Heaven and Hell (62 page)

"No. Never."

"Where is he hiding, Dills?"

Ah, a chance to wound her. Forcefully, he said, "I have not the slightest idea."

"How long have you not known?"

"Since shortly before the end of the war. He left the Union Army in disgrace." She flung back against the tall chair. "He deserted."

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"Oh, God. My poor boy. My poor Elkanah."

She groped beneath her chair again, stirring cobwebs, which became attached to her fingers and hand. She drew into the light an old green wine bottle and a fine lead-glass goblet with a crack and a patina of dirt so thick that the goblet looked translucent. Into the glass she splashed some dark fluid, a port or sherry, perhaps, brown as coffee.

He smelled only the rancid odor of spoiled wine.

She sipped without offering him any. Not that he would have touched the filthy stuff. "I should like to retire, madam. It was an exhausting trip."

The yellow eyes slipped across his face, and beyond. The dark brown fluid in the glass leaked from a corner of her mouth, running down her chin like a muddy river through snow. "You have no idea 392 HEAVEN AND HELL

how I cared for him. How badly I wanted a decent life for him. All the more because he had such a terrible start."

What was she saying? The eyes sought his, almost pitiable in their sudden plea for understanding. "You know about my family, Mr. Dills."

"A little. By reputation only."

"There is a strain of mental instability. It runs back many generations, and has spread widely."

Even to the Executive Mansion, he thought.

"It tainted my father. After my mother's death, when Heyward Starkwether began to pay court to me, my father grew jealous. I was his favorite child. Heyward proposed. When I told my father that I wanted to accept, it drove him to incredible rage. He had been drinking heavily. He was very powerful physically--"

Dills felt he was about to peer into some buried place, a place where something had been hidden, putrefying, for decades. He was gripped, perversely fascinated. Somewhere the rats shrieked, and there was another, lower sound, as of prey caught and hurt.

"Allow me to guess the rest, madam. Marriage was by then a necessity? You were already carrying Starkwether's child, later named Bent after the farm people who raised him. You revealed your condition to your father, and he beat you."

A vacant smile. Her right hand lolled over the carved chair arm.

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The filthy goblet slipped, fell, broke. She paid no attention. "Ah--ah.

If it were only that simple. My father did use force the night I told him I wanted to marry. The rest of your chronology is out of order." He didn't understand. "Later, I wanted to do away with the unborn child.

My father in one of his rages said he would kill me if I did. I was too terrified of him to attempt it. Together--his was the hand forcing mine, you see--we summoned Starkwether and convinced him of his respon.

sibility. His guilt, if you will. I suspect he carried it until he died, poor wretched man."

Dills's hair crawled. Light was shining into the putrefying burial place.

"Are you saying you deceived Heyward Starkwether, madam?"

"Yes."

"My late client--Elkanah Bent's patron and declared father--had no connection with the boy?"

"Heyward supposed he was Elkanah's father. We convinced him of it."

"But he was not?"

"No."

"In other words, all those years, my client was coerced into helping and supporting--?"

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"Not coerced, Mr. Dills. Once he was convinced that Elkanah was his child, he helped him gladly, as any father would."

"Who was Bent's father, madam?"

The yellow eyes, moist and mad, reflected the candles around the tower.

"Why, Mr. Dills--" she giggled, a hideous coquetry--"surely you know. I said he used physical force."

"Sweet Christ! Elkanah's father was--"

"Mine, Mr. Dills. Mine."

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The straw-littered stones of the floor seemed to tilt and shiver beneath Jasper Dills. The rational underpinning of his world threatened to collapse. "Goodbye," he said, snatching his carpetbag and rushing toward the door. "Goodbye, Miss Todd."

In the cul-de-sac, shivering, he waited and waited for the hackney to return. Now he understood the cause, and the extent, of Elkanah Bent's insanity. He no longer cared about the stipend. He wanted no more of it, or the woman he'd deceived, or Bent. Especially Bent, wherever he might be.

Dills finally understood much that he'd never understood before.

Bent's unreasonable grudge against the Mains and the Hazards, a preoccupation since his cadet days; the brutality of the Lehigh Station slaying--Bent had inherited a capacity for evil.

Chilly sweat broke out on Dills's face as he recalled the times he'd criticized Bent, reproved him, ordered him out of his office. If he'd known the sort of man Bent really was, and if he'd known why, he'd never have done such things. He'd probably have cowered instead.

The hackney never came. Dills picked up his carpetbag and stumbled downhill, all the way to the lodging house he'd previously telegraphed for a room. There, at a late hour, he paid exorbitantly for a zinc tub of heated water.

Feeling filthy down to his bones, he sat in the tub with a cake of homemade soap as yellow as her eyes, scrubbing and scrubbing at his wrinkled, mottled skin and thinking of Elkanah Bent, his brain, his blood, his very being poisoned before his birth.

Dills slumped back in the tub, inexplicably sorrowful. God pity poor Bent, whom he surely would never see again. God pity even more the next person to incur Bent's wrath.

42

North of Washington on the Seventh Street Road, Maryland farmers once a week set up stalls and wagons for an open-air market. On the last Saturday in March, two days before the President's trial was to begin in the Senate, Virgilia and Scipio Brown went to the market to buy food for the orphanage. Brown drove the buggy and carried the money, amusing Virgilia by this insistence on handling all the male duties. He didn't seem upset by the looks they drew because she was
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white and he was not.

They moved through the crowded lanes of the market, among hens squawking in crates and piglets squealing in improvised pens. They argued about the subject most of Washington was arguing about these days.

"He's usurped power, Virgilia. To make it worse, he's the elect of an assassin, not the people."

"You have to be more specific than that to convict him."

"Good Lord, they've drawn up eleven charges."

"The first nine are all related to the Tenure of Office issue. Ben Butler's tenth article condemns Johnson for speeches criticizing Congress.

Is free speech now a high crime or misdemeanor? The eleventh article is just a grab bag."

"Authored by your good friend Mr. Stevens."

"Even so--" They reached a cross lane. A cart approached, piled with crates of rabbits. "I stand by my opinion of it."

He saw the cartwheel lurch into a rut, tilting the vehicle sideways.

Cordage snapped, freeing the crates. The huge stack toppled toward Virgilia and Scipio. He seized her waist and swung her away from the spot where the crates crashed down. Several broke; rabbits escaped in every direction. The driver ran off in pursuit.

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Virgilia was abruptly aware of the mulatto's strong hands on her waist. And of a curious intensity in his dark eyes. She'd noticed

similar looks several times lately. "Perhaps we'd better search for eggs and forget politics, Scipio. I wouldn't want it to ruin our friendship."

"Nor

I." He smiled and released her. She tingled from the touch of his hands, and was more than a little startled by that reaction.

With arms grown strong from hard work, Virgilia pushed the wood paddle around the steaming kettle of thick pea soup. It was noon the next day. Across the kitchen, Thad Stevens sat with a tawny little boy dozing in his lap, thumb in his mouth. Virgilia's friend looked pale and weary.

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"You will be there tomorrow for the opening of the trial?" he asked.

"Yes, and for as much thereafter as I can manage without falling behind here."

"You want him convicted, I assume."

Reluctantly, she said, "I don't think so. He denies any crime."

"His denial is estopped by his previous behavior. He sent Thomas to remove Stanton."

"Thomas failed, so it was only an attempt, not a removal."

"You're becoming legalistic, my dear." He didn't sound happy about it, although the whole Stanton mess was nothing if not a lawyer's delight.

Even Grant had been caught in the tangle. Grant's withdrawal as interim Secretary of War had precipitated a series of bitter exchanges with Andrew Johnson; a final letter from Grant charged the President with trying to "destroy my character before the country." That letter completely alienated Johnson, and persuaded many people that Grant was at heart a Radical. No one had been quite sure before. Grant's detractors immediately called him an opportunist, a political chameleon, and--the old canard--a drunkard. Never mind. Grant had purified himself in the eyes of the Radical leadership. In late May the Republicans would convene in Chicago to nominate a presidential candidate. Cynics said

the General would there be "confirmed as a new member of the Radical church," and be chosen to run.

"Legalistic, Thad?" she said. "No. I'm only trying to look at matters fairly."

"The devil with fair. I want Johnson out. I will hound him till he'sgone."

She let the paddle rest against the rim of the kettle. In the yard, Where a mild March sun fell through the bare branches of two unbudded

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cherry trees, Scipio laughed and romped with several of the children.

"Whether he's guilty or not?"

In his glare, she saw the answer before he gave it. "We are purging the man, but we are also purging what he represents, Virgilia. Leniency toward an entire class of people. Unrepentant people who still conspire to return this nation to what it was thirty years ago, when an entire black population was in chains and Mr. Calhoun arrogantly threatened secession if anyone dared object. There are seven impeachment managers. Do you have any idea of the enormous pressure already being brought against us? Letters. Cowardly threats--"

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Disturbing the boy nestled in his lap, he pulled a wrinkled yellow flimsy from his pocket. "This came from Louisiana, that's all I know for certain."

She unfolded it and read, stevens, prepare to meet your god.

THE AVENGER IS UPON YOUR TRACK. HELL IS YOUR PORTION. K.K.K.

Shaking her head, she handed it back. For a moment Stevens's waxy cheeks showed some color. "The avenger is upon Mr. Johnson's track, too. His portion is a guilty verdict."

Scipio ran in the sunshine, whooping. The joyful sound seemed chillingly at odds with the congressman's angry eyes. His dogma had carried him down a road Virgilia had abandoned. There was no longer much hatred in her, but in him the war raged on.

On Monday, March 30, she arrived an hour before the doors to the Senate gallery opened. When they did, she fought her way upward among people hurrying and pushing. By the time Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase took the chair and opened the trial, there wasn't an empty seat or vacant stair step in the gallery.

Days ago, Chase had organized and sworn the Senate as a court.

Today, all fifty-four legislators representing the twenty-seven states were present on the floor. Among them Virgilia saw Sam Stout, calm and smiling. He'd been quoted widely about his confidence in the outcome.

He believed there would be no problem in obtaining the thirty-six votes necessary to convict Johnson on one or more of the articles.

The gallery was noisy, demonstrative, divided by partisanship. Some spectators whistled and waved handkerchiefs when the impeachment managers, seven men from the House, including old Thad with wig askew, took their places amid piles of books and briefs at a table to the left of the chair. President Johnson's five eminent attorneys faced them on the other side of the chair. All of the senators were squeezed into the first two rows of desks, with the desks behind packed with members of the House. Reporters filled the back aisles, lined the wall and blocked the doors.

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The trial opened with a three-hour oration by the chief manager, Representative Ben Butler of Massachusetts. Spoons Butler, the Beast
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of New Orleans, was a skilled and abrasive lawyer. He generated cheers and a blizzard of waving handkerchiefs when he declared that Johnson was patently guilty for removing Stanton in defiance of Congress and while Congress was in session.

Seated in the restless, noisy crowd, Virgilia gazed down on Sam Stout and felt no great hurt, only a melancholy emptiness. Time was indeed changing and mellowing"her. To her surprise, her attention wandered several times from the scene below. In its place she saw Scipio Brown's eyes after he'd saved her from injury when the market cart overturned. She remembered how his hands had felt on her waist, pressing tightly. She liked the memory.

By the ninth of April, the managers had rested their case. Perhaps the high point of the prosecution's presentation had come when Butler whipped out a red-stained garment and flourished it. He said it was the shirt of an Ohioan from the Freedmen's Bureau whom Klansmen in Mississippi had flogged. Next morning Washington had a new phrase for its political lexicon; you whipped up anti-Southern sentiment by

"waving the bloody shirt."

Johnson's lawyers presented the arguments for acquittal. Because of an epidemic of measles at the orphanage, Virgilia missed many of those sessions in April. When she read about them in the papers, she didn't regret it. The legalisms, the hair-splitting over the language of the Constitution, and the all-day orations sounded boring.