Out of her mind with fright, she found something on the desk — the prop dagger. He reached for her wrist, but before he could stop her she swung it down. Although the point was blunt, it tore through the plaid fabric of his trousers because she struck so hard. She felt the dagger meet flesh, stop a second, then sink on through.
"Jesus," Wood said, groping with both hands for the prop weapon buried two inches in his left thigh. He struggled with it, bloodying his fingers. "Jesus Christ. I'll kill you!"
Wild-eyed, Willa pushed him with both hands, toppling him sideways. He shouted and cursed as he overturned a fake palmetto plant. She crawled to the chair, snatched her things, and ran from the office and through the dark. At the door she struggled with the bolt, shot it open, and half fell into the rainy passage, expecting to hear him in pursuit.
I---------, do solemnly swear in the presence of Almighty God, that I will henceforth faithfully support, protect and defend the constitution of the United States and the Union of the states thereunder, and that I will in like manner abide by and faithfully support all laws and proclamations which have been made during the existing rebellion with reference to the emancipation of slaves. So help me God.
Oath required of all Confederates seeking presidential pardon, 1865
3
"I must take this oath?" Cooper Main asked. He'd ridden all the way to Columbia to see about the matter, and suddenly had doubts.
"If you want a pardon," said lawyer Trezevant, from the other side of the flimsy table serving as a desk. His regular offices had burned in the great fire of February 17, so he'd rented an upstairs room at Reverdy Bird's Mortuary on the east side of town, which the flames had spared. Mr. Bird had converted his main parlor to a shop selling cork feet, wooden limbs, and glass eyes to maimed veterans. A buzz of voices indicated good business this morning.
Cooper stared at the handwritten oath. He was lanky man and had a lot of gray in his untrimmed hair, though he was only forty-five. The scarcity of food had reduced him to gauntness. Workdays lasting sixteen hours had put fatigue shadows under his deep-set brown eyes. He was laboring to rebuild the warehouses, the docks, and the trade of his Carolina Shipping Company in Charleston.
"See here, I understand your resentment," Trezevant said. "But if General Lee can humble himself and apply, as he did in Richmond last week, you can, too."
"A pardon implies wrongdoing. I did nothing wrong."
"I agree, Cooper. Unfortunately, the federal government does not. If you want to rebuild your business, you have to free yourself of the onus of having served the Confederate Navy Department." Cooper glowered. Trezevant continued. "I went to Washington personally, and, within limits, I trust this pardon broker, even though he's a lawyer, and a Yankee on top of it." The bitter humor was lost. "His name is Jasper Dills. He's greedy, so I know he'll get your application to the clerk of pardons, and to Mr. Johnson's desk, ahead of many others."
"For how much?"
"Two hundred dollars, U.S., or the equivalent in sterling. My fee is fifty dollars."
Cooper thought a while.
"All right, give me the papers."
They talked for another half hour. Trezevant was full of Washington gossip. He said Johnson planned to appoint a provisional governor in South Carolina. The governor would call a constitutional convention and reconvene the state legislature as it was constituted before Sumter fell. Johnson's choice was not unexpected. It was Judge Benjamin Franklin Perry, of Greenville, an avowed Unionist before the war. Like Lee, Perry had proclaimed his loyalty to his state, despite his hatred of secession, saying: "You are all going to the devil — and I will go with you."
"The legislature will have to fulfill Mr. Johnson's requirements for readmission," Trezevant said. "Officially abolish slavery, for example." A sly expression alerted Cooper to something new. "At the same time, the legislature may be able to, ah, regulate the nigras so that we'll have a labor force again, instead of a shiftless rabble."
"Regulate them how?"
"By means of — let's call it a code of behavior. I'm told Mississippi is thinking of the same thing."
"Would such a code apply to whites, too?"
"Freedmen only."
Cooper recognized danger in such a provocative step but the morality of it didn't concern him. The end of the war had brought him, his family, and his state a full measure of humiliation and ruin. He no longer cared about the condition of the people responsible — the people the war had set free.
By noon, Cooper's slow old horse was plodding southeast on the homeward journey. The route carried him back through central Columbia. He could hardly stand the sight. Nearly one hundred and twenty blocks had been burned down. The smell of charred wood still lay heavy in the air of the hot June day.
The dirt streets were littered with trash and broken furniture. A wagon belonging to the Bureau of Freedmen, Refugees and Abandoned Lands dispensed packets of rice and flour to a large crowd, mostly Negro. Other blacks crowded the few stretches of wooden sidewalk still in place. Cooper saw military uniforms and some civilian gentlemen, but well-dressed white women were notably absent. It was the same everywhere. Such women stayed indoors, because they hated the soldiers and feared the freed Negroes. Cooper's wife, Judith, was an exception, which irritated him.
General Sherman had destroyed the wooden bridge spanning the Congaree River. Only the stone abutments remained, standing in the stream like smoke-stained gravestones. The slow crossing on the ferry barge gave Cooper an excellent view of one of the few buildings the fire had spared, the unfinished statehouse near the east shore. In one granite wall, like periods on paper, three Union cannonballs testified to Sherman's fury.
The sight of them raised Cooper's anger. So did the burned district, which he reached soon after leaving the ferry. He rode along the edge of a lane of scorched earth three-quarters of a mile wide. Here, between flaming pines, Kilpatrick's cavalry had pillaged, leaving a black waste marked by lonely chimneys — Sherman's Sentinels, all that remained of homes in the path of the barbaric march.
He stayed the night at a seedy inn outside the city. In the taproom he avoided conversation but listened closely to the impoverished yeomen drinking around him. To hear them, you'd think the South had won, or at least was able to continue fighting for its cause.
Next morning, he rode on, through heat and haze promising another fierce summer in the Low Country. He traveled on dirt roads left unrepaired after Union supply trains tore them up. A farmer would need a strong new wagon to get through the eight-inch ruts in the sandy soil and reach market with his crop — if he had a crop. Probably the farmer couldn't find a new wagon to buy, or the money for it, either. Cooper seethed.
Riding on toward Charleston and the coast, he crossed a roadbed; all the rails were gone and only a few ties were left. He met no white people, though twice he saw bands of Negroes moving through fields. Just past the hamlet of Chicora, on his way to the Cooper River, he came upon a dozen black men and women gathering wild herbs at the roadside. He reached into the pocket of his old coat and took hold of the little pocket pistol he'd bought for the trip.
The blacks watched Cooper approach. One of the women wore a red velvet dress and an oval cameo pin, probably, Cooper thought, stolen from a white mistress. The rest were raggedy. Cooper sweated and clutched the hidden pistol, but they let him ride through.