Charles walked all the way to Georgetown in the lightning and thunder and rain. Knocking at a cottage, rousing the owners, he obtained directions to the private cemetery. The sleepy couple with the lamp were too frightened to deny him an answer. He was a hellish apparition on their wet porch, a nightmare man with furnace eyes and a soaked gray shirt and rain dripping from his beard and his holstered gun.
Hurrying on, he reached the cemetery in an interval of pitch darkness. He slipped in wet grass, falling forward and nearly impaling himself on the spikes of the low fence. On his knees next to it, he felt the metal. Wrought iron.
Was it Hazard's? He uttered a crazed laugh. He was losing his mind. Everything was slipping, fusing, jumbling together. He wanted to scream. He wanted to die.
He kicked the gate open and lurched into the cemetery, searching by lightning flash. Granite angels spread granite arms and granite wings, imploring him to heaven with granite eyes. No thank you, I'm at my proper destination already.
In the dark he stumbled repeatedly over low headstones or crashed painfully into cold marble. Jagged lightning ran through the sky. He saw a towering obelisk against the glare and a name carved huge on the pedestal. STARKWETHER.
After a long period of wandering one way, then another, he found the grave. The headstone was small and rectangular, with a slightly sloping top upon which Duncan had put her name and the years of her birth and death, nothing more.
Charles sank to his knees, every inch of him soaked by the rain that still poured down. He didn't feel it or the cold. Only the misery, the awful, mind-destroying misery. He knelt beside the grave, careful not to kneel on it, and without conscious volition closed his fists and began to beat them on his thighs.
He pounded harder. To hurt, to punish. The undersides of his fists ached, but he kept pounding. The thunder cannonaded like the guns at Sharpsburg. The lightning flashed again and again, revealing a spot of blood on the right leg of his pants. The rhythm of the pounding quickened.
What was he to do, now that he bore this guilt? What was he to do with the child for whom he was responsible, thereby making himself responsible for this headstone? What was he to do?
A short, strange cry came from his throat; animal grief. Then, deep inside, a force began to build, its outlet impossible to deny. He opened his throbbing fists. Raised his right hand to his wet face and felt beneath his eye. That was not rain.
He threw himself forward on the grave, wet body to wet earth, and for the first time since Sharpsburg, wept.
Charles kept vigil at Augusta Barclay's grave until well past dawn, when the storm abated. Shivering, teeth chattering, he walked the long distance back to the central part of town, reaching the brigadier's house about ten.
Exhausted from the physical and emotional strain of the night before, Duncan had slept late and was only just starting his breakfast when the unbelievably sorry sight named Charles Main appeared in the door of the dining room. From somewhere above came the bawling of Charles's son and Maureen's comforting voice in counterpoint.
Clenching his jaw, Duncan strove to control himself. It was difficult. Red-faced, he said, "Christ. What did you do, drink and wallow in some gutter all night long?"
It looked like it. Charles's right pants leg showed a large blood spot. Dirt clung to his beard and every part of his soaked shirt.
"I spent the night at her grave. I spent the night thinking of my son. Trying to decide what to do."
Slowly, Duncan straightened to his most erect posture, his back no longer touching the chair. His eyes were full of hostile challenge.
"Well?"
147
"Next stop Lehigh Station. Lehigh Station will be the next stop —"
The conductor's voice faded as he left the car. The local had pulled out of Bethlehem at half past six. That meant they should be stepping through Belvedere's front door in less than an hour. George was thankful; he was spent. So was Constance, to judge from the way she leaned against him, silent.
He occupied the seat beside the window, watching twilight burnish the river and the blue-mantled slopes on the western side. He turned to say something to his wife but didn't. Her eyes were closed, her head sagging forward, creating three rounded chins in place of one.
George's tired face smoothed out as he lovingly studied her. Then his eye was caught by movement beyond the window on the other side of the aisle. As the train slowed down before a curve, he saw a cemetery and, in the foreground, three rows of five crosses, new and white. The movement drawing his attention was that of two elderly workers shoveling earth onto an unseen coffin in an open grave. A middle-aged man and woman stood beside the grave, the man with something red and white folded in his crossed arms. A flag.
The cemetery disappeared. Carefully, George put his arm around Constance so as not to wake her. But he wanted the comfort of touching her.
He felt an immense surge of love for the plump woman dozing beside him. Love for her and for his children, whose lives he must begin to supervise again, changing from soldier back to father. Love was really all that had pulled him through the past four years, he reflected. His eyes drifted across the river again, to the profusion of mountain laurel on the hillsides. Nothing else will pull us through the years just ahead, either.
"— gone too fast. With too many changes."
"Oh, definitely. I'm sorry Lincoln was martyred, but he can certainly be faulted for his policies."
George frowned, overhearing the travelers in the seat immediately behind. The first speaker sounded old, his voice full of the cranky negativism that inevitable state too often produced. The second speaker, female, sounded young. It was she who continued.
"The darkies deserve their liberty, I suppose. But at that point it should stop."
"So far as I'm concerned, it does. Let any nigger try to step through my front door like a white man, and I'll be there to deny him with my old horse pistol."
The woman sighed. "Some of our politicians aren't as courageous as you. They're actually promoting the franchise for the colored."
"Ridiculous. Why would anyone encourage such a change in the order of things? It's insanity."
Having endorsed each other's convictions, they settled into a period of quiet, leaving George to meditate amid the smells of dusty upholstery and the overflowing spittoon at the head of the car. Now the western hills were higher, their summits intermittently blocking the direct rays of the low sun. Changing patterns of shadow and light flickered over his face as he pondered.
Changes indeed. He thought of the slain President, whose unbelievably stark photograph — a recent one — they had seen in a black-draped shop window after they docked in Philadelphia. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln's party had nominated him because he was the least-known, therefore least-offensive candidate available. A strong man with strong views might have stirred strong reactions, which was dangerous to any organized group in pursuit of votes.
But once in office — the furnace of war — Lincoln, like iron, had been heated and hammered, melted and molded and transformed into something wholly new. Out of the corn-country politician of unknown views, presumably safe views — or no views or insane views, depending on the speaker — there emerged with the aid of the pricking of conscience and the whipping of expedience a President who propounded a definition of freedom so new and sweeping the nation would be years finding and deciphering all its meanings.
Lincoln's burdens of party leadership, governmental leadership, war leadership wrought radical physical changes as well. They cut gullies in the pain-eroded landscape of his face and drowned his eyes in lakes of perpetual shadow. The photographic portrait in the Philadelphia shop barely resembled those of a few years earlier.