“You may be a damnyankee, but I’m damned if I think you’re wrong,” Landis said.
“This must never happen again,” Irving Morrell said solemnly. “Never.”
“Never,” Colonel Landis said. “Never, by God.” He took the flask off his belt again. “To peace.” He drank and offered it to Morrell.
“Thank you, sir.” Morrell drank, too. “To peace.”
XX
Jake Featherston slouched down the dirt road toward Richmond at a pace that would have made him scream curses at any soldier using it. No one would scream curses at him, not now. He still wore his uniform, but he wasn’t a soldier any more. Along with most of the rest of the Army of Northern Virginia, he’d been mustered out and paid off and sent on his way with a pat on the head.
“Threw me out,” he snarled under his breath. “Threw us all out, so the War Department wouldn’t have to fret itself about feedin’ us or payin’ us any more. Payin’ us!” He snorted and slapped a pocket. Paper inside crinkled. They’d paid him off in banknotes, not real money. He wondered how far the notes would go when he tried spending them. Not far enough. He was already sure of that.
Dust rose from the pocket when he slapped it. A lot of paid-off soldiers-no, ex-soldiers-were on the road. Every time he took a step, dust kicked up from under his battered boots. Any time any of them took a step, dust kicked up. Thousands of men, millions of steps, a hell of a lot of dust.
“You’d think they’d want to keep a good artilleryman in the Army,” he muttered. He’d been plenty good enough to command a battery. But he hadn’t been good enough-no, the War Department hadn’t thought he was good enough-to get promoted past sergeant, or good enough to keep, either. “Well, to hell with Jeb Stuart, Jr. He can go down there and toast his toes with Jeb Stuart III.”
A Negro soldier trudging along the same road turned his head at the sound of Featherston’s voice. Jake stared unwinkingly back at him. In the days before things had gone to hell in the CSA, a couple of seconds of that look from a white man would have been plenty to make any black buck lower his eyes. Now the Negro, a big, burly fellow, tried to stare him down.
It didn’t work. Featherston might have been on the wiry side, but rage had kept him going during the war, and that rage hadn’t got any smaller now that the war was lost. It blazed out of him now, almost tangibly, and the colored soldier flinched away from it. Jake laughed. Instead of trying to start a fight, the Negro flinched again. “Do Jesus!” he said softly, and let Featherston pass.
That night, Featherston slept by the side of the road wrapped in a blanket, as he had slept by a lot of different roads in several blankets during the war. He had turned in his pistol when he was paid off. Again, no: he had turned in a pistol when he was paid off. He took his pistol out of his pack and set it where he could grab it in a hurry. The precaution proved needless; he slept undisturbed.
When morning woke him, he started walking again. He took the fifty-five miles from Fredericksburg to Richmond in three medium-easy days, not the two harsh ones he would have used if still in the Army. That meant he got into the Confederate capital this side of exhausted but empty as a cave: the men who’d moved faster had got what food there was on the road.
Richmond was full of dirty scarecrows in butternut. The gray-uniformed police seemed to have not a clue about what to do with so many men odds-on to be tougher and shorter-tempered than they were. The best answer they found was, as little as we possibly can. That struck Jake as showing better sense than he expected from police.
He went into a saloon to take advantage of its free-lunch spread. The meal-ham and deviled eggs and pickles and salted peanuts and other thirst-inducers-was indeed free, but the mug of beer he had to buy to avail himself of it set him back a dollar, not the prewar five cents. “Christ!” he exclaimed.
“I’ll take fifteen cents in silver, if you’ve got that,” the barkeep said. “Hell, I’ll take a dime. It’s just as well the banknotes are already brown, on account of that’s what people will be using them for.”
“Don’t have enough silver to want to spend it quick,” Featherston said. “If a beer is a bean, what do I have to pay for a bed?”
“Paper? Five easy, and the bugs’ll carry your mattress in for you, you get anything that cheap,” the fat man in the black apron answered. “Why didn’t you bastards win the war instead of laying down for the damnyankees? Then they’d have to pay-”
Featherston reached across the bar and grabbed a handful of the white shirt showing above the apron. “You don’t ever want to say anything like that again, you hear me?” When the bartender didn’t say anything, he shook him, lifting his feet off the floor with no particular effort. “You hear me?”
“I hear you,” the fat man wheezed. Jake set him down on the floor. He went on, “Drink your beer and get the hell out of here.”
“I will,” Featherston said. “You ain’t crowded here. And while I’m drinking it, you keep both hands where I can see ’em, hear? You try hauling out whatever kind of persuader you got under the bar there, I promise you won’t like what happens after that.”
He took his time finishing the beer, then turned and walked toward the door. He hadn’t gone three paces before the bartender shouted, “Don’t even breathe, soldier boy!”
Featherston looked back over his shoulder and found himself staring down the barrels of a sawed-off shotgun. After gas and machine guns and Yankee traveling forts, that was not so much of a much. If the bastard did pull the triggers, it would be over in a hurry, anyway. “Fuck you,” Jake said, and kept walking.
No blast of shot tore into his back. He stood on the street for a few seconds. Five dollars for a flophouse bed? He shook his head and made for Capitol Square. Sleeping in the park was free. Maybe a congressman or a senator would come by and see what the aftermath of war looked like.
He was not the only soldier in Capitol Square-far from it. As evening fell, several campfires started flickering. That was probably against the rules, but no policemen came in to do anything about it. Jake saw them on the sidewalk and clustered around the bomb-scarred Capitol. “Cowardly bastards,” he muttered.
“Wish they would try and break us up,” another ragged veteran said. “Look at ’em there, fat and happy. Nobody who ain’t been through what we been through can know what it’s like, but we’d give ’em a taste, goddamn if we wouldn’t.”
“That’s right, by Jesus,” Featherston said. “Wonder who their pappies were, so they didn’t have to put on a real uniform.”
“Amen,” the other soldier said. “You can sing that in my church any old day.” He stuck out a hand. “Name’s Ted Weston. I’m in the 22nd North Carolina Infantry-or I was, anyways.”
“I’m Jake Featherston, First Richmond Howitzers.”
“I’ve heard of that outfit,” Weston said. “Pretty la-de-da, ain’t they? You might could have had a pappy of your own, get into a unit like that.”
“Hell I did,” Jake growled. “I was good at what I did, is all. Good enough to lead a battery for a year and a half, but not good enough to take the stripes off my sleeve and put a bar or two on my collar. La-de-da, my ass-hadn’t been for a la-de-da officer with a fancy pa gettin’ hisself killed…ahh, the hell with it.” He spat in disgust.
Weston eyed him in the dim, flickering light; they weren’t close to a fire. “Sounds like you got a powerful load of angry rilin’ your belly, Jake.”
“Oh, a touch,” Featherston allowed. “Just a touch. Don’t get me started, or I’ll sick it all up.” He waited to see if Weston would ask him more. He would have brought it all out; he might even have purged himself of some of it. But the infantryman from North Carolina shrugged and moved away.