Varina(72)
From Greensboro on past Charlotte, nothing but confusion and bad weather, blown-up railroad bridges and muddy roads ahead, Sherman coming from the south and Grant coming from the north to rub out the remainders of the Confederacy. Before long, what was left of the Confederate government and army traveled by horseback and wagon train. Day by day, rank meant less, and even the officers lost interest in giving and taking orders. The powerful men became too consumed with the deluge sweeping over their own personal worlds to worry about controlling underlings like Ryland and Bristol, who floated on, rode the tidal wave.
They made themselves useful to Judah Benjamin and General Basil Duke, who had both so fully let go of rank that the boys weren’t sure how to address either of them. Benjamin had occupied almost every position of power in the government short of president. Call him Mr. Attorney General, Mr. Secretary, Mr. Senator and he would laugh and say, Oh that’s all gone. Call me by my first name. A band of outlaws should travel as equals. So that’s what the boys called him. Mr. Judah. He traveled down the country roads the most cheerful outlaw since Robin Hood. His trunk must have been at least half full of fat Cuban cigars—big, dark coronas. From midday until bedtime he always had one fuming, and he gave them away like penny candy to keep the Yankees from taking them if he was captured. He said he was Havana bound and would restock there.
Similar attitude with Basil Duke. He looked like an actor playing the part of a young general. He was smart and handsome and knew it, but he didn’t go around puffed up and stiff. He cracked jokes and shared tobacco and rum, and said outright that he thought it a good thing to abolish slavery. Said, Great God, imagine if we’d had the sense to abolish it fifty years ago. He shrugged off the title of general with the ease of a man who expects life to be unpredictable and defines himself anew almost daily.
When Bristol called him General Duke, he said, The country that issued my military rank is dead and gone. Call me mister or sir.
—Sir Duke? Ryland said.
—Damn, that does have a ring to it. But we’re all near the same footing now. So I’ll call you boys Bristol and Ryland, and you call me whatever you want.
—Yes, sir, Bristol said.
Every morning, sunshine or monsoon, Basil Duke would get up at gray dawn and exit his tent looking fresh, groomed, clean collar on his shirt. Everybody else wandered around bleary, disheveled, weary, and not wanting to keep doing what they’d been doing—which was break camp, load up, and slog down the road another day, clothes dirty and hair greased tight to their heads. The first miles of the day, Basil Duke talked about how well he had slept and how much he admired the landscape and enjoyed watching it unspool. He always said, A bad day on the road beats a good day sitting at home doing nothing.
Every night Basil Duke sat by the campfire like he was posing, finding the most flattering angle of light for a painting. He always had exactly three drinks no matter how late the night went. The younger officers—and anybody else who cared to listen, including Bristol and Ryland—gathered around, and Basil Duke led the discussion. Late, after the older men had bedded down, they laid odds that changed night by night as to which of the politicians would escape. Everybody bet that Judah Benjamin would be the first captured, and everybody but Basil Duke bet Davis would escape. But Duke didn’t believe the president wanted to escape. What Davis wanted most was justification, to defend himself in court and be hanged if he lost.
Odds on Judah Benjamin changed considerably when he took a disguise out of his big trunk—a beat-up brown suit and a gray felt hat with holes in the crown, and a dirty shirt without a collar. He took off alone with two half-dead mules and the most broken-down wagon they had. This happened around Washington, Georgia. He said he aimed for the Gulf, and if he met Federal troops, he planned to use his Louisiana French to act like a lost trader trying to get back to New Orleans—pretend he didn’t know a word of English. When he left, he lifted his beat hat from his head, and around the fat, black cigar in his mouth, he said, So long, desperadoes. See you in Havana or Paris.
All that time President Davis seemed strange, aloof from reality. Some nights he lurked at the edge of the campfires, righteous and doomed, skeletal with the firelight on his face and deep shadows under his cheekbones. He muttered constantly about the Constitution, its precious phrases. Saying how he and the other hard men left over from Lee’s and Johnson’s surrenders would head west and become horseback guerrillas, fighting the Federals—not battles but running skirmishes, covering many miles and several days of desert and prairie. Light and fast. Or he might form an alliance with Maximilian, emperor of Mexico, and return with a vast army to sweep across the South and retake the homeland. Or wear the Federals down over time, make it a hundred-year war. Last resort, the true believers could go to South America and carve cotton fields out of jungle and create a new republic, where the original Constitution and full property rights would rule.
Basil Duke whispered among the dwindling remainders, said that they accompanied Davis only to help him escape, not out of delusion that the war would continue deep into the future.
By the time they reached Washington, Georgia, the remains of the treasury had fallen into Basil Duke’s care. He acted as if it were slightly humorous, a burden. He made no secret that it had been represented to him as somewhere between five thousand and five hundred thousand dollars. Who’d lately had time to count? It took the form of gold and silver and other assets, including the Tennessee State School Fund and the old ladies of Richmond jewelry donation program, and it traveled in leather shot bags, green canvas bank money bags, little metal casks and big wooden casks, even money belts stuffed fat as an old gentleman’s paunch with coins.