Love, Come to Me(76)

“I’m sure that’s not true. I’m sure he has integrity and honor—”

“Like hell he does!” Heath finished the whiskey and poured another with a careless tilt of the bottle. Lucy had never seen him drink so much in such a short amount of time.

“What did you argue about?”

Suddenly all the fight and anger in him seemed to ebb, and he shook his head, taking another swallow of the biting liquor. His fingers were wrapped tightly around the glass. Lucy remained silent, sitting down on the edge of the bed and watching him as he drank the rest of the second glass of whiskey. He was in pain. She was helpless to do anything for him until he let down some of the walls. Ask me to hold you . . . here are my arms, ready to wrap around you. Here is my heart . . . just ask.

Heath stood by the window, silent in his self-imposed isolation. He took a deep breath and shook his head again, lifting his shoulders in a helpless shrug. “Today . . . ,” he started, and the rest of his words just dried up, unwilling to be voiced. He strode over to the whiskey bottle, but Lucy made it there before him and laid her fingers across his outstretched hand.

“Don’t have any more,” she said, looking up at him. He saw something in her eyes that made him release his hold on the bottle. Slowly he withdrew his hand and went back to the window, but not before she had seen the flash of misery in his expression. She was shaken by the urgency of her need to comfort him. “What happened today?”

“Bad news.”

“Reconstruction?” She couldn’t think of anything else that could have affected him so strongly.

“What else?”

“Heath, don’t make me guess. Tell me.”

“We had finally made some progress. Until today, the federal government was loosening its control over the South. They decided to start with Georgia . . .”

“Yes,” she hurried in to fill the silence, “I know a little about it. Georgia and a few other states were readmitted to Congress.”

“And the military rule was lifted. At last. And I thought the rest of the South would be allowed to follow. And then the war would really be over. No more soldiers in the streets. No more arbitrary rules and military commissions. We would be given back our land. We would get our rights back as citizens . . . rights we’re entitled to.” Heath sighed and leaned his forehead against the window frame.

“But now that Georgia is free of federal control, all of that will happen.”

“No,” he replied tersely. “Today Georgia dismissed at least half of the state legislature. The government took it as an open act of rebellion.”

“Oh, Heath . . . oh, no.” She stared at him in disbelief. “They’ll come down so hard on the state—”

“They already have. Georgia’s been thrown out of Congress, and it’s been put under military control again. Do you know how far back that puts the whole South?”

“I know that the state legislature must have had some idea of what would happen if they dismissed all those people.”

“They’ve had all these changes rammed down their throats too fast to swallow! They need to be eased into it . . . they . . . they’re trying to hold onto their pride. For years they’ve had no voice, no control over what’s happened to them. I’m not excusing what they did, but they need to have some kind of say about the decisions that affect them. Georgia is just as much a part of this country as Massachusetts or New York, and Georgians deserve the same rights. And they’ll never get them. Every time the federal troops withdraw, something like this is going to happen, and they’ll be put back under the national government’s thumb. It’ll never be over.”

“Heath—”

“I left because I couldn’t stand to see it,” he continued, ignoring her attempt to break in. “The frustration . . . I could feel it wherever I went. It was in the air we breathed; there was no way to get away from it. We were beaten . . . but there were a few hopes . . . maybe it would be all right. Maybe we could get on with rebuilding our lives . . . maybe all that Lincoln said about lending a helping hand to the South was going to be true—”

“If he had lived—”

“But he didn’t, and we got Johnson, an incompetent fool, and Grant, who doesn’t give a damn about anything so long as no one bothers him about his stock manipulations. The minute the war was over, thousands of Northerners came down to the South to loot and scavenge, and they’ve done it for years, over and over again. We’re the only Americans who’ve ever lost a war and been occupied by the enemy. There’s only so long you can hold still for that before you start to fight back in the only way you know how. And it doesn’t matter if it’s a good way or not, just as long as you’re doing something—”

“I know,” Lucy said quietly. “I know that you want to speak in defense of your people, and that you want to help each side understand the other. But you can’t expect Damon to be a voice for the South.”

“I didn’t ask that of him. I only wanted a moderate editorial. Nothing radical—”

“And he refused to write it?”

“Oh, he wrote it all right. He couldn’t be more in agreement with the federal government, and he damn well said so.”

“Did you try to reason with him?”