Leon Uris (42 page)

“Anyone know that Amanda is back in Nebo?” Jefferson asked.

“Nobody but family,” Ned answered, “but everyone sure going to know by tomorrow unless we put some shoe polish on her face.”

They prattled back and forth. Amanda accepted the warmth of her welcome, able to speak after a time.

“My father knows I’m in Nebo. On the way here, the trip was so dizzying I didn’t have much time to think. I realize now that coming here could put you all in danger. I’ll stay for a day. Put me in a safe place tomorrow so I can think it through and find somewhere—”

“Daisy said your father wouldn’t send anyone to Nebo after you,” Willow said.

“Laveda told me you was going to be safe here,” Jefferson added.

“Lord, Lord, Miss Amanda a runaway!” Pearly said.

“Mr. Horace has really been put in his place,” Willow said.

“Please, please,” Amanda said, “my heart is so full, I can barely speak.”

“Amen,” Pearly said.

“But you don’t know Horace Kerr like I know Horace Kerr. He’s capable of anything,” Amanda continued.

“Well,
I
know Horace Kerr,” Ned said. “He been in Nebo—what, three times. Fourth time I saw him at the Wyman Landing, coming to fetch you. You know, Amanda, we got to learn to read a white man’s intentions real quick. Your daddy’s a bully, but he rarely been called on it. Well, he’s been called on it now and he ain’t going to bully us.”

“I wouldn’t put it past him to try to burn you out after I leave,” Amanda warned.

“Remember old Sheriff Charlie Bugg?”

“ ‘The Big Mosquito’?”

“Me and Willow went around to see him yesterday,” Ned said. “Nothing sets foot in this county without him knowing, and if they try to come for you, got to remember half the old people in Nebo was runaways at one time or another. We know the places and the routes to the places and our hound dogs can smell a nasty white posse ten miles away.”

Pearly went to the organ and pumped it as Ulysses and his wife, Sugar, entered. Ulysses was as massive as Sugar was tiny. He went clear shy at the sight of Amanda, lowered his eyes, and held out his hand. Amanda gave him a mighty hug while Sister Sugar’s eyes widened at the sight of the snow princess.

Willow and Amanda lay on their backs on the four-poster bed in Veda’s cottage staring at the timber rafters. It was no cropper’s cottage but a jewel of taste and manner.

Amanda spoke of the clash with Horace and worried about what might follow.

“Ned’s pretty certain about Sheriff Bugg,” Amanda said.

“He should be. Nebo has made him rich. He owns the cannery in St. Lawrence, so the men here fish up nice blue crabs and the women pick them and pack them. He pays a good price but takes a very good commission on everything. Everyone knows that Charlie’s niggers are under his protection.”

“Don’t say it that way.”

“ ‘Scuse me, his colored folk are very Christian and peaceful. Nothing and no one moves into this county without Charlie Bugg knowing it.”

“You hate him?”

“He’s the best we can do. He doesn’t go back on his word and that’s fine with Ned and the elders. Ulysses is very shy, always been, but he’s a strong boy and he’ll be on the council someday.”

“He and Sister Sugar make some pair.”

“He doesn’t hear a word she says. You heard her sing. Almost makes up for her talking.”

“No kids yet?”

“I don’t think they can.”

Willow was being grim. Amanda tickled her hard.

“That’s a little something you got around your waist. Anything in the oven.”

“No, just a spread from sitting and reading contracts. I think little Matthew will be enough for us.”

“He’s gorgeous.”

“All little chocolate drops and pickaninnies are gorgeous . . . until they take their first walk alone.”

“You and Jefferson all right?”

“It’s hard not to love Jeff Templeton,” Willow said. “And Mama sent me off with the right words.”

“Which were?”

“Don’t marry up with a man with the idea you’re going to change him. This is not a generation for black men. Jeff is great at what he does and can hardly keep up with his orders. A lot of white people would like to go into partners with him and his brothers. Jeff just wants to stay small and safe. I’m being a real bore.”

“Yes, you are.”

“I just get weary of the everlasting moral malnutrition,” Willow said.

They were quiet. Often the quiet spells were as good as the talky ones.

“What happens after your month here with Zachary?” Willow asked at last. “You’re flirting with losing your head.”

“The only thing I’m going to lose, I want to lose so badly I can hardly stand it.”

“The two of you never made love?”

“Silly, isn’t it?”

“That’s crazy. When you leave Nebo, what then?”

“We don’t know.”

“Shit!”

“I just feel the same about Zach as you do about Jeff. I’m not going to change Zachary O’Hara. The Corps has been good to him and he’s dying to pay his dues. He’ll be going to a new post. He wants sea duty. It’s a Marine badge of honor. I can’t follow him on sea duty and he’ll probably be gone at least a year, fifteen months.”

“Jesus, baby,” Willow said. “You going to marry?”

“Can’t without permission and that’s Father’s last line of defense. Zach will be long gone by my twenty-first birthday. I’ll never go back to Inverness. I’ll wait for him, someplace, maybe start a small academy.”

This time Amanda received the tickles and tickled back, and they tickled and tickled until they were breathless and flopped.

“I felt so much love tonight,” Amanda whispered.

“Ned says it’s got to do with your hugs. You hug from head to foot.”

“You’re a silly billy, Willow.”

“While we were waiting for you to get here, Ned told me about the first time you came to Nebo. We were nine or ten. Ned was sitting on a stump sweating. The drought was wilting his stunted corn and sorrows had all started to pile up. Losing his kids to the world and the earth was cruel and he was all but broken. He said you came up to him and wiggled up on his lap, put your arms around his neck, and laid your head on his shoulder and told him, with nary a word, that you understood how sad he was. And you knew why he was so sad and it made you sad as well.”

“If Ned only knew how cold, how cunning, how manipulative I
can be. I have inherited my father’s habits and a great deal of his bad intentions,” Amanda said, “but the moment Zach touched me at the casino I was unable to resist him any longer and the rest of it didn’t matter. All I want is to love him.”

Willow wanted to say that she wished she was able to love like that and she wanted to say she was glad Amanda had become a compassionate woman. She had once thought Amanda would never find someone she loved more than Amanda.

. . . but Amanda was so tired. She peeped out a tiny snore, curled into Willow’s arms, and slept.

•
39
•

It had been an excellent year for the Kerr Shipyard, yet Horace was not content. The first trials and shakedown cruise of the
Vermont
were highly successful. It was perhaps the finest warship ever built in America. It was a powerful announcement to the world of America’s new might: a ten-thousand-ton warship. As the year came to a close, every dry dock was laying new hulls and every inch of Dutchman’s Hook buzzed with activity.

The nation was tied together by rail and great riches were steaming in from the West and down the Mississippi. America clung to a national dream of a canal through the isthmus and a two-ocean navy.

Then came disturbing news. The navy had made the decision to build a battleship on the West Coast. One could call that progress, Horace supposed, but it was ridiculous as well. How the hell are those people out there going to cast fourteen-inch guns? Or the
new steam turbines? Or all the electrical equipment? A California-built battleship would take some of the luster from the great yards at Newport News and Brooklyn, to say nothing of Dutchman’s Hook.

Horace’s dream of bottling up the Chesapeake was put on hold. Did he even want the monopoly now? Those sons of bitches in Washington were talking about antitrust legislation, the first step to choking off the great industrialists!

What was the use of taking over the Constable yard anymore? Could there even be a merger without the marriage of Amanda and Glen Constable? Hell! It all had to do with Amanda’s flight. That awful night she left Tobermory.

With all his plans of all the years, an alignment had finally been set for continuity and industrial power that would put him among the mighty.

Now he didn’t know if he even wanted the fucking Chesapeake.

. . . enough of that.

The Christmas ritual was upon him. Horace Kerr would again play his role of noble benefactor. No Scrooge, he. On with the show!

Dutchman’s Hook was trimmed up in ribbons, and Horace, acting like an eager candidate for office, made a round of the yard, pumping hands with the sauerbraten, spaghetti, and pork-and-beans workmen. Envelopes, a bonus of two to four days’ extra pay according to rank, were passed out, and kegs of beer uncorked, and everyone doffed their hats.

The foremen and shop bosses, all called by first name, pocketed five days’ pay as bonuses. They got rum. The main gates were locked against a demonstration by temperance screechers.

Who says you can’t toast the Lord on his birthday!

In the meeting hall in the executive building, the architects, engineers, office staff, and titled managers received baskets that included cheese from Luxembourg, English tea biscuits, jellies and jams from Maine, and Scotch whiskey.

And for their children, a Santa Claus with sacks of little wooden livery vans, popguns, rag dolls made by a black community’s old folks—an annual goodwill purchase—and bags of candies. Peppermint stripes drooled sticky off happy little chins.

Due to the influx of female office workers—most of whom were unmarried—brought in to use the new writing machines and such, the Pinkertons kept a wary eye on the backside pinchers and those making too many trips down the hall or too many trips to the punch bowl.

It was a wonderful party.

Horace was still gimpy from his sail to Immigrant Reef and leaned on a cane, with Daisy attending him closely.

When they reached their carriage and tucked in, they scarcely spoke all the way into Baltimore.

During the past few years, there had been an explosion in the uses of electricity. Inverness was the first of the Baltimore mansions to illuminate its grounds. Each season now, Kerr engineers enhanced the spectacle, lighting up the place with its own generators and drawing common folk from all over the city. They came by trolley and walked six blocks up Butcher’s Hill.

Nice Christmas touch, the folks from downhill able to share the lights with those living uphill. Crowd control was in place; white people came through the main gate and walked the circular driveway into the blaze of lights. Blacks came through a side entrance.

A rotating bandstand erected by the great pine tree had orchestras from the Peabody Conservatory, the symphony, the Salvation Army, and the U.S. Army, Fort Meade, backing choruses from Protestant churches.

. . . and around to the enormous west lawn and living crèche with camels from the Baltimore zoo, live Josephs, Marys, and Wise Men. Baby Jesus was a doll.

The cast changed hourly.

Those on the “list” gained entry to Inverness itself, to the foyer where Horace had planned earlier to hang the finished portrait of Amanda.

On this first night, the heads of charities, orphanages, churches, and hospitals all gratefully accepted envelopes from the Kerr Foundation.

Tomorrow would come upper-midlevel city and state officials. Republican ward bosses, prominent citizens, and upper-midlevel businessmen.

And the night after, the elite!

Horace did not throw the switch this year, passing the honor to one of his vice-presidents. He was alone, in the dark, in the master’s quarters, hit once again by that dull tingly pain. He stretched out on the chaise, unpeeled a cigar, and felt about the nightstand for the lamp and matches.