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Authors: Thomas Fleming

BOOK: When This Cruel War Is Over
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A steamboat plowed downriver, a gleaming white mass in the late-afternoon sunshine. A huge American flag flew from its stem. “I never see one of those boats without thinking of my brother Charlie,” Paul said. “The last time I saw him, I was getting on a steamboat at New Orleans.”
“Did he stay there when the war began?”
“He was dead by then. He was killed in 1859, trying to make Cuba the thirty-fifth state.”
“Your family fascinates me, Major Stapleton. One brother a martyr to the South, another a major general in the Union Army.”
“Charlie was a martyr to the Union, in our eyes. We thought making Cuba a state would placate the South and keep them in the Union. My father put up most of the money for the expedition. But someone in a high place betrayed them. The Spanish took no prisoners.”
“The Union, the Union. I'm sick of this invocation of the Union. My father began the war using the word as if it were a sacred chant. Now the mere mention of it torments him. Would you have Charlie die for Lincoln's kind of Union? One created by bullets instead of ballots?”
“In order to graduate from West Point we were required to take an ironclad oath of loyalty to the federal government.”
“But is it the same federal government to which you swore your allegiance? A government that has converted the war into a crusade to free the blacks, after teaching them to hate the whites?”
“As a citizen I deplore that. But as a professional soldier my political opinion is irrelevant.”
The emotions that played across Janet Todd's face were an exquisite blend of sympathy and desire. “Major—listen to me. I'm telling you that the constitution—the government—to which you swore allegiance has ceased to exist. Lincoln and the Republicans have annihilated it. We're in a new world, where force and risk are the only arbiters of the future.”
As soon as women embark on abstract reasoning, they create love unconsciously.
Another of Charlie's gems of amorous wisdom. But what did it mean? Did reasoning women create love in themselves? Or in their lovers? For the moment, Paul only knew it was another step in the process of discovering the remarkable dimensions of this woman's mind and heart.
“Your logic, Miss Janet, has a certain irresistibility. Are you prepared to live on risk? That seems to make you susceptible to the flattery of a professional soldier.”
“I'm prepared to love a professional soldier who lives on risk for my sake. That man—I would love with my whole soul.”
Paul felt the tremor of a fresh wholly original crystallization in his flesh. A woman who
wanted
him to live on risk. The idea had enormous resonance in his soul.
Back home in New Jersey, while he was recuperating from his Gettysburg wound, he had been forced to endure the lamentations of his brother Jonathan's wife. She orated endlessly on how determined she was to persuade Jonathan to quit the war. His next wound would be fatal. For a while it had only stirred sardonic amusement, thinking of Major General Stapleton listening to these cries of woe in the bedroom when he limped home from the battlefield. But in retrospect the tears of the Union hero's wife had grown distasteful.
By now twilight was seeping across the Ohio, like a flood of darkness from the South. Janet Todd was a white ghost beneath the cottonwood trees. The dwindling light made it easier to speak the final seductive words: “I think you should be the first to know I'm planning to return to the fighting front as soon as possible. Honor doesn't permit me to linger here in safety any longer. If I thought the risks I'll face there were for your sake, it would transform them in a way that would make the fear of another wound a mere trifle.”
Without warning, without invitation, Janet Todd kissed him. As that strong pliant mouth pressed his lips, Paul knew that crystallization had been occurring in Janet's heart too. She loved him beyond politics, perhaps even beyond risk. But his Gettysburg wound insisted on whispering,
Confederate agent.
HENRY TODD GENTRY SAW HER hesitating in the doorway, her behemoth of a husband glowering behind her. “Amelia—Rogers!” he called, careening toward them. “I was hoping you'd come—”
Amelia Jameson brightened marvelously, although a patina of sadness remained beneath the exquisite smile. “I told my husband I wasn't going to let a war stop me from going to a Gentry party,” she said. Her russet hair still retained its sheen, the face its Grecian cast, although her complexion was no longer the pure snow of a japonica.
Before Gentry could speak, his mother's bulk dispersed them like a steamboat on a collision course with canoes. “I'm
so
pleased you've come, Amelia
darling
,” she said. The dewlaps protruding over Millicent Todd Gentry's high-necked lace collar virtually vibrated with the intensity of her emotion. Her large square face, powdered a garish white, was distorted by a totally insincere smile.
Rogers Jameson and Gentry exchanged glances. Were they both marveling at the talent women had for concealing hatred behind elaborate courtesy and the rhetoric of affection? Millicent Todd Gentry had never forgiven Amelia for jilting her son.
Gentry decided he was attributing too much intelligence to Rogers Jameson. He was probably thinking the same triumphant sentence he had been caressing in his primitive forebrain for the last thirty years:
She's mine,
Gentry, and there's not a goddamn thing you and your money can do about it.
Out in the garden, beneath a tent festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, Jimmy Hemings's fiddle band was striking up his theme song, “Muckymoss.” For a moment Gentry was back thirty-five years, his arms around Amelia Conway, dancing to the plaintive strains of that old Welsh song. In the darkness outside the tent, Rogers Jameson was watching, envy on his fleshy face. Gentry had made the mistake of savoring that envy. He had assumed that God was in his heaven waiting to unite elegant Amelia Conway, descendant of one of Virginia's First Families, and Henry Todd Gentry, heir to one of the largest fortunes in Indiana.
Time! What an empty vapor 'tis!
And days how swift they are:
as an Indian arrow—
Fly on like a shooting star.
The present moment just is here
Then slides away in haste,
That we can never say they're ours,
But only say they're past.
How often had he heard young Abe Lincoln recite that poem? But Henry Gentry had paid no more attention to it than he had paid to Abe's warning that Rogers Jameson was going to lure Amelia Conway out of Gentry's arms. In those days, Henry Gentry had felt immune to disasters, disappointments, losses. He was destiny's darling, with his head crammed full of Sir Walter Scott and his pockets full of money.
How could Rogers Jameson, who seldom had a nickel left after one of his flatboat trips to New Orleans, who could barely sign his name, much less read Sir Walter Scott, possibly entice Amelia Conway into abandoning
Henry Gentry? Granted Rogers had, as his name suggested, some vague claim to descent from George Rogers Clark, conqueror of Indiana and Illinois in the days of 1776. But the old warrior had died drunk and forgotten and his descendants had been left with nothing but their muscles to rely on.
Lincoln had wrinkled that lean already ugly face into a grimace: “He's goin' to tell her all men are created equal, Henry. And her hypocritical old Democratic daddy's gonna smile and say, ‘That's my box.'”
When Gentry returned from his senior year at Harvard College, he discovered that Lincoln was right. The Democrats' rant about equality, which left four million black men and women under the lash from Kentucky to the Rio Grande, could also melt the female heart. Especially when it was combined with a set of magnificent muscles, a permanent suntan and a gift for crude flattery.
Also not to be discounted were Rogers Jameson's assaults on the pretensions of fake pioneers like the Gentrys, who had arrived from the hated East with enough money to buy up all the best land and support politicians in Kentucky and Indiana who dared to say the Democratic Party was a collection of swindlers and incompetents. That was why Gentry's grandfather had named his mansion The Grange, in memory of the New York estate of Alexander Hamilton, the great foe of the founder of the Democratic Party, Thomas Jefferson.
Gentry had thought it was no more than a charming aberration when Amelia lectured him on Jefferson's call for universal democracy and rebuked Gentry for his “aristocratic” notions. She particularly deplored his tendency to imitate Lincoln's caustic criticism of Democrats. Too late he realized she was rationalizing her attraction to Rogers Jameson and echoing her father's hostility to the Gentrys and their conservative politics.
“What can I get you to drink?” Gentry asked.
“Whiskey,” Rogers Jameson said.
“Have you opened any of your wonderful wines?” Amelia asked.
“We have a Montrachet fifty-four on ice—and a Latour fifty-two on the sideboard.”
Gentry poured a glass of Montrachet for Amelia and asked his black butler, Peter, to bring Rogers Jameson a whiskey. The behemoth accepted it without so much as a grunt of thanks and strolled over to Dr. Walter Yancey. “How's John Brown Junior doin', Walter?” he asked. “You chop off any arms or legs yet?”
“He's almost certain to recover and give you another shot at him,” Yancey said.
“Don't that prove there's no God?”
“It would certainly suggest that he's not paying attention to his business.”
Gentry led Amelia into the garden. On the dance floor, Major Paul Stapleton was waltzing with Janet Todd. The glow of delight on their young faces made him wince. Did it also disturb Amelia? “When I see those two I hear the sound of wedding bells,” he said. “But I've been wrong about that sort of thing before.”
“They do look terribly pleased with each other,” Amelia said pretending to have no idea when Gentry heard those earlier wedding bells.
“Except that Cousin Janet is a passionate supporter of the Confederacy. I wonder how—or if—they can resolve that contretemps.”
“This dreadful war can't last forever.”
“There are people around here who are trying to prolong the war, I'm afraid. You must know that.”
Amelia continued to gaze at Major Stapleton and Janet Todd as they cavorted across the floor with a half dozen other couples in a lively square dance. “I pray to God they won't succeed,” she said.
Her favorite younger brother, Eddie, had been killed at Shiloh. He was one of the few Democrats in the ranks of Lincoln's Own. Gentry had recruited him.
“I'm glad to hear that. I've been afraid—ever since Eddie died—that your dislike of me had turned to hate. I'm not sure I could bear that.”
“Hate you? How could you even think such a thing, Henry?”
“War does terrible things to people's feelings. Could you believe thirty years ago that so much hatred would be swirling through Kentucky and Indiana? The days of our youth begin to seem more and more like a sojourn in Eden to me. Our little personal quarrels that caused us so much heartbreak recede to the level of the trivial, the childishly innocent.”
“Isn't everyone innocent at a certain age?” Amelia said.
“I think we exceeded the natural tendency by a vast American distance.”
“I never thought of your friend Lincoln as innocent. He always looked too lean, too hungry.”
“You think he's proving that as president? His hunger was for power?”
“I don't know. I'm a mere woman. But it seems to me he could have ended this war a dozen times. Why didn't he say to the people of the North at some point—after Fredericksburg or Chickamauga or some other Union defeat—‘Fellow citizens, we have tried to force our southern brethren to submit. But they refuse. I now see that the contest will engender undying hatred between the two sections if we persist. Here are my terms for an honorable settlement.'”
“He could have done that. But by then he owed a debt of honor to the dead—and the wounded. He had to prove that they hadn't bled in vain.”
“So he could get re-elected?”
“So he could face them in the middle of the night. Can you imagine Abe's dreams? His waking nightmares? Those legions of ghostly faces parading through his bedroom? I pity him, Amelia. I wish you did too.”
“I pity the dead—and the wounded.”
For a fraction of a moment she glanced at his empty sleeve. Henry Gentry's soul almost leaped its fleshly moorings. Mingled with pity and regret was there a fragment of their original love in her eyes? Some echo of their happiness before the democratic serpent slithered into their garden hissing,
equality
?
“When Lincoln receives a wound, maybe I'll pity him too.”
“Amelia, I could show you letters that reveal a hundred thousand wounds. One for every death.”
A mistake. That extravagance only invigorated Amelia's youthful dislike of Abraham Lincoln. “That man has been a bad influence on you, Henry. I sensed it from the day I met him. I
sensed
that in some strange way, he would come between us. His peculiar
hatred
of the Democratic Party—I can remember him mocking it back then, when we were barely twenty. He especially mocked
rich
Democrats. He said they were the biggest hypocrites on earth. He was insulting my
father
and you just sat there, smiling.”
What could he say? He agreed with every word Abe said? Colonel Augustus Conway
was
the biggest hypocrite, if not on earth, certainly in Kentucky, where he ran for office, and in Indiana, where he was often a stump speaker for other Democratic candidates. He poured rotgut bourbon and gaseous rhetoric down the throats of the voters so he could go to Washington and orate in the “Cave of Winds,” as Lincoln called the House of Representatives, about the greatness of Thomas Jefferson while he cut deals with railroads and land speculators and Indian agents that made him rich enough to turn Rose Hill into an ornate imitation of a European palace.
Gentry tried to make a joke of Amelia's diatribe. “Now—at last—I find out why you broke our engagement. It was Lincoln's fault. He's been blamed for
everything else under the sun. Why not this ultimate blunder?”
“I'm
serious
, Henry. There was an arrogance about that man—an intellectual arrogance. He communicated it to you.”
Gentry wanted to tell her that if anything, it was the other way around. He had not needed Lincoln to make him arrogant. He had only needed his mother, Millicent Todd Gentry, a woman who was convinced that everyone with Todd blood was superior to the rest of the human race. But he chose conciliation over the truth.
“Maybe he did, maybe he did.”
On the dance floor the young folks continued to prance, and the music swelled to Jimmy Hemings's call:
“Take your partner, twirl her around.
Kiss her twice if she makes a sound.
Bees in the honeycomb, cows in the creek,
Men are strong and women are weak!
The preacher says that kissing is wrong.
But men are weak and women are strong!”
Watching Paul Stapleton and the other smiling young men twisting and turning their laughing partners, first with their left hands, then with their right, Gentry was suddenly back on the battlefield at Shiloh. The southern boys charged the Union lines howling like young wolves, incredibly indifferent to death. Soon there were several hundred bodies on the sunken road in front of Lincoln's Own regiment. An acrid cloud of gunpowder scorched Gentry's lungs. But he was exultant. His men were holding their ground. The air was full of hissing bullets but only a few members of Lincoln's Own had gone down.
The Confederate attack faltered and a Union colonel rode up on a white horse and shouted, “Now is the time! Charge them!” Colonel Gentry seized his sword and
strode out on the road among the Confederate dead. “Follow me, men!” he shouted. He was racing toward glory, toward the thought that Amelia Jameson would wonder why she had failed to marry such a hero, the man who won the battle of Shiloh.
Gentry had gone only a half-dozen steps when a bullet struck his right arm midway between the elbow and shoulder, literally breaking it in two, shivering and splintering the bone down to the elbow and upward to within two inches of the shoulder joint. The bullet struck with such force that it spun him around and sent his sword flying. As his men rushed past him into an apple orchard on the other side of the road, where a Confederate cross fire massacred them, Colonel Gentry stumbled to the rear, clutching his smashed arm. A half hour later he was in a field hospital under chloroform, dimly aware of the rasp of the saw as the surgeon cut off the arm near the shoulder.
“I would love some more of this wonderful wine,” Amelia said.

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