“You’d use us, eh?” Lang cocked his head. “From your point of view, I suppose that makes good sense. But how would you know you could trust us?”
“There lies the rub,” Lee admitted. “I am glad you can see it. We would be taking a risk; with your greater knowledge, you might delude the men with whom you work in the same way you sought to delude the entire Confederacy as to the path the future would have taken without your intervention—and as you tried to do with your speaking wireless telegraph.” Learning of that device still irked Lee. He said, “We could have done great things with it in the late war…had you seen fit to reveal its existence.”
Lang said, “We would have, I swear it, if you’d been in trouble. As it was, as we thought, the AKs turned out to be plenty to win your freedom.”
“And so you concealed a potentially vital tool from us, for your own advantage. I promise we shall do our best to prevent any future episodes of that sort. Your Rivington men would be split up, not permitted to know where your fellows are nor, save under most unusual circumstances, to communicate with them. Further, you would be required to explain fully to the scholars or mechanics with whom you will be working every step of every process you demonstrate. Even so, we recognize the risk remains, though we shall do our utmost to minimize it.”
Benny Lang made a sour face. “We’d be just like the poor damned German technicians hauled off to Russia at the end of World War II.” Lee did not understand the reference. Seeing that, Lang went on, “Never mind. Whatever you propose is better than hanging. I think most of us will be willing to go along. I know I will.”
“The reason I chose to put the question to you first, Mr. Lang, is that you are one of the Rivington men likeliest to be chosen to help us comprehend the products of your time. By most accounts, you have comported yourself well here in the Confederate States: you fought bravely on our behalf—and then later, it must be said, against us—and, while living the planter’s life in Rivington, you treated your Negro servants relatively well. This lets me hope, at least, you will be able to accommodate yourself to your changed circumstances.”
“I’ll manage. Given the alternative, you can bet I’ll manage,” Lang said.
“Yes; that would offer considerable incentive—so much so, in fact, that we shall carefully examine every man’s sincerity and credentials before even considering his release. Your sentences may possibly be suspended; they shall not be forgotten.”
“You’d be stupid if you did forget them,” Lang said, nodding. “The other thing that worries me is, not an of us know the kinds of things you will want to learn. Up in our own time, we weren’t professors, you know. A lot of us were soldiers or police. Me, I repaired computers.”
“There. You see what I meant about the gap between your time and mine?” Lee said. “I haven’t the faintest idea what a, ah, computer is, let alone how to repair one.”
“A computer is an electronic machine that calculates and puts information together very quickly,” Benny Lang said.
Lee almost asked him what sort of machine he had said, but decided not to bother, as he doubted the answer would have left him enlightened—the gap again. He chose a simpler question:, ‘What does a computer look like?” When Lang explained, Lee grinned like a small boy—one mystery solved! “So that’s the proper name for the qwerty.”
“For the what?” Lang’s confusion lasted only a couple of seconds. “Oh. You named it for the keyboard, didn’t you? That’s not bad. Give me a steady supply of electricity and I’ll show you things with that machine the likes of which you’ve never imagined.”
Lee believed him. The Rivington men had already shown him—shown all the South—a great many things whose likes had never been imagined. Some of them, he thought, should have remained unimagined. He wondered if the computer would prove to be one such. Time alone would tell. He said, “If the device be as useful as you say, will you teach us to manufacture more like it? We have commenced production of our own AK-47s, you know.”
“No, I didn’t know that, but it doesn’t matter anyhow. Genera! Lee—” Three guards growled at the same time. Lang looked briefly nonplused, then realized his mistake. “Sorry. President Lee, if you want me to build you a bloody computer, you may as well hang me now. I can’t do it, or rather, you can’t do it. You not only lack the technology you need, you lack the technology to make the technology you need, and likely a couple of more regressions before that, too. Give me electricity and I’ll show you how to use however many computers you’ve captured. You can do that until they break down. When they do, they’re gone for good.”
“But you repair computers,” Lee objected. “You just said as much.”
“So I do, when I have the proper tools and parts. Where am I to come by those in 1868?”
“And if repairing one becomes a condition for your continued freedom—for your survival?”
Benny Lang stared bleakly at him. “Then I’m dead.”
Lee liked the answer; it bespoke a certain basic honesty. If any Rivington men ever saw the outside of Libby Prison, he resolved that Benny Lang would be one of them. For now, though, he said only, “Tell your comrades what I have said to you, Mr. Lang. Before long, you will be furnished paper and pens. I want a complete listing of the types of knowledge each of you possesses. Warn the rest not to lie; you have lied to the Confederacy far too much, and any claim one of you proves unable to substantiate will result in his being considered a full-fledged traitor once more. Do you understand that and agree to it?”
“I understand it. As for agreeing, what choice have I?”
“None,” Lee said implacably. “Be warned also that your crimes and your likely trustworthiness will be weighed against what you know when we consider whether to release any of you. Also, Mr. Lang, do pass on to your friends the vote of the House of Representatives. If you are set at liberty, you shall not be permitted to meddle in politics. Is that quite clear?”
The resentment that flared in Lang’s eyes showed it was. “You give us few choices.”
“Would you, in my position?” Lee said, and Lang would not meet his gaze. He turned to the prison guards. “Take him back upstairs.”
As they marched off with Benny Lang, Lee walked back down to the street. His bodyguard said, “Sir, if it was up to me, the only time those bastards ever saw the sun again except through iron bars would be the day we took ‘em out to hang ‘em.”
“Believe me, Lieutenant, I sympathize with you there,” Lee said, “but they may yet prove of great value to our country. And it is our country, Lieutenant. We shall shape it to our ends, not theirs, I promise you that.”
“But if they do meddle, sir?”
“Then we hang them,” Lee said. Satisfied at last, the bodyguard raised his repeater in salute.
“Ain’t gonna be easy, Nate,” Mollie Bean said. The closer the wedding day came, the more nervous she got. She stooped down, tossed a pebble into Stony Creek.
“We’ll do fine,” Caudell said stoutly, watching the ripples spread. “Your hair is growing out nice as you please; pretty soon you’ll be able to pack away your wig and just say you’ve changed your style.”
“My hair’s not what I’m fret tin’ about, an’ you know it perfectly well. Ain’t gonna be easy livin’ in this town with some of the people knowin’ I used to be a whore.”
“I wish you wouldn’t be so blunt,” Caudell muttered.
“How come? Don’t you like bein’ reminded, neither?”
“You know it’s not that,” he answered quickly; they’d had this discussion before. He continued, “Once we’re married, do you want to move back to Rivington, then?”
“God almighty, no!” Mollie threw up her hands. A startled blue heron leaped into the air with a loud whuff, whuff, whuff of wings. “In Rivington, everybody knows I was—doin’ what I was doin’—till first part o’ this year. Hereabouts, it’s only some of the men who remember back to the war—leastways, I hope that’s how it is.”
“Nobody’s ever given me a hard time about it.” Caudell made a fist. “Anyone who tried, I’d give him this. Now you tell me straight out, Mollie, have you ever had any trouble from the women in town, any at all?”
“No-o,” she said; he judged she was telling the truth but didn’t quite trust it. As if to confirm that, she went on, “sometimes, though, I just don’t feel like I can look them fine ladies in the eye.”
“They’re no finer than you are,” he insisted, and meant every word of it. “Come to that, do you want me to tell you which ones had great big babies six or seven months after they said their ‘I do’s’? I can name three or four right off the top of my head.”
That won a giggle from her. “Can you? It don’t surprise me. “
“There, you see?” he said triumphantly.
“Ain’t gonna be easy,” she said again, brief confidence deserting her.
He took a deep breath. “How’s this, then? We’ll stay here as long as everything is good, as long as everybody treats us the way they’re supposed to. The first time anybody doesn’t, we’ll Pack up whatever we happen to have and move someplace where nobody’s ever heard of either one of us, and we’ll make ourselves a fresh start.”
“You don’t want to do that, Nate.” Mollie sounded worried. “Hard pullin’ up stakes when you’ve been somewheres a long time, An’ you like Nashville; you know you do.”
“I like you more,” he said, and intended to add, “And I want you to be happy, too.”
Before he had the chance, Mollie pulled his face down to hers and kissed him. Her eyes were shining as she said, “Nobody never told me nothin’ like that before.” Some of her fear seemed to leave her once more, for she looked around and then waved, and this time she surprised no birds. “It’s right pretty here—the willow there, the jasmine just across the creek that’ll be all full o’ sweet flowers tonight…Nate! Whatever is the matter, Nate?”
“Nothing, really, I reckon.” But Caudell still felt as though he’d seen a ghost; the sensation was almost as strong as when he’d fired through the Rivington man on the time machine platform. After a moment to steady himself, he explained: “I was fishing under that willow when poor Josephine—remember Josephine?—stuck her head out through the jasmine. Piet Hardie had the hounds out after her.”
“Him.” Mollie’s face changed; her voice needed only the one word to turn flat and hard. “I’ve prayed more than once that he didn’t get away when we took Rivington. It ain’t Christian, but I done it. ‘Fraid I’ll never know, though.”
“Oh yes, you will.” Caudell told how he’d huddled behind Hardie’s body after Henry Pleasants touched off the mine outside Rivington.
Mollie clapped her hands together when he was done. “He got what was comin’ to him, by God.” Caudell felt as if he were a bold knight who’d slain the Rivington man in single combat, not just stumbled upon (almost stumbled over) his corpse. By the way Mollie flushed and pressed herself against him, she had something of that same feeling herself. She looked up and down the creek. Her voice went low and throaty. “Don’t seem to be anybody around, Nate”
“So there doesn’t.” Grinning, he laid her down on the thick, soft grass, then quickly stooped beside her. With practiced fingers, he undid the buttons and eyelets that held her dress closed; the process would have gone even faster than it did had he not paused every few seconds to kiss the flesh he exposed. But soon she lay bare, and he as well. Their sweat-slick skins slid against each other. “Oh, Mollie,” he said. She did not answer, not in words.
He got back into his clothes reluctantly; no matter what a preacher might say, early summer was easier to take without them. He felt at peace with the whole world as he and Mollie kept walking slowly along the creekbank. But after a few paces, she said, “Reckon we can try what you said, Nate. I hope it works, I purely do. But if it don’t, I’ll be glad for the chance to pull stakes, and that’s a fact.”
“All right,” he answered, pleased and a trifle annoyed at the same time; he might have wished her to stay happy and distracted rather longer.
Before he could say anything (later, he thought that just as well), the two of them rounded a bend in the creek. On the far bank, by a thicket of water oaks, a gray-haired black man sat fishing. He waved with his left hand, called, “How do, Marse Nate, Miss Mollie?”
“Hello, Israel.” Nate looked over his shoulder. No, the Negro couldn’t have seen him and Mollie cavorting in the grass. Relieved, he turned back. “Catching anything?”
“Got me a couple catfish.” Israel held them up. Stony Creek was so narrow, he hardly needed to raise his voice to talk across it.
“How’s it feel, workin’ for the famous Colonel Pleasants?” Mollie asked.
“Now the fightin’s done, Marse Henry, he took off the uniform fast as can be,” Israel said. “The railroad he was workin’ for, they send a man out to the farm the other day, askin’ him to take back his old job at twice the money. He say they make it back by usin’ his name, an’ I expect he be right.”
“What did Henry tell him?” Caudell said, bumping into a new set of mixed emotions. He wanted his friend to do well, but he didn’t want him moving back down to Wilmington. As far as seeing him went, that would be almost as bad as if he went home to Pennsylvania.
Israel answered, “He tol’ that man to git off his land and never come back, that he had better things to do with his name than sell it to a railroad that hadn’t wanted the man who was wearin’ it. His very words, Marse Nate; I was there to hear ‘em.”
“Good,” Caudell said. Mollie nodded. So did Israel. Just then, the line the black man was holding gave a jerk. He pulled in a fat little sunfish, let it flop away its life on the bank. Nate added,” As long as that’s settled, I think I’ll call on Henry some time in the next few days.”
“Always glad to see you, Marse Henry and me too,” Israel said. As he spoke, he got another bite. “You come tomorrow, maybe some of this nice fish be left.”
“I wouldn’t mind if there was,” Caudell said agreeably. “I won’t be going up there just to eat it, though. I want to ask Henry if he’ll be my best man.”
Taken by surprise, Mollie gasped and clung to him. Israel smiled across the creek at the two. of them. “That’s fine,” he said. “Marse Henry, he always goin’ on about how happy you two be, so I know he be happy to do that for you.”
“Don’t tell him ahead of time,” Caudell warned. “I want to do it myself.”
“I won’ say a word,” Israel promised. “Miss Mollie, Marse Henry, he go on too about how much your brother or cousinI ain’t quite sure which—Melvin looks like you. He be at your weddin’?”
“I—don’t think so,” Mollie answered after a moment’s hesitation. “Now that the fighting’s done, I don’t think we’ll see Melvin much around these parts.”
“Travelin’ sort o’ man, is he?” Israel said. “Some folks is like that. Too bad he won’t be there to see you wed, though.”
“We’ll do fine without him.” Mollie leaned against Nate again. They started walking along the creek once more. Israel’s farewell wave was interrupted by yet another catch. Caudell knew mild envy; he’d never pulled so many fish out of Stony Creek so fast.
Mollie said something. His mind on fish, Caudell missed it. “I’m sorry?”
“I said, maybe it’ll work out all right after all. You start talkin’ about get tin’ a best man and things like that, it makes the wedding start to seem real.”
“It had better seem real.” He slipped his arm around her waist, pulled her close, kissed her. Israel was no doubt watching from the far bank. Caudell couldn’t have cared less.
The upstanding wings of Nate’s collar brushed against his beard and tickled. He felt slightly strangled; he wasn’t used to the tightness of his cravat. Even without the black silk tie, he suspected he would have had some trouble breathing: few men go calm to their wedding. The still, sultry air inside the Baptist church gave him an excuse for sweating.
As men will, he tried to tell himself he was being foolish—he’d marched into battle with fewer palpitations than he had right now. But the inside of his mouth stayed dry.
Ben Drake was well into the wedding service. The preacher’s big voice boomed, “If there be any who know of any reason this marriage should not take place, let him speak now or forever hold his peace.”
Caudell tensed. Preachers intoned those words at every wedding. But here—some of the men listening here knew who—and what—Mollie had been. He didn’t think anyone held that sort of grudge against him or her, but—The prescribed pause passed. No one spoke. The service went on. Caudell eased, a little.
Much too quickly, or so it seemed, Drake turned to him and said, “Do you, Nathaniel, take this woman Mollie to be your lawful wedded wife, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, until death do you part?”
“I do.” Caudell was used to outshouting a room full of school children. Now he wondered if even Henry Pleasants beside him, resplendent in full colonel’s uniform—Confederate, though he had threatened to scandalize everyone by wearing blue—could hear. Pleasants beamed—he must have spoken out loud. He tried on a smile. It fit.
“Do you, Mollie, take this man Nathaniel to be your lawful wedded husband, to have and to hold, to love and to cherish and to obey, until death do you part?”
From behind her veil, Mollie’s words rang clear: “I do.”
“Then under the laws of God and those of the sovereign state of North Carolina, I pronounce you man and wife.” Ben Drake smiled. “Kiss your bride, Nate.”
Awkwardly, Caudell moved aside the filmy veil. The kiss was decorously chaste. In the third row of pews, Barbara Bissett started to sob. His landlady cried at any excuse, or none. This time, she was not alone. By the time Nate and Mollie walked up the aisle to the church door, half the women who’d watched the ceremony were dabbing at their eyes. Caudell wondered why they did that. Weddings were supposed to be happy times, but the little lace handkerchiefs always came out.
The Guns of the South Page 68
