Heaven and Hell (6 page)

"Who's there?"

Claudius Wood's shadow preceded him to the door. He yanked it fully open, and the rectangle of gaslight widened to reveal Willa with the petition in her hand.

Wood's cravat was untied, his waistcoat unbuttoned, his sleeves
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rolled up. He scowled at her. "The call was half past the hour. You're forty minutes late."

"Mr. Wood, I apologize. I fell behind."

"With what?" He noticed the papers with signatures. "Another of your radical crusades?" He startled her by snatching the petition.

"Oh, Christ. The poor wretched Indian. Not on my time, if you please.

I'll dock your wages. Come in, so we can get to work."

Something undefined but alarming warned her then--warned her to run from the silent theater and this burly man, whose handsome face was already giving way to patterns of veins in his cheeks and a bulbous, spongy look to his nose. But she desperately wanted to play the difficult role he'd offered her. It called for an older actress, and an accomplished one. If she could bring it off, it would promote her career.

And yet--

"Isn't there anyone else coming?"

"Not tonight. I felt our scenes together needed special attention."

"Could we do them onstage, please? This is the Scottish play, after all."

His bellow of laughter made her feel small and stupid. "Surely you don't believe that nonsense, Willa. You who are so intelligent, conversant with so many advanced ideas." He flicked the papers with his nail, then handed them back. "The play is Macbeth, and I'll speak the lines anywhere I choose. Now get in here and let's begin."

He turned and went back in the office. Willa followed, a part of her saying he was right, that she was infantile to worry about the superstitions.

Peter Parker would have worried, though.

Overhead, a rumbling sounded--the storm growing worse. The actor-child in Willa was convinced that baleful forces were gathering above Chambers Street. Her hands turned cold as she followed her employer.

"Take

off your shawl and bonnet." Wood moved chairs to clear a space on the shabby carpet. The office was a junkshop of period furniture and imitation green plants in urns of all sizes and designs. Handbills for New Knickerbocker productions covered the walls. Goldsmith, Moliere, Boucicault, Sophocles. The huge desk was a litter of bills, play scripts, contracts, career mementos. Wood pushed aside Macbeth's Lost Causes 33

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enameled dagger, a metal prop with a blunted point, and poured two inches of whiskey from a decanter. Green glass bowls on the gas jets seemed to darken rather than lighten the room.

Nervous, Willa put the signed petitions on a velvet chair. She laid her velvet gloves on top, then her shawl and bonnet. All in a pile in case she needed to snatch them quickly. She had started to mature at twelve, and men who worked around the theater soon began responding to her beauty. She'd learned to stand them off with good humor, even a little physical force when necessary. She was expert at running away.

Wood strolled to the door and closed it. "All right, my dear. First act, seventh scene."

"But we rehearsed that most of yesterday."

"I'm not satisfied." He walked back to her. "Macbeth's castle."

Grinning, he reached out and ran his palm slowly down the silk of her sleeve. "Begin in the middle of Lady Macbeth's speech, where she says 7 have given suck.'

He relished the last word. The gas put a highlight on his wet lower lip. Willa struggled to suppress fear and a sad despair. It was so obvious now, so obvious what he'd wanted all along, and why he'd engaged her when there were scores of older actresses available. Mrs. Drew had done everything but tell her in explicit language. She wasn't flattered, only upset. If this was the price for her New York debut, damn him, she wouldn't pay.

"Begin," he repeated, with a harshness that alarmed her. He caressed her arm again. She tried to draw away. He simply moved and kept at it, blowing his bourbon breath on her.

"/ have given suck, and know--" She faltered. "How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me."

"Do you, now?" He bent and kissed her throat.

"Mr. Wood--"

"Go on with it." He seized her shoulders and shook her, and that was when freezing terror took hold. In his black eyes she saw something beyond anger. She saw a willingness to hurt.

"/ would--while it was smiling in my face, have plucked my nip Pte from his boneless gums-- "

Wood's hand slid from her arm to her left breast, closing on it.

You wouldn't pluck it from mine, would you?"

She stamped her high laced shoe. "Look here, I'm an actress. I w°n't be treated like a street
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harlot."

He grabbed her arm. "I pay your salary. You're anything I say y°u are--including my whore."

"No," she snarled, yanking away. He drew his hand back and rove his fist against her face. The blow knocked her down.

34 * HEAVEN AND HELL

"You blonde bitch. You'll give me what I want." He caught her hair in his left hand, making her cry out when he pulled her head up.

His right fist pounded down on her shoulder, and again. "Does that convince you?"

"Let go of me. You're drunk--crazy--"

"Shut up!" He slapped her so hard, she flew back and cracked her head on the front of his desk. "Pull up your skirts." Lights danced behind her eyes. Pain pounded. She reached up, fingers searching for some heavy object on the desk. He stood astride her right leg, working at his fly buttons. "Pull them up, God damn you, or I'll beat you till you can't walk."

Out of her mind with fright, she found something on the desk-- the prop dagger. He reached for her wrist, but before he could stop her

she swung it down. Although the point was blunt, it tore through the plaid fabric of his trousers because she struck so hard. She felt the dagger meet flesh, stop a second, then sink on through.

"Jesus," Wood said, groping with both hands for the prop weapon buried two inches in his left thigh. He struggled with it, bloodying his fingers. "Jesus Christ. I'll kill you!"

Wild-eyed, Willa pushed him with both hands, toppling him sideways.

He shouted and cursed as he overturned a fake palmetto plant.

She crawled to the chair, snatched her things, and ran from the office and through the dark. At the door she struggled with the bolt, shot it open, and half fell into the rainy passage, expecting to hear him in pursuit.

/,

, do solemnly swear in the presence of

Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the constitution of the United States and the Union of the states thereunder, and that I will in like manner abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the

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existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves. So help me God.

Oath required of all Confederates

seeking presidential pardon, 1865

I must take this oath?" Cooper Main asked. He'd ridden all the way to Columbia to see about the matter, and suddenly had doubts.

"If you want a pardon," said lawyer Trezevant, from the other side of the flimsy table serving as a desk. His regular offices had burned in the great fire of February 17, so he'd rented an upstairs room at Reverdy Bird's Mortuary on the east side of town, which the flames had spared. Mr. Bird had converted his main parlor to a shop selling cork feet, wooden limbs, and glass eyes to maimed veterans. A buzz of voices indicated good business this morning.

Cooper stared at the handwritten oath. He was lanky man and had a lot of gray in his untrimmed hair, though he was only forty-five. The scarcity of food had reduced him to gauntness. Workdays lasting sixteen hours had put fatigue shadows under his deep-set brown eyes. He was laboring to rebuild the warehouses, the docks, and the trade of his Carolina Shipping Company in Charleston.

"See here, I understand your resentment," Trezevant said. "But if General Lee can humble himself and apply, as he did in Richmond last week, you can, too."

!'A pardon implies wrongdoing. I did nothing wrong."

"I agree, Cooper. Unfortunately, the federal government does not.

" you want to rebuild your business, you have to free yourself of the onus of having served the Confederate Navy Department." Cooper

glowered. Trezevant continued. "I went to Washington personally, and, wUhin limits, I trust this pardon broker, even though he's a lawyer, and

^ Yankee on top of it." The bitter humor was lost. "His name is Jasper

"Is. He's greedy, so I know he'll get your application to the clerk of Pardons, and to Mr. Johnson's desk, ahead of many others."

"For how much?"

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36 ' HEAVEN AND HELL

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"Two hundred dollars, U.S., or the equivalent in sterling. My fee is fifty dollars."

Cooper thought a while.

"All right, give me the papers."

They talked for another half hour. Trezevant was full of Washington gossip. He said Johnson planned to appoint a provisional governor in South Carolina. The governor would call a constitutional convention and reconvene the state legislature as it was constituted before Sumter fell. Johnson's choice was not unexpected. It was Judge Benjamin Franklin Perry, of Greenville, an avowed Unionist before the war. Like Lee, Perry had proclaimed his loyalty to his state, despite his hatred of secession, saying: "You are all going to the devil--and I will go with you.''

"The legislature will have to fulfill Mr. Johnson's requirements for readmission," Trezevant said. "Officially abolish slavery, for example."

A sly expression alerted Cooper to something new. "At the same time, the legislature may be able to, ah, regulate the nigras so that we'll have a labor force again, instead of a shiftless rabble."

"Regulate them how?"

"By means of--let's call it a code of behavior. I'm told Mississippi is thinking of the same thing."

"Would such a code apply to whites, too?"

"Freedmen only."

Cooper recognized danger in such a provocative step, but the morality of it didn't concern him. The end of the war had brought him, his family, and his state, a full measure of humiliation and ruin. He no longer cared about the condition of the people responsible--the people the war had set free.

By noon, Cooper's slow old horse was plodding southeast on the homeward journey. The route carried him back through central Columbia.

He could hardly stand the sight. Nearly one hundred and twenty blocks had been burned down. The smell of charred wood still lay heavy in the air of the hot June day.

The dirt streets were littered with trash and broken furniture. A wagon belonging to the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands dispensed packets of rice and flour to a large crowd, mostly Negro.

Other blacks crowded the few stretches of wooden sidewalk still in
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place. Cooper saw military uniforms and some civilian gentlemen, but well-dressed white women were notably absent. It was the same everywhere.

Such women stayed indoors, because they hated the soldiers and feared the freed Negroes. Cooper's wife, Judith, was an exception, which irritated him.

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General Sherman had destroyed the wooden bridge spanning the Congaree River. Only the stone abutments remained, standing in the stream like smoke-stained gravestones. The slow crossing on the ferry barge gave Cooper an excellent view of one of the few buildings the fire had spared, the unfinished statehouse near the east shore. In one granite wall, like periods on paper, three Union cannonballs testified to Sherman's fury.

The sight of them raised Cooper's anger. So did the burned district, which he reached soon after leaving the ferry. He rode along the edge of a lane of scorched earth three-quarters of a mile wide. Here, between flaming pines, Kilpatrick's cavalry had pillaged, leaving a black waste marked by lonely chimneys--Sherman's Sentinels, all that remained of homes in the path of the barbaric march.

He stayed the night at a seedy inn outside the city. In the taproom he avoided conversation but listened closely to the impoverished yeomen drinking around him. To hear them, you'd think the South had won, or at least was able to continue fighting for its cause.

Next morning, he rode on, through heat and haze promising another fierce summer in the Low Country. He traveled on dirt roads left unrepaired after Union supply trains tore them up. A farmer would need a strong new wagon to get through the eight-inch ruts in the sandy soil and reach market with his crop--if he had a crop. Probably the farmer couldn't find a new wagon to buy, or the money for it, either. Cooper seethed.

Riding on toward Charleston and the coast, he crossed a roadbed; all the rails were gone and only a few ties were left. He met no white people, though twice he saw bands of Negroes moving through fields.

Just past the hamlet of Chicora, on his way to the Cooper River, he came upon a dozen black men and women gathering wild herbs at the roadside. He reached into the pocket of his old coat and took hold of the little pocket pistol he'd bought for the trip.

The blacks watched Cooper approach. One of the women wore a red velvet dress and an oval cameo pin, probably, Cooper thought, stolen from a white mistress. The rest were raggedy. Cooper sweated and clutched the hidden pistol, but they let him ride through.

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A big man with a red bandanna tied into a cap stepped into the foad behind him. "You ain't the boss 'round here any more, Captain."

Cooper turned and glared. "Who the hell said I was? Why don't You get to work and do something useful?"

Don't have to work," said the woman in red velvet. "You can't orce us and you can't whip us.

Not no more. We're free."

Free to squander your lives in sloth. Free to forget your friends."

"Friends? The likes of you, who kept us locked up?" The ban 38 HEAVEN AND HELL

danna man snickered. "Ride on-, captain, 'fore we drag you off that nag and give you the kind of hidin' we used to get."