North and South: The North and South Trilogy (65 page)

Affecting sternness, Stuart said, “Sirs, you’d better watch your step now that Virginia has one of her own in charge of this institution.” With a quick glance over his shoulder, he lowered his voice. “Came to warn you. One of the drummer boys smuggled a batch of thirty-rod onto the post. Slocum bought some. He’s drunk and mentioning both of you by name”—Frank Pratt paled—“so avoid him if you can.”

“We will, sir,” Billy said. “Thank you.”

“Don’t want you thinking ill of every Southerner you meet,” Stuart said, and disappeared.

Pensive, Billy stared at the autumn sunlight spilling through the room’s leaded window.
Don’t want you thinking ill of every Southerner.
Even in small turns of conversation, reminders of the widening chasm were inescapable.

Frank broke the silence. “What did we do to Slocum?”

“Nothing.”

“Then why is he down on us?”

“We’re plebes and he’s a yearling. He’s from a Southern state and we’re Yankees. How should I know why he’s down on us, Frank? I guess there’s always someone in this world who hates you.”

Frank gnawed his lip, speculating on some dour future. He wasn’t a coward, Billy had discovered, just pessimistic and easily startled. Once he got over that skittishness, he might make a good officer.

“Well,” Frank said finally, “I have a feeling that one of these days Slocum’s really going to nail our hides to the doorpost.”

“I agree. Best thing we can do is take Beauty’s advice and avoid him.”

But he felt that an encounter with Slocum was inevitable. So be it. When it happened, he would stand up to the Arkansas cadet, and to hell with the cost.

He wanted to reassure Frank that they could handle Slocum. Before he could, the bugle sounded. Doors crashed open; cadets rushed noisily to the stairs and down to the barracks street, there to fall in for the march to the mess hall. On the stairs Frank stumbled, fell, and tore the left knee of his trousers. Out in the sunshine, Slocum spied the rent and placed Frank on report.

Billy started to say something but checked himself. Slocum smirked and proceeded to place him on report for “insolent bearing and expression.”

No doubt about it, there’d be a reckoning one day.

B
ESET BY SLEEPLESSNESS AND
thoughts of Madeline, Orry picked up George’s letter again.

The writing was blurred. He moved the paper a few inches away and the date, December 16, grew legible. So did the rest. He had first noticed the problem with his vision earlier this fall. Like so many other things, it depressed him.

The letter was a mixture of cheer and cynicism. George had visited Billy at West Point earlier in December. Billy was doing well, albeit the same could not be said for the superintendent. Lee disliked the part of his job that required him to discipline the cadets. He wanted them all to behave well out of a desire to do so, without the threat of demerits or dismissal. “Unfortunately,” George wrote, “the world is not peopled with Marble Models—although it would be a distinctly better place if it were.”

Lee had greeted George warmly, as an old war comrade, although in truth they had met only a couple of times in Mexico, George said. The superintendent confided that his biggest problem was the sectionalism threatening to divide the cadet corps.

On a pleasanter note, he had observed that Billy was in the top section in every class and would no doubt pass his January examinations easily. A born engineer, Lee told the visitor. Mahan already had his eye on Billy.

The letter closed with some comments about the President-elect. Quite a few in the North were already accusing Franklin Pierce of being a doughface. Of the many names being mentioned in connection with the Cabinet, one of the most prominent was that of Senator Jefferson Davis.

Davis of the Mississippi Rifles, Orry recalled with a faint smile. Colonel Davis and his red-shirted volunteers had fought valiantly at Buena Vista. If he became secretary of war, the Military Academy would have a true friend in Wash—

The crash downstairs brought him leaping out of bed. Before he was halfway to the bedroom door, his stiff kneecaps were hurting. God, he was falling apart. Age and the dampness of the low-country winter were accelerating the process.

“Orry? What was that noise?” his mother called from behind her door.

“I’m on my way to find out. I’m sure it’s nothing serious. Go back to bed.”

He meant to say it gently, but fear roughened his voice for some reason. At the bottom of the staircase he saw black faces floating in the halos of hand-held candles. He clutched the banister and hurried down. The effort intensified the pain in his joints.

“Let me pass.”

The slaves fell back. Cousin Charles came racing down the stairs behind him. Orry opened the library door.

The first thing he saw, bright on the polished floor, was the river of spilled whiskey. Tillet’s glass lay in pieces. The sound Orry had heard was his father’s chair overturning.

Orry rushed forward, too stunned for grief. Tillet lay on his side in a stiff pose. His eyes and mouth were open, as if something had surprised him.

Seizure, Orry thought. “Papa? Can you hear me?”

He didn’t know why he said that. Shock, he later decided. Even as he heard Clarissa’s fretful voice from the second floor, he knew he had asked the question of a dead man.

They buried Tillet in the small plantation cemetery on the second of January. A big crowd of slaves watched from outside the black iron fence. During the prayer before the lowering of the coffin, it began to drizzle. On the other side of the grave, Ashton stood next to Huntoon, in defiance of the custom that required all members of the family to mourn together. The coffin was let down into the ground with great care.

Clarissa didn’t cry, merely stared into space. She hadn’t wept since the night of Tillet’s death. After the burial Orry spoke to her. She acted as if she didn’t hear. Again he asked if she was feeling all right. She replied with an incomprehensible murmur. Nor did her face give any clue. Altogether, he couldn’t remember a sadder day at Mont Royal.

After the family left the enclosure, the slaves slipped in to surround the grave and pay respects with a few soft words of prayer, or a hummed phrase of a hymn, or merely a bowed head. Cooper fell in step beside his brother. He marveled that the Negroes could feel kindly toward their owner. But then, he thought, human beings of all colors had never been famous for logical or consistent behavior.

Judith and Brett were walking with Clarissa. Cooper fondly watched his wife for a moment. In mid-December she had presented him with a daughter, Marie-Louise. The infant was at the great house, in the care of the maids.

Cooper noticed his brother’s slumping shoulders and dour face. He tried to think of something to take Orry’s mind off their father’s passing.

“Before I left Charleston, I heard some news about Davis.”

“What is it?”

“You know that last month he refused to confer with Pierce in Washington—”

“Yes.”

“They say he’s relented. He may go to the inaugural after all. It would be a fine thing for the South if he became a member of the Cabinet. He’s an honest man. A sensible one, too, for the most part.”

Orry shrugged. “His presence wouldn’t make a whit of difference, Cooper.”

“I refuse to believe that one man can’t make a difference. If you take that position, what’s the use of going on?”

His brother ignored the question. “Washington’s one huge madhouse these days—and the worst lunatics are the ones the American people elect to represent them in Congress. I can’t think of a less respectable deliberative body, unless it’s our own state legislature.”

“If you don’t like the drift of things in South Carolina, change them. Stand for election and go to Columbia yourself.”

Orry stopped, turned, gazed at his brother to see if he had heard correctly. “Are you saying I should enter politics?”

“Why not? Wade Hampton did.” The wealthy and well-respected up-country planter had just been elected to a seat in the legislature. Cooper went on, “You have the necessary time and money. And your last name makes you eminently electable around here. You haven’t alienated half the population the way I have. You and Hampton are a lot alike. You could be another voice of reason and moderation in the rhetorical storm up in the capital. There are precious few.”

Orry was tempted, but only briefly. “I think I’d sooner be a pimp than a pol. It’s more respectable.”

Cooper didn’t smile. “Have you ever read Edmund Burke?”

“No. Why?”

“I’ve been studying all his speeches and papers that I can locate. Burke was a staunch friend of the colonies and a man of radiant good sense. He once wrote in a letter that just one thing is necessary for the triumph of wicked men, and that’s for good men to do nothing.”

Resentful of what that implied about him, Orry started to retort. A cry from Brett prevented it.

“It’s Mother,” Cooper exclaimed. Clarissa sagged into Judith’s arms, sobbing loudly. Orry was thankful she was letting her misery pour out at last.

His relief changed to anxiety an hour later when he heard his mother still crying in her room. He summoned the doctor, who gave her laudanum to calm her, then said to the assembled family:

“Bereavement is never easy to bear, but it’s particularly hard for a woman who has always been an inseparable part of her husband’s life. Clarissa is a strong person, however. She’ll soon be herself again.”

In that, he was wrong.

Orry noticed the first change within a week. When Clarissa smiled and chatted, she seemed to look through him rather than at him. Servants would put a question to her about a household matter, she would promise to answer as soon as she took care of some other, unnamed task, and then she would walk away and not return.

She developed a new passion, one that was common enough in South Carolina but had never been pursued at Mont Royal. She began to research and draw a family tree.

A green line represented her mother’s family, the Bretts. A red line stood for the paternal line, which culminated in her father, Ashton Gault. Other colors were used for the Mains, so that the entire tree, which filled a large piece of parchment, resembled a rainbow-hued spiderweb.

Clarissa spread the parchment on a table by the window in her room. She spent hours working on it, so that it quickly became smudged and virtually unreadable. Yet she kept working. Every plantation duty to which she had once attended so diligently she now ignored.

Orry said nothing. He understood that Tillet’s death had pushed his mother into some far country of the mind. If sojourning there soothed her grief, well and good. He would take up the slack as best he could.

But there were areas in which he was unskilled or simply ignorant. The plantation began to run roughly, like a clock that was always twenty minutes slow no matter how often it was adjusted.

“Straight, damn it—straight! What’s the matter with all of you?”

It was a bright blue February morning. Orry was supervising preparation of the fields for March sowing. He had yelled at the trackers, experienced Negroes, mostly older, who were stringing guide ropes in parallel lines eleven inches apart. At the moment the trackers were working on the far side of the square. They turned to stare at their owner in a bewildered way; their lines looked straight.

Equally puzzled by the outburst were the trenchers, younger men and women who followed the lines and dug the seed trenches with hoes. Orry had shouted so loudly even some male slaves shoveling out the irrigation ditches at the edge of the square looked up. All the stares told Orry he was in error.

He closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with his fingertips. He had been up most of the night, fretting about his mother and then composing a letter to George to tell him the Mains would no longer summer in Newport. The reason he cited was Clarissa’s condition; the truth was never mentioned. Last summer Orry had felt an unmistakable hostility on the part of some citizens of the little resort town. Putting up with Yankee unfriendliness was not his idea of a vacation.

“Orry, the lines are perfectly straight.”

Brett’s voice brought his eyes open abruptly. He turned and saw her a short way down the embankment. Her cheeks shone. She was breathing hard. Evidently she had come running up behind him just as he reprimanded the slaves.

He squinted over his shoulder. What she said was true. Fatigue or some trick of his mind had caused a misjudgment. The slaves had all resumed working, knowing they were right and he was wrong.

Brett walked to him, touched his hand. “You stayed up too late again.” He shrugged. She went on, “I just broke up a noisy muss in the kitchen. Dilly boxed Sue’s ears because Sue forgot to order more curing salt. Sue swore she told you we needed it.”

Memory rushed back. “Oh, God—that’s right. I am the one who forgot. Last week I was just about to put curing salt on the factor’s list when I was called to look at Semiramis’s baby with the measles.”

“The crisis has passed. The baby will be all right.”

“No thanks to me. I didn’t know what the devil to do with a six-month-old infant. Anyway, how do you know so much about it?”

She tried to say it kindly. “They sent for me right after you left. I couldn’t do much for the child other than wrap him up to keep him warm. But Semiramis was wild with worry, so I held her hand and talked to her awhile. That quieted her, and the baby got some rest—which is exactly what was needed most.”

“I had no idea what was needed. I felt like a helpless fool.”

“Don’t blame yourself, Orry. Mama carried a lot of the burden of this place. More than you men ever realized.” That was as close as she came to teasing him, and it was just a brief, gentle sally accompanied by a smile. She touched his hand again. “Let me help you run the plantation. I can do it.”

“But you’re just—”

“A little girl? Why, you sound just like Ashton.”

From a whole quiver of arrows she had chosen precisely the right one to pierce and destroy his resistance. He burst out laughing. Then he said, “You’re right, I had no idea how much Mama took care of. I’ll bet Father didn’t either. I’ll be glad to have your help. Thankful for it! Take over wherever you see a need. If anyone questions you, tell them you’re acting on my authority. Tell them to speak to me—what’s wrong?”