Savannah, or a Gift for Mr. Lincoln

by John Jakes

  Hattie suspected Vee was right. Whatever else Sergeant Winks might be, he probably wasn’t one to commit those frequently mentioned outrages. He didn’t have horns.

  A serious disappointment.

  If there had been no laughter, the story would end differently. It fell out this way:

  Hattie and Legrand left Vee’s house, Hattie wearing her old plaid shawl for warmth. Legrand’s leg was healing nicely, but he found it less strenuous to move along with the aid of his crutch. Amelia trotted at the end of her rope; wound around her neck was the woolen muffler Hattie had sewn two years ago, when cloth was less scarce. Amelia didn’t like the muffler but had given up resisting it.

  The winter sun was already sinking; pale amber light tinted the city. Town houses and live oak trees, passing horsemen and creaking conveyances threw long shadows. Legrand said, “First time I ever met a hoozer.”

  “Hoosier, it’s hoosier.”

  “You ever been to Indiana?”

  “I should hope not.”

  “What’s it mean, then?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. I suppose it’s an Indian word for ‘peasant.’”

  They wandered north in the direction of Miss Vee’s church. Amelia stopped to snuffle on someone’s lawn. Hattie pulled her rope crossly. Legrand said, “That Yankee didn’t seem like a bad sort. I was ready to brain him if he so much as looked cross-eyed, but he didn’t. He took responsibility.”

  “I know.”

  “I always say it takes a big man to admit a wrong.”

  “I know.”

  “Can’t believe I was shooting at fellows like that out on the lines.”

  Their peregrination took them to Johnson Square, around through the chilly shadows of Christ Church and the Bank of Georgia and back down Bull toward Wright Square. As they reached the corner of York Street, Hattie noticed that the Yankee and his Negro had gone. Before she could remark on it, a party of five Union officers of varying ages emerged from the haze hanging over the new tents and shanties in the square. The officers seemed in a light mood, chatting and joking as they approached a large open carriage driven by a corporal. The youngest of the officers, a lieutenant with long blond mustaches, caught the attention of a companion. He pointed at Amelia, who was oinking joyously, sensing the warm sanctuary of Miss Vee’s not far off.

  The officers laughed, though not the oldest, at the center of the group. He was the queerest, shabbiest soldier Hattie had ever seen, tall and lanky, with a face reddened by the winter air. His beard, closely cut, was rust-colored. The shoulders of his stained blue coat bore no straps indicating rank. He wore ill-fitting brown trousers and an old black slouch hat disreputable as the rest of him. Largely ignoring the merriment of his companions, he peered at the ground, hands locked behind his back, as though thinking furiously while chewing his fuming cigar. All this Hattie absorbed in a single glance, before the mustachioed officer called out, “Little girl, you have a handsome baby. What’s its name?”

  Hattie thrust Amelia’s tether into Legrand’s hand. “Wait, don’t,” he exclaimed, “I saw a picture of that—” She didn’t hear the rest, charging across the rutted sand to confront the officers.

  “I demand an apology. That was a rude remark. I suppose it’s typical of Yankees who strut and swagger because they’ve beaten a lot of old men and boys.”

  The unkempt man, fortyish, stepped to the fore; the others made room. “See here, child,” he said, not unkindly, “Lieutenant Dunn meant no offense.”

  “But he gave it and I won’t stand for it. Your lieutenant had better apologize to my pig. Some of your soldiers wanted to roast her on a spit last night.”

  “Truly?” The lanky man scratched his beard.

  “Yes, they broke into our house and deliberately destroyed the toys my friend and I were making because the stores are empty. That’s my friend over there, holding my pig.”

  “Hmm.” The man wasn’t able to pursue the thought because uncontrollable laughter seized the mustachioed lieutenant. Hattie’s restraint gave way. She lowered her head, her curls dancing, and sailed into the lieutenant. She gave him two sockdologers, right fist, left fist, in the midriff. “See here, stop that,” the lanky man said. Hattie spun about.

  “You keep out of this. You don’t even look like a soldier.”

  “Be that as it may—”

  “Get away, little girl,” barked another officer, seizing Hattie from behind. She blew like a barrel of dynamite then, kicking and writhing free. The lanky man grabbed her to forestall further violence.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Hattie cried, delivering a powerful kick to his shin. The man yelped, seized his right ankle with his left hand, and hopped about like a stork.

  His minions were goggle-eyed. Hattie tossed her curls and marched back across the street to Legrand, whose mouth hung open.

  “I guess I showed them they can’t mistreat the innocent people of Georgia.” She snatched Amelia’s rope and, chin high, continued marching straight along to Miss Vee’s gate. There she turned in.

  Legrand chased her and caught her at the stoop. “For heaven’s sake, do you know who you attacked?”

  “That brute with the yellow mustache.”

  “No, no, the other one, the one you kicked.”

  Hattie saw the officers heatedly arguing, no doubt trying to agree on a strategy of retaliation. All, that is, except the lanky man. He grasped a convenient shoulder while standing on one leg and massaging the other. Hattie couldn’t hear what he said, but she had no doubt he was exercised.

  “That dirty old wreck? I don’t care who he is. I wouldn’t care if it was Sherman himself.”

  “Well, you should, because it is.”

  Hattie didn’t incriminate herself; Legrand’s stricken look gave them away. Sara pressed for an explanation. Ladson Lester had taught his daughter always to be truthful. Admittedly she thought of lying, but the idea didn’t last long. She told all.

  Sara said, “I don’t condone your behavior for one minute, but I understand it.”

  Vee said, “I have an idea. Claim it was an accident.”

  “Nuh-uh, not the way she lit into him,” said Legrand.

  “Claim it was mistaken identity.”

  He perked up. “That’s what it was, mistaken identity.”

  Sara shook her head. “Whatever the excuse, we must be ready for the inevitable.”

  “Do they arrest children?” Vee said.

  Sara said, “We’ll surely find out.”

  When Winks finally left his tent to search for the miscreants, Zip materialized like an ebony ectoplasm. He wanted to perform his perfected imitation of the catbird. Winks sent him away, and not politely. The report by Captain Hopewell had ruined his day and disposition; he was obliged to buck the incriminating facts up the ladder to the colonel, but not until he personally confronted the wrongdoers.

  He followed the cling-clang of horseshoes and coarse laughter and easily found Corporal Marcus and Private Spiker. They were outdoors, near their tents, at a newly dug horseshoe pitch. Both were in fine spirits, as though their misdeeds had never happened. This only confirmed Winks’s belief that most law-breakers were numskulls.

  A damp winter dusk was settling; Spiker and the professor didn’t see their sergeant until he stepped forward and kicked Spiker’s ringer away from the peg.

  “No more skylarking. Stand at attention when I talk to you.”

  Marcus responded with a slovenly representation of military posture. Spiker, more literal-minded, snapped his shoulders back and puffed out his chest. Winks stomped up and down the horseshoe pitch, angrier than he’d expected to be.

  “A captain name of Hopewell looked me up today. I believe you boys ran into him last night. I guess he broke up your little party. I’m informed that you terrorized a bunch of innocent women, damaged their property, and threatened to roast their livestock.”

  “What of it?” Marcus retorted. “They’re just rebs.”

  “That’s
true, but Uncle Billy said there was to be no more of that sort of behavior while we’re enjoying Savannah hospitality.”

  Spiker said, “Wasn’t my idea. I only—”

  Marcus kicked Spiker, then jutted his jaw: “So what are you going to do, ask for a court-martial? Bet there isn’t a man jack in this army would censor us for ragging those rebs.”

  “I think you mean censure,” Spiker said. Marcus kicked him again. With a stentorian “Oww,” Spiker reeled away and fell, almost knocking down a tent before he landed on his rump.

  “The colonel’s got to hear a full report,” Winks said. “How he punishes you, that’s up to him. I came here for a different reason. I came to say I don’t want you in my detail from now on, and if you show your faces within half a mile of me, I’ll whale the tar out of you.”

  Marcus sneered. “So it doesn’t matter how good a job we done, you’re throwing us out like old junk?”

  “You went too far. Threatening to cook a little girl’s pig—dancing on a lady’s piano—what kind of behavior’s that?”

  The stricken choirboy betrayed his cohort by exclaiming, “He put me up to it, I swear.”

  Professor Marcus threw a handful of dirt in Spiker’s face. Winks leaped forward, clamped the professor’s wrist, and shouted, “As you were,” which brought a few heads popping from tents roundabout.

  He took a fistful of the professor’s soiled blouse and shook him. “I hope the colonel fries your gizzards, but if he don’t, I better not catch you hurting any more women and children.” He shook the professor once again and released him. “Do we have an understanding here?”

  “Sure, and glad of it.” The professor dusted himself off with exaggerated gestures implying injury. “Ask me, we’ll be a whole lot better off foraging on our own. ‘A wise man makes more opportunities than he finds.’”

  “You just think that up, did you?”

  The professor sneered again, more richly. “For your information, you dumb country boob”—outraged, Winks was in motion—“it was the outstanding English philosopher Frank Bacon.”

  Winks blasted the professor’s jaw with his right hand, lifting and sailing him into the iron peg, which impacted the back of his skull. Spiker looked faint.

  Marcus felt his pate, peered at a tincture of red on his finger. “Shouldn’t’ve done that. Sergeant or no sergeant, shouldn’t’ve done that.”

  “Threatening me?”

  “Take it how you want.”

  Winks wheeled about and stalked away down the dusky lane between tents now lit by lanterns. A few chilly raindrops splashed his face. He felt foolish. To lose his temper with Professor Marcus only ripened the enmity between them.

  Winks proceeded to regimental headquarters, the domain of Col. Herman Jolley. The colonel, an apothecary in better times, loved military pomp, and the war itself. He loathed rebs of every description, almost as much as he loathed his ill-tempered wife and disobedient children. He dreaded the day he’d be mustered out, forced to return to his savage brood in sleepy Crawfordsville. Of late he’d contemplated slipping away anonymously to California, the Isthmus of Panama, or even Europe.

  Winks waited nearly an hour before Captain Gleeson granted him entree to the presence of the large ruddy-faced Colonel Jolley. Winks felt like a tattling schoolboy as he related Hopewell’s charges, which the colonel wrote down while his lips twitched in a curious fashion. The colonel promised appropriate action.

  After Winks left, Jolley broke into a fit of chuckling and filed his notes in a lard bucket holding trash.

  Winks was a good man, if inclined to sentimentality. Of course he didn’t have to serve with the men he’d disciplined if that was his choice, but the colonel had no intention of punishing them. He heartily wished they’d go right on and do more damage to the secesh.

  The gentleman was as unhandsome as his name, Isaiah Fleeg.

  To begin with, he was short, which often induces a certain pugnacity. His protuberant eyes were the color of white grapes. His nose, though not nearly as large as an eggplant, had acquired some eggplant coloration from long hours in taprooms. He slouched rather than strode, a habit developed during frequent escapes from the scene of this or that felonious misdeed.

  Approaching forty, Isaiah had long ago recognized the truth told to him by any looking glass. He compensated by arraying himself in the latest, most colorful male fashions, often acquired from vendors who dealt in stolen goods. He saw himself as a vivid cardinal in a drab aviary of male sparrows and cowbirds.

  Isaiah was a fifth-generation scion of the New Jersey Fleegs, people who persevered despite repeated negative encounters with sheriffs, constables, jailers, and hanging judges. His forebears were arrested and prosecuted for everything from drugging unsuspecting tourists who woke up on outbound cargo ships captained by lascars, to the furious driving of chaises and gigs in crowded thoroughfares with total disregard for laws of courtesy and personal survival. New Jerseyites were famous for bad driving, and Isaiah was not one to besmirch the record.

  Isaiah had been fortunate to find a wife uglier than himself. She bore him fourteen children before she died of exhaustion. He had a strong appetite for profit and had been feeding it for six months in one of the many dives on Robber’s Row at Hilton Head. Self-exiled, he fleeced Union soldiers at cards while avoiding a Weehawken arrest warrant for arson.

  His experience as a cheat outmatched the innocence of the boys in blue whom he lured to his table. He projected a strong aura of patriotism, reflected in his marked decks. Their red and blue suits were American eagles, national flags, five-pointed stars, and Federal shields. The face cards were Union generals: Grant, Sherman, Halleck, Meade, McClellan. (The decks were old.)

  The Hilton Head garrison, extant since Admiral DuPont captured Port Royal Sound in November 1861, had attracted several thousand civilians: sharps, saloon keepers, military outfitters, fish house proprietors, souvenir sellers, hard-faced ladies of dubious reputation, even a few parsons striving to save souls. Recently Sherman had arrived by water to confer with the garrison’s poorly regarded Gen. John Foster. Afterwards Sherman set out for the return trip to Savannah on the steamer Harvest Moon. The steamer ran aground about the time Dr. Arnold was surrendering the city.

  Sherman’s delayed arrival was unknown to Isaiah as he prepared to inspect the captured city. Weeks ago, a letter from his son Freddi, already criminally adept at thirteen, had informed him that the arson matter had largely faded. Freddi reminded him that draft substitutes were still in demand, at a going price of three hundred dollars per head. Since the War Department endorsed the suitability of Negroes for the military, a substitute’s color was not an issue.

  Thus, on a chill gray morning two days before Christmas, Isaiah loitered on the open deck of the steam packet Princess Poweshiek. On leaving the Hilton Head pier, Isaiah had asked the gruff German supercargo who Princess Poweshiek might be. The supercargo guessed she was some unlettered Indian from the barbaric tribes living on the Iowa plain—assuming there was an Iowa plain. The supercargo really didn’t know or care.

  The manifest listed Isaiah’s occupation as “authorized recruiting agent.” The person who had authorized him was himself. He was, as always, regally attired. His overcoat, green checked wool, matched his green silk cravat; collar and cuffs of dyed rabbit fur ornamented the coat. His trousers, top hat, and ankle boots were black, his leather gloves lemon yellow.

  The packet negotiated the curves of the Savannah River on a favorable tide, carefully avoiding red-and-white pennons bobbing on floats; the Federal navy had set these out to mark rebel torpedo sites. Isaiah found the December air pretty deuced cold but comforted himself with the thought that a dozen contrabands trussed up and shipped north would outweigh temporary discomfort.

  Bells rang, the packet’s whistle blew. Isaiah made certain that his hideout pistol, a Colt’s .31 caliber, was secure in a special deep pocket of his waistcoat. It was a popular and dependable traveler’s gun; several rash gentlemen
had confronted Isaiah’s piece with much grieving afterwards on the part of widows and common-law companions.

  He stepped ashore amid bales of moldering cotton dripping water through gunny cloth. Stevedores swarmed on Savannah’s main wharf, every one an able-bodied colored man.

  He spoke to the first one he found catching a breath: “Boy, are you someone’s property?”

  “No sir, not no more. Mr. Linkum ‘mancipated me. Gen’ral Shermung’s come to make it for sure.”

  “Delighted to hear it, congratulations to you,” Isaiah said with false bonhomie.

  An Army captain, smelling of rum this early in the morning, was yet able to offer a select list of hotels. He informed Isaiah of General Geary’s curfew and warned that Fleeg was subject to arrest if abroad after 9 p.m., unless on official business, with appropriate documentation.

  Carpetbag in hand, Isaiah slouched up the steep pedestrian stairs to Bay Street. He thrilled to the sight of so many young bucks running about in perfect freedom. Hurrah!—he would have no trouble filling his anticipated quota.

  A poor night’s sleep plus dissatisfaction with the colonel put the notion into the head of Alpheus Winks. He decided the idea was brilliant, or as close to brilliance as he could get with his limited book learning, because it successfully addressed one problem and at the same time temporarily rid him of a pest.

  He found Zip not far from the tent, seated on a log and wrapped in an old horse blanket to keep off the damp. Head tilted back, Zip was uttering a series of sharp barks.

  Winks usually stifled his limited curiosity about Zip’s peculiar hobby, but this vocalizing was so strange, he blurted, “What kind of bird is that, a dying crow?”

  “No siree, something new. Gray squirrel. Lots of ’em around here, notice? I’m trying it out. How you like it?”

  Winks sidestepped. “I have a task for you.”