A Moment in the Sun

BEACHHEAD

Nobody is shooting at them. Royal has been imagining it, dreading it, the green mat of jungle facing them crowded with armed Spanish, every one of them sighting his rifle at a spot dead between his eyes. But nobody is shooting, nobody here but a passel of sick-looking locals, nary a one of them got shoes on their feet. At least that, with all the orders shouted and screamed, with the waves washing over the rowboats and the mess with the livestock. The muscles in Royal’s stomach ache from all he’s thrown up on the big ship, his legs feel weak and it is hotter than it ever got in Tampa, but as he lunges out of the boat, waves breaking around his knees, and hurries after the others onto the little strip of sandy beach he is flooded with relief to be here, on solid ground, on Cuba.

“Company H stack rifles here!” shouts Sergeant Jacks, standing on a small rise in a swarm of mosquitoes he chooses to ignore. “Then get on those crates. Move!”

“I don’t see any of the white soldiers unloading cargo,” says Junior. He and Royal butt their rifles into the sand, bringing the muzzles together, and Little Earl adds his to make the pyramid stand.

“Somebody got to do it.”

Junior follows back to the boats. “But it’s always us.”

Royal shrugs as he wades out, then staggers backward into the surf as a crate of ammunition is pushed into his arms. “Didn’t send us down here to sit on the beach and eat cocoanuts.”

In the drawing a barefoot insurrecto stands behind Uncle’s massive calf, sticking his tongue out. Just in front of Uncle’s knee is Teddy in his campaign outfit, gloved hands on hips, glaring. The object of scorn is a Spanish don, greasy moustache ends dragging the ground, peeking up timorously at the towering American Icon whose top-hatted shadow covers him.

A NEW “BULLY” ON THE BLOCK

But he’ll have to start again. It’s impossible not to sweat on the paper here, to smear, and the Cuban isn’t right yet. He’s drawn a Mexican before, but the sombrero is different here and what cactus there is grows only a few inches from the ground. And the Chief is not fond of Mexicans. There are Cubans in Tampa of course, cigar kings and soapbox politicians, but they look nothing like this motley rabble grinning at the edges of the American throng, looking for something loose and preferably not terribly heavy to steal.

And then every few moments one of the damned illustrators drifts by from the operations at the shoreline to peer over his shoulder, maybe chuckle, and say how wonderful it would be to just be a lampoon man and not have to render the realities of life.

It is not meant kindly.

Remington is here, glued to the Rough Riders, the younger illustrators all kowtowing each time he passes, and Glackens from McClure’s, and Howard Christy from Collier’s and Macpherson drawing for the London papers, and a claque of photographers hung with leather-covered boxes and even a fellow from the Vitagraph company who thinks he’ll make a motion picture of the fighting.

The quandary is which type of insurrecto to draw. All the ones here to greet them are barefoot and starving and wear tattered white linen pajamas and slouch hats, the wide brims rolled back in the front so as not to hamper their aim. They carry their machetes, but for the few who sport captured Spanish Mauser rifles or ancient Winchesters, and have a beaten, hangdog look to them. Something less than your ideal plucky freedom fighter. A handful look like his Mexican or have the long El Greco faces of dignified European gentlemen, sans monocle and trapped in beggar’s rags. But more vexing, two out of three are clearly negro, and many of the others some mongrel mix. The Chief has not been promoting a slave rebellion, or an endorsement of miscegenation. He is sailing down on his yacht, due any day now, and Crane and a few of the other wags insist no real fighting will be allowed till he comes ashore. Perhaps when presented with the facts, when he sees the actual ebony-skinned, barefooted article — but no. Higher ideals are at stake here.

This place, Bacquiri, Daiquiri, something like that, is pleasant enough but for the heat and the mosquitoes. They were expecting a hot reception, and the Navy guns plied the coastal hills for a good while, a fireworks exhibition that perhaps induced the Dons to scurry inland. The only real excitement was the unloading of the beasts, which, in the absence of a landing dock, had to be improvised. A mule or horse would be led to the cargo port and given a glance at the beach, some four hundred yards distant, then shocked on the hindquarters with a blacksnake whip, the animal bolting forward into an awkward plunge. Quite a bit of braying and screaming when they first went in, but then each got down to the grim business of survival, many considering the floating transports to be their only safe haven and circling back to try to climb on board. There had been a particularly persistent mule just below him, somehow managing to lift its forelegs clear of the swells and thump the hull for a solid hour before going under. Teamsters and sailors were out among them in rowboats, talking softly, trying to herd them, occasionally managing to rope and guide a few to shore. Fitzpatrick was beside him at the rail, sketching furiously, doing an especially nice job on their eyes, huge with terror, and with the already drowned rolling about on the surface. And glancing over at the Cartoonist’s own empty hands as if to say, You’re not getting this?

Oh, he can draw a mule, all right. His Democratic donkey is second only to old Nast’s, and the Chief loved his Bryan riding backward on a Populist nag. But he likes to think he is more an interpreter of events, an editorialist, colleague to Davis in his pith helmet and Crane and Creelman, to Stephen Bonsal and Poultney Bigelow and the other correspondents who stand querulous in the seething mass of blue uniforms, pumping the regulars for information and priming the volunteers for quotables, colleague to men of ideas, rather than a mere draftsman.

“Look there,” he said at one point, and Fitz was obliged to reckon with the despatch boat chugging past with a half-dozen Kodak fiends and the Vitagraph man cranking his bulky apparatus, all capturing the bedlam on celluloid. “There’s your future, old man,” he added, in what was meant to be a kidding tone. “You’ll go the way of the buffalo.”

So no bloated equines, but he has done a sketch of one of the scurrying land crabs, terrible little brutes with their eyes, in perpetual astonishment, suspended above their bodies on little stalks. Very promising — perhaps a Spanish diplomat, or one of their key generals, or even Spain itself as a crab, side-stepping in terror beneath Uncle’s giant impending footstep. It is a shame they’ve recalled General Weyler, the “Butcher” sobriquet license for wonderfully gory analogies, cleaver in hand, dripping innocent Cuban blood, clasping horrified black-eyed maidens to his offal-smeared apron.

Keep Your Claws Off! Uncle will say, or some play on scuttling.

It needs work.

Wooden crates of ammunition are being hauled ashore, negro soldiers staggering wet to their armpits, while sergeants everywhere bark regiment numbers and company letters and order their milling warriors to fall in. The men are casual, light-hearted even, no doubt relieved to be making the landing without Spanish interference and exuberant to be free of the stifling, overcrowded transports. Like a football rally, American boys all in blue, or an especially crowded 4th of July picnic, and if not for the steaming heat you could imagine it was the Jersey shore.

He ran into Rudy Dirks in Tampa, Dirks who draws the Katzenjammers, wearing the uniform of one of the volunteer regiments, and Post who’d sketched at the Journal is here with the 71st New York, a private in arms. Taking things a bit far, he feels, though maybe for the German it is a declaration of his patriotism. Personally, he needs to take the Olympian view, to distill the essence of a situation, to perch on a general’s shoulder, if need be, and view the larger canvas. He has done several drawings of Shafter, his favorite the one where the commander’s bulk is sinking the flagship of the invasion fleet. But the Old Man has so nurtured this war, is so thoroughly in the jingo camp, that in everything he’s submitted Shafter is merely “substantial” rather than the gout-ridden colossus he’s made to appear in the Havana papers.

In the drawing, now, the insurrecto is scrawnier, clinging onto Uncle’s massive thigh, not even a machete to protect himself. And his face—

The Chief’s favorite, Davenport, is not here, nor is Fred Opper or any of the other big-money cartoonists. He is the only one who has made the voyage, not in uniform but here nonetheless, with beasts of burden still washing ashore, some of the colored Ninth detailed to drag them out of the surf. The native militia are offering doughboys huge green bananas from their flour-sack carryalls, offering short stalks of sugarcane and exotic fruit, hoping to trade for tinned beef, and the strip of beach is just as crowded and disorganized as the dock at Tampa the day they left. This, this whole thing, could be a disaster, a folly. A great mulatto approaches him, smiling, holding out one of the oblong yellow-green fruits.

“Mango?” says the giant insurrecto.

He waves his pen in the air to decline. “No, thank you very much.” He tilts his head back and closes his eyes then, feels the relief of a slight breeze off the ocean, and tries to imagine the Cuban face.

FORAY

It is unseasonably cool, chilly even, a stiff breeze coming in off the Cape Fear as the cab rolls along Water Street to the train station. It will be colder up there, Harry knows, snow eventually, and his coat will be inadequate. Perhaps his first purchase in the great city. He has only the new-bought wall trunk and his old leather satchel, amazed at how few possessions seemed vital enough to warrant inclusion. The wheel shop is only padlocked, no sign indicating his absence or likely return.

The familiar sights roll by — Harry knows the owners of most of the commercial properties, the residents of at least half of the private dwellings — and he muses that away from the noise and smell of riverside industry Wilmington is a lovely town. But compared to the northern metropolis he has read and imagined so much about, only that. A town.

He wonders if there will be trees.

The cabman is one of the sullen rather than cheerful types, a tubercular old negro who sighed and staggered dramatically as he lifted the snugly packed trunk into his vehicle. His horse needs washing. The Judge will be at his Front Street club now, trading stories with his contemporaries, and then on to his nap in the leather chair by the south window. Harry’s note, rewritten several times and left at home in the Judge’s box by the door, presents an orderly rationale for his departure. Harry is not, in fact, getting any younger. Opportunities do exist, up there, which may never be available in Wilmington. And it is his own money, after all, that is being ventured, his own life to lead.

And yet he feels furtive as they pass the busy Sprunt works, cotton press slamming bales together, and roll into the yard before the Atlantic Coast Line depot.

“Wait here a moment, please,” he says to the moping cabman as he carefully lowers himself to the ground. Train schedules have been known to change.

He does not recognize the station agent, which is a blessing. Tuck Sim-mons, who mans the booth until noon, is a familiar of the Judge, having procured the position through the old man’s kind agency after his cigar emporium was destroyed, uninsured, in a suspicious blaze. Wilmington is full of such gentlemen, beholden to his father for this or that act of generosity, and as a boy it seemed a wonderful thing. Only lately has it become oppressive, Harry unable to miss, behind the effusive greetings and inquiries as to the Judge’s health, the silent evaluation.

He must be such a disappointment to the old gentleman.

The agent sits behind his window, contemplating the front page of the Messenger and shaking his head.

“Hell in a hand basket,” he mutters before looking up. “Somebody got to make a stand.”

It is suddenly very close, though it is only Harry and the station agent and the empty benches inside. He removes his hat.

“May I inquire,” he begins, though he has three printed schedules folded in his pocket, though he has all but memorized the timetable, “how one would proceed from here to New York City?”

The agent cocks his head to one side, looking Harry over. “My, my, my,” he says, then glances up at something that must be posted on the wall above the window.

“Monday, Wednesday, and Friday there’s a Florida Special coming through, northbound — it leave here at one-ten, stops in Wilson and Rocky Mount before you reach Richmond. At Richmond you change from the ACL to the Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Potomac, take you to Washington. From there you switch to the Pennsylvania Railroad, trains to New York nearly every hour.”

Harry nods at each point of the itinerary. “And the fare?” He has it counted out, folded in an envelope, in another pocket.

“To Richmond, or all the way through?”

“The entire journey.”

“Private compartment?”

“I can share.”

The agent smiles at him. He knows the Judge, knows who Harry is. He must. Harry feels the perspiration on his lip, feels his color coming up. Nobody of his immediate acquaintance, other than Niles, has ever ventured beyond Charlottesville, Virginia, and certainly none has entertained the idea of actually living in what the Judge still refers to as “enemy territory.” The few yankees Harry has met — mostly snowbirds on their way to one of Mr. Flagler’s sunshine resorts — have been less intimidating than he expected, though of course not in their native element. All have commented on the charm of an accent he was not aware he possessed, and assured him that he would be regarded in the North as a creature of refreshing novelty. Rara avis.

“If you were to travel on a single ticket,” says the station agent, “it would cost you sixteen dollars and seventy-five cents. Meals not included.”

It will cost me a great deal more than that, thinks Harry. His legs, both the healthy and the malformed one, do not feel as if they can support his weight. Perhaps he is coming down with something.

“I thank you very much,” he says to the agent as if his idle curiosity has been satisfied, then turns to go. His footsteps, uneven as always, sound very loud on the depot floorboards as he makes his retreat. The Judge will be at cigars and brandy by now, and there is ample time to return home and cover his tracks.

The balers at the Sprunt works seem to be operating inside his head as he steps into the yard, pounding, throbbing. He is short of breath. It is the farthest he has gotten, the last attempt only a long sight-seeing ride past the depot and then up to visit his mother’s grave at Pine Forest. He is ashamed of himself, but not enough to turn and march back inside to make the purchase.

“Not today,” Harry smiles sheepishly to the cabman, who does not seem to care.

EL CANEY

They are up and moving before sunrise. No breakfast, not even coffee. The order is silence, though Royal and the others are too tired to have much to say. It has been days of marching since the landing, marching in the heat and the bone-soaking rain and at night only rolling the wet poncho and blanket and tent-half canvas out on the ground to try to stay dry on at least one side and feeding the mosquitoes or out on sentry. At night there are shots, shouting, crabs rustling in the underbrush. And then that whole day spent hurrying in circles in the jungle, trying to relieve the ambushed Rough Riders at Las Guasimas but never finding them, lost, a dozen men falling from the heat and Royal nearly one of them. It is a wet heat that sits heavy on you, like being a steamed oyster says Junior, only oysters don’t carry forty pounds of supplies and a horse-collar blanket roll over their necks.

Parrots and tocororos begin their squawking in the canopy above as the men form twos and start down the pathway that is being called a road. Light filters in through the branches, giving shape to the trees, and by the time they come out into the first canefield the morning mists are rising, then thinning to reveal the distant Sierra Maestras. Royal had never seen mountains, never left the Carolina coast before the Army and Fort Missoula, and these don’t look real to him, their slope too sudden, too steep. He is already sweating under his sodden uniform, haversack strap digging in, already feeling tired when a squad of Cuban fighters lopes past their line. The men and boys are dressed in thin, light cloth, a few with sandals, most not, and every shade under the sun. A few look like white men, a few like the Chinese he’s seen in picture books, and a few are blacker than any man in North Carolina. Achille Dieudonné from G Company who speaks Creole French and border Mex says these dark black ones are Haitians, floated over on rafts from that island where the going is even rougher.

These Cubans are smaller, mostly, than the Americans, and very thin, though that is exaggerated by how little they carry — a sugar sack and a machete, maybe a rifle, their cartridge belts rigged from stiff cloth or no belt at all, just a leather pouch worn round the neck holding the few bullets they have. Thin, but nothing like the ones back at Firmeza, the reconcentrados they found behind barbed wire who looked even more miserable than the drawings in the newspapers. Royal has never seen people so poor, so starving, white, black, and brown thrown in together, hollow-eyed with their bones poking up under their skin.

“I wouldn’t treat a dog that way,” said Too Tall Coleman as they passed. The people only watched them, mute, too wasted to muster an expression.

There is a sound ahead, a deep, coughing, compressing of air like truncated thunder. Four of them, one just after the other. Sergeant Jacks turns to call softly over his shoulder.

“The dance has begun, gentlemen,” he says. “Let’s keep moving here.”

They continue marching, in and out of the thick trees, and Royal can tell by the mood of the sergeants that today it will be real. Last night they were given extra rounds to carry, two hundred more he has twisted into the spare socks in his pack, and the chaplain was busy and the officers were huddling together with maps. The mosquitoes are up now and at their business but Royal knows to crush them not swat them and to strap his load tight so it doesn’t rattle and to not ask questions. He and Junior and Little Earl are rookies but not so green as they once were, real soldiers now except for the one thing and after today that will be done.

They have been marching almost three hours when volunteers begin to appear, coming in the opposite direction in twos and threes, men from the 2nd Massachusetts who have been pulled off the firing line. Many are wounded, pale and a little stunned, a few shot through the body and walking as if it is a conscious effort to hold themselves together, their gaze gone inward.

“Don’t bother, fellas,” says one man with a bloody crease across his stubbled cheek. “They’re sittin up there where you can’t even see em, pourin it down on us. You won’t have no more show than we did.”

“Volunteers can’t see through their own smoke, is what,” says Sergeant Jacks flatly after the man has passed. “Got them old shit Winchesters. Black powder will draw enemy lead like bees to honey. Smart to get them off the field.”

Jacks sees another man moving toward them against the flow, a top sergeant like himself, with a sunburned face, holding one arm close to his body.

“What they dealing out?”

The sunburned sergeant stops ahead of them. “Maybe a couple Hotchkiss guns up there, Mausers.” He grabs his wounded arm by the wrist and raises it to display a small black stain on the bicep of his uniform shirt. “Put one right through me.”

Jacks cocks his head at the wound. “Mauser ball make a nice clean hole, don’t it?”

“We lost a boy in an ambuscade on the way, some of these guerillas up in the trees. Went in over the lung and come out his back the size of a fist.”

“That’d be a Winchester round. She’ll tear the hell out of you.”

Royal wonders if he is saying this for effect, trying to scare the greenhorns like the other veterans do. The two sergeants could be talking about fishing.

“You like a bullet to stay in one piece when it hits you,” adds Jacks.

The white soldier shakes his head. “Don’t know what they think a man can do,” he says. “Aint nobody going to take that hill.”

They continue to move forward, the men watching the treetops now. On the third day ashore they saw a few of the guerillas, hacked dead with machete blows and laid out on the side of the road, already stripped of equipment and some of their clothes. Cubans who fought on the Spanish side of this mess, but not looking any different from the insurrectos.

“Why would a man want to fight against his own people?” Junior wanted to know.

“We used the Crows to track the Sioux,” said Achille, who did a stretch in the 9th Cavalry when he was a young man. “Used the Tonkawa to fight the Comanches. But to a man outside they all just Indians.”

They march past a dead American, sitting propped at the base of a huge ceiba tree bordering another canefield. His whole middle is wet with blood, and there are a half dozen vultures circling in the sky. If the man’s head was at a normal angle it would look like he was resting.

“There’s the music,” says Bevill ahead of Royal and yes, he can hear it now, very light and distant but lots of it, no break between gunshots, just louder ones and softer ones.

They cross the field and fall out under the shade of the mango trees by a big plantation house. Men hurry their fixings out, rolling smokes, Too Tall cutting open a green cigar he has bought from some roadside muchacho and wadding the tobacco into his pipe. Royal drinks, realizes his canteen is already half empty. It is a beautiful spot. It is all beautiful country but for the heat and if you had the right clothes and nothing much to do and nobody was shooting at you it would be a paradise. Royal’s stomach is still not right from the green mangoes they boiled down for dinner last night, smelled like turpentine but tasted sweet. His stomach hasn’t been right, in fact, since the trip over on the Concho, the drinking water warm and brownish, the food no better than usual and all that rolling in the hold, sick even at night and having to take turns for time up on deck.

“Somebody’s catching hell,” says Gamble. “That firing aint let up once.”

The men listen. Birds are still singing, the high-pitched frogs are awake and throbbing, and through it they can hear the rattle and roll of rifle fire punctuated with an infrequent bass note of artillery.

Junior points. “Over there.”

They look and can see a cloud of white smoke rising above the jungle canopy to the right, maybe a half-mile away.

“That’ll be our battery,” says Sergeant Jacks. “Four pieces. Working kind of slow.”

They listen awhile, then lose interest, some men unhitching their loads and lying back on the ground, some talking quietly, most sitting alone with their own thoughts.

“Insurrectos say they cut the Spaniards’ heads off if they catch em,” muses Achille. “Say the Spanish do the same, put em out on a stake.”

“What that mean to us?” asks Coop, who lays back with his eyes closed and his hands folded on his chest.

“Means maybe some of them Spanish boys been wanting to surrender, get sent back home. Now they got us to give up to.”

“Don’t sound like nobody surrenderin to nobody up there.”

“They got their officers behind em, stick em with a sword they don’t keep fighting.”

“So alls we got to do is kill all their officers.”

“That would do it.”

“Good,” says Coop. “I keep that in mind.”

Sergeant Jacks comes by to inspect rifles, just the rookies, and Royal pulls out the oiled rag he keeps stuffed down the muzzle.

“There’s a village called Caney,” says the sergeant as he handles the Krag, “behind a fort on a hill. We sposed to take that, then swing over and help the main force at San Juan.” He has never volunteered this kind of information before, never explained, and Royal wonders why he wants them to know this now. “We get into the shit, you just do what you see everybody else doing.”

The sun is directly overhead when they are formed up again and marched toward the gunfire. Royal is out off the path as a flanker with Junior, struggling through the brush, when they come to a man hanging upside-down from a tree, a rope tied to his ankle. Another Cuban, a guerilla, with palm fronds fastened around his body. Blood has run from the hole where his eye used to be to collect in his hair and spatter down onto the broad-leaved plants below.

“Sniper,” says Junior, pausing to look up into the nearby treetops. “No telling how many of ours he killed.”

The battle is louder now, flankers called in as they approach the end of the cover. Now and again there is the whine of a closer bullet, leaves and palm branches fluttering down from above, snipped by the spillover from the fighting in front of them. A sharp crack here and there and wood chips flying. The men strip off the load of bedrolls and haversacks, jettison everything but rifle, rounds, and canteen. Royal imagines he is dead.

If he is dead they can’t kill him.

He crouches with the others at the end of the woods and looks through the trees at what is waiting. A rugged stretch of mostly open ground, green-brown chaparral with a few spindly trees leading to a steep hill crowned by a stone fort. There are wooden blockhouses stretching off to the left of it, and then, on another hill slightly behind, a village with a tall stone church. Royal imagines his mother at her table, quiet and all cried out. He imagines Jessie with a black armband over her white shirtwaist sleeve, wearing it for him, solemn for a year, maybe more. Being dead is nothing, exactly that, nothing, so much better than being afraid, being injured, in pain, maimed.

He is dead and whatever happens next cannot hurt him.

Lieutenant Caldwell strolls in front of them, still inside the first line of trees, shouting to be heard over the gunfire that seems to be mostly off to the right of the hill.

“We will need to step into the open to form ranks,” says the lieutenant. “And we will advance in extended order at once. We are part of a larger maneuver — people are counting on us and we cannot fail them. Sergeants!”

They step out and form a firing line then, sergeants trotting parallel and shouting, getting the intervals right while the volleys from the fort swing their way. There is nothing to hide behind, and though most of the rounds sing over their heads a few men fall and soldiers sidestep to fill in the gaps. G and H Companies are out front in the firing line, Royal near the far left, with C and D to follow a hundred yards back in support, the rest crouching back in reserve. Royal sees the 4th Infantry, who had been with them on the Concho, whites to port and blacks to starboard, step out to form on their left flank. There had been lots of jokes across the bowline stretched between them about who was being protected from who.

“Firing line, forward — march!”

Kid Mabley blows the order and they quickstep ahead.

The idea seems to be to keep moving forward and hope all of them are not dead by the time they reach the top. Royal checks to each side to be sure he is not getting out front too far and sees that more men are falling. He feels the bullets singing past as much as he hears them and keeps walking through the chaparral, everything very bright, very clear and thinking he should be firing like some of the others but there is nothing, nobody up there visible to shoot at. The line reaches some small trees and there is barbed wire stretched between them, a half dozen strands of it and posts every three feet to kick and club through, something to concentrate on furiously as chunks of wood crack into splinters and more men fall. Somebody is screaming behind him. The line is scattered when he comes into the clear again, Royal trotting with the few left on either side of Sergeant Jacks.

“In rushes!” shouts the sergeant. “Keep moving!”

There are whistles and bugle calls behind but now it is just rush and flop, rush and flop, desperate lunging forward then extending the Krag and diving to the ground. It’s a wildly uneven field with spiky pineapples in rows upon the churned earth and hard to navigate without tripping. Royal flops in a furrow and fires his first shot, not really using his sight but just pointing at the fort and pulling the trigger. Others are firing and the sergeant said to do whatever they did. The thick spat of a bullet near him and there is hot sticky fruit on his cheek and he is up and rushing forward again.

He can see something at the top of the hill, movement, behind the line of barbed wire staked in front of the rifle pits before the fort, and he fires again, trying to aim this time, if not at a person then at a spot a person might be in. The hill is steep, steeper than the sand dunes back in Tampa, Royal holding his rifle in one hand and using the other to grab roots, plants, anything to help haul himself up and something sprays his face again, not a pineapple this time but somebody, a wet part of somebody, men dropping, men stopping movement around him but he climbs upward, upward till he is exhausted and needs to lie with his face on the hot ground a moment, then roll on his back and let his lungs work. The dead can be exhausted, they can be thirsty, but they are never afraid. Royal drinks from his canteen and sees down the hill to the second line coming up past the bodies of the first, sees D Company double-timing forward on the right as flankers, then rolls and struggles upward again.

He reaches a little dip, a depression running across the hill for several yards in which Jacks and half a platoon are lying, and falls down beside them. The artillery has been firing from behind them all this time and finally it seems to have found the range, one shell blowing a breach in the barbed-wire fencing and the next blasting the front of the fort itself, snapping the flagpole off and sending the Spanish colors tumbling to the ground. The men around him cheer. Royal is heaving for breath and drenched in his own liquid and he burns his hand on the barrel of the Krag, hot only from the sun and not his few random shots and he drinks again as more men reach the dip and flop down. They are only a hundred yards from the first of the trenches now and the Mausers are cracking, bullets spanging off rocks and flicking up dirt in front of their faces and it is unthinkable that he will have to stand and go forward.

“Sharpshooters!” yells Jacks, who seems to be the ranking officer on this part of the hill. “Articulate fire! Get those loopholes in the fort, get those bastards in the pits!”

Sharpshooters have been designated back in Tampa and Royal is not one of them. He looks down the ragged line of soldiers, sees men pushing up on their elbows to sight and fire, some rising on a knee, pulling the trigger, working the bolt, rolling on their sides to reload. It is methodical, hot work, and he is suddenly filled with awe for these men and hopes some of them will survive.

Coop aims at the spot where the white hat had just been. Fuck em. Kill em. The hat reappears and he fires and it drops out of sight. He cranks the empty out and pans down the trench line searching for another. Take your time. Sons of bitches have been trying to shoot him all the way up the fucking hill, had hours to get the job done and here he still is so fuck them, kill them, blow their damn brains out. He empties his magazine once, twice, three times — yes they’re shooting back still but they better not pause to aim or he’ll put one in their Dago skull. He stops once to refill his cartridge belt, slow and steady, not dropping a round, and when the corporal beside him gets it he slithers over to use the body for cover, propping the Krag barrel on the dead man’s hip. They are taking fire from the left, from the blockhouses and the village and whatever passes high over the 4th is hitting them but that will have to come later. Now it is the fort, bullets pocking the stone front like hard rain on dusty ground, the fort that has to be taken before the men inside it can kill him.

The little ditch isn’t much cover, not with the crossfire from the blockhouses, and it’s Sergeant Cade who jumps up to scream Let’s go and all of them rise at once, up, screaming their Comanche yell, scrabbling up the last steep pitch of the hill through corn stubble, the 4th still pinned down but Company C filling in to the left, Coop firing and running and firing and running till he flops again just short of the first of the trenches and jams his barrel through the barbed wire to fire down into it. A man steps out into the doorway of the fort with a white flag and Coop drops him, then another picks it up and is torn apart by several shots down the line then the sergeants are screaming to cease fire. No fire from the fort now, though still from the blockhouses and the village to the left. Another rush comes up behind him, men yelling Let’s take it and Coop stands to join but is banged from behind into the barbed wire, wrapped by it, kicking and chopping with his Krag till he tears his skin away and rolls untangled into the firing pit on top of a carpet of dead men. All of them lying in their blue-striped, mattress-ticking uniforms with holes in their foreheads, jumbled on top of each other. Coop gets hold of his rifle and squirms to his knees and sees one still alive, weeping, sitting on top of the others with no weapon in hand. Coop jumps out of the pit and dashes to the fort.

There are dead men lying in the way and he runs over their bodies and slams hard against the front wall, then joins the others who have made it, firing a few rounds into the loopholes cut in the wooden window plugs then rushing for the doorway. He loses his feet just inside, hip cracking hard on the blood-slick floor, then stands and steadies himself. Bodies everywhere and a few on their knees begging not to be shot. Fuck them, Coop thinks, kill them, but he is out of ammunition.

Men from the 12th have come up behind the fort on the right and Sergeant Jacks waves at them to keep down, heavy fire sweeping across from the blockhouses now. The firing pits are filled with dead and more lie dead and dying amid chunks of stone blown off from the fort. A black-bearded civilian in a long coat, maybe a newspaper man, sits on the ground beside him with a hole in his shoulder and the dust-covered Spanish flag in a pile in his lap.

“I did it,” says the bearded man, looking dazed at the red and yellow cloth. “I did it for the Journal.”

Jacks scurries, bent low, a quick lap around the hilltop to see what’s left. He saw Lieutenant McCorkle get it at the beginning, saw Bevill go down in the pineapples and Gilbert knocked backward on the hill, but there are a lot of blue shirts up here and some of his people who have stripped to the waist in the heat. They’re taking heavy fire from the blockhouses and the town but the bulk of the firing line has made it and the 12th is here and the 4th and their own reserve companies hustling up and they hold the high ground now, can swing even higher and shoot down through the roof of the nearest blockhouse. No officer up yet, no telling what is happening with the main force at the San Juan Heights, no orders. He sees one of the rookies, Scott, crouching behind the fort wall next to another who is holding the side of his neck with a bloody hand and having a hard time breathing. The rookie’s cartridge belt is full.

“Take him back,” he yells to Scott, who is shaking hard but seems to understand. “If he can stand take him back down where they can do something.”

The rookie gives him a searching look. “Where do I take him?”

“Back the way we came. Somebody will know where the field hospital is.” The other one is shaking too, his eyes starting to glaze over.

“Get him as far as he’ll go,” says Jacks, “then get your ass back up here. Move!”

They just be in the way, both of them, and there is work left to do.

A captain from the 12th strides past trying to separate his white boys from the 25th. “Form up!” he is calling. “Form companies!” He is walking upright and stiff-legged, feigning disregard for the bullets still chipping away at the stone walls, but the men on the hilltop are too busy to be inspired. The rookie helps his friend up and they stagger away together.

The artillery has been hopeless all day long, the little battery still a half-mile back in the jungle, and if the Spanish send reinforcements over from Santiago the hilltop will be impossible to hold. Jacks curses, then rises and runs, tapping men splayed out on the ground as he goes, calling them to follow. He makes it into the trench on the west side of the fort, facing the village, and a dozen men pile in after.

“We take the blockhouses one at a time,” he tells them, “then go get that fucking church.”

They lift the bodies of the dead Spaniards up then, and add them to the breastworks behind the barbed-wire fence.

The shaking seemed to catch up with Royal, chasing him all the way up the slope and over the wire and the bloody pit and overtaking him only when he was safe and solid against the stone wall of the fort, catching him like a chill hand at the back of his neck and then down through the rest of his body and now only movement will mask it. Royal leads Little Earl back down the hill, passing much of C and D Company still struggling up, sidestepping down and reaching back to support his friend when it gets too steep.

“They got surgeons,” he says. “Surgeons that know all about bullet wounds. They got drugs for the pain and on one of the ships they got the X-ray machine, look right into your bones.”

If Little Earl is reassured he doesn’t say so, keeping his hand pressed hard to his neck. There is blood but it isn’t throbbing out, just keeping his fingers wet, and he stares at a spot level with his eyes as if he can’t look down or at Royal for fear of losing his balance. They move in silence, past more troopers climbing and broken bodies left on the slope and bodies left in the pineapple rows, bodies left in the scrub and suspended awkwardly on the trocha of barbed wire. Royal leads Little Earl back as quickly as he can without dragging him, certain that now that he’s been to the top the ones still shooting from the village will discover he’s no longer dead and will murder him.

Hardaway is back guarding their bedrolls and haversacks behind the treeline.

“We done it!” he says with a gap-toothed smile. “Can’t deny the 25th.”

“Where’s the field hospital?”

“Sposed to be at El Pozo.”

“Where’s that?”

Hardaway just points back into the trees. “Think we was near there two, three days ago. You keep walkin, somebody bound to know.”

Royal finds his gear and pulls the first-aid roll out from it. He folds the arm sling a few times, making a compress.

“Look pretty hot up there,” says Hardaway, watching Royal’s hands. Hardaway is another rookie and feeling sheepish he wasn’t on the hill.

“Hot enough.”

Royal gives the folded cloth to Little Earl to hold against his neck.

The sun is slanting low and the firing from behind more sporadic by the time they find the dressing station. It is only one young doctor’s assistant and a pair of litter bearers with a small supply of bandages. The doctor’s assistant looks at the hole in Little Earl’s neck, blood starting to ooze out again, then scribbles on a red-white-and-blue tag and loops it with copper wire through a buttonhole on his shirt.

“There many more behind you?” he asks.

“Hard to tell. Half of who was on the hill run over to the village. Don’t think we be much help for San Juan.”

“Oh, we took that near two hours ago,” says the taller of the litter bearers. “They shot the hell out of us getting there, but the boys run up and took her.”

The shorter of the litter bearers walks a ways with them to be sure they are headed right. He reads Little Earl’s tag, gives Royal a dark look.

“Don’t give him no water till they say so,” he says. Little Earl seems not to be listening, seems barely to be there at all anymore but keeps following, putting one foot in front of the other. “And don’t be stopping to rest.”

Coop stands in the plaza in front of the church in Caney, looking down on a dead Spanish general. There are only scattered shots popping now, back in the village. The general is a goat-bearded, white-haired man spread out on a stretcher on the ground, shot through the legs and in the head. Some of his hair is stained with blood and stuck to the canvas of the stretcher. Coop nudges the body with his foot.

The village is mostly just palm huts but in the stone and stucco houses there were holdouts, most of them civilians, who had to be burned out and shot. Achille and Too Tall have a group of maybe forty prisoners, fever-looking Spanish soldiers, standing by the church doorway with their hands up on their heads.

“Get over here,” calls Too Tall. “We gone need you.”

“Need me for what?”

“We spose to march these boys back and hand em to the Cubans.”

“If they know where they headed,” Achille adds, cocking an eye, “they try to bolt for sure.”

“You mean if they know where they beheaded,” says Too Tall and they both laugh.

In their light blue pinstripes the captured men and boys look like hospital patients in pajamas.

“Why I want to hook up with your detail?” Coop asks.

“Cause come nightfall everbody else gone be digging trenches for the white boys over on San Juan.”

Coop laughs and crosses to join them. “At your service, gennemen.”

It is nearly dark when Royal finds the Santiago — Siboney road. They follow it to the field-hospital tents, sitting in high wild grass between the road and a little brook, three big ones for operations and dispensary, one slightly smaller for wounded officers, then six bivouac tents for enlisted men. These are all full, a hundred men crowded inside each where only sixty should be, and a dozen long rows of wounded lie on the ground outside.

Royal has to grab the shoulders of the orderly trotting by to get his attention.

“I got a wounded man here.”

“You aint the only one.”

“It’s real bad, I think.”

The orderly glances at Little Earl’s tag without looking at his wound, then points to a line of men lying at the base of a cluster of piñon bushes. “Set him down at the end there,” says the orderly. “He’ll get his turn.”

“They any blankets?”

“Not less you brought one.”

Royal pulls Little Earl to the end of the line of waiting wounded. Some of them are moaning and rocking, or weeping quietly, and more sit or lie staring blankly. A few are dead. Little Earl tries to rest on his side but starts to choke and Royal helps him sit up.

“Won’t be long now,” he says to his friend. There are nearly thirty men ahead of them. Some of them have had their shirts or trousers stripped off to uncover their wounds, and as the light goes the temperature is dropping. There seems to be no system to bring water to the waiting wounded or to the hundreds more who have already been through the tents. Royal squats on the guinea grass and realizes he is dizzy himself.

“I’m going for water,” he says, squeezing Little Earl’s arm. “I be right back.”

He passes the open flap of one of the big tents on his way to the brook. A white soldier makes choking noises, writhing on a table as a pair of orderlies work a rubber hose down his throat, blood frothing out the sides of his mouth while a blood-spattered surgeon stands waiting, his eyes closed as if sleeping on his feet.

“Easy does it,” coos the orderly who is pinning the wounded man down on the table. “Easy does it.”

The brook water is cool and Royal drinks from his cupped hands till his stomach starts to hurt. Litter squads are still arriving, adding their damaged men to the line of the waiting, then staggering back toward the front. The night frogs begin to chirp. He fills his canteen and a pair of orderlies come carrying something heavy rolled in a blood-soaked sheet between them, leaving the whole load just up the bank from him and stepping away quickly.

Royal has an idea what it is but looks anyway.

When he lifts the sheet up he is not sure at first why it seems so wrong. Then he realizes it is because they are all together, white arms and black, white legs and black, stripped naked, obscenely intertwined. One of the legs, cut off below the knee, still has a boot on it and that seems wrong too. Royal covers the limbs and hurries back to find Little Earl.

“Take some water in your mouth,” he says, offering the canteen, “but don’t swallow.”

Little Earl tries but begins to choke again. He spits bloody hunks of phlegm and tissue onto the ground, looks to Royal with fear in his eyes.

“Won’t be long now,” Royal tells him. “They moving along.”

A table has been set up in front of the nearest tent, a doctor just back from the front working on a soldier’s chest, an attendant holding a lit candle close to the wound to help him see. The moon is almost full, peeking over the treetops across the road. Sergeant Jacks said to hurry back, but they’ll be plenty more chances to kill him tomorrow and he’s not going to leave his friend lying alone here.

Little Earl takes his wrist, pulls him near, then whispers a request into his ear.

“I’m not much of a singer,” says Royal.

His friend only looks at him, waiting, blood soaked through the folded cloth he presses to his neck. Royal sees that Little Earl’s arm is shaking now, that even in the moonlight you can tell he isn’t the right color.

“I can’t think of anything from church.”

Little Earl gives a slight shrug. The only song that comes, the one they sing marching sometimes, doesn’t seem right and the lyrics he knows are mostly dirty. Little Earl squeezes his wrist, hard, and Royal is as scared as he’s been all day.

The old gray mare

She come from Jerusalem

Come from Jerusalem

Come from Jerusalem—

— he sings, softly—

The stud had balls but

He lost the use of em

Many long years ago

RALLY

The Judge sits in the last car with seven maidens in white. The soot and cinders from the engine can’t reach them here, and there is no excuse for the rough element on board to come passing through. Sally has set her heart on riding the Float of Purity since she heard of it and the Judge has had to explain more than once that Cumberland County is hosting the event and has its own supply of maidens. She has insisted on wearing white from head to foot, though, stating that every other woman attending in Fayetteville will be similarly attired.

“I have heard no such thing.”

“Neither have I, Father, but trust me, they will.”

So she jabbers with her school friends and fellow debutantes while the Judge chaperones the whole clutch of them, unable to so much as light a cigar. Clawson from the Messenger and one of the Meares brothers and George Rountree and Sol Fishblate who used to be mayor and some of his cronies from the ousted board are in the dining car, passing the Scotch, no doubt, and the Judge would join them but for the way those White Government Union layabouts were running their eyes over Sally on the platform this morning.

He looks out at the overcast landscape. It is still drizzling a bit, puddles lying gray in the fields from last night’s downpour, and he wonders if the weather will keep people away. There is a burst of raucous laughter, men’s laughter, from the car ahead. It is the age-old dilemma of revolution — for that, after all, is what they have embarked upon. The rabble, the sans culottes, are needed to storm the barricades, but then must be held in check before they run rampant, mistaking the power to destroy with the sense to rule. Most of the contingent, already four railroad cars full when they pulled out of Wilmington, seems responsible enough, many in the uniform of the Cape Fear Militia. But the White Government clubs, ranks swelled by brother organizations at each whistle-stop, have changed the tone of the excursion. The call themselves a Union, but the only thing uniting them is their mutual unemployment and a hatred of negroes, seeming more like the dregs of Coxey’s Army than the solid base of a political-reform movement. White Emancipation, the purpose of this rally, is too important, too vital a cause to allow it to be sullied by vulgarians.

The train slows to a stop and up in the second car the Fifth Ward Cornet Band blasts into Onward, Christian Soldiers to greet the new passengers, giving it a bit more Sousa than you’d likely hear at a revival meeting. It is the station in Tar Heel, a buggy ride away from the rally site, and only a handful of pilgrims step aboard. A red-cap porter backs away from the train as it begins to roll again, looking a little stunned as the men in the car ahead begin to shout at him from their open windows. The Judge closes his own, hoping to spare the young ladies, but they are too involved in their own excited chatter to have heard anything.

The epithets linger in the air like train smoke.

He was asked to join the hooded riders when they were at their peak back in ’68, when, many would still insist, they were most needed. They performed important services, vital to the day, but the society included too many men of the wrong caliber. The Judge sensed how easily they might sink from moral vigilantism to mere revenge and thievery, and regretfully declined. Roaring Jack Butler was in his heyday then, enrolling blacks in the Union League, ringleader of the Republican militia formed to stamp out the Klan, promoting his version of the “new South.” He made certain allegations against the Judge, merely a lawyer then, in the carpetbagger press, which in his father’s day would have resulted in a duel. But his father’s day had ended with the Capitulation.

“The only thing a man can truly carry to his grave,” the old man would say, “is his honor.”

The Judge realizes now that this was his only lesson, repeated in many forms over the years. Even the nightly treat of Sir Walter Scott, read or recited from memory, was an affirmation of that basic principle. His father said they were descendent from Jacobite Scots who had fled to France after the ’45 uprising, that the blood of kings flowed through their veins. The blood of kings flowed, quite literally, through most of his stories, often to the point of death defending an untenable cause. It was his father who taught him the original meaning of the burning cross, the beacon calling the clan, men of the same blood, together to defend their families, their land, their honor. It was such a potent image — fire, religion, family, the premonition of torture and death — blazing its message through the dark night of oppression.

“Symbols matter,” his father had told him. “They stir men to action. They must never be degraded.”

“Father?”

It is Sally, turned to look over the back of her seat to him.

“When we get there, I’ll need a moment to arrange myself. We all will.”

“I’m sure there will be time.”

The rallying of the clan.

If they had done their work in the daylight he might have joined. But in the uncertainty of darkness, men with masks and firearms — there was too much opportunity for blunder and mismanagement. The only act he ever regretted committing had been at night, in the company of other men. It was at Chancellorsville, though the battle had no name then, just another endless day of slaughter, mostly in a tangle of woods that allowed little opportunity to know if you were in the van or outflanked, no chance to reform ranks on the flag. His only brother, Robert, had been killed that day, as had many other good friends in the 18th. There was murder in his heart and when they assumed the picket they were told that yankee cavalry was operating in the area.

You only had time for one shot if horsemen overran you, the object being to fire quickly and hope to dodge the saber. They heard hoofbeats, a small party approaching at a canter and he joined in the volley toward the looming silhouettes, muzzle flashes on both sides of him, then the cries and the terrible discovery that it was their own officers they had fired upon, with General Jackson unhorsed and sure to lose his arm. He looked into the great man’s eyes when they carried him to a tent — they were glossy with shock and he was moving his lips very slightly, whispering a prayer. There was no knowing if his own bullet had found its mark on any of the wounded, but no comfort in that ignorance. Jackson was stricken with the pneumonia just after his surgery, and died a week after. A few days before Gettysburg the Judge saw a photograph of the coffin, covered by the new Stainless Banner that he thought, with its massive white field, too much resembled the flag of surrender.

They arrive in Fayetteville shortly before noon, a fine mist of rain still in the air, and hurry without organization the few blocks to the Lafayette.

“Oh my,” says Sally, thrilled, “just look at all of us!”

Thousands choke the street. Every sunburned farmer in the county, with wife and tow-headed brood, has come for the festivities, a logjam of buggies and haywagons that needs breaking up before the procession can get under way. Sally and her friends duck into the hotel to freshen themselves, and the Judge finds himself waiting, watching the frantic last-moment pushing and prodding of the rally organizers who shout and wave over the throng, trying to shape the energy and good will present into concerted action.

A half-dozen bands tune their instruments at once, grunting and blatting, snare drums rattling, while wearers of uniforms struggle through the crush of bodies to find each other. The rain stops, which is a blessing, and the Judge manages to get his back up against the hotel and avoid being jostled by the crowd.

The battle flag has reappeared.

During the Occupation it was outlawed by statute, and even after the yankee troops marched out it was rare to see one. But today, from his own limited viewpoint, the Judge can count nearly a dozen. It is the old square cloth of the Southern Cross with thirteen white stars upon it, the flag that came from the St. Andrew’s Cross of Scotland that came from the crux saltire, the X-shaped cross the Romans had used to crucify the apostle. His father, years before the War, told him how St. Andrew had appeared in a dream to King Angus MacFergus the night before battle, how his Picts and Scots had looked above the battlefield to see a great white cross in the sky and were inspired to drive back the Northumbrians. There was no mistaking that banner, held high above the artillery smoke, no mistaking it for the enemy’s flag as with the Stars and Bars. It thrills him to see it again, rippling in the little breeze that has come up, and makes him anxious as well.

They must never be degraded.

He tried to call Jack Butler out. They were boyhood friends, fished and hunted together, their fathers partners in law and business. But the war of ink, each letter to the editor surpassing the last in vitriol, degenerated from my esteemed colleague to notorious scalawag and Secessionist assassin. Action was called for. His father was wounded in a duel as a young man, precipitated by a point of honor so complex he was never able to fully explain it to his sons. He described the confrontation, the deadly honor and solemnity of it, as the event that finally made him a man.

The Judge met his adversary by chance on the courthouse steps, Butler descending with a gang of the officeholders from that benighted time, himself with only poor tubercular Granville Pratt as a witness.

“Sir,” he said, blocking the other man’s way, regretting that the terrain put him at a disadvantage in stature, “I demand satisfaction.”

Butler smiled with condescension. “You won’t receive it from me.”

The carpetbaggers laughed then, as they had been laughing since Appo-mattox.

“You are no gentleman,” the Judge observed.

“That may be true,” Butler replied, and here held a finger in his face, “but neither am I a cutthroat and a terrorist.”

The Judge did not carry a cane then, or he’d have done more damage before they were separated.

It was so clear, in his father’s time, so personal. Insults were redressed face to face, with seconds and pistols, both parties often able to walk away with honor restored or maintained, unharmed.

“I was young and hot-headed and in the wrong,” his father said of his own ceremony. “But the time had passed for apologies. The gentleman grazed my ribs, then I fired into the air. He did not demand a second exchange.”

The Judge looks about at this as yet unfocused mass, this storm-sea of discontent, and thinks of the worst of the fighting. The days when, blackened with powder, he fired into smoke and hoped to hit flesh, days when he felt the indifferent calm of the butcher.

Or felt like the man who killed Stonewall Jackson.

The march begins the moment Sally reappears on the front step of the hotel, as if they have all been waiting only for her. The Cornet Band heads out playing The Carpetbaggers’ Lament and Sally beams and God Himself smiles on their activity, opening the clouds for the first time in days to bathe them all in gold. And then, cutting in from the side street where they must have been assembled and waiting all along, come the Red Shirts. There is a collective intake of breath as they appear, then applause and wild cheering from those lining the streets and leaning out their windows. There must be at least three hundred riders, four abreast as they flow past, smiling and waving their hats. The shirts are not uniform, ranging from silk to the roughest flannel, but together they make a river of color down Hay Street and once again the Judge’s heart is lifted.

“It’s so beautiful,” Sally exclaims, taking his arm. “Niles should be here.”

A passing horse lifts its tail and deposits a steaming load at their feet, but Sally, imbued with her departed mother’s gentility, will not recognize it.

“Our own cavaliers,” she says.

That many or most are mill hands up for the day from South Carolina is not worth mentioning. They were the mailed fist of the Redeemers in that state back in ’76, and their presence here, the Judge can only hope, will inspire a similar rising in the Old North State. It takes ten solid minutes for them to pass, and then, drawn by four mottled Percherons, comes the Purity Float. Twenty-two lovely Christian girls in white dresses, one from each district in the county, smile and wave as they pass on a decorated logging trailer. Sally presses her gloved hands together in delight.

“Oh, they’ve done such a wonderful job of it!” she cries. “Considering what they have to work with.”

The carriages come next, with the Mayor of Fayetteville, the editor of their Observer, the Democratic chairman, and Pitchfork Ben Tillman himself riding in the first. The Senator waves energetically, a solid man of fifty dressed like a middling farmer come to church, his one eye bright with the excitement of the occasion.

“If we had a firebrand like him,” the Judge shouts to his daughter over the tumult, “crisis would not be upon us.”

Mr. Bridgewater, father of Sally’s dearest friend Emilia, beckons them then, and they walk to the elegant landau he has rented for the day. The driver, an Irishman in a jacket a size too small, eases it into the procession once they are settled, the girls facing forward, waving delicately as if they are the true dignitaries and the Judge and Bridgewater facing the rear, with an excellent view of the Fayetteville White Government Union lads footing along on either side in homburgs and plugs and slouch hats, strutting to beat the band.

She has a sense of purpose that neither of his boys possess, Sally, able to chart a course and stay true to it. Harry leaps from one fascination to the next, while Niles — the less he thinks about Niles the better. Sally has her mother’s soft-spoken perseverance, plus an intellect that if not restrained within the limited purview of her sex would be formidable. She is no suffragist, though, feigning no interest in what she condescendingly refers to as “men’s business.” He was surprised that she asked to come with him, until the display of maidens was revealed, and she has asked no questions about the gathering that might not pertain to a country fair. The girls have their parasols up, as it has begun to sprinkle again, and look a picture. One of the White Government boys, transfixed by them as he walks alongside, steps into a lamppost and is heartily mocked by his companions.

Cannons boom across the fairgrounds as they enter, the Cornet Band greeting them with Dixie. The judges’ stand on the racetrack infield is serving for the speakers’ platform, and dozens of benches have been set up on the turf to accommodate those who cannot fit in the grandstand. Tom Mason, a fine academic speaker from up by the Virginia border, is already holding forth when they find seats, Bridgewater having brought a blanket to cover the damp pine. The crowd is only half paying attention, the fairgrounds no venue for fine points and historical flourishes, but all rise to applaud when he introduces the Senator from South Carolina.

The approbation continues for some time. Here is the stalwart of the backcountry farmer in his struggle with robber barons and tidewater Bourbons, the Free Silver man who offered to stick a pitchfork in Grover Cleveland, his own party’s candidate, if he continued to acquiesce to combinations and goldbugs, who lost an eye in the War and proudly claimed to have instigated the Hamburg Massacre. That he lost the eye to disease and saw no battle does not dampen the enthusiasm of the gathering, nor does the fact that his role in the historic first blow of Redemption is greatly exaggerated. He is the people’s man, though never an avowed Populist, blunt-spoken and unapologetic. The Judge’s Charleston acquaintances, of notably bluer blood, complain that Tillman’s accomplishments as governor have been limited to outlawing Greek letter fraternities and denying citizens the right to buy liquor by the glass, but that was ignoring the larger picture. The man has stemmed the tide of defeat.

“They call me Pitchfork Ben,” he opens and there is another cheer, punctuated by rebel yells throughout the gathering.

“Out on the farm we employ a pitchfork to handle manure. And I can tell that you want a long-handled one to deal with the recent political shenanigans in your state.”

The Wilmington contingent, mostly around them on the grandstand, are particularly amused by this.

“As a United States senator, I am asked to consider matters which at first might seem to have little to do with one another. But during my tenure there I have discovered that a great number of the things which affect us here in the South adversely — are all of a piece. Our former candidate, Mr. Cleveland—” booing here, though rather good-natured, “—has been revealed as not only a mono-metalist and a tool of Wall Street, but an accomplice to the international thieves who doom the poor farmer and the honest white working man to patches in his clothes and slim pickings on his table! He so damaged our economy he was forced to bring in Rothschild and his American agents—” more boos now, with an edge of anger, “—to maintain the gold standard. The richest and most powerful nation brought so low as to allow a London Jew receiver to its treasury!”

The Judge looks over to his daughter, the smile never leaving her face, as if she might be at a garden party back home.

“With such men in power, we here in the South are doomed to economic servitude. New York shall ever be the center of manufacture and usury, and we here in the heartland of America shall never be more than drawers of water and hewers of wood, toilers on another man’s plantation.”

The Judge understands that this is the root of Tillman’s popularity, that it brings the bulk of the populace to the fold, but class hatred is a dangerous brew to stir. Easy resentment, simplified solutions—

“Let me talk about numbers for a minute here. There are three negroes in our state to every two white men. Let that sink in for a minute. With a free vote and a fair count, how you gonna beat those numbers? The Federals come down and handcuffed us and threw away the key, propped up their carpetbagging negro government with bayonets—” he looks around at them, indignant, “—and ever since they left we’ve had the damn Republicans trying to put white necks under black heels!”

Applause now, murmurs of outrage and agreement.

“But we took the government away from them in ’76. We took it. We have had no organized Republican party in our state since 1884, and we have fewer negro voters than a hen’s got teeth!”

Handclapping, some stomping on the footboards of the grandstand.

“My people,” he says with humility, “were but simple farmers. They never owned negroes. And I wish to God the last one of them was in Africa and that none had ever been brought to our shores. But that is not the case. So when we began our great movement we scratched our heads to figure out how we could eliminate the last one of them from the election process in our state. How? We stuffed ballot boxes. We threatened them. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it.”

Many are standing to cheer now. The Judge looks around uneasily at his confraternity. It is one thing to gain power and change laws — another to openly break those that exist. It should be possible, he believes, to challenge unjust institutions without fostering contempt for the law itself. He is beginning to understand more fully his Charleston friends’ aversion to the Senator.

Tillman turns to address the Red Shirts, dismounted now and standing in rough formation at the base of the judges’ stand. “It stirs my heart to see the demonstration of patriotism, the show of backbone, that these men have offered us today. When the Redemption got going in South Carolina I recall seeing more than five thousand Red Shirts in one gathering, and when they mounted up and rode together through the precincts of our adversary, believe me, those people ran back into their holes like rabbits.”

Laughter again, and a cheer for the Red Shirts, who raise their right fists into the air as one.

“We did not disenfranchise our negroes till 1895,” Tillman continues, easing back a little. “Then we had a constitutional convention which took the matter up, calmly, deliberately, with the avowed purpose of disenfranchising as many of them as possible under the 14th and 15th Amendments.”

Serious booing of the Amendments in question ensue. The Judge has taken them apart in front of a law class, revealed their basic incompatibility with the Founders’ intentions. A federal law must be truly iniquitous, he thinks, for the common man to know of its existence.

“We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us,” Tillman explains. “Now, I hear you got a few overeducated niggers up here in North Carolina—” laughter, applause, “—but if they so smart, they’ll learn to stay clear of the polling places soon enough! Our negro is as contented and well protected as in any state of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he has found the more he meddles in them the worse off he gets. And as to his ‘right’—” Tillman pauses masterfully, seeming to look into the eyes of each man present, letting the last charged word hang in the air, “—we of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men and we never will!” He pounds the podium with a fist as he shouts. “And we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him!”

This is what they’ve come for, and the reaction is enormous. Sally is swept up by the excitement of it, standing and applauding with the others. But Tillman is in no hurry, and draws back.

“Now I’ve been told,” he says, “that your numbers up here come out to two white men for every black.” He makes a puzzled face, holds his arms out at his sides. “Now if that is true, what, short of idiocy, has kept you people from prevailing over negro domination?”

An uneasy laughter follows this. The Judge notices that Colonel Waddell, who he had not seen on the train, is but two rows below them, chuckling and shaking his head.

“This is not meant as an insult, for I am your guest. But I have been invited here as a man of some experience in these matters, a surgeon, if you will, and as such I must not spare the knife when it needs be employed. Your politicians have betrayed you, they have delivered you into the tender mercies of the negro party for their own profit and glorification, and you are seeing the fruits of that irresponsibility, of that treason, in the increasing boldness of those who would put big ideas in small minds.”

Tillman looks to the Float of Purity below him to the right, extending a hand to indicate the ladies, then swinging it toward the audience before him, seeming to look directly at Sally. “I can’t help noticing,” he says, “how many very beautiful girls we have among us today. They are our pride, they are our greatest treasure.”

Yes, thinks the Judge, this is it. This is it exactly.

“And every one of these fine young Christian ladies,” Tillman continues, voice rising in power, “lives in constant peril of losing her most precious possession!” He slams both fists down on the podium. “Why don’t you people get your damn niggers under control?”

And if any had been present they certainly would have been torn apart, with bare hands if need be, such is the vehemence of the reaction. Sally seems bemused, looking around her, taking the curses and protestations as a compliment. Which in a way it is. What do we fight for, thinks the Judge, if not the virtue of our women?

“I have three daughters,” says Tillman when it is quiet enough to be heard, sadness and reflection creeping into his voice, “but so help me God I had rather find any one of them killed by a tiger or a bear and gather up her bones and bury them, conscious that she had died in her purity, than to have her crawl to me and tell me the horrid story that she had been robbed of the jewel of her maidenhood by some black fiend!”

Again the Judge marvels at his daughter’s powers of concentration as men all about forget themselves and curse at the top of their lungs. It is the Southern woman’s great ability to shape reality by recognizing the existence of only those things they wish to, to smooth a rough or awkward moment with a pleasant phrase, to remain pure in the most compromised of situations. His wife, may she rest in peace, was a nonpareil of the breed, in command of any social situation, able to float above the unpleasant, able to disengage herself from — from everything. Sally has inherited much of this, but there is a warmth in her, a womanliness—

Judge Manigault looks at his daughter and Tillman’s image, a sooty paw on her pellucid, ivory skin covered with the finest golden down, overwhelms him to the point of nausea, his hands curling into fists. He knows that much of it is buncombe, an orator’s trick, but the diamond-hard kernel of it is undeniable. Their women will not be dishonored.

“From this day forth,” cries the Senator, “let the enemy live in terror of the slumbering giant he has awakened! The Anglo-Saxon will not be ruled! I don’t care if you been a Populist, Democrat, Fusionist — there must be only one political party in the great state of North Carolina, and that is the White Man’s Party!”

The Red Shirts wave their fists, the maidens on the float wave their hats, the White Government Unionists screech and stomp, flasks of whiskey passing from hand to hand. The Judge holds on to Sally’s arm and to the rail as the grandstand shakes, men pounding the boards with their booted feet. The old Confederate battle flag is waved atop a dozen poles. The rabble have been roused, the fuse lit for an explosion that will rock the state. The Judge decides that they will return on the train after the picnic, though they had planned to stay over at the hotel.

Tonight, he is certain, Fayetteville will not be a safe place for a young lady.

CONQUERORS

The moon is bright and high in the night sky by the time Royal stumbles back to the 25th.

They regroup, those not dead or wounded, in the mango grove to reclaim their blanket rolls and haversacks. The order comes to take the road back to El Pozo. Trudging through the dark jungle, too tired to talk, unsure if the day has been victory or defeat, Royal surrenders himself to the sight of Junior’s back in front of him and the mindless rhythm of one step after another. In the middle of the night they are allowed to stop and sleep next to the La Cruz plantation house, lying on their gear with their hands on their rifles.

Royal dreams of bullets.

A horizontal hail of bullets, singing down from the top of the endless slope in deadly sheets, no hiding from them, no cease in their nightmare waspwhine swarming till Kid Mabley blows him awake an hour before sunrise.

They are ordered to move to a ridge overlooking Santiago under light fire, intermittent pops and the occasional cry, a man from Company C catching one that smashes the bone of his elbow, his forearm hanging useless. Some of the red-tile roofs below them show damage from artillery. Black smoke rolls up from a fire. Only Cooper seems serious about hitting the few uniformed Spaniards moving behind the breastworks.

“Them I didn’t get yesterday, Imonna get em today,” he says, up on the firing step in the trench some other outfit has left them, peering over his Krag. “Counted a dozen I’m sure is dead and a couple I knows I winged em.”

“Watch out for them truce flags,” says Willie Mills. “You pop one whilst they under that, Sergeant Jacks nail your ass to the shithouse door.”

“White flag only last till I hear a shot comin our way,” Cooper tells him, squinting to aim at a spot where he’s seen movement. “Then all bets is off.”

There is thunder from the bay in the afternoon, the men wondering if the counterattack has begun, if the Spanish reinforcements have come with artillery. It lasts less than an hour, then stops as suddenly as it began.

By dusk Cooper’s count is up to seventeen despite the white flags hustled back and forth and Royal has identified three different kinds of lice living on his body. The regiment is marched back down to the base of the ridge and told to hack a new trench from the hard ground. They were given three days’ rations before the attack and there is nothing left to eat. They dig through the night.

“What they got us down here doin nigger work for,” grumbles Cooper, “when they Spanish left to kill?”

Royal’s hands are bleeding, his bowels starting to twist. The Captain has them pile the breastworks on the rear side, as if they might be attacked from behind.

“You don’t eat nothin,” says Willie as they finally lay out their gear to sleep in the open again, “you starts to shit your body out. Keep this up and we won’t be nothin left but eyes and assholes.”

In the morning, refugees from Santiago appear on the road that cuts through their trench line. Hundreds of them, hungry-looking and scared, old men, women and children, even a few dogs skulking along nervously at the edges of the sorry stream, casting a suspicious eye on the watching soldiers.

“Dog look like stewmeat to me,” says Willie.

“If you kill it, I’ll eat it,” adds Cooper, but nobody shoots the dogs, preferring not to scare the wretched Cubans any worse. Some of them are dressed well enough, one lady wearing cotton gloves and walking stiffly under a parasol, but most are barefoot in rags with a numb, unfocused look on their faces. Where they can all be going is unclear.

“Counterattack comin today,” says Corporal Barnes. “Rats always climb off the ship when it’s set to go down.” Barnes, whose experience of ships is like their own, puking over the rail when he could get to it and in the hold when he couldn’t.

A mule train comes, teamsters haggard and mud-spattered, with sacks of raw beans and cans of embalmed beef and the news that the Spanish fleet attempted to run the blockade the day before and was smashed by the American gunships. There is a cheer, echoed along the lines as the word spreads.

“It’s the 4th,” says Junior, stabbing a can of the slimy meat open with his knife. “We ought to celebrate.”

“Celebrate what?” asks Cooper, who has sworn off the beef since it made him sick in Tampa.

“Celebrate our naval victory,” says Junior. “Freedom from tyranny.”

Cooper and some of the others laugh. “Why’nt you step up on that ridge and make us a speech?” he says, pointing to their former perch, occupied now by a white regiment. “I guarantee we see some fireworks.”

They stay just beneath the ridge the next day, and the next, when the rain starts in the evening and the men push rags into the barrels of their Krags and the water runs down the slope and into the backside of the trenches and Royal just barely makes it to the tiny ditch of a latrine before the beef runs through him. He has been thinking about Jessie but decides to give it up, something dirty about even the memory of her while he’s in this obscene place, this place where dead men and dead animals lie still unburied. There are a dozen other men squatting in the rain beside him, pants at their ankles, including one being held in position by his bunkie.

“He got the shakes,” says the standing bunkie apologetically, holding his moaning friend by the wrists, head turned sideways to provide the illusion of privacy. “We aint gonna fight no more why don’t they pull us the fuck out of here?”

It rains through the night, wet coming up through their groundcloths and soaking the little half-shelter tents, water over their ankles when they climb back in the trenches, rubber peeling off the flimsy ponchos of the men who bother to wear them. Royal is shivering too, now, though the rain feels warm on his face.

“Guess I’m not one of them Immunes,” he says to Junior, who looks away without comment, mouth tight. Royal’s hands shake as he tries to shovel muck on one of the pointless details the officers are inventing to keep them busy during the endless back and forth of negotiations with the Spanish.

“I can imagine they’re eager to surrender,” Junior says. “Even if they do have us outnumbered. They’ve spent a fever season here before.”

“Don’t let your guard down,” warns Sergeant Jacks, glaring at the make-work he’s been ordered to supervise. “It aint over till the Fat Man says so.”

The Fat Man is Shafter, who they have seen only once, being loaded into a carriage after a visit to the front, the huge, gouty pile of general in charge of the whole circus.

“Spanish just got to wait,” says Pres Stiles, who has been coughing up black, tobacco-looking hunks of phlegm. “Nother week in this shithole gone do us in.”

Heads have been counted. In their company Cousins and Strother are dead and Little Earl is lying under a tent back at Siboney waiting to be shipped home. When Royal left him he couldn’t talk but was still breathing. Lieutenant McCorkle from G was killed right at the beginning with Leftwich, and three men from D were lost on the barbed wire. A few more of the wounded might not make it, but considering the volleys that were poured into their firing line, the impossible open slope they had to cross, it is a wonder to have so few casualties.

“Aint been the bullet made can bring me down,” brags Cooper, who was a good ten yards ahead of the rest of them during the charge to overrun the trenches.

“Yeah, but they makin new ones every day,” says Sergeant Jacks. Royal remembers Jacks walking backward up the hill, heedless of the Spanish volleys, checking to be sure the men didn’t bunch up and blowing his whistle when it was time to flop or rush ahead.

“There’s a lot of stupid things you can do to get yourself killed,” Jacks likes to say, “but there aint much smart you can do to stay alive, except quit the damn Army.”

On the 11th they are marched back to the front lines in the pouring rain. Royal has a fire in his throat and something pressing behind his left eye, has to step out from the column twice to drop his pants and let go. By now it is one man out of four with the aches and chills and they are down to hardtack only, which they break apart to fry in the little bit of rancid sowbelly left to them. Royal threw away his last bit of that days ago but the smell clings to the cloth of his haversack, grease spots attracting swarms of tiny ants if he lays it on the ground during the few hours it isn’t raining. Pete Robey sings at dinnertime when they are making their desperate little fires, smashing charred coffee beans with the butts of their bayonets—

There’s a poor starving soldier

Who wears his life away

Clothes are torn and his better days are oer

He is sighing now for whiskey

With throat as dry as hay

Singing “Hardtack, come again no more!”

Pete has a deeper voice than Littler Earl’s, a voice that rumbles out of his barrel chest, and the others are too beaten to join him for the chorus—

It’s the song, the sigh of the weary

“Hardtack, hardtack

Come again no more

Many days you have lingered

While worms crawl at your core

O-oh hardtack, come again no more!”

When they reach the trenches overlooking Santiago again the white unit who has been holding them staggers away, scrawny and unshaven, filthy uniforms hanging from their bodies.

“You boys are welcome to it,” says a sunburned, runny-eyed sergeant. “Skeeters’ll get you if you don’t drownd first.”

It rains all through the night and for most of the rest of the week. The officers, some of them just as sick as the men, give up on everything but keeping the pickets out and every day another dozen can’t hold themselves upright in the morning.

The day the Spanish leave Santiago, Royal is shitting blood.

Not mixed with anything, just a hot slick stream of blood out where it shouldn’t be coming from and he is on his way to tell Sergeant Jacks something might be wrong when he sees the Spanish marching out, hears the bitter grandeur of their drums and horns as the side of the hill tilts up and smacks him hard in the cheek. He lies in the mud a while, dry-heaving, before Junior comes to find him.

“You o.k.?”

Royal manages to roll himself on his back.

The sick tent is just back down the hill, too many men down in all the regiments to transport the private soldiers all the way back to the coast. There is no medicine but for a spoonful of bismuth once a day and the treatment amounts to checking for dead every few hours and hauling them out.

“You got it easy now,” says Junior, trying to seem cheerful. “Just lay back and wait to ship out.”

After Junior leaves, a delirious man, a corporal from D Company, starts to thrash in his cot and rave about missing buckwheat cakes.

“I catches the one who took em,” he repeats, over and over, “I cut him to the bone.”

There is a different kind of time inside the sick tent, fever-time, each man in his separate sticky hell. It keeps raining, rivulets, then streams running under the tent edges and cutting away the ground beneath their cots. Royal finds himself tilting, feet higher than his head, and no one comes to set him level again. The delirious man is shouted at, told to shut up, threatened, but none of them lying there has the strength to get up and strangle him.

When he is conscious enough to sustain a thought, Royal realizes that all of it — the drumthumping of recruitment, the long training, the weapons and uniforms, the soul-wearying marches, the waiting in vomit-sloshing ship holds for the bilious, ocean-tossed transport of their blue horde to this steaming island, the flags and the stirring horns and the frank judgment in his comrades’ eyes pushing him forward, willingly if not eagerly, one foot in front of the other, obeying the order of the moment — are just parts of an intricate, implacable process meant to bring a sharp-nosed, shrieking bit of metal and his own forehead to the same spot at the same instant.

But the machine has failed somehow, too many moving parts, too much room for error, and so he lies here with rotting bowels waiting to feed the sweet-smelling, poisonous green jungle that grows and decays around him.

Royal is swept by waves of fever. The heat generates inside him then flashes through his body, a shimmering liquid heat beneath his skin cooking out in fever-sweat, his clothes sodden with it, heat concentrating as it rises to a place behind his eyes, brain boiling, images flashing, images first of battle, of the angry whine of bullets sizzling by, of metal ripping through flesh, but then as the days pass (if they are days and not only waves of clarity and unconsciousness) the images soften and swoon and there are times that Jessie comes to him, Jessie in a way he’s never dared to imagine her, loose and naked and steaming amid the hot green jungle plants, Jessie smiling, her tongue impossibly red, her breasts oozing sticky white pulp that drops, spat, on the broad green blades of the foliage below, her skin slick and oozing like the fleshy succulent plants and hot and wet and her sex a purple orchid red at the pistils yielding hot and wet and fleshy to embrace him, tightening in a sweet hot grip around him, squeezing, constricting, pulsing hot until he bursts and she is gone, his uniform cold and wet and heavy as a shroud on his trembling body.

The chills start then, shimmering through bone-aching limbs, pulsating Northern Lights of sensation that flutter, icy and electric, clear through him and he understands that he is dying despite Junior talking somewhere close You’re o.k. you’ll be fine don’t worry and piling on blankets — where did he find blankets? — that press on Royal but bring no relief from the icy wind that blows in his blood. And sometimes, suddenly, a patch of smooth water after the chilling rapids, Royal vaguely conscious and aware of sounds, a snatch of voices from the living outside the tent, the ones who can still prop themselves up at their posts and shiver under the searing noon sky, aware of where he is and who he is, aware of bright light strained through dirty white canvas overhead and mosquitoes whining by his ears and dying men groaning and Junior there again, giving him a drink from his cool metal cup and Royal hasn’t the strength left to lift his own head, then, slipping back down, flushing hot with fever as he is swept under another wave, lost to another steaming nightmare.

Days pass in waves of heat and chill.

Rain drills the tent canvas at night, stormwater cutting a deeper furrow below the cot, somebody weeping, weeping.

And Royal is a sidelong bulge of panic in a horse’s eye.

The horse is churning without direction in a hot, acid sea, snorting saltwater after each new wave slaps its upstretched head, nostrils barely above the surface, legs pedaling desperately, hooves seeking solid ground and finding none, not lathered despite the effort but huffing and pedaling in a lather of ocean, slapping waves incessant and blocking sight on every side, the powerful forelegs beginning to tire, saltwater rushing into the nose and down the long gorge and still it struggles, frantic, without the sense to surrender to liquid, a machine of slamming heart and burning muscle torn from its mooring but powering forward nonetheless, no thought, no plan in the beast’s mind only a shrill unwavering note of fear—

!

!

!

Royal is a sidelong bulge of panic in a horse’s eye.

If it was me, thinks something just a little removed from what used to be his conscious mind (not a thought, really, or a voice, just a knowledge that is separate from his body), if it was me and not this thrashing animal I would give up, give in, let the water fold over but they can’t see ahead, horses, eyes set off on each side of the great head, they can’t see what’s straight in front of them, can’t understand that there is no safe harbor to swim to, that the kicking and huffing and bulging out of eyes is a waste. When the dying man, Royal, saw something like this there were dozens of them, horses and mules churning the sea into a lather with their fear and their pedaling legs and a few of the last ones saved, that’s right, saved when a bugler already on shore played Boots and Saddles and they obeyed the order of the moment, unthinking like good soldiers and swam to the shore that led to the pathway that led through the poisonous jungle to the steep murderous slope where the angry waspwhine bullets waited to burn through them and carry their parts away. But that’s over now, and he’s not needed anymore, different fevered men crouch atop the hill, and he is free to give in, to accept the warm caressing water if he was Royal still and not the sidelong bulge in a horse’s eye, was not thoughtless panic and thrashing and here it comes, a big one, more than a wave a mighty lathering swell rising up and over, blotting out the sky, and the nostrils swept under and the powerful forelegs spasm, barrel chest pressed in a vice, lungs flushed with acid saltwater, no air, no air, no air, till the machine jolts, wrenching his throat open with a crying gasp and wheezing, dragging the hothouse sick-tent air into his lungs, sopping wet and cold now lying on solid ground with the taste of brine in his mouth.

“What happened?”

Junior is standing over him. “Fever broke.” Junior is hollow-eyed, un-shaven. He holds himself upright leaning on his rifle.

“You look like hell, Junior.”

“You want to see hell,” says Junior, smiling a gaunt, death’s-head smile, “I’ll get you a mirror.”

“No calls,” says Royal. Something that has been gnawing at the edge of his consciousness, a lack, something missing in the air. “No reveille.”

“Kid Mabley’s in the other tent, almost as bad as you. And none of the others got the wind left to blow.”

Royal shifts his weight slightly and feels the pool of sweat beneath his back and buttocks. He is lying on a cot, beneath a tent, and knows now that he’s not going to drown. But the rest of it is distant, unformed.

If there’s no bugle, he wonders, how do we know which way is the shore?

Father—

Junior off on water detail, writing hidden behind a tree so the others won’t know he has paper. His hand trembling, paper propped on an empty canteen on his thigh. Something dead is nearby, buzzards wheeling overhead.

You have no doubt read reports by now of the gallant show made by our force at El Caney and the San Juan Heights. It was, from a military point of view, an inelegant and possibly ill-advised assault, though the results appear to be much more auspicious than expected. The Spaniards put up a desperate fight, and any doubts about their valor on the battlefield have been put to rest. Santiago, and possibly the war, have been won at the cost of much precious American blood, and certain notables with political aspirations are already elbowing their way into position to take full credit. We have not received any papers since our arrival, and thus I have no way to know if the role played by our colored troops has received adequate attention. The 24th Infantry and the 9th and 10th Cavalry were instrumental in the capture of the San Juan Heights, while my own 25th led the last desperate dash to take the fortifications at El Caney. The sons of Ham have made quite a military record for themselves here, and I can only hope that this will be justly recognized and celebrated throughout our homeland.

He hears the shouts and splashing of the others on the detail, naked in the river scouring themselves with the little yellow cubes of soap they’ve been issued, black men with ribs showing through their skin, a few just sitting at the edge of the flowing water, too weak to risk the current. Junior, with everything he’s just experienced, still can’t fathom bathing in front of others.

What the citizens at home should also know is that our great victory is in danger of betrayal by the incompetence and self-serving of powerful men far from the clamor and deadly consequence of the battleground. If we are not brought home from this place immediately we shall all be lost to fever and starvation. The rains are upon us — dysentery, malaria, and the dreaded yellow jack have leveled over a third of the regiment, with more taking ill each day. My own company lost Private Charles Taliaferro this morning — a good soldier and a good friend — and the brass have forbidden the firing of a last salute and playing of Taps for fear the constant burials will undermine morale. But there is no morale, only the desperate realization that we have been abandoned here to die by an unprepared and uncaring government. There is insufficient food, medicine, shelter, no provision for dealing with the fever season and seemingly no plan for what follows the “liberation” of this island and these people. On the 12th we took high ground and encamped with our backs to the enemy city, told to defend the Spaniards from any incursions by our insurrecto allies wishing to wreak vengeance. These Cuban patriots now mutter among themselves, wondering, no doubt, if we have designs on their sovereignty.

Rumors of beheadings, a good deal of theft. The Cuban fighters have kept themselves apart since the rains and sickness began, cutting the strange local fruits open with their machetes and offering them in trade for whatever they don’t have, which is everything. The refugees are beyond pitiful. Apparently the custom here is to be buried by your peers — how many times has a cortège of little boys or little girls passed shouldering the tiny box that bears their stricken playmate? And those are only the ones with enough spark left to care about their sacraments.

Royal Scott, who you will remember from Wilmington, has been through a terrible bout, touch and go for a while but if we receive transport soon he may stand a chance of pulling through. He asks me to send his regards. Desperation is a great leveler, and the observation of “Jim Crow” rules has all but disappeared among the men here, trapped in the same dire circumstances. Sad that it requires such an extreme of suffering to break down the habits of color prejudice. I am eager to see, once privation and the threat of annihilation are lifted, whether our white comrades will return to their former ways.

Junior can smell whatever it is that has died. When the jungle is wet there are many odors of decay, but none so sweet as rotting flesh. The evening of the charge he was on burial detail, pulling Spanish boys out from the trenches where they had been shot and clubbed and bayoneted and smashed apart by artillery. The bodies were surprisingly light, though they had swelled in the heat, and after the first few he was careful to turn them face-down so he wouldn’t have to see dirt thrown into their mouths and eyes. That had bothered him more than the smell. And then yesterday, when they found the mule mired with a broken leg and Coop shot it and the cooks tried to dress it and make a meal it had not been the smell but the color of the meat, deep purple, that made his gorge rise and sent him stumbling toward the blood-splattered latrine.

The dignity of brave men who have faced death in battle is now dragged through the filth, the best men of our generation to be lost in this pestilent wasteland. We are soldiers, and deserve the support of a grateful nation. Please spread the word to any with the ear of those in power.

Junior has a wound, infected now, a long trough cut in his arm going through barbed wire during the ascent, a wound he didn’t notice till they were marching away from the hill that first night. He flexes his hand, feels the ache. The doctors have nothing left to treat it and he worries it will swell and have to come off, like what happened to Briscoe of A Company.

“Bad enough a man go home, take his uniform off and the white fokes don’t want to know about him,” Cooper said when they got the news of the amputation. “But you take a whole arm off, you might’s well throw way the rest of the nigger.”

As for my own performance in the tumult of mortal conflict, you have nothing to be ashamed of. I acquitted myself as an American patriot, no more or less, and though I know now I will never love the military life, I am confident I can at least uphold the honor of my family and my race. My love to Mother and Jessie—

Your son,

Aaron

SURRENDER

They put the white flag out an hour after the merienda.

The chino camp followers came up from Manila, and the men paid them to prepare some pancit canton and baboy, and Bayani, the new sargento who reported to him this morning, had the idea of throwing a few of the pork ears on the fire once the breeze shifted to send the odor over the thornbush breastworks to the Spanish garrison crouching without food in Guagua. He is insolent, this Bayani, addressing Diosdado with the tú when he speaks Spanish, which he does ironically and with an atrocious accent, moving among them with a kind of assurance, as if already the platoon belongs to him. It was a good idea, though, a very good idea, and Diosdado shrugged in what he hoped was a manner becoming an officer and said he supposed they could give it a try. The siege has been on for over a week, the Spaniards never even stirring to snipe at their positions until nightfall, Diosdado’s men dug in all around the town and kept busy shuttling from one trench to the next to try to appear like a much larger force and gambling away their meager three-and-a-half-peso monthly pay. Almost all the people from Guagua managed to sneak out with their livestock the night his platoon arrived, and are camped in the fields behind them complaining constantly about how long it is taking to drive the Spanish away.

“If you would like to lead the charge,” said Kalaw, the private with the big nose, to one delegation, “we will be two steps behind you.”

But an hour after they are finished with all the pancit and the baboy and the fried bananas the chinos have brought up, the white flag appears from the belltower of the tiny church in the plaza of Guagua, the high spot from which a Spanish sniper hit Anacleto Darang in the knee, their only casualty so far.

“Come and talk to them with me,” Disodado says to Sargento Bayani, who claims he was a cuadrillero for the Spanish in the Moro islands and understands the thinking of their officers.

“Con placer, hermano,” says Bayani with his strange, insolent smile. “Let me get a flag together.”

It takes nearly a half an hour for one of the privates to run back to the hacienda they liberated a week ago and borrow a sheet. Sargento Bayani holds this banner of truce, tied to a long bamboo pole, high over his head as they step out and approach the Spanish breastworks.

“Our boys need practice,” says the sargento as they walk. “They’ll never get it this way.”

“The point is to regain our country, not to test ourselves in battle.”

“And when we have to fight the yanquis?” He has that smile on his face.

“The yanquis are our allies,” says Diosdado. It is ridiculous, this cynicism. If not for the Americans the Spanish would still control the harbor in Manila, would still be able to resupply themselves, be able to send fresh troops to relieve any besieged garrison. Education will be the key, as Scipio always says. Of all the ills that plague the people, this overriding cynicism, this ignorance, is the worst.

“We’re sending you into the field,” Scipio told him in Cavite. “Very soon, when we are in power, the people will want their leaders to be men who bore arms against the Spaniards, men of action.” Scipio, never a weapon in his hand, has moved up in the hierarchy, though he will never tell Diosdado his official title.

Diosdado had expected to rejoin the Supremo’s staff, Pepito Leyba at one side of their diminutive leader and himself at the other, translating, rewriting proclamations in a more confident Spanish, offering his opinion when asked. He had a detailed scenario worked out in which Ninfa Benavides, looking up at him contritely in the rags of one of her fabulous gowns, begged for his intercession to save her collaborationist father from the wrath of the Philippine Republic. She was so very grateful—

“This is because of my accent,” he said to Scipio at the time, hurt. “Because I’m not a Tagalo, much less a Caviteño.”

His friend did not deny it. “This will be good for you,” he shrugged. “Believe me. Just avoid being shot.”

Diosdado has no training, of course, but there doesn’t seem to be much to it. Setting a good example, being a model of character for the men, explaining the importance of doing one’s duty and not leaving in the middle of an engagement to deal with problems at home. The uniform — he had the foresight to have a pair made in Hongkong before he left — does half the job. When he caught the men looting the hacienda, Diosdado made them replace everything that was not of immediate use in the military campaign, and put Sargento Ramos in charge of making certain the goods taken were shared equally.

“We are soldiers of the Filipino Republic,” he reminds them constantly, “not a gang of tulisanes.”

There is only an alferez under a smaller, improvised white flag on the other side of the breastworks.

“My comandante wishes to hear your terms,” he tells them.

“You will leave your arms and ammunition stacked, neatly, in the church,” says Diosdado. “You will form ranks and march out fifty yards on the road to San Fernando and halt. There I will accept your surrender.”

“Stacked neatly,” echoes Bayani, mocking, and Diosdado shoots him a look.

“And there will be no reprisals?”

“You will be treated with the consideration due to fellow soldiers.”

The alferez looks uneasily to Bayani, then back to Diosdado.

“We are starving.”

Diosdado nods. He wanted to ask the men to save some of the merienda, but realized it would never be enough to feed the garrison.

“There is food in Malolos,” he says. “You will be taken there to join your defeated comrades.”

He has no idea if there is sufficient food for them in Malolos, only that that is where prisoners are to be sent. The alferez nods and offers him a salute. “I will inform my comandante.”

“There is no reason to make them feel ashamed,” he says to the sargento on their way back to the men.

“Of course not. We may shoot them, cut their throats, hack them to bits, but we wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings.”

The ideal is to keep the best of the Spanish — learning, culture, a certain code of honorable behavior — and jettison all that is base and hypocritical. The friars will have to go, of course, though the Jesuits might be allowed to remain if their political inclinations can be discouraged. The native clergy will do well in the villages, but for the ilustrado class a more elevated approach to Heaven will be required. Sadly, there are aspects of the Filipino temperament, shortcomings, brought into sharp relief by a character like this Bayani—

The Spanish begin to come out of the plaza. They are trying to stay in ranks, but the men sent ahead to make a gap in the breastworks are weak and struggle with the spiky mass of aroma bush and a few men collapse while they are waiting. It is thirst, really, Diosdado knows, no well dug within the garrison’s fortifications and his own people tearing down the bamboo acueducto that fed the town from the hillside stream, and finally the alferez appears beside a tall, emaciated comandante, leading the men who can walk, maybe sixty of them, out onto the San Fernando road. Before they left for this outpost, no doubt, these soldiers knelt in their ranks before the Arzobispo in Manila, receiving his blessing and swearing before God that they would never surrender the sacred banner of their nation. Bayani sends two squads of the men who have rifles to quickly flank them, worried about their reaction when they discover how few of their tormentors are present. Diosdado steps up to the tall officer, who salutes him.

“I am Comandante Ramón Asturias y Famy,” he says. “We are at your mercy.”

“We will take you first to the stream,” Diosdado tells him. “And then on to Malolos. Are there wounded left behind?”

“Perhaps a dozen. Sick, not wounded.” The officer looks Diosdado over. He is glad that the uniform fits him well, that he has managed to keep it nearly spotless during the siege. “May I inquire about your training?” asks the comandante.

It seems a strange, if not presumptuous question for a prisoner of war to put forth. Diosdado wonders if he should reveal his inexperience, even to a man unlikely to resume arms against the Cause. Filipino forces will be at the outskirts of Manila soon, circling the final gem of the crown, and the troops inside the Walled City must be made to believe they are outmanned, outgunned, outgeneraled—

“I believe he is very well trained in philosophy,” Bayani interjects, an innocent look on his face, “with an interest in the Classics.”

It is cruel, yes, and Diosdado wonders how he knows. He has not spoken to anyone in the platoon of his education. Asturias y Famy is weeping.

“A university boy,” he says, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. The Spaniards have not bathed for a week. “I am surrendering to a fucking university boy.”

REPRIEVE

After the swim they stop at the Iolani Palace for a picnic. President Dole came aboard looking like Father Christmas with his long white beard and invited the whole sorry bunch of them from the China—Colorado Volunteers and the 8th Infantry and the Utah Battery and the engineers and the hospital people, everybody but the damn mascot goat — and now they’re breathing air heavy with the smell of flowers and spread out at long, long tables set on the grass under the trees with plates and utensils and cloth napkins for what they call a loo-wow. Hod still has water trapped in his ears from the surf, the bottoms of his feet scraped by coral. There were Kanakas riding the waves in on their wooden boards, men and women wearing almost nothing at all, but they disappeared quick once the beach was mobbed by the sickly-skinned, boat-dopey soldiers, peeling their uniforms off to give themselves up to the sea water. Only Big Ten chose not to go in, sitting on the shore with all his uniform still on, even his boots.

“My people will row on top of the water all day and all night,” he says, “but swimming is for fishes.”

Hod thinks it’s so the others won’t see how dark he is all over.

The food is hard to believe and just keeps coming. The local Americans, celebrating the Annexation Bill just passed in Congress, have roasted a whole herd of pigs down in holes in the ground, serving up steaming chunks from them wrapped in palm leaves, and then there are crabs and fish and chickens and yams and huge sweet potatoes and pineapples that never been in a can and bread and cocoanut milk and the best coffee Hod has ever tasted and dates and cocoanut pudding and something called alligator pears that Big Ten at first tries to eat without peeling the hide off. Inside they are light green and creamy and nutty tasting and you eat them with Worcestershire sauce. Everybody eats twice as much as they can hold, the food on the trip so far just pitiful, salthorse and sea biscuit, and no reason to think it will improve for the rest of the way. Three days into the voyage they let some carrier pigeons loose up top, supposed to fly with their messages back to San Francisco.

“I was gonna eat them birds,” said Big Ten, watching them fly. “Now we stuck with fishee ricee.”

The Chinamen and Japs who serve as the crew of the transport always have something you can buy to eat, a nickel here, a nickel there, even doughnuts if you catch them at the right time, but they won’t take Army grub in trade. The yellow men were left on board, helping the stevedores load coal into the ship, when the regiment marched away.

“Yo, Chief!” calls Corporal Grissom down the table. “Introduce me to your sister.”

There have been a lot of them telling Big Ten he looks just like the Kanakas and he takes it like a sport. He turns to the long-haired girl who is serving and speaks some of his lingo at her, but she just covers her face and giggles. There are dozens of the Kanaka girls serving in their bright shifts with flowers in their hair, and white women too, white women in clean white dresses with high collars and little straw hats moving around the long tables under the banyan trees with platters of food and urns of coffee.

“I think she’s a Princess,” says Big Ten. “They aint spose to talk with commoners.”

Corporal Grissom points to the Palace, just visible through the trees. “They say they got the Queen shut up in there. Once the Americans bumped her off the throne she hooked up with some bunch that wanted to put her back on it, so they stuck her under house arrest.”

“Tough duty. Lookit that place.”

“She should of behaved herself.”

“If this was my island,” says Big Ten, looking around, “I’d sure as hell want to get it back. In fact, I think I better volunteer to be on her guard detail, make sure she don’t bust out and cause any more ruckus.”

They all agree that duty here would be paradise, even without women serving you a feast every day. There is a kind of orchestra playing for them while they eat, natives wearing bright-colored shirts and ropes of flowers around their necks and some of the instruments Hod has never heard before. Suddenly it is their table’s turn to give back the compliment and they stand to sing On the Banks of the Wabash Far Away only with the words changed for their section of the country—

Oer my Colorado Rockies flies the eagle

Down the slopes flow rushing rivers clear and cool

Oftentimes my thoughts revert to scenes of childhood

Where I single-jacked for silver, Nature’s school

But one thing there is missing in the picture

Without her face it seems so incomplete

On the ship it is a whore they sing of, each verse nastier than the next, but this is polite company, with officers hovering and white ladies present—

I long to see my mother in the doorway

Of our cabin years ago, her boy to greet

Big Ten has a strong bass voice and can harmonize with anybody. Hod sings along, letting the other voices carry his, wishing he could feel a part of this like he did on the run with the Butte contingent of the Commonweal Army. But all he feels is that he’s hiding from something, that his life is not real, and being here in this dreamland, pleasant as it is, doesn’t help any. When the China was towed up to the wharf there were little Kanaka boys and girls swimming all around the hull who smiled and shouted and dove down under to grab for pennies the soldiers threw overboard. That’s me, Hod thought as he and Big Ten, throwing nothing, watched them splash and shout. That’s my whole damn life. Scrambling for pennies to entertain the folks up high—

Oh, the moonlight’s fair tonight in Colorado

From saloons there comes the sound of men at play

Oer the glory holes the caution lights are gleaming

In my sweet Colorado, far away!

“So the Philippines is just like this, right?” says Private Neely when they have received their applause and are allowed to sit down and gorge themselves again.

There has been a lot of talk during the long, stomach-heaving days at sea as to where exactly the islands are and what the nature of the people on them is.

“They’re just like Cuba and Porto Rico,” insists Corporal Grissom, who has never been to either of those places, “only farther away.”

“It’s part of China,” says Private Falconer, “only the Papists got there before the other religions.”

“You sit under a tree,” says Sergeant LaDuke, “and take a nap, and when you wake up your lunch has dropped down into your lap.”

Runt, before they booted him out for being too small and too young, showed them the islands on a map he got hold of somewheres.

“Jesus, lookit em all,” said Neely, impressed. “We got to liberate every one of those?”

“We just wrap up the big one here,” said Runt, poking his finger onto an island called Luzon, “and the rest of em tip over like dominoes.”

Manigault strolls by them, wearing a white duck uniform and white canvas shoes like the navy officers.

“Dig in, fellows,” he says jauntily. “This will have to last you quite a while.”

“We been hearing plenty talk here, Lieutenant,” says Corporal Grissom. “There was some sailors at the wharf who see everything that comes on the wire, and their scut is that after what Dewey done to the Spanish fleet it’ll be over before we even get there.”

Manigault gives him a pitying smile, then nods toward an enormous roast pig being carried past on a litter by two barefoot Kanaka men.

“There is no feast,” he says, “without a slaughter.”

FURLOUGH

Halfway home on the Comanche, Royal is strong enough to climb up to the steamer’s aft deck and see the dolphins. The creatures, sometimes three, sometimes four, power along in their wake then leap again and again, sleek and glistening, to the cheers of the men. It is the best he has felt since Chickamauga.

There is a full band on one of the battleships plowing alongside the returning fleet, and several times a day the thump of bass drums is heard across the water, military airs and the new Sousa marches pounding out to cheer their passage. Royal is not stirred. He grips the aft rail tightly, still weak at the knees, and thinks of what a small thing his death would have been. His mother would have mourned him, and his brother Jubal, and his uncle Wicklow and Junior, for a while. They turned to waste so quickly, the bodies of the dead. A white man with a clipboard came through the sick tent, stopping by the cots of the ones who were thought to be dying.

“Next of kin?” he asked Royal.

“Jessie Lunceford.”

Her name came without thought, and when it was out it seemed right. To be mourned by Jessie Lunceford would mean you were someone in the world. You were not easily replaced. The Luncefords kept a horse and carriage, they lived in a house with white folks on either side of them. They were people the world looked at, wondered about, tried to be like.

“Relation?” asked the man with the clipboard.

“We’re going to be married,” Royal answered.

He is no longer delirious, or dying. But he will make it happen.

The Judge confronts him halfway into the street, brandishing a newspaper.

“Have you seen this?”

It’s hard for MacRae to make out anything on the paper with the Judge still waving it. “What is it?”

“It’s today’s Record, is what it is, and it is the most vicious slander.”

“I’m not in the habit of reading the colored sheet, Judge.” MacRae pulls his watch from his vest, glances at it. There’s a meeting with the fellows across the street in Bellamy’s building and he’s late already.

“Nor am I. But when it was brought to my attention—” the Judge slaps the rolled newspaper hard against his open palm. “Measures must be taken!”

“Are you mentioned by name?”

“I am not, damn it, but if he ever dare print it in this vile rag, I will—”

“Mr. Manly is not reticent with his opinions.”

“His opinions are criminal! This is part and parcel of what has become of the entire state. Our homes are no longer safe, the streets are overrun with insolent darkies who have been told they are our equals, no, that they are superior to us, men of proven value and social standing are ignored while the governor doles out state commissions to every shitheel Republican with two nickels to rub together—”

“The governor,” says MacRae, laying a calming hand on the Judge’s shoulder, “will not plague us for long.”

“His term is—”

“His term has meaning only so long as he controls the legislature. We have an election coming up.”

“And every one of these grinning monkeys will be lined up at the polls, lording it over us—”

“That will not be allowed. Not this time.”

The Judge is brought short by the bluntness of MacRae’s reply.

“And who will prevent it?”

The difficult part will be the timing. Building the pressure without letting it explode too soon, keeping secrets from your friends as well as your adversaries.

“Men of substance,” he says. “Men of honor. Men, as you put it, of proven value.”

“But the legalities—”

“The legalities will be dealt with as they arise. Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

They are distracted then by the loud rattling of an empty dray, a high-stepping horse heading directly at them and the teamster, a young, hatless negro, pointedly neglecting to rein it in.

“Pardon me, gennemen!”

The Judge and MacRae both have to scramble back onto the curb to avoid being trampled. Both men stare after the wagon as it speeds away toward the river, incredulous.

“When the time comes, Judge,” says MacRae, his voice shaking with anger, “trust me — you will be called upon.”

Jubal pulls the dray in front of the loading dock at the lumberyard. Dap Mosely, the foreman, is sitting with the others eating their lunches, legs hanging over the edge of the platform.

“Got Mister Rankin load ready?” asks Jubal.

“Lunch don’t end till I say it do,” Dap smiles. “An I aint said so yet. What’s your hurry, young man?”

“This one always in a rush.” His Uncle Wicklow sits on a pile of railroad ties back in the shade of the awning, shoes off, wiggling his toes. “In a big rush to get nowhere.”

“What you doin here, Wick?”

“Oh, just resting my feet. Listening to Broadnax here read the news.”

Percy Broadnax, who is missing two fingers from a sawmill accident, waves a copy of the Record. “Gonna be trouble over this one. Get all the white folks in a fuss.”

“I just put a few of em up on their toes,” says Jubal, stretching out on the seat of the wagon. “My Nubia pert near run Mr. Hugh MacRae and that old Judge Nannygoat over.”

“What you want to do that for?” says Wick, leaning forward with a frown.

“They was standing right out in the middle of Market Street like they own it. You got to leave people room to do their bidness.”

“Hugh MacRae probly does own Market Street,” says Dap. “Spect he thinks he does, anyway.”

“What you care about them, anyhow?” says Jubal. His uncle has done livery work for plenty of white families over the years, but none of them lived in a castle. “They aint your people.”

“Got to treat white folks and snakes just the same,” says Wick. “Don’t rile em less you got to.”

“Well this gonna get em hissin and spittin, all right—” Broadnax holds the paper at arm’s length to read it, “If these alleged crimes of rape were so frequent as has been reported in our state’s newspapers, Mrs. Felton’s plea might be worthy of consideration.”

Teeter Williams, brushing cornbread crumbs off his pants, whistles. “Damn. That boy Manly can articulate.”

“Say his grandaddy was governor back before the war, had him a fondness for the gals back in the cabins.”

“Well, he act like he’s king of somethin.” Jubal shakes his head. “I haul his paper around every morning to them that sell it. I see him up there in his office — he hardly look at a man. Just cause you look white don’t mean you got to act it.”

“It’s his mama the one got the brains in that family,” says Dap Mosely, who is nearly as old as Uncle Wick and seems to know everybody in the city. “Woman is sharp. She aint so light-complected as her boys, cause she don’t come from the Manly line, but she don’t miss nothin.”

“However,” Broadnax reads, raising his voice to regain their attention, “some white women who cry ‘Rape!’ in this regard may be exaggerating the truth.”

“How you do that?” says Jubal. “Exaggerate—”

“He means lying.”

“Right. Some lowlife dog either rape a woman or don’t. Aint no exaggerate about it.”

“Only the truth and a lie. But either one get your neck stretched.”

“Many black men,” Broadnax continues, “are sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them.”

Jubal straightens and shows them his profile. “Yeah, an I’m one of em.”

The men laugh, all but Wicklow.

“You be careful how you talk,” he says.

“Relax, Wick—”

“Here it’s a joke. Somebody else be listening, you find yourself tied up to a tree.”

“Uncle Wick still got them old plantation ways in his head.” Jubal winks to the others. “Fraid the Massa gone come back and get him. Them days over.”

Dap stands and stretches. “You go back and ask your Mr. MacRae about that, young man. See what he got to say about it.” He turns to the others. “Stir your bones, gennemen. We got some wood to load.”

Judge Manigault is in the editor’s office when Milsap arrives. The Judge comes at least once a month, fulminating about one outrage or another that must be redressed in print, but Milsap has never seen his face quite this crimson before.

“Furthermore,” reads the Judge, shouting though Mr. Clawson sits only feet away from him, “in the light of the continued rape and seduction of black women by white men, we must ask these carping hypocrites how they can cry aloud for the virtue of their women while they seek to destroy the morality of ours. Sir, I ask you—”

“It came across my desk this morning,” says the editor, calmly.

“This must not be tolerated!” The Judge hurls the folded newspaper on Mr. Clawson’s desk. “Scurrilous, vile—”

“Yes, Judge, they gone way past cheeky in this town.”

“And what do you intend to do about it?”

Clawson swivels in his chair, scooping up the paper. Milsap can tell from the doorway it is the Record. Eight pages, cheap paper.

“I have only just begun to formulate my editorial comments — you may read them in tomorrow’s issue. Mr. Manly’s absence from our community is strongly advised. As for this fortuitous bit of calumny,” the editor slashes a blue pencil across the first and last paragraphs of the piece in front of him, then holds it out toward Milsap, “we must first be sure that our readers are aware they have been so maligned.” He finally looks over. “This goes in today, Drew.”

Milsap steps in to take the paper, glances at the article. “Just the middle part of it?”

“Cut to the heart of the insult. Header—” the editor tilts back in his chair, musing for a moment—“ ‘A Negro Defamer of the White Women — of the Christian White Women of North Carolina.’ Lead column left, change the typeface from our own.”

“They use Baskerville—”

“That will be fine. And the other front-page piece—”

“ ‘Attempted Assault by Black Brutes.’ ” Some colored boys had thrown stones at a trolley on Fourth and Red Cross. “I’ve already set the column.”

“Redo it with a subhead so it looks like a continuation. Then beginning tomorrow we’ll run Manly’s statement in a box, center bottom, front page.”

“Yes, sir.” Milsap turns to go.

“And Drew—”

“Yes sir?”

“Be sure to have them hold onto the slugs. We’ll be reprinting this in every issue till Election Day. Center bottom, first page.” The editor swivels back to smile pleasantly at the Judge. “In a box.”

The justification of the article is terrible, as it always is with the Record, but the text makes it hard for Milsap to concentrate on the borders of the column. His fingers dig into the keys, matrices rattling down the chutes of the Linotype—

We suggest that the whites guard their women more closely, as Mrs. Felton says, thus giving no opportunity for the human fiend, be he white or black. You leave your goods out of doors and then complain because they are taken away.

Milsap is not married, never even engaged, but can imagine the anxiety of leaving a wife or daughter at home unprotected with marauding beasts at large, intent upon rapine and murder. Is that all the provocation necessary, to let them step out into the light of day? Seeing old Manigault has made him think of the Judge’s daughter Sally, strolling past his room with her friends on their way to Bible class, made him think of his own furtive thoughts, the few regrettable instances of self-pollution that have followed them. But to violate another, to touch them against their will—

Poor white men are careless of protecting their women, especially on farms. They are careless of their conduct toward them, and our experience among poor white people in the country teaches us that women of that race are not any more particular in the matter of clandestine meetings with colored men than are the white men with colored women.

Milsap feels dirty just to read this, and setting it into the machine makes him sweat, the seat of his pants sticking damp to his chair. It always makes his stomach go funny if one of them is pressed against him in a crowded trolley car, man or woman, especially on a hot day. They have a smell that is peculiar to their race and are unpredictable in their moods. In Charleston when he visited his Aunt Hepatha they had the Jim Crow rule in effect and everybody seemed comfortable with it. But here—

Meetings of this kind go on for some time until the woman’s infatuation, or the man’s boldness, bring attention to them, and the man is lynched for rape

Milsap stops halfway through the line. His pulse is racing. He tries to imagine what sort of white women would willingly, no, willfully submit to — has he ever met such a creature? Haskins the inker and some of the others who work the cylinder press like to go on about the women in Patty’s Hollow, teasing him about what they could show him if he’d only come along with them some night, but those places are only for white men and as far as he knows the negroes must have prostitutes of their own color. It is not something written about in the newspapers, except for a rare mention of a disorderly house. How debased a woman would have to be to — but that is the point, it is a lie, a projection of this Manly’s own twisted fantasies. A window into the criminal mind—

Every negro lynched is called a Big Burly Black Brute, when, in fact, many of those who have thus been dealt with had white men for fathers, and were not only not “black” and “burly,” but were sufficiently attractive for white girls of culture and refinement to fall in love with them, as is very well known to all.

The light-colored ones were always like that, impressed with themselves, making assumptions. There is a condescension, a challenge in that as is very well known to all that makes Milsap burn. He knows no such thing. That he knows no women of culture and refinement, not personally, is beside the point. Such ladies would naturally be even closer to the feminine ideal than those he is familiar with. When tomorrow’s Messenger reaches the public, with Mr. Clawson’s editorial—

And then he understands it. Understands it all. The daily headlines of outrage, the editor’s meetings with important men, the cartoons reprinted from Raleigh, even the arsenal he stumbled upon the other day in the storage room — cases of shining new Winchesters and Colt pistols. It is a campaign. Not a campaign like the trash collection or the county voting or the smallpox warnings earlier in the year. Intricate plans have been made, strategies devised, and the press, the shining jewel of American democracy, is to be the sharp point of the sword. He should have known. The way Mr. Clawson was with the Judge, so relaxed, a player with all the aces in his hand. He looks at the last line again, seeing now that it is somebody’s death notice, and is thrilled to be here, humble as his part in it will be, the man who feeds the machine.

Milsap yanks the lever and the hot metal flows.

It is Frank, with his usual long face.

“He wants us out.”

Manly sits by the electric lamp, writing. They are so much superior, steadier. Stay with gas light and he’ll be blind by fifty.

“We have a lease,” he answers. Frank can be an alarmist. Frank has assured him, many times, that the newspaper will ruin them all.

“He says there’ll be a county sheriff here at ten o’clock.”

“What gives him license to do that?”

Frank sighs, points at the article he has pinned upon the wall. “Your reply to Mrs. Felton. What do you think?”

“It’s been out for days. Old news—”

“The Messenger just reprinted it. And the Raleigh News and Observer.”

“Ah.”

Manly rises, looks around at the press crowding the tiny room. “I suppose we’ll have to cease operations tomorrow, make arrangements—”

“Anything left in this room,” says Frank, “they destroy or confiscate.”

“They can’t do that.”

Frank keeps staring at him. Of course they can do that, and much worse.

“It’s already dark out.”

“Good,” says Frank, beginning to stack piles of paper on other piles of paper. “Maybe nobody will see us.”

“I have nothing to hide.”

Frank shrugs. “Course not. You’re the one that pass for white, not me.”

His sharpest memory of her is on a train. He was at the station to help his brother Jubal load crates onto the wagon and she called to him from the window of an excursion train, dressed in white like always, the only girl he knew who wore gloves that weren’t for scalding chickens. It was the AME Zion youth group off on a day trip to Lake Waccamaw, laughing and shouting, and he was down on the platform with bare feet and stains on his shirt.

“Royal,” she said, excited, “there’s going to be a boat race!”

Junior is sleeping in the seat by the window as the passenger car clicks over the rail joints and the dark countryside rolls by. They are in uniform, but there have been no parades. The station in Washington was full of soldiers, the hearty, sunburned ones just mustered out from volunteer units that were never shipped to Cuba, and a few of the hollow-eyed men, too, regulars discharged or chasing their regiments, who had made it back. Men, black and white, like Royal, who’d had to punch another hole in their belts and cinch tight to keep their pants up, men who looked dazed as they passed through the crowded waiting room, shades among the living throng.

The porter who works the dining car, still awake, comes back to sit across from him, grinning.

“Allus likes to see another man in uniform.”

It is a joke, the porter running his finger down his long row of buttons.

“Yours fits better.”

“You boys was down there?”

Royal nods.

“You in the Nigger Ninth?”

Royal shakes his head. “25th Infantry.”

The porter smiles and lifts his cap. “Yall was in the middle of it then. Regulars.”

“That’s right.”

“You done us proud. Ever time you or the Cavalry boys or the 24th make a move down there it’s all up and down the line.” The porter waves a finger back and forth to indicate the rail they are riding. “This here the colored man’s telephone.”

Royal forces himself to smile. Since he’s been back in the world the white people just look through them like always, even with uniforms on, but everywhere the colored folks stop and gladhand and want to know where they served.

“How far you headed, son?”

“Just to Wilmington,” Royal tells him. “Then we’ll get on something headed west, catch up with our regiment in Arizona.”

“Out to the Territories.”

“Fort Huachuca. Near where Chief Geronimo gave up the warpath.”

“Wa-chew-ka,” the porter sounds it out. “But you too young to be in on them Indian wars.”

Royal nods. “I suppose now we’ll just sit back and watch the jackrabbits run by. Unless the Chinamen get up in arms.”

The porter chuckles. “Young man your age, you seen nearly as much of the world as me. And I been some places. You got people in Wilmington?”

“Yes sir. Born and raised.”

“Got a gal there, I suppose.”

Royal is surprised to feel his heart race at the question. He still gets dizzy if he stands up too quickly, still feels like his insides have been bruised. “I suppose I do,” he answers, glancing over to Junior, snoring softly now by the window.

“She aint around, young war hero won’t have no trouble findin another. If we could change uniforms for one night,” the porter winks, “I be a happy man.”

Alma opens the cellar door to a racket and a swirl of black dust. She shuts it quickly, grabs the house bucket and steps out back to find Wicklow shoveling the morning delivery into the chute.

“Got some of that for me?” she calls, loud enough to be heard over the rattling coal.

Wicklow turns, leans on the wide-bladed shovel and cricks his neck to the side, wincing. The Crosbys’ rooster over on Queen Street is announcing himself, and the backyard is still in shadow.

“Miss Alma,” he says, smiling. “My first ray of sunshine.” He has a sweet tongue, Wicklow, but is never free with his hands like Calvin Hines who brings the ice. Alma always keeps her broom in hand when Calvin comes by.

“How you be this morning, Wick?”

“Sore all over, truth be known.”

“You getting old.”

Wick laughs. “That’s true enough, young lady, but also I been helpin my boy Jubal, got the dray bidness, move Mr. Manly’s press.”

“He leavin town?”

“No, M’am, he only been ast to vacate his office by the white man owns the building.”

“What I heard,” she says as Wicklow scoops smallish chunks with his hands to fill the house bucket, “he lucky he still got his head on his shoulders. Though Lord knows what he use it for, talking like that.”

“He didn’t say nothin, Miss Alma, he wrote it. Wrote it out in his newspaper.”

“That’s even worst. You speak out wrong and they come after you for it, you can always tell em folks just misheard what you really said, or even that you was drunk when you said it, act the fool and save your neck. But to print it out in black and white—” Alma shakes her head, lifting an armful of kindling from the pile against the back wall and crossing to add it to the fire already crackling beneath the huge galvanized kettle.

“Wash day again,” Wicklow remarks, watching her hips as she moves.

“Blue Monday.” Boiling the clothes and linens, wringing them out and hanging them up, the endless ironing — on top of all of what she usually does for the Luncefords. “Ever damn time I turn around it come up on me.”

“You got to admit,” the old man continues, “wasn’t nothin he wrote in his article that’s untrue.”

Alma doesn’t read the newspaper. She barely has time for a chapter of her love stories at the end of the day, measuring them out so a book will last a month, all through work wondering at what will befall the poor girl next and then finding out by candlelight and falling hard into sleep. But she’s heard about what was written, heard that it had to do with colored men and white women, and if Manly is so smart and educated he ought to know better.

“True don’t have one little thing to do with it,” she says. She licks her finger and touches it to the kettle — getting there. She tosses a handful of the powdered bluing in. If she’s lucky Miss Jessie won’t lay up in bed too long and she can strip the sheets off. “You know Mrs. Beauchamp, got that big red whatever-it-is growing on the side of her neck?”

“Sits two pews ahead of me in church.”

“Well then, you meet up with her on the steps, no place to look her but right in the face, and she know it’s there and you know it’s there — but do you say ‘Lord, Mrs. B, if that aint growed twice its size since I see you last!’? You do not.”

“That’s just polite,” says Wicklow, turning back to the pile of coal. “This here with Mr. Manly not about manners, it’s about principles.”

Alma snorts. “Who tole you that?”

“Mr. Manly. Last night whilst we were hauling all his machinery upstairs over the Love and Charity Hall.”

“Where Doctor have his Lodge meetins.”

Wicklow nods. “That’s the new headquarters of the Wilmington Daily Record. Would you believe ever damn one of them letters they use to print the paper is made of lead? I’d knowed all that mess was going to the top floor I’d of told Jubal to go chase hisself.”

“Manly help you carry?”

“Him and his brothers. Course Mr. Alexander that’s the editor is the one that look most like a white man. Talk like one too. He wanted to, he could move off somewhere and pass, easy as pie.”

Alma has seen the Manlys out in their carriages, has heard the story of how their grandfather was governor of the state, how the great man set their father, his son, free, even before the War.

“Don’t matter how white he look,” she says. “People read that paper they see a colored man speakin through it, and a colored man got to have more sense than just shout out whatever little idea fall into his head.”

Wicklow draws himself up to his full height. “A man can’t live thout principles.”

“Well I can live without em,” says Alma, picking up the coal bucket and heading inside. “Specially ones that’s bound to get me lynched.”

Wicklow shovels in silence for a moment after the screen door bangs, frowning and flinging the coal hard into the chute.

“Man laid out the truth,” he mutters finally. “In black and white.”

Alma feeds coal into the maw of the cooking range, flicks water on the stovetop to see if it’s ready. She has the bacon sliced and the eggs ready to fry for Doctor, who will be out early on his rounds. Jessie and Mrs. Lunceford only take toast and tea before climbing back upstairs to face their corsets, but Doctor is an old farm boy no matter how he works to cover it over, and wants some fuel for the day.

The bacon is sizzling, starting to curl in its fat when someone, probably Wicklow asking about the carriage, knocks at the back door. Alma flips the slices and hurries out. It is Clerow, Hattie Pettigrew’s boy, with a telegram.

“This here just come.”

The telegraph office won’t send their white boys to the colored houses, but their colored messengers are allowed to deliver to whites and get in the habit of coming to the back. He looks cute in his little hat, wears uniform pants too long and shoes too big. Hattie can’t shut her mouth bragging about the boy, maybe because her older one is the worst hophead in the whole Brooklyn section.

“It need a reply?”

“No M’am.”

She gives Clerow a penny from the dish she keeps by the door and steps back in, worried. Before the Spanish War she would have just put it by Doctor’s plate at breakfast, but now, with Junior still in uniform and so many sick up north on Long Island, she hurries through the kitchen to pull the skillet off the heat. A telegram is not a letter. A letter, with Junior’s handwriting on the front, means he is well enough to write it, no matter how long ago it was sent. The news inside might be bad but not the worst. A telegram is short, maybe just one hard fact in it, and Alma keeps it in her apron pocket, unread, till she is upstairs.

Doctor is doing his men’s business behind a locked door so she brings it to Mrs. Lunceford, sitting in her bedroom in her dressing gown, looking pretty by the window that takes the morning light.

“This just came.”

Mrs. Lunceford looks at the paper like it might be a snake in her hand.

“Leave it on the dressing table, Alma.”

Except for Jessie, the Luncefords don’t want her witness to their private life. The Hightowers, the white folks she kept house for just before, would scream and holler and curse and then make up with tears and little private names as if Alma wasn’t standing there an arm’s-length away from them. And then that mess working for the Judge and his boys — well. But she has never been seated in a room with either Doctor or Mrs. Lunceford, has never been taken into their confidence.

And still knows everything she needs to about them.

Alma waits halfway down the stairs to listen, hand gripping the banister to keep from shaking, until she hears Mrs. Lunceford cry out “Oh, wonderful!” and then she is called and rushes back up to find Mrs. L and Jessie and then Doctor, all excited and smiling cause Junior is visiting them on leave this very day.

“It’s sent from Washington,” says Doctor, scrutinizing the little note. “He must have just wired it from Union Station on his way.”

“You’re certain it’s today? There’s only the one sentence.”

“With telegrams you pay by the word,” Doctor explains. “It’s a virtue to be concise.”

“We need to have something special—”

Jessie takes the telegram and reads it. “Coming today on leave arrive 4:20 Love Jr. It doesn’t say how long he’ll be here.” She shoots a look to Alma.

“Alma,” Mrs. L says again, “we’ll have to have something special.”

“No trouble, M’am,” she smiles, and hurries back down the stairs. It will be trouble, with the wash and breakfast not even started and the extra cleaning that will be expected, but she feels lightheaded as she steps back into the kitchen. Junior can’t be the only soldier on the train.

Jessie nibbles toast. Mother is going on about what needs to be done, what needs to be cleaned, and Father has already gotten his Lodge brothers busy setting up a reception for Junior tonight.

Their eyes meet first — his are wounded, smoldering with unexpressed longing, hers misting with the sudden release from her lonely vigil. He crosses the room with long strides, ignoring all the others, no object in his mind but her, the image he had carried through the hell of battle now real, made flesh before him, and taking her, who he has barely touched before, taking her full in his arms—

It does not seem possible, after all her thinking, all the scenarios, each different in at least one detail, that she really will see him, Royal, again, that he is a person who walks the earth and not a character from books.

“I’m just so relieved he’s out of that horrible quarantine,” says Mother. “The conditions he described—”

“Scandalous neglect,” says Father, getting up to go on his rounds. “If the stories you read about how badly they’ve served the white soldiers are true, you can imagine what our colored boys have been through.”

The last she’d heard of Royal was in one of Junior’s letters. Failing had been mentioned, and We can only pray. Nothing from Royal himself, though Alma said she asked the carrier each day when he came by if there was anything for her. Alma never got mail at home, she said — her street, just an alley really, was not on the official route. But surely if something terrible had happened since Junior’s letter he would have found a way to let her know.

There were stories told about the young woman, about her silent, almost mute demeanor, the sadness that always seemed to fall upon a room she had entered, the black gowns, always black, that she wore. The stories were only conjecture, of course, attempts to fathom why one so young, one so seemingly full of life should have come to be this mysterious, selfless Sister of Help in such a remote corner of the world—

No. It couldn’t be. She would have felt something, would have sensed it somehow. Her mother is right — there is so much to be done. If Royal is in Wilmington and Junior does not bring him home, how will they see each other? The one time Jessie mentioned him, in passing, at the dinner table there was a long, strained silence until Father began complaining again about the black layabouts in Brooklyn who made his vaccination work so difficult. What if Royal is already sent away, off to another post in another forsaken country? Or still in the death-camp in Hempstead?

“I suppose he’ll be different,” says Mother. “A man on his own.”

Jessie lays her toast down and hurries upstairs to study her wardrobe.

Alma throws the last of the linens into the boiling water, poking them under with the paddle, adds a double handful of soap flakes, then stirs the mass of it around till soap foam comes to the surface. She has the shirtwaists, petticoats, and collars in a pile by the starch tub, has Doctor’s clothes all separated the way he asked her to after the smallpox hit in January. She has to lean over the kettle for leverage, working the paddle with both hands, and the rising steam wets her face and forces her eyes shut. It’s a relief when she hears Honniker’s man down the street and can leave it for a moment.

Alma pulls her wet shirt away from her body, smooths it down, and walks around the house. Honniker’s man, Simon, tall, gap-toothed, cinnamon colored, has a bell on his wagon so he doesn’t need to call out. There are always a half-dozen dogs, strays mostly, following him around town, though he swears he never throws them a scrap.

“Alma Moultrie, needs some poultry,” he smiles when she steps out to the curb and he pulls the reins in.

“Today you right,” she says to his usual greeting. “Two big fryers.”

“Company coming.” Simon leans back to uncover the birds and Alma picks out a pair. Honniker mostly sells to white folks, but you can buy what he calls the “colored cuts,” the head and trotters and innards, out the back door or off Simon’s wagon. Doctor draws the line at anything below bacon or cured ham, though. “If these low-class negroes attended to their diet,” he says, “they wouldn’t fall ill all the time.”

“We got Mr. Lunceford Junior coming back from the war. Usually I’d make him a stew, but that’s more time than I got today.”

Simon wraps the birds in butcher paper, hands them down. “So after you got your family all squared away here, nine, ten o’clock, think you like to step out with me?”

He’s a nice-looking man, Simon, and Wilma Reaves says that Lula Mae who used to live with him is gone and not coming back. But there’s the chance that Clarence — Henry — whatever name he’s carrying now, will show up and as tired as she is—

“Spect I’ll be later than that.”

“Party at Brunjes’ still be goin no matter when you free.”

The dogs are up around the wagon now, sniffing.

“Imonna walk into Brunjes’ all by myself.”

“Plenty of ladies do.”

“They some that might, but they aint no ladies.”

Simon laughs and twitches the reins to wake his horse up. The dogs shy away, heads low, as the wheels begin to turn.

“I’ll have Mr. Honniker put this on their slip.”

Wilma Reaves said he was just too good to Lula Mae, that some women need a rough man and she left to look for one.

“Simon,” she calls, and he looks back to her from his seat, the motion of the wagon ringing his bell. “Ast me again sometime, you think of a nicer place to visit.”

Coop is the last one off the train, checking the platform on both sides through the windows before he makes his move. There are people he doesn’t want to see, not all of them lawmen. Snapper Jones is at his little stand like always, unseeing eyes a milky blue, fingers stained a half-dozen shades of polish. Coop hasn’t spoken to the man in years.

“Shine?”

“Wouldn’t mind one.” Coop sits and props his feet up. The old man is surprisingly limber, squatting down to probe at his shoes with an oxblood finger.

“Black.”

“That’s right. Make em sparkle.”

Snapper wipes the leather down. “New in town?”

“May as well be,” says Coop. The old man’s scalp is yellow brown where the hair is gone on the top. “How things workin for us these days?”

“Oh, lively, lively.” Snapper taps a dab of polish onto one shoe, begins to work it in. “Repubikins got the mayor’s seat again, ony there’s three different gangs of em claims it. Mist’ Wright seem to won out, an he aint a bad man. Then there’s that old fox crowd, they’s Democracks, been rilin up the peckerwoods somethin awful. Got these Red Shirts and Rough Riders — not the Teddy Rooseville kind, these is local boys — marching around, makin speeches, shootin off their pistols, say they gone make this a white man’s city again.”

Coop snorts a laugh. “What they think it is now?”

“I spose they won’t be happy till they push us all the way back down to slavery days.” Snapper starts to buff the shoetops, popping his rag. “We got three of us that’s aldermen, we got police, mail carriers, Mr. Dancy who runs the Customs at the port, got Mr. Miller that own so much property he got white folks owes him money — and that don’t sit right with these plantation colonels. What they want is our vote, see, and we aint givin that back.”

“They took it in Georgia,” says Coop, standing to hold the shine in the light, one foot at a time. “South Carolina too.”

“Well, then, they got some sorry niggers down there.”

Coop has never voted. It starts with giving your address to register, and why make it easy for them to find you? “So where’s a black man ought to go after dark?” he asks, changing his tone. “I only got tonight.”

Snapper glances up at him. “What you lookin for?”

“Hot dice and cold beer,” says Coop. “That’ll get me started.”

“Oh, there’s Darden’s, there’s Pompey Galloway’s place on Castle, there’s Brunjes’ saloon in George Heyer’s store, he allus got a crap game goin.”

“Probly usin the same old bones, too. Lopsided little pocket-robbers.”

Snapper grins. “I know you! You Clarence Rice, took off four, five years back!”

“That boy dead and forgotten,” says Coop, tossing an extra coin into the blind man’s cigar box and stepping down to go. “Let’s keep him that way.”

Jessie is thrilled to see her brother, of course, to feel the new strength in him when they embrace, but then there he is, Royal, standing back out of the light like a word that nobody will utter. Father is smiling, it’s so wonderful to see him really smile, but when he turns to Royal it hardens somehow and her heart sinks, the impossibility of it all, the silliness of her fantasies coming home to her and she stands immobile in the spot she has chosen where the best of the afternoon light slants in, smiling prettily but no more than that, not even able to take his hand.

“I’m pleased to see you’ve passed the test as well, young man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Scott, isn’t it?”

He knows it’s Scott, of course, Royal’s own mother cleaned his office for years before he discovered she was selling home cures to her neighbors and had to dismiss her. Jessie’s cheeks burn with embarrassment.

“Yes, sir.”

Royal says it evenly, without deference, and she sees he is different too. He is thin, sickly thin, but it’s like he knows something about them he didn’t know when he left. Mother feels it as well, made uncomfortable, and does not call to Alma for cool drinks.

“Your mother must be so relieved to have you back,” she says. “You have seen her, haven’t you?”

“I’m on my way,” says Royal. “Just wanted to pay my respects, M’am.”

“That’s very kind of you.” Mother, who tells her that an awkward situation can always be defused with the proper grace and charm, Mother just smiles at him and lets the moment hang and Junior is about to step in when Royal saves him the trouble.

“Thank you M’am,” he says, and turns to her and nods — only that, or is it a bit of a bow? — and says “Miss Jessie,” and turns to leave.

“In the morning, old man,” calls Junior.

“I’ll be there.”

Then he is gone and all the strength rushes out of her while Mother reacts to the hard news that Junior has only the one night to spend here before he’s off to the West and Royal too, thinks Jessie, I’ve lost him, lost him before I ever had him! Unless, and this is all that gives her the strength to stir herself from the suddenly oppressive patch of sun and take part in the family conversation, unless she read the haunted look in his eyes correctly, the look he gave when he nodded or half-bowed to her upon leaving, a look that made her hear his voice, his true voice, inside her head.

Save me, he said. Save me.

Alma is in the kitchen peeling yams, one of Junior’s favorites, wondering why they haven’t called her out to greet him yet, she wiped that boy’s nose enough times, when there is a rap at the back door. It is Royal Scott, looking tragic in a uniform too big for him.

“Little Roy,” she says, wiping her hands on her apron. “Aw honey, you come back all right.”

Royal nods, hands her a folded note. “Would you give this to her?”

Jessie has pestered her with a thousand questions about him, about what he’s really like, about what he might think of her, but Royal has never asked Alma to go between them before. She stuffs the note in her apron pocket. It will be trouble, whatever she does with it.

“If I get a chance,” she says. She thought she heard him out front before, so this is secret business, not just a hello. “You back for good?”

“Just tonight. We’re chasing after the regiment.”

“You know the one calls hisself Cooper?”

“He got off the train with us.”

Alma smiles. “Well, sometime later, I get alone with her, I’ll pass this on.”

“I preciate it.” He steps away.

“And tell your mama Imonna be by for more poke root.”

“I’ll do that.”

She can hear Junior telling stories in the music room when she goes back to the yams. He’ll come in, by and by, and make a fuss over her. A thoughtful boy, Junior, and she wonders if he had him one of those Cuban gals in the drawings, if he’s more than his daddy’s little echo after being to war. Maybe Clarence — Coop — will be by later. Man like Coop is a cool breeze in August. It don’t last long, feels good when it turns your way, then leaves you sticky and wanting more. Never know when a breeze like that coming up, but you won’t get through the heavy days without one.

“Alma!” cries Junior when he stomps into the kitchen. “How’s my best girl?”

Early is at the crate and Coop knows it’s his lucky night. A quick peek from the swinging door that leads from the store in the front — nobody here yet he’s got bad blood with — and he steps up to the bar.

“Look what crawled back from the grave!” calls Brunjes, laying him down a cold one in a mug. “Must be the Judgment Day.”

There is a table of young sports in the corner who look over wondering who he is, Early playing it fast and ragged, nodding to him over the keys, three or four women he doesn’t recognize and the usual Harnett Street crowd. Simon Green is there, like always mimicking the sausage-eater he works for.

“Gott im Himmel!” he cries when he sees Coop. “Ist der schwartzer goniff!”

There is some back-slapping and old jokes then, a few happy to see him and the others with one nervous eye on the door. He almost killed Pharaoh Ballard here one night, or Pharaoh almost killed him, and the police must have come sniffing round more than once after he left town.

“Somebody told me you was on a work gang down South Cahlina,” says Brunjes.

“Still there,” Coop gives him a look. “If you know what’s what.”

Little Bit appears at his elbow.

“Clarence. Gone, but not forgotten.”

“Little Bit. Forgotten, but not gone.”

The old boys laugh at this. A couple of the sports drift over.

“Way I recollect, you owes me fi’ dollars.”

“Damn, must of left it in my other pants.”

More laughter.

“How bout that uniform, brother?” asks one of the young ones, who Coop can’t place. “You was down there fightin?”

“Smack in the middle of it.”

Some of the women are pressing close now. There is a short one in a green dress, little bit of a thing, got her hair in a Indian braid.

“What them Spanish look like?”

“Oh,” says Coop, turning to rest his back against the bar, “mostly they look just like white folks. Dark hair, but white-complected.”

“And they let you shoot em?”

“As many as I could hit.”

The crowd laughs and Brunjes tops his beer off. “On the house tonight, brother.”

Little Bit has stopped looking at him. “Fi’ dollars aint a pittance.”

You don’t want to take Little Bit too light. Smallish man like that, known to handle a wager, he’s got to back it up with steel.

“I’d of paid you back already, brother, if circumstances hadn’t come between us.” A few chuckles. Coop can feel the others, especially the young ones, hoping for a fight. But he’s not in the mood for one yet. “What you say,” and he puts a hand on Little Bit’s shoulder, “we get up a card game later, and the first fi’ dollars you bet comes out of my pocket?”

It isn’t a surrender and it isn’t a holdout, either, and in front of all these eyes Little Bit knows it’s the best he’ll do without killing the man. He tips his little bowler. “I looks forward to it.”

Early switches to a waltz now, but cutting it up with his right hand. After the thudding oompah of the regiment band it brings a smile to Coop’s face.

“Almost forgot what music sound like.”

“But you got a band come with you to the battles.” It’s the young sport that asked about his uniform.

“Yeah, and a mule got a dick.” The Indian-looking gal laughs with the others. “But aint much gonna result from it. Way the military is, everything by the numbers, see, which means right square on the beat.”

“You carry a pistol?” Another of the young ones, more familiar.

“Officers got the sidearm — that’s for shootin snakes and deserters. Fightin men, that’s the sergeants on down, we carry a Krag rifle. Drill a hole in your skull a hundred yards away.”

The boy, cause he is not out from his teens yet, looks once to the door before asking. “Any way a man get one of them without he’s in the Army?”

Coop recognizes him. “You Twyman Wilson’s brother.”

“That’s right.”

“How he is?”

The boy shrugs. “There was a accident at Sprunt’s.” Sprunt owns the cotton press and half of the waterfront. “He passed.”

Coop nods. “Sorry to hear that. What you want a rifle for?”

“Things getting bad.”

“Things always bad.”

“Fire and pitchfork bad,” says Twyman’s brother, and nobody contradicts him. “Man gonna need to protect himself.”

Both Simon and Brunjes look away. Coop thought the blind man was only passing gas, entertaining a customer for the length of a shine.

“You try somebody in one of them volunteer outfits,” he tells the boy, moving away from the counter. “Regular Army aint handin out no rifles.” He takes the hand of the girl in the green dress, Early pushing the waltz tempo a bit, and calls across the room.

“Loosen them cards up, Little Bit! Imonna carry this pretty thing round the floor a couple times and then we play. What’s your name, darlin?”

“Hazel,” she says, not even pretending to be shy.

“Let’s see what you got, young lady.”

Jubal is riding. Just riding. Aint so many colored men in this town got a horse just to ride on its back, not hitched to a damn thing, and sure as hell not a horse like Nubia. He got some Arabian in him along with whatever else, got the blood and the high-stepping pride and when Jubal make him shine there aint a gal in Brooklyn won’t turn her head and stare. There is men put their pay into clothes, and they do fine with the ladies, but a ride—

A skinny man in a blue uniform is leaning up front of his stalls and it is Royal.

Jubal jumps down and ties Nubia off and feels how much of his brother is gone, a rack of bones when he hugs him.

“I told em all,” he beams. “They can’t kill no Royal Scott!”

“They did their best,” says Royal, quiet like always but sounding moodier with his face so thin.

“You home now?”

“One-day leave,” says his brother. “Let us see our people on the way.”

“You been to Mama?”

“That’s next.”

“She gone bust out, man, see you back and in one piece.”

“You moved out.”

“Couldn’t take the smell, man. Them medicines old Minnie brew up—”

Royal laughs. “And this all is yours?”

There is a room over the two stalls, stairs to it on the outside of the building.

“I rents it from Mr. Longbaugh.”

“Mind if a take a look?”

“Be my guest. I just put my ride here in with old Dan.”

“That’s a fine-looking horse, Jubal.”

Jubal can’t stop grinning. “Aint he though?”

Jubal’s room smells fine. He has hung a half-dozen of Mama’s lavender sachets from the low ceiling, cutting the horse odor from below. The bed is narrow but almost level, and there is a pile of clean linen on a chair, which makes Royal smile. Mama still doing his wash. There is a little window, with a view out to Swann Street and Love Alley. He sits on the bed. There are pictures of famous racehorses tacked up on the walls. It could be worse.

Jubal steps in, steps to the little basin to wash his hands.

“I been savin,” he says. “Got my eye on a nice hinny mare, team her up with Dan. Once I can haul the big loads, I make some real money in this town.”

Royal looks at his brother and is suddenly enormously relieved that Jubal has asked him not one thing about Army life. One colored boy they won’t get to kill.

“I need to ask you a favor,” he says. “Bout using this place tonight.”

Jubal’s grin does not change. “This aint who I think.”

“The less you think,” says Royal, knowing she probably won’t come, that he will spend his night of leave staring at pictures of long-dead racehorses, “the better it be for all of us.”

Minnie Scott always brings a rake and her collecting basket. The rake is for the acorns, which can pile up inches deep on the graves in the late fall, rotting underneath, getting musky and black if you don’t keep on top of them. There aren’t so many headstones here in Oak Grove, sometimes just a rock with a name scratched on it or a rusted child’s toy or something about the departed. One man who was a plumber before he gambled it all away is under a cross made of pipe, and another beneath a dented, discolored trumpet. Leaper, gone to Glory these many years, has a proper stone now, that she was able to buy and have scribed. But that’s only for the sake of the living. The Lord don’t care what you lay on top, He’s only after souls.

Minnie rakes his site clear, acorns making a neat little rectangle around it when she is done. He was a good man, Leaper, never raised a hand to her or the children, did his best to find work. But the weakness for spirits was there from the beginning, it dogged him his whole poor life and left them nothing to send him off with when he turned yellow and died. Most of her family was in Pine Forest behind the white folks, but they were all so cross at Leaper, even her brother Wick and Reverend Christmas at the Central Baptist, that they let the town bury him here.

“No sense pourin money into a hole,” Wicklow said when she came to him. “Just like when he was with us, you give him money, you knowed what it was going for.”

Leaper had said it himself, coming home sweet and unsteady, sitting hard at the table and looking around like he could barely recognize his own house. Then smiling that beautiful smile when he’d see her, smile that could break your heart. “There’s my girl,” he would say. “There’s my Minnie.” And then later, after she’d helped him out of his clothes and maybe bathed him, he’d say in that far-off voice he got when he was tired, “When I go, just lay me out in the Oaks.”

She blames it on the yankees. The first story he told anyone about himself was him and Jimmy Shines tippin off one night from the indigo plantation, ten years old, stealing a boat and rowing out to the blockade ships. How they shouted and banged their oars on the hull of one till the yankees hauled them up, how Jimmy fell out of the ropes and drowned a few days after but Leaper, they give him a little sailor suit and made him mascot and filled him up with rum most every day, setting him up on a box to sing dirty songs and curse the Rebels. And him thinking it was all right since he was already bound for Hell, having robbed Mr. Ralston of himself and Jimmy.

“I caught a taste for rum,” he like to say, “that I never lost.”

Minnie bends carefully to wipe the headstone clean. She’s got the water on the knee now, too many years cleaning floors and pulling up roots, not so easy to get back off the ground. Taking liquor isn’t a sin, not the way some would have it, it’s how you act once the liquor is in you. Leaper called it “his medicine” and without it he would brood, he would lay up in the house without moving for a whole day, or if he thought she couldn’t hear he’d weep like a child. The only people he had were sold away before he came to know them, and when the boys was born he would look but never touch, smile at her admiringly like a baby was something she’d done on her own. The Royal Scot was the name of the blockade ship, and he had taken Scott for his name when a yankee census man came through to count heads and explain the voting. Leaper had been one of Mr. Ralston’s favorite hounds that he said was the same shade of brown as the little nigger boy and as many times as Minnie begged him to be born again as someone with a Christian name, Luther maybe, he wouldn’t have it.

“If a man’s name not even the truth,” he’d say, “than what about him is?”

Minnie stops to pick some goldenseal that grows just beyond the oak trees, pulling the plants up, shaking the root clean and stuffing them in her basket. Wilma Reaves’s daughter has the pinkeye again.

She takes the long way home, stopping in a stand of pines on the way to gather some deertongue.

She believes that the Lord listens to prayer, but is mighty picky about which ones He answers. “Please, Lord,” she would beg every night, sacrificing her knees one last time before sleep, “deliver my man from that devil’s brew.” And maybe He tried, as He is a merciful Lord, but Leaper had as tight a hold on rum as it had on him. Neither Jubal nor Royal never took up with it, praise Jesus, and she lies in bed worrying about her younger son been off to this Cuba, which Reverend Christmas says is one of the islands where they make it.

It is a long and halting two-horse trolley ride back toward the river and then having to pay again to transfer onto the new electric line. No wonder the acorns build up, she thinks, moving to the front since there’s no old horse’s behind to smell on this one — poor folks can’t afford to get out there. The car is crowded enough by the time they pass Queen Street that the white man who has avoided sitting beside her for three blocks finally surrenders and stiffly takes the seat, body angled so his feet are in the aisle. The Jim Crow has come as far up as Charleston, she knows, but here it is still just a rumor. The man hurries off at City Hall and Minnie can relax till the depot and then take up walking again. By the time she turns down Terry’s Alley the sun is low and she is exhausted, bone-weary from cleaning Judge Manigault’s house all day, man can’t keep no permanent help even with his boys gone, weary from raking at the cemetery and picking the herbs and knowing it will start again before sunrise tomorrow. Halfway to her door she smells the yarrow, overpowering the rest of what she’s got hanging and drying inside. It takes her eyes a moment to adjust, someone standing inside, a flicker of fear and then her knees gone to water as she realizes who it is, how skinny he’s gotten. She drops the rake and the basket.

“Royal! My poor baby! What them people done to you now?”

The Love and Charity Hall is full to bursting when they step in, almost all the Lodge membership present plus a smattering of Masons and a few of the city’s unaffiliated colored men of importance. Mr. Lowery the carriage maker is holding forth in one corner and Reverend Moore from St. Luke’s next door and Valentine Howe with a crowd of firemen past and present and at least two of the Manly brothers, who have apparently moved their newspaper operation to the floor above. John Dancy from Customs is already seated, looking up patiently as old Mr. Eagles, elegant as always, jabs his silver-headed cane to make a point.

“I want to know the purpose,” he is saying, “of raising hopes, of assembling a fighting force, of the training, of the marches and the grandiose speeches, when all along they knew we’d be mustered out before the first angry shot was fired!”

Mr. Eagles accepted a commission with the North Carolina Volunteers and feels used. There was much public contention over whether officers would be white or colored for the colored companies, and the regiment’s sudden dismissal in February, with the halfhearted explanation that there were already sufficient forces to defeat the Spaniards, was at least an embarrassment to him, if not an insult.

“The marching and the speeches were the purpose,” says Dr. Lunceford in passing and is treated to a glare. They are on opposite sides of the Russell question, the “Black Eagle” a regular, arguing that the governor should be supported no matter what his printed disparagement of the race, while the Doctor has joined Lowery and Fred Sadgwar and some of the others to form the Independents around the issue of “character.” And him walking in with Junior, a soldier fresh from battle, can only be salt in the old man’s wounds.

Junior is smiling and shaking hands, modest but firm, grown up in so many ways so rapidly, and the Doctor has a sudden rush of hope that it might be here, Wilmington, that the tide is turned, here that a final, desperate battle against ignorance and disenfranchisement is fought and won. Such hopes had been pinned on young men before, Lowery and Eagles carried the burden in their own day, but look at him, Aaron Jr., handsome, educated, confident — and a war hero. Dr. Lunceford’s own father bore arms for the cause, and was wounded at New Market Heights, and now Junior—

“Got to be a proud day for you, Dr. Lunceford.” Dorsey Love, moving up behind him.

Dr. Lunceford nods. “A very proud day.”

“A credit to his race,” says the barber, smiling admiringly at Junior as he fends off compliments a few yards away. Dorsey cuts white people’s hair at the Orton Hotel, owns a shop on Brunswick where his employees serve negroes.

“I can only hope that the credit will be rendered.”

“Oh, they got to take note, Doctor, got to take note. That San Juan Hill—”

“Junior was at El Caney.”

“That too, that too. And how is your lovely wife?”

“Mrs. Lunceford is well. Extremely happy for a visit from her son, of course.”

“And little Miss Jessie?”

The barber always calls her “little Miss” to disguise his interest, but the Doctor is not fooled. Love is a decent sort, industrious, a man of property, but uneducated. He has no more chance of success than that Royal boy who always attaches himself to Junior in order to skulk around her.

“She has a recital coming up in November, after the election. And of course, she’ll be off to Fisk soon.”

If the mention of the University fazes Dorsey Love in any way he does not reveal it. He has a constant, bemused smile, perhaps a manner he’s adapted for his profession, as if life is a perpetual wonder.

“That’s a clever girl you got, Dr. Lunceford,” says the barber, shaking his head at the unique quality of the phenomenon. “Gonna make a prize for some lucky gentleman.”

Dr. Lunceford reminds himself to have a word with Junior about the Scott boy before he leaves tomorrow. The way he looks at Jessie — those people, well-meaning some of them but bone ignorant, living over in the Brooklyn section with their liquor and their crime and their disease. When the smallpox hit in January he was asked, with Dr. Mask, to administer the vaccination program. One would expect open arms, gratitude, at the least a grudging submission to the public good. But instead they were met with suspicion, with lies, with violence. After Dr. Mask’s carriage was despoiled and himself threatened by a drunkard wielding an ax, they petitioned to be relieved of the duty unless law officers were dispatched to accompany them. It was superstition, of course, distrust and fear of the unknown stirred up by those jealous folk practitioners, like Scott’s own mother Minerva, who persist in bilking their neighbors with roots and potions and Indian cures despite the legal prohibitions. Had she not accepted vaccination herself, and made no observable effort to dissuade others, he would have had her arrested.

Isham Joyner has the gavel by now, rapping the gathering to order.

“Gentlemen, if you’d please arrange yourselves!” Isham loves his voice like a preacher, and is always the one chosen to recite epic poems or quote Patrick Henry’s exhortations on Emancipation Day. The men still standing begin to find seats.

“Brothers of the canton, honored guests, this is not an official meeting of our Lodge, and we will dispense with the customary observances and invocations.” He is the Noble Grand Sire and a stickler for protocol, Isham, a stern master of rites when Degrees are awarded. Dr. Lunceford is a Patriarch himself, Treasurer of the Lodge, but is uncomfortable with the swordplay and passwords, the mysteries and symbols, the play-acting around Abram’s Tent and the Oak of Mamre. He would be content to “visit the sick, relieve the distressed, bury the dead, and educate the orphan” without any of the baroque ceremony, but perhaps his Brothers’ secret, allegorical selves are preferable to their everyday ones.

“We have gathered instead to honor and to listen to remarks from a young man who not long ago was my pupil—” Isham tutors Latin in the foyer of his undertaking business, “—but, as we will see, he has survived that ignoble apprenticeship to become a guiding star among our youth.”

Isham spotted Junior first when the young boy’s oration on Remembrance Day overshadowed his own. What to do with the competition but take some part in, and therefore some credit for, its development? Latin was a must for a medical career, of course, but Junior has always exhibited more interest in the Doctor’s political efforts than in his profession.

“To introduce this paragon, I cede the floor to one who took part in his development at a much earlier stage than I—” laughter here, “—Dr. Lunceford?”

Polite applause as he steps to the podium they’ve pulled out from behind the bar.

An excellent turnout, really, Fusionists, many of the more wary Repub-lican die-hards, men who voted but chose to leave their allegiances unspoken, even a few who owe fealty to the Old Fox Crowd, employees or functionaries of powerful white men or those, like Dorsey Love, who are under their constant scrutiny. In light of the racial enmity that has been so publicly encouraged in the state, all will need to pull together to survive this next election, and he hopes this common celebration, this moment of shared pride, will help drive that idea home.

“When Mr. DuBois,” he begins, knowing that the mention of that controversial gentleman’s name will assure their attention, “speaks, as he often does, of the ‘Talented Tenth’—and I would argue that we can boast of a much higher percentage than that — he is being both practical and political.”

He sees that Alex Manly is already scribbling. A word to him later about editorial restraint.

“It does not ordinarily, in this section of the country, behoove us to celebrate our gains too openly. However, the showing made by our colored regiments in the recent conflict—” and here there is more hearty applause, “—brings credit to all of us. I confess my particular pride in sheltering one of these fine young men under my roof. Gentlemen, I present to you — Aaron Lunceford Jr.”

Men stand on their feet when his son takes the podium. Dr. Lunceford has made many speeches, has won election to a post vital to the community’s welfare, has saved lives even, in his professional capacity, but men have never stood to applaud him. He could be the one, Junior, to build it on. An orator, a tactician, a man with the sound of cannons on his record. A black Bryan, perhaps, a stirrer of men’s souls.

Junior looks the gathering over slowly before speaking.

“We are honored tonight to have in our midst men who defended the Union, and I need not add, freed our people, bringing us honor as they fought beneath the flag in the desperate days of ’64,” says Junior, bowing to old John Eagles sitting ramrod straight in the first row. “I have had the honor of carrying that banner to a foreign shore to liberate its oppressed citizens, many of them of our own hue, and can only hope that our performance there is a worthy reflection on the glory of those illustrious patriots.”

A black Lincoln, thinks Dr. Lunceford, but a handsome one.

Later, Alma will decide that she was just too weary to oppose it. Her own clothes are hanging between lines of the Luncefords’ sheets, Mrs. L never objecting as long as she keeps them hidden from the neighbors, and dry by the time Jessie reveals her plan. Or is it pure treachery? They pay her a bit more and treat her at least as well as any of the white folks she has worked for, but there is something about Doctor’s tone with her, about the way Mrs. L always says “a young lady of her standing” when she’s talking about Jessie. White folks don’t know any better, plus they’re white and don’t need to do anything to be sure nobody mistakes them for the help.

And Jessie has treated her as a sister.

Nothing will come of it, of course, no matter what kind of goodbye they say to each other tonight. Soon enough they’ll ship her off out of sight to the school in Tennessee like they did with Junior, where she’ll play her piano and make friends with other “young ladies of her standing” and meet someone Doctor will approve of. Doesn’t hurt a girl to have a little heartbreak at her age, get used to what’s in store for her.

If Coop was coming he’d of been here by now.

“It fits me perfectly,” says Jessie, excited, turning in front of the mirror to see herself in Alma’s gray shift. It is, in fact, a little high at the ankle for her, but uncorseted and wearing a pair of old shoes Mrs. L has ceded to Alma, she even moves like a different person. “Are you sure about your coat?”

“I got all my clothes in a basket by the cookstove,” says Alma. “I’ll just bundle up.”

Mrs. Lunceford is at the Household of Ruth meeting, bragging about her son, and gave up looking in on her sleeping Jessie years ago. They have worked out which light will signal what in the house — Jessie has promised to be home at least by ten but there is some little risk of her running into Doctor or Junior when she’s sneaking back.

“Tell me which way you gonna walk, child. Don’t matter what you passin for, they places won’t no woman go by if she got sense.”

Jessie sighs dramatically, impatient, and crosses to her dressing table to read the crumpled note from Royal again. “This isn’t the worst part of the city,” she says.

“You don’t know the first thing bout what’s bad in this city. Let me hear the street names.”

“Why should I feel like a criminal?” It is one of her favorite sayings lately, along with “They’re determined to ruin my life.” Jessie stands next to Alma, looks at the two of them in the mirror. Jessie is lighter of course, younger, with the good hair and the way of holding herself that says Quality to folks who never seen her before. “Sometimes, Alma, I am so envious of you.”

Alma smiles. She will pay for this, maybe, if it ever becomes known, but now she is too tired or too weak or too low and contrary to deny her sweet baby Jessie this wish.

“You want to change places with me, darlin,” she says, “there’s a mess of dirty dishes waitin downstairs.”

Miss Loretta always says to Jessie that it is the things she never did that haunt her.

Ruth Hall, where her mother is meeting, is just on the corner. Jessie hurries by, hoping she looks like someone else. She plays at the Hall when there are musical programs, the ladies always very kind, but tonight she doesn’t want them to see her face. She hurries north on Seventh, passing the Williston School that somebody, and Father has his suspects, keeps trying to burn down, and wishes she had a shawl to cover her face with like in the books. Anyone who knows her family who sees her will report back — What was your daughter Jessie doing out alone at night, dressed in serving girl’s clothing? She hasn’t been allowed to walk alone like this since she was twelve and even if she were only to circle the block and return home right now it would feel like a wicked transgression. She crosses Ann Street, crosses Orange, then Dock, then stops at the edge of Market to look up and down. Across the way looms the MacRae castle where once as a little girl she stood outside with Father and was frightened by the screeling of bagpipes, Father telling her it was only a kind of music the white folks had played across the seas before they invaded America. Right next door is Mr. MacRae’s sister who married Mr. Parsley. It was on the street just in front that their little Walter Jr. had run out and been hit by a bicyclist last year, the shades pulled down in their windows ever since, a house in mourning. Jessie waits for a carriage to pass, then hurries across the broad avenue to the north side, tilting her face away as she sees the city lamplighter, Primus Bowen, with his ladder against a pole up on Eighth. Miss Loretta lives on that corner, and just beyond her Carrie Sadgwar who was famous with the Jubilee Singers and teaches at the Williston now, whose grandfather was a white man raised as a slave and whose father is building a house down on Fourteenth for her to live in with Alex Manly, the newspaper man, when they are married.

She continues up Seventh, using the sidewalk on the east side, and realizes she knows who lives in almost every house, black or white or Jew — the Solomons and the Davids and the Bears all off to her left within a few blocks of each other — knows who is related and what their businesses are, knows, from hearing Father and Junior talk, where each of the men stands in the complicated tangle of city and state politics, and she feels a wave of hopelessness course through her. How can she imagine being anyone but Miss Jessie, daughter of Dr. and Mrs. Lunceford, who plays piano and sings passably well, soon to be presented in colored society for the consideration of young men whose fathers know and have the deepest respect for her own? “We must set a standard,” he is always saying, mostly to Junior, but she is included within her more circumscribed sphere of activity, “that others will strive to raise themselves to.”

But here she is walking unaccompanied and “unbraced” as the Shake-speare play put it, in an increasingly strange part of the city, to meet a man she loves—

The gas lamps end at Red Cross Street. Jessie finds herself caught in a flow of people, mostly older women, making their way into the Central Baptist for an evening service. They are dressed for church, of course, and she is not, but they might expect her to be one of them — floor-scrubbers and pot-washers, laundresses, seamstresses, cooks and caretakers. Aunt Sassy — she never learned the woman’s proper name — who was her great friend Fannie Daltrey’s nanny when Fannie lived on Front Street, passes within a foot of her, walking with difficulty on swollen legs, a hat with glistening raven feathers fastened on her head. The woman barely glances as she goes by. Mrs. Sharpless, who Father treated for palpitations and who sold pecan clusters at the train station for years, looks her full in the eyes with no recognition, no “How we doin, Miss Jessie?” and maybe it is working, maybe the clothes and Alma’s simple, fraying straw hat tilted low over the eye have transformed her. She rushes to cross the street away from the church entrance, and has only taken a few steps into the darkness beyond the spill from its open doors when the crazy man blocks her way.

“Tender chicken,” he says, smiling with all his face, “pitter-pat away from her roost.”

His clothes are filthy, his face streaked with grime, his hair hangs in gnarly ropes past his narrow shoulders. He is the skeleton of a man who calls himself Percy of Domenica, King of the Creole, and appears throughout the city with his message of Repentance.

“You frighten of Percy, child?”

She could run, turn and run back toward the Baptists shouting for help, but that would be the end of it, would mean explanations and recriminations and the end of trust and liberty. “No sir,” she tells him.

“Little chicken tell me proper.” He waves a Coca-Cola bottle in his hand, the liquid inside it not the right color. “Only ting we got to fear now is the Wicked One come out when sun is down, work himself into our heart.” People say he is from the islands, which ones they don’t know, and his speech is like song. “You let the sun shine on your body, child?”

“I do.”

“All your body?”

He is blocking the sidewalk but not crowding her. She saw him almost on this very spot, last year when she talked Alma into taking her to the tent that had been set up to exhibit the Nightingale. It was ten cents admission, collected by a man who claimed to be a Doctor of Deformity and sold the sisters’ pamphlet, “Written by One of Them,” which contained the details of their unfortunate birth and subsequent adventures. But once inside Mille-Christine McCoy herself recounted those events. Mille, who was on the left as you faced the Nightingale, concentrating on the harrowing incidents of kidnapping and privation, while Christine countered with tales of rescue and impressions of European nobles they had met in their travels. As they demonstrated their facility with six languages, sang prettily in close harmony, employing all four legs and all four arms as they moved about the platform, Jessie was so enthralled she did not notice who it was who took the seat beside her. It was his odor that distracted her first, sweet and thick, like overripe pears, and then his constant chuckling drew her to look.

“God make a joke,” he said as the sisters were reciting The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Mille in English and Christine in German. “Bond two woman together, give them only one hole for pizzle, one for poop.”

Tonight he smells of persimmons.

“Do you let the sun shine on all your body?”

“Whenever possible,” she answers.

The King of the Creole smiles again with all his face. “The High Spirit loves you, child. How many year you got?”

“I’m sixteen.” She thinks of telling him she’s older, to seem less vulnerable perhaps, but his gaze, guileless and unblinking, has her transfixed.

“Then you must fast for sixteen day, purify the soul. You promise Percy this?”

“I will do my best.” She has fasted once for two days, after reading Robin-son Crusoe, pushing her plate away at every meal until Father gave her a dose of ipecac, thinking she had been poisoned by tinned fruit.

“Percy sense a young woman at her crossroad, cyannot decide which trail to accept.”

“I don’t—”

“Forward. Always forward to the Light. The Wicked One dog our passage — turn back and we are lost forever.” He holds the Coca-Cola bottle out to her. “But first you must partake from the Source.”

“I really couldn’t—”

“Cyannot refuse the Blood of Christ, child! Drink, and it make holy everting you do this night.”

Jessie holds the neck so it doesn’t touch her lips, tilts the bottle. It is warm, just water, and she manages to swallow a tiny bit. Percy smiles and takes the bottle from her and steps aside with a gallant half-bow.

“Go forth, then,” he says, “and mul-ti-ply.”

He moves aside and she walks toward the river, resolute, the lunatic’s blessing filling her with courage, till she turns right to cross over the railroad bridge into Brooklyn. The gaslights are far behind her and the grand houses too and the paint is peeling on many of these houses, or was never applied, someone is making frightening noises on a piano a few blocks ahead but this is the only way, the way to save Royal, to save the two of them, to come to him in servant’s clothes and do something she can barely imagine.

Something irreversible.

Coop is leaving Hazel, smelling her on his clothes, when Toomer steps out with his hand on his pistol. They stand a few yards apart, facing each other, Coop feeling himself reel slightly with the gin that followed the beer, and stare at each other’s uniforms. Toomer laughs first.

“Who you steal that from, Clarence?”

They are on Brunswick Street, just the two of them. Toomer keeps his hand on top of the holster.

“Second squad, Company H, 25th Infantry,” says Coop. “And what you sposed to be doin?”

“Keeping the peace. Protecting folks from the likes of you.”

“I’m just passing through, man—”

“Far as I know,” says the police officer, “you still a fugitive round here.”

“White people’s bidness.”

“I work for the law. Law cuts both ways.”

“Yeah? They let you ’rest a white man?”

“If it come up, that’s my job. Only don’t many of em show their faces this part of town.”

“So you out keepin us wild niggers in line.”

“Let’s say old Pharaoh Ballard come around, find out some soldier boy passin through has been next to his gal Hazel,” says Toomer, easing his hand off the holster and hooking his thumb in his belt, “and Pharaoh commenced to waving his blade around and bragging how he’s gonna cut a certain lowlife son of a bitch up for fishbait.” Hazel didn’t say nothing about Pharaoh, but it make sense she got somebody. “It be my responsibility to advise him to reconsider, and if he go ahead and do it, to bring him to justice.”

“That happens, you best shoot before he sees you.”

Toomer nods. He was the best pitcher on the Cape Fear Mutuals when Coop left, a long-armed house-painter whose brother Granville owned a furniture store Coop and Tillis had hit once. “You understand my position.”

“I didn’t come here to mess with him.”

“Then you best stay clear of the waterfront. He get off his shift at Worth and Worth in a half hour.”

If he was staying they’d need to have it out, him and Pharaoh, no way he was skulking around Brooklyn avoiding a fight. But passing through like this—

“Don’t spect we’ll meet up.”

“How long you plannin to be in town, Clarence?”

“When the westbound pull out this morning at seven,” he says evenly, holding Toomer’s eyes so the man knows it’s his own choice and not the threat, “I be on it.”

Toomer smiles. “25th Infantry. The heroes of Santiago.”

“That’s us.”

“With feet to field and face to foe,” he intones, “In lines of battle lying low — The sable soldiers fell!”

“That’s the Ninth. We were on a different hill.”

“Lots of folks walking tall in this city when that news hit town.” Toomer steps aside to let Coop pass. “You done more than free them Cubans, brother.”

It smells like lavender. She is shaking so hard, even just hurrying up the stairs outside, that he thinks she is freezing and takes Alma’s coat off her and holds her tight. The shaking calms down some but he kisses her on the mouth and it starts up again and she says she’s sorry.

“Got nothin to be sorry about,” he says.

They both know what they are up to, though. That going all the way through with it means there is no going back, not for Mother and Father either. It is the only way. Jessie can hear the animals stirring below, hooves on hollow wood, snortings and shiftings. Once the horse is out of the barn—she has heard her father say it more than once, treating ruined girls over in this section of town or closer to home.

Royal is looking her straight in the eye, his face so close it makes her shake even more. “I just got to know,” he says, “that this is what you want.”

Jessie takes his hand then and places it over her breast, something she read once in one of Alma’s love books. She doesn’t have much there, she knows, and she is still in the shift, but in the books it is always how the chapter ends and you’ve got to imagine what happens next.

She nods.

On the bed he puts his hand on her thigh, Alma’s shift riding up, and then he moves his fingers under. She never thought of that, even when touching herself. The shaking stops and she has to breathe deep and he is still looking at her, that is the most incredible thing of all, looking deep into her eyes right as it is happening. She reaches down and curves his fingers just the right way, leans herself against him and closes her eyes when it happens. Amazing that he would know. Even this much, she thinks, if I went home now having done even this much maybe they would be forced to reconsider, but she sees how his pants are, just like Alma told her they get, and knows there is going to be more.

His bare skin is reddish in the lantern light, darker than hers, and she is glad there are no mirrors on the walls, only pictures of beautiful horses. How did he know how much she loves them?

She is shaking again and really cold now, she is never naked except in a warm bath, and he has her squat on the edge of the bed facing him and then lower herself down. Junior showed her a picture in one of Father’s medical books once, but it was pink and wrinkly and not hard like this. This is not in Father’s book, this is not in any book she has ever read or imagined.

“Easy,” he says in her ear, “easy.”

And it is like when Alma draws the bathwater too hot, you have to let yourself down a little at a time and maybe come back up a little bit and then ease down and the second time down it isn’t so bad, a little farther, a little deeper, and then suddenly you are all the way in and it only stings for a tiny instant.

“I can’t believe this,” Royal says, looking at her, their faces even closer now, his eyes digging into her and she kisses him so maybe he will close them. He has his tongue up past hers, even that, they even put that up into you.

When she opens her eyes he is still looking.

“We won’t get stuck, will we?”

He smiles. He has a kind smile, never teasing. “You mean like dogs? That doesn’t happen to people.”

“You’re sure?”

He takes hold of her under and lifts all of her up a little and then eases her down, once, twice, three times. She must be wet or he must be wet because it slides. “If it could happen, there’s nobody I rather be stuck with than you.”

Who is doing this? she thinks as he somehow lifts her around so she is on her back and he is standing on the floor with it still in her, pointing down. She is not wearing Alma’s clothes anymore, not any of them, and when he pushes it deeper, if that is possible, it is her name he whispers hot into her ear.

“Jessie. Jessie Lunceford.”

He is as beautiful, in the lantern light, as she imagined, thinner even, muscles and bones standing out under his beautiful dark skin as he pushes in again and again and now each time she can’t help but squeeze it a little, like you do when you hold your water, like she won’t let him pull it back.

“Jessie,” he says, “I can’t hold back anymore,” and then he sighs deep and lays heavy on top of her, holding her tight.

He is the one shaking when he steps away and cleans himself off at the basin and then brings the lantern over to look at her closer.

“Sorry,” he says. “I been sick.”

“Something you can catch?”

She means it as a joke, but he doesn’t smile.

They don’t talk much after, Jessie telling him no, he shouldn’t write to Father, not yet. She has no idea what time it is. They lie under a rough blanket for a while, her cheek on his chest, listening to his heart beat, and she wishes she could sleep here, sleep and then wake to discover it is fine, everyone has agreed and they will be allowed to be this way forever. Jessie reaches up and touches his face, moved by the incredible fact that this is now something allowed between them, that for the moment she owns this right, at least while they are alone together. The books are no use now. Debased has no meaning for her, nor virtue or ruined, the familiar litany of traps for the young and foolish do not seem to apply. She cannot imagine, now, being Alma — how can she have been intimate with more than one man, how can the heart bear it?

“I should start home,” she says.

“You’re not walking,” says Royal. “Not alone.”

How can he know?

It was her very first dream of him — night, black night with a full moon and her arms around him and the horse’s body hot between her legs, no saddle, just the power of the muscles flowing. And waking out of breath.

“What does he call it?” she asks as Royal guides the beautiful horse over the railroad bridge.

“Nubia,” he says, eyes wary for whoever might be out this late. “I think he calls him Nubia.”

Alma has left the back door unlatched. Jessie finds her asleep in a hard chair in the kitchen. She frowns when she wakes, taking Jessie’s hand and looking her in the eye.

“Child, I’m sorry. Don’t know what I was thinking.”

“I promise you won’t get into any trouble.”

“Not me I’m worryin about.”

Jessie turns away from Alma’s eyes. “Did yours come?” Alma has let it slip about her soldier being in town.

“Not a sign of him.” Alma crosses to the range, rubbing her eyes, lays a pot on the heat. “You gonna drink some tea.”

Jessie sniffs the few inches of brown liquid in the pot. “What’s in it?”

Alma shrugs. “Squawroot, pennyroyal, little bit of rum.” She doesn’t add that she bought the herbs from Royal Scott’s mother, for her own use, a few months ago. “If you been up to what I think, you need to drink some.”

Jessie wrinkles her nose. “I don’t think so.”

“You got five, six weeks I can maybe help you, girl,” says Alma, pulling down Jessie’s favorite cup. “After that you in the hands of the Lord.”

Royal puts the horse back in its stall, rubs it down. Steam comes off the sides of the animal as he works, and he can feel his own muscles, feel the blood moving in him again, back with the living. Just maybe on his way to being somebody in the world instead of a little barefoot nigger whose daddy had a dog’s name. The horse is asleep and the sun just rising by the time he locks up and starts for the train station. He falls in with the early shift heading for the docks, many of them, the colored workers, asking about his uniform and reciting the highlights of the campaign. Ben Chesnutt is among them, and Moses Toney and Nat Washington who he knew from his days working at the creosote yard, and Vernel Underwood who played left field to his center on the Mutuals.

“Always knew you was gonna turn out o.k.,” says Vernel, winking. “No matter what anybody say.”

Henry Cooper is there, dozing on a bench, Junior a few feet away looking unshaven and exhausted.

“I feel like I’m running for governor,” says Junior as Royal sits.

“Your daddy has his way, you be doing that soon enough.”

“How’s your mother?”

“Fine. Living along.”

“Jubal?”

“Jubal got his horses, keeps him happy I guess.”

Coop wakes then, making a face. “Mouth feel like cotton,” he says. “And that water fountain is bust.” He looks at them, disoriented. “Yall made it.”

“With time to spare.”

Coop stretches, yawns. “Met a gal last night, like to wore me out. How bout you, Roy? You plant the flag somewheres?”

Royal knows he’s just ribbing, but with Junior looking at him, a little smile on his face, the question prompts a guilty sweat.

“Naw,” says Royal. “Just took care of some family bidness.”

THE MARCH OF THE FLAG (II)

Hod and the others walk toward Fort San Antonio Abad in double file, wading knee-deep in the river where it spreads and spills into the sea. To the left he can see Dewey’s ships steaming parallel to them, moving into position for the attack. It is cold still, having rained all night, and the men clutch their rifles with grim resolve. There has been shooting and shelling almost every night since they replaced the Filipinos in the positions facing the fort, but nothing much to shoot back at. Rumors of surrender without a fight have been running through the regiment, but here they are, marching straight into it. There is no cover as they climb up onto the sand and move forward toward the stone walls, only the Bay to the left and the flat beach ahead. A perfect killing ground.

“Fear not, gentlemen,” says Niles, or Lieutenant Manigault as he must now be called. “This is mere formality. Our worthy adversaries have their backs to the ocean and a hundred thousand overexcited niggers seething at the gates. They know we’ve come to preserve their posteriors.”

Niles hints that he is privy to the inside dope, that the men with stars on their shoulders confide in him, that today’s action will be a stroll in the park. But even he flinches at the first percussive boom of the cannon.

“It’s the Admiral, gentlemen,” he calls out, recovering. “He’ll soften them up for us.”

Smoke coughs out from the five-inch guns of the ships, broadside to the Spaniards, in a piston-like sequence. The return fire from the shore battery is sporadic and ineffectual. They are close enough now to see chunks of masonry flying from the seaward walls whenever Dewey’s guns find their mark.

“If the Dagoes haven’t shot me by now,” says Big Ten, walking big as a house just behind Manigault, “they aint even trying.”

The barrage is a brief one, followed by much wig-wagging of signal flags on board the Olympia and atop the wall of the Spanish fort, and then there is only the sound of the waves spilling out over the sand. The fort looks something like a beached stone vessel, triangular in shape, with cannon on the parapet walks and poking out from holes in its walls, several of them, it seems to Hod, pointing directly at him. Major Moses organizes them, Hod’s 2nd Battalion spreading out on the sand in support of the firing line before them, and then it begins. Rifle fire from the Spanish trenches in the sand in front of the fort now, a thin whining of Mauser balls overhead, and now and then a Dago running frantically to get the fort between him and the advancing volunteers. Hod holds his rifle ready but does not fire as they walk forward. He feels very calm. Not me, he thinks. Not today. If they’re really shooting at us, why aren’t rounds kicking up the sand?

There is a hatless correspondent scampering ahead of the firing line, pausing here and there to snap with his Kodak — now toward the fort, now turning back to photograph the approaching Coloradans.

“Get the hell out of there, you stupid son of a bitch!”

It is Colonel Hale himself, shouting over a megaphone, advancing along with the reserve line.

“I’ll have you thrown in the brig!”

The correspondent, looking sheepish, stops to allow the firing line to pass him.

Three dead Spaniards have been left like rags, tangled in the sand, when they enter the first of the trenches. Some officer, thinks Hod, some boss told them to sit there and put up a fight or go to jail or maybe be shot if they didn’t. Big Ten turns to look at the reserve line behind them, still advancing.

“I could hit those stiffs from here with my eyes closed.”

“What did I say?” Niles waves his walking stick toward the fort. “More of a foregone conclusion than a test of arms.”

“You don’t think it’s a trap? Drawing us in?”

“I think,” says Lieutenant Manigault, strolling ahead, “they’re all back in the city by now, packing their valises.”

The fort is unmanned by the time they enter. A few dead left from the naval barrage, a boy soldier who has shot himself in the foot so he won’t have to flee and be killed somewhere farther up the beach.

“Check inside,” says Niles as men scatter in groups to search the structure. Hod and Big Ten flank the doorway to one of the low stone buildings, one corner of it collapsed from the bombardment.

“I’ll throw it open,” says Big Ten, “and you shoot anybody who makes a fuss.”

Hod positions himself on one knee, sighting down his rifle, and Big Ten yanks the door. Inside the room is packed with soldiers sitting or lying down, covered in blood. A man with a Red Cross band on his arm turns to look at Hod and says something in Spanish. He does not seem grateful to have been saved from the Filipinos.

Diosdado now regrets the uniform. The old Chinaman wrapped strips torn from the margin of a newspaper around his arms and legs, penciling measurements and mumbling to himself. It fits perfectly, white cotton drill for the jacket and pants, sturdy canton for his shirt, and looks not unlike the other officers’ dress, but the taos they have assigned to him regard it with a mixture of awe and resentment. Sargento Bayani, who they turn to for confirmation every time Diosdado issues an order, seems only amused.

“If I were a fusilero,” says Bayani, “I would forget all the others and aim at the one in the pretty suit.”

Diosdado has them spread out along the puddle-filled trenches left by the retreating Spaniards a week before, a defense line of earthworks now and then reinforced with logs and topped with sandbags that stretches the full mile from here out to Fort San Antonio on the coast. When the yanqui ships began their shelling he sent runners to bring the remainder of his platoon from their homes, but none have come back yet. General Luna throws a daily tirade against this practice of treating the army like any other job and walking back to your family at the end of a shift, but the Tagalog officers only make faces behind his back and tell their men to be prompt in returning.

“Bahala na,” shrugs Bayani with seeming indifference. “As long as they leave their rifles at the front, it’s probably better to have them out of the way.”

And now the sun has broken through the clouds and the yanquis seem to be marching north to Manila.

A thick column of them stumble out of the inland swamps behind the line and spread out along the muddy entrenchments, big men like all Americans, each one with his own new-looking rifle, glancing with curiosity and mistrust at Diosdado’s cheering platoon. Caught up in the moment, several of his men stand and begin to shoot into the trees in the general direction of the Spanish. A sweat-soaked officer, seeing the uniform, walks directly toward Diosdado.

“You people are not supposed to be here.”

Diosdado salutes the American. “We await orders, Captain.”

The captain does not seem surprised that Diosdado speaks his language. “Your orders are to clear the hell out of here. And stop those men from firing!”

Gunfire is coming back from the Spanish position now, twigs and leaves falling from above, clipped by bullets. The captain stands a full head taller than Diosdado.

“I am sorry if there is confusion, but our orders must come from our own commanders—”

It is not so much a directive as a wave of the hand and suddenly the entire company of yanquis has taken a knee, pointing their weapons at his handful of men.

“Sargento,” Diosdado calls in Zambal, which apparently this Bayani speaks, voice as calm as he can muster, “tell the platoon to hold their fire.” He turns back to the captain. “May I ask you to identify yourself?”

“This is the 13th Minnesota,” answers the American. “You people are slowing us down.”

“There is more difficult terrain ahead of you. Wire fences, forests of bamboo, flooded fields of rice — and your naval guns cannot reach this far inland. If you were to move to the west—”

“We’ve already got another column coming up the beach parallel to us. How many more of your outfit along this line?”

“There is a blockhouse lying ahead,” says Diosdado, “that commands the Pasai Road. If we were to guide you—”

“All you need to do,” interrupts the American captain, poking Diosdado in the chest with a finger, “is have your men put their weapons down and stand aside.”

The men are looking to Sargento Bayani and Bayani is looking at Diosdado. The Americans seem carved in stone, the barrels of their rifles unwavering, at least three of them to every one of his own. He turns and gives the order. The men, grumbling and looking sideways at each other, lower their rifles, stick the tips of their bolos angrily into the mud.

“We’ll be back in no time, fellas,” winks one mud-splattered Minnesota private as he clambers over the sandbags. “After we’ve whipped them Dons for you.”

“What are they doing?” asks Sargento Ramos, who is a Kawit from Bacoor.

“They’re doing what we should be doing,” Bayani answers him in Taga-log. “They’re going to the Walled City to kill the Spanish.”

“We can’t let that happen!”

There has been no warning of this attack, only the long siege and the knowledge that without proper artillery the walls of the Intramuros cannot be breached. The Americans have promised that insurrectos who try to enter Manila will be shot, though up to now it has seemed an idle threat.

“We will not advance until ordered,” Diosdado tells the sergeants. “Pass the word.”

The yanquis form into lines just ahead of the earthworks, each man stretching one arm out to touch another to establish their spacing, then move forward in a great wave through the woods. The gunfire from the Spanish positions thickens, crackling uninterruptedly now, and the yanquis return it in a seemingly haphazard, random way, barely pausing to aim.

Diosdado’s men begin to pour out of the trench around him.

“Halt! Come back here! There is no order to advance!” he shouts, but each word sounds weaker and more ridiculous than the last. Bayani is by his side again, with his customary hint of a grin, speaking in Spanish as he does to emphasize his contempt.

“Our nation is about to be liberated, mi teniente,” he says, “and our loyal soldiers wish to have a part in it.”

Diosdado raises the field glasses he bought second-hand in Hongkong and can see smoke through the trees, smoke coming from the loopholes in the blockhouse, the hornets’ nest awakened now and responding as the yanqui line approaches it, a hail of rifle fire and the sound of at least one Hotchkiss gun and his own men firing their sorry mix of Enfields and Metfords and old Mausers captured from the enemy and the yanquis seem confused, caught in between, looking behind and then throwing themselves on their bellies to join in the fight. Diosdado, almost alone in the ditch behind the earthworks, climbs over and strides forward to join his men. He has been given the leftovers to command, Tagalos and Ilocanos and Pampangans and even a few Zambals who volunteered late in the struggle, men who, except for Bayani and Ramos, have never been in combat before. There has been very little shooting in their engagements with the Spanish so far, one starved garrison of fuzz-faced conscripts after another surrendering with only token resistance, the best of their officers and soldiers sent to Cuba. But now there are more bullets flying through the air than he has ever experienced, buzzing and whining and thwacking against the trees and Diosdado breathes deeply and wills himself to appear calm, unconcerned even, as he steps into the lethal, buzzing air in front of the earthworks. His uniform is a target, of course, an officer honor-bound to be the most visible and least intimidated man in any troop, willing to take a greater risk than the private soldiers. He reaches the spot where his men have paused, kneeling behind trees for cover, firing over the yanquis at the blockhouse, intently struggling to reload their antiquated weapons, and stands with his hands clasped behind his back as if judging a competition, gazing this way and that as the forest splinters apart around him.

“I’ll remember that pose,” laughs Bayani, sitting on the ground just to his left, leaning his back casually against the thick trunk of a narra. “For when they carve your statue.”

Teniente Diosdado Concepción calls out to his troops, trying to keep the anger from shaking in his voice.

“Do not waste your ammunition,” he shouts to them over the rattle and whine of the fight, “and attempt to avoid shooting the yanquis in the back!”

There are Spanish firing at them from a thicket of bamboo across from the dirt road that runs parallel to the shore, probably the same men who just abandoned the fort, and Hod is thankful for the trenches they’ve left along the west side of it. He squats with the others, bullets thapping against the low earthworks, and turns when he hears a band playing Dixie. Big Ten raises himself up slightly to look.

“It’s our outfit, all right,” he says, ducking back down. “Couple hundred yards back, out in front of the fort.”

“Somebody ought to tell them this isn’t over yet.”

“I’d aim at the tuba, I was them,” says Big Ten, nodding toward the bamboo thicket. “Knock out the heavy artillery first.”

By the time the order comes to eat, the band has retreated back behind the shelter of the fort walls, playing Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight. There is only hardtack and canned goldfish that has to be hacked with bayonets out of the tin and whatever is left in their canteens. The salmon stinks like something left on the beach for a week.

“It’s said that the Dagoes holed up in the city all these weeks have been dining on rats,” says Donovan, who is from Lake City by way of Sligo. “And there’s come to be a shortage of those.”

“Maybe we could trade them some of this,” says Thorogood, who was a timberman in the Thespian Mine back in Leadville.

“The divil that ye know,” says Donovan, mashing some of the oily fish onto a slab of sea biscuit and trying to chew it down, “is to be preferred over the divil ye don’t.”

The artillery boys bring up their one-pounders then, wheeled behind a trio of the enormous water buffalo they’ve borrowed from the natives, and begin to blast the thicket. Niles, scanning the bamboo through his binoculars, orders the platoon to fix bayonets and prepare to advance.

“I thought this was in the bag,” says Hod.

The lieutenant puts the field glasses down and turns to address them. “Your Spanish Don is, above all things, a man of honor,” he explains. “Despite the odds, one must keep up appearances.”

“We’ve got to slaughter each other just so’s the Spanish brass don’t get their medals tarnished?”

Manigault smiles. “ ‘Ours is not to reason why.’ ”

The Captain calls down the line, “Skirmish formation, in rushes — move out!” and they are back into it.

Hod scrambles over the wall of dirt and joins the others, nearly trotting now, bayonet catching a glint from the mid-morning sun. The one-pounders are still firing, bamboo shaking and splintering ahead as the shells rip through it and only a few scattered shots coming back at them. Shit, shit, shit, thinks Hod as he hurries toward the thicket, my feet are going to stay wet all day.

There are only a handful of dead men left in the bamboo when they get there, one man missing his head, and the band catches up, playing behind them as they move over the open ground and into the wood-and-thatch buildings at the outskirts of Malate, spreading out five abreast on the Calle Real, turning every few steps to look up at windows and roofs. A few dogs trot away from them, looking back over their shoulders and yipping nervously, and a startled young native girl, pregnant, stands frozen on the steps of a large stone church. They pass a building that from the wall of sandbags out front appears to be the Spanish headquarters in the neighborhood and Major Moses orders the color bearers to decorate it, halting their advance for everybody to watch and cheer. The boys hang the regimental flag out the second-story window and then the Stars and Stripes and the whole 1st Colorado hurrahs together, nearly covering the sound of the sniper fire, bullets whanging in from at least three directions. Phenix, a sharpshooter in Company I who is still wrestling with the banner in the window, takes one in the neck and is carried, writhing and blood-soaked on a stretcher, to the rear.

Hod and Big Ten hug the buildings on the west side as they advance again, watching the rooftops across the street.

“Somebody runs up a flag,” says Big Ten, “you best hustle your hindquarters clear of it.”

It is late afternoon before they loop around and face the bridge over the flat, lazily curving Pasig River that leads to the north walls of the city. The band, following only a few hundred yards behind their lines all day, strikes up Marching Through Georgia. Some of the boys begin to sing along as they form up in flying columns to cross—

How the darkies shouted when they heard the joyful sound

How the turkeys gobbled that our commissary found

Even sweet potatoes leapt out willing from the ground

While we were marching through Georgia!

— singing still as they double-time across the bridge by squads, bullets from hidden assailants flying at them from every direction, from the rooftops of the tall church steeples visible over the moss-covered walls ahead of them, from the covered barges tethered in the water below, from the bamboo shacks they just left behind—

Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the Jubilee!

Hurrah! Hurrah! The flag that makes you free!

So we sang the chorus from Atlanta to the sea

While we were marching through Georgia!

— Hod bending over his rifle as he runs, as if there is anything but pure dumb luck keeping him, keeping any of them, from being hit—

And so we made a thoroughfare for freedom and her train

Sixty miles of latitude, three hundred to the main

Treason fled before us, for resistance was in vain

While we were marching through Georgia!

But there are no cheering darkies at the far side of the bridge, only Lieutenant Niles Manigault waiting for them, pistol in hand and a look of displeasure darkening his countenance.

“The next man who utters a line from that blasphemous ditty,” he announces, “will have his brains blown out.”

Blockhouse 14, though manned by the cazadores of the 73rd, who have never retreated before, is finally abandoned and Diosdado and his men follow the yanquis, marching just far enough behind that it is not worth the Americans’ effort to turn and try to disarm them, following as they circle wide around another blockhouse that is already burning, ragged shards of wood blown out from the walls as the munitions inside explode, then squatting in a rice paddy to shoot past them again as the Spaniards try to make a stand in the little baryo of Cingalon, the yanquis leaving their wounded in the church to be cared for later and moving on as the enemy retreats northward. Diosdado’s men linger in Cingalon after the Minnesotas march out, searching the dozen Spanish dead but finding no weapons.

Then the firing from the north stops. The navy guns to the left are silent. Diosdado has the sergeants form the platoon into a ragged skirmish line and they hurry to catch up.

The Americans have dug in behind the trenches on the far side of the Paco road.

Their rifles are facing south.

Bayani and Ramos walk forward with him to meet the Minnesota captain in the middle of the road.

“Show’s over, fellas,” says the yanqui. “This is as far as you go.”

Diosdado points. “The enemy is that way.”

“Enemy no more. We just got word, there’s a white flag been up for hours.”

Bayani asks what the captain is saying and Diosdado tells him. He asks to borrow the binoculars.

“Orders now are to make sure you insurrectos don’t slip in and queer the whole deal. Take revenge on the Dons, loot the city—”

“It is our city,” says Diosdado.

“Not at the moment,” says the American, his ocean-blue eyes unblinking. “I suggest you take your outfit and back off a ways. Don’t want any trouble if we can avoid it.”

“The flag isn’t white,” says Bayani in Zambal. There are tears of anger in his eyes as he takes the binoculars away from them. “It is red and white stripes, with a blue square in the corner. It’s the fucking yanqui flag!”

Diosdado takes the glasses and adjusts them until the field becomes clear, turning to the northwest, searching till it comes into view. There are American soldiers sitting on the ground in the Luneta, American soldiers marching on the drawbridge that crosses the overgrown moat that faces the thick walls of the Intramuros, American soldiers already posing for photographs on top of the Revellín de Real like a group of tourists, and above them, rippling in the late afternooon breeze that comes off the Bay, their gaudy banner.

There is no breeze on the Paco Road. It must be low tide, the little esteros that run inland from the bay beginning to smell.

“I am still waiting for orders,” he tells the captain.

“Well, you just move back on out of sight and wait for them there. It wasn’t for you little monkeys riling up the Spanish we could have marched in there hours ago without a single casualty.” The captain turns as his men cheer. Very faintly, from the direction of the Walled City, come the wobbling strains of the yanquis’ strange anthem.

“We should have been first into the city,” Diosdado says bitterly, and turns to stride back to his own lines.

More yanquis, the reserve units of the day’s campaign, step around Dios-dado’s men as if they are fence posts, crossing the road to join their countrymen. Bayani and Ramos follow Diosdado back.

“You fucking people,” says Bayani, in Tagalog for the sake of Ramos, “you fucking people have given them our country.”

He means all of the ilustrados, of course, the educated, the wealthy, the ones who make treaties and wear tailored uniforms and get to float safely to Hongkong in between massacres, but under Bayani’s unwavering glare Diosdado feels personally responsible.

This wasn’t a battle, he realizes — it was a show staged by white men. Not a liberation but a changing of the guard. And still not a word from Aguinaldo.

Ramos is red-faced, chest heaving as if it is hard for him to breathe. “What do we do now, mi teniente?”

“Now?” The platoon has gathered around them, confused, suspicious, angry. They stare into his eyes. He is the only one of them who has ever been out of the country, the only one, excepting maybe Bayani, who can read. He feels exhausted, though they have not traveled so very far today.

“If the Americans have the city,” he tells them, feeling his own fury rush to his head, “we will have to take it back.”

ANGLER

The fishhook pokes up through the northern tip of Luzon, snagging it securely.

The Cartoonist has arranged the other islands, eliminating many of the smaller ones, to suggest the body of something long and twisted, a fighting pickerel perhaps, with Luzon the head and Mindanao representing the tail flukes. Sitting forlornly upon the northern isle, under a drooping, sickly-looking palm, is a Filipino man, hatless, elbows on knees and head in hands, his tattered shirt open to reveal the slat-ribbed torso of the undernourished. A poor brown little bugger despondently facing away from the hook and its line, which extends tautly across the Pacific to the tip of the slightly bent cane pole held in Uncle’s firm, knobby-knuckled hands. Uncle has rolled his striped trousers up and cools his bared legs to the shins in the rolling sea.

SHALL I REEL HER IN?

— asks the caption, Uncle turning his head to query the reader with bushy eyebrows raised. An extremely unseaworthy-looking dinghy is being rowed away to the northeast of the hooked fish by a white-moustachioed Spanish admiral, with a greasy merchant balancing a bag of loot at the prow, and a fat, tonsured friar in the rear, turning his head back for a last sad glimpse of his Paradise Lost.

The Cartoonist has modeled the friar after Hastings in editorial, and hopes no one will notice till after the paper hits the street.

SOLDIERS OF MISFORTUNE

Hod watches the cards pile up in front of him, still a little dizzy from the wine Neely smuggled in. Company G is back from the defensive line that’s been set up north of the Pasig, scattered now in the nipa huts serving as their cantonment by the reservoir at the edge of a neighborhood called Sampalac or Salampoc or something just as hard to get your mouth around. They’ve named it Camp Alva after the governor, just like back in Denver.

“The women won’t show in public without their chaperones,” explains Corporal Grissom, who has declared himself the squad’s expert on local customs and has a nasty-faced little monkey named Aggy perched on his shoulder. “Daylight catches a señorita on the street, you can bet she’s got one or two old bulldog aunts clearing a path for her.”

“You mean the Spanish girls,” says Big Ten.

The Spanish haven’t all gone, merchants and friars and even a few soldiers awaiting transport still hanging on in the Walled City, depending on their new amigos yanquis to protect them from the locals. There are days Hod feels like a militia guarding a mine boss.

“I mean the Spanish girls.” Grissom finishes the deal, takes a gander at his hand. He has managed to teach the monkey to throw cocoanuts and other fruit down from the trees and to shit anywhere but on his own shoulder. “And the half-breed ones with money. The dark ones, the whatever — Indian ones, that sell stuff on the street and slick their hair with cocoanut oil, they’ll stare you straight in the eye.”

“Which leaves the field open for you, Chief.”

Big Ten shrugs. “Don’t talk the lingo.”

The locals, the ones who aren’t in Aguinaldo’s so-called army, just stare at you. There are rich folks’ houses here with Filipinos living in them, even the bigger bamboo huts in this neighborhood look comfortable enough, but it is hard to get a peep into their lives with them scowling at you. Worse than being a Gentile in Utah.

“Ye just rattle some of them Mexican cartwheels in front of their noses,” says Donovan, who has already been busted down to private for wandering into a posted district. “They’ll get the idea, all right.”

“I wouldn’t fuck a googoo on a bet,” says Grissom.

“Ye’d fuck a rockpile if ye thought there was a squirrel in it. A dead squirrel.”

Hod has had the trots for a week now and the Dhobie itch real bad and it feels raw where he sits. Some of the guys wear red flannel bands around their middles, even to sleep, but they’ve been getting sick just like anybody else. The wine was a bad idea. Hod is tired of their talk, always the same, tired and bored and worried about his insides turning to mush. He hasn’t been right since a day out of Honolulu, stuffed in the three-tier bunks, only two hours on deck a day, trying to eat the slump they shoved in front of you with puke sloshing around your feet. Here inside the hut there are mosquitoes that come out at dusk and dawn, lurking at the edges of the light from the single kerosene lamp they’ve hung over the ammo box they play on, a half-dozen men sitting around it on a woven-mat floor. They don’t buzz, these mosquitoes, and the only strategy seems to be to let them land and fill up with some of your blood before you crush them.

“The young ones don’t look so bad.”

“Monkey faces,” scoffs Grissom.

“Just close your eyes,” says Winston Wall, a private from the Kansas Vols who it seems is a third cousin of Hod’s, demonstrating with his hips. “And then imagine the woman of your dreams—”

Neely reddens, slaps his cards down on the crate. “She wouldn’t do nothin like that.”

The men laugh.

“You in this game or not, Atkins?”

It takes Hod a moment to react to his Army name.

“Let’s go, buddy, shit or get off the pot.”

Hod doesn’t want to think about shitting. He spreads his cards out. Garbage. “Sure. Gimme two.”

A boy in a white provost uniform ducks into the hut, squints at them through his glasses.

“Hey fellas,” he says cheerfully, “long time no see. What we playing for?”

The men take a moment, in the weak light, to recognize the boy.

“It’s Runt!” grins Big Ten.

“How the hell you get over here, son? Thought they threw you back for being too puny.”

Runyon squeezes onto the floor next to Hod. “Stupid bastards. I snuck on the train to Frisco, hung around the camps—” He shrugs. “There was a Minnesota company that come up a few men short one morning, I talked to the sergeant—”

“They must be desperate.”

“It’s a good outfit—”

“That uniform appears a might roomy on you—” says Winston Wall.

“It fits just fine. They got us policing the city now.”

“Well,” says Sergeant LaDuke, scowling at his hand, “least there’s one of you short enough to look the googoos in the eye.”

The boy scrutinizes the backs of the men’s cards as if he could see through them, cards decorated with a lanky Gibson Girl holding a bicycle. “They’re not a happy group of people, our comrades in arms,” he says. “Had their hearts set on chopping up the Spanish, and then along we come—”

“What I want to know is where they keep the sportin gals.”

Runyon grins. “Just down the street here in Sampaloc. What’re you, blind?”

Grissom deals Runt in, the boy throwing a ten-centavo piece into the ante.

“So you Minnesotas are pullin the provost.”

“For the moment, yeah,” he says, studying his hand. “But we were in the thick of it the day the city fell.”

“We were in the thick, what there was of it,” corrects Sergeant LaDuke. “I don’t remember seeing you.”

“Me neither,” says Wall. “Less it was way back in our dust.”

“We hooked up with the Astor Battery, hauling their pieces with those water buffalo,” says Runt, standing pat, “and all day long whatever we run into, Spanish in a blockhouse, Spanish holed up in a church, whatever, we get the Astor boys set up and they blast the hell out of it.”

“Imagine having so much money you can field your own artillery,” muses Big Ten.

“I wish old John Jacob would come over here, build us one of his swanky hotels,” says Donovan. “I can’t sleep in these feckin rat-holes no more.”

“And the rats aint too happy about you snoring like a freight train—”

“I don’t snore.”

“And shit don’t smell. Tell him, Neely.”

“I was a googoo sneaking up and heard that racket coming out of your tent,” says Neely, “I’d turn and run for my life.”

“General Otis has ordered all the saloons closed down on Sundays,” says Runt. “But the boys have discovered this beeno home-brew stuff—”

“General Otis,” complains the Kansas private, “has parked his fat ass on a supply of Krag rifles and won’t give em out to us vols.”

“What we need with new rifles if we’re going home?”

“Hate to break it to you, pal, but we aint going anywhere.”

“I signed up to slaughter Dagoes,” says Donovan. “And at that I’ve been sorely disappointed.”

“You’ll get home when they squeezed the last drop of blood outta you.”

“So they got you playing nursemaid to the drunks and goldbricks,” Sergeant LaDuke says to Runt, “while we keep the googoos in line.”

LaDuke was a militia back in Colorado, and when Private Thorogood called him out as a scab and a strikebreaker the sergeant put him on report for a week.

“For a while they had me guarding this herd of buffalo calves,” says Runt. “When they’re little they’re kind of pink-colored—”

“And when they grow up they wallow in the mud and taste like shoe leather.”

“These aint for eatin. They grow the pox on em, for vaccine.”

“Evry time ye turn around this place there’s a feckin doctor with a needle in his hand—”

“Now we’re inside the walls, keeping order. Most nights it’s about what you’d see in Pueblo on a Saturday after dark. One of our fellas got cut by a pimp and his patrol partner shot the little bastard, almost had a riot on our hands.” Runt and Grissom’s monkey trade a look. “What’s the stakes here?”

They gamble, dice and cards and side-bets about what time it is going to rain or how many insects will they find in a plate of beans or anything that comes to mind, many of the men owing next month’s pay and the one after that, gamble, Hod included, because so far they have only time to kill and nothing to save for.

“Fifty-centavo minimum,” says Grissom, “and if one of our Mariquina googoos picks you off before you settle your debts we don’t pony up to bring the body back.”

Manigault steps in then, and Sergeant LaDuke nudges the wine bottle behind his body.

“As I assumed,” says the officer, looking over the spread of cards and pesos on the ammo crate. “Uncle Sam’s finest issue, ever vigilant, girding their loins for battle.”

“We’re rarin to go, Lieutenant,” says LaDuke. “Only the coons have decided to take the night off.”

He was not popular in training or on the ship, Manigault, the men going through “that cracker peacock” and “Niles Manlygoat” before settling on “Lieutenant Tarheel” when he was out of earshot. Opinion improved on the day of the so-called invasion, Niles striding out in front of the company with a malacca cane in hand, seeming to grow more cheerful with every flurry of sniper fire.

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” he says, tapping the cane twice on the edge of the crate. “I had the opportunity to visit headquarters today, and from what I was able to glean—” he winks to the men, a hint of conspiracy in his voice, “—I wouldn’t wander too far from your weapons.”

They’ve been sleeping in their boots for a week, but other than insults tossed across the two hundred yards the forces are ordered to maintain between each other, there has been no action. Hod feels it coming again, stomach churning, but holds to his seat.

“Merely a suggestion to the more prudent among you,” says the lieutenant, raising his eyebrows, then sees Runt.

“Runyon, if I recall.”

“Yes sir.”

“I thought I cashiered you in Denver.”

Runt grins. “But I caught on with the Minnesotas. Some real fighting men.”

“With real officers,” adds Hod, “from what I hear.”

Manigault moves to stand behind Hod. “Insubordination is not looked upon kindly, McGinty. Even in the volunteers.”

“He’s Atkins,” corrects Big Ten. “I’m McGinty.”

Manigault narrows his eyes at the Indian. “I am acutely aware of what you are, Private.” He turns to the others. “None of that wine had better end up in your canteens, gentlemen. I miss nothing.” He gives Hod a smart tap on the shoulder with his cane and steps out into the darkness.

“What’s with the shavetail?” asks Runt when he is gone. “Is that the real goods?”

“They like to start rumors. So’s we don’t become lax and undisciplined.”

“As if the little monkeys would dare start anything.”

“Who says they’ll be the ones to start it?” says Big Ten.

“Give me something to shoot,” declares former corporal Danny Donovan, “or send me the feck home.”

If respect is not forthcoming from the lower ranks, one must settle for fear. Niles strolls toward the entrenchments, the night beginning to cool, startling a private so overcome with the sprue that he has dropped his trousers to do his business at the side of the path.

“Name and company,” Niles barks as he steps around.

“Bollinger,” says the sweating youth. “Company I.”

Niles only nods curtly and continues. He may or may not pursue the matter. Unpredictability is a valuable tool, even the worst dullards forced to attend, to remain vigilant. Jeff Smith was the master of unpredictability, his moods, genuine or feigned, keeping his pack of thugs and grifters on a very short leash, his pistol always prominently displayed and judiciously brandished. Niles reflects that his own sidearm, an Army Colt ransomed from a pawnshop on lower Larimer, is rather plebeian for an officer of his caliber. It is not a gentleman’s weapon.

“Who goes there?” calls a sentry at the Cossack post, whirling around.

“Lieutenant Manigault,” he answers. “Had I been a skulking googoo, you’d have been dead three times over.”

Command suits him, thinks Niles — he seems to have been born to be a leader of men. The Colorado Volunteers are a ragtag outfit, true, with a criminal element personified by Hod Brackenridge and his redskin cohort, but such a group demands a finer, firmer class of officer to be effective. When this Philippine fracas has petered out he will look in on the political situation in Wilmington, and, if it is still impossible, offer his services to the Regular Army. Colonel Manigault, at least.

Niles strides past the discomfited sentry and climbs up on the earthwork wall that faces the enemy — no, they are not yet that, officially — the Filipino lines. Conversation, in their atrocious ning-nong dialect, drifts across the no-man’s-land with the sound of a guitar being strummed. If, when, the reckoning comes, they shall not prove an estimable foe.

There is a man standing on the opposite earthworks.

He is wearing boots and a short-peaked cap, sporting a pistol on his hip. He sees Niles and mimes pulling the sidearm, pointing it at him and pulling the trigger. It is too dark, the distance between them too great, to see if he is smiling or not.

Niles lifts his hat and gives the nigger a stiff bow.

Soon enough for you, my friend.

IMPROMPTU

The keys have changed their pattern. Jessie stares at them, trying to remember, trying to let the music in. She feels like her body is sinking, heavy, into the floor as her head floats dizzily above it. The Conservatory is in Virginia, not far from Hampton where Junior went to school, and if she can be the first colored girl accepted there, living away from her parents—

“Jessie?” calls Miss Loretta, the voice, echoing in the near-empty hall, a shock.

“Yes, M’am,” she says. The white man’s eyes challenged her when he said hello, his steady gaze asking Just what do you think you’re doing here?, and at the moment she has no answer for him. Usually she has only to lay her fingers on the keys, all in their proper pattern, and the music is there.

Royal can come to her in Virginia, they can have the ceremony, and if this is what she dreads the most, everything will be made right. She will be forgiven. She only has to survive this test, to prove herself worthy.

The white man clears his throat, impatient, out there somewhere in the staring rows of seats with Miss Loretta. Jessie looks at the sheet music, notes drawn on lines, swimming.

G-Minor, she thinks, and wills her fingers into motion.

It isn’t wrong, really, just not what is accepted. Miss Loretta sits on the aisle, a few rows behind the Maestro, and can’t help but try to read his reaction from the set of his shoulders, the tilt of his head. It has been such a trial to convince him to come up, and she worries she may have overstated Jessie’s abilities. What is outstanding in Wilmington may not impress Atlanta or Charlottesville, though her ear and her intuition have not deceived her before.

“Another Hottentot prodigy,” the Maestro smiled tightly when she met him at the station. “You’ve become something of a missionary.”

He is listening, though, eyes closed as always, fingertips of his right hand gently pressed against his temple as if the music is being played inside his head. Jessie has chosen her favorite ballade, and though it is meant to begin in a pensive mode there is something — not tentative, exactly, for the girl’s fingers know where they’re meant to be — something otherworldly about her playing as she begins. The caesuras are much too long, Jessie listening to each phrase, pondering it, before proceeding with the next. The massive hall is cool, as always in the early afternoon, and Miss Loretta realizes she is shivering.

There will be only this one opportunity with the Maestro. She has made an effort not to frighten the girl, tried not to overstress the importance of the audition. But the fact remains that it is one of those rare moments in which the course of one’s future is determined, the road dividing, only one path leading forward. She is so young, Jessie, innocent yet of the terrible knowledge that certain actions, certain decisions, cannot be undone. Miss Loretta dabs at her neck with her handkerchief, then fans herself, suddenly flushing with one of the vaporous attacks she is prone to lately, worse always when she is tense or upset, and then Jessie stops playing.

Just stops.

The ballade is meant to change character here, gaining power and certitude, but Jessie only sits staring at the keys as if this more resolute music is a forest she dare not enter.

The Maestro turns his head to Miss Loretta, arches an eyebrow.

“I’m sorry,” says Jessie, her near whisper carrying out to them.

The girl stands and steps off into the wings, footsteps hammering. Miss Loretta is up and leaning in to placate the Maestro.

“Perhaps if I speak with her—”

“She understands,” he says, shaking his head slightly and reaching for his coat as he rises. “Left to their own devices, they prefer to dwell at their own level.” He pats Miss Loretta’s hand as he steps into the aisle, as a father pats the hand of a child who has lost her balloon. “Your efforts for the girl are commendable, and I’m sure you saw the spark of something there,” he says, slipping his coat on, “but the Academy is not a settlement house.”

“I apologize for—”

“No need. I’ll be able to catch the three o’clock if I hurry.”

Miss Loretta sits then, suddenly exhausted, till she hears the door to the lobby thump shut behind him. The chill that so often follows her hot spells shudders down her spine from the sides of her neck. It is very quiet in the great hall. She stares at the piano, mute and reproachful at the center of the stage. She remembers hearing Anton Rubinstein from this very seat on the aisle, enthralled at thirteen years of age, the music filling her soul. Miss Loretta sighs and stands to find the girl.

Jessie sits on a stool by the bank of pulleys that control the scenery and curtains. Her cheeks are wet with tears as she looks up to see her teacher.

“I am so very sorry.”

“Not as sorry as I.” Jessie flushes as if she has been slapped. Miss Loretta regrets the phrase the moment it is uttered, but she has suffered the Maestro’s condescension, has confused her own thwarted hopes with those of this colored girl.

Softer now, “You’re not feeling well?”

The girl’s forehead is damp, the neck of her shirtwaist darkened with perspiration.

“I was afraid I was going to be ill.”

There was a girl at Conservatory, Antonia, a lovely girl who played like the wind and had great dark eyes that were rumored to be the result of gypsy blood in her family. Miss Loretta and the others would gather outside the rehearsal room and marvel at her facility, her passion. But if more than one of them stepped in to listen Antonia would break off and return to playing scales or pretend to study the score. The morning of her first recitif she began to tremble and by noon was burning with a fever so intense an ambulance was called for. It was said that her symptoms had disappeared by the time she reached the hospital, though none of them ever saw her again. The porters were there to remove her belongings from her room the next morning.

“The nature of your sex,” said Professor Einhorn without mentioning Antonia by name in his next lecture, “disposes you to a heightened sensitivity. It is both your glory and your undoing.”

Miss Loretta chooses her words carefully. “You have performed in front of people, important people, before this,” she says. There was the concert in February, the haute monde of Wilmington present, and but for the girl’s parents not a dark face in the audience. She was brilliant.

“I feel ill all the time,” says Jessie. “Not just today.”

It is unthinkable.

The girl has been rounding out lately, her body ripening. Nothing more. These are growing pains, perhaps, the unruly sway of female humors. We women are slaves to our bodies, thinks Miss Loretta, and our emotions rule our health.

“Have you had—”

She is not the girl’s mother, after all, not responsible. But at the end of all her pleading to lure the Maestro here for a trial, after all her steady instruction and guidance through the years, her investment in this child, there must be an accounting.

“Have you started having your flow?”

The girl seems to understand. “It began last August,” she says. “But since I’ve been ill—”

Unthinkable.

Miss Loretta feels her own tiny swoon of nausea. She is a music instructor, nothing more. “How long has it been interrupted?”

The girl looks at her with fearful eyes. “It can’t be that.”

“Of course not.” It is very stuffy, here in the wings, the air stale and motionless. “Because you’ve never engaged—” they are familiar, Miss Loretta and this colored girl, more familiar than teacher and student, more familiar than society will normally allow, given what separates them, “—because you’ve never engaged in improprieties with your young man.”

It is not a question.

It is a statement begging confirmation and the girl lets it hang too long, another caesura, the sound of Miss Loretta’s words decaying in the narrow space that is heavy with the mildew of the side curtains bunched around them, and then the realization that they are not alone.

“Pologize for disturbin you ladies,” he says, pulling his cap off and holding it over his chest, “but you finish with that pianner?”

It is the day man, old Samuel, a fixture at Thalian Hall since Miss Loretta was a girl, known as Songbird because of his constant humming while at his tasks. He has appeared without a note, however, and stands frozen in a slight bow awaiting her instruction.

“We are quite finished with it, Samuel. Thank you.”

He turns to the girl. “I seen your Daddy out the hallway, here on city bidness,” he says. “He ax if I know how it’s goin for you in here.”

“I’ll have to tell him when I get home,” she says quietly.

Samuel bows again and puts his cap back on. “Yes M’am, Miss Jessie.” He leaves them to attend to the piano.

“It was only the one time,” she says when he is gone, as if this may provide absolution.

Slaves to our bodies.

“Yes,” nods Miss Loretta, wishing there was a place for her to sit. “You will need to tell your father when you are home.”

“I’ve let you down,” cries the girl, Jessie, her Jessie. “I’ve betrayed you.”

Jessie is weeping now and Miss Loretta finds herself holding her, cradling her head against her chest as she stands and the girl sits on the stool, feeling the tight-coiled black tresses she has always wanted to touch, if only from curiosity, stroking her hair now and this is too much, too much to bear. She has lost her, lost her dear Jessie forever.

“What can I do?”

“Oh my dear,” says Miss Loretta, weeping herself now, “there is so very little you can do.”

“They’ll find out.”

“You will tell them. Today.”

She is amazed to discover that she does not think any less of the girl, that there is, in fact, no betrayal. Only sadness. There are worse fates, of course, but she wanted more for this one. Colored society — what, society in general being what it is — the young man may suffer no consequences. Off in the Army somewhere, at liberty, in the eyes of the world, to shoulder his responsibility or not. What must it be to move with that freedom, to love without care. What reckless joy to saunter through life with only your conscience as restraint, ever the raptor and never the ruined.

“You will tell them today, and you will be married, and you will have your child,” Miss Loretta says to Jessie, as gently as she can muster.

“Is that all?”

It is more than she herself has achieved, it is what women are raised to do. Jessie looks up to her from the stool, holding tightly to both of her hands now, waiting for her response.

“You can pray that it is a boy,” says Miss Loretta.

“First you loosen the set screw — that’s right, now lift that lever pin.”

Milsap wills himself to patience, standing over Davey’s shoulder while the boy tries to pull out the distributor clutch. He can follow instruction, Davey, but every time he puts his hands into the Linotype it’s like the first time they been there. No sense of the machine, of what sets what into motion.

“Now you can take the lever and the spring away — get a good holt on it — you drop these little pieces in there we got to tear the whole thing apart.”

“All right—”

“Now — you’re gonna take the screw from the bracket there and loosen the other screw over on the right front so the whole clutch bracket comes off its dowel pins without springing the clutch shaft—”

“There’s so many parts.”

It could have been done with an hour ago but part of the job is seeing if he can train anybody else to fix the apparatus. Maybe come a day when he’s not there and there’s important news and the machines go down, both of them, could be one of a thousand things. What happens then if it’s only Davey or Clifton Lee or that half-wit German they just brung in? The people must be informed, that’s how a democracy functions.

“You do as many things as this machine does, you need a lot of parts. And they got to be in harmony, which is why we’re changing out this clutch.”

Milsap sees that there is God in the machine, in the active interplay of slides and matrices, of wheels and pulleys and discs and shafts and springs and ejectors, of hot lead and cold steel, just as there is God in the holy, complex cycles of rain and seed and growth and harvest, in the cleverness of the human mind that can, like Mr. Merganthaler’s, discover a system so intricate yet so obvious once invented that it surely must be divine.

The copy boy comes up and stands by them but Milsap isn’t ready to see him.

“Anything in this life,” he says, “got to be in harmony to operate how it’s sposed to. Your church organ — how many moving parts you think that has? One of them, just one, gets out of kilter and you gonna hear noise in the house of God, not music. Our society,” he says, picking up a theme that Mr. Clawson has been developing in his editorials this week, “has got some intricate workings of its own. Something, somebody, steps out of their place—well, that’s when you get chaos. That’s when you get anarchy. What you want?”

The copy boy, staring into the guts of the machine, is startled to be addressed.

“Oh. Mr. Clawson need you.”

The boy runs off. Milsap considers leaving instructions with Davey, then decides against it.

“Don’t touch anything till I get back,” he says. “Anything.”

When you put the clutch back on the beam you have to be sure that the timing pin in the distributor screw meshes into the clutch-shaft gear, where the tooth is cut away, so that the screws will be in accurate time with each other. It seems plain enough, like holding a bottle of milk the right way up before you pull the cap off, but some people got no feel for machines and Davey is one of them.

Clawson is in his office in the tilt-back chair, reading, when Milsap ducks his head in.

“I got a telephone call from over at the Armory,” he says without looking up from the copy in his lap. There’s only a handful of telephones in town and the Messenger got the first. Milsap can read the subhead, upside-down, of the copy that lies in the editor’s lap—

FEDERAL BAYONETS TO BE USED IN

CARRYING ELECTION IN NORTH CAROLINA

The yankees are threatening to come back and escort their friends to the polling places and the Messenger is making the proper stink about it.

“They need you to go over and help them with something. Right now.”

“What is it?”

Mr. Clawson looks up and gives him one of those Do I pay you to ask questions? looks.

“Bring your tools.”

Davey is still staring into the machine when he comes back.

“You touch anything?”

“No sir.”

“You might’s well clean out the magazines while this is down.”

“Yes sir.”

If there is God in the machine, his printer’s devil will be the last man on earth to recognize Him.

You got to take note when old Dan start rubbing his ass on everything in sight. Rubbing his ass and jerking his tail around and pulling his lip up to show his teeth like he got something to say. Jubal leaves him tied out front on Terry’s Alley and goes around behind the shack. Mama is off cleaning for somebody, hardly ever find her home this time of day, but she say come by and get herbs whenever.

The wormwood plant is in an old wood tub half-buried away from the rest of the garden. Jubal pulls the leaves off, few from this side, few from that, and stuffs them in a leather sack. Brew up some tea with them, lace it with plenty of honey. Dan won’t take nothing that bitter less you sugar it up some. Maybe mash some garlic in with his oats, lace some honey in that too. He had the roundworm once before, Dan, had to shit every three blocks and fought when you cinched the traces on him.

Jubal has the four-wheel dray with the headboard and seat hitched to him out front. Got to get four, five more years out of Dan, the way prices are. The horse leaves a pile, sick-smelling, in the sand as they turn south to head out of Brooklyn.

If there was some way to know ahead, like these white folks do who got the telephone, you would never roll empty. Drop one load off and pick up another on the same block, and just keep doing that, making triangles all over town. But how it is, they send some little barefoot boy they give a penny to that finds you or he doesn’t and some other man he sees with a wagon get your job. Jubal pulls back on the reins to slow and ease alongside Mance Crofut, walking along Fourth.

“How they treatin you, Mance?” he calls.

“They’s mischief afoot.”

“How you say?”

Mance is a hunting friend of his uncle Wicklow, do up a stew with squirrel or possum make you slap your brains out. Mance have to roll around in this one spot where the deadfall trees are going back to dirt before he goes stalking, cause he always smell of creosote from his years on the dock. Jubal went out with them once when he was maybe twelve — Mance hit a doe neither him nor Royal nor Uncle Wick could even see it was so far back in the trees, little hole just under the ear.

“You know my ole Trapdoor Springfield I got,” says Mance, leaning on the edge of the front wheel as the dray comes to rest. “I allus gets my bullets at Mr. Yaeger store, maybe some chaw that he hang out back. Only this mornin he won’t sell me no bullets, says he fresh out of em. I can see the boxes right there behind him on the shelf, but you don’t want to call no white man out as a liar, specially if he one of the better ones, sell me on credit now and then when there aint no work. So I goes down to Dothan’s and to Bailey Catlin’s and even all the way up to the Phoenix Genral Store, they say they got none either. You know that’s a.45–70, aint like half the town don’t shoot with them old Army rifles, so’s I know somebody tellin stories. I come back to Mr. Yaeger’s, buy a hank of that chaw, an I look right at them boxes behind him an I says ‘You haven’t got noner them.45s in since I come by this mornin, have you?’ Now he look round that storeroom to be sure aint nobody listenin and he lean crost the counter and he lower his voice down, say ‘I be honest with you, Mance, they is an innerdiction on us sellin no weapons nor bullets to the colored folks till we told it’s o.k. again.’ Seems it’s this White Man’s Union, going bout making rules and you break em they gone shut you down or burn you out.”

They are quiet for a moment, pondering this.

“Election coming up,” says Jubal.

“Well I wish it was already past,” says the old man, shaking his head. “White people start actin skittish, you got to step lightly.”

Jubal offers him a ride but the old man is almost home and cuts off into Campbell Street, still shaking his head. Dan whickers and farts as they cross over the railroad tracks on the Hilton Bridge. Mostly it’s the foals you got to worry about with roundworm, eat their whole insides up. A mule Dan’s age has had em more than once, and they don’t usually suffer too much with it. That’s just life, is what Uncle Wicklow says, whatever bad happens to you, you don’t ever lose it. Just learn how to carry it inside.

He turns at Princess, and then again on Seventh, crunching on the shell road now, passing little Jessie Lunceford who his brother is so sweet on, walking alone, dressed pretty and wearing a face like she lost her last friend. He calls out to her but she doesn’t seem to hear him. Jubal pulls Dan’s head to get them off the main street, then stops the dray crosswise to the rear of Turpin’s Pharmacy like they asked. Mr. Kenan is there waiting.

“We not going far,” says Mr. Kenan, winking, “but this here’s a load.”

Jubal has never liked a man, specially a white man, to wink at him, and it makes him uneasy when Mr. Turpin and Mr. Kenan commence to joshing while he helps them lift the big crate out.

“Boys at the Armory gone preciate this,” says Mr. Kenan, winking again. “After this party done, they be some young men wish they hadn’t.”

But the crate is way too big and way too heavy for liquor, dead weight that staggers the three of them getting it out from the back and onto the dray. The springs complain when they thump it down.

“Yes sir,” says Mr. Turpin, “there be some heads hurtin fore this wingding over.”

Jubal just smiles the way they like and shoves the crate farther onto the platform. No need to tie it down with the Armory just about around the corner.

“Whatever you gennemen got in there,” he says, “they’s a good deal of it.”

Mr. Turpin throws a tarp over the crate and goes back inside. Mr. Kenan rides beside Jubal on the seat, looking glad there isn’t nearly anybody around, and hops down quick when they pull up behind the Armory. Mr. Kenan was the Customs House man, where they say you make more salary than the governor. When they give it to John Dancy, who is colored, a lot of people thought there would be trouble but so far it’s just noise.

“Get us some more hands,” says Mr. Kenan, and hurries inside.

Jubal pulls the tarp off and tries to peek between the slats of the crate but it’s covered in there too. Sure as hell aint no whiskey bottles. Mr. Kenan comes out with Colonel Moore and another man Jubal doesn’t know, young man with blisters on his nose. Colonel Moore won’t hardly look at him but then he is one of them die-hard Confederates, marches with the Klan and still hasn’t give up the emancipation war for lost.

Jubal climbs up and kneels and puts his shoulder to the crate to get it sliding, while Mr. Kenan and the white boy take the weight of the back end. He hops down to take a corner but Colonel Moore shoulders him away.

“We got it from here,” he says.

So Jubal holds the back door open for them and when they’re through Colonel Moore calls, “You shut that, boy.”

He’s got to wait to be paid then. It’s always better if you help them carry it in cause then you just stand there in the way till somebody notices and pays and usually give you a tip on top of it. When they leave you outside there’s no telling, you just wait and even if they have forgotten about you they act like you done something wrong if you knock to remind them.

But Mr. Kenan hurries out and gives him an extra twenty-five cents even though he didn’t help them bring it in, and winks.

“Don’t be careless how you spend that, now,” he says. “Don’t let the devil get it all.”

Dan is pulling his lip up and farting more as they roll empty back to the stable, but keeps on pulling strong and steady, and every time they pass a white man Jubal sneaks a look at their face to see if he can guess what they up to. Mance is right, he thinks. Acting strange and skittish.

Not knowing what their problem is, Milsap has to lug both boxes of tools, but it’s just a short walk to the Armory. It used to belong to the Taylor brothers’ family and is more a clubhouse for the Light Infantry and their friends than a real fortress like in Raleigh or Charleston. There’s a long wait after he knocks and then it’s Mr. Kenan who answers the door and pulls him in.

“He didn’t tell you to come to the back?”

“No sir.”

“Least you’re here. Come on.”

Kenan leads Milsap to a room in the rear and there it is, laid out in pieces on a tarp on the floor, beautiful. Colonel Moore is there and a young fellow, maybe one of the Shiner clan from over in Dry Pond, who they don’t introduce to him.

“It’s got an instruction sheet for assembly,” says Colonel Moore. “But we didn’t want any slip-ups.”

The cylinder is already put together, ten blued-steel barrels, smelling of oil and metal shavings.

“Look like it come straight from Hartford.”

“We thought it was heavy,” says the boy, “but they just thrown all the ammo in the same crate with it.”

Colonel Moore holds out the assembly sheet for Milsap but he steps past without glancing at it.

“They done most of it for you,” he says. “Just kept a few things apart to pack easier.”

He sits and opens one of his toolboxes as the men look on, excited. He saw one pulled behind a wagon once when he was a boy, but it was a yankee parade and his father wouldn’t let him go closer. It is one of those inventions that once you see it makes perfect sense, that plenty of people had thought of only the machining wasn’t up to it then or the cartridges weren’t uniform or any of the dozens of little things that have to fall in place at the right time.

“The beauty of this,” he says, cradling the cylinder and beginning to attach it to the frame, “is each barrel got its own breech and firing-pin system. And by the time you crank her around again, your spent cartridge has fell out of the ejection port and a fresh one has slid in from the hopper. What’s this take?”

“Krag rounds,” says Mr. Kenan. “You work it right she’ll put out six hundred a minute.”

“That’s some monkey-buster,” grins the boy, who surely resembles a Shiner.

Milsap sets the brass crank in the socket, gives it a turn to check the action, then begins to secure it.

“It’s a Peace-keeper,” says Mr. Kenan. “Best way to keep the peace, you let the other side know what you capable of, militarily speaking. Deters any ideas they might get about disruption.”

“Or voting,” says the Shiner boy.

“You gone roll it into place?” asks Milsap.

“Haven’t decided yet,” says Colonel Moore.

“Well, it’s best you mount this plate on first — shipboard, wagon bed, wherever you want, get it rock solid, and then bolt the apparatus on top of that. It’ll tolerate some cant, but the more level the better. And if you expect to be firing a good deal,” and here Milsap looks up to Mr. Kenan, “you best put some plugs in your ears. Don’t want to end up deaf like me. Imonna put these on now so you can move it easier.”

Colonel Moore and the Shiner boy lift the assembly up while Milsap wrestles the carriage wheels onto the axle, tightens the nuts on the hubs. When he is done they all step back to behold what he’s put together, silent for a long moment. There is nothing in the magazine yet, the boxes of cartridges stacked against the wall, but there is no mistaking the purpose of this machine. There is God in this design as well, thinks Milsap, the God of swift and terrible retribution. He realizes he is in a sweat, though it’s the others who done all the lifting.

“You think it’s likely to come to this?” he asks.

“It might and it might not,” says Mr. Kenan. “But we’ll sleep better just knowing it’s here.”

“You have ruined us.”

Yolanda has seen him angrier than this, furious over some defiance on Junior’s part, some pointed slight at a Council meeting, but never so cold.

“You understand that, don’t you? You understand what you’ve done?”

Her daughter stands before him, chest heaving with sobs, near hysteria since he began his relentless questioning of her symptoms. He has not touched her, and Yolanda can tell that she is not yet allowed to.

“I was going to tell you earlier,” Jessie manages to say between sobs for breath, “but I wasn’t sure.”

“Sure of what? There is no question about your relations with that boy—”

“But that doesn’t mean—”

“So you think your behavior would be acceptable if there hadn’t been this consequence?”

Yolanda wishes he would stop. Her daughter’s girlhood is shattered, that is all that matters now.

“I see this sort of behavior every day across the tracks,” he says. “I expect it from those people. But in my own family—” He is shaking his head now, eyes fixed with censure on Jessie. He is not a man to hurl objects, not a man to kick and curse. She knows he is gentle with the other ones, the fallen girls he treats north of Red Cross Street, she knows from the way they smile and proudly show off their fatherless infants when encountered on the street. But this is their daughter, their jewel, their gift to the world.

“How could you do such a thing?”

It isn’t shame she hears in her husband’s voice, though public shame is certainly on his mind. It isn’t shock or disappointment or even the fear of how this will be used against him, against them all, that she senses in his tone.

He is jealous.

“I’ll write to him,” Jessie sobs. “Or if you let me, I’ll go to him—”

His smile, his pride, walking arm in arm with her, showing her off to the world—

“The next time I see that boy,” he says, “will be his last day on earth.”

He walked that way with her once, Yolanda, when she was his young wife, but time passes and daughters love their fathers and fathers return that love—

Jessie runs and throws herself on the divan, covering her head with her arms, wailing. Yolanda takes a step but he stops her with his eyes.

“It’s that white woman,” he fumes. “Filling her head with scandal.”

“She’s a piano teacher.”

“And a Suffragist.”

“You’ve never had a problem with—”

“It isn’t the voting, it’s everything else that goes along with it!” He is pacing now, pointedly looking away from Jessie, pacing the way he does when he returns from the city meetings and condemns the latest outrages. “The father is practically an anarchist.”

“You know that isn’t true.”

“And that boy—”

“His name is Royal.”

“His name,” says her husband, raising his voice so Jessie can hear over her sobs, “will never be spoken in this house again!”

It is easier, it must be, for the rest of them, the people north of the tracks. Nobody is watching them, nobody hoping for them to fall. And there are women there, midwives and roots women, who can erase an indiscretion if engaged in time. More than once he has spoken of having them arrested, but never made a formal complaint. And some just have the child, acknowledging the father whether he reciprocates or not. Easier, yes, but no option for a decent Christian girl.

“I’ll write to his commanding officer,” he says, “and have him discharged.”

“And what purpose will that serve?” says Yolanda. She is amazed to feel so calm. It is the same calm that came over her when Junior went under at Lake Waccamaw and she was the one to pull him out, the one to flip him on his stomach and work his arms and squeeze his little ribs till the water was forced out and he took his first gasping breath. Jessie is making those sounds now on the divan, drowning in her misery, but Yolanda is calm and already thinking ahead to what can be done. What must be done. The worry will come later, as it did with Junior, trembling every time he came near the water after that, her first thought when he announced his enlistment the anxious relief that, thank the Lord, he had not signed on to be a sailor.

“We need to be strong now,” she says. “We need to think very clearly.”

Jessie is weeping more quietly, having made her last effort and eager to hear what fate will be decided for her. Dr. Lunceford stops pacing, turns to face his wife. We have been so fortunate, she thinks. I will not allow this to destroy us. Jessie has been foolish and weak but not wicked, never that, and what they’ve planned for her is gone. But there will be no tragedy. We have endured worse than this in our lives, she thinks. And then, with the tiniest guilty twinge of excitement — there will be a new baby.

Her husband begins to pace again, but now his eyes are inward, calculating, his step the measured stride that always follows his diatribes.

“We find a husband,” he says. “Immediately.” He shoots a look to Yolanda before she can raise the possibility. “Someone respectable.”

Alma sits on the stairs, waiting for the storm to pass. Her own father had taken his belt to her the first time and for a while she blamed him. The next she lost before she was showing much and by the third he was out of their lives. That was the story with railroad men, her mama said, they went off down the tracks and one day didn’t come back.

Dr. Lunceford uses suspenders to keep his pants up and she’s never known him to raise a hand to any of his family. Not like the Judge, thrash his arm stiff whipping his younger boy’s behind, and him, Niles, only waiting for it to end and taking no lesson from the punishment. The last fight was the worst, with blows exchanged and blood on the rug and her in the middle of it.

And now little Jessie down there sobbing like she’s got it hard.

Alma hurries back up to their bedroom when the girl’s begging loses steam, when Doctor’s plans are fixed and Mrs. Lunceford stays quiet. Alma finishes making their bed, sheets smelling the tiniest bit of smoke from the fire over on Castle Street the day she hung them out, and she hears Jessie running up and slamming the door to her room.

She waits till it is clear Mrs. Lunceford won’t be following, still reasoning with Doctor down the stairs. She steps in without knocking. The girl is sprawled on her belly, exhausted from crying. Alma sits on the edge of the bed. It is a long moment before Jessie pulls her face out of the pillow and stares, red-eyed, toward the window.

“Did you hear?”

“I heard.”

“They won’t let me have him.”

“You didn’t tell him before this? Write to him?”

“I wasn’t sure.”

“I told you, girl—”

“You’re not a doctor.”

“I aint a farm girl, neither,” says Alma, “but I know when a melon is set to bust.” She puts a hand on Jessie’s shoulder, tries to remember being this young. By the time she got shoes, ten, maybe eleven, she knew enough not to hope for things. You try to get what you can out of life, but only white folks and the few there is like the Luncefords, the educated colored, bother to make big plans and expect them to work out.

“Can’t spen’ what you ain’ got,” her mama always said, “and can’t lose what you ain’ never had.”

“What you gone do now?”

“What can I do?”

“That boy want you. That’s all you been tellin me—”

“He’s in the Army.”

“So? Texas somewhere—”

“Arizona.”

“It aint the moon. If it’s on the map, there’s a train will get you there.”

Jessie throws her arm across her forehead. “I’m just a girl,” she says in a very small voice.

If there was one like Royal Scott wanting her, she’d walk to the damn Territories if that’s what it took. But she is not this girl and never was.

“You gone marry who they say?”

Jessie covers her face with her other arm.

If I’d been able to keep one alive, keep maybe a couple of them, Alma thinks, I’d of schooled them better than this. Not the way her mama did, no time to do more than warn and worry and pray every night to the Lord for His divine protection, but really telling what was what and keeping the men off them long enough to have some little-girl time, making mudpies without a worry in the world. But after the fourth one came out looking like a tadpole the white doctor told her it was never going to happen for her, and the only mothering she’ll ever do is letting this fool girl know she isn’t licked less she lets herself be. She just got to deal with it, one way or the other.

“You aint so far gone,” says Alma, softly, stroking the girl’s arm. “There’s things that can be done.”

Jessie uncovers her face, looks scared at her.

“I thought them teas and baths was gonna fix you, but it’s caught hold now and there’s—”

“I can’t do that.”

Alma shrugs. “Then you can’t.”

The girl keeps staring at her. “Did you? Ever?”

“Never had to, never wanted to,” says Alma. “Nature done it for me.”

“Oh.”

First time out and this girl end up with a baby, everything goes regular, and she don’t even want it. Alma offers the other possibility.

“You need a train ticket, whatever, I got some money put by. You welcome to it, darlin.”

It will be the end of her job here, for sure, though it probably won’t be long before some of the blame for this spills her way and she’ll be fired anyhow. “Junior will take your side on it if you get there,” she adds. “I just bet he will.”

Jessie takes too long to answer. Alma remembers sitting with her just two years back, maybe three, playing dolls and talking nonsense, the girl laying her head against her when she laughed, little braids back then — how she worked every morning doing up those little braids for Jessie. Girl could melt your heart. Jessie takes too long to answer, but when she does she tells the truth.

“I’m just a girl,” she says.

It never happens in the books. Ruined girls are mentioned, pitied, but there is never one you get to know as a character, as a friend.

Jessie studies herself in the mirror above her vanity. Maybe they’re all wrong. Her father never took her temperature, never listened to her heart or even put his hand on her forehead the way he did when she was little and had a fever. And if they’re wrong about it there is still time to win them over, to make them see who Royal is. If he knew he would come, Army or no Army, he would come and make everything right.

It was his tongue that surprised her more than the rest. Alma told her about the rest, told her not to expect so much the first few times, but that part was nice, was sweet and thrilling, building up after the first strange invasion of his tongue into her mouth, touching her own, breathing into one another for a moment. Intimate. They were intimate. And that is all they will ever have.

Jessie studies herself, studies the swollen wreck this day has made of her face, feeling like a powerful hand is squeezing her throat shut, like each breath is a hill she has to climb. She turns the corners of her mouth down and wonders what it will be like to never smile again.

MAIL CALL

Tombstone is closer but the boys say there’s more cooking every night in the Gulch so that’s where they are. It is most of a day’s ride and none of them are cavalry.

They ditch the mounts at a stable and come into the Calumet Saloon all together, nine of them, uniforms but no sidearms, and the miners are too drunk to care. Royal’s sitter is sore as hell so he stands at the bar drinking from the stone jug they fill from a barrel, what they say is Old Crow but tastes like creosote and it doesn’t matter.

My dearest Royal—

Mail call was early, with Corporal Puckett handing out the letters.

“Royal Scott got him three,” he shouted out, holding the envelopes under his nose. “Smell good, too.”

Oohing and aahing and catcalling from the boys then, like they would with anybody.

“What you want to do is read the last one first,” said Hardaway. “Get to the grit.”

But Royal started with the first one and wasn’t one line in before he couldn’t swallow.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you.

The thing with a jug is you can’t see how much whiskey is left. He hopes there is enough. The miners are singing one song and the boys from Companies A and H something else, but happy, it is early Saturday night and the holes around Bisbee are puking out copper like there is no tomorrow and the Papagos and the Apaches are quiet and the boys will have half of Sunday to sober up in the saddle and Royal is slugging his way through a gallon jug.

My dearest Royal—

Her handwriting is beautiful, like you’d expect, and at first it was hard to understand that something so wrong could be hiding in such gracefully crafted shapes. If she is as upset as she says she is, he thinks, why can’t you see it in the writing? If the handwriting in the letters was a voice it would be soft, reasonable, calm—

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child.

Something he heard from the Bible once. With child. Too Tall is down the bar telling a story about Coop, who is back digging slit trenches at Huachuca cause they caught him smoking hemp on guard duty. Whatever is in the jug feels better when it gets down now, though swallowing is still a chore. His throat started closing right while he was reading, his insides trying to push up out of him, and by the end of the first section he could hardly breathe.

My dearest Royal—

It hurts me so much to have to write this to you. Nature itself has betrayed us, and I am with child. But our love cannot be.

Fort Huachuca is nothing but heat and dust. They drill, they march into the mountains with full packs on, they listen to the officers tell them they may be needed in the Philippines or in China, but finally it is only Army makework and not nearly enough of it.

“Stick the niggers where they can’t make too much trouble,” Coop grumbles whenever they are out on maneuvers. “Any further an we be in Mexico.”

“All I know,” says Too Tall, who got the trench foot so bad in Cuba they almost had to amputate, “is it aint rainin.”

It is crowded in the saloon, crowded in all of the dozens of saloons in Brewery Gulch, and the boys will tie one on and then climb uphill to buy women but Royal is looking straight ahead, past the two busy bartenders who run back and forth, looking to the even busier picture behind them of the 7th being slaughtered by Indians on the hills he has ridden over on a bicycle. At the lower right there are men already stripped of their clothes, others having their scalps lifted or being trampled by horses or shot or stabbed or tomahawked, and only a few able to fight back. More Indians on horseback are on their way, galloping from the mountains at the top of the picture. The General himself is just up and over from the middle, dressed in buckskins, hatless, empty pistol held as a club in his left hand and saber raised high in his right. Above the frame it says that the beer company presented the original of the painting to the regiment, though why you’d want a picture of your friends being murdered and mutilated is not explained. On the bottom it identifies RAIN-IN-THE-FACE and HALF BREED and GENERAL CUSTER and some others and at the far right SQUAW KILLING WOUNDED. Sure enough above it there is a woman in a red dress grabbing a downed soldier at his collar and raising a club overhead to brain him. No prisoners.

We have no engagement to break off, of course, no, we have nothing but our one night of love to remember—

He has seen Custer’s Last Fight in bars before but never studied the details. The old troopers say you kept the last bullet for yourself because if you weren’t finished they would scalp you alive and then do other things. Coop said that in Caney they found a Spanish officer who’d stabbed his woman, a Cuban girl, and then shot himself in the head. But that is just meanness and honor, Dago stuff, and no model for his present situation.

Father will not be moved and I am not of an age to defy him. If it was not for my condition we could wait—

Junior is sitting over with the boys but quiet. And feeling bad, Royal hopes. He drinks more whiskey from the jug. He read all three letters, the second two just more of how bad she feels but she is not the mistress of her own fate, her hands are tied, she suffers with each breath, each word seeming more of a fake than the next, and only the first one has anything for him, scrawled as an afterthought below her name—

I will always love you.

He will not always love her, not if he can help it. He thinks, in fact, that he has already stopped, but that doesn’t make it any easier to breathe. He wants to paint his face like the Cheyenne and the Sioux in the picture and ride straight over somebody, wants to pound somebody to jelly with a club. Dorsey Love is an old man, almost thirty, and he will be the one lying with Jessie, he will be the one raising up Royal’s baby boy or girl, he will be the one that sits at the Luncefords’ big table and the Doctor will have to smile at him and pass the chicken and pretend he is happy about it. The liquor has no bite now, just a smell, and Hardaway is up on a chair reciting The Charge of the Nigger Ninth for everybody in the saloon, though Hardaway is in the 25th and didn’t come up the hill till the second day.

“What you got there?” he called out, passing by as Royal pondered the letters, sitting on the barracks steps. “Some gal that won’t leave you be?”

“Just news from home,” Royal said and looked across at Junior, who was reading his own letter from his mother and knowing by then. “Junior’s sister is getting married.”

“That right?” Mudfish Brown joined in. “Fore you know it he be a uncle. Uncle Junior.”

They were still calling him that on the ride across the scrublands, Junior shooting Royal a sorry look now and then but not saying anything. There is not much he can say that won’t end with Royal hitting him.

I have never understood why Father is so ill-disposed toward you—

Royal understands. Royal has always understood. Junior is the one who doesn’t fit in here, Junior with his little half smile watching the men thumping Hardaway on the back, not a spot on him from a day of riding, Junior the one who grinds through every stupid detail without complaint, who acts like someone even higher than the white brass is watching his every move, judging his deportment, keeping score, while Royal accepts that he is just another sorry-ass nigger no matter how you dress him up.

The second letter didn’t say she would always love him at the end of it, it said how in the light of the terrible circumstances they should probably not correspond any more. And the third one was to apologize for the second one, but it was only a few lines, like she was in a dungeon somewhere and had to write it quick and smuggle it out.

I shall soon reap the consequences of my own weakness. Do not mourn for me, do not even think of me—

She doesn’t say if she means she was weak to come to him at Jubal’s place or weak not to fight more against the Doctor. It doesn’t matter. She is as gone from his life as if she was dead, worse even. Squaw killing wounded. The boys are having too much fun now and he is afraid they will try to pull him into it and the jug is feeling awfully light. He takes it with him, reeling out through the back to the alley behind where you piss and there are two men already sick there, heaving what is probably not really Old Crow and he decides to get the horse and ride somewhere.

But on Commerce Street there are too many men, the town overstuffed with miners come in desperate to spend their pay and get at least as drunk as Royal is. There are three different fistfights in progress and men peeing right out on the curb and a man who has taken his shirt off standing out in the middle and screaming, just screaming. The Gulch rises up steep to the next block, drunken men stumbling down past as he climbs and thrusts the jug into the arms of an already weaving white miner and then passes through an alley between two buildings and just keeps climbing, up the slope and away from the racket of Bisbee and the glowing lights of the copper smelter just below it. It is steep enough that sometimes he has to put his hands down and climb on all fours but finally he is on the ridge, standing unsteadily, looking back down at the lights and the shouting and the raucous music and now and then a gunshot and he can think of nothing more than Sodom and Gomorrah in the Bible story. They had it coming and so did he, it looks like, and he wheels around and walks farther away from the light and the noise.

A different story — forty days and forty nights in the desert, Jesus maybe, or maybe Moses. Mama tried to take them regular to church but for a long time was caring for some white people’s children on Sundays and he and Jubal would go but sit in the back and sneak out sometime before the sermon, so sometimes the stories get mixed up in his head. Forty days and forty nights in the desert and turning away from Temptation and then coming back clean and holy but mostly being away from everybody, away from their ribbing and their eyes able to see the shame of it on your face and them talking about you when they think you can’t hear. Might as well give the damn letters to Hardaway and have him read them out loud. He keeps walking up a dry gulley away from the town, don’t look back, don’t look back, that is another story, and it is getting colder fast now and the wind picking up and he starts to howl back at it. There are coyotes at night, of course, a couple big tribes of them around the Fort that set each other off with their noise that can go on for hours, but you don’t see much of them unless you’re out on maneuvers and cook up a mess of bacon and then they’ll come sniffing, head low and ears back. The stars are gone now, no moon, the sky feeling suddenly low and heavy above him and then there is thunder, rolling at first, and sheet lightning flickering up in the clouds, one section of the sky lighting up for a moment, then another, like the clouds are packs of coyotes calling to each other then CRACK! a bolt sizzling down not so far from him and CRACK! another behind and then it is hail, hard and scouring and there is nowhere to shelter, the land here even more wasted, even less friendly than Montana and the hailstones sting like hell where they slap against his skin, Royal ducking his head in under his arms, left his hat on the bar in the Calumet, and thinking I looked back, dammit, I forgot the story and I looked back and now I will turn into a pillar of shit. And CRACK! it answers, close enough to smell fried air this time, answering him, reminding him how small he is, how it don’t care a thing about his troubles.

Royal sits heavily onto the spiky ground, covering his head and waiting for it to end.

Sergeant Jacks is skirting around Bisbee with Guadalupe and the new mule when a mine foreman riding in the opposite direction tells him there is a soldier sitting in the desert. The mule is the end result of a transaction among Lupe’s hundreds of cousins that started at least two years ago, and he hopes to hell it isn’t stolen. El Chato, who sold it to him at his shack down near Naco a hundred yards from the border, is from the Apache side of her relatives, a son of old Hernán whose sister was one of Geronimo’s wives, and likes to brag about what great stock thieves his people are.

“Some of my fellas hauling timber in seen him,” says the mine foreman, trying not to stare at Guadalupe on the grulla mare beside him. “They stopped and walked all the way over from the wagon road but he said he’d just stay where he was.”

Lupe is half Mex and half Indian, which Jacks didn’t know till they were hitched and nobody come to congratulate her. Relatives on both sides will nod hello if they pass by but that is about all. And then up in Missoula with her it was a whole nother kind of people, white ladies who couldn’t be bothered and the Flathead gals who don’t speak Spanish or Apache. So it is mostly just the two of them, which has been just fine so far. Marriage is a tricky enough deal without the in-laws thrown into the pot.

“Es un loco?” she asks about the soldier when they are riding away.

“No sé cual soldado es,” he shrugs. “Quizás es solamente un borrachón.”

There are men in the company, good men in a pinch, who can’t handle peacetime duty and fall into the bottle. And it is worse out here in the Great Nowhere, easy for a soldier to think the Army has just forgotten about you, that you’ll shrivel up in the sun like a dead rattler. Which is some of why he chased after Lupe so hard on his first tour here, knowing only that she wasn’t white and she wasn’t for sale and that she was one tough trader. They still had a sutler at the Fort then and whenever he would try to swap canned provisions for her wild game or Navaho blankets or other souvenir goods she would pick a can out at random and make him eat the contents, all of it, before she’d close the deal. Wouldn’t talk any English, either, though even back then Jacks could tell she understood it fine.

She points to the sky.

There are nearly a dozen buzzards wheeling lazily in the air, enough to know that what’s below them is bigger than a javelina and high enough to guess that it isn’t dead yet. Lupe leads the mule on a rope. It is maybe a three-year-old, bred in the Mex style on a mustang mare, and is way too curious to have been used in the traces. Its big ears start twitching every which way when they cut off the road and into the chaparral.

From a distance he does look dead, though he is sitting up, cross-legged in the middle of a big patch of ocotillo and cholla cactus. There were maybe twenty each from A and H got the two-day pass, let them blow off some steam and keep the barracks scraps to a minimum. Men are not mules, which would be happy to eat mash and switch flies all day, they get mean and skittish if there’s too little to do, if there’s nobody else to fight but each other. Huachuca isn’t bad duty, laid out just like Fort Missoula only the mountains are scrub instead of evergreen, but riding herd on the cursing, whining, sweat-stinking lot of troopers will wear a man down, so whenever there is a chance to spend a night at the cabin he grabs it. If there was ever a person don’t need taking care of it is Guadalupe. She won’t come on the Fort any more, not even to sell, and he figures it is on his account. The old hands know better than to call him Squaw Man or tamale-eater but still it is nice to keep the two things separate. Army owns enough of you.

It is Royal Scott.

It is Royal Scott and he’s lost his hat and the skin on his face has started to blister. He sits cross-legged, hands resting on his knees with his palms up, eyes closed. Lupe hands Jacks her reins and gets down, stepping carefully over the horse-crippler and around the cholla till she can bend down and look at him close. He opens his eyes to see her.

“Here she is,” he smiles. “Come to kill the wounded.”

“You got lost in the desert,” calls Sergeant Jacks, giving the boy an out. Scott looks over and doesn’t seem too surprised that he is there.

“No, Sergeant, this is just where I come to a stop.”

“You were due back in camp sometime yesterday, I expect.”

The boy shakes his head. “I need to go home.”

“You are home, son. Till they tell us different.”

He keeps smiling, one of those don’t-give-a-damn-no-more smiles Jacks has learned to be wary of. Guadalupe is still bent over the boy, studying his face.

“Just leave me here, Sarge. I aint worth shit for a soldier.”

He is mostly right. “Army will be the judge of that, son. Get up and we ride in together.”

Private Scott holds his hands out. At some point, probably in the dark, he fell and tried to catch himself and got both hands full of cholla spines.

“I can’t hold no reins.”

“You just get up. Lupe can pull you along.”

Lupe helps him stand. He teeters some when he walks, but there is no bottle left on the ground so it is just thirst and hunger and being out in that crazy hail that made such a racket on the cabin roof.

“Thank you, M’am, I think I got it now.” He looks up to Jacks. He isn’t the worst in the company, but he is no warrior, not like some of the old boys or that wild-ass Cooper. “This is her, isn’t it? Mrs. Sergeant.”

“That’s her.”

“I thought it was just a rumor.”

Jacks gets down from his buckskin quarter horse to help her hoist him up onto the mare.

The boy’s hands are useless so it is not easy. The circle of buzzards loosens, disappointed, and one by one they peel off to search for a less active prospect.

The private is still watching Lupe. “She write you letters when you’re away?”

“She don’t write.”

“Good. Don’t teach her.”

When the boy is settled in the saddle Guadalupe rides bareback on the new mule, who is surprised but doesn’t kick, pulling the mare along by the reins.

“Es que se le parte el corazón,” she says to Jacks when they are on their way to Huachuca. “Nada más.”

The Army will occasionally grant leave on the death of a soldier’s mother, but makes no provision for broken hearts. Every time the damn mail comes there is somebody left in a funk, and he wishes the people at home would have the decency to lie if they don’t have good news to report.

“We’ll stop on the way, deal with them hands of yours. Lupe got something to put on it.”

“She a medicine woman?”

“Horse doctor. If she can fix saddle galls and glanders and poll-evil, I figure she can’t do too much damage to a colored infantryman.”

It is only a glue that she makes that you paint on after the big spines are pulled out and wait for it to dry. When you peel it off all the little cactus hooks and hairs in the wounds come out too. They ride for some time, Scott still smiling his smile though he is facing at least a week in the brig and won’t see another leave for months, though it must be some effort to keep seated being weak and dizzy and riding with his hands crossed in front of his chest.

“You were out there a good five miles from Bisbee,” Jacks says finally. “Mind telling me where you were headed?”

“Not headed anywhere. Just waitin.”

“Waiting for what?”

The private stops smiling and looks off to the right to the Dragoons, where old Cochise holed up with his people. “You sit there long enough,” he says, “and the Dark One is spose to come and offer you the world.”

A CALL TO ARMS

It will take a day or two for the word to drift back from Magnolia, and with the election tomorrow it won’t likely compete as big news. The Reverend and Mrs. Cox seem like they’ve hosted plenty of these — wedding party of four, no announcement in the papers. The Record has shut down, of course, Manly supposed to be halfway to Philadelphia, and the Messenger doesn’t bother with colored society. Dorsey doesn’t mind a bit, not any of it. Only too bad Mama passed before she could see him married to Miss Jessie Lunceford.

“From the beginning of creation God made them male and female,” says Reverend Cox with his big deep voice, “that they might be one flesh.” Dorsey has seen him preach once or twice, coming back from Raleigh on a Sunday and stopping halfway for church. A joyful messenger for the Lord. Dorsey is joyful now, surely more joyful than Mrs. Lunceford with her handkerchief to her eyes and Dr. Lunceford grim-faced and wishing it was over and Jessie, so beautiful in her yellow dress holding the yellow roses it was so hard to find, a brave little smile on her face like a girl waiting for her smallpox needle. Dorsey doesn’t mind any of it. There is joy in his heart, and in time hers will follow.

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves unto his wife,” booms Reverend Cox, voice filling the tiny nave they’ve requested to avoid the empty, accusing pews in the main hall. Reverend Cox knows this is not a judge’s sentence but a joyful sight under Heaven, and thunders out the Scripture while Mrs. Cox keeps an eye on the clock. Dorsey noticed the party waiting in the main hall when they passed through, the girl showing six months if it’s a day. With Jessie you’d hardly guess, maybe just a little butterfat here and there, make her look more womanish.

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things—”

Dr. Lunceford endures the Reverend’s words with shoulders set and chin thrust upward. Dorsey has cut him once or twice, in the days before he moved to the Orton Hotel for the white trade. A serious man, Dr. Lunceford, a race man. People have nothing but good to say for him as a doctor, but the rest scares them some, showing so proud in the world, making the white folks jumpy. They are Episcopalians, the Luncefords, but have chosen Reverend Cox because it’s Magnolia where nobody of any account knows them and because the Reverend is understanding of what he called the ex post facto of the situation. Dorsey expects some heavy ribbing from the boys who cut for him over that, maybe even from some of the white gentlemen at the Orton when they finally hear. But no matter the circumstances, from this day forward Dorsey Love and Miss Jessie Lunceford will be bound in holy matrimony.

“I do,” says Jessie, quiet and sweet and dry-eyed as she speaks.

“I do,” says Dorsey, feeling shivery as the words come out. His life will never be the same.

There is no way to cross the river of white men. Jubal pulls back on old Dan and sits as still as he can, watching them pass, white men in red shirts riding through the colored section of Wilmington, whooping their rebel yells, some already taken with liquor and all of them shiny-eyed with the power of their numbers. Jubal watches and is careful to avoid meeting the gaze of any of them, knowing how easy they can spook. There are the horsemen in the red shirts under the old slavery flag and then a bunch on foot, the first two holding up a banner that says WHITE CITIZENS’ UNION which is the ones he has been losing hauling jobs to, the bossman saying Sorry, Jubal, I got to hire white till this election business blow over, three dozen Paddy-looking characters ambling along in sloppy rows singing—

Onward Christian sojers

Marching as to war—

Making it sound more like a drinking song than a hymn—

With the cross of Je-sus

Going on before

Then there is another mounted group, ten or twelve riders in buff uniforms and campaign hats. ROUGH RIDERS is written on the banner the first two support, the third man carrying the American flag on a long pole. This bunch gets the biggest noise from the white folks lining the street, as if they are all veterans of the recent triumph.

Two of them detach from the rank and ride up on either side of Jubal, a big one with a beard and a mean-looking little one.

“Come to gawk at the parade, Rastus?” says the little one.

“Nawsuh. Just waitin to cross.”

“We aint holdin you up, are we?”

“Naw. Yall go ahead first.”

“That’s white of you, Rastus,” says the little one and the big one laughs. The little one tugs at the front of his shirt. “You know what this uniform mean?”

“Mean you been to the Spanish war,” says Jubal. “Like my brother Roy.”

The white men trade a look.

“We was meant to go,” says the little one. “North Cahlina Volunteers. Only they pushed them nigger outfits in front of us.”

The big one indicates the parade passing behind him. “Know what this all about?”

“Aint sure I do.”

“This here’s the White Man’s Rally. It’s about how we gonna take this city back.”

Jubal says nothing.

“What you think about that?”

There is always the point where you got to guess which way it’s best to move. “You don’t never show a mad dog your back,” his uncle Wick always says, “and you never look a papa bear in the eye.”

“Don’t spect I think nothin about it, one way or the other.”

The little one nudges his horse closer. “You playing with me, boy?”

Jubal is a little above him on the wagon seat. Dan won’t bolt no matter what you hit him with, been trained for that, so even if the path ahead was clear there is no way out of this. He just hopes they won’t look into what he’s hauling under the tarp behind — Dorsey Love would surely skin him alive if that got messed with.

“Nawsuh, I aint playin.”

“You gonna vote tomorrow?” asks the big one.

“And there aint many white folks,” Uncle Wick always finishes, “who merits the truth.”

“I aint never voted,” says Jubal, looking the little one in the eye with as empty a face as he can muster. “And I don’t spect I start up tomorrow.”

The big one grunts. “Sounds like a wise plan of inaction.”

“We gonna be out here tomorrow, supervisin,” says the little one. “We see you anywhere near a polling spot, you be one dead nigger.”

They yank the reins and are gone then, trotting to catch the other Rough Riders. There are gaps in the flow of the white people coming down Bladen now, just the stragglers, black folks starting to pop their heads back out from their houses, but Jubal is in no hurry to push through.

Her father insists on running up the colors when they pass. He has lost several flags to vandals in the past, even after he fenced the yard with pickets, in the annual battle of the dead. When Miss Loretta was a girl and the bluecoats still a presence in town her father would march with them up to the National Cemetery on Decoration Day, though he had never been a soldier, would drag her along by her skinny arm, mortified, to hear the yankees speechify and the negroes sing. Honoring the Nation’s Sacrifice is what they said, but really it was only the graves of the Union men and some of the colored who had served with them they were praying over, and there were many in town who wanted to reroute the New Bern Road so they wouldn’t have to pass by the entrance gate. She was twenty-four when the bluecoats marched to the train station, gone forever, and since then every tenth of May when the rest of white Wilmington flocks to the Oakdale flying the old Dixie flag to mourn the Confederate Dead her father raises his defiant Stars and Stripes to shame them all. And here he is today, Roaring Jack, ramrod straight beside the pole, banner rippling above him, glaring his contempt over the white pickets to the horsemen passing by.

“Daddy,” she says gently, stepping out on the lawn to touch his arm, “just come in and pull the shades down. This will only spur them on.”

“White Citizens’ Union,” he snarls, then raises his voice in a shout to the men on foot who follow the Red Shirts. “Passel of damned layabouts, got nothing better to do with their time! Shiftless trash—”

The men, singing, turn and wave their hats—

Christ the royal Master

Leads against the foe

Forward into battle

See His banners go!

“It’s just noise, Daddy. You know how elections are.”

“It is rebellion,” he says. “Armed insurrection.”

“Nobody has fired a shot yet.”

“The voting doesn’t start till tomorrow. There will be bloodshed.” The old man’s face suddenly drains of color. “And what is this?”

A group of men dressed as in the photographs of Roosevelt’s famous cavalry appear, riding two abreast. One of them carries the Stars and Stripes, what Daddy calls the Flag of Freedom, on a pole jammed into a scabbard on his saddle.

“How dare they?” says her father.

Miss Loretta feels her stomach clenching. If those men can use that flag for this purpose—

“Sacrilege!” cries Roaring Jack, striding forward to the fence, cheeks flaming now. “You have no damned right to drag those colors through the mud!”

A rider who seems too much the runt for his enormous campaign hat pulls his mount up on the other side of the fence, spurts a gout of black tobacco juice back over his shoulder.

“What’s your trouble, Granpaw?”

“That flag—”

“We fought the Dagoes for that flag, old man. It’s ours now.”

“Never.”

The runty man looks past Roaring Jack to Miss Loretta.

“You want to keep him tied in the yard the next couple days, M’am. Might could get dangerous for people who can’t control what they say.”

“If that was a uniform,” her father says, looking the rider up and down, “you would be a disgrace to it.”

A larger man with a beard walks his horse over. He touches his hat. “Afternoon, M’am.”

“There are laws in this country,” her father continues. “Men have rights by the Constitution. Anybody put themselves in the way of those rights commits treason.”

“You tell em,” says the big man.

“What’s your name?” asks the other.

“Daddy, come away from there.” Miss Loretta stays rooted where she stands, her father as likely to turn his wrath on her if she interferes. “You don’t need to tell them anything.”

“My name is Jack Butler. And you skulking sons of bitches know where to find me.”

Miss Loretta holds her breath. Rolling past the two Rough Riders, past the last of the white men parading on foot, is a carriage with two men in gray tailored suits and derbies sitting impassively in the front. The one with the reins is Frank Manly, beside him his brother Alexander, and though the latter is at least as light-skinned as she with her mother’s touch of Cherokee blood, the word has circulated that he is to be lynched on sight. The carriage is headed north.

Alex meets her gaze for a moment in passing, holds her eyes.

“You gentlemen will have to excuse my father,” she says, moving sideways to draw their attention. “Whenever an election comes up he can become somewhat inflammatory.”

Her mother said a lady can diffuse the most awkward of situations with a compliment and a soothing word. “You all make such a stirring sight, up there on your mighty steeds—” and here she sugars her words with the tiniest lilt of flirtation, “it’s no wonder you’ve got him all riled up.”

“I forbid you to speak with these scoundrels!” snaps her father, turning to her, furious. He slapped her once, only that one time.

The carriage is past, out of sight. In the one cartoon of Alex Manly she has seen, waved in front of her by her father during one of his jeremiads, he is depicted as a coal-black fiend in the loud clothing of a Dock Street procurer, leering at a young white woman with her leg uncomfortably exposed as she steps down from a carriage very much like the one he just drove past in.

Miss Loretta spreads her arms apologetically. “He can be so difficult,” she says, nodding at her father. “If you gentlemen don’t mind—”

The big one attempts a bow on horseback and leads away, while the runt turns to glare back at them as he follows.

“Names are being collected,” she says quietly to her father when the riders are gone. “Mischief is being planned. They have lists.”

“Well sign me up,” says Roaring Jack Butler, standing fast beneath his flag.

It is the piano that makes her cry.

All the way back to Wilmington in the carriage he’s rented she is strong, she is polite and respectful the way her father says she has to be. Dorsey is a good man, like her mother says, and mostly tends to the reins as if he isn’t used to driving, tipping his hat now and then to the loud collections of white men, carrying banners on horseback, who seem to have invaded the city. Dorsey makes no mention of them, as if not acknowledging nasty looks and leering comments means they didn’t happen, and instead compliments her dress, remarks on the Reverend’s beautiful voice. She understands how he can cut their hair all day. His house is on Eleventh just north of Red Cross, smallish, but his own house, he remarks with pride, bought and paid for.

I will bear this, she thinks, this is my life now and I will be strong. Then he opens the door and the first thing there, too big for the room, is the gleaming piano and Dorsey turns to her proud and hopeful, gleaming himself, and it is too much.

“I don’t need you to play for me,” he says when he has her sitting in the one soft chair, Dorsey perched on the arm of it holding her hand in his, patting the back of it as if comforting a child. “Just whenever you want — if you get the notion.”

“I am so sorry,” she says, wiping her eyes and trying to catch her breath. “I didn’t mean to do like this.” My room, she thinks, her heart racing. I won’t ever sleep in my own room again.

“We got lots of time, Miss Jessie.” She hasn’t called him anything yet, not Dorsey or Mr. Love or Dear or anything, just making sure he is looking at her before she speaks. He is always looking at her, sneaking sideways glances, and she wishes he wouldn’t. “Lots of time for everything,” he says. “Aint no hurry about it when you married. You just let me know when you ready for — you know. When you ready.”

She was hoping to get that over tonight, but now, with the piano filling up this room, pushing her back against the wall, maybe not.

“Thank you,” says Jessie. He’s looking at her again, looking at her like she could break and she’s feeling like she might just, might shatter into a million pieces. White men are singing on the street outside, drunken, and she wants him to pull the shades down.

“That’s the deal, being married,” he says again, squeezing her hand. “Aint no hurry about a thing.”

Later, when he is gone to return the carriage wherever he hired it from, she plays a chord on the piano. It wants tuning.

The gunfire begins when the sun goes down. There has been commotion all day, horns and drumming and the devil yells of the horsemen, and now the gunshots, singly and in volleys, accompanied by animal whoops and laughter. Dr. Lunceford can see the reddish glow over their bonfire on Chestnut, can hear the men shouting and carrying on from several directions, the rally having spread throughout the city. Yolanda, still mourning for their daughter, calls him in off the porch.

“No reason to give them the satisfaction,” she says quietly when he steps back into the parlor. “Those kind of people get into the drink, there’s no telling what they might do if they come by and see you out there.”

“This is my house,” says Dr. Lunceford, sitting heavily beside her on the settee.

They have only the one gaslight lit on the wall and the piano throws a long shadow. It is so quiet with Jessie gone.

“They see you on the porch of this house,” says Yolanda, “owning it, not doing the yard work, and it makes their blood boil. You know that.”

During his visits to Brooklyn the previous morning the people were tight-lipped and grim, near whispering when they spoke of the election. The positions at risk on the state level are not so vital in themselves, and this is not South Carolina, or Mississippi, God forbid — but every new day there has been another warning. In the evening yesterday he and a handful of the others prominent in the colored community were escorted with an undertone of menace out onto the water, that huge gun bolted on the foredeck, the white men smirking as they neared Eagle Island and the deadly machine demonstrated. A simple cranking motion, like operating a meat grinder, then the hammering of bullets, all of them covering their ears as they watched thick wood reduced to flying chips on shore in an angry hailstorm of destruction. All this followed by a quiet but pointed lecture on civics and security. His companions were duly impressed.

There is a crackle of gunfire, not too distant, and Yolanda puts her hand on his arm.

“They say they’ll be watching the polls tomorrow. Carrying weapons.”

“We’ve petitioned the governor,” says Dr. Lunceford. “He doesn’t want to know about it.”

More gunfire, and a distant, drunken cheer. “Do you suppose Jessie is safe?”

“They’re mostly down by the river.”

“But tomorrow—”

“She’ll have her husband with her.”

He knows this comforts his wife no more than it does him. They ran into the procession on the way back from Magnolia, a lot of white trash from Dry Pond strutting about, displaying their banners and their ignorance. But they are only the hounds, set loose to yowl and slather. The ones behind the hunt are the cigar-puffers in the Cape Fear Club, the planters and pressers of cotton, the lawyers and land-speculators and ambitious sons of the men who lost their city to the Union and now want it back. The ones who are listening to that old Confederate wind-bag in the gilded embrace of Thalian Hall, not those scorching pig and swilling whiskey behind the post office.

“Will you go out tomorrow?”

Yolanda asks in as neutral a tone as she can produce, neither a challenge nor an admonition.

“I am an Assemblyman, elected by the people,” says Dr. Lunceford. “I am responsible for more than my own personal safety. I am going to vote.”

It is very quiet in the parlor. This is the time of day Jessie would play. Not practice, just play a whole piece, Brahms perhaps, something slow and sweet while they all waited for Alma to call dinner.

“They say they’re out to hang the Manly boys,” says Yolanda. It is her attempt to caution him, to remind him of the atmosphere on the streets.

“They’re safe out of town,” says Dr. Lunceford. “Rode out this afternoon.”

Yolanda looks to him. “You had something to do with it?”

“Several people came together,” he says. “White and black. They’re long gone now.”

“There’s one thing we can be thankful for.”

Someone is walking up their street, singing loudly. As he moves closer the words become distinct—

The Paddy has his attributes

His love of drink and song

He’ll serenade the stars the whole night long

The Dutchman is a stolid chap

Beneath his heavy brow

But I don’t like a nigger — nohow!

Yolanda puts her other hand on her husband’s arm and leans into him.

“If I could go,” she says, “if I was allowed to vote, I would not allow anyone, anyone, to steal the ballot from my hand.”

The Judge moves through the men standing at the back as the old Colonel begins his aria.

“We have seen our institutions destroyed,” says Waddell, standing wraithlike on the Thalian stage, “our ideals trampled upon, our women dis-honored.”

Most of them are up there behind him, basking in the reflected glory of the moment, MacRae and Parsley and Rountree and the Taylor brothers. The hall is packed with men and not a few women, emotion running high.

“But the time for smooth words has gone by, the extremest limit of forbearance has been reached,” Colonel Waddell’s voice trembles with righteousness as he exclaims, pounding the podium before him for emphasis, “and the blood of warriors rises in our veins!”

The Judge reaches Turpin, smiling as he leans against the center-aisle doorway, gazing out over the cheering throng.

“You know what’s going on outside?” calls the Judge over the shouts of the audience.

“Some of our brother Redeemers having themselves a barbecue,” says Turpin, not taking his eyes off the stage.

“We are Anglo-Saxons,” Waddell sings out, spreading his arms to include every person in the gathering, raising his eyes to the balcony—

“They’re a bunch of hooligans staggering around in the streets. I almost ran over two of them coming here, weaving straight up the middle of Princess passing a bottle between them.” The Judge is listed on the Businessmen’s Committee that has sponsored the evening’s oration, and he is a part of what is brewing, for better or worse.

“We are the sons and daughters of those who won the first victory of the revolution at Moore’s Creek Bridge, who stained with bleeding feet the snows of Valley Forge,” cries the old man on the stage, “and only left the service of our country when its independent sovereignty was secured.”

“It’s like the old coot been born again,” Turpin chuckles. “Just what you worried about, Judge?”

“If this whole deal is going to work we must operate within the law, we must be beyond reproach. We can’t have the rough element taking over and blackening the name of our city.”

“Our city got a pretty black name in the world as it is,” says Turpin. “That’s the whole problem right there.”

“We are the brothers of the men who wrote with their swords from Bull Run to Bentonville the most heroic chapter in American annals, and we ourselves are men who intend to preserve, at the cost of our lives if necessary, the heritage that is ours!”

Ben Tillman might hold an audience with his plainspoken grit, concedes the Judge, surveying the eager faces in the Hall, but this old Confederate has the gift, the voice—

“We maintained that heritage against overwhelming armies of men of our own race — shall we surrender it to a ragged rabble of negroes led by a handful of white cowards who at the first sound of conflict will seek to hide themselves from the righteous vengeance which they will not escape? No!” he thunders, the audience joining his shout. “A thousand times no! You are armed and prepared,” he says, and looks among the aisles with piercing gaze, “and you will do your duty. Go to the polls tomorrow,” Colonel Waddell commands, “and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave. If he refuses, kill him.”

A massive cheer erupts in the Hall, men and women standing, shaking their fists and applauding, many with tears in their eyes.

“Negro domination shall henceforth be only a shameful memory to us and an everlasting warning to those who shall seek to revive it!”

The Judge takes a step down the aisle toward the Colonel. The old man looks forty again, reanimated, a spirit back from the grave. And yes, sometimes the only course is to let the dogs loose and have at it. Order can be restored later. They are only dogs, after all, and tire even of blood.

Turpin claps him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Judge,” he winks. “Every move been planned out. Gonna be like clockwork.”

“We shall prevail in this election,” cries the old rebel, “even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses!”

Somebody has to shovel the coal. To feed the engine. Mr. Clawson said as much when he left for the Thalian with the others. “Drew,” he said, “you got to mind the fire while we gone.”

Milsap perches on his stool setting type as Colonel Waddell speaks in the great Hall and the others rally outside. He can hear the Red Shirts through the window as his fingers fly over the keyboard, shouting and singing and shooting off their pistols, celebrating tomorrow’s great victory. When he ducked his head out before, he could see flaming barrels of tar on the street corner, could smell sweet pork cooking. But somebody has to set the front page of the Messenger, Special Morning Election Edition, somebody has to ensure that the lightning bolt of truth, hurled before a yearning public, will be properly spelled and spaced.

Milsap has filled the hoppers with italics, and the words quicken his heart as they fall into line—

Rise ye sons of Carolina!

The clandestine pamphleteers of the Revolution must have felt this way, peeling Tom Paine’s seditious manifesto off the blocks—

Proud Caucasians one and all;

Be not deaf to love’s appealing—

Hear your wives and daughters call;

That Milsap has neither wife nor daughter does not lessen the chill that rises up his back as he commits the phrases to metal—

See their blanched and anxious faces

Note their frail but lovely forms;

Slender, pale girls with arms thin as broomsticks, eyes pleading as they submit, horrified as they stare the Nameless Crime in its brutal visage, breasts heaving, thrilled—

No. No. Horrified. Milsap strikes the keys and the matrices rattle down the slides, lining up like soldiers for a volley—

Rise, defend their spotless virtue

With your strong and manly arms!

CONGRESS

Diosdado is here because of the uniform. The one that has not been torn or stained in his few desultory engagements with the disheartened Spanish, nor in the weeks of guiding his mongrel company from post to post facing the American defenses north of the Pasig.

“If you’ve still got a decent uniform,” said Scipio, passing close to the front in white linen and straw boater, “I can get you on for the Congress.”

So he stands here at attention beneath a bamboo arch, borrowed sword raised in salute to the delegates as they file past from the train station nearly a mile away. It is all nipa in Malolos, roof panels woven here sold throughout the island, nipa huts strung along either side of the narrow main road, lined now with excited citizens eager to greet and evaluate their representatives.

These great men, perspiring in full evening dress, pause now and then to lift their silk top hats and acknowledge the throng, wiping their brows with dazzling handkerchiefs. There are not nearly enough carriages. The Banda Pasig, up ahead at the massive stone church, are pumping out Alerta Katipunan!, though that old secret society of workers and peasants, wellspring of the people’s revolution, has recently been dissolved by General Aguinaldo.

The entire Philippines is now the only Katipunan, read his decree, published in both Spanish and Tagalog, the real Katipunan, where all are united in saving the Mother Country from the depths of slavery.

A cunning piece of diplomacy, thinks Diosdado, standing at attention, eyes forward, sweat rolling down his face. Certainly none of these gentlemen parading before him were in the original organization, their cédulas torn with Bonifacio’s at Pugad Lawin, nor did they rise up valiantly in ’96 to battle the oppressors. Most have not been elected by the regions they represent, regions they may never have set foot in, but have been appointed by the Supremo to impress the yanquis and the ruling powers of Europe, reassuring them that the new republic will be administered by educated men, men of means and culture.

Here, riding in an open calesa, is the lawyer Pedro Paterno, who after his role in brokering the truce of Biak na Bato petitioned his well-connected Spanish supporters to have himself made “at least a Duke” of Castile, with the position “valued in dollars so that the common Filipino will not hold it in contempt.” Paterno who made his best efforts to rally those Filipinos to the cause of Spain, certainly his Mother Country, when the Americans declared war on her.

And here is Don Felipe Calderón y Roca, grandson of a Spanish friar, who balked at recognizing the Revolutionary Government and decries those who “cater to the ignorant masses” who have shed their blood to make this day possible, with Buencamino just behind him, only a month ago jailed for intriguing with the Spaniards, now strolling at the head of a gaggle of his minions.

One of whom is Scipio Castillero.

Scipio, in a swallowtail coat he never wore to the theater, favors Diosdado with his customary smirk and a discrete nod as he passes, and now the sun is almost unbearable, the dust stirred up by this herd of strolling dignitaries thick in his nose, the Banda Pasig, playing an overwrought version of Jocelynang Baliwag, perceptibly out of tune.

Two local kasamas have camped behind him, men in their forties who look sixty, missing teeth and, in the case of the taller, several fingers.

“So who are they,” asks the shorter, whose name is Eulalio, “these men in the tall hats?”

“Ilustrados,” replies Zacharias of the severed digits. “Men who know things.”

“And what do they know?”

“For one thing,” Zacharias states confidently, “they can speak kastila.”

“But if we have defeated the kastila themselves, if they are banished to their home across the seas, why would we speak their language?”

“Because it is the language of learning,” explains the taller man. “When Padre Fulgencio stole the last five hectares of field from you, in what language did he read the legal decree?”

“Kastila,” Eulalio concedes.

“And when he gives his sermon to admonish us on Sunday, what does he speak?”

“Kastila, again. After speaking that other one for Mass.”

“That is called Latin. The language God uses to speak to His angels.”

“I’ve never understood why the padre does this before us, we who are no angels,” says Eulalio, “when he can speak our language passably well.”

“To remind you of your ignorance,” Zacharias explains. “And to take advantage of you. What is the point of knowledge if you can’t use it to prevail over others? Look at this one—”

It is the fiery Ilocano newspaperman Antonio Luna, tricked out in a general’s regalia, strutting down the center of the road at the side of Dr. Trinidad Pardo de Tavera. A strange and symbolic pair, thinks Diosdado, though comrades from their wild indios bravos days in Paris and Madrid — Luna’s brother Juan, the celebrated painter, very pointedly shot his wife and mother-in-law, Pardo de Tavera’s sister and mother, to death in a jealous rage.

“There are only ten, maybe a dozen families who matter in this country,” Scipio likes to say, “eternally bound by blood and commerce.”

The last of the pedestrian delegates pass. The kasamas and many of the other spectators drift toward the Barasoain Church. Diosdado holds his pose till his arms begin to tremble, then eases the sun-heated blade back into its scabbard and allows himself to look around.

The honor guard is mostly infantrymen, privates favored with footwear and intact rayadillo uniforms, troops who no doubt fought for the Spanish at some point, with junior officers like himself spaced at the bamboo arches for decoration. Capitán Janolino, charged with the detail, hurries down the line with an aide.

“He’s getting in his carriage,” announces the capitán breathlessly. “We’ll greet him at the church.”

They form in double file and march, the rest of the spectators tagging along on either side, till they come to the huge churchyard and create a passageway with their ranks, two hundred yards long, leading to the neo-classical grandeur of the basilica. The shadow of the three-story belltower gives relief to a good half of the waiting soldiers, but Diosdado is not among them. He waits, at attention, in the sun.

Malolos is renowned for its churches, “infested with them” as Scipio would say, and within them many of the Spanish friars captured in the central provinces are being held prisoner. Humiliated, yes, but fortunate to have been spared the wrath of the poor villagers they have bullied and defrauded for so many years. If it had not been for the Church some sort of reform acceptable to Filipinos might have been possible, some link with Spain preserved. But the religious corporations had the ear of the Queen Regent, that girl of sixteen years who famously stated that she would “rather lose all of the Philippines than a single soul for Christ.”

There will be a Philippine Republic now, with Philippine laws and a Philippine Constitution, each new proclamation, Diosdado hopes, no matter how compromised by the principalía in their top hats, further refutation to American designs on the archipelago.

Cheers erupt from the crowd as they see the carriage, drawn by four enormous white horses, passing over the small bridge and under the towering, hastily constructed triumphal arch, a trotting phalanx of infantrymen to keep the well-wishers from mobbing it, now swinging into the passageway of soldiers and stopping in a waft of dust at the foot of the great church.

Diosdado can see the delegates crowding at the entrance to the basilica, the Banda playing the newly written national anthem, cries of “Viva Aguinaldo! Viva la República Filipina!” filling the air.

He is a small man, even smaller than Diosdado remembers from Hong-kong, carrying a large ivory cane with a golden head, flanked by his taller subordinates as he mounts the steps. The mass of cheering delegates part to allow him entrance.

A small detail of Janolino’s men is left to guard the doorway, and Dios-dado is able to squeeze his way back through the spectators who press forward hoping to catch a phrase or more of the Supremo’s opening address, till he reaches the shade of a huge mango tree. It is an honor to be here, he knows, but he can’t escape a twinge of disappointment at being left outside like this, after his close and valuable service—

Eulalio and Zacharias are there beside him, squatting on their heels and fanning themselves with their hats.

“First Don Emiliano will give a speech,” says Zacharias, “and then the rest will make up the new rules.”

“And what will these be?”

“Better ones, God willing.”

Eulalio indicates a dozen Augustinians, no doubt receiving their daily allotment of exercise, being shepherded across the rear of the yard by a pair of armed soldiers. Robes wrinkled and dusty, the frailes hide their unshaven faces from the happy indio throng with their parasols.

“Will they be sending these ones away?”

“Without a doubt. As soon as it is allowed by the Americans.”

Eulalio ponders this. “Why do we need their permission?”

Zacharias sighs at the ignorance of his friend. “Because the Americans control the harbor of Manila and every ship that sits upon it. We can’t make the prayles swim home.”

“I would like to see them try,” says Eulalio, his face brightening. “I bet the fat ones can float for a long time.” He looks around the churchyard. “Are the Americans here?”

Zacharias stands to look over the heads of the crowd, then approaches Diosdado, holding his hat over his heart.

“Excuse me, po,” he says, bowing slightly to the younger man. “Do you know if any Americans have attended? Their great Admiral Dewey, perhaps?”

Every anuncio has been full of praise for “the Mighty and Humanitarian North American Nation, cradle of Liberty,” who has “offered its disinterested protection” to the fledgling republic, but the yanquis remain distant, cloistered within the Walled City and on their menacing gunships, like dark clouds of a typhoon hanging over the sea whose very mention may draw their fury screaming about one’s ears. We have mounted an impressive spectacle today, thinks Diosdado, but our most important audience is absent.

“Perhaps,” he tells the barefoot kasama, “the Americans have other plans.”

ELECTION DAY

They’re supposed to burn the city down. Sally Manigault strolls up Princess, giddy with fear as she carries the basket, but at every corner there is only another pair of men she knows, tipping their hats and warning her not to be long on the street. The only smoke in the sky is behind her, a long black tail from a steamer heading upriver. They’re still working at Sprunt’s and the other big places on the water, but most of the downtown businesses are closed for the voting. It is the quietest Election Day she can recall.

Myrtle Talmadge said he was up on Tenth, so she passes the corner sentries feeling like Little Red Cap from the Grimm brothers’ story, swinging the basket and smiling and greeting the men. Niles would be out here if he hadn’t had his tiff with the Judge and been forced to go out West. Sally is wearing the lavender dress with the leg-o’-mutton sleeves and gloves of a darker purple, embroidered in rose, and the pink and black chiffon touring hat she bought in Charleston last year. Her boots, of course, pinch like the devil, but there is no remedy for that short of surgery. If she had only gotten Niles’s slender, modest feet instead of flat monstrosities like Harry’s, but one is not consulted when physical attributes are being handed out.

The men carry shotguns and rifles and all have a white handkerchief tied on their left arm. They are ever so brave, volunteers all, and she gives them her brightest smile as she walks by. The Judge wanted to send her out of town like many of the other women in their acquaintance, but she told him if the men of Wilmington had suddenly discovered their backbone the least their women could do is be there to encourage them.

He is on the northeast corner of Tenth, as dazzling as Myrtle said, standing a few yards away from a crowd of rough-looking men outside an old carriage barn being used as a polling place.

“Excuse me, Miss,” he calls out shyly. “May I ask where you’re heading?”

“You may not,” she answers, sweetening her response with a smile.

The boy flushes. “It’s just that we have orders — public safety—”

“There are armed citizens on nearly every corner. I can’t imagine any harm coming to me.”

“We don’t know their plans. There’s been all kinds of rumors.”

The burning will be the most difficult to control. One deluded soul with a tin of kerosene, a waterfront piled with cotton bales and wooden shacks—

“Besides,” says the blue-eyed volunteer, “this is where the First Ward begins. You don’t want to be up here.”

Sally casts a glance at the men hanging about, joking and jostling, many of them wearing the red shirts the Dry Pond ruffians have adopted, crudely sewn garments with sailor-type collars bordered in white stitching. She can picture their wives, hair a mess, big feet working the treadle, hunched over the machine by a sooty oil lamp. If anybody is to burn the city down, these are the prime candidates.

“You believe there’s going to be trouble?”

“Pretty sure of it, M’am.” He shoots a look to be sure nobody is listening, bends close and lowers his voice. “In fact, it’s been planned. Gonna be a bit of a rush come time to count the ballots.”

“Indeed.” The Judge has been grumbling around the house about secret plots and cabals all week, more upset by his exclusion from them than by the fact that they seem to exist.

“I got to keep em under control till then.”

“All alone?”

“My — my fellow volunteer was — he had to attend to something.”

“How long do you think you’ll be out here?”

“Oh, as long as it takes, Miss. I haven’t laid eyes on a nigger all morning, which has got to make you suspicious.”

“Perhaps they’ve been discouraged from showing themselves—”

“That’s the general idea, Miss.”

Sally cocks her head and allows herself to look him over. He is a good foot taller than she, a few years older, clean-shaven. He looks a bit like the young man in the Arrow Shirt advertisements.

“I don’t believe we’ve met before—”

He straightens, touches the brim of his hat. “Robert Forrest,” he says. “I come down from Raleigh yesterday.”

“All the way from the capital just to help us out?”

“Least I could do, Miss. The stories in the paper—”

“We are so very grateful.” Sally offers her hand. “Sally Manigault.”

He takes her hand, once more looking to the crowd outside the old barn. Being forthright, she always needs to remind the Judge, is not the same as being forward.

“My father, Judge Manigault, is a great friend of Mr. Daniels of the News and Observer. We visit him there quite often.”

“Well, if you’re ever up there again,” says dazzling Robert Forrest, then leaves the rest to her. He is polite, this young man, and brave, but certainly not gallant.

“Have you and your companion had anything to eat or drink since you’ve commenced your duties here?”

“No, actually—”

“In that case you are in good fortune,” she smiles, and lays the basket on the ground. “I have a tureen of coffee here, sandwiches, some pie—”

“Oh—”

“In response to your initial question, Mr. Forrest, where I was headed was here — to lend my support to the cause, so to speak.” She flips the lid of the basket open and the boy looks into it, somewhat stunned.

“That is very kind of you.”

“Nonsense. It’s the least I can do. Let me pour you some coffee—”

Flirt with them, Myrtle Talmadge always says, and you win their hearts. Feed them, and you own their souls.

There are two dozen outside the icehouse, staring at him. One of them, a red-haired man with a face ruined by smallpox, steps out to block his way but is whistled back by Turpin the druggist.

“This is Dr. Lunceford,” he says with a hard smile.

Turpin is a Fourth Ward man, yet seems to be in charge of this bunch blocking a polling place in the Fifth. Dr. Lunceford himself would not be here were his house on the west side of Eighth rather than the east, though geography and race are not so closely wed in Wilmington. Colored and white are poor, uneasy neighbors in much of the Fifth Ward, and not an inconsiderable show of white workmen live north of the Creek in Brooklyn, outnumbered five to one in the First.

“How we know he supposed to vote here?”

“Dr. Lunceford represents this ward.” Turpin touches his hat and gives a tiny bow. “One of our distinguished aldermen.”

“If he was extinguished,” says the pox victim, “we’d all be better off,” and the white men laugh.

“Now, now,” says Turpin. “Make way for the gentleman. We don’t want any complaints once the numbers come in.”

They stand aside ever so slightly, eyes mocking.

Dr. Lunceford can’t help but think of the revolving gun. The cylinder that housed the barrels was on a swivel, and one could direct the torrent of projectiles easily, back and forth, like a fire hose. He imagines the crank in one of his hands, trigger finger of the other squeezing hard as he faces this clot of leering white men, imagines their flesh and bone tearing apart, the terrible swift justice of it, the job done in five quick heartbeats. His father must have killed men, white men, when he wore the blue uniform. It was, however, like his youth in bondage, a matter he would not elaborate upon.

“Expect we’ll have quite a turnout today,” says Turpin as Dr. Lunceford passes through their gantlet, eyes fixed straight ahead. “Hell, we got folks been buried five, six years coming out to vote.”

The white men laugh.

Dr. Lunceford feels his perspiration chill against his body as he steps into the icehouse. There are only a handful of men there by the table, a pair of kerosene lanterns hung from the rafters to light their task. Laughlin is behind the Republican box, and Dr. Lunceford wonders how many of the other white Fusionists have dared come out today. He fills his ballot out quickly, stuffs it into the slot. Laughlin meets his eyes.

“How is it out there?”

“About what you’d expect,” says Dr. Lunceford, “given the saber-rattling that has preceded. Will you be safe here?”

Laughlin looks to the other men in the room, two of them colored, all of them worried. “It’s the end of the day that worries me. When it’s time to count.”

“We petitioned the governor—”

“Yes, well, none of those famous yankee bayonets seem to be at our disposal. You be careful out there.”

The poll-watchers are less interested as he steps out, and he can’t help then but to think of the rest of it. The shredded flesh, the blood. He treated a man once who’d been shotgunned at very close range, a pox of buckshot on the parts of his body that had not been torn away by the blast, tissue crushed, bones snapped. He amputated what was left of the right arm, cut out a ruined eye, extracted a palmful of lead pellets. He is no surgeon, but none was available at the moment, and the man died a week later from blood poisoning. He can’t help but wonder, should the rapid-fire gun be turned today on its owners, on its inventors, if he would lift a hand to treat them.

“We know who you are,” calls the red-headed man as Dr. Lunceford turns to walk home, “and we know where you live.”

Jessie is rewriting her last letter to Royal in her head, for the hundredth time, when Dorsey steps through the front door. She can’t help but cry out, feeling guilty—

“Dorsey!”

He crosses to her, takes her hand. “You’re shaking—”

“I was so worried,” she says. “Worried about you, out there—”

She will no longer allow herself to lie, she tells herself, unless it is to spare the feelings of another.

“I’m fine.”

“How is it?”

He sits at the table, right where she was just thinking about her lover who she will never see again, and slumps like he has been carrying a great weight for a long time.

“I went around to see some of the boys.” He calls the men who work in the tonsorial parlors his boys. “Hoke Crawford say he was by the polling spot, there was a mess of white folks with guns outside, taking names.”

“So you didn’t go.”

Dorsey turns his face away from her. “No point to it. Won’t be an honest count.”

Jessie fills the coffee pot with water, places it on the stovetop. He says he drinks coffee when he comes home from work, that it helps him think.

“I expect my father voted,” she says and immediately regrets it. Now he looks at her.

“Dr. Lunceford treat colored,” says Dorsey, “so he got nothing much to lose. Half my business is white heads.”

“I’m glad you’re back safely,” she says, and it is no lie. “There’s been so much talk about violence—”

“Something else afoot, I can smell it.” He was on one of the Fusionist ward committees for a while, then quit it when the infighting boiled up. “Word is they got a couple reporters from up North in town, come to watch the ruckus, and it’s gonna wait till the yankees leave town. Something tricky afoot.”

He waits till she drifts to the piano stool, sits, and meets his eye again.

“You think bad of me? Cause the polls don’t close till—”

“You did the right thing,” says Jessie. What she means is that if men insist on keeping politics to themselves, they may do with it as they wish. With Royal the unsaid was always something you couldn’t risk yet because you weren’t certain, the unsaid was tantalizing and delicious—

“I can march right down there and look them in the eye, tell them here is Dorsey Love, make what you want out of it—” Dorsey has straightened up now. He sounds like Father— “—throw my ballot on the fire — cause that’s where it’s going — and let the Devil have his due. If it make you think better of me, Jessie, I am willing to suffer the consequences.”

Dorsey has no trouble with words. Maybe because he has never read the books, not the love stories anyway, and has not learned to lie from them. Dorsey hides nothing from her and at the moment it brings tears to her eyes and she crosses to put her arms around him. She has never been the first to touch before.

“You stay right here,” says Jessie to her husband. “I don’t want you to suffer a thing.”

There was some talk of using the Dance Hall for a polling place, but the Exalted Africans didn’t think it looked good. “Think of who we’ll be associated with,” said one of the reverends. “Put a ballot box among the low crowd that congregates there and we’ll look like a cartoon from the Messenger.”

Jubal doesn’t read the Messenger or any of the other white papers but has been forced to look at some of the comic pictures, inky coons smoking cigars and bug-eying at white women, and stood for the usual “Aint that you, nigger, how long you have to pose for that picture?” and sometimes wishes he could draw to point out how funny white people look. He doesn’t mess with the Exalted Africans either, the whole crowd with their clubs and their college degrees that his brother Royal been sniffing around, as if Dr. Lunceford was ever going to let that boy lie on his daughter and act happy about it. So it’s not any polling place, but when Jubal steps into the Dance Hall there are a pair of ballot boxes set up on the bar counter and you got to put your money in a slot if you want a drink, one with an old post-office WANTED FOR ASSAULT drawing of Pharaoh Ballard pasted on its front and the other with the same for Clarence Rice who disappeared some time ago. His drawing says WANTED FOR LARCENY and Jubal is about to drop a dime in the slot when Pharaoh Ballard himself calls out from the corner. “Don’t you be feedin that box, boy, or you answer to me.”

Gus Mayweather behind the bar takes his dime and puts it in Pharaoh’s box. “Right good turnout we had today,” he says. “Half the First Ward been in to vote.”

“Can’t get a drink nowhere else. You got beer?”

“Wet and cold.” Gus bends to pull a bottle from an ice chest at his feet, pulls the cap off. “Yeah, when we heard the mayor was thinking of closing down the saloons we laid in some supplies. Imagine that — no liquor on Election Day.”

Simon Green, the butcher’s man, steps up next to Jubal. “That mayor up for office this time around?”

“Not for another two years.”

“Well he aint getting my vote.” Simon drops money in Pharaoh’s box.

“You register?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t vote or not vote for the man. You aint even counted as a person.”

“They put somebody up that’s worth the trouble, that’s the day I register for their little game.”

“Like who?” asks Jubal.

Simon thinks a long while. “Mr. Miller.”

“Thomas Miller?”

“That’s the man. I owed Mr. Miller ten dollars, he let it ride for two weeks and didn’t charge me no extra.”

“That aint no reason to vote for a man.”

“Yeah, well he got white-people kind of money, owns lands, owns buildings, only he don’t try and act like them. These other high-tone sonsabitches—”

“Exalted Africans,” says Jubal—

“That’s the ones. I deliver to their houses all the time, mostly got to bring it to the back door.”

“You sellin em pig guts, Simon,” says Gus. “You think they want that mess coming through their parlor?”

“These ones won’t eat no innards, they rose above that. They eatin high off the hog.”

“Still, any kind of quality folks, you expected to deliver to the back.”

Simon isn’t having any. “Just cause a man is a nigger,” he says, “aint no reason to treat him like one.”

“How’s this vote going?” asks Jubal, sipping his cold beer and nodding at the ballot boxes.

Gus leans in and lowers his voice, glancing over to Pharaoh and Little Bit and some of the others sitting at a corner table. “The calculations won’t happen till late, but I’d say our friend there has opened up a fair lead since he come in to supervise the proceedings.”

“And old Clarence aint here—”

“Changed his name,” says Jubal. “Went off in the Army with my brother.”

“You heard of a absentee ballot?” says Gus. “Clarence a absentee candidate.”

“It’s pretty much that way outside, too.”

“You tried to get in?”

Jubal shrugs. In here it seems silly but their Mama took both him and Royal down to register the minute they came of age. “Your Daddy risk his life for that vote,” she always says, “and you boys damn well gonna use it.”

“You never know,” he says, feeling like it’s an apology, “maybe somebody you help to get in do something for you later. Get you a job or something.”

“Post office,” says Simon Green, nodding. “Wear that uniform. Or on the police like old Toomer.”

“That’s right,” says Jubal, feeling better about it. “Give and take. That’s politics, right? Or maybe the white folks got something planned, take one of our schools away, and we got a black man up there he can stop them.”

“So you get there?” asks Gus.

“Got close. But there was a line of peckerwoods outside, showin off their hardware.”

“Guns—”

“Pistols, rifles, shotguns—”

The bunch from the corner has drifted over, listening in.

“You got to pick your ground,” says Jubal. “Like they taught my brother in the 25th. The ground aint right, you back off and fight another day.”

“So you didn’t get in?”

Jubal feels them watching him. “It made me think. If the vote don’t mean nothin — how come they so set on taking it away from us?”

“How many was there?”

It is Pharaoh Ballard, leaning his back against the counter so his coat falls open to show everybody the pistol in his belt.

“Oh — nine, ten of em.”

There had been six, but two had shotguns and they looked desperate to shoot somebody.

“Don’t no white man deny me entrance, I wants to go in,” says Ballard.

Gus laughs. “You can’t vote, Pharaoh. You a convicted assaulter.”

“Maybe I just want to walk in the door, see how things is comin along—”

“You gonna mess with a posse of rednecks, you only got that old — what is it—”

“.45.”

“Man got a Colt was old when they buried Custer and he wants to start a war.”

“The point is how they get to strut about our section of town, wavin their iron? What happen if we march down Market Street all loaded up and ready to shoot?”

“That would be a war.”

“This is ours,” says Pharaoh, indicating the empty dance floor, but Jubal knows he means the whole of Brooklyn. “They want to block off the Fourth Street Bridge like they done today, keep us from crossin in, fine. But stay the fuck out of where we live, man. That aint nothin to ask. You may own the world,” says Pharaoh, pointing his finger toward the door, “but you don’t come in my house.”

Gus and Simon applaud, and there is no mockery on their faces.

“Can’t have a proper Election Day,” says Gus, “without a speech.”

The numbers make no sense. Even the big number — two years ago the Republicans outpolled the Democrats by five thousand, and now he’s supposed to set into the morning edition that the Democrats took this one by six thousand. Of course there should be a sizeable swing, everything they’ve printed in the last year has been pushing folks that way, to come back to responsible, white government, but if the colored were discouraged from the ballot how can they be showing up in the Democrat boxes? Milsap climbs down from his stool and goes looking for Mr. Clawson. The editor had just handed him the slip of paper with the election returns though the polls aren’t due to close for another hour. The big number is confusing enough, but these ward returns—

Mr. Clawson is in his office entertaining Mr. MacRae and the younger Taylor brother, pouring out liquor into the glasses he keeps in his bottom drawer. He raises his eyebrows at the interruption.

“Do we have a problem, Drew?”

“It’s these figures, Mr. Clawson,” says Milsap, holding up the slip of paper. “I think maybe somebody pulling your leg.”

Clawson smiles and winks to his guests. “And what makes you think that?”

“Every one of these precinct tallies is just way over — look here, the Third Ward, there’s not more than six hundred forty or fifty men registered to vote, but here just for the Democrats we got over eight hundred and—”

“I trust my source.”

“Yes, but—”

“Lots of new people been moving into the city,” says Mr. MacRae. “And this business with the colored editor got people motivated to come out and vote.”

“But I know the registration numbers,” says Milsap, frustrated. “It just doesn’t add up.”

“Got all those figures in your head?” asks Allen Taylor.

“Yes, sir, I make sure and bone up before Election Day, keep an eye on our reporters. We are the paper of record here in Wilmington.”

“Well I am impressed. City government could use a man with a head for figures and that kind of diligence.”

“Thank you, sir,” says Milsap, and now he realizes what this is, that the numbers are — what — symbolic of the will of the people, not actual counts. He feels like an idiot. “But I’m a newspaper man.”

“And an outstanding one,” adds Mr. Clawson. “Drew serves as my watchdog here — misspelling, grammatical infractions both grievous and minor, errors of punctuation. But facts,” and here the editor’s eyes lose their twinkle and his voice takes on an edge, “facts he leaves to the men in the field. Isn’t that right, Drew?”

“Yes sir.”

“The numbers may be a tad extreme, but these are extreme circumstances we are faced with, aren’t they Drew?”

“Yes sir.”

He indicates the paper in Milsap’s hand. “My source for these figures is unimpeachable.”

“I understand, sir.”

“I’m confident that you do. So you go ahead and set that front page. And this here—” he holds up another slip of paper, “goes in a box, bottom center. Bold.”

Milsap steps in to take the paper from him. “I get right on it.”

Milsap is not so far down the hallway to avoid hearing Mr. Clawson’s summation of the incident to his guests. “That is the most infuriatingly literal sumbitch,” says his employer, “that ever trod the earth.”

The other men laugh and Milsap feels his ears grow hot. He glances at the paper. It is an announcement not written in the editor’s hand, perhaps the work of one of his visitors. At the top, in thick capitals, it says

ATTENTION WHITE MEN!

The Judge understands why they’ve chosen to do it in the courtroom, but it makes him uneasy. There was no legality in the summons, an admonition on the front page of the Messenger for “every good white citizen” to meet here this evening, and though every man in the throng is white, he knows for a fact that several are not good. Merchants, lawyers, doctors, ministers, men of property — a large proportion of those who make the city function. No trial he ever judged here at a decent hour attracted as many spectators, the jury box filled, and the gallery, and men standing shoulder to shoulder in the aisles and on the floor watching MacRae and Sol Fishblate and the few others who, thankfully, have chosen to stand in front of the bench rather than rule behind it.

MacRae is holding some sort of document and Fishblate, who’s been mayor and clearly wants to be again, shouts for order.

“We’re going to make history here today,” he says, and calls up Colonel Waddell to read a statement.

There are cheers as the old man steps out of the crowd, looking pleased but puzzled. MacRae hands him the few typewritten pages and whispers something in his ear.

“I am as uninformed as the rest of you as to the purpose of this meeting, or the content of this document,” he says, holding the pages at arm’s length and cocking his head as if trying to make sense of a foreign script, “but I shall endeavor to do it justice.”

The Judge looks around the room. A handful of the men, all up by the bench, are clearly the impresarios here, standing with folded arms, confidently studying the faces of their public, while others seem either eager to be led or, like the Judge himself, annoyed to have been excluded from the decision-making.

“The White Declaration of Independence,” the Colonel intones, and there is wild cheering.

The election is not in question, the advantage gained will tip the scales and the city charter can be amended to negate the sway of pure numbers in local government. What they hope to gain with this display—

“ Believing,” the Colonel sings out, “that the Constitution of the United States contemplated a government to be carried on by an enlightened people; Believing that its framers did not anticipate the enfranchisement of an ignorant population of African origin, and believing that those men of the State of North Carolina, who joining in forming the Union, did not contemplate for their descendants’ subjection to an inferior race—”

This is all true, no doubt, but legally insignificant given the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in their own state legislature. The Judge recognizes the argument, has written statements not dissimilar, but that was when he was young and they were justifying the Secession. If this is indeed a declaration of independence they had better be damned clear about who they plan to be independent of—

“We the undersigned citizens of the City of Wilmington and County of New Hanover,” the Colonel continues, one hand holding the proclamation and the other held over his heart now like some touring Shakespearian, “do hereby declare that we will no longer be ruled, and will never again be ruled, by men of African origin.”

Cheers and stomping. The Judge is stirred, what white man would not be, but the arbitrator in him hovers above the clamor, awaiting the specifics—

“While we recognize the authority of the United States, and will yield to it if exerted—”

The Judge smiles. The lawyer’s hand reveals itself. Iradelle Meares is standing up there between the Taylor brothers, and this bears evidence of his precision. They will recognize and yield to preclude any whiff of sedition, but only if exerted, to maintain the boldness of the assertion—

“—we would not for a moment believe that it is the purpose of more than sixty million of our own race to subject us permanently to a fate to which no Anglo-Saxon has ever been forced to submit.”

Playing to the jury here, and not the judge, appealing to what even the most hard-hearted white yankee must admit—

“We hereby proclaim—”

It is the same appeal the great Calhoun made to the Senate when he was at Death’s door, his last plea to settle the differences of North and South or part amicably. That the original intent had been perverted, the original balance irrevocably lost, and that it was only the North with its numbers and control who could save the day, unless “her love of power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the Union.” The sine qua non here is not Union but the deeper, more holy sense of what it means to be a white man and a Christian—

“First — That the time has passed for the intelligent citizens of the community, owning ninety percent of the property and paying taxes in like proportion, to be ruled by negroes.”

It is common sense, but common sense and statutory law are distant cousins. The Colonel continues down the list of resolutions to much noisy approbation, that whites who manipulate the black vote to dominate the public sphere will no longer be tolerated; that the negro is incapable of understanding where his best interests lie; that the practice of hiring blacks to fill the predominance of positions in the workplace has encouraged their present impertinence and must be curtailed; that the responsible white citizens of the city are prepared and determined to protect themselves and their loved ones—

“We are prepared,” Waddell continues, with none of the vacillation of the unrehearsed, “to treat the negroes with justice and consideration in all matters that do not involve sacrifices of the interest of the intelligent and progressive portion of the community—”

The flattery is brilliant, for who will not desire to be included among the intelligent and progressive? Who will argue that the interests of such exalted citizens should not be paramount? And then, without ever mentioning his name, the Colonel comes to the fate of Alexander Manly.

“This vile publication, the Record, shall cease to be published and its editor banished from our environs within twenty-four hours.”

Men are standing on chairs to applaud now, pounding the walls in a frenzy. Were this a trial he would clear the courtroom, but it is no legal proceeding but an exercise in posse comitatus that he hopes will preclude a lynching, or, if that act be done, indemnify the citizens in this room from responsibility.

Sol Fishblate thanks the Colonel profusely and thanks the press, looking pointedly at Tom Clawson, for serving as secretaries for this historic gathering and for their vital efforts to inform and inflame the public preceding the election. Then the wily Jew recommends a few amendments to the Declaration, requiring the resignation of the mayor and the chief of police and the Board of Aldermen, and there is more celebration and the Judge feels the gear click into place, the machinery of it all too clear to him now. A coup has been planned, no waiting for the slow evolution of political reform, for the months of proposal and legislation to effect the needed changes — it is a coup d’etat, despite all the eloquent verbiage, and when his name is called to be on a Committee of twenty-five to enforce the provisions of the document he steps forward and agrees to join it.

MacRae is on the Committee, no surprise there, and Allen Taylor, and Meares and Frank Steadman and a pair of ministers and Dr. Galloway and a quorum of the intelligent and the progressive, of good white men, and he is proud to be included but relieved that there is no swearing in, no palms pressed to Scripture to legitimize the moment. His emotions are just as divided as he lines up with over four hundred others to put their names on the Declaration.

“This is how the Founders must have felt,” says John Bellamy, who will be their new congressman, “waiting to sign the parchment.”

Perhaps. But to the Judge it feels more like the uneasy night in the Masonic Hall, when, surrounded by his fellows in the Craft, he knelt bare-kneed beneath the blue ceiling, cable tow wrapped three times around his body and swore, upon no less a penalty than having his body severed in twain and his bowels taken hence, never to violate the Obligation — an emotion both solemn and false.

It takes the citizen behind him in the line, Junius Hargeaves, who butchers swine on Front Street, to cut to the bone of the matter.

“If it stick the niggers back where they belong,” he twangs, “I’ll sign any damn thing.”

Dr. Lunceford has never been in the Cape Fear Club before. The two white men in red shirts who came to get him with their pistols showing bring him in through the front door and lead him to a large meeting room. Inside are Hugh MacRae and two dozen white men neatly arranged on one side of a long table and a greater number of black citizens who have been summoned like himself crowded haphazardly on the other. His fellow alderman Elijah Green is here, and Dr. Alston and Henderson and Moore and Scott the attorneys and Tom Miller and his own son-in-law Dorsey and some other barbers and even Mr. Sadgwar, the old gentleman looking confused and upset to be awake at this hour.

“That should be enough,” says Mr. MacRae on the other side of the table. “Let’s get this thing started.”

The next surprise is that it is old Colonel Waddell who seems to be presiding over whatever this gathering is supposed to be.

“I’m going to read you a statement,” he says, “and you’re going to listen.”

Dr. Lunceford studies the faces of the white men as Waddell reads. A few meet his gaze with glares or stoic indifference, but none shows the slightest hint of the shame they should feel to be associated with the racialist tripe the old man is flatly reading. White Man’s Declaration of Independence indeed. It is a clever strategy, he admits, to adopt the language of patriotism and liberation to cloak their designs on absolute power, but it is also as vile and cowardly a course of action as he can imagine. He looks to his fellow “leaders,” whom MacRae has taken it upon himself to dub the Colored Citizens’ Committee. They have no doubt been escorted here at gunpoint as he was, and sit with a kind of stunned resignation as one preposterous resolution follows another. The election results have been tampered with beyond the credulity of even the most prejudiced observer, the Democrats apparently not content to merely threaten their competitors away from the ballot box, and this farce of a proclamation seems a pointless reiteration of their contempt—

“It is further resolved,” reads the old Secessionist, “to demand the immediate resignation of Mayor Silas Wright, Chief of Police John R. Melton, and the entire standing Board of Aldermen—”

Elijah Green makes a small groan beside him. This isn’t a declaration of independence, it is a demand for submission.

The Colonel finishes, lays the typewritten sheets of paper back on the table. “This is not a proposal,” he says. “There will be no discussion.”

Nobody on his side of the table speaks, so the Doctor clears his throat. “In regards to Editor Manly,” he says softly, “he has acted entirely on his own. His newspaper has ceased publication, and, I have it on good authority, he has already absented himself from the city.”

“We will require a written response as to your acceptance of these demands,” says Waddell without acknowledging him. “It shall be delivered to me personally at my residence by half past seven tomorrow morning. This meeting is adjourned.”

With that the white men remain seated, staring at the colored committee they have invented, insulted, and now dismissed. Tom Miller is the first to comprehend, standing without a word and walking quickly for the door. Dr. Lunceford takes a final glance at the faces across the table and finds no hint of bluff or reservation, only the florid glow of righteousness.

“I’d had my.44,” says Tom Miller when Dr. Lunceford catches up to him on Dock Street, “I’d have blown his cotton head off.”

Dorsey has never actually sat in David Jacobs’s shop before. He’s looked through the window in passing, David or one of his boys snipping over the white men who come in, a three-chair tunnel of a room. It is packed to the walls now as most of the men from what they’re calling the Committee and some others who have caught wind of this new threat have all crowded in. Dr. Lunceford stands in front of the middle chair and tries to pull them together.

“The mayor is useless,” he says. “Once the hope of Federal troops was gone he crawled under a rock to hide. Which means it’s up to us.”

“They got the guns, they got the power.”

“They’ve asked for a reply.” The Doctor seems almost calm. “We should give them one. We reject their declaration and all of its provisions. If they can achieve the same ends through legal means, let them try. There’s no reason we should take a part in our own disen—”

“There’s a couple hundred reasons still wandering around town,” says David Jacobs. “They’re just aching for an excuse to let fly at us.”

“I’m not talking about a physical confrontation. I believe it is important, for the record, to—”

“Who’s gonna write that record?” Tom Miller holds the lease on Dorsey’s Dock Street shop, owns the pool room he used to hang in before he married Jessie. “Anything don’t look good for them they just change it.”

“If there’s nothing to be gained by defiant language,” says Mr. Henderson, “I suggest we just distance ourselves from Alex Manly and appeal to the cooler heads among them. If those Red Shirts had their way—”

“Those Red Shirts don’t do a damn thing the big folks don’t put em to.” Miller is by the door, angry, holding up a fist studded with rings. “And no matter what we say in any letter it’s already been decided whether they be let loose or not. But lemme tell you, they come huntin niggers where I’m at, they gonna find one who bites back.”

Dorsey finds himself stepping up on one of the chairs by the back wall to be seen. “They think we got some say about how other colored folks act,” he says. “But the ones they worried about, all that wild Brooklyn crowd, them shack people live down south of town, they don’t go to no church service. And they sure as hell don’t care what we got to tell em—”

“Just like how we had nothing to do with what Alex Manly wrote in his paper.”

“That boy was here,” says Tom Miller, “I’d put my boot to his near-white behind.”

“So what will our response be?” asks Dr. Lunceford.

“You seen that gun they got,” says John Goines, who was Manly’s printer at the Record before it shut down. “Seen what it can do. You want to be responsible for that machine being turned loose on our people?”

“The responsibility rests on the head of the man who pulls the trigger,” says the Doctor.

“Yeah, and the man who gets caught in front of it,” adds David Jacobs, who is also the city coroner, “won’t have no head left.”

Jubal spends the long night down with his animals. Old Dan is still poorly, shedding the worms, and Nubia is flighty from the white people all day. They’ve been quieter and more sober than for the marching, but so many of them about, crowded around the polling places, laughing and waggling their rifles and looking their looks at you. Jubal take her out for her little trot, Nubia a horse you can’t leave in a stable all day, no matter what, and she got a sense for it, contention in the air make her shy just like a shotgun blast, and now her skin is still quivering on her back in sudden ripples, her ears switching this way and that listening for it to start for real. Jubal listening just as hard.

“Best thing for it,” he says softly as he moves around her stall, “is they drink some more and fall out from it, wake up happy they won this round. Things go back to normal.”

Dan is farting as he dozes, not a mule to worry about people business. There is hauling to do tomorrow and Jubal wants people back in their homes and forgotten about the election. He uses his time now, too jangled up to fall asleep, to put the tiny stable in order, hanging tack and polishing leather, talking soft to his nervous riding horse.

“Maybe this Sunday we head out to the beach,” he tells her. “Let you go on them mudflats. You like that, I know.”

It is a quiet night, a long night, and dawn is peeking in through the cracks between the planks before Nubia’s head finally drops low and her ears relax. Jubal eases the bar up silently and steps out onto Love Alley.

Across the way, sitting in the sand with his back against a slat-and-wire chicken coop, is old Caleb who used to drink with his father, who was a slave on the indigo plantations and then rolled turp barrels on the loading dock till the liquor made him useless, which he’s been as long as Jubal can remember, Caleb who never in his life give a damn about anything you couldn’t pour down your throat. There is no telling what shade the old man is under the crust on him, with yellow eyes and yellow nails thick as horse teeth on his toes.

“They done stole it back,” he says, looking in Jubal’s direction, the way he does, but not really at him. “Everthing we won in the War, everthing we built up, they done took it back.” He shakes his head, lets his turtle eyelids drop shut, tears making channels in the grime on his cheeks. “Aint that some shit?”

And then there are roosters crowing.

POSSE COMITATUS

When Milsap turns onto Market Street a thousand armed white men are marching toward him. At least a thousand — they fill the wide thoroughfare from side to side all the way from Sixth to the Armory two blocks down. The flood must have come like this through the streets of Johnstown, he thinks as he waits for it to sweep him along, no chanting or haranguing in the ranks, only an inexorable force of nature unleashed to run its course. He knows where they are headed.

Colonel Waddell is in the van, the old gentleman riding ahead with a Winchester held up like a standard, grim as fate. Many of the town’s leading men hurry to keep beside him on foot, armed or not, determined to be noted by the swelling throng behind them. Mr. Clawson is up on the sidewalk staying parallel, with Walter Parsley and Hardy Fennell trailing after, Clawson scribbling in his notebook as he walks. Milsap falls into step — where else in the wide world should he be? — and feels the power of a thousand bodies with one deadly purpose in their consciousness as the mass surges hard right down Seventh Street, picking up speed, more men and boys pushing into the torrent from the side streets as they cross Dock and Orange and Ann and Nun, small brown faces goggle-eyed at the windows of the Williston School till they are pulled away by their teachers and then Waddell raises his rifle over his head and the righteous horde washes out around him facing a two-story clapboard house just south of the colored Methodist church, modest in façade and seemingly empty. The Love and Charity Hall.

Milsap has only seen it once, when he was a boy in South Carolina. By the time he and his friends got there the beating and burning was well over and somebody had strung a cord through the calves like it was a slaughtered deer and three of the Knights were hoisting it by rope over the branch of a sycamore tree. The top part was more charred than the legs, but as it swung, poked by gleeful older boys with long sticks, it was evident that it had been a man. Mr. Hudson, the town’s only photographer, had been summoned to set up his apparatus and there was repeated posing with the trophy, Milsap and his friends sneaking in just before the cord was pulled to be included among the huntsmen. He had not, at that point in his life, seen himself in a photograph. He remembers them all being queasy with excitement, remembers the bitter smell and the strange rush of saliva in his mouth, this confluence of blood and gathered neighbors always in the past leading to fresh cracklins and pickled souse.

“You know who it is?” Milsap asked one of the older boys wielding a stick and the boy laughed and poked the hanging carcass again to make it spin and said “Say hello to Albert Lee.”

But Albert Lee was a man he knew, a man who sat on the dock at the feed store and had once given him a gator he had carved from a chunk of tupelo, and this thing with half a head left strung up by the sinews could not be him.

One of the Red Shirts steps forward to pound on the door and there is shouting from the men who have flowed around and behind the structure and then Milsap is borne in a rush, feet barely touching the ground, in through the door just smashed open with axes and wrenched hard, fighting to keep from falling under the stampede of men squeezing into the downstairs hall, chairs and benches hurled shattering before them, Milsap grabbing a belt and lifted at the head of the crush up the steep incline to the crowded press at the top of the stairs. It is all he can do to avoid being brained by wood or glass or metal as the furies attack Manly’s den and wreak upon his tools of outrage what they had hoped to inflict on his person.

They have been, as Milsap often surmised, still setting by hand here at the Record, and he cannot help but make a hasty inventory as the smaller pieces of equipment whiz past his head to smash against the walls, as stacks of papers are flung about to carpet the floor and sloshed with kerosene from the lamps snatched up from below and a man next to Milsap is beating on a folding table with a compositor’s stick, smashing down again and again screaming “Nigger! Nigger! Nigger! Nigger!” while four burly men struggle to tear the bulky rotary press from its moorings and, failing that, allow others to rush in and have at it with ax and sledgehammer. Then fire, the flames whooshing across the floor and the angry wave that has scoured this room becomes a desperate scramble of men fighting to escape, men leaping down the stairwell rolling over those still struggling upward to claim a shard of glory. Milsap is shoved and then rides another man’s back to the ground floor, someone stepping on his neck, then lifted and pulled to safety, hundreds of voices roaring in exaltation as white men pour out the bottom of the house and black smoke pours from the top.

Milsap doesn’t remember having grabbed the chunk of metal till he feels it cutting into the palm of his tightened fist. It is a rectangle of brass with a raised shape on one face, only a shape to most but to Milsap unmistakably a capital N when reversed in a newspaper headline. He jams it in his pocket and hurries back from the sudden wave of heat roaring out from the building, flames licking out from the smashed front window above now, nearly stumbling over the guts of the defenestrated printing machine.

They could have stripped the office of the equipment, he thinks, and given it to someone who would have used it responsibly. He learned his trade on an old four-cylinder press just like the one now busted at his feet, which Mr. Clawson himself had bought cheap then sold on credit to the Manly brothers. A pity to butcher the horses, he thinks, when the coachman is to blame.

The heat has driven them all to the west side of Seventh and the fire bells are sounding their alarm when Davey finds him in the throng. Tiny points of orange are reflected in the printer’s devil’s eyes.

“Manly wunt in there,” shouts the boy over the clanging of the bells and the cheers of their companions. “That bird done flew the coop.”

Milsap nods. His neck hurts where it was tromped on. “Then we’ve all got something to thank him for,” he says.

The alarm bells are clanging and then it’s their new hose wagon come rattling down Fourth behind those two big iron grays. Jubal ties Dan off to a light pole and runs alongside till Elijah Gause can pull him up to the siderail.

“What we got?”

“Seventh and Church,” shouts Elijah, pointing ahead to the left where the smoke is billowing up.

It is a mixed neighborhood and it might be three other companies there first. Jubal used to drive for these boys, the Phoenix Hose, before they went on the city payroll at the beginning of the year. Back then it was every company for itself and a race to be first at the scene for a crack at the insurance money. Uncle Wick told him once how he and Mance Crofut killed a bear years ago, how it reared up big as a hillside and threw their dogs through the air and took a couple pounds of lead shot and a smack on the head with a railroad spike before the light finally went out in its eyes. There are no bears left around here, though, and maybe a fire is the biggest thing left worth fighting, where at the end you feel like you done something important and come out alive.

They whip around the corner, wheels sliding in the dirt, and Jubal calls forward to Elijah. “You know what’s burning?”

“Not yet,” Elijah shouts back. “But I got a feeling it’s more than a fire.” And then Johnson has to pull back the reins as they come into the white people.

There is a shifting sea of them all around the fire at the Love and Charity Hall, men and boys, lots of them waving guns around. White men catch up the horses and surround the wagon, looking ugly, though Bud Savage is grinning as he struts up to hand them the word.

“False alarm, boys,” he says. “Chief says we gone let this one go to the ground.”

None of the other city companies have come. Heavy wood is shifting and cracking inside the building now, glowing embers floating down all around them, but not one of the Phoenix boys budges from the rig. Jubal can feel crackling heat from the blaze ahead and the acid glare of the white men closing in.

“You mean to let this church burn too?” asks Johnson, nodding to the St. Luke’s Zion. “Cause that’s what’s gonna happen next.”

An old gray-haired white man walks his horse over.

“What’s the problem here?” he says.

“Boy claims the church gonna burn,” says Bud.

The old man looks at the church and then back at the Hall, frowning. “Our work here is done,” he says. “Let them through.”

It takes a minute for the others to catch wind that they’ve been vouched for, every few yards another knot of white men throwing up their guns to challenge, but finally Elijah’s brother Frank jumps off and hooks them up to the hydrant as Jubal runs the hose out to within twenty yards of the fire with the other pipemen, his face feeling like it is blistering, and then Frank yanks the valve. The hose jolts stiff on his shoulder and then, despite themselves, the crowd of white men cheer as the first gout of water spurts skyward and smacks down on the St. Luke’s roof. Hot sweat boils off Jubal’s face, stinging his eyes as he wrestles the line with the others, water pressure pretty feeble here and thinking they could use one of the steam engines to pump while he hears the old white man’s voice, singing above the noise of the fire bells and the now roaring flames and suddenly the greater part of the white men start to move back north up Seventh, many of them ducking under the hose as they go. Something cracks under his feet and when he glances down he sees it’s a sign that’s been torn off the front of the house and hacked with axes, a sign you can still tell said THE RECORD PUBLISHING COMPANY.

He helped carry the printing gear up into that house just a little while back and now it is burning away, and he has to wonder was anybody trapped inside or shot when they run out from it, such a low, spiteful thing to do when they already took their damn election, the faces on the couple hundred whites who stay to watch not twisted with meanness, but just looking happy and curious like it’s the 4th of July and next there’s going to be rockets. Johnson directs them to wet the outside of St. Luke’s and then do a quick knockdown of the fire on what’s left of the Love and Charity top floor.

“What’s the use setting it on fire,” says a disappointed white boy, stepping up close with two of his friends, “if you gonna let em come and put it out?”

Dorsey was born on the day of the Capitulation, when the rebels give up to the Union at Appomattox, and his mama says that’s why he’s bound to keep the peace. But nobody seems to be in the mood for that right now. There is a big crowd of them come out from the cotton press, maybe a hundred men, worried about their families or their homes or just so mad they want to fight back, all facing the double row of white men lined up across Nutt Street with rifles raised and ready to shoot, some with uniforms and some without, and a Gatling gun mounted on a wagon with a white man sweating at the trigger.

Dorsey stands in the middle with Mr. Rountree and Mr. Sprunt and old James Telfair.

“What we heard is they strung up Alex Manly and burned down the Love and Charity Hall and St. Luke’s Zion,” says James, who manages the floor for Mr. Sprunt and sometimes preaches at St. Stephen’s. “And now we hear they coming over to Brooklyn to shoot us up.”

“No truth to that at all,” says Mr. Rountree, whose hair looks like he hasn’t put a comb to it this morning. “You got to get these people back inside.”

“—that if any persons, to the number of ten or more, unlawfully, tumultuously and riotously assemble together to the disturbance of the public peace—” Mr. Roger Moore shouts out, reading from a paper and marching back and forth in front of the line of riflemen, “—and being openly required or commanded by invested authority to disperse themselves—”

“Dammit, will you stop that?” snaps Mr. Sprunt.

Mr. Roger Moore is in some kind of made-up uniform, wearing a sword. “We got to make this legal,” he explains.

“There hasn’t been any disturbance here and there’s not going to be any,” says the press owner. Dorsey was cutting Mr. Sprunt in his shop in the Orton when a couple men run in and yelled “Your niggers are coming out!” and then run off again. He should have just stayed and let the white man deal with it, but they put his name on that Colored Committee, which maybe was an honor but felt more like a responsibility, and so here he is in the middle of it. He knows they at least won’t start shooting while the man who owns the cotton press and the Orton Hotel and a good deal of the rest of the city is right beside him, but the big mounted rapid-fire gun keeps swiveling to follow every time his nerves force him to move a little bit.

“If there’s nothing to it about a mob coming,” says Dorsey quietly, trying to be still, “I don’t see why the men can’t go and see for themselves.”

“The situation has got beyond that,” says Mr. Roger Moore. There are stripes and other shapes on the shoulder of his uniform but Dorsey doesn’t know what rank they add up to. “We can’t let a whole gang of these people out into the streets when they supposed to be working.”

“It’s the rumors, suh,” says James Telfair, who belonged to the de Rosset family when he was a young man and knows how to talk to white folks. “Rumors beset a man’s mind. But if you let a few out, two or three at a time, they can go look and come back with the real story.”

“That would be fine with me,” says Mr. Sprunt. “They won’t get any work done till this is settled, one way or the other.”

Mr. Rountree turns. “How bout that, Roger? Two or three can’t do us much mischief.”

“I’ll let these two go,” he says, pointing to Dorsey and Reverend Telfair. “And then I want the rest of them inside.” He flips the Riot Act paper over, holds it out.

“Write your names here, if you can write.”

Dorsey writes, and thinks how this is the second time in two days the white people got his name on a paper.

“You hurry your asses back here,” says the man behind the Gatling gun as they pass. “This deal won’t hold water long.”

Men and boys are posing for photos when Jubal leaves the fire. It’s only just smoldering now and he’s got Dan tied across the Creek on Fourth with a wagon full of coal left to deliver. He tries to stay on the far side of the street from the white men who are drifting back toward Brooklyn in small groups, rifles slung carelessly over their shoulders, talking excitedly. The ones that got jobs must be taking the day off, as they are none of them in any hurry. When he crosses Chestnut he sees Toomer hurrying up in his uniform.

The police gives him a look. “Where you been, get all sooty like that?”

“With the Phoenix boys at the Love and Charity fire. Where were you, man?”

“Bad business popping up all over town. Somebody got a plan,” says Toomer, “but they aint let me in on it.”

Jubal nudges Toomer’s stick as they walk. “You gone ’rest somebody?”

“Not if I can help it. I be happy I get out of this day alive.”

There are a couple dozen black men outside when they get to Fourth and Bladen, glaring diagonal across the trolley track at as many whites carrying rifles who have bunched up between Brunjes’ store and the St. Matthew’s church. Dan is tied up by the white men.

“Help me with this,” says Toomer, heading for the black men.

“I aint no police.”

“Yeah, but you was over at the Love and Charity. You can put them straight.”

The one they call Little Bit who you don’t want to mess with at craps is out front of the men with his chest puffed out.

“Look who comin,” he says. “Pet nigger in a blue suit.”

Toomer steps very close to Little Bit. Jubal doesn’t understand stepping that close to a man known to favor a knife. “What you think you gonna settle out here?” says Toomer. “All this shit blow over fast if you let it.”

“They lynched a man.”

Toomer turns to Jubal.

“You see anybody swinging?”

Jubal shakes his head. “Burned down Manly’s paper but he wasn’t there. Not that I seen anyway.”

“Then what they all doin over here now?”

“Most of em lives here,” says Toomer. “Now why don’t alla you just—”

Little Bit pushes Toomer back a little and there is a pop and then another and a couple of the men around him have pistols out and there is a volley from the rifles across the street and a half dozen men fall. Jubal squats down as more shots are fired and glass shatters and one white man is down in the dirt with Dan rearing and bucking to tear himself loose while other white men take cover behind the wagon, shooting, shooting at him, and then Dan is down and screaming, kicking and writhing and Toomer stands tall and disgusted in the middle yelling “Damn you! Damn the bunch of you!” and then more white men with rifles arrive and Jubal is running, running with the rest, first down Fourth and then right up Harnett but there are men in houses shooting at them there and they retreat, a few men turning to fire back at the houses and then toward the river but more shooting now, whites chasing and black men coming out of their houses shooting and on Third another man goes down, Sam Gregory, he thinks, but Jubal just jumps over the body as it sprawls and keeps running, cutting back with three other men toward the railroad tracks and maybe a bridge to hide under, the fire bells ringing again all over town and marching up from Nutt Street to their right comes what looks like the Wilmington Light Infantry and a hundred of the Vigilance Committee with a rapid-fire gun mounted on a wagon.

“In volley, front line,” calls a white man on a horse, “fire!”

The front line fires and two of the runners fall, the other two just sprinting on through and they continue to march, the Light Infantry in the van, not a one out of step as Milsap follows the loose squadron of irregulars behind them.

“On your left,” calls Captain Kenan as they take fire from another house on Brunswick, “top-floor window. Fire!” Another volley and the front of the unpainted house is blistered with rounds. A pair of the infantrymen stop when they reach one of the men who was just mowed down. The top of his head is gone, and there are brains spread in the sand.

“Nigger got himself a haircut,” says one Red Shirt to the other.

Milsap feels dizzy, and then sees Mr. Clawson up by the wagon that carries the Gatling. He has heard there was a demonstration, a display for the colored that he was not invited to, and he would love to see the mechanism in action but not today. The detachment moves over to Bladen Street where the original trouble was reported and continues to move west, firing at whatever moves unless it is white and sensible enough to throw its arms up and declare loyalty.

“Keep your eyes open, Drew,” Mr. Clawson tells him cheerily, dropping back a few yards as they head for Manhattan Park. “Won’t see many a day like this one.”

Milsap nods, but when the editor strides away he lingers and then crosses to sit on the porch. There is gunfire from every direction now, screams and cursing, black powder smoke hanging in the air. A straggling Red Shirt with a shotgun steps over to him.

“Can’t stay here without us, buddy,” the man says. “They see a white man on his lonesome, they kill him for sure.”

This is probably true and his hands are shaking but he feels more weary than scared. “I live here,” says Milsap, nodding at the little shotgun shack behind him. “This is my home.”

Dorsey had this nightmare just last night. Trying to find his way back to Jessie but every path blocked, knowing she’s in the house and something might be wrong. Reverend Telfair went back to the cotton press hours ago, left before the worst of the shooting began to tell them it was not so bad. But now the alarm bells strike a constant warning, a clamor of metal in the air on every side, and all of Brooklyn is a running gun battle. Whatever street Dorsey turns down there are men who want to shoot him and what began as a search for a safe passage home has become nothing but flight, turning to walk, not run, away from the spots where they are killing.

If you run you’re just a target.

Without Jessie it would be easy, just get down to the river and make his way to the Orton. The whole colored staff will be there, safe, behind their wall of quality white folks. But without Jessie nothing matters and the least thing a man can do and hold his head up in the world is to protect his woman from harm.

“That’s him!” he hears, and his heart falls.

There are too many of them, and too many with rifles to run. They back Dorsey up against a building, dozens of them, wild-eyed and cursing, so close he can smell whiskey, and he thinks he sees Mr. Turpin at the back looking on. He holds his palms up in front of himself.

“I’m just trying to get home, people,” he says. “I don’t want no trouble.”

“That’s the one!” A different voice this time. “That’s the one shot Bill Mayo!”

“I don’t know any Mr. Mayo,” Dorsey says, trying not to sound as scared as he is. If you’re too bold or too scared they lose control—

“I saw him up on a roof! Shot right down at Bill!”

“I aint been on any roof,” Dorsey says, feeling the bricks hard at his back. He wants to put his hands down over his privates where one of the men keeps poking him with the barrel of his rifle but you have to keep them up where they can see. “I don’t own any gun.”

“Crafty nigger, huh? Think we believe that?”

“I’m Dorsey Love,” he says. “I own property. Mr. Turpin, he can tell you—”

But Mr. Turpin, if he had been there, has disappeared. A man grabs Dorsey by the collar and yanks him stumbling out into the middle of the street with the others jeering and the rifle barrel poking him hard, again and again, in the ribs now and then a hard blue shock of light and he is down with his face in the sand and he smells blood and it is his own making mud next to his cheek and they kick him, kick him over onto his back and there is a big one with a chunk of lead pipe in his hand peering down.

“Did you kill him? Is he dead?”

“I hit him in the head,” says the big one. “You know they got skulls like cast iron.” And there is laughing and hands pulling him up till his jaw is grabbed and forced open and someone, he can’t see who with the blood stinging his eyes, jams a pistol into his mouth cracking his teeth and he can taste blood now, his own, and you can’t talk peace with a gun in your mouth.

“We gonna give you a chance to do what niggers do best,” says the man pushing the pistol into him. “Either you run or you stay here and eat this.”

He always knew it couldn’t last, that they’d find out sooner or later and put a stop to it. Raggedy-ass little orphan boy, what he do to deserve all he got, own himself a business, got the most beautiful young wife. Dorsey blinks till his eyes clear. He can see the way to Jessie. The man pulls the pistol out and gives him a shove, the others screaming for it now, veins standing out in their necks, spit flying. He runs to her.

Jessie listens to the gunshots and wishes he was here. She knows he will be trying to get to her, that’s Dorsey, sweet and courtly, though he should just stay in his shop and let it blow over. She will be fine, she knows, if you don’t step outside it’s only noise, the havoc of the alarm bells and the angry popping of guns. There’s nothing you want to see happening out on those streets.

Jessie sits at the table watching the door and misses the trees. At home — at her parents’ house — there are trees lining all the streets, white ash and chestnuts and live oaks and a kind of shade and shadow they make that smoothes the sharp edge off life. Over here north of the Creek the trees have mostly been cut down and the few left are twisted and scraggly. Sand blows into the house from the street and though there’s colored and white living side by side the feeling is different than where she grew up — harsh words and meanness all the time. She wishes he was home. If he gets here she will hold him and be glad and he’ll know it, he’ll feel it even if she can’t find the words for how good he’s been to her and what he’s done for her and what she thinks of him as a man. She’s been holding herself inside and that isn’t fair to him and she feels him out there, worrying, that’s Dorsey, a worrying man, and her heart lifts at the first hollow footfall on the wood of the front step.

The door is kicked in so hard it smashes against the wall behind it and sends a hung picture crashing to the floor. There are six of them, two in the red shirts, and one has a list he reads from.

“Dorsey Love,” he says.

“He isn’t home.” Jessie stands, thinking strangely of her mother all of a sudden, the lady of the house. What she would do.

“He’s on the list.”

“You may not come in here,” she hears herself tell them. This is Dorsey’s home. He works so hard to keep it—

“Look under everthing,” says the man with the list. “He’s probly crawled under somewhere.”

The men spread out, kicking and throwing and tearing and smashing, not looking at all, and Jessie can only stand where she is and hope they won’t turn on her and that Dorsey won’t arrive till they are long gone. One of the men stands scowling at the piano, as if its presence is a grave insult.

“Look at this,” he says. “Can you believe this?”

When the inside of the house is in ruins they come back to the man with the list.

“He shows his face,” the man says to Jessie, “tell him he got to report to City Hall, give himself up.”

“But he hasn’t done anything.”

“He got his name on this list,” says the man. “That’s enough.”

As they leave the man who is angry at the piano gets two others to help him. She has barely touched it. The keys give up a moan as the men bang through the doorway.

“That’s mine,” she says and feels the first tears rolling down her face. “He gave it to me.”

Harry has somehow located the only cabman left working on the streets of Wilmington, a poor little hare-lip negro with a spotted dobbin who has seen better days.

“Oh my Lor’,” says the cabbie as they are blocked and redirected and once even chased by the marauding white men, jerking his reins this way and that till they are thoroughly lost. Harry was at the wheel shop when the shooting began, cataloguing the inventory, and was struck with the sudden knowledge that it was his duty to join his father at home. He has seen the Judge’s signature on some sort of proclamation this morning, pasted crookedly on the display window of his shop, and it has troubled him deeply.

“A sense of impending shame,” Niles used to say, but always with his mischievous grin, his touch of irony. There were names far more prominent than their father’s on the ridiculous document, but he had an impulse to mount one of his speedier models and pedal to the old man’s side. As if he could.

A cripple running a bicycle shop, he thinks. An apt metaphor for the situation in this city. This city, he promises himself, that I am leaving.

“Oh my Lor’,” says the cabbie beside him, pulling up on the reins.

Men are butchering a piano in the middle of the street. Polished wood cracks sharply under the backside of an ax head, pieces of the beautiful machine yanked free and hurled about. The men, white men, look up from their furious work but say nothing, make no threatening move.

“Don’t worry,” says Harry to the rigid cabman. “You’re with me.”

He has his cane in hand, but is not suggesting he will use it in defense. It is their contract, the one race serving the other, that protects them, that has even elicited a smile or two from the rampant Caucasians they have encountered. The man in the red shirt, the one with the ax, is smiling at them now.

“You can pass by here, Mister,” he says to Harry, then winks. “I see you got yourself a tame one.”

Harry elbows the poor hare-lip, who chucks his ancient nag forward. It is a tense, jittery passage, the cab wheels bumping over the scattered ivory keys, black and white.

It is one thing to bear witness as the disgraced ones sign themselves out, but another to compromise his office by swearing this new crowd in.

“You haven’t been elected,” says the Judge. “Not a one of you.”

Mayor Silas and the white aldermen and Melton the police chief have just been sent off with their tails between their legs, having signed the paper and said the words to relinquish their positions, and here is Waddell shoving this new slate under his nose for confirmation.

“But you agree, Judge,” says Hugh MacRae, who is listed as one of the new aldermen, “that we need somebody in charge to deal with this riot we got outside.”

“It appears to be running pretty much how you planned it,” says the Judge. They can jockey for position all they want, but nobody is going to ride on his back.

“We need this board in place,” says Waddell, who has windbagged himself into the mayor’s spot on the list. “We need our new chief of police to get active weeding the troublemakers out of town and we need at least a couple hundred special constables sworn in to restore the peace.”

“Now that you’ve burned down everything you wanted.”

The old man stiffens. “Mob violence is the most terrible occurrence. I dispersed those men myself, with words of conciliation.”

“I can hear them out there spreading fellowship.” The alarm bells have been ringing since before noon, the gunfire constant and not so far to the north of City Hall.

Allen Taylor is pacing behind him. “You going to do this for us or not?”

There was no subterfuge in the Secession. He remembers the euphoria of those first days, how free they all felt, free of compromise and secret agendas, their defiance proud and open. But this, despite the legal filigree and the old Colonel’s stirring peroration about saving the city from an African uprising, is nothing but clubhouse politics under the cover of wholesale slaughter.

“No, I will not,” he says.

“Dammit.” Taylor looks to the other men, the self-declared saviors of Wilmington, already occupying the old board’s seats. “Somebody go dig up a Justice of the Peace,” he snaps, “that got more sense than scruples.”

The men seem almost awed, standing on the carpet in the Doctor’s house. Alma shows them in and then Mrs. Lunceford comes down to tell them no, he is not home, and yes, if they must they may search the house. Alma wants to take a fire poker to the one that sits in the Doctor’s favorite chair without being invited and sticks his dirty boots up on the hassock, but Mrs. L is as gracious as if they were guests.

“My husband is a physician,” she says, using the fancy word. “I suggest you go look for him where the victims of this outrage,” and here she drills the one sprawled in the Doctor’s chair with a look that would melt lard at forty paces, “are being treated.”

Mrs. L doesn’t blink as they get up and shuffle out, a few grumbling, the others looking like boys just been whipped by the deacon. She turns to Alma.

“Would you’d help me pack a few things?” she says. “I suppose we need to be prepared for the worst.”

It feels like the alarm bells are in his head. They should shut them down — everybody knows to watch out by now and it’s only adding to the panic. Jubal ducks behind a light pole as a riderless, crazy-spotted Appaloosa comes barreling down the street, big eye swimming around in terror, lathered beyond what is healthy. Horse like that will run till those bells stop or it falls down dead.

He finds Uncle Wicklow at the stable, calming Tobey and Socks and Strider with wet blankets over their heads to dull the sound.

“They killed Dan,” Jubal says as he steps in, glad to be out of sight of the street. “And they done their best to kill me too.”

Wick is running the curry-comb down Strider’s shivering flanks with long, easy movements. “They done step past the line,” he says with a look in his eye his nephew has never seen before.

“Aint nothin we can do about it.”

Wick snorts in disagreement and comes out of the stall, carrying his hunting rifle with him. “They after you?”

Jubal shrugs. “Some that know who I am got a look at me when it come to gunfire. Right now they just huntin black hides, don’t care who it is, but I expect they been takin names.”

Wick pulls the bridle and steps in with Tobey. “Best thing for you is ride out of here tonight and don’t look back.”

“Leave Wilmington?”

“This city dead for us now. Won’t never be the same.”

Jubal is not so sure it won’t settle down, that tomorrow or the next day he can’t be back hauling coal and ice and whatever else they want, but he gets the saddle and throws it over Tobey’s back.

“I got near one hundred dollars in a tin box under them grain sacks,” Wick says, nodding to the corner. “Take all the paper money — it won’t weigh you down.”

There is shooting only a block away and Strider whinnies and shifts about, then lets loose with his pizzle and the barn starts to reek. Smells like fear, sharp and nasty.

“That horse don’t never foul his own nest like that,” says Wick, shaking his head. “Done step past the line.”

Jubal has never been farther north than Raleigh. “What I’m gonna do?”

“You a strong young man, nearly smart as your little brother. You find something.”

Jubal cinches the saddle tight. Tobey don’t hold a candle to Nubia, but won some races when he was younger, his dam covered by a thoroughbred, and can still cross some ground if you keep him at a canter. And he is jet black, hard to pick out after dark.

“You’ll tell Mama?”

“I get through this day I will.”

Wick has the Remington up in his hands again, watching the door. Jubal remembers the day the postman brung it from the Montgomery Ward catalog, wrapped tight in brown paper, and how proud his uncle was, bragging about the pop it had, how it took the smokeless powder and shot the pointed bullets. It looks puny after what he’s seen on the street today.

“They got soldiers marching in lines,” says Jubal. “They got a whole army out there killing people.”

“They want to start a war with me,” says his Uncle Wicklow, who takes his hat off when he talks to ladies, who he’s never heard mouth an angry word against any man, black or white, “I’ll shoot their damn eyes out.”

The Judge walks with his hands over his ears. The bells and the gunfire and the drunken scoundrels hollering from every trolley that careens up Market and his own heartbeat hammering in his ears — all such a racket he can barely think. At least Sally is safe in the church basement with the other ladies and children, at least for once in her life she’s obeyed his instruction, and the new girl will be cowering in the pantry, no doubt, rolling her crooked eyes with consternation and useless to fix him anything to eat. Not that he’s hungry. A queasiness, a mild nausea has settled in his gorge since he came down the steps of City Hall and had to push through the insolent crowd of rednecks loafing there waiting to be set on whatever victims this Secret Seven or Clandestine Nine who are behind the whole sorry business have chosen next. A dizziness.

The Judge turns onto Eighth to get away at least from the raucous trolleys and suddenly his left arm cramps and he feels like he’s been rammed in the chest with a lodge pole. He grabs on to the picket fence beside him, unusually high, then his legs go to water and he sits hard on the ground. The sky has gotten very bright, too bright, and the alarm bells are like his life-pulse made sound, screaming through his body, and then there is a woman, young but not so young, someone he knows he should recognize, kneeling beside him.

“You just be still, Judge,” she says, laying a hand on his arm. Kindness, he thinks. There has not been a moment of kindness in days. “My daddy’s coming out to help you.”

If there are white men wounded and dying at the main building, he doesn’t know and doesn’t care. Dr. Lunceford supposes he would be even busier if the ambulances were willing to bother with black men and if they could get through the fighting. So far there has been a steady stream of injured, most of whom have walked in on their own two feet, nervous about the neighborhood around City Hospital and still shy of medicine from the whole smallpox disaster at the beginning of the year. There was a riot then, too, a couple of the pest houses on Nixon burned to the ground and both black and white invading the Board Chamber to declare the vaccination law a violation, people pointing at him as if he were a poisoner of children. But gunshot wounds are not the province of root doctors and so they come in, half in shock, to ask will it cost them to get the bleeding stopped. They’ve only needed to use the ether once, as most of the bullets have passed through clean, but all the beds are full and there are wounded sitting on the floor in the hallway, waiting.

Dr. Mask comes in with the next one, laid out on the stretcher and looking like he’s been used for target practice. Tom resigned from the Health Board along with him, surrendering science to superstition and leaving the smallpox rampant, but his practice has not suffered.

“They left this one lying where they shot him,” he says, looking angry. “It’s been some hours and he can’t have much blood left, but there’s still a pulse.”

Dr. Lunceford has the man nearly naked on the table before he realizes it is his son-in-law.

Dorsey has been shot many, many times, his back torn apart, a few of his fingers missing, the side of his head swollen. He is breathing shallowly, not conscious, which is, as the shack people never fail to say, a blessing.

“Where do we start?” Mask says, spreading his hands to indicate the extent of the damage. “That’s bile leaking out there.”

He thinks immediately of Jessie. “Where was he found?”

“Down on Hanover,” says the orderly, Barnes, examining the blood-soaked canvas of his stretcher.

“On the street? And no one with him?”

Barnes only shrugs. “White boys from the ambulance said they keep coming back but them with the guns say leave him out here for an example. Like there aint enough examples still layin out in the dirt.” Barnes pulls out a buck knife and starts to cut the ruined canvas off. “Finally Judge Manigault’s boy, the cripple one, stop and make sure he get picked up.”

There is hollering then, Millicent who runs the nurses booming from out in the hall and then white men with rifles push her in and look around.

“You’re not allowed in here!” shouts Millicent. “This area got to be clean.”

The men try to ignore her, though she is bigger than any of them. “Which one of you is Lunceford?”

Dr. Lunceford steps away from Dorsey’s body. “I’m Dr. Lunceford,” he says.

“You got to come downtown with us.”

They are in the uniform of the Light Infantry and the barrels of their rifles are pointed at the floor. Not one of them glances at Dorsey lying raw under their noses. Dr. Lunceford suddenly finds it difficult to breathe and knows to take this slowly so the contempt will not show. It was his first and most important lesson in politics.

“If the board has determined to take action,” he says evenly, “they will have to proceed without my vote. We have patients to tend to.”

“There’s a new board been put in,” says the one who seems to be the leader, “and you aint on it. Just come with us and there won’t be any ruckus.”

Barnes has the buck knife held low in his hand and Tom Mask is seething, and he has seen Millicent lift an intoxicated watchman up and slam him against the wall, but these men have weapons and there is murder in the air. Dr. Lunceford takes hold of Dorsey’s bicep on the arm that is not shot away and gives it a squeeze. There is no way to know how much a dying man is aware of.

“If he wakes up,” he says to Dr. Mask, “just be sure he’s not in pain.” And then he lets the white men lead him away.

The Judge lies propped on the sofa, looking up at Roaring Jack Butler.

“You had yourself a heart attack,” says his old enemy, his old law partner. “Smack in front of my house.”

“I’m sorry,” says the Judge, still working to catch his breath.

“It’s catching up to us all,” says Jack. “The best and the worst.”

They are quiet for a moment, and as if to honor that the last of the alarm bells stops ringing. There is still gunfire, distant and sporadic, and the Judge has a sudden crushing feeling of shame to be lying here.

“I am sorry,” he says again, “for the inconvenience.”

“If you’d been Alfred Waddell I’d have had the girl leave you out there.”

“You know what he’s been up to, then.”

“A great deal of wind,” Jack says, “of the overheated variety, has been rushing past my ears of late.”

“He’s our new mayor.”

Jack laughs then, and if he could the Judge would join him and then both men are in tears.

“Look what we’ve come to, Cornelius,” says Jack, shaking his head. “Look what we’ve come to.”

When the newly minted Special Constables knock and the daughter, Loretta, who never married, lets them in, the Judge is beginning to get some feeling back in his fingers and toes.

“I am Judge Cornelius Manigault,” he tells them, the fist behind his lung tightening again. “You leave this man be.”

“Manigault not on our list,” says the cretin in charge of the arrest, and they haul Jack away before he can find his hat.

He didn’t think there would be so many people on the tracks. It is raining now, and cold, raining since the sun went down. Jubal keeps Tobey at a trot, leaning forward in the saddle to try to make out where the flat ground along the track bed is. You got to know what’s ahead or there can be trouble. There are folks walking up on the rails or resting along the way, some empty-handed and some carrying canvas tarps or mattresses rolled up, set to spend the night outside. They startle when they hear Tobey’s hooves coming up behind and Jubal keeps calling out, softly, “It’s all right, it’s all right.”

It is not all right, and the people, mostly women and children, are fleeing out of Wilmington in the rain and the cold and none of them sure when it will be safe to come back. Even Tobey knows something is wrong, skittish and sharp-eared, a horse that’s never been rode at night without a carriage hung with a lantern hitched behind him.

There are lanterns on the bridge up ahead, sentries. The Hilton drawbridge has been raised up all day to keep people on the poor side of the Creek, and this way, the tracks over the railroad bridge, is the only stretch they haven’t been patrolling. Jubal has his friend Denson up in Mount Olive and if he can follow the rail far enough out of town and then cut north — unless the whole state gone crazy. Used to be a black man got worried, white folks in his town mad at him or just looking at him funny or there’s no work, he pull up and come to Wilmington. This our town, people used to say, don’t nothing move unless it’s us that moves it. It’s the only place he’s ever lived.

“Who’s that?” calls a voice from up on the bridge and he feels Tobey twitch with fright under him and he kicks hard with his heels and they are galloping, rain hard in his face and shots coming after and cursing and dark shapes of people leaping out of the way and it is dark, dark, so dark that for all he knows there might be nothing up ahead—

The cemetery is filled with living souls, wandering in the rain. Jessie lights her kerosene when she comes upon the first miserable group of them, but is shouted at to kill the flame.

“Them men still about,” says a woman with a half-dozen sniffling children clinging at her. “They see a light in here they shoot at it.”

Jessie lays the lantern on top of a stubby tombstone and keeps searching, pushing her face close to whoever she meets to see if it might be him. There are dozens, maybe hundreds among the headstones, all with a different story.

“They decided to kill us all. It come down from the governor.”

“Naw, it’s the North and South War that’s started up again. There’s Federal soldiers with bayonets coming on a train to take our side.”

“It just got out of hand, is all. Fed them redboys too much liquor.”

A very old woman tells her there are even more people run all the way to the swamp back of the Smith Creek Bridge.

“Nobody can survive out there,” Jessie protests. “Not on a night like this.”

“You be surprise what folks can get through,” says the very old woman, who sits on the wet ground with her back up against a stone angel. “Even your own little self.”

Jessie is wet to the bone and cold, her hair plastered down on her head and streaming with rain and there is no shelter, no shelter, only the wet, cold stones and the frightened people haunting this ground waiting for the sun to come up or to be chased farther into the woods and it feels like this rain, this dark, will last forever, a sodden limbo of fear and not knowing.

She hadn’t started out to be here. When the shooting had settled down to a distant pop she’d taken the lantern and set out to find him. She’d headed first for his colored shop and there was a dead man spread out in the middle of Brunswick Street in the rain, but too tall, not his clothes, and another man curled in a ball at Hanover and Third and she’d had to put the lantern down by his face to be sure. The man’s lips had curled back so he looked like a dog about to snap and she hurried on, sand turning to mud in the streets and at Campbell the sentries began, white men and sometimes just boys challenging and a few just letting her pass when they saw she was a woman, while others had to step close and throw their lights over her and tell her to go home, there was nothing she could do now for her man. Dorsey’s colored shop was closed up but none of the glass broken, no fight there, and she thought of going back to Dorsey’s house, going home, but with the inside torn up and the piano smashed apart out front it didn’t seem safe anymore, didn’t seem like where she should be.

She was trying to get to the Orton Hotel, maybe they’d kept the bunch of them there from leaving, there were so many guns around town, when the boys stopped her. Boys almost men. They had rifles and mocking eyes and had draped their jackets over their heads against the rain so they looked like neckless creatures, surrounding her.

“Look at this one,” said the boldest of them. “She got a pickaninny on the way.” Then he touched her belly and she swung the lantern hard but only hit him in the side and they told her turn back, nigger bitch, before we get any ideas.

She felt numb walking back then, soaked and shivering already, and met the people carrying their crippled boy up to the cemetery.

“I seen em outside the Central Baptist,” the mother told her. “Whole mess of them in their uniforms, come up with that big swivel-gun in a wagon and set outside whilst a dozen of em go in and tear the place apart. Churches aint safe, house aint safe, we got to get out where they can’t find us.”

They cut through backyards and under fences, Jessie swept along, numb and cold, taking her turn with the boy on her back. His arms were tight around her neck and his legs no more than little sticks and he weighed nothing, nothing at all.

“They tell me they coming back to kill my Charles,” said the mother, “but I aint seen him all day.”

Jessie wanders through the gravestones, looking for life. She can’t really imagine that Dorsey will be here, he’ll be all about finding her, the last man to think only of himself. But she approaches everyone she finds, seeing in their eyes the same searching, the same hope to recognize somebody who’s been missing. There is a figure alone by a tall pillar.

“Little Dove,” he says. “Caught out in the wet.”

It is Percy of Domenica, smiling. How can his eyes shine so bright when it is so dark?

“Little Dove,” he says, “got to fly from the nest.”

The wet has bushed out his matted locks of hair, making him wider, more substantial. He places his palm on her belly.

“I see we been fruitful, Little Dove.”

Jessie steps back. Nobody should be touching her there but Dorsey.

“You know bout Armageddon, child? We seeing the End of Days now. Satan have gathered him Host, arm them to challenge the High Spirit. Today begin the Final Battle.”

“I need to find him,” says Jessie.

“Oh, Him soon come, don’t you worry. Pronounce upon the wicked and the righteous.” Percy points to her belly and she takes another step backward. “Even them what never see the light.”

“What have we done?” she asks. “What have we done to deserve this?”

Percy laughs. “He make the black man to sin,” says the King of the Creole, eyes gleaming, spreading his spindly fingers over his chest, “and the white man as our punishment.”

“It wasn’t a sin.” He is crazy, she knows, but there has been murder all day and she is standing soaked and freezing in a cemetery on a moonless night. “Nothing done in love can be a sin.”

He laughs louder now and gives his cape of hair a shake. “Only one question for you, Little Dove — are you prepare to accept His judgment?”

“No,” says Jessie, backing into a row of tombstones. “I have to find my husband.”

Rain blows in over the Cape Fear River, rain dousing the small fires that have been left unattended, rain puddling around the bodies left uncollected, cold, steady rain that drives the last of the vigilantes, hoping for one last triumph for their cause, finally to shelter. Rain falls steady and cold on the people huddled in the cemetery and in the dark swamp, rain collects and rolls in sheets from the sides of the bridge others have sheltered beneath, sudden creeks of rainwater appearing on the downtown streets, rushing downhill for the swollen river, the storm drains backed up with debris, the city unable to swallow any more.

It is still raining early in the morning when they pull them out of the jail. Dr. Lunceford is tied with rope to the others, to Ike Lofton and Toomer the patrolman and William Moore who represented the anti-vaccination crowd in court, to Arie Bryant the butcher and Bell and Pickens the fishmongers and Tom Miller at the rear complaining that his watch has been stolen. There is little slack so when the major raises his hand for them to halt each man bumps into the back of the one in front. At least their hands and legs are free, the deputies all on their first day of service and ignorant of how to attach the shackles.

White people, men and women, line the street jeering at them as they are herded to the station, nigger this and nigger that, some walking parallel with the soldiers to unload their contempt, a group of boys trying to time their spit to fly in between the gaps in the escort. It is very early in the morning for such outrage, and he assumes these are people unable for whatever reason to participate in yesterday’s action and feeling left out.

And then he sees them, standing on the other side of Third, his wife holding the broad umbrella and his daughter, looking exhausted, huddled beneath it. They are safe. Now he can bear anything. He catches Yolanda’s eye and she covers her mouth for a moment, then waves, regally, the way she does when she sees him off on any other train journey.

“When you think they’ll let us get off?” asks Salem Bell.

“Told me there’s a lynch mob waiting at every train stop from here to Washington,” says Frank Toomer. “I aint getting off till I seen the last of Dixie.”

“Close your yaps,” the major calls back to them. “Else I’ll put a muzzle on you.”

Dr. Lunceford wishes he could have been present to see their faces when they came looking for him and found his wife instead, in her parlor, when they got a dose of Yolanda Lafrontiere. They’ll steal the house, of course, they own the law now and there will be taxes due or ordinances passed and within months some white man rewarded for his participation in the coup will be sitting in his favorite chair. A house is wood and brick. His Yolanda has come through it safely and will be with him for whatever comes next. She will save what she can, will help Jessie bury her husband, and then, as is their long agreement, the plan almost a joke between them, she will reunite with him whenever she is able in the city of Philadelphia, on the steps of Independence Hall.

Jessie wants to follow him to the depot but her mother says no, he knows we’re safe now and there is so much to do. She means putting Dorsey into the ground. Jessie spent the night in the cemetery and then walked home, to her old home, to find the windows shot out and Alma weeping and her mother saying He’s gone, you poor child, he’s gone. She thought it was her father and then could tell from the tone it was Dorsey.

“Your father has been banished from Wilmington,” her mother told her, holding her shoulders and looking straight into her eyes, “and your husband has been murdered.”

Jessie is still shivering even after the bath and changing her clothes and her throat is raw, frantic and without sleep all night in the rain in the cemetery. There is a woman walking straight at them from the jailhouse, somebody she should know.

“Jessie,” says Miss Loretta. “Mrs. Lunceford.”

Jessie looks at her like she doesn’t recognize her. She hasn’t seen the girl in months and here she is on this terrible morning with her little belly sticking out.

“They have my father in there,” Miss Loretta says, indicating the jail. She wishes she could hold Jessie for a moment, for her own comfort if not for the girl’s, but even if it was allowed she is not sure it would be welcome. “He’s being sent away. I shall follow, I suppose.”

Mrs. Lunceford nods.

“He’ll be on a later train than your husband,” she says to Jessie’s mother, then smiles bitterly. “So there won’t be any race-mixing.”

Dr. Peabody says it is only a twinge, brought on by the Judge’s extreme choler and the unnecessary exertion. The old man lies in his bed upstairs, frowning out at the drizzle, Harry standing awkwardly to the side, hat in hand. He has not slept, and there is blood on his shoes, acquired while he was attempting to help the ambulance men with their gruesome duty.

“I have made my decision, Father,” he says. “Or, rather, it has been made for me. I will be leaving.”

The words do not seem to register.

“Today.”

The Judge turns his head to look at him then, eyes not unfriendly, nods. “Don’t let them make a yankee of you,” he says.

Alma is trying to get all the glass up from the carpet when Wicklow looks in.

Once the sun went down the shooting began, first the windows on the ground floor, then the second, and finally even some around the back. If it had been all at once it would not have been so bad, but they just come every half hour or so all night, shooting another pane out and yelling their filth and strolling away to brag about it. She sat on the upstairs bed in their big bedroom while Mrs. L wrapped the silver and sewed her jewelry into the lining of a jacket and fussed about what clothes she should bring for him if they had to leave.

“You folks made it all right?” asks Wicklow when he peeps through the open window.

“They kilt Dorsey Love,” she says, trying not to cry again. “Who my little Jessie married.”

Wick shakes his head. “Sorry to hear it. That was always a nice polite boy, Dorsey. They killed a good score more than him. Talk is about bodies in the river, people thrown in ditches and covered over—”

“Don’t make any sense.”

“Got what they wanted, I spose. Had to send my nephew off. Jubal. There’s hundreds pulled out last night, hundreds more gone follow as soon as they can. They made it plain enough that this aint a town for us no more.”

Alma leans on her broom for a moment and sighs. She has never felt this tired.

“Don’t make any sense at all,” she says. “Who gonna do all the work?”

Milsap knows he is already late for work but he doesn’t care. He has been drawn back to the blackened, dripping ruins of the Love and Charity Hall, no screaming mob now, no Kodak bugs snapping photographs. He steps into what’s left of the ground floor, rain collecting in the burned-away remnants above and funneled into little waterspouts that drizzle down onto the debris. There is a large hole in the ceiling where the bulk of the press fell through, machinery lying tilted on its side draped with a layer of charred newspaper. Milsap picks his way across the floor, poking with his toe till he finds a melted hunk of lead. It is still warm in the palm of his hand. He turns it over a few times, deciding that there is no telling what letter it was, then sticks it in his pocket with the brass N he found yesterday. He comes out from the ruined building, then absently switches it to the other pocket. Force of habit — you always want to keep your brass and your lead separate.