Love and War

shouldered conductor step through, barring him. The trainman saw the pursuers staggering down the track, understood their shouts and gestures.

'Please,' Charles said, 'let me go inside.'

'Get off this train.'

'You don't understand. It's an emergency. One of your passengers —'

'Get off or I'll throw you off,' the conductor said, starting to push. Charles lurched backward, his left boot finding just empty air above the second step. Frantically, he grabbed the handrail and only in that way kept himself from tumbling into space.

'Get off!' the conductor yelled, raising his hands for a second, final, shove. Something hard rammed the center of his vest. He looked down and went rigid at the sight of Charles's army Colt pressed into his stomach.

'You have ten seconds to stop this train.'

'I can't possibly —'

Charles drew the hammer back to full cock.

'Ten seconds.'

With a flurry of signal flags and alarm whistles, the train stopped.

146

Only Brigadier Duncan's intervention and influence prevented Charles's immediate arrest and imprisonment. At half past ten that night, the two men sat in the parlor of the reopened house, their faces grim as those of opponents still at war. The Irish wet nurse was upstairs with the child Charles had looked at twice, the second time with feelings of confusion and even revulsion. After returning from the depot, Duncan had told him the whole story, and Charles wished he hadn't.

The evening had grown sultry, with rumbles of an approaching storm in the northwest. His neck button still fastened, Charles sat in a plush chair, an untasted shot of whiskey on a small table to his right. His lamplit eyes looked dead. As dead as he felt inside.

Suddenly, with fury, he leaned forward. 'Why didn't she tell me?'

'Major Main,' the brigadier replied with icy correctness, 'that is the third, possibly the fourth time you have asked the same question. She loved you very much — as I stated in the letters you never received. She grieved because the war had — damaged you, to use her phrase. Damaged you to the point where you mistakenly believed you could not continue your relationship with her. But my niece was a decent and honorable young woman.' Unmistakably, there was the suggestion that Charles had neither of those characteristics.

Duncan continued, 'She refused to hold her — condition as a club over your head. Now I shall not explain all that again. Indeed, I am beginning to regret you found me. I cannot understand your coldness toward your own flesh and blood.'

'The baby killed her.'

'There is indeed something wrong in your head, Main. Circumstance killed her. Her frailness killed her. She wanted the child. She wanted to bear your son — she named him after you. Do you seriously mean to tell me you want nothing to do with him?'

Anguished, Charles said, 'I don't know.'

'Well, I have no intention of remaining in Washington while you undertake your bizarre deliberations on the matter. I thought that if I ever found you, the reunion would be a joyous moment. It is anything but that.'

'Give me just a little time —'

'Hardly worth my while, Major — having heard your remarks of a moment ago. I shall be on tomorrow evening's six o'clock express for Baltimore and the West. If you do not want your son, I do.'

A dazed blink. 'The West —?'

'Duty with the plains cavalry, if it's any of your affair. Now, if you will excuse me, I find this conversation odious. I shall retire.' He stalked to the parlor door, where strained politeness made him pause and say, 'There is an unused bedroom at the second floor rear. You may spend the night if you wish.' Duncan's eyes flayed him. 'Should your son cry out, you needn't trouble yourself. Maureen and I will look after him.'

'Goddamn you, don't take that tone with me,' Charles yelled, on his feet. 'I loved her! I never loved anyone so much! I thought I should break things off for her sake, so I could do my job and she wouldn't worry constantly. Now if that's a crime in your estimation, the hell with you. When I stopped your train and found you inside, I didn't know I had a son. All I wanted was to learn where she is — was —'

'She is buried in the private cemetery in Georgetown. There is a marker. I shall ask you tomorrow, Major, before my departure, to give me your decision about young Charles.'

''I can't. I don't know what it is.'

'God pity any man who must say words like those.'

The brigadier marched up the stairs. On the upper landing, he  heard the front door slam, then a rumble of thunder, then silence. White light glittered through the house. Duncan raised his head  as the hard pelting rain hit the roof. He heard no further sound from below.

With a shake of his head and a sudden sag of his shoulders, he continued to his room, a grieving and dismayed man.

Charles walked all the way to Georgetown in the lightning and thunder and rain. Knocking at a cottage, rousing the owners, he obtained directions to the private cemetery. The sleepy couple with the lamp were too frightened to deny him an answer. He was a hellish apparition on their wet porch, a nightmare man with furnace eyes and a soaked gray shirt and rain dripping from his beard and his holstered gun.

Hurrying on, he reached the cemetery in an interval of pitch darkness. He slipped in wet grass, falling forward and nearly impaling himself on the spikes of the low fence. On his knees next to it, he felt the metal. Wrought iron.

Was it Hazard's? He uttered a crazed laugh. He was losing his mind. Everything was slipping, fusing, jumbling together. He wanted to scream. He wanted to die.

He kicked the gate open and lurched into the cemetery, searching by lightning flash. Granite angels spread granite arms and granite wings, imploring him to heaven with granite eyes. No thank you, I'm at my proper destination already.

In the dark he stumbled repeatedly over low headstones or crashed painfully into cold marble. Jagged lightning ran through the sky. He saw a towering obelisk against the glare and a name carved huge on the pedestal. STARKWETHER.

After a long period of wandering one way, then another, he found the grave. The headstone was small and rectangular, with a slightly sloping top upon which Duncan had put her name and the years of her birth and death, nothing more.

Charles sank to his knees, every inch of him soaked by the rain that still poured down. He didn't feel it or the cold. Only the misery, the awful, mind-destroying misery. He knelt beside the grave, careful not to kneel on it, and without conscious volition closed his fists and began to beat them on his thighs.

He pounded harder. To hurt, to punish. The undersides of his fists ached, but he kept pounding. The thunder cannonaded like the guns at Sharpsburg. The lightning flashed again and again, revealing a spot of blood on the right leg of his pants. The rhythm of the pounding quickened.

What was he to do, now that he bore this guilt? What was he to do with the child for whom he was responsible, thereby making himself responsible for this headstone? What was he to do?

A short, strange cry came from his throat; animal grief. Then, deep inside, a force began to build, its outlet impossible to deny. He opened his throbbing fists. Raised his right hand to his wet face and felt beneath his eye. That was not rain.

He threw himself forward on the grave, wet body to wet earth, and for the first time since Sharpsburg, wept.