Love and War nas-2 Read online

  She drove up to Herbert's General Merchandise and tied the horse to one of the six iron posts in front. As she crossed the walk, she noticed two men watching her from a shaded bench outside the lager-beer saloon two doors down. Their muscular arms and drab clothes told her they probably worked at Hazard's.

  Watching her, one man said something to the other, who laughed so hard he nearly spilled his tin growler. Despite the heat, Brett shivered.

  The General Merchandise smelled of licorice and rye flour and other items sold by Mr. Pinckney Herbert. The proprietor was a small-boned, bright-eyed man who reminded Brett of a rabbi she'd met once in Charleston. Herbert had been raised in Virginia, where his family had lived since before the Revolution. His conscience had driven him to Pennsylvania when he was twenty; all that he'd brought from the South were his loathing for slavery and the name Pinckney, which he admired and adopted in preference to his real name, Pincus.

  "Afternoon, Mrs. Hazard. How may I serve you today?"

  "With some heavy white thread, Pinckney. White. Constance and Patricia and I have been sewing havelocks."

  "Havelocks. Well, well." He avoided her eyes, which was a second comment on the novelty of a Southern girl fashioning protective flaps for the hats of Union soldiers. When George's wife and daughter began — Constance said most of the women in town were doing similar work — Brett joined in because it didn't seem a partisan act to help another human being protect his neck from rain or sunburn. Why, then, did a subterranean sense of disloyalty persist while she sewed?

  She paid for the half-dozen spools and left the store. At the sound of a plank creaking, she turned sharply to her left and wished she hadn't. There stood the two idlers, sloshing beer round and round in their tin cans.

  "What d'ya hear from Jeff Davis, lady?"

  She wanted to call him an idiot but decided it was safer to ignore the remark. She headed for the buggy, alarmed to notice only one other person in sight: a bonneted matron who vanished around a corner. From the Station House came faint cheering; the rally and the afternoon heat had emptied the streets.

  She hurried past her horse, heartbeat quickening. She heard sounds behind her — harsh breathing, boots on the hard-packed dirt — and felt the man near a moment before he grabbed her shoulder and yanked her around.

  It was the one who'd taunted her. His beard, bushy red with white mingled in, held flecks of beer foam. She smelted the dirt on his clothes and the fumes from his drinking.

  "Bet you pray Old Abe will get a seizure some night and fall down dead, huh?" The bearded man's companion found that so funny, he brayed. It caught the attention of two men walking on the other side of the street. When they saw who was being bothered, they went right on.

  Slurry of speech, the first man said, "Still own some niggers back home in Carolina?"

  "You drunken jackass," Brett said. "Take your hands off me."

  The second man giggled. "That's the ole reb spirit, ain't it, Lute?"

  The first man dug his fingers into Brett's sleeve. Her face contorted. "Somethin's wrong with your eyesight, woman. I'm a white man. You cain't talk to me like I was one of your damn slaves. Get that in your bonnet, an' this, too. We don't want any secesh traitors paradin' around this town." He shook her. "Hear me?"

  "Fessenden, let her go, and right now."

  Pinckney Herbert had emerged from his store. The second man ran at him. "Get back inside, you old Jew." One hard punch doubled up the merchant and knocked him back through the door. He tried to rise, while Fessenden dropped his growler and grasped Brett's shoulders, shaking and twisting them so as to hurt her and, perhaps, touch her breasts with his forearms, too.

  Herbert grasped the door frame and struggled to pull himself up. The second man hit him under the chin. Herbert crashed down on his back with an involuntary yell. Brett knew she could scream for help, but it ran against the grain. Abruptly, fright seemed to defeat her. She sagged in Fessenden's grip, her eyes half shut.

  "Please, please let me go!" Were any tears coming? "Oh, please — I'm just a poor female. Not strong like you —"

  "Now that's what I 'spect a little Southern girl ought to sound like." Laughing, Fessenden slipped an arm around her waist, pushed her against the buggy wheel, bent near, his beard scraping her cheek. "Say pretty please an' see what happens."

  Apparently she didn't understand. "I'm not — big and burly like you — You must be kind — polite — Won't you do that? Won't you?" Small, desperate sighs and gulps fell between the quivering words of the plea.

  "I'll think on it, missy," Fessenden promised. His other hand took hold of her skirt and the petticoats beneath and the leg beneath those. That left her hands free.

  "You Yankee scum." She raised the leg he wasn't holding and drove it into his privates. While he screamed 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-y
ear 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 the local residents didn't upset her, but it did. She couldn't banish the feeling, only contain it.

  Control returned in a minute or so. She shook the reins, and by the time she reached the big stable at Belvedere, she was composed again. Determined to say nothing about what had happened, she hoped George wouldn't hear about it by accident.

  By the time he got home, the rest of the family had gathered for supper. He entered the dining room as Constance was speaking to their daughter in that friendly but firm tone she reserved for matters of discipline.

  "No, Patricia, you may not spend any part of your allowance that way. As you well know, a glass or marble egg has just one purpose — to cool the palms of an overly excited young woman at a dance or a party. It will be a few years before you are in that position."

  Patricia stuck out her lip. "Carrie King has one."

  "Carrie King is thirteen, two years older than you. Further­more, she looks twenty."

  "Acts like it, too, so I hear," remarked William with a salacious grin. George was amused, but the parent in him didn't dare show it. He frowned at his sturdy, handsome son.

  Behind his wife's chair, he bent to kiss her cheek. "Sorry I'm late. I stopped at the office." The explanation was familiar in these days of furious war production. He felt her move slightly beneath the affectionate hand he had placed on her shoulder. Damn. She smelled the spirits on him.

  "Tell me about your speech," Constance said as he walked to his place at the other end of the long wooden table. "Was it a success?"

  "Magnificent." He sat down.

  "George, I really want to know." He responded with a tired shrug. "The rally, then. How did it go?"

  "Predictably." One of the house girls set terrapin soup in front of him. "The rebs were consigned to perdition, the flag waved verbally several hundred times, then that pol from Bethlehem issued the call for volunteers. He got eight."

  Some soup helped him relax and readjust himself to this confined but comfortable domestic universe. The dining room was bright with the shimmer of the gas mantles on fine silver and flocked wallpaper. He peeped at Constance over his spoon. What a lucky fellow he was. Her skin still had the smoothness of newly skimmed cream, and her eyes were the same vivid blue that had enchanted him the night they met, at a dance in Corpus Christi arranged for army officers temporarily stranded en route to Mexico. After the war, he had brought her to Lehigh Station to marry her.

  Constance was two inches taller than her husband. He took that as a symbolic incentive to be worthy of her. Though Stanley had once predicted in a sniffy way that her practice of Catholicism would disrupt the marriage, it hadn't. Years of child rearing, intimacies shared, and troubles borne together had deepened their love and kept physical attraction strong in the marriage.

  Patricia fidgeted. She stabbed her poached fish with her fork, as if the fish were responsible for her failure to get a hand cooler.

  "Did the factory produce a lot of havelocks today?" George asked, addressing the question more to Brett than anyone. She sat on his left, her eyes downcast, her face fatigued. She hadn't said one word to him.

  "Quite a few, yes," Constance said, simultaneously shooting out her left arm. She thwacked Patricia's ear with her middle finger. That ended the fish-stabbing.

  The meal dragged to its finish. Brett remained quiet. After George gave the customary permission for the children to be excused, he spoke briefly to Constance, then followed his sister-in-law to the library. He closed the doors before he said: "I heard about the trouble today."

  She looked up wearily. "I had hoped you wouldn't."

  "It's a small town. And, regrettably, you are very much a center of at
tention."

  She sighed, absently brushing her palms across the open Leslie's in her lap. George lit one of his strong dark brown cigars as she said, "I suppose I was foolish to think it would all pass unnoticed."

  "Especially since Fessenden and his cousin are under arrest for assaulting you."

  "Who charged them?"

  "Pinckney Herbert. So, you see, you do have some friends in Lehigh Station." After telling her that he had already written orders discharging both of her attackers from their jobs at Hazard's, he said in a gentle voice, "I can't tell you how angry and sorry I am about the whole business. Constance and I care for you just as much as we care for any member of this family. We know how hard it is for you to be so far from home and separated from your husband —"

  That broke through. She leaped up, spilling the illustrated paper on the carpet, and flung her arms around his neck like a daughter wanting a father's comfort. "I miss Billy so terribly — I'm ashamed to say how much —"

  "Don't be." He patted her back. "Don't be."

  "The only salvation is, I'll soon be able to join him somewhere. Everyone says the war won't last ninety days."

  "So they do." He released her and turned away so she wouldn't see his reaction. "We'll do our best to see that those ninety days pass quickly — without another incident. I know it wasn't the first. You're a brave young woman, Brett. But don't fight every battle alone."

  She shook her head. "George, I must. I've always looked after myself." Forcing a smile: "I'll be fine. Ninety days isn't so long."

  What more could he do? Frustrated, he excused himself and left, trailing a blue ribbon of smoke.

  Upstairs, he found his son marching in the hall and bellowing the popular song about hanging Jeff Davis from a sour-apple tree. George stopped that and ordered William to his room, where he worked with the boy on ciphering lessons for half an hour. He next spent fifteen minutes with Patricia, trying to convince her that she'd have a hand cooler at the proper time. He failed.