Heaven and Hell (7 page)

Cooper's jaw clenched. He pulled out the pocket pistol and pointed it. The woman in velvet screamed and dived into the ditch. The others scattered, except for the bandanna man, who strode toward Cooper's horse. Suddenly, good sense prevailed; Cooper booted the nag and got out of there.

He didn't stop shaking for almost ten minutes. Trezevant was right.

The legislature must do something to regularize the behavior of the freedmen. Liberty had become anarchy. And without hands to labor in the heat and damp, South Carolina would slip from critical illness to death.

Later, when he calmed down, he began to consider the work to be done at the shipping company. Fortunately, he didn't have the extra burden of worrying about Mont Royal. Decency and propriety had prompted him to make his arrangement with Orry's widow, and she now bore all the responsibility for the plantation to which he held title.

Madeline was of mixed blood, and everyone knew it, because Ashton had blurted it to the world. But no one made anything of her ancestry.

Nor would they so long as she behaved like a proper white woman.

Melancholy visions of his younger sisters diverted him from thoughts of work. He saw Brett, married to that Yankee, Billy Hazard, and bound for California, according to her last letter. He saw Ashton, who'd involved herself in some grotesque plot to unseat Davis's government and replace it with a crowd of hotspurs. She'd disappeared into the West, and he suspected she was dead. He couldn't summon much sorrow over it, and he didn't feel guilty. Ashton was a tormented girl, with all the personal difficulties that seemed to afflict women of great beauty and great ambition. Her morals had always been despicable.

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The sun dropped down toward the sand hills behind him, and he began to wind through glinting salt marshes, close to home. How he loved South Carolina, and especially the Low Country. His son's tragic death had transformed him to a loyalist, although he still perceived himself to be a moderate on every issue but one: the inherent superiority of the white race and its fitness to govern society. Cooper was at this mo- \ ment about ten minutes away from an encounter with a man who carried

Southern loyalty far beyond anything he ever imagined.

His name was Desmond LaMotte. He was a great scarecrow of a man, with outlandishly long legs, which hung almost to the ground as he rode his mule through the marshes near the Cooper River. His arms I were equivalently long. He had curly carrot-colored hair with a startling I Lost Causes 39

streak of white running back from his forehead; the war had given him that. He wore a neat imperial the color of his hair.

He came from the old Huguenot stock that dominated the state's town and plantation aristocracy. His late mother was a Huger, a Husuenot name pronounced You-gee. The war had cut down most of the young men in both families.

Des was a native Charlestonian, born in 1834. By the time he was fifteen he'd reached his adult height of six feet four inches. His hands measured ten inches from the tip of the little finger to the tip of the thumb when the fingers were spread. His feet measured thirteen inches from heel to big toe. So naturally, like any strong-willed, contrary and defiant young man with those physical characteristics, he decided to become a dancing master.

People scoffed. But he was determined, and he made a success of it. It was an old and honorable profession, particularly in the South. Up among the hypocrites of New England, preachers always railed against mixed dancing, along with dancing in taverns, Maypole dancing (it smacked of pagan ritual), or any dancing with food and drink nearby.

Southerners had a more enlightened view, because of their higher culture, their spiritual kinship with the English gentry, and their economic system; slavery gave them the leisure time for learning how to dance.

Both Washington and Jefferson--great men; great Southerners, in Des's view--had been partial to dancing.

Early in life, whether riding or thrusting with a foil or idly tossing a horseshoe with some of the children of Charleston's free Negro population, Des LaMotte demonstrated an agility unusual in any boy, and remarkable in someone growing so large so quickly. His parents recognized
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his ability, and because they believed in the benefits of dance instruction for young gentlemen, they started his lessons at age eleven.

Des never forgot the first stern words of his own dancing master. He'd committed them to memory and later used them with his own pupils: .

The dancing school is not a place of amusement, but a place of education.

And the end of a good education is not that you become accomplished dancers, but that you become good sons and daughters, good husbands and wives, good citizens and good Christians.

In the five years preceding the war, well and happily married to lss Sally Sue Means, of Charleston, Des had established a school in s on King Street, and developed a thriving trade among the Low ntrv plantations, through which he made a circuit three times annu

»ways

advertising in local papers in advance of his visit. He never d for pupils. He taught a little fencing to the boys, but mostly he 40 HEAVEN AND HELL

taught dances: the traditional quadrilles and Yorks and reels, with the dancers in a set or a line that would not compromise their morals through too much physical contact. He also taught the newer, more daring importations from Europe, the waltz and polka, closed dances with the couples facing one another in what some considered a dangerous intimacy.

An Episcopal divine in Charleston had preached against "the abomination of permitting a man who is neither your fiance nor your husband to encircle you with his arms and slightly press the contour of your waist." Des laughed at that. He considered all dancing moral, because he considered himself, and every one of his pupils, the same.

The five years in which he taught from the standard text, Ram beau's Dancing Master--his worn copy was in his saddlebag this moment--were magical ones. Despite the abolitionists and the threat of war, he presided at opulent balls and plantation assemblies, watching with delight as attractive white men and women danced by candlelight from seven at night until three or four in the morning, hardly out of breath. It was all capped by the glorious winter social season in Charleston, and the grand ball of the prestigious St. Cecilia Society.

Des's knowledge of dancing was wide and eclectic. He had seen frontier plank dancing, in which two men jigged on a board between barrels until one fell off. On plantations he'd observed slave dancing,
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rooted in Africa, consisting of elaborate heel-and-toe steps done to the beat of clappers made of animal bone or blacksmith's rasps scraped together. Generally, the planters prohibited drums among their slaves, deeming them a means of transmitting secret messages about rebellions or arson plots.

He had dreamed long hours over an engraved portrait of Thomas D. Rice, the great white dancer who'd enthralled audiences early in the century with his blackface character Jim Crow. From Carolinians who'd traveled in the North, he'd heard descriptions of the Shaking Quakers, notorious nigger lovers whose dances gave form to religious doctrine.

A single slow-moving file of dancers, each placing one careful foot ahead of the other, represented the narrow path to salvation; three or more concentric rings of dancers turning in alternate directions were the wheel-within-a-wheel, the Shaker vision of the cosmos. Des knew the whole universe of American dance, though to those who paid him he admitted to liking only those kinds of dancing that he taught.

His universe was shattered with the first cannon fire on Fort Sum ter. He mustered at once with the Palmetto Rifles, a unit organized by his best friend, Captain Ferris Brixham. Out of the original eighty men, only three were left in April of this year, when General Joe Johnston surrendered the Confederacy's last field army at Durham Station, North Carolina. The night before the surrender, a beastly yankee sergeant and Lost Causes 41

four of his men caught Des and Ferris foraging for food and beat them unconscious. Des survived; Ferris died in his arms an hour after officers announced the surrender. Ferris left a wife and five young children.

Embittered, Des trudged back to Charleston, where an eighty-fiveyearold uncle told him Sally Sue had died in January of pneumonia and complications of malnutrition. As if that wasn't enough, throughout the war the whole LaMotte family had been shamed by members of another family in the Ashley River district. It was more than Des could bear.

His mind had turned white. There was a month of which he remembered nothing. Aging relatives had cared for him.

Now he rode his mule through the marshes, looking for plantation clients from the past or people who could afford lessons for their children.

He'd found neither. Behind him, barefoot, walked his fifty-year old servant, an arthritic black called Juba; it was a slave name meaning musician. After his return home, Des had signed Juba to a lifetime contract of personal service. Juba was frightened by the new freedom bestowed by the legendary Linkum. He readily made his mark on the paper he couldn't read.

,

Juba walked in the sunshine with one hand resting on the hindquarters
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of the mule ridden by a man with only two ambitions: to practice again the profession he loved in a world the Yankees had made unfit for it, and to extract retribution from any of those who had contributed to his misery and that of his family and his homeland.

This was the man who confronted Cooper Main.

A yellow-pine plank thirty inches wide lay across the low spot in the salt marsh, a place otherwise impassable. Cooper reached the inland end of the plank a step or two before the ungainly fellow on the mule reached the other end with his mournful Negro.

On a dry hillock twenty feet from the crossing, an alligator lay sunning. They were common in the coastal marshes. This one was ma, ture: twelve feet long, probably five hundred pounds. Disturbed by the interlopers, it slid into the water and submerged. Only its unhooded eyes, above the water, showed its slow movement toward the plank.

Sometimes 'gators were dangerous if too hungry, or if they perceived a man or an animal as a threat.

Cooper noticed the 'gator. Although he'd seen them since he was small, they terrified him. Nightmares of their tooth-lined jaws still tormented him occasionally. He shivered as he watched the eyes glide closer. Abruptly, the eyes submerged, and the alligator swam away.

Cooper thought the young man with the imperial was familiar, but

°uldn't place him. He heard him say, from the other end of the plank, Give way."

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Hot and irritable, Cooper began, "I see no reason--"

"I say again, sir, give way."

"No, sir. You're impertinent and presumptuous, and I don't know you."

"But I know you, sir." The young man's glance conveyed suppressed rage, yet he spoke in a conversational, even pleasant, way. The contradiction set Cooper's nerves to twitching.

"You're Mr. Cooper Main, from Charleston. The Carolina Shipping Company. Mont Royal Plantation. Desmond LaMotte, sir."

"Oh, yes. The dancing teacher." With that resolved, Cooper started his horse over the plank.

It had the effect of a match thrown in dry grass. Des kicked his
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mule forward. Hooves rapped the plank. The mule frightened Cooper's horse, causing it to side-step and fall. Cooper twisted in the air to keep from being crushed, and landed in the shallows next to the horse. He thrashed and came up unhurt but covered with slimy mud.

"What the hell is wrong with you, LaMotte?"

"Dishonor, sir. Dishonor is what's wrong. Or does your family no longer understand the meaning of honor? It may be insubstantial as the sunlight, but it's no less important to life."

Dripping and chilled despite the heat, Cooper wondered if he'd met someone unbalanced by the war. "I don't know what in the name of God you mean."

"I refer, sir, to the tragedies visited upon members of my family by members of yours."

"I've done nothing to any LaMotte."

"Others with your name have done sinful things. You all smeared the honor of the LaMotte family by allowing Colonel Main to cuckold my first cousin Justin. Before I came home, your runaway slave Cuffey slew my first cousin Francis."

"But I tell you I had nothing to do--"

"We have held family councils, those of us who have survived,"

Des broke in. "I am glad I met you now, because it saves me from seeking you out in Charleston."

"For what?"

"To inform you that the LaMottes have agreed to settle our debt of honor."

"You're talking nonsense. Dueling's against the law."

"I am not referring to dueling. We'll use other means--at a time and place of our choosing. But we'll settle the debt."

Cooper reached for his horse's bridle. Water dripped from the animal and from Cooper's elbows, plopping in the silence. He wanted to Lost Causes 43

scoff at this deranged young man, but was deterred by what he saw in LaMotte's eyes.

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"We'll settle it with you, Mr. Main, or we'll settle it with your brother's nigger widow, or we'll settle it with both of you. Be assured of it."

And on he rode, mule shoes loud as pistol fire on the plank. After he reached solid ground, his hunched serving man followed, never once meeting Cooper's eye.

Cooper shivered again and led his horse from the water.

Late that night, at his house on Tradd Street, near the Battery, Cooper told his wife of the incident. Judith laughed.

That angered him. "He meant it. You didn't see him. I did. Not every man who goes to war comes back sane." He didn't notice her mournful glance, or recall his own mental disarray in the weeks following their son's drowning.

"I'm going to warn Madeline in a letter," he said.

WINTER GARDEN

Broadway, between Bleecker and Amity sts.

THIS EVENING,

commencing at 7V2 o'clock,