Love and War

from the steeple of St. Michael's Church, though the ringing never seemed to coincide with the quarter-hours. All the clocks in the house were set wrong, he decided.

One night, nearly as exhausted as her husband by now, Judith brought a lamp to the room with the white wicker chair.

'Cooper, this can't continue — sitting up, never resting.'

'Why should I go to bed? I can't sleep. The night of the seventeenth of February was a milestone in naval warfare. I try to find peace in that thought, and I can't.'

'Because you —' She stopped.

'I know what you started to say. I am responsible for that milestone. I wanted it so badly I killed seven men.'

She turned her back, unable to withstand his glare. He was right, though. She whispered to herself as much as to him, 'You should have left her to rust. But you didn't, and I wouldn't have wished harm on any of those poor boys, but I'm glad Hunley's gone. God forgive me. I'm glad. Perhaps it will finally purge some of the madness that torments you —'

His head jerked up. 'What a peculiar choice of words — madness. I performed my duties to the best of my ability, that's all. I did my work. And there's more, much more, waiting. I will do it in the same way.'

'Then nothing's changed. I had hoped —'

'What could possibly change?'

She raised her voice. 'Won't you even let me finish a sentence?'

'To what purpose? I ask you again, Judith. What could possibly change?'

'You're so full of this awful rage —'

'More than ever. Poor Dixon's life must be paid for, and the life of every man who went down with him.' His lips turned white. 'Paid for ten times over.'

The shudder of her arm rattled the lamp in her hand. 'Cooper, when will you understand? The South can't win this war. It cannot.'

'I refuse to debate the —'

'Listen to me! This — dedication to slaughter — it's destroying you. It's destroying us.'

He turned his head, stiff and silent.

'Cooper?'

No movement. Nothing.

She shook her head and carried her lamp away, leaving him glaring at the rainy garden, the fury on his face digging lines so deep they were becoming permanent.

Passing the head of the stairs, Tim Wann noticed the motionless figure on the landing below. Tim looked a second time to be sure.

'Billy?'

The emaciated prisoner raised his head. Tim saw new streaks of white in the untrimmed hair. 'Billy!' With a whoop and a slap of his leg, he bounded down to his friend, who supported himself with a padded crutch under his arm. 'You're all right!'

'Well enough to come back to our splendid quarters. There are still some ribs healing, and I'm not steady on my feet — you talk too loudly, you're liable to blow me over. I'm a little slow getting around. It's taken me ten minutes to come from the ground floor.'

'Someone should have helped you.'

'I guess Turner doesn't believe in coddling his guests. You can help me the rest of the way if you want.'

Tim slid his arm around Billy, who put his across the shoulders of the young soldier. Thus they reached their room, where Billy was greeted by exclamations of surprise and shouts of welcome. Even one of the daytime guards said he was happy Billy had pulled through.

A lieutenant thoughtlessly slapped Billy on the back. Billy made a desperate stab with his crutch and prevented a fall. 'Jesus, Hazard — I'm sorry,' the lieutenant said.

' 'S all right.' Sweat showed in Billy's beard suddenly. 'I need to sit down. Someone give me a hand —?'

Tim did. Others crowded around. Billy asked, 'Is it still February? I lost track downstairs.'

'It's the first of March,' a man said. 'They've doubled the guard force outside. There's a column of our cavalry north of Richmond — practically on the doorsill. Three or four thousand horse. The rebs fear they've come to free us and raze the city.' 'Do you know about the escape?' someone else asked. Billy shook his head, and heard about it. More than forty of the prisoners involved had been recaptured; but the rest, presumably, were on their way back to federal lines or already across. He learned next that Vesey, demoted to private, had been transferred to less comfortable duty outside one of the main doors.

They asked questions about his treatment downstairs, how he had gotten hurt. He answered each question with silence or a shake of his head. When he said he needed to visit the lavatory, Tim and another soldier lent a hand.

After Billy gained his feet, Tim said: 'It was Vesey, wasn't it? Vesey tortured you and that's why he was demoted and tossed outside. That's right, isn't it?'

Billy's silence was already a matter of pride with him. 'Never mind,' he said. 'I know who did it, and if I get a chance, I'll settle with him.'

He wobbled on the crutch, pale and too feeble to settle much of anything. Tim and the other man exchanged looks. Tim had kept Billy's improvised journal safe. That night, while distant cannon fire reverberated through Libby, Billy wrote with the pencil stub.

Mar. 1 — Two remarkable circumstances. I am alive when Dr. Arnold, the old toper in the surgery, expected I'd die. Also — the reb who took it as his duty to injure me taught me a lesson so monumental I do not wholly grasp it yet. In here, forced to obey any order, no matter how humiliating or destructive, I at last understand how the enslaved negro feels. I have dwelt a while in the soul of a shackled black man and taken a little of it into my own, forever.

94

Stanley found it increasingly hard to accept and deal with all the changes in his life. Pennyford continued to send monthly reports of the enormous profits earned by Lashbrook's. Stanley read each with disbelief. The figures could not possibly be real. If they were, no man deserved such wealth. Certainly he didn't.

He found it hard to cope with the swift flow of public events as well. Weariness with the war now infected the entire North, the President having hastened the process with his proclamation of amnesty and reconstruction, announced last December. Lincoln proposed to pardon all rebels except the highest government officials and former army and navy officers who had defected.

The plan was not harsh enough to suit Wade and Stevens and their crowd, therefore not harsh enough for Stanley either. But what other kind of plan could one expect from a negrophile half mad from perpetual sleeplessness and depression? Instead of thinking rigorously about the enemy and the postwar period, Lincoln busied himself with trivialities, pious orations at cemetery dedications and the like. At Gettysburg last November he had delivered himself of one such anthology of homilies, to the monumental boredom of the crowd.

Because of his increasingly pro-Negro position and his failure to bring the war to a successful end, Lincoln was a detested man. The capital seethed with rumors of plots to kidnap or murder him. Stanley heard a new one approximately once a week.

Further, influential Republicans believed the President had done the party great harm by insisting on a new draft of half a million men on the first of February. There would be a call for an additional one or two hundred