Notes

gentlemen and Mr. Butler arrive?" Davis smiled at his choice of words. "In
three days' time. I Ve arranged for them to stay at the Powhatan House and
for an armed guard to ensure nothing unfortunate befalls Mr. Butler: the
forms must be observed, after all. Your discussions themselves will take
place in the Cabinet room, which, being but one floor below my own
offices, will enable me to quickly form a judgment as to any disputed
points."
"Very good, Mr. President," Lee said, nodding. Davis was a man to keep a
close eye on everything that Page 155
was done in his administration. Lee went on, "Mr. Benjamin must be
pleased to have more activity in his sphere these days than was formerly the
case."
"Oh, indeed," Davis said. "Along with the European powers, the Emperor
Maximilian has sent a minister from the city of Mexico, and Dom Pedro of
Brazil has also extended to us his nation's recognition. As our social
institutions are so like those of Brazil, I find that last recognition long
overdue, but I shall take no public notice of the delay."
"Have you specific instructions for the adjustments we are to seek from the
United States?" Lee asked.
"I did not object to the armistice terms you proposed to Lin-cob-as a
starting point for our discussions. As to how much more than that starting
point the Federals prove willing to yield, well, General, on that we shall
have to await events. The Rivington men, who have always been
uncommonly well informed, seem to be under the impression that they may
well surrender both Kentucky and Missouri, as well as specie payments to
serve as an indemnity for what they worked upon our country, which, after
all, bore the brunt of the recent fighting."
"Kentucky and Missouri? That was not the impression Mr. Lincoln created
in me. Quite the opposite, in fact." Lee frowned. He wondered how muchhe
wondered just what-the Rivington men had told Jefferson Davis. Though
dealing with his own President, he felt the need to be circumspect in finding
out. He said, "The Rivington men know a great many things, Mr. President,
but they do not know everything there is to know."
"I sometimes wonder." Davis fell silent. He cocked his head slightly to one
side, as if studying Lee. Then he murmured four words: "Two oh one four."
Lee grinned in genuine admiration; it was all he could do to keep from
clapping his hands. Had he not learned the secret of America Will Break,
the numbers would have been meaningless to him. As it was...
"So, Mr. President, they have also told you they're from a time yet to come
and given proofs you find convincing?"
"They have." Jefferson Davis's features were too stern, too disciplined, to be
very expressive, but a tiny widening of his eyes, an easing of the tension
that pulled, as if with purse strings, at the corners of his mouth, showed his
relief. "I wondered if I was the only one to whom they'd entrusted their
secret."
"So did I," Lee admitted. "I am glad to learn otherwise. But did they not tell
you, sir, that while they came from the future, it was a future wherein the
Federals overcame us, a future they traveled back here to prevent?"
Davis nodded; his wide, thin mouth narrowed again. "Yes, and of many
evils that would arise there. Thaddeus Stevens." He spoke the abolitionist's
name as if it were a curse. "If nothing else, they have kept that evil from
overfalling us, for which alone we should be in their debt."
"All true, Mr. President. They helped me greatly by their foreknowledge of
the course Grant's thrust into the Wilderness would take. But once I and
others began to act upon that foreknowledge and change what would have
been, the world grew apart from what they knew. Andries Rhoodie said as
much to me; they now see through a glass, darkly, even as other men. They
cannot know, then, it seems to me, upon what terms Mr. Lincoln's
commissioners will settle with us."
Davis reached up to stroke the graying tuft of hair under his chin. "I see the
point you are making, General. It is well taken. Nevertheless, they remain
astute men, and their considered judgments worthy of Page 156
our closest attention."
"Certainly, sir." Again choosing his words carefully, Lee added, "Any group
within our confederation which found itself possessed of such power as the
Rivington men enjoy would be worthy of our closest attention."
"Lest they seek to dominate it, you mean?" Davis said. Lee nodded. So did
the President, rather grimly.
"That thought has crossed my mind, often in the small hours when I would
be better off asleep. When the North remained our chiefest foe, it was a
little worry. Now it is a larger one. I am glad to find that a man of your
quality shares it. I gain confidence that, at need, I shall be able to pass on
the burden to someone already familiar with it."
"Sir?" Lee said, not quite catching the President's drift. Davis's eyes bored
into his. "You know that under the terms of the Constitution of the
Confederate States, I am limited to a single six-year term. After the 1867
elections, our nation must have at its head someone able to rise above
faction and lead us all. I can think of no one more likely than you to meet
that requirement and, additionally, to meet whatever challenge the
Rivington men may present. I chose you as a commissioner not only for
your undoubted and unmatched abilities, but also to help keep you in the
public eye between now and our election day. One thing I have learned is
that the people forget too soon."
"You are serious," Lee said slowly. He had not been so startled since the day
when General McClellan, relying on a captured set of Confederate orders,
abandoned his usual indolence and broke through the South Mountain gap
to force the battle of Sharpsburg. This surprise was almost as disagreeable
as the other had been. "I have never taken an interest in politics, Mr.
President, nor ever cared to."
"I was trained as a soldier myself, as you know perfectly well. I would ten-a
hundred-times rather have commanded troops in the field than spent my
days wrangling with a recalcitrant Congress over the minutiae of legislation
whose urgency in the situation in which we found ourselves should have
been apparent to anyone this side of raving idiocy, a state to which I
frequently thought Congress was striving to reduce me. But I remained
where fate and duty placed me, and I entertain no doubt that, come the time,
you will do the same."
"May that cup pass from me," Lee said.
"You know what passed with Him who first made that prayer, and how,
when the hour came, He drank the cup to the dregs." The President smiled
his thin, wintry smile. "We've known each other better than half our lives,
since the West Point days when we were youths learning to be soldiers-and
to be men. Now that we are become what once we aspired to be, how may
we fail to recognize that which is required of us?"
"Give me battle, any day," Lee said.
"Battle you shall have, even if it be battle without flags or cannon. That, if
nothing else, this office holds." Lee still shook his head. Davis did not press
him further. The President was not always an adroit politician; his own
passionately clear view of affairs made him have trouble compromising
with those who held differing opinions. But Lee knew Davis had hooked
him as neatly as if he were a crappie in a gravel-bottomed stream. Just as a
crappie would go for a worm, so Lee leaped high when his duty was
invoked. Oh, but the hook was barbed, barbed. "I think I should sooner face
the frying pan than the Presidency," he muttered.
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"Of course," Davis said, taking the privilege of the last word, "for the
Presidency is the fire." With a screech of iron against iron, a deep-throated
bellow from the steam whistle, and a series of jerks as cars came together as
closely as their couplings would allow, the southbound train pulled to a halt.
Nate Caudell wiped his face with his sleeve. With the windows shut, the
passenger car was a stinking sweat-box. With them open, so much smoke
poured in that all the soldiers would have taken on the look of a traveling
blackface minstrel show.
A brakeman stuck his head into the compartment, shouted, "Rivington! All
out for Rivington! Half an hour layover." Mollie Bean got to her feet. "This
here's where I leave." "Good luck to you, Melvin." "Y'all take care now,
you hear?" "We uns will miss you." Whether she was called Melvin or not,
her disguise could not have held up much longer, not from the way the
Castalia Invincibles hugged her as she walked to the front of the car.
Caudell got off at Rivington too, though he intended to board again, for he
was traveling through to Rocky Mount. He told himself he just wanted to
stretch his legs and to get a look at the town from which the marvelous
Confederate repeaters had sprung, but somehow he was not surprised to end
up walking beside Mollie.
"I'm sorry you chose to stop here," he said after a little while.
"On account of what I'm likely to be doin', you mean?" she asked. He felt
himself reddening, but had to nod. Mollie sighed. "Readin" and cipherin' or
no, I couldn't set on anything else that seemed promisin', if you know what I
mean." She looked up at him. "Or was you maybe thinkin' of takin' me
along with you?" Caudell had thought of it, more than once. Being with
Mollie as a soldier, as a companion, made him think differently about herand
in many ways more of her-than any other woman he'd known. But... she
was still a whore. He could not make himself forget that. "Mollie, I-" he
said, and could not go on.
"Nevermind, Nate." She set a hand on his arm. "I shouldn'tve asked you. I
know how things are. I just hoped-Oh, shitfire." The more she sounded like
a soldier, the harder the time he had remembering she was anything else.
She forced animation into her voice: "Will you look at this place? Don't
hardly seem like the same town I left two years ago."
Caudell looked. The train tracks ran down the middle of what passed for
Rivington's main street. The train station was of familiar Southern type,
with clapboard walls, an eight-foot roof overhang on either side to keep off
the rain, and unloading doors for freight and passengers. But everything
was freshly painted and almost pretematurally clean; two Negroes with
long-handled mops went around swabbing off soot as Caudell watched.
Several others picked up trash and tossed it into sheet-metal bins. He'd
never seen anything like that before anywhere.
Just west of the station stood a row of warehouses that were plainly new:
the pine boards from which they'd been built were a bright, unweathered
straw color. Sentries wearing the motley green-brown that was the uniform
of the Rivington men and carrying AK-47s walked a beat around the
warehouses. They looked alert and dangerous, and measured Caudell with
their eyes when he glanced their way. They did not seem much impressed,
which irritated him. What sort of action had they been through?
"Never seen them before," Mollie said; Caudell wondered if she meant the
warehouses or their arrogant guards. She pointed to the corduroyed road
that ran west from the new buildings until it disappeared into the pine
woods that grew almost to the edge of town. "That there's new, too. Wonder
where it goes? Never knew anybody to live out that way."
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"Fancy road to go nowhere," Caudell said; corduroying was expensive.
"Have to ask at the Excelsior." Mollie nodded toward a rather shabby hotel
a few doors down from the station. It hadn't been repainted any time
recently. Neither had the general store, the Baptist church, or the
blacksmith's shop nearby. They seemed reassuringly normal. But beyond
them was another hotel that dwarfed the old Excelsior. It was smaller than
the Powhatan in Richmond, but not much. In bold red letters above the
doorway, its sign said NOTAHILTON. "What's a Notahilton?" Mollie said,
her eyes wide. "That's new since I left. So are the bank and the church by
it."
"Damned if I know what a Notahilton is," Caudell answered. "Shall we
wander over and find out?"
"Wouldn't want you to miss your train, Nate. Fellow said half an hour."
"Just because he said it doesnt make it so. Half an hour train time is usually
an hour and a half if you're not railroading." Despite his confident words,
Caudell glanced back toward the train. The local Negroes certainly seemed
more diligent than the ordinary run of slaves. He supposed he oughtn't to
have been surprised; if the Rivington men worked niggers hard in the army,
they would hardly let them slack at home.
But his eyes opened wide at the vim with which a crew of four black men
hauled wood from a covered rick and tossed it into the tender, at the care
with which another slave, this one hardly more than a boy, oiled the trucks
under each car. In his experience, most niggers would not have bothered to
lift the oil can as they went from one car to the next: they would let a stream
of oil spill onto the ground, though it had cost a dollar and a half a gallon
even before the war. This Negro wasted not a drop; few white mechanics
would have been so fussy.
Caudell stuck his hands in his trouser pockets. One hand closed on his pay
warrant. He took it out. "I know what I can do fast, though: turn this into
money. Let's try your new bank instead of the Notahilton."
"I got one of them, too," Mollie said. "Let's go." FIRST RIVINGTON
BANK proclaimed the gilded sign above the entrance. Three clerks waited
behind a high counter. A guard stood inside. He nodded politely to Caudell
and Mollie. Caudell nodded back, also politely: the guard carried a repeater
with the safety off and wore green-brown. He looked like a combat soldier.
"How can I help you gentlemen?" asked the clerk whom Caudell and Mollie
approached. He had an accent like Benny Lang's. Caudell passed him the
warrant. "Forty dollars? Yes, sir, with pleasure." He opened a drawer on his
side of the counter, took out two big gold coins, a tiny gold dollar, two
silver dimes, and a large copper cent, then passed them across the polished
marble. "Here you are." Caudell gaped at the coins. "Gold?" he said, his
voice a startled croak.
"Yes, sir, of course," the clerk said patiently. "Forty dollars is 990 grains, or
two ounces thirty grains. These are one ounce apiece." He picked up the big
coins, let them ring sweetly against the counter. They were like no coins
Caudell had seen before, with the profile of a bearded man on one side and
an antelope on the other, but below the antelope were magic words: 1 oz.
GOLD,.999 FINE. The clerk went on, "Thirty grains of gold comes to $
1.21, which is your balance here."
"I-never expected gold at all," Caudell said. "Just banknotes." No matter
how big a lie that.999 FINE was, he had to come out ahead on this deal. He
also abruptly understood why the First Rivington Bank needed a guard with
an AK-47.
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The clerk frowned at him. "This is Rivington, sir. We deal properly here,
especially to soldiers." His eyes dared Caudell to challenge him. All at
once, Caudell was convinced his gold was the real thing. He scooped it up.
"Pay me, too." Mollie passed the Rivington man her warrant.
"Twenty-six dollars, Private, makes 643-'k grains, which is..." The clerk
thought for a moment. "A trifle more than an ounce and a third." He took
out another of those one-ounce coins, another one smaller but otherwise
identical-"Here is a quarter-ounce piece."-a gold dollar, three quarters, and,
after another pause for thought, a one-cent piece. "That should do it."
Mollie and Caudell both shook their heads in disbelief as they left the bank.
"Gold," Mollie whispered. "I got me a bit of a stake."
"Me, too," Caudell said. Rivington men might trade gold dollars for
Confederate dollars one for one, but no one else did. Forty dollars in gold
would take him a long way. " Let's go spend some of it, and have ourselves
a drink at mat Notahilton."
"That sounds right good to me," Mollie said. But just then, the steam
whistle let go with a blast that rang through the town. "Oh, goddam." She
kicked at the dirt, began to turn away.
"I guess they mean that half an hour after all," Caudell said regretfully.
Then he had an inspiration: "Tell you what, Mollie: one of these days soon,
you go on into that Notahilton, find out what it's like. Then you write me a
letter and tell me about it. I'll write back; I promise I will. That way we can
stay friends, even if we're far apart."
"Write a letter?" Mollie looked more frightened than she ever had,
marching into battle. "Nate, you learned me some readin', but writin'-"
"You can do it. I know you can. In fact, I'll write you first, so you'll know
where I am; I'm not sure whether I'm going to stay in Nashville or head on
up to Castalia. And I expect to hear back from you, do you understand?" He
did his best to sound like a first sergeant.
"I don't know, Nate. Well, maybe if you do write first, I can try and answer
you back. If you do." If you don't wont to forget you ever knew me the
minute that train rolls out of here, he read in her eyes. He wondered how
many lies she had heard over the years, and from how many men.
"I'll write," he promised. The train whistle wailed a second warning.
Caudell scowled. "They did mean it." He hugged Mollie hard. It would not
have seemed out of place to an onlooker even had she been only a fellow
soldier. Through her shin, though, her small firm breasts pressed against
him. She hugged him, too.
"Good luck to you," he said.
"To you, too, Nate." The whistle wailed again. Mollie pushed him away.
"Go on. You don't want to miss it."
He knew she was right. He turned and trotted toward the train. He didn't
look back until just before he climbed aboard. Mollie was walking, not to
the Notahilton, but into the old Excelsior. He shook his head, stared down at
the dirty parquet floor of the passenger car. The train jerked, began to roll.
Very soon, the bulk of the station hid the hotel from sight-very soon, but not
soon enough.
"Rocky Mount!" the brakeman yelled as the train wheezed to a stop. "Onehour
layover. Rocky Mount!" Page 160
Caudell climbed to his feet. Allison High stood too, held out his hand. "I
wish you well, Nate, and that's a fact," he said.
"Thank you, Allison, and the same to you." Caudell walked to the front of
the car, shaking a few more hands as he went. Allison High sat back down;
he wouldn't get off until Wilson, down in the next county. Caudell jumped
down. Leaving the train for the last time made leaving the army seem real.
He looked around. Save for the sign that told what town it belonged to, the
station might have been cut from the same mold as Rivington's: cut from
that mold, and then left out in the rain for eighty or a hundred years. It was
weather-beaten; two of the windows had empty panes; the decorative
wooden latticework that edged the roof was broken in half a dozen places.
He looked north toward the mound on the far side of the falls of the Tar
River, where Rocky Mount had first begun to grow. He had a clearer view
than he really wanted; the year before, Federal raiders had burnt most of the
cotton mills and cotton and tobacco warehouses that stood between the train
station and the older part of town. Here a wall stood, there a few charred
timbers. The odor of burnt tobacco still hung in the air.
Off to one side lay the fine house that belonged to Benjamin Battle, who
owned the mills. Somehow, it had escaped the flames. Seeing that, Caudell
clicked his tongue between his teeth. "Them as has, gits," he muttered to
himself. He seldom let such uncouth Southernisms pass his lips, but nothing
more refined seemed appropriate.
He walked over to the station. The stationmaster, a tall, thin, dour fellow in
his sixties, peered out at him through one of the glassless panes. They had a
few seconds' staring contest before the stationmaster unwillingly said, "He'p
you, so'jer?"