“Amen,” Liles said. “Next time I’ll save you a paper no matter what, Nate, I promise.”
“You’d better,” Caudell said, mock-fiercely. As he left the general store, he found himself half-delighted Lee had won the election, half-worried because even that victory looked to be bringing trouble in its wake. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. The older he got, the more he wondered if there was such a thing as an unmixed blessing.
Robert E. Lee’s heels made a reassuringly solid sound as he walked down the stairs from the great columned porch of Arlington and onto the lawn. Even the boards of those stairs were new since the war; the old timber, uncared for while the Federals occupied the mansion, had grown dangerously rotten. The lawn, at the moment, was patchy and yellow, but spring would restore its lushness for him.
Someone rode up the path toward Arlington. At first Lee thought it might be one of his sons, but he soon saw it was not. After another few seconds, when he did recognize the rider, his brows contracted in a frown. It was Nathan Bedford Forrest.
He stood stiffly, waiting for the former cavalry general to approach. After their hot words in Richmond, after the bitter campaign, he wondered that Forrest had the nerve to visit him here. He would have liked nothing better than sending his adversary away unheard. Had he been merely Robert E. Lee rather than President-elect of the Confederate States of America, he would have done just that. The good of the country, though, demanded that he give Forrest a hearing.
He even made himself take a few steps toward Forrest, who reined in and dismounted. His horse began cropping the sere grass. Forrest began to raise his right hand, then stopped, as if unsure whether Lee would take it and unwilling to give him cause to refuse. He dipped his head instead, a sharp, abrupt gesture. “General Lee, sir,” he said, then added after a tiny pause, “Mr. President-elect.”
“General Forrest,” Lee said, with the same wary politeness Forrest had used. He was not ready to shake hands with his recent rival, not yet. Seeking neutral ground on which to begin the conversation, he nodded toward Forrest’s horse. “That is’ a handsome animal, sir.”
“King Philip? Thank you, sir.” Forrest’s eyes lit up, partly, perhaps, in relief, partly with a horseman’s enthusiasm. “I rode him in a good many fights. He’s old now, as you’ll note, but he still carries me well.”
“So I saw.” Lee nodded again. Then, because he found no other polite but meaningless questions to ask, he said, “How may I serve you today, sir?”
“I came—” Forrest had to start twice before he could get it out: “I came to congratulate you for winning the election, General Lee.” Now he did hold out his hand, and Lee took it.
“Thank you, General Forrest—thank you,” Lee said with no small relief of his own.
“I’ll do anything I can to make things easy for you as you take over,” Forrest said.
“Will you?” Lee said, all at once suspicious as well as relieved.” After the—unpleasantness which marked the campaign, that is good to hear, but—” He let his voice trail away. Forrest was notoriously touchy; if he was in earnest, no point to stirring him.
But he would not be stirred, not today. He waved his hand. “All that was just business, just trying to put a scare”—he pronounced it skeer—”on you and on the people out there who did the voting, same as I would have on a Yankee general, to get him runnin’.” He waved again, this time encompassing the whole of the Confederacy. “I came close.”
“That you did, sir,” Lee said. “And having come so close, you are most generous to come here now with your support.”
“When it comes to niggers, General Lee, I don’t agree with you still, and I don’t reckon I ever shall,” Forrest said. “But I lost. The whys of it don’t matter. That I got beat is a self-evident fact, sir. If I carried on now, it would be nothin’ but folly and rashness. I wanted to meet you like a man and say that to you straight out.”
Lee saw he meant it. This time, he held out his hand to Forrest, who squeezed hard. Lee said, “The nation owes you a debt of gratitude for taking that view. I hope you will forgive me for saying that I wish more of those who followed you would do likewise. The talk of new secession out of the southwest is deeply troubling to me, and Senator Wigfall has produced more than his share of it.”
“He does go on, don’t he?” Forrest grinned, then sobered. “I tell you what, General Lee. If those damn fools try and leave the Confederacy, I’ll put my uniform back on and whip ‘em into line inside of six weeks. I mean it, sir. Tell it to the papers, or if you’d rather, I’ll tell it to ‘em my own self.”
“If you would do that, General Forrest, I think it would have a very happy effect on all concerned.”
“Then I will,” Forrest said.
“Would you care to come inside and take some coffee with me?” Lee asked. In Richmond, he had ordered Forrest out of his house; now he tacitly apologized.
But Forrest shook his head; he remembered the quarrel, too. “No, sir. I do this for the country’s sake, not yours. I will abide by the vote of the people, but they—and you—have not the power to make me like it. I aim to keep on working against you in every way I lawfully can.”
“That is your right, as it is the right of every citizen. Congress will have to ratify my proposals in order for them to take effect, of course; I anticipate considerable disputation before that comes to pass.” Lee and Albert Gallatin Brown had been going over the list of congressmen and senators returned to office, trying to work out the odds of their favoring the commencement of even gradual, compensated emancipation. He thought his program had a chance of passage; he knew it was far from assured.
Forrest bowed to Lee. “We have been rivals; I reckon we’ll stay rivals. But we’ve both fought for this country. We can work together to keep it whole. That’s what I came to say, General Lee, and now I’ve said it. A good morning to you, sir.” He bowed again, swung up onto King Philip, and rode away.
Lee plucked at his beard as he watched Forrest go. He felt as if a weight had come off his shoulders. Nathan Bedford Forrest was still a political foe, but seemed not to want to remain a personal enemy after all. That suited Lee; political foes, he was. learning, could be dealt with. The casual thought brought him up short—was he in fact turning into a politician in his old age? He stopped to consider the idea carefully. At last he shook his head. His inevitable slide into decay hadn’t yet progressed so far.
Dressed in his Sunday best—which, save for being the newest of his four shirts and three pairs of trousers, was no different from what he wore the other six days of the week—Nate Caudell hurried into the Nashville Baptist church. Once inside, he took off his hat and slid into a place on one of the hard wooden pews. Several people—including the preacher, Ben Drake—sent disapproving looks his way; the service was about to begin. He avoided Drake’s eye as he sat.
Yancey Glover strode importantly to the front of the hall, nodded to the preacher, and waited a few seconds to let everyone notice him standing there. Then the precentor launched into “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The congregation joined in. They had no hymnals; Glover’s big bass voice pulled them through the song. That voice was one of the reasons the church elder had the precentor’s job.
“Rock of Ages” came next, with several more hymns right behind. The congregation warmed up, both physically—a chilly, nasty rain was falling outside—and spiritually. Yancey Glover marched back to his seat. Ben Drake pounded a fist down on the pulpit, once, twice, three times. The preacher was an impressive-looking man of about forty-five, with a full head of wavy gray hair; he’d served a few months as a lieutenant in the Castalia Invincibles, till chronic dysentery forced him to resign his commission.