How Few Remain (55 page)

“Sir, I’m seventeen,” Jeb Stuart, Jr., answered. He looked like his father, though instead of that famous shaggy beard he had only a peach-fuzz mustache. But for that, though, he looked older than his years, as any man will coming straight out of battle. With his face dark from black-powder smoke, he had the aspect of a minstrel-show performer freshly escaped from hell.

“How did you become senior officer in your regiment, Lieutenant?” Jackson inquired. How young Stuart had become a lieutenant at his age was another question, but one with an obvious answer—his father must have pulled wires for him.

“Sir, I wasn’t,” Stuart answered. “Captain Sheckard sent me back to Colonel Tinker with word that the Yankees were pressing my company hard.”

“I see.” Jackson wasn’t sure he did, not altogether, but he didn’t press it. Had Sheckard decided to get his important subordinate out of harm’s way, or had he chosen him because he was worth less on the fighting line than an ordinary private? No way to tell, not from here. “Go on.”

“There I was, sir, and a Yankee shell came down, and, next thing I knew, Colonel Tinker was dead and Lieutenant-Colonel
Steinfeldt had his head blown off and Major Overall”—Stuart gulped—”the surgeons took that leg off him, I heard later. And the Yankees were coming at us every which way, and everybody was yelling, ‘What do we do? What do we do?’ “He looked a little green around the gills, remembering. “Nobody else said anything, so I started giving orders. I don’t know whether the captains knew they were coming from me, but they took ’em, and we threw the Yankees back.”

Jackson glanced at Alexander. Alexander was already looking at him. They both nodded and turned back to Jeb Stuart, Jr. Alexander spoke first: “Congratulations, son. Like it or not, you’re a hero.”

That summed it up better than Jackson could have done. He did find one thing to add: “Your father will be very proud of you.”

“Thank you, sir.” Stuart was less in awe of Jackson than most young officers would have been, having known him all his life. But the wobble in his voice had only a little to do with his youth. More came from the question he asked: “Sir, what would have happened if it hadn’t worked out?”

Jackson was not good at diplomatic responses. He managed to come up with one now: “You probably would not be here to wonder about that.”

The young officer needed a moment to see what he meant. Jackson was unsurprised; at that age, he’d thought he was immortal, too. Stuart licked his lips. He understood what might have happened, once Jackson pointed it out. He said, “I meant, sir, if I’d failed but lived.”

“Best to draw a merciful veil of silence over that,” E. Porter Alexander said.

Beneath his coating of smoke and soot, Jeb Stuart, Jr., turned red. “Er, yes, sir,” he said, and turned back to Jackson. “Sir,
will
we hold the Yankees from our flank?”

“That still hangs in the balance,” Jackson replied. “I will say, however, that we have a better chance of doing so thanks to your action, Lieutenant Stuart.” He inclined his head to his old comrade’s son. “You will be changing the ornaments on your collar in short order.”

Jeb Stuart, Jr., understood that right away. He raised a hand to brush one of the single collar bars marking him as a second lieutenant. His grin lit up the inside of the headquarters tent, brighter than all the kerosene lamps hung there.

* * *

Orion Clemens rolled a hard rubber ball through a couple of squads of gray-painted lead soldiers. “Take that, you dirty Rebs!” he shouted as several of them toppled. Sutro ran barking after the ball and through the soldiers, completing the Confederates’ overthrow. With a cry of fierce glee, Orion sent blue-painted lead figures swarming forward. “They’re on the run now!”

His father looked up from
Les Misérables
. “If only it were that easy, for our side or theirs,” Sam Clemens remarked to his wife. “The war would be over in a fortnight, one way or the other, and we could slide back to our comfortable daily business of killing one another by ones and twos—retail, you might say—instead of in great wholesale lots.”

Alexandra set Louisa May Alcott’s
After the War Was Lost
on her lap. “I think too many telegrams from the front have curdled your understanding of human nature.”

“No.” He shook his head in vigorous denial. “It’s not the wires from the front that make your belly think you’ve swallowed melted lead. It’s the ones from the politicians, who keep on claiming the boys die to some better purpose than their own stubborn greed and the generals’ stupidity.”

Even Orion’s triumphal advance was interrupted. Ophelia got the ball away from Sutro and threw it at the toy soldiers who wore blue paint. The missile struck with deadly effect. One of the many casualties flew into the air and bounced off Sam’s shin.

“Artillery!” Ophelia cried. “Knock ’em all down!”

Sam studied his daughter with the mixture of admiration and something close to fear she often raised in his mind. She couldn’t possibly have read the latest despatches out of Louisville … could she? He shook his head. She was, after all, only four years old. She knew her ABCs, she could print her name in a sprawling scrawl, and that was about it. How, then, had she been so uncannily accurate about what the Confederate guns were doing to U.S. attackers?

She was Ophelia. That was how.

“Pa!” Orion shouted angrily. “Look, Pa! See what she did? She broke two of ’em, Pa! This one got his head knocked off, and this other one here, this sergeant, his arm is broke.”

“Casualties of war,” Clemens said. “See? You can’t even fight with toy soldiers without having them get hurt. I wish President
Blaine were here, I do. It would learn him a good one, if you don’t mind my speaking Missouri.”

“Sam.” Alexandra Clemens somehow stuffed a world of warning into one syllable, three letters’ worth of sound.

“Well, maybe I could find a better time to talk about politics,” her husband admitted. With a sigh, Sam raised his voice. “Ophelia!”

“Yes, Pa?” Suddenly, she sounded like an ordinary four-year-old again.

“Come here, young lady.”

“Yes, Pa.” No, not an ordinary four-year-old after all: as she walked toward him, a halo of rectitude sprang into glowing life above her head. Sam blinked, and it was gone. A trick of the gaslights, or perhaps of the imagination, though what a newspaperman needed with such useless stuff as an imagination was beyond him.

“You broke two of your brother’s lead soldiers,” he said, doing his best to sound stern and not break out laughing at the sight of the oh so precious, oh so innocent countenance before him. “What have you got to say for yourself?”

“I’m sorry, Pa.” The voice was small and sweet and pure, like the chiming of a silver bell.

Probably sorry you didn’t wipe out the whole blasted regiment
, Clemens thought. He turned her over his knee and gave her a swat on the bottom that was as much ritual as punishment. That opened the floodgates for a storm of tears. Ophelia always howled like a banshee when she got smacked. Part of that, Sam judged, was anger that she should be subjected to such indignities. And part of it probably stemmed from a calculation that, if she made every spanking as unpleasant as possible, she wouldn’t get so many of them.

Orion seemed properly gratified at the racket his sister made. When she stalked off to sulk in her tent, he held out the broken lead soldiers and asked, “Can you fix ’em, Pa?”

“I’ll take ’em to the paper tomorrow,” Clemens answered. “The printers can melt ’em down for type metal.”

“Sam!” Three letters and an exclamation point from Alexandra this time. Too late. Orion started crying louder than Ophelia had.

Over those theatrical groans, Sam said, “I was only joking. They’ll be able to solder the soldiers back together.” He had to say it twice more, once to get his son to hear him through the
caterwauling he was putting out and again to get the boy to believe him.

“Can’t you remember to save all that for the editorial page and not to bring it home to your family?” Alexandra asked after relative calm—and calm among the relatives—returned.

“I’m all of a piece, my dear,” Clemens answered. “You can’t very well expect me to flow like a Pennsylvania gusher at the
Morning Call
and then put out pap for no better reason than that I’ve come home at night.”

“Can I expect you to keep in mind that your son
will
believe you no matter what you say, while the politicos who read your editorials
won’t
believe you no matter what you say?” Alexandra was never more dangerous than when she worked hardest to hold on to her patience.

Sam wagged a finger at her. “You had better be careful. You will make me remember that once upon a time I was fitted out with a sense of shame, and that’s dangerous excess baggage for a man in my line of work.”

“Hmm,” was all Alexandra said. “Joke as much as you like, but—”

Orion broke in: “Pa, will you really and truly fix my soldiers?”

“They will rise from the dead—or at least the maimed—like Lazarus coming forth from his tomb,” Clemens promised. Orion looked blank. His father explained: “In other words, yes, I will do that. If only General Willcox could make a similar—”

Alexandra suffered a coughing fit of remarkable timeliness. Sam shot her a look half annoyed, half grateful. Orion said, “As long as they really and truly get fixed, it’s all right.” He paused, then asked, “When you get ’em soldered, will it leave scars on ’em, like?”

“I expect it may,” Sam said solemnly. “I’m sorry, but—” “Bully!” Orion exclaimed, which made his father shut up with a snap.

The next morning, Sam walked over to the
Morning Call
carrying the mortal remains of the lead soldiers in a jacket pocket. One of the printers, a wizened little Welshman named Charlie Vaughan, took a look at the casualties of war and said, “Yeah, we can set ’em right again.” His cigar, made from a weed even nastier than those Clemens favored, bobbed up and down as he spoke. “Damn shame we can’t fix the real soldiers this easy, ain’t it?”

“You, sir, have been listening at my window,” Sam said. Vaughan shook his head before realizing the editor was joking. He gave Sam a sour look. “Never mind,” Clemens told him. “You’ll make my son very happy and help my daughter out of trouble.” He rolled his eyes. “And God forbid I should use that particular phrase fifteen years from now.”

Jerk, jerk, jerk went the printer’s cigar as he chuckled. “Know what you mean,” he said. “I have three of ’em. Married the last one off a couple years ago, so I don’t have to worry about that any more.”

“All your children out of the house, then?” Clemens asked. When Charlie Vaughan nodded, he aimed another question at him: “How the devil do you stand so much quiet?”

“You think you’re making fun of me again, only you ain’t,” Vaughan said. “Gets almost spooky-like, sometimes.” The cigar twitched. “Would be worse, I suppose, if my missus’d ever learned to shut her trap.”

“I’ll be sure to tell her you said that, next time I see her,” Sam said, and beat a hasty retreat in the direction of his desk before the printer could choose one of the numerous small, heavy objects within arm’s length and throw it at him.

“Morning, Sam,” Clay Herndon said when he walked in a few minutes later. “What have you got there?”

“This? Police-court story Edgar turned in last night,” Clemens answered, excising an adverb. “Man bites dog, you might say: three Chinamen charged with setting on an Irish railroad worker, whaling the stuffing out of him, and departing with his wallet. Since the Celestials decided the wallet was worth keeping, they must have caught the mick before he started his round of the saloons.”

“Ha,” Herndon said, and then, “You’re right—that’s not the way it usually goes. The Irish get liquored up, they cave in John Chinaman’s skull, and the judge slaps ’em on the wrist. We’ve seen that story so many times, it’s hardly news enough to put in the paper.”

“Back when I first started working for this sheet, in the days when the office was over on Montgomery, you couldn’t have put that story in the paper,” Sam said. “Publisher wouldn’t let you get by with it. He thought it would offend the Irish, though I always reckoned not more than a double handful of ’em could have read it.”

“Those must have been the days,” Herndon said. “This would have been a rip-snorting town back then.”

“It was, when I first got here,” Clemens agreed. “Then the United States went and lost the war, and San Francisco got a lot of the snorts ripped clean out of it. The panic was a hell of a lot worse than it ever got back in the States.” For the first time in a long while, he hauled out the old California expression for the rest of the USA. “The railroad hadn’t gone through yet, remember, and we were about as near cut off from the rest of the world as made no difference—and the rest of the world seemed to like it just fine that way, too.”

“I’ve heard it was pretty grim, all right,” Clay Herndon allowed.

“Grim?” Clemens said. “Why, it made dying look like a circus with lemonade and elephants, because once you were dead you didn’t have to try and pay your bills with greenbacks worth a hot four cents on the gold dollar—oh, they dropped down to three cents on the dollar for a week or two, but by then everybody who could be scared to death was already clutching a lily in his fist.”

“Hard times,” Herndon said. “Every time somebody who went through it here starts talking about it, you wonder how people got by.”

“You hunker down and you hang on tight to what you’ve got, if it isn’t that damn lily,” Sam answered. “The great earthquake of ‘65 didn’t do us any good, either. You’ll have felt ’em here now and again, but there’s never been anything like that since, thank heavens, not even the quake of ‘72, which wasn’t a piker. I don’t reckon we’ll see the like again for another couple of hundred years, and, if God pays any attention to what I think, that’d be too soon, too.”

“Even the common, garden-variety earthquakes are bad enough,” Herndon said with a shudder. “Makes me queasy just thinking about ’em.” He deliberately and obviously changed the subject: “What’s the war news?”

“They’re killing people,” Sam said, and let it go at that. When his friend coughed in annoyance, he blinked, as if surprised. “Oh, you want the
details.”
He pawed through the blizzard of telegrams on his desk. “General Willcox has proved he can get stuck in two different places at the same time—a lesser man would have been incapable of it, don’t you think? The British gunboats on the Great Lakes have bombarded Cleveland again, though
Lord knows why, having visited the place once, they felt inclined to come back. The Indians are on the warpath in Kansas, the Confederates are on the warpath in New Mexico Territory, and Abe Lincoln’s on the warpath in Montana Territory. And, with ruffles and flourishes, the War Department announced the capture of Pocahontas, Arkansas.”