Waldo Krug reined in. "Where's Barnes?"
"Head of the column. Sir."
"Well, you tell him that his trickery came to my attention. General Hoffman's putting it into the regiment's permanent record."
Charles pretended innocence. "Trickery, sir?"
"Don't give me that goddamn phony tone. You know the laundresses were expressly ordered not to leave the post with C Company."
"They didn't. It's my understanding that they left an hour ago. Do you mean to say the Army would object if we happened to meet them down the road and did the courteous, gentlemanly thing and offered them a ride?"
"All the way to fucking Fort Riley?" Krug's cheeks boiled with color. "You'll answer to me yet, you bastard."
"Look, Krug. I'm a soldier, exactly like —"
"Bullshit. You're a traitor. You're a disgrace to the uniform you refuse to wear. If Grierson didn't coddle you, I'd have you up for that. You and those niggers, too. Look at them — scruffy as a bunch of Sicilian banditti."
Charles stepped up in the stirrup. "Goodbye. General."
In Leavenworth City, C Company took the laundresses into a wagon. Beyond the town they passed through a belt of farms whose rich black soil already showed green shoots. The whitewashed houses and outbuildings had an air of age and permanence, though probably not one was over ten years old.
By choice, the company veered away from the railroad and the parallel line of telegraph poles. A wind rose, whipping the branches of the budding hickories and buttonwoods, willows and elms. Across soft hills hidden by thousands of swaying sunflowers, through gleaming creeks where the wild strawberry grew, sheltered by a cathedral of sky, cleaving an ocean of grass, colors and guidon streaming, C Company rode west.
Charles carried a score of memories of Willa — and a hurt. He hummed the little tune she'd written down for him. He'd packed the music carefully in the folds of his gypsy robe. This morning he found the melody inexplicably sad, so he stopped humming and rode in silence for a while.
The invigorating air and the sunlit country gradually eased his melancholy. In a baritone voice not much better than a monotone, he sang to himself, one of the sweet sad songs he'd first heard when he lazed outside the Mont Royal praise house, the slave chapel, of a Sunday when he was small and trouble-prone and didn't understand the world around him, or the suffering the song expressed.
Hook cantered up beside him.
"Where'd you learn coon songs, Charlie?" "It isn't a coon song, it's a hymn. A slave hymn." "You surely give it a cheerful lilt. Glad to see you feeling good for a change."
Charles smiled and kept his thoughts to himself.
The heel of military dictatorship crushes our prostrate state. Its bayonets enforce the new gospel of lust and racial mingling. ... Among us there come the blue-clad missionaries of wrath, with vast new powers to kindle hate and sow the seeds of damnation. ... Waving their Bible spotted with sin, and their Constitution stained with crime and political chicanery, they preach but one sermon, Radicalism. ... Better that we should welcome the Anti-Christ himself than these emissaries of Hell.
MADELINE'S JOURNAL
April 1867. The Congress has seized control. Last month's Reconstruction Act carved the 10 unrepentant states into 5 military districts. The two Carolinas comprise the Second District. Stanton appoints the military governors. Ours at Charleston is miserable old Gen. Sickles. We shall not be part of the Union again until there is a new convention of black as well as white voters, a new state gov't assuring black suffrage, and passage of the 14th Amend. The Thunderbolt and even the better Democratic papers are shrill not to say violent, denouncing all of it.
Such events seem removed from the day-to-day affairs of Mont Royal. Two sizable rice crops last year brought a slim profit, almost all of which I paid to Dawkins's bank to reduce our debt. Bank now absolutely rigid about late payments. They are not tolerated.
... Yankee speculators are descending like the Biblical locusts. They float bond issues for railroad lines that will never be built, snap up land on sale day at 8 cents on the dollar, start new businesses in the wreckage of bankrupt ones that once gave livelihoods to local people. An unexpected letter from Cooper, very brief and curt, warned me against investing in such schemes, as he suspects most are crooked. In this case I will heed what he says. I can't tell the honest Yankee from the vulture.
... Today the freedman Steven said that he will leave, taking his wife and 3 children. Saddening; he is a dependable, steady worker. But the emigration agent whose wagon is parked at Gettys's store swayed him with a promise of $12/mo., guaranteed, plus a cabin, garden plot, and a weekly ration of a peck of meal, 2 lbs. bacon, one pt. molasses, and firewood — all this to be delivered to him somewhere in Florida. We have a second plague in these emigration men from other states. They come here knowing our freedmen have never gotten over the falsity of the cruel rumor of "40 acres & a mule" in '65. When I asked Steven to stay, he replied with a fair question — could I pay him real wages, instead of merely marking down sums to his credit in my ledger?
I wanted to lie; could not. I answered truthfully, so he is going.
... Mrs. Annie Weeks in a quarrel with Foote's Cassandra at the Summerton crossing. Annie, who is mixed blood, very light and delicately featured, attacked and hit Cassandra because of some fancied slight. Cassandra is full-blooded Negro. I have heard of this kind of animosity before. A mulatto can sometimes "pass," so will not associate with true blacks.
They in turn hate the mulatto's "uppity" ways. I wonder if there is any end to the rancor caused by the war?
... The Jolly clan, the squatters, have stayed on. We occasionally hear of a mule, corn meal or a woman taken at gunpoint by "Captain" Jack and his oafish brothers. They do not discriminate! They prey equally on both races. Am terrified of them, esp. the eldest, who boasts of "slaying niggers for sport" in the massacre at Ft. Pillow, Tenn.
Prudence spoke last night of her unhappiness over the state of the school. ...
"Madeline, I now have fourteen pupils working with alphabet and primer, two almost ready to advance to the Second Reader, and Pride is in the second arithmetic series. I want to buy a geography for him, and slates for the rest. We have just three slates for all, not nearly enough."
Head down and pensive, Madeline walked beside the schoolteacher on the shore of the Ashley. The spring twilight was settling, hazy and full of shrill nightbird cries. The familiar vista of star-specked water with dense forest beyond usually soothed her. Tonight was different.
"I can't give you any answer but the one you've heard before," she said. "There's no money."
For once the plump teacher seemed to lose her Christian patience. "Your friend George Hazard has it to spare."
Stopping, Madeline said sharply, "Prudence, I have made it clear that I won't beg from Orry's best friend. If we can't survive by our own wits and initiative, we deserve to fail."