Jordan County (35 page)

“Which one of them is it?” Mrs Jameson asked.

‘It’ was the third of six unmarried daughters of a Bristol lawyer, a widower who had risen by his bootstraps, so far and no further; he was only relatively successful — in the light of his opportunities, that is — and though he was not downright poor, he was considerably poorer than a man with six unmarried daughters had any right to be. There was a good deal of surprise and even more of outrage when the engagement was announced. The various disappointed mothers, remembering the way Clive had moved among them, attentive
and pleasant, yet always with such grave assurance and always a bit removed — like a bachelor prince or, worse, a wealthy shopper in a bargain basement — considered themselves tricked. They took such solace as they could in reminding each other that his mother had been “practically a barmaid, after all.”

But this died down and at length it even disappeared, the more quickly since the girl, who was dark-haired, with an earnest, heart-shaped face, saw her family after the wedding only to nod to from her carriage as they waved from porch or boardwalk. After her return from the European honeymoon tour, having moved into the big new house on Solitaire, she never saw them at all. This way, there was something grand and impersonal about her triumph. They did not resent it, neither the rivals-at-large nor the sisters, as they certainly would have done if she had continued to move among them, in which case her every phrase and gesture would have been interpreted as signaling her contempt. Even the mothers of rejected girls soon lost their resentment, recovered their equilibrium, so to speak, and were off on other pursuits. She made her success seem so conclusive, so inevitable in the light of all that followed; they could not imagine her in a different position.

The big new house was a wedding present from Isaac and Mrs Jameson, particularly the latter; it was her idea. The day Clive told them he was going to be married she told Isaac to send to New Orleans for an architect. By now she had had to relax her efforts to keep her house the finest on the lake. Bigger, grander ones, whose pillars were not of concrete but of fir or even marble, were being built all down the eastern shore, houses which the old house could not hope to equal by any amount of remodeling or addition. The architect came at once, a big man with frilled shirtfronts, a goatee, and hands that were always in motion while he spoke. He drew the plans and landscaped the grounds, settling down for a year in residence, and immediately after the marriage ceremony, four months later, presented the bride and groom with a list of
appointments and furnishings for them to purchase during the tour of Europe.

When they returned at New Year’s, after a six-month absence, the shell of the house was up. It had three stories and forty rooms, sixteen-foot ceilings and walls a little less than two feet thick. The bricks, kiln-dried to a warm, rosy color that delighted the architect, had been made on the place, from a clay deposit near the site of the Choctaw village Isaac had found deserted and burnt when he stayed here alone for three days in the spring of 1820; it had been a pottery center in Indian times, and plowmen still turned up shards of it in the fields every spring. Then the furnishings and appointments began to arrive in crates from Europe, half a dozen wagon-loads a week, addressed in outlandish calligraphies to
Mr
— or
M
or
Hr
or
Sr
; they had done the full circuit —
Clive Jameson
(sometimes with an
Esq
) “
Solitaire
,”
near Ithaca Mississippi, U.S.A.
As fast as they arrived they were unloaded and uncrated and installed.

In June the architect returned to New Orleans. “I leave you the best I’ll ever do,” he said, looking back at the house as the carriage pulled off for the landing. He had been there a year, and though other commissions were offered him up and down the lake, as well as in other parts of Jordan County, he wanted to get back to city life; he wanted other amusements besides poker, at which he lost consistently until he quit, and hunting, in which he took no part, and Negroes who butted heads with bulls until the bulls cried out in pain. He went home.

The house was complete, inside and out, two soaring wings flanking a low entrance with squat columns. It was set well back, with a lawn giving down to the road; from the veranda you saw the sun set bloody across the lake. Clive and his wife moved in. This was Solitaire now, not the smaller house where Isaac and Mrs Jameson still lived, and nothing in the region could rival, let alone equal it.

Now things moved fast. The young couple’s first son, conceived
in Europe, was born in July. Then two more came in rapid succession, in June and May of the following two years. They were growing boys, the oldest already out of skirts, when the war came. The younger Mrs Jameson saw her husband only between campaigns; at other times she heard of him as everyone was doing, as the South and the North were hearing of him, the Starborn Brigadier, as the French peasants heard of Bayard or the Hebrews the Angel of Death. When he did come home — and he returned infrequently at first, apparently to gather corn; he would drop back a hundred miles with his cavalry brigade to harvest crops — it was like eating and breathing and couching with an avatar or a thunderbolt. At table he wore an aura of battle fury and shell glare, like brimstone, as bakers at home disseminate an atmosphere of flour and baking bread.

That was their marriage, up to the midpoint of the war, when the fighting was still decked with plumes and roses. At the time the house was building, Isaac — past seventy, nearing eighty — could look back on a life divided neatly into two unequal compartments, the first containing fifty years of wildness and the second containing twenty-odd — nearly thirty — years of domesticity, with marriage like an airtight door between them. Now, though he did not know it and could have done nothing about it anyhow, he was moving toward another door which led to a third compartment, less roomy than either of the other two, with a closer atmosphere, even stifling in the end, and more different from both of the previous two than those two had been different from each other. In a sense beyond longevity he led three lives in one.

Since 1850, the year of the Compromise, planters in the lake region had been talking disunion. As a topic for discussion it had crowded out the weather and even the cotton market. Seated on their verandas or in their parlors, clutching juleps in their fists, they blustered. They had built their fine big neo-Tidewater houses, displaying them to their neighbors and whoever passed along the lakeside road, each as a sort of patent
of nobility, a claim to traditions and ancestry which they for the most part lacked. Insecurity had bred a semblance of security, until now no one questioned their right to anything at all. When Lincoln was nominated in 1860 they took it as a pointed insult. Not that they believed he would be elected; no; “Never in all this world,” they said. “Those abolitionist scoundrels just want to flaunt this ape in our faces for the purpose of watching our reaction. Yes. Well, we’ll show them something in the way of action they havent bargained for, if they dont watch out. Let them be warned,” they added solemnly.

They admired the spirit and emulated the manner of the Texas senator, an ex-South Carolinian with a reputation as a duelist, who said to his Northern fellow-senators, smiling as he said it though not in friendliness at all: “The difficulty between you and us, gentlemen, is that you will not send the right sort of people here. Why will you not send either Christians or gentlemen?”

“Wigfall knows how to treat them,” the planters said. That was the Texas senator’s name. “A few more like him and Preston Brooks and we’d have this hooraw hushed.”

But Isaac, who had fought under Andrew Jackson at New Orleans and followed his politics ever since, believed in the Union in much the same way as Jackson had believed in it. He thought sectional differences could be solved better within the Union than outside it. At first he would say so, with the others watching him hot-eyed over the frosted rims of goblets. Later he saw that it was no use. Like much of the rest of the nation, they were determined to have violence as the answer to some deep-seated need, as actual as thirst.

Clive took little or no part in these discussions which went on all around him. He had come home from the Institute with a soldier’s training, but now he was busy learning the life of a planter; the slate-gray uniforms and the tactics texts had been folded away in a trunk with the unblooded sword. He was closer to his mother than he was to Isaac, and closer now to his wife than he had ever been to either of his parents.
He was quiet, indeed somewhat vague in his manner, with gentle eyes; his way now was very little different, in fact, from the way in which he had moved among the Bristol matrons and fanned their hopes with his almost casual attentiveness. It was as if, here too, he knew his worth, and what was more it was as if he knew that this state, too, was temporary. He loved horses and spent much of his time in the stables. Behind the softness of his eyes and voice there was something wild that matched the wildness of horses, and this was where he most resembled his father.

Then Lincoln was elected — the planters had said it would never happen; “Never in all this world,” they said — and South Carolina seceded, followed within two weeks by Mississippi and then the others among the Deep South fire-eater states. That was in January; again there was a speed-up of events. Moderation was gone now, what little had remained. Clive even heard from the Institute that the chalkdusty Professor Jackson, a Mexican War veteran himself, had stood up in chapel and made a speech; “Draw the sword and throw away the scabbard!” he had cried. It did not sound at all like him, but anything was believable in these times. Two months later, a month before Sumter was fired on, Clive rode off as captain of a cavalry troop formed by the lake planters and their sons. With their wagons, their spare mounts and body servants, they made a long column; their ornaments flashed in the sunlight.

Nearly all of them returned within four months, not as a unit but in straggling twos and threes. It was the common end of all such ‘elite’ organizations; they had not expected war to be like that. The excitement lasted not even as long as the glitter of their collar ornaments. Once it was gone they thought they might as well come home. They had seen no fighting anyhow. It was mostly drill and guard mount, patrolling encampments while the infantry slept, moving from place to place, then back again. The glory had departed, and so did they. Some of them stayed at home through the next two years, under the twenty-Negro clause of the Conscription Act, which
provided that any man who owned as many as twenty slaves would be needed at home to work them, producing goods and feedstuffs for the armies. One or two went to Europe, expanding their horizons through the war years; you saw them in Heidelburg and Paris, wearing the garb of students, bitter and dangerous, quick to engage in duels — or anyhow fistfights — defending the honor of the Confederacy in sidewalk café arguments. Most of them, however, after the original sally (which had been mainly social, so to speak) returned to the army with sobered judgments. They fought hard and well and came to manhood, those who survived.

So it was with Clive. He came home, his uniform and saber sash a bit faded from the weather. Isaac came out to meet him in the yard, looking somehow more military in broadcloth than his son looked in uniform. They stood looking at each other. “How did it go?” Isaac asked him.

“It went all right, considering. There just wasnt anything to do.”

“You wanted it another way. Was that it?”

“I didnt want it the way it was. We disbanded piecemeal, man by man. They would come and say they were leaving. Then theyd leave. Finally there were less than a dozen of us; so we left too. We made it official.”

They stood facing each other in the hot summer sunlight; First Manassas had been fought two weeks ago. Clive was smiling. Isaac did not smile. “And what are you going to do now?” he asked. “Stay here and farm the place?”

“I might.”

“So?”

“I might.…”

“So?”

“No, papa. I’ll go back. But different.”

“So,” Isaac said.

He stayed ten days, and then he left again. This time he went alone. Within two years Clive Jameson was one of the sainted names of the Confederacy. It began when he came out of Donelson with Forrest, escaping through icy backwater
saddle-skirt deep. Then he distinguished himself at Shiloh, leading a cavalry charge against the Peach Orchard and another at Fallen Timbers after the battle; Beauregard cited him as one of the heroes of that field. By the time of Vicksburg, in the summer of ’63, newspapers were beginning to print the story of his life. Southern accounts always mentioned his having been born the year the stars fell; Starborn, one called him, and the others took it up. Poetesses laureate in a hundred backwoods counties submitted verse in which they told how he had streamed down to earth like a meteor to save the South; they made much of the flaming wake. Northern accounts, on the other hand — like the Bristol matrons at the time when his engagement to the lawyer’s daughter was announced — made much of the fact that his mother had tended bar in her father’s taproom.

He never wrote. Though for the first two years he would drop back occasionally to glean corn for his horses and men, once the Vicksburg Campaign was underway they heard of him only as everyone was doing, by word of mouth and in the papers and in the cheap, laudatory books that were beginning to pour from presses all over the country. They did not see him again until late in ’63 when he was wounded at Chickamauga, his fifth but his first really serious wound, and was brought home in an ambulance to recover. He was still a young man, just past his thirtieth birthday, but he looked older than his years. It was as if the furnace of war had baked the flesh of his hard, handsome face, which by now was tacked in replica on cabin walls, badly reproduced pen-and-ink sketches clipped from newspapers, and mooned over by girls in attic bedrooms. The softness had gone from his eyes and voice. He did not resemble himself; he resembled his pictures. Having him at Solitaire was like having a segment of some actual blasted battlefield at hand. His mother, after an hour with him, came away shaking her head. “What have they done to my boy?” she asked.