Authors: Clifford Jackman
Duncan suddenly laughed. They looked down at him. His breathing was hitched, as if every breath caused him great pain. But his eyes were still clear and focused, lit up with malevolent intelligence.
“Caught … me … there,” Duncan said. “Stupid … gun. Didn’t … think …”
He coughed three times, each seeming to cause him more pain, his face going red and the cords of his neck standing out, a thin stream of blood coming from his nose.
Bill flinched. Duncan stared at him again, a smile on his lips.
“What’s … the … matter? Can’t … look … at … me?”
The sound of his breathing, so truncated and harsh and unnatural.
“He’s … mad … Quentin … mad … I was … the only … one.”
Duncan closed his eyes and relaxed, and they all thought he was dead. But no such luck. He opened his eyes again and looked at Winter. When he spoke next it was all in a rush.
“I was the only one who could have saved you all.”
Duncan’s face screwed up in pain and he let out that terrible cough.
“You … remember. You … remember. You … remember … me.”
Bill was trembling, and Johnson’s eyes were wide. But Winter was calm. He looked at Duncan very closely, as if he were attempting to engrave Duncan’s appearance on his memory for all time. Eventually, Winter nodded.
“You remember,” Duncan whispered. “Where … where … do you think … it’s going to … end? What … do you think … going to … happen. So stupid. So … stupid.”
Duncan shook his head a little. Then he said, “Go … on. Do … it.”
“All right,” Winter said.
Winter lifted his rifle. Duncan grinned, his teeth stained with blood, his eyes so lively. And it struck Winter that Duncan was alive, even now. His hair and fingernails growing, his stomach digesting its last meal, heart beating, lungs working. Alive. But not for long. It was the end. And each time in this war that someone had died, this same thing had happened. This same unimaginable finality. How many times the universe had been destroyed.
Winter began to cry then, and he looked very much like a little boy.
“You … coward.”
The shot rang out and Duncan’s head skipped in the dirt.
Winter lowered the rifle and wiped his streaming eyes with his broken forearm.
“What the hell are we going to do now?” Johnson asked. “They going to hang us all.”
“It’s all right,” Winter said. “We’ll say that half-breed did it.”
“Where is Sevenkiller?” Bill asked.
“He’s dead,” Winter said. “Him and your uncle.”
“You killed them?” Bill asked.
“Sure did,” Winter said, and as he spoke the weakness began to evaporate from his face.
Bill shivered; he was still soaked from swimming across the river and back. He was hit with a sudden heavy blow of guilt. His uncle, who had tried to save him, was dead. All the men in his regiment were dead. The war was lost. His family’s humble lands would be forfeited, or destroyed, just like the town of Planter’s Factory. He was alone in the world.
“I didn’t …,” Bill started. Then he stopped and looked down, momentarily overcome.
“You didn’t what?” Winter asked. When Bill didn’t reply, Winter said, “Why’d you come back here anyway?”
“I knew he was coming to kill you,” Bill said.
“Yeah? What was that to you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know,” Winter said, tilting his head back, his strange golden eyes pinning Bill in place.
“I don’t know,” Bill repeated. He thought of his uncle, dead, and another wave of guilt washed over him, but this time commingled with another sensation. Of freedom. Of relief. When he lifted his head he looked into Winter’s eyes and again he felt that thrill of excitement in his spine. The feeling that anything was possible. And then more guilt, the payment for this feeling, and he looked down.
Finally, Winter said, “Well. You saved our lives. You can go where you want.”
“Where am I supposed to go?” Bill asked.
Winter shrugged and turned to Johnson.
“Same goes for you, I suppose,” Winter said. “And before you ask, I don’t know where you should go neither. That’s what freedom is all about. There’s nowhere in particular you’re supposed to be.”
“They’ll kill me no matter what,” Johnson said.
“Then it doesn’t matter much where you go,” Winter said.
Johnson remembered how the lieutenant had stopped Sergeant Service from killing him. If he had protected him before, perhaps he would protect him again. What other choice did he have?
“If you’re coming with me,” Winter said, “then let’s move.”
Captain Jackson lay on his back and struggled to breathe. Where was everyone? He felt as if he’d been lying in his own blood for hours. His neck and shoulder pulsed with pain every time he took a breath, and his leg had flared up as well. The thought of trying to move was terrifying.
And then Bill Bread was looming over him.
Bill, he tried to say.
But blood just bubbled up in his mouth.
The Indian looked at him sorrowfully.
“Hello, Captain,” Bill said.
Bill, Tom tried to say again.
Another shadow fell over him. Tom’s heart froze in his chest. It was a Negro, tall and powerful.
“What do we do?” the Negro asked.
Bill, Tom tried to say.
But Bill only shrugged.
“Ask Winter,” he said.
Jan Müller led his men from the mill out into the fresh air, feeling physically and morally tired, wiping sweat and soot out of his eyes. They had thoroughly wrecked both the mill and the factory. Then he saw the blackened skeleton jutting out of the water. It took him a moment to realize that it was all that remained of the bridge.
They made their way to the center of the village, where they found Quentin and the rest of the Union foragers crouched on their heels in the town square. Many houses burned, while others had been smashed and looted. Angry blacks ran back and forth, hurling flaming torches and shouting in triumph.
“Lieutenant Ross, what is happening?” Jan asked.
“Why hello, Sergeant Müller,” Quentin replied.
“Why didn’t you tell us the bridge was gone?”
“Well, Sergeant,” Quentin said, “I made the decision that it was necessary to inflict some punitive damages on this village. After all, General Sherman made it perfectly clear that the Union Army’s right to forage was clear and uncontroversial and attacks on his foragers would not be tolerated. The level of resistance we have encountered in this village has been nothing short of astonishing. Therefore, it was necessary, in the good general’s own words, ‘to order and enforce a devastation more or less relentless.’ ”
Jan looked concerned, but he didn’t say anything more.
“Look!” Reggie cried.
Winter, Johnson, and Bread were coming up from the riverbank. Bread and Johnson were carrying a wounded man between them.
“Lieutenant,” Winter said.
“Where have you been?” Quentin asked.
“We took on the Confederates,” Winter said. “This here is their captain. He’s still alive.”
Bread and Johnson dropped Captain Tom Jackson onto the ground, and the Union soldiers gathered around him and gawked.
Tom closed his eyes and turned his head away from them.
“Well done, Winter,” Quentin cried. “I’ll see you commended for this!”
“Who is this Negro?” Jan said.
“He saved my life,” Winter said.
“Well then, he deserves our thanks,” Quentin said.
“No,” Jan said. “He is the one who killed his master. He is the slave Freddy.”
“I didn’t do nothing,” Johnson said.
“I know you,” Jan said.
“He saved my life,” Winter repeated flatly.
“Sergeant Müller, a word, please,” Quentin said.
Quentin took Jan by the elbow and led him a little away.
“But sir,” Jan said.
“Now, Sergeant, those rebels took Reggie and Winter and this Negro saved them both. His only crime is the killing of his cruel master. Surely you don’t expect me to kill him, or to turn him over to the army.”
“We have to, sir,” Jan said.
“You trust me, don’t you?”
“Yes sir.”
“Well then, leave it in my hands for now,” Quentin said. “We can discuss it later. Perhaps we will be able to apply for clemency on his behalf.”
“Very well, sir,” Jan said. His sensitive eyes, disapproving, met Johnson’s defiant gaze. For a while neither of them looked away.
“Well, we should be moving out soon,” Quentin said. “Are we all here? Where’s Duncan?”
“He’s dead,” Winter said.
“Dead?” Charlie Empire cried.
“The Confederates killed him too,” Winter said. “Duncan crossed the river and a little half-breed jumped him. He’s dead.”
Winter’s tone was unemotional.
“What do you mean he’s dead?” Charlie cried again, starting to
his feet. “How could he be dead? Why would he have gone to the other side of the river, away from the town?”
Charlie’s voice was shocked and wildly angry. Johnny was on his feet too. But Winter only shrugged.
“I don’t know, Charlie,” Winter said. “I don’t know why people do the things they do.”
“Sergeant Müller,” Quentin said. “Take them across the river and secure their brother’s remains. Take a boat if you can find one; there must be one around here somewhere. The rest of you, we are to finish our duties in this town and continue moving east.”
“Shouldn’t we wait here?” Jan asked. “And make our report?”
“Not yet,” Quentin said. His eyes were lit up and dancing. “Not yet. I want to keep moving. Not yet. I … perhaps at Milledgeville. Yes. Perhaps then. Just not yet.”
When the body of the Union Army arrived at the ruins of Planter’s Factory they marveled at the destruction. They were astonished to hear that Union foragers had incited the slaves to violent rebellion. Astonished, and skeptical. It was exactly the sort of story most likely to inflame southern sensibilities, and nothing similar had happened elsewhere during the entire war.
One thing that did not worry them was the destruction of the bridge. Less than an hour after their arrival, the engineers were hard at work, unloading flat, light pontoon frames off the wagons and dragging them to the water. The frames were then attached to one another with canvas sides and anchored six feet apart, all the way across the river. Next the men laid beams across the pontoons, then planks across the beams. The new bridge was ready by dawn, and the right flank of Sherman’s army marched across it that very same day, chasing Quentin Ross and his men across Georgia.
For a time, Quentin’s lies to his superiors were believed because he told them with such impassioned conviction, and because they were more plausible than the truth. The Confederates had every reason to exaggerate the crimes of Union foragers; Quentin had no reason at all to do the things he did. But by the time they reached the sea in mid-December, it was over. Quentin had begged off two appointments with the brigade commander, claiming exigent circumstances. He was informed that if he missed a third he would be shot as a deserter
.
Very few of Quentin’s men had seen the sea. It made an impression upon them, all that endless blue, so vast beyond imagination. Perhaps it affected their behavior; perhaps it showed them that none of them had been the men they had believed themselves to be. For when Quentin told them they were outlaws because they had sheltered a slave who had killed his master, and that if they did not wish to surrender him then they would have to desert, they all deserted as one
.
Sergeant Müller had advocated strongly in favor of abandoning Fred Johnson, but Quentin was loyal to Johnson, as were Winter and many of the other men. Some were concerned that having aided and abetted Johnson for so long, a pardon was not certain. But there was also something more. Something that had stirred in them, gestating, feeding and growing and coiling over itself, waiting to spill out, to be born. A swath of smoke and carnage and destruction had followed them to the sea, to the blue edge of infinity, to the end of the world. To turn back then? To surrender themselves to hypocrites who claimed rules governed what they’d seen? What they’d done? To have come this far, only to be hanged?
They turned north instead, staying well ahead of the army, passing themselves off as foragers. In the chaos and destruction visited upon the Carolinas, ten times as furious as the march through Georgia, their depredations were scarcely noticed. When the army turned east toward Wilmington, Quentin and his band headed west. In the disorder of the new peace, with the roads choked and flooded with the dispossessed, it was easy for them to travel to the City of Kansas. Sleeping in barns
during the day and riding at night, they took a savage part in the endless skirmishes and settling of scores that marked that ill-named peace. A lesson in human brutality taught to a people and to a land that could not have needed it less
.
They lived well enough, paid in coin by vengeful Unionists. Their group attracted Union veterans, former slaves, and young troublemakers
.
Their central meeting place in the City of Kansas was the home of one Molly Shakespeare, a whore with three young sons who fancied herself a thespian
.
But it was a directionless life, without hope and purpose, the men always looking out for vengeful Confederates and the forces of the law. There did not seem, at first, to be any sort of path forward. However, events were in motion in the South, where the antebellum way of life had been destroyed. The blacks were free and they sought to better themselves, to learn and to lead. Former Confederates had been stripped of the vote and barred from public life, so blacks and Republicans were elected to many southern offices. Northerners purchased land for pennies. And in December of 1865, something happened that changed their lives forever. In Pulaski, Tennessee, six well-educated Confederate veterans founded the Ku Klux Klan
.
Robed and hooded men riding at night by torchlight. They burned churches and schools, they tarred and feathered carpetbaggers and scalawags, but above all, they murdered black leaders: schoolteachers and politicians and any who sought to vote
.
Word of the talents of Quentin and his men made their way south. Union veterans were already forming unofficial bands to fight the Klan, and the newly wealthy Unionist landlords sought to protect their power and holdings from vigilantes. By then, the landowners of Kansas were only too happy to see Quentin depart; despite his effectiveness, he had worn out his welcome
.
So they rode south, to continue the war they had left behind them only a year ago. With the South in rebellion, they could work out in the open,
their past misdeeds public knowledge. For years they hired themselves out as mercenaries to one carpetbagger after another, but despite every victory, the violence only accelerated. Captain Tom Jackson, recovered from his injuries and burning for vengeance, now led a group of Klansmen who hid in swampy forests and conducted midnight raids on the freedmen and northern blacks who were felling the timber in the Mississippi Delta
.
Quentin and his men were powerless to stop them until Augustus Winter learned the location of Jackson’s next attack. Jackson’s men were butchered from behind and Quentin’s men were celebrated as heroes. Until photographs circulated, in newspapers all over the country, of the men, women, and children killed in a barn in Aberdeen, and it became clear how, precisely, Augustus Winter had learned where Jackson was planning to strike
.
Quentin and his men had always had problems with their superiors and employers. In Georgia, Kansas, the Deep South. Orders slightly exceeded. Unnecessary force. Petty, profitless crime. Now it was all remembered and they became despised across the nation. The men fell out, disbanded, and spread across the country
.
But then, in 1871, a fire burned in Chicago for two days and destroyed three square miles of the city. In the wake of the destruction, the Democrats (who had been banished from politics since the end of the War Between the States) were included in a unity government and grew rich by skimming city contracts and powerful by appointing flunkies to the judiciary and the police. A mayoral election was scheduled for the fall of 1872, and in Washington fears grew of a Democratic political machine in Illinois to match the one in New York. It was whispered that the fate of not only the state, but the country, hung in the balance. And with the stakes so high anything became possible
.