Questions hammered at his head till it ached as much as his body while he scratched the Carolina soil in the steaming sun. He was bent at the task one afternoon when Andy called his name sharply. He raised his head, wiped his sweaty eyelids to clear his vision, saw Judith dashing along the embankments separating the squares.
From her haste and her reddened face, he could tell something was wrong. He ran to meet her.
"Cooper, it's your mother. I went in during her nap, as I usually do, and found her. If I can judge from her expression, her passing was peaceful. Perhaps painless. I'm so sorry, darling —"
She stopped, cocking her head, puzzled and a little frightened by his queer half-smile. He didn't explain the momentary recollection that produced the strange reaction. Memories of Clarissa airily wandering about in the midst of the guerrilla attack. She had walked where guns were firing and never been scratched.
The odd smile disappeared; practical matters intruded. "Do you suppose we can find any ice at all for the body?"
"I doubt it. We'd better bury her right away."
"Yes, I think you're right." He slipped a throbbing arm around her, tears filling his eyes. They returned to the yellow-pine house for the rest of the day.
Cooper had discovered long ago that life had a perverse way of surprising you with the unexpected when you least needed it. He was sweating with Andy in the dusk, hammering together a coffin for Clarissa, when Jane appeared.
"We have three visitors."
Cooper swabbed his wet brow with his forearm. "More soldiers?"
She shook her head. "They came by railroad as far as they could — they say it's been reopened part of the way. Then they managed to buy an old mule and a wagon, both about done for —"
Testy, he said, "Well, whoever they are, you know what to tell them. They're welcome to camp and use the well. But we have no food."
"You'll have to feed these people," Jane said. "It's your sister and her husband and Miss Madeline."
When he thought it reasonably safe, Jasper Dills went down to occupied Richmond.
He was appalled at the destruction that had accompanied the collapse and flight of the Confederate government. A Union officer told him that while the fires raged, small-arms ammunition and more than eight hundred thousand shells had detonated over a period of several hours. A few substantially fireproofed buildings remained standing, but there were blocks and blocks destroyed. It was the heart of springtime, and the air should have smelled of flowers and new greenery. In Richmond it smelled of smoke.
The rutted streets were dumps for broken and abandoned furnishings, clothing, rags, bottles, books, personal papers. Even more distasteful to the little attorney was the human litter. Destitute white families roaming. Confederate veterans, many as young as fourteen, sitting in the sun with starved faces and vacant eyes. Crowds of Negroes, some strutting outrageously. And everywhere — on foot, astride saddle horses, driving wagons — soldiers in the blue of the conqueror. They were the only whites in the city who smiled, Dills noticed.
He was in a high state of nerves when he reached the sutlers' tents set up, complete with outdoor tables and cheap chairs, on the lawns of Capitol Square. At one such establishment, identified by its canvas banner as Hugo Delancy's, he met his contact, a former operative of Lafayette Baker's whom Dills had hired at a high price, dispatching him to Virginia to attempt to pick up a trail that was, perhaps, nonexistent.
The operative, a burly fellow with a cocked eye, took Dills to an outdoor table at Delancy's. He swilled lager while Dills drank a pitiful watery concoction passed off as lemonade.
"Well, what do you have to report?"
"Didn't think I'd have a blessed thing till six days ago. Tramped up and down the James almost three weeks before I turned up something. And it still isn't much."
The operative signaled a waiter to bring another beer. "Early in July last year a farmer saw a body floating in the James. Civilian clothes. The body was too far from shore to be retrieved, but the description — an obese man; dark-haired — roughly matches the one you provided for Captain Dayton."
"Last July, you say —?" Dills licked his lips. The stipend had continued during the intervening months. "Where did this happen?"
"The farmer was on the east bank of the river, about half a mile above the Broadway Landing pontoon bridge the army built later in the autumn. I spent another three days in the neighborhood, asking questions, but I didn't turn up anything else. So I'll take my money."
"Your report's inconclusive. Unsatisfactory."
The operative seized the lawyer's frail wrist. "I did the job. I want the pay."
Dills's strategy to save some money failed. He surrendered the bank draft from inside his jacket. The operative gave it a moment's suspicious scrutiny to embarrass him, then pocketed it, gulped the rest of his beer, and departed, leaving Dills between two tables of noisy whores, not far from the magnificent statue of George Washington.
Had Starkwether's son deserted to the enemy after Baker discharged him? If he had been killed, was it the result of a military mission or something more sinister? Was the body in the river actually Bent's? He had to know. If his periodic reports stopped, so would the stipend. He thumped his fist on the table. "What happened?"
Two of the sluts to his right heard the loud expression of turmoil and made remarks. Dills composed himself. The trail had run out. Starkwether's son was dead, merely another casualty of the long, distasteful, and ultimately purposeless war.
On reflection, the lawyer decided that an inconclusive report was better than none at all. Was valuable, in fact, if interpreted correctly. Since it said nothing to the contrary, it allowed him to continue writing the periodic memoranda, confidently asserting that Bent was still alive. It permitted him to continue to generate income indefinitely with those little pieces of paper — a huge return on a minuscule investment.
Less upset, he relaxed in the sunshine, ignored the odors of smoke and cheap perfume, and ordered a second glass of lemonade.
137
They buried Clarissa Gault Main in the half-acre of fenced ground that had received Mont Royal's dead, white and black, for three generations. Jane cried longest and loudest of any of the small band of mourners. She had developed a great affection for the gentle little woman whose aging mind had long ago freed her of ordinary human burdens. Jane had always taken special pains to see to Clarissa's needs, as she would those of a child. Aunt Belle Nin had once told her that for many people the process of growing old was one of reversal, a return to the state of the child, who needed a special kind of care, patience, love.
Andy stood at Jane's side and wept with her. Brett and Madeline were more controlled in their grief. Their greatest shock and emotional catharsis had come immediately after Billy escorted them up the lane, when Madeline saw that Orry's home was gone, and they learned about Clarissa.
Cooper showed the least emotion. He felt it his duty to remain steady, an example in a difficult time. Before the burial, he read verses from the New Testament — Christ's dialogue with Nicodemus on everlasting life from the gospel of John. Following the reading, Andy and Billy lowered the coffin into the ground, and each mourner tossed in a handful of sandy soil. For the closing prayer Cooper deferred to Andy, who praised Clarissa as a kind and generous woman, and movingly commended her to God's care.