The grocer looked up over the rims of his half-glasses. A grin split his whiskery, wrinkled face. “Good to have ye back with us, Nate! Tell me what the war was like.”
Filthy, boring, hungry, terrifying past any nightmare. How to explain all that to the eagerly waiting old man, to show him the stuff from which his imagined glory was distilled? At his first bump against it, Caudell saw the problem was as impossible as squaring the circle. “Another time, Mr. Liles,” he said gently. “For now, have you any writing paper?”
“Matter of fact, I do,” the storekeeper answered. “Got in some a few months back, and it don’t move what you’d call quick. Even got envelopes, if you need one.” He looked over his glasses at Caudell again, this time slyly. “You find yourself a sweetheart up in Virginny?”
“No.” Caudell shook his head at the very idea, no matter how many times he’d bedded Mollie Bean. Comrade, friend, bed partner—all that, certainly. But sweetheart? If she’d been his sweetheart, he told himself, he’d have brought her to Nashville. He borrowed a pencil to write her a note that said where he was.
“Got money to pay, or we gonna have to do some kind of swap?” By his tone, Raeford Liles expected the latter. His reading glasses magnified his eyes. They got bigger still when Caudell took out one of his one-ounce gold coins. He rang it on the counter, bit it, weighed it in an apothecary’s balance. “Goddam, it’s real,” he remarked when he was satisfied at last. “Gonna have to dig some to change it. It’d be, hmm, close on twenty gold dollars, eh? Call it nineteen and three bits, if that’s all right with you.”
Caudell had already made the calculation. “Square enough, Mr. Liles.”
“All right. Don’t you go away. I got to retreat to the plunder room.” The grocer shuffled into the back of the store, where he remained for some time. He emerged at last with a gold eagle and enough silver to make up the other nine dollars and change. “Wouldn’t give this for them ass-wipes the gov’ment calls money, but you give me straight goods, you get straight goods back.”
“Thanks.” Caudell shoved two silver half-dimes back toward him. “I’ll have a postage stamp, too, if you please.” While Liles got it, he wrote Mollie Bean’s name on the envelope, sealed the note inside. Lilies smiled knowingly when he saw the addressee. Caudell had been sure he would, but somehow it annoyed him less than he’d expected.
“Gentlemen.” Robert E. Lee bowed as he entered the Cabinet room on the second floor of the former U.S. customhouse.
“General Lee.” His fellow Southern commissioners both rose from their seats to return the compliment. Lee was struck by how odd they looked, standing side by side. Vice President Stephens was short, gaunt, gray, and sober-looking, Secretary of State Benjamin tall, portly, dark-haired, though a year older than Stephens and only four years younger than Lee, and wearing his usual bland smile, a smile that claimed he knew more about matters of state than any other three people living.
He said, “Join us, General. Our Federal counterparts, as you see, are not yet arrived.” Lee took a seat, leaned back against green baize. Note paper, pen, and inkwell waited his use, but he wished he’d thought to ask that a map be brought to the Cabinet room.
A Confederate captain, commander of the armed guard assigned to the Federal peace commissioners, strode into the Cabinet room. “The honorable William H. Seward, U.S. Secretary of State,” he announced. “The honorable Edwin M. Stanton, U.S. Secretary of War.” Polite neutrality left his voice; scorn replaced it. “Major General Benjamin F. Butler.”
The three Northern men came in. Lee, Benjamin, and Stephens rose to greet them. As they had decided beforehand, the Confederate commissioners bowed to Lincoln’s emissaries, then sat down again, thus avoiding the issue of whether or not to shake hands with Ben Butler.
One of Seward’s eyebrows rose slightly as he bowed in return, but he made no comment. Though a New Yorker, he looked hewn from New England granite—most especially the majestic promontory of his nose, which dominated his long, thin, clean-shaven face. Stanton was younger, shorter, stouter, with a thick, curly beard and a look of driving energy. He made Lee think more of the high-priced lawyer he had been than the Cabinet member he was now.
Ben Butler came last, the uniform of a Union major general still stretched over his short, corpulent frame. With his mustache curling down over each corner of his lips, he reminded Lee of nothing so much as a sagging walrus. His wattled jowls sagged, the sacks under his eyes—sacks as big and dark as carpetbags—sagged onto his cheeks, which also sagged themselves; the fringe of hair that wreathed his bald crown sagged greasily onto his neck. Even his eyelids sagged. But the eyes they half-concealed were sharp and dark and full of calculation. He was no soldier—he’d proved that in several fights—but he was not the buffoon he looked, either. Before the war, he’d been an even fancier lawyer than Stanton.
The Federal commissioners sat down across the mahogany table from their Southern hosts. After a couple of minutes of chitchat meant to be polite—but during which the three Confederates managed to avoid speaking directly to Butler—Seward said, “Gentlemen, shall we attempt to repair the unpleasantness that lies between our two governments?”
“Had you acknowledged from the outset that this land contained two governments, sir, all the unpleasantness, as you call it, would have been avoided,” Alexander Stephens pointed out. Like his body, his voice was light and thin.
“That may be true, but it’s moot now,” Stanton said. “Let’s deal with the situation as we have it, shall we? Otherwise useless recriminations will take up all our time and lead us nowhere. It was, if I may say so, useless recrimination on both sides which led to the breach between North and South.”
“You speak sensibly, Mr. Stanton,” Lee said. Stephens and Benjamin nodded. So did the other two Federals down from Washington City. He went on, “Our chief difficulty will be to keep the bitterness engendered by our Second American Revolution from poisoning further relations between the two countries which now comprise the territory formerly held by the United States of America.”
Butler said, “We have recognized your Confederacy’s independence, General Lee—recognized it at rifle point, I concede, but recognized it nonetheless.” He paused to draw in a wheezy breath. “Further, in exchange for your withdrawal only from our capital, we have removed our forces from the entire broad reach of territory under our control this past June, withdrawing to the line you yourself proposed, sir. I question the propriety of entering into these further negotiations for any purpose whatsoever.”
Judah Benjamin turned to Lee. “If I may, sir?” Lee raised one finger of his right hand as a sign for the Secretary of State to continue. Benjamin did, in the deep, rich tones of a trained orator: “Mr. Butler will surely be aware that, in a republic, soldiers have not the authority to set down final terms of peace. Nor did General Lee presume to do so. He merely arranged a halt to hostilities so that peace might afterwards be established: thus we are met here today.”
“So we find out how much you rebs can jew out of us, you mean,” Butler said coarsely.
A slow flush mounted to Benjamin’s cheeks. Lee was, outside of his profession, a peaceful man, but he knew that, had anyone touched his own honor so, he would have continued the conversation only through seconds. But Benjamin had risen to prominence despite a lifetime of such abuse. His voice was calm as he replied, “Mr. Butler will please remember that when his half-civilized ancestors were hunting the wild boar in the forests of Saxony, mine were the princes of the earth.”