Heaven and Hell (14 page)

My town, George thought as the phaeton proceeded toward the hill road. He owned a majority interest in the Bank of Lehigh Station, one square over, and he owned the Station House Hotel, on his left, and about a third of the real estate within the town limits. Most of it was in the commercial section along the river, but he also owned fourteen substantial brick homes on the higher, terraced streets. These were rented by foremen at Hazard's and by some of the wealthier merchants.

As the carriage rolled along, George searched the streets for the town's three war casualties. He saw the blind boy begging on the crowded sidewalk near Pinckney Herbert's general store. He didn't see the peg legged boy, but in the next block he spied Tom Hassler.

"Stop, Jerome. Just for a moment."

He jumped from the carriage; Patricia and William sighed with impatience. George's short legs carried him to the boy he'd given a job at Hazard's. But Tom couldn't manage even the simplest task, so he shambled through Lehigh Station every day, rattling a tin cup in which his mother put pebbles to suggest that others had already given. George stuffed a ten-dollar note in the cup. The sight of Tom's slack mouth and dead brown eyes always destroyed him. Like the town's other two maimed veterans, Tom Hassler was not yet twenty.

"How are you today, Tommy?"

The boy's vacant eyes drifted across the hazy river to the laurel covered slopes on the far side. "Fine, sir. Waiting for orders from General Meade. We'll charge those rebs over there on Seminary Ridge before dark."

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"That's right, Tom. You'll carry the day, too."

He turned away. How shameful, this urge to weep that came upon him so often of late. He climbed into the phaeton and slammed the half-door, avoiding his wife's eye. How shameful! What is happening to me?

What was happening, he sometimes understood, was exactly what had happened to his brother and to thousands of other men. Powerful and unfamiliar emotions in the wake of the surrender. Bad dreams.

Thoughts of friendships formed in the strange giddy atmosphere of ever present death. Memories of good men slain in pointless skirmishes, and of fools and pale trembling cowards who survived by accident or by means of a feigned illness the night before a battle . . .

What had happened to George, and to America, was a four-year struggle of a kind never before experienced in the world. Not only had cousin slain cousin, brother slain brother--that was not new--but mechanized weapons, the railroad, the telegraph, had brought a new efficiency to the art of slaughter. In meadows and creek bottoms and pretty, rustic glens, innocents had fought the first modern war.

It was a war that refused to release George now. Constance saw that in her husband's pained, lost eyes as the phaeton followed the winding road up toward Belvedere, their mansion on the summit. She wanted to touch him, but she felt that his pain was beyond her reach--perhaps beyond anyone's.

George spent the afternoon at Hazard's. The firm was almost completely converted from war production to the fabrication of wrought iron for architectural embellishment, cast-iron parts for other products, and, perhaps most important, rails. Nearly all of the South's railroads were in ruins. And in the West, two lines had created another huge new market. The Union Pacific, along the Platte route, and the Union Pacific, Eastern Division, in Kansas--no connection despite similar names-- Were taring each other to the hundredth meridian. The first to lay track

to the meridian would win the right to go the rest of the way and link Up with the Central Pacific, building east from California.

George didn't arrive home until the family members had dined and

^ere gathered around their new treasure, a grand piano, sent as a gift by Henry Steinweg and his sons in New York. Hazard's provided much

°f the iron plate for the firm's pianos, which were called Steinways, because Steinweg thought that name more euphonious, commercial, and American. Steinweg had come a long way from the red field of Water*°o, where he'd soldiered against Napoleon. George liked him.

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; He greeted the family and in the kitchen found some slices of cold 82

HEAVEN AND HELL

roast, all he needed for supper. On the veranda, he sat down, put a foot on the rail, and penciled comments on an architect's site plan for a new foundry he wanted to build in Pittsburgh. The city, situated on two rivers that flowed into the Ohio, would almost certainly become the iron and steel center of the nation in the next ten years. George wanted to be in early, with Bessemer-process converters modified for greater dependability by a technique from Sweden.

Inside, Constance and Patricia sang while Patricia played. "Listen to the Mocking Bird" and "Dixie's Land"--Brett's favorite--and "Hail, Columbia!", which many considered the national anthem; Congress and the public couldn't decide on an official one.

Presently the singing stopped. George kept working until the August daylight failed. He saw the caretaker's lantern moving through the sheet-shrouded rooms of Stanley and Isabel's house next door. The owners were seldom in residence. George didn't miss them.

He tried some mathematical calculations involving a piece of land he was considering for the new plant. He got the wrong answer four times and finally threw the papers aside. The melancholia, formless yet consuming, came on him again. He wandered inside, feeling old and spent.

In the empty library, he stopped beside a polished table and studied the two objects he kept there. One was a fragment of a meteorite-- star-iron, it was called in the trade in ancient times. To him, it represented

metal's incredible power to improve life or, forged into weapons, eradicate it. Beside the meteorite lay a sprig of mountain laurel, so abundant in the valley. In the Hazard family, by tradition, the laurel was an emblem of resilience, survival, the certain triumph of hope and goodness made possible by love and by family. The sprig was dead, its leaves brown. George flung it into the cold hearth.

Behind him, the door rolled open. "I thought I heard you in here."

When Constance kissed his cheek, he smelled the pleasant sweetness of chocolates. Her red hair was pinned up, her plump face shiny from a scrubbing.

She studied him. "What's wrong, dearest?"

"I don't know. I feel so damn miserable. I can't explain why."

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"I can guess some of the reasons. Your brother's on his way to the other side of the continent, and you're probably feeling like those two men you told me about. The men at Willard's who admitted they missed the excitement of the war."

"I'd be ashamed to admit I missed killing human beings."

"Not killing. A heightened sense of life, like walking on the edge of a precipice. There's no shame in admitting that if it's the truth. The feelings will pass."

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He nodded, though he didn't believe it. The near-despair seemed overwhelmingly potent.

"It will be even emptier here in a few weeks," he said. "William off to start at Yale, Patricia back in Bethlehem at the Moravian Seminary."

She

stroked his bearded face with the cool back of her hand. "Parents always feel sad when the fledglings leave for the first time." She took his arm. "Come, let's walk a while. It will do you good."

In the hot night wind, they climbed the hill behind Belvedere.

Away to the left below them spread the furnaces and sheds and warehouses of Hazard's, casting a red glare on the sky.

Unexpectedly, their path brought them to a place Constance would have preferred to avoid, because it symbolized despair. They were at the large crater produced by a meteorite that fell in the spring of '61, right at the time the war started.

George leaned over the edge and peered down. "Not a blade of grass. Not even a weed yet. Did it poison the earth?" He glanced at the path running on up the hill. "I suppose Virgilia passed this way the night she stole all that silver from the house."

"George, it doesn't help to recall only bad things."

"What else is there, goddamn it? Orry's dead. Tom Hassler wanders the streets with a mind that will never be right. We didn't strive hard enough to prevent war, and now we've inherited the whole rotten

mess. They talk about the South's cause being lost. Well, so is America's.

So is our family's. So is mine."

The chimneys of Hazard's shot spark showers into the night sky.

Constance held him tightly. "Oh, I wish I could banish those feelings.

I wish you didn't hurt so terribly."

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"I'm sorry. I'm ashamed of how I feel. It isn't manly." He muffled an oath by burying his face in the warm curve of her throat. She heard him say, "Somehow I can't help it."

Silently, she prayed to the God in whom she devoutly believed.

She asked Him to uncloud her husband's mind and lift his burdens. She begged Him not to add so much as one new burden, however small.

She feared for George if that happened.

Silent in each other's arms, they stood a long time on the empty hill beside the dead crater.

madeline's journal

August, 1865. She is here!--Miss Prudence Chqffee of Ohio.

She is twenty-three, very robust--she is the child of a farm family--and calls herself, without self-pity, a plain person. It is 84 * HEAVEN AND HELL

true. Her face is round and she is stout. But every word, every expression shines with a miraculous glow. Not of impossible perfection, but of dedication--the glow of those rare and decent people who will leave this earth better than they found it.

Her father must have been a special man, for he did not subscribe to the popular notion that education for young girls is a waste--even dangerous, because higher mathematics is too taxing for the female brain, science too indelicate, studies such as geography too threatening to the teachings of Genesis. She has faith and good training as well, the latter received at the Western College for Women.

She arrived with a valise of clothing, her Bible, a Pilgrim's Progress and a half-dozen of McGuffey's Eclectic Readers. The first evening, over a poor meal of rice, I tried to be honest about the obstacles we face, especially ill will from neighbors.

To that she said, "Mrs. Main, I prayed for this kind of situation.

No reverses will defeat me. I am one of those lucky few St.

Paul described in his Epistle to the Romans-- 'Who against all hope believed in hope.' I am here to teach, and teach I shall."

Orry, 1 think I have found a confidante--and a friend.

. . . Prudence continues to astonish me. Took her this morning
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to the schoolhouse, already under construction halfway down the road to the abandoned slave quarters. Lincoln, our newest freedman, is roofing it with cypress shakes split by hand. Prudence said it was her- school, so she should share the toil. Whereupon she hoisted her skirts between her legs and knotted them and scampered up the ladder. Lincoln looked stunned and embarrassed, though he quickly got over it when she began to drive nails as if born to it. I asked later about her skill.

"Papa taught me. He felt I must be prepared to provide for myself in every circumstance. I believe he felt--never saying it, mind--that no man would wed an ugly duckling with abolitionist views. I may marry someday. I told you I have hope. But whether that's true or not, carpentry is good to know. Learning anything useful is good. That's why I teach."

. . . To the Dixie Store this morning, which I had not seen since it reopened. The plump and white Mr. Randall Gettys, himself, greeted me from behind the counter.

Evidence of his literary pretension was prominently in view in an old woodbox on the floor. Secondhand copies of Poe, Coleridge, the novels of Gilmore Simms, doubtless bargained away by some impoverished landowner. Who will buy them, even at five cents each, I cannot imagine.

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Evidence of Mr. Gettys's political views reposed even more prominently upon the counter--a neat stack of issues of The Land We Love, one of several publications pandering to the sad belief that the South's cause is not lost. . . .

Gettys affected an exaggerated politeness, hovering uncomfortably close to Madeline. His small round wire-rimmed spectacles shone. A huge white handkerchief billowed from the breast pocket of his greasy coat. Even closely shaved, his. dark beard lent him a vaguely soiled look.

Madeline noted the profusion of goods on the shelves. "I didn't know you were so well stocked. Nor that you had the capital for it."

"A relative in Greenville furnished the money," Gettys said at once. She saw him glance at her breasts while he wiped his chin with his handkerchief. "It's a decided pleasure to see you, Mrs. Main. What may I sell you this morning?"

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"Nothing just yet. I'd like to know your prices." She pointed to a barrel. "That seed corn, for instance."

"One dollar per bushel. And one-quarter of the crop produced, or the cash equivalent. For the colored, the price is double."

"Randall, I'm happy to have the store open, but I don't believe we can stand that kind of price-gouging in the district."

She said it without rancor. Even so, it enraged him. He shed his smarmy politeness. "What we can't stand is that infernal school you're putting up. A school for niggers!"

"And any white person who cares to better himself."

Gettys ignored the remark. "It's an outrage. Furthermore, it's a waste. A darky can't learn. His brain's too small. He's only fit to be our hewer of wood, our drawer of water, exactly as Scripture says. If a nigger does have a scintilla of intelligence, education just inflames his base passions and foments hatred of his betters."

"Dear God, Randall, spare me that old cant."

"No, ma'am," he exclaimed, "I ~wil\ not. We lost the war but we haven't lost our senses. The white citizens of this district will not permit it to be Africanized."

Wearily, she turned and walked to the door.

"You'd better listen," he shouted. "You've been given fair warning."