Love and War

George stopped a foot short of the canvas and lifted it. He had lately been investigating the cost of a modern Latta steam pumper for the town, hence knew something of fires and their effects. That didn't prepare him for the sight of the dead lovers.

Of the two, the wife was charred worse, her blackened skin split and rolled back upon itself in many places. The cousin's burned-away clothing revealed hundreds of blisters weeping a shiny yellow fluid that mirrored light. The faces, necks, protruding tongues of both victims had swollen in the final agonies of wanting air and drawing only scorching fumes into the lungs. Ultimately, the throats had swollen, too, though in the wife's case it was hard to tell whether flames or asphyxiation had killed her. With the cousin there was less doubt; his eyes bulged, big as new apples.

George let the canvas fall and managed to suppress vomit as it reached his throat. What he had seen conjured strange specters. Not merely fire. Death. Suffering. Loss. And, in overpowering summation, war.

Shuddering, he walked back to the chief, feeling deep, unexpected things stirring within him.

'Can I be of help, Tom?'

'Mighty good of you to offer, sir, but it's too late to do anything except wet down them places next door.' A fireman ran up to say Fenton had died. George shivered again; why did he still hear screaming? He shook his head. The chief went on. 'It was too late when we got here.' George nodded sadly and walked back to his horse.

What happened to George as he left the scene, mounting and letting the horse walk, was the result of tragedy encountered, of horror witnessed. The numbed state in which he'd lately been drifting vanished.

He had known there was — would be for many weeks, possibly months — a civil war. But knowing was not the same as understanding. He had known and not understood, and that was true even though he'd fought in Mexico. But the Mexican campaign was a long time in the past. As he rode slowly back up the hillside with wind- driven ash blowing overhead, he at last came to grips with reality. The nation was at war. His younger brother, Billy, an officer in the Corps of Engineers, was at war. His dearest friend in all the world, West Point classmate, comrade in Mexico, sometime financial partner, was at war. He didn't remember the writer, but he remembered the passage: No man is an island —

He cast his thoughts back over the past two weeks, attempting to discover in the national mood an explanation of his own. To many, perhaps most, citizens in the North, the final relieving of three decades of tension by the bombardment of Fort Sumter on the twelfth of this month of April, 1861, had been a welcome, if not a joyous, event. George's principal reaction had been sadness; the guns said that men of good will had failed to solve a grievous human problem conceived the first day white traders sold black men and women on the coast of the American wilderness.

Sadness because the problem had been so long deemed insoluble — and, toward the last, not even capable of examination, so thick were the barbicans of rhetoric surrounding the opposing camps. For others, the forever self-occupied and self-serving, the issues were not threatening, or even serious, merely nuisances to be stepped around — treated as invisible, as one would treat beggars sleeping in some gutter.

But in the years in which the war cauldron came to the boil, America had not consisted of two classes only — the fanatical and the indifferent. There were men and women of decent intention. George thought of himself as one of them. Might they have kicked the cauldron over and soaked the coals and called a council of the reasonable? Or were the divisions so deep, so pervasive, that the hotheads on both sides would never have permitted that? Whatever the answer, the men of good will had not prevailed, had let the rest take charge, and the cloven nation was at war.

Sadness. Orry Main had shared it when he visited Lehigh Station. Just two weeks ago, it was. His courageous journey from South Carolina to Pennsylvania was laced with menace, and the visit itself had become a night of desperate danger when George's sister, Virgilia — extreme abolitionist, obsessive hater of all persons and things Southern — had betrayed Orry's presence to a mob that George held off at gunpoint until he could get his dear and honorable friend out of town.

After that had come — what? Not lassitude, not quite. He had coped with daily problems: contract proposals; uneasiness about Fenton's plight at home; a hundred things, small and large, with one excepted. Until tonight, he had somehow walled out understanding of the meaning of the war. The fire and the knife had destroyed that wall and retaught a basic lesson. The hell with fools who blithely predicted 'only' a ninety-day conflict. You needed nothing but brief moments for death and ruin.

His head pounded. His stomach felt vile. Beyond the leveled wall he saw the threat from which he'd been trying to hide these past two weeks. It was a threat to the lives of those for whom he cared most in the world, a threat to the slowly forged bond between his family and that of the Mains of South Carolina. He'd been hiding from the truth about those lives, that bond. The fire had shown him they were perilously fragile. Fragile as Fenton, and the other two, and the house that had held them with all their passions, imperfections, dreams. Of them, that house, those emotions, nothing remained but that which followed George on the wind, spotting his collar, flicking his ear — ashes; blowing, blowing all around him.

Riding up the Pennsylvania hillside after midnight on the first of May, he could turn his back on the glow of a small, soon-to-be-forgotten domestic tragedy—a cliche in its commonness; so god­damn horrifying and heartbreaking in its specifics. He could turn his back but not his mind. His inward vision swept beyond the past two weeks to embrace two decades.

The Hazards, ironmasters of Pennsylvania, and the Mains, rice planters of South Carolina, had formed their first ties when a son from each house met by chance on a New York City pier on a summer afternoon in 1842. George Hazard and Orry Main became acquaintances on a northbound Hudson River boat that day. As soon as they left the boat, they became new cadets at West Point.

There they survived much together, much that strengthened their natural affinity for one another. There was the skull work — easy for George, who had no great desire for a military career; hard for Orry, who wanted nothing else. They managed to endure the hazing of a deceitful, some said lunatic, upperclassman named Elkanah Bent, even conspired to get him dismissed after a series of particularly heinous acts on his part. But influence in Washington had returned Bent to the Military Academy, and he had graduated promising George and Orry a long memory and full accounting for their sins against him.

The Mains and Hazards got to know one another, as Northern and Southern families often did in those years while the long fuse of sectionalism burned down to the powder of secession. There had been visits exchanged, alliances formed — hatreds, too. Even George and Orry had seriously quarreled. George was visiting at the Main plantation, Mont Royal, when a slave ran away, was caught, then cruelly punished on orders from Orry's father. The argument of the two young men afterward was the closest they ever came to seeing their friendship destroyed by the divisiveness dripping into the country's bloodstream like a slow poison.

The Mexican War, which found the two friends serving as lieutenants in the same infantry regiment, finally separated them in unexpected ways. An encounter with Captain 'Butcher' Bent sent George and Orry into action on the Churubusco Road, where a shell fragment destroyed Orry's left arm and his dreams of a career. Not long after, news of the death of the senior Hazard called George home, because his mother, with sound instincts, could not trust George's older brother, Stanley, to be a wise steward of the immense family business. Soon after taking charge of Hazard's, George wrested control of the ironworks from his ambitious, irresponsible brother.

Amputation of Orry's left arm put him in a brooding, reclusive mood for a time. But as he trained himself to run the plantation and perform two-handed tasks with one, his outlook revived and the friendship with George renewed itself. Orry stood up as best man when George married Constance Flynn, the Roman Catholic girl he'd met in Texas while en route to Mexico. Then George's younger brother, Billy, decided he wanted to attend the Academy, while Orry, desperately seeking some way to save his orphaned young cousin Charles from a wastrel's life, persuaded him to seek an Academy appointment. The friendship of Charles Main and Billy Hazard, already acquainted, soon replicated that of the two old grads.

In the last decade of peace, many Northerners and Southerners, despite ever fiercer rhetoric, ever sharper threats from political leaders and public figures on both sides, remained personal friends. It was so with these two families. Mains came North, Hazards traveled South — though not without difficulties in each case.

George's sister, Virgilia, who had carried her passionate abolitionism across an invisible line into extremism, had nearly undone the friendship. During a Hazard family visit to the Main plantation, she'd met a slave belonging to