Free When This Cruel War Is Over by Thomas Fleming Page B

Jonathan to quit the war. His next wound would be fatal. For a while it had only stirred sardonic amusement, thinking of Major General Stapleton listening to these cries of woe in the bedroom when he limped home from the battlefield. But in retrospect the tears of the Union hero’s wife had grown distasteful.
    By now twilight was seeping across the Ohio, like a flood of darkness from the South. Janet Todd was a white ghost beneath the cottonwood trees. The dwindling light made it easier to speak the final seductive words: “I think you should be the first to know I’m planning to return to the fighting front as soon as possible. Honor doesn’t permit me to linger here in safety any longer. If I thought the risks I’ll face there were for your sake, it would transform them in a way that would make the fear of another wound a mere trifle.”
    Without warning, without invitation, Janet Todd kissed him. As that strong pliant mouth pressed his lips, Paul knew that crystallization had been occurring in Janet’s heart too. She loved him beyond politics, perhaps even beyond risk. But his Gettysburg wound insisted on whispering, Confederate agent.

SEVEN
    HENRY TODD GENTRY SAW HER hesitating in the doorway, her behemoth of a husband glowering behind her. “Amelia—Rogers!” he called, careening toward them. “I was hoping you’d come—”
    Amelia Jameson brightened marvelously, although a patina of sadness remained beneath the exquisite smile. “I told my husband I wasn’t going to let a war stop me from going to a Gentry party,” she said. Her russet hair still retained its sheen, the face its Grecian cast, although her complexion was no longer the pure snow of a japonica.
    Before Gentry could speak, his mother’s bulk dispersed them like a steamboat on a collision course with canoes. “I’m so pleased you’ve come, Amelia darling ,” she said. The dewlaps protruding over Millicent Todd Gentry’s high-necked lace collar virtually vibrated with the intensity of her emotion. Her large square face, powdered a garish white, was distorted by a totally insincere smile.
    Rogers Jameson and Gentry exchanged glances. Were they both marveling at the talent women had for concealing hatred behind elaborate courtesy and the rhetoric of affection? Millicent Todd Gentry had never forgiven Amelia for jilting her son.
    Gentry decided he was attributing too much intelligence to Rogers Jameson. He was probably thinking the same triumphant sentence he had been caressing in his primitive forebrain for the last thirty years: She’s mine,
Gentry, and there’s not a goddamn thing you and your money can do about it.
    Out in the garden, beneath a tent festooned with red, white, and blue bunting, Jimmy Hemings’s fiddle band was striking up his theme song, “Muckymoss.” For a moment Gentry was back thirty-five years, his arms around Amelia Conway, dancing to the plaintive strains of that old Welsh song. In the darkness outside the tent, Rogers Jameson was watching, envy on his fleshy face. Gentry had made the mistake of savoring that envy. He had assumed that God was in his heaven waiting to unite elegant Amelia Conway, descendant of one of Virginia’s First Families, and Henry Todd Gentry, heir to one of the largest fortunes in Indiana.

    Time! What an empty vapor ’tis!
And days how swift they are:
as an Indian arrow—
Fly on like a shooting star.
The present moment just is here
Then slides away in haste,
That we can never say they’re ours,
But only say they’re past.

    How often had he heard young Abe Lincoln recite that poem? But Henry Gentry had paid no more attention to it than he had paid to Abe’s warning that Rogers Jameson was going to lure Amelia Conway out of Gentry’s arms. In those days, Henry Gentry had felt immune to disasters, disappointments, losses. He was destiny’s darling, with his head