North and South: The North and South Trilogy (114 page)

She started to cry, but immediately fought back the tears and squared her shoulders. “It’s your decision, darling.” She took his arm again. “Could we go back to the house now? I feel a sudden and quite uncontrollable urge to make love.”

Despite her smile, he still saw a glint of tears. He cast an eye at the scraggly underbrush visible behind large boulders up at the edge of the beach.

“What’s the matter with right there?” He managed an impish smile, then kissed the tip of her nose. “Unless, of course, you deem yourself too conservative, Mrs. Hazard.”

“George”—a pause, a teasing look—”did you ever do this sort of thing before we were married? At West Point, for instance? You seem to fall into it quite naturally.”

“I have no comment.”

She thought again. “What if we’re seen?”

“By whom? There isn’t another soul for miles.”

“It’s rather chilly.”

“I’ll keep you warm.”

“Do you really think we dare?”

“Of course. Wartime has a disastrous effect on convention. People know they might not get a second chance.”

She saw that his jest hid something somber. There was no humor in his eyes. She clasped his hand tightly. They turned their backs on the lifeless sky and ran toward the rocks.

A
T BELVEDERE, BILLY AND
Brett went in to supper together. Billy suggested they go walking afterward because the spring night was so fine. They both understood that there was a second, unstated reason; the passing hours had released an increasing poignancy. Late that afternoon he had received a telegraph message: orders to return to Washington the following morning. The thought of his imminent departure depressed Brett and ruined her appetite.

Toward the end of the meal, there was a commotion. A sudden light suffused the twilight sky beyond the dining-room windows. As Billy, Brett, and two serving girls rushed to look outside, a distant shudder shook the house to its foundation. One of the girls gasped. A groom came running excitedly into the room, exclaiming that a shooting star had blazed bright as noon, then disappeared in the next valley.

The meteor striking the earth would account for the concussion they had all felt. The unnerved man spoke of the many shooting stars seen above the valley of late. He trembled and whispered something about God’s fury coming to the land.

Brett took those remarks with outward calm, yet the strange light and the tremor heightened her uneasy state as she and Billy set out for the hilltop overlooking the three brick furnaces of Hazard Iron. It was a splendid evening, cloudless and warm. Thousands of stars were visible, breathtakingly bright from horizon to zenith, except where their glow was muted by phosphorescent light veils.

A peculiar acrid odor came drifting over the top of the hill they were climbing. The smell was borne on a thin, nearly invisible smoke. “What’s burning?” she asked as they reached the summit, both slightly out of breath. They stood surrounded by thick clumps of laurel, the blooms white in the darkness.

Billy sniffed. “Don’t know but it doesn’t seem far away. Just down there. Wait here; I’ll go see.”

He scrambled down through more of the laurel. The blowing smoke thickened somewhat, and the strange, scorched odor increased. He felt the crater before he saw it; the heat washed against his face. Finally, with the help of the starlight, he perceived it—a pit nearly twelve feet across, black in the side of the hill. He could not see the meteorite itself, but he knew it was there.

“Nothing to fret about,” he said when he returned to the crest. “The shooting star, or a piece of it, struck the hill.”

She sheltered in his arms, trying to conceal her anxiety and her sense of isolation. Of course George and Constance always did their best to make her feel at home. She enjoyed the company of their children, and caring for them gave her something to do. Yet she had not really adapted to life in Pennsylvania, to the valley, its people, or their ways. The psalmist said the Lord protected the stranger, but she wasn’t sure about that.

And now she could no longer contain her feelings.

“Billy, I’m frightened.”

“Of the war?”

“Yes, and frightened of your leaving. I’m frightened of not knowing where you are or whether you’re safe. I’m frightened of the townspeople and the way some of them look at me accusingly because I’m a Southerner. I’m frightened of everything. I’m so ashamed to admit that, but I can’t help it!”

Her voice sounded faint, lacking the strength he always expected from her. Well, he was just as scared as she was. He had no idea where the Army would post him.

He did have a fair idea of what sort of duty lay in store, though. Engineers tore down the trees, prepared the roads, and built the pontoon bridges on which great armies advanced. Engineers went ahead of all the regular troops and were usually first within range of enemy guns.

“Everything’s so uncertain,” she was murmuring. “There’s so much hate, so much joy at the prospect of killing. Sometimes I hardly see how any of us can survive.”

“If we love each other enough, we can survive anything. So can our families. So can the country.”

“Do you honestly believe that?”

“Yes, I do. Once when I was feeling low, George helped me by doing this.” He broke off a sprig of laurel and put it in her hand. “The laurel thrives where other plants die. Mother always believed our family’s like the laurel, and I expect yours is too. Strong enough, because there are a lot of us who love each other to live through anything.”

She looked at the sprig with its small white flower, then tucked it into a pocket of her dress “Thank you.”

When he bent to kiss her face, he tasted her tears; but her voice did sound stronger.

“As soon as I know where I’ll be stationed, and if it’s possible to send for you, I will. We’ll get through this all right.”

She turned, kissed him again. “Oh, I love you, Billy Hazard.”

“I love you, Brett. That’s why we’ll get through.”

After another long kiss, she turned once more and rested comfortably with her back against his chest. They watched the stars while the spring wind gusted across the summit of the hill. The laurel tossed and murmured. Billy had spoken his hope, not his certainty. He knew full well the hope was fragile.

The darkness proved fragile, too. They faced away from the sprawl of Hazard Iron, but even so they soon grew conscious of its light all around them, a strengthening red glow that seemed to tinge the whole river valley. The lamps of the town grew dim behind it; some faded altogether.

Billy didn’t want to look around or even acknowledge the existence of the factory, but it was unavoidable. The sanguinary glare from the three furnaces washed out the stars. He heard men shouting, working through the night in the smoke and the fire, to the earsplitting sound of steam engines strained to the limit.

He shut his eyes a moment. It didn’t help. Scarlet light flowed over his wife’s hair and shoulders. The vagaries of the wind surrounded them with smoke and fumes from the mill. The valley and the world seemed to fill with the noise of the great machinery hammering on, turning out the first of tons of iron for armor, for the Union, for war. The wind blended the smoke from Hazard’s with that from the hillside where the meteorite had fallen, burning away the laurel as if it had never been.

Slavery brings the judgment of

heaven upon a country. As nations

cannot be rewarded or punished in

the next world, they must be in this:

GEORGE MASON OF VIRGINIA

1787

N
ORTH AND SOUTH
IS
the first of three projected novels about a group of Americans caught up in the storm of events before, during, and after the Civil War.

Some would argue that the Old West is the essential American experience. It is probably the most romanticized. But for many others, the central experience of the still-unfolding story of our republic remains the War Between the States.

As Richard Pindell of the State University of New York wrote in an article on
Gone with the Wind,
it is, first and foremost, “entirely
our
war.” Its causes reach back beyond Jefferson to the first white speculators who trod our shores. Its effects reverberate onward to the nineteen-fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties like a storm that refuses to surrender its fury.

Out of the primary issues of slavery and secession there came glory, misery, and myth. Robert Penn Warren has said the war gave the North its treasury of righteousness and the South its great alibi. It also gave American blacks, if not freedom in fact, then at least the legal basis for freedom. To American families on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line it gave an estimated 600,000 dead.

Historians say the war marks our national coming of age. A brief period of two decades taught us more about ourselves and American society than we had learned in all the years since the arrival of the first colonists. More, perhaps, than we cared to know.

And yet we remain fascinated with the period. We refight its great battles in books and articles, classrooms and discussion groups. We ponder its cautionary lessons or ignore them, and see its central issues still spilling blood in our streets. It is this power, this sometimes tragic outreach of past events, that attracted me to the subject, as it has attracted so many other writers and scholars.

Some interesting reactions have attended the preparation of this book. At a party not long after the subject was announced, a woman asked—and rather testily, I must say—”How can a Yankee presume to come down South and write about
us?”

The last word bothered me. I wanted to reply that I thought of myself as an American, not a tub thumper for a particular region or cause. But I tried to give her a better answer: “The same way any professional writes about any period he didn’t directly experience. By studying, walking the ground, trying to extend a storyteller’s imagination into the minds and hearts of characters.” So this may be a good place to comment on the book’s historical content.

The primary purpose of
North and South
is to entertain. Still, I wanted the story to be an accurate reflection of the period; not so much a retelling of every last incident that contributed to the outbreak of war in Charleston harbor, but a fair presentation of prevailing attitudes and tensions on both sides.

There were, for example, voices like Cooper Main’s here and there in the South. And when the cavalryman O’Dell speaks of the need to resettle new freedmen in Liberia, he is only saying what quite a few Northerners said—including, on occasion, Lincoln. Many who were strongly in favor of abolition did not believe blacks worthy or capable of full participation in American democracy; regrettable as that view may seem today, to distort it in a historical novel, or omit it altogether, would be a disservice to accuracy and to all those who have struggled so hard to change such attitudes.

Although I have tried to make the book historically correct, there have been minor alterations of the record in a few places. There has always been a reason for such alteration. A couple of examples should demonstrate.

Company K of the Second Cavalry Regiment served with distinction in Texas in the late 1850s. The officers and men of my Company K are, of necessity, fictitious, and so is the incident at Lantzman’s—although it is not unlike those that actually took place during the period. Details of life and activity of this famous regiment are faithful to the record.

Sometimes I have made a change for reasons other than the requirements of the story. In memoirs of West Point life written in the last century, for instance, the plural form of demerit is spelled the same way—demerit. I added an s because in a contemporary book, the correct spelling looks like an error.

Another question I heard during the writing—this one, too, occasionally put forth with a distinct edge—was this: “And which side do
you
take?”

I never answered because I always found it the wrong question. I see only one worthy “side”;—the side of those who suffered. The side of those who lost their lives in battle, and those who lost their lives more slowly, but no less surely, in bondage.

Here we confront another great lure of the subject: its fascinating and tragic paradox. The schism should not have happened, and it had to happen. But that is my interpretation; as one historian has said, “Every man creates his own Civil War.” The statement helps explain the fascination of the conflict, not only for Americans but for millions of others around the world.

It is time to pay some debts. A great many people played a part in the preparation of this book. Foremost among them are two editors—Carol Hill, who helped shape the plan, and Julian Muller, who did the same for the manuscript. The work of each was invaluable.

For assistance with research I must especially cite the Library of the United States Military Academy, West Point, and particularly the map and manuscript librarian, Mrs. Marie Capps.

The reigning expert on the Academy in the mid-nineteenth century is, I think, Professor James Morrison of the history department at York College of Pennsylvania. Professor Morrison is also a former Army officer and West Point faculty member. He answered many questions he doubtless found naive and spent precious time providing me with a copy of the Tidball Manuscript—a memoir-of life at the Academy by Cadet John C. Tidball, class of 1848.

Tidball’s narrative deserves publication and widespread attention. If professional historians wrote with a fraction of the color, humor, and humanity of this nineteenth-century soldier, history would be a more attractive study to many more people. At the end of the handwritten Tidball papers, I found myself wishing I had known the man. I know I would have liked him.

The Beaufort County, South Carolina, Library and its branch on Hilton Head Island were once again of inestimable help in locating scores of obscure source materials. I owe special thanks to Ms. Marf Shopmyer, who kept faithful track of my seemingly endless requests for books, documents, periodicals, and newspapers of, and dealing with, the period of the story. Appreciation is also due to the cooperative staff of the South Carolina State Library, Columbia; I have seen few research libraries to equal it.