Varina(48)
Along the way the boys heard rumors spreading that the entire treasury—a million dollars in gold and silver bars from the several mints and also canvas bags packed heavy with floor sweepings, fingernail parings of silver and gold—waited on the platform to be loaded onto a railcar. And that the president and his cabinet were fleeing south with the treasure, leaving the capital looted and burned out so that the Yankees and also the inhabitants would be left with nothing. Other people claimed the president’s wife had already left with most of the treasure days ago.
BY THE TIME THE CADETS rolled into the train station, they found a mob ruling the platform, dark-minded and globbing together in cohorts, talking loud and vicious. Two trunks sat by the rail lines and treasure hunters beat open the locks with their pistol butts and pulled out suits of men’s clothes and some big underpants and socks. The cadets had been dipping from the gutters themselves and had just blown up a goddamn full-size side-wheel steamship, and they were heavily armed. So they had achieved a certain mood, under which the opinions of their elders factored small.
Firelight from burning buildings lit everything around the station lurid. Brick walls stood bloody red, washed over with black shadows and flashing yellow from explosions rising in the sky over toward Tredegar ironworks. The train waited at the platform. It stubbed off short—only a black locomotive and a wood car and two passenger cars and a stock car and one blue boxcar at the end. Men loaded half a dozen horses into the stock car, and they clattered up the ramp with their ears back and yanking against their lead lines.
The train appeared to be waiting on something or somebody, either the treasure, if it wasn’t already gone, or the officials of the government, or both. Pressure built up in the boiler and then periodically whooshed away in clouds of steam that broke white against all the hell colors lighting that particular instant in history.
Ryland said, I believe if I was hiding treasure, I’d put it in the stock car. Let robbers fight the horses to find it.
Bristol said, I’d put it at the bottom of the wood car.
About then, carriages pulled up. Four or five of them. All in a hurry, the president climbed out, looking sick and skinny, his face the color of ham fat. He went without a hat, and for a man his age, his hair flowed admirably back from his temples. He visored his bad eye with a hand and looked around at the fires and the torches. He lifted his nose and whiffed smoke in the air. He looked tragic and also like he might toss off an impromptu speech about sacrifice and the holy Constitutions—ours and theirs—both documents identical except for a paragraph or two having to do with slaves. Secretary of State Judah Benjamin, balding, plump, and almost jolly, followed him with a fat stub of cigar between his teeth. A few elder cabinet members hustled from carriage to car, looking stunned as fish just pulled out of water into sunshine and air. Davis looked at the mob and at the cadets in what appeared to be confusion.
Jeers broke out. Hecklers sang improvised songs with repetitious thumping rhythms suitable for drunks. Such as the tune to “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” but chanting about how they’ll hang Jeff Davis from a sour apple tree instead of the business about John Brown’s mouldering body. Hard to say which version claimed worse lyrics.
The world fell apart. Fire blazed everywhere and walls tumbled down. And yet, to a degree, the night felt a lot like a party. Ryland reached Bristol a full bottle of Cuban rum he had confiscated along the way, and they traded swigs.
Davis hurriedly climbed the stairs to the passenger car, and Bristol noticed as he lifted his foot to the first step what a pretty pair of low boots he wore.
A remnant delegation of slaves—three men and a woman lugging a baby on her hip—shifted bags from the carriage to the passenger car and then went to the boxcar and threw their own carpetbags inside and climbed in behind them.
Benjamin followed Davis onto the passenger car. He looked delighted by the chanting, yelling crowd—amused, as if he might break into applause at the unexpected entertainment. He doffed his hat, and then hustled up the steps.
After the big men disappeared through a door, the mob gathered strength and yelled death threats at Davis and called Benjamin every epithet for Jew in the English language, at least all such words known in the South. Moment by moment they built nerve to loot the train with support from gutter whiskey and the hortatory skills of angry drunks.
Lights in the passenger car stayed unlit, windows black. The train stood still. Some problem to do with the locomotive kept it from rolling away into the night. Steam built and released and rebuilt, and the train stayed still.
The cadets were a gang of boys unused to liquor in quantities greater than a raw taste of cheap rum on the tongue, all of them splinter-thin from a forced regimen of only two meals a day, mostly shreds of off-smelling salt pork and hardtack wetted with false coffee. Sailor food, the officers called it. The boys just called it shit. On the rare occasion they ate vegetables, their insides rebelled and they suffered the runs for days, their bowels working in the manner of a strong woman wringing water out of a dishrag. But, on the other hand, they were left calling their own orders. So they hung together arrogant on the rail platform, claiming a space between the mob and the train. They carried their newfound rifles and shotguns slung over their shoulders on straps, revolvers holstered on their slim hips or just shoved down their belts. They were not in a patient mood for outside opinions on how this next few minutes ought to play.
The mob roiled within itself until it found leaders.