The Warriors (37 page)

“You walk away!”

Michael pondered, reluctantly shook his head.

“I appreciate your side of it, General. I want to see this line go through. So do most of the men. They’ll say little about it—they’d be scorned as sentimental—but they’re as anxious to reach the meridian as you. It’s become a point of pride.”

He looked Casement in the eye. “But I’m not sure I can pay the price you’ve set. As I told you, I had a bellyful of fighting in the Irish Brigade. On the other hand, I will not be trampled on.”

He thought Casement was about to smile. He didn’t. Instead, he said crisply, “Entirely up to you. We understand each other.”

“Yes, sir,” Michael started to leave.

“Boyle.”

Michael turned back.

“You tell another man I said this and I’ll deny it to the gates of paradise. I wish you’d broken the back of that son of a bitch.”

At last Michael grinned.

“I almost wish I had too, sir.”

“Mind now”—another stabbing finger—“it has nothing to do with his former service—except that being on the losing side affected his attitude. If any man could have taken care of him, it would be one of Colonel Meagher’s own.”

Michael’s grin widened. “That’s always how we felt in the Irish Brigade. We could do the job when others couldn’t.”

Casement sobered. “But you lost your chance. Don’t seek another.”

Michael offered no assurances. He couldn’t.

“Do you have any objections if I look in on Christian this evening, General?”

“I don’t care if you look in on Satan himself so long as you avoid Worthing and help me lay a mile of track a day, six days a week. Now get out of here, find yourself a replacement, and take charge of Worthing’s gangs.”

A stunned look. “Take charge?”

Exasperated, Casement waved. “Someone’s got to fill the man’s spot! You’re diligent. You know the routine. You’re promoted. Until and unless you promote yourself back to Omaha.”

Casement sat down, whirled his chair toward the desk, and immediately began to sort through the accumulated papers, the astonished Irishman already forgotten.

S
TARTING SHORTLY BEFORE THREE
in the afternoon, General Jack Casement personally took charge at the end of the track.

From the supply handlers, Michael had already dragooned a fifth member for his gang—a plump, bow-legged acquaintance of Murphy’s named Artemus Corkle. And to the surprise of Murphy and the rest, Michael insisted on being a working supervisor. He handled the fifth position on the gang and kept an eye on the various other crews when he wasn’t carrying rails.

He felt miserable, childishly weak after the brawl. But he drove himself, unwilling to surrender to the aches and dizziness. If he were to establish his authority, it had to be done at once, while the other gangs were still grateful Worthing had been removed.

The strategy worked. Casement watched with approval as Michael prodded and cajoled some spike men who’d gotten sloppy, never showing his fear that he’d pass out at any moment.

But Michael’s performance was all that Casement approved. Although the noon meal had been shortened from one hour to twenty minutes, by the time the sun began to slant low over the prairie, setting the Platte alight with red ripples, not quite three-quarters of a mile of track had been put down. Casement grumpily called a halt. He murmured a word of congratulations to Michael, then announced there’d be no Sunday labor. But the lost quarter of a mile would be made up Monday.

Casement retired to his quarters, a scowl on his face. He wasn’t the only one scowling. As the men straggled back toward the perpetual train, the Saturday night conversation was short on laughter and long on complaints. Business at Dorn’s whiskey wagon commenced almost at once.

Normally, Michael Boyle loved the calm of the prairie evenings. The stark lines of the horizon were softened by the dusk. Lanterns on the work train shone like large yellow stars below the smaller, bluer ones glimmering in the purple arch of the darkening east.

The beauty of the Nebraska sunset held little attraction for him tonight. He was worn throughout from his effort to stay alert and on his feet during the seemingly interminable afternoon. He was tormented by pain in his hands, shoulders, and back. He was increasingly ashamed of having lost control and turned on Worthing. And he couldn’t forget the captain was still at the railhead, his face pulped, and his authority destroyed. Sean Murphy had reported the Virginian was still lying in his bunk in one of the sleeping cars—not Michael’s, fortunately. No doubt Worthing would soon be plotting retaliation—if he wasn’t already.

Casement’s charge not to indulge in further fighting rankled too. Michael wanted to do a good job of handling his new responsibilities. That was the sole reason he’d driven himself so cruelly all afternoon.

But if it came to a test of loyalty to General Jack—loyalty meaning turning the other cheek to the Virginian—Michael knew which way his decision would go.

At the evening meal he said little to his companions, Murphy and Greenup Williams. After a while they ceased their jokes about earning promotions with bare knuckles and let him eat in silence.

When their plates and cups were empty, the men walked to the office car and waited their turn at the paymaster’s cubicle. Some of the rust eaters took all of their wages in greenbacks or gold. Others had part or all of their pay posted to their accounts. Michael chose the last alternative; he didn’t plan to buy any whiskey tonight. He intended to sit with Christian—if Dorn’s daughter would permit him inside the tent.

During the final hour of the workday, a combination payroll and commissary train had chugged in: two cars, a tender, and a locomotive whose engineer had decorated the top of his headlight box with spreading stag antlers. The train also brought mail. After having his wages marked down, Michael walked back to see whether there might be a letter from Jephtha.

To his surprise, he discovered two.

In his bunk, Michael poured a little of his carefully hoarded tobacco into the bowl of his clay churchwarden, lit the pipe, and wriggled into a comfortable position for reading.

One of the two letters addressed in Jephtha Kent’s familiar, boldly slanted hand was extremely thick. He opened the other, slimmer one first. It took him about a minute and a half to scan the message Jephtha had penned in mid-July.

Jephtha’s first wife Fan had been prostrated by a heat seizure and had died two days later. Jephtha and his current spouse, the likable former proprietress of a Washington boardinghouse, were leaving next morning for the burial services in Lexington. Gideon, his wife, Margaret, and their four-year-old daughter, Eleanor, were going too. Gideon was again searching for work, Jephtha noted.

That last disturbed Michael. Gideon and his family weren’t having an easy time of it in New York.

Michael had never met Jephtha’s three sons. Yet he felt a curious kinship with them due to his closeness to their father. In spirit, he might have been their cousin or half brother.

Of the three, he knew most about Gideon—because Jephtha had had more to tell. Previous letters written from Jephtha’s small Methodist parsonage had contained a good deal of information about Gideon Kent’s activities and attitudes since the end of the war.

Michael knew Gideon had been glad to see the conflict end. And he’d been fortunate that his rank of major excluded him from those classes of military men to whom Andrew Johnson’s General Amnesty Proclamation of May ’65 did not apply. Southern army colonels, navy lieutenants, and any officer trained at West Point or Annapolis who’d returned to the South to fight were still considered guilty of treason until personally pardoned. Had Gideon been a colonel at the time of his parole, he’d have been forced to seek the services of a new breed of legal specialists operating in Washington. The pardon attorneys or “brokers” could speed an individual application to the President’s desk for a fee of $100 or $200. Even in making peace there was profit for scoundrels and opportunists, it seemed.

Michael knew Gideon had been dismayed at the South’s defeat. But he’d accepted it—and considered that chapter of his life closed. He’d told his father he was ready to get on with the business of making a life for himself, his wife, and daughter. He’d even shown Jephtha a document he’d written out as a reminder. It was a verbatim copy of the widely publicized loyalty oath required of those who received individual clemency from Johnson.

Whoever took the oath vowed before God to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and to abide by the laws of the Union, including all proclamations dealing with Negro freedom. Various groups of noncombatant Southerners exempted from Johnson’s general amnesty—postmasters, judges, tax collectors, even former Confederate government printers—had to swear the oath before they could again buy or sell real estate, apply for patents or try to recover their own land if it had been confiscated as enemy property.

Gideon hadn’t been required to take the oath. He’d written it out as a private, personal declaration. Jephtha was delighted his son had returned to civilian life in a positive frame of mind, determined not to let the past, or his prison injury, ruin his future.

Despite the loss of his left eye, Gideon—at least according to Jephtha—looked handsomer than ever, even rakish with the black patch.

More important, he seemed to possess a new drive. Before the war he’d been easygoing, an indifferent student. The time in prison had made him realize he knew nothing except cavalry tactics. He’d decided he’d better settle down and try to learn a skill—or at least find gainful employment in some place where the economy was still thriving.

Considering the question of secession settled, and the country whole again, the place Gideon had chosen in preference to burned-out Richmond was New York.

Jephtha had used his connections in newspaper circles to get his eldest son a position as an apprentice in the pressroom of Gordon Bennett’s highly successful
New York Herald.
Working for the
Union
owned by Louis Kent was out of the question.

Gideon’s supervisors had reportedly praised his diligence and quick wits. But he’d quit quietly at the end of six months, unable to tolerate the confining indoor work. Reading the news in a letter, Michael had recalled hearing Jephtha once say his son was happiest outdoors, no matter what the weather. Gideon had taken a second job driving a wagon for a construction company.

The man who hired him evidently hadn’t been concerned about his obviously Southern speech. That wasn’t the case with the manager of the firm’s wagon fleet. Gideon lasted exactly two days—discharged and replaced by a former Union soldier. The manager refused to pay wages to a “Southron traitor.” And according to this current letter, Gideon had been unable to find another position. Michael wasn’t surprised. The labor market was being flooded by returning veterans and newly freed blacks migrating from the South.

In previous correspondence Jephtha had confessed that he’d tried to offer financial assistance to his son. But Gideon had a stubborn pride and a determination to succeed by virtue of his own hard work. Provided anyone would let him work.

Margaret had evidently made a fine adjustment to New York, though. She liked the city, and had helped tide the little family through lean times by doing piecework for some of the better emporiums specializing in individually designed gowns for wealthy women. Gideon’s wife was experienced in that area because of the time she’d spent in her aunt’s Richmond apparel shop.

Jephtha had also remarked that Margaret had done a marvelous job of creating a comfortable home in a small rented house in lower Manhattan. And she helped and supported Gideon in his effort to make up for his lack of education through constant reading.

Naturally Jephtha regretted Gideon hadn’t cared to stick with the printing trade. As a printer, he could have carried on the family tradition begun with Philip Kent’s founding of the firm of Kent and Son in Boston—another business unfortunately still under Louis Kent’s ownership.

But Jephtha was clearly resigned to Gideon’s going his own way—if he could ever find that way in a city glutted with Northerners and blacks eager to take any job.

Jephtha and his son never saw Louis Kent socially. Louis despised the elder Kent for his role in exposing the illegal wartime trading venture. And Gideon was a kind of living accusation that Louis had been a shirker. Undoubtedly Louis had paid the maximum fee—a trifling three hundred dollars out of his millions—to exempt himself from the 1863 Conscription Act that had sent mobs of poor New Yorkers into the streets for four days to riot, burn, and hang blacks from lampposts as a protest against the war and a draft lottery that only the wealthy could escape.

Actually, Michael was thankful for the rift separating Louis from his relatives. Julia Kent was in his thoughts often enough as it was. It would have been too painful if Jephtha’s letters described personal encounters with her.

The shorter letter closed with Jephtha saying that fifteen months after the conclusion of hostilities, he still knew nothing of the whereabouts of his two younger sons.

Always a poor correspondent, Matthew had last written his father early in 1865, from Havana. Matt’s skipper, McGill, had been preparing to take his schooner
Fair Amanda
to one of the last ports still open to the Confederacy—neutral Matamoros, across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas.

That same, final letter from Matt had contained several of the charcoal sketches he’d started making on his own, without formal training, when he was much younger. Jephtha had mailed a drawing to Michael. It was tacked up in the bunk.

He glanced at the sketch now. A sinuous black man, youthful but totally bald, dominated the foreground. He was wearing only a pair of ragged trousers and balancing a metal can on one shoulder.

The black’s other hand was extended, as if he were pleading with someone. His grin was infectious, his eyes merrily sly; the whole figure was bent forward to suggest a subservience that was affected and hence not degrading.