Read When This Cruel War Is Over Online

Authors: Thomas Fleming

When This Cruel War Is Over (13 page)

If the medium's theories were true, Janet was an obstruction on the spiritual telegraph. Yet there was no diminution of Mrs. Havens's performance. Deep sighs followed by theatrical shudders shook her ample frame. “I feel the spirits all around us, but none are familiar,” she whispered. “The message I've sent into the void often attracts wandering souls who have no other hope of solace, creatures who have died unrepentant or unloved.”
She gasped and clutched her stomach with both hands. “Oh! I feel an entry. I feel—”
Mrs. Havens went rigid in her chair. Expression
drained from her face. She leaned forward and blew out the candle. In the darkened room Janet heard a burst of boyish laughter. “Momma! Momma!” said a voice that was very different from Mrs. Havens's normal voice.
“Oh, who is it? Who is it?” Letitia Todd cried.
“Andy—wants—candy,” said the childish voice.
“Oh, the dear sweet boy remembers that little joke,” Letitia Todd said. “It's him, reminding me of the perfect love we shared in his babyhood. Ask him if he sees Jack. Are they together?”
“Let us first make certain it's Andy,” Mrs. Havens said. “Give us the signal we agreed on, dear boy.”
Six sharp raps echoed around the room. They came from the vicinity of the table. But as far as Janet could see in the semidarkness, Mrs. Havens remained immobile.
“It's Andy,” Letitia Todd said. “Ask him about Jack.”
“Do you see Jack? Are you together?”
“Sometimes,” the childish voice said from Mrs. Havens's lips.
“Is he—happy? Are you both—still happy?”
“Yes—Momma,” said the childish voice. “Completely … happy.”
Janet knew Letitia Todd feared her wild son Andy had gone to hell for his drinking and gambling and whoring. “Why are you speaking in your little boy's voice?” her mother asked.
“We—are—still—angels—Momma. Baby—angels.”
“As long as you're happy, that's all I care about.”
“Your—pain—Momma. Offer—up—your—pain. For—our—souls. Offer—it—to—Jesus.”
“I will! I will!” Letitia Todd cried.
Silence. Mrs. Havens shifted in her chair. “He's leaving us,” she whispered.
“He's told me all I wanted to hear,” Letitia Todd said.
Silence until Mrs. Havens spoke in her sepulchral whisper. “Are there any other familiar spirits here who wish to speak?”
A terrific gust of wind swept through the bedroom, making the white curtains dance. Janet heard glass break as pictures fell off the walls or toppled from side tables.
“Oh my God,” gasped Mrs. Havens. “Who are you?”
The wind whirled around them. It felt clammy on Janet's hands and face. “Who are you?” Mrs. Havens quavered.
Silence for sixty seconds. Then another voice took command of Mrs. Haven's lips. “Death!” it said in a guttural growl. “I am Death. I've come to warn all of you. Especially Paul. Don't—do—it—Paul! Don't!”
“That's enough!” Paul Stapleton leaped to his feet. “That's enough of this—this torture! Who is this woman? Is this some sort of test?”
Janet lit the candle. Mrs. Havens was slumped in her chair, saliva drooling from her lips.
“Don't—do—it,” she croaked in the same voice, dwindling now. If some sort of evil spirit was not possessing her, she was giving a very good imitation of it.
“Get her some brandy, for God's sake,” Letitia Todd said. “I fear she's having a stroke.”
Janet rushed downstairs to the brandy decanter. By the time she returned to the bedroom, Mrs. Havens had regained consciousness. But she was a very frightened woman. She gulped the brandy and said, “Nothing like that has ever happened to me before. I dealt only with benign spirits. That being seemed about to tear the flesh from my bones.”
“Was it a demon?” Letitia Todd asked.
“I don't know,” Mrs. Havens said.
“It wasn't a demon,” Paul said.
Janet was bewildered to see tears on his cheeks. “It was someone who had recently died—without accepting death. I think I know his name,” Paul said.
“One of your classmates?
“Yes. One of my classmates,” Paul said. “Will you excuse me?”
He bowed to Letitia Todd. He seized Janet's hand and pressed it to his lips. She listened to the thud of his footsteps in the carpeted hall, the slam of his bedroom door. A nameless fear swept her. What an awful ending to a glorious day.
IN HIS ROOM, PAUL FLUNG off his uniform as if it were a straitjacket. Pulling on a robe, he threw himself down on the bed. Was that Jeff Tyler's soul in that spirit medium's body, warning him against betraying his oath of allegiance to the Union?
Or was Jeff telling him not to betray the South's last hope? Don't betray Gabriel Todd's pathetic attempt at consolation for his dead sons? Don't betray the love he saw on Janet's face when she looked at her father? Don't ignore—and thereby betray—the Democratic Party's justifiable anger at the Republicans' outrageous abuse of the Constitution in their determination to hold onto Kentucky?
Beyond these immediate betrayals lay his consciousness of Caroline Kemble Stapleton's secret wish for a Southern victory. It would be her justification, her triumph, in her bitter quarrel with her oldest son, Paul's brother, Jonathan Stapleton.
Paul paced the bedroom, trying to think analytically, reasonably, about the future he was confronting. What sort of Union would there be at the end of this murderous war? Captain Simeon Otis and his fanatic ilk talked of arming the slaves and making them masters of the South. They seemed indifferent to the prospect of a race war. Nothing was too monstrous to punish the South for the sin of slavery.
At the very least, the South would become a sullen desolated part of the Union, perpetually mourning her dead, forever resentful of her conquered status—a kind
of geographic cancer in the body politic. Was Jeff Tyler telling him that the only hope of future peace was some sort of settlement that permitted the South to decide its own destiny?
Duty Honor Country
. How prayerfully Paul had repeated those words at West Point. They offered a refuge, a guarantee of inner peace, while he was learning how to wage war. But he was a child then, seventeen years old.
When I was a child, I thought as a child
, Saint Paul said. Now he was thinking as a man. Perhaps there were duties beyond the army's rigid regulations and obtuse orders. Perhaps there was a higher code of honor, unwritten, known only to the individual conscience. Perhaps there was another country—a country of the heart that transcended the constitutional nation to which he had sworn his loyalty.
Tears trickled down Paul's cheeks as he thought of Jeff Tyler in his Georgia grave. Jeff had chosen to fight for the South, knowing a nameless grave was part of the risk. Knowing that only a miracle could deliver victory. They had discussed it as professional soldiers and decided each had to follow what Jeff called the imperatives of the heart, no matter what their calculating professional brains concluded. Jeff had gone south rather than take the new ironclad oath of loyalty to the Union that the government required before they permitted anyone in the class of 1861 to graduate. Paul had taken that oath, driven by his own heart's imperatives—his loyalty to his brother, Jonathan, and their father's devotion to the Union.
Now he was trapped between love—or was it pity?—for this Kentucky variant of the South's agony and that oath of loyalty and obedience to duty, honor, country.
Somewhere in the trees beyond Hopemont's lawn, an owl hooted. Wisdom, was he groping for wisdom here in the silence? Was he finally becoming his own man? Not Senator George Stapleton's son or Major General
Jonathan Stapleton's younger brother, not even Major Paul Stapleton, U.S.A., that boilerplated product of the U.S. Military Academy, but simply Paul Stapleton, unranked, identified by nothing but his existence here in the Kentucky night, with the woman he loved lying sleepless in her bed a few dozen feet away.
Tiptoeing down the hall, he tapped on Janet's bedroom door. She opened it in an instant. “I was hoping—praying you'd come,” she said.
“To talk,” Paul said. “We need to talk.”
“Exactly what I want to do,” Janet said. She was still wearing her dress, an elaborate green silk affair with a large bow at the waist. It pained Paul to detect coldness, suspicion, in her voice. But what else could he expect? “Let's go out to the gazebo,” she said. “We can speak with more freedom there.”
A full moon was still riding high. It bathed the lawn with golden light. The old trees cast bizarre shadows on the grass. A night wind, as hot as a sirocco, stirred the branches. They strolled to the gazebo with Paul's arm around Janet's waist.
“You must think you're engaged to a madman,” he said.
“I confess to being baffled by your outburst tonight. Did you really think Mrs. Havens was some sort of secret agent who was testing your loyalty to us?”
He told her about Jeff's death and its impact on him.
“Why didn't you share that with me?” Janet asked.
“I thought you were burdened by enough deaths.”
“Do you believe the dead survive beyond the grave?” Janet asked.
“I didn't—until tonight.”
“I didn't either. I thought Mrs. Havens's spirit talk was nothing but a clever performance. I tolerated her because she consoled Momma.”
Janet threw her arms around him and pressed her head against his chest. “Oh, my love. My dearest love.”
She was trembling. “Does it make you wonder if there are powers beyond our comprehension? That we have no real control over our fate?”
“So much of what we do is beyond our free choice. I think there are only moments when we're truly free. When we speak or act out of what is truly individual in our souls. That moment by the river today was one of them.”
He meant that, Paul told himself. Even though he felt her nakedness—and his desire—had compromised the absolute freedom of his choice.
“What did you mean by accepting—or not accepting death?”
“That's another moment of freedom. The most powerful one I've ever experienced, until I met you.”
Paul was back on the bullet-swept field near Gettysburg, kneeling beside General John Reynolds, watching blood ooze from the wound in his heart. Reynolds had been his army father. His death was a devastating blow.
A moment later, George Armstrong Custer loomed above him on his black horse. Defying army regulations, his blond hair cascaded to his shoulders. He shouted above the crash of rifles, the boom of cannon, “Goddamn it, they got Uncle John! I was going to ask permission to charge them. Nothing else will stop them. They're coming on like an avalanche.”
“Let's do it. I'll say it was Uncle John's last order.”
Paul heard himself telling this to Janet Todd. “Not until I rode toward the Confederates did I realize Custer had only six hundred men. A third of Lee's army, at least twenty thousand men, were coming down the road! That didn't bother Custer in the least. He told his bugler to blow the charge and we rode straight at them. I saw—I I
knew
—we were committing suicide. No one but Custer would have done such a thing. He's absolutely convinced of his own indestructibility.”
“I'm not sure I want to hear the rest,” Janet said,
pressing herself against him. But Paul knew she wanted to hear everything.
“The Confederates deployed into line of battle. Cannon opened on us. Then a blast of rifle fire that emptied saddles all around me. At that moment, I saw my own death. I saw it as something inevitable, ordained, even worthwhile. I saw or thought I saw the whole meaning of my life. I accepted death as something more important, more meaningful, than life. Fear vanished. I chose death, beside Custer, freely, proudly. A moment later a minié ball hit me in the head. I woke up two days later in the hospital.”
Janet was silent for a long time. Somewhere in the trees the same owl—or his cousin—hooted. “I hate it,” she said. “I hate the whole idea. But I see the wonder of it. The nobility.”
“I'm not sure what to name it. I can only tell you it happened.”
“And you think your friend Jeff Tyler didn't have a chance to accept his death?”
“I'm sure he knew how desperate the South's cause has become. That alone would make it difficult to die.”
The contrast between Jeff's death and his own memories of Gettysburg troubled Paul. “Somehow I didn't feel that way at Gettysburg, although our situation on that first day was about as desperate as soldiers can get. Paul Stapleton seemed to be standing outside the war, playing his part with no sense of being essential to the outcome. Maybe that's all we can hope to do. Honorably play the part assigned to us.”
“I've assigned you another part,” Janet said. “One that's far more essential to the outcome. I'm sure you'll play it as honorably.”
“I'll try. I can promise you that,” Paul said, He meant those words, even though he still felt bound by his oath of loyalty to the Union. Somehow he would have to find
a way to be loyal both to honor and to love.
“Father is inviting some of the local leaders of the Sons of Liberty to supper tomorrow. He wants them to meet you.”
“What's your impression of them?”
“They're good men. I think you'll like all of them—except one you've already met.”
“Who?”
“Rogers Jameson. He's the second in command of the Daviess County brigade. He's no thinker but on a battlefield Father says he'll be a fighter.”
“He's probably right About that.”
They retreated to their separate bedrooms after a passionate kiss. In the morning Paul was relieved to find Mrs. Havens had departed for her next appointment with the spirit world. Gabriel Todd joined them at the breakfast table and asked how the seance had gone.
“Momma felt much better,” Janet said. “She heard a voice that seemed to be Andy's. He spoke of how much he loved her.”
“Good, good,” Todd said. He clearly had neither faith nor interest in the afterlife. Paul was glad there was no need to tell him about Jeff Tyler's intruding voice. After sleeping on it, Paul wondered if there was another explanation. Perhaps Mrs. Havens had picked up a subconscious thought from his own mind. Perhaps that was his own troubled conscience crying out, “Don't do it!” Perhaps people with special sensitivity like Mrs. Havens could pick up emotions on an invisible spiritual telegraph. That would also explain her ability to produce Mrs. Todd's memories of the childhood of her dead son.
The butler brought the day's mail. Colonel Todd shook out his copy of the Louisville
Register.
His eyes widened with amazement at his first glimpse of the front page. “Here's news that could change everything!” he said.
He showed them the headline of the story in the right-hand column:
LINCOLN CALLS FOR ANOTHER
500,000 MEN.
MOST WILL BE DRAFTED.
KENTUCKY'S QUOTA
36,885. GOVERNOR FEARS WIDE UNREST.
“The man is either the greatest fool or the most reckless tyrant on the face of the earth,” Colonel Todd said. “Either way, he's playing into our hands. If this doesn't make the Democrats fight, nothing will.”
“Grant's casualties in the Wilderness and Sherman's losses before Atlanta must be far higher than the government's admitting,” Paul said.
“In other words, they're as desperate as we are,” Janet said.
Her smile made Paul uneasy. It was too triumphant. She assumed a Sons of Liberty victory was almost a foregone conclusion when the opposite was more probably the case: the North's desperation made the insurrection an even more enormous gamble. Paul groped for his image of Blondin on the high wire. But the acrobat . was nowhere to be seen. The abandoned wire swayed above the cataract in history's hurricane.

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