big man said, “Truly sorry to hear that.” Charles’s curt nod dismissed it.
They shook hands. Dutch Henry Griffenstein tipped his hat and left, closing the slat door, leaving Charles to swear with renewed frustration. In the dark he reached for the half-empty bottle under the cot.
Nellie Slingerland stuck by the firing. Charles was bad for business. Trooper Nell’s was almost empty for the entire seven days that he lay in the shanty. The grocer turned sheriff dropped in on the last day to say witnesses had exonerated Charles on the grounds of self-defense.
Hobbling, he packed his few possessions. Nellie didn’t bid him goodbye personally, just sent ten dollars with the barkeep. Charles used the money to get Satan from a livery in the respectable part of town. He left Abilene in the summer dusk and rode east into the dark.
45
WHEN WILLA WENT TO pieces and forgot her lines a third time, Sam Trump said, “Ten minutes, ladies and gentlemen.”
He drew her aside to the cushion-strewn platform serving as a rehearsal bed. He sat her on the edge, leaving inky prints on the sleeve of her yellow dress. Because of the fierce September heat, his blackamoor makeup ran and smeared.
“My dear, what is it?” He knew. She looked bedraggled; her silvery hair was dull and pinned up carelessly. He sat beside her, his black tights and tunic darkened by sweat. The white chrysanthemum pinned over his heart was wilted. Prosperity jumped in his lap and purred.
When she stayed silent, he prompted her. “Is it the weather? It will surely break soon.”
“The weather has nothing to do with it. I just can’t keep my mind on my part.” She touched his hand. “Will you cancel rehearsals long enough for me to dash to Leavenworth again?”
“You were there not thirty days ago.”
“But that poor child needs someone besides a housekeeper to pay attention to him. The brigadier’s gone with the pay chest for weeks at a time. Gus might as well be an orphan.”
Sam stroked Prosperity’s sleek back. It was imperative that he find some way to jolt Willa out of her melancholy. It was deepening day by day, robbing her performances of energy. He nerved himself and said, “Dear girl, is it really the little boy who concerns you? Or his father?”
She gave him a scathing look. “I don’t know where his father is. Furthermore, I don’t care.”
“Ah, no, of course not. ‘The poet’s food is love and fame,’ Mr. Shelley said, and it’s true of actors also. But you are telling me that only half applies to you.”
“Don’t torment me, Sam. Just say you’ll let Grace stand in for me for a few nights. I’ll do better with Othello once I know Gus is all right.”
“I hate to delay rehearsals. I have a premonition that our new production will be the one that propels us to the heights. I have telegraphed several New York managers, inviting them to come—”
“Oh for God’s sake, Sam,” she said, her face uncharacteristically hostile. “You know all those wonderful triumphs exist only in your imagination. We’ll live and die provincial actors.”
Trump stood. Leaping off, the theater cat caught claws in his tunic and left a long rip. Trump stared at his partner, wounded. Willa’s blue eyes filled with tears.
“I’m sorry, Sam. That was a vile thing to say. Forgive me.”
“Forgiven. As to your absence, what choice have I? You are sleepwalking through your roles. If one more trip to Leavenworth will arrest that, by all means go. Since we are being so candid, permit me to continue a moment more. I liked that young man when I first met him. I no longer like him. He’s hurt you. Even when he’s absent he hurts you. Somehow he reaches out into my theater to poison everything.”
Willa gave him a sad half-smile. “It’s called love, Sam. You’ve had affairs of the heart.”
“None that destroyed me. I’ll not see you destroyed.”
“No, Sam. Just a few days, then things will be fine.”
“All right,” he said, doubting it.
On the train that carried Willa across the state, passengers jumped off at every stop to buy late papers. An unfolding story from eastern Colorado had burst onto the front pages. On the Arikaree Fork of the Republican River, a special detachment of Indian-hunting plainsmen under a Colonel Forsyth had been surprised by a huge band of Cheyennes. The detachment took refuge on a sparsely treed island in the river and forted up to fight.
Incredibly, they repelled charge after charge by the Indians, who numbered as many as six hundred, according to some of the dispatches. In one of the charges a renowned war chief named Bat had ridden in wearing a great war bonnet whose medicine was supposed to turn aside bullets. The medicine failed him. He was blown down, this Bat—Roman Nose, some called him.
Passengers on the train reveled in the reports of the battle of Beecher’s Island, named in honor of the young Army officer, second in command, who had taken a fatal wound there. “They’re safe,” a passenger in the next seat exclaimed to Willa, showing a paper. “The men Forsyth sent to Fort Wallace got through. The relief column found ’em still holed up and carving their horses for meat.”
“How many did they kill?” another passenger asked.
“Says here it was hundreds.”
“By God, there ought to be fifty more fights like that, to make up for all the poor innocents who got scalped and outraged this summer.
Fuming, Willa spoke across the back of the seat. “You expect the Cheyennes to be peaceful when they aren’t even treated with simple fairness and honesty? Almost a year ago, the peace commission promised them rations and weapons for hunting. By the time the weapons were issued, summer was nearly over. Do you expect them not to break faith when we do?”
Her voice trailed away over the clicking of the wheel trucks. The male passengers stared at her as though she carried cholera. The man with the paper said to the others, “Didn’t know there was squaws who could pass for white women, did you, boys?”
Willa started to retort, but before she could, the man with the paper leaned forward and spat a large gob of tobacco pulp on the floor.
In times past, that kind of behavior would have challenged her to fight all the harder. Not now. She felt despondent, even foolish, caught in a battle that couldn’t be won.
She stared out the window at white barns and cattle grazing in the twilight. She tried to close her ears to the sarcastic jokes the man continued to make about her. She felt miserable. Somehow he reaches out to poison everything.
Maybe her often-impractical partner was wiser than she knew. Maybe she should stop chasing doomed dreams. Maybe she ought to make this visit to Leavenworth her last.
“No, the brigadier’s not heard from him in weeks,” Maureen said when Willa arrived on a gray, gusty morning. “Is the general here?”
“No. He’s riding the pay circuit again.”
“Where’s Gus?”
; “I put him to hoeing the vegetable garden in back. It’s entirely the wrong time of year—we’ve already harvested our squash and potatoes—but the poor thing needs something to fill his hours.”
“He needs a normal life.” Willa set her valise near the cold iron stove. “He needs schooling, parents, a home of his own.”
“No disputing that,” Maureen said. She looked older; the harsh prairie weather had wrinkled and aged her skin. “He’ll not find those things here, I fear.”
A low-pitched howling underlay their conversation. The front door rattled in its frame. Maureen twisted her apron. “Mary and Joseph, I hate this place sometimes. The heat. That infernal wind. It’s blown for weeks.”
Willa went to the back door. From there she could observe little Gus, a sturdy, strong boy bending over a corner of the garden patch and listlessly poking at the dirt with his hoe. Dust and debris whirled over the garden and the nearby buildings. Gus’s little round-crowned hat threatened to blow away at any moment.
Watching from the open door, Willa felt her heart near to breaking. How forlorn he looked. As hunched as a little old man. Digging, chopping—to no purpose.
She stepped outside. “Hello, Gus.”
“Aunt Willa!” He dropped the hoe and ran to her. She knelt and hugged him. Charles’s son was almost four now. He’d lost his baby pudginess. Although he was outdoors a lot, he tended to fair skin and paleness.
Despite the wind, she took him walking along the bluff above the river. She was asking questions, which he answered with monosyllables, when she heard a hail behind them. She turned.
“Oh good Lord.”
Down the path lurched Charles. Over the back of his gypsy robe he wore some sort of canvas sling from which the stock of his rifle jutted. His beard was long again, and unkempt.
Little Gus spied his father, a smile burst onto his face, and he ran toward him. He’d gone but halfway when Charles stumbled over a rock and fell. Only a jarring stop with his hands kept him from slamming face first on the ground.
Gus halted, confused. Willa’s expression grew strained. From the way Charles weaved as he stood up, she knew he was drunk.
“Hallo, Gus. Come give your pa a hug.”
The boy continued to advance, but cautiously. Charles crouched down, enfolded the boy in his arms. Gus turned his head and Willa saw his eyes close and his mouth purse, as though he feared the man hugging him. The moment of spontaneous exuberance was gone.
Willa held her feathered hat against the gusting wind. That wind brought her a ripe whiskey smell. Drunk, all right. Gus quickly wriggled away from Charles. He looked relieved.
Charles stared at her, almost unfriendly. “Didn’t expect to run into you. What’re you doing here?” He spoke thickly, slowly.
“I wanted to see Gus. I didn’t imagine you’d be around.”
“I just rode in. Gus, go on back to Maureen. I need to talk to Willa.”
“I want to stay out here and play, Pa.”
Charles grabbed his shoulder, spun him, and flung him toward the row of officers’ houses. “Don’t sass me. Go along.”
Little Gus looked ready to cry. Charles yelled, “Go on, goddamn it.”
Gus ran. Willa wanted to upbraid Charles, strike him, horsewhip him. The intensity of her emotion upset her, both in its own right and because she knew she wouldn’t feel it if she didn’t love him.
Somewhere on the post, artillery pieces fired practice rounds. Charles took Willa’s elbow and turned her almost as rudely as he’d turned the boy. He all but pushed her down the weed-grown path toward the river. Fighting for control, she said, “Where’ve you been, Charles?”
“Oh, do I answer to you about that?”
“For God’s sake, I’m curious, that’s all. Can’t you recognize a polite question anymore?”
“Abilene,” he muttered. “Been in Abilene. Had a job, but I quit it.”
“What kind of job?”
“Nothing you’d care to hear about.”
In a clump of willows near the edge of the bluff she stopped, confronting him. The wind stripped yellowing leaves from the weeping branches and flung them into the dusty gray distances. She hated the whiskey smell on him, the odor of unwashed clothing. Emotion overwhelmed her again.
“Why are you so angry all the time?” She braced her gloved palms on the front of the gypsy robe and, on tiptoe, she kissed him. His beard scratched. She might as well have kissed marble.
“Look, Willa—”
“No, you look, Charles Main.” Something warned her not to give rein to her feelings. She couldn’t stop. “Do you think I’m here out of charity? I love you. I thought you loved me once.” His eyes swept past her, to the dust-hazed river. “I want you to stop this wild life you’re living.”
“I came to see Gus, not hear lectures.”
“Well, that’s too bad. You’ll hear this one. You don’t belong on the Plains. Find a job in Leavenworth. Take care of your son. You’ve frightened him. You have to win him back. Can’t you see that? He needs you, Charles. He needs you the way you were two years ago. I need you that way. Please.”
He tugged the brim of his black hat low over his eyes, holding it against the roaring wind. “I’m not ready to come back here. I’ve got unfinished work.”
“Those infernal Cheyennes—” She was nearly in tears.
“For whom your heart bleeds. You go take care of your Friendship Society and your goddamn petitions.”
Not an hour here, and it’s all going wrong, she thought “Why are you yelling at me, Charles?”
“Because I don’t want you interfering with my son.”
“I care about him!”
“So do I. I’m his father.”
“Not much of one.”
He hit her, open-handed, not hard. But she felt a pain beyond description.
Holding her cheek, she stepped back. Her small feathered hat blew off. He stabbed a hand out automatically but the hat sailed by, lifting on a gust, spinning on through the willows toward the Missouri. “Oh,” she said, a small, forlorn sound. Then she looked at him again. Something hard kindled in her blue eyes.
“You’ve turned into a complete bastard. I used to wonder why it was happening. I used to care. I don’t any more. Your boy doesn’t either, but you’re too stupid and drunk to see that. If you keep on, he’ll hate you. Most of the time he’s terrified of you.”
“Christ, you’re superior.” He was loud, scornful. “First you had all the answers about the Indians. All the wrong answers. Now you’re telling me how to raise my son; I don’t need you. Take care of your own problems. Find some other man to drag into your bed.”
“Go to hell, Charles Main. You just go to hell! No—” She shook her head, a violent movement. “You’re already there, as low as anybody can get.”
Enraged, he grabbed for her. She dashed by. “Willa!” A fleeting look back showed Charles her tear-streaked face. “Go ahead, run. Run!”
RUNRUNRUNRUN—it went echoing over the river. She was gone in the blowing clouds of leaves and dust.
“Miss Willa, you just got here.”
“A mistake, Maureen. A huge mistake. Take care of that poor youngster. His father won’t.”
She walked all the way into Leavenworth City, the dust caking on her lids and lips and hands. A kindly ticket agent found her a basin of water and a piece of clean rag. She left on the four o’clock steamer for St. Louis.
When she walked back into Trump’s Playhouse, filthy from travel, the old actor was astonished at the brightness of her manner. “Call a rehearsal, Sam. I’m eager to get back to work. I’ll not be seeing Mr. Main again, if I’m lucky.”
_____
So boys! a final bumper
While we all in chorus chant—“For our next President we nominate
Our own Ulysses Grant!”
And if asked what State he hails from
This our sole reply shall be, “From near Appomattox Court House,
With its famous app
le tree.”
For ’twas there to our Ulysses
That Lee gave up the fight—
Now boys, “To Grant for President
And God defend the right!”
Campaign verse in Greeley’s
New York Tribune, 1868
MADELINE’S JOURNAL
September, 1868. Klan activity much increased in the state with elections less than two months away. York County, up near the N. Carolina border, is a hotbed. The Klan has seized the public fancy in a bizarre, faddish way. Visiting Marie-Louise here, Theo brought and displayed a tin of “Ku Klux Smoking Tobacco.” He saw for sale in C’ston sheet music of a song written in the Klan’s honor. In Columbia a base-ball team called “Pale-Faces” openly pays homage to the organization.
The Summerton “den” remains visible but has not moved against us. Sometimes cannot decide whether to laugh at this blight of pretentiously costumed bigots, or tremble. …
The muscular young black man, Ridley, put his arm around his wife. May was a slight, frail girl. She was in her third month, beginning to show.
Ridley had come home tired from digging and hauling all day in the Mont Royal phosphate fields. But the weather was so agreeable, he’d persuaded May to delay their supper and come enjoy the air with him. He felt good these days. He was earning a decent wage, and starting to build his own two-room house of tabby with help from his friend Andy Sherman and some tools loaned by Mr. Heely, the white foreman of the Mont Royal work force. Ridley was proud to be able to do all these things, and go wherever he wished as a free man. That included Summerton, where he intended to vote for General U. S. Grant for president, as Mr. Klawdell of the League suggested.
The last redness of the day was fading behind the thick woods bordering the river road. Walking together, Ridley and his wife heard a low hooting. May huddled close against him. “Sun’s gone. We walked too far.”
“Felt so peaceful, I lost all track,” Ridley said, all at once aware of the lowering darkness. He gripped her hand and lengthened his stride; he couldn’t hurry her too much because of her condition. Suddenly, behind them, they heard horses.
