Pleasants said, “She was a finer Christian than I can ever hope to be, so I am sure of it as well. But it took four big strong miners to keep me from leaping into the grave after her. Without her, the world was cold and empty and not worth living in. After Fort Sumter, my aunt Emily asked if I’d ever thought of enlisting in the army. I took her up on it: she must have thought it would help me forget. That was partly my reason, I suppose.”
Caudell knew he had not finished. “What was the rest?”
“If you must know, Nate, I hoped I would be killed. What better way to be set free from my sorrow and pain and uselessness? I lived, as you see, but you seemed a gift from God that day in Rocky Mount. I seized on any excuse not to go back to Pottsville, as you may imagine.”
“Whatever your reasons were for staying here in North Carolina, I’m glad you did. Life goes on. It’s the oldest thing in the world to say, but it’s true. If nothing else can, going through a war the size of ours will teach you that. At camp the last night after Gettysburg—” It was Caudell’s turn to have trouble continuing. So many friends had fallen in that futile charge, but he and his fellow survivors had to carry on as best they could.
Henry Pleasants nodded. “I do know that, but I know also that the words are easier to speak than to live. Moving on toward six years now that Sallie’s gone, yet the memory of her pierces me still. I would have spoken of her to you before, but—” He tightened his lips, blew air out through them. “It still hurts. I’m sorry.”
“I don’t blame you.” As pleasants had before, Caudell waved to the fields and the fine farmhouse. “She’d be proud of what you have here.” Caudell hesitated, wondering if he should say what had sprung into his mind. He decided to: “And if she was like a lot of Northern women, I reckon she’d be proud of the way you’re running this farm with free labor, too.”
“I thank you for that, truly I do. It can’t have come easy, not from a North Carolina man. But you’re right—Sallie was strong for abolition, likely stronger than I was then. I don’t think I could have hoped to meet her in the world to come if I’d bought Negroes to work this place.”
Caudell only grunted. He reached for the whiskey jug. More and more these days, he leaned against slavery himself. But he would not say that out loud, not yet, not even to a close friend who sprang from the North. If word he had such notions ever got around, he might be lucky to lose only his job. He finished his drink, then said, “Show me the inside of the house, why don’t you?”
“I’d be glad to.” Pleasants also emptied his glass, then led Caudell in through the open kitchen door. Hattie looked over her shoulder at him from the little tin tub in which she was washing the dishes. The furniture in the big sitting room was country-made, and therefore cheap, but looked comfortable: low chairs and a sofa, all with the seats of undressed calfskin. Hand-hewn shelves full of books lined one wall.
A washroom with a tin tub on feet and several storage rooms took up the rest of the ground floor. “Bedrooms are upstairs,” Pleasants said: “one for me; one for Israel, who works more around the house than in the fields; one for my Irishmen; and one for the two local boys. Hattie and Tom and Joshua sleep in the overseer’s cabin out back. I think they find that very funny and very satisfying; I know I would, in their shoes. There used to be a row of slave huts out there, too. I’ve knocked down every one of them.”
“It’s your farm, Henry. Do you get the work out of your people that an overseer could with a slave gang?”
“I certainly believe so, given what some of my neighbors tell me they expect from their Negroes. The two Irishmen are capital workers and the free blacks good enough. The ones with whom I’ve had the greatest difficulty are the local white men, if I may tell you that without causing offense. I’ve had to let several of them go; they will not work steadily for hire, and think the very idea smacks of turning them into niggers, as one of them said.”
“A lot of white folks in the South are like that,” Caudell said. “If they have to work at tasks slaves normally do, they feel as if they are slaves themselves,”
“But that’s wrong, don’t you see?” Pleasants said earnestly. “Keeping slaves degrades all labor, free and slave alike, and there’s nothing wrong with labor in itself. But when even a good many of your artisans are slaves, where’s the prod for a white man to learn a skill? Your rich planters here are very rich indeed; I’ll not deny that for a moment. But your poor are poorer than they are in the United States, and have fewer choices open to them to improve their lot. Where is this country of yours—country of mine now, too—going?”
“I don’t think we worry so much about going somewhere as folks do up North,” Caudell said. “Most of us are just content to stay where we are.” Throughout the war, All we want is to be left alone had served as a Confederate rallying cry.
“But the world keeps changing, whether you do or not,” Pleasants pointed out. “You can’t keep walls up forever—look at Admiral Perry’s trip to Japan.”
Caudell made a wry face and held up his hand. He suspected—he was virtually certain—his friend was right. That didn’t mean he wanted to admit it, or even to talk about it very much. “Let us finish getting back on our feet after the war and we’ll do pretty well for ourselves,” he insisted.
“All right,” Pleasants said pacifically, seeing he had irked his friend. Still, he did not abandon the argument: “The war’s been over for a couple of years now, Nate, and the world’s not in the habit of waiting.”
Josiah Gorgas’s round face beamed like the sun. “I am truly delighted you could visit the armory on: such short notice, General Lee.”
“When you sent word yesterday that you had something worthy of my consideration, Colonel, I naturally made it a point to come investigate at once,” Lee answered. “Your performance, both in the war and since, gives me every confidence in your judgment. Your note, however, I found mysterious. What precisely am I here to consider?”
The Confederate ordnance chief walked out of his office, returned a moment later with a pair of repeating rifles. “These,” he said proudly.
He held one of them out to Lee, who took it and said, “I have become moderately familiar with the AK-47 over the past couple of years, and this—” His voice trailed away as he examined the weapon more closely. When he spoke again, it was without sarcasm. “This rifle appears different in certain small ways from those to which I have become accustomed. What have we here, Colonel?”
“A copy of the AK-47 manufactured here at the armory, sir. Two copies, as a matter of fact.”
“Oh, how excellent,” Lee said softly. He worked the charging handle of the rifle Gorgas had given him. The smooth, well-oiled sniick! took him back to the tents northwest of Orange Court House and to the day he first heard that sound. He looked along the barrel. The Confederate gunsmiths had substituted a simpler sight for the calibrated one which normally graced an AK-47. “Have you tested these weapons as yet, Colonel?”
“Yes, sir,” Gorgas said. “We have successfully duplicated the repeating action of their models. When fired with cartridges furnished by the Rivington men, they also shoot about as accurately and with recoil similar to those models. Though trials have as yet been limited, they appear sturdy enough.” His eyes flicked away from Lee as he said that. He remembered the cavalry carbines which had proven as dangerous to their users as to the enemy, then—