Galloway, massa, but he's not here.'
'He's with the army, is he?' Starbuck asked.
'Yes, massa.' The man smiled ingratiatingly. 'He's with the army.'
Starbuck returned the smile. 'But which army?'
The black man's smile vanished instantly. He said nothing, and Starbuck kicked his heels to ride past him. 'Any slaves in the house?' he called over his shoulder to the black man.
'Three of us, massa, and we're not slaves. We're servants.'
'You live in the house?'
'In the cabins, massa.' The servant was running after Starbuck, while Truslow brought the company on behind.
'So the house is empty?' Starbuck asked.
The man paused, then nodded as Starbuck looked back at him. 'It's empty, massa.'
'What's your name?'
'Joseph, massa.'
'Then listen, Joseph, if you've got any belongings in the house, get them out now, because I'm about to burn this goddamned house to the ground, and if your master wants to know why, tell him it's with the compliments of the whores he burned alive at McComb's Tavern. You got that message, Joseph?' Starbuck curbed the horse and swung himself out of the saddle. He jumped down, spurting dust from beneath his boots. 'Did you hear me, Joseph?'
The black servant gazed in horror at Starbuck. 'You can't burn it, sir!'
'Tell your master that he killed women. Tell him my name is Starbuck, you hear that? Let me hear you say it.'
'Starbuck, sir.'
'And don't you forget it, Joseph. I am Starbuck, avenger of whores!' Starbuck declaimed that final sentence as he climbed the veranda steps and threw open the house's front door.
To see his father.
Clouds heaped in the south, darkening a day already declining toward dusk. In the steep hills and valleys where the rebel flank attack surged forward, the fading light made the rifle flames stab brighter and the smoke look grayer. There was a sense that the weather must break soon, and indeed, far to the south, on the empty earthworks that the Yankees had abandoned by the Rappahannock River, the first drops of rain splashed heavy. Lightning flickered in the clouds.
At Manassas the rebel flank attack grew ragged. It had been launched across broken country, and the advancing brigades soon lost touch with each other as they detoured about thorn-choked gullies or around thick groves of trees. Some regiments forged ahead while others met Yankee troops, who put up unexpectedly stubborn resistance. Cannons cracked from hilltops, canister fire shredded woodlands, and rifle fire stuttered along a crooked three-mile front.
Behind the Yankees was the Bull Run, a stream deep and wide enough to be a river in any country other than America, and a stream deep and wide enough to drown a man encumbered with a pack, haversack, cartridge box, and boots, and if the rebels could just break the Yankees and hurl them back in panic, then eighty thousand men might be struggling to cross that killing stream, which boasted only one small bridge. The beaten army could drown in its thousands.
Except the Yankees did not panic. They streamed back across the bridge, and some men did drown as they tried to swim the run, but other men stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the hill where once a man called Thomas Jackson had earned the name of Stonewall. They stood and met the oncoming rebel troops with a cannonade that lit the hill's forward slope red with the flash of its gun flames and made the valley beyond crackle with the echo of rifle volleys; volley after killing volley, a stinging flail of lead that ripped the gray ranks apart and held the land west of the bridge long enough to let the bulk of John Pope's army escape. Only then did the stoic blue ranks yield Stonewall Jackson's hill to Stonewall Jackson's countrymen. It was a Northern defeat, but the Northerners had not been routed. Lines of blue-uniformed men trudged away from a battlefield where they had been promised victory but had been led to defeat, and where the victorious rebels began to count the captured weapons and captured men.
And at Joseph Galloway's farm, on the southern bank of the Bull Run, the Reverend Starbuck stared at his son, and his son stared back.
'Father?' Starbuck broke the silence.
For a second, a heartbeat, Starbuck thought his father would relent. For that one second he thought his father was about to hold out his arms in welcome, and there was indeed a sudden expression of pain and longing on the older man's face, and for that one second all the plans Starbuck had ever made for defying his father should they ever meet again vanished into thin air as he felt a swamping wave of guilt and love sweep through him, but then the vulnerable expression vanished from the preacher's face. 'What are you doing here?' the Reverend Starbuck demanded gruffly.
'I've business here.'
'What business?' The Reverend Starbuck barred the hallway. He was carrying his ebony stick, which he held out like a sword to prevent his son from stepping further into the house. 'And don't you dare smoke in my presence!' he snapped, then tried to swat the cigar out of his son's hand with his ebony cane.
Starbuck easily evaded the blow. 'Father,' he said, trying to appeal to old ties of stern affection, but he was brusquely interrupted.
'I am not your father!'
'Then what kind of a son of a bitch are you to tell me not to smoke?' Starbucks temper flared high and fierce. He welcomed the anger, knowing it was probably his best weapon in this confrontation, for the instant that he had seen his fathers stern face a lifetime of filial obedience had made him cringe inside. At that moment when the door had swung open, he had suddenly felt eight years old again and utterly helpless in the face of his father's unforgiving certainty.
'Don't you swear at me, Nathaniel,' the preacher said.
'I'll goddamn swear where I damn well want. Now move!' Starbuck's anger burned bright. He pushed past his father. 'You want to pick a quarrel with me,' he shouted over his shoulder, 'then make up your mind whether it's a family quarrel or a fight between strangers. And get yourself out of this house, I'm burning the damn place down.' Starbuck shouted these last words from the library. The shelves were empty, though a handful of account books were piled on a table.
'You propose to do what?' The Reverend Starbuck had followed his son into the big room.
'You heard me.' Starbuck began tearing the account books into scraps that would burn easily. He piled the scraps at the edge of the table, where their flames would work on the empty shelving above.
The Reverend Starbuck's face showed a glimmer of pain. 'You have become a whoremonger, a thief, a traitor, and now you will burn a good man's house?'
'Because he burned a tavern'—Starbuck started tearing apart another book—'and killed women. They pleaded with his soldiers to stop firing, but they wouldn't. They went on shooting and they burned the women alive.'
The Reverend Starbuck swept the pile of paper scraps off the table with his cane. 'They didn't know there were women in the tavern.'
'They knew,' Starbuck said, starting to make another pile of torn paper.
'You're a liar!' The Reverend Starbuck raised his cane and would have slashed it down on his son's hands had not a shot been fired inside the room. The sound of it echoed terribly inside the four walls, while the bullet ripped a scar into the empty shelves opposite the door.
'He ain't lying, preacher. I was there.' Truslow had appeared in the open garden door. 'I carried one of the women out of the ruins myself. Burned to a crisp, she was. Kind of shriveled to the size of a newborn calf. There were five women burned like that.' He spat tobacco juice, then tossed a tin to Starbuck. 'Found these in the kitchen,' he said. Starbuck saw they were lucifers.
'This is my father,' Starbuck said in curt introduction.
Truslow nodded. 'Preacher,' he said in brief acknowledgment.
The Reverend Starbuck said nothing but just watched as his son made another pile of broken paper. 'We kind of got upset,' Starbuck went on, 'on account of not fighting against women ourselves. So we decided to burn this son
