Heaven and Hell (34 page)

"My friends and constituents, thank you for your generous welcome to Cleveland. It is not my intention to make a speech--"

The man in the campaign hat smirked. The idiot nearly always said that, throwing his audiences an obvious cue. One of the hired men took it. "Then don't."

Laughter. Clapping. Johnson gripped the balcony rail. "You hecklers seem to follow me everywhere. At least have the courtesy--"

"Where's Grant?"

"I regret that General Grant is unable to appear with me. He--"

Groans covered the rest.

"Why don't you want colored men to vote in Dixie?" someone yelled.

Seward touched Johnson's sleeve to caution him. The President Pulled his arm away. "Cast the mote from your own eye before you

Worry about your neighbor's," he cried. "Let your own Negroes vote

"ere in Ohio before you campaign to extend the franchise down South."

The voices began a crescendo from various points in the crowd:

"You're spineless."

"Prison's too good for Jeff Davis!"

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"Hang him. Hang himV

Johnson exploded. "Why don't you hang Ben Wade?" Loud booing, which only goaded the President. "Why don't you hang Wendell Phillips and Thad Stevens while you're at it? I tell you this. I have been fighting traitors in the South and I am prepared to fight them in the North."

"You're the traitor," someone cried over the booing and hissing.

"You and your National Union Party. Traitors!"

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The taunt enraged the President. He shook a finger at the mob.

"Show yourself, whoever said that. No, of course you won't. If ever you shoot someone, you'll do it in the dark, from behind."

A tumult of oaths and boos greeted that. Johnson roared over it, his temper irrevocably lost:

"The Congress has done this. The Congress has poisoned your minds against me while failing to do anything of its own to restore the Union. Instead, they divide the American people, conqueror against conquered, Republican against Democrat, white against black. Had Abraham Lincoln lived, he too would be suffering the vicious enmity of the power-crazed Radical clique--" Frantic, Seward kept trying to pull him inside. "--the merchants of hatred who now control our House and Senate, and seek to intimidate and control me."

"Liar!" someone screamed. Johnson's jaw worked, but no one could hear him over the mounting roar. He shook a fist. "Liar, liar,"

the chant began, louder at each utterance.

At the back of the crowd, the man in the Union campaign hat, who had hired and planted people on instructions from an intermediary, allowed himself a smile. The plan had worked perfectly. Johnson was in a fury, and the reporters would have every word of the debacle on the telegraph wire by midnight. Johnson foolishly thought he could attack Wade with impunity. The man in the campaign hat was sure the senator had arranged and paid for the disruption, though of course there was no provable link. That was the reason for intermediaries.

"Liar! Liar! Liar! Liar!"

The roar was a sweet sound. It meant a generous bonus. The man in the campaign hat walked rapidly away from the chanting mob. At the telegraph window of the railway station, he picked up a blank and a stubby pencil and began to block out the message announcing his success to the intermediary who had hired him. On the first line he printed MR. S. HAZARD, WASHINGTON, D.C.

. . . It appears Mr. Johnson's "swing around the circle" 's ending in disaster. How sad and strange that this prostrate land

A Winter Count 2\j

is being fought over, savagely, as a great prize. One war has only yielded to another.

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. . . Another attempt on the school last night. In bad weather its windows are covered by shutters. We cannot afford glass.

Whoever did the deed was careless about noise while tearing shutters off. The evening was still, and the sound carried to Andy's cottage. He ran there and laid hands on the malefactor in the dark. The man felled him with hard blows and fled. Andy never saw his face.

Do not know who to suspect. The white-trash squatters near Summerton? Mr. Getty s, the man of genteel poverty? That dancing master who fancies himself an aristocrat? Among possible suspects, we seem to have all the white classes represented . . .

From the pines of South Carolina came turpentine, shipped out of Charleston in kegs. Most of the black stevedores carried but one at a time up the plank to whatever steamer they were loading. Des LaMotte, reduced to their level because there were still no fine families to employ him, carried two.

He worked in gentleman's linen breeches, soiled and torn. He balanced a keg on each shoulder. When he first tried it, the rims left red welts that later bled. Now a ridge of scar tissue had toughened both shoulders.

He detested the work, and all those nameless, faceless Negrophiles in the North who had forced him into it. Yet he took a certain crazed pride in doing more, carrying more, than the strongest buck. He soon became a figure of note on the Charleston docks, an immense white man with bulging arm muscles and the neatly tended chin beard of a rich planter.

He refused to speak to any of the black stevedores unless some circumstance of the job required it. On his second day, he'd almost knocked down a darky who approached him about joining a new Longshoremen's Protective Association. The man opened his appeal with remarks about a burial aid fund, so much contributed each week to guarantee that funeral expenses would be met when necessary.

When Des heard that, his mind flashed white. He quelled his murderous impulses but couldn't banish them. How could the ignorant African understand the depth and subtlety of Des's affection for his wife, Sally Sue, or his commander, Ferris Brixham? Those were the only funerals Des cared about, funerals enshrined in memory.

The incident left him shaken, because he'd come close to killing the stevedore. How long until he really turned on one of them? He 2l8 HEAVEN AND HELL

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realized that by working among freed Negroes, he was playing a dangerous game with his own life. Somehow he didn't care.

In the hot sunshine of a Carolina autumn that was more like summer, he sweated rivers of salt sweat as he labored up the plank of the coastal steamer Sequoiah again and yet again, muscles twisting like ropes under his raw-burned skin. He allowed none of his pain to show on his face.

More than pain and the tiny Low Country gnats deviled him this morning. He'd received a note from Gettys. It said that Captain Jolly, the trash they planned to employ to pull the trigger on Madeline Main, had filled himself with stolen com whiskey, then gone off to try to wreck the school.

Idiot, Des thought, simmering. He heaved a keg to his right shoulder, and then another to his left. His knees buckled a little as he absorbed the weight.

He was as impatient as ever to see the Mains brought down, starting with Colonel Orry Main's widow. He didn't want to hang for the crime, though. And Mr. Cooper Main of Tradd Street, while having no truck with the occupying soldiers, had quite enough influence to turn the soldiers in pursuit of Des if he grew suspicious.

So he had been lying low all these weeks, awaiting a suitable pretext. He believed a nigger uprising inevitable. Some hot night, inflamed by spiritous liquors and the agents of the Yankee government, the freedmen would go wild. There would be arson, rapine, hell to pay for any man with white skin. Such an outbreak was the sort of screen he needed.

And now Jolly had drawn attention to himself, and to Mont Royal.

Jolly was accustomed to doing whatever he pleased, terrorizing both whites and niggers in the Ashley district. Well, he wouldn't do as he pleased with the Main woman. Des had already sent off a reply to Gettys demanding that Jolly be restrained until ordered to act.

Groaning and sweating, Des bent his back and struggled up the plank step by painful step. A trio of elegant young ladies, one of whom.

Miss Leamington of Leamington Hall, had been a pupil, came promenading along the crowded quay under their parasols. Threadbare dresses told of their poverty, but the easy arrogance of their class--something understood by Des, and even shared--showed in their amused looks at the stevedores and their lively chat.

Miss Leamington stopped suddenly. "Dear me. Is that--?" Des hunched to hide his head behind a cask. "No, it couldn't be."

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"What, Felicity? What couldn't be?"

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"You see that white man carrying kegs like a nigger? For a moment I thought he was my old dancing master, Mr. LaMotte. But Mr.

LaMotte's a white man through and through. He would never demean himself that way."

The young ladies passed on without glancing back. Who cared to waste a second look on dirt?

That was Friday. All night the memory of Miss Leamington's scorn kept Des awake. He drifted to s.leep on his sodden pallet around four, waking several hours late for work. He dressed without eating and hurried toward the docks, hearing the blare of a small band on Meeting Street.

When he reached Meeting, he was prevented from crossing by a parade. He saw niggers marching in formation, each man wearing a frock coat of white flannel with dark-blue facings and matching white trousers. They were festive, waving and chatting with people in the mixed crowd that had turned out to watch. At the head of the parade, two men carried a banner.

CHARLESTOWNE VOL. FIRE CO.

Number 2

"black opal"

Des stood in the third row of the crowd, glaring as the firemen passed. Behind the marchers, horses decorated with flowers pulled two pumping units. Small American flags were tied to the burnished brass rails of the pumpers. Des's hands knotted at his sides. All that black skin, those Yankee flags--it was almost more than he could tolerate.

A shiny-cheeked, strapping buck waved to someone at Des's left.

"How'd you do, Miss Sally? Fine morning."

Des turned to look. The name Sally resonated in his head with sharp echoes. He saw a fat, trashy girl waving a hanky at the fireman, who grinned at her as if he wanted to stroll right over and lift her skirts.

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Miss Sally was a white girl. She waved and waved her hanky, taking notice of the nigger, demeaning herself, her race. Des felt as if the blood would burst his temples.

A small five-piece marching band, part of the fire company, had teen counting cadence with drumsticks clacked together. Now the brasses struck up "Hail, Columbia!" and the white slut beamed so broadly at the fireman, he blew her a kiss.

Which she returned.

Des's huge hands flew up, one fastening on a shoulder at his left, fck

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one at his right. He parted the human wall. Someone protested, hurt, as he lunged into the street.

Then his mind turned to flame, and he remembered nothing.

Col. Munro here, inspecting the school and complaining about duplicate and triplicate reports he must file over "outrages." He left two young corporals, charming and friendly Maine boys, to guard the school for a few days. One said he wants to settle in Carolina, he finds the climate and people so winning.

Before Munro marched back to town, he issued a gloomy warning, which 1 quote as best I can recall it. "I have now been in the Palmetto State long enough to understand something of Southern feelings. So far as my observation goes, I do not find the white people hostile to the Negro as a Negro. They like him in most instances. But when he threatens them as a possible office holder, juror, voter, political and social equal, he goes too far.

Freedom s not the issue, but equality. Any persons or institutions promoting that are the enemy."

"Perhaps so," I said. "But Prudence and I will keep the school open."

"Then I predict you will keep having trouble," he said.

' 'Someday it will be of a magnitude that neither luck nor courage will overcome."

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. . . Cooper writes that D. LaMotte is jailed. On Saturday he attacked a colored vol. fireman with no apparent provocation, and the authorities arrested him. C. said he has lately been skeptical

of LaMotte's willingness to carry out his threats. He is no longer skeptical. For some while, however, we are, to use C.'s word, "reprieved."

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The Cheyenne's rifle shot blew out the left eye of Wooden Foot's horse. Amid blood and animal bellowing, the trader tumbled into the wind-whipped grass. Charles was already dismounted. He grabbed his Spencer and slapped Satan to send him trotting away. Boy, upset by the sudden attack, vainly tried to control the pack mules from horseback.

"Get

down, get off your horse," Charles shouted. The Cheyennes rushed their ponies up the rise. A bullet snapped Charles's hat brim; the hat sailed away. He yelled at Boy again but the howls of the Indians and the bray of the mules competed. But after a few seconds, Boy understood the look on Charles's face and slipped clumsily to the ground.

Wooden Foot knelt and shot at the Cheyennes nearing the top of the rise. He missed. Charles fired as the brave next to Scar flung a feathered lance. Charles dodged it. The Indian took Charles's bullet, blasted off his pony.

Everything was noise and confusion. A few miles west, lightning sizzled down from approaching storm clouds and struck the dry prairie.

The grass smoked and sparked. Boiling, tumbling, the black clouds sped on toward the Cheyennes and the embattled traders.

Boy cried out. Charles saw him stagger, clutching a reddened sleeve.

A lance had grazed him. Tears of pain and bewilderment rolled down his face.

Wooden Foot shouted, "Behind you, Charlie," and fired his long 8un almost simultaneously. Charles pivoted and saw a mounted Cheyenne about to hammer him with a stone-headed war club. Charles shot at the red-painted face, but not soon enough to stop the blow. The club

Pounded his shoulder with an impact that drove him sideways. The Uieyenne sagged from his pony, his face a sheet of blood.

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