Different Sin (12 page)

Michael ended the grace to a chorus of soft amens. His father turned to David. “I’m glad you were able to get time off work for a visit. The way things stand, there’s no saying when we’ll be able to be together like this again.”

David managed a smile. His father’s last utterance registered belatedly. In his preoccupation with his private torment, he’d paid scant attention to the still seething controversy that had culminated in South Carolina’s proclamation of secession four days ago.

“You think it’ll come to war, Dad?” he asked. George Carter turned up his palms in a helpless shrug. “I pray not, though if Lincoln tries to hold the secessionists by force....”

The rest of the family gazed at him solemnly. Only little Joshua, just a week short of his fourth birthday, plunged his spoon happily into the oyster stew Rachel had prepared for Christmas Eve dinner.

“It won’t come to war, Grandpa Carter,” Peter—Mike and Rachel’s oldest—said bitterly. “The North finds trade with the South too profitable to fight a war over slavery. More likely they’ll grant the slaveholders every concession they can to keep them in the Union. There’s already been three states repealed their personal liberty laws.”

David looked at Peter in astonishment. “You can’t mean you’d welcome a war!”

“If it would free my people, I would!”

“David, you’re a newsman,” Rachel put in. “You must have more knowledge than we do of what’s likely to happen.”

“I’m afraid not. I don’t do much reporting, except for a few scribbles to explain my sketches. And I’ve never paid much attention to politics.”

“We’d be better off with disunion,” Peter said. “At least there’d be no more fugitives returned to slavery like my father was! And the government wouldn’t be bound to protect slavery anymore, so revolts would have a better chance. John Brown might’ve succeeded if not for the power of the army.”

“He might have,” David said slowly. “But I can’t agree with shedding blood over slavery. I mean, I can understand how you feel about it—”

“Not really,” Michael stated.

“What?”

“You can’t understand how we feel, just seeing it from the outside, even coming up as close to it as you did. You’ve no idea what it’s like to be another man’s property. You’ve never been whipped or sold or—” Michael broke off. His face seemed graven in stone. He looked across the table, meeting his father’s eyes.

Then he’s never really forgiven Dad after all, David thought. He stared in fascination at his father and half-brother. A moment went by. Michael’s expression softened. A look of affection slowly grew between the two men as they continued to gaze at one another.

David looked down at his plate, abashed at his sudden dismay.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“I missed you,” Zach told him. He propped himself up on one elbow and smiled at David, running his fingers gently down David’s jawline.

“I—” Hell, he’d missed him too. His visit to Boston hadn’t changed a thing. “I was just gone a week. For God’s sake, let’s get our clothes on.”

He shoved his shirttails into his trousers. “I thought about you a lot,” he said finally. “But it was good to see my family while we still have a chance to get together.”

David managed a smile. “Mike and Rachel gave Joshua a pair of skates. We took him over to the Frog Pond the day after Christmas. You’d have enjoyed seeing it.”

He’d stood there as the three older children took turns guiding Joshua in circles around the crowded pond, barely seeing the scene before him, thinking of Zach’s love for skating, thinking of Zach’s unnatural love for him—

“You all right, David?” He started at his half-brother’s question.

“Yeah, fine.”

“You seem troubled. You still worrying about war?”

David managed a smile. “No, I think Peter’s probably right about that. I was just thinking how peaceful the Common looks under the snow, and what a contrast it is to the pond. I doubt you could squeeze in another child. I thought I might do a sketch of it.” He opened his sketchbook, glad he’d brought it along to give credence to his lie.

He brought himself back to the present. Zachary was smiling at him wistfully. “I envy you your family,” Zach said.

“It’s good to have them.” David studied Zach a minute. “What you told me about your father— This is why he threw you out, isn’t it?” His hand made a semicircle, encompassing their hastily clad garments, the rumpled sheets.

Zach slowly nodded. “Yes, it’s why. I had a friend, a year older than myself. Ephraim. We were very— very drawn to one another. He looked a little like you must’ve done as a boy, tall and thin, with yellow hair forever falling in his eyes.” Zach smiled painfully. He reached out and pushed a few strands of hair off David’s forehead.

“Pa caught us fondling one another,” he said after a long pause. “We’d gone into the woods behind our homes after firewood—we often helped one another with our chores. There was a hollow half filled with fallen leaves we’d lie in. Pa came out to see what had kept me at so simple a task. We were too taken up with one another to hear his footsteps.

“Pa used to lean on a hickory staff when he walked, on account of his rheumatism. When he took in what we were doing, he raised it over his head as if he would smite us. Then he looked at Eph and said, ‘You’re not my son, Ephraim. Your own father must do with you as he sees fit.’ He stood there with the stick in his hand all the while Eph was taking to his heels, and I shrank back, waiting for it to fall. Then he lowered it, and looked at me—the way you might look at a rat you’d just killed in your pantry. ‘Neither are you, Zachary. You’re no more son of mine.’ I’d have rather he’d beaten me, I’ll tell you that. Even if he’d struck me dead.”

“Oh God, Zach.” David laid his hand on Zach’s, pulled it back. He sat looking at him numbly. “How can you be so easy about us now?” he whispered finally.

“I wasn’t easy about it then, I’ll grant you. I was certain my father’s God would consign me to eternal hellfire, though Mother promised me the Lord hated the sin, not the sinner. But I couldn’t repent of it. I spent hours on my knees trying to pray for forgiveness, but whenever I closed my eyes I’d see Eph lying there with the leaves in his hair and that crooked smile he had, and I couldn’t be sorry for what we’d done.”

“I don’t see how you bore it.”

“It came to me after a while that I was as the Lord made me.” Zach shrugged mightily, as if he were shaking off the memory as a dog shakes off water. “I didn’t ask to be fashioned this way—to love men instead of women.”

“I’ve been with women!”

“I didn’t say you hadn’t. But not half so eagerly, I daresay.”

David flushed, not answering.

“At any rate, I’ve come since to a different view of sin.”

“Christ, Zach, what other view can you come to!”

DAVID SET BILL WAUD’S SKETCH OF A SOUTH CAROLINIAN REGIMENTAL review in the top rack of his drawing table, ready for copying. He picked up his pencil resignedly, thinking a moment of the argument he’d had with Leslie when the editor had announced his decision to assign a staff artist to Charleston, two days after Lincoln’s election. “Why are you picking Bill to send? I’m a Virginian, after all,” he’d pointed out. “I’m at home in the South.”

“And equally at home, I’m given to understand, in the company of Greeley’s correspondents.”

David flushed. Surely Leslie knew nothing of what had occurred all fall between Zach and himself! The editor couldn’t have guessed that his eagerness for the assignment stemmed as much from his desire to get away from temptation as from interest in the convention called by South Carolina to vote the state out of the Union.

Leslie looked at him shrewdly. “It hasn’t escaped my notice that you came within a hairsbreadth of being expelled from Charles Town during John Brown’s trial, along with Greeley’s man.”

“Oh.”

“At any rate, young Waud’s English and the Southerners want to court allies abroad. And reporting on the new Southern government will take a good deal of moving about in society. To be frank, your own strength lies solely in your facility as an artist.” David nodded in resignation. He didn’t have half Bill’s social graces, he knew.

He turned his attention back to Bill’s drawing now, automatically reversing it left to right as he copied. Earlier in March Leslie had published Bill’s portrayal of Jefferson Davis’ inauguration as Confederate president, in the same issue with illustrations of the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. Outside of that, during the four months he’d been in South Carolina Bill had sent little besides portraits of secessionist leaders, sketches of rallies, parties and gallantly posing soldiers, and chatty notes describing the fervor of the South Carolinians for their new nation.

Despite the South’s revolutionary fervor, conservative Northerners still cherished hopes of mollifying the Southerners sufficiently to restore the Union. Abolitionist meetings were set upon by mobs led by lawyers and clerks as well as lower class ruffians. In the abolitionist stronghold of Boston, anti-slavery meetings were broken up with the unofficial blessing of the police. In January and February, Zach— dispatched to upstate New York for the
Tribune—
had wired reports of attacks on abolitionist gatherings in Buffalo, Rochester, Rome and Auburn. Only in Albany did an anti-slavery meeting proceed uninterrupted, protected by the police and the presence of the city’s mayor, seated on the platform with a revolver in plain view on his lap. David had read the account with a shiver of fear for Zach’s safety.

He’d missed Zach, he admitted to himself, however much he told himself a period of separation would cool their ardor. He sighed, redirected his attention to the drawing of the strutting Southern regiment.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

With the approach of April, Bill Waud’s dispatches from Charleston took on a grimmer tone. South Carolina pressed her claim to the Federal fort, Sumter, on an island commanding the entrance to Charleston harbor. Bill forwarded sketches of entrenched guns on Morris Island, the Charleston armory and the batteries ringing the Charleston harbor.

April sixth, a month after his inauguration, Lincoln informed the governor of South Carolina that he intended reprovisioning Fort Sumter, nearly out of supplies since an attack by South Carolina shore batteries had repulsed a Northern relief ship.

The new Confederate cabinet replied with a demand for the fort’s surrender. On April 12
^th
the Confederates opened fire on the unyielding fort. Two days later, Sumter’s commander formally surrendered Fort Sumter to the superior Confederate forces. On Monday, April 15
^th
, Lincoln proclaimed the South to be in a state of insurrection, and issued a call for 75,000 state militia.

The attack on Sumter wrought a “wonderful transformation,”
Leslie’s
reported. War fever took over the North; the Stars and Stripes waved from every building. David filled his sketchpad with scenes of mass rallies in Union Square, the fervent faces of cheering men and women mirroring those of the Confederate celebrants in Bill’s dispatches from South Carolina.

Northerners of every persuasion rallied behind the President. The prominent abolitionist Wendell Phillips abandoned twenty years of calls for disunion to welcome a war which, he now felt, would bring freedom in its wake.

Dick Potter, in accord with his abolitionist views, gave notice to the
Tribune
and enlisted in the newly mobilizing militia. David felt alone in viewing the conflict with misgivings. He sat silently at Dick’s farewell party in Pfaff’s, listening to other young reporters boast of their plans to join up. At least he was past the age where anyone would expect him to volunteer for military duty, not that he could imagine taking up arms against his home state, any more than he could see himself fighting in defense of slavery.

On April 17, a Virginia State Convention adopted an ordinance of secession, voting 88 to 55 to submit the question to popular referendum in May. The western counties, at least, seemed reluctant to leave the Union. It was possible the populace would override the action of the convention.

It was a slim hope at best.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

“If I were a few years younger, I warrant you I’d be in uniform myself,” Zach said in David’s ear as they watched the first squadrons of Colonel Ellsworth’s New York Fire Zouaves march smartly down Broadway. The onlookers were crushed so tightly together that David felt Zach’s beard rubbing his face, yet he had to strain to make out his words over the noise of the crowd.

“They’re damned impressive,” he answered, his eyes fixed on the flamboyant Zouaves—the 11
^th
New York Infantry—in their colorful red and blue uniforms. At their head, drawing excited yells of admiration, stepped young Colonel Ellsworth, more dashing than any of his men.

“It’s amazing how he’s formed such a splendidly turned out regiment in so short a time,” David added. He’d sketched the Fire Zouaves as they drilled the day before, admiring the precision of their acrobatic maneuvers in the exotic, Arabic-inspired uniforms Ellsworth had adapted for them. Only twenty-four years old, Elmer Ellsworth— a one-time student in Lincoln’s law office—had outfitted and trained his men at his own expense. In just a few weeks, he’d turned the volunteers he’d recruited from New York City firemen into a military unit of dashing verve and precision.

David turned his attention back to the parade. The Fire Zouaves marched by in colorful unison, the rhythms of their regimental band nearly drowned out by the shouts of the watching throng. David’s enthusiasm swelled with that of the crowd, his reservations about the war momentarily set aside as the Zouaves trooped by in glorious pageantry.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

The lead steamer moved silently across the Potomac under a moonlit sky, trailed closely by two sister ships bearing the men of the 11
^th
New York. Ellsworth surveyed his troops with satisfaction, then turned to the accompanying newsmen. “The 1
^st
Michigan will cross into Alexandria over the Long Bridge while we take the Secesh by surprise, landing at the foot of the town. We’re not expecting much resistance.”