Charles slouched in his seat. No one had sat next to him, because of his sinister appearance: worn straw hat pulled down to his eyebrows, the gypsy robe beside him. On his knee, unread, lay a National Police Gazette.
Dark rain-streaks crawled diagonally down the window. The storm and the night hid everything beyond. He chewed on a stale roll he'd bought from a vendor working the aisles, and felt the old forlorn emptiness.
He turned the pages of a New York Times left by a passenger who'd gotten off at the last stop. The advertising columns caught his eye: fantastic claims for eyeglasses, corsets, the comforts of coastal steamers. One item offered a tonic for suffering. He tossed the paper away. Damn shame it wasn't that easy.
Unconsciously, he began to whistle a little tune that had come into his head a few weeks ago and refused to leave. The whistling roused a stout woman across the aisle. Her pudgy daughter rested her head in her mother's lap. The woman overcame her hesitation and spoke to Charles.
"Sir, that's a lovely melody. Is it perchance one of Miss Jenny Lind's numbers?"
Charles pushed his hat back. "No. Just something I made up."
"Oh, I thought it might be hers. We collect her famous numbers in sheet music. Ursula plays them beautifully."
"I'm sure she does." Despite good intentions, it sounded curt.
"Sir, if you will permit me to say so" — she indicated the Gazette on his knee — "what you are reading is not Christian literature. Please, take this. You'll find it more uplifting."
She handed him a small pamphlet of a kind he recognized from wartime camps. One of the little religious exhortations published by the American Tract Society.
"Thank you," he said, and started to read:
Verily, verily, I say unto you, Hereafter ye shall see heaven open, and the angels of God ascending ...
Bitter, Charles faced the window again. He saw no angels, no heaven, nothing but the boundless dark of the Illinois prairie, and the rain — probably a harbinger of a future as bleak as the past. Duncan was undoubtedly right about hard times ahead. He sank farther down on the seat, resting on the bony base of his spine and watching the darkness pass by.
Softly, he began to hum the little tune, which conjured lovely pastel images of Mont Royal — cleaner, prettier, larger than it had ever been before it burned. The little tune sang to him of that lost home, and his lost love, and everything lost in the four bloody years of the Confederacy's purple dream. It sang of emotions and a happiness that he was sure he would never know again.
June, 1865. My dearest Orry, I begin this account in an old copybook because I need to talk to you. To say I am adrift without you, that I live with pain, does not begin to convey my state. I will strive to keep self-pity from these pages but I know I will not be entirely successful.
One tiny part of me rejoices that you are not here to see the ruin of your beloved homeland. The extent of the ruin is only emerging slowly. South Carolina offered some 70,000 men to the misbegotten war and over a quarter were killed, the highest of any state, it's said.
Freed Negroes to the number of 200,000 now roam at large. This is half the state's population, or more. On the river road last week I met Maum Ruth, who formerly belonged to the late Francis LaMotte. She clutched an old flour sack so protectively, I was moved to ask what it contained. "Got the freedom in here, and I won't let it go." I walked away full of sadness and anger. How wrong we were not to educate our blacks. They are helpless in the new world into which this strange peace has hurled them.
"Our" blacks — I have paused over that chance wording. It is condescending and I am forgetful I am one of them — in Carolina one-eighth black is all black.
What your sister Ashton spitefully revealed about me in Richmond is now known all over the district. No mention has been made of it in recent weeks. For that, I have you to thank. You are held in high esteem, and mourned. ...
We planted four rice squares. We should have a good small crop to sell, if there is anyone to buy. Andy, Jane, and I work the squares each day.
A pastor of the African Methodist Church married Andy and Jane last month. They took a new last name. Andy wanted Lincoln, but Jane refused; too many former slaves choose it. Instead, they are the Shermans, a selection not exactly certain to endear them to the white population! But they are free people. It is their right to have any name they want.
The pine house, built to replace the great house burned by Cuffey and Jones and their rabble, has a new coat of whitewash. Jane comes up in the evening while Andy works on the tabby walk of their new cottage; we talk or mend the rags that substitute for decent clothing — and sometimes we dip into our "library." It consists of one Godey's Lady's Book from 1863, and the last ten pages of a Southern Literary Messenger.
Jane speaks often of starting a school, even of asking the new Freedmen's Bureau to help us locate a teacher. I went to do it — I think I must, in spite of the bad feeling it will surely generate. In the bitterness of defeat, few white people are inclined to help those liberated by Lincoln's pen and Sherman's sword.
Before thinking of a school, however, we must think of survival. The rice will not be enough to support us. I know dear George Hazard would grant us unlimited credit, but I perceive it as a weakness to ask him. In that regard I surely am a Southerner — full of stiff-necked pride.
We may be able to sell off lumber from the stands of pine and cypress so abundant on Mont Royal. I know nothing of operating a sawmill, but I can learn. We would need equipment, which would mean another mortgage. The banks in Charleston may soon open again — both Geo. Williams and Leverett Dawkins, our old Whig friend, speculated in British sterling during the war, kept it in a foreign bank, and will now use it to start the commercial blood of the Low Country flowing again. If Leverett's bank does open, I will apply to him.
Shall also have to hire workers, and wonder if I can. There is wide concern that the Negroes prefer to revel in their freedom rather than labor for their old owners, however benevolent. A vexing problem for all the South.
But, my sweetest Orry, I must tell you of my most unlikely dream — and the one I have promised myself to realize above all others. It was born some days ago, out of my love for you, and my longing, and my eternal pride in being your wife. ...
After midnight of that day, unable to sleep, Madeline left the whitewashed house that now had a wing with two bedrooms. Nearing forty, Orry Main's widow was still as full-bosomed and small-waisted as she had been the day he rescued her on the river road, although age and stress were beginning to mark and roughen her face.