When This Cruel War Is Over (11 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
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“No! His father would kill Robin. He'd kill him in cold blood if he ever suspected. Better me. I'll have to trust you—and the faceless bureaucrats above you.”
“You can trust me, Amelia. You must know that.”
She looked past him at Lincoln's picture, her lips compressed to a bitter line. Her silence stirred a throb of pain in Gentry's amputated arm. Strange, the way pain existed in absent flesh—and in departed affection.
“How should I communicate with you?”
“Write letters to me at my store, addressed to Walter Scott. I want to know the number of men they've raised, where their guns and ammunition are being hidden—above all the exact date on which they plan to rise.”
“I understand.”
She rose to go. She looked so sad, Gentry wondered if she was mourning this annihilation of the pathetic ghost of their lost love. For a moment he wanted to put his arm around her and ask her to forgive him. But he was afraid she would recoil from his touch.
“Lincoln says after the war we can begin to think about loving each other again.”
There was no answer. Amelia vanished into the dim center of the cellar. Gentry listened to her slowly ascend the stairs.
Is that good enough, Abe?
he asked the picture on the wall.
Is that good enough?
THE SULTRY RIVER BREEZE WAS almost tropical in its mixture of heat and humidity. It combined with the current to drive the red-hulled canoe down the Ohio at a swift, almost reckless pace. In the prow, Janet Todd lounged against a set of red leather cushions like an houri in white. But Paul Stapleton, wielding the paddle in the stem, did not see the passionate woman he had held in his arms last week. He was not on the broad Ohio. He was on another river and there was another face, another body in the prow: Jeff Tyler. He was paddling past Anthony's Nose and the other mountains around West Point while Jeff gave him playful orders like a pompous captain on a man-of-war.
Stop
, Paul told himself.
That is not death in the prow of this canoe. It is life, woman, vivid with desire—with all the potential for happiness that love can create.
“There's a cove about a mile from here,” Janet said. “Let's stop there for our picnic.”
In another fifteen minutes, the prow thrust through a stand of reeds and grated on the sandy shore. Janet sprang out and held the canoe until Paul joined her and dragged it onto the grass. Janet lifted out a picnic basket and led Paul through the trees to a dell surrounded by huge cedars. Their branches formed a canopy against the July sun. Janet set out cold ham and potato salad and a bottle of white wine.
“We can speak freely here,” Janet said. “There isn't a house within two miles. My brothers used to come here and pretend to be Indians. They called it the Happy
Hunting Ground. They drank liquor they'd snitched from their parents' cellars and pranced around the fire in breech clouts, doing war dances. Lucy and I crept through the woods one day and watched them.”
“I envy them everything except you seeing me in a breechclout,” Paul said.
“It's in my brothers' names—and in the names of all the other dead on both sides—that I'm hoping you'll join me in a cause that will unite us in the deepest imaginable way.”
She was ignoring what he had told her about a professional soldier's indifference to causes. Once more he tried to evade her determination. “I can't imagine how I can feel more united to you than I am already—”
“It's a way—a plan—to end this abominable war.”
“End the war? Janet—how can people our age do such a thing? Our best hope is to survive it—”
“I want you to join me in creating a new nation, a western confederacy that will pursue a separate destiny from the Old South and the Yankee East.”
“I hope we're not going to do this all by ourselves.”
His attempt at humor went nowhere. Darkness spilled from Janet's eyes, transforming her into a woman from an ancient saga, a prophetess, a sibyl. “Tens of thousands of Democrats in Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, and Michigan have learned they have nothing in common with the hate-filled hearts of the original sections. If they rise up and withdraw from the war, the killing will end. The West, with its immense resources, will hold the balance of power between the old North and South—and insist on immediate peace.”
South,
whispered Paul's Gettysburg wound
. That's where she's trying to take you. South. This western confederacy is a stalking horse for the other confederacy.
Doesn't this prove something?
whispered Jeff Tyler in the deepest recesses of Paul's heart.
Wasn't south where you wanted to go with me?
Paul swallowed the cold wine and struggled to regain the cool professional soldier who lived on risk. With almost desperate urgency, he told himself Janet Todd was proposing a fantasy. President Abraham Lincoln was not going to let raw militiamen seize the nations' heartland without a fight. A dozen veteran regiments from Ulysses Grant's Army of the Potomac or William Tecumseh Sherman's Army of the Tennessee would annihilate them in a week.
Suddenly Paul saw himself as Charles Blondin, the daredevil acrobat who had mesmerized the world in 1859 by walking across Niagara Falls on a high wire. But in this version Janet was walking just ahead of him, putting both their lives at risk. The cataract boiled beneath them. It had its own fascination, a weird kind of face and voice. Was it the war, with its ten thousand murderous mouths?
“I wish I could believe in your vision,” Paul said. “But won't it lead to even more bloodshed and worse federal tyranny? Won't Lincoln detach men from the armies in the East and West and rout these amateur soldiers? I'm afraid their uprising will only give him the justification he needs to set up a military dictatorship.”
“If he tries that, he'll encounter a secret weapon that will reduce Washington, D.C., and every other city in the East to ashes.”
“What's that?”
“Greek fire. It's a form of combustion that resists all attempts to extinguish it. It can burn down whole blocks in minutes.”
“I've heard the term. It was supposedly used in the Middle Ages. But I thought it was a myth.”
Janet shook her head. “A German scientist in Canada has rediscovered it. Hundreds of men are being trained in its use in Canada at this very moment. Hundreds more have already smuggled supplies of it into targeted northern cities.”
“These men are from Kentucky?”
“Some are. Others are from the Southern Confederacy. The two confederacies will be natural allies. Though each will retain its independence.”
Paul said nothing, but he realized his stare was accusatory. Janet was admitting her real motive: southern independence. For a moment her intensity faltered. She regained it by an act of will. “Other states may break away from New England's grip and join the West or the South. New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware. They all despise Lincoln and his war—and loathe Yankees.”
“New Jersey certainly does,” Paul said, thinking of how often he had heard Boston abolitionists denounced at his boyhood dinner table.
“Paul—if you join me we'll have a love that's united by our admiration, our desire, for each other—and by a cause that will change America's history.”
History never made anyone happy. The Stapletons, living and dead, have proved that a dozen times,
whispered the Gettysburg wound. Paul's aching head wanted to say it but his heart chose silence. A quarrel now might fatally undo their balance on the high wire.
Janet leaned toward him, her voice gathering fresh intensity in the shadowy stillness. “Say yes and love me here, now, in the daylight,” she said. “I want to see all of you and I want you to see all of me. I want our nakedness to be a pledge of absolute honesty between us, a vow to conceal nothing, to hesitate at nothing, to risk everything without shame or fear of disgrace.”
A mistake
, whispered the Gettysburg wound in Paul's aching head. But in his heart another voice (Jeff Tyler's?) whispered it was
right
. It was exactly right for a soldier who lived on risk. The risk was more formidable than he had imagined it could become. But why should that stop him? Once love became part of their lives, it could change everything.
Slowly, they stripped away their clothes until Janet
was in a chemise and Paul in his underwear. He hesitated and watched her slide the straps of the chemise down her arms and peel it down her body. Naked, she walked toward him across the thick grass and kissed him.
It was not the first time Paul had seen a naked woman. In New Orleans, where French mores reigned in the brothels off Congo Square, nakedness was a given. But those women, even the most beautiful of them, were playthings, creatures of the night. Never had Paul expected to see naked the woman he would call his wife. Like most Americans, he accepted the need for darkness to make love respectable.
This was a new kind of love, infused with war's delirium. “Janet,” Paul whispered. “Janet.” He placed his hands on her firm, full rump and returned her kiss.
“Now, now,” she murmured.
His lips on her mouth, Paul carried her back to where the dell narrowed and the grass was lush. He put her down and knelt beside her, his eyes roving her body, from her small coned breasts to the thick dark hair of her pubis. Above them the summer wind sighed through the topmost branches of the cedars. Sunlight spangled the shadowed grass and her flesh and his flesh, creating a magical aura.
“How beautiful you are,” he said. It was not completely true. Janet's body was much like he had imagined it, more stocky than slim, not in accord with the standards of classic beauty. But that only made her supremely beautiful for Paul. A new irremovable crystallization was occurring in his soul. No matter what happened in the unforeseeable future, Paul knew he would never love another woman this way.
Janet touched the ugly scar of his Antietam wound on his chest. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Now and then,” he said.
“When I saw it the night I came to you, I vowed I'd make sure a bullet would never do that to you again.”
“Remember what I said that night? No matter what happens, our love comes first. Nothing can destroy it, failure, defeat, disappointment. Do you believe that?”
“We won't fail.”
He kissed her before she could say more. He wanted to bar history and the possibility of its pain from this moment. He almost believed that if he isolated them from time's unpredictable grasp, they could achieve the perfection they needed to armor themselves against future disappointment.
If time did not stop, it unquestionably faltered. The swift shining Ohio became as motionless as a river in a painting; the wind seemed to dwindle in the treetops; even birds fell still. “Love, love, love,” Paul whispered with each slow deliberate thrust. His brother Charlie had taught him well. He knew how to bring a woman to the edge of rapture.
Simultaneously, Paul remained Blondin on the high wire, performing an act infinitely more daring than that famous acrobat had ever attempted. To his surprise and secret pleasure, daylight made his performance a drama of conquest and submission that convinced him he was not surrendering. It was Janet who was surrendering. The willful woman who teased and taunted him at the Gentry house vanished before his eyes. She became a creature of the forest, a heaving primitive thing, crying out with uncontrolled delight. In Paul's churning head this transformation promised him that somehow he would extricate them from her commitment to the South's lost cause—in spite of Jeff Tyler's forlorn grave in Georgia.
IN HOPEMONT, Lucy LAY ON Janet Todd's bed, gasping for breath. She was covered with sweat yet she shook and shivered like someone who had just fallen into the Ohio River in December. She had run all the way back from her hiding place in the bushes beyond the dell where she had watched Miss Janet and Major Paul Stapleton make love.
It was so unbelievable, Lucy found herself wondering if some evil spirit had cast a spell on her. Was she going to be damned to hell for betraying Miss Janet and Colonel Todd? Were maybe the ghosts of Mister Jack or Mister Andy responsible? She remembered how mad they were when Miss Janet let drop that Lucy had led her down there with her friend Alicia Jameson to watch the boys dancing around that fire practically bare-ass.
Maybe their ghosts were driving her crazy in revenge for that long-ago betrayal. They probably knew all about what she was doing because in the spirit world there were no secrets, everybody knew everything because they were part of God. If they kept torturing her, maybe she'd confess her spying and Colonel Todd would whip her until she died and then Colonel Gentry never would get Maybelle out of that whorehouse in New Orleans.
Thinking of Maybelle steadied Lucy. It was not an evil dream. It was
real.
It was
true
. Miss Janet had taken off her clothes and made love like a fallen woman there on the grass. What could have gotten into her soul, that she'd do a thing like that? No matter how bad Lucy felt
about betraying Miss Janet, she never stopped loving and respecting her.
Lucy had lived half her life in Miss Janet's body, imagining how good it must feel to be white and beautiful and have all those men wanting her and being able to say, no, not you or you or you but maybe you, Adam Jameson. And that tremendous man, so big his head kept bumping every doorway he walked through, slobbered and gurgled like a four-year-old whose momma had just said he could have a tiny taste of chocolate cake for dessert.
Having that kind of power over men had made Miss Janet seem like a kind of archangel to Lucy, a creature with huge white wings and a flaming sword. Miss Janet had shown her a picture of an archangel once in the family Bible. Black Joe, the preacher who went through the county saving souls at all the plantations, said that was exactly how they looked and they were the most powerful creatures in the spirit world outside God and the devil.
For a long time Lucy thought Miss Janet could not possibly be human like her, even though she had to go to the jakes like everybody else and her blood came every month and twice she got the summer fever and sweated and moaned and shivered and shook in her bed for a week or two with Lucy wiping her forehead and neck and giving her ice water every five minutes. Still Lucy thought maybe Miss Janet was just pretending to be human and at night she turned into that creature of wings and spirit.
Even when Miss Janet said maybe to Adam Jameson, she never let him near the woman part of her. The most she ever allowed was a kiss at twilight in the garden gazebo and a little squeeze that maybe let him feel her bubbies against his chest. He probably wanted to tear off her clothes and take her right there in the gazebo but he didn't. Instead he went away telling himself he was a no good.
Lucy knew this was the way white men thought about women like Miss Janet because she used to listen to Mister Jack and Mister Andy talk about their love lives. They never minded enjoying niggers and whores bare-ass or any other way but a respectable white woman like Miss Janet was another thing altogether. They almost hated to admit they wanted such women that way. They'd confess to each other how much they wanted someone like Adam Jameson's sister Alicia and how ashamed it made them and off they'd go to Louisville or Cincinnati for another go at the whores.
That was the way white people did it. They divided women up into good and bad and only loved the good ones. Niggers didn't get divided. They were only there to play with when you couldn't find a bad white woman. Adam Jameson loved Miss Janet so much you could see him almost bent over with the pain of it. It was like a knife in his belly all the time. But he never complained because the pain only proved how much he loved her.
Lucy used to look forward to the day when Adam would marry Miss Janet. She would sleep outside their door and listen to the love sounds inside. Even a lady like Miss Janet was bound to make some—and that would be the time when Lucy would creep into Miss Janet's body and find out what it meant to get laid and be loved by someone at the same time.
Niggers didn't seem to know how to do that, at least the niggers she knew. You couldn't blame them, really, because if you loved someone and the master decided to sell one or the other south the poor nigger could go stark crazy with the pain of it and maybe kill himself or herself or do something even worse like putting insect powder in the master's oatmeal and winding up getting hanged outside the county courthouse if the master's people didn't kill him or her first.
No one knew about the trick Lucy had learned of getting into Miss Janet's body. It was easy when you spent
so much time with a person, watching her dress and undress and talk to you like she was talking to herself and you stood at the windows watching her flirt and dance with men since she was twelve years old and before that sat outside the schoolroom each day and walked her there and home again and made jokes with her about boys and other girls and pretty soon knew almost everything Janet thought and felt about the whole world.
What upset Lucy most about the dream or the craziness or whatever she saw in the Happy Hunting Ground today was the way Miss Janet talked that Union major out of his clothes. It was her idea. No white lady was ever supposed to do such a thing. Lucy could see the major did not really want to strip. Maybe he knew Miss Janet was acting like a whore and he didn't really like it, no matter what she said about it meaning they'd never hide anything from each other.
Miz Janet, how could you do it? How could you spoil my idea about you? I loved and respected you so much. I never thought you'd get hurt or anything besides disappointed from the stuff I've been telling Colonel Gentry. In fact he told me that it would help him keep you from getting hurt. They'd arrest all those traitors like Rogers Jameson and no one would ever know about Miz Janet but him.
Lucy wrapped her arms around herself and moaned, remembering why she loved Miss Janet. She would never forget the time when they were little and Mrs. Todd caught Lucy with her finger in a chocolate cake while they were entertaining Colonel Gentry and his mother at dinner and Colonel Todd swore he'd whip Lucy but Janet said,
Father
,
if you whip her I'd feel it as if you whipped me.
She was remembering that time when they were walking in the woods and Janet told her they had the same soul. She said it was like water poured into two different glasses from the same pitcher. She said
Colonel Gentry (except he wasn't a colonel then) had written a poem about it. She said it was better than anything some Yankee named Ralph Waldo Emerson ever wrote. She said Uncle Henry was a very artistic man, whatever that meant.
Instead of thinking about Uncle Henry and Ralph Waldo Emerson Lucy had thought about the soul and the body. She was almost tempted to tell Miss Janet that she didn't care about the soul, no matter what the preachers said. What she wanted was the same body as Miss Janet, the same white skin and perfume to put on it and beautiful white dresses to wear over it. She almost told her how she lived in her body sometimes. But she was afraid Miss Janet would say she was crazy.
Oh oh oh. None of these thoughts stopped the memory of the crazy dream that turned out to be real. Miss Janet there with Major Stapleton in the shadowy green grass with the sun making spangles on their white skin. Lucy could see something strange was happening inside the major's soul, something was making him hold back a part of himself, while Miss Janet held back nothing, she was as gone as a mare in heat. There was no soul; there was only a kind of blankness, as if her face were a piece of paper with all the words washed off.
Lucy clutched a pillow and wept. She had not been in Miss Janet's body while she watched it. Not for one second. She realized that she could never do that again. They were separate bodies forever now. Miss Janet was no longer mysterious and wonderful in any way. She was just a woman whose skin happened to be white. A woman not so different from Lucy.
That did not mean she stopped loving Miss Janet but it freed her to think about what to do. She had to get over to Indiana to tell Colonel Gentry about this. From what she had heard this afternoon, there was no doubt that Miss Janet was turning Major Stapleton into a Confederate.
Lucy got up, smoothed the bed covers, and went
downstairs. Miss Janet and the major were just getting back from their trip on the river. Miss Janet was telling Colonel Todd how clever the major was, the way he kept close to the shore and avoided the worst of the current and they came home so fast you would swear they were going downriver instead of up.
“Miz Janet,” Lucy said. “I been goin' through your clothes. I found I forgot to pack your new blue taffeta dress, the one you bought the last time you went to Louisville. I give it to one of the Gentry niggers to wash and she never give it back to me. I'll be glad to go get it if you gimmy two pennies for the ferryboat.”
Lucy could see Miss Janet was pleased to hear about this mix-up. It meant she would not have to worry about Lucy waking up at the foot of her bed if she decided to visit Major Stapleton later in the night to celebrate him joining the Confederacy. The dress was actually hanging in Miss Janet's wardrobe upstairs but Lucy planned to fold it neatly and hide it in a bureau drawer in one of the guest rooms until she got back.
An hour later, Lucy was giving the ferryman a penny and listening to the
whump
of the steam engine in the middle of the long open boat. On the other side of the river it was another half hour's walk to Gentry's. It was almost dark when she got there. Who did she see in the front yard talking to Colonel Gentry but the big sergeant, Moses Washington. He looked at Lucy and she looked at him and she suddenly knew she was going to see him in the barn tonight.
Something in Washington's eyes made Lucy think he might be glad to see her. He looked sad and weary, like someone had turned him from a sergeant into a low-down slave nigger. Colonel Gentry asked her what she wanted. She pulled an envelope out of the pocket of her dress and said she had a letter from Major Stapleton: Colonel Gentry looked pleased. He took it from her and told her to get some supper in the kitchen.
Pretty soon Mrs. Gentry, the colonel's mother, came into the kitchen and asked if Miss Janet and the major were enjoying themselves. “Enjoyin' theirselves?” Lucy said. “They is crazy in love, Miz Gentry. She fusses so over everything she wears for him I'm worn to the bone puttin' on and talkin' off dresses. I got so tired I was
uppity.
It's a wonder I didn't get whipped.”
“Janet would never whip you,” Mrs. Gentry said. “You have that poor girl wrapped around your little finger.”
Lucy ate in the kitchen with the Gentrys' cook, Minnie, and her husband, Peter, the butler. They were both old and gray and had rheumatism. They wheezed and groaned when they had to get up from the table. They were free niggers and considered Lucy such slave trash they did not even bother to talk to her. The two maids were the same way. They just looked at Lucy and laughed at her worn-out dress and bare feet.
“Don't they even buy you shoes?” one of them asked.
Minnie and Peter and the maids talked to each other about the war. The maids had brothers in the Union Army. They wanted the war to end before their brothers got killed and didn't care who won or lost. Minnie and Peter wanted the Confederacy to win. If the rebels lost all the slave niggers would come north and take away jobs from free niggers like them and their children. They had sons and daughters working in Indianapolis and Cincinnati who told them this was the big worry of their lives.
Lucy did not try to understand it. She concentrated on the only thing she wanted, getting Maybelle out of that New Orleans whorehouse. After dinner she went outside and saw Moses Washington walking up and down outside the barn like he had a hundred-pound sack of wheat on his back. “I'm comin' to see you tonight,” she said. “Where you sleepin'?”
“Don't bother me,” he said. “You didn't bring me nothin but bad luck, girl.”
“I'm comin'. I got somethin' to tell you,” she said. “Somethin' important 'bout the major.”
“I'll be in the barn.”
Lucy waited until it was really dark and Colonel Gentry turned on the light in the cellar. She darted through the vegetable garden and pulled a string that hung outside the cellar door. It rang a little bell in Colonel Gentry's office. He had another string and bell running down the wall from his bedroom, in case she or some other spy came to see him late at night.
The damp cool air of the cellar made Lucy shiver. The colonel stood tilted to one side, as if he could not balance himself because of his missing arm. “What brings you back so soon?” he asked.
“I got some ‘portant news. Miz Janet's turnin' the major into a Confederate.”

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