Charleston

  Before she could commiserate, he rushed on. “I have news. I was at the Mansion House for two hours, entertaining a new client.” The Mansion House was a venerable old hotel on Broad Street, lately reopened. Ham dropped two law books on the office table and pulled off his boots. At fifty-one, though gaunt and gray, he seemed in better spirits than at any time since Alex’s return.

  “Mr. Maxwell’s from Boston. A speculator in commodities. He came down by steamer to buy cotton and rice futures.”

  “A Yankee doing business here? That’s a hopeful sign.”

  “Ah, but there’s more. Maxwell knows three other investors who will be here within a month. They’ve already reserved at the hotel. South Carolina may be on her knees, but she still has valuable goods in her barn. I think we should fix up Bell’s Bridge. Get ready to reopen for business.”

  “That’s a fine idea. What if I go there tomorrow and inventory what needs to be done?”

  He seized her waist and danced her around. “Hurrah. Maybe we can wash the red ink off the books of Buckles and Bell at last.”

  Alex was wide awake before dawn. With a shawl over her shoulders, moving as briskly as she could with her aching leg, she arrived at Bell’s Bridge just as the sun rose out of the sea and painted the inner harbor. Her presence at the end of the pier attracted gulls. She held up her empty hands as she had long ago. They squabbled and swooped over her, then flew off. She laughed and inhaled the old, intoxicating perfume of the harbor, a mingling of mud and salt and summer air not yet heavy with dampness.

  Using a pencil and a precious block of paper from the law office, she started a list of the most urgent repairs. Half the roof of the first storage shed had collapsed. She opened the padlock using Ham’s big ring of keys. Inside she found the roof debris and an infestation of rats that ran over her shoes as they fled.

  At the second shed her mouth rounded in silent surprise. The padlock chain hung in two pieces, filed through. She had an uneasy feeling that she might not be alone on the pier.

  She rolled the door back on its noisy wooden wheels. Someone grumbled, “What the devil?” She couldn’t see the interloper in the dark. She stamped her foot.

  “Who is that? You’re trespassing. Come out this instant.”

  “Woke me up, woman.”

  “What do I care? Show your face.”

  Slow steps brought him to the light. He was a man of middle years, lean and strong-looking. Half a dozen Carolina wrens could have nested in his gray beard and shoulder-length hair. He’d slept in his clothes, overalls and a ready-made shirt, faded gray. A blanket full of moth holes draped his shoulders.

  “This is private property,” she began.

  “You forgot to post a sign saying so.”

  “Don’t quibble with me, sir. You got in here illegally. Collect your things and go. If I catch you on the premises again, I’ll have the city police arrest you.”

  The man blinked against the light; his large brown eyes had a curious familiarity. Recognition came to him suddenly. “You’re Miss Bell. You took me boating once, from this very pier. We sailed out to watch them building Fort Sumter.”

  Stunned, she said, “Why, that’s right. Your father brought you along when he called on my father.” She couldn’t recall his name, though.

  “Your father the attorney,” he said. She caught a whiff of something sour on his clothes. He offered his hand; at least that was clean. “Richard Riddle.”

  His handclasp was warm, strong. “I do remember.” She remembered much more: his terrible complexion; the lovelorn looks he threw at her that afternoon, and how haughtily she had dismissed him.

  “I plead guilty to the charge of breaking in. I didn’t have a penny left, or anywhere to lay my head. I was walking down East Bay when I saw this place and remembered it. It looked deserted, so I got hold of a file, never mind how.”

  “You don’t live in Columbia any longer?”

  “No. While I was coming home from prison in Ohio, my house and my business were destroyed by Sherman’s vandals.”

  “You were in the army, then.”

  “Congaree Mounted Rifles. At Second Manassas I was captured by those Northern bast—our Northern foe,” he corrected with a slight coloration in his cheeks.

  “Well, I suppose I can let you stay until we start repairing the wharf. Are you employed?”

  “I drive a garbage wagon back and forth to the marshes. Pays thirty cents a day. That’s how I eat.”

  “You’re one of the city street cleaners?”

  He nodded. “Won’t last forever, but I’m lucky to have any kind of job. So many don’t. They offered me a helper, a colored fellow, but I said no. I didn’t fight for those people, and I don’t propose to work with them.”

  For a moment or so they had conversed amiably; now he was hostile again. “Mr. Riddle—”

  “Captain Riddle, if you don’t mind.”

  “The war is over, sir.”

  “Not for me. I lost everything. I lost the dearest woman in the world to smallpox.”

  “Your wife? I’m terribly sorry. And I’m sorry things are so difficult for you, but—”

  “Difficult for the whole state. They say we lost over twelve thousand men. Sherman burned and pillaged like a madman. I should have expected that, I spent a couple of years with his verminous colleagues. I’ll never forgive the Yankees for what they did to us.”

  “I would remind you that South Carolina started the war.”

  “Whose side are you on? I thought you were Charleston born.”

  “I am, but I’m trying hard to be an American again, as we all should.”

  “Oh, spare me your pious cant, Miss Bell. I’m a damned rebel and I’ve earned the right to stay that way. I’ll clear out. Send you a new chain when I can afford it. Good day.” He rolled the door shut in her face. It banged the frame; termite dust drifted down.

  Alex was furious. Riddle was the kind of stiff-backed Carolinian whose militancy had brought on the war, and the very conditions he railed about now. She stuffed paper and pencil in her pocket and marched up the pier. She’d finish the inventory another time.

  When she came back next morning, true to his word he was gone. The shed had been swept out, as if no one had trespassed.

  Remembering William Drew’s passionate advocacy of forgiveness, she wanted to feel sorry for Riddle. It was difficult; she disliked him intensely. Yet that night he visited her in her dreams, his odd speckled eyes glowing as he touched her hand and whispered words she couldn’t understand. She awoke with her nightdress twisted between her legs, damp with perspiration.

  She dismissed the dream as a late symptom of the midlife change that had tormented her with dizzy spells, night sweats, and erosion of her patience and good temper. Riddle was a recalcitrant lout.

  She lit a candle and sat down to brush her hair in front of Cassandra’s oval mirror. She plied the brush hard, painfully tearing out tangles, angered by her confusion and by what she saw in the glass: long tresses more white than blond; a childless woman of fifty with a roof over her head but little else.

  Alex hated self-pity, but at 3:00 A.M., it came easily. She threw the hairbrush on the floor and rested her head on her arms while the candle burned down.

  67

  Ouida’s Tea

  Cal stumbled down the stairs at half past ten. Ouida’s boy had been home four weeks. The first few days were a delirious ecstacy of reunion; Ouida wept frequently. At first she neither understood the meaning of Cal’s whipped look nor clearly heard his bitterness. Then, as she awoke to the changes in him, a battle began. Sometimes it was a skirmish of glares and pouty silences, sometimes a frontal assault of angry words. This morning he seemed benign, if bleary eyed.

  “Good morning, Mama.”

  “In the name of heaven, cover yourself.” Cal wore only a pair of drawers. His hair was uncombed, his hairless chest bright with sweat. They were into the hot season, without a single house slave to cool the white masters with fans. r />
  “You’ve seen me with less on than this,” he said. “’Least I hope you swaddled me once or twice when I was a babe. Give us a hug.”

  “Stay away from me. You smell like a groggery. Where do you get liquor?”

  “There’s plenty to be had if you know where to look.”

  “How do you pay for it?”

  “Cards and dice, Mama. Sometimes faro. I learned skills in the army. Anything for breakfast?”

  “Do you think I’m a nigger cook you can order about?”

  “No, but far as I can see, there isn’t another cook at Prosperity Hall, nor a washerwoman, nor anybody else to do for us.”

  “Dear Lord, what ever brought this on? What happened to you?”

  A muscle in his throat quivered. “I’ll answer you the way I answer anybody who asks, Mama. The war happened. You and your Goddamn friends happened, the ones so eager to send boys off to fight, though they’d never go themselves, oh, no. Old men issue orders, young men die. It’s a tradition, isn’t it?”

  “The Yankees did this,” Ouida moaned, kerchief at her eyes. “I’d kill every Yankee on earth if I had the power.”

  By then he’d left the hall for the kitchen. She heard him knocking about, dropping a pan, breaking a piece of crockery, spewing his filthy oaths. That he should have come home a wastrel, a burnt-out wreck, broke her heart. What they had done to him demanded punishment.

  In the soggy July heat Gibbes walked the fallow fields at Malvern. Once indigo had flourished here, and cotton. The weedy desolation mocked him; reminded him of his straits. All the money earned through Palmetto Traders had been spent. His Confederate bonds were worthless. So, it seemed, was his land.

  He and Snoo had moved out to Malvern because he loathed the sight of all the strutting soldiers and, as Snoo put it, “The streets are so niggery anymore.” Gibbes had to drive the coupe rockaway himself, with Snoo and their luggage inside. The coach’s glossy carmine paint had faded and grown dull. Bits of the gilded Bs on the side panels had flaked away.

  Leaving the city, they’d passed the site of the old Fair-grounds Prison, now a burying ground for the blue-bellies. In May, Union fanatics had celebrated some sort of memorial day at the cemetery. Gibbes had leaned over and spat at the graves as they rolled by.

  Gibbes’s fine cambric shirt stuck to his back and belly. Gnats deviled his neck. Little triangular burrs attached themselves to his pant legs as he walked. Leaving the field, he sat down beside a magnolia, weighted with unhappiness. His finger traced in the dirt, the same two letters, OW, over and over.

  In the war’s aftermath resistance had hardened within Gibbes. He refused to take Andrew Johnson’s oath, even though he fit none of the excluded classifications. He hadn’t been a high-ranking officer of the Confederate army or navy. He no longer possessed $20,000 in liquid assets. Even so, he was damned if he’d swear loyalty to the Constitution and obedience to the laws of the nation. On Independence Day he had refused to show the Stars and Stripes at Malvern.

  The North poured out a poison stream of propaganda about equality for the freed slaves. It was sponsored and promoted by a powerful clique of extreme Republicans bitterly opposed to Johnson’s generally moderate reconstruction plan cast in the forgiving mold of Lincoln’s program. He’d be a dead man before he’d go along. Top to bottom South Carolina’s situation was intolerable. But what to do about it? Damned if he knew.

  He traced OW again, then scowled and scuffed it away with his boot. He walked into the silent house. He presumed Snoo was napping. They lived without servants, forced to do all the chores themselves.

  On the river porch he picked up a Mercury, now filled with Yankee flummery and precious little news. He rocked in a rocker, swore at the midges and mosquitoes, flipped the pages for items of interest. He found just one. The recently appointed provisional governor, Benjamin Perry, had called a special election of delegates to a convention in September to write a new state constitution.

  Election?

  The idea was so simple and obvious. If true sons of Carolina were to keep the state out of the hands of the white radicals and the black-hearted niggers, those patriots must launch a new war, a secret war whose soldiers appeared outwardly docile and cooperative.

  He dragged himself upstairs, his hands on the bannister pulling, his artificial leg thumping the risers. “Snoo?” He burst into her bedroom, where she sprawled behind gauze curtains hung from the four-poster’s canopy. She’d put on a thin summer gown for her nap, not expecting interruption. He could see her sex and the round, rosy breasts that had first attracted him.

  “Snoo, wake up, I want to tell you something.” He batted the curtain aside, flung himself down beside her. She murmured and frowned in her sleep. “I’m going to run for office. Help write a new state constitution. You hear me, Snoo?”

  Gradually her eyes focused. “No. Tell me again.”

  He did, a step at a time. First, the special convention; he’d campaign to be a delegate from Charleston. He knew he’d win; influential friends would support him. The next step was more important. A new legislature would be elected to write new laws, find clever ways to evade or vitiate the dictates of the madmen in Washington.

  “My Lord, aren’t you the ambitious one?” Snoo said. “But, sweet, can you do any of that without taking their old oath?”

  “Doubt it. I’ll have to go before a judge and sign the damn thing, even if it makes me sick to my stomach.”

  “You really want to go into politics?”

  “It’s the only way. White men have got to reclaim this state.”

  Drowsily, she tickled his chin. He noticed that her nipples had enlarged. “Well,” she said with the coy smile she affected at such moments, “I ’spose I could be happy as the wife of an important politician and war hero. But before you go into politics, why don’t you go here?” She pulled the hem of her gown above her waist.

  Feeling good again, Gibbes got busy hauling off his britches. When he kissed Snoo he thought of Alex.

  Next morning he bade Snoo good-bye, mounted the one decent saddle horse left to him, a strong bay named Trajan, and took the road to Prosperity Hall to announce his decision to his sister.

  Though never musical or inclined to sing much, Gibbes was in high spirits. He bellowed “I Am a Good Old Rebel” as he galloped:

  “I can’t take up my musket,

  And fight ’em anymore,

  But I ain’t agoing to love ’em,

  That is sarten sure,

  And I don’t want no pardon

  For what I was and am,

  I won’t be reconstructed,

  And I don’t care a damn.”

  When he cantered up the drive beneath the tall pines, he saw an unfamiliar horse tied to the ring block. He recognized the regulation black leather saddle and bridle, the indigo-blue saddle blanket with its orange border. What the hell was a Union soldier doing at Prosperity Hall?

  He opened the front door, called out, “Hello the house?”

  “Gibbes? Brother, is that you?” Ouida trilled it like a bird. “We’re in the parlor. Come meet my guest.”

  Straw hat in hand, Gibbes brushed at his hair to neaten it, then walked into the room, whose soggy heat almost made him gasp. A Union officer, ruddy, thick waisted, and no more than five feet tall, rose politely. His shoulder straps had gold-embroidered leaves at the ends.

  Ouida’s face was a mask of white powder scribed by trickles of sweat. “Major Fryberg, this is my brother, Mr. Gibbes Bell. Gibbes, this is Major Klaus Fryberg, did I pronounce that right, Major?”

  “Indeed, ma’am. Pleased to know you, sir,” Fryberg said in a queerly nasal voice. He offered his hand while Ouida rattled on.

  “Major Fryberg’s surveying the roads and bridges hereabouts. He stopped in to ask permission to water his horse and I invited him to tea. Some of my special lemon herb tea that Miss Bess liked so much.” Gibbes froze. Miss Bess was a fat calico Ouida had owned briefly last year. The cat had unwisely
lapped rainwater from a pot where pale pink oleander grew. Dark leathery leaves had dropped from the plant and floated in the water. An hour after Miss Bess imbibed, she started to choke and convulse. At the end of another hour her heart stopped. The veterinarian explained.

  “Nerium oleander is an evergreen of the dogbane family. The flowers are pretty, but the plant itself is deadly. The sap’s toxic to pets and humans in varying degree. One crushed leaf can kill a large sheep. They grind the leaves to make powder to kill rats.” He proceeded to describe the horrific symptoms of oleander poisoning.

  Major Fryberg cleaned his sweated brow with a big blue handkerchief. “You’re mighty hospitable, Mrs. Hayward. We don’t get such a friendly reception elsewhere in the district.”

  “Well, the war’s over, and we must all be countrymen again, mustn’t we? If you gentlemen will sit yourselves down and get acquainted, I’ll have the tea in a jiffy.”

  Gibbes threw his hat on a love seat. “Let me help you, sister.”

  He grasped her elbow and fairly pushed her through the narrow door to the pantry hall. He swung her against the wall, gripping her arms. “Have you gone crazy?”

  “I’m as sane as you are,” Ouida whispered. “I’m going to serve him some of my special tea.”

  “With some oleander leaves crumbled into it? In half an hour he’ll be puking and shitting all over your floor. It may take him hours to die. Then what are you going to do with him?”

  “Lock him in the cookhouse till he’s gone. There’s no one to hear him cry out. Cal’s in town for the night, liquoring himself to death.”

  Steam was spouting from a kettle on the stove. A silver tray on the chopping block held fine old cups and saucers inherited from Lydia, a small strainer basket of silver mesh containing tea leaves, and a saucer of slices from a wrinkled lemon. The veterinarian said oleander tasted like the very bitterest of lemons.

  Gibbes nodded at the strainer basket. “Empty that.”