Chapter Five

Despite Gentry's indifference to it, dawn appeared on the horizon as usual. Standing in front of the Pulaski House, he watched a lamplighter snuff out a gaslight nearby and then move on down the street until the man was but a small outline bobbing in the hazy glow of each lamp before it was extinguished. A dilapidated buggy rolled by, followed by another with a half-dozen children in the back all dressed in the shabby finery of their church-going clothes. He had forgotten it was Sunday. He watched a steady procession of wagons, carts, and buggies roll past then shifted his attention to nothing in particular. Where would a man go who had just discovered that if his young wife may be crippled for life? An unwelcome interjection in Gentry's head added ...if she survived the fever of infection.

Andy couldn't go to his family. There wasn't a Kearney left in Chatham County, his father and most of his brothers being dead in the war, and his mother gone to her Missouri kinfolk after the Kearney plantation was destroyed. Ella had tried to console Andy, assuring him Honor would be fine, but being doubtful herself, the pair only added to each others depression. When Andy and little Elizabeth weren't nearby, Ella was inconsolable—even when he made it clear that they wouldn't leave for Texas until they knew Honor would be all right and was healing. She had only stared at him as if she hadn't hard a word he'd said. "It's my fault! It's my fault!" she has cried, and nothing he could say convinced her otherwise.

Gentry searched the town one last time for Andy then headed for Greenpoole. As much as he wanted to find him, he was relieved that the young hot-head wasn't in town—there were too many Union soldiers in Savannah and Andy's hatred for "the vile Yankee presence in the South" had grown since Honor's accident. At the fork in the road, Gentry stopped, and then turned off toward the one place he hadn't looked—the deserted Kearney plantation.

Scattered heaps of brick and ash were the only reminders of the Kearney's once stately home. Where a barn and stable once stood, there lay only piles of charred rubble. All that remained of the once fine-looking old plantation was a row of slave's cabins toward the rear of the property. Gentry rode up to each cabin and, without dismounting, looked into the open windows. The freed occupants had left long ago and only chunks of broken pottery and old rags remained. A horse neighed behind the last hovel, and Gentry slid from the saddle as Andy called out.

"I haven't hung myself, Gent ... if that's what you come to find." He sat on the ground, leaning against a dead hickory stump, a small campfire at his feet, and a bedroll laying open nearby. He tossed Gentry a bottle. "Pour yourself a nip or two. I got another where that one come from."

Gentry flipped the cork away and turned up the bottle. "Worked up a hell of a thirst looking for you, Andy."

Andy's bloodshot eyes rolled aside to stare at nothing. "She's gonna die, Gent. My Honor's gonna die. She been feverish for a week now, talking out of her head. She's gonna die."

Gentry sat on the ground across from him, and took another drink before handing the bottle over. "It's the laudanum Doc Boles gives her, Andy ... it'll keep her half unconscious and talking gibberish for awhile."

She'll never walk again. It'll kill my Honor if she can't ever walk. You know her, Gent. Honor has only two speeds—fast and faster. She'll die if she can't get where she wants to go on her own two legs."

"Don't tell me I know your wife better than you do, old pal," Gentry said, smiling. "The Honor I know won't waste time moaning over what was and what is. She'd be damned mad if she thought that's what you were doing."

Andy threw the empty bottle into the fire, sparks and embers swirling around them. "Those Goddamned Yankees...!"

"It was an accident, Andy. Those men were sickened by what happened. They saved her life. She would have bled to death without their help." Gentry poked the fire with a stick, and watched Andy pull the cork on another bottle. "Ella and Miz Bea are worried about you, Andy. Won't put you out none to show up at Greenpoole today, if only to make them feel better. What if Honor wakes and asks for you? Little Elizabeth—she needs you more than ever n-"

"Okay. Okay!" Andy's face reddened, and he looked past Gentry rather than at him. "Look Gent, I 'bout got this place sold. I can't keep up with the taxes anymore." He looked this way and that, as if taking a final inventory of the place. "Not much left of it, but there's a good pine woods back yonder and my buyer wants. He's coming first thing in the morning. I'm waiting so I can show him around the place. I just want to be by myself 'til then, understand?"

Gentry rose and started to leave, but turned. "She's not dead, Andy, so stop acting like she is. Would you love Honor any less if she couldn't walk? She'd still be Honor. Do you think she'd let a pair of injured legs take away the joy that's always made her so special? Hell no! So pull yourself together and be the man she believes in."

Andy slowly raised his head and ran his hands through his cap of wiry blond curls. "She was special, wasn't she?" His voice grew hoarse. "Man ... did she love to dance! Why, just that same morning before those Yankees—!" He gritted his teeth, trembling, and then took a deep breath. "Just that same morning, we danced all round that big old empty house, laughing, chasing each other ... dancing like there was no tomorrow...." His head fell to his chest, his shoulders shaking.

"Honor is special, Andy, not was. How 'bout I keep you company tonight, friend? I haven't camped out under the stars in a long time."

Without looking up, Andy shook his head, and waved him away.

Gentry paused long enough to squeeze Andy's shoulder, and then left.

* * *

The next morning, Gentry sought Ella out in Honor's room, from which she had rarely emerged. He found her at the window, her eyes shadowed but tearless at last. He rested his hands on her shoulders, and pressed his lips lightly to her crown of platinum hair. She did not move, and with his cheek pressed to hers, he too gazed out the window at the headstones that stood in neat rows at the end of what was once Greenpoole's rose garden. He knew her thoughts, and it pained him to see her torturing herself, reliving her parents' death and that of her and Faircloth's son, the little boy she often spoke of, as did Adam.

"Are the children still asleep?" she said.

"Like kittens."

"...and Andy, did you find him?"

"He's at his family's old place waiting for a buyer—he's selling."

"Selling? Today? But that Yankee sergeant came back yesterday and paid for the wood they forgot to pay for when-" she clenched her eyes a moment, "and he told Meshach he and his wagons were going to the Kearney place this morning. He said they had contracted with Andy to clear ten acres of timber. Why would he do that if he was selling?"

Gentry tried not to hurry. He said maybe Meshach had misunderstood, and then he kissed her cheek and left.

* * *

At the fork in the road, Gentry saw fresh hoof prints and three sets of wagon tracks leading off toward the Kearney place. He kicked his mount into a crazed run.

Around a bend in the road, he saw the wagons five hundred yards ahead and heard the distant squeaking of wheels mixed with the low drone of Negro voices bantering back and forth as the entourage rolled onto the property near the old slave quarters. Then, as speedily as an axe splits a piece of kindling, a blood-chilling yell exploded above the clatter, as Andy burst from the cabin, pistols blazing ... his mouth tore open in that eternal scream of battle reviled so by Northern veterans of the war. Almost in that same instant, a dozen rifles and pistols cracked again and again until their target lay, bloodied and still, his body half-hidden in a gently rippling patch of wildflowers. A soldier on one of the wagons clutched his arm while the man next to him, the driver, slumped dead over the dash. The Sergeant, who had helped stem Honor's bleeding, stepped from his horse when he saw Gentry. Gentry jerked his mount to a halt and did the same, thinking the Sergeant about to approach him, but the man took only a step then slumped to his knees and fell on his face, dead. Men from the third wagon jumped down and ran from body to body.

"Six dead, including one nigger who didn't hit the ground fast enough," one of them cried. "That son-of-a-bitching Confederate bastard makes seven!"

* * *

With Andy's gory body wrapped in a piece of canvas provided him by the Union soldiers, Gentry rode home to Greenpoole with his small brother-in-law cradled in his arms like a child. Andy's crazed plot to kill Yankees was testament to the madness of a war that, though ended, was still being fought in the hearts and minds on both sides, more so in the South than anywhere else. The notion was that time was supposed to heal all wounds, but Gentry had a feeling that the wounded face of humanity in the South would show its ugly side more and more rather than less. Civil war—non military, but even more treacherous in its hatred—would fester into an underlying puss of evil that would seep over the land, both North and South, far into the future.

Gentry's black eyes looked neither left nor right, as he steadied Andy's lolling head against his shoulder and tried not to think how many long months must now pass before Ella nursed Honor back to health, if she lived, and past the sorrow of loosing her husband. Only then would he finally be able to gather his little family and leave this senselessness existence behind.