COLONEL HENRY GENTRY PONDERED THE calendar on his desk. It was August 15. General Grant was still stalemated before Richmond. General Sherman was not doing much better before Atlanta. In Sherman’s rear, a Confederate cavalryman named Nathan Bedford Forrest was doing fearsome damage in Tennessee, burning railroad bridges, capturing railroad trains loaded with supplies and money, routing a Union force sent to stop him. Guerrillas still rampaged through Kentucky. In retaliation, General Burbridge had executed another twelve captured men.
Still not a word from Amelia Jameson. Was his plan going awry? It was exactly what he deserved, Gentry mused. He was acting like a swine. Perhaps that was another word for intelligence officer. He imagined Amelia, watching the clock hands, the calendar, as time plodded inexorably toward the date when Robin would be drafted: September 1. His stomach twisted with disgust at himself, the war, General Burbridge, General Carrington, President Lincoln.
Every other day, Major Stapleton invented another excuse that took him across the river to Kentucky. Janet Todd was ill. It was her father’s birthday. Janet’s mother was ill and had taken a great fancy to him. None of these was a very clever lie. But Gentry made no attempt to challenge him. From other informants, such as Luther Sprague, the typesetter at the Keyport Record, he knew that they were moving toward the moment of explosion. Sprague had sent him a surreptitiously printed front
page of the Record proclaiming the birth of the western confederacy.
From one of the Keyport ferry hands he learned that there was a great deal of activity on the Ohio River after dark. The man had been offered twenty dollars a night to pull an oar. He had pleaded a bad back and rushed to Gentry, who paid him twenty-five dollars for the information. Did he know what was in the boats? “Guns,” the man said.
Gentry telegraphed the commander of the federal gunboat flotilla in Louisville, asking him why he was not patrolling the river at night. He was told it was too dangerous. The low water created unexpected sandbars and shallows that could only be detected by the naked eye. Charts were next to useless.
Gentry sipped his bourbon and wondered if he should do something. Perhaps advise Burbridge to arrest Rogers Jameson? That would remove Amelia’s fear of immediate retaliation. He decided it would be superfluous. Gentry knew why she was unable to act. She was torn between Adam and Robin. Between the ape and the angel. She loved both of them.
Another day passed. The drought, the heat wave, continued. The temperature dropped below ninety-five only for an hour, between dawn and sunrise. Gentry responded to a choleric letter from General Carrington demanding to know if he had anything to do with getting the deserter Robert Garner pardoned. Gentry blamed Lincoln’s mercy on Major Stapleton. Gutless coward that he was, Carrington would think twice about attacking the younger brother of a major general.
A hobbling Lucy brought him a letter for Moses Washington. She had written it herself! The handwriting was at about the third-grade level but she had decorated it with a string of hearts—no doubt at Dorothy Schreiber’s suggestion. Moses was still in a federal hospital in Louisville, fighting an infection that had developed
in his wound. Gentry’s mother continued to make nasty remarks about a Negro sleeping on the second floor of her house, just down the hall from her. Gentry continued to ignore her.
At noon on August 16, Dorothy Schreiber called down to Gentry in the cellar, “Colonel, Mrs. Jameson is here! Can she visit you for a moment?”
Gentry lumbered to the foot of the stairs with a candle. “Be careful,” he said. “The last step is higher than the others.”
Amelia let him take her hand. The touch of her moist palm ignited strange sensations in his body. Not exactly desire. Something closer to longing. That made him certain she was here to tell him once and for all that she despised him.
Amelia declined a drink of water. Arranging her skirts, she wiped her face with a handkerchief. “Now I see why you hide out down here. It’s cool.”
“And Mother can’t negotiate the stairs.”
She almost smiled. “Robin’s been drafted,” she said.
“I—I had no idea. It’s done by each state—”
“I begged you to do something for him.”
“I tried. But General Burbridge has a hard heart.”
Tears trickled down her cheeks. “Henry, I can’t do it! I can’t betray Adam.”
“I understand.”
“But you still won’t do anything?”
“It’s out of my hands, Amelia.”
“Pompey came down the other day with a message for Rogers.”
“Did he say anything about Saltville?”
“The battle? Only that you got whipped.”
“I’m surprised.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought he might have said something about the blacks. What Adam’s men did to them.”
“What?”
“They shot the wounded. One by one. They must have shot two hundred of them.”
Amelia just sat there. In the distance, Gentry heard the German sergeant, Adolf Schultz, drilling his men: “Eins, zwei, drei, vier!” The German had a voice that could be heard in Chicago. Still Amelia sat there. Upstairs, Dorothy Schreiber began playing “Weeping Sad and Lonely, or When this Cruel War Is Over” on the piano. The tinkling notes fell around them like snowflakes. Still Amelia sat there.
Finally she said, “You’re lying.”
“I wish I were. I saw it, Amelia. I rode up the hill and asked Adam to come out and tell them to stop it. But he ignored me. He said he’d see me in Indiana.”
“Adam,” she said.
She sat there. A steamboat hooted on the river. Bees droned around a hive under the eaves. Birds chirped in the hedges just outside the cellar door. Once the hedges had been part of a maze his father had constructed for want of something better to do in his middle age. Gentry remembered wandering through the leafy labyrinth with Amelia on his seventeenth birthday. He made her kiss him every time she got lost. Only he knew the way out. Now they were in another labyrinth but he was not at all sure he knew the way out of this one.
“This war is evil. I knew it from the start.”
“So did I.”
“But you didn’t try to stop your friend Lincoln from starting it.”
“Like him, I thought it would be over in a month.”
She sat there. “I believe I will have a drink of water,” she said.
He poured it for her. She sipped it. “What do you want to know?” she asked.
“As much as possible,” he said. “Above all—the date.”
“What if I don’t know it?”
He opened his hand helplessly.
“I don’t know it.”
He opened his hand again. “Anything will be better than nothing.”
“I understand.”
Was she trying to bargain with him? Or was she telling the truth? He preferred the latter judgment. Naturally. He was still a fool in love. Gentry’s heart swirled with longing for a time forever lost. He ordered himself to say nothing. He sat there, waiting, watching. She was still beautiful. Perhaps only to him. The patina of beauty was visible beneath the lines of care on her face.
“I really don’t know,” she said.
She left him. He listened to her footsteps mounting the stairs. He went out in the yard through the cellar door and watched Schultz drilling the poor Germans in the heat. A man crumpled to the ground. Two of his friends carried him into the barn. “By the right flank, vorwärts!” roared Schultz. “Eins, zwei, drei, vier!”
Sheriff Monroe Cantwell rode into the yard on a small gray horse. Gentry noticed Democrats preferred small horses. The party of the people. “Henry,” Cantwell said. “I just got a report of two deserters at the Murray farm.”
“You have work to do, Sergeant,” Gentry said.
In a half hour, Schultz and his hundred Germans clattered out of the yard. Gentry went back to his cellar and wrote another letter to Lincoln, reporting his latest information about the Sons of Liberty. He told the president about the guns moving up and down the Ohio at night. He enclosed his copy of the Keyport Record’s front page announcing the western confederacy. He recommended detaching 10,000 men from Grant’s army. If Lincoln put them on trains, they could be here in two days. Ten thousand veterans would squelch these amateur desperados in a day.
The railroad has revolutionized warfare. Why not
take advantage of our mobility? No. Portentous. He was talking to a man who had been running a war for three years. Lincoln knew all about mobility. The problem was manpower. He remembered what Lincoln had told him a year ago. Desertion alone was costing the Union fifty thousand men a year. Yet it would be worth weakening Grant to stop this explosion before it occurred. The men leading it were not stupid. They knew it did not have to succeed to bring Lincoln down. The mere fact that twenty or thirty thousand men had taken up arms—the Democratic newspapers would swell it to a hundred thousand—would be enough to ruin Lincoln in November.
The thing had to be suppressed. Why couldn’t Lincoln see that? His tired brain had fallen into a military groove. Victory had become something won with the gun. The man who said he was against appealing from the ballot to the bullet was now relying on the bullet. Abe, Abe, we’re doing it the hard way.
An hour after the Germans departed, Major Stapleton returned from his latest foray to Kentucky. He was upset to discover there was work to be done in Indiana. “You should have sent for me,” he said.
“I didn’t know where you were, Major,” Gentry replied.
“At the Todds’. You knew that.”
“I’ve had reports of you riding far afield.”
“Janet has decided to ride each day for exercise.”
“Ah.”
The Major galloped off to the Murray farm. Two hours later, one of the Germans rode wildly into the yard. “Eine grosser Schlacht!” he shouted. “Many Feinde! Many tod. Wagons, bitte! Schnell!”
Gentry translated: “A big battle! Many enemy! Many dead. Wagons please! Quickly!”
He sent the German galloping to the fields with a message to his farm manager. In a half hour ten of his
hands were in the yard. They hitched horses to six wagons and lumbered toward the Murray farm, which was at the far end of the county. Gentry rode with them, after dispatching a messenger to Dr. Yancey. As they approached the farm, a spiral of smoke curled into the blue sky. Major Stapleton galloped down the road to meet them, his face flushed.
“It was another ambush. Much bigger, this time. At least forty men. When Schultz charged them they stood their ground around the farmhouse for a half-dozen volleys. Then they vanished through the corn. It was over by the time I got there.”
“How many men did we lose?”
“At least twenty,” Stapleton said.
“Did they catch any deserters?”
Stapleton shook his head. “I don’t think there were any.”
“Who set the Murray house on fire?”
“The Germans. They’re angry about their losses.”
As Gentry rode into the Murray yard on the lead wagon, a tearful Margaret Murray rushed up to him. She was his age. They had danced together at more than one youthful hoedown. “Henry, they’re burning our house! We didn’t do anything! The Sons of Liberty came from nowhere and took over the farm—”
Flames were gushing from the second floor windows. It was much too late to save the house. Stout Stephen Murray stood to one side, glaring at him. “Is this the kind of protection you’re giving citizens who’ve tried to stay neutral?” he shouted. He was a Democrat, like his father before him. He had three daughters and no sons. It was interesting, the way people’s neutrality or partisanship reflected what they stood to lose in the war.
The dead and wounded were in the dust in front of the Murray barn. Sergeant Schultz dragged a tall thin boy of about seventeen over to Gentry. The boy was groaning
and whining with pain. His right leg was drenched in blood. “Do you know this man, Colonel?” Schultz shouted.
Gentry shook his head.
“He says he’s a member of a regiment of the Indiana Sons of Liberty! He wants to be treated as a prisoner of war.” Schultz’s face was streaked with black powder. “What craziness is this? They shoot my poor fellows for no reason.” He babbled about getting a doctor for his men.
“There’ll be one waiting at my house,” Gentry said.
On the ride back Schultz wanted to know where the Sons of Liberty got their guns. “They had repeating rifles. No wonder they shot us to pieces.”
“I have no idea,” Gentry said. “Do you, Major Stapleton?”
“No,” Stapleton said. Gentry thought he sounded uncomfortable, telling that lie.
“They could have bought them in New York and shipped them out here. The country is awash in guns,” Gentry said. “The federal government can’t keep track of them all.”
Yancey worked all afternoon and into the night on the wounded. There were several amputations, including the captured Son of Liberty’s shattered leg. He was from nearby Cannelton. His name was Theodore Stearns. He died about an hour after the operation. Yancey said amputees sometimes died from the shock. Or the grief of it, Gentry thought. The idea of a crippled future.
The next morning, Gentry pondered the coffins of eight dead Germans recruited from distant Europe to die in Lincoln’s war. Somehow that had meaning for him. A world war fought to free America from the stain of slavery. But most Americans did not think slavery was a stain. The majority party, the Democrats, said it was
perfectly all right. It was in the Constitution, wasn’t it? If it was good enough for Washington and Jefferson, what’s wrong with it now? Was this new birth of freedom Abe Lincoln had proclaimed at Gettysburg worth dying for, a year later? Theodore Stearns and his friends apparently did not think so.
Major Stapleton joined him for the funeral service. Gentry read sonorous words from his mother’s Episcopal prayer book. Sergeant Schultz wept. Gentry thought Major Stapleton looked downcast. They buried the Germans in the Gentry family graveyard about a half mile from the main house, beside the two blacks who had died in the earlier ambush.
After dinner, Gentry retreated to his cellar office to write a telegram to Lincoln describing the ambush: This demonstrates how serious the situation is. Again, I urge you to detach ten thousand veteran troops and get them here as soon as possible. He had just finished putting this into code when Dorothy Schreiber called, “Colonel, Mrs. Jameson is here!”
Once more he greeted Amelia at the foot of the stairs. In his office, she asked him for a drink of water. From an embroidered bag on her wrist she took two folded pieces of paper. “Here is what you want, I suspect,” she said.
She withdrew it from his reaching hand. “First I must extract another promise. If Adam is captured, he will not be executed as a guerrilla. He will be treated as a prisoner of war.”
“Agreed,” Gentry said.
Amelia handed him the paper. He spread it on the desk:
The date of the Sons of Liberty attack is August 28. The Rogers Jameson brigade will cross the Ohio late that night to occupy Keyport and join regiments from Hunter County for a march on Indianapolis.
They expect to have at least 10,000 men. Rose Hill is the rendezvous point.
The names of Rogers’ colonels are:
George Mooney
Henry Travis
Arthur Haliburton
Luke Bowman
The Kentucky commanding general is Gabriel Todd. His chief of staff is Colonel Paul Stapleton. Rogers is a brigadier general. The soldiers will be met in Keyport by Judge Joshua Bullitt with a month’s pay in greenbacks for every man. Judge Bullitt is coming from Canada with the money on the Cleveland and Great Western Railroad. money on the Cleveland and Great Western Railroad.
“Thank you, Amelia. You’ve done a brave thing. A good thing, I hope.”
“Why don’t I feel good? I feel soiled. I think I’ll always feel soiled.”
“Amelia. Don’t say that.”
“I will say it, Henry. I think you should know it. You above all.”
He sat there in the silence, listening to Amelia’s footsteps on the stairs. All these years she had known about his longing. All these years she had nurtured the possibility in her heart that someday somehow she might satisfy it. Now she was telling him that hope, that possibility, was gone forever.
With a sigh Colonel Gentry tore up the telegram to President Lincoln and sent another one to Major General Stephen Burbridge in Louisville. All’s well. Additional information will follow in code. I will await your early reply.
Gentry telegraphed another coded copy of Amelia’s letter to General Henry Carrington in Indianapolis. He had no doubt that he and Burbridge would take the credit for defeating the Sons of Liberty. Gentry wanted
it that way. He would not accept a medal from Lincoln if he offered one. You do not want a medal for doing something you will be ashamed of for the rest of your life.
We’re doing it the hard way, Abe.