Джон Джейкс - Heaven and Hell

Rain fell on Washington through the night. Shortly before daybreak on May twenty-third, a Tuesday, George Hazard woke in his suite at Willard's Hotel. He rested a hand on the warm shoulder of his wife, Constance. He listened.

No more rain.

That absence of sound was a good omen for this day of celebration. A new era began this morning, an era of peace, with the Union saved.

Why, then, did he feel a sense of impending misfortune?

George slipped out of bed. His flannel nightshirt bobbed around his hairy calves as he stole from the room. George was forty-one now, a stocky, strong-shouldered man whose West Point classmates had nicknamed him Stump because of his build and his less-than-average height. Gray slashed his dark hair and the neat beard he'd kept, as many had, to show he had served in the army.

He padded into the parlor, which was strewn with newspapers and periodicals he'd been too tired to pick up last night. He began to gather them and put them in a pile, taking care to be as quiet as possible. In the second and third bedrooms, his children were asleep. William Hazard III had turned sixteen in January. Patricia would be that age by the end of the year. George's younger brother, Billy, and his wife, Brett, occupied a fourth bedroom. Billy would march in today's parade, but he'd gotten permission to spend the night away from the engineers' camp at Fort Berry.

The papers and periodicals seemed to taunt George for his sense of foreboding. The New York Times , the Tribune , the Washington Star , the most recent issue of the Army and Navy Journal all sounded the same triumphant note. As he created the neat pile on a side table, the phrases leaped up:

Though our gigantic war is but a few days over, we have already begun the disbandment of the great Army of the Union ...

They crushed the Rebellion, saved the Union, and won for themselves, and for us, a country ...

The War Department has ordered to be printed six hundred thousand blank discharges on parchment paper ...

Our self-reliant republic disbands its armies, sends home its faithful soldiers, closes its recruiting tents, stops its contracts for material, and prepares to abandon the gloomy path of war for the broad and shining highway of peace ...

Today and tomorrow were to be celebrations of that: a Grand Review of Grant's Army of the Potomac and Uncle Billy Sherman's roughneck Army of the West. Grant's men would march today; Sherman's coarser, tougher troops, tomorrow. Sherman's Westerners sneered at Grant's Easterners as "paper collars." Perhaps the Westerners would parade the cows and goats, mules and fighting cocks they'd brought to their camps along the Potomac.

Not all of the men who went to war would march. Some would lie forever hidden from loved ones, like George's dearest friend, Orry. George and Orry had met as plebes at West Point in 1842. They had soldiered together in Mexico, and had preserved their friendship even after Fort Sumter surrendered and their separate loyalties took them to different sides in the conflict. But then, in the closing days, Orry met death at Petersburg. Not in battle; he fell victim to the stupid, needless, vengeful bullet of a wounded Union soldier he was trying to help.

Some of the young men made old by the war still tramped the roads of the South, going home to poverty and a land wasted by hunger and the fires of conquering battalions. Some still rode northbound trains, maimed in body and spirit by their time in the sinks that passed for rebel prisons. Some from the Confederacy had vanished into Mexico, into the army of the khedive of Egypt, or to the West, trying to forget the invisible wounds they bore. Orry's young cousin Charles had chosen the third path.

Others had ended the war steeped in ignominy. Chief among them was Jeff Davis, run to earth near Irwinville, Georgia. Many Northern papers said he'd tried to elude capture by wearing a dress. Whatever the truth, for certain elements in the North prison wasn't enough for Davis. They wanted a hang rope.

George lit one of his expensive Cuban cigars and crossed to the windows overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. The suite offered a fine view of the day's parade route, but he had special tickets for a reviewing stand directly across from the President's. With care, he raised a window.

The sky was cloudless. He leaned out to let the cigar smoke blow away and noticed all the patriotic bunting on the three- and four-story buildings fronting the avenue. Brighter decorations were at last replacing the funeral crepe that had hung everywhere after Lincoln's murder.

A scarlet band of light above the Potomac River basin marked the horizon. Vehicles, horsemen, and pedestrians were beginning to move on the muddy avenue below. George watched a black family — parents, five children — hurry in the direction of President's Park. They had more than the end of the war to celebrate. They had the Thirteenth Amendment, forever abolishing slavery; the states had only to ratify it to make it law.

A clearing sky, a display of red, white, and blue, no more rain — with such favorable portents, why did his feeling of foreboding persist?

It was the families, he decided, the Mains and the Hazards. They had survived the war, but they were mangled. Virgilia, his sister, was lost to the rest of the family, self-exiled by her own extremism. It was particularly saddening because Virgilia was right here in Washington, although George didn't know where she lived.

Then there was his older brother, Stanley, an incompetent man who had piled up an unconscionable amount of money through war profiteering. Despite his success — or perhaps because of it — Stanley was a drunkard.

Matters were no better for the Mains. Orry's sister Ashton had vanished out in the West after being involved in an unsuccessful plot to overthrow and replace the Davis government with one that was more extreme. Orry's brother, Cooper, who had worked in Liverpool for the Confederate Navy Department, had lost his only son, Judah, when their homebound ship was sunk off Fort Fisher by a Union blockade squadron.

And there was his best friend's widow, Madeline, facing the struggle to rebuild her life and her burned-out plantation on the Ashley River, near Charleston. George had given her a letter of credit for forty thousand dollars, drawn on the bank in which he owned a majority interest. He'd hoped she would ask for more; most of the initial sum was needed for interest on two mortgages and to pay federal taxes and prevent confiscation of the property by Treasury agents already invading the South. But Madeline had not asked, and it worried him.

Even at this early hour, the horse-and-wagon traffic on the avenue was heavy. It was a momentous day and, if he could believe the sky and the soft breeze, it would be a beautiful one. Then why, even after isolating his anxieties about the two families, could he not banish the feeling of impending trouble?

The Hazards ate a quick breakfast. Brett looked particularly happy and excited, George thought with a certain envy. In a few weeks, Billy planned to resign his commission. Then the two of them would board a ship for San Francisco. They'd never seen California, but descriptions of the climate, the country, and its opportunities attracted them. Billy wanted to start his own civil engineering firm. Like his friend Charles Main, with whom he'd attended West Point — both inspired by the example of George and Orry — he wanted to go far from the scarred fields where American had fought American.