The Titans Read online

  “Why, even my old chief, Colonel Mosby—” The man plucked the cigar from his mouth and cut a smoky arc with the stub held between his index and middle finger. The smoke whipped away toward a hole chopped in the side of the car above him. The hole let in flickering shafts of sunlight and fresh air. But not enough air to cleanse the car of the stench of dirt and sweat and wounds still oozing pus.

  “He disbanded the rangers last month. Voluntarily! I read about it right after I was let out. Couldn’t believe it—John Mosby truckling to the Yanks for a parole! Said he was a soldier, not a highwayman.”

  The man spat into the straw between his knees.

  “Wanted to get his shingle back up so he could practice law again. I’ll tell you, I about puked. There weren’t any tougher fighters than John Mosby’s Partisan Rangers. We had less than two hundred men most of the time, and a lot of the boys tended their fields by day and rode by night. Even so, with Yanks all over the place, we had most of Loudoun and Fauquier counties under control. People took to calling the territory Mosby’s Confederacy. Before I got trapped by some of Custer’s men, Mosby was a regular fighting cock. Now, all of a sudden, he up and quits just like Lee!”

  “I wish you’d quit, too,” Gideon said in a weary voice. “The war’s over.”

  Slowly the Virginian drew the cigar from his teeth.

  “You speakin’ to me?”

  “That’s right. What the hell good does it do to keep talking that way?”

  “I’ll talk any way I blasted please. They haven’t whipped all of us yet. They haven’t whipped Captain Leonidas Worthing!”

  “Well,” Gideon replied with a sour smile, “you just go right on fighting, then. But be good enough to do it silently.”

  The man in the duster surveyed Gideon’s filthy overcoat, saw no emblems of rank. “Where’d you get on this train, soldier?”

  “Major,” Gideon snapped. “Major Kent of Stuart’s cavalry. I got on at Baltimore, just like you.”

  Worthing absorbed the information. Gideon ranked him—though it really made no difference since Worthing had belonged to what was essentially a guerrilla group. It made no difference now that the meeting had taken place at Appomattox Courthouse; now that the Army of Northern Virginia had surrendered and received General Order Number Nine; now that Fort Delaware had become a memory, though one Gideon would carry all his life.

  There, Dr. Cincinnatus Lemon had summoned other guards, succeeded in breaking into Tillotson’s office, and ordered Gideon rushed to his surgery table where he discovered the heated stick had penetrated Gideon’s cornea.

  For the sake of speed, Lemon had chosen to do an evisceration, rather than a relatively slower enucleation which took the whole eyeball and its connective muscle. “Damned medical professors can’t make up their minds which is best anyway,” Lemon informed him later. “We’ve been doing enucleations since ’41, but the pedants still quibble, quibble, quibble!”

  Lemon had widened the corneal opening with a scalpel, scooped out the contents of the sclera with an evisceration spoon, then repaired the cornea with silk sutures. Afterward, regular applications of mercuric chloride ointment prepared to his specifications kept the site of the operation clean.

  Gideon had become despondent when he discovered he’d lost part of his vision. But Dr. Lemon waved every complaint aside, growling that it was an insult to his skill. It was Lemon himself who brought a hand glass and forced Gideon to look at his own face for the first time.

  He was startled. The eyelids overlapped neatly; just a slight bulge suggested the empty sclera beneath. The eyeball itself, gristly white and lacking a pupil, was far from pretty. But the closed lids hid it well, and in a way not at all disfiguring.

  As if he were discussing a choice of menu items, Lemon held a bedside debate with himself on the merits of a prosthesis versus a patch. He didn’t care for the quality of available artificial eyes, and thus made Gideon’s decision for him. It had to be a patch. Lent a man a certain air of dash and mystery, didn’t Gideon agree?

  Lemon’s bristly good cheer was infectious. Gideon soon stopped thinking how unfortunate he was, and became thankful he’d pulled through. His spirits improved even more when Lemon arrived with word that he’d succeeded in getting Tillotson transferred to the most squalid and dangerous shed in the prison—the one housing the criminals from the Union army. All in all, Gideon would be eternally grateful to the skillful, kindly doctor.

  But now he was impatient to get home to Margaret and Eleanor, and to begin piecing his life back together—though he had no idea how he’d do it.

  That was what frightened so many of the silent men in the car, he supposed. How would they start again? Unless they hailed from family farms, what could they do to earn a living? The cities would be flooded with returning veterans as well as hundreds of thousands of freed nigras. Gideon was eager to start over, but fearful there’d be no place.

  For the present, he drove that particular worry from his mind.

  “So,” Worthing said to him, mockingly, “you’re another one who thinks we should have quit like we did?”

  “We were beaten. What else could we do?”

  Worthing leaned forward. “Keep fighting.”

  Gideon shook his head. “You heard Lee’s order. They say he was sick of watching men die for nothing. When he lost the Petersburg line, he knew it was the end. He did the right thing.”

  “Not for me. You sound like Old Abe! Go home. Forgive. Forget. Those Republicans won’t forgive anything! That Johnny Booth should have shot the whole damn pack of ’em, not just Lincoln.”

  If Worthing hoped for a response from the scathingly delivered remark about the dead President, he was disappointed. Gideon admired the way Lincoln had behaved during the last few days of his life. According to the papers, he’d gone to Richmond on a James River steamer less than forty-eight hours after Davis had abandoned the city and Lee had given up the Petersburg lines. Richmond’s new military governor had asked Lincoln how to treat the people of the city and he’d replied, “If I were in your place I’d let ’em up easy.”

  Gideon would be eternally grateful for those words. Before he’d embarked on the trip back to Virginia, Dr. Lemon had voluntarily telegraphed Richmond for him, telegraphed Margaret and received a four-word reply:

  All well. Hurry home.

  She didn’t know about his eye. But at least she’d survived the devastation of the city that Sunday in April when Davis and his cabinet had fled by railroad for Danville, the three trestles over the James burned and blown behind them. After supply and ammunition warehouses had been torched so they wouldn’t fall into enemy hands, a large area of the city had been gutted by the spreading fire. That same night Admiral Semmes had blown up his pathetically small James River Squadron; shells in the magazines had erupted for hours, like an aerial display on the Fourth of July.

  Presumably Margaret might have seen the first of the Federals coming into Richmond shortly after seven the next morning. They’d come from the east. Cavalrymen.

  Black cavalrymen.

  Maybe she’d even seen Lincoln himself walk all the way up from Rockett’s Landing to the center of the city, accompanied by his son Tad and a small military guard. Nigras had poured into the streets to watch him pass. Clapped. Sung hymns. Even knelt in front of him. During that visit, he’d told the military governor to “let ’em up easy.” On his way home, near City Point, a band on the presidential steamer had serenaded him. He’d called for “Dixie,” saying with a smile that the melody was now Federal property. The whole nation’s property.

  And then he’d been shot in his box at Ford’s Theatre.

  Trying to keep frustration out of his voice, Gideon asked Worthing, “You plan to keep on fighting, do you?”

  Worthing peered at the end of his cigar. “I expect I got to live just like anybody else. Before the war, I left Loudoun County to work on railroads all over the South. Surveying, grading, laying track—I’ll get me another railroad jo
b if I can. But I don’t aim to forget what happened.”

  “And fight about it?”

  “Should the occasion arise—” Worthing let the sentence hang, a smug smile on his face.

  “You’re a damn fool,” Gideon said, turning away.

  Worthing flung the cigar down and jumped to his feet. “Don’t talk to me like that, you son of a bitch!” The butt smoldered in the straw, ignored as Worthing lurched across the car.

  Men stirred in the gloom. Sleepers woke at the sound of an altercation—and at the slowing of the rhythm of the trucks. The B & O special was grinding to a halt.

  Gideon shoved up from the floor, disgusted that he still had to keep on battling—and with one of his own kind. Other men, including the artilleryman, tried to step between them.

  “No call for this, boys.”

  “We’re all tired.”

  “It’s been a damn long trip for all of us.”

  Worthing pushed and batted at the intervening arms. “I’m not gonna take any mouth from a coward!”

  Gideon refused to be stared down. “All right,” he sighed. “If you want to keep your war going, I’ll accommodate you.”

  Someone stamped on the cigar and smoking straw as Worthing reached across the arms of the men trying to keep him separated from Gideon. The boxcar rocked to a stop. Worthing swayed, off balance.

  The door rolled back, flooding the smoky interior with the sunlight of a May day in 1865. Gideon’s right eye slitted against the golden glare. A gray-haired, heavyset brakeman in a ragged blue Union overcoat leaned into the boxcar.

  “Lads?” he shouted. “Time for a stretch!”

  Or a fight, Gideon thought.

  ii

  The weeping boy never raised his head. Worthing glanced around to the brakeman. “Why the devil are we stopping?”

  “This here’s Relay House. Switch point. ’Fore we go on to Washington, we got to wait for a train comin’ from Annapolis with some more of you uncaged birds.”

  Gideon’s eye adjusted to the brilliant light. He saw rusty tracks, and beyond, spring green hills.

  Switching his gaze back to Worthing, he said, “We can discuss our differences outside. More room.” His tone unmistakably said he was prepared to do something besides carry on a discussion.

  Worthing’s unpleasant eyes scrutinized him, measuring his size and probable strength. Despite the patch on his eye, Gideon looked formidable.

  The brakeman scratched a graying eyebrow. “What the hell’s goin’ on in there, boys? Don’t none of you want a breath of air?”

  A man with the right leg of his gray trousers pinned up at the knee maneuvered his padded crutch under his armpit. Steadying himself by pushing his left palm against the wall of the car, he hopped toward the door. “I do. This place stinks to hell.”

  Gideon continued to stare at Worthing with one sun-touched blue eye. “Well, friend?”

  Worthing finally smiled in a contemptuous way. “Hell, I’m not gonna quarrel with a wounded man. Even a yella one.”

  “Don’t worry about my sight.”

  “No, I don’t fight cripples.” Worthing pulled a fresh cigar from his duster, lit it as he stalked toward the rectangle of light. Gideon suspected Worthing had said one thing while meaning quite another. Even though one of Gideon’s eyes was useless, Worthing had decided it might be an even contest. He probably didn’t care for even contests.

  Worthing shoved the man on the crutch out of the way. Someone snickered. Worthing’s neck reddened. As he poised to jump down, he was blocked by the blue-coated brakeman standing close to the door. He booted the brakeman under the chin.

  Several of the Confederates yelled in surprise and disgust. The gray-haired man sprawled on the gravel between the tracks. Worthing jumped down. Gideon knew he should stay out of it, but he was so sick of men like this—the Tillotsons for whom the war had become an end instead of a means—that his bad temper got the better of him. He shouldered past the artilleryman and the others who’d been attempting to prevent a fight. He hurled himself through the open door onto Worthing’s back, driving him to the ground.

  iii

  Grimy Confederates began to pour out of the long line of boxcars and stream toward Gideon and Worthing from both directions. But Gideon didn’t intend to give them a prolonged show. He had the advantage, and he used it.

  He dragged Worthing to his feet from behind, pulled Worthing around. The Virginian’s stubbled face twisted in alarm. Evidently Gideon’s strength surprised him. He tried to stab his freshly lit cigar against Gideon’s cheek.

  Gideon ducked, punched Worthing in the stomach to double him. Then, with his other fist, he delivered a hard-chopping uppercut to Worthing’s mouth. Worthing reeled back, blood running from a cut in his lip.

  Some soldiers behind Worthing cushioned his fall. The Virginian tried to struggle free. Before he could, Gideon shouted, “Put him in another car or I’ll kill him.”

  The soldiers saw the intensity of Gideon’s expression and dragged Worthing away.

  “Come along, now.”

  “Come on this way, Cap’n.”

  “Ain’t right that two who fought on the same side should go at each other.”

  Worthing protested, screaming curses from his bloodied mouth. But Gideon noticed the Virginian didn’t make more than a token effort to escape those restraining him.

  Panting, Gideon dropped his fists. His heartbeat slowed. He was quietly thankful the fight had been so brief, thankful Worthing had turned out to be largely bluster—at least against an adversary who could hold his own.

  He walked over to the gray-haired brakeman, who was still seated on the ground, looking baffled. “What the hell did I do to that Reb?”

  “He was mad at me, not you.”

  “Could have fooled me.”

  Gideon grasped the man’s arm and helped him to his feet. “He hurt you?”

  “Not much.” The man worked his jaw back and forth. Smiled. “Thank you, soldier. Miller’s the name. Daphnis O. Miller.”

  “Beg pardon? Your first name is—?”

  “Daphnis.” The man pulled a face. “Don’t know what it means and never have. Sounds like it belongs to a woman. I think my mother made a mistake.”

  Gideon smiled. “Oh, I doubt it.”

  “You can, but I don’t. It’s been the curse of my life.”

  “Where are you from, Mr. Miller?”

  “Jersey City. Got temporarily promoted from switchman to brakeman by the grand and glorious United States army. What’s your name, young fellow?”

  “Gideon Kent.”

  “Pleasure to meet you.” Miller extended his hand.

  They shook. In the simple greeting, flesh against flesh, Gideon suddenly found a small hope. The issue of an independent and sovereign South had been settled. If a Union trainman and a former Confederate officer could impulsively clasp hands, maybe the country could make a start at burying the animosities of three generations and healing the wounds of four years of carnage and bitterness. He felt a little more certain of it when several of the hundred or so Confederates taking the air outside the long train paused to apologize to Miller for Worthing’s attack.

  The paroled Confederates began to wander across the switch tracks and sprawl on a grassy bank. A balmy breeze warmed Gideon’s unwashed face.

  “Jersey City, you said. You’re a fair distance from home, Mr. Miller.”

  “That’s so.” The brakeman nodded. “But they need us to run these prisoner trains—beg your pardon. Guess you ain’t a prisoner anymore.”

  “Take it you’re a railroad man?”

  “That’s right. Where were you locked up?”

  “Fort Delaware.”

  Miller grimaced. “Heard that was a hellhole.”

  “Compared to the fort, I expect hell would be a spa.”

  “A what?”

  “Resort. Vacation place.”

  Gideon restrained a smile; the reading had helped. Dr. Lemon had somehow cajoled an
d threatened until Tillotson had returned the stolen books, which Gideon had devoured while he was recuperating in the prison infirmary. Now and again he tried a new, unfamiliar word, always with a bit of awkwardness, and always feeling he might be thought to be acting superior by the person to whom he uttered the word. But he didn’t mean to sound superior. He simply needed to practice.

  “What branch of service you from?” Miller inquired.

  “Cavalry. Jeb Stuart’s. I was captured at Yellow Tavern.”

  “Mighty fine outfit, the papers said.”

  Quietly: “That’s understating it.”

  “Where’s your home, Kent?”

  “Lexington, Virginia, originally. Presently Richmond.”

  “Did you have a trade before the war?”

  Gideon’s stomach quivered. “No, none. I was too thickheaded to learn one. I’ll pay for it now. I have a wife and baby to support. I’ll have to find work.”

  In spite of the difficulties he faced in doing that, he’d made one firm decision in prison. Even if his father offered, he wouldn’t accept so much as one dollar of help. The California inheritance would be his someday. But until it was, he meant to make his way on his own, hardship or no. If he didn’t, he’d have no pride of accomplishment.

  “Jobs are gonna be mighty scarce,” Daphnis Miller observed as they started strolling beside the train.

  “And not too many available for a man who’s half blind, I suspect.”

  It was said with a smile, and no trace of self-pity. Yet the truth of his situation haunted him. What could a man do who was less than whole?

  “Well,” Miller chuckled, “you ever get desperate enough to work in a rail yard, come to Jersey City an’ look me up.”

  “Railroading a rough business, is it?”

  “Let’s put it this way. A fellow who couples cars for a living and has both hands, all his fingers, an’ two good legs is one of three things: Mighty quick, mighty lucky—or new on the job.”