I further assume that need might be for ever, but I surmise it is only the fear of his family that keeps him in Virginia. Perhaps, if you can spare the time from your endeavors,’ and Adam had smelt the rancor in his father’s choice of that word, ‘you might inform Nate’s family that their son is penitent, humiliated and dependent on charity, and so gain for him a token of their forgiveness?’
Adam had wanted to visit Boston. He knew the city was the most influential in the North, a place of learning and piety where he hoped to find men who could offer some hope of peace, but he had also hoped to discover some peace for Nate Starbuck to which end he had gone to the Reverend Elial Starbuck’s house, but the Reverend, apprised of Adam’s business, had refused to receive him. Now Adam had listened to his friend’s father preach and he suspected there was as little hope for America as there was for Nate. As the venom had poured from the pulpit Adam had understood that so long as such hatred went unassuaged there could be no compromise. The Christian Peace Commission had become irrelevant, for the churches of America could no more bring peace than a candle flame could melt the Wenham Lake in midwinter. America, Adam’s blessed land, must go to war. It made no sense to Adam, for he did not understand how decent men could ever think that war could adjudicate matters better than reason and goodwill, but dimly and reluctantly, Adam was beginning to understand that goodwill and reason were not the mainsprings of mankind, but instead that passion, love and hate were the squalid fuels that drove history blindly onward.
Adam walked the plump ordered streets of residential Boston, beneath the new-leafed trees and beside the tall clean houses that were so gaily decorated with patriotic flags and bunting. Even the carriages waiting to take the worshipers back to their comfortable homes sported American flags. Adam loved that flag, and could be made misty-eyed by all it stood for, yet now he recognized in its bright stars and broad stripes a tribal emblem being flaunted in hate, and he knew that everything he had worked for was about to be melted in the crucible. There was going to be war.
Thomas Truslow was a short, dark-haired stump of a man; a flint-faced, bitter-eyed creature whose skin was grimy with dirt and whose clothes were shiny with grease. His black hair was long and tangled like the thick beard that jutted pugnaciously from his dark-tanned face. His boots were thick-soled cowhide brogans, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, filthy Kentucky jeans and a homespun shirt with sleeves torn short enough to show the corded muscles of his upper arms. There was a heart tattooed on his right forearm with the odd word Emly written beneath it, and it took Starbuck a few seconds to realize that it was probably a misspelling of Emily.
‘Lost your way, boy?’ This unprepossessing creature now challenged Starbuck. Truslow was carrying an antique flintlock musket that had a depressingly blackened muzzle pointing unwaveringly at Starbuck’s head.
‘I’m looking for Mister Thomas Truslow,’ Starbuck said.
‘I’m Truslow.’ The gun muzzle did not waver, nor did the oddly light eyes. When all was said and done, Starbuck decided, it was those eyes that seared him most. You could clean up this brute, trim his beard, scrub his face and dress him in a churchgoing suit, and still those wild eyes would radiate the chilling message that Thomas Truslow had nothing to lose.
‘I’ve brought you a letter from Washington Faulconer.’
‘Faulconer!’ The name was expressed as a joyless burst of laughter. ‘Wants me for a soldier, is that it?’
‘He does, Mister Truslow, yes.’ Starbuck was making an effort to keep his voice neutral and not betray the fear engendered by those eyes and by the threat of violence that came off Truslow as thick as the smoke from a green bonfire. It seemed that at any second a trembling mechanism could give way in the dark brain behind those pale eyes to unleash a pulverizing bout of destructiveness. It was a menace that seemed horribly close to madness, and very far from the reasoned world of Yale and Boston and Washington Faulconer’s gracious house.
‘Took his time in sending for me, didn’t he?’ Truslow asked suspiciously.
‘He’s been in Richmond. But he did send someone called Ethan Ridley to see you last week.’
The mention of Ridley’s name made Truslow strike like a starving snake. He reached up with his left hand, grabbed Starbuck’s coat, and pulled down so that Starbuck was leaning precariously out of his saddle. He could smell the rank tobacco on Truslow’s breath, and see the scraps of food caught in the wiry, black bristles of his beard. The mad eyes glared into Starbuck’s face. ‘Ridley was here?’
‘I understand he visited you, yes.’ Starbuck was struggling to be courteous and even dignified, though he was remembering how his father had once tried to preach to some half-drunken immigrant longshoremen working on the quays of Boston Harbor and how even the impressive Reverend Elial had struggled to maintain his composure in the face of their maniacal coarseness. Breeding and education, Starbuck reflected, were poor things with which to confront raw nature. ‘He says you were not here.’
Truslow abruptly let go of Starbuck’s coat, at the same time making a growling noise that was half-threat and half-puzzlement. ‘I wasn’t here,’ he said, but distantly, as if trying to make sense of some new and important information, ‘but no one told me how he was here either. Come on, boy.’
Starbuck pulled his coat straight and surreptitiously loosened the big Savage revolver in its holster. ‘As I said, Mister Truslow, I have a letter for you from Colonel Faulconer …’
‘Colonel is he, now?’ Truslow laughed. He had stumped ahead of Starbuck, forcing the Northerner to follow him into a wide clearing that was evidently the Truslow homestead. Bedraggled vegetables grew in long rows, there was a small orchard, its trees a glory of white blossom, while the house itself was a one-story log cabin surmounted by a stout stone chimney from which a wisp of smoke trickled. The cabin was ramshackle and surrounded by untidy stacks of timber, broken carts, sawhorses and barrels. A brindled dog, seeing Starbuck, lunged furiously at the end of its chain, scattering a flock of terrified chickens that had been scratching in the dirt. ‘Get off your horse, boy,’ Truslow snapped at Starbuck.
‘I don’t want to detain you, Mister Truslow. I have Mister Faulconer’s letter here.’ Starbuck reached inside his coat.
‘I said get off that damned horse!’ Truslow snapped the command so fiercely that even the dog, which had seemed wilder than its own master, suddenly whimpered itself into silence and skulked back to the shade of the broken porch. ‘I’ve got work for you, boy,’ Truslow added.
‘Work?’ Starbuck slid out of the saddle, wondering just what kind of hell he had come to.
Truslow snatched the horse’s reins and tied them to a post. ‘I was expecting Roper,’ he said in impenetrable explanation, ‘but till he comes, you’ll have to do. Over there, boy.’ He pointed at a deep pit which lay just beyond one of the piles of broken carts. It was a saw pit, maybe eight feet deep and straddled by a tree trunk in which a massive great double-handed ripsaw was embedded.
‘Jump down, boy! You’ll be bottom man,’ Truslow snapped.
‘Mister Truslow!’ Starbuck tried to stem the madness with an appeal to reason.
‘Jump, boy!’ That tone of voice would have made the devil snap to attention, and Starbuck did take an involuntary step toward the pit’s edge, but then his innate stubbornness took command.
‘I’m not here to work.’
Truslow grinned. ‘You’ve got a gun, boy, you’d better be prepared to use it.’
‘I’m here to give you this letter.’ Starbuck took the envelope from an inside pocket.
‘You could kill a buffalo with that pistol, boy. You want to use it on me? Or you want to work for me?’
‘I want you to read this letter …’
‘Work or fight, boy.’ Truslow stepped closer to Starbuck. ‘I don’t give a sack of shit which one you want, but I ain’t waiting all day for you to make up your mind on it either.’
There was a time for fighting,