“I got money o’ my own,” Melvin Bean said, drawing himself up with prickly pride.
“As may be. Use this anyhow, please, if for no other reason than as a token of my thanks for having brought this volume to my notice,.” He took Bean by the elbow, steered the private to the door, and pointed in the direction of the dining room. “Go ahead, please, as a favor to me.” Still shaking his head, Melvin Bean walked slowly down the hall.
Lee went back to his chair, picked up the Picture History of the Civil War, and plunged in. He was not normally an enthusiastic reader; when he’d come back to Richmond from Augusta, Georgia, he’d had half a dozen chapters to go in Quentin Durward, and those six chapters remained unread to this day. But he held in his hands a volume he had never imagined he would be able to examine. He eagerly seized the chance.
This Bruce Catton’s style was less Latinate, less ornate, more down-to-earth than Lee would have expected from a serious work of history. He soon ceased to notice; he was after information, and the smooth, flowing text and astonishing pictures made it easy to acquire. He had to remind himself that Cat ton was writing long after the war ended and that, to the historian, it had not gone as he himself remembered.
But the odd tone ran deeper than that. Cat ton plainly saw chattel slavery as an outmoded institution which deserved to perish; to him, the Emancipation Proclamation gave the United States the moral high ground for the rest of the war. Lee had trouble squaring that with what Andries Rhoodie had said about the hatred between black and white which was to come.
The sun sank; the only light left in Lee’s room was the yellow pool beneath the gas lamp. He never noticed—he had reached 1864, and all at once the world he knew turned sideways. He studied Grant’s campaign against him, and Sherman’s against Joseph Johnston, and nodded most soberly. That relentless hammering used Northern resources simply to club the Confederacy into submission. It was the sort of attack he had feared most, and one which only the Rivington men’s AK-47s could have disrupted.
He winced when he read of John Bell Hood taking Johnston’s command in front of Atlanta. Hood had the fierce visage of a lion and boldness to match. At the head of a division, he was a nonpareil. But for boldness, though, he lacked all qualification for army command. He would attack whether attack was called for or not…Over the next few pages, Lee read what had come—what would have come, he made himself remember—of that.
He also took far more careful note of the political maneuvering in this other version of the war than he would have before his own not-altogether-voluntary entry into politics. He was unsurprised to discover Lincoln reelected; Andries Rhoodie had told him of that. But Rhoodie had also spoken of Lincoln treating the Confederate States as conquered provinces after their defeat, and that proved nothing but a lie: even with the war all but won, Lincoln had tried to get the Federal Congress to compensate Southern slaveholders for the animate property they were losing. Past reunion and emancipation, Lincoln had intended to impose no harsh terms upon the states which had lost their war for independence.
Absurdly, rage filled Lee at Rhoodie’s untruth. A man who knew the future might at least have the courtesy to report it correctly, he thought. That Rhoodie had lied argued he and America Will Break had their own political agenda, one which they aimed to impose on the Confederacy. Given their support for Nathan Bedford Forrest and all their efforts against the Negro, the nature of that agenda was easy enough to deduce: the permanent dominance of the white man. But by the tone of the Picture History of the Civil War, white supremacy was an outmoded idea in their own day, just as the course of history would have led Lee to believe. Did that make them maverick heroes, or simply mavericks?
The question being unanswerable for the time being, Lee put it aside and kept reading. He pursed his lips and tightly clenched his jaw when he came upon a picture of a wrecked locomotive in the burned-out ruins of the Richmond and Petersburg Railroad depot. A few pages farther on, he encountered himself, old, grim, and defeated, standing on the back porch of the rented house in which he and his wife had lived in Richmond. It was uncanny, seeing himself in a photograph for which he’d never posed. As eerie was the photograph on the facing page of his farewell order to the’ Army of Northern Virginia, unmistakably in the handwriting of Charles Marshall, and as unmistakably nothing Marshall had been compelled by fate to write.
He read of Lincoln’s second inaugural address and of the broad peace Lincoln hoped to gain, and, a page later, he read of the bullet that had slain Lincoln on Good Friday evening in 1865. He clicked his tongue between his teeth at the thought of a President dying at an assassin’s hands. Then, all at once, he shivered as if suddenly seized by an ague. He had seen Lincoln in Louisville that Good Friday, had listened to him plead without avail for Kentucky to stay in the Union, had even spoken with him. He shivered again. In defeat in the world he knew, Lincoln had wanted to martyr himself for the United States. In the other world, where there was no need for it, he had been made a martyr in the hour of his greatest triumph.
At last, Lee closed the Picture History of the Civil War. His joints creaked and protested when he got up from his chair: how long had he been sitting, rapt? He took out his watch. He blinked—it was after midnight.
“Dear God, I’ve entirely forgotten Melvin Bean!” he exclaimed. He hoped the young soldier had bought supper as well as dinner with his money, hoped even more that he was still here—perhaps stretched out asleep on a couch in the hotel lobby—to be questioned. Lee opened the door, hurried down the hall to find out.
To his dismay, he found no gray-clad soldier taking his ease in the lobby, or at the bar. No waiter recalled serving supper to any such person. Scowling, Lee headed for the front desk. Bean had said he had money; maybe, just maybe, he’d taken a room here.
The desk clerk regretfully spread his hands. “No, sir, nobody by that name has checked in today.” He spun the registration book on its revolving stand so Lee could see for himself. Then he turned to the bank of pigeonholes behind him. “This came in for you this afternoon, though, sir.”
Sure enough, the envelope he held out bore Lee’s name in a sprawling scrawl. Lee accepted it with a word of thanks, slit it open. When he saw what was inside, his breath went out in a surprised hiss.
“Something wrong, sir?” the clerk asked anxiously.
After a moment, Lee said, “No, nothing wrong.” He took the twenty dollars out of the envelope, returned the bills to his pocket, and slowly walked back to his room.
“What can I do for you today, General Lee?” Andries Rhoodie asked, more than ordinary curiosity in his deep, rough voice. “I tell you straight out, I’d not expected you to ask me for a meeting.”
“Nor had I expected the need for my doing so to arise,” Lee answered. “I find, however, that you and your colleagues have been less than completely candid with me and with others in the Confederacy concerning the course events would have taken had America Will Break not intervened on our behalf—or perhaps on your own behalf would phrase it more accurately.”
“Haw!” Rhoodie fleered laughter. “You find that, do you? I tell you now, what I have said before is the truth. And even if it weren’t, how the devil would you know?”
Lee sat beside a small marble-topped table, covered at the moment with an antimacassar borrowed from the couch. He pulled the cloth aside to reveal the Picture History of the Civil War. “By this means, sir.”
Rhoodie’s air of disdainful arrogance crashed in ruins; for the first time since he’d known the Rivington man, Lee saw him altogether at a loss. Rhoodie lost color, gave back a pace, sank heavily into a chair. His mouth opened, but no sound came forth. After a few seconds of gathering himself, he tried again: “How did you come by that book?”