When This Cruel War Is Over Read Free Page A

hot-tempered Andy, three years younger, had encouraged Janet’s tomboyish tendencies at first, then sternly tried to eliminate them when she reached her teens. He wanted his “little sister” to marry well, he said—and he even had his eye on the man she might attract, if she concentrated on becoming a Southern belle. Andy never failed to bring her an expensive present—a new pocketbook or a half-dozen pairs of English stockings—if he had a good weekend at the Lexington races.
    Janet trembled. It was hopeless. Memory could not give her brothers even a half-life in its feeble world. They were dead. Vanished. As if they had never existed, except for those tombstones, which Gabriel Todd had insisted on raising, even though both were buried far away. Janet stood there, thinking of the hundreds of other plantations and thousands of more modest homes where Southern parents and sisters and wives mourned their dead in the same anguished way, struggling to keep them alive in memory’s pathetic glow. Recently the Louisville Journal had estimated the South had lost 150,000 men, the North 300,000—and the slaughter continued unabated, devouring lives like a monstrous, insatiable Moloch.
    Gabriel Todd sat in the gazebo most of the day, steadily consuming a quart of bourbon to dull the pain of his lost sons and an almost lost war. By dinnertime he was often incapable of carrying on a conversation. But at this hour of the morning, he was reasonably coherent.
    â€œJanet!” he called. “Give your ancient father a kiss for old times’ sake.”
    She strolled into the gazebo and kissed him on the lips. He clutched her against him and she breathed his unwashed body odor and the sweetly sour smell of the bourbon on his breath. Why did her mind record these realistic details? It was so unfeminine. Somewhere in the creative process God had become confused and given Janet Todd a man’s brain and a woman’s body.
“Tell me some good news,” he said as he released her. Janet smiled and recited:

    â€œâ€˜Report of fashion in proud Italy
Whose manner still our tardy apish nation
limps after in base imitation.’”

    An answering smile brought Gabriel Todd’s wide creased face aglow. He responded to those lines from Shakespeare’s Richard II with another quotation from the same play:

    â€œâ€˜For gnarling sorrow hath less power to bite
The man who mocks at it and sets it light.’”

    Janet smiled and replied:

    â€œâ€˜Teach thy necessity to reason thus
There is no virtue like necessity.’”

    Janet and her father had been playing this quotation game for over a decade. Shakespeare was another of Gabriel Todd’s literary passions. On their summer trips north, they had never failed to stop in New York to see a performance by one of the great actors of the day, such as Edwin Booth in Macbeth. More than once they had gone down the river to Louisville to see a traveling troupe perform Romeo and Juliet or The Merchant of Venice.
    With no warning, Janet’s mind lurched out of control. Shocking words rampaged through it. Has Richard II become your favorite play because it’s about a man who thought he was a king and slowly discovered he was a noble fool?
    No! That thought was not only unworthy; it was untrue. Gabriel Todd had done his utmost to undo the blunder of declaring Kentucky neutral. He had helped to
create this conspiracy to win the war with an uprising by the Democrats of the West. He had taken the idea to his old friend from Mexican War days, Confederate president Jefferson Davis, in Richmond. Colonel Todd had persuaded the members of the Kentucky delegation in the Confederate Congress to support it. He had recruited his own daughter to become the movement’s courier.
    â€œI’ve written to Adam Jameson,” Janet said. “He seems to be in command of Morgan’s cavalry at the moment. I told him this time