“Sure, ma’am.”
“Do me a favor, sugar. There’s a bottle of whiskey in that hamper there. Pour me three fingers in a glass and fix yourself one too. Then take the rest of your damn clothes off and git over here and comfort me.”
Daniel did what she asked. It occurred to him as he swallowed his whiskey that this was an opportunity to complete his mission. But he had none of his silver nor his compass, nor had he been able to prepare his horse in advance, and he was unsure just how close the sergeant really was, so he decided to wait for a better opportunity, wondering darkly if he was making a fateful decision. He knocked back his whiskey and drank another, and two more, and Loving Morrow kept pace with him, and after an hour they were quite drunk. By now, they were both out of their clothes and in the throes of desperate sloppy copulation, which brought Loving Morrow to her usual dependable conclusion and left Daniel tumid and frustrated.
“Poor little thing,” she said. “Is it something I said?”
“No, ma’am,” Daniel said. “Just the whiskey, I think.”
“You men. You’re so damn sensitive.”
She kissed him on the belly, got the hamper from the table, and they sat up in bed eating egg salad sandwiches and pecan bars with more whiskey.
“We gotta go soon,” she said when they were done eating, puffing out her cheeks. “Back to all the madness.”
“I know.”
“I wanted you to hear me sing, though. Let’s go outside and watch the sun go down and I’ll sing for you.”
“Okay.”
They put their clothes back on and went outside. In fact, the sun had already gone down over the hills to the west, where the White House was, but the sky was incandescent with lingering reds, pinks, and violets. They sat out on the porch with the whiskey bottle and their glasses on the table. Loving Morrow picked up her guitar and began noodling on it, finger-picking complicated versions of “Little Maggie” and “Three Forks of Cheat.”
“Okay, I’m limber,” she said. “This one’s a traditional tune about a man who’s love won’t have him cuz he’s too poor, so he leaves his home country and lights out for the other side of the Smokies, but he will never forget her. It’s called ‘Pretty Saro.’”
It was a melancholy modal tune. She had a way of making every note she played on guitar count, Daniel thought, not like pikers who just bang away. Her voice was crystalline and transcendent. He understood how she had been a professional recording star in the old times.
Oh I wish I was a little sparrow, had wings and could fly
Straight to my love’s bosom this night I’d draw nigh
And in her little small arms all night I would lay
And think of pretty Saro till the dawning of day
“Did you like that?”
“I did, ma’am. Very much. Your voice is lovely. And you’re a hell of a guitar player.”
“I been playing twice as long as you been on this planet, my friend,” she said and giggled, then finished another whiskey. “Here’s another. Traditional Appalachian murder ballad. It’s called ‘Banks of the O-hi-o.’ It’s about a young man who takes his love down to the river on a little walk to pop the question and things go awry.” She sang the opening verses. The next two seized Daniel’s mind like a glimpse of perdition.
I took her by her lily white hand
And dragged her down that bank of sand
There I throwed her in to drown
I watched her as she floated down
Was walking home ’tween twelve and one
Thinkin’ my God what I had done
I killed a girl, my love you see
Because she would not marry me
She finished the song with a graceful walk down on the neck of her instrument, landing gently back on the E chord.
“You wouldn’t do that to me, would you?” she said, pretending to be serious.
“I couldn’t ask you to marry me,” Daniel said. His statement terrified him.
Loving Morrow gave him a long hard look, then softened and smiled.
“Of course, you’re right. Anyway, I’m already married to all my Foxfire angels,” she said. “Whoa, I’m a bit tipsy. We’d better go.”
The next two days, his instructions arrived promptly at the usual time, but they said his attendance was not required and to await further orders. Daniel’s anxiety level reached an intolerable pitch. He worried that he had insulted Loving Morrow by dismissing the idea of marriage. He wondered if it was something else he said or did, perhaps something as trivial as his failure to come to orgasm when he was drunk. He worried that he didn’t have the nerve to carry out his mission after all, if he had the chance to. He worried about all that would ensue if it turned out he could. Or if he tried and botched it. He resolved that if he was not ordered back to the White House before the week was out he would leave Franklin with his horse, his silver, and his pistol and make his way back north. He spent those two days of nervous uncertainty riding Ike hard and drinking more heavily than he was accustomed to. On the third day, his instructions said to meet the car again on a particular back street in town.
He was both relieved and in a heightened state of agitation when the car pulled over to get him. The sergeant, as usual, was behind the wheel up front.
“Everything all right up at headquarters?” Daniel asked.
“There’s some bit of hubbub going on,” the sergeant said. “It appears the niggers are trying to take Chattanooga. We’re holding on so far. It’s got everybody’s knickers in a twist up there.”
“She all right?” Daniel asked.
“Far as I know. I haven’t seen much of her lately,” he said. “You’ve had good long run with the lady.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, her boys don’t generally stay around more’n a few days. It’s been about two weeks for you. You must be a dandy.”
“What happens to them?” Daniel said.
He saw the sergeant glance at him in the rearview mirror.
“She don’t kill ’em,” he said and cackled.
“Where do they go?”
“They get reassigned. Most are army boys. They go where the battle is. Most of ’em want to be heroes, you know, to shine for the Leading Light. You got some hero in you, son?”
“I don’t know.”
When he got up to Loving Morrow’s private quarters in the White House she was not there and he waited two hours for her, reading the old copies of
Southern Living
magazine that she kept in the bedroom, and drinking some of her whiskey as he did that, and marveling with ever more incredulity flipping through the pages at the massive losses the broken nation had endured in his lifetime. She came in around seven-thirty in the evening. She appeared even more anxious and distressed than he was.
“Hi, sugar. I’m sorry I’m late.” She began undressing right away. “Come on, let’s take a shower together.”
He peeled off his clothes and followed her into the big bathroom with its luxurious appointments. In the shower, she held him tightly, letting the stream of hot water play over her neck while she groaned and pressed her ear against his breastbone. For the first time in their acquaintance he could see the weight of the years on her.
“Is everything all right?” he said after they’d been in there a while.
“Things are kind of screwed up right now,” she said. “I got to release some of this tension. I just knew it would help if I came to you.”
With that, she turned desperately amorous, kissed him, pressed her body into him, then turned around and asked to be taken, with her hands gripping the faucets on the wall. When the act was complete, she just slumped onto the floor, bawling. After a little while he hoisted her to her feet, finished washing her, and then toweled her off.
“You are an angel for sure,” she said, coming back to herself.
Back in the bedroom, he poured both of them whiskeys. They moved to the bed.
“Here’s what-all else is going on,” she said as the whiskey began to calm her down. “Promise you won’t tell anybody?”
“I won’t tell anybody.”
“One of my very closest advisors has gone traitor on me.”
“What did he do?”
“It was him plotted with that goddamn Milton Steptoe to get up into Chattanooga. He sold us out. I can’t believe it. I’ve known Hector Tillman from the beginning of all this when we went our own way from the federals.”
Daniel felt an electric pulse of fear rise up his spine and go off like a blue spark in his brain.
“Who would’ve ever thought. Mr. Tillman,” she went on, chattering nervously. “I always called him mister because he had this air about him of unshakable integrity. He was my rock. Did you ever meet Mr. Tillman?”
“No, never.”
“Well, why would you. He’s just another one of all those people over there.” She made a dismissive gesture at the government’s part of the gigantic house. “Of course you wouldn’t know him. I could use another one of these, sugar,” she said, presenting her empty glass. He got them both another.
“What’ll happen to him?”
“Oh, Lord. I dunno. We’ll take him out to the speedway at Carter’s Creek, I expect. Drag him behind a race car or something. Skin him alive. Crucify him. Something like that.”
“You mean, literally.”
“Oh, yeah. We’re gonna have to make an example of him, in case there’s any more like him in the government. We got to make a damn statement. This is the part of being in charge that I really hate, believe me, but we can’t have traitors among us. There’s too much at stake. This is history at work here.”
Daniel’s brain was churning so violently he thought it would overheat and melt.
“I’m a mess,” Loving Morrow said. “Please git me going again. Go down there, sugar, and do what you do with your mouth that’s so lovely and calm me down.”
Daniel did what she asked, his mind burning as he did, wondering if Hector Tillman had revealed anything about him. In time he understood that she was satisfied and he came back up to her.
“You’re sweet,” she said. “This is nuts, but I believe I’m falling for you a little.”
“You’ll get tired of me, I’m sure.”
“No I won’t!” she said. “Hey, lookit, I got an idea. Let’s go out to my special place tonight.”
“The cabin out on the river?”
“Yeah. Right now. Let’s just get on out of this wretched place of treachery and strife for a little while before I lose my mind.”
Daniel hesitated. “Okay,” he said. “But I got an idea too.”
“What’s that, sugar.”
“Let’s go out there alone. Just you and me in the car.”
“Yes, let’s. Won’t that be fun!”
“I want to drive that car myself one time,” he said. “I never drove a car in my whole life. I might never have the chance.”
“Well, all right. Sure. You made me happy so I’m obliged to do something’ll make you happy. Maybe even more than what you ask. You never know.”
“What?”
“You’ll see when we get there,” she said. “A special something. I bet you could guess if you put your mind to it.”
Daniel grabbed the whiskey bottle on his way out and hid it under his jacket. They took an exit door off the home theater room, which brought them into a stairway to the basement. That part of the White House basement was an underground garage that contained seven cars, all identical Lincoln Navigators. It was dim in there. A young soldier sat in a little lighted booth. He had been tilted back in his chair reading a novelization of a TV show about the zombie takeover of the United States. He awkwardly got up and stood at attention.
“Ma’am,” he said.
“Which car you want?” Loving Morrow asked Daniel.
“I dunno,” he said. “They’re all the same.”
“How ’bout one that runs good, Corporal,” she said.
“They all run pretty good, ma’am.”
“Aw hell,” she said. “Give me the keys to this one here.”
The corporal fetched the keys from a pegboard in the booth. Loving Morrow tossed them to Daniel and told him to get in behind the wheel. She gave him five minutes of instructions for how to operate such a car.
“It’s easy as pie,” she said. “By the time they stopped making these things, they practically drove themselves.” She reached over and turned the key in the ignition. The engine came alive and purred.
Daniel’s hands sweated so much that the steering wheel felt slippery. The corporal threw a switch that opened an electric overhead door up a ramp. Daniel put the gear shift in
DRIVE
and steered up the ramp. They came out on the back side of the White House. Night had fallen. A sliver of moon hung in the treetops up a wooded hill.
“Turn here,” Loving Morrow said.
She directed him down a long, curved, paved road and then onto a gravel lane.
“This here’s the service road,” she said. “We can git clear of this place without any fuss.” The gate at the end of the service road was a plain wooden shed manned by two privates. The soldier who leaned in the window was shocked to see the Leading Light of the Foxfire Republic next to Daniel.