Thursday January 24, 1861
The day after Martin Royer’s funeral, a buggy moved through the overcast valley towards Frederick and Miss Eliza Angell.
The clip clop of hooves and wheels squelching in mud remained constant in its interrupting the silence between the brothers Royer.
The Baltimore train would leave the Frederick depot at four, allowing Jude a few hours with the Angells. In the rosy glow of hope, he anticipated the demure kiss on the forehead Eliza allowed, and the way her height meant he’d have to bend to embrace her, his lips tantalizingly brushing against her hair, and to briefly feel her cheeks against his. Her great-grandfather had anglicized the original Engel into Angell when he came to America, and how provident the name had become. Eliza Angell! His angel!
He badly yearned for the solace she could hopefully offer. And could he, too, finally confide his love? The love that he’d been unable to write in his letters, for that was the nature of polite, provincial Frederick County. Jude thought jealously of the Baltimore swells, rich dandies squiring their elegant ladies with a flirtatious confidence that always eluded him.
Next to him, George Royer cracked the buggy whip. George had been quiet since Martin’s death.
“It is a beautiful land,” Jude tactfully spoke when the buggy crested a rise as a ray of sunlight broke through the clouds, and a vista of tidy farms emerged, but also leaving him thinking that the sun rose equally on both the just and unjust.
“Tis January.”
“The sparseness of winter only shows you how remarkable the American taming of the great wilderness was,” Jude commented, turning away from his own unexpectedly dark thoughts and looking for a more cheerful subject. “The productivity of the settlers in turning millions of acres untouched since Creation into farms and towns in just a hundred years is a testament to the industrious nature of America and something to be proud of.”
“Anyone ask them Injuns?”
“I know Americans idealize the farmer’s independence,” Jude said, persisting at a conversation. “I know nothing symbolizes America’s freedom as much as the family farm where people work with their own hands to feed themselves instead of answering to a boss. I know you don’t think highly of my becoming a lawyer instead of master of my own acres, but it doesn’t mean I think any less of your and Oscar’s commitment to Frederick County. I understand how you must love this land and the rewards it delivers to you.”
“You thinks a lot, don’t you?”
What Jude didn’t tell George was how Philadelphia and Baltimore had revealed a world he never knew existed during a rural childhood. American cities bustled, no, crackled, with creativity and innovation. Mrs. Melville had a water pump in the kitchen, gaslights lined the streets, horsecars ran on tracks and steam-powered sailing ships crowded the harbors, plying trade with the West Indies, Europe and even further afield. Eighty years ago, Frederick County had been the frontier. Now America stretched three thousand miles to the Pacific!
New states, booming cities in yesterday’s wilderness, towering smokestacks and farms on the prairies relying on newfangled iron plows and modified seeds from catalogues to raise one or two cash crops were where the future of America lay. With the arrival of railroad timetables, the brokers in Baltimore’s Mercantile Exchange were now more concerned with the latest price of beef in Chicago while here in Frederick County, only fifty miles distant, it might as well still be 1776, and the familiarity of his childhood belonged to a past steadily slipping into the shadows of history.
The relentless, onward march of progress! It’d freed him from the dreariness of his childhood, offered an escape from his sins, and Jude wholeheartedly supported it.
George unexpectedly laughed and started to speak but when Jude looked at him, he grunted and returned to staring moodily at the horse.
“You know the Angells will be glad to have you come in for a respite,” Jude said when the buggy finally came to a halt in front of a large brick house on the outskirts of Frederick, a prosperous town serving as the county seat.
George shook his head. “Got business at the feed store. They got a warm stove and them papers. A few men to jaw with. A hot coal for my pipe.” He gave Jude a wry glance. “You making good money in Baltimore?”
“I don’t complain,” Jude said, tugging his scarf off.
“You’ve become one of ‘em? Rich people?” George said, nodding at the house. “Ma’s homespun scarf ain’t good enough for Mrs. Angell?”
Jude scowled. “Must you think everything I do an insult?”
“’Cause everything you do is an insult,” George flatly said. “How else you quarreled with Pa all the time?”
“Papa was an angry man. I refused to bow to his anger.”
“Got to say if anything kept Pa alive for so long, it were his anger at the sins of slavery he saw all around him.”
“Hah! Papa liked sin. He lived for it.”
“So do you, Jude.”
Jude shot a look at his brother.
George raised a wry eyebrow. “And it ain’t no way to talk of Pa neither. He ain’t been right since the Virginia men hauled him to jail, for aidin’ and abettin’ fugitive slaves. Dunno what they did to him. Pa never spoke of it. He came back a right cripple. No one would loan Ma money for the seeds. If it hadn’t been for Ma’s sister we’d all have starved.”
“I do remember,” Jude said shortly.
“Really?” George trailed off.
“What about Mama?” Jude demanded, knowing George suspected what Oscar did too. “Look what Papa’s done to her. Decades of shouting about sin scared her to a living death. She’s afraid she’ll go to Hell even though she’s done nothing wrong. I will never forgive him for that.”
“Ain’t your place to forgive Pa. And Ma’s a good woman,” George simply said. “’Sides, Pa were right. America is to face the sin of slavery soon enough and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”
“You do think war will come?”
“Don’t you?” George gave Jude a keen look. “Everyone thinks war is coming, except you. You think there’d be another compromise. And it’s you who’s got a college degree and speaks like a gentleman ‘cause you’re ashamed of how you grew up. Maybe it’s ‘cause you’re so wrapped up in your lawsuits so you can’t see what’s going on.”
“Will the North and South really send men to die in battle?” Jude said, exasperated.
“Of course. One side’s got slaves. T’other’s got free men. As Mr. Lincoln said, America’s got to be either all one, or all the other.”
“War isn’t a sensible recourse for anything,” Jude protested. “Have men not learned anything from history?” he said, thinking of the Trojan wars.
“You got too much reason, Jude. It’s what your education done to you. War ain’t sensible, I’ll grant ye. Like most men with fancy education you think it’s sitting around a table and talking out another treaty. You forget it don’t always work. You forget people get angry. You forget men got passion. They don’t hide it like you do. And there comes a time when no amount of talking can fix a problem. Plus, Oscar’s onto something. Mebbe he’s right about conspiracies. Seems damned hard not to believe there’s men out there, rich men, greedy men, doing everything they can to drive Americans apart. Like them secessionists.”
“Oscar’s not right in the head,” Jude said, even when thinking of Matthew Swann’s arrest and the colored woman’s warnings. “Papa turned slavery into a bugbear. Oscar sees it everywhere he goes. He’s not….logical,” he lamely added.
“Men who thinks logical, when they sees something that don’t fit their logic, they pretend it ain’t there. They talk over it. Ignore it, despite the world never done make sense to begin with,” George said. “Just like what you do.”
He took out his pipe and put it in his mouth, unlit. “Sometimes it takes someone like Oscar to see what’s really going on.”
“If war comes, will you fight?” Jude challenged his brother.
George shrugged. “I ain’t saying I don’t feel sorry for them coloreds. It’s awful what’s been done to them. Most men in the North won’t fight to defeat slavery neither. Now, they will fight to stop the secessionists from attacking Federal forts and leaving the Union. And it still means this war is happening because of the coloreds. If there ain’t ever been colored people in America, we ain’t have these problems. But it ain’t my problem and I ain’t see why I got to die for them.”
“Oscar will fight.”
“Aye,” George agreed. “He thinks he’s a Christian soldier meant to defeat the Devil. There’s four million slaves in America, four million sins, and four million reasons to fight. His crusade, like them knights of old against the Infidels in the Holy Land.”
“Let him,” Jude said shortly, remembering the fight in the barn. “I’m not my brother’s keeper.”
“Sure, Cain.” George paused, watching his frosty breath dissipate. “Anyways, I ain’t waiting much longer. Once Ma’s settled with her sister, I’ll be going. Frederick County’s all right but I don’t love it, not like how you pretend to when you really hates it. I was thinking what it’d cost to buy steamboat tickets for California, sailing around Cape Horn or cutting across Panama. Or even join a wagon train across the prairies. Heard the Injuns ain’t so bad these days. Go someplace where I ain’t got to worry about all these problems created by other men and forced upon me.”
“I can sympathize,” Jude said in a rare moment of empathy, so unsettled by his brother’s frankness. “Perhaps I’ll join you on your steamboat.”
George raised his eyebrow again. “No you ain’t. You ain’t got what it takes to rough it. You likes your finery. You’re a civilized man.”
“You presume too much,” Jude said, clenching his teeth.
“I don’t presume. I knows. You ain’t gonna take your Miss Angell with you. Her ma and pa wouldn’t like it. ‘Sides, you’re too smart. Like smart folks, you’ve made your life too complicated to leave Maryland, for you ain’t free.”
Jude stared at his brother. He could blame Oscar’s ravings on the limitations of an uneducated man, but not George. His brother may have possessed no more than a common school education and rarely spoke, but when he did he showed an intelligence few of Jude’s college classmates did.
George gave a mock salute. “Aye, aye, sir. You’ll be captain in the North’s army when the time comes to fight the secesh men. You may think it illogical now, but you got brains and it’ll persuade you it’s the right thing to do. The moral thing to do. The just thing to do. It’s what complicated men do. It’s why you ain’t truly free. And you’ll order men like Oscar to be torn apart by Southern bullets in the name of justice. Me? Glad I ain’t have to worry about being that kind of person. I ain’t complicated, so I says no without guilt.”
“You’d turn your back to everything? Refuse to fight slavery? To save America? To defend justice?” Jude said, astonished, and battling back the dark fury stirring inside him. For years the family had assailed him for refusing to devote his life to abolitionism. Now George talked of running off without suffering the same punishment he’d dished out to his brother?
“I’m a free man, Jude,” George simply said. “I’m unfettered. The ability to make my own decisions without anything interfering. It’s the whole point of freedom, ain’t it, college boy?”
“And you don’t care about the freedoms of others? You, Pa’s own son?” Jude snapped.
George laughed, snorting and contemptuous at the same time. “You read too many books, don’t you, agonizing about what’s right and wrong. You agonize about it so much that you forget you only thinks about the rights and wrongs as it affects you, and never others. That be your problem.”
George paused and looked around the wintry countryside, away from his brother. Then he suddenly peered closely at Jude.
“You think you ain’t like Pa because you don’t shout at the world and you take up fine airs and manners. But you forget you ain’t a nice person either, ‘cause you ain’t ever help anyone else. Everyone be a paragon of virtue when words cost them nothing, but you don’t even say anything. So you ain’t tellin’ me the right thing to do. But I will say you’re just like Pa in your ignorance to what others really think of you.”
“A stubborn, angry man,” Jude shot back, astonished.
“Yep. Just like Pa.” George smiled without mirth. “You got that same anger inside you. And I sees it, for I knows who the real Jude Royer is and what you done.”
George took out his pipe and spoke tonelessly. “But unlike Pa, you ain’t use your anger right. While Pa weren’t kind, at least he stood for his beliefs. He helped others. You? You confuse working hard with havin’ principles. But you stand for nothing. You fight for nothing. And I knows why.” He nodded at the Angell’s large house. “Miss Eliza Angell, does she know that fire you pretend you ain’t got in your belly? Nope. She don’t really know who the real Jude Royer is, for you’re afeared to show it to her. You’ve done evil afore. And that anger still be there and you don’t use it for good, unlike Pa. But you use it to feel sorry for yourself, like a coward.”
Jude watched his brother for a long time. “What does justice mean to you?”
“Justice?” George shrugged indifferently. “I don’t think much ‘bout it. Something invented by people. Like them fairy tales for little kiddies but only for adults. Gives ‘em hope when there ain’t any.”
He waved at the countryside. “I been a farmer all my life. I knows there ain’t justice out there. I knows the land don’t care for me. I work hard then we get a drought. Or we get so much rain it floods the fields. It ain’t beautiful to me. And look at how men treat one another in America. We kicked out all the Injuns and enslaved the coloreds. But even the Injuns and coloreds can be real bad to their own people too. I don’t see justice in the world. So I don’t worry about them questions. I break no laws, I tell the truth and I won’t take debts and as long as I ain’t hurtin’ others, I’ll do exactly what I want. Guess you could say if there’s justice, that be it.”
“Your justice is someone running away from his problems too,” Jude angrily said. “Your justice is selfish, thinking for yourself and not of others. You and Oscar call me a coward. Now look at you! Doing the same! How can you talk of this distorted, ignorant justice when others can’t share in the same justice! Isn’t it unjust?”
“It’s ‘cause I know who I am, Jude,” George flatly said. “I’ve made peace with myself. I’ve long acknowledged I ain’t perfect. I don’t claim to be happy. Don’t know if I want to be happy but I’m happy to be content. I knows there’s problems in America and I’ve decided there ain’t anything I can do ‘bout it. As long as I ain’t do anything wrong I don’t worry about justice or morals or God. I’m unfettered,” he reminded Jude. “Not like you at all. You care. You really do. ‘Cause you been filled with guilt and anger since you betrayed Pa to the Virginia men. His death ain’t change any of that. Mebbe even worsened it. You talking about justice says it all. Men who ain’t angry or guilty don’t think of justice.”
Jude gripped his valise. He hopped off the buggy and Matthew’s frock coat caught on the stirrup, ripping the silk lining.
George laughed and tugged off the trailing fabric. “Fare thee well little brother, Captain Judas Iscariot,” he said, giving a mock salute. “I hopes you enjoy your visit with your angel for you surely need one, even if she ain’t deserve you.”
He picked up the reins and the gravel cracked underneath the wheels as the horse stepped forward. The horse flickered its tail and snorted frosty puffs as she set off down the drive, leaving behind a Jude Royer and his wordless rage.
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