The Titans Page 24

  Gideon laughed. A whistle sounded eastward, the source hidden by the boxcars. The chug of a second train approaching grew steadily louder. Miller answered a hail from another brakeman up near the engine.

  “Keep your pants on, Feeny, I’ll be there. Kent, I truly ’preciated what you done. That Reb looked as if he wanted to tear me apart.”

  “He wanted to tear somebody apart. I don’t think it mattered who it was.”

  “Damn job’s gettin’ as bad as workin’ in the Erie yards. Well, so long. Thanks again.”

  “Mr. Miller?”

  The trainman turned.

  “Do me one small favor in return.”

  Miller’s white eyebrow lifted, inquiringly.

  “Don’t say Reb anymore. We’re all Americans again.”

  Miller smiled in a sheepish way. “Guess you’re right. Didn’t mean anything nasty by it. But it’s gonna take a while to get out of the habit.”

  He waved and hurried off.

  Gideon leaned against the boxcar, fighting to keep his hand down. The blind eye itched again. The brakeman was right. Men on both sides would be a long time breaking the habit of using certain words.

  Reb.

  Traitor.

  Damn Yank.

  Enemy.

  Men would be a long time forgetting.

  iv

  Presently, more boxcars were switched and coupled to the end of the first train. The whistle blew three times and the Confederates began to clamber back aboard the cars. Spirits had improved. There was a good deal of laughing and joking.

  Gideon sank down in the place he’d occupied before. Miller appeared outside, spied him, and waved as he slid the door shut, leaving only the chopped hole to ventilate the boxcar as the train resumed its journey to Washington.

  So much to do, Gideon thought. See if my little girl even recognizes me. Doubt if she will.

  Find a way to support Margaret.

  Try to discover what’s become of Matt and Jeremiah.

  Visit my mother down in Lexington—

  For a moment the odds against successfully beginning a new life seemed overwhelming. Especially when he remembered Worthing and Tillotson. There were haters on both sides. They’d make Lincoln’s idea—“Let ’em up easy”— difficult to turn into a reality. And with the Illinois President gone and his policies already being disavowed by many Northerners, the auspices were poor.

  Indeed, they hadn’t been too promising while Lincoln was still alive. Gideon had studied an account of the hysterical celebration in Washington two nights after Davis’ abandonment of Richmond. Lee had not yet surrendered and even then, on a platform in front of the Patent Office, Vice President Andrew Johnson had roared to a howling mob that he would hang Jefferson Davis “twenty times.” As for others who’d participated in the rebellion—Gideon could recall Johnson’s chilling words almost exactly: “I would arrest them, I would try them, I would convict them, and I would hang them. Treason must be made odious! Traitors must be punished and impoverished!”

  So cried the obscure Tennessee Democrat, under fixtures specially arranged to blaze the word UNION from the top of the pillars of the Patent Office on the night all Washington shone with candle and gas illuminations to celebrate the fall of the enemy capital. Now Johnson was serving in the office Lincoln had still held on that evening when Johnson had shouted, “Hang, hang!”

  Fortunately no one had expressed an interest in hanging Gideon. He was alive, and there was a wonderful, warm girl waiting for him in Richmond. He intended to devote himself to her and to their daughter, to giving them a comfortable, secure existence. He was done with war. Never again would he actively seek a fight, for whatever lofty principles. To that he’d made up his mind.

  His thoughts kept returning to Margaret. They’d spent very little time together during the past three years, so each memory was just that much more vivid.

  The sight of her. The feel of her lying close in the cool hours of the night. Her ardor as a wife—it sent a pleasurable thrill of anticipation chasing through him.

  Somehow, no matter how formidable the obstacles, they’d overcome them together. Rebuild the life—the marriage—begun when he’d returned to Richmond after First Manassas. He felt more optimistic when he recalled the innate decency of Northerners such as Dr. Lemon and the trainman, Miller, with his words about looking him up in Jersey City. Miller obviously hadn’t meant what he said; he’d merely been trying to express his gratitude in familiar terms. But at least he’d said something. It was encouraging.

  Down at the end of the car, the boy in gray was still crying. His back heaved, but Gideon could hear no sound above the rattle of the wheels.

  He smoothed his beard again, clambered up, and stepped over outstretched legs. Maybe there was something he could do to alleviate the boy’s misery.

  He knelt beside him. Laid an arm across the shuddering, butternut-clad shoulders.

  “Son?”

  Not even twenty-two years old himself, Gideon was calling this stripling son. But he saw nothing incongruous. He’d lived through enough struggle, enough perils, for three adult lifetimes.

  “Son?” he repeated.

  No answer.

  “Any way I can help?”

  Still silence. The boy didn’t raise his head.

  Gently, Gideon patted his back. After a moment the violent spasms began to subside.

  Gideon remained where he was, neither speaking nor being spoken to, just moving his hand up and down, up and down, softly, an almost fatherly touch. Somehow it helped the boy.

  The whistle on the Baltimore and Ohio engine shrieked. The boxcars clattered faster, carrying those wounded in body and those wounded in spirit on toward home.

  Book Three

  The Fire Road

  Chapter I

  Escape to the West

  i

  HE FIRED. RELOADED. FIRED again. Every round seemed to miss.

  The gray-faced men were cleverly hiding in the tangled second-growth timber fifty yards out in front of the log and brush breastwork. With startling abruptness, one or two would dart from cover, shoot, and jump back out of sight. He fired at one such marksman and an instant later, blinked. Where there’d been a target, there was nothing but the smoke.

  Beside him, a boy no more than seventeen took a ball in the side of his face. The boy’s shriek of pain turned to a whimper as he fell. The crackle of gunfire up and down the Union defense line quickly muffled the sound.

  He squinted over the breastwork then, wondering whether the Irish Brigade of Hancock’s II Corps had been sent into the tangled woodland known as the Wilderness, or into the nether regions.

  Smoke billowed everywhere. Artillery rumbled like a storm in a sky he couldn’t see. Not far overhead, tree branches formed a thick web that shut out most of the late afternoon light above, and intensified the light below: the spurting flash from rifle muzzles, the flickering light of large limbs and small twigs blazing and raining sparks.

  Directly over him, a branch crumbled apart. A hot piece of charred wood dropped onto his neck. He yelped, jerked the trigger, saw a slab of bark fly from one of the gargoyle trees behind which the enemy lurked.

  Even this deep in the forest, he could feel a fairly stiff breeze blowing. Somehow it failed to dispel the smoke, though it fanned the scattered fires. The Rebs kept sniping.

  On his right, young replacements who’d joined the Brigade only weeks ago scrambled back as balls chunked into the crazily piled, hastily cut logs. One of the boys cried out, “Mother of Mary! She’s catchin’!”

  The brush atop the logs a yard to his right burst into flame. Snapping, roaring, the fire raced both ways along the improvised fortification. More men of the Brigade leaped away. Out in the shifting red smoke, the Rebs howled in pain or in defiance and kept volleying.

  The fire swept past him, not a foot in front of his nose. The intense heat drove him back. In moments, the entire breastwork was burning.

  He heard a bugle call. T
he blare was suddenly aborted by a scream. Someone shouted, “Fall back! Fall back!”

  Beyond the barrier of fire, the gray soldiers seemed to be on the move. He tried to find a target, then wiped sweat from his eyes with the back of a hand. He couldn’t believe what he was witnessing.

  Among the stunted trees, boys in butternut were advancing. Some had no weapons. In silence, they pleaded for mercy with outstretched hands. Minié balls smashed into their soiled blouses, piercing the fabric. No blood ran from the wounds.

  He fought back a desire to scream and flee from this impossible battle taking place below the Rapidan. He clutched his rifle with both hands, as if gripping it would help keep his duty uppermost in his mind, keep him from running away.

  The wall of fire rose higher.

  Four feet.

  Six.

  From the other side, a woman called his name:

  “Michael?”

  He rose on tiptoe, risking death from the Confederate balls that had begun to whiz past again. A gust of wind tore holes in the flames. He saw her wandering among the gray men, saw her small, well-proportioned body with exquisite clarity in spite of the smoke. Her glossy dark hair had a scarlet nimbus. Her bright blue eyes reflected the glare of burning trees. Repeatedly, the advancing soldiers jostled her. They seemed unaware of her presence.

  “Michael?”

  A few Union soldiers were returning the Confederate volleys. Any second she’d be hit.

  “Julia, go back!”

  She didn’t hear. Her head kept turning, her eyes searching for him.

  He flung down his rifle, crouched, and ran at the burning breastwork. His left boot slipped on the body of a dead comrade. His leap was bad. He crashed chest-first into the sagging timber.

  Fire scorched his ragged blouse. The last two metal buttons dropped off, their threads burned away. The pain on his exposed skin was hideous, but he bore it, scrambling up and over the collapsing fortification. By the time he cleared it, both his sleeves were afire.

  He could still see her out there, helpless and unable to locate him. The gray men, pleading with their hands, continued to brush by.

  “Julia? Here I am!” He waved his arms. The blue sleeves trailed fire. She’d come all this way to find him. He couldn’t abandon her.

  “Here, Julia. Here!”

  A Confederate rifleman stepped from a turbulent cloud of smoke. Shot. Michael felt the ball slam into his belly.

  Fire curled up his legs, filling his nostrils with the stench of burned leather. Another ball struck his left shoulder. She turned away in the red musk, shaking her head sadly. She started back to the gargoyle trees where the Rebel wounded flailed and bayed.

  “Julia? Julia!”

  Afire and hit, he began to topple forward. A third Rebel ball thumped into his body. Despairing, he continued to fall slowly, so slowly. At the impact of a fourth ball, he heard a deep, sonorous tolling.

  He took another bullet in his left thigh. The bell tolled.

  He took one in his right arm. The bell tolled.

  Soon it was pealing without pause. It was the only sound he heard. It mocked his failure to reach the woman he wanted against all reason. It knelled his death in the Wilderness as he drifted face-first into a pit of dark where ground had been only a moment before.

  ii

  Someone jabbed his hip.

  Terrified, he heard men grumbling. Sounds of motion above the bell’s strident clang.

  Michael Boyle’s eyes popped open. He gasped loudly the instant he realized he’d been dreaming again.

  He lay on his side in the cramped top bunk. In tiers of three, the bunks lined the walls of the eighty-five-foot railroad car lit at each end by a hanging lamp.

  Moment by moment, the nightmare was fading. He searched for another familiar detail, found it in the pale rectangle of the charcoal drawing he’d tacked to the wall beside his head. Once he saw the drawing, he knew, finally and positively, that he was alive and whole.

  Dry-mouthed, he scratched his crotch, wondering whether the cooties had gotten him at last. The bell beside the door at the car’s end was being rung to wake the workers. Again he felt a jab on his hip.

  He rolled over to face the aisle. The man who occupied the bunk below, Sean Murphy, stood on his own bed, his head on a level with Michael’s eyes. Murphy was fifty or thereabouts, robust, pie-faced, genial. He had surprisingly little gray in his curly, copper-colored hair and huge fan of a beard. He poked Michael a third time.

  “Sleep all mornin’, lad, and our boss’ll be on your ass worse than he is already. Rise an’ shine!”

  “I’m coming,” Michael growled. He sat up without thinking, banged his head on the wooden roof, and swore.

  He swung his legs out of the bunk and jumped down among the other Paddies tumbling from their bunks with varying degrees of speed and ill humor. Murphy’s bright blue-green eyes raked Michael’s six-foot frame; noted the sweat rings under the arms of his long underwear. Murphy clucked his tongue.

  “You must have had some night, Michael me boy.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “For the last hour ’twas all I could do to catch a few winks. You been tossin’ and babblin’ something awful. What was goin’ through your head?”

  Michael stepped on the edge of the empty bottom bunk, reached to the lower end of his own, and dragged out his faded flannel shirt, trousers, and boots. He dumped the clothing in the aisle, where he proceeded to dress amidst the buffeting of earlier risers already stumbling toward the end of the car.

  He disliked having to answer Murphy’s question. How could he admit he’d been dreaming of a woman who didn’t belong to him and never would? A woman he’d come all the way out here to escape and couldn’t? Guardedly, he said, “I was back in the Wilderness. The last afternoon, when I got hit.” Michael still bore a scar on his left hip. A Confederate ball buzzing in over the barricades had slammed him out of action—and out of the war.

  “You dream of that every other night,” Murphy sighed, helping Michael pull his galluses over his shirt. “That was two years ago, lad. Seems like you’d be forgettin’ it by now.”

  He recalled the fire, the smoke, the feeling of forever being cut off from safety and sanity.

  “If you’d been there, Sean, I doubt you’d forget it.”

  “But the war’s over. I keep remindin’ you of that.”

  Michael knotted a red bandana around his neck and finally managed a smile. He was a tall Irishman of thirty-six with fair hair already showing gray, a horizontal white scar across his forehead, and steady golden-brown eyes close to the color of the handlebar mustache he’d grown since coming west. Like his hair, the mustache was gray streaked.

  There was no flab left on him, either. He was spare and hard after eleven weeks as a rust eater on what he and the other Paddies referred to as the U-Pay.

  “Out of the way, I’m hungry,” a man named Flannagan complained, giving Michael a shove. Michael stiffened. Double-chinned Sean Murphy laid a hand on his arm:

  “Easy—easy! You’re edgy as the devil this morning.”

  Michael let himself be restrained and took no offense. Murphy had become a good friend. Murphy was the man who’d persuaded him to leave the Chicago saloon where he’d been sweeping floors and tending bar. Together they’d ridden the cars west to the end of the existing rail lines, then traveled on to Omaha.

  And Murphy’s remark was embarrassingly accurate. Of late, Michael had found Louis Kent’s wife slipping into his dreams with increasing frequency. No matter how far a man fled, apparently certain things could never be outrun.

  He’d tried running once before, when he’d finally admitted how he felt about the spoiled and lovely spouse of Amanda Kent’s only son. In a rage, he’d taken her at the family’s country seat up the Hudson River from New York. The way he’d taken her amounted to rape. Almost immediately he’d realized it was more an act of lust than anger; he’d wanted her secretly for a long time. He’d enlist
ed in the 69th New York to escape the cause of his feelings, but found he couldn’t.

  After the Wilderness, the desire to flee had still been with him. But it was complemented by another drive, just as strong. He was sick at heart after seeing so much death. Weary of watching life and property being destroyed. He’d wanted an antidote—a feeling of accomplishing something, building something. So Julia had been one reason but not the only reason he’d left the Washington hospital as soon as he could, accepted his discharge, and headed for new country.

  He’d spent a season in Ohio, planting and harvesting corn while Lee gave up to Grant at Appomattox, the bloodletting ended, and the Northern punishment of the beaten enemy commenced. Late in ’65 he’d moved on to Chicago and held unsatisfying menial jobs in a packing house, a tannery, the saloon. During those months, the nation watched in astonishment as Andrew Johnson—“His Accidency, the President”—swung away from his pronouncements about hanging Southerners and began carrying put the conciliatory Reconstruction policies foreshadowed in Lincoln’s 1864 inaugural.

  In Ohio and Illinois, too, the memory of Julia stayed with him.

  Then crusty widower, Sean Murphy, approached him in the Chicago saloon, and they became drinking companions and eventually friends. Michael listened with interest when Murphy spoke of leaving his poor-paying drayman’s job for higher wages and cleaner work in the open air beyond the Missouri. There, the long-delayed transcontinental railroad was going forward at last. Michael decided to pack his few belongings and join Murphy and a number of other Paddies heading for the prairie.

  The men went west in a spirit of hope, enthusiasm and pride, declaring that the Irish had built the Erie Canal, a marvel in its day, and by God they’d build the century’s newest and greatest marvel too—

  “No denials, Michael?”

  He forced himself from his reverie. “What’s that?”

  “I remarked—several hours ago, it seems—that you woke up nervous as an Orangeman in County Cork. Again.”