When This Cruel War Is Over (30 page)

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
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His big hand touched Paul's face. A gesture of love. It was astonishing to discover Jonathan loved him. Growing up Paul had half feared him. He was ten years older, a man of twenty when Paul was still a boy. Jonathan's love had sent him to Indiana in a forlorn attempt to get him out of harm's way. The love was as real as Jonathan's guilt for his colossal misjudgment of how long the war would last. Did he owe something to that guilt-ridden love?
There was a postscript to Jonathan's letter:
I saw this poem by my favorite writer, Herman Melville, in a newspaper. It was inspired by that Michigan regiment who goes into battle with a live eagle chained to their standard.
THE EAGLE OF THE BLUE
Aloft he guards the starry folds
Who is the brother of the star
The bird whose joy is in the wind
Exulteth in the war
Amid the scream of shells, his scream
Runs shrilling; and the glare
Of eyes that brave the blinding sun
The volleyed flame can bear.
The pride of quenchless strength is his
Strength, which though chained, avails
The very rebel looks and thrills—
The anchored emblem hails.
Though scarred in many a furious fray,
No deadly hurt he knew;
Well may we think his years are charmed
The eagle of the blue.
Paul sat down on the bed and read the poem again. He dimly realized he should get out of this oven of a bedroom. He was being roasted alive. Sweat ran down his forehead into his burning eyes. He rubbed his streaming neck.
They shot your men,
whispered his Gettysburg wound. What did his Antietam wound, his emancipation wound, say to that? Nothing, apparently. What did Jeff Tyler say? Also nothing. What could Jeff say?
Paul stripped off his sweat-soaked civilian clothes and put on his uniform. Henry Gentry's servants had washed and ironed it. There was a crispness, a freshness to the blue cloth that was momentarily pleasurable.
Did Janet and her father expect him to wear this uniform when he returned to Hopemont to take command of a Sons of Liberty regiment or brigade? He suspected they would like that very much. But it was impossible.
He was trapped between impossibilities. He had sworn an oath to join the Sons of Liberty, he had pledged his love to Janet Todd. He could not escape those obligations. But they did not include this uniform.
He would not dishonor the uniform in which he had trained his dead troopers.
Maybe this proves something,
whispered a voice. It was not Jeff Tyler. It was Paul's Gettysburg wound, sardonic as usual. Suddenly Paul felt death all around him in the hot silent bedroom. How it would come he had no idea. But he saw it was inevitable. It was his only exit from this labyrinth of impossibilities.
THE FIRST THING JANET TODD noticed inside Hopemont was the absence of the servants. The place was like a haunted castle. The curtains were drawn against the August sun. In room after dim room there was not a sign of a familiar black face. Upstairs she found her mother in bed. Letitia gazed at Janet with only minimal recognition on her haggard face. Her hair was uncombed. The room smelled of urine and feces.
It was eleven o'clock in the morning. Normally, Letitia would be bathed and dressed and sitting in her chair. “Mother—what's wrong? What's happening?” Janet asked.
“Nobody comes when I call,” she said. “I've been calling you and your father and Sally. Nobody comes.”
Sally was Letitia's personal maid. “Why? What's going on?”
“Ever since your father whipped Lucy—”
She found her father in the gazebo in the garden, almost too drunk to speak a coherent sentence. She asked for Lucy. His face darkened. “Whipped the spyin' black bitch! Whipped'er till there was ‘n' inch of blood on th‘barn floor and shipped'er t‘Gentry. Rogers' idea. He took her over th'river. Tole Gentry we were ready to fight any time he was, see?”
“Father I asked you not to whip her.”
“Not whip‘er? Janet darlin', women don' know how t'fight war. War is blood. Soldier doesn' l'people insult' m. Fights back—”
“I asked you not to do it!”
“Had to—Rog Jameson said had to. He wanted to kill'r. I said no. Let'r die on Gentry's hands.”
“Why are you sitting here drunk while Momma is up in her room, neglected? She looks half-starved! Is this how we're going to win the war?” She grabbed the half-open bottle of bourbon and smashed it against a tree.
Do you know what I've been doing, Father? I've been letting Paul Stapleton have me. Night after night after night. I've been selling myself for your stupid cause, ruining my reputation and my self-respect.
She did not say it. She could not inflict another wound on this man. Besides, she had not lost her self-respect. She was not a typical woman. She was an exceptional woman. An
adventuress.
That justified everything she had done, from bedding Paul Stapleton to plotting to overthrow Lincoln's government. Maybe even whipping Lucy. She had known Gabriel Todd was going to whip Lucy. The most she tried to do was limit the number of stripes.
Janet strode down to the slave cabins and found a half-dozen women sitting around, staring disconsolately into space. Beyond them lay empty fields.
“What's going on? Where are the hands?” she asked.
“Run away,” Milly, one of the housemaids, said.
“Where's Lillibet?” Janet asked.
They gestured to the open door of her cabin.
“Where's Sally?”
They gestured in the same direction.
She plunged into the hot cabin. Lillibet lay in bed, looking like a black mirror image of Letitia Todd in the main house. Her face was wasted, her eyes dazed with pain or woe or both. Sally sat beside her, bathing her forehead. She jumped up, trembling, when she saw Janet.
“What are you doing here while Mistress is up in her bed with nothing to eat or drink and her night stuff not emptied for the last week, from the smell of it?” Janet said.
“Momma's been sick,” Sally mumbled. “She been sick since Master whipped Lucy so bad.”
“She deserved it!” Janet said. “Do you know what she did? She spied on me. She took money to spy on me!”
It was obvious Sally did not know what spy meant. She stared at Janet as if she were insane. “It tore up everybody, Miss Janet. We couldn't understand it. We still don' understand it. Everybody went sorta crazy. The hands all run away. No one lef' but us poor women. Master—your daddy—got drunk and stayed that way. What's happenin' to us? We was the happiest niggers in Kentucky a lil while ago.”
Something seemed to collapse inside Janet. She could not retain her rage. It crashed through her body and lay in ruins around her. “Terrible things are happening to all of us,” she said. “Go up to the house and take care of Mistress. I'll stay with Lillibet.”
She sat down beside Lillibet and dipped the cloth in the dish of water beside the bed. She bathed the mournful black face. “Lillibet, I'm so sorry. I asked Daddy not to whip her. But the war—the war has us all half-crazy.”
“Is Lucy dead and gone?”
“I don't know.”
“She looked mighty near dead when Jameson took her away in his wagon. He throw her in the river?”
“No! He took her across the river to Colonel Gentry's house.”
“Why?”
“I don't know,” she lied. “Maybe they thought he'd take care of her. She's free now, one way or another.”
“If she ain't dead.”
“I'll find out.”
By nightfall she had restored a semblance of order to the house and the slave quarters. Her mother had been bathed and dressed in clean clothes and her bed changed. Sally prepared a halfway decent dinner of
fried chicken and yams for them. Janet had no idea what to do about the runaways. Neither did her father.
Gabriel Todd had sobered up enough to discuss her trip. She did not tell him about the desperation in besieged Richmond, the sordid deal with Femando Wood, the nearly fatal negotiations with the gunrunners. She cast a glow of hope over everything, especially the Spencer repeating rifles. After dinner he sent for Rogers Jameson, who galloped to meet them with only one question on his lips: “Did you get any guns?”
“Fifteen thousand Spencer repeating rifles.”
Rogers gave her an exultant bear hug worthy of his son Adam. His broken jaw had mended. He was his voluble self once more. He said he had 3,000 men ready to cross the Ohio the moment Adam and his men appeared. They had bribed the ferryboat captains at Owensboro. They had made a trial run last night. They could get everyone across in four hours. He wanted to know when the Spencers would arrive, what date Richmond had set for the insurrection.
When Janet told him Jefferson Davis had been immovable about keeping August 29 for the date, Jameson smashed both his huge fists on their dining room table. “I wish we didn't have to depend on that broken-down old fool. You should hear what Adam says about him!” he roared.
“He has his reasons. Everything has to be coordinated with the men in Chicago and elsewhere.”
“Where's your West Point hero?” Jameson asked. “Did he decide to stay in New Jersey with his momma?”
“He's in Keyport. He had to report to Colonel Gentry. I wish you'd think better of him. Without Paul we would have gotten old worthless muskets from Mexico.”
“Get him over here. We've got this army about organized,” Jameson said. “We want to fit him in.”
The next morning Janet sent Sally across the river with a note to Paul, urging him to come as soon as possible.
Sally returned with a scrawled promise that he would be on the noon ferry.
Something is wrong
, Janet thought the moment she saw Paul standing at the prow of the ferry as it approached the landing. For one thing, he was not wearing his uniform. Had he quit the Union Army? She wanted him to appear before Rogers Jameson's Sons of Liberty brigade in that uniform. It would have an electrifying impact on the men in the ranks. She had never mentioned it to him. She had assumed he understood the value of such a gesture.
The grave expression on his face was wrong too. It was not the look of a man who was about to be welcomed back to a daring conspiracy by the woman he loved. She decided there was only one thing to do. She kissed him boldly on the mouth as he walked up to her. At least a dozen heads turned. Everyone on the ferry landing knew Janet Todd. But she did not care. She had stopped caring about everything except victory.
On the way to Hopemont in the buggy, Janet asked him about Lucy. “Is she all right? I asked my father not to whip her but—”
“But he did,” Paul said. “She's still a mass of welts. Her arms are swollen. She can't walk very well. Dr. Yancey thinks they damaged some nerves in her back.”
“How awful.”
“You can say that again,” Paul replied.
Janet refused to say it—or think it. “In a way she deserved a beating, don't you think? She was spying on us. She watched us in the Happy Hunting Ground. She was in the bushes. Do you know that?”
“My God,” Paul said. She could not tell whether he was admitting she was right or was simply appalled by the ruin of that beautiful memory.
“In spite of that, I honestly tried to prevent her being whipped. But I had to meet you in Cincinnati—”
Paul nodded. They rode on through the suffocating
heat. Thank God the buggy had a top that gave them some protection from the relentless sun. “The slaves got into a state. Most of the field hands ran away.”
Paul did not seem to be listening. He stared into the sunbaked distance. They passed neighboring farms where other slaves were working. “If we don't bring off this insurrection, every slave in Kentucky is going to run away. The handwriting is on the wall. Ours were just looking for an excuse,” Janet said.
“I heard about the battle of Saltville from Colonel Gentry,” Paul said. He spoke in a hurried way, as if he knew he was crudely changing the subject.
“Was it as bad as the newspapers said? For the federals, I mean?”
“Worse. He told me something else. Something I still can't believe.”
“What?” Janet asked, feeling, sensing, it was going to be something similar to what Sally had said to her, something that would send things crashing inside her.
“They shot the black wounded. Murdered them in cold blood after the Union Army retreated. They killed all my men from Keyport—except for a handful.”
The horse, a big roan named Caster, continued his steady pace down the road. More fields with slaves hoeing and grubbing. A house or two in the distance. Above a distant copse a hawk wheeled slowly. The sky remained mercilessly blue. There was not a cloud anywhere.
“Isn't that—just one more terrible thing—in this awful war?” Janet said.
Paul stared straight ahead. “When I see your friend Adam Jameson, I'm going to ask him for an explanation,” he said. “If he doesn't have a good one, I may kill the bastard on the spot.”
“I'm sure—absolutely sure—he'll have an explanation.”
“I doubt it.”
“Paul—calm down. You're not even sure it happened.
You only have Gentry's word for it. You know what a lyin' sneakin' scum he is. Who else but a Lincoln lover would set a slave to spy on his own kin? These people will do anything to get their vile way.”
“You may be right about that,” Paul said.
“Don't bring this up with my father or Rogers Jameson, please. They won't know how to deal with it.”
“I have no intention of mentioning it. I only wanted you to know about it.”
Why?
she wondered. Did he enjoy tormenting her? No. Paul was remembering the night in New York when she had become an adventuress, when she had married her soul and body to the cause. Now the cause had been ruined for him by the slaughter of those nameless blacks at Saltville. Was that true for her, too?
No. No such obscenity could or would have been committed by a white Kentuckian before the abolitionists created hatred between the blacks and the whites. The Yankees had ignited this murderous rage against the blacks, the innocent source of the South's woes. It only made stopping the war, giving the South a chance to deal with the blacks in an atmosphere of peace and forbearance, all the more essential. Why couldn't Paul see that? Why was he letting this one unworthy act threaten their victory?
If she was wrong, Janet dared God to contradict her. She dared God to prove the South's cause was wrong. She dared him to prove giving herself to Paul was wrong. She was ready to risk her soul as well as her body for
victory.
At Hopemont, Rogers Jameson was waiting with her father. Gabriel Todd was sober and clear-eyed. Janet wondered if she was responsible for the change. Did she restore his sense of paternity, his hope for a future shaped around her children? Or was Rogers Jameson's crude vitality the explanation?
On Hopemont's broad veranda, they talked about the
guns. Jameson chortled about the damage a regiment of men could do with the seven-shot Spencers. “Them Yankees will dirty their pants, I guarantee you,” he said.
Gabriel Todd said the Sons of Liberty had issued commissions to the principal officers. He was a major general in command of the Kentucky troops. Rogers Jameson was a brigadier general in command of the Daviess County troops. They had appointed an overall commander in Indiana, a doctor named William Bowles. He had commanded a regiment in the Mexican War. The army's top commander was the former chief justice of Kentucky, Joshua Bullitt.

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