The Warriors (41 page)

“It’s the last of the morning coffee, Mr. Boyle. Very strong, I’m afraid.”

“Couldn’t be stronger than the poison they pour in the dining car,” he laughed, dumping the chips.

Hannah used a thong to tie the pot’s wire bail to a tripod improvised from three rusty iron rods. She dug matches from her pocket. Michael extended his hand.

She passed him two matches. Their hands touched. She inhaled softly at the unexpected contact.

He pulled his fingers back quickly.
Damned if I’m not as nervous as she!

The chips caught almost instantly. Soon scraps of flame were tossing in the night breeze. He sat down cross-legged near her stool. Out of sight beyond Dorn’s wagon, the workers had begun to sing again, this time “The Vacant Chair,” a slow, mournful war ballad about a family’s loss of a son. He turned his head to listen as a soprano voice soared above the rest. That would be Tom Ruffin, the lad from Indiana. One by one the older men stopped singing. Only the boy’s voice was left—pure and almost painfully sweet under the Nebraska stars.

“You were in it, then?”

Startled, he swung around. “What brought that to mind?”

“The look on your face when you heard the song from the war.”

He tried to shrug as if the music raised no memories.

“Yes, I was in it. The New York 69th of the Irish Brigade. I was in it up until the Wilderness, where I took a wound.” A bitter smile. “It was a struggle all the way. The fighting was enough to scare twenty years off your life every time you went in. And practically from the beginning, we never had enough men. After Gettysburg—we were only in sharp action on the second day—we had just about three hundred muskets left. We carried five regimental flags, every one supposed to represent something like a thousand soldiers. We tried to fight ten times as hard, as if we were a true brigade; but it was futile because so many had been lost along the way.”

Studying him, she asked, “Were you proud of fighting?”

“Proud of killing other Americans?”

Michael’s hand strayed to his mustache. An index finger smoothed the gold and gray hair as his eyes fixed on the fire.

“No. I came to hate it.”

She was pleased. “As all men should who keep the commandments God gave Moses.”

He grimaced. “I’m afraid my hatred of the war only appeared
after
I broke that commandment a number of times.”

“How many?”

“Four that I saw for certain. Possibly more. I preferred never to be too sure.”

His head lifted.

“On the other hand, Miss Dorn, I’d like to believe that when we
were
required to kill, we did it for a just cause.”

“The Southern side thought the same.”

“Admittedly.”

“There should have been another way to settle the differences.”

He sighed. “A great many men more clever than I tried to find one. For thirty years they tried. The differences were too strong. Too fundamental—ah, well. It’s over.”

But the memories weren’t. Helpless, he was pulled back to a July afternoon of billowing smoke and blaring bugles. He heard again the incredible, earth-shaking bombardment Tom Seminary Ridge that had preceded the slaughter of Pickett’s infantrymen as they advanced gallantly toward the clump of trees, only to be shot down, blown down, stabbed down—the highest cresting of the Southern tide, men called it. Michael’s brigade had watched it from afar. His inner eye saw the gray-clad bodies tumbling, singly and in great masses, as other Irishmen—the Pennsylvania 69th of the Philadelphia Brigade—blunted the assault at Pickett’s center.

He wrenched himself from the reverie.

“I do confess I took pride in our unit. The Union commanders put special faith in the Irish Brigade. Before an action, they’d ask, ‘Are the green flags ready?’ The flags were decorated with bright golden harps and sunbursts. A man could usually see the gold even in the thickest smoke. But by the end, there were too few marching behind the flags.”

“Too few on both sides,” Hannah agreed. “I’ve read that altogether four hundred thousand were lost.”

“I’ve heard more than half a million, and perhaps the same number injured. No one will ever know for certain. Both sides kept shamelessly poor records. An officer I met in the hospital told me some Confederate units were still listed on the rolls when only six or eight from the original complement were left.”

She sensed his distaste for the subject and shifted to a slightly different one. “You said you belonged to a New York regiment. Did you mean the state or the city?”

“The city.”

“It’s your home?”

“Was.” He nodded. He pointed at the dark bulk of the train. “That’s my home now.”

“Why did you come out here?”

He pondered the question. Should he be honest? Yes. But not entirely.

“Several reasons. To find work. Earn money—”

“Was there no work in New York City?”

“I could have returned to the docks, I suppose. I started there, as a longshoreman, when I was young.”

She smiled. “Come, now. You’re far from old.”

“But getting there.” His own smile faded. “When I left the hospital, I wanted a particular sort of work. No, better to say I needed it. Everywhere in the East, there are crippled men. Stumbling along the streets having left part of themselves in some damn—some bloody field or forest. It’s too depressing a reminder of the price we paid to hold the Union together.

“I’ve read they’re recruiting cavalry regiments for service against the Indians out here, and because so few able-bodied men are left, the Army’s waiving many of its restrictions. The Plains Army will accept one-armed fellows, or men who’ve lost an eye. Men with a limp are welcome in the cavalry since a limp won’t impair their riding. We’ll be a nation of invalids for a generation. I hoped to see less of that on the railroad.

“But there’s a more important reason I came to the U-Pay. I decided I’d done my share of destroying things. Property. Lives. I wanted work to balance that. I wanted to build, not tear down. The railroad’s a worthy enterprise, even though many say it’s controlled by schemers who aren’t above bribing Congressmen to get it finished. But the heart of it’s good, and important. Unfortunately”—a rueful smile—“I haven’t been entirely successful in my effort to get away from fighting. I allowed myself to be drawn into the scrape with Worthing. He deserved what he got, but I’m ashamed I was the one to dish it out.”

She continued to study him without speaking. He’d experienced a strange release in describing his past. Unexpectedly, he found himself telling her most of the rest.

“I also left the East because of personal problems. Before the war, I was employed by a wealthy family. The Kents.”

The name produced no response.

“I was discharged—rather, I did a thing or two which made it impossible for me ever to work for them again.”

Such as telling Louis I would not cooperate in his scheme to trade with the enemy.

Such as nearly raping his wife that very same night at Kentland, then finding myself smitten with her
—

He sat up straighter in an effort to clear his mind. For a moment Julia’s blue eyes seemed to glow near Hannah Dorn’s face. He blinked. The vision vanished.

“No need for you to listen to any more, Miss Dorn. It’s a tedious story, full of mistakes and regrettable lapses into many of those vices you abhor.”

“Why, Mr. Boyle, that almost sounds like an insult.” But she wasn’t angry.

“Please, I don’t mean to mock your faith. I expect these times require more of it, not less. But as I suggested inside, I—just don’t have any of my own.”

“I don’t believe you. Every man has something he wants to achieve.”

“Yes. To lay a mile of track a day.”

“I mean some goal he wants to reach.”

“To get the job done. To reach the hundredth meridian, then see the Atlantic and the Pacific joined by the rails.”

“And that’s all?”

He nodded.

“What will you do when the railroad’s completed?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“That’s a sad and aimless way to go through life, Mr. Boyle.”

“In truth, it is. But it’s better than making war.”

His brows knit together. He was unsettled at the way this woman was drawing out confessions he’d never intended to make.

She lifted the Bible from her lap, stood up, and touched an index finger to the pot. She withdrew it quickly; the coffee was hot enough.

“At least you’re better off than Papa,” she said. “You have a goal to last you a while. Papa never thinks beyond the next dipper from the barrel. We had very high hopes when we came to America in 1850. I recall it well—I was twelve when we made the passage in steerage. I can still hear Mama talking before we left Hamburg about how grand the future would be. Better by far than what we were leaving.”

She untied the thong with one hand and held the pot bail with the other. “There are two china mugs on the washstand, Mr. Boyle.”

He walked into the tent, returned with the cups, and let her pour. She held the pot by the bail and the bottom, as if it weren’t even warm.

Steam drifted from the mugs as she finished pouring and bedded the pot in the ash of the disintegrating chips. She accepted one of the mugs. Her eyelids dropped briefly as their fingers accidentally touched a second time.

He sat down again. “You came from Germany, you said.”

She took her seat on the stool, stared into the mug, spoke softly. “Papa was the last of fourteen brothers. Fourteen men and not a girl among them to marry off. The family brewery couldn’t support him as well as a wife. Eight of his brothers also had to make their way in other kinds of work. It was Mama’s savings and Mama’s insistence that brought us here from Hamburg. We got as far as Cincinnati. Papa tried the butcher trade. First working for a shop owner to learn it, then opening a place of his own. But as a young man, he’d gotten too fond of beer and spiritous liquors. The habit was fixed. In Cincinnati he abused his customers. Word soon got around. The business failed. Papa managed to make a little on the sale of the building, but it was nothing more than luck.”

“And your mother?”

“Mama wore herself out raising my brother Klaus. He was born in ’52. She also worked with the Cincinnati Negro railroad, helping blacks who’d escaped from Kentucky on their way to Canada. One night six years ago, she and two other women and I were giving food bundles to three runaway boys on the Cincinnati waterfront. We were set on by a farmer who’d rowed across the river to recapture the boys. There was no violence, just a good deal of rough talk. The farmer did brandish a gun, however. And Mama’s heart was bad. She suffered a seizure and died that night.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It took Papa a year to recover, realize the butcher shop had failed, and sell it. We came from Cincinnati to Nebraska because Germans had settled here too. Papa set up the store in Grand Island, and within two or three months it was Cincinnati all over again. He drove customers away with his foul temper and his discourtesy.”

“Yet you’ve stayed with him.”

“I said it before—he’s my father. And there’s Klaus to look after. The strong man doesn’t pass by the weak merely because the weak man’s flawed. We’re all flawed.”

Her free hand came to rest on the dark pebbled cover of the Bible on her knees.

“Christ taught that.”

With her head bowed, she drank, then resumed. “Whatever happens to Papa, I’ll stay in the territory. Mama’s belief in America was justified, that much I’ve learned since I’ve grown up. And perhaps it’s not Papa’s fault that he isn’t strong enough to take advantage of the opportunity this country affords. Nebraska is a good land. All it needs are good people who believe in God and hard work. In a few years Grand Island will have schools, and churches, and be as fine a town as any other. I’ll stay—even after Papa’s gone.”

“You do have a strong faith,” Michael said, hoping she understood it as a compliment.

She bobbed her head, self-effacement. He was conscious again of how lovely she looked with her face patterned by the firelight. But he still didn’t quite know what to make of her odd combination of piety and vulnerability.

All at once Hannah set her mug between her boots and opened the Bible.

“Mama taught me to believe in three things, Mr. Boyle. Work. Cleanliness. And this book. I know some people would laugh at me for saying that.”

He raised a hand. “Not I. Truly, I do wish I had things to believe in other than this infernal railroad. The family I worked for had such things. But they turned away from—never mind. Go on.”

“There’s little more to say—except one thing. I do believe what’s in these pages. And I believe this country offers greater hope than any other land on earth. America will always be a blessed place if we abide by its purpose, and this book.”

He looked dubious. “At the moment, I wouldn’t classify the East as a blessed place. It’s poisoned with hatred.”

“No more so than here. That fellow you fought—how is he different from all those politicians tearing at one another? Or the businessmen the papers rail about? There’s always wickedness in the world, Mr. Boyle. But we can turn away from it and enjoy the blessings of life here. We have guidance.”

She patted the book. “I was reading something along those very lines when you arrived. Second Chronicles, chapter seven, verse fourteen—”

He was envious of the peace he saw on her face as she quoted without looking up the passage.

“‘If my people, which are called by my name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land—’”

He wished he could believe her answer was the right one—and easily implemented. Their eyes met for a long moment. Then she succumbed to embarrassment. Resting her palms on the book, she gazed down at them. He was gripped by an impulse to stand, circle the fire, and touch her.

He didn’t. If she knew that a certain tension below his belly was in part responsible for his feeling, no doubt she’d run inside the tent for the Hawken—

What in the devil’s happening to you, Michael Boyle?