"You've begun well. Please finish the same way, clean up, then go to your studies."
"All right, Mama."
Thank heaven their daughter caused them no serious problems, Judith thought, walking through the downstairs with a headache beginning to push at her temples. Cooper in bed day and night, depressed, silent — that was enough.
She wrote a letter to Mont Royal, requesting some rice flour if it could be spared, and a note of congratulations to a cousin in Cheraw who had delivered her first baby last month. On the Mont Royal letter she put a ten-cent rose-colored stamp; on the second, a blue five and one of the older green ones. How tired she was of the face of the President on stamps of every denomination.
She sat down at the pianoforte, her sense of failure deepening as she bent over the keyboard. A few white strands showed in her blond curls. Slowly, expertly, she began to play "The Vacant Chair." Like so many of the war songs published in the North, it was popular on both sides. The lyric suited her mood. Soon she was singing in her fine soprano voice:
A sound startled her. She played the wrong keys, jangly discord, and looked toward the ceiling. Had she imagined —?
No. Faint but unmistakable, the little bell rang again.
Weeping with hope, she ran up the stairs, flung open the door of the stale room. She couldn't see him in the dark, but she heard him clearly.
"Judith, would you mind opening the draperies to let in some light?"
The salt wind reached Tradd Street from the sea, flowing in to cleanse the bedroom. Late that afternoon, Cooper consumed half a bowl of turkey broth and a cup of Judith's imitation coffee. Then he rested with his head turned toward the tall windows, open to show the great live oak just outside and the rooftop of his neighbor's house.
He felt weak, as if he had just thrown off a prolonged high fever.
"But my head's clear. I don't feel — how should I put it? — I don't feel the way I did before Stephen called. I don't feel so angry."
She sat against the headboard and pulled him gently to her small bosom, left arm cradling his shoulders. "Something in you burst like a boil when you attacked that prisoner. You despised slavery and where it was leading the South for so very long, but when you took your stand three years ago, you did it with all the fervor you'd once directed the other way. That was commendable, but I think it started terrible forces warring inside you. Judah's death made it worse. So did long hours at the department, trying to accomplish too much with too little." She hugged him. "Whatever the reason, I thank God you're better. If I were Catholic, I'd ask them to canonize Stephen."
"I hope I'm sane again. I know I'm mightily ashamed. What of that sergeant I attacked?"
"A concussion. But he'll recover."
A relieved sigh. "You're right about the struggle inside. It's still there. I know the war's lost, but I suppose I should go back to work if the department wants me. Where is Stephen, by the way?"
"He's resting at the Mills House. As for working again — I'd think a while. My feelings about the war haven't changed. At the time Sumter fell, they were your feelings, too." His eyes shifted away from her, to the neighbor's rooftop.
"This war's wrong, Cooper. Not only because all war is wrong, but also because it's being fought for an immoral cause — no, please let me finish. I know all the rhetoric and apologetics by heart. So do you. It isn't the tariff or states' rights or Northern arrogance that brought all this suffering. It's what we did — Southerners — either directly or through the complicity of our silence. We stole the liberty of other human beings, we built fortunes from that theft, and we even proclaimed from our pulpits that God approved."
He took her hand, his voice like that of a bewildered child. "I know you're right. But I don't know what to do next."
"Survive the war. Work for Stephen if you must. Whatever you decide, it will be all right. Your head's clear now. But promise yourself — and promise me — that when the South falls, you'll work just as hard for peace. You know how it will be when the shooting stops. Animosity will persist on both sides, but the losers will feel it most. You know that because you went through it. You know what hatred does to a man."
"It feeds on itself. Multiplies. Begets more hate and more pain, and that begets still more —"
Overcome, she let the tears fall, hugging him harder. "Oh, Cooper, how I love you. The man I married — went away for a while — but I think — I found him again —"
He held her while she cried joyously.
Presently she asked if he wanted to talk to Mallory when he returned. Cooper said yes, he thought so. He would put on a fresh nightshirt and dressing gown and join them for supper. She clapped her hands and ran to find Marie-Louise.
Feeling buoyant, free of pain — composed — he returned his gaze to the garden. Above his neighbor's roof he saw a rectangle of clear, brilliant sky; his beloved Carolina sky. He had lost sight of how greatly that kind of simple perception cheered and exalted a man.
Lost sight of a great many other things, too. Including his own nature.
Judith was right: grief for his son had precipitated the worst. That grief would never leave him, just as his loathing for Ashton would not, or the unbecoming wish that she be punished for her greed. But the emotions building and building within him for so long had been purged in that explosion on Meeting Street, purged by his rain of cane strokes on the luckless Yankee.
The aftermath had left him wanting to die — or at least sleep a long time. Was it possible that the emotional desolation was the actual start of healing? He recalled another passage from the pen of the man he most revered, Edmund Burke. The storm has gone over me, and I lie like one of those old oaks which the late hurricane has scattered about.
Weakened but not destroyed. Mending; that was his condition. He was no longer the same man who had attacked the sergeant. He could again examine past behavior with objectivity, if not exactly with pride.
He had veered for a time into absolute patriotism — unquestioning acceptance of all things Southern. Before Sumter fell, he knew what was fine and worthy in his homeland. He loved that part, rejecting the rest. But then he had changed, gradually became willing to fight for and accept all of it. Including what was represented by the whitewashed huts three-quarters of a mile from Mont Royal's great house. The attitude was wrong before, and it was wrong now. It was one of the first things he would set right.
He examined his feelings about the war itself. He knew the storm had passed him because he once more felt as he had in the fateful spring of '61. The war was misbegotten because it couldn't be won. The war was an abomination because it pitted American against American. How shameful to grasp now that he had, for a while, become one with those who had pushed the nation into the war. One with the James Huntoons and Virgilia Hazards. One with those who could not or would not find a means to prevent the holocaust.
All right, the war was evil. What then?
He thought it through. He would no longer lend himself to wars except the one of which Judith had spoken, the inevitable one against the political barbarians, whose names he knew well. Wade. Davis. Butler. Stevens. The South would need men to stand against their onslaught. It would be a fierce battle, full of unexpected dangers. Burke, as always, had words to frame the challenge: The circumstances are in a great measure new. We have hardly any landmarks from the wisdom of our ancestors to guide us.