Charleston (41 page)

Johnson's Island paroled its prisoners in the late spring. South Carolinians were released last, as a punitive measure, after they took the oath of allegiance. Richard tasted the humiliation for days, bitter as gall.

He and Cal had each lost nearly thirty pounds during incarceration. Both had beards down to their chests, Richard's mostly gray.

They rode boxcars south to Cincinnati. As they chugged into the rail yard, a private died before their eyes, shaking with ague and calling for his mother. Two other rebs converged on the corpse, eager to lift a fine Kerr revolver, five-shot .45-caliber double-action, probably stolen. Richard got to the dead boy first. He kicked the men to drive them back, shoved the Kerr in his belt with glee in his flecked eyes. He found ammunition in the dead boy's pockets.

They ferried over the broad Ohio and walked through the grassy meadows and green mountains of Kentucky, border to border. They survived on berries and roots, fish or rabbit they caught. They drank from springs or raided wells at night. They didn't call at farmhouses, never knowing which side a farmer might have taken in the divided border state.

One afternoon while Richard fished in a creek with a string, a bent nail, and worms, Cal borrowed his revolver. He held up a storekeeper in a nearby hamlet, relieving him of a quart of corn juice from a local still. Richard had given up trying to talk Cal out of his destructive habit of liquoring himself day and night.

In east Tennessee they stole two horses and saddles from a livery barn. “Don't let it trouble you,” Richard said as they rode away. “In this part of the state they loved the Union.” Cal conducted several more raids on crossroads stores and each time returned with some kind of whiskey. He called it his crutch.

The closer they came to Carolina, the more Richard's spirits improved. He knew Sherman's army had ridden across the state like the Mongol horde and overrun Columbia in February. But after so many months of loneliness and worry, he had to believe all was not lost. Loretta would be waiting for him, they would pick up their lives together, and he would set his wagons on the road again.

He was unprepared for the extent of the destruction. He and Cal rode through a burned belt maybe twenty miles wide; there, instead of farmsteads, only chimneys remained. Fences lay like broken matchwood. Weeds covered abandoned fields. Rails on the Charlotte & Columbia had been heated and bent; they stood like so many steel pretzels, fantastic images against the sky. “Sons of bitches,” Cal kept saying, swigging from his bottle and ready to fall out of the saddle. “Sons of bitches.”

Union patrols passed by but didn't bother them; in North Carolina they'd exchanged their uniforms for pants and work shirts taken from a storekeeper at gunpoint. And there were many others wandering: soldiers with an eye missing, a leg amputated; black men and women, faces bewildered, clothes bizarre. Some of the women wore gray army jackets, the men flour-sack shirts or coats cut from carpet. Few had shoes.

 

After the Union army appeared on the heights south of Columbia, a brief period of shelling had followed. Frightened merchants and householders rushed into the main street, Richardson, with bales of cotton they'd hidden in yards and storerooms; they feared the shelling would ignite it. Sherman ordered a stop to the bombardment be
fore that happened, but the cotton stayed in the middle of the street, stretching for blocks.

The enemy marched in to the strains of “Yankee Doodle.” Drunken soldiers, principally from Howard's XV Corps, ran riot. They pillaged relics in the State House, threw turpentine on the street cotton and set it on fire. It was great sport until a brisk north wind turned to a gale. Two thirds of the town burned.

 

Richard's foreboding returned as they rode into the midland hills, once so verdant and pleasing to the eye. In Columbia homes were gone or reduced to looted wreckage. Where gardens had bloomed, only blackened earth showed. Trees had caught fire and fallen on once-shady avenues, amid rubbish and broken furniture.

Richard's heart beat fast as he and Cal jogged down Gervais Street under a hot white sky. Cal pointed out a cannonball lodged in the west wall of the State House. They turned up Richardson Street, passing demolished hotels and office blocks, then rode west again on Laurel, past the fallen armory on Arsenal Hill. There the street sloped toward the Congaree, where Richard's freight yard had occupied an entire block at Laurel and Gist. From the hillside he saw that his business no longer existed. Pens and barns for his mules and oxen, the small office—all gone. As if to mock him the black shell of one freight wagon leaned on two charred wheels in the main yard. He could still smell burned wood.

Was any of the stock penned somewhere? Loretta would know.

They rode back to Wheat Street, below Gervais. Near the river he and Loretta had built a five-room house. It had burned to the foundation. There wasn't a human being to be seen, only some rooting pigs.

Piers jutting up like giant tombstones were all that remained of the Congaree River Bridge. Richard and Cal boarded a five-cent ferry. They had no money, so the ferryman drank from Cal's supply of rum.

In the shantytown on the west bank Richard tied his
horse in front of a ramshackle house with daisies growing in the dooryard. “A man named Simon West lives here. He worked for me.”

“I'll wait,” Cal said, throwing a leg over his saddle and uncorking his jug.

Richard fanned himself nervously with his hat, knocked. A dried-up woman with a naked infant on her shoulder came forward through sour-smelling shadows. “Mr. Richard,” she exclaimed. He touched his forehead politely.

“Dora. Is Simon about?”

“Simon”—as she said his name the tears came—“you don't know? Oh, I guess you wouldn't. Three weeks after Sherman left, we had smallpox. Simon died.”

“Dora, I'm so terribly sorry. I saw the freight yard.”

“God curse those fiends for what they did.”

“Do you know where I can find Mrs. Riddle?” Cal's horse neighed fretfully. Dora West's silence and her evasive eye gave the answer. “Oh, my God. Not Loretta.”

“The pox carried off so many.” She wept again.

He felt faint. He couldn't control a tic in his right eyelid. The miles of walking and riding, the months of hoping and yearning—for nothing. With some effort he found his voice. “Was she properly buried?”

“Simon tended to it before he fell sick. She's in the Lutheran churchyard down the road.”

“Thank you. If there's anything—” He broke off. What could he do for her, or anyone? All that was left to him was a weapon and abiding hatred of those who'd reduced his city and state to ruin.

Trying to mount, he missed the stirrup twice. When he swung up, Cal offered the jug. Richard shook his head.

“I'm mighty sorry, Richard. I heard what the lady said.”

“I want to see the grave.”

“I'll ride down and wait at the ferry.”

Richard turned his horse's head. “All right,” he said, starting up the rutted road in the pitiless afternoon glare.

 

Good-hearted Simon West had carved a grave marker from a slab of pine. He'd scribed
LORETTA FLOWERS RIDDLE
into it, though without a birth date. It said just “—1865.”

Richard knelt in the shade of tallow trees whose leaves rustled in a sultry breeze. He clasped his hands to pray, couldn't; even his thoughts were locked into numbness. He stayed at the grave for an hour, until his tears were exhausted. His rage would never be.

 

Near the West Columbia ferry dock, within sight of the fallen bridge, they found an inn. They bargained for space in the barn in return for chopping wood and slopping pigs. Richard noticed every window in the ramshackle inn building propped open with a stick. He asked the landlord about it.

“Hell, we give up all the window weights so's they could make bullets. Damn lot of good it did. I hope Jeff Davis suffers plenty when they catch him.”

“They did, a few weeks ago, down in Georgia. Man up Gastonia way told me. He said Davis tried to escape in a woman's dress but I can't believe that. They took him to prison in Virginia.”

“Not good enough. Ought to crucify him,” the landlord said.

At sunset Cal borrowed Richard's revolver. He returned in an hour with three dollars in Yankee greenbacks. “No trouble at all. Strangers don't argue with Mr. Kerr. Let's have ourselves a meal. There'll be money left over for more popskull.”

“Why do you drink so much? It'll kill you.”

“What's to live for?” Cal said with a shrug.

After a pork chop and greens and some passable beer in the deserted taproom, he was less gloomy. “You plan to stay in Columbia, Richard?”

Richard stared at his knuckles. “There's nothing here. I saw where my insurance agent had his rooms, downtown, opposite what's left of Hunt's Hotel. The agent may be gone, and I'm damned sure the insurance company's gone. I won't even ask, not without Loretta.”

Cal laid a nail-bitten hand on Richard's sleeve. In the wan lamplight he looked the older of the two; his nose was red. “You can't just hang up your fiddle. Come on down to the coast with me. Change of scene. Maybe a fresh opportunity. We've been through a lot together. We're friends. That's something to hang on to.”

“Guess it is,” Richard said, uncertain.

“Come along, then.”

Richard nodded.

 

They reined in at a road junction deep in live oaks and pines. “Yonder's the road to my mother's place on the Ashley. You're welcome to stay with us.”

Richard decided against it. Cal had talked a lot about his mother, Ouida Hayward, whom he didn't like very much. He lumped her with his uncle Gibbes and all the other Low Country aristocrats who had provoked a bloody war they were incapable of winning.

“Thanks, but I don't want to take charity. I'll ride on down to the city. It can't be worse off than Columbia. Maybe there's work for able-bodied men.”

“Well, if we don't see each other at Prosperity Hall, I'm sure we'll meet in Charleston. I can stand Mama only so long. Guess it isn't her fault, she saw my great-grandmother slashed to death before her eyes.”

They shook hands. Richard turned the horse down the south road, leaving Cal at the junction with a new bottle in hand and a sad, lost look on his face.

“Got to start over,” Richard told himself, as though he could make it happen merely by saying it. “Got to start over.”

In the weeks following the surrender two hundred hired laborers cleared the streets of rubble and garbage, weeds and broken glass. A committee of Charleston gentlemen that included Marion Marburg traveled to Washington to present the new president, Andrew Johnson, with suggested names of an interim governor. Johnson's presidential order of May 20 granted amnesty to all but fourteen classes of Confederates. Ham belonged to none of them. He gladly signed the loyalty oath.

The scourge of Carolina paid a visit to Charleston. Ham was thrilled to be invited when General Sherman took tea with Jim Petigru's frail widow, Amelia. Ham said the general resembled a storekeeper more than a soldier. He was mild spoken and courteous, expressing regret for the damage done to a city he remembered favorably from his younger days.

“But he never apologized for what he did elsewhere,” Ham said. “He quoted General Halleck, who told him the soil of Carolina should be salted so no more secession crops would grow. I'd say Sherman heeded that charge. He'll be cursed forever around here.”

 

Few young men could be seen in the city; young women in weeds were ubiquitous. A Northern actor-manager brought back theater at Artillery Hall on Wentworth Street; soldiers, freedmen, and white civilians sat together in uneasy familiarity. As the weather warmed, attractive mulatto ladies attached themselves to Union officers who
squired them along South Battery on Sunday afternoons. People of color had been forbidden to walk there before the war.

Charleston streets were a Union-blue sea. Alex found it wonderful that black men were wearing the uniform, though the Negro soldiers were openly sneered at. They in turn didn't hide their anger, or their authority.

 

Maudie and Little Bob moved in. Maudie shared Alex's bed. Little Bob curled up on a pallet at the foot. Alex didn't mind the crowding; it lent a sense of renewed life to a house long shadowed by the menace and despair of war.

Maudie blended into the daily routine as though she'd never been away. She volunteered to cook, but she was quite clear about how she would do it: taking turns with Alex, as an equal.

Alex found Little Bob something of a puzzle. He was a polite boy but withdrawn, seldom saying more than a few words unless asked a direct question. Even then his answers only hinted at inner feeling. When she asked if he liked Charleston, he said, “Pretty big place. No room to run.”

She tried to be affectionate but quickly realized that the boy didn't want to be touched, let alone hugged or kissed good-night. He was most relaxed in the evening, when Alex played the old harpsichord and Maudie kicked off her straw slippers and danced barefoot with Little Bob clapping. They sang together—“Kingdom Coming” and “Tramp! Tramp! Tramp!” and “Go Down, Moses” and “Marching Through Georgia,” a new anthem not heard publicly in Charleston. Little Bob had a sweet boy's tenor he used effectively when they sang “Tenting Tonight.” Ham never took part in the impromptu musicales but often looked in, smiling and nodding pleasurably.

Alex moved her classroom to the dining room of the house and searched for new students. The class grew to seven. Her pupils were a spectrum of the social upheaval produced by emancipation and the occupation.

Rolfe now earned wages from Letty Porcher-Jones. Clem lived on the streets, choosing to beg rather than work for his former master. His sister Cora was one of those frightened of her new independence. By drawing an X—she couldn't as yet write her name—she entered into a labor agreement with the black tavern keeper who had owned her. At Ham's suggestion Cedric Buckles examined the agreement while Cora waited nervously in his client chair.

“These terms are unconscionable, Miss Cora. The man took advantage of you. You have all but signed yourself into slavery again, and for an indefinite period of time.”

“'Least I know where I am, don't need to wonder and worry all the time,” Cora said.

The first of Alex's new pupils was white, a volunteer fire brigade captain named Plato Hix. A quiet sort, though he seemed perpetually unhappy, as though carrying some invisible burden. He could read simple English and print short words in stiff, blocky letters, but he wanted to improve his vocabulary and learn proper penmanship. Alex said neither study fitted her plan for the class, but she stole a few minutes occasionally to teach him what she could.

Arthur Lee, barely out of his twenties, drove a night soil wagon; unpleasant work, but it paid. He told Alex that whatever she taught him would be taught in turn to his eleven children.

Aunt Mary-Margaret, toothless and frail, claimed to be seventy-five. She was determined to read, though she declared she had no intention of reading anything but Scripture. Alex added a King James Bible to the small shelf of books she used in class.

Jewel, nineteen, was the illegitimate daughter of a light-skinned prostitute; she made no secret of it. Jewel's mother pushed her to the class, wanting better for her child than a life in the cribs. Jewel was the slowest pupil, probably because she constantly veered between obedience to her mother and an urge to rebel. Alex feared that no matter how hard she tried, she would lose Jewel eventually.

 

One evening before class Ham dashed into the house with a bloodstained napkin knotted around his head. “For God's sake, what happened?” Alex exclaimed.

“The white soldier boys prefer the old secesh crowd to all the black freedmen wandering about. I stumbled into a fracas between soldiers and some colored. Brickbats flew and I caught one.”

Before she could commiserate, he rushed on. “I have news. I was at the Mansion House for two hours, entertaining a new client.” The Mansion House was a venerable old hotel on Broad Street, lately reopened. Ham dropped two law books on the office table and pulled off his boots. At fifty-one, though gaunt and gray, he seemed in better spirits than at any time since Alex's return.

“Mr. Maxwell's from Boston. A speculator in commodities. He came down by steamer to buy cotton and rice futures.”

“A Yankee doing business here? That's a hopeful sign.”

“Ah, but there's more. Maxwell knows three other investors who will be here within a month. They've already reserved at the hotel. South Carolina may be on her knees, but she still has valuable goods in her barn. I think we should fix up Bell's Bridge. Get ready to reopen for business.”

“That's a fine idea. What if I go there tomorrow and inventory what needs to be done?”

He seized her waist and danced her around. “Hurrah. Maybe we can wash the red ink off the books of Buckles and Bell at last.”

Alex was wide awake before dawn. With a shawl over her shoulders, moving as briskly as she could with her aching leg, she arrived at Bell's Bridge just as the sun rose out of the sea and painted the inner harbor. Her presence at the end of the pier attracted gulls. She held up her empty hands as she had long ago. They squabbled and swooped over her, then flew off. She laughed and inhaled the old, intoxicating perfume of the harbor, a mingling of mud and salt and summer air not yet heavy with dampness.

Using a pencil and a precious block of paper from the law office, she started a list of the most urgent repairs. Half
the roof of the first storage shed had collapsed. She opened the padlock using Ham's big ring of keys. Inside she found the roof debris and an infestation of rats that ran over her shoes as they fled.

At the second shed her mouth rounded in silent surprise. The padlock chain hung in two pieces, filed through. She had an uneasy feeling that she might not be alone on the pier.

She rolled the door back on its noisy wooden wheels. Someone grumbled, “What the devil?” She couldn't see the interloper in the dark. She stamped her foot.

“Who is that? You're trespassing. Come out this instant.”

“Woke me up, woman.”

“What do I care? Show your face.”

Slow steps brought him to the light. He was a man of middle years, lean and strong-looking. Half a dozen Carolina wrens could have nested in his gray beard and shoulder-length hair. He'd slept in his clothes, overalls and a ready-made shirt, faded gray. A blanket full of moth holes draped his shoulders.

“This is private property,” she began.

“You forgot to post a sign saying so.”

“Don't quibble with me, sir. You got in here illegally. Collect your things and go. If I catch you on the premises again, I'll have the city police arrest you.”

The man blinked against the light; his large brown eyes had a curious familiarity. Recognition came to him suddenly. “You're Miss Bell. You took me boating once, from this very pier. We sailed out to watch them building Fort Sumter.”

Stunned, she said, “Why, that's right. Your father brought you along when he called on my father.” She couldn't recall his name, though.

“Your father the attorney,” he said. She caught a whiff of something sour on his clothes. He offered his hand; at least that was clean. “Richard Riddle.”

His handclasp was warm, strong. “I do remember.” She remembered much more: his terrible complexion; the lovelorn looks he threw at her that afternoon, and how haughtily she had dismissed him.

“I plead guilty to the charge of breaking in. I didn't have a penny left, or anywhere to lay my head. I was walking down East Bay when I saw this place and remembered it. It looked deserted, so I got hold of a file, never mind how.”

“You don't live in Columbia any longer?”

“No. While I was coming home from prison in Ohio, my house and my business were destroyed by Sherman's vandals.”

“You were in the army, then.”

“Congaree Mounted Rifles. At Second Manassas I was captured by those Northern bast—our Northern foe,” he corrected with a slight coloration in his cheeks.

“Well, I suppose I can let you stay until we start repairing the wharf. Are you employed?”

“I drive a garbage wagon back and forth to the marshes. Pays thirty cents a day. That's how I eat.”

“You're one of the city street cleaners?”

He nodded. “Won't last forever, but I'm lucky to have any kind of job. So many don't. They offered me a helper, a colored fellow, but I said no. I didn't fight for those people, and I don't propose to work with them.”

For a moment or so they had conversed amiably; now he was hostile again. “Mr. Riddle—”

“Captain Riddle, if you don't mind.”

“The war is over, sir.”

“Not for me. I lost everything. I lost the dearest woman in the world to smallpox.”

“Your wife? I'm terribly sorry. And I'm sorry things are so difficult for you, but—”

“Difficult for the whole state. They say we lost over twelve thousand men. Sherman burned and pillaged like a madman. I should have expected that, I spent a couple of years with his verminous colleagues. I'll never forgive the Yankees for what they did to us.”

“I would remind you that South Carolina started the war.”

“Whose side are you on? I thought you were Charleston born.”

“I am, but I'm trying hard to be an American again, as we all should.”

“Oh, spare me your pious cant, Miss Bell. I'm a damned
rebel and I've earned the right to stay that way. I'll clear out. Send you a new chain when I can afford it. Good day.” He rolled the door shut in her face. It banged the frame; termite dust drifted down.

Alex was furious. Riddle was the kind of stiff-backed Carolinian whose militancy had brought on the war, and the very conditions he railed about now. She stuffed paper and pencil in her pocket and marched up the pier. She'd finish the inventory another time.

 

When she came back next morning, true to his word he was gone. The shed had been swept out, as if no one had trespassed.

Remembering William Drew's passionate advocacy of forgiveness, she wanted to feel sorry for Riddle. It was difficult; she disliked him intensely. Yet that night he visited her in her dreams, his odd speckled eyes glowing as he touched her hand and whispered words she couldn't understand. She awoke with her nightdress twisted between her legs, damp with perspiration.

She dismissed the dream as a late symptom of the midlife change that had tormented her with dizzy spells, night sweats, and erosion of her patience and good temper. Riddle was a recalcitrant lout.

She lit a candle and sat down to brush her hair in front of Cassandra's oval mirror. She plied the brush hard, painfully tearing out tangles, angered by her confusion and by what she saw in the glass: long tresses more white than blond; a childless woman of fifty with a roof over her head but little else.

Alex hated self-pity, but at 3:00
A.M.
, it came easily. She threw the hairbrush on the floor and rested her head on her arms while the candle burned down.