When This Cruel War Is Over (36 page)

Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over

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She nodded. “I half knew that. But I hoped I was wrong.”

“Can't weâsomehowâget beyond it, Janet?”

Slowly, sadly, she shook her head. No. They could never get beyond it. Instead, each week, month, year it would only grow more insurmountable, more intolerable, more irreversible. Paul saw the shape, the substance of the doom that was descending on him. Like his father, he had become the figure in the foreground, the unintending culprit who bore the burden of history's refusal to fulfill the deepest desire of a woman's heart.

“Go away,” she said. Tears were on her cheeks now. “Goâaway. I'll always love you. But I never want to see you again.”

Another chunk of Hopemont crashed into the ruins. “Janet, I can't bear that thought,” Paul said.

“I can't, either. But we'll have to try.”

She picked up the pistol and walked away from him and from ruined Hopemont, down the path toward the slave cabins. She left him standing there among the dead.

“Janet!” Paul cried.

She did not look back. The last thing Paul saw before he turned away was the forlorn figure in the gray cloak, her head bowed, the unused silver pistol in her hand.

THIRTY-SEVEN

JANET TODD SAT OUTSIDE HER hut in Hopemont's slave quarters, shelling peas. Spring was greening the verdant earth. Trees were budding, cows and sows were in heat, larks were singing in the garden. But she felt nothing, neither joy nor sorrow. It also happened to be Easter Saturday. That meant nothing to her, either.

A few hundred yards away, Hopemont's charred ruins lay untouched. She had no money to rebuild the house. Her father had died of dysentery in the fetid federal prison in Louisville before they could bring him to trial for treason. Other Sons of Liberty leaders had been convicted before military courts and sentenced to death. But President Lincoln (influenced, some say, by Henry Gentry) had declined to hang them. They were still in prison; some were appealing their convictions.

This was only a dollop of the deluge of history in the last eight months. A week after the Sons of Liberty uprising had been crushed, General Sherman had telegraphed electrifying news from Georgia:
Atlanta is
ours and fairly won
. Overnight, Lincoln's chances of getting reelected had been transformed from improbable to near certainty. In November he had been returned to the White House by a hefty majority.

Meanwhile, General Sherman launched his 70,000-man army on a march through Georgia from Atlanta to the sea, cutting a swath of destruction through the heart of the Confederacy. In desperation, the Confederate Army of Tennessee, too small to stop Sherman, marched in the opposite direction, hoping to chew up
scattered Union garrisons in Tennessee piecemeal and reach Kentucky, where a harvest of new recruits would enable them to invade the upper west.

But General George H. Thomas, the Union commander in Tennessee, had used the telegraph and the railroads to concentrate every available man at Nashville. There, ten days before Christmas, he routed the Army of Tennessee in a two-day battle that many called the death knell of the Confederacy. In that tremendous clash, Colonel Paul Stapleton had been killed. In the
Keyport Record
Janet read how he had been mortally wounded breaching the Confederate defenses at a crucial point at the head of his regiment of black soldiers.

Janet knew Paul had volunteered to command black troops. Henry Gentry told her this in a letter assuring her that Paul had not betrayed her. She had understood the implications of Paul's choice. She wondered if Caroline Kemble Stapleton also understood it. She did not try to find out. She was beyond sympathy, beyond grief, beyond everything human except mere survival.

Her mother was an even more pathetic zombie, living with Amelia Jameson at Rose Hill, cared for by her faithful maid, Sally. Mrs. Jameson spent most of her time grieving over Adam. He was permanently blind. That single bullet had destroyed both his eyes.

When Janet visited her mother, she sometimes sat with Adam. She let him hold her hand. She told him what she heard about the dwindling war. She knew he still loved her. More than once she had to stifle an impulse to scream,
It's impossible! I don't love you! I'll never love anyone again!

Most of the time, Janet stayed on the Todd plantation, trying to get in a crop. She had hired some Irish laborers from Cincinnati who were working about a third of the acres for five dollars a week. She did not know why she was trying to survive. She was an automaton, going through the motions of life without a spark of human
feeling inside her. She had been that way since the night the western confederacy died.

Over the horizon, the war churned on. Every newspaper made it clear the South's collapse was imminent. Last week General Lee had surrendered the battered remnant of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox. Janet no longer cared. Not even President Lincoln's second inaugural address, calling for reconciliation and peace, reminding everyone that both sides had prayed to the same God and neither side's prayers had been completely answered, meant anything to her. She was beyond all those ideas.

“Miss Todd?”

A big black man in a blue uniform was standing in the lane between the huts. He had sergeant's stripes on his sleeve. He had doffed his kepi and was holding it in both his large hands.

“I don't know whether you remember me. I'm Moses Washington. I was stationed over the river at Colonel Gentry's house.”

“I remember you,” Janet said, continuing to shell the peas.

Sergeant Washington cleared his throat. “Miss Todd. I got a message for youâfrom Colonel Stapleton. It was the last thing he said to me before he died at Nashville.”

“What is it?”

“He saidâto tell you he never stopped lovin' you.”

No. No. No. She did not want to hear those words. But she had heard them. What did they mean? She knew the answer. It was exhaled from her empty heart. “I never stopped loving him, either.”

“He saidâto tell you he accepted it. He said you'd understand what he meant.”

“Yes,” Janet said, gazing up at the earnest black face. “I understand.”

“He saidâhe hoped you did too. Accept it.”

“I'll try, Sergeant. What brings you here?”

“I'm fixin' to marry Lucy and take her west to Fort Leavenworth. With the war almost over, the Army's recruitin' two regular Negro regiments to keep the Indians quiet out that way.”

“How is Lucy?”

“She's pretty much all right, ma'am. Walks with just a little limp now.”

The sergeant paused and fiddled with his kepi. “Lucy asked me to give you a message, too, Miss Todd.”

“What?”

“She said she still loves you and always will. She knows you didn't mean to have her whipped that way.”

“Tell herâI didn't. Tell her I'll always love her too.”

“She'll be mighty glad to hear that, Miss Todd.”

“Did Colonel Gentry ever find Maybelle?”

Sergeant Washington shook his big head. “He went to New Orleans himself but he never found her.”

“I'm sorry.”

“I'll tell Lucy that too, Miss Todd.”

“Good luck at Fort Leavenworth.”

“Thanks, Miss Todd. Good luck to you, too. I hopes you get things back to normal here soon.”

The words were so earnestâand so ludicrously far from realityâJanet did not know what to say. Perhaps Sergeant Washington realized that. He forced a smile, put on his kepi and strode away toward the ferry landing.

Janet sat there in the spring sunlight and tried to imagine Paul saying those words with his last breath.
Accepted it. Hoped you did too
. She remembered his description of accepting death on the battlefield. He was talking about thatâand something moreâa great deal more. He meant accepting everything. Their love. The war. The ruin of their love by the war.

Paul was telling her from his soldier's heart what he had learned about accepting deathâtrying to make her see what this new more terrible acceptance meant.
When a soldier accepted death, he was freed from fear. He was able to go forward, to be a man of courage in a new transforming way. Was Paul telling her that he wanted her to be free that way, too?

What was the use of transforming herself? From what to what? From Automaton Janet to Acceptance Janet? Her life would still be as empty as a shelled pea pod.

No, it wouldn't,
whispered a voice in her heart.

Who was it? Janet took a deep slow breath and realized it was Paul. Sergeant Washington had brought him here to say good-bye to her. Here to Hopemont, where they had pledged unflinching honesty and perpetual love.

Slowly, dazedly, Janet saw what acceptance would free her to do. She would be able to marry Adam. She would bring him here and build a house suitable for a blind man. Not a Hopemont with a winding staircase worthy of a palace. A simple one- or two-story house. Acceptance Janet would try to love him. She would slowly, painfully, help him see the terrible implications of the way God had answered their prayers. Together they might learn to see a different world from the one they had inherited from their fathers.

Janet put aside the peas and walked down the road to Rose Hill. Adam was sitting in the parlor, huge, black-bearded, immobile. “Adam,” Janet said. “I've been thinking. Now that your wound has healed, isn't it time we got married?”

He trembled. “Janet. Oh Janet. Do you want an oversize cripple on your hands for the rest of your life?”

“I want a man who loves me,” Janet said. She kissed him on the lips. It was amazing. A half hour ago she had been sure she would never kiss a man that way again.

“Mother!” Adam shouted. “Come here. I've got some good news.”

Amelia Jameson stopped at the parlor door, her face brightening, her eyes widening with hope. She knew what Adam was going to say before he said it.

“Janet dearest,” Amelia said, embracing her. “I can't tell you how long I've wanted you as a daughter.”

Robin Jameson rushed into the parlor. Before anyone could speak, he blurted out news of his own: “I was down at the steamboat dock. A Bible salesman from Cincinnati got off. He says Lincoln's dead. The actorâJohn Wilkes Boothâshot him. Why would he do a crazy thing like that?”

“Dear God,” Amelia Jameson said.

Two days later, on the other side of the Ohio River, Henry Gentry sat in his cellar office, staring up at the photograph of Lincoln with his hair mussed. On his desk, a headline in the
Keyport Record
reported the president's assassination. What did it mean? Gentry did not know. He could not begin to fathom the undertakings of Abraham's God. All he knew was an overwhelming sense of loss, as if the foundations of the earth beneath the house had given way and he was alone here, inhabiting a ruin.

Where could he turn for consolation? Paul Stapleton, with whom he had begun a wary father-son-like friendship, was dead. He could not think of another person who did not secretly gloat that Henry Gentry had been deprived of his powerful friend. Everywhere Democrats were silently rejoicing at this sign of God's righteous wrath.

Struggling against tears, Gentry took a deep breath and noticed an unusual odor outside his officeâone he seldom encountered in his dank dungeon: perfume. Amelia Conway Jameson stood in the doorway in a blue dress.

“Henry,” she said. “I felt almost a needâor at least a wishâto come over here and tell you how badly I know you must feel about the president.”

“Thank you.”

“All these months I was hoping you might visit Rose
Hill. I suppose you were embarrassed because of Adam. He's going to marry Janet Todd. She's going to build a house on her propertyâ”

“I'mâI'm so glad.”

“Robin's going to college in the fall. Yale, I think. I want him to get out of Kentucky.”

“A good idea.”

She sat down in the chair beside his desk. In the dim light he could not see a single line on her lovely face. The silken voice was exactly the same as it had been thirty years ago.

“Maybe you were worried about yourâyour wound. It doesn't trouble me, Henry.”

“Amelia.”

In ways too mysterious to comprehend, love had returned to the heartland.

Europe extends to the Alleghenies, while America lies beyond

âRalph WALDO EMERSON

It was evident that the portion of the North lying west of the Alleghenies was in the process of becoming the heartland of America.

âSTEPHEN Z. STARR,
The Union Cavalry in the Civil War

Tell themâtell the world that I only loved America.

âJEFFERSON DAVIS