Starbuck shivered in the rain, his knees drawn up to his chest. He felt utterly alone. So what should he do? The rain dripped monotonously, while behind him a picketed horse stamped the wet ground. The wind was cold, coming up from the settlement with its grim furnace house and rows of dull houses. The furnace illuminated the buildings with a sullen glow against which the tangled trees of the intervening slope were intricately and smokily silhouetted to form an impenetrable tangle of twisted black limbs and splintered trunks. It was a wilderness, Starbuck thought, and at its far side lay nothing but hellfire, and the dark horror of the intervening downward slope seemed a prophecy of all his future life.
So go home, he told himself. It was time to admit that he had been wrong. The adventure was over and he had to go home. He had been made a fool, first by Dominique and now by these Virginians who disliked him because he was a northerner. So he should go home. He might still be a soldier, indeed he should be a soldier, but he would fight for the North. He would fight for Old Glory, for the continuation of a glorious century of American progress and decency. He would give up the specious arguments that pretended slavery was not the issue, and instead join the crusade of righteousness and he suddenly imagined himself as a crusader with a red cross on his white surcoat galloping across the sunny uplands of history to defeat a huge wickedness.
He would go home. He had to go home for his soul’s sake, because otherwise he would stay enmeshed in the tangled dark of the wilderness. He was not yet sure just how he would manage to reach home and, for a few wild moments, he toyed with the idea of seizing his horse and just galloping free of this hilltop, except that the horses were all tethered and Colonel Faulconer, fearing a pursuit by northern cavalry, had insisted on setting sentries who would be sure to stop Starbuck. No, he decided, he would wait till he reached Faulconer Court House and there he would seek an honest interview with Washington Faulconer and confess his failure and his disappointment. He would then ask for help to go back home. He had an idea there were truce boats sailing up the James River and Faulconer would surely help him find a berth aboard one of those ships.
He felt the decision settle in his mind, and also the contentment of a choice well made. He even slept a little, waking with a clearer eye and a happier heart. He felt like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress, as if he had escaped from both Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond and were once again heading toward the Celestial City.
Next day the raiding party reached and crossed the Shenandoah Valley, and the following morning they rode out of the Blue Ridge Mountains under a clearing sky and a warming wind. Scraps of white cloud blew northward, their shadows flying across the green good land. The disappointment of the raid seemed forgotten as the horses scented home and quickened into a trot. The town of Faulconer Court House was spread before them, the copper-coated cupola of its courthouse bright in the sun and the steeples of its churches rising sharp above the blossom-rich trees. Nearer, beside the quick river, the tents of the Legion lay white in the meadow.
Tomorrow, Starbuck thought, he would seek a long talk with Washington Faulconer. Tomorrow he would confront his mistake and put it right. Tomorrow he would begin to straighten himself with man and God. Tomorrow he would be born again, and that idea cheered him and even made him smile, and then he forgot the thought entirely, indeed he let the whole plan of going back to the North slide free of his mind altogether, for there, coming from the Legion’s encampment and mounted on a pale horse, was a stocky young man with a square beard and a welcoming smile, and Starbuck, who had been feeling so lonely and so mistreated, galloped madly ahead to greet his friend.
For Adam had come home.
THE FRIENDS MET, REINED IN, BOTH SPOKE AT ONCE, CHECKED, laughed, spoke again, but were each too full of news and the pleasure of reunion to make much sense of the other. “You look weary.” Adam at last managed to edge in an intelligible remark.
“I am.”
“I must meet Father. Then we’ll talk.” Adam spurred on toward Washington Faulconer who, the failure of his raid apparently forgotten, was beaming with happiness at his son’s return.
“How did you get back?” Faulconer called as his son galloped toward him.
“They wouldn’t let me over the Long Bridge at Washington, so I went upriver and paid a ferryman near Leesburg.”
“When did you get home?”
“Just yesterday.” Adam reined in to receive his father’s greeting. It was plain to everyone that Washington Faulconer’s happiness was entirely restored. His son had come home, and the uncertainties of Adam’s loyalty were thus resolved. The Colonel’s pleasure expanded to include and even to seek forgiveness from Starbuck. “I’ve been distracted, Nate. You must forgive me,” he said quietly to Nate when Adam had gone on to greet Murphy, Hinton and Truslow.
Starbuck, too embarrassed by the older man’s apology, said nothing.
“You’ll join us for dinner at Seven Springs, Nate?” Faulconer had mistaken Starbuck’s silence for pique. “I’d take it hard if you refused.”
“Of course, sir.” Starbuck paused, then bit an unfair bullet. “And I’m sorry if I let you down, sir.”
“You didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t.” Faulconer thus hurriedly brushed away Starbuck’s apology. “I’ve been distracted, Nate. Nothing else. I put too many hopes in that raid, and didn’t foresee the weather. That was all it was, Nate, the weather. Adam, come!” Adam had spent much of his morning meeting his old friends in the Legion, but his father now insisted on showing his son around the whole encampment one more time, and Adam good-humoredly expressed his admiration of the tent lines and the horse lines, and of the cook house, the wagon park and the meeting tent.
There were now six hundred and seventy-eight volunteers in the camp, almost all of them from within a half day’s ride of Faulconer Court House. They had been divided into ten companies, which had then elected their own officers though, as Faulconer cheerfully admitted, a deal of bribery had been needed to make sure that the best men won. “I think I used four barrels of best mountain whiskey,” Faulconer confided in his son, “to make sure that Miller and Patterson weren’t elected.” Each company had selected a captain and two lieutenants, while some had a second lieutenant as well. Washington Faulconer had appointed his own headquarter’s staff with the elderly Major Pelham as his second in command and the egregious Major Bird as his over-promoted clerk. “I tried to rid us of Pecker, but your mother absolutely insisted,” the Colonel confided in Adam. “Have you seen your mother?”
“This morning, sir, yes.”
“And is she well?”
“She says not.”
“She usually improves when I go away,” the Colonel said in a dryly amused voice. “And these are the headquarter tents.” Unlike the bell-shaped tents of the infantry companies the four headquarter tents were large wall-sided ridge tents, each equipped with a groundsheet, camp beds, folding stools, washing bowl, jug and a collapsible camp table which folded into a canvas bag. “That’s mine.” Faulconer gestured at the cleanest tent. “Major Pelham’s is next to me. I’ll put Ethan and Pecker over there, and you and Nate can share the fourth tent. I guess that will please you?” Adam and Ridley had both been appointed as captains, while Starbuck was the lowest of the low, a second lieutenant, and together the three young men formed what the Colonel called his corps of aides. Their job, he told Adam, was to be his messengers, as well as to serve as his eyes and ears on the battlefield. He made it all sound very ominous.
The Legion consisted of more than just the headquarter’s staff and ten companies of infantry. There was a band, a medical unit, a color party, a force of fifty cavalrymen who would be led by a captain and serve as the Legion’s scouts, and the battery of two bronze six-pounder cannon, both twenty years old and with smoothbore barrels that Faulconer had purchased from Bowers Foundry in Richmond where the guns had gone to be melted down and so made into newer weapons. He proudly showed the pair of guns to his son. “Aren’t they marvelous?”<
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The guns were certainly smart. Their bronze barrels had been buffed to a sun-reflecting dazzle, the wheel spokes and rims were newly varnished, while the guns’ accoutrements, the chains and buckets and rammers and wormscrews, had all been variously polished or painted, yet there was something oddly unsettling about the two weapons. They looked too grim for this summer morning, too full of the menace of death.
“They’re not the last word in guns.” Faulconer took his son’s silence for an unspoken criticism. “They’re hardly Parrotts, and not even rifled, but I fancy we can strew a few Yankee corpses across the field with these beauties. Ain’t that so, Pelham?”
“If we can find some ammunition for them, Colonel.” Major Pelham, who was accompanying the Colonel on this inspection tour, sounded very dubious.
“We’ll find ammunition!” Now that his son had returned from the North, the Colonel’s ebullient optimism was wholly restored. “Ethan will find us ammunition.”
“He’s sent none yet,” Pelham answered gloomily. Major Alexander Pelham was a tall, thin, white-haired man whom Starbuck, in the days before the raiding party had ridden north and west, had discovered to be almost perpetually morose. Pelham now waited till the Colonel and his son had ridden out of earshot then cocked a rheumy eye at Starbuck. “The best thing that can happen, Lieutenant Starbuck, is that we never find the ammunition for these cannon. The barrels will probably crack apart if we do. Artillery isn’t for amateurs.” He sniffed. “So the raid went badly?”
“It was disappointing, sir.”
“Aye, so I heard from Murphy.” Major Pelham shook his head, as though he had known all along that such adventurousness would be doomed. He was dressed in his old United States uniform that he had last worn in the War of 1812—a faded blue tunic with washed-out braid, buttons bereft of their gilt and crossbelts made of leather as cracked as sun-dried mud. His saber was a huge, black-scabbarded hook of a blade. He winced as the band, which had been practicing in the shade of the Legion’s meeting tent, started playing “My Mary-Anne.” “They’ve been playing that all week,” he grumbled. “Mary-Anne, Mary-Anne, Mary-Anne. Maybe we can drive the Yankees off with bad music?”
“I like the tune.”
“Not when you’ve heard it fifty times, you won’t. They should be playing marching tunes. Good solid marches, that’s what we need. But how much drill are we doing now? Four hours a day? It should be twelve, but the Colonel won’t permit it. You can rest on it that the Yankees won’t be playing baseball like us.” Pelham paused to spit tobacco juice. He had an almost mystical belief in the necessity of endless drill and was supported in that creed by all the old soldiers in the Legion, and opposed by the Colonel, who still feared that too much close-order drill would dull his volunteers’ enthusiasm. “Wait till you’ve seen the elephant,” Pelham said, “then you’ll know why you should be drilling.”
Starbuck felt his customary response to the idea of seeing the elephant. First there was a pulse of pure fear, as palpable as a chill of liquid pumped from the heart, then there was a surge of excitement that seemed to come from the head rather than the heart, as though sheer resolution could overcome the terror and thus create a vigorous ecstasy from battle. Then came the unnerving knowledge that nothing could be understood, neither the terror nor the ecstasy, until the mystery of battle had been experienced. Starbuck’s impatience to understand that mystery was mixed with a desire to delay the confrontation, and his eagerness with a fervent wish that battle would never happen. It was all very confusing.
Adam, released from his father’s company, turned his horse back toward Starbuck. “We’ll go down the river and have a swim.”
“A swim?” Starbuck feared this activity might be a new enthusiasm in Adam’s life.
“Swimming is good for you!” Adam’s eagerness confirmed Starbuck’s fear. “I’ve been talking with a doctor who claims that soaking in water prolongs life!”
“Nonsense!”
“I’ll race you!” Adam kicked back his heels and galloped away.
Starbuck followed more slowly on his already tired mare as Adam led him around the town on paths he had known since childhood and that led eventually to a stretch of parkland which Starbuck assumed was part of the Seven Springs estate. By the time Starbuck reached the river Adam was already undressing. The water was limpid, tree edged and bright in the spring sunshine. “What doctor?” Starbuck challenged his friend.
“He’s called Wesselhoeft. I went to see him in Vermont, on mother’s behalf, of course. He recommends a diet of brown bread and milk, and frequent immersions in what he calls a sitz-bad.”
“A sitting bath?”
“Sitz-bad please, my dear Nate. It works better in German, all cures do. I told Mother about Doctor Wesselhoeft and she promises me she’ll try each of his specifics. Are you coming in?” Adam did not wait for an answer, but instead leaped naked into the river. He came up shouting, evidently in reaction to the water’s temperature. “It doesn’t really warm up until July!” he explained.
“Maybe I’ll just watch you.”
“Don’t be absurd, Nate. I thought you New Englanders were hardy?”
“Not foolhardy,” Starbuck quipped, and thought how good it was to be back with Adam. They had been apart for months, yet the very first moment they were back together it seemed as if no time had passed at all.
“Come on in, you coward,” Adam called.
“Dear God.” Starbuck leaped into the cleansing coldness, and came up shouting just as Adam had done. “It’s freezing!”
“But good for you! Wesselhoeft recommends a cold bath every morning.”
“Does Vermont not provide asylums for the insane?”
“Probably,” Adam laughed, “but Wesselhoeft is very sane and very successful.”
“I’d rather die young than be this cold every day.” Starbuck scrambled up the bank and lay on the grass under the warm sun.
Adam joined him. “So what happened on the raid?”
Starbuck told him, though leaving out the details of Washington Faulconer’s moroseness on the return ride. Instead he made the foray into something comical, a chapter of errors in which no one was hurt and no one offended. He finished by saying he did not think the war would get any more serious than the raid had been. “No one wants a real war, Adam. This is America!”
Adam shrugged. “The North isn’t going to release us, Nate. The Union’s too important to them.” He paused. “And to me.”
Starbuck did not reply. Across the river a herd of cows grazed, and in the silence the sound of their teeth tearing at the grass was surprisingly loud. Their cowbells were plangent, matching Adam’s suddenly ominous mood. “Lincoln called for seventy-five thousand volunteers,” he said.
“I heard.”
“And the northern papers say that three times that many will be ready by June.”
“You’re frightened of numbers?” Starbuck asked unfairly.
“No. I’m frightened of what the numbers mean, Nate. I’m frightened of seeing America struck down into barbarism. I’m frightened of seeing fools ride yelling into battle just for the joy of it. I’m frightened of seeing our classmen become the Gadarene swine of the nineteenth century.” Adam squinted across the river to where the distant hills were bright with blossoms and new leaf. “Life is so good!” he said after a while, though with a sad intensity.
“People fight to make it better,” Starbuck said.
Adam laughed. “Don’t be absurd, Nate.”
“Why else do they fight?” Starbuck bridled.
Adam spread his hands, as if to suggest there could be a thousand answers, and none of them significant. “Men fight because they’re too proud and too stupid to admit they’re wrong,” he finally said. “I don’t care what it takes, Nate, but we’ve got to sit down, call a convention, talk the whole thing out! It doesn’t matter if it takes a year, two years, five years! Talk must be better than war. And what’s Europe going to think of us? For years we’ve been
saying that America is the noblest, best experiment of history, and now we’re going to tear it apart! For what? For states’ rights? To keep slavery?”
“Your father doesn’t see it as you do,” Starbuck said.
“You know Father,” Adam said fondly. “He’s always seen life as a game. Mother says he’s never really grown up.”
“And you grew up before your time?” Starbuck suggested.
Adam shrugged. “I can’t take matters lightly. I wish I could, but I can’t. And I can’t take tragedy easily, at least not this tragedy.” He waved toward the cows, evidently intending those innocent and motionless beasts to stand for the spectacle of America rushing headlong into warfare. “But what about you?” He turned to Starbuck. “I hear you’ve been in trouble.”
“Who told you?” Starbuck was instantly embarrassed. He stared up at the clouds, unable to meet his friend’s gaze.
“My father wrote to me, of course. He wanted me to go to Boston and plead with your father.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.”
“But I did. Except your father wouldn’t receive me. I heard him preach though. He was formidable.”
“He usually is,” Starbuck said, though inwardly he was wondering why Washington Faulconer could possibly want Adam to plead with the Reverend Elial. Was Faulconer wanting to be rid of him?
Adam plucked a blade of grass and shredded it between his square, capable fingers. “Why did you do it?”
Starbuck, who had been lying on his back, suddenly felt ashamed of his nakedness and so rolled onto his belly and stared down at the clover and grass. “Dominique? Lust, I suppose.”
Adam frowned, as if the concept was unknown to him. “Lust?”
“I wish I could describe it. Except that it’s overwhelming. One moment everything is normal, like a ship in a calm sea, then suddenly this enormous wind comes from nowhere, this enormous, exciting, howling wind and you can’t help it, but just sail madly off with it.” He stopped, dissatisfied with his imagery. “It’s the sirens’ song, Adam. I know it’s wrong, but you can’t help it.” Starbuck suddenly thought of Sally Truslow and the memory of her beauty hurt so much that he flinched.