Rebel

Starbuck raised the walnut lid to reveal a beautiful ivory-handled revolver that lay in a specially shaped compartment lined with blue velvet. Other velvet-lined compartments held the gun’s silver-rimmed powder horn, bullet mold and crimper. The gold-lettered label inside the lid read ‘R. Adams, Patentee of the Revolver, 79 King William Street, London EC.’ ‘I bought her in England two years ago.’ The Colonel lifted the gun and caressed its barrel. ‘She’s a lovely thing, isn’t she?’

‘Yes, sir, she is.’ And the gun did indeed seem beautiful in the soft morning light that filtered past the long white drapes. The shape of the weapon was marvelously matched to function, a marriage of engineering and design so perfectly achieved that for a few seconds Starbuck even forgot exactly what the gun’s function was.

‘Very beautiful,’ Washington Faulconer said reverently. ‘I’ll take her to the Baltimore and Ohio in a couple of weeks.’ ‘The Baltimore …’ Starbuck began, then stopped as he realized he had not misheard. So the Colonel still wanted to lead his raid on the railroad? ‘But I thought our troops at Harper’s Ferry had blocked the line, sir.’

‘So they have, Nate, but I’ve discovered the cars are still running as far as Cumberland, then they move their supplies on by road and canal.’ Faulconer put the beautiful Adams revolver away. ‘And it still seems to me that the Confederacy is being too quiescent, too fearful. We need to attack, Nate, not sit around waiting for the North to strike at us. We need to set the South alight with a victory! We need to show the North that we’re men, not craven mudsills. We need a quick, absolute victory that will be written across every newspaper in America! Something to put our name in the history books! A victory to begin the Legion’s history.’ He smiled. ‘How does that sound?’

‘It sounds marvelous, sir.’

‘And you’ll come with us, Nate, I promise. Bring me Truslow, then you and I will ride to the rails and break a few heads. But you need a gun first, so how about this beast?’ The Colonel offered Nate a clumsy, long-barreled, ugly revolver with an old-fashioned hook-curved hilt, an awkward swan-necked hammer and two triggers. The Colonel explained that the lower ring trigger revolved the cylinder and cocked the hammer, while the upper lever fired the charge. ‘She’s a brute to fire,’ Faulconer admitted, ‘until you learn the knack of releasing the lower trigger before you pull the upper one. But she’s a robust thing. She can take a knock or two and still go on killing. She’s heavy and that makes her difficult to aim, but you’ll get used to her. And she’ll scare the wits out of anyone you point her at.’ The pistol was an American-made Savage, three and a half pounds in weight and over a foot in length. The lovely Adams, with its blue sheened barrel and soft white handle, was smaller and lighter, and fired the same size bullet, yet it was not nearly as frightening as the Savage.

The Colonel put the Adams back into his drawer, then turned and pocketed the key. ‘Now, let’s see, it’s midday. I’ll find you a fresh horse, give you that letter and some food, then you can be on your way. It isn’t a long ride. You should be there by six o’clock, maybe earlier. I’ll write you that letter, then send you Truslow hunting. Let’s be to work, Nate!’

The Colonel accompanied Starbuck for the first part of his journey, ever encouraging him to sit his horse better. ‘Heels down, Nate! Heels down! Back straight!’ The Colonel took amusement from Starbuck’s riding, which was admittedly atrocious, while the Colonel himself was a superb horseman. He was riding his favorite stallion and, in his new uniform and mounted on the glossy horse, he looked marvelously impressive as he led Starbuck through the town of Faulconer Court House, past the water mill and the livery stable, the inn and the courthouse, the Baptist and the Episcopal churches, past Greeley’s Tavern and the smithy, the bank and the town gaol. A girl in a faded bonnet smiled at the Colonel from the school house porch. The Colonel waved to her, but did not stop to talk. ‘Priscilla Bowen,’ he told Nate, who had no idea how he was supposed to remember the flood of names that was being unleashed on him. ‘She’s a pretty enough thing if you like them plump, but only nineteen, and the silly girl intends to marry Pecker. My God, but she could do better than him! I told her so too. I didn’t mince my words either, but it hasn’t done a blind bit of good. Pecker’s double her age, double! I mean it’s one thing to bed them, Nate, but you don’t have to marry them! Have I offended you?’

‘No, sir.’

‘I keep forgetting your strict beliefs.’ The Colonel laughed happily. They had passed through the town, which had struck Starbuck as a contented, comfortable community and much larger than he had expected. The Legion itself was encamped to the west of the town, while Faulconer’s house was to the north. ‘Doctor Danson reckoned that the sound of military activity would be bad for Miriam,’ Faulconer explained. ‘She’s delicate, you understand.’

‘So Anna was telling me, sir.’

‘I was thinking of sending her to Germany once Anna’s safely married. They say the doctors there are marvelous.’

‘So I’ve heard, sir.’

‘Anna could accompany her. She’s delicate too, you know. Danson says she needs iron. God knows what he means. But they can both go if the war’s done by fall. Here we are, Nate!’ The Colonel gestured toward a meadow where four rows of tents sloped down toward a stream. This was the Legion’s encampment, crowned by the three-banded, seven-starred flag of the new Confederacy. Thick woods rose on the stream’s far bank, the town lay behind, and the whole encampment somehow had the jaunty appearance of a traveling circus. A baseball diamond had already been worn into the flattest part of the meadow, while the officers had made a steeplechase course along the bank of the stream. Girls from the town were perched along a steep bank that formed the meadow’s eastern boundary, while the presence of carriages parked alongside the road showed how the gentry from the nearby countryside were making the encampment into the object of an excursion. There was no great air of purpose about the men who lounged or played or strolled around the campground, which indolence, as Starbuck well knew, resulted from Colonel Faulconer’s military philosophy, which declared that too much drill simply dulled a good man’s appetite for battle. Now, in sight of his good Southerners, the Colonel became markedly more cheerful. ‘We just need two or three hundred more men, Nate, and the Legion will be unbeatable. Bringing me Truslow will be a good beginning.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir,’ Starbuck said, and wondered why he had ever agreed to face the demon Truslow. His apprehensions were sharpened because Ethan Ridley, mounted on a spirited chestnut horse, had suddenly appeared at the encampment’s main entrance. Starbuck remembered Anna Faulconer’s confident assertion that Ridley had not even dared face Truslow, and that only made him all the more nervous. Ridley was in uniform, though his gray woolen tunic looked very drab beside the Colonel’s brand-new finery.

‘So what do you think of Shaffer’s tailoring, Ethan?’ the Colonel demanded of his future son-in-law.

‘You look superb, sir,’ Ridley responded dutifully, then nodded a greeting to Starbuck, whose mare edged to the side of the road and lowered her head to crop at the grass while Washington Faulconer and Ridley talked. The Colonel was saying how he had discovered two cannon that might be bought, and was wondering if Ridley would mind going to Richmond to make the purchase and to ferret out some ammunition. The Richmond visit would mean that Ridley could not ride on the raid against the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, and the Colonel was apologizing for denying his future son-in-law the enjoyment of that expedition, but Ridley seemed not to mind. In fact his dark, neatly bearded face even looked cheerful at the thought of returning to Richmond.

‘In the meantime Nate’s off to look for Truslow.’ The Colonel brought Starbuck back into the conversation.

Ridley’s expression changed instantly to wariness. ‘You’re wasting your time, Reverend. The man’s off stealing horses.’

‘Maybe he just avoided you, Ethan?’ Faulconer suggested.

‘Maybe,’ Ridley sounded grudging, ‘but I’ll still wager that Starbuck’s wasting his time. Truslow can’t stand Yankees. He blames a Yankee for his wife’s death. He’ll tear you limb from limb, Starbuck.’

Faulconer, evidently affected by Ridley’s pessimism, frowned at Starbuck. ‘It’s your choice, Nate.’

‘Of course I’ll go, sir.’

Ridley scowled. ‘You’re wasting your time, Reverend,’ he said again, with just a hint of too much force.

‘Twenty bucks says I’m not,’ Starbuck heard himself saying, and immediately regretted the challenge as a stupid display of bravado. It was worse than stupid, he thought, but a sin too. Starbuck had been taught that all wagering was sinful in the sight of God, yet he did not know how to withdraw the impulsive offer.

Nor was he sure that he wanted to withdraw because Ridley had hesitated, and that hesitation seemed to confirm Anna’s suspicion that her fiancé might indeed have evaded looking for the fearful Truslow.

‘Sounds a fair offer to me,’ the Colonel intervened happily.

Ridley stared at Starbuck, and the younger man thought he detected a hint of fear in Ridley’s gaze. Was he frightened that Starbuck would reveal his lie? Or just frightened of losing twenty dollars? ‘He’ll kill you, Reverend.’

‘Twenty dollars says I’ll have him here before the month’s end,’ Starbuck said.

‘By the week’s end,’ Ridley challenged, seeing a way out of the wager.

‘Fifty bucks?’ Starbuck recklessly raised the wager.

Washington Faulconer laughed. Fifty dollars was nothing to him, but it was a fortune to penniless young men like Ridley and Starbuck. Fifty dollars was a month’s wages to a good man, the price of a decent carriage horse, the cost of a fine revolver. Fifty dollars turned Anna’s quixotic quest into a harsh ordeal. Ethan Ridley hesitated, then seemed to feel he demeaned himself by that hesitation and so held out a gloved hand. ‘You’ve got till Saturday, Reverend, not a moment more.’

‘Done,’ Starbuck said, and shook Ridley’s hand.

‘Fifty bucks!’ Faulconer exclaimed with delight when Ridley had ridden away. ‘I do hope you’re feeling lucky, Nate.’

‘I’ll do my best, sir.’

‘Don’t let Truslow bully you. Stand up to him, you hear me?’

‘I will, sir.’

‘Good luck, Nate. And heels down! Heels down!’

Starbuck rode west toward the blue-shadowed mountains. It was a lovely day under an almost cloudless sky. Starbuck’s fresh horse, a strong mare named Pocahontas, trotted tirelessly along the grass verge of the dirt road, which climbed steadily away from the small town, past orchards and fenced meadows, going into a hilly country of small farms, lush grass and quick streams. These Virginia foothills were not good for tobacco, less good still for the famous Southern staples of indigo, rice and cotton, but they grew good walnuts and fine apples, and sustained fat cattle and plentiful corn. The farms, though small, looked finely kept. There were big barns and plump meadows and fat herds of cows whose bells sounded pleasantly languorous in the midday warmth. As the road climbed higher the farms became smaller until some were little more than corn patches hacked out of the encroaching woods. Farm dogs slept beside the road, waking to snap at the horse’s heels as Starbuck rode by.

Starbuck became more apprehensive as he rode higher into the hills. He had the insouciance and cockiness of youth, believing himself capable of any deed he set his mind to achieve, but as the sun declined he began to perceive Thomas Truslow as a great barrier that defined his whole future. Cross the barrier and life would be simple again, fail it and he would never again look in a mirror and feel respect for himself. He tried to steel himself against whatever hard reception Truslow might have for him, if indeed Truslow was in the hills at all, then he tried to imagine the triumph of success if the grim Truslow came meekly down to join the Legion’s ranks. He thought of Faulconer’s pleasure and of Ridley’s chagrin, and then he wondered how he was ever to pay the wager if he lost. Starbuck had no money and, though the Colonel had offered to pay him wages of twenty-six dollars a month, Starbuck had yet to see a cent of it.

By midafternoon the dirt road had narrowed to a rough track that ran alongside a tumbling, white whipped river that foamed at rocks, coursed between boulders and worried at fallen trees. The woods were full of bright red blossom, the hills steep, the views spectacular. Starbuck passed two deserted cabins, and once he was startled by the crash of hooves and turned, fumbling for the loaded revolver, only to see a white-tailed deer galloping away through the trees. He had begun to enjoy the landscape, and that enjoyment made him wonder whether his destiny belonged in the wild new western lands where Americans struggled to claw a new country from the grip of heathen savages. My God, he thought, but he should never have agreed to study for the ministry! At night the guilt of that abandoned career often assailed him, but here, in the daylight, with a gun at his side and an adventure ahead, Starbuck felt ready to meet the devil himself, and suddenly the words rebel and treason did not seem so bad to him after all. He told himself he wanted to be a rebel. He wanted to taste the forbidden fruits against which his father preached. He wanted to be an intimate of sin, he wanted to saunter through the valley of the shadow of death because that was the way of a young man’s dreams.

He reached a ruined sawmill where a track led south. The track was steep, forcing Starbuck off Pocahontas’s back. Faulconer had told him there was another, easier road, but this steep path was the more direct and would bring him onto Truslow’s land. The day had become hot, and sweat was prickling at Starbuck’s skin. Birds screamed from among the new pale leaves.

By late afternoon he reached the ridge line, where he remounted to stare down into the red-blossomed valley where Truslow lived. It was a place, the Colonel said, where fugitives and scoundrels had taken refuge over the years, a lawless place where sinewy men and their tough wives hacked a living from a thin soil, but a soil happily free of government. It was a high, hanging valley famous for horse thieves, where animals stolen from the rich Virginia lowlands were corralled before being taken north and west for resale. This was a nameless place where Starbuck had to confront the demon of the hardscrabble hills whose approval was so important to the lofty Washington Faulconer. He turned and looked behind, seeing the great spread of green country stretching toward the hazed horizon, then he looked back to the west, where a few trickles of smoke showed where homesteads were concealed among the secretive trees.

He urged Pocahontas down the vague path that led between the trees. Starbuck wondered what kind of trees they were. He was a city boy and did not know a redbud from an elm or a live oak from a dogwood. He could not slaughter a pig or hunt a deer or even milk a cow. In this countryside of competent people he felt like a fool, a man of no talent and too much education. He wondered whether a city childhood unfitted a man for warfare, and whether the country people with their familiarity with death and their knowledge of landscape made natural soldiers. Then, as so often, Starbuck swung from his romantic ideals of war to a sudden feeling of horror at the impending conflict. How could there be a war in this good land? These were the United States of America, the culmination of man’s striving for a perfect government and a godly society, and the only enemies ever seen in this happy land had been the British and the Indians, and both of those enemies, thanks to God’s providence and American fortitude, had been defeated.

No, he thought, but these threats of war could not be real. They were mere excitements, politics turned sour, a spring fever that would be cooled by fall. Americans might fight against the godless savages of the untamed wilderness, and were happy to slaughter the hirelings of some treacherous foreign king, but they would surely never turn on one another! Sense would prevail, a compromise would be reached, God would surely reach out his hand to protect his chosen country and its good people. Though maybe, Starbuck guiltily hoped, there would be time for one adventure first—one sunlit raid of bright flags and shining sabers and drumming hoofbeats and broken trains and burning trestles.

‘Go one pace more, boy, and I’ll blow your goddamned brains to kingdom come,’ the hidden voice spoke suddenly.

‘Oh, Christ!’ Starbuck was so astonished that he could not check the blasphemous imprecation, but he did retain just enough sense to haul in the reins, and the mare, well schooled, stopped.

‘Or maybe I’ll blow your brains out anyhows.’ The voice was as deep and harsh as a rat-tailed file scraping on rusted iron, and Starbuck, even though he had still not seen the speaker, suspected he has found his murderer. He had discovered Truslow.

FOUR

THE REVEREND ELIAL STARBUCK leaned forward in his pulpit and gripped his lectern so hard that his knuckles whitened. Some of his congregation, sitting close to the great man, thought the lectern must surely break. The Reverend’s eyes were closed and his long, bony, white-bearded face contorted with passion as he sought the exact word that would inflame his listeners and fill the church with a vengeful righteousness.

The tall building was silent. Every pew was taken and every bench in the gallery full. The church was foursquare, undecorated, plain, as simple and functional a building as the gospel that was preached from its white-painted pulpit. There was a black-robed choir, a new-fangled harmonium, and high clear-glass windows. Gas lamps provided lighting, and a big black pot-bellied stove offered a grudging warmth in winter, though that small comfort would not be needed for many months now. It was hot inside the church; not so hot as it would be in high summer when the atmosphere would be stifling, but this spring Sunday was warm enough for the worshipers to be fanning their faces, but as the Reverend Elial’s dramatic silence stretched so, one by one, the paper fans were stilled until it seemed as if every person inside the church’s high bare interior was as motionless as a statue.

They waited, hardly daring to breathe. The Reverend Elial, white-haired, white-bearded, fierce-eyed, gaunt, held his silence as he savored the word in his mind. He had found the right word, he decided, a good word, a word in due season, a word from his text, and so he drew in a long breath and raised a slow hand until it seemed as though every heart in the whole high building had paused in its beating.

‘Vomit!’ the Reverend Elial screamed, and a child in the gallery cried aloud with fear of the word’s explosive power. Some women gasped.

The Reverend Elial Starbuck smashed his right fist onto the pulpit’s rail, struck it so hard that the sound echoed through the church like a gunshot. At the end of a sermon the edges of his hands were often dark with bruises, while the power of his preaching broke the spines of at least a half-dozen Bibles each year. ‘The slavocracy has no more right to call itself Christian than a dog can call itself a horse! Or an ape a man! Or a man an angel! Sin and perdition! Sin and perdition! The slavocracy is diseased with sin, polluted with perdition!’ The sermon had reached the point where it no longer needed to make sense, because now the logic of its exposition could give way to a series of emotional reminders that would hammer the message deep into the listeners’ hearts and fortify them against one more week of worldly temptations. The Reverend Elial had been preaching for one and a quarter hours, and he would preach for at least another half hour more, but for the next ten minutes he wanted to lash the congregation into a frenzy of indignation.

The slavocracy, he told them, was doomed for the deepest pits of hell, to be cast down into the lake of burning sulfur where they would suffer the torments of indescribable pain for the length of all eternity. The Reverend Elial Starbuck had cut his preaching teeth on descriptions of hell and he offered a five-minute reprise of that place’s horrors, so filling his church with revulsion that some of the weaker brethren in the congregation seemed near to fainting. There was a section in the gallery where freed Southern slaves sat, all of them sponsored in some way by the church, and the freedmen echoed the reverend’s words, counterpointing and embroidering them so that the church seemed charged and filled with the Spirit.

And still the Reverend Elial racked the emotion higher and yet higher. He told his listeners how the slavocracy had been offered the hand of Northern friendship, and he flung out his own bruised hand as if to illustrate the sheer goodness of the offer. ‘It was offered freely! It was offered justly! It was offered righteously! It was offered lovingly!’ His hand stretched farther and farther out toward the congregation as he detailed the generosity of the Northern states. ‘And what did they do with our offer? What did they do? What did they do?’ The last repetition of the question had come in a high scream that locked the congregation into immobility. The Reverend Elial glared round the church, from the rich pews at the front to the poor benches at the back of the galleries, then down to his own family’s pew, where his eldest son, James, sat in his new stiff blue uniform. ‘What did they do?’ The Reverend Elial sawed the air as he answered his question. ‘They returned to their folly! “For as a dog returneth to his vomit, so a fool returneth to his folly.”’ That had been the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s text, taken from the eleventh verse of the twenty-sixth chapter of the Book of Proverbs. He shook his head sadly, drew his hand back, and repeated the awful word in a tone of resignation and puzzlement. ‘Vomit, vomit, vomit.’

The slavocracy, he said, was mired in its own vomit. They wallowed in it. They reveled in it. A Christian, the Reverend Elial Starbuck declared, had only one choice in these sad days. A Christian must armor himself with the shield of faith, weapon himself with the weapons of righteousness, and then march south to scour the land free of the Southern dogs that supped of their own vomit. And the members of the slavocracy are dogs, he emphasized to his listeners, and they must be whipped like dogs, scourged like dogs and made to whimper like dogs.

‘Hallelujah!’ a voice called from the gallery, while in the Starbuck pew, hard beneath the pulpit, James Starbuck felt a pulse of pious satisfaction that he would be going forth to do the Lord’s work in his country’s army, then he felt a balancing spurt of fear that perhaps the slavocracy would not take its whipping quite as meekly as a frightened dog. James Elial MacPhail Starbuck was twenty-five, yet his thinning black hair and perpetual expression of pained worry made him look ten years older. He was able to console himself for his balding scalp by the bushy thickness of his fine deep beard that well matched his corpulent, tall frame. In looks he took more after his mother’s side of the family than his father’s, though in his assiduity to business he was every bit Elial’s son for, even though he was only four years out of Harvard’s Dane Law School, James was already spoken of as a coming man in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and that fine reputation, added to his famous father’s entreaties, had earned him a place on the staff of General Irvin McDowell. This sermon would thus be the last James would hear from his father for many a week for, in the morning, he would take the cars for Washington to assume those new duties.

‘The South must be made to whimper like dogs supping their own vomit!’ The Reverend Elial began the summation which, in turn, would lead to the sermon’s fiery and emotive conclusion, but one worshiper did not wait for those closing pyrotechnics. Beneath the gallery at the very back of the church a box pew door clicked open and a young man slipped out. He tiptoed the few paces to the rear door, then edged through into the vestibule. The few people who noticed his going assumed he was feeling unwell, though in truth Adam Faulconer was not feeling physically sick, but heartsick. He paused on the street steps of the church and took a deep breath while behind him the voice of the preacher rose and fell, muffled now by the granite walls of the tall church.