He was graduated third in the class of 1828 at West Point, and was stationed for some time in Savannah, Georgia, where he married into a local family. He resigned his commission on April 30, 1835 and settled in Savannah. From 1841 until the outbreak of the Civil War he was cashier of the Planters’ Bank there. Upon the secession of Georgia, Mercer entered Confederate service as colonel of the 1st Georgia Volunteers. He was promoted brigadier general on October 29, 1861. During the greater part of the war, with a brigade of three Georgia regiments, General Mercer commanded at Savannah, but he and his brigade took part in the Atlanta campaign of 1864, first in W. H. T. Walker’s division and then in Cleburne’s. On account of poor health he accompanied General Hardee to Savannah after the battle of Jonesboro, and saw no further field duty. Paroled at Macon, Georgia, May 13, 1865, General Mercer returned to banking in Savannah the following year. He moved to Baltimore in 1869, where he spent three years as a commission merchant. His health further declined, and he spent the last five years of his life in Baden-Baden, Germany. He died there on June 9, 1877. His remains were returned to Savannah for burial in Bonaventure Cemetery.
But in the center of the line there was no General Augustus Mellon. There had obviously been a retreat during the night. Lee Mellon was crushed. The librarian was staring intently at us. Her eyes seemed to have grown a pair of glasses.
‘It can’t be,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘It just can’t be.’
‘Maybe he was a colonel,’ I said. ‘There were a lot of Southern colonels. Being a colonel was a good thing. You know, Southern colonels and all. Colonel Something Fried Chicken.’ I was trying to make it easier for him. It’s quite a thing to lose a Confederate general and gain a colonel instead.
Perhaps even a major or a lieutenant. Of course I didn’t say anything about the major or lieutenant business to him. That probably would have made him start crying. The librarian was looking at us.
‘He fought in the Battle of the Wilderness. He was just great,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘He cut the head off a Yankee captain with one whack.’
‘That’s quite something,’ I said. ‘They probably just overlooked him. A mistake was made. Some records were burned or something happened. There was a lot of confusion. That’s probably it.’
‘You bet,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘I know there was a Confederate general in my family. There had to be a Mellon general fighting for his country . . . the beloved South.’
‘You bet,’ I said.
The librarian was beginning to pick up the telephone.
‘Let’s go,’ I said.
‘OK,’ Lee Mellon said. ‘You believe there was a Confederate general in my family? Promise me you do. There was a Confederate general in my family!’
‘I promise,’ I said.
I could read the lips of the librarian. She was saying Hello, police? Vaudeville, it was.
We stepped outside rather hurriedly and down the street to anonymous sanctuary among the buildings of San Francisco.
‘Promise me till your dying day, you’ll believe that a Mellon was a Confederate general. It’s the truth. That God-damn book lies! There was a Confederate general in my family!’
‘I promise,’ I said and it was a promise that I kept.
Headquarters
1
THE OLD HOUSE where I took Lee Mellon to live, provided, in its own strange way, lodging befitting a Confederate general from Big Sur, a general who had just successfully fought a small skirmish in the trees above the Pacific Ocean.
The house was owned by a very nice Chinese dentist, but it rained in the front hall. The rain came down through a broken skylight, flooding the hall and warping the hardwood floor.
Whenever the dentist visited the place, he put a pair of blue bib overalls on over his business suit. He kept the overalls in what he called his ‘tool room,’ but there weren’t any tools there, only the blue overalls hanging on a hook.
He put the overalls on just to collect the rent. They were his uniform. Perhaps he had been a soldier at one time or another.
We showed him where the rain came from and the long puddle leading splash, splash down the hall to the community kitchen in the rear, but he refused to be moved by it.
‘There it is,’ he said philosophically and went away peacefully to take off his overalls and hang them in his ‘tool room.’
After all it was his building. He had pulled thousands of teeth to get the place. He obviously liked the puddle right where it was, and we could not argue with his cheap rent.
2
Even before Lee Mellon made the old place his official San Francisco headquarters in the spring of years ago, the building was already occupied by an interesting group of tenants. I lived alone in the attic.
There was a sixty-one-year-old retired music teacher who lived in the room right underneath the attic. He was Spanish and about him like a weather-vane whirled the traditions and attitudes of the Old World.
And he was in his own way, the manager. He had appropriated the job like one would find some old clothes lying outside in the rain, and decide that they were the right size and after they had dried out, they would look quite fashionable.
The day after I moved into the attic, he came upstairs and told me that the noise was driving him crazy. He told me to pack my things quickly and go. He told me that he’d had no idea I had such heavy feet when he rented the place to me. He looked down at my feet and said, ‘They’re too heavy. They’ll have to go.’
I had no idea either when I rented the attic from the old fart. It seems that the attic had been vacant for years. With all those years of peace and quiet, he probably thought that there was a meadow up there with a warm, gentle wind blowing through the wild flowers, and a bird getting hung up above the trees along the creek.
I bribed his hearing with a phonograph record of Mozart, something with horns, and that took care of him. ‘I love Mozart,’ he said, instantly reducing my burden of life.
I could feel my feet beginning to weigh less and less as he smiled at the phonograph record. It smiled back. I now weighed a trifle over seventeen pounds and danced like a giant dandelion in his meadow.
The week after Mozart, he left for a vacation in Spain. He said that he was only going to be gone for three months, but my feet must continue their paths of silence. He said he had ways of knowing, even when he wasn’t there. It sounded pretty mysterious.
But his vacation turned out to be longer than he had anticipated because he died on his return to New York. He died on the gangplank, just a few feet away from America. He didn’t quite make it. His hat did though. It rolled off his head and down the gang-plank and landed, plop, on America.
Poor devil. I heard that it was his heart, but the way the Chinese dentist described the business, it could have been his teeth.
Though his physical appearance was months away, Lee Mellon’s San Francisco headquarters were now secure. They took the old man’s things away and the room was empty.
3
There
