The Eno Club

Prologue The old general rubbed his temples, the exhaustion of war causing a ceaseless ache behind his eyes. He could see the end of this sickening war through the dingy windows of James Bennitt’s tiny farm house, where a handful of troops from both sides were gathering to witness the historic surrender. He was weary, so weary, and filled with grief. It wasn’t the personal grief of losing friends and colleagues in horrible and bloody ways, nor did he grieve for the time away from his family that he would never recover. He grieved for the really good men, thousands of good ones with families and homes and futures and dreams, whose deaths came in ditches and fields across the southern part of this divided country. When he closed his eyes during sleepless nights, he knew their deaths came in awful ways, with musket balls that maimed but didn’t kill instantly, leaving their targets to writhe in the dirt with no hope of help or salvation or anything to ease their relentless pain. They were in those ditches and fields because he told them to go there, and they went, and they died. And now it was nearly over. But he still had two problems. Those whom he had vanquished on the battlefield continued to press for more concessions in the surrender document, creating a terrible conflict within the mind of the general who wanted to burn down the homes of his counterparts on the losing side. They were cowards in his mind who had betrayed their country and the constitution to which they had pledged the same allegiance as he when they studied together at the military academy. But his president wanted compassion, so he would agree to give them their horses and swords and a swift boot towards home if they would simply stop fighting. Negotiating the end of a major war, however, was simple compared to his second problem which sat in front of him in one of farmer Bennitt’s cane-bottom chairs. The handsome leader of a barely known group of natives sat in that chair and stared at the weary general. The young Occoneechee had laid a package of papers on the dining table used as a desk by the general and waited. These two men had met years earlier when the war was still young, and both sides could remember why they fought. On a spring day between battles as the general’s army moved through the piedmont of the Carolinas, his soldiers encountered the Occoneechee huddled in a tiny enclave along a small, beautiful river that meandered and twisted through the area, often more a stream than an actual river, usually shallow enough to cross on foot without trouble. To call it a tribe was generous; the group was more like an extended family, and not at all like the violent and desperate Indians whom many of these soldiers would encounter in the coming years as the country expanded westward. These Indians were simple, peaceful folk who traded the skins of deer and beaver with local businessmen and had learned enough English to function in a new world. They retreated to their enclave when they heard from traders that the whites who now ruled this land had begun a war with each other. This was not their war, not their fight. But the general convinced them otherwise. When his troops captured the Occoneechee and brought them to him, he could immediately see that their knowledge of the area and skills in the woods would help him since he was essentially an invader who had to rely on traitors, spies, scalawags and bad maps for the information to plan his strategies. Their refusal to help him melted away when he told them that they were, frankly, his prisoners. He also explained that this war was being fought by white people, but it was a war about black people and whether the country would continue to enslave them, and that brown people were just as likely to be enslaved as well if such a policy was not stamped out. They had done their part, the general acknowledged. They were a peaceful people, but had done some things for him that his own commanders and soldiers couldn’t, so he had concluded early on there was no reason for his army and general staff to know that many of the setbacks, ambushes, surprises, murders, kidnappings and thievery that hamstrung their enemy were handled by his unknown squadron, which had turned out to be clever, tireless, and brutal if necessary. The papers on the desk were a treaty and a promise the general had made to the Occoneechee. They already had their gold. The general delivered that when he got word that another surrender two weeks earlier at a court building a hundred twenty miles away had confirmed that the war was ending. The gold was delivered in canvas bags and loaded into a big chest, and he gave them the mule and a wagon needed to haul it away. He hoped it would be several days before they realized that half of those canvas bags actually held worthless metal coins confiscated from confederate warehouses. Those bags were on the bottom of the pile in the chest, just to be safe. He allowed himself a tiny grin at the thought of this trickery, which was the idea of a clever lieutenant on his staff, a ruse which got him promoted to captain on the spot. Now, the general stared at the Indian’s papers, the other part of the bargain. “You know,” he said to the Occoneechee, “only Congress can ratify a treaty.” The Indian stared back, unmoving in the uncomfortable wooden chair. “You made a promise to my people,” he said. “We did what you asked. Three of my family are dead because of it. You are the government, you are your people, you are the Congress here.” The general rubbed his temples some more. He was giving them land he couldn’t give, making them a promise he feared his fractured government wouldn’t keep, and creating an Indian nation that was completely illegitimate. There was no survey, no markings on trees or iron in the ground or kerchiefs on fence posts. There was only a handful of words on some flimsy parchment paper that loosely described a parcel of acreage a few miles from where they sat. The Indians had asked for a couple thousand acres, but these papers described maybe a thousand and the general knew the Indians couldn’t tell the difference. He already was being vilified by some in his government for being too generous, too lenient to those whom had been conquered. He was certain he would be criticized for this, as well. One day, he thought to himself, there will be war of a different kind because of what I’m about to do. But, he concluded, that is a war for others to fight. He flipped through the treaty again without looking, signed it with a flourish, and handed it to the newly minted captain with instructions to send it to Washington with the surrender documents when those were finalized. Then, he strode from the tiny farmhouse to end a war, his war.