Heaven and Hell (38 page)

Charles weighed two murders against another lie and said, "None, sir."

It continued for a half hour, interrupted by an occasional angry objection from Krug or a question from Hoffman that quickly turned to Republican cant. Charles was limp, tired, perspiring heavily when Hancock excused him. He and Duncan and Grierson went out and shut the door.

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"They'll approve you," Grierson predicted.

"No, they won't. I botched it."

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"To the contrary. You did well. But I must say something that I've already said to Jack. If you're ever found out, I won't be able to help you. I won't compromise the regiment. It comes first. In every other circumstance you can count on me to go to the wall for you."

"Thank you, Colonel. I don't think it'll be necessary for you to worry about--"

The door to the hearing room opened. Ike Barnes, the junior man, stepped out.

"Three to two in favor of commissioning. It's conditional on War Department approval and a pardon." Beaming, Barnes stuck out his hand. "Welcome to the Tenth, Mr. August."

Charles crossed the Missouri on the ferry and rode to St. Louis in leisurely stages, savoring the tangy air and the crimson and gold of the leaves. The calendar kept Willa from making the reunion a physical one, but they slept warm in each other's arms in her bed at the New Planter's House.

When morning came, they kissed and murmured words of affection.

Before he dressed, he lathered his face to shave away yesterday's stubble. He whistled while he plied the razor.

"That's very pretty," Willa called from her dressing table. "What is it?"

"This?" He whistled five notes. "Just something that came into my head last year. Whenever I think of Mont Royal, of everything that I loved before the war, I hear that tune."

"There's a piano at the theater. Would you hum it when we're there, so I can write it down for you?"

"Why, yes, of course."

And she did.

"That's my tune?" he asked, staring at the notes, which made no sense to him. She nodded. "Well, if you say so. It'll be a keepsake."

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He folded the paper carefully. "Maybe I can stop thinking about the past. I've found something better to take its place."

He leaned over and kissed her forehead. She closed her eyes and held his arm.

While she attended to theater business for a couple of hours, he strolled through the bustling streets. Today he wasn't at all troubled by the risk in the strengthening attachment; he was too full of excitement w

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about the commission--an excitement Willa shared until they walked along the levee later, and he told her the reason he'd rejoined the Army.

Although he spared her the obscene details, he described the demise of the Jackson Trading Company, and the hatred it had generated.

Willa had a strong reaction. But she kept it to herself, putting her feelings for him above her conscience. She'd never done that before, at least not so far as she could remember.

In her rooms that night, she showed him what she called her prize.

It was the large framed photograph of the two of them taken the year before, Willa on the velvet settee with her head in the invisible clamp, Charles with his hand on her shoulder. Amused, he said they looked like figures in a waxworks. She swatted him and said she would retaliate for that by forcing a copy of the picture on him. He said he'd be glad to have it, and halfway meant it.

Over breakfast he learned something else about her. Her birthday was December 25. "Easy to memorize but hard to get anyone to celebrate with so much going on. I'm a horrid cook, but I can do a simple cake and icing. Most years, I even have to buy my own candles." He laughed.

Charles stayed in St. Louis for three more days. He attended a performance each evening. Then Brigadier Duncan summoned him back with a telegraph message. The pardon had been granted.

Willa cried when they said goodbye. She promised that she and Sam would be touring soon, and she'd find him. And love him properly, as she couldn't this time. He was in good spirits as he rode away.

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A light drizzle started as Willa walked from the hotel to the theater.

She was so preoccupied with Charles, she almost forgot to open her umbrella.

She knew so much about him, yet still knew so little. She sensed a coiled anger within him, an emotion quite different from last year's war-induced malaise. He. had an enemy now. That was why she hadn't told him about taking the initiative and starting a local unit of the Indian Friendship Society.

There were six members. A Quaker couple, a Unitarian preacher, an elderly headmistress of a private school patronized by the children of wealthy German merchants, the theater's aging juvenile, Tim True Wood, and herself. Charles wouldn't have liked to hear about the memorials they had already sent to Congress and the Interior Department.

She reached the theater and found the stage deserted, though she card Sam's voice somewhere.

She closed her umbrella and laid it on

"e prompter's table. The stage manager shot from behind a flat.

"Not there, not there! If he sees it, he'll go wild."

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"That's right, I forgot. No umbrellas on the prompt table. I can't remember all the superstitions. What's he doing?"

"He's behaving a bit strangely. He's been bustling about with Prosperity's feeding dish, and now he's rehearsing in the green room."

"He does insist on doing Hamlet." She and the stage manager exchanged tolerant smiles, and she followed the sound of Trump's resonant voice as it proclaimed Yorick's infinite jest and excellent fancy.

She almost stumbled on a crockery bowl of milk. She saw Prosperity curled up nearby, uninterested. She frowned. The bowl smelled peculiar.

She picked it up and sniffed it again.

She marched the bowl to the green room, interrupting Sam's rehearsal in front of a long mirror. Despite the lacing of his corset, his black tights couldn't hide his corpulence. He looked silly in that costume, and more so with a wilted yellow chrysanthemum pinned to the front.

"Dear girl--" he began, one thumb hooked in the eye socket of a prop skull. He lost color when Willa extended the bowl at arm's length.

"I'll feed the cat from now on, Sam. You must have mixed up the bowls. She won't touch this one." Willa passed it under her nose with a stagy sniff. "Cats don't like sour mash whiskey."

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Trump almost fell in his haste to get the bowl. "It's nothing. A mere nip to brace me up today."

"And every day for a week. I've wondered why you were so excessively cheerful in the morning." She put the bowl on the table, saying sweetly, "Don't touch it."

Trump beat his breast with an aggrieved air. "Yes, my dear." He studied her from under his eyebrows, laid the skull aside and put a fatherly arm around her. "You look unhappy. Am I the cause?"

"Not really."

"Charles has left, then."

"It's more than his leaving, Sam. He's managed a commission in the Army again."

"The Army's the right place for him. It's what he knows."

"It's the right place for the wrong reason." In a few sentences she described what had happened to Wooden Foot and Boy. By the end.

Trump was pale. "He wants retribution. When he talks of it there's a blazing fury in him."

Cautiously, Trump said, "Is it the end for you two, then?"

"Oh, no." A rueful shrug. "It should be, but it's too late. I love him. I know it may bring me grief, and I can't do a thing about it. Mr Congreve was right about love being a frailty of the mind."

She tried to smile and instead burst out crying. Sam Trump put his w

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arms around her and tugged her in, gently patting her back with both hands while the sobs shook her.

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26

Lieutenant August? Come quick." j Charles shot up from the desk. "Someone hurt?"

"Nosir," puffed the recruit. "They taken' down those tents you told us to put up an hour ago. They was ordered to take 'em down."

"What stupid noncom--?"

"It's some general. Krig?"

"Krug. Damn." He grabbed his hat. What a way to start his third day in uniform.

"With all due respect, Captain, what's going on here?"

Krug's gray eyes spiked him. "You'll address me as general."

In a weedy field a half mile outside the main gate, five black recruits, none in uniform yet, struggled to dismantle two A-frames. Tangled canvas hid the fallen poles. Red-faced, Charles pointed at the men.

"Why are they striking those tents?"

The raw autumn wind snapped the elbow-length cape of Krug's
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overcoat. "Because I ordered it. They're to move to the ground immediately west of the steam pump."

"That field is full of standing water."

Krug jutted his jaw. "Change your tone, mister, or I'll have you up on charges. Three quarters of the men on this post would like to see you gone."

Including most of my own, Charles thought. The five recruits watched him as though he were old Salem Jones, Mont Royal's overseer before the war. Through gritted teeth he said, "The barracks assigned us--General--is infested with rats, bats, roaches--it's a damn zoo.

While we fumigate it, these men need temporary quarters. Why must they move?"

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"Because, August, General Hoffman rode past this morning. He doesn't like to look at nigger soldiers. He wants them out of sight when he travels to and from Leavenworth City. Is that clear enough?"

Charles recalled Grierson's warning about Army bigotry. "Sir, if you insist on this, we'll have to put down lumber to floor the tents.

Build walkways--"

"No lumber. They sleep on the ground. They're soldiers, or so we've been led to believe."

"Why the hell are you so angry at me, Krug?"

"Two reasons, mister. One, I still consider you a traitor. Two, the North fought for preservation of the Union, not the glorification of darkies.

General Hoffman shares that view. Now move those men."

Krug marched to his horse, mounted, and headed for the gate.

Charles approached the recruits. Slate-colored clouds filled the sky.

Dead weeds rattled in the wind, and canvas flapped and snapped. The five black men stared at him with expressions ranging from stoic to sullen.

"Men, I'm sorry. Guess you'll have to move for the time being.

I'll try to commandeer some lumber somewhere."

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A large walnut-hued man stepped forward. Potiphar Williams, formerly a cook in a Pittsburgh hotel. He could read and write; he'd learned is an adult, in order to understand recipes and prepare menus. Charles lad marked him as promising.

Williams said, "We'll hunt the wood. Sir."

"It's my responsibility to--"

"We don't need favors from a white man who rode for the rebs."

Rigid, Charles said, "You get this straight. I didn't go to war to reserve slavery, or the Confederacy, either. I went to fight for my iome in South Carolina."

"Oh, yes, sir," Williams said. "My brother and his kin in North

-arolina, the only home they had to fight for was the slave cabins they ived in." He turned his back. "All right, boys. Let's pick up and go where the white man tells us."

Ike Barnes, already miserable and in bad temper because of a case

'f piles, turned the air blue when Charles reported the incident. Grier°n went to Hoffman. The general refused to rescind the order. Two of he recruits caught pneumonia from camping on the wet ground. They

^re sent to the post hospital, causing three white patients to walk out 11 Protest.

The next week, a gaudy troupe of travelers appeared, bound for

°rt Riley. The troupe consisted of two white women, a former slave 248 HEAVEN AND HELL H

who did the cooking, a little black jockey from Texas, four horses, including a pacer and a racing mare, and dogs: a greyhound, a white pit bull, several hunters.

"Is this a circus or the Army?" Barnes grumbled. "Whatever it is, it's a damn disgrace."

"Agreed," Grierson said. "But you notice we're here, aren't we?"

The two of them and Charles, along with two dozen more of the curious, had gathered to see the elegant young soldier who headed the troupe. As George Custer supervised the loading of his colt Phil Sheridan into a special rail car on the post spur, he shouted boisterously and cracked jokes, playing to the crowd.

Charles remembered Custer vividly from the war. He was still
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dandified: flowing hair, walrus mustache, bright red scarf, gold spurs.

Charles said to Barnes, "I rode against him at Brandy Station. I know he fights to win, but he's too reckless to suit me. I'm thankful I'll never have to serve with him."

The fall produced a smashing Republican victory in the national and state elections. Johnson's catastrophic "Swing Around the Circle"

had worked against him and for the Radicals. When Congress eventually convened, the course of Reconstruction would be in Republican hands more surely than ever.

At Fort Leaven worth, meanwhile, in spite of trouble with white men because of their prejudice, and trouble with black men because of his background, Charles again began to savor Army life. He liked the measuring of the days by bugle and trumpet, drum and fife. It had been part of his bone and blood since West Point. In his monastic cubicle in bachelor officers' quarters, some internal clock wakened him every morning at 4:30, fifteen minutes before trumpeters' assembly.