Love and War

and turned red, she pushed him. He tumbled into the dust. Though Pinckney Herbert still looked hurt and pale in the doorway, he started laughing over the sudden revival of the wilted flower.

Fessenden clutched his crotch. His friend called Brett a bad name and started for her. She snatched the whip from the socket and laid it across his cheek.

He jumped back as if set on fire, then screamed as he fell over Fessenden behind him. He landed on his head, managing to kick Fessenden's jaw at the same time.

Brett flung her sack of thread on the buggy floor, untied the horse, and clambered up lithely as a tomboy. As she gathered the reins in one mitten, the second bully, back on his feet, came at her once more. She snapped her right hand over her left arm and whipped his face a second time.

By then, two or three conscience-stricken citizens had appeared in doorways along the block, demanding an end to the bullying. A little too late, thank you. She raced the buggy away toward the hilltop road, yellow dust rising behind like the evil clouds that preceded summer storms. How I hate this town, this war — everything, she thought as fury gave way to despair.

10

On the temporary stage erected at one end of the main parlor of the Station House, George Hazard was being cruelly and unjustly tortured by heat, verbosity, and the hardest chair ever made by human hand. In front of him, moist faces, wagging paper and palm-leaf fans, flags and swags of bunting draping every wall.

Behind George and the other dignitaries hung a large lithographed drawing of the President. Mayor Blane, who worked at Hazard's as an assistant night foreman, had risen from his customary daytime sleep to chair the rally. Blane pounded the rostrum.

'Our flag has been violated! Desecrated! Torn down by Davis and his treasonous mob of pseudoaristocrats! Such mistreatment of the sacred red, white, and blue can be met with but two replies: a volley of shot and a hang rope for those who dare rend the fabric of this nation and its dear old emblem!'

Godamighty, George thought. How long will he carry on? Blane was supposed only to introduce the two main speakers, of whom George was the reluctant first and a leading Republican from Bethlehem the second. The politician was raising a volunteer regiment in the valley.

The mayor marched on, pausing only to smile and acknowledge whistles, applause, or people jumping on chairs and shaking their fists to approve of some particularly pithy bit of warmongering. In the weeks since federal flags had been hauled down, spat on, and burned throughout the South, the North had experienced an epidemic of what the newspapers called star-spangled fever.

George didn't have the disease. He would have preferred to be at his desk, supervising affairs at Hazard's, or working on details of his application to start the Bank of Lehigh Station, the first in town.

Banking in Bethlehem had become too inconvenient for Hazard's and most of its employees. George had faith in the usefulness and eventual profitability of a local bank. Conventional thinkers would have shied from such a venture just now — economic conditions were bad, confidence low — but George believed there was never great success without considerable risk.

The new bank would be organized under Pennsylvania's revised Banking Act of 1824, with a twenty-year charter and thirteen directors, all of whom had to be United States citizens and share­holders. He and his local attorney, Jupiter Smith, had plenty to do to prepare all the papers required by the chartering body, the state legislature.

Yet here he was, because he was the only local resident who had fought in the Mexican War, and the audience craved some fiery remarks about the glory of war. Well, he'd serve up the desired dish and try not to feel too guilty. He dared not say what he'd really learned in Mexico when he and Orry Main had campaigned there. War was never glorious, never grand — except in the pronouncements pols and other noncombatants made about it. It was, as he had experienced it, mostly dirty, disorderly, boring, lonely, and, for brief intervals, terrifying.

'Forward to Richmond! Up with Old Glory! Down to the depths, then up to the gallows with the vile combinations of the godless Confederacy!'

George put his palm over his eyes to hide any visible reaction. It was impossible for him to think of his beloved friend Orry as godless or vile. Nor could he apply the description to many of the other Southerners he'd met at the Military Academy and marched with in Mexico. Tom Jackson, the queer duck whose great head for soldiering had been recognized way back, when his cadet nickname, 'The General,' was bestowed. Was he still teaching at the military school in Virginia, or had he joined up? George Pickett, last reported at a federal garrison in California. Good men, even if unable or unwilling to find a way out of the sectional crisis that had now descended into a fight. Well, he himself was as guilty as any of them of neglectfully surrendering that crisis into the hands of political hacks and barroom bullies. The description wasn't his, but that of Braxton Bragg, another West Pointer from the South.

George wished for a cigar to relieve his mingled annoyance and nervousness. He was to speak next. He unplugged his inner ear a moment to listen.

'— distinguished veteran of the war in Mexico, and the highly successful industrialist many of us know as our trusted friend, good neighbor, and generous employer —'

You won't get a raise that way, Blane.

The moment George thought it, he was ashamed. What a wretched cynic I've become. Then something else occurred to him. He leaned over to whisper to the man beside him.

'Had my mind on my remarks. Did he say I went to West Point?' The man shook his head. The omission irked George but didn't surprise him. The school, always falsely perceived as Southern-oriented, was even more unpopular now that so many graduates had left the regular army and gone over to the South.

'— Mr. George Hazard!'

Quickly he cleared his head of the burden of the telegraph message he had received that morning. He waved a fly away from his nose and stepped forward to loud applause, prepared for the sake of the cause to lie splendidly about the joys of war.

11

Halfway up the hill, Brett slowed the buggy. The nerve that had helped her through the encounter with the bullies was leaching away. She felt again, and more stingingly, the absence of the one person whose good sense and physical presence could help her get through these bad times.

She understood that Billy must go wherever duty took him. She'd promised to follow him here, Ruth after Boaz, and wait till he came home again. But her resolve was wearing away faster than ever this afternoon.

She had been the target of hostilities in Lehigh Station before this. Some were sly — little jibes she happened to overhear at social functions. Some were overt — derisive yells when she drove through the streets. Usually they didn't bother her. Like her brother Orry, she took pride in that kind of strength.

But this latest incident somehow pierced the armor. More unwelcome thoughts followed. Thoughts of her sister, Ashton, who had conspired with a would-be suitor of Brett's to have Billy murdered on their wedding day. The memory was too depressing to be held in mind for more than short periods, but now it came back, adding its burden.

She let the horse walk while feelings of defeat and loneliness consumed her. Trembling a little, she felt tears in her closed eyes. She opened them just in time to prevent the buggy's off wheel from slipping over into the drainage ditch.

She stopped the horse and sat motionless in the glaring light. The air was so still that the mountain laurel the Hazards loved so well looked petrified and faintly dusty on the summits above her. She wished the animosity of