Heaven and Hell (19 page)

°f darkness. I'm sure the same men sent me this." She thrust her arm °ut, showing them the face of the prostitute. "This is a black woman °f bad character. The men who burned the school are
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saying blackness

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HEAVEN AND HELL

equals evil, evil equals blackness. God curse them. Do you know why they sent me this particular picture? My mother was a quadroon." They were astonished. "What's more, during a certain period in her life she sold herself to men. Yet my father adored her. Married her. I honor her memory. I'm proud to have her blood. Your blood. They want us to think it's a taint. Inferior to theirs. We're supposed to cringe in a corner and bless them when they deign to throw us scraps, or thank them if they choose to whip us. Well, to hell with them. This is what I think of them, and their tactics, and their threats."

She ripped the daguerreotype in half and flung the pieces on the coals. They smoked, curled, burned, vanished.

Madeline's face glowed red in the firelight. It ran with sweat from the heat, and her anger. "In case all of you are wondering, yes, this upsets me terribly, but, no, it doesn't change anything. When the ashes are cold, we'll clear them out and we'll start building a new schoolhouse."

One of the ' 'Negro laws'' foolishly enacted by the new legislature defines a person of color as one with more than one-eighth Negro blood. So I am exempt. Somehow, my dearest, I think that will have no effect on those who are against me.

I am convinced Mr. Gettys is one of them. Could another be that dancing master? I don't know, nor care much. They have declared war, we need to know nothing else.

I can tell you, my dearest, that I am badly frightened. I am a person of no special courage. Yet I was brought up to understand right and wrong, and the need to persevere for the former.

The school is right. The dream of a new Mont Royal is right.

I will not submit. To thwart me they will have to kill me.

F"

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A Negro is allowed to buy and hold property.

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A Negro is allowed to seek justice in the courts, to sue and be sued, and to be a witness in any case involving Negroes only.

A Negro is allowed to marry, and the state will recognize that marriage and the legitimacy of children

of that marriage.

A Negro is not allowed to marry a person of a different race.

A Negro is not allowed'to work at any trade except that of a farmer or servant without a special license

costing $10 to $100 per annum.

A Negro is to be whipped by authority of a judicial

officer and returned if he runs away from a master

to whom he has attached himself as a servant; if

under 18, he is to be whipped moderately.

A Negro is not to join any militia unit or keep any weapon except a fowling piece.

A Negro is to be hired out for field labor if found guilty of vagrancy by a judicial officer.

A Negro is to be transported out of state or put to hard labor for all crimes not demanding the death penalty.

A

Negro is to be put to death for inciting rebellion, for breaking and entering a home, for carnal attack

upon a white woman, or for stealing a horse, a

mule, or baled cotton.

Some provisions of

South Carolina's "Black Code," 1865

&

11

Dear Jack, Charles wrote, / am going west with a trading company for 6 mos. to a year. My partner says leave any messages at Ft. Riley, Kans.

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I will be in touch as soon as I come back. I hope my son will stay well

& will remember me & won't be too much trouble for you & Maureen.

Give him an extra big hug from his "Pa."

I have to do this because I'm not in the Army after all. I had some trouble at Jefferson Barracks. . . .

A slit of brilliant light lay between the land and solid gray clouds pushing down through the western sky. The calendar still said summer, September, but the rain-freshened vegetation and the chilly air tricked the senses into thinking autumn.

Out of the woods rode the entire Jackson Trading Company, leading a dozen mules heavily loaded with trade goods. Canvas parcels held bags of glass beads in both pony and smaller seed sizes; Wooden Foot Jackson favored diamond and triangle shapes, like those that glittered and flashed on the bosom of his coat.

The trader had explained to Charles that Cheyenne women wanted beads to decorate the apparel they made. White men had introduced beads to the West, so it was an acquired liking. An older, traditional, one was that for porcupine quills, which were abundant among the Mississippi but scarce on the dry plains, where they were going. The mules were carrying bundles of quills, too.

Jackson had also stocked up on some relatively bulky items. Iron hoe blades, which lasted longer than those made of a buffalo's scapula tied with rawhide to a stick. Durability was a virtue of another item he carried in quantity--a small iron rectangle with one long edge sharpened by a file. The tool replaced a similar one of bone used to scrape 116

Lost Causes 117

hair from buffalo hide and render it ready to sew into garments or a tipi cover.

The trader said there were plenty of other things he could sell, but he preferred to carry just a few that had proved popular year after year.

All the merchandise was for women, but it would be paid for by men, using the most common form of Indian wealth, horses.

Charles absorbed this along with Wooden Foot's explanation of his success.

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"They's fort traders who sell the exact same goods I do, only the Cheyennes won't go near 'em.

And vice versey. I been haulin' goods

into the villages near twenty years."

"Don't the Indian agents regulate trading?"

Wooden Foot spat out some plug tobacco, thus expressing his opinion of the Interior Department's Indian Bureau employees. "They sure would like to, because they're mostly greedy no-goods who want the trade all to themselves. I keep an eye peeled for 'em. If they don't find me they can't stop me. The Cheyennes won't turn me in, for the same reason I still got my hair. I'm a friend."

"Who might turn into something else if you were crossed?" Charles pointed to the notched feather.

"Well, yes, they's that, too."

A cigar curled smoke up past the brim of Charles's brand-new flat crowned wool hat. He sat comfortably on Satan, having sewn strips of scraped buffalo hide to the inner thighs of his jeans pants. The piebald was again in good fettle, though Charles took care to rein him lightly and guide him with knee and hand pressure whenever possible. Satan was responsive; he was smart. Charles hadn't picked wrong.

In the saddle scabbard he carried a shiny new lever-action Spencer that fired seven rounds from a tube magazine in the stock. His gypsy robe hid a foot-long bowie knife and a keen hatchet with Pawnee decorations, feathers, and beaded wrappings on the shaft. He was better equipped than the U.S. Cavalry, which had to put up with war surplus arms, no matter what.

The autumnal landscape, the chilly temperature, and the lowering night cast a melancholy spell over him. Wooden Foot attempted to counter it with lively conversation.

"How's that little actress? Pinin' away?"

"I doubt it."

"Plan to see her again?"

"Maybe in the spring."

"Charlie, you got a funny look. I seen it on men before. Did you lose some other woman?"

m

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I 18 HEAVEN AND HELL

"Yes. Back in Virginia. I don't like to talk about it."

"Then we don't. Still, it's nice you got the actress, for comfort."

"She's only an acquaintance. Besides, one woman can't replace another. Can we drop it?"

"Sure. You'll soon forget about it anyway. They's lots of other things to command your attention where we're goin'." His tone said he meant perils, not amusements.

Charles wished he could forget Gus Barclay for even a little while, but he couldn't. And in the privacy of his heart he wished that his conscience would let him think in a more personal way about Willa Parker. She did capture his fancy with her striking combination of youth and worldliness, idealism and cheerful tolerance. He supposed it wouldn't hurt to accept her offer of a ticket to a performance when he got back.

If he got back.

Wooden Foot seemed confident. Still, there was a vast country lying ahead of them. And no denying that some of the tribes were angry about the presence of the Army and the steady westward waves of migration.

Fenimore

Cooper switched his tail and frisked back and forth ahead of the riders, bolting now to the left, now to the right but always loping back with joyous barks. Charles wondered if the dog was happy about not being hitched to a travois just yet.

Boy saw a blue jay bickering in a shrub and clapped his hands in delight. Charles puffed his cigar and patted Satan. Growing smaller and smaller in the immense wooded landscape, the Jackson Trading Company passed out of sight and into darkness.

12

A thunderstorm roared over the city of Richmond. Rain poured from the eaves of the City Almshouse and splashed the gravestones of Shockoe Cemetery immediately to the south. The noise of the storm kept patients awake in the charity wards this bleak September night.

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One patient lay on his side, knees drawn up to his chest, arms clasped tightly around them. His cot was on the end of the row, so he was able to face the bare wall and hide with his thoughts.

In the dark high-ceilinged room men turned and groaned and rustled their bedding. A matron's lamp floated through like a firefly. A young man with a completely white beard sat up suddenly. "Union Cavalry. Sheridan's cavalry on the left flank!"

The matron rushed to his bedside. Her voice soothed him to silence.

Then her lamp floated away again.

The Almshouse had been a Confederate hospital at the height of the war. Toward the end, it became temporary headquarters for the Virginia Military Institute, which had been forced out of the Shenandoah by the ferocity of Phil Sheridan's horse. Since the surrender, several wings had reopened on a temporary basis to care for mentally disturbed veterans, the human debris cast up by the tide of war and left to lie on the shore of peace, abandoned, forgotten. At present the Almshouse sheltered about fifty such men. Hundreds more, perhaps thousands, huddled in the South's ravaged cities and wandered its ruined roads, without help.

The patient on the end cot tossed and writhed. A familiar awl of Pain pierced his forehead and turned, boring deeper and deeper. He'd offered with the pain, and a broken, almost deformed body, ever since he took a near-fatal fall into . .

Into . . .

A

,19

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HEAVEN AND HELL

God, they'd destroyed his mind, too. It took him minutes just to finish the thought.

Into the James River.

Yes. The James. He and fellow conspirators had planned to rid the Confederacy of the inept Jefferson Davis. They'd been discovered by
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an Army officer named . . .

Named. . .

No matter how he tried, it wouldn't come back, though he knew he had reason to hate the man. In the struggle that ensued after the discovery of the plot, the man had pushed him through a window above the river.

He vividly remembered the shocks of the fall. He had never experienced such pain. Outcrops of rock slammed his head, buttocks, legs as he went bouncing downward, finally striking the water.

He had a recurring nightmare about what had happened next. Sinking beneath the water, clawing against the current to reach the surface, and failing. In the dream, he drowned. Reality was different. Somehow, by effort or by chance, he no longer remembered which, he'd dragged himself to a bank downstream, vomited water, and lost consciousness.

Since that night he had been a different man. Pain was a constant companion. Strange lights frequently filled his head. Lying on the cot in the midst of the storm, he saw them again, yellow and green pinpoint flashes that blossomed to starry bursts of scarlet, fiery orange, blinding white. As if all of that wasn't a sufficient portion of suffering, his memory constantly betrayed him.

Somehow he had reached Richmond and survived the great conflagration that leveled so much of the city the night the Confederate government fell. He lived by prowling the night streets, committing robberies.

His most recent had yielded but two dollars and the handsome though old-fashioned beaver hat sitting on a shelf above his cot. He'd gone without food for long periods--two, even three days sometimes. Then there was a blank, after which he awakened in the Almshouse. They said he'd collapsed in the street.

Why could he remember some things at certain times, and not at others? Then again, a whole new set of recollections would be clear while the first ones were beyond his mind's grasp for hours, or days, it was all part of the damage done to him by ...

By ...

It wouldn't come.

The rain fell harder, a sound like drumming. His hand crawled around under the cot like a blind white spider, seeking something he did remember. He felt it, pulled it up, hugged it tightly to his filthy Lost Causes 121

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coarse patient's gown. A torn magazine, given him during one of his lucid periods. Harper's New Monthly for July of this year.

He was able to recall paragraphs from the section called "Editor's Easy Chair." The copy described the Grand Review of Grant's and Sherman's armies in Washington, lasting two days in ...

In . . .

May, that was it.

In the dark, he squeezed his hand into a fist. / should have marched.

People kept me from it. They kept me from playing the role I was born to play.

He could picture it. He was riding a fine stallion, bowing from the waist to acknowledge the cheers of the mob, saluting President Lincoln with his saber, then riding on, his great steed moving in a high-stepping walk while the mob, sweating, awe-struck, chanted as one: