Джон Джейкс: North and South

Brett took those remarks with outward calm, yet the strange light and the tremor heightened her uneasy state as she and Billy set out for the hilltop overlooking the three brick furnaces of Hazard Iron. It was a splendid evening, cloudless and warm. Thousands of stars were visible, breathtakingly bright from horizon to zenith, except where their glow was muted by phosphorescent light veils.

A peculiar acrid odor came drifting over the top of the hill they were climbing. The smell was borne on a thin, nearly invisible smoke. "What's burning?" she asked as they reached the summit, both slightly out of breath. They stood surrounded by thick clumps of laurel, the blooms white in the darkness.

Billy sniffed. "Don't know but it doesn't seem far away. Just down there. Wait here; I'll go see."

He scrambled down through more of the laurel. The blowing smoke thickened somewhat, and the strange, scorched odor increased. He felt the crater before he saw it; the heat washed against his face. Finally, with the help of the starlight, he perceived it — a pit nearly twelve feet across, black in the side of the hill. He could not see the meteorite itself, but he knew it was there.

"Nothing to fret about," he said when he returned to the crest. "The shooting star, or a piece of it, struck the hill."

She sheltered in his arms, trying to conceal her anxiety and her sense of isolation. Of course George and Constance always did their best to make her feel at home. She enjoyed the company of their children, and caring for them gave her something to do. Yet she had not really adapted to life in Pennsylvania, to the valley, its people, or their ways. The psalmist said the Lord protected the stranger, but she wasn't sure about that.

And now she could no longer contain her feelings.

"Billy, I'm frightened."

"Of the war?"

"Yes, and frightened of your leaving. I'm frightened of not knowing where you are or whether you're safe. I'm frightened of the townspeople and the way some of them look at me accusingly because I'm a Southerner. I'm frightened of everything. I'm so ashamed to admit that, but I can't help it!"

Her voice sounded faint, lacking the strength he always expected from her. Well, he was just as scared as she was. He had no idea where the Army would post him.

He did have a fair idea of what sort of duty lay in store, though. Engineers tore down the trees, prepared the roads, and built the pontoon bridges on which great armies advanced. Engineers went ahead of all the regular troops and were usually first within range of enemy guns.

"Everything's so uncertain," she was murmuring. "There's so much hate, so much joy at the prospect of killing. Sometimes I hardly see how any of us can survive."

"If we love each other enough, we can survive anything. So can our families. So can the country."

"Do you honestly believe that?"

"Yes, I do. Once when I was feeling low, George helped me by doing this." He broke off a sprig of laurel and put it in her hand. "The laurel thrives where other plants die. Mother always believed our family's like the laurel, and I expect yours is too. Strong enough, because there are a lot of us who love each other to live through anything."

She looked at the sprig with its small white flower, then tucked it into a pocket of her dress "Thank you."

When he bent to kiss her face, he tasted her tears; but her voice did sound stronger.

"As soon as I know where I'll be stationed, and if it's possible to send for you, I will. We'll get through this all right."

She turned, kissed him again. "Oh, I love you, Billy Hazard."

"I love you, Brett. That's why we'll get through."

After another long kiss, she turned once more and rested comfortably with her back against his chest. They watched the stars while the spring wind gusted across the summit of the hill. The laurel tossed and murmured. Billy had spoken his hope, not his certainty. He knew full well the hope was fragile.

The darkness proved fragile, too. They faced away from the sprawl of Hazard Iron, but even so they soon grew conscious of its light all around them, a strengthening red glow that seemed to tinge the whole river valley. The lamps of the town grew dim behind it; some faded altogether.

Billy didn't want to look around or even acknowledge the existence of the factory, but it was unavoidable. The sanguinary glare from the three furnaces washed out the stars. He heard men shouting, working through the night in the smoke and the fire, to the earsplitting sound of steam engines strained to the limit.

He shut his eyes a moment. It didn't help. Scarlet light flowed over his wife's hair and shoulders. The vagaries of the wind surrounded them with smoke and fumes from the mill. The valley and the world seemed to fill with the noise of the great machinery hammering on, turning out the first of tons of iron for armor, for the Union, for war. The wind blended the smoke from Hazard's with that from the hillside where the meteorite had fallen, burning away the laurel as if it had never been.

Slavery brings the judgment of heaven upon a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this.

North and South is the first of three projected novels about a group of Americans caught up in the storm of events before, during, and after the Civil War.

Some would argue that the Old West is the essential American experience. It is probably the most romanticized. But for many others, the central experience of the still-unfolding story of our republic remains the War Between the States.

As Richard Pindell of the State University of New York wrote in an article on Gone with the Wind , it is, first and foremost, "entirely our war." Its causes reach back beyond Jefferson to the first white speculators who trod our shores. Its effects reverberate onward to the nineteen-fifties, sixties, seventies, and eighties like a storm that refuses to surrender its fury.

Out of the primary issues of slavery and secession there came glory, misery, and myth. Robert Penn Warren has said the war gave the North its treasury of righteousness and the South its great alibi. It also gave American blacks, if not freedom in fact, then at least the legal basis for freedom. To American families on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line it gave an estimated 600,000 dead.

Historians say the war marks our national coming of age. A brief period of two decades taught us more about ourselves and American society than we had learned in all the years since the arrival of the first colonists. More, perhaps, than we cared to know.

And yet we remain fascinated with the period. We refight its great battles in books and articles, classrooms and discussion groups. We ponder its cautionary lessons or ignore them, and see its central issues still spilling blood in our streets. It is this power, this sometimes tragic outreach of past events, that attracted me to the subject, as it has attracted so many other writers and scholars.

Some interesting reactions have attended the preparation of this book. At a party not long after the subject was announced, a woman asked — and rather testily, I must say — "How can a Yankee presume to come down South and write about us ?"

The last word bothered me. I wanted to reply that I thought of myself as an American, not a tub thumper for a particular region or cause. But I tried to give her a better answer: "The same way any professional writes about any period he didn't directly experience. By studying, walking the ground, trying to extend a storyteller's imagination into the minds and hearts of characters." So this may be a good place to comment on the book's historical content.