Faded Coat of Blue

by Ralph Peters (as Owen Parry)

  I woke to the sounds of a steamship putting in and the calling of stevedores, for my bed lay hard by the docks and Saturday was for business in Philadelphia. For a moment, I wished my beloved and I could but climb aboard and sail for California or a place more distant still. But, like Tyrone, I knew I had run far enough. I had come to the land where the running ended.

  Perhaps that was what the war was really about. Twas an entire nation of runaways, America in 1861, and your place in society depended upon what you had run from and when. Perhaps General McClellan was right that the war was not really about slavery. Perhaps it was a struggle between the dreams of men who would run no more.

  I resolved to go to the Reading depot and take a train to Pottsville. Even if the only run consisted of empty coal wagons, I was willing to wrap myself up and ride in one of those.

  I felt ill in my stomach from the shame of the role I had been put to play—though I did not understand it yet, I sensed there was evil behind it. I needed the rest that only love can give. So I ran to my Mary Myfanwy, as I always did. We men and women are incomplete things, and must be made whole every so often if we are to continue in our adversities.

  McClellan had not specified that I return directly to Washington, and I clung to that as an excuse. For I am the sort who cannot defy too directly. Duty has its comforts, after all, and what would a man be without a sense of it? I might spend one Saturday night in Pottsville, quiet like, without failing the Union. In the comfort of my beloved, I might take the strength to recognize that which was right, and to do it.

  Chapter 9

  The railroad entered the mountain gap where the Schuylkill had carved its way, and my heart beat like a lad’s. The tracks followed the canal, with its coal barges and mule paths. The boatmen looked up sternly as we raced past. At the hoot of the whistle, children poured from shacks nestled under the slopes. Pallid faces those, and too similar, for an odd breed lived in the hollows by the canal, fond of remoteness from the law and the church. The driving wheels counted the miles with me, pounding like native drums in the vale of Peshawar. The ridges were bare now, but beautiful, and copper leaves covered the valley and floated on the waters. The last geese lifted from the marshes.

  We burst into a valley and braked into Schuylkill Haven. The town was clean-painted and heavy with Dutchmen. Laborers unloaded crates and bundles, taking their time about it, or so it seemed to me. With Pottsville not five miles away, I ached to get out and run, bad leg or no. Then the whistle called for the clearance of the tracks, and the cars snapped into motion again. Plump town boys ran along beside us until their breath quit.

  Twas afternoon and we entered the shadow of the next mountain, with the canal a highway of anthracite below us, its water silted gray above the locks. The sky, too, was gray to the rest of the world, but summer blue it was to me. The valley narrowed and shanties rose beside the rails. The Palo Alto iron works—a dwarf to Cawber’s giant—loomed under turbans of smoke. Saturday half-shift that would be. I moved to the other side of the carriage and saw Henry Clay high on his pillar and the backsides of the houses along South Centre Street. Then the commerical buildings began. There was money coming in.

  Coal had marked the valley even then, though it was not so glum as it would be later. A great potch of shoppers filled the streets and delivery wagons jostled for rights at the corners. The carriages of the colliery owners kicked up the last dust of the season. We pulled into the station, with its curtain of saloons and drummer’s hotels, and it was all as dear to me as Jerusalem.

  I almost took a hack, such was my haste to get home, but the price was up with the war and I worried that my Mary Myfanwy might think me an even greater fool than I was if I rolled up in a hired trap like Lord Folderol. So I walked. And not a few startled looks I got, and many a citizen would have talked me to death in the street. I ran to the edge of rudeness to get free of them. If there was pain in my leg, I did not feel it. Across Centre Street I went, with its grandeur of banks and company offices, of good shops and law shingles, then straight up Norwegian, where the addresses were respectable but not extravagant. I might have been blubbering like a babe, for all I knew. My thoughts were not on myself. I lacked the sense to stop and put right my hair or blow my nose.

  Oh, the face of her. Looking up from her scrubbing as if the ladies of the chapel had caught her prancing, with strands of hair loose from her bun and moist pearls waiting to be kissed from her forehead. You should have seen the look of her. First that high flash of anger at the interrupting she got, then the shock of her seeing, then the trembling of the lips and all around the eyes as she rose to her feet.

  “There is beautiful,” I said, “and beautiful you are, Mary Jones.”

  She held me fit to break my ribs, and sobbing she was. Then I saw my son behind her, and was not master of myself.

  How she held me, though. If ever I doubted her love, though I did not, that one hug would have filled me with trust for a lifetime. Never was the smell of soap and water so akin to lavender and roses.

  “You’re an evil man,” she told me, crying. “Wicked and evil. Coming upon me like this.”

  And the boy, standing little in his wonder—my son standing—stared up with his mother’s eyes. My Mary Myfanwy sensed me pull toward him, but she would not let me go, not yet.

  “My love,” I said.

  “I look like the rag woman.”

  “Then it’s such I will have, my beauty.”

  She wept again, with her face buried against me. “Oh, God,” she said, “oh, God, I’ve dreamed of this day.” And she kissed me at last. Hungry. Starved.

  She had not thought to put down her scrub rag, and the wet of it was already through my coat. But I would have drowned in dirty water for the taste of her.

  The boy’s face glazed with fear. He put a little hand to the corner of an eye, and I could not have that. I broke her hold as gently as I could.

  “Is it a strange man you have taken into the house, Mary Jones? And who is this strapping buttie?”

  Then we were three together, and no man hated war as I did.

  “There is foolish,” my beloved said to me. With her black hair loose and streaming. “What good is to come of confronting the man? A general he is. And you with twice his heart but not a tenth part of his power.”

  Twas Sunday morning. Sunday morning, already. We were still in private circumstances that do not want description. Though I will speak again of the loveliness of that hair, that shining midnight hair that is pure Welsh from up the valleys. And the whiteness of her skin, and the eyes green.

  “He shamed me, woman.”

  Yes, those green eyes. One of your fancy book writers would compare them to jade. But I have seen jade and it is a dead thing, while there was nothing more alive in the world than my Mary Myfanwy’s eyes. Fiery emeralds, they were, with sparks of gold.

  “Go on with you. Shame is it, Abel Jones? Well, there is shame and there is shame, and I say the man shamed himself the more if he lied to a good man such as you and used him wrongful.”

  “Will I take it like a dog, then?”

  “You will take it like a man, and keep your tongue in your mouth.”

  “It chews on me.”

  She rose to her elbow. In the soft light. With the child still blessedly asleep. “And what is it, then? That’s cause of this great chewing? The shame and embarrassment that is nothing but selfish? Or the knowing that the boy’s murder goes unanswered?”

  She was a loving woman, but firm. No empress matched the backbone of my sweetheart.

  “The shame and embarrassment first,” I admitted. “And then?”

  “I would know what happened to the Fowler lad.” She smiled. Oh, she knew me, that one. “Then swallow the false pride down, Abel. For the pride of man is dust. And let this General McClellan think you a fool, if he will. And you will sit there knowing more than him, and who will be the fool then?”

  “It could be that he did not understand… the range of th
e business.”

  But I had shared the meat of the story with her, and most of the trimmings, too, and we both knew better.

  “There is foolish. The man has proven himself a liar, if only by all he left unspoken. You mark me, Abel Jones. His like will come to naught, for all his airs.” She lifted away a tumbling richness of hair that had sneaked too close to her mouth.

  “And what would you have me do, woman? There is badness every way I turn.”

  She thought for a moment. A great thinker she was, and deep. Then her eyes come out to play again. “I wish I were a man. For I would help you then.”

  “A man is it? I would have you a woman and as you are.”

  “You wait, boy. And hands to yourself while we’re talking.” Her hair fell forward again as we tustled and she brushed it back once more. Without lowering her defenses. “Go on with you now. A bad little boy you are. But I will tell you what I do not like. And that is this lieutenant. The one who is to be married fair, and who drinks himself dumb by dinner. There is a story there.”

  “And?” I said. For I knew she was the smarter of us, and I could listen to her without false pride. She never gave me bad advice, and how many men can say that of anyone, let alone of a wife?

  “And then, Captain Jones, I would look into those other friends. Young gentlemen who go to a Negro bawdy house. And on a weeknight.”

  I blushed at her bluntness. But her skin held white as the first snow. I have never known another so decorous in the parlor and so honest upstairs, if you will excuse me the liberty. In her it was only good sense, not hypocrisy.

  “There is something wrong there, see,” she continued. “And if they were true friends to Anthony Fowler, it is wrong twice. For I do not believe he would have fought to lift the Negro from his chains only to see the daughters of Africa bound to a worse slavery still. Trouble there.”

  “More still, my little one?”

  She thought for a moment. And wasn’t I proud of her? What a man she might have been, with that mind of hers, though me the poorer for it.

  “I would like to know,” she said. “What those fellows were singing.”

  She lost me.

  “In the rain,” she went on. “You told me the sentry boy heard singing and naught else. In the night before Anthony Fowler’s body was discovered. He heard officers drunk and singing. And I would like to know what they were singing, for I do not think they were so drunk. And I would like to know how he knew sure they were officers, if he could not see them. That is what I would like to know.”

  I shook my head. Putting to her a silent question. For I did not yet see her wisdom.

  “There is simple,” she said. “Out in the fierce of the weather they were, these drunken, singing officers. And why? I will tell you. Because they put the lad’s body down where it was found. Carrying him along as if he were only the drunkest of them and unable to walk by himself. Clear it is, see. That is why there was no bullet hole in his overcoat. They had disguised him up as a drunkard, and all muffled over they had him, and what sentry would think twice of it? Singing they went, but not so drunk or not drunk at all, and I would know the song that was on their lips. For by it I might know the men. And if I knew the men I would know the killers.”

  She was a clever one, mine. And me the greater fool still, for having all the pieces and none of the puzzle together.

  “I would two things of you, Abel,” she said. “Go carefully. For I will not lose you again. It is too long I have waited. Second, I would have justice for the Fowler boy, if justice can be got.”

  I looked at the steel and softness of her. “He… may not have been the perfect one people think.”

  She scooted her elbow up and rose higher. “And who is perfect? Short of Jesus Himself, I ask you?” For the first time, there come a real scold over her. “I saw that boy, didn’t I? With these two eyes. And heard him with these two ears. And there was goodness in him. I will tell you that, Mr. Jones. There was goodness. And if he suffered all the temptations of the Damned, I will believe he rose above them as best he could.”

  “Mary, really… your language, girl.”

  “Find out what happened to him, Abel. Your Christian duty it is. For like as not he was killed for his goodness, say what they will. And my language is no more than what is in the Bible, thank you, and good enough for archangels.”

  I sat up so straight my nightshirt caught under me and gave me a yank at the neck. I reached for the stand where I had set my pocket watch. We had forgotten the hour.

  “Late for chapel,” I fair shouted, tossing back the covers.

  But she caught me. And tugged me back down.

  “No chapel today.”

  Those endless eyes moved closer. Above the rose of her lips.

  “I will not share you with them,” she said. “Not yet. Not now.”

  “Talk there will be, Mary Jones.”

  “Let them peck. For they’re only caught between wishes and regrets.”

  With the splendid timing of infants, young John began to cry in the room next. But my beloved only held me the more tightly for it. At my concern, she whispered:

  “He will learn patience, your son.”

  Later, I played with the boy, and talked to him, and held him. He was strange with me, of course. I ached to make an impression on him, for I wanted to be remembered. My job seemed the safest of the war, yet war is cruel in its jokes. If never I saw him again, I wanted my son to have some recollection of his father, however slight. But he was too little, and I realized I would be gone from his mind as soon as I was gone from the house.

  Twas hard.

  I had to leave the two of them for an hour, though I would have stayed within those walls forever and been glad of it. First, I went down to the station, with the good folk of the city still in their pews. In fair luck I was, for Iestyn Hughes was the yard master that day. There were no passenger trains going south from Pottsville, but he promised me a place on the bunk car of a coaler, if I would come by three. It would take me to Philadelphia, but then I would have to wait until morning for a train to carry me on to Washington.

  He was a good man, Hughes the Trains. But he broke my heart when he told me three o’clock. I had hoped to steal the afternoon all whole.

  I yearned for home, but had another stop to make. I intended to catch Mr. Gowen just after he come from church. A constable guided me to his residence directly—all full of questions about the war, he was, and why hadn’t we taken Richmond yet?—but the housemaid handed me disappointment.

  “Already gone, he is, sir, is Mr. Gowen.” She was an Irish girl, with freckles and a starched linen apron.

  “And where might I find him, then?” She gave me the doubtful eyes, unsure of the propriety of giving out such information. But the constable, bless him, told her, “It’s all right, missy. He’s an officer, our Jonesie, and it’s all official.”

  Which is what I had told him, more or less. How the Irish have had the fear beaten into them. It shows most on the women, since they do not drink. Her lips shivered as she spoke, though not from the cold.

  “He’s gone to a Sunday hooley up the Masters, he is. But he’s a great one for keeping his Sundays all private, sir, is Mr. Gowen. If you please, sir…” Her hands worried in the pockets of her apron.

  “We will not trouble him with the source of our information,” I said. “There’s a good girl.”

  She curtsied as though she had just learned the gesture and had not yet got the knack.

  “You know where Mr. Masters lives?” the constable asked me as the door shut on us.

  Everybody knew where Masters lived. Up the hill, as the rich always do. He was a coal boss of a far higher order than my Mary Myfanwy’s uncle.

  I went alone up the streets, with the climbing stiffness in my leg, and the size of the houses grew. I fell the watch tick against my stomach, time running away and every moment of my life squandered that was no spent with my wife and son.

  The Masters hous
e had no Irish girl to reckon with callers. A fellow in a fine get-up opened the front door He looked me over quick, sharp as a tailor in his judgement of cut and cloth. “Yes, sir?”

  “I would like to speak with Mr. Gowen, please.”

  “Have you an invitation, sir?”

  “Official business,” I lied.

  He considered me again, snoot in the air as if he owned the house himself. There is no senator so arrogant as a well-placed serving man.

  “One moment, sir,” he said. Then he shut the door on me.

  Mr. Franklin B. Gowen, Esquire, stepped out to the chill of the porch. He was a grand-looking man, young and a comer, with a figure gaining substance. But his eyes were cold as winter. His face was all annoyance at first, colored up by irritation, but he placed me after a moment and changed his demeanor, as lawyers will.

  I had already heard the rumor that he would be our next district attorney.

  “Why, Jones,” he said. “What the devil is this? Our county’s hero and left on the doorstep? Come in, man. Old Masters will want to shake your hand.”

  He smelled of alcohol. On a Sunday.

  “Sir, I cannot. Time I have none, but for a question. If you will excuse me.”

  He folded his arms and looked down at me. Still thinking how to be. I did not trust him then, though I hardly knew him, nor did I like him of a sudden. It is almost as if I had a presentiment of all that was to come after the war, of the violence and injustice and the coal country torn apart, of my own home burned. But that is another story. Let it bide.

  I could not know that I would be the one to find him, decades hence, hanging dead in a Washington hotel room.

  “Well… what is it, man?”

  “Sir… did General McClellan ask you for a recommendation? Did you give him my name?”