North and South: The North and South Trilogy (10 page)

To work off some of the demerits, the two friends had to walk a good many extra guard tours. The weather turned stormy. George withstood the outdoor duty with no ill effects, but it was different with Orry. Ever since their river adventure, he had been sneezing and sniffling, and he was feeling weak and dizzy when he started an extra tour on a particularly dark Saturday afternoon.

A blizzard was roaring across the mountains from the northwest. A foot of drifted snow piled up in less than an hour. Then the temperature rose and the result was sleet. Orry was slogging back and forth near the sally port when he realized that despite the cold, he was burning up.

Sweat mingled with melting sleet on his cheeks. His musket seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. He staggered in the snow, then leaned against the barracks wall to rest.

Someone plucked his sleeve. Orry recognized a first classman named Sam Grant, an undistinguished fellow except for his horsemanship, which was outstanding.

“Who sent you out here in this weather?” Grant demanded. “You look green. About ready to faint. You should take yourself to the hospital.”

“I’m fine, sir,” Orry croaked, attempting to straighten up.

The short, dark-eyed cadet was skeptical. “You’re about as fine as my Aunt Bess five minutes before she expired. Shall I find a tactical officer and ask him to see that you’re relieved?”

“No, sir, that would be—dereliction of—my duty.”

Grant shook his head. “You’ll make a fine soldier, Mr. Main. If you don’t die of mulishness first.”

“You know who I am?”

“Every man in the corps knows about you, and your friend, and that scum from Ohio. It’s a pity Corporal Bent’s standings are so high. Some of us are trying to remedy that. He’s being deviled as furiously as he devils others. I sincerely hope you survive to enjoy that, sir.”

With a little smile, Grant tramped off into the storm.

It was about four o’clock, Orry guessed. Dark as midnight. He forced himself to move. He thought he was marching, but actually he was reeling from point to point. Fortunately, most of the officers were indoors, hence didn’t witness his awkward performance.

Another half hour passed. He began to fear he was desperately ill—mortally ill, maybe—and that his foolish wish to avoid a display of weakness would finish him.

“You’re not stepping smartly, sir. Not smartly at all.”

Stunned by the voice, Orry turned. He saw Bent’s tentlike overcoat looming just this side of the sally port. Bent seemed to float forward, a huge shape in the murk. His eyes shone with glee.

“I heard you were out here, sir. I came to inspect—”

The Ohioan’s voice faltered as Orry wrenched the old smoothbore flintlock off his shoulder. Orry was out of his head, beyond fear.

“Why are you pointing that piece at me, sir?”

“Because I’m going to shoot you, Bent. If you don’t leave me alone, and my friend too, I’m going to shoot you.”

Bent tried to sneer. “That musket is unloaded, sir.”

“Is it?” Orry blinked and weaved on his feet. “Then I’ll beat you to death with it. They can court-martial me, or even shove me in front of a firing squad, but if you’re still here at the end of the next five seconds, you ungrateful bastard, I’m going to kill you.”

“By God, we’ve a madman at West Point.”

“Yes, sir. An Ohio madman, who treats plebes like animals. Well, Mr. Bent, sir, this is one plebe who won’t be treated that way any longer. Five seconds. One,
sir,
two,
sir
…”

Bent huffed, but said nothing. He was intimidated by the wild white specter in front of him. Sleet clung to Orry’s cap and eyebrows. His expression almost maniacal, he turned the musket so that he gripped it by the barrel, like a club.

Humiliation and hate flickered on Bent’s face. Suddenly, he spun on one heel. He seemed to melt into the storm.

Orry swallowed and shouted, “And you’d better leave us alone from now on.”

“What did you say, sir?”

The sharp voice turned him the other way. Bundled to the ears, one of the tactical officers came striding toward him. The howl of the wind forced the officer to yell. “Cadet Grant requested that I come out here, sir. He said you were too ill for this duty. Is that true?”

By now Orry had practiced the position of a soldier a thousand times or more. He tried to assume it, not even realizing he had just committed the one unforgivable sin. He had dropped his musket in the snow.

The tactical officer seemed to be tilting back and forth. Orry attempted to stop the motion by blinking his eyes.

“Is that true, sir?”

“No, sir!”
Orry cried, and fell forward against the officer, unconscious.

George came running to the hospital an hour later. Surgeon Wheaton met him in the waiting room.

“Your friend is in extremely serious condition. His fever is dangerously high. We are trying to reduce it, but if it doesn’t break within twenty-four hours, his life could be in jeopardy.”

George thought of Bent, and the storm outside, and of Orry. “The poor damn fool wants to be a soldier too badly,” he said in a bitter voice.

“This place has a way of inspiring that ambition.” Wheaton’s tone mingled regret and pride. “You look none too well yourself, young man. I prescribe a tot of rum. Come into my office and”—he smiled—“Wheaton it for a few minutes, as the saying goes.”

With the surgeon’s permission, George kept a vigil at Orry’s bedside all night. Pickett joined him for a while. So did Jackson. A first classman named Grant looked in briefly. How Orry knew him, George couldn’t imagine.

By morning the hospital was cold and silent. George wriggled on his chair. The others were gone. Orry’s face was still as pale as the undyed wool coverlet drawn up beneath his chin. He looked fragile in the flickering glow of the fish-oil lamps. Fragile and very sick.

George gazed at his friend and, to his astonishment, found tears welling in his own eyes. The last time he had cried he was five years old. He had been thrashed by this older brother for daring to play with Stanley’s pet frog.

George wasn’t surprised that Orry Main’s fate could mean so much to him. The two of them had gone through a lot together, in a very short period. Common hopes and hardships had forged a strong bond of affection. West Point apparently had a way of doing that, too.

He stayed in the chair, neither sleeping nor eating, until noon, when Orry’s fever broke.

The next afternoon, with February sunshine pouring through the window, Orry looked much better. George visited him before supper call with some good news.

“Bent seems to have gotten tired of deviling us. I passed him when I was coming over here. He looked the other way.”

“I’d still like to kill him. God forgive me for saying such a thing, but it’s the way I feel.”

Orry’s quiet savagery disturbed George, but he smiled and tried not to show it. “See here, my friend. You were the one counseling meekness and mercy when he was going down ’neath the icy waves. And I listened to you.”

Orry folded his arms. “Almost wish you hadn’t.”

“It’s better to leave him alive and squirming. The upperclassmen are skinning him right and left. That’s sweet revenge.”

“But he’ll blame us. Even if he lets up on us for a while, he won’t forget. There’s something twisted about him.”

“Well, don’t fret over it,” George said with a shrug. “We have enough to do keeping our demerit total under two hundred. It’s a long way until June.”

Orry sighed. “I reckon you’re right.”

But neither believed that merely forgetting about Bent would do away with the threat he posed.

Late in the spring, all the Hazards except Virgilia paid a visit to West Point. George wheedled the necessary permission to join them for Saturday dinner at the hotel. He took his friend along.

William Hazard invited Orry to visit them in Lehigh Station at some time in the future. Orry said he’d enjoy that. He found the family as likable as he remembered—save for Stanley, who talked, or rather bragged, incessantly. Stanley was preening over the fact that he and his father were to dine that night with a family named Kemble, who lived across the river in Cold Spring.

Between bites of a delicious lamb chop, Orry asked, “Are the Kembles relatives of yours?”

Stanley snickered. “No, my boy. They are the proprietors of the West Point Foundry. Who do you think casts most of the ordnance purchased by the Army?”

Stanley’s pompous manner made his little brother Billy grimace and silently imitate him. Billy was seated next to Stanley, who didn’t see the imitation and thus didn’t understand why George guffawed. Billy’s antics earned him a thwack on the ear from his father. Mrs. Hazard looked chagrined.

Stiffly, Orry said, “I’m sorry, I never heard of the Kembles.”

“Their Saturday-night fetes are famous.” Stanley’s tone suggested that Orry and his home state somehow existed outside the mainstream of national life.

To Mr. Hazard, Orry said, “They’re ironmakers, are they?”

The older man nodded. “With candor and envy, I must admit there are none better in the nation.”

“Maybe they could help my brother.”

Bored, Stanley forked up a potato. But William Hazard listened politely as Orry explained that in recent letters Cooper had complained about excessive breakage of wrought-iron walking beams and flywheels in the rice mill at Mont Royal.

“That’s the name of our plantation. The mill used to be powered by the river tides, but my brother talked my father into trying a steam engine. Father was against the idea. Now he thinks he was right.”

“Casting iron is a tricky business,” Mr. Hazard said. “Perhaps the Kembles could help your brother. Better still, why not let us try? Have him write me.”

“I’ll do that, sir. Thank you!”

Orry was always eager to make his older brother think well of him. He wrote Cooper the next day. Cooper’s reply began with words of appreciation to Orry. He then said he suspected that the man in Columbia who made the mill parts understood the process even less than he did. Hence he would be grateful for advice and assistance from experts. He was dispatching a letter to Hazard Iron immediately.

June approached. To Orry’s surprise, he realized he stood a good chance of surviving his plebe year, although he seemed destined to remain an immortal forever. George continued to stand high in the academic ranking, and without visible effort. Orry envied his friend, but never to the point that jealousy impaired their relationship.

Both friends had managed to keep their demerit total just under two hundred, and when the new group of prospective cadets began to arrive, pressure on the plebes lessened. Orry and George did their share of deviling the newcomers, but there was little meanness in it. Bent had provided too good an object lesson.

It was impossible to avoid the Ohioan completely, of course. But whenever they encountered him, he affected an opaque stare, as if they didn’t exist. The friends continued to feel that although Bent had left them alone during their final months as plebes, he certainly hadn’t forgotten about them. Nor was it likely that he had forgiven them, either.

About ten days before the start of the summer encampment, Cooper arrived unexpectedly. He had just come from Pennsylvania, where William and Stanley Hazard had examined some of the shattered parts from the Mont Royal mill.

“Your father and brother solved the problem in short order,” Cooper reported to George. “As I suspected, that clod in Columbia doesn’t know what he’s doing. Apparently he doesn’t remelt his pig iron at the right temperature. If I can convince him of that, we may have fewer breakdowns. Of course convincing him won’t be easy. As far as he’s concerned, admitting you can learn something from a Yankee is almost as bad as saying Johnny Calhoun was wrong on nullification.”

George was fascinated by Cooper Main, who was twenty-three and taller than his younger brother. He wore fine clothes, which managed to look terribly untidy. He had sunken cheeks and darting dark eyes and was not without a sense of humor, although George found him more inclined to sarcastic smiles than to laughter. Cooper and Orry shared certain obvious family traits, including a slender frame, the brown wavy hair, and the narrow, almost haughty nose. But the older brother lacked the robust color Orry developed whenever he spent even one day in the sunshine; Cooper’s thin face and body seemed to have an unhealthy aura, as if he had been born pale, tired, and driven to think too much.

Cooper had decided to make the whirlwind overnight visit not only for the purpose of seeing Orry but to inspect the school that was turning out the nation’s smartest soldiers. He remarked that there was nothing in creation unworthy of study, unless perhaps it was family trees in his native state.

During Cooper’s short stay at Roe’s Hotel, however, his attention seemed to wander repeatedly from the sights he had come to see. Once Orry caught him gazing at the big stone barracks—or perhaps something beyond them—with an almost melancholy look in his eyes.

But just before Cooper left, he put aside his preoccupations and his air of mockery and flashed a big grin at George, saying: “You must pay us a visit, sir. Lots of mighty pretty girls down on the Ashley. Got a couple in our own family. They’ll be beauties when they grow up. Didn’t see many pretty girls in the Lehigh Valley. ’Course; I spent most of my time staring into fiery furnaces. Your family operates a mighty impressive factory, Mr. Hazard.”

“I wish you’d call me George.”

“No, call him Stump,” Orry put in. “All the cadets get nicknames eventually. We were christened last week.”

“Stump, eh?” Cooper shot a glance at his brother. “What’s yours?”

“Stick.”

That made Cooper laugh. “Parts of the same tree, is that it? Well, Mr. Stump, I want to say I admire the size and scope of your family’s enterprise.” Again his eyes took on that distant, melancholy look. “I surely do.”

Over the bellowings from a calf boat moving down the Hudson, they heard the whistle of the steamer at the North Dock. Cooper grabbed his valise and rushed down the steps of the hotel veranda.

“Come see us, Mr. Stump. Mind that you eat right, Orry. We’ll expect you home next summer.”