A Moment in the Sun (48 page)

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.