lawyer who stood nearest the grave, flanked by three bland, jowly civilians with the look of moneyed men.
Bent hunched close to the cross, half again as tall as he was. He despised Dills but didn't want to antagonize him by inadvertently showing himself. It was through Dills that Heyward Starkwether had communicated with his illegitimate son and provided him with money. It was Dills to whom Bent appealed in times of emergency. Never in person after their first interview; only in writing.
The solemn minister raised his hand. The coffin went down into the earth, and down, on canvas sling straps. Bent had been invited to meet his father twice in his adult life. At each meeting the conversation was inconsequential and awkward, with many lengthy silences. He remembered Starkwether as a handsome, reserved man, obviously intelligent. He had never seen his father smile.
Rain seemed to get into Bent's eyes as the coffin disappeared. The mourners prepared to leave. Why hadn't Starkwether cared enough about him to acknowledge him? Bastardy wasn't such a great sin in these modern times. Why, then? He hated his father, for whom he cried now, for leaving that and so many other questions unanswered.
Foremost, who was Bent's mother? Not Starkwether's long-dead wife; that much Dills had told him, going on to warn him never to ask a second time. How dare the lawyer treat him that way? How dare Starkwether hide the truth?
During Bent's only talk with Dills, the lawyer had purported to explain why a close relationship with Starkwether was impossible. Those who paid Starkwether wanted him to live in perfect rectitude and never by word or deed draw public attention to himself. Bent didn't believe the smooth story. He suspected Starkwether had a simpler and crueler reason for abandoning him. Starkwether had fathered no legitimate children. He was probably one of those selfish careerists too busy for parenthood.
Bent inhaled sharply. Dills seemed to be watching the stone cross while he conversed with the three moneyed men. Bent began a retreat, careful to keep the monument between himself and the grave. He failed to see a pedestal supporting a looming granite angel. He stumbled against the pedestal and cried out. He kept himself from falling by catching hold of the wet stone drapery.
Had anyone heard him? Dills?
No one came, and the rattle of departing carriages continued. When he got his breath, he lumbered on to the tree where he'd tied his horse. The horse side-stepped when Bent's full weight settled on him.
Soon he was safely away, cantering on a muddy road at the edge of the Georgetown College campus, where forlorn pickets stood guard around the tents of the Sixty-ninth New York militia. His loss continued to hurt, though less and less as his rage intensified. Goddamn the man for dying just now.
Although Bent had eaten a full breakfast, his desperation drove him back to Willard's for a huge dinner in the middle of the afternoon. He stuffed a fork laden with mashed potatoes into his mouth, sopped up chicken gravy with a wad of bread, and stuffed that in, too. Eating had been his narcotic since childhood.
It did little to soothe him today. He kept picturing Starkwether resentfully. He had even refused Bent his own name, insisting the boy take the name of the family with whom he'd been placed for his upbringing.
The Bents were tired, barely literate people who farmed near the Godforsaken hamlet of Felicity in Clermont County, Ohio. Fulmer Bent had been forty-seven when Starkwether's son was delivered to him. Bent had been quite small and didn't remember it. Or maybe he had blotted it from memory; only a very few of the most hurtful scenes from those years remained with him.
Mrs. Bent, who had numerous relatives across the river in Kentucky, was a peculiar woman with a wall eye. When she wasn't dragging him to visit her relations, she forced him to listen while she read the Bible aloud or lectured him in a whisper about the filth of the human body, the human mind, and a majority of human actions and desires. In his thirteenth year she caught him with his hand on himself and whipped him with a rope until he screamed and bled all over the bed sheets. No wonder Fulmer Bent spent more hours out of the house than in it. He was a secretive man whose only source of amusement seemed to be the mating activities of his livestock.
The Felicity years were the darkest of Bent's entire life, not only because he loathed his foster parents but also because he learned at age fifteen that his real father was alive in Washington and unable to acknowledge him. Before, he had presumed his father to be some dead relative of the Bents who had perhaps disgraced the family; they were evasive whenever the boy asked questions.
It was Dills who made the long coach and riverboat journey to Ohio to check on Bent's welfare and tell him the truth, at a time Dills had chosen because he believed the boy capable of receiving and accepting the facts. Dills spoke about Starkwether at length one sunny afternoon on the farm, careful that he and the boy were alone in shade near the well. The lawyer's phrases were tactful, even gentle, but he never guessed how deeply they wounded his listener. Ever afterward, no matter how much Starkwether helped with influence or money, there was submerged outrage in Bent's love for his father.
In Bent's sixteenth year, just before Starkwether secured the boy's appointment to the Military Academy, Fulmer Bent took pigs to market in Cincinnati and died in a shooting incident in a house of ill repute. That same autumn a sweet-voiced young clerk at the Felicity general store had initiated Bent sexually. Bent didn't have his first woman until two years later.
Long before Starkwether secured the Academy appointment, however, Elkanah Bent had begun to dream of a military career. The dream had its genesis in a cluttered Cincinnati bookshop to which the boy wandered one day while Fulmer Bent transacted business elsewhere. For five cents he bought a badly torn, water-stained life of Bonaparte. That was the start.
He saved little bits of the allowance money Dills sent twice a year. He bought, read, and reread lives of Alexander, Caesar, Scipio Africanus. But it was Bony whose heir and American counterpart he came to be in his florid imaginings —
Become a Bonaparte in Kentucky? He was more likely to become a corpse. The state was contested ground; half of its men had joined the Union, half the Confederacy. Lincoln kept hands off the slaveowners so they wouldn't foment secession. He absolutely would not go to a place like that.
Nervous sweat slicking his cheeks, he waved to the waiter. 'Bring me another helping of pie.' He gobbled it and leaned back, a drip of the sugary filling hanging from his lower lip like a moist icicle. Swollen with food — aching — he felt better, able to think and plan again. One thing he would never deny about Fulmer Bent's wife: she was a splendid cook.
He had attended a country school with a lot of farmers' sons who teased him and conspired to make him the target of pranks. Once, they had filled his lunch pail with fresh cow dung. He had run home and found his foster mother pulling six of her yeasty, yellow-crusted loaves from the iron stove. He had devoured one and begged for another. From that day, she kept him stuffed. When he pleaded for second and third helpings or treats between meals, she was flattered and always gave in.
All the eating made him fatter and fatter. And unattractive to girls. But he learned to use the weight to fend off and punish bullies. He would cringe and cower, and when they thought they had him, he'd push them down and fall on them. Once he did that, they left him alone.
A third piece of pie tempted him now. But his belly hurt, so he concentrated on his problem. He still believed a great military future could be his, but not if he died in Kentucky.
He knew only one man who could intercede now. Bent had been warned against contacting him in person, but a desperate plight required desperate measures.
The office of Jasper Dills, Esquire, overlooked Seventh Street, the city's commercial center. The book-lined room was small, cramped, suggestive of a failing practice. It gave no hint of the wealth and status of its occupant.
Nervous, Bent lowered his buttocks into the visitor's chair to which the clerk had ushered him. He had to squeeze; the fit was tight. He had put on his dress uniform, but Dills's expression said it was a wasted effort.
'I thought you understood you were not to call here, Colonel.'
'There are extenuating circumstances.'
Dills raised one eyebrow, which nearly devastated his distraught visitor.
'I need your help urgently.'
Dills kept a clean desk. In the center lay some sheets of legal foolscap. He inked a pen and began to draw, concentrating on the series of stars that emerged.
