Gentry gazed into the still-beautiful face for which he had sacrificed his arm. At a party five or six years ago, he had seen, beneath carefully applied powder, the shadow of a bruise on Amelia's cheek. He had heard rumors of Jameson snarling drunken insults at her, telling her she was not as good in bed as the sluts he enjoyed in New Orleans.
Gentry snatched a glass of Montrachet off a tray that the butler was carrying to guests sitting at tables around the dance floor. Amelia sipped it and said, “The Sons of Liberty. What do you know about them, Henry?”
For a moment Gentry was too flabbergasted to speak. “They're a secret organization,” he finally said. “I wish I knew more about them.”
“Rogers has joined them. He says they're going to win the war for the South. How could they do that?”
“I have no idea.”
“I'm afraid it might be dangerous. He tells me Adam is playing a part in their plans.”
The possibility of turning Amelia into an informer blazed in Henry Gentry's mind. But he could not speak. Why? He was urging Major Paul Stapleton into Janet Todd's arms in the hope of planting an informer in Hopemont. But he could not violate the purity of his betrayed love for Amelia Conway. It lay there in the past, battered by time but ultimately beautiful, like the classic statues Lord Elgin had discovered in Greece.
Gentry struggled to disregard the rage and humiliation he had felt when Amelia jilted him. He consigned to oblivion all those expensive women with whom he had sought consolation in Cincinnati and Louisville. A man had to cling to something pure and true, even if, like so many other things in this disintegrating American heartland, it was irretrievably lost.
“I'M TELLIN' YOU AGAIN, TRANSFER youself and yâmen outta here. They gonna kill every last one'f you.”
In the dark rear of the Gentry barn, with the sound of the whites' Fourth of July celebration in the distance, Sergeant Moses Washington tried to concentrate on what Janet Todd's slave, Lucy, was telling him. There was a revolution coming in Indiana and Kentucky, led by Democrats. It made sense. Those looks of hate blacks got when they walked down the main street of Keyportâthe insults flung at them by boys. Today's ambush at the Fitzsimmons farm.
But Sergeant Washington did not like the idea of running away. Lucy was a slave nigger, after all. Running away was slave talk. Sergeant Washington's people had been free in Monmouth County, New Jersey, for almost a hundred years. He tended to have a low opinion of slave niggers, although he felt sorry for them. All the men in the troop, except for his New Jersey sidekick, Jasper Jones, were slave niggers. He and Jasper had long since agreed that they were a poor grade of human being. Not one could read or write. They were incredibly ignorant. Most of them had never seen a book or a newspaper.
Still, the slave niggers made good soldiers. They had obedience ground into their bones. Major Stapleton said that was more important than being smart. When the bullets started flying, the important thing was to obey orders. The sergeant saw no need to run away. Major Stapleton had told him that their seven-shot Spencer
carbines gave them the firepower of a full Confederate regiment
Besides, what could he do to transfer his men? Sergeants did not transfer soldiers in the United States Army. Only generals did that.
“Where did you hear all this?” Washington asked.
“Aunt Sophie, our washwoman at Hopemont, got a son who's a house servant at the Jameson place. He says they got a plan all worked out. When Colonel Adam Jameson and his Confederate cavalry come, the Democrat Sons of Liberty is headin' for you and your boys. They gonna kill all of you. No surrender. Why don't you go kill them first?”
“On your say-so? We should just cross over the river to this man's farm and shoot him to pieces? You can't do that in a civilized country, girl.”
“Who says this is a civilized country?”
“I'll talk to the major about it.”
“The major? He on the dance floor lookin' down Miz Janet's dress. She gonna have him so dizzy in a day or two, he won't know which end of a horse is which.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I keeps my ears and eyes open. That's what I'm tellin' you to do, if you don't want to get killed. That shootin' at the Fitzsimmons place is just the beginnin' of big trouble for you.”
“Water! I needs water.”
Fred Clay, one of the wounded, was burning up with fever. Dr. Yancey said he might have to take his leg off if it got any worse. Sergeant Washington thought Yancey looked too eager to start cutting. But what did he know about medicine? Clay was on a bed of straw in one of the stalls. Washington gave him his canteen and returned to Lucy.
She moved against him in the dark, black against lesser blackness. She had taken off her dress. “I wants you real bad,” she said. “Don't you want me? They
won't even give you time off to go to a whorehouse in Cincinnati. Lots of black whores in that town. I heard Miz Janet's brothers talkin' about them before they got themselves killed.”
Sergeant Washington's mouth went dry with desire. It had been four months since he had a woman. Four long dry (or wet, if you counted his dreams) months since he arrived in Keyport and became a sergeant, thanks to Major Stapleton. Lucy was a good-looking woman, even though she didn't seem to know it.
Lucy put his hand on her breast. “I know I ain't beautiful and you can probably get a lot better-lookin' women where you come from. But I'm here and willin'.”
“Put your dress on, girl,” Sergeant Washington said. “I made a promise to Major Stapleton when he 'pointed me sergeant. I said I'd set an example to our men. How can they respect me if one comes in here and finds me ass-naked in the hay with you?”
“You northern niggers is crazy,” Lucy said. “You think you're as good as white folks. Maybe gettin' yourself killed is the only way you'll learn the truth.”
“There's all kinds of truths,” Washington said. “The one I'm tryin' to prove is a black soldier is as good as a white soldier. That's why I joined the army. Jasper Jones and me heard a speech by a man named Fred Douglass. He's half-white, but he's proudest of his black side. He told us we had a chance to prove to the whole country that black people deserve the vote and a lot more by joinin' this fight.”
Lucy thrashed back into her dress. “Only truth I know is my sister Maybelle's in a whorehouse in New Orleans gettin' fucked seven times a night. Is it because I'm so damn ugly? Is that why you don't want me?”
She ran the words together so fast Washington had a hard time untangling them. “I want you all right. You're not ugly. But I been given responsibility. I got to show a black man can handle responsibility.”
“How long that gonna take? Eight, ten years? Then the white man's gonna let you have some satisfaction?”
“I'll get satisfaction when I decide I want it. Get out of here now before I whip your silly ass.”
Lucy scuttled out a side door and Sergeant Washington stopped to check on the feverish Clay. Jasper Jones was sitting with him. “Don't let that cracker doctor cut off his leg, Moses,” Jasper said.
“I'll talk to the major. Maybe find another doctor.”
“Get him some whiskey,” Jasper said. “Whiskey kills fever.”
Outside, the troopers were chowing down on chicken and ham from the Gentry kitchen. The major had made sure they got a share of the white folk's feast. But there was no whiskey. The major had made that a standing rule. They were drinking champagne mixed with apple juiceâstrong enough to make the boys cheerful but not crazy.
Sergeant Washington decided to go over to the party and see if the major could give him some whiskey for Private Clay. There were about a dozen couples on the dance floor. The band was playing a waltz and everyone was moving in a slow way that reminded the sergeant of dances at the seaside New Jersey hotel where he had worked before he joined the army. There was no sign of Major Stapleton.
The sergeant found Colonel Gentry talking to a tall sad-eyed woman and a big, heavyset man. “What's this?” the man said. “Are niggers invited to this shindig?” He was drunk.
“Of course not,” Gentry said. “What brings you here, Sergeant?”
“Lookin' for Major Stapleton, Colonel. One of the wounded men could use a little whiskey. I wanted to get the major's permission.”
“He's off in the trees with Miss Todd.”
Why couldn't Gentry give him permission? It was his
whiskey. The colonel let Major Stapleton handle all the military details. He acted like his lost arm had disqualified him from being a real soldier.
Washington soon reached the grove of cottonwood trees at the far end of the property. Twice figures loomed up in the darkness and he said, “Major?” but they turned out to be other couples, kissing and panting like stallions and mares in heat. On the third try it was the major all rightâand he was doing the same thing. He had his arms around Janet Todd and his lips were on her mouth. She let out a little shriek when Washington said, “Major?”
“What the hell do you want, Sergeant?”
Washington apologized and explained Private Clay's desperate need for whiskey. “Tell Colonel Gentry it's okay,” the major said.
Back at the dance floor, Washington found the band was playing “Yankee Doodle.” The big man who had cracked wise about niggers at the party was roaring out a song while Colonel Gentry stood there with a sad smile on his face.
“Yankee Doodle is no more
Sunk his name and station
Nigger Doodle takes his place
And favors amalgamation.
Nigger Doodle's all the go
Ebony shins and bandy
Loyal people all must bow
To Nigger Doodle Dandy.”
Something strange started happening inside Sergeant Washington's head. The words that Major Stapleton had laid on him,
responsibility
,
leadership, example
, dissolved in a churning inner wind, a kind of spiritual hurricane. Maybe it had something to do with refusing Janet Todd's slave, Lucy. Maybe he could still feel, almost
breathe, how much he had wanted her. Maybe it was just these lying sneering words.
Suddenly Sergeant Washington was out on the dance floor, putting his full weight behind a punch that sent the singer flying twenty-five feet. The sergeant stepped over him, walked to the bar and poured a half-bottle of Kentucky bourbon into his canteen. No one said a word while he stalked back to Private Clay with the whiskey.
RISK.
THE WORD ECHOED AND re-echoed in Janet Todd's head. He was a soldier who lived on risk. He admired other people who lived the same way. Her tongue moved slowly across her bruised lips. He loved herâhe had almost confessed it out there in the darkness beneath the cottonwoods. He had been on the brink of saying the words and she had been ready to revealâor at least implyâwhat she was prepared to do if he undertook for her sake a risk considerably greater than the battlefields of Virginia or Georgia. To her chagrin they had been drawn back to the dance floor by cries and shouts to find Dr. Yancey kneeling beside Rogers Jameson, diagnosing a badly broken jaw. Major Stapleton had been forced to respond to the outrage among the guests by arresting Sergeant Washington and confining him in the Keyport jail.
Downstairs, a clock chimed 2:00 A.M. A desultory breeze rustled the leaves of the cottonwood trees outside her window. It did nothing to stir the hot thick air in Janet's bedroom. At midnight, as everyone went to bed, Henry Gentry had reported that the temperature still hovered at ninety degrees.
Was Major Stapleton awake, perhaps wondering what she would do if he tiptoed into her room? Had she communicated her willingness to him by some sort of mental or spiritual telegraph lovers shared?
When she was fourteen Janet had watched a stallion cover a mare. Her father had invited her to the occasion. He said it was part of her education. He wanted her to
remember it as an image of male desire. He hoped it would make her more understanding, more compassionate, toward men.
She heard his oblique criticism of her mother. Letty Todd had not been more understanding, more compassionate, toward Gabriel Todd's desires. After their fourth child, a boy, was born dead, she had moved into a separate bedroom. At night, her door was closed to her husband. Behind her gaiety, the buoyant party manner she displayed in Lexington, there was this silent secret refusal. Janet's brothers never said a word about it to her. They left her to puzzle over love and the other mysteries of life while they rode off to gamble and cavort in Lexington and other cities where young men and fast women gathered.
What had happened between Gabriel and Letty Todd? Had her mother found sexual love disgusting? Was there a similar secret waiting to be discovered in Major Stapleton's bedroom? Some sort of repulsive ritual that no educated woman could tolerate? Would he take her the way the stallion had covered the mare? Crude wild thrusts from behind while she whimpered and snuffed half in ecstasy, half in terror?
At St. Mary-of the-Woods, the Indiana school where Janet had spent two happy years, love and marriage had been one of the favorite topics after the lights were extinguished. Her roommate, Clara Daly, an Irish-American from Chicago, confided that she planned to stay single. Her mother had given birth to twelve children before dying in her thirteenth pregnancy. Maybe that was all Letty Todd was trying to avoid, behind her closed door.
Were there better ways to avoid pregnancy? One girl from Detroit, with a talkative older brother, said coitus interruptus was the best way, even if it was condemned in the Bible. No lover worthy of the name wanted to get a respectable woman pregnant.
Wait
. Janet struggled to rein in her careening mind.
Think
. Paul was not going to tiptoe into this room. He knew Lucy was sleeping at the foot of the bed. This might be the last time she would see him. He was mailing his letter to the adjutant general tomorrow. He had implied that the response would be swift. West Point officers were a relatively rare and valued commodity.
Think.
There was only one solution. She would have to tiptoe into his room. There was no need to worry about pregnancy. She sensed Paul would instantly understand she was risking it to prove how much she loved him. He would respond to her daring, confident that he had the money and the family name to proffer a wedding ring the moment one was needed. Long before that became necessary, the larger risk she would ask him to take for her sake would succeed or fail.
She was buoyed by knowing she was ready to marry him, by the certainty that they could be happy in a postwar world that included an independent South, even if they did not choose to live there. She had been attracted to him from the moment she saw him, in spite of his blue uniform. There was a sadness in his eyes that stirred an echo in her own soul. They were both children of the war, even if she had never seen a battlefield.
The war was like the Ohio in flood, ripping away chunks of the banks, toppling majestic old trees. The war tore away chunks of lives; it shattered faith in a benevolent God; it left desolation in its wakeâbut it also left freedom. There were no certainties, only the remorseless unfolding of the future and a chanceâa hopeâthat a woman could find a place for herself in it.
The clock downstairs bonged once. Two-thirty.
Do it
, whispered an alien voice in Janet's head. It was not Day-Janet, the dutiful obedient daughter. It was Night-Janet, the new woman who was emerging from the
war's rampage, a creature who moved through a world of unstable hopes and dangerous secrets in search of a new self.
Janet swung her legs out of the bed and listened for a long moment. The only sound was Lucy's deep breathing. She was asleep on her pallet at the foot of Janet's bed, as usual. If Lucy woke up, she would say nothing, even if she guessed where Janet was going. Lucy was totally devoted to her. At times she seemed almost part of her.
Gathering her blue silk nightrobe around her, Janet tiptoed into the hall. One, two, three doors to Paul's room. She tried the knob. It moved noiselessly in her hand. She opened the door just enough to slip inside, without arousing a rusty hinge.
To the right, on a desk in the corner, a small oil lamp created a yellow glow and left the rest of the room in virtual darkness. Major Stapleton sat at the desk, naked from the waist up, writing a letter. The major had the physique of a Greek or Roman statueâa broad firm chest covered with curly blond hair, sloping muscles in his arms, a solid neck. Just above the nipple on the left side of his chest was the scar of the wound he had received at Antietam. It was an ugly red blotch, with a web of bluish lines all around it.
For a moment, Janet could do nothing but stare at the scar in dismay.
Damaged
. The word resounded in her head. She felt as if she were looking at one of those extraordinary marble statues Lord Elgin had discovered in Greece that had been marred by a clumsy workman or a puritanical hater of nudity in art. It was much worse than Paul's head wound. She had seen the ridge of scar tissue beneath his blond hair. He had joked about how the doctors had opened his skull and closed it with a metal plate. Somehow this chest wound seemed more awful. Was it because it was concealed? Or because it was so close to his heart? Did it suggest more than disfigurement?
Paul gazed at Janet in undisguised astonishment. “What do you want?” he asked in a hushed voice.
“I've comeâto let you know just how much I care for you,” Janet said. “To show youâthat you're not the only one who's willing to risk something.”
He leaned forward and blew out the oil lamp. His chair scraped on the floor as he stood up. In a moment he loomed over her. “You're sure?” he said.
“If you are,” she said.
“I've never been more certain of anything in my life. I was writing a letter to my mother, telling her about youâ”
“I want you to share a risk that means a great deal to me. A risk connected with the war. I hope you'll do it as wholeheartedly as I'm prepared to share myâmy affectionâwith you.”
He drew her to him for a long surprisingly gentle kiss. “Only if you understand something
vital.
Loving you takes precedence over everything else. No matter what I think or say about this other risk, loving you will come first. I want you to love me that way. Can youâwill you?”
It was not unfolding like the scenario Janet had imagined. Where was the swelling savagery of male desire, the brutal thrusts? She had assumed the pledge of partnership, the words of endearment, would be exchanged later, when she had demonstrated how richly she was prepared to reward him. She had to answer him without hesitation.
“I'll try. With all my heart.”
“Oh, Janet.”
Paul kissed her again and slipped the nightrobe from her shoulders. His hands roved her body and found the straps of her nightgown. He slid them down her arms and the silken cloth fell to her feet. Naked, she sensed he too had shed the underclothes he had been wearing.
“I'm so
honored
âthis is so
precious
,” he said.
His hands continued to rove her body. She felt a wildness, like the beat of invisible wings, rising inside her. She
wanted
him. She wanted to be that violated humiliated mare. She was unafraid, moving past her mother's refusal with a faith in her capacity to survive the worst imaginable shame.
Major Stapleton lifted her in his arms and carried her to the bed. Suddenly his fingers were in truly forbidden territory. He was touching her in a way that transcended any and all expectations. The beating wings multiplied enormously inside her body until they threatened to pound her heart to pieces.
“I love you,” she whispered. “I love you love you love you.”
Where had that dangerous word come from? Not once but four times. It seemed to exist outside Janet's will, her intellect. Suddenly he was above her, pressing her into the soft mattress with his body. His tongue roved her mouth. “Janet, Janet, Janet,” he whispered.
A flash of white pain as he tore her hymen and he was within herâbut there was still nothing of the stallion's rampage.
He's a lover,
whispered Night-Janet in shock and dismay.
He was in loving control.
Long slow thrusts sent whirring flights of azure pleasure up her belly into her breasts.
A fist pounded on the door. “Major Stapleton!” cried Colonel Gentry in a hoarse gasping voice. “You'd better get downtown immediately with your troopers. There's a mob gathering. They're threatening to lynch Sergeant Washington.”
“God
damn
it!” Paul hissed.
Coitus interruptus
whispered a voice in Janet's head. Was it Day- Janet, mocking her? Paul rolled out of the bed, found Janet's night robe and nightgown and pressed them into her arms.
“Send a servant to wake up the bugler,” Paul said to
Gentry. “Tell him to sound boots and saddles. I'll be there in five minutes.”
“Are you dressed?” Paul whispered to Janet.
“Yes,” she said, pulling the nighrobe around her.
He lit the small lamp on the corner desk and began putting on his clothes in the shadows just beyond its glow. “You should be able to get back to your room. I'll take Gentry with me.”
In no more than three minutes Paul was in his uniform. She watched him strap his holstered pistol around his waist. He strode across the room and kissed her. “I love you,” he said. “You love me. Nothing else matters.”
He was gone into the night. Janet waited five minutes and slipped into the silent hall. In her bedroom, Lucy was awake. “Oh, Miz Janet, I feared you was sick,” she said.
“It's so hot. I took a walk around the grounds.”
Outside, the metallic notes of the bugle rang out, summoning Major Stapleton's black troopers from sleep. Lucy ignored it and persisted in her puzzlement.
“Would you like a drink of cold water?”
“No. Don't worry about it.”
“Yes'm.”
Lucy waited a strategic moment. “Major Stapleton's a handsome man, ain't he.”
“Yes.”
“He sure seems crazy about you.”
There was no need to tell Lucy anything. But another kind of need was exploding in Janet's body and soul. She had to tell someone what was happening to her. Who better than Lucy? It was almost like talking to herself.
“Major Stapleton loves me. He's going to help us win this war.”
“That's powerful news, Miz Janet.”
“Don't mention it to a soul.”
“I won't say a word to no one,” Lucy promised. “I means, it's a sort of military secret, ain't it?”
Janet laughed and gave Lucy a fierce hug. “Yes. That's what it is. A wonderful military secret. Not even Major Stapleton knows it yet.”