December 1859
David Strong watched them lower his father’s coffin into the grave on the knoll above Washington Farm. He was a tall, thin man, with graying hair that grew close to his head, and deep-set dark brown eyes that always held a hint of sadness. He did not try to hide his tears; he was not the kind of man who would have ever felt the need to do so. A man was likely to shed a few tears when they buried his father, even if, as David now suspected, the tears were more for what might have been than for what was. He had never been really close to his father: it always seemed to David and to his younger brother Sam that their father had squandered all the love he had on their sister, Mary. And when Mary ran away from home, it was like Big Jed forgot how to love anybody else on the face of the earth. Goodbye, Pa, David thought.
Jedediah Morrison Strong, ‘Big Jed’ to everyone who knew him, had died at eleven o’clock on the morning of December 2 1859, at almost precisely the same moment that his grandson and namesake, Lieutenant Jedediah Strong, US Army, watched the abolitionist John Brown dropping through the scaffold trap to his death. It was a bright warm day, the kind that comes occasionally to Virginia at that time of year, so balmy that it felt like springtime. The last words Big Jed uttered were ‘damned fools!’ and every member of the family agreed that they were typical. The ‘damned fools’ to whom the old man referred were, of course, the Virginia legislature, and, in particular, that learned, patrician, eloquent and brilliant idiot who occupied the gubernatorial chair of the Old Dominion, Henry A. Wise. The reason Big Jed died damning them was because, in spite of there being no good reason for it, the Virginia legislature had determined, as punishment for attempting to lead the slaves in revolt against their masters, that old John Brown must hang. It was folly that would lead to war, Big Jed prophesied. Damned fools, all of them. And died, just like that.
Big Jed was full of years at the time of his death, eighty going on eighty-one. Eighty-one years full of trouble and my own damned folly, he used to say, and there was truth as well as rue in the words. Big Jed was as old as the country: the war for America’s independence had still been raging when he was born in the old Cobbett house on Boston’s Salem Street.
‘Under a wanderin’ star,’ he used to say. ‘Footloose all my life, like my daddy was afore me.’
And he would take down the old broken sword from the wall, lift it reverently off its blue velvet mounting, his eyes filming with memory. It was more than a keepsake of his father, Grandpa Davy. It had become a talisman as revered as the battered, leather-bound Bible that Davy Strong had brought across the seas from England nearly a century before.
‘This was my father’s sword,’ Big Jed would tell his children. ‘As it was his father’s afore him.’ It was an old Spanish weapon, taken in battle by the English soldier John Strong at the siege of Gibraltar. ‘April sixteenth, 1727,’ Jed told them. ‘Remember that date always, for it marks the beginning of this family’s story.’ And they would clamor for more and he would tell them about all the Strongs whose names were entered in the Bible that was always kept next to the sword.
‘Now you, David,’ he would tell his oldest son. ‘You’re named for my father’s grandfather, who saw the last witch burned officially in England. You, Mary?’ His eyes always softened with love when they were directed towards his daughter’s beautiful face. ‘You’re named for my Daddy’s mother, sweet Mary Wakefield, who was murdered by the black-hearted Oliver Wellbeloved.’ The children would shiver with delight. It was in Oliver Wellbeloved’s body that Davy Strong had snapped the blade of the Spanish sword. The villain’s name was as familiar a bugaboo to the Strong children as the troll in the story of the Billygoats Gruff.
Big Jed’s daughter and two sons grew up with some of America’s greatest men as surrogate uncles. Grandpa Davy had the gift of friendship with highborn and low. When he finished building Washington Farm, named in honor of his patron and friend, the great man himself had come to visit and to pat the round-eyed children on the head. Big Jed had journeyed to the Far West with the Lewis and Clark expedition as a personal favor to his friend Tom Jefferson, who wanted old hands along to ensure the successful exploration of his Louisiana Purchase.
‘There’re more than a few people who’d be happy to see I’ve made a damned fool of myself in buying those lands from the French, Jed,’ Jefferson had said. ‘But I am convinced that there are great marvels out there and I want you to help my two captains to find them.’
Big Jed always used to tell them that if it hadn’t been for his marrying Sarah Morrison, he would in all likelihood have been hauled into court with Aaron Burr and tried for treason. Burr, he said, had been flirting with the British in a plan to separate the western part of the United States and deliver it to the British for the sum of half a million dollars.
‘I was all afire to go in with him an’ Jimmy Wilkinson,’ Big Jed told the children. ‘But then your Mama come along and she had other ideas. And I’m here to tell you, when your Mama had her mind made up, you couldn’t hardly shift it with six kegs o’ blastin’ powder!’
None of them had ever really known their mother. She had died when the eldest of them, David, was only seven, and little Sam hardly more than a babe. But there was a portrait of her above the mantelpiece in Big Jed’s bedroom, and you could see from the proud way she held her head, the fine eyes and the sturdy body, that she had been quite a lady.
‘Her Paw had some misgivin’s about us marryin’, as I recall,’ Big Jed would say. ‘Her bein’ only seventeen, and me nigh on ten years older. But Henry Morrison reckoned it needed an older man to tame her down some, an’ by Christmas! he was right!’
Sarah was a tall, raw-boned girl with a temper that had come intact across the Atlantic from her family’s native heath in Wicklow. She was a good head taller than her husband, who had the same compact, stocky build as his father. The name ‘Big Jed’ only came after the birth of David’s son, who they called ‘Little Jed’ to differentiate between them. He was never a big man, and Sarah, who was touchy about her height anyway, was even touchier about his, as Amos Clinton found out at Jed and Sarah’s wedding. He made some kind of remark about ‘the long and short of it’ and turned around to find himself facing Sarah Morrison, fresh from the altar, arms akimbo.
‘Amos Clinton,’ she said, without apparent anger, ‘you are a mean-mouthed man.’ She handed her bouquet of lilies to one of her bridesmaids and then, to the astonished delight of everyone present, laid Amos Clinton out with a blow of her clenched fist. Then she turned back to her awestruck bridegroom and smiled her deceptively sweet smile.
‘And that can serve as notice to you, Jedediah Strong!’ she said. ‘I’ll take hard words from no man!’
Their marriage, Big Jed always said, was like the sea. When it was calm, it was beautiful. But when there were storms, there was no worse place on earth to be. And storms there were when Jed announced that he was going south with Burr and Wilkinson.
‘Tom Jefferson don’t trust that man!’ Sarah shouted at the peak of their argument. ‘And if Tom Jefferson don’t trust a man, then that man isn’t worth what cats lick off their backsides!’
‘Hell, woman!’ Jed stormed back. ‘That’s politics! It ain’t got anythin’ to do with trustin’ or not trustin’!’
‘Aaron Burr is trouble, Jedediah!’ Sarah said. ‘She never called him anything else in all the years they were married.’
‘And if you follow his star, you’ll end up ruined!’
‘Well, as to that, who knows?’ Jed argued. ‘Might be I’d come back with a fortune. Burr’s offered me twenty thousand acres if I want it.’
‘Twenty thousand acres of what, addlepate?’ she snorted. ‘Swamp? Desert? What then? You don’t even know where’s he’s a-goin’ to.’
‘Woman, you don’t understand business matters,’ Jed said exasperatedly. ‘You just leave it to me to know what’s best.’
‘It’ll be a fine day raining fishes when I leave it to you to know what’s best, Jedediah Strong!’ she retorted. ‘And who’s to manage this farm while you’re off gallivantin’ God knows where?’
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Jed said. ‘Broken both your arms and legs, have you?’
‘I’ll be doing other things, dearest heart,’ Sarah said, honeyed venom in her tone. ‘Thanks to you.’
‘What other things?’ he snapped. ‘What damned nonsense are you talkin’ now?’
She smiled like a cat and patted her belly; For a long, long moment, Jed just looked into her smiling eyes. Then his anger disappeared like wind-blown smoke. He got up out of his chair and swept her up in his arms. ‘It’s true?’ he said softly.
‘Your son will be born in April,’ she said and kissed him. Jedediah put his hands on her shoulders and held her at arm’s length, looking into her eyes, smiling, smiling. ‘You’re really something, you are,’ he said.
‘Come upstairs,’ she grinned. ‘And you’ll find out just how much.’
She was right about Burr. He was arrested the following February, barely two months before little David was born, and tried the following September for treason. He was a damned scoundrel, Aaron Burr was, Big Jed told the children, but I wasn’t all that much of a saint, either.
And they would beg to hear more stories, because he was a storyteller born. He could make you see the faces of the people he told you about and conjure up the darknesses of the great forests, the sunlight sparkling on the waters of the mighty rivers. The long winter nights were the best time for stories as all gathered around the fire. It was from Big Jed they had learned about Grandpa Davy and the broken sword, and about Andrew Brennan and the man with the strange name ‘Half-hanged’ Bowman, who had cheated the London hangman and died in the cause of American freedom.
From the time of David’s birth, Jedediah Morrison Strong wandered no more. ‘Took me a pretty damned long time to settle down,’ he said. ‘But by Christmas, when the time come, I done her right!’
The end of his wandering marked the beginning of his dynasty. After David came Selina, then William, Thomas, Mary, Henry and Samuel, little Sam who was only five months old when Sarah Morrison Strong died of the ‘wasting sickness’ that had come upon her. The big, raw-boned girl whom Jedediah had married weighed scarcely more than eighty pounds when they lowered her into her grave on the grassy knoll overlooking the house.
And now they were laying Big Jed alongside her, David Strong thought, remembering how he had stood beside his mother’s grave that windy March day. You didn’t really understand what death was when you were eight years old. The wasted little creature in the bed upstairs seemed to him to have no connection with the sturdy, smiling woman who had been his mother. It was as if that mother had gone away somewhere, and left in her place a strange, feeble, wan invalid whose burial he could witness without tears. Strange that now, over forty years later, he should find himself crying for her as if it were she and not his father who was being laid to rest.
‘Man that is born of woman hath but a short time to live,’ he heard the minister saying. He was reading from the big Bible with the worn leather cover which the grandfather after whom David had been named had brought to America in 1775. He had often thumbed through it and knew every name on the flyleaves by heart, every member of the Strong family, all the way back to the beginnings.
The first entry had now almost faded entirely but he knew the words as a priest did his catechism. ‘To David Strong on his birth, from his father’s father, Ezekiel Strong, in this year of grace’, with looping T’s where the S’s should be.
He looked around. There were many distinguished faces among the mourners, for Big Jed had died full of years and honors. Unable to attend personally, President Buchanan had sent his vice-president, John Breckinridge, to deputize for him. John Floyd, Breckinridge’s Cabinet colleague who was secretary of war, had come over from Abingdon. The two men stood close together, their faces sober. Next to Floyd stood another senator, Jefferson Davis, a tall, handsome man whom David still remembered fondly mooning around the place after his sister, Mary, when Sam had brought Jeff home for a visit from West Point.
How very many of the men Big Jed had known had preceded him to the grave, he thought. Among his circle of friends had been three presidents of the United States. Washington Farm had sheltered them all; among the first to visit it on its completion had been the one after whom it had been named. Grandpa Davy and his wife Martha had built the solid, square house on to which all the rambling extensions of later years had been grafted. At the time of his death in 1826 Davy Strong had been renowned as one of the best bloodstock-breeders in Virginia. The lovely house with its delicate Georgian lines became a hub from which radiated servants’ cottages and the buildings of the stud: eighty-five loose boxes, six stallion boxes, twelve foaling boxes, sitting-up rooms, grooming stables, a covering yard, a trotting track, and a great, gloomy, dust-filled Dutch barn for fodder. There were no slaves: all the servants and field hands on Washington Farm were freed men.
Up on the knoll overlooking the house, Grandpa Davy set aside a plot of land, perhaps an acre in all, to serve as the family cemetery. The first grave in it was dug for his old friend Andrew Brennan, whose body he located in a forgotten graveyard in Carolina and brought back to Virginia. The grave lay on the western edge of the knoll, looking west towards the Blue Ridge Mountains. Over it stood a simple stone on which were carved Brennan’s name and the date of his death, together with the words Old David had thought fitting: Greater love hath no man than this.
It was here that David Strong lingered after the funeral was over and the mourners had all returned to the house. He came here often. It was as if the past held him in safe arms, as if all those who had gone before were with him, watching benignly as he strove to find solutions to the problems that lay before him. The thing was, he told himself – knowing it was just an excuse to stay where he was – they’d be talking politics up at the house, and politics was something that right now he was getting more of than he considered was his share. There were hotheads everywhere these days, with their talk of free soil and slavery, who pounded fists on palms and said emphatically that war between the states was becoming inevitable. To go to war over slavery!
That slaves were an essential element of the South’s economy, particularly in the cotton-growing area, was a fact no sensible man argued against. He might complain mildly, and sometimes did, that a man who owned two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of slaves paid no tax on that ‘property’, while a man who owned land to the same value did. But only mildly. And certainly not to bolster his arguments against slavery, as did his neighbor, Edward Maxwell. Of course, Maxwell was obsessed with the abolition of slavery. Obsessed was the only word for it, David thought. Maxwell was the kind of hothead – and there were too damned many of them altogether for his liking – who would set fire to his own mother if he thought it would advance the cause of abolition. The Maxwell house was draped with black banners, the father in ‘mourning’ to mark the hanging of John Brown. Maxwell’s two sons, Paul and David, were as bigoted as their father, perhaps worse. They wanted war against the slave states the way a babe wants mother’s milk. Only a day after his arrival on furlough, young Jed had got into a furious argument with Paul Maxwell because Jed had been present at the hanging. That it was his duty as a soldier to go where he was sent lent no justification to it in Paul Maxwell’s eyes. Fortunately Andrew had interceded before it got out of hand. Harsh words had been spoken all the same; words that would not readily be forgotten by either the Maxwell boys or David’s sons.
The folly of it angered David. The fact that he, personally, found the concept of owning another human being abhorrent, did not convince him that he ought immediately to take arms against someone who did not. There were plenty of men who would though. Maxwell was just such a one. You could not reason with zealots: they heard no voices but their own.
He walked away from his father’s grave, up to the crest where Grandpa Davy was buried alongside his wife Martha and his friend, Andrew Brennan. I wonder what they think of all this? he thought. David was convinced of their constant presence, and never more than when he was in this place alone. Life, he felt, was but one of many existences, and there were many lives beyond this life of which mere men knew nothing. After all, he reasoned, if life was such a series of surprises, why shouldn’t death be, too? He stopped beside the slim marble marker beneath the oak which crowned the knoll.
Well, Jo, he thought, another one gone. Joanna had been dead over three years. He missed her as much, indeed more now, than ever. He was a man careful never to be too certain about anything, but of one thing he was sure: that whatever happened to him in the rest of his years on this earth, nothing worse could ever happen than seeing Joanna die. He sat down on the edge of her grave, as he always did.
‘Hard times coming, Jo,’ he said. ‘Just the way you said they would.’ She had read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and espoused the cause of abolition on the spot. No use to argue that the book was wrongheaded and often highly-colored. Joanna reached her decisions all at once, and once she made them she never budged. Stubborn Dutch streak, David used to say. You’ve got a streak of stubborn that would make a mule jealous. It was almost as if Joanna had known her life was destined to be a short one and she had no time for arguments. She wanted to know everything about everything, cramming information into herself, talking a blue streak as though to say, I must know, I must know! She was four months short of her forty-fourth birthday when the thing which was eating her up finally killed her. David buried her upon the knoll beneath the great old tree, because one of her greatest pleasures had been to sit in the shade of the ancient oak behind the house, drinking tea served English-style in the porcelain cups which had been the wedding gift of her tobacco-merchant father, Frederick Ten Eyck. Her gravestone was a simple granite marker. David had carved her name, the dates, and the inscription himself, not wanting any but himself to perform this last act of love for her. The inscription was her last words: Remember me. She had whispered them as he bent over her in the big bed. Her voice was as soft as the lifting of an angel’s wing, arid a moment later she was gone. He touched the inscription with his fingers. Remember me, he thought. As if I could ever forget.
‘They’re choosing up sides, Jo,’ he told her now. He still felt close to her, even though the wasted body they had buried was only a shadow of the lovely, lively woman with whom he had shared a happy, secure and loving quarter century. ‘They’re set on keeping slavery in the western part of the state, and just as set on abolishing it back here. Hanging John Brown has put a torch to the fuse. I feel like a mart who’s heard the thunder and is waiting for the lightning to strike. Worrying times, Jo. They’re worrying times.’
He tamped down some tobacco into the bowl of the blackened old briar she had given him and lit it with a kitchen match. The sun was sliding over the meridian, and it was getting a little cooler.
‘I worry about the boys, Jo,’ he said. ‘Though they’re boys no more, grown to men. You’d be proud of them, Jo, but worried, like me. If there’s a war, they’re bound to be caught up in it. Even Andrew, who says he’ll never raise his hand against a fellow man, even he won’t be able to escape it. And little Jed, he was down there at Harper’s Ferry, you know. I told you he was there, didn’t I?’
He came up here often, two or three times a week, to talk over family matters with Joanna. He felt sometimes as if he could just reach out, just stretch out his hand and she would be there. She was not gone, he was sure of that. You only died. There was another life waiting for you, another existence. The Lord in His Wisdom decided when it was time for you to begin it.
Won’t be long, he thought, I don’t know how I know that, but I know it. I don’t want to live forever any more, anyway. I did when you were around, Jo. But not anymore. He shook his head. Got to cheer up, he told himself. Tell her something a bit more cheerful, for God’s sake.
‘Andrew’s going over to Washington,’ he said. ‘Didn’t tell you that, did I? Aims to bring little Ruth Chalfont down here for the holidays. Hell, I wish you could have met her, Jo. She’s just the nicest thing you ever saw. Did I tell you about her already? I guess I must have done. Well, it won’t hurt if I tell you again. She’s maybe the same height as you, Jo, only her hair’s real blonde, almost white. Blue eyes she’s got, and smart! Her folks sent her to college. Set a lot of store by education, Quakers do. They’re good people, the Chalfonts. They think real well of our boys, Jo. Figure you’ll be pleased to know that.’
Got to stop calling them boys, he thought. They were grown men. Hell, I reckon I’ll always think of them as boys. Men outside, but inside the same little boys, the ones I taught to ride and to shoot and to try to tell the truth. They once thought I knew the answers to all the questions in the world, he reflected. Well, they don’t think that any more.
‘You think they love me, Jo?’ he asked his wife. ‘I think they probably like me all right. I always thought they loved you so much there wasn’t a lot left over for me. I never minded, you understand. I never minded at all.’ He shook his head. ‘By God, Jo, men are damned funny critters and no mistake, aren’t they?’
He got up, knocked out the ashes from his pipe. Got to go now, Jo, he thought. Got to get back to the house and listen to them all jaw about the coming troubles. You know what they ask me, Jo? They ask me, when the war comes – you notice they say when, now, not if – they say, who you going to sell your horses to, David Strong, the North or the South? They say to Sam, you’re a man knows all about guns, Sam Strong. Who you going to give that knowledge to? Which cause you going to support? As if a gun or a horse knows or cares who uses it? As if you aid a cause by selling a horse or a gun! Like I said, Jo, men are damned funny critters, and for all sorts of reasons. Well, enough of that. Can’t spend the whole day wool-gathering. He said good-bye to his wife and walked down the hill towards the big house.
The big, airy dining room with its long polished table and stout chairs was noisy and warm. Sunlight streamed in through the tall Georgian windows looking out across the terraced garden to the river valley, where willow, elm and slender beech trees marked the threading course of Mountain Run. Sitting in the old carver at the head of the table, David found himself thinking, yet again, that the Strongs had become a tribe. He imagined Grandpa Davy looking down on them. ‘My God, where did they all come from?’ he’d be saying. ‘The whole fan damily,’ Joanna had dubbed them. They had all come down for Big Jed’s funeral and stayed. No point coming all that way with Christmas just round the corner, as Sam said. One more Sunday, David thought, and it’s Christmas Day. It would be the first one in which David sat at the head of the table in what had always been Big Jed’s chair.
Well, he thought, I suppose I’m just going to have to get used to being head of the family, same as I had to get used to the idea of Jed and Andrew being grown men. Yet still it seemed like only yesterday to David that he had watched the two of them romping across the fields with fishing poles. He remembered the time little Andrew had latched on to his first catfish: didn’t know whether to shout with joy or wet his breeches, he was so excited. It was as though it had all happened in another existence, on some other planet.
With Sam and his family staying, with Andrew’s fiancé Ruth Chalfont visiting, the big house was once again full of noise and laughter. The boys – all right, men – had embarked on a holiday round of riding, visiting and calls at the tavern in Culpeper. Andrew and Ruth spent a lot of their time walking. They didn’t seem to notice how muddy it was. Love, David thought. Love makes the world go blah.
‘Well, David, say grace and let’s get our eating done!’
Sam’s wife Abby said, in that direct way she had. ‘Else we’ll be late for church.’
‘If we’re late, Abby, I don’t doubt but what God will forgive us,’ David said with a smile. ‘After all, that’s His specialty.’
‘You let Pa be, now, Aunt Abby,’ Jed grinned. They all knew Abby was a mite ‘pushy’. Probably had to be with Sam. She enjoyed nothing better than a good argument. The best thing was to head her off before she got started, which was what Jed was doing right now David realized. Hope he doesn’t think he’s got to protect me from my own brother’s wife, David thought, amused by the idea. Abby might be outspoken, even argumentative, but she hadn’t got a mean bone in her body. Sam Strong was a damned lucky man to be married to her.
‘Hurry’s like worry,’ Sam said from the far end of the table. ‘Gives you something to do, but it doesn’t get you anyplace.’
Sam, Sammy, where have the years gone? David wondered as he looked at his brother. Sam looked older than his forty-five years. He was inclined to portliness and his hair was prematurely gray. Both tended to give him a distinguished air, a look of prosperity at odds with the reality. Sam was making a living, but you couldn’t get rich mending guns. He’d always been Grandpa Davy’s pet, Sam had. It was to Sam the old man had passed on all his own skills, teaching him patiently for long hours in the little workshop out behind the house he kept for tinkering with guns. Grandpa Davy had been a gunsmith and a gunsmith’s son. Sam was the one who now kept the family tradition alive.
‘Well, Jed, you aiming to call on Janie Maxwell while you’re home?’ Andrew asked. ‘I seem to recall you were kind of smitten with her last time.’
‘Ah, she’s just a kid, Bo,’ Jed smiled. ‘Same as you.’
‘Not so much of the “kid”,’ Andrew grinned. ‘I’m big enough to whup you, you don’t mind your manners!’
‘You and whose army?’ Jed said. ‘Quit showin’ off for Ruth.’
‘Don’t do any such thing!’ Ruth Chalfont smiled. ‘I like it.’
She was a pretty little thing, blonde and petite, with a lively sense of fun that David had not expected. Somehow you got the notion that Quakers were deadly serious, full of preachifying. Well, little Ruth was not like that and neither were her parents, Jacob and Eleanor Chalfont. David liked them all very much: especially Eleanor, a damned attractive woman.
The good-natured banter around the table was a little forced, but that was understandable, he supposed. Big Jed’s death was still very fresh in their minds. He was gone, but he was still with them: his portrait looked down on them from the wall. The artist had painted him wearing the buckskins and fur hat he’d worn on the ascent of the Missouri with Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, but had not properly caught the vibrant presence of the man, except in the eyes. Big Jed seemed to regard them all with satisfied benevolence. David Strong bowed his head and folded his hands.
‘Lord’, he said. ‘We work long hours to plant the seed and nourish our stock, and we all try hard to earn what we eat. You give us the sun and the rain and the warm spring weather and we thank You for Your help. Amen.’ He looked up. ‘Pass the biscuits, Abby.’
They fell to with a will. Mealtimes at Washington Farm were always an occasion because Aunt Betty, the cook, was renowned throughout eastern Virginia for her table. She had served presidents and princes, and was as proud of her kitchen as her husband Moses, David’s manservant, confidant and friend, was proud of the Strong family’s history. He probably knew more about it than any one of them, David thought. He had made Moses and Betty free on the day of his marriage to Joanna in May 1831, a good two years before the long crusade of Wilberforce, Macaulay and Clarkson culminated in the abolition of slavery in all British possessions.
‘Little Jed – Hell, I guess we’ll be calling you plain Jed from now on, won’t we, boy? – Jed here’s been telling me about this John Brown business,’ Sam said. ‘Now what do you make of it all, David?’
‘What I make of it is what any fool with a nose on his face would make of it,’ David said. ‘That damned idiot Henry Wise has made as big a hash of things as any man could make!’
‘I agree with Pa,’ Andrew said. ‘Why in Hades did he have to make such a meal of it? If he’d only treated Brown like the common criminal he is, instead of elevating him to political status—’
‘Well!’ Abby sniffed. ‘You think that fine man nothing more than a common criminal?’
‘How about charlatan, then?’
‘If he’s such a charlatan,’ Sam said heavily, ‘tell me why his hanging has caused such a furor? D’you know that they rang bells at Concord on the hour of his death? Concord, where your own grandfather fought against the British!’
‘Grandpa Davy didn’t—’ Jed began, but Abby’s voice drowned his intended correction.
‘Are you aware, Andrew, that Emerson has called John Brown a saint? Did you know that no less a person than Henry David Thoreau dubs him an angel of light?’
‘That doesn’t make him either, Abby,’ David said. ‘I must say I lean towards Andrew’s point of view. I can’t see why people are trying to canonize the man. His intentions were perfectly clear. He was just stupid.’
‘And you will no doubt tell us why,’ Abby said tartly. She was as much of an abolitionist as Joanna had been. The slaves must be freed. It didn’t matter who got hurt; it didn’t matter how much it cost; it didn’t matter if the world went to Hell in a hand basket. The slaves must be freed and there was no argument against it. Abby and Sam had run slaves to freedom on the so-called “underground railway” through Kansas. Both of them tended to see slavery in only one dimension. Of course, they lived in New York. That made a difference, too.
‘Any soldier could tell you that, Aunt Abby,’ Jed said. ‘Just look at the mistakes he made.’ He held up a hand and ticked off John Brown’s tactical errors, one finger at a time, as merciless as a West Point examiner. ‘One, he didn’t secure his lines of retreat. Two, he made no provision for holding his position. Three, even if a thousand slaves had rallied to his banner at Harper’s Ferry, he had nothing on which to feed them. And four, he made no advance plans. He hadn’t stocked or fortified any strong point to which he could retreat in the face of the army – and he had to know he would eventually confront it.’
‘Maybe he just plain didn’t give a damn.’
The speaker was Sam’s oldest boy, Travis. It was the first time either of Sam’s sons had spoken all through the meal. Travis was the wild one. Tall, with hair bleached the white-yellow of corn in late summer, Travis had spiteful blue eyes that always looked as if he was daring someone to take issue with him, to pick a fight. He’d spit in Satan’s eye on a bet, David thought. The diametric opposite of his brother, Henry. Henry was plump, glum, dispirited-looking. He always wore the expression of someone who knows his ship will never come in.
‘There’s that,’ he allowed. ‘He may just not have cared.’
‘One bold stroke and on to glory, eh?’ Jed said. ‘That the way you see it, Trav?’
‘That’s the only road to glory there is,’ Travis said, eyes wary, as if somehow he expected every word he spoke to entrap him. ‘He might have pulled it off, Uncle David. You look at the way the army’s spread to Hellan’gone all over the country. Shoot! There ain’t more than fifteen companies atween here and Florida. All the rest are on the frontier. Whole damned army don’t amount to more than about thirteen thousand men. Maybe old John just figured he could raise that many slaves an’ go marchin’ up Pennsylvania Avenue and knock on President Buchanan’s door. “Good morning, Mr. President,” he’d say. “How’d you like to free the slaves, or would you rather get your head shot off?”.’
He had a wicked grin, the white teeth like a scar against the dark brown of his skin. He acted out the words with relish, like a man who wished he could play them in real life. David caught Ruth Chalfont staring at Travis, eyes wide with admiration. Travis could be damned attractive to a simple, wholesome girl like Ruth. Better keep an eye on that, he told himself.
‘Trav’s right,’ Jed said. He and Travis were the same age but for a few days. They had always been close friends, all through childhood. David had sometimes wondered which of them was the wilder. Now they were older, he knew. Jed was every bit as much of a fighter as Travis. But Jed would never be more than reckless. Travis? Well, it was David’s judgment that if the pressure ever hit Travis in a certain way, he’d snap. He had that light in his eyes. He shook his head impatiently at his meandering thoughts and put his mind to what Jed was saying.
‘ … any real fighting, Congress is going to have to take note of what General Scott has been telling them for years. We need a regular army of—’
‘—Oh, come on, Jed!’ Andrew said, testily. ‘Don’t let’s get started on that “we need a bigger army” business. Somebody ought to pension that old fool Scott off. He’s past it. He wants to enlarge the army to be ready for troubles that won’t occur unless he enlarges the army.’
‘Speaking personally, I wouldn’t mind the army being a mite larger, Andrew,’ Sam said with a slow smile. ‘Maybe then I’d be able to sell them some rifles.’
Sam had spent nearly two years working on a design for a repeating rifle. He couldn’t get a hearing in Washington, much less an interview with the Ordnance Department. People thought a repeating rifle was about as realistic an idea as a flying machine. Even his own family were not altogether convinced that Sam’s idea had any merit, but the Strong loyalties would never permit its being said.
‘We could have used repeaters down at Harper’s Ferry, I can tell you,’ Jed said. ‘When do you suppose you might begin to manufacture in bulk, Uncle Sam?’
‘About the same time John Brown gets up out of the grave and gives a sermon,’ Sam said glumly, ‘the way things are looking right now.’
‘Well, if there secession,’ Andrew said. ‘Won’t the government need all the weapons it can lay its hands on?’
‘If, if?’ Travis said. ‘There’ll be secession, for sure. John Brown has taken care of that all right.’
‘You’ve been in the South, Henry,’ Jed said. ‘What’s the feeling down there now?’
Henry looked up as if he was surprised that anyone would want his opinion about anything. His thick eyeglasses glinted in the bright sunlight, giving his face an almost oriental look. There was a sheen of perspiration on his upper lip. For no reason David recalled that Travis had contemptuously dubbed his younger brother ‘Mary Ann’. It was cruel, but it had stuck.
‘I can tell you this,’ Henry said. ‘There are places in Alabama where you can be tarred and feathered for no offence more awful than having a Yankee accent. And lots of places where it’s dangerous to speak up against slavery.’ He was in the artillery, stationed at Fort Sumter in South Carolina. He had told them it was like being on an island in the middle of a shark-infested sea.
‘Well, I can see why,’ Andrew said. ‘People down there can hardly not notice all the tub-thumping and flag-waving that’s going on up North. They likely see that as evidence the North wants to fight. Even around these parts there are plenty of men who look at a Yankee and see someone who hates all Southerners and only wants to encourage the slaves to revolt.’
‘Nonsense, boy!’ Sam said. ‘Nobody in the North wants servile revolt. But the South has to realize that abolition is an historical inevitability!’
‘Nothing’s inevitable, Sam,’ David said quietly.
‘Abolition is,’ Abby said, as if she’d had the news directly from God. David smiled. ‘Abby, do you have any idea at all how much emancipation would cost the South?’
‘I’ll bet you’re just about to tell us,’ Abby said, tart as a June gooseberry.
‘A billion dollars in slave property,’ David said, ignoring the jibe. ‘The disruption of the labor system. Outfitting the slaves to become self-supporting. Enormous social upheaval. You can’t imagine what it would all cost! Hundreds of millions of dollars!’
‘And how much of that bill d’you reckon the North would foot, Pa?’ Travis asked, his blue eyes glinting maliciously.
‘Well!’ Abby said, her lips pressed thin. ‘I never thought I’d live to hear Joanna Strong’s husband and sons talking like pro-slavers! Never!’
‘I’m not pro-slavery, Abby,’ David said. ‘Nor abolitionist, either. You ought to know that as well as any woman. But I’ll tell you what I am: I’m in favor of common sense, and frankly, there’s not a lot of it around right now.’
‘Amen to that!’ Jed chorused.
‘All right, then,’ Sam said. ‘What do you suggest?’
‘As long as slavery pays in dollars, it will flourish, Sam,’ David said, getting up from the table. ‘Like all the other evil things which flourish because of money. The only thing that will make slavery unprofitable is machinery. Multiply the amount of machinery in the South and the slaves will disappear, for the same reason that unskilled labor has disappeared from the Illinois wheat farms – because it’s unprofitable! You mark my words, Sam. The minute slavery becomes unprofitable, you’ll see the masters running away from the slaves a damned sight faster than you’ll ever see slaves running from their masters. All right, let’s go to church!’
He lifted his coat off the hook by the door and put it on, his movements almost angry, as though he was annoyed with himself for saying as much as he had. Outside, the servants had already brought around two surreys, one for Sam and Abby, and the other for David. He always rode alone. The empty seat next to his was Joanna’s, and no one else would ever occupy it. Ruth and Andrew climbed up behind Abby. Jed, Henry and Travis had their own horses. David watched as Sam climbed heavily into his surrey, which sank on its springs as he settled into the seat.
‘It’s no use, David,’ Sam said. He took hold of the reins. ‘You can’t sit on the fence for ever, you know.’
‘Maybe not,’ David said grimly. ‘But I’m sure as Satan not climbing down until I’ve got to! Hey up, there!’
He flicked the whip across the rumps of his pair of matched bays and they moved smoothly into a trot. They were fine thoroughbreds, as were most of the horses at Washington Farm. The Strong strain was long and studded with honors: the entire wall of one stable was lined with trophies and bright rosette ribbons. The two horses in front of him today were a pair David had hand-raised from colts. Beauty and Treasure he called them. He loved them quite as much as any human he knew.
When they came out of church, the minister, Frank Jones, was waiting to bid them farewell and give them his blessing. He was a man of medium height, with graying hair and a perennially hopeful expression. His eyes had the sad look of someone who still believes in miracles, but knows he will never witness one.
‘Enjoy the sermon, David?’ he asked.
‘Not especially,’ David said. ‘Seems to me preachers ought not to choose texts calculated to raise people’s temperatures.’ Frank Jones had chosen as the text for his sermon Isaiah Chapter five, verse twenty: Woe unto them that call evil good and good evil.
‘Surely you can’t believe that God wants his ministers to shrink from what is going on around them?’
‘I’m not qualified to comment on what God expects,’ David said. ‘But I know how I feel.’
‘I sometimes wonder why you bother coming to church at all,’ the minister said exasperatedly.
‘I come because I promised Joanna before she died that I’d see the children went to church regular,’ David replied. ‘And that’s what I’m doing. She never made me promise to like it. Excuse me, Reverend. I see Dan Holmes over there.’
Dan Holmes’ farm lay on the northern side of the pike, a little further out of Culpeper than Washington Farm. He was a big, fleshy man who smoked cigars and smelled of bay rum and horses and whiskey. He was blunt and truthful and David liked him a great deal.
‘David,’ he said, acknowledging David’s greeting. ‘See you got your whole family with you. That Andrew’s fiancé, the blonde girl?’
‘Name’s Ruth Chalfont,’ David said. ‘Pretty isn’t she?’
‘As a picture,’ Dan said. ‘As a picture.’
‘Hear tell she’s a Quaker,’ Carrie Holmes said. ‘Don’t she mind going into our church?’
‘Hell, no, Carrie,’ David grinned. ‘She knows all us Strongs is heathens.’ The boys were mingling with the crowd of worshippers grouped around the little square in front of the church. Sunday morning was a good time for catching up on all the local gossip, even a little sparking while the older people talked.
‘Hear tell young Jed was over to Harper’s Ferry during the late excitement,’ Dan said. ‘Seen the hangin’, they say. That right?’
‘He was posted there end of November.’ David said. ‘Apparently there was a lot of talk about a rescue. Turned out that’s all it was – talk.’
‘Maybe he’ll come over for supper,’ Dan said. ‘Tell us about it.’
‘If Carrie’s planning on cooking a ham any time soon, might be I’ll mosey over there with him,’ David said.
‘Big of you,’ Holmes grinned. ‘Why are you so good to me?’
‘I guess it’s on account of I know you don’t get a lot of excitement, Dan,’ David grinned. ‘After all, a man your age got to take it easy—’He dodged, grinning, as Holmes took a mock swing at him.
‘You heading back directly?’ Dan asked.
‘Soon as everyone’s ready.’
‘Looks to me like you might have some difficulty prisin’ your boy Jed away from little Janie Maxwell,’ Dan grinned, jerking his chin towards the group of young men clustered around the Maxwell girl. She was tall, slender and elegant and dressed in the height of fashion. Her mother was determined that Jane would be a belle, just as she had been. Hannah Terrill Maxwell was the granddaughter of French aristocrats who had fled Santo Domingo during the slave rebellion of 1794. Socially she considered herself quite a cut above most of the other families around Culpeper. They said she had been a beauty, although when you looked at her persimmon face and the bitter lines around her eyes and mouth, it was hard to imagine. David lifted his hat to her and was favored with a frosty smile. Not for the first time he wished he could be a fly on the wall of the Maxwell house long enough to find out what happened when the blinds were drawn. You always figured you knew something about the life of your friends and neighbors. You always learned, much later, that you’d never known a damned thing.
‘Trade holdin’ up?’ he heard Dan say.
‘We’re selling everything that can walk,’ he told his friend. ‘There’s enormous demand for good animals. How about you?’
‘At least we’re not paying for April’s seed with last October’s harvest, like some I know,’ Dan said. ‘How was your Thanksgiving?’
‘All right,’ David said. ‘But the boys were away. It wasn’t very festive.’
‘Where was Andrew?’
‘He was in Washington, visiting the Chalfonts.’
‘He still take the same view of all this fighting talk?’
‘He does. He says nobody who’s ever seen warfare could want it. Says it’s hotheads who think of battle as something glorious who’ll get us fighting, not men who have actually experienced it.’
‘Jed feel the same way?’
‘No.’
‘He’s been at the sharp end, too.’
‘Aye,’ David said. It wasn’t his job to defend Andrew’s viewpoint or Jed’s either. They could do so quite adequately themselves. He got out his pipe and made a performance out of filling it with tobacco.
‘You think I’m wrongheaded, Dan, don’t you?’ he said. ‘You think I’m stubborn.’
‘A bit,’ Dan said.
‘A man is entitled to make up his own mind,’ David went on. ‘To decide if he’s for something, against it or neutral. He oughtn’t to be harangued into a decision by priests and politicians.’
‘I know how you feel,’ Dan said. ‘It’s going to be a hard line to hold, that’s all. It’s going to be hard to stay out of it.’
‘I don’t mind it being hard,’ David said. ‘As long as folks just let me be. All I want to do is raise my horses, mow my hay and raise my crops. I’ve got sons I’d like to see settled down with families of their own. I don’t want war, Dan, and I don’t want anything to do with those who are clamoring for it.’
‘Jed’s in the army,’ Holmes observed. ‘What will he do?’
‘He can make his own mind up,’ David replied. He realized that he did not really know what Jed would do if there was a war. Take his orders, do what they had trained him to do, he supposed. He looked across the street. The group of young men was still clustered around Janie Maxwell: Jed, Travis, young Tom Cosgrove, even vapid Henry. Andrew was standing to one side talking to Ruth. Jed was talking animatedly to Janie Maxwell. She was as pretty as a six-week foal, he thought, and she knew it. Off to one side, Janie’s two brothers, Paul and David, stood glowering protectively.
As David watched he saw Paul Maxwell say something to Jed. Janie Maxwell pouted as Jed’s attention left her. He saw Andrew move to Jed’s side, laying a hand on Jed’s arm. Paul Maxwell looked darkly angry and he was saying something that made Jed’s head come up. David saw Ruth Chalfont’s eyes widen, and then, suddenly, shockingly, he saw Paul Maxwell’s hand move. He saw Andrew’s head turn as the slap hit him and he thought, Oh, sweet Jesus Christ, there’ll be a killing over this!