American Dreams Trilogy

by Michael Phillips

  “I didn’t. I just hoped you would, when I heard there were going to be photographers present. I saw a small article about the event in the paper.”

  “But why did you think I would be here?”

  “I read an article about war photographs in the newspaper. Your name was mentioned. That’s how I knew you were a photographer. I could hardly believe my eyes. And then when I saw the article about this speech, I thought maybe you would be here. I… I needed to talk to you.”

  “Sure—let me get my things.”

  The childhood friends and onetime fiancés from Dove’s Landing sat in the restaurant of the Raleigh Arms Hotel sipping tea and catching up on their lives since they had last seen one another. But how different was the exchange than any they had had previously. Seth was now mature and self-assured, while Veronica was obviously embarrassed at the circumstances that had brought her here. They had until now mostly been catching up on news about each other and their respective families.

  “Have you seen Wyatt and Cameron since the war began?” Seth had just asked.

  “No. Richard and I left for Luxembourg after we were married. By the time we came back they were off fighting. And Thomas… and your family?”

  A pained look came over Seth’s face and he took in a deep breath.

  “Thomas was killed,” he said after a moment.

  Veronica gasped. “Oh, Seth… I am so sorry.”

  “Actually, he and Cameron were in the same unit. My father and mother received a nice letter from Cameron afterward. He was the one who notified them about Thomas.”

  A melancholy several seconds followed.

  “But tell me about going to Europe after you were married,” said Seth at length. “Was it exciting?”

  “I don’t know… not really. I didn’t know anyone. It was a relief to come back, though Washington wasn’t much better. That’s…”

  Veronica paused and glanced down.

  “Do you think people can change, Seth?” she said after a moment. “I mean… really change?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean can someone who has been selfish all her life, someone like me… do you think I can ever be a nice person… nice—like you?”

  “Aren’t you being a little hard on yourself, Veronica?”

  “You know it’s true. I’m not a nice person.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. But to answer your question—of course people can change. We would all be in trouble if they couldn’t. I’ve changed too. Everyone does.”

  “I hope you’re right. I don’t want to be selfish anymore.”

  “I still think you’re being a little hard on yourself.”

  Veronica looked away, then drew in a deep breath.

  “I am in trouble, Seth,” she said after a moment. “I have nowhere to turn.”

  “I can tell,” he smiled kindly. “I can see it in your face.”

  “Seth,” Veronica went on, looking at him earnestly across the table, “you are a friend. I know I can trust you. No matter what I tell you, I know you will be fair to me. I am not sure I can say that even about Richard… what I have done is so… so horrible. I honestly don’t know what he would say. As for my father, because of his position, I am not sure he could help.”

  “How can I help?”

  “I don’t know… maybe you can’t. Maybe no one can. But I have to tell someone. I have no one to turn to but you, Seth.”

  Veronica looked away. Seth realized that she had begun to cry. This was certainly a different Veronica than he had previously known. He waited patiently.

  Veronica dabbed her eyes and nose with her handkerchief and forced a smile.

  “Do you remember my eighteenth birthday party at Oakbriar?” she asked.

  “How could I forget?” laughed Seth. “It seems like a long time ago now.”

  “There was a man there… a young man, a few years older than you and me,” Veronica went on. “He passed himself off as a journalist, though I am not really sure what he was. His name was Cecil Hirsch. He ingratiated himself first to my mother, and then I later met him when we went to Washington…”

  Veronica went on to tell Seth everything that had happened, up to her recent trip to Atlanta and what the packet she had delivered had contained. By the time Veronica was finished, her eyes were red and she was so contrite that the tears had again begun to flow.

  “I don’t know what to do, Seth… I’m afraid. How could I have been so blind? Whatever I might think about Cecil, I wasn’t very nice for a long time either. I certainly wasn’t nice to you.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t so bad.”

  “You’re being nice, Seth. You were always nice. But I was dreadful to you.”

  “That was a long time ago. We were young. All is forgiven.”

  Veronica looked at Seth with a thoughtful expression.

  “But what am I going to do?” she said again. “I don’t want to go to jail, Seth. Maybe I deserve it, I don’t know. But I still don’t want to. Is that wrong of me?”

  “I don’t know, but let’s don’t worry about jail just yet.”

  Seth thought a moment.

  “From everything you’ve said, it sounds to me as if Hirsch is playing both sides of the fence,” he said at length.

  “What do you mean?” asked Veronica.

  “Spying for both the North and the South. That would explain both the money you say he has, and that envelopes and information are apparently going in both directions. There is good money in passing information—the better the information the more people will pay for it.”

  “Cecil says things like that too.”

  “Stories of double spies have been circulating ever since the war started.”

  “If what you say is true, what can I do, Seth?”

  “We’ll have to give it more thought,” answered Seth. “Somehow we’ll have to get something on Hirsch that will prevent him turning you in.”

  “What do you mean, get something on him?”

  “I don’t know exactly, somehow put him in a position where he can’t expose you without implicating himself. If he is playing both sides of the fence, threatening to reveal him to both his Northern and Southern contacts might be a powerful weapon to use against him.”

  “Why would he be afraid of that?”

  “Because exposing his game to both would make neither side trust him again. He would be finished.”

  “I still don’t see how I could ever do something like that.”

  “To be honest, neither do I. I’ll have to think about it further. If you don’t mind, I will talk to a few people I know at the paper who may know more about the espionage end of the war than I do. It may help us figure out what to do.”

  “So… do you mean… will you really help me?”

  “I’ll try, Veronica.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Go home and do nothing. I’ll try to get in touch with you before Hirsch gives you another assignment.”

  “But what about the war and your job and everything?”

  “My editor is an understanding man. Once I tell him what is going on, he won’t mind. This is potentially a better story than anything else I could give him. Write down your address in Washington for me so that I can contact you. If I call, introduce me as an old friend from home, which I am. If Hirsch contacts you again before I do, telegraph me at the Boston Herald. Oh, I just had a thought… if there is any way for you to find out the people Hirsch works for, like the restaurant fellow… what was his name?”

  “Mr. Garabaldi.”

  “Oh, right… and maybe someone even higher up than him, and anyone like that in the South other than the contact people you have seen only once. If we could learn the names of his main contacts, the real source of the money and information, they would be the people we could threaten Hirsch with. If there is any way you can find out more about the people involved above Hirsch, that’s what we really need to know.”

  “I will try. Oh,
Seth, I cannot thank you enough!”

  “I haven’t done anything yet!” laughed Seth.

  “Just knowing that you are going to try gives me hope. I feel much better already.”

  Seth turned serious again and nodded. It was no laughing matter and he knew it.

  Thirty-Five

  Running… running… someone was chasing him. He was running toward Harper’s Peak.

  He glanced back in terror. A great black horse, with wide flaming nostrils, was bearing down on him. He could not hope to escape! On its back, a rider whipped the huge beast into a frenzy… a gun was in his hand… he saw a flash of fire explode from the barrel, but there was no sound.

  More silent gunfire… he turned and ran… bullets spraying the ground all about his feet. He tripped and sprawled on his face. The horse thundered toward him, but the great hooves jumped in the air to leap over him… the rider fell off beside him.

  He struggled to get up… more gunfire… where was it coming from?

  He looked down. It was Cameron! He lay flat on his back, eyes leering up at him, blood pouring out of his chest.

  Suddenly in shock, he looked at his own hand… he was holding the pistol… its barrel smoking! He opened his mouth to scream, but from his lips came only silence.

  He threw the gun from his hand and tried to run. He stumbled over Cameron’s dead body and toppled onto him, silently screaming in horror at the blood—

  Thomas suddenly started awake.

  The night was black. He was sweating and breathing hard. Soft voices from across the barn were whispering in the darkness.

  “All we hab ter do is fin’ da win’ in da horse’s head,” someone was saying. “Den we’ll be safe.”

  A chill went through him at the words.

  “Wha’chu mean?” asked another.

  “Dere’s a place we’s tryin’ ter get, it ain’t far now. Dey say hundreds ob runaways hab gone an’ dey’s always safe. Dey say dere’s angels watchin’ ober dat place on account er da white folks who live dere. I don’t know ’bout dat, but dat’s where we’s boun’. Dey say no one has eber been captured from dere.”

  Thomas listened in silence.

  “Where is it?” asked one of the voices in the darkness.

  “I don’t know. But hit ain’t far now.”

  Thomas was fully awake now. Could they be… actually talking about… Greenwood!

  Had he really been so blind to all that God was doing in the lives of so many people through his parents? Thomas thought back to the many runaways who had come through that his parents had helped get to freedom. Now he was in the same plight—on the run. Suddenly things looked very different.

  Why had his father’s spirituality grated on him so as he had grown into his teen years? It made no sense. With all the bad people in the world, why would his father’s desire to live an upright life with God annoy him? Why hadn’t he been proud of his father’s convictions?

  Thomas had no answers to the many whys now facing him.

  But the first step toward growth and wholeness is the turning of the searchlight of truth inward. And this, during his long weeks of convalescence, Thomas had begun to do. Now that he was strong and thinking clearly again, much was changing inside him.

  Slowly and invisibly a radical new thought began to take shape: What if the problem lay with him not his father? What if his father had merely been a mirror to reflect back upon him, his own unrightness, his own sourness of spirit?

  It was not a pleasant question to face. But his weakened physical condition had heightened his moral and spiritual sensitivities. And he now found himself more introspective than he had ever been in his life. Death had come uncomfortably close. He had seen it all around him.

  Though he did not exactly relate his predicament to the swine stalls or fleshpots of Scripture, his brain had begun tentatively probing the uncomfortable realization that the story of the prodigal was not altogether alien from his own spiritual condition. His problems at home had been because of what was inside him. He hadn’t been what a son was meant to be.

  What if he were to die? What if the illness that had so weakened him over the winter had been more serious than it was? What if someone walked in right now and told him he had only a week to live?

  The thought sobered him as he lay in the darkness. He felt a tear rise in his eye. The one thing he would want to do before that week was over… was see his father and mother again… and tell them how much he loved them.

  By now tears filled his eyes. Thomas blinked hard. He realized that he was lonely. He missed his home and family. He wanted to be with his parents again.

  He heard Deanna’s soft breathing where she slept beside him. Almost as if in response to his thoughts, she sighed in her sleep, rolled toward him, snuggled a little closer as her arm stretched out across his chest. She sighed contentedly and once again fell into the steady breathing of a contented sleep.

  Tenderly Thomas wrapped his arm around Deanna’s shoulder, closed his eyes, and gradually drifted again to sleep.

  Thirty-Six

  Perhaps it is the quiet stillness that night brings, or the sense that everyone more or less shares at such times of being completely alone. Perhaps it is that darkness of itself stimulates a keener awareness of primal fears and aspirations, and with them forces humanity into more elemental regions of spiritual attentiveness. But for whatever reason, out of the depths of blackness, voices from above, below, and within probe with more penetrating intensity than is possible during the noise and bustle of the day. Thus it is that the Spirit of God often carries out its most vital contact with the human species in the hours between midnight and the crow of the cock at first morning’s light.

  Cherity Waters had not been actively engaged with her heavenly Father for long years. Still there was much for her to discover. And she continued to ask many questions about the new outlook she had recently discovered of attempting to live as God’s daughter.

  It was not immediately, therefore, that it occurred to her that she had been awakened for one of the holiest of all life’s exchanges—a prayer dialog with her Father-Creator. She only knew that suddenly she was wide awake. It was very, very quiet and the night was very, very black.

  Something strange was in the air… a sense of life… a sense of presence.

  She did not know the story of young Samuel. Yet she had the sense—how could it be!—that, like the young prophet of old, someone had just called her name out of the night. It was as though some unknown silent summons had brought her instantly awake.

  She reached for the lantern beside her bed, turned it up, then looked at her small watch on the nightstand. It showed thirty-seven minutes past two.

  Sleep was out of the question. Her brain was too full. The events of the day rushed back upon her… the conversation with Carolyn and Richmond in the garden… the dreadful news that they might lose Greenwood.

  Then her own statement returned forcefully to her memory: I wish there was something I could do to help.

  Almost instantly three words seemed to speak themselves out of the night with such clarity that she thought she had actually heard them:

  “You help them.”

  Unconsciously Cherity glanced about. The night was as quiet and empty as before. But something was in the air… something meant for her.

  Then first it occurred to her that who else could be with her than God himself?

  “God,” she whispered, “are you speaking to me?”

  Twice more came the strange injunction—You help them… you help them.

  “But, Lord,” she prayed, “what could I possibly—”

  Suddenly Cherity’s eyes shot open.

  She jumped from the bed and ran across the floor to the desk and bureau where she kept her things. She sat down and pulled out the top drawer and removed the envelope that had come to her several months before from Mr. Glennie, her father’s attorney in Boston. She had scarcely thought about it since. She took out the paper inside an
d unfolded it.

  Dear Miss Waters, she read again.

  Enclosed please find a current statement of your third of your father’s investment assets. Your sisters have moved their accounts elsewhere according to their needs, and I want to reiterate again that if I can be of assistance in advising you in the matter of your investments, or should you need to liquidate any portion of them for your own needs, please do not hesitate to contact me. Until I hear from you to the contrary, be assured that your funds are secure and growing at a reasonable rate given these uncertain and troubled times.

  With regard to the disposition of the house, previously your father’s, at 17 Constitution Hill, I have the pleasure to inform you that all legalities of probate are finalized and title to the house is now fully in your name. Until hearing from you otherwise, I have the deed to the property, in your name, here safely with your other financial records. Should you wish me to attempt to sell the house on your behalf, or should the time come when you will again take possession of it personally, I am at your service. Until then, it is being cared for and watched over pending further instructions from you.

  I am,

  Sincerely yours,

  R. Glennie, Paul Revere Court, Boston.

  The letter slipped from Cherity’s hand as her brain spun excitedly with possibilities.

  The next morning at breakfast she announced her intentions, though not the reason for her decision.

  “I need to go to Boston,” she said. “There are some things regarding my father’s house, as well as some other matters, that I need to attend to.”

  “Isn’t this rather sudden?” said Carolyn. “You’ve not mentioned a word of it before now.”

  “I received a letter from my father’s attorney some months ago. I’ve delayed a reply for too long. In the middle of the night I woke up thinking about it and suddenly realized that I wanted to get it taken care of. Is it safe to travel, Mr. Davidson?” she asked, turning to Richmond.

  “Things remain a little dangerous in Virginia,” he replied. “But most civilian trains are moving through pretty well. I think I would want to accompany you as far as Washington just to be on the safe side, if you would not find that an imposition.”